Avoiding Intellectual Phase Lock

Nice, Feynman also described this in cargo cult science:(<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calteches.library.caltech.edu&#x2F;51&#x2F;2&#x2F;CargoCult.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calteches.library.caltech.edu&#x2F;51&#x2F;2&#x2F;CargoCult.htm</a>)<p>&gt; We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.<p>&gt; Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

Sounds like the author is describing techniques to avoid Kahnemann &amp; Tversky&#x27;s anchoring effect. Avoiding one&#x27;s own cognitive biases is important in debugging too; I mutter &quot;listen to the system&quot; as I read logs and error messages to try and avoid ignoring output that contradicts my preconceptions about root causes.

To summarize it for the curious in a hurry: intellectual phase lock is the tendency for people in science&#x2F;intellectual-endeavors to publish&#x2F;assert results that are not too far from what other people are getting. With this tendency, it can take a while for a (science) community to drift from a fashionable, wrong belief to a more correct belief. thijser&#x27;s comment[0] is a good example of intellectual phase lock.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21113365" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21113365</a>

It may be weird to some, but there are a lot of intellectual phase locks today.<p>A major cause is publish-or-perish. And expert-group-bias. That last one is like: &quot;Experts in astrology agree that astrology is working well.&quot;<p>We can spot these phase-locks by comparing the theoretical predictions with the actual real-world results. I also noticed that some of the results are altered afterwards to fit to the model.<p>Another signal is that good (and friendly) criticism is attacked, with personal attacks usually. This often happen when two different experts meet. From their expertise they come to different conclusions.<p>I noticed that these conflicts are hidden due to the peer-review system. Each specialisation is controlled by their own experts. This means that the different experts won&#x27;t touch each other areas much. And just stay at their own territory to avoid conflicts. Or do not even widely publish their conflicting results.

IIRC similar care was taken for the gravitational waves paper. They had the measurement team send multiple data sets of observations to the team writting the paper but only one of them correct.

As a side note, if you like collecting notes like this but find yourself frustrated that you can&#x27;t copy paste from the source. I recommend you download tesseract, take a screenshot, and parse the image to extract the text. Tesseract runs really well on these kind of things and saves a lot of manual typing.

More commonly called bias I think, calling it &quot;intellectual phase lock&quot; seems like a weird flex.

&quot;Most people are concerned that someone might cheat them; the scientist is even more concerned that he might cheat himself.&quot;

Looks like the two good comments were taken (Feynman, Kahnemann). I&#x27;ll just leave a couple quotes I thought of when I read a few paragraphs further about the hierarchy for ability in math and how it can be quite upsetting to discover how far up it goes beyond you, when you thought you were pretty high up.<p>&gt;&gt; [Pascal Costanza] Why is it that programmers always seem to think that the rest of the world is stupid?<p>&gt; Because they are autodidacts. The main purpose of higher education and making all the smartest kids from one school come together with all the smartest kids from other schools, recursively, is to show every smart kid everywhere that they are not the smartest kid around, that no matter how smart they are, they are not equally smart at everything even though they were just that to begin with, and there will therefore always be smarter kids, if nothing else, than at something other than they are smart at. If you take a smart kid out of this system, reward him with lots of money that he could never make otherwise, reward him with control over machines that journalists are morbidly afraid of and make the entire population fear second-hand, and prevent him from ever meeting smarter people than himself, he will have no recourse but to believe that he &#x2F;is&#x2F; smarter than everybody else. Educate him properly and force him to reach the point of intellectual exhaustion and failure where there is no other route to success than to ask for help, and he will gain a profound respect for other people. Many programmers act like they are morbidly afraid of being discovered to be less smart than they think they are, and many of them respond with extreme hostility on Usenet precisely because they get a glimpse of their own limitations. To people whose entire life has been about being in control, loss of control is actually a very good reason to panic.<p>–– Erik Naggum, 2004 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xach.com&#x2F;naggum&#x2F;articles&#x2F;3284144796180060KL2065E@naggum.no.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xach.com&#x2F;naggum&#x2F;articles&#x2F;3284144796180060KL2065E...</a><p>&gt; Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi&#x27;s very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, &quot;You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me.&quot;<p>-- Relayed by Nick Metropolis<p>I got the second one from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infoproc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;03&#x2F;differences-are-enormous.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infoproc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;03&#x2F;differences-are-enormo...</a> which also quotes this submission at the point a bit further, no wonder it was so familiar and these quotes came to mind.

Would he have used the same approach if there were fierce competition in his field?

It&#x27;s remarkable that in this case he was able to obscure just a single piece of information to avoid phase lock. That&#x27;s rarely the case. If you wanted to avoid phase lock for most topics you&#x27;d have to completely cut yourself off from all the literature in the field. I can&#x27;t think of a way to do this in any of my fields: robotics, programming languages, or algorithms.

Can intellectual phase lock apply culturally, and if so, what does it look like? For example, I wonder what techniques can be used to avoid it.

This is a great excerpt.