So my prior is that incredible things really do happen, and nothing Sacks said was any more unbelievable than these phenomena.
That is a tricky problem, isn’t it? There are much weirder things that are well-known to be true, like the ability to cure phantom limb pain with some well-placed mirrors, or the fact that you can give someone back the ability to recognize faces by disabling the part of the brain meant to ‘shortcut’ facial recognition. We build a probabilistic model of how ‘weird’ we expect a given domain to be, and, when a story’s weirdness is well within one or two standard deviations of what we expect, we don’t see any reason to be doubtful. It’s comparable to your neighbor lying about having gone to the grocery store yesterday, or having seen a rare breed of dog at the local park. The effort needed to investigate and uncover unsurprising lies would be intractable.
In the general case, this is a pretty harmless thing. It only allows lies to go unrecognized when the updates they’d produce would be small. The more dangerous case is when malicious actors abuse this same phenomena by preempting a true-but-surprising story that would produce large updates after readers investigate and find it to be true by circulating a similarly surprising false story that, after being discredited, causes readers to forego the effort needed to investigate the original story.
Sadly, I think Sack’s actions may, unintentionally, have the same effect as the explicitly malicious example above. “Cool neuroscience thing turns out to be made up for book sales” is now in the public psyche, and ordinary people who do not spend time reading neuroscience papers may default to dismissing interesting discoveries that could improve their lives or motivate them to learn more.
That is a tricky problem, isn’t it? There are much weirder things that are well-known to be true, like the ability to cure phantom limb pain with some well-placed mirrors, or the fact that you can give someone back the ability to recognize faces by disabling the part of the brain meant to ‘shortcut’ facial recognition. We build a probabilistic model of how ‘weird’ we expect a given domain to be, and, when a story’s weirdness is well within one or two standard deviations of what we expect, we don’t see any reason to be doubtful. It’s comparable to your neighbor lying about having gone to the grocery store yesterday, or having seen a rare breed of dog at the local park. The effort needed to investigate and uncover unsurprising lies would be intractable.
In the general case, this is a pretty harmless thing. It only allows lies to go unrecognized when the updates they’d produce would be small. The more dangerous case is when malicious actors abuse this same phenomena by preempting a true-but-surprising story that would produce large updates after readers investigate and find it to be true by circulating a similarly surprising false story that, after being discredited, causes readers to forego the effort needed to investigate the original story.
Sadly, I think Sack’s actions may, unintentionally, have the same effect as the explicitly malicious example above. “Cool neuroscience thing turns out to be made up for book sales” is now in the public psyche, and ordinary people who do not spend time reading neuroscience papers may default to dismissing interesting discoveries that could improve their lives or motivate them to learn more.