I am very uncertain about the truth of the proposition, so I would like to hear arguments in favor of or against it to develop a more informed opinion.
I see lots of ways for Russell’s proposal to fail in practice. Whose evidence? If he is suggesting confining yourself to evidence that you have gathered in person, he is proposing an unreasonably tight confinement that will certainly make the world worse. For example running your own double-blind trial of a drug requires that you trust your collaborators, so most of medicine is off limits to those who want evidence that they have seen with their own eyes.
Granting trust in your close associates doesn’t get you very far. You are still going to have to read the B.M.J. and trust “evidence” from people that you have never met and against whom you have no prospect of redress.
Right from the start we must read Russell as asking us to get into the habit of basing convictions upon third-party evidence. How then are we to grant only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants? It is not our evidence. We didn’t gather it in person. Clearly it is not just evidence that it at issue but also trust. Who do we trust and why?
I started with a legal perspective; what kind of custody chain conveys remote events to us? Turning to an accounting text book, the key words are relevance and reliability. There is a terrible tension between them. Two examples.
One argument in favour of the 2nd Amendment of the US constitution is that governments go bad and massacre their own citizens. One can read the history of the twentieth century as the story of governments disarming their citizens and then ruling badly; unconstrained, since they need no longer fear revolt. Is this a good argument? It is a coarse grained argument, based on rare events of huge importance. Rare events mired in their own detail and circumstance. There is a strong temptation to look finer grained aspects of the issue. The use of fire arms in ordinary criminal murders is common enough and random enough to permit the deployment of the statistical tools of social science. Many prefer to discuss the issue in terms of guns and murder rates. Looking at events that happen every day instead of looking at events that happen every century gives us reliability, but what price have we paid in relevance?
Meditation involves noticing what your mind is up to. One claims that one is studying the mind. The relevance of the thoughts going through your mind to the thoughts going through your mind is 100%. Excellent! But wait! You are studying introspection. That is only a tiny part of the life of the mind. If you generalise to the mind in toto what becomes of reliability? Is there any reliability left at all?
I hope my two examples don’t distract from my broader point. An emphasis on evidence usually results in prioritising reliability over relevance. A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, if it became general, would lead us to take decisions based on irrelevant considerations about which we were certain.
Russell is not just saying that beliefs should be proportional to evidence (if anyone on LW disagrees with THAT, I’ll be shocked); he’s saying that if that were done, it would eliminate most of the world’s problems.
If he had said ‘many’ instead of ‘most,’ it would be a great quote. Unfortunately there is a huge class of problems that, although they may eventually be solved by rational methods, are not solved just by being rational. Turning everyone rational overnight doesn’t automatically cure death, for example. Nor does it remedy the partiality of human utility functions, or cure psychopaths of their psychopathy… et cetera.
You should not take the statement too literally: Look it in a historical context. Probably the biggest problems at Russel’s time were wars caused by nationalism and unfair resource allocation due to bad (idealistic/traditionalist) policies.. Average life expectancy was around 40-50 years. I don’t think anyone considered e.g. a mortality a problem that can or should be solved. (Neither does over 95% of the people today). Population was much smaller. Earth was also in a much more pristine state than today.
Times have changed. We have more technical issues today, since we can address more issues with technology, plus we are on a general trajectory today, which is ecologically unsustainable if we don’t manage to invent and use the right technologies quickly. I think this is the fundamental mistake traditional ecological movements are making: There is no turning back. We either manage to progress rapidly enough to counteract what we broke (and will inevitably break) or our civilization collapses. There is no stopping or turning back, we have already bet our future. Being reasonable would have worked 100 years ago, today we must be very smart as well.
That is not what circular means. If I say, “All claims need supporting evidence,” then I am being inconsistent if I cannot provide evidence for that claim. Circular would be, “All claims require evidence. We know this, because without evidence, you cannot make a proper claim.”
What part of it are you uncertain about? Do you just think that it’s overstating things to think that rationality alone can “cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering”? Or are you actually questioning the wisdom of rationality?
I might just be suffering from availability bias since I was reading about the French Revolution right before I read the quote, but I was thinking that so much of what we do that is non-rational (not based on explicit reasoning or weighing of evidence) could be adapted to our social environment through memetic evolution. If this was the case, dropping norms of behavior or social institutions simply because we don’t have sufficient rational justification for them might prove disastrous.
Edmund Burke added lustre to an already high reputation with his Reflections on the Revolution in France published in 1790, in which he predicted that the revolution would lead to terrible disorder and, in time, a military coup.
The general principles that he relied on for his successful prediction are close to what you suggest. Indeed your question “Does this sound crazy or am I making sense?” jars somewhat. Your position, Burkean Conservatism, is highly controversial, but the controversy is all the fiercer because Burkean Conservatism is acknowledged to be a respectable position on matters of great importance.
Burkean conservatism seems to be different in critical ways from Phil Goetz’s “Reason as memetic immune system disorder”, in ways I can’t quite articulate yet. Or at least, this is another case of, “Well, [Burke], it would have been a lot more convincing if you said it that way!” and another case of me getting angry because of how bad people are at explaining themselves.
Also, I don’t think Burke would have liked the view of dominant memes as viruses we’ve learned immunity from (even after adjusting for the negative connotations of “virus”, and Burke not being alive while the term was in common use in English).
It makes a certain sense. On the other hand, a sufficiently powerful rationalist should have some sense of what works well in our social environment, and thus shouldn’t be reflexively ignored.
True, which is why I am very uncertain about the quote or my first thoughts about it. Also, I had a vague picture in my mind of an entire society going through the valley of bad rationality at the same time. Needless to say, that would be a very scary (and thankfully very improbable) possible future.
Why? Do you agree with him? :)
I am very uncertain about the truth of the proposition, so I would like to hear arguments in favor of or against it to develop a more informed opinion.
I see lots of ways for Russell’s proposal to fail in practice. Whose evidence? If he is suggesting confining yourself to evidence that you have gathered in person, he is proposing an unreasonably tight confinement that will certainly make the world worse. For example running your own double-blind trial of a drug requires that you trust your collaborators, so most of medicine is off limits to those who want evidence that they have seen with their own eyes.
Granting trust in your close associates doesn’t get you very far. You are still going to have to read the B.M.J. and trust “evidence” from people that you have never met and against whom you have no prospect of redress.
Right from the start we must read Russell as asking us to get into the habit of basing convictions upon third-party evidence. How then are we to grant only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants? It is not our evidence. We didn’t gather it in person. Clearly it is not just evidence that it at issue but also trust. Who do we trust and why?
I started with a legal perspective; what kind of custody chain conveys remote events to us? Turning to an accounting text book, the key words are relevance and reliability. There is a terrible tension between them. Two examples.
One argument in favour of the 2nd Amendment of the US constitution is that governments go bad and massacre their own citizens. One can read the history of the twentieth century as the story of governments disarming their citizens and then ruling badly; unconstrained, since they need no longer fear revolt. Is this a good argument? It is a coarse grained argument, based on rare events of huge importance. Rare events mired in their own detail and circumstance. There is a strong temptation to look finer grained aspects of the issue. The use of fire arms in ordinary criminal murders is common enough and random enough to permit the deployment of the statistical tools of social science. Many prefer to discuss the issue in terms of guns and murder rates. Looking at events that happen every day instead of looking at events that happen every century gives us reliability, but what price have we paid in relevance?
Meditation involves noticing what your mind is up to. One claims that one is studying the mind. The relevance of the thoughts going through your mind to the thoughts going through your mind is 100%. Excellent! But wait! You are studying introspection. That is only a tiny part of the life of the mind. If you generalise to the mind in toto what becomes of reliability? Is there any reliability left at all?
I hope my two examples don’t distract from my broader point. An emphasis on evidence usually results in prioritising reliability over relevance. A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, if it became general, would lead us to take decisions based on irrelevant considerations about which we were certain.
I just find it a bit circular that you want evidences for the assertion saying that assertions need evidences.
Russell is not just saying that beliefs should be proportional to evidence (if anyone on LW disagrees with THAT, I’ll be shocked); he’s saying that if that were done, it would eliminate most of the world’s problems.
If he had said ‘many’ instead of ‘most,’ it would be a great quote. Unfortunately there is a huge class of problems that, although they may eventually be solved by rational methods, are not solved just by being rational. Turning everyone rational overnight doesn’t automatically cure death, for example. Nor does it remedy the partiality of human utility functions, or cure psychopaths of their psychopathy… et cetera.
You should not take the statement too literally: Look it in a historical context. Probably the biggest problems at Russel’s time were wars caused by nationalism and unfair resource allocation due to bad (idealistic/traditionalist) policies.. Average life expectancy was around 40-50 years. I don’t think anyone considered e.g. a mortality a problem that can or should be solved. (Neither does over 95% of the people today). Population was much smaller. Earth was also in a much more pristine state than today.
Times have changed. We have more technical issues today, since we can address more issues with technology, plus we are on a general trajectory today, which is ecologically unsustainable if we don’t manage to invent and use the right technologies quickly. I think this is the fundamental mistake traditional ecological movements are making: There is no turning back. We either manage to progress rapidly enough to counteract what we broke (and will inevitably break) or our civilization collapses. There is no stopping or turning back, we have already bet our future. Being reasonable would have worked 100 years ago, today we must be very smart as well.
That is not what circular means. If I say, “All claims need supporting evidence,” then I am being inconsistent if I cannot provide evidence for that claim. Circular would be, “All claims require evidence. We know this, because without evidence, you cannot make a proper claim.”
The original quote made a much stronger claim than merely “assertions need evidence”.
What part of it are you uncertain about? Do you just think that it’s overstating things to think that rationality alone can “cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering”? Or are you actually questioning the wisdom of rationality?
I might just be suffering from availability bias since I was reading about the French Revolution right before I read the quote, but I was thinking that so much of what we do that is non-rational (not based on explicit reasoning or weighing of evidence) could be adapted to our social environment through memetic evolution. If this was the case, dropping norms of behavior or social institutions simply because we don’t have sufficient rational justification for them might prove disastrous.
Does this sound crazy or am I making sense?
Edmund Burke added lustre to an already high reputation with his Reflections on the Revolution in France published in 1790, in which he predicted that the revolution would lead to terrible disorder and, in time, a military coup.
The general principles that he relied on for his successful prediction are close to what you suggest. Indeed your question “Does this sound crazy or am I making sense?” jars somewhat. Your position, Burkean Conservatism, is highly controversial, but the controversy is all the fiercer because Burkean Conservatism is acknowledged to be a respectable position on matters of great importance.
Burkean conservatism seems to be different in critical ways from Phil Goetz’s “Reason as memetic immune system disorder”, in ways I can’t quite articulate yet. Or at least, this is another case of, “Well, [Burke], it would have been a lot more convincing if you said it that way!” and another case of me getting angry because of how bad people are at explaining themselves.
Also, I don’t think Burke would have liked the view of dominant memes as viruses we’ve learned immunity from (even after adjusting for the negative connotations of “virus”, and Burke not being alive while the term was in common use in English).
No, that makes sense—PhilGoetz wrote a post on the theme some time back.
Thanks for the link.
It makes a certain sense. On the other hand, a sufficiently powerful rationalist should have some sense of what works well in our social environment, and thus shouldn’t be reflexively ignored.
True, which is why I am very uncertain about the quote or my first thoughts about it. Also, I had a vague picture in my mind of an entire society going through the valley of bad rationality at the same time. Needless to say, that would be a very scary (and thankfully very improbable) possible future.