This reminds me a little bit of the posts on anti-memes. There’s a way in which people are constantly updating their worldviews based on personal experience that
is useless in discussion because people tend not to update on other people’s personal experience over their own,
is personally risky in adversarial contexts because personal information facilitates manipulation
is socially costly because the personal experience that people tend to update on is usually the kind of emotionally intense stuff that is viewed as inappropriate in ordinary conversation
And this means that there are a lot of ideas and worldviews produced by The Statistics which are never discussed or directly addressed in polite society. Instead, these emerge indirectly through particular beliefs which really on arguments that obfuscate the reality.
Not only is this hard to avoid on a civilizational level; it’s hard to avoid on a personal level: rational agents will reach inaccurate conclusions in adversarial (ie unlucky) environments.
This reminds me a little bit of the posts on anti-memes. There’s a way in which people are constantly updating their worldviews based on personal experience that
is useless in discussion because people tend not to update on other people’s personal experience over their own,
is personally risky in adversarial contexts because personal information facilitates manipulation
is socially costly because the personal experience that people tend to update on is usually the kind of emotionally intense stuff that is viewed as inappropriate in ordinary conversation
And this means that there are a lot of ideas and worldviews produced by The Statistics which are never discussed or directly addressed in polite society. Instead, these emerge indirectly through particular beliefs which really on arguments that obfuscate the reality.
Not only is this hard to avoid on a civilizational level; it’s hard to avoid on a personal level: rational agents will reach inaccurate conclusions in adversarial (ie unlucky) environments.