So… we should respond by removing the things people love?
I suspect I just disagree with your claim. But even if you were right, I don’t think the right answer is to ban beloved things. I think it’s to learn how to have beloved things and still be sane.
By my own personal judgment, rationalist culture developed a lot of epistemic viciousness by gripping hard onto the chant “Politics is the mind-killer!” and thereby banning all development of the Art in that domain. The Trump election in 2016 displayed that communal weakness in force, with rationalists getting sucked into the same internal signaling games as all the other primates, and then being shocked when he won.
I mean, think about that. A whole community that grew out of an attempt to practice an art of clear thinking that supposedly tries to pay rent largely made the same wrong prediction. Yes, I know there are exceptions. I live with one of them. But that just says that some people in that community managed not to get swept up.
This doesn’t bode well for a Calvinist approach to epistemic integrity.
This is a tangent, but I feel like this comment is making the mistake of collapsing predictions into a “predicted Trump”/”predicted Clinton” binary. I predicted about a 20% chance of Trump (my strategy was to agree with Nate Silver, Nate Silver is always right when speaking ex cathedra), and I do not consider myself to have made an error. Things with a 20% chance of happening happen one time out of five. Trump lost the popular vote after an October surprise; that definitely looks like the sort of outcome you get in a world where he was genuinely less likely than Clinton to win.
So… we should respond by removing the things people love?
I think about it like a memetic ecosystem. Ideas can spread because they’re visibly helping someone else, or because they’re catchy, or because they tap into primal instincts, or because there’s an abstract argument for them, or combinations of such things. Ideas in an ecosystem have properties at different levels: they have appeal that helps them spread, they have effects on peoples’ actions, and they can also be understood as having effects on the ecosystem. The idea of the scientific method, for example, has some philosophical appeal, it changes peoples’ actions to involve more testing, and it also changes what thoughts those people think and spread.
In this framing, my claimed problem with the mythic mode is that it pushes people, and to an extent the entire ecosystem, more towards spreading ideas based on how they tap into primal instincts and emotions, at the expense of appeal based on certain sorts of abstract argument about value.
So to be more precise, information that has a lot of appeal not based on its value is dangerous, because I think we need this memetic ecosystem to appeal mostly based on value and knowledge. Hence why my example was the dangers of political discussion, not the dangers of chocolate (though my belly might argue for certain dangers of that too). Even if the mythic mode is valuable, or if certain political discussions are valuable, we need to balance this local value with the effect it’s going to have on the global value generated. A ban is one sort of meme that shapes the memetic ecosystem—but it’s not the only way.
Trump
I live in central Illinois and do my interaction with rationalists via the internet these days, deliberately ignoring 99.9% of people talking about politics, so I’m guessing you experienced something pretty different out in Berkeley. Given this, I think I just don’t have the context to interpret your argument. Arguing that we should systematically outperform Nate Silver seems wrong, but I suspect that’s not what you’re arguing.
So… we should respond by removing the things people love?
I suspect I just disagree with your claim. But even if you were right, I don’t think the right answer is to ban beloved things. I think it’s to learn how to have beloved things and still be sane.
By my own personal judgment, rationalist culture developed a lot of epistemic viciousness by gripping hard onto the chant “Politics is the mind-killer!” and thereby banning all development of the Art in that domain. The Trump election in 2016 displayed that communal weakness in force, with rationalists getting sucked into the same internal signaling games as all the other primates, and then being shocked when he won.
I mean, think about that. A whole community that grew out of an attempt to practice an art of clear thinking that supposedly tries to pay rent largely made the same wrong prediction. Yes, I know there are exceptions. I live with one of them. But that just says that some people in that community managed not to get swept up.
This doesn’t bode well for a Calvinist approach to epistemic integrity.
(…and that method is a lot less fun!)
This is a tangent, but I feel like this comment is making the mistake of collapsing predictions into a “predicted Trump”/”predicted Clinton” binary. I predicted about a 20% chance of Trump (my strategy was to agree with Nate Silver, Nate Silver is always right when speaking ex cathedra), and I do not consider myself to have made an error. Things with a 20% chance of happening happen one time out of five. Trump lost the popular vote after an October surprise; that definitely looks like the sort of outcome you get in a world where he was genuinely less likely than Clinton to win.
I think about it like a memetic ecosystem. Ideas can spread because they’re visibly helping someone else, or because they’re catchy, or because they tap into primal instincts, or because there’s an abstract argument for them, or combinations of such things. Ideas in an ecosystem have properties at different levels: they have appeal that helps them spread, they have effects on peoples’ actions, and they can also be understood as having effects on the ecosystem. The idea of the scientific method, for example, has some philosophical appeal, it changes peoples’ actions to involve more testing, and it also changes what thoughts those people think and spread.
In this framing, my claimed problem with the mythic mode is that it pushes people, and to an extent the entire ecosystem, more towards spreading ideas based on how they tap into primal instincts and emotions, at the expense of appeal based on certain sorts of abstract argument about value.
So to be more precise, information that has a lot of appeal not based on its value is dangerous, because I think we need this memetic ecosystem to appeal mostly based on value and knowledge. Hence why my example was the dangers of political discussion, not the dangers of chocolate (though my belly might argue for certain dangers of that too). Even if the mythic mode is valuable, or if certain political discussions are valuable, we need to balance this local value with the effect it’s going to have on the global value generated. A ban is one sort of meme that shapes the memetic ecosystem—but it’s not the only way.
I live in central Illinois and do my interaction with rationalists via the internet these days, deliberately ignoring 99.9% of people talking about politics, so I’m guessing you experienced something pretty different out in Berkeley. Given this, I think I just don’t have the context to interpret your argument. Arguing that we should systematically outperform Nate Silver seems wrong, but I suspect that’s not what you’re arguing.