First: thank you for writing this post, emphatically agree that these are issues that need to be discussed systematically.
Second: I think lots of people in the LW community are already aware of him, but I want to point at Jonathan Haidt as someone who is doing good work on these kinds of problems (would welcome disagreement on this point, as I think I’m a bit too confident in it for my own good).
Third: A problem suggested by Haidt’s work to add to this list, in the context of a society/nation-scale group (epistemic status: somewhat half-baked):
To optimize for cohesion (at least in a population containing authoritarians, likely unavoidable at a nation scale), a community should emphasize similarities among group members; to optimize for truth-seeking, a community should be viewpoint diverse (couldn’t find one link that summed up the whole argument on short notice, but I think this comes close). It seems to me that norms that foster truth-seeking are in tension with norms that foster cohesion, to the extent that the former requires diversity while the latter requires sameness. Perhaps this doesn’t apply as much to smaller, more intentional communities (in particular because such communities can be selected for people who value diversity, and against people who are threatened by/uncomfortable with it), but on a nation scale I think it does apply. Would welcome criticism on this as well, the idea is somewhat half-formed and I have not given up hope that there is a way to reconcile these two goals in a satisfactory way. I plan to write at least one longer-form, top-level post on this topic at some point.
First: thank you for writing this post, emphatically agree that these are issues that need to be discussed systematically.
Second: I think lots of people in the LW community are already aware of him, but I want to point at Jonathan Haidt as someone who is doing good work on these kinds of problems (would welcome disagreement on this point, as I think I’m a bit too confident in it for my own good).
Third: A problem suggested by Haidt’s work to add to this list, in the context of a society/nation-scale group (epistemic status: somewhat half-baked):
To optimize for cohesion (at least in a population containing authoritarians, likely unavoidable at a nation scale), a community should emphasize similarities among group members; to optimize for truth-seeking, a community should be viewpoint diverse (couldn’t find one link that summed up the whole argument on short notice, but I think this comes close). It seems to me that norms that foster truth-seeking are in tension with norms that foster cohesion, to the extent that the former requires diversity while the latter requires sameness. Perhaps this doesn’t apply as much to smaller, more intentional communities (in particular because such communities can be selected for people who value diversity, and against people who are threatened by/uncomfortable with it), but on a nation scale I think it does apply. Would welcome criticism on this as well, the idea is somewhat half-formed and I have not given up hope that there is a way to reconcile these two goals in a satisfactory way. I plan to write at least one longer-form, top-level post on this topic at some point.