Skeptic magazine? I’d guess that it would be unwilling to publish anything very positive about cryonics, given Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief Michael Shermer’s very public anti-cryonics stance.
Shermer’s position may have shifted since he wrote Nano Nonsense and Cryonics: when I asked him about it he recommended I read David Brin, Steve Harris and Gregory Benford.
EDIT: see also his description of Steve Harris’s reply to his article as “very well reasoned”.
I got a bit disappointed, when it seemed to be a group of people that shout basic level cached ideas about religion and new age around.
How rational are they actually? A skeptic is no singularist, but at least he should not stop at the easily refuted counterarguments.
Christopher Hitchens demonstrated a great ability to change his mind. He agreed to be waterboarded and it took him less than 10 seconds to change his mind about whether or not waterboarding was torture.
There are several examples of people asserting that waterboarding isn’t torture and agreeing to undergo the experience. I know of none who have thought so afterwards.
Of course, one will undoubtedly step forward—talk is still cheap, even after such an experience. The real test would be if anyone would volunteer to undergo it twice.
Wait. “waterboarding isn’t torture” is not a question on which changing one’s belief is evidence of rationalism. Asking or answering the question at all is a political ploy only. The rationalist reaction is to taboo the word “torture” and reduce the question to something physical and testable.
I don’t know anyone who claims waterboarding is pleasant, or something that one would volunteer for in most cases.
The question of whether waterboarding is torture has at least a little bit of factual underpinning—that’s why it’s possible for the experience to change people’s minds about it.
In particular, people who say that waterboarding isn’t torture are apt to claim that it isn’t painful enough for anyone reasonable to object to it being used.
Wait. “waterboarding isn’t torture” is not a question on which changing one’s belief is evidence of rationalism. Asking or answering the question at all is a political ploy only. The rationalist reaction is to taboo the word “torture” and reduce the question to something physical and testable.
Tabooing a word isn’t the only response that’s rational, especially because that is a not even well-known technique. In this circumstance, what Hitchens change of mind essentially meant is that he agreed afterwords that the experience was so unpleasant that any definition of “torture” that captured his intuition of the term would have to include waterboarding. Cyphergoth’s point stands: Hitchens was willing to change his mind when confronted with evidence. Whether there might be a marginally more rationalist thing to do is somewhat besides the point.
I agree with all commenters that experiencing waterboarding led Hitchens to change his mind about the amount of unpleasantness/harm in the experience.
I wonder how he’d react to 3^^^3 copies of himself getting dust specs in their eyes.
I agree with your proposal to taboo the word “torture” here in order to properly understand the situation, and that its use is essentially political. Nonetheless Hitchens’s expectation of what it might be like as an experience was very much violated, and instead of just giving us all bravura to appear consistent, knowing that he wouldn’t have to do it again, he said so, and I respect that.
If I taboo the word “torture”, I get: people would rather face the humiliation of a climbdown over their public statements on it than do it a second time.
Will you change your mind if I self-identify as a skeptic who has changed their mind? In this earlier comment I listed three examples of recent updates.
I got a bit disappointed, when it seemed to be a group of people that shout basic level cached ideas about religion and new age around. How rational are they actually?
Pretty rational. These are cached thoughts often because they are generally correct. (ETA: Similarly, for example, when people make arguments here about why qualia should matter, fairly basic arguments are often presented about why they aren’t mysterious. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence and all that.)
Indeed, I’ve found that if anything LW is more likely to take for granted simplistic negative views about religion than much of the skeptical movement. For example, see this thread where a user made a trivially wrong claim about Newton’s religion and its impact on his work as a scientist. That claim got voted up to +6. Eliezer spotted that the claim was dubious enough to ask for a citation but didn’t do the minimal thought that was required to correct it, and it took me to actually go through and explain why the claim was complete nonsense. In that regard, the skeptical movement seems similar to LW, incorrect claims that reinforce peoples’ worldview are likely to be accepted uncritically but corrections will be accepted. In this regard, this is a (small) step up from most of the world where claims that support a pre-existing world view once accepted become almost impossible to dislodge.
Will you change your mind if I self-identify as a skeptic who has changed their mind?
Yes. I overgeneralized.
Pretty rational. These are cached thoughts often because they are generally correct.
I sometimes wonder if ‘that is all’, the fight against homeopathy, religion, fortune teller etc. is highly valuable. It sometimes seems to me like boring grunt-work where more would be possible. The picture of sanity plumbers sounds nice.
In that regard, the skeptical movement seems similar to LW, incorrect claims that reinforce peoples worldview are likely to be accepted uncritically but corrections will be accepted. In this regard, this is a (small) step up from most of the world where claims that support a pre-existing world view once accepted become almost impossible to dislodge.
Yes. I fell into this trap quite often, and still do.
I’m having a hard time thinking about topics they should have changed their minds about from recent years. Most of the stuff skeptics argue is so terribly wrong that there isn’t much chance of anything sensible ever coming out of it, and skeptics end up being more like sanity waterline plumbers than scientists. There might be an analogy to psychiatry made here. Psychiatrists deal with genuinely diseased thinking day in and day out, so if they had to assess some genuinely novel philosophy, there might be some trouble.
The most high-profile case where the scientific fringe ended up being right and skeptics had a serious opportunity for changing their minds I can think of was continental drift 50 years ago. Someone will probably want to suggest the many-worlds interpretation here. If the arguments that have been around here that internalizing MWI would actually make people change how they behave do hold, this would actually be a good example, but I’m still seeing MWI as mostly just a conceptually simpler interpretation of accepted physics.
The most high-profile case where the scientific fringe ended up being right and skeptics had a serious opportunity for changing their minds I can think of was continental drift 50 years ago.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent major reversal of longstanding dogma, but I don’t know if its proponents were ‘fringe’ or not.
Another example might be the (mental & physical) health benefits of meditation, which seems to have been the exclusive province of fringey New Age types up until the ’90s or whenever the surveys and experiments began coming out.
A good example would be one that either significantly changes how we see the world, plate tectonics definitely qualifies, or will make people change their behavior in some way if assumed true.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent discovery, but it seem to change either that much. Human brains are still finicky and brain damage is very, very scary. I’m also not aware of there being any movement for adult neurogenesis warranting the attention of skeptics before the discovery was conclusive, which there apparently was for continental drift.
Meditation is a better example though. The discovery of actual beneficial neurological changes is likely to make people meditate more. It’s not a very strong example though, as I don’t think skeptics have been very hostile to meditation itself before the findings (unlike claims that meditators can levitate, cure cancer and bring about world peace). The fact that an exercise repeated regularly through many years leads to measurable anatomical differences isn’t exactly a paradigm shift related to our understanding of human physiology either.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent discovery, but it seem to change either that much.
What, compared to plate tectonics? What utility exactly does plate tectonics have? That seems about as useful as finding the Higgs boson: providing an explanation for well-characterized and predictable phenomenon like continental drift. You can’t even predict earthquakes knowing plate tectonics.
The fact that an exercise repeated regularly through many years leads to measurable anatomical differences isn’t exactly a paradigm shift related to our understanding of human physiology either.
Here I think we have a paradigm shift over time that makes it hard to understand*. Try to put yourself back in the ’60s or ’70s—the age of Timothy O’Leary, of talking to dolphins, the Age of Aquarius, the Beatles going to India. The mind is separate from the body. Stress is just a word, not a known killer from countless studies (see the Wired article). Schizophrenia seems to be caused by mothers not loving their children. IQ is not hereditary.
How could a bunch of neurons possibly mess with the subtle chemical balances that rule the rest of the body? Are there little neurons connected to levers in glands which only fire when strange foreign syllables are repeated a lot? For that matter, how could sitting down and doing nothing whatsoever or reciting some mantra like a Buddhist monk improve your health and happiness?
If that isn’t counterintuitive, I don’t know what is.
* For a Reddit comment, I was looking up Kevin Kelly’s Maes-Garreau Law about biases of futorology toward dramatic change by the end of the futorologist’s life, and the introduction strikes me as relevant:
“Forecasts of future events are heavily influenced by present circumstances. That’s why predictions are usually wrong. It’s hard to transcend current assumptions. Over time, these assumptions erode, which leads to surprise. Everybody “knew” that people won’t work for free, and if they did that it would not be quality work. So the common assumption that a reliable encyclopedia could not be constructed upon volunteer labor blinded us to the total surprise of a Wikipedia.”
What, compared to plate tectonics? What utility exactly does plate tectonics have?
It doesn’t have much utility, but it changes the way we understand the world in a pretty big way. Not revolutionizing physics big, but turning the immense, eternal and unchanging face of the Earth into something that moves and flows in deep time is pretty impressive viscerally. Adult neurogenesis just doesn’t seem as big, even though it probably has more utility.
Viscerally big things are ones which draw the attention of the people skeptics debunk, so that’s why I’m picking them out here.
For that matter, how could sitting down and doing nothing whatsoever or reciting some mantra like a Buddhist monk improve your health and happiness?
If a brain does focused relaxation, it gets better at relaxing. I don’t see how this would have been very counterintuitive 50 years ago. The unexpected part was the causation going from mental actions to brain anatomy.
Now I’m actually interested about the history of this concept. The correlation between mental abilities and brain anatomy has been entertained for something like 200 years. Abilities getting very much better with training has been known forever. So when was the idea that training a skill could actually change the relevant brain anatomy to a degree first introduced? I’ve no idea.
If a brain does focused relaxation, it gets better at relaxing. I don’t see how this would have been very counterintuitive 50 years ago. The unexpected part was the causation going from mental actions to brain anatomy.
Why is relaxation something to get better at? Why isn’t it just the absence of effort? And even if we assume that it’s a skill, why meditation and not, say, watching The Ed Sullivan Show? Plenty of people found that relaxing.
Neuroplasticity.
A few episodes of the brainsciencepodcast deal with them, and the book of Norman Doidge: the brain that changes itself.
Nutrition is a topic that is still up for grabs.
Is this a good thing? (That is not a rhetorical question!)
As far as I can tell from the essay, he used to claim to hold a Lomborg position, but he doesn’t indicate knowing what that position is. I think he switched positions for majoritarian reasons (which he mentions, along with data). That would seem to lose him the “skeptic” label! That might be good if he were explicit about it, but he simultaneously claims to be data-driven, while not presenting any data that Lomborg disagrees with.
I’m not impressed by someone who changes their position because everyone else in their tribe has done the same. I am impressed by someone who changes their position for majoritarian reasons and says so explicitly.
First question: what about Randi? Is he signed up?
Per Rudi Hoffman, he’s “open to the idea, but has not done anything about it.”
AARGH! Someone needs to take him aside and tell him to sign up now—tomorrow could be too late. Cryocrastination is bad enough at any age, but at 82?
Skeptic would/could/should be the easy target for mass convincing. Someone there should be able to look up the facts and write nice stuff on it.
Skeptic magazine? I’d guess that it would be unwilling to publish anything very positive about cryonics, given Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief Michael Shermer’s very public anti-cryonics stance.
Shermer’s position may have shifted since he wrote Nano Nonsense and Cryonics: when I asked him about it he recommended I read David Brin, Steve Harris and Gregory Benford.
EDIT: see also his description of Steve Harris’s reply to his article as “very well reasoned”.
Are Skeptics known to ever change their minds?
I got a bit disappointed, when it seemed to be a group of people that shout basic level cached ideas about religion and new age around. How rational are they actually? A skeptic is no singularist, but at least he should not stop at the easily refuted counterarguments.
Christopher Hitchens demonstrated a great ability to change his mind. He agreed to be waterboarded and it took him less than 10 seconds to change his mind about whether or not waterboarding was torture.
There are several examples of people asserting that waterboarding isn’t torture and agreeing to undergo the experience. I know of none who have thought so afterwards.
Of course, one will undoubtedly step forward—talk is still cheap, even after such an experience. The real test would be if anyone would volunteer to undergo it twice.
Wait. “waterboarding isn’t torture” is not a question on which changing one’s belief is evidence of rationalism. Asking or answering the question at all is a political ploy only. The rationalist reaction is to taboo the word “torture” and reduce the question to something physical and testable.
I don’t know anyone who claims waterboarding is pleasant, or something that one would volunteer for in most cases.
The question of whether waterboarding is torture has at least a little bit of factual underpinning—that’s why it’s possible for the experience to change people’s minds about it.
In particular, people who say that waterboarding isn’t torture are apt to claim that it isn’t painful enough for anyone reasonable to object to it being used.
Tabooing a word isn’t the only response that’s rational, especially because that is a not even well-known technique. In this circumstance, what Hitchens change of mind essentially meant is that he agreed afterwords that the experience was so unpleasant that any definition of “torture” that captured his intuition of the term would have to include waterboarding. Cyphergoth’s point stands: Hitchens was willing to change his mind when confronted with evidence. Whether there might be a marginally more rationalist thing to do is somewhat besides the point.
I agree with all commenters that experiencing waterboarding led Hitchens to change his mind about the amount of unpleasantness/harm in the experience.
I wonder how he’d react to 3^^^3 copies of himself getting dust specs in their eyes.
I agree with your proposal to taboo the word “torture” here in order to properly understand the situation, and that its use is essentially political. Nonetheless Hitchens’s expectation of what it might be like as an experience was very much violated, and instead of just giving us all bravura to appear consistent, knowing that he wouldn’t have to do it again, he said so, and I respect that.
If I taboo the word “torture”, I get: people would rather face the humiliation of a climbdown over their public statements on it than do it a second time.
He never said it wasn’t torture… the experience just made him somewhat more enthusiastic in his pre-existing opinion.
Will you change your mind if I self-identify as a skeptic who has changed their mind? In this earlier comment I listed three examples of recent updates.
Pretty rational. These are cached thoughts often because they are generally correct. (ETA: Similarly, for example, when people make arguments here about why qualia should matter, fairly basic arguments are often presented about why they aren’t mysterious. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence and all that.)
Indeed, I’ve found that if anything LW is more likely to take for granted simplistic negative views about religion than much of the skeptical movement. For example, see this thread where a user made a trivially wrong claim about Newton’s religion and its impact on his work as a scientist. That claim got voted up to +6. Eliezer spotted that the claim was dubious enough to ask for a citation but didn’t do the minimal thought that was required to correct it, and it took me to actually go through and explain why the claim was complete nonsense. In that regard, the skeptical movement seems similar to LW, incorrect claims that reinforce peoples’ worldview are likely to be accepted uncritically but corrections will be accepted. In this regard, this is a (small) step up from most of the world where claims that support a pre-existing world view once accepted become almost impossible to dislodge.
Yes. I overgeneralized.
I sometimes wonder if ‘that is all’, the fight against homeopathy, religion, fortune teller etc. is highly valuable. It sometimes seems to me like boring grunt-work where more would be possible. The picture of sanity plumbers sounds nice.
Yes. I fell into this trap quite often, and still do.
I’m having a hard time thinking about topics they should have changed their minds about from recent years. Most of the stuff skeptics argue is so terribly wrong that there isn’t much chance of anything sensible ever coming out of it, and skeptics end up being more like sanity waterline plumbers than scientists. There might be an analogy to psychiatry made here. Psychiatrists deal with genuinely diseased thinking day in and day out, so if they had to assess some genuinely novel philosophy, there might be some trouble.
The most high-profile case where the scientific fringe ended up being right and skeptics had a serious opportunity for changing their minds I can think of was continental drift 50 years ago. Someone will probably want to suggest the many-worlds interpretation here. If the arguments that have been around here that internalizing MWI would actually make people change how they behave do hold, this would actually be a good example, but I’m still seeing MWI as mostly just a conceptually simpler interpretation of accepted physics.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent major reversal of longstanding dogma, but I don’t know if its proponents were ‘fringe’ or not.
Another example might be the (mental & physical) health benefits of meditation, which seems to have been the exclusive province of fringey New Age types up until the ’90s or whenever the surveys and experiments began coming out.
A good example would be one that either significantly changes how we see the world, plate tectonics definitely qualifies, or will make people change their behavior in some way if assumed true.
Adult neurogenesis is a recent discovery, but it seem to change either that much. Human brains are still finicky and brain damage is very, very scary. I’m also not aware of there being any movement for adult neurogenesis warranting the attention of skeptics before the discovery was conclusive, which there apparently was for continental drift.
Meditation is a better example though. The discovery of actual beneficial neurological changes is likely to make people meditate more. It’s not a very strong example though, as I don’t think skeptics have been very hostile to meditation itself before the findings (unlike claims that meditators can levitate, cure cancer and bring about world peace). The fact that an exercise repeated regularly through many years leads to measurable anatomical differences isn’t exactly a paradigm shift related to our understanding of human physiology either.
What, compared to plate tectonics? What utility exactly does plate tectonics have? That seems about as useful as finding the Higgs boson: providing an explanation for well-characterized and predictable phenomenon like continental drift. You can’t even predict earthquakes knowing plate tectonics.
Here I think we have a paradigm shift over time that makes it hard to understand*. Try to put yourself back in the ’60s or ’70s—the age of Timothy O’Leary, of talking to dolphins, the Age of Aquarius, the Beatles going to India. The mind is separate from the body. Stress is just a word, not a known killer from countless studies (see the Wired article). Schizophrenia seems to be caused by mothers not loving their children. IQ is not hereditary.
How could a bunch of neurons possibly mess with the subtle chemical balances that rule the rest of the body? Are there little neurons connected to levers in glands which only fire when strange foreign syllables are repeated a lot? For that matter, how could sitting down and doing nothing whatsoever or reciting some mantra like a Buddhist monk improve your health and happiness?
If that isn’t counterintuitive, I don’t know what is.
* For a Reddit comment, I was looking up Kevin Kelly’s Maes-Garreau Law about biases of futorology toward dramatic change by the end of the futorologist’s life, and the introduction strikes me as relevant:
It doesn’t have much utility, but it changes the way we understand the world in a pretty big way. Not revolutionizing physics big, but turning the immense, eternal and unchanging face of the Earth into something that moves and flows in deep time is pretty impressive viscerally. Adult neurogenesis just doesn’t seem as big, even though it probably has more utility.
Viscerally big things are ones which draw the attention of the people skeptics debunk, so that’s why I’m picking them out here.
If a brain does focused relaxation, it gets better at relaxing. I don’t see how this would have been very counterintuitive 50 years ago. The unexpected part was the causation going from mental actions to brain anatomy.
Now I’m actually interested about the history of this concept. The correlation between mental abilities and brain anatomy has been entertained for something like 200 years. Abilities getting very much better with training has been known forever. So when was the idea that training a skill could actually change the relevant brain anatomy to a degree first introduced? I’ve no idea.
Why is relaxation something to get better at? Why isn’t it just the absence of effort? And even if we assume that it’s a skill, why meditation and not, say, watching The Ed Sullivan Show? Plenty of people found that relaxing.
Neuroplasticity. A few episodes of the brainsciencepodcast deal with them, and the book of Norman Doidge: the brain that changes itself. Nutrition is a topic that is still up for grabs.
This is a good question.
Michael Shermer changed his mind about anthropogenic global warming.
Is this a good thing? (That is not a rhetorical question!)
As far as I can tell from the essay, he used to claim to hold a Lomborg position, but he doesn’t indicate knowing what that position is. I think he switched positions for majoritarian reasons (which he mentions, along with data). That would seem to lose him the “skeptic” label! That might be good if he were explicit about it, but he simultaneously claims to be data-driven, while not presenting any data that Lomborg disagrees with.
I’m not impressed by someone who changes their position because everyone else in their tribe has done the same. I am impressed by someone who changes their position for majoritarian reasons and says so explicitly.
...and is, in fact, correct. Otherwise that could lead you to being impressed by those impressed by majoritarianism enough to become theists.