… I’ll just briefly note for the benefit of others that this excerpt seems like the biggest crux and point of disagreement. …
In tne interest of the general norm of “trying to identify cruxes and make them explicit”, I’d like to endorse this—except that to me, the issue goes well beyond “human coalitions” and also encompasses many other things that would generally fall under the rubric of ‘politics’ in a broad sense—or for that matter, of ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’! When people, plausibly, were ‘politically’ mindkilled by Duncan’s Dragon Army proposal, this was not necessarily due to their belonging to an “anti-Duncan”, “anti-rationality” or whatever-coalition; instead, the proposal itself may have been aversive to them in a rather deep sense, involving what they regarded as their basic values. This impacts the proposed solution as well, of course; it may not be sufficient to “actively fight back” a narrow coalitional instinct, but a need may arise for addressing “the political [or for that matter, moral, ethical etc.] aspects of things” at a somewhat deeper level, that goes beyond a conventional “arguments and evidence” structure to seek for ‘cruxes’ in our far more fundamental attitudes, and addresses them with meaningful and creative compromises.
Yeah, agreed. It’s not just “political instincts”, it’s that humans are always operating in what’s a fundamentally social reality, of which coalitional instincts are a very large part but not the entirety.
I kinda dislike the “actively fight back” framing too, since it feels like a “treating your own fundamental humanity as an enemy” kind of thing that’s by itself something that we should be trying to get out of; but the easiest links that I had available that concisely expressed the point used that language, so I went with that.
I actually thought the “coalitional” part did deserve a mention, precisely because it is one of the few facets of the problem that we can just fight (which is not to say that coalitions don’t have a social and formal role to play in any actual political system!) Again, I think Crick would also agree with this, and ISTM that he did grapple with these issues at a pretty deep level. If we’re going to go beyond our traditional “no politics!” attitude, I really have to wonder why he’s not considered a trusted reference here, on a par w/ the Sequences and whatever the latest AI textbook is.
In tne interest of the general norm of “trying to identify cruxes and make them explicit”, I’d like to endorse this—except that to me, the issue goes well beyond “human coalitions” and also encompasses many other things that would generally fall under the rubric of ‘politics’ in a broad sense—or for that matter, of ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’! When people, plausibly, were ‘politically’ mindkilled by Duncan’s Dragon Army proposal, this was not necessarily due to their belonging to an “anti-Duncan”, “anti-rationality” or whatever-coalition; instead, the proposal itself may have been aversive to them in a rather deep sense, involving what they regarded as their basic values. This impacts the proposed solution as well, of course; it may not be sufficient to “actively fight back” a narrow coalitional instinct, but a need may arise for addressing “the political [or for that matter, moral, ethical etc.] aspects of things” at a somewhat deeper level, that goes beyond a conventional “arguments and evidence” structure to seek for ‘cruxes’ in our far more fundamental attitudes, and addresses them with meaningful and creative compromises.
Yeah, agreed. It’s not just “political instincts”, it’s that humans are always operating in what’s a fundamentally social reality, of which coalitional instincts are a very large part but not the entirety.
I kinda dislike the “actively fight back” framing too, since it feels like a “treating your own fundamental humanity as an enemy” kind of thing that’s by itself something that we should be trying to get out of; but the easiest links that I had available that concisely expressed the point used that language, so I went with that.
I actually thought the “coalitional” part did deserve a mention, precisely because it is one of the few facets of the problem that we can just fight (which is not to say that coalitions don’t have a social and formal role to play in any actual political system!) Again, I think Crick would also agree with this, and ISTM that he did grapple with these issues at a pretty deep level. If we’re going to go beyond our traditional “no politics!” attitude, I really have to wonder why he’s not considered a trusted reference here, on a par w/ the Sequences and whatever the latest AI textbook is.
Do you have reading recommendations on him?