Tag: bayesian

Argue The Point, Not The Person

There’s no end to the number of scenes in movies and television series in which you’re told to play the man, not the hand, when it comes to poker.

This is because the objective is to win, and poker is, by definition, a zero sum game.

But arguments are not zero-sum games, although most (all?) of us tend to think so, at least when we’re actually arguing. We get so caught up in winning that we often choose to defeat the person making the argument, rather than the argument itself. And we’re much likelier to do this if we realize that our own argument is unlikely to carry the day. The fancy-pants word for what we are likely to do next is ad-hominem. We’ve all used this strategy, if nowhere else, at least in school while growing up. And I’m not proud of this, but I’ve used it well into adulthood too.

And the reason this happens is because we think the point of an argument is to win it. Which is wrong, of course. The point of an argument is to figure out what is right (or true). But this simple point is hard to remember, and so we end up turning arguments into a battle for preserving our egos.

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle in a subset of Twitter in the recent past, and while you will be able to click your way through and figure out what it has all been about, I’d much rather you didn’t, not right away at least. Focus, instead, on what the thread is telling you about how to argue:

While the thread itself doesn’t mention it, my biggest takeaway from reading it is to ask myself what the point of an argument is. Or, to put it in a way that resonates with one of my favorite questions, what should one be optimizing for in an argument? And my own answer is that one should be optimizing for figuring out what is right (or what is true), rather than winning the argument.

Note that this is hard to do, and note that the person dispensing this gyaan to you right now (i.e., me) often isn’t very good at following his own advice!

But that being said, it still is advice worth pondering over.

By the way, if you’ve been wondering why I’ve been careful to distinguish between that which is right and that which is true, I have a movie recommendation for you.

And on a related note, learn to read the news in such a way that you end up updating or changing your beliefs, rather than being in a rush to confirm them. Statisticians will say that I’m simply asking you to be more Bayesian in your outlook, and they wouldn’t be wrong (click here and read hansn’s answer).

I’d urge you to spend some time in thinking through the paragraph immediately above this one, making sure you understand what Baye’s theorem is and why I bring it up in the context of reading the news, and then read this excellent post by Tyler Cowen. It is excellent (to me) precisely because it isn’t clear the first time you read it.

But the reason I bring that post up here is because I would argue that the Twitter thread and this post are making the same point: arguing should not be about feeding your ego, and neither should learning more about the world be about feeding your ego. Arguing and learning more about the world should, instead, be about figuring out that which is right (or true).

Note to self: this is, of course, much easier said than done.

Let me be clearer: whether while reading something or while arguing with someone, continually ask yourself this question: in what ways might I be wrong? How does this article/video/movie/podcast/argument help me update my understanding of how the world works?

And if you find yourself resolutely saying “it doesn’t! I’m obviously right!”, be very afraid!

Links for 30th April, 2019

  1. “On average that means each MP represented 1.85 million people. Now it is 2.4 million. There can’t be anything more absurd in the world.”
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    A very short takeaway from a very interesting article, about an issue that not too many people have thought about – remapping India’s parliament. This is going to be rather complicated.
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  2. “Bayes classifiers seem natural, and in many applications they are. But an interesting insight is that some classification problems may have hugely different costs of type I and II errors, in which case an NP classification approach may be entirely natural, not clumsy. (Consider, for example, deciding whether to convict someone of a crime that carries the death penalty. Many people would view the cost of a false declaration of “guilty” as much greater than the cost of a false “innocent”.) ”
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    Stats nerds only – but if you are one, a fairly interesting set of papers awaits you at the bottom of this link.
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  3. “At the end of the book, Fukuyama, when discussing the contemporary China, writes that “good enough” rule of law is often sufficient for fast economic growth. Moreover, technology is much more important than property rights. Fukuyama points out that in a Malthusian world, no property rights will provide you with an economic surplus; but technological development will (p. 249).”
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    Reading this article should hopefully encourage you to read a little bit more about Hayek, Mancur Olson (which I myself have just started to do, courtesy prodding from a friend), and Fukuyama himself.
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  4. “There is one key idea of the book. If you wish to have a functional political order that enables economic growth and gives people freedom from arbitrariness of the sovereign or from oppression by their peers, you need three components: (i) a strong state, (ii) rule of law, and (iii) accountability.”
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    Do not diss either the excerpt, or the post, or the book it reviews. The link is in fact the first one from the article linked to in 3 above – but the post is important enough to merit a separate link.
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  5. “Thus, I agree with McCloskey that truly “thinking like an economist” is a very rare outcome in a principles course, and unless you are comfortable as a teacher with setting a goal that involves near-universal failure, it’s not a useful goal for instructors. But it also seems true to me that the series of topics in a conventional principles of economics course, and how they build on each other, does for many students combine to form a comprehensible narrative by the end of the class. The students are not thinking like economists. But they have some respect and understanding for how economist think.”
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    Gokhale Institute this August embarks upon an attempt to disprove this lovely article. Wish us luck.