I strongly oppose collation of this post, despite thinking that it is an extremely well-written summary of an interesting argument on an interesting topic. The reason that I do so is because I believe it represents a substantial epistemic hazard because of the way it was written, and the source material it comes from. I think this is particularly harmful because both justifications for nominations amount to “this post was key in allowing percolation of a new thesis unaligned with the goals of the community into community knowledge,” which is a justification that necessitates extremely rigorous thresholds for epistemic virtue: a poor-quality argument both risks spreading false or over-proven ideas into a healthy community, if the nominators are correct, and also creates conditions for an over-correction caused by the tearing down of a strongman. When assimilating new ideas and improving models, extreme care must be taken to avoid inclusion of non-steelmanned parts of the model, and this post does not represent that. In this case, isolated demands for rigor are called for!
The first major issue is the structure of the post. A more typical book review includes critique, discussion, and critical analysis of the points made in the book. This book review forgoes these, instead choosing to situate the thesis of the book in the fabric of anthropology and discuss the meta-level implications of the contributions at the beginning and end of the review. The rest of the review is dedicated to extremely long, explicitly cherry-picked block quotes of anecdotal evidence and accessible explanations of Heinrich’s thesis. Already, this poses an issue: it’s not possible to evaluate the truth of the thesis, or even the merit of the arguments made for it, with evidence that’s explicitly chosen to be the most persuasive and favorable summaries of parts glossed over. Upon closer examination, even without considering that this is filteredevidence, this is an attempt to prove a thesis using exclusively intuitive anecdotes disguised as a compelling historical argument. The flaws in this approach are suggested by the excellent response to this post: it totally neglects the possibility that the anecdotes are being framed in a way that makes other potentially correct explanations not fit nicely. Once one considers that this evidence is filtered to be maximally charitable, the anecdotal strategy offers little-to-no information. The problem is actually even worse than this: because the information presented in the post does not prove the thesis in any way shape or form, but the author presents it as well-argued by Heinrich, the implication is that the missing parts of the book do the rigorous work. However, because these parts weren’t excerpted, a filtered-evidence view suggests that they are even less useful than the examples discussed in the post.
The second major issue is that according to a later SSC post, the book is likely factually incorrect in several of its chosen anecdotes, or at the very least exaggerates examples to prove a point. Again, this wouldn’t necessarily be a negative impact on the post, except that the post a). does not point this out, which suggests a lack of fact-checking, and b). quotes Heinrich so extensively that Heinrich’s inaccurate arguments are presented as part of the thesis of the post. This is really bad on the naive object level: it means that parts of the post are both actively misleading, and increase the chance of spreading harmful anecdotes, and also means that beyond the evidentiary issues presented in the previous paragraph, which assumed good-faith, correct arguments, the filtered evidence is actively wrong. However, it actually gets worse from here: there are two layers of Gell-Mann amnesia-type issues that occur. First, the fact that the factual inaccuracies were not discovered at the time of writing suggests that the author of the post did not spot-check the anecdotes, meaning that none of Heinrich’s writing should be considered independently verified. Scott even makes this explicit when he passes responsibility on factual inaccuracies to the author instead of him on supporting the thesis of his post in the follow-up post. This seems plausibly extremely harmful, especially because of the second layer of implicated distrust: none of Heinrich’s writing can be taken at face value, which, taken in combination with the previous issue, means that the thesis of both this post and the book should be viewed as totally unsupported, because, as mentioned above, they are entirely supported by anecdotes. This is particularly worrying given that at least one nominator appreciated the “neat factoids” that this post presents.
I would strongly support not including this post in any further collections until major editing work has been done. I think the present post is extremely misleading, epistemically hazardous, and has the potential for significant harm, especially in the potential role of “vaccinating” the community against useful external influence. I do not think my criticism of this post applies to other book reviews by the same author.
I strongly oppose collation of this post, despite thinking that it is an extremely well-written summary of an interesting argument on an interesting topic. The reason that I do so is because I believe it represents a substantial epistemic hazard because of the way it was written, and the source material it comes from. I think this is particularly harmful because both justifications for nominations amount to “this post was key in allowing percolation of a new thesis unaligned with the goals of the community into community knowledge,” which is a justification that necessitates extremely rigorous thresholds for epistemic virtue: a poor-quality argument both risks spreading false or over-proven ideas into a healthy community, if the nominators are correct, and also creates conditions for an over-correction caused by the tearing down of a strongman. When assimilating new ideas and improving models, extreme care must be taken to avoid inclusion of non-steelmanned parts of the model, and this post does not represent that. In this case, isolated demands for rigor are called for!
The first major issue is the structure of the post. A more typical book review includes critique, discussion, and critical analysis of the points made in the book. This book review forgoes these, instead choosing to situate the thesis of the book in the fabric of anthropology and discuss the meta-level implications of the contributions at the beginning and end of the review. The rest of the review is dedicated to extremely long, explicitly cherry-picked block quotes of anecdotal evidence and accessible explanations of Heinrich’s thesis. Already, this poses an issue: it’s not possible to evaluate the truth of the thesis, or even the merit of the arguments made for it, with evidence that’s explicitly chosen to be the most persuasive and favorable summaries of parts glossed over. Upon closer examination, even without considering that this is filtered evidence, this is an attempt to prove a thesis using exclusively intuitive anecdotes disguised as a compelling historical argument. The flaws in this approach are suggested by the excellent response to this post: it totally neglects the possibility that the anecdotes are being framed in a way that makes other potentially correct explanations not fit nicely. Once one considers that this evidence is filtered to be maximally charitable, the anecdotal strategy offers little-to-no information. The problem is actually even worse than this: because the information presented in the post does not prove the thesis in any way shape or form, but the author presents it as well-argued by Heinrich, the implication is that the missing parts of the book do the rigorous work. However, because these parts weren’t excerpted, a filtered-evidence view suggests that they are even less useful than the examples discussed in the post.
The second major issue is that according to a later SSC post, the book is likely factually incorrect in several of its chosen anecdotes, or at the very least exaggerates examples to prove a point. Again, this wouldn’t necessarily be a negative impact on the post, except that the post a). does not point this out, which suggests a lack of fact-checking, and b). quotes Heinrich so extensively that Heinrich’s inaccurate arguments are presented as part of the thesis of the post. This is really bad on the naive object level: it means that parts of the post are both actively misleading, and increase the chance of spreading harmful anecdotes, and also means that beyond the evidentiary issues presented in the previous paragraph, which assumed good-faith, correct arguments, the filtered evidence is actively wrong. However, it actually gets worse from here: there are two layers of Gell-Mann amnesia-type issues that occur. First, the fact that the factual inaccuracies were not discovered at the time of writing suggests that the author of the post did not spot-check the anecdotes, meaning that none of Heinrich’s writing should be considered independently verified. Scott even makes this explicit when he passes responsibility on factual inaccuracies to the author instead of him on supporting the thesis of his post in the follow-up post. This seems plausibly extremely harmful, especially because of the second layer of implicated distrust: none of Heinrich’s writing can be taken at face value, which, taken in combination with the previous issue, means that the thesis of both this post and the book should be viewed as totally unsupported, because, as mentioned above, they are entirely supported by anecdotes. This is particularly worrying given that at least one nominator appreciated the “neat factoids” that this post presents.
I would strongly support not including this post in any further collections until major editing work has been done. I think the present post is extremely misleading, epistemically hazardous, and has the potential for significant harm, especially in the potential role of “vaccinating” the community against useful external influence. I do not think my criticism of this post applies to other book reviews by the same author.