Regardless of who was “right”, this conversation is a springboard for examining the broader conversational move of claiming “the author was right but was writing sloppily.”
Without getting into the specifics of this particular example,[1] sometimes this pattern occurs when an author wants to communicate some intuitive conclusion they have reached, but that intuition is the result of interacting such a large amount of literature/research/empirics/self-reflection/personal experience etc. that they can no longer point to any single short and compelling argument for why it’s true.
Mindful of norms and razors such as “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence,” they believe saying “I believe X because of intuition, but I can’t explain why” would be dismissed by their audience,[2] so they instead try to manufacture some makeshift argument for it because it feels more epistemically virtuous[3] to come up with “proper” scientific evidence. Unfortunately, their argument is often subtly wrong or slightly off-topic, which shouldn’t be surprising; after all, it’s not the argument that actually caused them to believe their conclusion, but more akin to a post-hoc confabulation.
See also Kaj Sotala’s comment here and Ben Pace’s summary of Jan Kulveit’s comment here.
Which isn’t entirely unreasonable to do if you’re such an audience member, but certainly not the optimal action to take if you have some degree of trust in the competence of the speaker’s intuition
I think this is an important point, especially when experts are talking to other experts about their respective fields. I once had a client call this “thinking in webs.” If you have a conclusion that you reached via a bunch of weak pieces of evidence collected over a bunch of projects and conversations and things you’ve read all spread out over years, it might or might not be epistemically correct to add those up to a strong opinion. But, there may be literally no verbally compelling way to express the source of that certainty. If you try, you’ll have forgotten most of the evidence, and even if you don’t, you’ll end up with an audience that’s bored to tears and (even if they’re trying to understand) able to easily explain away each individual piece of evidence.
One canonical example might be Niels Bohr telling Einstein to quit telling God what to do. Not everything Einstein thought was right, but he clearly had and used very strong intuitions, based on thinking about known examples, regarding the nature of physical law. These were difficult to express and (rightly) would not, themselves, be considered scientifically valid evidence for drawing conclusions. IIRC I think that specific retort was in regards to “God does not play dice,” which AFAIK most physicists then and since have disagreed with. But, depending on what specifically Einstein meant, and how the universe is actually operationalizing the underlying physics we see as quantum mechanics, it is still entirely possible he was right, but in a different way then he would have expected at the time.
Without getting into the specifics of this particular example,[1] sometimes this pattern occurs when an author wants to communicate some intuitive conclusion they have reached, but that intuition is the result of interacting such a large amount of literature/research/empirics/self-reflection/personal experience etc. that they can no longer point to any single short and compelling argument for why it’s true.
Mindful of norms and razors such as “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence,” they believe saying “I believe X because of intuition, but I can’t explain why” would be dismissed by their audience,[2] so they instead try to manufacture some makeshift argument for it because it feels more epistemically virtuous[3] to come up with “proper” scientific evidence. Unfortunately, their argument is often subtly wrong or slightly off-topic, which shouldn’t be surprising; after all, it’s not the argument that actually caused them to believe their conclusion, but more akin to a post-hoc confabulation.
See also Kaj Sotala’s comment here and Ben Pace’s summary of Jan Kulveit’s comment here.
Which I acknowledge at the outset doesn’t actually fit into what I’m describing here
Which isn’t entirely unreasonable to do if you’re such an audience member, but certainly not the optimal action to take if you have some degree of trust in the competence of the speaker’s intuition
Even though it isn’t
I think this is an important point, especially when experts are talking to other experts about their respective fields. I once had a client call this “thinking in webs.” If you have a conclusion that you reached via a bunch of weak pieces of evidence collected over a bunch of projects and conversations and things you’ve read all spread out over years, it might or might not be epistemically correct to add those up to a strong opinion. But, there may be literally no verbally compelling way to express the source of that certainty. If you try, you’ll have forgotten most of the evidence, and even if you don’t, you’ll end up with an audience that’s bored to tears and (even if they’re trying to understand) able to easily explain away each individual piece of evidence.
One canonical example might be Niels Bohr telling Einstein to quit telling God what to do. Not everything Einstein thought was right, but he clearly had and used very strong intuitions, based on thinking about known examples, regarding the nature of physical law. These were difficult to express and (rightly) would not, themselves, be considered scientifically valid evidence for drawing conclusions. IIRC I think that specific retort was in regards to “God does not play dice,” which AFAIK most physicists then and since have disagreed with. But, depending on what specifically Einstein meant, and how the universe is actually operationalizing the underlying physics we see as quantum mechanics, it is still entirely possible he was right, but in a different way then he would have expected at the time.