Remember that my objection is whether epistemic conditions “have always been this bad” as per the title of the post. The most convincing thing for me would be some sort of comprehensive analysis of how this era’s epistemic conditions are worse than prior eras. Otherwise, I could just respond by pointing to an area where we have better epistemic conditions now.
For example, there was a big stigma against gay people, and this caused people to have incorrect views about how HIV was spread throughout the 1980s. Does that count as evidence that our epistemic conditions have improved?
I guess it would, if the incorrect views were nearly universal among the intellectual elites (at least in public), and if anyone dared to speak up against those incorrect views they’d be “canceled” from elite institutions. If you think that was the case, please cite a source?
I guess it would, if the incorrect views were nearly universal among the intellectual elites (at least in public), and if anyone dared to speak up against those incorrect views they’d be “canceled” from elite institutions.
I mean, what happened wasn’t isomorphic to the canceling thing going on right now, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary. I’d recommend watching this video (it’s from a biased source but it just plays audio from the 1980s). I am honestly quite shocked with the way elites reacted to HIV at the time, based on what I’ve seen, and this makes me think that conditions haven’t actually gotten worse—perhaps they’ve just gotten different?
Even with the death from AIDS of his friend Rock Hudson, Reagan was widely criticized for not supporting more active measures to contain the spread of AIDS. Until celebrities, first Joan Rivers and soon afterwards Elizabeth Taylor, spoke out publicly about the increasing number of people quickly dying from this new disease, most public officials and celebrities were too afraid of dealing with this subject.
Reagan prevented his Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, from speaking out about the AIDS epidemic.[87] When in 1986 Reagan was highly encouraged by many other public officials to authorize Koop to issue a report on the epidemic, he expected it to be in line with conservative policies; instead, Koop’s Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome greatly emphasized the importance of a comprehensive AIDS education strategy, including widespread distribution of condoms, and rejected mandatory testing. This approach brought Koop into conflict with other administration officials such as Education Secretary William Bennett. In 1988, Koop took the unprecedented action of mailing AIDS information to every U.S. household. This information included the use of condoms as the decisive defense against contracting the disease.
So there was a taboo against the subject but it was broken relatively quickly (Joan Rivers publicly supported an AIDS charity in 1985, just 4 years after AIDS was discovered), and sane people could overcome politics/ideology to make their voices heard. This seems to compare quite favorably with the current situation. (Also keep in mind the medical science was in a much more primitive state so we can perhaps also excuse some of the craziness as just plain ignorance rather than bad epistemic norms/conditions.)
So there was a taboo against the subject but it was broken relatively quickly
Unless I’m reading it incorrectly, quickly refers to “years”?
I expect the epistemic dam to break on the coronavirus within months, in the sense that people will stop treating the main issue as one of racism. Why do you think that “This seems to compare quite favorably with the current situation.”?
It’s hard to directly compare AIDS with COVID-19 since the latter moves so much faster and will quickly and obviously affect a majority of people. I was thinking of other taboos related to race (which I can’t make explicit for obvious reasons) which have persisted for at least a decade, have negative effects on policy comparable to early 80s AIDS, and are only getting stronger.
ETA: The fact that epistemic conditions make it very difficult for two otherwise seemingly sane people to discuss how bad epistemic conditions actually are seems uniquely bad. How far would we have to go back to see something similar? (And it’s not entirely because we’re doing this in public. Even in private, in today’s environment I’d be afraid to talk about some of the object-level things because I can’t be sure you’re not a true believer in some of those issues and try to “cancel” me for my positions or even my uncertainties.)
At the time, it wasn’t clear whether AIDS was moving fast either. Given that the reporter said (IIRC) something like 600 people were infected and a third of them had died, and the other people in the room just laughed and dismissed him, don’t you think that’s really actually worse than what’s going on right now?
Another thing is that your evidence came from a school board, and personal Facebook interactions. But my evidence came from the executive branch of the United States, which is the official body that is supposed to take these things seriously. I imagine if Facebook existed in the 1980s you’d also be getting some pretty epistemically horrendous replies from people about what to do about AIDS. We just don’t have that type of evidence, but it’s easy to see that things could have been that bad.
It’s again important to remember that the thesis is that things are worse now. In order to convince me that epistemic conditions are worse now, you’d need to explain that whatever is going on, it’s worse than what I just showed you.
Now it’s possible I’ve been misled because the clip I linked was cherrypicked or something, and maybe their outright dismissal was warranted given their primitive state of science, but that’s just not clear to me right now.
Given that the reporter said (IIRC) something like 600 people were infected and a third of them had died, and the other people in the room just laughed and dismissed him, don’t you think that’s really actually worse than what’s going on right now?
But that was a direct reflection of them not caring about (or actively hating) gays, not an error of empirical fact. Also laughter/dismissal is better than taboo/sanction because you’re still free to speak out (like that reporter did) and slowly change people’s minds. With strong enough taboo/sanction we can be stuck in a bad equilibrium for much longer.
I imagine if Facebook existed in the 1980s you’d also be getting some pretty epistemically horrendous replies from people about what to do about AIDS. We just don’t have that type of evidence, but it’s easy to see that things could have been that bad.
Again what’s different now is that nobody dares to speak up against the social consensus, because they’d risk being “canceled” or suffer other strong sanctions (in part due to social media). I think that’s a key difference from 1980s. (See for example Joan Rivers and that reporter, neither of whom got canceled.) There’s going to be wrong beliefs in every decade, but by “bad epistemic conditions” I mean social mechanisms that keep those wrong beliefs frozen or move them in even worse directions. (Perhaps I didn’t make this clear enough?)
Even in private, in today’s environment I’d be afraid to talk about some of the object-level things because I can’t be sure you’re not a true believer in some of those issues and try to “cancel” me for my positions or even my uncertainties.
This seems like a problem we could mitigate with the right kinds of information exchange. E.g., I’d probably be willing to make a “no canceling anyone” promise depending on wording. Creating networks of trust around this is part of what I meant by “epistemic prepping” upthread.
A “no canceling anyone” promise isn’t very valuable if most of the threat comes from third parties—if you’re afraid to talk to me not because you’re afraid of attacks from me, but because you’re afraid that the intelligent social web will attack you for guilt-by-association with me. A confidentiality promise is more valuable—but it’s also a lot more expensive. (I am now extremely reluctant to offer confidentiality promises, because even though my associates can confidently expect me to not try to use information to hurt them, I need the ability to say what I’m actually thinking when it’s relevant and I don’t know how to predict relevance in advance; there are just too many unpredictable situations where my future selves would have to choose between breaking a promise and lying by omission. This might be easier for people who construe lying by omission more narrowly than I do.)
I also want to point out that the epistemic conditions displayed in the linked video I sent are much worse than what I would expect from either the Trump administration or a Sanders administration regarding coronavirus, even in early days. Of course, it’s difficult to compare these situations, but I’m not sure if you think that people talking about racism being a big issue is comparable to the outright dismissal that happened in the clip, or whether you are arguing some other claim.
Remember that my objection is whether epistemic conditions “have always been this bad” as per the title of the post. The most convincing thing for me would be some sort of comprehensive analysis of how this era’s epistemic conditions are worse than prior eras. Otherwise, I could just respond by pointing to an area where we have better epistemic conditions now.
For example, there was a big stigma against gay people, and this caused people to have incorrect views about how HIV was spread throughout the 1980s. Does that count as evidence that our epistemic conditions have improved?
I guess it would, if the incorrect views were nearly universal among the intellectual elites (at least in public), and if anyone dared to speak up against those incorrect views they’d be “canceled” from elite institutions. If you think that was the case, please cite a source?
I mean, what happened wasn’t isomorphic to the canceling thing going on right now, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary. I’d recommend watching this video (it’s from a biased source but it just plays audio from the 1980s). I am honestly quite shocked with the way elites reacted to HIV at the time, based on what I’ve seen, and this makes me think that conditions haven’t actually gotten worse—perhaps they’ve just gotten different?
From Wikipedia:
So there was a taboo against the subject but it was broken relatively quickly (Joan Rivers publicly supported an AIDS charity in 1985, just 4 years after AIDS was discovered), and sane people could overcome politics/ideology to make their voices heard. This seems to compare quite favorably with the current situation. (Also keep in mind the medical science was in a much more primitive state so we can perhaps also excuse some of the craziness as just plain ignorance rather than bad epistemic norms/conditions.)
Unless I’m reading it incorrectly, quickly refers to “years”?
I expect the epistemic dam to break on the coronavirus within months, in the sense that people will stop treating the main issue as one of racism. Why do you think that “This seems to compare quite favorably with the current situation.”?
It’s hard to directly compare AIDS with COVID-19 since the latter moves so much faster and will quickly and obviously affect a majority of people. I was thinking of other taboos related to race (which I can’t make explicit for obvious reasons) which have persisted for at least a decade, have negative effects on policy comparable to early 80s AIDS, and are only getting stronger.
ETA: The fact that epistemic conditions make it very difficult for two otherwise seemingly sane people to discuss how bad epistemic conditions actually are seems uniquely bad. How far would we have to go back to see something similar? (And it’s not entirely because we’re doing this in public. Even in private, in today’s environment I’d be afraid to talk about some of the object-level things because I can’t be sure you’re not a true believer in some of those issues and try to “cancel” me for my positions or even my uncertainties.)
At the time, it wasn’t clear whether AIDS was moving fast either. Given that the reporter said (IIRC) something like 600 people were infected and a third of them had died, and the other people in the room just laughed and dismissed him, don’t you think that’s really actually worse than what’s going on right now?
Another thing is that your evidence came from a school board, and personal Facebook interactions. But my evidence came from the executive branch of the United States, which is the official body that is supposed to take these things seriously. I imagine if Facebook existed in the 1980s you’d also be getting some pretty epistemically horrendous replies from people about what to do about AIDS. We just don’t have that type of evidence, but it’s easy to see that things could have been that bad.
It’s again important to remember that the thesis is that things are worse now. In order to convince me that epistemic conditions are worse now, you’d need to explain that whatever is going on, it’s worse than what I just showed you.
Now it’s possible I’ve been misled because the clip I linked was cherrypicked or something, and maybe their outright dismissal was warranted given their primitive state of science, but that’s just not clear to me right now.
But that was a direct reflection of them not caring about (or actively hating) gays, not an error of empirical fact. Also laughter/dismissal is better than taboo/sanction because you’re still free to speak out (like that reporter did) and slowly change people’s minds. With strong enough taboo/sanction we can be stuck in a bad equilibrium for much longer.
Again what’s different now is that nobody dares to speak up against the social consensus, because they’d risk being “canceled” or suffer other strong sanctions (in part due to social media). I think that’s a key difference from 1980s. (See for example Joan Rivers and that reporter, neither of whom got canceled.) There’s going to be wrong beliefs in every decade, but by “bad epistemic conditions” I mean social mechanisms that keep those wrong beliefs frozen or move them in even worse directions. (Perhaps I didn’t make this clear enough?)
This seems like a problem we could mitigate with the right kinds of information exchange. E.g., I’d probably be willing to make a “no canceling anyone” promise depending on wording. Creating networks of trust around this is part of what I meant by “epistemic prepping” upthread.
A “no canceling anyone” promise isn’t very valuable if most of the threat comes from third parties—if you’re afraid to talk to me not because you’re afraid of attacks from me, but because you’re afraid that the intelligent social web will attack you for guilt-by-association with me. A confidentiality promise is more valuable—but it’s also a lot more expensive. (I am now extremely reluctant to offer confidentiality promises, because even though my associates can confidently expect me to not try to use information to hurt them, I need the ability to say what I’m actually thinking when it’s relevant and I don’t know how to predict relevance in advance; there are just too many unpredictable situations where my future selves would have to choose between breaking a promise and lying by omission. This might be easier for people who construe lying by omission more narrowly than I do.)
I also want to point out that the epistemic conditions displayed in the linked video I sent are much worse than what I would expect from either the Trump administration or a Sanders administration regarding coronavirus, even in early days. Of course, it’s difficult to compare these situations, but I’m not sure if you think that people talking about racism being a big issue is comparable to the outright dismissal that happened in the clip, or whether you are arguing some other claim.