As written up here, it’s a bit abstract for my personal tastes. I can’t tell from this description whether in the potential post you’re planning on using specific examples to make your points, probably because you’re writing carefully due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter. I suspect the post will be received more favorably if you give specific examples of some of these cherished normative beliefs, explain why they result in these biases that you’re describing, etc.
On the other hand, given the potentially polarizing nature of the beliefs, there’s no guarantee that you won’t excite some controversy and downvotes if you do take that path. But given the subject matter of some of your other recent comments, I (and others) can probably guess at least some what of you have in mind and will be thinking about it as we read your submission anyway. And in that case, it’s probably better to be explicit than to have people making their own guesses about what you’re thinking.
I was planning to introduce the topic through a parable of a fictional world carefully crafted not to be directly analogous to any real-world hot-button issues. The parable would be about a hypothetical world where the following facts hold:
A particular fruit X, growing abundantly in the wild, is nutritious, but causes chronical poisoning in the long run with all sorts of bad health consequences. This effect is however difficult to disentangle statistically (sort of like smoking).
Eating X has traditionally been subject to a severe Old Testament-style religious prohibition with unknown historical origins (the official reason of course was that God had personally decreed it). Impoverished folks who nevertheless picked and ate X out of hunger were often given draconian punishments.
At the same time, there has been a traditional belief that if you eat X, you’ll incur not just sin, but eventually also get sick. Now, note that the latter part happens to be true, though given the evidence available at the time, a skeptic couldn’t tell if it’s true or just a superstition that came as a side-effect of the religious taboo. You’d see that poor folks who eat it do get sick more often, but their disease might be just due to poverty, and you’d need sophisticated statistics and controlled studies to tell reliably which way it is.
At a later time, as science progresses and religion withdraws in front of it, and religious figures lose power and prestige, old superstitions and taboos perish, and now defying them is considered more and more cool and progressive. In particular, believing that eating fruit X is bad is now a mark of bigoted fundamentalism. Cool fashionable people will eat X occasionally just to prove a point, historians decry the horrors of the dark ages when poor people were sadistically persecuted for eating it, and a general consensus has been formed that its supposed unhealthiness has never been more than just another religiously motivated superstition. “X-eater” eventually becomes a metaphor for a smart fashionable free-thinker in these people’s culture, and “X-phobe” for a bigoted yokel.
People who eat X in significant quantities still get sick more, but the consensus explanation is that it’s because, since it’s free but not very tasty food, eating it correlates with poverty and thus all sorts of awful living conditions.
Now, notice that in this world, the prevailing normative belief on this issue has moved from draconian religious taboos to a laissez-faire approach, while at the same time, a closely related factual belief has moved significantly away from reality. For all the cruelty of the religious taboo, and the fact that poor folks may well prefer bad health later to starving now, the traditional belief that eating X is bad for your health was factually true. Yet a contrarian scientist who now suggests that this might be true after all will provoke derision and scorn. What is he, one of those crazed fundamentalists who want to bring back the days when poor folks were whipped and pilloried for picking X to feed their starving kids in years of bad harvest?
I think this example would illustrate quite clearly the sort of bias I have in mind. The questions however are:
Does it sound like too close an analogy to some present hot-button issue?
Does the idea that we might be suffering from some analogous biases sound too outlandish? I do believe that many such biases exist in the world today, and I probably myself suffer from some of them, but as you said, taking concrete examples might sound too controversial and polarizing.
I can think of several hot-button issues that are analogous to this parable — or would be, if the parable were modified as follows:
As science progresses, religious figures lose some power and prestige, but manage to hold on to quite a bit of it. Old superstitions and taboos perish at different rates in different communities, and defying them is considered more cool and progressive in some subcultures and cities. Someone will eat fruit X on television and the live audience will applaud, but a grouchy old X-phobe watching the show will grumble about it.
A conference with the stated goal of exploring possible health detriments of X will attract people interested in thinking rationally about public health, as well as genuine X-phobes. The two kinds of people don’t look any different.
The X-phobes pick up science and rationality buzzwords and then start jabbering about the preliminary cherrypicked scientific results impugning X, with their own superstition and illogical arguments mixed in. Twentysomething crypto-X-phobes seeking to revitalize their religion now claim that their religion is really all about protecting people from the harms of X, and feed college students subtle misinterpretations of the scientific evidence. In response to all this, Snopes.com gets to work discrediting any claim of the form “X is bad”. The few rational scientists studying the harmfulness of X are shunned by their peers.
What’s a rationalist to do? Personally, whenever I hear someone say “I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect”, I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis. People have to work hard to convince me of their rationality.
Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say:
Personally, whenever I hear someone say “I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect”, I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis.
Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness.
Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is—are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn’t even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?
Maybe you could use the parable but put in brackets like you have with (sort of like smoking) but give very different ones for each point. That will keep the parable from seeming outlandish while not really starting a discussion of the bracketed illustrations. Smoking was a good illustration because it isn’t that hot a button any more but we can remember went it was.
Actually, maybe I could try a similar parable about a world in which there’s a severe, brutally enforced religious taboo against smoking and a widespread belief that it’s unhealthy, and then when the enlightened opinion turns against the religious beliefs and norms of old, smoking becomes a symbol of progress and freethinking—and those who try to present evidence that it is bad for you after all are derided as wanting to bring back the inquisition.
Though this perhaps wouldn’t be effective since the modern respectable opinion is compatible with criminalization of recreational drugs, so the image of freethinkers decrying what is basically a case of drug prohibition as characteristic of superstitious dark ages doesn’t really click. I’ll have to think about this more.
maybe I could try a similar parable about a world in which there’s a severe, brutally enforced religious taboo against smoking and a widespread belief that it’s unhealthy, and then when the enlightened opinion turns against the religious beliefs and norms of old, smoking becomes a symbol of progress and freethinking
Actually, you might be surprised to learn that Randian Objectivists held a similar view (or at least Rand herself did), that smoking is a symbol of man’s[1] harnessing of fire by the power of reason. Here’s a video that caricatures the view (when they get to talking about smoking).
I don’t think they actually denied its harmful health effects though.
Yes, I’m familiar with this. Though in fairness, I’ve read conflicting reports about it, with some old-guard Randians claiming that they all stopped smoking once, according to them, scientific evidence for its damaging effects became convincing. I don’t know how much (if any) currency denialism on this issue had among them back in the day.
Rothbard’s “Mozart was a Red” is a brilliant piece of satire, though! I’m not even that familiar with the details of Rand’s life and personality, but just from the behavior and attitudes I’ve seen from her contemporary followers, every line of it rings with hilarious parody.
Personally, I like this approach. Leave out the contemporary hot buttons, at least at first. First keep it abstract, with fanciful examples, so that people don’t read it with their “am I forced to believe?” glasses on. Then, once people have internalized your points, we can start to talk about whether this or that sacrosanct belief is really due to this bias.
I would think you could do with some explanation of why people aren’t genetically programmed to avoid eating X. Assuming that it has been around for an evolutionarily significant period. Some explanations could be that it interacts with something in the new diet or that humans have lost a gene required to process it.
Some taboos have survived well into the modern times due to innate, noncultural instincts. Take for example avoiding incest and the taboo around that. That is still alive and well. We could probably screen for genetic faults, or have sperm/egg donations for sibling couples nowadays but we don’t see many people saying we should relax that taboo.
Edit: The instinct is called the Westermarck Effect and has been show resistant to cultural pressure. The question is why cultural pressure works to break down other taboos, especially with regards to mating/relationships, which we should be good at by now. We have been doing them long enough.
There might be emotional as well as genetic reasons for avoiding incest. We don’t really know much about the subject. If anyone’s having an emotionally healthy (or at least no worse than average) incestuous relationship, they aren’t going to be talking about it.
As written up here, it’s a bit abstract for my personal tastes. I can’t tell from this description whether in the potential post you’re planning on using specific examples to make your points, probably because you’re writing carefully due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter. I suspect the post will be received more favorably if you give specific examples of some of these cherished normative beliefs, explain why they result in these biases that you’re describing, etc.
On the other hand, given the potentially polarizing nature of the beliefs, there’s no guarantee that you won’t excite some controversy and downvotes if you do take that path. But given the subject matter of some of your other recent comments, I (and others) can probably guess at least some what of you have in mind and will be thinking about it as we read your submission anyway. And in that case, it’s probably better to be explicit than to have people making their own guesses about what you’re thinking.
I was planning to introduce the topic through a parable of a fictional world carefully crafted not to be directly analogous to any real-world hot-button issues. The parable would be about a hypothetical world where the following facts hold:
A particular fruit X, growing abundantly in the wild, is nutritious, but causes chronical poisoning in the long run with all sorts of bad health consequences. This effect is however difficult to disentangle statistically (sort of like smoking).
Eating X has traditionally been subject to a severe Old Testament-style religious prohibition with unknown historical origins (the official reason of course was that God had personally decreed it). Impoverished folks who nevertheless picked and ate X out of hunger were often given draconian punishments.
At the same time, there has been a traditional belief that if you eat X, you’ll incur not just sin, but eventually also get sick. Now, note that the latter part happens to be true, though given the evidence available at the time, a skeptic couldn’t tell if it’s true or just a superstition that came as a side-effect of the religious taboo. You’d see that poor folks who eat it do get sick more often, but their disease might be just due to poverty, and you’d need sophisticated statistics and controlled studies to tell reliably which way it is.
At a later time, as science progresses and religion withdraws in front of it, and religious figures lose power and prestige, old superstitions and taboos perish, and now defying them is considered more and more cool and progressive. In particular, believing that eating fruit X is bad is now a mark of bigoted fundamentalism. Cool fashionable people will eat X occasionally just to prove a point, historians decry the horrors of the dark ages when poor people were sadistically persecuted for eating it, and a general consensus has been formed that its supposed unhealthiness has never been more than just another religiously motivated superstition. “X-eater” eventually becomes a metaphor for a smart fashionable free-thinker in these people’s culture, and “X-phobe” for a bigoted yokel.
People who eat X in significant quantities still get sick more, but the consensus explanation is that it’s because, since it’s free but not very tasty food, eating it correlates with poverty and thus all sorts of awful living conditions.
Now, notice that in this world, the prevailing normative belief on this issue has moved from draconian religious taboos to a laissez-faire approach, while at the same time, a closely related factual belief has moved significantly away from reality. For all the cruelty of the religious taboo, and the fact that poor folks may well prefer bad health later to starving now, the traditional belief that eating X is bad for your health was factually true. Yet a contrarian scientist who now suggests that this might be true after all will provoke derision and scorn. What is he, one of those crazed fundamentalists who want to bring back the days when poor folks were whipped and pilloried for picking X to feed their starving kids in years of bad harvest?
I think this example would illustrate quite clearly the sort of bias I have in mind. The questions however are:
Does it sound like too close an analogy to some present hot-button issue?
Does the idea that we might be suffering from some analogous biases sound too outlandish? I do believe that many such biases exist in the world today, and I probably myself suffer from some of them, but as you said, taking concrete examples might sound too controversial and polarizing.
I can think of several hot-button issues that are analogous to this parable — or would be, if the parable were modified as follows:
As science progresses, religious figures lose some power and prestige, but manage to hold on to quite a bit of it. Old superstitions and taboos perish at different rates in different communities, and defying them is considered more cool and progressive in some subcultures and cities. Someone will eat fruit X on television and the live audience will applaud, but a grouchy old X-phobe watching the show will grumble about it.
A conference with the stated goal of exploring possible health detriments of X will attract people interested in thinking rationally about public health, as well as genuine X-phobes. The two kinds of people don’t look any different.
The X-phobes pick up science and rationality buzzwords and then start jabbering about the preliminary cherrypicked scientific results impugning X, with their own superstition and illogical arguments mixed in. Twentysomething crypto-X-phobes seeking to revitalize their religion now claim that their religion is really all about protecting people from the harms of X, and feed college students subtle misinterpretations of the scientific evidence. In response to all this, Snopes.com gets to work discrediting any claim of the form “X is bad”. The few rational scientists studying the harmfulness of X are shunned by their peers.
What’s a rationalist to do? Personally, whenever I hear someone say “I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect”, I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis. People have to work hard to convince me of their rationality.
Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say:
Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness.
Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is—are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn’t even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?
Maybe you could use the parable but put in brackets like you have with (sort of like smoking) but give very different ones for each point. That will keep the parable from seeming outlandish while not really starting a discussion of the bracketed illustrations. Smoking was a good illustration because it isn’t that hot a button any more but we can remember went it was.
Actually, maybe I could try a similar parable about a world in which there’s a severe, brutally enforced religious taboo against smoking and a widespread belief that it’s unhealthy, and then when the enlightened opinion turns against the religious beliefs and norms of old, smoking becomes a symbol of progress and freethinking—and those who try to present evidence that it is bad for you after all are derided as wanting to bring back the inquisition.
Though this perhaps wouldn’t be effective since the modern respectable opinion is compatible with criminalization of recreational drugs, so the image of freethinkers decrying what is basically a case of drug prohibition as characteristic of superstitious dark ages doesn’t really click. I’ll have to think about this more.
Actually, you might be surprised to learn that Randian Objectivists held a similar view (or at least Rand herself did), that smoking is a symbol of man’s[1] harnessing of fire by the power of reason. Here’s a video that caricatures the view (when they get to talking about smoking).
I don’t think they actually denied its harmful health effects though.
ETA: [1] Rand’s gendered language, not mine.
Yes, I’m familiar with this. Though in fairness, I’ve read conflicting reports about it, with some old-guard Randians claiming that they all stopped smoking once, according to them, scientific evidence for its damaging effects became convincing. I don’t know how much (if any) currency denialism on this issue had among them back in the day.
Rothbard’s “Mozart was a Red” is a brilliant piece of satire, though! I’m not even that familiar with the details of Rand’s life and personality, but just from the behavior and attitudes I’ve seen from her contemporary followers, every line of it rings with hilarious parody.
Reminds me a little of homosexuality, but only a little.
Personally, I like this approach. Leave out the contemporary hot buttons, at least at first. First keep it abstract, with fanciful examples, so that people don’t read it with their “am I forced to believe?” glasses on. Then, once people have internalized your points, we can start to talk about whether this or that sacrosanct belief is really due to this bias.
Yes; as soon as you got to the correlates-with-poverty part, I thought to myself, ‘what is he doing with this racism metaphor?’
I would think you could do with some explanation of why people aren’t genetically programmed to avoid eating X. Assuming that it has been around for an evolutionarily significant period. Some explanations could be that it interacts with something in the new diet or that humans have lost a gene required to process it.
Some taboos have survived well into the modern times due to innate, noncultural instincts. Take for example avoiding incest and the taboo around that. That is still alive and well. We could probably screen for genetic faults, or have sperm/egg donations for sibling couples nowadays but we don’t see many people saying we should relax that taboo.
Edit: The instinct is called the Westermarck Effect and has been show resistant to cultural pressure. The question is why cultural pressure works to break down other taboos, especially with regards to mating/relationships, which we should be good at by now. We have been doing them long enough.
There might be emotional as well as genetic reasons for avoiding incest. We don’t really know much about the subject. If anyone’s having an emotionally healthy (or at least no worse than average) incestuous relationship, they aren’t going to be talking about it.
The upvotes and interested responses indicate that there’s more than enough enthusiasm for a top-level post. Stop cluttering up the open thread! :-)
It seems like this general topic has already been discussed pretty extensively by e.g. Mencius Moldbug and Steve Sailer.