One day, I started looking at the people around me, and I began to realize how much they looked like apes. I quickly stopped doing this, because I feared it would cause me to treat them with contempt. And you know what? Doublethink worked. I didn’t start treating people with more contempt as a result of purposely avoiding certain knowledge that I knew would cause me to treat people with more contempt.
If you think that my efforts to suppress observations relating the appearance of humans with the appearance of apes were poorly founded, then you have a very instrumentally irrational tendency towards epistemic rationality.
[...] then you have a very instrumentally irrational tendency towards epistemic rationality.
Guilty as charged! I don’t want to win by means of doublethink—it sounds like the sort of thing an ape would do. A gloriously androgynous creature of pure information wins cleanly or not at all. (I think I’m joking somewhat, but my probability distribution on to what extent is very wide.)
At some point you will have limited resources, and you will need to decide how much that preference for winning cleanly is worth. How much risk you’re willing to take of not winning at all, in exchange for whatever victory you might still get being a clean one.
For example, say there are two people you love dangling off a cliff. You could grab one of them and pull them to safety immediately, but in doing so there’s some chance you could destabilize the loose rocks and cause the other to fall to certain death.
The gloriously androgynous creature of pure information (henceforth GACoPI) that you wish you were cannot prioritize one love over the other in a timely fashion, and will simply babble ineffectual encouragement to both until professional rescuers arrive, during which time there is some chance that somebody’s arms will get tired or the cliff will shift due to other factors, killing them both. An ape’s understanding of factional politics, on the other hand, has no particular difficulty judging one potential ally or mate as more valuable, and then rigging up a quick coin-flip or something to save face.
The gloriously androgynous creature of pure information (henceforth GACoPI) that you wish you were cannot prioritize one love over the other in a timely fashion, and will simply babble ineffectual encouragement to both until professional rescuers arrive, during which time there is some chance that somebody’s arms will get tired or the cliff will shift due to other factors, killing them both.
The grandparent uses “winning cleanly” to mean winning without resorting to doublethink. To go from that to assuming that a GACoPI is unable to enact your proposed ape solution or come up with some other courses of action than standing around like an idiot smacks of StrawVulcanism (WARNING: TVTropes).
Wouldn’t your efforts be better directed at clearing up whatever confusion leads you to react with contempt to the similarity to apes?
I can maybe see myself selling out epistemic rationality for an instrumental advantage in some extreme circumstance, but I find abhorrent the idea of selling it so cheaply. It seems to me a rationalist should value their ability to see reality higher, not give it up at the first sign of inconvenience.
Even on instrumental grounds. Just like theoretical mathematics tends to end up having initially unforeseen practical application, giving up on epistemic rationality carries potential of unforeseen instrumental disadvantage.
An approach using both instrumental and epistemic rationality would be to research chimps and bonobos and find all the good qualities of them that we share. The problem here is your association “apes = contempt,” and trying to suppress that we are apes isn’t going to fix that problem.
One day, I started looking at the people around me, and I began to realize how much they looked like apes. I quickly stopped doing this, because I feared it would cause me to treat them with contempt. And you know what? Doublethink worked. I didn’t start treating people with more contempt as a result of purposely avoiding certain knowledge that I knew would cause me to treat people with more contempt.
If you think that my efforts to suppress observations relating the appearance of humans with the appearance of apes were poorly founded, then you have a very instrumentally irrational tendency towards epistemic rationality.
Maybe the lesson to draw is that you don’t respect apes enough?
Guilty as charged! I don’t want to win by means of doublethink—it sounds like the sort of thing an ape would do. A gloriously androgynous creature of pure information wins cleanly or not at all. (I think I’m joking somewhat, but my probability distribution on to what extent is very wide.)
At some point you will have limited resources, and you will need to decide how much that preference for winning cleanly is worth. How much risk you’re willing to take of not winning at all, in exchange for whatever victory you might still get being a clean one.
For example, say there are two people you love dangling off a cliff. You could grab one of them and pull them to safety immediately, but in doing so there’s some chance you could destabilize the loose rocks and cause the other to fall to certain death.
The gloriously androgynous creature of pure information (henceforth GACoPI) that you wish you were cannot prioritize one love over the other in a timely fashion, and will simply babble ineffectual encouragement to both until professional rescuers arrive, during which time there is some chance that somebody’s arms will get tired or the cliff will shift due to other factors, killing them both. An ape’s understanding of factional politics, on the other hand, has no particular difficulty judging one potential ally or mate as more valuable, and then rigging up a quick coin-flip or something to save face.
The grandparent uses “winning cleanly” to mean winning without resorting to doublethink. To go from that to assuming that a GACoPI is unable to enact your proposed ape solution or come up with some other courses of action than standing around like an idiot smacks of Straw Vulcanism (WARNING: TVTropes).
Wouldn’t your efforts be better directed at clearing up whatever confusion leads you to react with contempt to the similarity to apes?
I can maybe see myself selling out epistemic rationality for an instrumental advantage in some extreme circumstance, but I find abhorrent the idea of selling it so cheaply. It seems to me a rationalist should value their ability to see reality higher, not give it up at the first sign of inconvenience.
Even on instrumental grounds. Just like theoretical mathematics tends to end up having initially unforeseen practical application, giving up on epistemic rationality carries potential of unforeseen instrumental disadvantage.
Good point.
An approach using both instrumental and epistemic rationality would be to research chimps and bonobos and find all the good qualities of them that we share. The problem here is your association “apes = contempt,” and trying to suppress that we are apes isn’t going to fix that problem.
Do you have evidence that the direct good effects of your doublethink outweighed the indirect bad effects?