Another instance of approximately the same error: “They are not trying to live. They are not trying to save their friends’ lives. If they were, they would have picked up my message about high-dose Vitamin D”. You are firmly convinced that high-dose vitamin D is plainly very helpful, but they may not be, and the reason need not be stupidity or dishonesty. E.g., Scott Alexander, at least as of December 2021, doesn’t think it likely that vitamin D is useful against Covid-19; he may be right or wrong, but to me this is already conclusive evidence that it isn’t obvious to any smart person who’s paying attention that vitamin D is useful against Covid-19. Which means that “if these people were really trying to save their own and their friends’ lives, they would agree with me about vitamin D” is just plain wrong.
I didn’t mean to claim that everyone would agree with me if they were trying to live. I meant that the vitamin D result would be interesting, and I’d see some combination of people being persuaded that vitamin D was helpful (and acting accordingly to pass along the info) or people making specific arguments against that proposition.
Instead what I saw among the kinds of people excited about vaccines was basically no intellectual initiative, combined with defensive nonsense like sneering at the idea of comparing costs and benefits as somehow unrelated to “reality,” when someone tries to makes sense of things in a decision-relevant way that doesn’t seem committed to getting the “right” answer for their faction.
An older cousin I talked with about this more recently openly admitted to me that she’d been anxiously trying to follow orders, that she’d been aware of this, and so when she felt like she was probably missing out on net by being too paranoid about COVID, arranged to get orders from a proper authority (someone who’d worked on the COVID vaccine studies) that it was correct to stop being so scared. The initiative to solve this problem seems like it reflects a desire to live, but it would have been a mistake to take anything she’d said about vaccine efficacy or COVID risk as a literal attempt to inform or part of a process of trying to figure out how to minimize nonpolitical harms from COVID.
On what basis do you think that people who are trying to live would reliably have been exposed substantially to the idea that taking vitamin D might be very good for them? Do you e.g. mean just that they would have heard you promoting it?
My impression is that most people will not, merely because one person in their social circle is strongly convinced of something, necessarily pay much attention to it. This is probably a good thing, at least for people with large social circles, because one only has so much attention to give and many people are strongly convinced of many things, and quite often they are wrong. I don’t think this means that most people don’t really care whether they or their loved ones live or die.
I agree that many people are intellectually incurious and un-agent-y. But it seems like you leap from that to something much more specific which doesn’t at all follow from it, namely that people on the whole, or some not-very-clearly-specified set of people, are “trying to give a costly signal of loyalty by hurting themselves and others”. I’m sure some people are. (Some people are X, for pretty much any X.) But nothing like that follows from the fact that they didn’t pay much attention to your advocacy for vitamin D as an anti-Covid-19 measure. Or others’ advocacy, or whatever it is that you think they should have been paying attention to.
I’d expect trying-to-live behavior to be trying to cooperate with other instances of itself, sharing and investigating what seems like relevant info. In the ideal case info being shared would be strong evidence of its relevance and importance, and info not being shared would be evidence of its unimportance.
“Intellectually incurious and un-agent-y” about info strongly relevant to mortality risk isn’t consistent with a rational-agent model of someone trying to live, and I don’t see what “trying to” could mean without at least implicit reference to a rational-agent model.
I don’t conclude that people are trying to hurt themselves to signal loyalty simply from the fact that they don’t seem to be trying very hard to survive. I conclude that from the relative popularity of injunctions to impose or endure harms for the collective good, vs info that doesn’t involve sacrifice. Many famous religious and philosophical writers have praised sacrifice for its own sake, which is strong evidence that some strong coordination mechanism is promoting such messages. Given that, it would be surprising—and require an explanation—if I didn’t know people who participated in that coordination mechanism.
In my idiolect, saying someone is “trying to X” means that, within the limits of their general agentiness and willpower and whatnot, they exert some effort in the direction of X versus not-X. Just how much depends on context.
If you take one of those people you describe as not trying to live, point a gun at them, and say “your money or your life”, they will probably give you their money. If you take one of those people you say are not trying to have their friends live and tell them credibly that their friend has a deadly but reliably curable disease, they will probably urge their friend to seek treatment.I say this means they are trying to live and trying to have their friends live, and it’s perfectly consistent with failing to take some measures that you would take if trying to live, if those measures are for whatever reason harder for them to take or harder for them to recognize as needing to be taken. (Or, for that matter, harder for you to recognize as not needing to be taken.)
Once again, in the matter of vitamin D, consider Scott Alexander. He may be right about vitamin D or he may be wrong, but he reckons it’s not particularly helpful against Covid-19. That indicates that it is possible for a very smart person, in contact with many of the same people as you, thinking about the matter pretty hard, to come to the conclusion that vitamin D is not very helpful against Covid-19. And I claim that means that others equipped with merely average-human levels of curiosity and brainpower and energy for investigating such things are not doing anything inexcusable, or incompatible with truly wanting to live, if the ambient state of the evidence on that matter doesn’t inspire them to look closely.
I agree that it’s clear that for many people “you must make costly sacrifices because X” is a message that resonates, and that things are apt to feel more virtuous when they involve costly sacrifices. I think there is a morally, logically and psychologically important difference between “many people feel that making costly sacrifices is virtuous” and “many people try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty”. (I suspect that this is another of those things that comes down to a general worldview difference: e.g., perhaps you regard it as obvious that anything that presents itself as virtue is best understood as “signalling loyalty”, whereas I don’t.)
It isn’t obvious to me that the widespread promotion of sacrifice for its own sake in religion and the like is good evidence of some strong coordination mechanism, at least not if I’m understanding correctly what sort of things you class as coordination mechanisms. For instance, it seems possible to me that this is just a quirk of human brains, doubtless with some fascinating evolutionary origin. (Maybe related to the fact that, to whatever extent moral behaviour functions as a signal of particular character traits, it’s a more reliable signal when the behaviour is personally costly.) I guess you might consider “we all have much the same evolutionary history” as a coordination mechanism, but I wouldn’t.
I remark that what you originally said wasn’t that you know some people who try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty, but that what Fauci says publicly is optimized for reception by people who try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty.
I didn’t mean to claim that everyone would agree with me if they were trying to live. I meant that the vitamin D result would be interesting, and I’d see some combination of people being persuaded that vitamin D was helpful (and acting accordingly to pass along the info) or people making specific arguments against that proposition.
Instead what I saw among the kinds of people excited about vaccines was basically no intellectual initiative, combined with defensive nonsense like sneering at the idea of comparing costs and benefits as somehow unrelated to “reality,” when someone tries to makes sense of things in a decision-relevant way that doesn’t seem committed to getting the “right” answer for their faction.
An older cousin I talked with about this more recently openly admitted to me that she’d been anxiously trying to follow orders, that she’d been aware of this, and so when she felt like she was probably missing out on net by being too paranoid about COVID, arranged to get orders from a proper authority (someone who’d worked on the COVID vaccine studies) that it was correct to stop being so scared. The initiative to solve this problem seems like it reflects a desire to live, but it would have been a mistake to take anything she’d said about vaccine efficacy or COVID risk as a literal attempt to inform or part of a process of trying to figure out how to minimize nonpolitical harms from COVID.
On what basis do you think that people who are trying to live would reliably have been exposed substantially to the idea that taking vitamin D might be very good for them? Do you e.g. mean just that they would have heard you promoting it?
My impression is that most people will not, merely because one person in their social circle is strongly convinced of something, necessarily pay much attention to it. This is probably a good thing, at least for people with large social circles, because one only has so much attention to give and many people are strongly convinced of many things, and quite often they are wrong. I don’t think this means that most people don’t really care whether they or their loved ones live or die.
I agree that many people are intellectually incurious and un-agent-y. But it seems like you leap from that to something much more specific which doesn’t at all follow from it, namely that people on the whole, or some not-very-clearly-specified set of people, are “trying to give a costly signal of loyalty by hurting themselves and others”. I’m sure some people are. (Some people are X, for pretty much any X.) But nothing like that follows from the fact that they didn’t pay much attention to your advocacy for vitamin D as an anti-Covid-19 measure. Or others’ advocacy, or whatever it is that you think they should have been paying attention to.
I’d expect trying-to-live behavior to be trying to cooperate with other instances of itself, sharing and investigating what seems like relevant info. In the ideal case info being shared would be strong evidence of its relevance and importance, and info not being shared would be evidence of its unimportance.
“Intellectually incurious and un-agent-y” about info strongly relevant to mortality risk isn’t consistent with a rational-agent model of someone trying to live, and I don’t see what “trying to” could mean without at least implicit reference to a rational-agent model.
I don’t conclude that people are trying to hurt themselves to signal loyalty simply from the fact that they don’t seem to be trying very hard to survive. I conclude that from the relative popularity of injunctions to impose or endure harms for the collective good, vs info that doesn’t involve sacrifice. Many famous religious and philosophical writers have praised sacrifice for its own sake, which is strong evidence that some strong coordination mechanism is promoting such messages. Given that, it would be surprising—and require an explanation—if I didn’t know people who participated in that coordination mechanism.
In my idiolect, saying someone is “trying to X” means that, within the limits of their general agentiness and willpower and whatnot, they exert some effort in the direction of X versus not-X. Just how much depends on context.
If you take one of those people you describe as not trying to live, point a gun at them, and say “your money or your life”, they will probably give you their money. If you take one of those people you say are not trying to have their friends live and tell them credibly that their friend has a deadly but reliably curable disease, they will probably urge their friend to seek treatment.I say this means they are trying to live and trying to have their friends live, and it’s perfectly consistent with failing to take some measures that you would take if trying to live, if those measures are for whatever reason harder for them to take or harder for them to recognize as needing to be taken. (Or, for that matter, harder for you to recognize as not needing to be taken.)
Once again, in the matter of vitamin D, consider Scott Alexander. He may be right about vitamin D or he may be wrong, but he reckons it’s not particularly helpful against Covid-19. That indicates that it is possible for a very smart person, in contact with many of the same people as you, thinking about the matter pretty hard, to come to the conclusion that vitamin D is not very helpful against Covid-19. And I claim that means that others equipped with merely average-human levels of curiosity and brainpower and energy for investigating such things are not doing anything inexcusable, or incompatible with truly wanting to live, if the ambient state of the evidence on that matter doesn’t inspire them to look closely.
I agree that it’s clear that for many people “you must make costly sacrifices because X” is a message that resonates, and that things are apt to feel more virtuous when they involve costly sacrifices. I think there is a morally, logically and psychologically important difference between “many people feel that making costly sacrifices is virtuous” and “many people try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty”. (I suspect that this is another of those things that comes down to a general worldview difference: e.g., perhaps you regard it as obvious that anything that presents itself as virtue is best understood as “signalling loyalty”, whereas I don’t.)
It isn’t obvious to me that the widespread promotion of sacrifice for its own sake in religion and the like is good evidence of some strong coordination mechanism, at least not if I’m understanding correctly what sort of things you class as coordination mechanisms. For instance, it seems possible to me that this is just a quirk of human brains, doubtless with some fascinating evolutionary origin. (Maybe related to the fact that, to whatever extent moral behaviour functions as a signal of particular character traits, it’s a more reliable signal when the behaviour is personally costly.) I guess you might consider “we all have much the same evolutionary history” as a coordination mechanism, but I wouldn’t.
I remark that what you originally said wasn’t that you know some people who try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty, but that what Fauci says publicly is optimized for reception by people who try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty.