Let’s do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.
Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren’t actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of “rationality” as practiced by LessWrongers.
A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is “Evangelical Polyamory”.
Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.
Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society’s expectations for normal behavior.
I would also like to endorse GLaDOS’s excellent list.
Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren’t actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of “rationality” as practiced by LessWrongers.
A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is “Evangelical Polyamory”.
Agreed except for the part about Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard. I think it’s actually doing better then most gatherings of smart people attempting to reorganize society. Keep in mind lesswrong’s equivalent 50 years ago would have been advocating Marxism.
Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.
Agreed.
Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
You’ve never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it’s another good example of your first point.
Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society’s expectations for normal behavior.
True, however, the previous culture was hyper-conformist, since it was ‘designed’ to create people intelligent enough to operate machinery but conformist enough to work in an assembly line.
As someone who has read many RAND papers and their retrospectives about the people in RAND 50 years ago, I strongly agree—if nothing else, because of RAND’s early computer work like constructing MANIAC and developing decision and game theory.
I think it gets closer to the truth if you replace 50 years with 100. A century ago communist ideas were the hip thing for a forward-thinking young person to believe in, especially in my home country (Russia), just like singularitarianism is now. This analogy is one of the main reasons why I’m not an outspoken singularitarian.
Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
You’ve never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it’s another good example of your first point.
AFAIK dictatorships are higher variance than democracies, but on average they aren’t too differerent (in terms of GDP at least). Most intuitive explanation: a good dictator can do really good things and a bad dictator can do really bad things, but good and bad democracies aren’t able to do as much good/bad because the political system moves like molasses.
This is the common wisdom at the moment but it’s far too short-termist. All theories are provisional and eventually your enlightened dictator will find themselves on the wrong side of history and need to be removed. Of course you can build a democracy which can’t do that and a dictatorship which can but I suspect the “moves like molasses” aspect moves with this quality and not the voting ritual.
All theories are provisional and eventually your enlightened dictator will find themselves on the wrong side of history and need to be removed.
It is most fascinating how often the right side of history coincidences neatly with the interest of the USG and how often their armed forces or intelligence agencies graciously do the removing.
Sorry, bro, but this statement by its very nature deserves a dozen downvotes, never mind coming from a user who was being proudly apolitical and striving for a non-tribal approach to things five minutes ago. It is perfectly clear to me that “the wrong side of history” in the parent, while perhaps being less than gracious rhetorically, was mentioned in good faith, and not intended to invoke such trollish name-calling.
I think you are right. The original statement does seem to be in good faith now that I reread it.
I however do stand behind the statement in general. “The wrong side of history” usually is a euphemism for the “getting on the wrong side of elements in the US government”.
Ideally doing good things shouldn’t be dependent on the political system.
Edit: I just realized the most obvious reading of this comment isn’t the one I intended. I meant that the political system’s job should be to get out of the way of the people trying to create good things.
A lot of us pro-market liberaltarian types would have been Marxists before the last 50 years of overwhelming evidence in favor of capitalism came in...
I often get the impression, from young american consequentialist libertarians, that they would be socialists in any other country. Certainly they don’t resemble right-libertarians elsewhere, or older american libertarians. And conversely your socialist organisations are missing their usual complement of precocious hippy cynics
You’ve never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it’s another good example of your first point.
The Ceteris Paribus is important. The fact that you can think of a lot of democracies that are nice places to live and dictatorships that are lousy isn’t good evidence that democracy is beneficial in itself. I view democracy as an extremely expensive concession to primitive equality norms that primitive agriculturalists can’t afford. But it isn’t a luxury worth buying.
How many cetera can you require to be paria before you’re creating an implicit No True Scotsman?
It’s quite possible, and indeed I find the idea highly persuasive, that while dictatorships may not necessarily cause all sorts of unpleasant things (oppression, civil war, corruption, etc.), they do make those unpleasant things much more likely due to more hidden structural flaws (e.g. lack of an outlet for dissatisfaction).
That proposition sounds to me a bit like saying “ceteris paribus, driving at 230km/h will get you to your destination much faster”.
I read that comment as: “I think it’s actually doing better than most (in staying self-aware and not being as socially naive)”. Not that it’s doing better than Marxists or others in actually changing the world. They obviously did a lot more in that regard than LessWrong ever has (or likely ever will).
Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren’t actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of “rationality” as practiced by LessWrongers.
Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. [...]
While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among “conservatives” (in a loose sense) complaining about how “intellectuals” (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, and complaints against “technocrats” and “ivory towers” in general. I also see disagreement with this, but not tabooing of it.
My agreement is based on the opinion appearing to be congruent with the quip “Evolution is smarter than you are”, or the similar principle of “Chesterton’s Fence”.
I also get the impression that this is often because smart people don’t see the value of the institutions to smart people. (This may be because it doesn’t have such value.) For instance:
A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is “Evangelical Polyamory”.
I’m fairly confident LessWrongers could engage in polyamory this without significant social dysfunction or suffering, let alone death on a massive scale. (BTW: I couldn’t find any articles here by that title. Are you referring to a general tendency, or did I fail at searching?)
Using Chesterton’s Fence here is a little misleading.
The whole rationale behind Chesterton’s Fence is that clearly someone put the fence there, and it seems pretty likely that whoever that was was just as capable as I am of concluding (given what I know) that putting a fence here is absurd, and it seems pretty likely that they know everything I know, and therefore I can conclude with reasonable confidence that they knew relevant things I don’t know that made them conclude that putting a fence here is worth doing, and therefore I should significantly reduce my confidence that putting a fence here is absurd.
Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn’t really work… there’s a reason it isn;t Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
You can, of course, put natural selection in the role of fence-builder, which seems to be what you’re doing. But actually there’s lots of areas where humans are smarter than evolution. At the very least, humans respond to novel situations a whole lot faster.
I’d actually extend that from natural phenomena to any sufficiently complex system. I spend a lot of my time working with a codebase that dates back to about 1993 and has been accumulating tweaks and refactors ever since; there’s enough obscure side-effects that it’s often a good idea to make a good-faith search for unusual consequences of seemingly vestigial code, but more often than not I don’t turn up anything. I can be fairly confident that any particular code segment was originally put in place for a reason, if not necessarily a very good reason, but if I understand the rest of the local architecture well and I can’t figure out why something’s there, it’s more than likely that all the original reasons for it have succumbed to bit rot.
Societies are one of the better examples of Katamari Damacy architecture that I can think of outside computer science, so it seems to me that a similar approach might be warranted. Which isn’t to say that you can get away with not doing your homework, nor that most aspiring social architects have done so to any reasonable standard.
Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn’t really work… there’s a reason it isn;t Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
Isn’t this one of the arguments sometimes invoked in favour of environmentalism?
Hm, this sucks, a bunch of birds are eating part of our harvest each year. Lets get rid of them!. Changing some things in your natural envrionment that you aren’t quite sure of what they do or why they are there, might be a very bad idea.
Also it as argument that can be used in medicine. It can be a bad idea to take something to artificiality reduce your fever for example. Changing some things in your own body that you aren’t quite sure of what they do or why they are there, is probably a very bad idea.
I would say that for societal adaptations that have come into being without design the case is stronger than with the natural environment but weaker than with your own body. Maybe there should be a thing like Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
Sure, changing some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea. Failing to change some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea too.
And, yes, human history is a long series of decisions along these lines: do we build habitations, or keep living in caves? Do we build roads, cities, power grids, airplanes, trains? Do we mine the earth for fuel, for building materials, for useful chemicals? Do we burn fuel on a large scale? Do we develop medicines and tools that interfere with the natural course of biological development when that course is uncomfortable? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Mostly, humanity’s answer is “Yes.” If we can do it, we typically do, just ’cuz.
Have we thereby caused bad consequences? Sure.
Have we thereby caused net bad consequences? Well, I suppose that depends on what you value, and on what you consider the likeliest counterfactual states, but if you think we have I’d love to hear your reasons.
Me, I think we’re unambiguously better off for having chopped Chesterton’s Fallen Tree into firewood and burned it to keep warm through Chesterton’s Deadly Winter. And in practice, when I see a fallen tree in my yard, I don’t devote a noticeable amount of time to evaluating the possible important-but-nonobvious benefits it is providing by lying there before I deal with it.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
This might lead us to contemplate the most terrifying and unthinkable proposition yet, not named anywhere else on this thread—that, perhaps, Stephen Wolfram was right!
I am surprised and confused. I would have thought that the analogy to evolution would be the one objected to first, as I think of social institutions first as things instituted by someone and second as things subject to vaguely evolution-like processes. (They are modified over time, imperfectly replicated across countries, and a lot more fail than survive.)
Interesting. I haven’t given this a lot of thought, but my intuition is the opposite of yours… I think of most social constructs as evolved over time rather than intentionally constructed for a purpose.
As a former Evangelical Polyamorist, now a born-again Monogamist, I enthusiastically endorse items 1 & 2 in this comment.
It can be thought of as the cultural equivalent of Algernon’s Law—any small cultural change is a net evolutionary disadvantage. I might add “previously accessible to our ancestors”, since the same principle doesn’t apply to newly accessible changes, which weren’t previously available for cultural optimism. This applies to organizing via websites. It does not apply to polyamory (except inasmuch as birth control, std prevention, and paternity testings may have affected the relevant tradeoffs, though limited to the degree that our reactions are hardwired and relevant).
It seems dictatorships work better (actually I can’t think of an example off hand) AND wildly worse. Dictatorships compared to republic is like male compared to female: the main difference is just a much wider spread. So you wind up rolling a much bigger set of dice with dictatorships and then survivorship bias and human bias towards picking off the high spots makes the result look good.
Further, would a dicatatorship work well for long in the absence of republics from which it could steal ideas? I don’t think there is a dicatatorship with a good record of innovation and technological development. (Hitler’s Germany SPENT technical capital it had accumulated before, Hitler didn’t last long enough to see if Germany would have been the exception).
North Korea, ceteris paribus, does not seem to have been helped by dictatorship.
Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren’t actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of “rationality” as practiced by LessWrongers.
A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is “Evangelical Polyamory”.
Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.
Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society’s expectations for normal behavior.
I would also like to endorse GLaDOS’s excellent list.
Agreed except for the part about Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard. I think it’s actually doing better then most gatherings of smart people attempting to reorganize society. Keep in mind lesswrong’s equivalent 50 years ago would have been advocating Marxism.
Agreed.
You’ve never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it’s another good example of your first point.
True, however, the previous culture was hyper-conformist, since it was ‘designed’ to create people intelligent enough to operate machinery but conformist enough to work in an assembly line.
What makes you say that? Reading “lesswrong’s equivalent 50 years ago” makes me think RAND Corporation.
As someone who has read many RAND papers and their retrospectives about the people in RAND 50 years ago, I strongly agree—if nothing else, because of RAND’s early computer work like constructing MANIAC and developing decision and game theory.
I think it gets closer to the truth if you replace 50 years with 100. A century ago communist ideas were the hip thing for a forward-thinking young person to believe in, especially in my home country (Russia), just like singularitarianism is now. This analogy is one of the main reasons why I’m not an outspoken singularitarian.
AFAIK dictatorships are higher variance than democracies, but on average they aren’t too differerent (in terms of GDP at least). Most intuitive explanation: a good dictator can do really good things and a bad dictator can do really bad things, but good and bad democracies aren’t able to do as much good/bad because the political system moves like molasses.
This is the common wisdom at the moment but it’s far too short-termist. All theories are provisional and eventually your enlightened dictator will find themselves on the wrong side of history and need to be removed. Of course you can build a democracy which can’t do that and a dictatorship which can but I suspect the “moves like molasses” aspect moves with this quality and not the voting ritual.
It is most fascinating how often the right side of history coincidences neatly with the interest of the USG and how often their armed forces or intelligence agencies graciously do the removing.
Sorry, bro, but this statement by its very nature deserves a dozen downvotes, never mind coming from a user who was being proudly apolitical and striving for a non-tribal approach to things five minutes ago. It is perfectly clear to me that “the wrong side of history” in the parent, while perhaps being less than gracious rhetorically, was mentioned in good faith, and not intended to invoke such trollish name-calling.
Noticing the enemies of a very powerful organization tend to consistently disappear is not I think an inherently political or tribal stance.
I think you are right. The original statement does seem to be in good faith now that I reread it.
I however do stand behind the statement in general. “The wrong side of history” usually is a euphemism for the “getting on the wrong side of elements in the US government”.
Ideally doing good things shouldn’t be dependent on the political system.
Edit: I just realized the most obvious reading of this comment isn’t the one I intended. I meant that the political system’s job should be to get out of the way of the people trying to create good things.
If you think so, you’re using the wrong ideals, or using them wrong.
60′s LessWrong would be Ayn Rand’s Objectivism rather than some yet another interpretation of Marxism.
It might be the error where “X years ago” counts back from 2000 instead of the current year.
Or perhaps just dropping a “1” from the left side of the number.
A lot of us pro-market liberaltarian types would have been Marxists before the last 50 years of overwhelming evidence in favor of capitalism came in...
I often get the impression, from young american consequentialist libertarians, that they would be socialists in any other country. Certainly they don’t resemble right-libertarians elsewhere, or older american libertarians. And conversely your socialist organisations are missing their usual complement of precocious hippy cynics
Can you unpack these intuitions? As a young American consequentialist vacillating between socialism and libertarianism, I’m very curious.
The Ceteris Paribus is important. The fact that you can think of a lot of democracies that are nice places to live and dictatorships that are lousy isn’t good evidence that democracy is beneficial in itself. I view democracy as an extremely expensive concession to primitive equality norms that primitive agriculturalists can’t afford. But it isn’t a luxury worth buying.
How many cetera can you require to be paria before you’re creating an implicit No True Scotsman?
It’s quite possible, and indeed I find the idea highly persuasive, that while dictatorships may not necessarily cause all sorts of unpleasant things (oppression, civil war, corruption, etc.), they do make those unpleasant things much more likely due to more hidden structural flaws (e.g. lack of an outlet for dissatisfaction).
That proposition sounds to me a bit like saying “ceteris paribus, driving at 230km/h will get you to your destination much faster”.
Bear in mind that LessWrong has not actually reorganised society yet.
I read that comment as: “I think it’s actually doing better than most (in staying self-aware and not being as socially naive)”. Not that it’s doing better than Marxists or others in actually changing the world. They obviously did a lot more in that regard than LessWrong ever has (or likely ever will).
Pff, this one is so normal it has an obligatory link :D
Another relevant link.
While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among “conservatives” (in a loose sense) complaining about how “intellectuals” (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, and complaints against “technocrats” and “ivory towers” in general. I also see disagreement with this, but not tabooing of it.
My agreement is based on the opinion appearing to be congruent with the quip “Evolution is smarter than you are”, or the similar principle of “Chesterton’s Fence”.
I also get the impression that this is often because smart people don’t see the value of the institutions to smart people. (This may be because it doesn’t have such value.) For instance:
I’m fairly confident LessWrongers could engage in polyamory this without significant social dysfunction or suffering, let alone death on a massive scale. (BTW: I couldn’t find any articles here by that title. Are you referring to a general tendency, or did I fail at searching?)
Using Chesterton’s Fence here is a little misleading.
The whole rationale behind Chesterton’s Fence is that clearly someone put the fence there, and it seems pretty likely that whoever that was was just as capable as I am of concluding (given what I know) that putting a fence here is absurd, and it seems pretty likely that they know everything I know, and therefore I can conclude with reasonable confidence that they knew relevant things I don’t know that made them conclude that putting a fence here is worth doing, and therefore I should significantly reduce my confidence that putting a fence here is absurd.
Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn’t really work… there’s a reason it isn;t Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
You can, of course, put natural selection in the role of fence-builder, which seems to be what you’re doing. But actually there’s lots of areas where humans are smarter than evolution. At the very least, humans respond to novel situations a whole lot faster.
I’d actually extend that from natural phenomena to any sufficiently complex system. I spend a lot of my time working with a codebase that dates back to about 1993 and has been accumulating tweaks and refactors ever since; there’s enough obscure side-effects that it’s often a good idea to make a good-faith search for unusual consequences of seemingly vestigial code, but more often than not I don’t turn up anything. I can be fairly confident that any particular code segment was originally put in place for a reason, if not necessarily a very good reason, but if I understand the rest of the local architecture well and I can’t figure out why something’s there, it’s more than likely that all the original reasons for it have succumbed to bit rot.
Societies are one of the better examples of Katamari Damacy architecture that I can think of outside computer science, so it seems to me that a similar approach might be warranted. Which isn’t to say that you can get away with not doing your homework, nor that most aspiring social architects have done so to any reasonable standard.
Isn’t this one of the arguments sometimes invoked in favour of environmentalism?
Hm, this sucks, a bunch of birds are eating part of our harvest each year. Lets get rid of them!. Changing some things in your natural envrionment that you aren’t quite sure of what they do or why they are there, might be a very bad idea.
Also it as argument that can be used in medicine. It can be a bad idea to take something to artificiality reduce your fever for example. Changing some things in your own body that you aren’t quite sure of what they do or why they are there, is probably a very bad idea.
I would say that for societal adaptations that have come into being without design the case is stronger than with the natural environment but weaker than with your own body. Maybe there should be a thing like Chesterton’s Fallen Tree.
Sure, changing some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea.
Failing to change some things in my natural environment might be a very bad idea too.
And, yes, human history is a long series of decisions along these lines: do we build habitations, or keep living in caves? Do we build roads, cities, power grids, airplanes, trains? Do we mine the earth for fuel, for building materials, for useful chemicals? Do we burn fuel on a large scale? Do we develop medicines and tools that interfere with the natural course of biological development when that course is uncomfortable? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Mostly, humanity’s answer is “Yes.” If we can do it, we typically do, just ’cuz.
Have we thereby caused bad consequences? Sure.
Have we thereby caused net bad consequences? Well, I suppose that depends on what you value, and on what you consider the likeliest counterfactual states, but if you think we have I’d love to hear your reasons.
Me, I think we’re unambiguously better off for having chopped Chesterton’s Fallen Tree into firewood and burned it to keep warm through Chesterton’s Deadly Winter. And in practice, when I see a fallen tree in my yard, I don’t devote a noticeable amount of time to evaluating the possible important-but-nonobvious benefits it is providing by lying there before I deal with it.
Gall’s law:
This might lead us to contemplate the most terrifying and unthinkable proposition yet, not named anywhere else on this thread—that, perhaps, Stephen Wolfram was right!
I am surprised and confused. I would have thought that the analogy to evolution would be the one objected to first, as I think of social institutions first as things instituted by someone and second as things subject to vaguely evolution-like processes. (They are modified over time, imperfectly replicated across countries, and a lot more fail than survive.)
Interesting. I haven’t given this a lot of thought, but my intuition is the opposite of yours… I think of most social constructs as evolved over time rather than intentionally constructed for a purpose.
As a former Evangelical Polyamorist, now a born-again Monogamist, I enthusiastically endorse items 1 & 2 in this comment.
It can be thought of as the cultural equivalent of Algernon’s Law—any small cultural change is a net evolutionary disadvantage. I might add “previously accessible to our ancestors”, since the same principle doesn’t apply to newly accessible changes, which weren’t previously available for cultural optimism. This applies to organizing via websites. It does not apply to polyamory (except inasmuch as birth control, std prevention, and paternity testings may have affected the relevant tradeoffs, though limited to the degree that our reactions are hardwired and relevant).
It seems dictatorships work better (actually I can’t think of an example off hand) AND wildly worse. Dictatorships compared to republic is like male compared to female: the main difference is just a much wider spread. So you wind up rolling a much bigger set of dice with dictatorships and then survivorship bias and human bias towards picking off the high spots makes the result look good.
Further, would a dicatatorship work well for long in the absence of republics from which it could steal ideas? I don’t think there is a dicatatorship with a good record of innovation and technological development. (Hitler’s Germany SPENT technical capital it had accumulated before, Hitler didn’t last long enough to see if Germany would have been the exception).
North Korea, ceteris paribus, does not seem to have been helped by dictatorship.
On the other hand, South Korea was a dictatorship until 1987 and did extremely well during those years.