Epistemology
Continued influence effect
- Aka belief persistence Even in the face of new and trustable evidence, we continue to believe what we thought was the truth ex. people were described a fire that burnt down a house, and explained that in the room the fire started, there were jerry cans of gasoline, thereby accelerating the fire. Later on, they described this observation as mistaken, and in fact there had been no gasoline at all. After all the explanations about the case were done, participants in the study were asked to make observations about what happened and what could have prevented this fire. A good number of participants continued to cite the gasoline as an issue, even after having been informed that this was not a factual claim.
Continuum of quality of Information
Information can be differentiated according to how scientific it is. At the very top are problems which give incentive for scientific research. Then you have meta analysis, systematic reviews, a whole bunch of individual studies, individual articles and more and more commercialized things which aren't scientific and oftentimes contain false information.
- This can be linked to First Principles. Ideas that are "closer to the metal" are more likely to be quality and less likely to be watered down. When a blog writer distills some piece of information (that has already trickled through a number of different levels), there is an increasingly higher likelihood that something gets misunderstood along the way.
When assessing one's competency in a particular area, you must be careful to realize the distinction between the depth of competency and the extent. For example, someone who is talking to me might mistakenly give me some degree of authority of my thoughts on jazz because of the simple fact that I'm a musician. This cognitive bias comes into play when w are at the level of "you don't know what you don't know" about a particular field.
The more generic something is, the more generally useful it is, but the less specifically useful
- consider a dictionary's definition of a term. it is going to be more on the generic side so it is more understandable to more people. however, it is less meaningful to each person. this is why we take notes: to make a general piece of information more meaningful by making it more specific.
- also consider formulas in mathematics. they have been simplified and reduced to their essence, which makes them widely useable, but also less easy to comprehend
On any points that you feel so adamant about, you have to ask yourself "what is one thing that would change my opinion on this", that is, "what evidence would I have to see that would go contrary to my beliefs that would cause me to change my views?" If you cannot think of this thing, then you are no longer thinking like a scientist. Instead, you are thinking like a preacher.