

Ask HN: how to deal with revisionism? - Tichy

It seems that there is no "major" topic without two factions that claim the exact opposite things from each other.<p>- global warming<p>- peak oil<p>- evolution<p>- vaccinations<p>- holocaust<p>- and so on...<p>The only one I where I can confidently say the deniers are wrong is evolution theory. That is because I know enough about it to validate it logically (to a degree that satisfies me personally), and I can even run experiments in my computer that demonstrate evolution at work.<p>Maybe it is best to simply ignore most of the issues. Just wondering if HN has some other ideas.
======
frig
Welcome to the modern condition; this will only get worse for the foreseeable
future.

The easiest heuristic is always to first ask _qui bono_ , and then heavily
discount information whose content if true would advance the interests of the
information supplier.

Thus: if Pepsi runs an ad on TV saying Pepsi is the schizz and Coke is just
fizz, you discount that information heavily b/c Pepsi's just talking its book.

There's a loose analogy to information-theory proper here: the information
content of a message is proportional to its unpredictability; if for example
you could reliably reproduce an N-bit message once you had the first k < N
bits you'd say the message only has k bits of information, not N.

Thus if knowing who is speaking lets you know what they'll say you should just
ignore them; if you ever want to find out what they said you just have to
remember who they were and reconstruct what they were saying, so you can defer
considering it until you have a reason to care.

This looks like ad hominem but isn't; it's just avoiding low-information-gain
use of your time.

The other thing to do is to back away from the twin notions that:

(1) holding true beliefs is in and of itself as valuable as you think it is

(2) most participants in a debate (a) attach the same importance to holding
true beliefs that you do and (b) would switch to a different belief if the
evidence supported it

(1) is probably the hardest to let go, but it's something you have to let go
(holding true beliefs when such beliefs are inputs to an important decision is
important; otherwise not so much).

(2) is more important.

A good general rule of thumb is that most people like to think of their lives
as having had some kind of meaning or purpose, etc.; just living, enjoying
what life brings you, and peacefully shuffling off the mortal coil isn't a
satisfying life for many people (probably b/c our brains are hardwired for a
difficult life in the jungle and get bored in the absence of real threats to
overcome).

In places where life is nasty, brutish, and short survival itself is enough of
a challenge that the struggle for simple survival is itself enough to cast
your life into a narrative where you're a hero of some sort; in modern
societies the challenges of life aren't generally enough on their own to
provide a convincing narrative of moral heft and so other struggles have to be
invented to fill in the meaning.

A first consequence of this impulse is firstly that people tend to assign
excessive moral heft to the things they're good at:

\- someone who has eg bootstrapped themselves out of a bad situation by virtue
of wise decisions and self-restraint will assign a high moral value to wise
decisionmaking and self-restraint, so that their life's story has a heroic
bent to it above-and-beyond simple utility maximization

\- someone who has strong aesthetic or artistic preferences or beliefs will
assign a high moral value to aesthetics and artistic purity so that the
decisions they have made (not "selling out", etc.) take on a heroic bent
above-and-beyond simple utility maximization

\- and of course someone who believes themselves to be good at arriving at
true beliefs will assign an irrationally high importance to holding true
beliefs (if you doubt this just count the # of times pundits or would-be
"thinkers" write sentences like "I used to believe X but then I learned about
Y and after some struggle I now believe Z instead X")

...etc. and a second consequence of this impulse arises from how it interacts
with social life; people are at heart social beings and thus it is very easy
to add additional axes of meaning to one's narrative by banding together into
a faction as part of a larger struggle against other faction(s).

These affiliation-derived meanings range from sports teams to political labels
to "sides" in an argument or public debate.

These two dynamics intersect in areas of contention in predictable ways:

\- on each side of an argument you'll have some nucleus (core members) who
will be a mix of people who assign a huge important to true beliefs (and
currently believe in the side they're on) and shills (representatives of those
whose interests hinge on what way the debate gets resolved if it gets
resolved)

\- then thanks to the way that additional meaning can be added to people's
lives the mechanism by which affiliation-derived meaning can be added just by
taking a side means that many hangers-on pick sides based on the meaning it
gives them to do so (or because they've already made a commitment to a faction
in exchange for enhanced meaning and "in for a penny in for a pound" (eg:
joining a church makes it easier for them to cast their life as partially a
struggle for virtue and against sin; b/c of that prior commitment they also
commit against evolution as in the church they joined they can't do both))

With the following consequences:

\- the people who hold true belief important can be convinced by reasoning and
argumentation, _provided the argumentation is sufficiently, overwhelmingly
powerful that it's impossible to see said argumentation without coming to
agree with it as a rational being_ ; most argumentation -- especially on
debatable issues -- is not that strong, and thus not enough on its own merits
to nudge someone on the "other side" to take the hit to their self-esteem (as
a discerner of true beliefs) and switch

\- the shills can't be convinced by anything; they're dishonest participants
and will argue their case as long as they keep getting paid

\- the affiliational-types aren't going to be convinced by reasoning; the get
convinced only when it becomes clear that greater meaning-in-their-lives can
be had by switching to the other side, which is more about reconciling
conflicting affiliational claims than it is about winning a debate (eg:
finding a away to reconcile their religious beliefs with the other side --
thereby letting them keep their religious affiliation and join your side -- is
more important than convincing them your side is right). A huge downside of
even trying to argue is that arguing with them _increases_ the amount of
meaning their participation in the struggle gives them -- as it starts to look
and talk like a real struggle, with conflict and bad guys and so on -- best
just to make your side seem like the more-meaningful side

Which en fin is why such issues are best ignored. Things will only get worse
as technology improves: allowing more communication => more opinions
transmitted to more places => more factions / debates (and thus less time to
learn the intricacies of each of them even if you wanted to) => more
opportunities to join factions and add meaning to life => more of the same
only more so.

This will be especially true for historical stuff, since history is _vastly_
underdetermined by the available evidence and the same set of historical facts
can usually support dozens of reasonable interpretations; much of the apparent
previous state of consensus about what happened historically is as much a
function of the previously high barriers to entry in publishing stuff as it is
a sign that the previous consensus opinion was correct.

------
tjic
The proper approach to these debates is either (a) rational ignorance [
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance> ], (b) study up on both
sides.

I dislike the word "revisionism" as a slur against the standard position.
Revision is good. When more data comes to light, one should reevaluate what
one things one knows. "Revisionism" is another word for "the scientific
method" ; it should not be a slur.

I've done a fair bit of reading on all of these, and I am convinced of the
"standard" position on all, except two. Anthropogenic Global Warming and Peak
Oil have a lot less solid science behind them than the others, and replace it
with (IMO) dubious modeling.

~~~
lbrandy
Definitions certainly get muddled. Revisionism, skepticism, and denialism. You
have to be really careful about labels, but we should all agree that
skepticism (esp. of the scientific variety) is good but when it becomes
denialism, we've left the rational world.

I find these topics fascinating. In fact, I think everyone should dig into one
just as a mental exercise. Convince yourself. You will learn a tremendous
amount, even from the most bizarre. And not just about science or whatever
topic is at hand, but at logic, fallacy, and how people think about and
convince themselves of things.

I've dug fairly deep into things like 9/11 conspiracy theories, creationism,
moon hoaxes, tax protesters, and other assorted "alternative" theories (like
homeopathy). I am 100% convinced they are all nonsense, but I encourage anyone
to dig in. You'd be simply amazed how much you can and will learn.

~~~
eru
You can start with the hollow (or flat) earth.

~~~
cousin_it
Brought to you by the same guy who invented the Dark Sucker theory:
<http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw2/square_earth.html>

EDIT: he also has a Force Skeptics page that might be relevant to our
discussion. <http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw2/force_skeptics.html>

------
tokenadult
The Holocaust deniers are definitely wrong too, just as are the people who
don't credit the evidence for biological evolution. And anyone who thinks that
medically administered vaccines are more dangerous than measles, pertussis, or
seasonal flu is crazy. The harder case is vaccination against chicken pox, a
disease with lower mortality and morbidity.

To answer your methodological question about how to tell the difference
between competing ideas, learn to read the peer-reviewed scientific journals
on each subject. Now that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals all
have open online access, it's easier than ever to practice reading scientific
literature. See Peter Norvig's guide to reading scientific research

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

for what to look for while reading.

~~~
Tichy
What makes you so sure, though? I think there are definitely cases of too much
vaccination, for example (though I personally don't think the major ones are
superfluous - but I have so far never vaccinated against the seasonal flu...).
There is a lot of money at stake, too.

Holocaust: well it's impossible to discuss, and to me personally it has little
relevance. Whenever I tried to look for more information, I hit on a lot of
question marks. So I think the details are very unclear, but no doubt a lot of
people died. Thing is, it was before I was born and there are hardly any
traces left, so how to ever be sure?

~~~
hvs
The evidence for the Holocaust is so complete and wide-ranging that to
question it almost instantly puts you into the "loony" category. Just because
it happened before you were born is not an argument for believing in it or
not. Otherwise, %99.9999... of the knowledge that you have would be useless.
The number of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust alone is evidence enough, but the
documentary footage of it is also significant.

~~~
Tichy
Documentary footage like "Schindler's Liste"? ;-)

I have not seen any of the footage. Where can I see it? I have seen movies of
concentration camps when the American soldiers first set foot in them. But I
don't know enough to be sure that it wasn't diseases that killed a lot of
people and led to the starved looks, for example. Also, how did anybody
survive at all? It seems difficult also to judge pictures from war times from
our modern perspective. (corpses were probably a common sight - not so much
today).

Not that I want to deny the HC, it is just that I don't take things at face
value. Luckily the HC issue is not relevant enough to me to get too involved.
It is sufficient to me to know that a lot of people died, and I know that
humans can be very evil. Nitpicking on the details is also likely just
something the revisionists start.

~~~
Retric
There is more evidence for the holocaust than there was for Kennedy
assassination. He is alive and living in Texas. Bob the impersonator in the
car had no idea he was about to be shot and nobody can talk about it because
they are all accomplices to the murder... [kidding]

Anyway, the idea that you can keep a secret that 100,000+ people are in on is
just silly. If you really want to know, use sonar to look at the mass graves.
Still the allure of conspiracy theories is huge. So it’s easy for people to
ignore evidence that does not support their pet theory.

PS: My favorite theory is idea that UFO's where created by the US Air force to
misdirect the Russians when people in the middle of the country started seeing
strange objects in the sky they would see reports from the US of the same
thing. The advantage of this theory is it would take a small number of people
to create, and those in the know would have little reason to tell the truth
thinking it's a good joke.

~~~
kingkongrevenge
> the idea that you can keep a secret that 100,000+ people are in on is just
> silly

100,000 would be hard, but 10,000 vetted employees threatened with the power
of the state for the rest of their lives is definitely done in militaries all
over the world.

Look at the never ending revelations about the early Soviet era. Many aspects
of the GULAG system are only becoming clear now.

I do not find the argument that governments can't keep secrets convincing at
all. Even if the seal isn't airtight there is often such a highly effective
ability to muddy the waters the truth becomes impossible to see through the
disinformation.

~~~
Retric
The US government failed to keep instructions for building Atomic bombs from
Russia. After realizing that failure they then designed and built the far more
powerful Hydrogen bomb, which was quickly copped by the Russians. This
information has then leaked around the world. You can trace every atomic bomb
program in the world back to information gathered from the US.

PS: Governments have discovered the best way to keep secrets is to tell as few
people as possible. There are not 10,000 people who know how to create the
best radar absorbing paint used by the Air force. So, even as we are
constantly compromised each leak is limited to what that person or computer
system knows.

~~~
kingkongrevenge
So Counter Intelligence was weak in that case. It's an anecdote, and there are
plenty of anecdotes about well kept secrets throughout history.

------
RyanMcGreal
If you think it's an important issue, read up on it. Read arguments from
people on as many different sides of the issue as you can, and be sure to read
up on the responses to those arguments from different sides of the issue.

Pay attention to peer-reviewed studies and meta-studies - look for data that
you can study and verify.

Pay attention as well to the manner in which arguments are made. If an
argument resorts to informal fallacies like ad hominem attacks, cherry picking
data, bait-and-switch and so on, be even more highly skeptical.

It's also important to understand whether the person making the argument has
any conflicts of interest (e.g. their own paycheck depends on a particular
point of view taking precedence over policy). However, it doesn't
_automatically_ follow that such a person is being dishonest just because they
stand to benefit from the adoption of their particular stance.

~~~
Tichy
I tried reading up on global warming, but it seems surprisingly hard to find
any information. The only "big" web sites on the topic were run by anti-
global-warmists, naturally they were full of charts and stuff.

How does one even find peer-reviewed information - by looking into "certified"
journals? And don't the revisionists have peers as well?

"If an argument resorts to informal fallacies like ad hominem attacks, cherry
picking data, bait-and-switch and so on, be even more highly skeptical."

Agreed, these tend to be fairly clear signs. My favorite is the inevitable
claim that "faction x can only resort to personal attacks", which is of course
also a personal attack ;-)

~~~
mixmax
There's a subreddit called hardscience dedicated to only scientific papers.
I've seen a few on global warming there. So that might be a good place to
start.

<http://www.reddit.com/r/hardscience/>

------
cousin_it
Evaluating a big controversial issue is hard for reasons analogous to the
"curse of dimensionality" when numerically computing multidimensional
integrals: a grid with step 1/k in N-dimensional space has ~k^N points, way
too many to sample them all. People solve this problem in practice by the
Monte Carlo method: sampling points at random and averaging their values
converges to the true integral much faster. So if some major topic has two
opposite factions, pick a _random tiny factual detail_ where they disagree,
and honestly work out for yourself which side is right about it. Repeat
several times to get a big picture with pretty good statistical assurance.

Some examples:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_made_from_human_corpses>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_seigneur>

<http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/carrots.asp>

------
edgeztv
(Edited)

To me the Holocaust is even more certain than evolution because I grew up with
the stories of it from my grandparents. But if you don't have those stories in
your family, you can also look at books, museums, photographs, eyewitness
accounts. The sources for facts are endless.

Being concerned about revisionism, I would have thought the OP is worried
about losing such facts, but then this thread turned into an outlet for your
unwillingness to accept the holocaust.

If you weren't German, I'd simply call you an asshole, but one can imagine it
being hard to believe that peers of your grandparents were responsible for
killing millions of people for no reason other than race. Although coming from
Germany, you should be much better informed than the average holocaust denier,
from say, Iran.

Half of my grandmother's family was machine-gunned into a pit outside of Kiev
called Babiy Yar with about 30 thousand other Jews by German SS during the
first weeks of German occupation. The bodies, bullets, and cartridges are all
still there. The executions at Babiy Yar went on for months until no more Jews
could be found in the region, at which point the site was used to execute
gypsies, prisoners, etc. These events were witnessed by thousands of residents
of Kiev during the occupation by German forces, and you can read one such
account in the book called Babiy Yar by Anatoliy Kuznecov.

Google image results:

[http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=babi+yar&sou...](http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=babi+yar&sourceid=navclient-
ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS268US268&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=7giUSqT_OoeSlAfU8Ym7DA&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4)

When you look at hundreds of individual mass execution events like this one,
you get a more complete picture of the Holocaust.

~~~
Tichy
"outlet for your unwillingness to accept the holocaust."

I do accept the holocaust, it is merely another big issue that displays the
revisionism phenomenon. I wish I hadn't mentioned it, though.

Please be careful before labeling people holocaust revisionists. At least in
Germany it is not a harmless thing to accuse somebody of.

Edit: I have also seen a lot of pictures like that. In Germany we have school
trips to concentration camps. I don't doubt the cruelty of the nazi time.

------
hughprime
I suggest reading R. A. Lyttleton on the nature of knowledge:

<http://amasci.com/freenrg/bead.txt>

 _The scientific attitude to adopt in regard to any hypothesis in my view (and
we are talking of subjective things,) can be represented schemat- ically by
means of a simple model of a bead that can be moved on a short length of
horizontal wire (see diagram on next page). Suppose the left-hand end denoted
by 0 (zero) and the right-hand end by 1 (unity), and let 0 correspond to
complete disbelief unqualified, and the right-hand end 1 to absolute certain
belief in the hypothesis. Now the principle of practice that I would urge on
all intending scientists in regard to any and every hypothesis is: never let
your bead quite reach the position 0 or 1_

Once you're freed of the need to be absolutely certain of whether something is
right or wrong, you can, in a more relaxed way, think about what the most
sensible level of skepticism for any controversial issue about the way the
world really is. Frinstance I'd say that the chance of creationism being right
is something on the order of 10^-8. The chance of vaccinations being dangerous
is maybe 10^-2, and the chances of them being more dangerous than the
alternative maybe 10^-3. Peak oil? I dunno, 20%, depending what you mean by
"peak oil". Holocaust denial comes in many forms from the lunatic to the
nitpicky, each one needs its own level of skepticism. The "global warming"
issue has quite unlikely positions on both sides with more plausible ones in
the middle. And so on.

------
mhb
It seems like you are mixing up revisionism with coming to a conclusion about
a debatable topic. The holocaust and global warming are not differences of
scale - they are differences of kind.

If you question whether the holocaust occurred, you should also be questioning
any other events which you didn't personally observe. And maybe even ones
which did happen to you. So unless this kind of philosophical debate is what
you are wrestling with, including the holocaust on your list muddies the
question you are asking.

~~~
Tichy
"you should also be questioning any other events which you didn't personally
observe."

Well I take it for granted that most things I see on the news are not the
truth, and that I can never know the truth if I haven't been there (and even
then it is debatable, as you point out). For example in wars, the official
history version gets written by the winners of the wars. That is actually one
reason why I avoid firm opinions about WW2 - since I witnessed the "official
history fabrication" in several cases during my lifetime, why should it have
been any different for WW2?

I also can not personally experience the global warming or not warming. I
don't see how the HC is very different from the rest of the list?

~~~
gloob
Just for the sake of curiosity: do you believe the Roman Empire existed?

~~~
Tichy
Sure, why not? There are plenty of roman ruins to be seen everywhere. Then
again, I was just told they are roman ruins...

~~~
jibiki
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)>

------
sethg
Let's say that in 10% of controversies of this nature, The Scientific
Consensus is wrong and the revisionists are actually correct. I personally
don't have time to review every controversy in enough depth to decide which
ones belong to that 10%. For issues that I care about I may read enough
critical work to form an opinion about whether or not the critics are kooks,
and if they aren't kooks, then I may do enough follow-up reading to decide
whether or not they are right. For issues that I _really_ care about I may
learn enough that I can advance arguments for one side or the other in my own
words. For issues that I don't have time to look at, I assume that The
Scientific Consensus is correct.

As Carl Sagan said, they laughed at Galileo and they laughed at Einstein, but
they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

------
wlievens
In many of these cases, the sides are not proportional at all. One side will
consist of consensus by a large group of various kinds of experts and
scientist, whereas the other might consist of a much smaller group of
religious lunatics.

That's not "debate". That's just random lunacy.

~~~
jibiki
Imagine that you are living in 15th century England. Christianity is followed
by a large group of experts and scientists (and everyone else as well.) Do you
then conclude that atheism is just random lunacy? (If you happen to be
Christian, you can do this thought experiment somewhere else--15th century
Persia, for instance.)

The consensus theory of truth is a good starting point, but it is not
sufficient.

~~~
cousin_it
Agree completely. This idea was eloquently expressed by yosefk:

 _Q: All those C++ users and overlords can't be wrong, can they? Why should I
believe you?_

 _A: This sort of thinking will get you in trouble, since it's recursive and
it has no termination condition. Very large groups of people with the usual
subset of those having impressive credentials are known to have been wrong for
very long periods of time (the flat Earth issue comes to mind; these people
weren't stupid, mind you, "wrong" and "stupid" is not the same thing).
Supposing you are in a group of people who are wrong right now, how do you
plan to find it out using your kind of thinking?_

------
mattchew
_The only one I where I can confidently say the deniers are wrong is evolution
theory . . . I can even run experiments . . ._

Maybe you have an excessive need for certainty. Most people who enjoy thinking
about these sorts of issues at all are willing to come to a conclusion without
running their own personal experiments or doing primary source research.

You could consider making your views less informed and more tentative. It's
not so bad if you have some wrong opinions. Almost certainly you do, some on
subjects you've never even thought to question.

That said, you might find lesswrong.com and overcomingbias.com interesting
places to hang out.

------
reedlaw
Whenever there are rational proponents on both sides of a controversial issue
I tend to view the "official" position with at least some degree of suspicion,
especially when there are politics involved (e.g. global warming,
vaccinations).

~~~
Tichy
But why? Your attitude is one of the reasons I tend to view the opposing
opinion with suspicion, because I suspect many people only choose that faction
because it is the "being against it" faction and the underdog.

~~~
reedlaw
Because there may be an underlying political interest in maintaining the
"official" position. For example, if anthropogenic climate change is "fact",
and not just a theory, then legislation such as cap and trade may be easier to
pass.

Also, when people adopt an unfashionable or non-PC position they are more
likely to experience ostracism and even persecution. That would seem to be a
significant barrier to entry into these "opposing factions".

------
sethg
For the specific issue of the Holocaust, I believe the go-to anti-revisionist
site on the Internet is the Nizkor Project:

<http://www.nizkor.org/>

~~~
Tichy
Thanks for the link!

------
biohacker42
You answered your own question. Learn enough to convince yourself.

