When reading popular books in a field I'm often uncertain how to treat the evidence. I'm reading Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". Fascinating, and much agrees with my prejudices. But I worry about caveats & counter-evidence that may not have made it into the book
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Not a criticism of the book - this is a genre convention, without which many paragraphs would need to be expanded into chapters.
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Still, it leaves me uncomfortable. I usually deal with this by (attempting) to treat such books merely as useful sources of heuristic ideas and models. It's a little frustrating. Other strategies?
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(In general I spend much more time reading primary literature. And maybe that's the right approach.)
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It's amusing to imagine an alternate one-paragraph version of all books: "Read the following 5 papers to obtain the actual evidence and references behind this book". I'd love a site which collected these. "Oh, I haven't read 'The Righteous Mind', but I read its evidence base."
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"read its evidence base" isn't really right. More like: "digested its evidence base". Sometimes, of course, there's no nutritional content....
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Also, something I've noticed is almost universally believed: everyone believes everyone else should up their standards of evidence, but they're just fine. Makes for amusing conversations. I exaggerate. Slightly.
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It's much like dinner parties of scientists at conferences, everyone complaining about the terrible (anonymous) referee reports that were, just as likely, written by other people at the table.
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The most striking exception on the standards question: the few logicians & cryptographers (not crypto-currency ppl) I've known often seem panicked that they're wrong. Unsurprisingly, they also seem to have the highest standards...
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nathan myhrvold told me that the secret of his invention dinners is that people can be critical of other’s ideas in a way that they fail to be with their own difficulties that you would otherwise see as being ‘engineering’ get targeted & in response they solve some real problems
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