What would it mean for a society to have real intellectual integrity? For one, people would be expected to follow their stated beliefs to wherever they led. Unprincipled exceptions and an inability or unwillingness to correlate beliefs among different domains would be subject to social sanction. Valid attempts to persuade would be expected to be based on solid argumentation, meaning that what passes for typical salesmanship nowadays would be considered a grave affront. Probably something along the lines of punching someone in the face and stealing their money.
This makes the fact that this technology relies on Ethical Calculus and Doctrine: Loyalty a bit of inspired genius on Reynolds’s part. We know that Ethical Calculus means that the colonists are now capable of building valid mathematical models for ethical behavior. Doctrine: Loyalty consists of all of the social techniques of reinforcement and punishment that actually fuses people into coherent teams around core leaders and ideas. If a faction puts the two together, that means that they are really building fanatical loyalty to the math. Ethical Calculus provides the answers; Doctrine: Loyalty makes a person act like he really believes it. We’re only at the third level of the tech tree and society is already starting to head in some wild directions compared to what we’re familiar with.
Its opposite would be to equivocate, to claim predictive accuracy after the fact in fuzzy cases you didn’t clearly anticipate, to ad hominem those who notice your errors, “to remain silent and be thought a fool rather than speak and remove all doubt,” and, in general, to be less than maximally sane.
Cf. “there are no atheists in a foxhole.” Under stress, it’s easy to slip sideways into a world model where things are going better, where you don’t have to confront quite so many large looming problems. This is a completely natural human response to facing down difficult situations, especially when brooding over those situations over long periods of time. Similar sideways tugs can come from (overlapping categories) social incentives to endorse a sacred belief of some kind, or to not blaspheme, or to affirm the ingroup attire when life leaves you surrounded by a particular ingroup, or to believe what makes you or people like you look good/high status.
Epistemic dignity is about seeing “slipping sideways” as beneath you. Living in reality is instrumentally beneficial, period. There’s no good reason to ever allow yourself to not live in reality. Once you can see something, even dimly, there’s absolutely no sense in hiding from that observation’s implications. Those subtle mental motions by which we disappear observations we know that we won’t like down the memory hole … epistemic dignity is about coming to always and everywhere violently reject these hidings-from-yourself, as a matter of principle. We don’t actually have a choice in the matter—there’s no free parameter of intellectual virtue here, that you can form a subjective opinion on. That slipping sideways is undignified is written in thevery mathematics of inference itself.
“Civilization in dath ilan usually feels annoyed with itself when it can’t manage to do as well as gods. Sometimes, to be clear, that annoyance is more productive than at other times, but the point is, we’ll poke at the problem and prod at it, looking for ways, not to be perfect, but not to do that much worse than gods.”
“If you get to the point in major negotiations where somebody says, with a million labor-hours at stake, ‘If that’s your final offer, I accept it with probability 25%’, they’ll generate random numbers about it in a clearly visible and verifiable way. Most dath ilani wouldn’t fake the results, but why trust when it’s so easy to verify? The problem you’ve presented isn’t impossible after all for nongods to solve, if they say to themselves, ‘Wait, we’re doing worse than gods here, is there any way to try not that.’”
Meritxell looks—slightly like she’s having a religious experience, for a second, before she snaps out of it. “All right,” she says quietly.
Dath ilani dignity is, at least in part, epistemic dignity. It’s being wrong out loud because you’re actually trying your hardest to figure something out, and not allowing social frictions to get in the way of that (and, of course, engineering a society that won’t have those costly social frictions). It’s showing your surprise whenever you’re actually surprised, because to do otherwise would be to fail to have your behaviors fit the deep mathematical structure of Bayesianism. It’s, among other things, consummately telling and embodying the truth, by always actually reflecting the implications of your world model.
Its opposite would be to equivocate, to claim predictive accuracy after the fact in fuzzy cases you didn’t clearly anticipate, to ad hominem those who notice your errors, “to remain silent and be thought a fool rather than speak and remove all doubt,” and, in general, to be less than maximally sane.
Cf. “there are no atheists in a foxhole.” Under stress, it’s easy to slip sideways into a world model where things are going better, where you don’t have to confront quite so many large looming problems. This is a completely natural human response to facing down difficult situations, especially when brooding over those situations over long periods of time. Similar sideways tugs can come from (overlapping categories) social incentives to endorse a sacred belief of some kind, or to not blaspheme, or to affirm the ingroup attire when life leaves you surrounded by a particular ingroup, or to believe what makes you or people like you look good/high status.
Epistemic dignity is about seeing “slipping sideways” as beneath you. Living in reality is instrumentally beneficial, period. There’s no good reason to ever allow yourself to not live in reality. Once you can see something, even dimly, there’s absolutely no sense in hiding from that observation’s implications. Those subtle mental motions by which we disappear observations we know that we won’t like down the memory hole … epistemic dignity is about coming to always and everywhere violently reject these hidings-from-yourself, as a matter of principle. We don’t actually have a choice in the matter—there’s no free parameter of intellectual virtue here, that you can form a subjective opinion on. That slipping sideways is undignified is written in the very mathematics of inference itself.
Minor spoilers for mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus (planecrash Book 1).