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Can you judge a book by its cover?
I read Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, by Gerard Prunier, and was quite impressed. I thought "what a smart and unbiased introduction to such a difficult topic." But why was I impressed? I don't know nearly enough about the topic to judge the material.
I was impressed because the author sounded so reasonable and so intelligent. But I can't cite any really good reason to believe this was more than a trick. Prunier sure didn't seem as if he were trying to talk me into a hidden agenda.
Bryan Caplan offers his heuristics for trusting a source or not; here's Arnold Kling on the same. Here's David Henderson's podcast on disagreement.
I tend to trust sources who use their intelligence to point out flaws in their own positions. But is this more than an aesthetic preference on my part? What's so trustworthy about that? Maybe I'm just looking for people who remind me of myself, and what's so good about me anyway?
If my trust standard works, it is only because not so many people use it. If more readers trusted on the basis of "using intelligence to publicly question one's foundations," that standard might be too easily to manipulate.
In other words, it is the stupidity of much of the audience (they can be fooled by simple tricks, complex tricks are not needed) which makes it possible for the more sophisticated readers to read signs of intellectual dishonesty and get closer to the truth.
Let's say you have a medium -- call it a blog -- which is read only by very smart people. Simple, relatively discernible tricks won't be used. Should those readers then have a special distrust of the authors?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 2, 2007 at 07:48 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
On the limit, it shouldn’t really matter how smart your readership is. Assume MR readers are a smart bunch: so, you would want to employ sophisticated techniques to conceal your biases. But with a blog, we read your viewpoints and stuff every day. If we are indeed smart, you may fool us for a little while - in the long run, however, nothing will work.
And it just takes a few smart ones amongst your thousands of readers to 'out' you: comments are usually open. I am confident you have no secret agenda – that is other than taking over the world!
Posted by: datacharmer at Aug 2, 2007 8:21:40 AM
If an author understands his position well enough to argue against it convincingly, that's a costly signal that he's thought long and hard about the issue rather than tossing off a polemic.
Also, it makes the book better, by allowing the reader to participate more efficiently in the debate.
Posted by: jb at Aug 2, 2007 8:29:08 AM
Speak truthiness to power! :)
Posted by: Derek SCruggs at Aug 2, 2007 8:31:07 AM
I find this entire theme a little puzzling. Don't we all possess analytical skills that enable us to evaluate arguments? If so, then the best heuristic is "question everything." If you can't bother to question, then don't formulate opinions. Anything less leads to silly heuristics like Caplan's "people employed at Harvard > people not employed at Harvard."
Posted by: TO at Aug 2, 2007 8:50:15 AM
seek out the categories of misjudgement prevalent among professionals - where are doctors most
likely to misdiagnose, institutional investors lose their shirts, etc.
Posted by: mkl at Aug 2, 2007 9:14:56 AM
I find the circular nature of this post amusing. You are doubting trust in self-doubting sources because of your own affinity for self-doubt.
FWIW, I'm also a self-doubter and approve of self-doubting sources.
Posted by: KingM at Aug 2, 2007 9:39:06 AM
I think jb is onto something. Using those who can argue against their own stance convincingly (or can point out the flaws in their argument) as a heuristic for spotting someone you can trust seems reasonable as opposed to being just an aesthetic preference. It's kind of a derivative of the scientific method where you make a hypothesis and test it repeatedly. And the best (the only?) way to do this is by trying to find counter evidence or prove that it is false, rather than trying to prove that it is true. So those who exercise self-doubt seem to be those who are just following the thoughtful and honest method of testing and challenging their own beliefs.
Posted by: mtlippincott at Aug 2, 2007 9:55:46 AM
If more readers trusted on the basis of "using intelligence to publicly question one's foundations," that standard might be too easily to manipulate.
I've found very, very few intellectuals actually question their core foundational assumptions about reality. Generally their assumptions are simply assumed to be self-evident truths. For example, most academics are materialists, and getting most of them to actually read a book like Irreducible Mind is about as difficult as getting a fundamentalist Christian to read a Richard Dawkins book. . . Of course there are always exceptions.
Posted by: Wondering at Aug 2, 2007 10:06:44 AM
This reminds me of the salesman's tool of raising legitimate and generally well known issues with their own products / positions, not necessarily to address them directly (which might give the impression of tokenism), but to make their presentation appear balanced, the presenter thoughtful, and introduce some apparent humility. The key is figuring out who your audience is ... if you're trying to persuade, this is useful; if you're rallying the faithful it's unnecessary.
That said I still tend to fall into your camp on this issue, although with experience my level of skepticism has increased substantially.
Posted by: mike at Aug 2, 2007 10:28:22 AM
Silly Tyler. Tricks are for kids.
The defense against lies is simple: the rest of the blogosphere! If someone can make a convincing case that you are a liar (and even have the photos with the flaming pants to prove it), I doubt I would be taking your musings as seriously as I do now.
Posted by: Robert at Aug 2, 2007 10:47:10 AM
I have had a related discussion with both graduate students and colleagues. Some colleagues advise graduate students not to point out the flaws in their work on the theory that that is the job of others. I encourage students to point out the flaws in their work because it shows that they are serious scholars and also because that way the work does a better job of contributing to the literature.
My sense is that the treatment effect of my advice is heterogeneous: some students do better on the job market by being up front about weaknesses, others do worse. I am not clear that I can sign the average treatment effect on the treated.
I would be curious to know what Tyler and Alex tell their students.
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Smith at Aug 2, 2007 10:57:52 AM
Is Caplan speaking tongue-in-cheek? His "...leaving the well-informed to guide policy"had me smiling.
Urging laypeople to "trust the experts" is
• useless (there are too many competing experts) and
• embarrassing (it's a self-serving "look at me" stance coming from a public policy intellectual) and
• generally insipid as most people think that they already do that but which obviously, by the state of the nation, they do not. The "experts" and "serious" people stood by and let GW Bush bring on the worst foreign-policy debacle in the history of the nation. So much for relying on the "well-informed."
Posted by: David Sucher at Aug 2, 2007 11:23:01 AM
I think the comments section of most any blog makes it abundantly clear that it is a good thing that policy is largely guided by expert, rather than popular, opinion.
This is not a claim that expert opinion is always, or even usually correct. Rather, it is a claim that it is correct more often than popular opinion and, when wrong, generally wrong in less harmful ways (and more prone, though still not very prone, to self-correction).
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Smith at Aug 2, 2007 11:32:10 AM
A trust betrayed is not regained (John Lott comes to mind). Intelligent people understand that and take pains not to lose their audience's trust. The audience, for its part, will best spend its skeptical resources looking for honest mistakes, honorable disagreements, and factual errors rather than hidden-agenda manipulations: the latter are rare. Well, outside of politics.
Posted by: Eduardo Santiago at Aug 2, 2007 12:19:44 PM
David Sucher: Caplan argues that on average the experts are more correct than the general public. Taking the consensus of the experts would then be wiser than taking the democratic consensus of the general public. You state that the experts stood by GWB, but you have not shown that they have done so to a greater degree than the general public. I recall polls on the eve of the invasion showing a very large amount of support, and Bush still got re-elected.
Posted by: TGGP at Aug 2, 2007 2:29:55 PM
"Let's say you have a medium -- call it a blog -- which is read only by very smart people"
That is a trick
Posted by: JEAN at Aug 2, 2007 2:47:14 PM
Caplan argues that on average the experts are more correct than the general public.
That doesn't convince me that experts should be permitted enhanced ability to enact policy or laws. Experts tend to overvalue their own opinions, to latch on to career enhancing exciting new (and un- or under- tested) theories and tend to make it a personal crusade to see their theories enacted, often forgetting the rules of civil society (e.g., Marxists). The public acts as necessary inertial weight against such experts.
While I haven't read them, others have discussed the value of experts The Experts Speak by Cerf & Navasky, Expert Political Judgement and, the name and exact phrasing escapes me, but someone coined the "Seer Sucker Theory."
Posted by: guy in the veal calf office at Aug 2, 2007 2:50:34 PM
All thinking and communication is a "trick". The only issues are how appealing, artistic, and clever they are.
As for experts, they are usually so ego-invested in their own expertise (= opinions) that they rush to ostracize any who challenge or dispute their status. So often they resemble herds that rush from one corner of the corral to another.
Posted by: Brian H at Aug 3, 2007 12:33:07 PM
A simple heuristic for judging the truth of an argument on a topic of which one has little knowledge is to see if the person making the argument has also spoken out on any topic of which you do have knowledge. If his arguments in an area of your expertise are convincing, this is a reason to trust his arguments in areas where you are not an expert. (Note: This is, of course, a rebuttable reason, but a reason nonetheless.)
Posted by: Ross Levatter at Aug 3, 2007 3:02:47 PM
The very idea for a heuristic for judging the truth sounds a bit over the top to me. Of course we are going to filter things through our world-view and yes, there are indicators that might suggest that somethings are more true than others, but in the final analysis, truth is a relative concept. What is truth is not always what is fact and either can sometimes not have anything to do with the other. Understanding truth and fact can only come from an exhaustive search of a wide range of material about a given subject and then you have to glean the truth from the contaminates of the author's bias, your world-view and personal filters. After all of that, one needs to consider context, perspective and purpose behind each source. Some of these things or none of these things may or may not help you discover the truth. After all, philosophers have been attempting to discover truth for centuries.
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