I should have made it more clear that I was using “pro-atheist” in the sense of the organized atheist movement. And yes obviously that movement is ideological. Worse for quality of thinking, it is political, in the sense that it has some clearly defined political allies (and also enemies).
I think it’s indicative of some deep biases that this stuff, unlike ideological rants in general, can be posted on LW with general approval
Remember it wasn’t posted separately, just as a batch of stuff from Skepticon. I doubt that many people from LW have seen it.
But yes some blatantly ideological material gets a free pass or at least much less scrutiny than is warranted (such threads show up in discussion once every week or two) because of the demographics of Lesswrong. Like any group of people we bring our politics with us at least implicitly (even if it is explicitly banished), which translates into ideological sympathies and the vocabulary of applause lights we use and recognize.
In addition most users here have a warm fuzzy feeling when they hear atheism, which might mean they misidentify to which contrarian cluster someone actually belongs to.
Also, another bias (or rather, a whole huge complex of biases) that I see as even more problematic is the choice of targets of these “skeptic” luminaries. Looking through the website of their conference and the list of speakers, I see people who attack traditional religion and various low-status folk superstitions, many of whom also promote ideological positions of the sorts that tend to have high status among academics and other respectable intellectuals. I haven’t see anything, however, about skepticism towards various falsities and biases that enjoy high status and official approval under the present academic system. Unless we are so lucky nowadays that no such things exist—a proposition that seems plainly false to me—I can’t help but conclude that the whole enterprise ends up as a farcical parody of “skepticism.”
Two potential counterexamples to keep in mind: (1) Yudkowsky’s pro-cryonics and generally anti-death stance, as evidenced in the “death panel” discussion (which hasn’t been posted yet, but his views are anyway familiar to regular readers of LW); and (2) J.T. Eberhard’s (very personal) discussion of mental illness, which (except for certain fashionable exceptions, and despite occasional rhetoric you may hear from time to time) actually remains quite low-status virtually everywhere, elite intellectual communities included.
Fair enough. Still, apart from these exceptions and the strictly non-ideological topics, the rest really does sound like a protracted scream of “Yay Greens! Down with Blues!”
The organized skeptical movement is aimed primarily at improving critical thinking among the general public. In LW terminology, this is about raising the sanity waterline about things like religion, astrology, and homeopathy. Given how much money is spent on such things, that’s a useful goal even from a simple naive utilitarian perspective.
I haven’t see anything, however, about skepticism towards various falsities and biases that enjoy high status and official approval under the present academic system.
Can you give an example of these falsities or biases?
Meta-note: I’m watching out for confirmation bias here because I’m strongly inclined to agree with you. I’m requesting specifics to better understand you, but I’m wary of it turning into a case of asking for confirming evidence.
As always there’s a bias against anything that might be considered to give aid and succour to the enemy. Since the time of Hitler, there’s therefore a politically motivated bias in favor of egalitarianism, in all its forms, and against the strong linking of aptitudes, especially mental aptitudes, to genetics. And especially when statistically linked to politically relevant groups and politically relevant aptitudes. E.g nobody cares that Irish have red hair more commonly than Greeks, but to link average IQ and racial groups causes political shitstorms.
Why? Because Politics is the Mindkiller. Once a belief is identified as a belief of the enemies, defending it makes you perceived as defending the enemies.
I don’t think it’s useful to steer the discussion towards such extremely charged issues, as if there were no other ones pertinent for the topic. Even if the whole class of biases you describe were absent, there would still be plenty of questions where (in my opinion, at least) a consistent skeptic would have to take up issue with the consensus of the academic institutions. (By “consensus” I also mean situations where there exist significant disagreements within the academic mainstream, but all the positions acceptable within the respectable mainstream share some underlying assumptions, which it is not possible to dispute without consigning oneself to an unacceptable contrarian status.)
In many of these areas, contrarian opinions aren’t particularly scandalous, and one doesn’t have to fear any serious repercussions for voicing them. (Unless one aims for an academic career in a field under direct bureaucratic control by the purveyors of the disputed official truth, of course.) The problem is that contrarian statements tend to sound just laughably wacky, like the rants of a physics crackpot, unless one accompanies them with lengthy and careful arguments in order to bridge the inferential distances. (And finds an audience willing to give them a fair hearing instead of just laughing them off, of course.) This is often just too time-consuming, and possibly also too demanding on one’s interlocutors.
However, the existence of such topics is, in my opinion, particularly damning for the selective skeptics of the sort I’ve been criticizing. Here they don’t even have the excuse that contrarian opinions would be too offensive and inflammatory to bring up. Their silence betrays either complete lack of critical thinking about such topics or the unwillingness to take even a minor status hit by dissenting from the highest-status purveyors of respectable opinion—in any case making their self-designation farcical.
For example, in economics and in all kinds of fields related to health and lifestyle, there are many issues where the academic mainstream appears to be seriously detached from reality, and the falsities and delusions purveyed by it cause very real damage in practice. Attacking these is unlikely to be dangerous, but it will put you in a position where you’re presumed to be a crackpot until proven otherwise (and likely even after that), since the word of the accredited experts is against you.
Now, if some people speak up against one sort of delusion and falsity, I certainly don’t think that they are obliged to speak against all of them. However, if there is mass gathering where purported skeptics and free-thinkers assemble to discuss a broad agenda of topics where, according to them, skeptics must speak up because dangerous delusions and falsities are rampant, then their choice of included and omitted topics sends a message by itself.
I don’t think it’s useful to steer the discussion towards such extremely charged issues, as if there were no other ones pertinent for the topic.
It does not seem to make much difference, whether examples are charged or uncharged: When I give, as an example, the seemingly uncharged mechanisms of speciation, the reaction is every bit as hostile, as when I give, as an example, the obviously highly charged female incapacity in science and maths.
People are happy with your criticism of academia in the abstract—but are unhappy with any particular example whatsoever. Indeed if there was a particular example that they were not unhappy with, then it would not be an example. Academia would be able to handle it OK.
Certain elsewhere controversial criticisms of academia are ok here sam, if one sticks to LW standards. Let me demonstrate, by what would be in many less reasonable place cause a blow up, even though its pretty obvious to be true:
Academia is biased against hereditary explanation of group differences.
While I will refuse to speculate on how good the hereditarian explanation is in this thread (anyone reading my comment history can figure out where I stand on that), I don’t think this post will get me downvoted. Recall a similar response I gave you on matters of gender relations.
But, you are obviously right in the sense of many more LWers thinking they are open minded to such criticism than they actually are. Despite your previous perceived norm violations, note that this particular comment isn’t downvoted below −1, despite basically Eliezer Yudkowsky himself branding you generally a troll or disruptive element. I’m actually quite sure the exact same post made by someone else would be in the +1 to +4 range.
I don’t think this post will get me downvoted. Recall a similar response I gave you on matters of gender relations.
In which post you piously denied all the differences that allegedly make women different and superior.
But since women are in fact superior in certain ways (though not those listed), your post was politically correctness in the face of reality.
Let us suppose you instead had listed the ways that women really are inferior, or merely genuinely different. Then you would have been downvoted to oblivion
For example you piously denied that women are better mothers than men are fathers. How very PC of you
Suppose you had instead said, that men are bad mothers and women are bad fathers, that boys without a natural father are apt to become petty thugs, no matter how much mothering they get, and girls without a natural father are apt to become whores, that it takes a intact marriage to raise a child, you would have been downvoted.
Had you said that women drivers disproportionately cause deadly accidents despite their disproportionately slower, more sober, and more cautious driving, that women have difficulty reading maps and parking cars, that everyone, male or female, hates female bosses in the workplace, you would have been downvoted into utter oblivion.
Tell me, what makes those statements contrary to LW standards while asserting that men are as good at fathering as women are at mothering is OK?
It is true that it is now safe to challenge many of the politically correct beliefs about women that first appeared in Victorian times—but in your post you only challenged those Victorian beliefs that are now safe to challenge. That there is nothing wrong with bastards, and that women are equally capable in many fields where they are obviously not equally capable is Victorian PC, and to challenge that Victorian PC is now even more dangerous than it was in Victorian times.
Although Victorians, unlike moderns, did not suggest that women were equally good at being lumberjacks and firemen and should be equally engaged in competitive team sports, they did, like moderns, pressure people to pretend to believe that women were equally good at being bosses, scientists, musical composers, and mathematicians, and that fatherhood is unimportant.
And, as I recently remarked, some of the 219 censured theses are still censured, or perhaps have been re-censured.
Tell me, what makes those statements contrary to LW standards?
Being unnecessarily mean perhaps?
Let me try and quickly restate them:
Boys without a father figure raising them have higher rates of delinquency
Girls raised without a father figure tend to have more sexual partners and higher divorce rates
Children raised in intact marriages have better life outcomes in a wide variety of measurable ways
Women drivers while more careful drivers and having fewer accidents, cause more accidents with lethal outcomes
Female superiors in nearly all types of organizations are generally more disliked than male superiors.
We’ll see if taking away the meanness makes them discussable or not on LW. Not claiming one can do so without controversy obviously, but I’m pretty sure I can discuss all of those in appropriate threads without getting down voted to oblivion.
Have no problems believing the first three, though I’d like to see the different correlations between widows/divorcees/never-married/lesbian couples and the levels of deliquency/promiscuity in the children; not just a generic “lack of father figure”, but the reason for the lack of father figure.
The sentence about women drivers seems the exact opposite than reality, if my half-minute of googling on statistical studies on the subject led me right—That link says statistically women have more accidents, but male drivers are the ones who are associated more with fatalities and the more serious accidents.
As for gender-likeability in bosses; I’d like to see the studies for that one too. And in what cultures they were taken. If I had to guess I’d guess that women in Iran would fare differently (and worse) than Texas which in turn would fare differently (and worse) than Sweden: that’s my prediction on the subject.
Since, in the ancestral environment, women were seldom bosses, whereas that minority of males that became ancestors frequently became ancestors because they were successful bosses, it is unsurprising that men are
inherently better adapted to it by a very large margin, a margin that is as large and obvious as the difference in upper body strength, or possibly larger.
To argue that women bosses are on average equally likeable as bosses, is like arguing that women are on average as strong as men. It is just nuts.
To argue that women bosses are on average equally likeable as bosses
Nobody here argued that, as far as I can tell. What you seem to find offensive is the prediction that female bosses may be more likeable in Sweden than in Texas.
As for the evolutionary argument, even if I acknowledged modern-day bosses of capitalist companies to be the equivalent of the sword-swinging warlords and kings, it doesn’t explain to me why Queen Elizabeth is seen as so much more likeable than Prince Charles, and in an informal poll I just found here it doesn’t explain why four out of five favourite monarchs from everyone seem to be female.
Evolutionary arguments often merely have the shape of a justification, but in reality they’re like snakes that you can twist them any old way to plug into any bottomline one seeks. After all one could just as well argue that male bosses could use physical strength and intimidation to frighten opponents, but his consorts needed to be well liked in order to have favorite position to produce the heirs—so likeability goes to women, and physical strength goes to men. Evolutionary arguments are often of very little use.
I wish to emphasise I didn’t mean to imply I agree with all of the statements or think they are likley to be true. I just rephrased them to reduce unnecessary meanness and demonstrated they can be discussed in the usual LW way.
But since women are in fact superior in certain ways (though not those listed), your post was politically correctness in the face of reality.
blinks
Okaaay. You do realize I was responding to:
Many modern PC beliefs about women first showed up in Victorian times, which beliefs were I to mention them would be get me as down voted now as much as they would get a Victorian gentlemen in trouble.
Right? I wasn’t trying to optimize the post to be PC, I was just challenging a specific claim you made. Can you agree that claim basically wasn’t true (I’m not talking about your recent point, just the quote above)?
Let us suppose you instead had listed the ways that women are inferior, or merely genuinely different.
Women have a different distribution of abilities and personalties, much of which is caused by differences that have their roots in biology. I talk about such differences all the time!
Remember it was me opening the discussion about how female hypergamy matters when thinking about the sexual marketplace in the polyamory thread.
Why? Because Politics is the Mindkiller. Once a belief is identified as a belief of the enemies, defending it makes you perceived as defending the enemies.
Aaaaaaaaaaand because espousing such a belief probably means you are “the enemy”, that you’re a reasonable person who came to the same conclusion (and didn’t have the sense to introduce it in a more effective way) is probably much less likely.
By correlating X with Y (where e.g. X=race and Y=average intelligence), other people end up correlating “People who correlate X with Y” with Z (Z=people who are evil racist bastards).
That’s a proper correlation, but it’s still a epistemological bias to prejudice against the idea, just because the speakers of that idea are often evil.
Can you give an example of these falsities or biases?
The trouble is that by the very nature of the problem, concrete examples are bound to provoke controversy, at least if stated bluntly and without careful explanation. See my comments in this thread, where I presented my views on this issue at length, and especially this subthread.
Don’t you see a blatant inconsistency between you criticizing others for not putting their faces and names on a public attack to such high-status biases, and yet you hesitate to speak clearly even when you are anonymous through the Internet?
Right now religion is arguably still killing more people than any other bias in the modern world—and unless one defeats it and its accompanying delusions of a just, designed, meant-to-be world, one has little chance of defeating deathist or other biases as well. Because most of them stem from the idea that what is was also meant to be. Inshallah and stuff.
Don’t you see a blatant inconsistency between you criticizing others for not putting their faces and names on a public attack to such high-status biases, and yet you hesitate to speak clearly even when you are anonymous through the Internet?
I don’t think people have any obligation to speak publicly against anything, and I am not criticizing anyone for mere failure to do so. What I am criticizing is when people claim to be skeptics, free-thinkers, etc. loudly and proudly, while at the same time effectively demonstrating this skepticism and free-thinking only on issues where it’s safe and easy to do so. (Safe in the sense that it won’t result in a controversy dangerous for one’s status, reputation, or career, and easy in the sense of sticking to topics where the existing official intellectual institutions provide reliable guidance—as opposed to those where they are unreliable, or worse, and one needs genuine skepticism and independent thinking to discern the truth. Unless you deny that any such topics exist, would you not agree that they are the ones that represent a real test of whether one deserves to be called a “skeptic,” “free-thinker,” etc.?)
Right now religion is arguably still killing more people than any other bias in the modern world—and unless one defeats it and it’s accompanying delusions of a just, designed, meant-to-be world, one has little chance of defeating deathist or other biases as well.
This is a complex and difficult topic in its own right, but in my opinion, if you operate with “religion” as a special category of metaphysical beliefs and accept the customary distinctions applied to this category in the contemporary ideological debates, you have likely already fallen prey to some deep and widespread biases. The main difference between ideologies and religions is, in my view, principally in the way that the former masquerade their metaphysical beliefs, instead of declaring them explicitly, in order to misrepresent themselves as commonsensical or even scientific. It shouldn’t be hard to see that this introduces only greater problems and dangers, and recent history, in my opinion, readily confirms this. (If you don’t think this position is reasonable, I can provide arguments for it at greater length.)
Moreover, if one engages in selective skepticism that consistently refrains from targeting high-status and official institutions, one can’t avoid sending off the implicit message that these institutions are fundamentally sound and trustworthy, that we shouldn’t be reluctant to put our destiny in their hands, and that people who have deep disagreements with them should be immediately written off as crackpots. Even if nothing of the sort is stated explicitly, such a message is clearly implied, willingly or not, and I don’t consider it a positive contribution to public discourse under any reasonable criteria.
The main difference between ideologies and religions is, in my view, principally in the way that the former masquerade their metaphysical beliefs, instead of declaring them explicitly, in order to misrepresent themselves as commonsensical or even scientific.
Perhaps the metaphysical beliefs aren’t that much important. They are almost always free-floating, not tied in any significant way to expectations and experiences, and serve as a group identification sign. (After all, it doesn’t seem to me that, say, Rand’s Objectivism is less explicit with its assumptions than Zoroastrianism. That ideologies don’t refer to gods doesn’t imply that they masquerade their basic beliefs.) Putting too much attention to these beliefs is itself a mistake, since it diverts attention from the real mechanisms of harm, which are related to biases and shared among ideologies and religions.
Perhaps the metaphysical beliefs aren’t that much important. They are almost always free-floating, not tied in any significant way to expectations and experiences, and serve as a group identification sign. (After all, it doesn’t seem to me that, say, Rand’s Objectivism is less explicit with its assumptions than Zoroastrianism. That ideologies don’t refer to gods doesn’t imply that they masquerade their basic beliefs.)
Let’s take your concrete example, which is a good case study for ideology in general.
Notice that Objectivism purports to be a product of pure rational thinking based on obviously true axioms, which will be accepted by anyone who is not ignorant or delusional, like some well-established result in mathematics or physics. In reality, however, dissecting the actual beliefs held by Objectivists reveals a whole rat’s nest of weird metaphysics—which is in fact the real content of their ideology, for which its purported derivation from pure logic and reason is just a masquerade.
With this in mind, even though I don’t know almost anything about Zoroastrianism, I would be surprised if its assumptions aren’t much more explicit than the real assumptions of Objectivism. Similar analysis can be applied to any ideology, including those that are nowadays popular enough that they commonly pass for sheer rationality and common sense. The danger is that these metaphysical beliefs masquerading as products of reason and common sense can easily motivate further beliefs and acts that clash with reality, sometimes quite severely. (In this sense, they aren’t free-floating.)
Or to put it in a different way, the question is ultimately about the importance of a specific common pattern in belief systems, namely postulating the existence of antropomorphic metaphysical entities. If one singles out religion as an especially problematic subset of the broader space of belief systems, this basically means that one’s heuristic for judging belief systems assigns an especially large negative weight to matching this pattern. The trouble is, over-focusing on this particular pattern can make one’s heuristic vulnerable to ideas and belief systems that can be quite awful even though they pass this particular test with flying colors.
The usual failure mode for passionate atheists and self-declared skeptics and free-thinkers is that they crank up their sensitivity to this pattern to eleven (along with some other patterns, such as conflict with established hard science), but their heuristics for judging ideas are otherwise very poor. This leads them to give pass to all sorts of horrible nonsense, or even to become active partisans of it.
I agree that non-religious ideologies have an advantage over religions in that they lack one clear sign of irrationality, thus being potentially more attractive for those who identify with reason and skepticism. (Religions may be, on the other hand, more attractive to believers in “spirituality” and whatever kind of self-identified opponents of rationality; it’s far from clear what group is larger and thus whether religions are more or less dangerous—measured by their propagation potential—than non-religious ideologies.) Specifically, you are right that most self-reported skeptics aren’t well prepared to tackle ideologies that don’t openly contradict science.
On the other hand, formulating it as a matter of explicit or masqueraded metaphysical assumptions suggests that the ideologies in question have assumptions in the first place—that is, that they have a fairly rigorous logical structure based on few starting axioms, which are stated openly in case of religions while being falsely pretended to be derived from some common-sensical truths in case of secular ideologies. I think a better model is that most ideological / religious beliefs are more or less arbitrary; when they are presented as being derived from some assumption, almost always the derivation is a non sequitur. Consider Christianity as an example: there is long tradition of theological inquiry based on assumption that truths about God can be revealed by reason (at least in Catholicism, that may not be true for other denominations), but in fact even if you accept the truth of whole Bible as a metaphysical assumptions (a fairly large axiom set, in fact), you can hardly derive truth of e.g. trinitarianism therefrom. (By “derive” I mean using arguments acceptable to human audience; of course from a formally logical point of view, you can derive anything from the Bible using the principle of explosion.) This is also true for many of the historically most harmful beliefs tied to Christianity, such as Antisemitism, beliefs in witchcraft, or generally, beliefs in moral permissibility of converting non-believers and heretics by force. These beliefs don’t follow from explicit Christian assumptions but were once widely shared by most of the Christian community; if we are going to call Randian non sequiturs “masqueraded assumptions”, we would rather call the mentioned Christian beliefs the same name.
Specifically, you are right that most self-reported skeptics aren’t well prepared to tackle ideologies that don’t openly contradict science.
There is also a particularly severe failure mode, which occurs when non-religious ideologies clash with ones that claim (some degree of) religious inspiration, and the views of the latter on practical matters are less bad by any reasonable standard. This may happen if the non-religious ideology purports to have rational and scientific answers, which are however just rationalization and pseudoscience, and as such severely delusional. At the same time, the views of the pro-religious ideology may use the religious stuff mainly to support some sort of traditionalist pro-status quo position, which may have many problems, but is at least unlikely to be downright crazy.
In this situation, people whose approach to evaluating ideas is excessively focused on anti-religious hostility may end up siding with the former—which means that they are, for all practical purposes, supporting the crazier side.
I think this pattern has in fact been quite common in recent history. To take a remote and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 in which the main contestants for power are Communists and, say, Catholic conservatives—and while the latter side may be problematic in all sorts of ways, it still offers something within the bounds of livable normality, unlike the former. (And indeed, observe how many intellectuals who would scoff at religious people have historically advocated Marxism and similar recipe-for-disaster ideologies.) I think contemporary instances of the same pattern could also be found, although these are of course likely to be extremely controversial.
I think a better model is that most ideological / religious beliefs are more or less arbitrary; when they are presented as being derived from some assumption, almost always the derivation is a non sequitur. Consider Christianity as an example: there is long tradition of theological inquiry based on assumption that truths about God can be revealed by reason (at least in Catholicism, that may not be true for other denominations), but in fact even if you accept the truth of whole Bible as a metaphysical assumptions (a fairly large axiom set, in fact), you can hardly derive truth of e.g. trinitarianism therefrom. [...] These beliefs don’t follow from explicit Christian assumptions but were once widely shared by most of the Christian community; if we are going to call Randian non sequiturs “masqueraded assumptions”, we would rather call the mentioned Christian beliefs the same name.
That’s a valid point. Every religion also has some such “masqueraded assumptions,” in some cases to a very large degree. (Here there is some contrast between religions that insist they’re based on straightforward readings of holy texts versus those that admit the role of extra-scriptural tradition, thus, in a sense, explicitly legitimizing some of their “masqueraded assumptions.”)
The contrast with non-religious ideologies, however, is that for them the “masqueraded assumptions” are fundamentally different from what these ideologies purport to be, i.e. products of reason. An ideology presents itself as sheer common sense, sometimes even a scientific truth, but under that masquerade there is a whole mess of irrational and illogical beliefs that form its actual content. We don’t see any such striking and tremendously relevant contrast when it comes to, say, those parts of the Baptists’ beliefs that are really based on a straightforward reading the Bible and those that only purport to be such.
There have already been several discussions in which I made similar points. (See e.g. my comments in this thread for a particularly detailed exposition of my views.)
The problem is that the juiciest examples are likely to provoke extreme ideological controversy, so I usually limit myself to the blander ones, where contrarian views are, if not respectable, then at least not overly scandalous. One such example is academic economics, where even rudimentary logical and epistemological scrutiny suffices to show that much of it is just institutionalized charlatanism and pseudoscience—and considering its influence in the current system of government, it seems bewildering that all these champions of skepticism and warriors against pseudoscience don’t seem bothered by this at all. (Similar things could be said about many other “social sciences” too, although the problems are usually less blatant and the related controversies more violent.) Another such example is provided by the vast complex of “scientific” fields concerned with lifestyle issues such as diet an exercise, where rampant pseudoscience is also quite evident, and it’s also clear that many people’s health and quality of life have suffered due to nonsense peddled by various officially accredited experts. These examples are probably as far as one can go without getting into hot-button issues that are too highly charged to be worth opening.
Moreover, I don’t think that confirmation bias is a problem here. As long as significant high-status and officially approved delusions exist, they should be high on the list of anyone who sports the label of “skeptic,” simply because their practical influence will be, for obvious reasons, much greater than that of low-status folk superstitions. Thus, recognizing some particular examples of such delusions is enough to establish my point, regardless of how representative these examples are of the overall state of the respectable and accredited intellectual institutions.
I should have made it more clear that I was using “pro-atheist” in the sense of the organized atheist movement. And yes obviously that movement is ideological. Worse for quality of thinking, it is political, in the sense that it has some clearly defined political allies (and also enemies).
Remember it wasn’t posted separately, just as a batch of stuff from Skepticon. I doubt that many people from LW have seen it.
But yes some blatantly ideological material gets a free pass or at least much less scrutiny than is warranted (such threads show up in discussion once every week or two) because of the demographics of Lesswrong. Like any group of people we bring our politics with us at least implicitly (even if it is explicitly banished), which translates into ideological sympathies and the vocabulary of applause lights we use and recognize.
In addition most users here have a warm fuzzy feeling when they hear atheism, which might mean they misidentify to which contrarian cluster someone actually belongs to.
Also, another bias (or rather, a whole huge complex of biases) that I see as even more problematic is the choice of targets of these “skeptic” luminaries. Looking through the website of their conference and the list of speakers, I see people who attack traditional religion and various low-status folk superstitions, many of whom also promote ideological positions of the sorts that tend to have high status among academics and other respectable intellectuals. I haven’t see anything, however, about skepticism towards various falsities and biases that enjoy high status and official approval under the present academic system. Unless we are so lucky nowadays that no such things exist—a proposition that seems plainly false to me—I can’t help but conclude that the whole enterprise ends up as a farcical parody of “skepticism.”
Two potential counterexamples to keep in mind: (1) Yudkowsky’s pro-cryonics and generally anti-death stance, as evidenced in the “death panel” discussion (which hasn’t been posted yet, but his views are anyway familiar to regular readers of LW); and (2) J.T. Eberhard’s (very personal) discussion of mental illness, which (except for certain fashionable exceptions, and despite occasional rhetoric you may hear from time to time) actually remains quite low-status virtually everywhere, elite intellectual communities included.
Fair enough. Still, apart from these exceptions and the strictly non-ideological topics, the rest really does sound like a protracted scream of “Yay Greens! Down with Blues!”
The organized skeptical movement is aimed primarily at improving critical thinking among the general public. In LW terminology, this is about raising the sanity waterline about things like religion, astrology, and homeopathy. Given how much money is spent on such things, that’s a useful goal even from a simple naive utilitarian perspective.
Can you give an example of these falsities or biases?
Meta-note: I’m watching out for confirmation bias here because I’m strongly inclined to agree with you. I’m requesting specifics to better understand you, but I’m wary of it turning into a case of asking for confirming evidence.
As always there’s a bias against anything that might be considered to give aid and succour to the enemy. Since the time of Hitler, there’s therefore a politically motivated bias in favor of egalitarianism, in all its forms, and against the strong linking of aptitudes, especially mental aptitudes, to genetics. And especially when statistically linked to politically relevant groups and politically relevant aptitudes. E.g nobody cares that Irish have red hair more commonly than Greeks, but to link average IQ and racial groups causes political shitstorms.
Why? Because Politics is the Mindkiller. Once a belief is identified as a belief of the enemies, defending it makes you perceived as defending the enemies.
I don’t think it’s useful to steer the discussion towards such extremely charged issues, as if there were no other ones pertinent for the topic. Even if the whole class of biases you describe were absent, there would still be plenty of questions where (in my opinion, at least) a consistent skeptic would have to take up issue with the consensus of the academic institutions. (By “consensus” I also mean situations where there exist significant disagreements within the academic mainstream, but all the positions acceptable within the respectable mainstream share some underlying assumptions, which it is not possible to dispute without consigning oneself to an unacceptable contrarian status.)
In many of these areas, contrarian opinions aren’t particularly scandalous, and one doesn’t have to fear any serious repercussions for voicing them. (Unless one aims for an academic career in a field under direct bureaucratic control by the purveyors of the disputed official truth, of course.) The problem is that contrarian statements tend to sound just laughably wacky, like the rants of a physics crackpot, unless one accompanies them with lengthy and careful arguments in order to bridge the inferential distances. (And finds an audience willing to give them a fair hearing instead of just laughing them off, of course.) This is often just too time-consuming, and possibly also too demanding on one’s interlocutors.
However, the existence of such topics is, in my opinion, particularly damning for the selective skeptics of the sort I’ve been criticizing. Here they don’t even have the excuse that contrarian opinions would be too offensive and inflammatory to bring up. Their silence betrays either complete lack of critical thinking about such topics or the unwillingness to take even a minor status hit by dissenting from the highest-status purveyors of respectable opinion—in any case making their self-designation farcical.
I didn’t choose it for being charged, I chose it for being the clearest and simplest example IMO.
In contrast, I read your three paragraphs above, and I don’t know what in the name of Cthulhu you’re actually talking about.
Can you name one or two, then?
For example, in economics and in all kinds of fields related to health and lifestyle, there are many issues where the academic mainstream appears to be seriously detached from reality, and the falsities and delusions purveyed by it cause very real damage in practice. Attacking these is unlikely to be dangerous, but it will put you in a position where you’re presumed to be a crackpot until proven otherwise (and likely even after that), since the word of the accredited experts is against you.
Now, if some people speak up against one sort of delusion and falsity, I certainly don’t think that they are obliged to speak against all of them. However, if there is mass gathering where purported skeptics and free-thinkers assemble to discuss a broad agenda of topics where, according to them, skeptics must speak up because dangerous delusions and falsities are rampant, then their choice of included and omitted topics sends a message by itself.
It does not seem to make much difference, whether examples are charged or uncharged: When I give, as an example, the seemingly uncharged mechanisms of speciation, the reaction is every bit as hostile, as when I give, as an example, the obviously highly charged female incapacity in science and maths.
People are happy with your criticism of academia in the abstract—but are unhappy with any particular example whatsoever. Indeed if there was a particular example that they were not unhappy with, then it would not be an example. Academia would be able to handle it OK.
Certain elsewhere controversial criticisms of academia are ok here sam, if one sticks to LW standards. Let me demonstrate, by what would be in many less reasonable place cause a blow up, even though its pretty obvious to be true:
Academia is biased against hereditary explanation of group differences.
While I will refuse to speculate on how good the hereditarian explanation is in this thread (anyone reading my comment history can figure out where I stand on that), I don’t think this post will get me downvoted. Recall a similar response I gave you on matters of gender relations.
But, you are obviously right in the sense of many more LWers thinking they are open minded to such criticism than they actually are. Despite your previous perceived norm violations, note that this particular comment isn’t downvoted below −1, despite basically Eliezer Yudkowsky himself branding you generally a troll or disruptive element. I’m actually quite sure the exact same post made by someone else would be in the +1 to +4 range.
In which post you piously denied all the differences that allegedly make women different and superior.
But since women are in fact superior in certain ways (though not those listed), your post was politically correctness in the face of reality.
Let us suppose you instead had listed the ways that women really are inferior, or merely genuinely different. Then you would have been downvoted to oblivion
For example you piously denied that women are better mothers than men are fathers. How very PC of you
Suppose you had instead said, that men are bad mothers and women are bad fathers, that boys without a natural father are apt to become petty thugs, no matter how much mothering they get, and girls without a natural father are apt to become whores, that it takes a intact marriage to raise a child, you would have been downvoted.
Had you said that women drivers disproportionately cause deadly accidents despite their disproportionately slower, more sober, and more cautious driving, that women have difficulty reading maps and parking cars, that everyone, male or female, hates female bosses in the workplace, you would have been downvoted into utter oblivion.
Tell me, what makes those statements contrary to LW standards while asserting that men are as good at fathering as women are at mothering is OK?
It is true that it is now safe to challenge many of the politically correct beliefs about women that first appeared in Victorian times—but in your post you only challenged those Victorian beliefs that are now safe to challenge. That there is nothing wrong with bastards, and that women are equally capable in many fields where they are obviously not equally capable is Victorian PC, and to challenge that Victorian PC is now even more dangerous than it was in Victorian times.
Although Victorians, unlike moderns, did not suggest that women were equally good at being lumberjacks and firemen and should be equally engaged in competitive team sports, they did, like moderns, pressure people to pretend to believe that women were equally good at being bosses, scientists, musical composers, and mathematicians, and that fatherhood is unimportant.
And, as I recently remarked, some of the 219 censured theses are still censured, or perhaps have been re-censured.
Being unnecessarily mean perhaps?
Let me try and quickly restate them:
Boys without a father figure raising them have higher rates of delinquency
Girls raised without a father figure tend to have more sexual partners and higher divorce rates
Children raised in intact marriages have better life outcomes in a wide variety of measurable ways
Women drivers while more careful drivers and having fewer accidents, cause more accidents with lethal outcomes
Female superiors in nearly all types of organizations are generally more disliked than male superiors.
We’ll see if taking away the meanness makes them discussable or not on LW. Not claiming one can do so without controversy obviously, but I’m pretty sure I can discuss all of those in appropriate threads without getting down voted to oblivion.
Have no problems believing the first three, though I’d like to see the different correlations between widows/divorcees/never-married/lesbian couples and the levels of deliquency/promiscuity in the children; not just a generic “lack of father figure”, but the reason for the lack of father figure.
The sentence about women drivers seems the exact opposite than reality, if my half-minute of googling on statistical studies on the subject led me right—That link says statistically women have more accidents, but male drivers are the ones who are associated more with fatalities and the more serious accidents.
As for gender-likeability in bosses; I’d like to see the studies for that one too. And in what cultures they were taken. If I had to guess I’d guess that women in Iran would fare differently (and worse) than Texas which in turn would fare differently (and worse) than Sweden: that’s my prediction on the subject.
You would like to see Harvard bless a fact that runs contrary to Harvard doctrine? You will have a long wait.
Yet the fact is evident, so evident that to make a study would be as ludicrous as a study to confirm that women have less upper body strength. There is, however, a study which reports, not that female bosses are less likeable, but that every single person surveyed is so horribly sexist, racist, stupid, and nasty, that they do not like female bosses
Since, in the ancestral environment, women were seldom bosses, whereas that minority of males that became ancestors frequently became ancestors because they were successful bosses, it is unsurprising that men are inherently better adapted to it by a very large margin, a margin that is as large and obvious as the difference in upper body strength, or possibly larger.
To argue that women bosses are on average equally likeable as bosses, is like arguing that women are on average as strong as men. It is just nuts.
Nobody here argued that, as far as I can tell. What you seem to find offensive is the prediction that female bosses may be more likeable in Sweden than in Texas.
As for the evolutionary argument, even if I acknowledged modern-day bosses of capitalist companies to be the equivalent of the sword-swinging warlords and kings, it doesn’t explain to me why Queen Elizabeth is seen as so much more likeable than Prince Charles, and in an informal poll I just found here it doesn’t explain why four out of five favourite monarchs from everyone seem to be female.
Evolutionary arguments often merely have the shape of a justification, but in reality they’re like snakes that you can twist them any old way to plug into any bottomline one seeks. After all one could just as well argue that male bosses could use physical strength and intimidation to frighten opponents, but his consorts needed to be well liked in order to have favorite position to produce the heirs—so likeability goes to women, and physical strength goes to men. Evolutionary arguments are often of very little use.
I wish to emphasise I didn’t mean to imply I agree with all of the statements or think they are likley to be true. I just rephrased them to reduce unnecessary meanness and demonstrated they can be discussed in the usual LW way.
Thanks, on my part at least I understood that.
blinks
Okaaay. You do realize I was responding to:
Right? I wasn’t trying to optimize the post to be PC, I was just challenging a specific claim you made. Can you agree that claim basically wasn’t true (I’m not talking about your recent point, just the quote above)?
Women have a different distribution of abilities and personalties, much of which is caused by differences that have their roots in biology. I talk about such differences all the time!
Remember it was me opening the discussion about how female hypergamy matters when thinking about the sexual marketplace in the polyamory thread.
Aaaaaaaaaaand because espousing such a belief probably means you are “the enemy”, that you’re a reasonable person who came to the same conclusion (and didn’t have the sense to introduce it in a more effective way) is probably much less likely.
That’s pretty much the same point I made in a different thread
By correlating X with Y (where e.g. X=race and Y=average intelligence), other people end up correlating “People who correlate X with Y” with Z (Z=people who are evil racist bastards).
That’s a proper correlation, but it’s still a epistemological bias to prejudice against the idea, just because the speakers of that idea are often evil.
Well said!
The trouble is that by the very nature of the problem, concrete examples are bound to provoke controversy, at least if stated bluntly and without careful explanation. See my comments in this thread, where I presented my views on this issue at length, and especially this subthread.
Don’t you see a blatant inconsistency between you criticizing others for not putting their faces and names on a public attack to such high-status biases, and yet you hesitate to speak clearly even when you are anonymous through the Internet?
Right now religion is arguably still killing more people than any other bias in the modern world—and unless one defeats it and its accompanying delusions of a just, designed, meant-to-be world, one has little chance of defeating deathist or other biases as well. Because most of them stem from the idea that what is was also meant to be. Inshallah and stuff.
I don’t think people have any obligation to speak publicly against anything, and I am not criticizing anyone for mere failure to do so. What I am criticizing is when people claim to be skeptics, free-thinkers, etc. loudly and proudly, while at the same time effectively demonstrating this skepticism and free-thinking only on issues where it’s safe and easy to do so. (Safe in the sense that it won’t result in a controversy dangerous for one’s status, reputation, or career, and easy in the sense of sticking to topics where the existing official intellectual institutions provide reliable guidance—as opposed to those where they are unreliable, or worse, and one needs genuine skepticism and independent thinking to discern the truth. Unless you deny that any such topics exist, would you not agree that they are the ones that represent a real test of whether one deserves to be called a “skeptic,” “free-thinker,” etc.?)
This is a complex and difficult topic in its own right, but in my opinion, if you operate with “religion” as a special category of metaphysical beliefs and accept the customary distinctions applied to this category in the contemporary ideological debates, you have likely already fallen prey to some deep and widespread biases. The main difference between ideologies and religions is, in my view, principally in the way that the former masquerade their metaphysical beliefs, instead of declaring them explicitly, in order to misrepresent themselves as commonsensical or even scientific. It shouldn’t be hard to see that this introduces only greater problems and dangers, and recent history, in my opinion, readily confirms this. (If you don’t think this position is reasonable, I can provide arguments for it at greater length.)
Moreover, if one engages in selective skepticism that consistently refrains from targeting high-status and official institutions, one can’t avoid sending off the implicit message that these institutions are fundamentally sound and trustworthy, that we shouldn’t be reluctant to put our destiny in their hands, and that people who have deep disagreements with them should be immediately written off as crackpots. Even if nothing of the sort is stated explicitly, such a message is clearly implied, willingly or not, and I don’t consider it a positive contribution to public discourse under any reasonable criteria.
Perhaps the metaphysical beliefs aren’t that much important. They are almost always free-floating, not tied in any significant way to expectations and experiences, and serve as a group identification sign. (After all, it doesn’t seem to me that, say, Rand’s Objectivism is less explicit with its assumptions than Zoroastrianism. That ideologies don’t refer to gods doesn’t imply that they masquerade their basic beliefs.) Putting too much attention to these beliefs is itself a mistake, since it diverts attention from the real mechanisms of harm, which are related to biases and shared among ideologies and religions.
Let’s take your concrete example, which is a good case study for ideology in general.
Notice that Objectivism purports to be a product of pure rational thinking based on obviously true axioms, which will be accepted by anyone who is not ignorant or delusional, like some well-established result in mathematics or physics. In reality, however, dissecting the actual beliefs held by Objectivists reveals a whole rat’s nest of weird metaphysics—which is in fact the real content of their ideology, for which its purported derivation from pure logic and reason is just a masquerade.
With this in mind, even though I don’t know almost anything about Zoroastrianism, I would be surprised if its assumptions aren’t much more explicit than the real assumptions of Objectivism. Similar analysis can be applied to any ideology, including those that are nowadays popular enough that they commonly pass for sheer rationality and common sense. The danger is that these metaphysical beliefs masquerading as products of reason and common sense can easily motivate further beliefs and acts that clash with reality, sometimes quite severely. (In this sense, they aren’t free-floating.)
Or to put it in a different way, the question is ultimately about the importance of a specific common pattern in belief systems, namely postulating the existence of antropomorphic metaphysical entities. If one singles out religion as an especially problematic subset of the broader space of belief systems, this basically means that one’s heuristic for judging belief systems assigns an especially large negative weight to matching this pattern. The trouble is, over-focusing on this particular pattern can make one’s heuristic vulnerable to ideas and belief systems that can be quite awful even though they pass this particular test with flying colors.
The usual failure mode for passionate atheists and self-declared skeptics and free-thinkers is that they crank up their sensitivity to this pattern to eleven (along with some other patterns, such as conflict with established hard science), but their heuristics for judging ideas are otherwise very poor. This leads them to give pass to all sorts of horrible nonsense, or even to become active partisans of it.
I agree that non-religious ideologies have an advantage over religions in that they lack one clear sign of irrationality, thus being potentially more attractive for those who identify with reason and skepticism. (Religions may be, on the other hand, more attractive to believers in “spirituality” and whatever kind of self-identified opponents of rationality; it’s far from clear what group is larger and thus whether religions are more or less dangerous—measured by their propagation potential—than non-religious ideologies.) Specifically, you are right that most self-reported skeptics aren’t well prepared to tackle ideologies that don’t openly contradict science.
On the other hand, formulating it as a matter of explicit or masqueraded metaphysical assumptions suggests that the ideologies in question have assumptions in the first place—that is, that they have a fairly rigorous logical structure based on few starting axioms, which are stated openly in case of religions while being falsely pretended to be derived from some common-sensical truths in case of secular ideologies. I think a better model is that most ideological / religious beliefs are more or less arbitrary; when they are presented as being derived from some assumption, almost always the derivation is a non sequitur. Consider Christianity as an example: there is long tradition of theological inquiry based on assumption that truths about God can be revealed by reason (at least in Catholicism, that may not be true for other denominations), but in fact even if you accept the truth of whole Bible as a metaphysical assumptions (a fairly large axiom set, in fact), you can hardly derive truth of e.g. trinitarianism therefrom. (By “derive” I mean using arguments acceptable to human audience; of course from a formally logical point of view, you can derive anything from the Bible using the principle of explosion.) This is also true for many of the historically most harmful beliefs tied to Christianity, such as Antisemitism, beliefs in witchcraft, or generally, beliefs in moral permissibility of converting non-believers and heretics by force. These beliefs don’t follow from explicit Christian assumptions but were once widely shared by most of the Christian community; if we are going to call Randian non sequiturs “masqueraded assumptions”, we would rather call the mentioned Christian beliefs the same name.
There is also a particularly severe failure mode, which occurs when non-religious ideologies clash with ones that claim (some degree of) religious inspiration, and the views of the latter on practical matters are less bad by any reasonable standard. This may happen if the non-religious ideology purports to have rational and scientific answers, which are however just rationalization and pseudoscience, and as such severely delusional. At the same time, the views of the pro-religious ideology may use the religious stuff mainly to support some sort of traditionalist pro-status quo position, which may have many problems, but is at least unlikely to be downright crazy.
In this situation, people whose approach to evaluating ideas is excessively focused on anti-religious hostility may end up siding with the former—which means that they are, for all practical purposes, supporting the crazier side.
I think this pattern has in fact been quite common in recent history. To take a remote and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 in which the main contestants for power are Communists and, say, Catholic conservatives—and while the latter side may be problematic in all sorts of ways, it still offers something within the bounds of livable normality, unlike the former. (And indeed, observe how many intellectuals who would scoff at religious people have historically advocated Marxism and similar recipe-for-disaster ideologies.) I think contemporary instances of the same pattern could also be found, although these are of course likely to be extremely controversial.
That’s a valid point. Every religion also has some such “masqueraded assumptions,” in some cases to a very large degree. (Here there is some contrast between religions that insist they’re based on straightforward readings of holy texts versus those that admit the role of extra-scriptural tradition, thus, in a sense, explicitly legitimizing some of their “masqueraded assumptions.”)
The contrast with non-religious ideologies, however, is that for them the “masqueraded assumptions” are fundamentally different from what these ideologies purport to be, i.e. products of reason. An ideology presents itself as sheer common sense, sometimes even a scientific truth, but under that masquerade there is a whole mess of irrational and illogical beliefs that form its actual content. We don’t see any such striking and tremendously relevant contrast when it comes to, say, those parts of the Baptists’ beliefs that are really based on a straightforward reading the Bible and those that only purport to be such.
Comment test—please ignore.
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Upvoted for concreteness.
There have already been several discussions in which I made similar points. (See e.g. my comments in this thread for a particularly detailed exposition of my views.)
The problem is that the juiciest examples are likely to provoke extreme ideological controversy, so I usually limit myself to the blander ones, where contrarian views are, if not respectable, then at least not overly scandalous. One such example is academic economics, where even rudimentary logical and epistemological scrutiny suffices to show that much of it is just institutionalized charlatanism and pseudoscience—and considering its influence in the current system of government, it seems bewildering that all these champions of skepticism and warriors against pseudoscience don’t seem bothered by this at all. (Similar things could be said about many other “social sciences” too, although the problems are usually less blatant and the related controversies more violent.) Another such example is provided by the vast complex of “scientific” fields concerned with lifestyle issues such as diet an exercise, where rampant pseudoscience is also quite evident, and it’s also clear that many people’s health and quality of life have suffered due to nonsense peddled by various officially accredited experts. These examples are probably as far as one can go without getting into hot-button issues that are too highly charged to be worth opening.
Moreover, I don’t think that confirmation bias is a problem here. As long as significant high-status and officially approved delusions exist, they should be high on the list of anyone who sports the label of “skeptic,” simply because their practical influence will be, for obvious reasons, much greater than that of low-status folk superstitions. Thus, recognizing some particular examples of such delusions is enough to establish my point, regardless of how representative these examples are of the overall state of the respectable and accredited intellectual institutions.