[deadpannini]

> To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters.

I love the model of adversarial collaboration, and I don't dispute the extremely strong influence of social bonds on knowledge formation, but Kahneman is just wrong about this. I know he's wrong because I change my mind relatively frequently, about things of at least some consequence.

For a recent example, I was fairly sure that at the beginning of the pandemic, in the US, widespread, cheap testing would enable us to drive COVID cases near zero, and I wasn't shy about telling everyone I met. Obviously, I was wrong, for a variety of reasons - so I updated.

That intimate experience with uncertainty and updating my own beliefs makes me wonder about Kahneman's research methods. It makes me doubt whether this question is even tractable or whether people are even legible enough to researchers to draw conclusions about this.

Interestingly (and disarmingly) Khaneman is very forthright about the role his own experiences have played in convincing him that people in general don't change their minds. He writes:

> I was also impressed by the fact that Anne and I didn't change our minds. I had read Kuhn and Lakatos about the robustness of paradigms, but I didn't expect that minor theories would also be impervious to evidence.

also:

> I will now share a personal experience of belief perseverance that I cannot shake ... However, it turns out that I only changed my mind about the evidence. My view of how the mind works didn't change at all. The evidence is gone, but the beliefs are still standing. Indeed, I cannot think of a single important opinion that I have changed as a result of losing my faith in the studies of behavioral priming, although they seemed quite important to me at the time.

I think the most likely explanation for this is 1) social desirability bias has a dramatic influence on what information people make accessible about their cognition and 2) Kahneman is unusually stubborn, and his generalization from his own personality to all humankind is a manifestation of the typical mind fallacy. [0]

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy

[naet]

You didn't change your mind, you made a specific prediction (testing will drive US covid cases to zero) and then maintained that position, and weren't shy about sharing it, until it was demonstrated to be wrong. Weren't you stubborn about your prediction, ignoring what other people had to say about it until you were irrefutably proven wrong?

[deadpannini]

I don't understand what you're suggesting - that changing your mind only counts if there's no evidence?

Even now, I can think of ways to argue that testing could still drive COVID nearly to zero in the US, most of which revolve around the idea that we're not really testing or we're not doing it right. But I think I was wrong, partly because of things other people said earlier during the pandemic, including parallel arguments about why "masks work" were wrong, which I saw right away, though I didn't draw the obvious conclusions related to the effectiveness of testing.

I think Kahneman's position requires creative gerrymandering about what counts as an important belief, and about what counts as persuasion.

[bombcar]

That's a recent example of something that you came to quickly (obviously, covid didn't exist before) and so you were relatively easily able to get back out of it.

As an approximation, it works insanely well. And as more and more things becomes "proxies for political decisions" we'll see it ramp up even more.

[deadpannini]

This turns into "no true Scotsman" pretty quickly.

I was a (relative) loudmouth about my position for over a year, since we didn't have access to home tests in the US until 2022. It was a very heated topic, since I often proposed testing as a preferred alternative to ineffective mask mandates that were popular where I live, and when my wish finally came true, I had to admit I had been wrong.

If changing one's mind about something of that magnitude doesn't count, the principle is badly overstated.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

Yet another case of someone being overly confident in an opinion that had no basis in fact.

Imagine if you had looked up to realize the flu hasn't gone to near zero with testing, so why in the world would you think something as unknown as covid would?

Of course that didn't stop many like you from attacking those who tried to call for caution. So while it's "nice" that you eventually changed your mind, consider being more open-minded at the start.

[deadpannini]

This is all beside the point at hand, but I suppose it's still about epistemology, so I'd like to stand up for my old position, even though I understand it looks foolish in retrospect.

The fact that so much was unknown was part of the reason I thought testing might have a different effect than the flu. Well into the pandemic, the vast majority of people feared COVID much more than the flu, so it seemed they would be much more likely to take precautions to avoid getting it or spreading it. But that fear attenuated over time, especially as people lost trust in the alarmist if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage.

Finally, your hostility is unwarranted: I am and have been a strong proponent of vaccines and I was fully on board to "flatten the curve", even for a short period of lockdowns. But I am not and never have been in favor of permanent midnight.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

Your position looked foolish then. Consider that maybe you don't do well in situations without perfect information and take that into account in the future.

The two most authoritarian countries on this earth (china and North Korea) were not able to get covid "to near zero". China literally had tanks rolling up and down their streets to enforce said curfew.

The idea that somehow the US (or similar western countries) were ever going to get there was always outlandish, as was the idea that it was worth giving up what makes us different from China and NK to do so (Australia is struggling with this question now).

---

Assumptions you made.

1. That human behavior was anywhere near the major deciding factor in covid transmission approaching zero

2. That covid transmission approaching zero was the most important factor

#2 is akin to always turning right in a vehicle because safety is the only concern. It was NEVER a good thought process.

---

And finally, the point here isn't that there were a lot of unknowns, it's that many people were RIGHT, and they got shouted down by people like you whose thinking was entirely flawed. There's a canyon of difference between being wrong because you just didn't know and being wrong because the entire platform you were basing it on turned out to be wrong.

[SR2Z]

Who was right?

The shelter-in-place orders were UNQUESTIONABLY damaging to people's mental health and livelihoods. They were what made the difference - the whole "stand six feet apart" thing did very little, and mask mandates were rarely enforced in consistent, useful ways.

Aggressive testing would have allowed various jurisdictions to scale restrictions up and down as necessary to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed while also not wrecking many people's lives.

"Near zero" was probably never possible, but we could have managed the response much better if our government did not say horseshit like "the numbers go up if you measure them!"

If there is another pandemic, or another variant, or whatever - the government will not be able to ask for more shelter-in-place orders. They have burned so much goodwill and energy among the people who spent two years shut-in with deteriorating mental health who had to watch the hamfisted response of the United States to this crisis.

[deadpannini]

I think you should perhaps cool down.

1) I am admitting that I was wrong and updated. That includes updating on my thought process, just like you are so ardently suggesting.

2) Ninety percent of your assumptions about me are wrong. I'm not sure what you're accusing me of, or what "many people were RIGHT" about.

> There's a canyon of difference between being wrong because you just didn't know and being wrong because the entire platform you were basing it on turned out to be wrong.

What is the "platform" I was basing it on?