We Should All Become Increasingly Comfortable Ignoring or Even Behaving Disrespectfully Toward Professionals who Cannot Produce Accurate Predictions

Especially when you can point to a random guy on Twitter with profanity in his name and a pornographic anime avatar with a much higher batting average

So my wife made the choice to stop drinking coffee two days ago and now my son is going to bed almost an hour earlier each night. I don’t know how long that will last. I don’t know if I am being fooled by randomness. I don’t know of any direct caffeine to breast milk pipeline that could possibly explain the behavior but I’m going to go ahead and irresponsibly state all of those things together and let you draw your own conclusions, but all the while knowing that you will almost certainly conclude —as I have, to be honest— that caffeine somehow magically moves from the esophagus to the breast milk without having been uselessly metabolized along the way and that my son has been jacked out on coffee for the last several weeks.

I have absolutely no evidence for this. I am not going to look up any evidence for it. I’m just going to choose to believe it because I’m too tired to be bothered.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “oh, this is one of those things where he’s going off on a tangeant again.”

Wrong.

I knew you would think that, so I buried my super cromulent —the etymology of this word is really good by the way— point in here by way of analogy. I tricked you for the very good reason that the way that I’m lying to you right now is the way that most news outlets will lie to you. It’s also the way that most professionals will lie to you. I’m just stating a bunch of things together, that treated atomically are true, without caring at all for if the arrangement of facts or if the connective tissue between them makes any sense.

I am lying by implication. I know damn well how you’re going to assemble those individually true facts once I give them to you.

To be fair, I kinda sorta believe that I know what’s going on but I haven’t tested this in any rigorous way. I wouldn’t be super surprised if this was just random and explained by other things like the fact it’s getting really dark earlier due to rain clouds and we have trained him to fall asleep to rain sounds with white noise machines. Or even that he’s just doing more activities the last few days and it’s tiring him out earlier. I just know that my wife drinks coffee, it goes into her digestive system, some molecules from what she ingested enter her bloodstream, and maybe enough of those molecules are caffeine or caffeine metabolites that produce similar effects to caffeine itself, and maybe these persist somehow through the milk production process. He got really amped up when she was drinking coffee and now that she’s stopped he’s getting really tired at seven o’clock.

I have no fucking clue if that actually happens. I’m not going to do some kind of centrifuge test. Or the one where you look at spectrum of emissions when you burn things that I didn’t care enough about to really learn how to do well in organic chemistry because it seemed like I would just forget it immediately after anyway. Also as soon as they explained that a computer could look at the emission spectra —which I specifically asked because no fucking way someone hadn’t built that already— and just tell you what the compound was I lost all emotional investment in looking at some squiggly lines and saying “oh yeah, that’s benzene.” I have pretty much forgotten all of it. I think it was gas spectro something or other. There was probably a “ferometry” in there somewhere. Spectroferometry? Not even going to google it. Not even going to google for how diet impacts breast milk.

I’m just choosing to believe.

Except I just did look it up just now because my wife texted me to do so and the Mayo clinic says “sure, caffeine can kinda do that sometimes.” Also, it’s gas chromotography and mass spectrometry.

Three things bring this to mind recently. One is this piece by Scott Alexander, who is my favorite of the guys that I disagree with fundamentally about weird stuff on the nature of intelligence, and totally coincidentally the one I agree with the most of the people I disagree with. The second is the recent 60 Minutes interview with the comically incorrect Paul Ehrlich. The third is some psychiatry organization trying to take away Jordan Peterson’s license, which I won’t link to because I already linked to two things and I’m quite lazy.

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of using functional definitions that you can trace to measurable real-world behavior. When you’re trying to describe the world, if you’re relying only on internal feeling to communicate… that’s art and poetry. I like art and poetry. I think that even helps elucidate a lot of important stuff. Also this is radically more complex than I’m saying that it is.

What I’m trying to get to, is that the definition of “lie” used by Scott Alexander in that piece is interesting, but only insofar as it is interesting the media will very rarely lie regarding individual facts. Why is that the case? Why specifically does that seem to be the limit of the quality control of large organizations? However, the usefulness runs out of that definition at that point. However, if you use lie in terms of effect, i.e. define lie to mean “any communication intended to give a false predictive model of reality to another predictive-modeler”—having created this definition myself, I smugly consider it to be the most useful— then yes of course the media lies all the time and it becomes obvious why.

People only ever lie to you for one reason. They want you to go out and behave differently, in a way they would prefer that is different than your normal behavior, and they know if they were fully honest with you that you wouldn’t behave that way. I’m not going to go any deeper than that because it always ends up being specific and varied and usually I don’t care but that’s the same reason people always lie. Whether that’s telling people that Ivermectin is horse paste only —I don’t believe it’s a COVID cure-all, by the way, just that it is a relatively harmless de-wormer. It seems obvious this became the lie just because telling people that taking something probably won’t harm them but also probably won’t impact their COVID is ineffective messaging— or that cloth masks will work when you put on two of them, all of these are attempts to trade a more complete model of the world for a less complete one that will get you to do what the communicator wants.

If you explain this to someone who is a bit more of a normie, they might say “but Ivermectin is a horse-dewormer, why are you so upset about this? Do you want people to not seek proper medical attention when they get COVID?” I think the problem this totally hypothetical normie I just made up to make me look smart is making is that there’s a sense that telling the truth is a game you are only playing once. That no one has any memory of all their previous interactions with you. Except if they do remember, when you reveal yourself to be unreliable or even only intermittently reliable which is another way of calling someone unreliable, what you say can no longer be taken with any weight. You’re a liar.

If reading the news doesn’t enable you to better understand the world, to create a very good mental model, then what is it even for?

I think the answer to the question of truth-telling on individual facts is two-fold. It’s the easiest level of information to confirm and the news is able to be called out on errors here quite readily. The second is that it creates a very simple basis for a lawsuit. If you lie about a knowable fact, you will lose money and reputation via the course system.

I’m now going to plug the Index again and pretend I haven’t been beating anyone’s head over this for a year now.

But what if there was another cost, for not being fully and completely transparent? What if it cost you reputation for trying to over simplify stories? What if you had to say “yeah, Ivermectin, harmless de-wormer. You can take it and be fine. Probably won’t help your COVID though because of these factors. There’s some concerns here about mass behavior and evidence right now points to you still needing to go to your doctor but calling it horse paste is misleading” or else people would stop reading you.

We live in a sea of people. You’ll see someone pop into your timeline and then you’ll never see them again. You are also limited. You cannot possibly know all the things you need to know to understand if any random news story is accurate. Your only hope is some kind of transparent, adversarial record where people’s work is challenged and remembered so that if they reveal themselves to be a continual liar you will know about it very shortly after it happens. I am now going to start calling the Index a Decentralized News Editor because whenever I eventually make a Twitter account and start blowing up the mentions of Twitter PM’s I need to convey what I need them to build in the simplest terms possible.

Let’s say you write an article that says Ivermectin is horse-paste only. Someone on the Decentralized News Editor could very quickly make an argument that is outright deceptive. This could be adjudicated with multiple sources. Using birdwatch plus some extra features, a record of this could be established in a wiki like database. Then this url and the writer would be labeled for having been deceptive. A better article could be provided with the more complicated truth. And the very fact that you know you got this article after it survived multiple challenges means that you can rely on it to a much greater degree than anything else that is out there. This is news that for the first time in history works for you and not for an advertiser.

My goal here isn’t to see Ben Collins living on the street, making his money on his knees underneath a bridge. Or even to see Taylor Lorenz collecting aluminum cans out of garbage dumpsters to sell to her local recycling plant. It’s to set up a series of carrots and sticks where everyone in the news profession just immediately knows whenever they start typing that they have to be 100% honest and transparent. I want people to give all the information they have, be totally upfront about what they’re not sure of, and when they make a mistake to immediately look at it with honest eyes and say “yeah, I messed that up” or “Nope, I’m still right on that one.”

The only way to do that is to create a reward mechanism that pushes money to honest actors and takes attention away from liars. Carrot and stick. I would rather give you the carrot than the stick, but if you continue to push the country toward Civil War because you don’t want to actually make a living and buy hot sandwiches for your family because you’re involved in some psychological drama where you’re the good guy in a movie trying to save the world, then maybe fuck you?

I’ve been reading more on prediction markets and while I think they are a valuable tool and should be integrated into an overall framework where we start to look at the function of the news as “give us the best possible predictive models of the world” I just don’t think they’re going to provide the right incentives to create social change.

Shifting tone now radically —except it’s the same old song— let’s turn to the subject of Paul Ehrlich. For those who don’t know this guy is a biologist at Stanford and should also probably not ever be treated as a serious academic. Remember in the 1980’s when human civilization crumbled? Or when the entire world started to starve in the 1970’s? What about when we all ran out of resources and the government had to start limiting the number of children we could have? Paul Ehrlich insisted that all of those things would come to pass. Very very close to the actual events themselves. Every time he’s been wrong, he’d just doubled down.

This man is a professor at Stanford…

… and he’s a goddamn moron.

He’s probably has a very good rote memory. He probably knows a lot of facts that I don’t. I bet I could still manage to learn a lot of things talking to him. But on the critical faculty of assembling facts into good predictive models and communicating those honestly to the public, he just fucking fails. And not in a cool way. In a malicious and evil way.

After Ehrlich’s book “the Population Bomb” was written, millions of people were forcibly sterilized. Also I don’t know if that’s true. But someone said it on twitter and it confirmed my priors and so I’m choosing to believe it for the sake of this writing. Looks like he did advocate for it in India, after a quick google search. I don’t know if it actually happened, though.

Anyway, the reason this motherfucker can keep doubling down —I’m sorry, I get very upset about this stuff. Some assholes like this destroyed my home town during the spotted owl crisis and I just get so pissed when I think about what that did to people I grew up with— is because he pays no cost in either reputation or dollars. He lives in a world where his wrongness can never touch him.

He even had the gall to send this tweet, claiming that he has never been wrong about the basics and that if he is wrong then so is Science. This may remind you of another person who rose to prominence in the last few years who claimed the authority of “The Science.”

Fuck off.

Just go get fucked.

I remember when I was at college, just not fitting in at all because I am a white trash hill billy who had the misfortune to be born pretty good at math, there was a middle-aged professor who used to enjoy riding his bike very aggressively through groups of students. Smaller guy, very slight build, but a devil on his bike. He did this for multiple days. I could tell he kind of liked it. He felt super powerful because he could fail people in his classes or whatever, or cause them trouble, so no one ever told him to knock it off. The guy just did not see undergrads as human. Then he started getting aggressive with some people I knew who were very meek and wanted to stay under his radar, except there was no place to easily get out of his way, and I decided “No, fuck you” and I refused to get out of his way.

I am a big man.

His bike hit me, he fell to the ground. In a very belittling way, I picked up him and his bike. Brushed him off, like a Grizzly bear petting an elk. I effusively apologized to him for him running into me deliberately. I could tell he wanted to fight me. Part of me wanted him to except I think he also knew the dynamics of how that would go and so did I, meaning that he didn’t want to take the beating and I didn’t want to take the hassle of having beaten him up. At that time of my life I was very agoraphobic but fighting has never been something I’m particularly afraid of. Also in my defense, I only get aggressive like this in response to physical aggression from other people. And pretty much only when I see that aggression directed at people who can’t defend themselves. Also I haven’t snapped at this like someone in over a decade now. My dad literally shoved a cop’s head into a toilet for being rude. It’s progress, so don’t judge. The professor left in the end, walking his bike, very rattled.

What rattled him most wasn’t the fact that he fell down. Or that I hadn’t moved. It’s that I thought he was a piece of shit and had treated him like a piece of shit. He’d fallen from a great height to the lowest depths. Or what he probably imagined were the lowest depths.

We as a society need to do this to Paul Ehrlich.

The best way to do that to Paul Ehrlich is to make sure everywhere he goes that people know he’s a moron. The best way to do that is to attach his repeated false predictions, the evidence that they are false, and the evidence that he was given a fair hearing to his online identity. If you see something by Paul Ehrlich anywhere, you should at the same time know, “Hey, this guy is full of it.”

And if that guy then comes and says “Hey, I was peer reviewed. I am science itself” then we should look at all those journals that did the peer reviewing and update their reputation as well to make sure people know “Hey, this isn’t a real journal or at the very least these editors are terrible. They need to admit this is wrong or else admit they don’t care about the accuracy of their papers.”

And if it’s an entire field of study that keeps being shown to be repeatedly wrong, then hey, why can’t we know that too?

Reality is the only God that reigns supreme over ever human heart. Reality is the thing that pushes back when we try to push our will on the world. Placing it back in charge of adjudicating the truth is the best hope humanity has to survive long-term.

The Decentralized News Editor could keep track of all of these items the same way that it would for the news.

On a final note, for Jordan Peterson, I’m not sure I believe in credentialing people in general. Except I probably do if you define credential to mean “here is some proof that I went through a process to show I can make verifiably correct decisions in this one given field.”

Jordan Peterson is currently on the horns for some spicy tweets about the government and his credentialing body has taken it upon themselves to say that spicy tweets mean he probably isn’t a very good psychologist. Or psychiatrist. Or whichever one of those he is. Not going to google it. Not the point.

I do think Jordan Peterson is slightly out of his mind. Probably to a somewhat lesser extent than I am out of my mind, but I am better at hiding it than him. I also probably think he’s pretty good at his job, based on the fact that he’s had such an impact on so many young men.

So what gives the moral authority to someone to tell somebody who has had that kind of impact that they’re not fit for duty?

Enter a Decentralized Credentialing System.

Producing results is another way of saying you submit to the will of reality. If you can go through some process where you are gradually increasing the risks you can take and gradually increasing the knowledge you can show, then who the hell is anyone to come into the middle of that and say you’re no good?

I have to start logging into work now because the VPN is super slow lately, but ask yourself this: where can you make reality the judge in your own life? How? And will it do a better job that some person somewhere that nobody elected making an arbitrary decision about what is right?