We’ve talked about this a few times but I still don’t really feel like there’s much empirical support for the kind of permanent backsliding you’re concerned about being widespread.
I’m not claiming direct empirical support for permanent backsliding. That seems hard to come by, given that we can’t see into the far future. I am observing quite severe current backsliding. For example, explicit ad hominem attacks, as well as implicitly weighing people’s ideas/arguments/evidence differently, based on things like the speaker’s race and sex, have become the norm in local policy discussions around these parts. AFAICT, this originated from academia, under “standpoint epistemology” and related ideas.
On the other side of the political spectrum, several people close to me became very sure that “the election was stolen” due to things like hacked Dominion machines and that the military and/or Supreme Court was going to intervene in favor of Trump (to the extent that it was impossible for me to talk them out of these conclusions). One of them, who I had previously thought was smart/sane enough to entrust a great deal of my financial resources with, recently expressed concern for my life because I was going to get the COVID vaccine.
Is this an update for you, or have you already observed such things yourself or otherwise known how bad things have become?
There are some fuzzy borders here, and unclarity about how to define the concept, but maybe I’d guess 10% from “easy” failures to deliberate (say those that could be avoided by the wisest existing humans and which might be significantly addressed, perhaps cut in half, by competitive discipline) and a further 10% from “hard” failures (most of which I think would not be addressed by competition).
Given these numbers, it seems that you’re pretty sure that almost everyone will eventually “snap out of” any bad ideas they get talked into, or they talk themselves into. Why? Is this based on some observations you’ve made that I haven’t seen, or history that you know about that I don’t? Or do you have some idea of a mechanism by which this “snapping out of” happens?
I’m not claiming direct empirical support for permanent backsliding. That seems hard to come by, given that we can’t see into the far future. I am observing quite severe current backsliding. For example, explicit ad hominem attacks, as well as implicitly weighing people’s ideas/arguments/evidence differently, based on things like the speaker’s race and sex, have become the norm in local policy discussions around these parts. AFAICT, this originated from academia, under “standpoint epistemology” and related ideas.
On the other side of the political spectrum, several people close to me became very sure that “the election was stolen” due to things like hacked Dominion machines and that the military and/or Supreme Court was going to intervene in favor of Trump (to the extent that it was impossible for me to talk them out of these conclusions). One of them, who I had previously thought was smart/sane enough to entrust a great deal of my financial resources with, recently expressed concern for my life because I was going to get the COVID vaccine.
Is this an update for you, or have you already observed such things yourself or otherwise known how bad things have become?
Given these numbers, it seems that you’re pretty sure that almost everyone will eventually “snap out of” any bad ideas they get talked into, or they talk themselves into. Why? Is this based on some observations you’ve made that I haven’t seen, or history that you know about that I don’t? Or do you have some idea of a mechanism by which this “snapping out of” happens?