Being wrong about something may harm you in the long term. Being right when others are wrong can get you killed right now.
Not sure how exactly this relates to the article (maybe it doesn’t), but I feel weird when this obvious part is missing from a debate about instrumental rationality. As if there is just me and the universe, and if I have the correct beliefs, the universe will reward me, and if I have incorrect beliefs, the universe will punish me, on average. Therefore, let’s praise the universe and let’s have correct beliefs! I agree that if I were a Robinson on an empty island, trying to have correct beliefs would probably be the best way. But most people are not in this situation.
It is a great privilege to live in the time and space when having the right beliefs doesn’t get you killed immediately. It probably contributes to our epistemic rationality more than anything else. And I enjoy it, a lot! But it doesn’t mean that the social punishments are gone completely. Even in the same country, different people live in different situations, so probably an important strategic move in becoming more rational is to navigate yourself in situations where the punishment for having correct beliefs is smaller. If you can’t… then you play by the more complex rules; the outcomes of epistemic rationally may be smaller, and you might need some doze of Dark Arts just to survive. (And by the way, this is the situation we are optimized for by evolution.)
Uhm… not sure where I wanted to get by saying this. I guess I wanted to say that “epistemic rationality is the best way to win” depends on the environment. In theory, you could have epistemically correct beliefs and yet behave in public according to other people’s wrong beliefs and expectations; but I think this is rather difficult for a human.
Lying constantly about what you believe is all well and good if you have Professor Quirrell-like lying skills and your conscience doesn’t bother you if you lie to protect yourself from others’ hostility to your views. I myself lie effortlessly, and felt not a shred of guilt when, say, I would hide my atheism to protect myself from the hostility of my very anti-anti-religious father (he’s not a believer himself, he’s just hostile to atheism for reasons which elude me).
Other people, however, are not so lucky. Some people are obliged to publicly profess belief of some sort or face serious reprisals, and also feel terrible when they lie. Defiance may not be feasible, so they must either use Dark Side Epistemology to convince themselves of what others demand they be convinced, or else be cursed with the retching pain of a guilty conscience.
If you’ve never found yourself in such a situation, lucky you. But realize that you have it easy.
Lying constantly about what you believe is all well and good if you have Professor Quirrell-like lying skills and your conscience doesn’t bother you if you lie to protect yourself from others’ hostility to your views.
Even then, it’s more cognitively demanding to lie. It’s like running a business with two sets of books—the set you show to the IRS and the set you actually use to run the business. It may save you a lot in taxes but you still have to spend double the time keeping your books.
Agreeing with the people around you isn’t demanding. And most people don’t need to maintain any “true” beliefs about politics, religion and philosophy. They butter no parsnips in practice, and parsinip-buttering beliefs are not varied or unpredictable enough for ingroup signalling purposes.
Agreeing with the people around you isn’t demanding.
I would say it depends on whether you really agree with them or not. If you believe X and you are surrounded by people who believe Y, and you need to conceal your belief in X, then you constantly have to be asking yourself “what would someone who believes in Y do or say?”
And most people don’t need to maintain any “true” beliefs about politics, religion and philosophy.
I’m not sure what it means to “maintain ‘true’ beliefs.” If you go through life, you will naturally develop a mental model (at least one, I suppose) of how the world works. If that model contains an Almighty Creator, then you are a theist. If it doesn’t, then you are an atheist. Perhaps there is a third possibility, that your model is uncertain on this point, making you an agnostic.
If you are an atheist or an agnostic, and you are in a time or place where everyone is expected to be a theist, especially anyone who wants to get ahead in life, then that’s a potential problem. Agreed?
I believe your first point us answered by my second.
You don’t need mental models involving God or not god for any practical purpose .. other than solidarity with your community.
If you are one of the people, typical on LW but not in the population at large, who like to have beliefs on the “big” but practically unimportant questions, you will find dissimulation difficult. If not, not.
A man was telling one of his friends the secret of his contented married life: “My wife makes all the small decisions,” he explained, “and I make all the big ones, so we never interfere in each other’s business and never get annoyed with each other. We have no complaints and no arguments.” “That sounds reasonable,” answered his friend sympathetically. “And what sort of decisions does your wife make?” “Well,” answered the man, “she decides what jobs I apply for, what sort of house we live in, what furniture we have, where we go for our holidays, and things like that.” His friend was surprised. “Oh?” he said. “And what do you consider important decisions then?” “Well,” answered the man, “I decide who should be Prime Minister, whether we should increase our help to poor countries, what we should do about the atom bomb, and things like that.”
You don’t need mental models involving God or not god for any practical purpose .. other than solidarity with your community.
I disagree with that. For example, suppose you are hunting in the woods and you find 10 gold coins. According to your village elders, Crom the grim gloomy unforgiving god commands that you donate any such windfall to the Village Shrine to Crom, and that to do so will guarantee you eternal paradise. And that to fail to do so will guarantee eternal damnation.
If your mental model of the universe includes Crom the grim gloomy unforgiving god, then of course you will make the donation. Otherwise you are likely to keep the windfall to yourself. Of course a decision must be made.
Of course you might object that those days are gone, that nobody is expected to follow religious precepts anymore, at least not in the United States. And I would disagree with that too. In today’s United States, you must still decide where to live and whom to do business with. Does your mental model of the universe include the fact that certain groups are more prone to crime and disruptive behavior than others? If so, you would be wise to have a rationalization in mind for why you don’t want to live anywhere near such groups. Or at least a few euphemisms.
Anyway, please answer my question from before:
If you are an atheist or an agnostic, and you are in a time or place where everyone is expected to be a theist, especially anyone who wants to get ahead in life, then that’s a potential problem. Agreed?
You don’t need mental models involving God or not god for any practical purpose .. other than solidarity with your community.
Oathes do work as a commitment device if you think that the God on which you swear is real and will punish you really exists. No automatic tracking like Beeminder, but still a decent alternative.
Not talking about religion, politics and sex is position that’s acceptable in many places.
Being an atheist is also an identity label. You don’t need an identity label to have accurate beliefs. If you label yourself as an atheist than you will feel uncomfortable doing certain to participate in certain religious rituals because your family expects you to be at church.
If you just don’t believe the ritual becomes a silly game that won’t make you uncomfortable.
I myself lie effortlessly, and felt not a shred of guilt when, say, I would hide my atheism to protect myself from the hostility of my very anti-anti-religious father (he’s not a believer himself, he’s just hostile to atheism for reasons which elude me).
Hm, an atheist who hides his atheism, from his father who also seems to be an atheist (aka non-believer) but acts hostile towards atheists? Just out of curiosity, do you also act hostile towards atheists when you’re around him?
I think you’ve identified a special case of a more general problem, which is that true beliefs do not have equal value, and that their values can vary wildly with your circumstances. To borrow blacktrance’s example: if you’re living in 6th-century Rome then it’s useful to know that Jews aren’t inherently evil...but it’s more useful to know what happens to people who say so. And if you don’t know how to profess that Jews are inherently evil without being corrupted by that lie, then it’s more important to learn that than it is to believe true things about Jews.
This discipline, of predicting the value of information before you’ve learned it, is very difficult. For me, it’s the most difficult thing. But it’s also the center of the art; if it weren’t, we could all level up endlessly by browsing Wikipedia.
As if there is just me and the universe, and if I have the correct beliefs, the universe will reward me, and if I have incorrect beliefs, the universe will punish me, on average. Therefore, let’s praise the universe and let’s have correct beliefs!
It is just you and the universe. “Other people” are a part of the universe.
(I actually kind of agree with you, though—the larger point is that your beliefs can impact outcomes directly rather than only via predictions. A non-sentient example of this would be Placebo effects. This seems not to have been included in the OP’s discussion.)
Having correct beliefs does not mean expressing them. If I traveled back in time to medieval Rome, I would still believe that Jews aren’t inherently evil and that Christ did not rise from the dead, but it would be unwise for me to be too public about those beliefs.
Nickpick: my understanding is that even in medieval Rome a lot of people didn’t consider Jews inherently evil. At least to the extend that they were willing to engage in business dealings with them.
The concept is called ‘ketman’—that term was popularized by Czeslaw Miłosz, who wrote about its practice under Communism.
I’m not sure if the pressure comes from lying per se—it’s not as if the practice is recent or uncommon—or from having no place to go where you can escape the necessity to lie. Dalrymple was on to something when he said that the purpose of forcing public profession of the official idea under Communism was to humiliate; any place to tell the truth is a blow against the regime’s goal of humiliation. Underground acts of non-public defiance aren’t a new concept.
Secret societies aren’t a new concept either; they don’t seem to be as common anymore as they once were (but then again, how would I know?), but that’s because they’ve been replaced by open but obscure/anonymous pseudosocieties online.
But there’s a problem with the act of practicing ketman and going underground. Say you get n utility from having a secret society or similar, having an outlet to assert the truth outside the watch of the authority demanding that you lie—but you’d get n^2 utility from getting the official lies dethroned. But you’d lose a great deal of utility if you got caught not believing in the lie.
That’s a difficult coordination problem, since you clearly can’t dethrone the official idea yourself. Perhaps it is deserving of study.
I’m not sure if the pressure comes from lying per se—it’s not as if the practice is recent or uncommon—or from having no place to go where you can escape the necessity to lie.
I believe it’s the latter. On emotional level, if I can’t speak openly with a person, I have a feeling like they “don’t belong to my tribe”, they are a stranger. There is a difference between being sometimes with strangers, and being alone among strangers, all the time.
It is much easier to have clear rules about when to use my “public” face, and when to relax and be myself. Using my “public” face increases my internal pressure; I need a place to talk about it and relax. If I don’t have that place, then I will lose attention in random moments, and expose my internal heresies. It is easier to keep control, if I have clear boundaries for when the hypocrisy begins and when it ends.
Having just one person to talk honestly with already helps a lot. (I am tired to google now, but there is probably some article on LW about how the first voice of dissent is most important.) It is much easier for me to think, if I can talk. Talking makes my thought processes much clearer. Not having a sane person to talk with is like not having a part of brain, or for a more realistic analogy, like being drunk or exhausted all the time.
Being wrong about something may harm you in the long term. Being right when others are wrong can get you killed right now.
Not sure how exactly this relates to the article (maybe it doesn’t), but I feel weird when this obvious part is missing from a debate about instrumental rationality. As if there is just me and the universe, and if I have the correct beliefs, the universe will reward me, and if I have incorrect beliefs, the universe will punish me, on average. Therefore, let’s praise the universe and let’s have correct beliefs! I agree that if I were a Robinson on an empty island, trying to have correct beliefs would probably be the best way. But most people are not in this situation.
It is a great privilege to live in the time and space when having the right beliefs doesn’t get you killed immediately. It probably contributes to our epistemic rationality more than anything else. And I enjoy it, a lot! But it doesn’t mean that the social punishments are gone completely. Even in the same country, different people live in different situations, so probably an important strategic move in becoming more rational is to navigate yourself in situations where the punishment for having correct beliefs is smaller. If you can’t… then you play by the more complex rules; the outcomes of epistemic rationally may be smaller, and you might need some doze of Dark Arts just to survive. (And by the way, this is the situation we are optimized for by evolution.)
Uhm… not sure where I wanted to get by saying this. I guess I wanted to say that “epistemic rationality is the best way to win” depends on the environment. In theory, you could have epistemically correct beliefs and yet behave in public according to other people’s wrong beliefs and expectations; but I think this is rather difficult for a human.
Having correct beliefs and telling people about them are two separate things.
Lying constantly about what you believe is all well and good if you have Professor Quirrell-like lying skills and your conscience doesn’t bother you if you lie to protect yourself from others’ hostility to your views. I myself lie effortlessly, and felt not a shred of guilt when, say, I would hide my atheism to protect myself from the hostility of my very anti-anti-religious father (he’s not a believer himself, he’s just hostile to atheism for reasons which elude me).
Other people, however, are not so lucky. Some people are obliged to publicly profess belief of some sort or face serious reprisals, and also feel terrible when they lie. Defiance may not be feasible, so they must either use Dark Side Epistemology to convince themselves of what others demand they be convinced, or else be cursed with the retching pain of a guilty conscience.
If you’ve never found yourself in such a situation, lucky you. But realize that you have it easy.
Even then, it’s more cognitively demanding to lie. It’s like running a business with two sets of books—the set you show to the IRS and the set you actually use to run the business. It may save you a lot in taxes but you still have to spend double the time keeping your books.
Agreeing with the people around you isn’t demanding. And most people don’t need to maintain any “true” beliefs about politics, religion and philosophy. They butter no parsnips in practice, and parsinip-buttering beliefs are not varied or unpredictable enough for ingroup signalling purposes.
I would say it depends on whether you really agree with them or not. If you believe X and you are surrounded by people who believe Y, and you need to conceal your belief in X, then you constantly have to be asking yourself “what would someone who believes in Y do or say?”
I’m not sure what it means to “maintain ‘true’ beliefs.” If you go through life, you will naturally develop a mental model (at least one, I suppose) of how the world works. If that model contains an Almighty Creator, then you are a theist. If it doesn’t, then you are an atheist. Perhaps there is a third possibility, that your model is uncertain on this point, making you an agnostic.
If you are an atheist or an agnostic, and you are in a time or place where everyone is expected to be a theist, especially anyone who wants to get ahead in life, then that’s a potential problem. Agreed?
I believe your first point us answered by my second.
You don’t need mental models involving God or not god for any practical purpose .. other than solidarity with your community.
If you are one of the people, typical on LW but not in the population at large, who like to have beliefs on the “big” but practically unimportant questions, you will find dissimulation difficult. If not, not.
A man was telling one of his friends the secret of his contented married life: “My wife makes all the small decisions,” he explained, “and I make all the big ones, so we never interfere in each other’s business and never get annoyed with each other. We have no complaints and no arguments.” “That sounds reasonable,” answered his friend sympathetically. “And what sort of decisions does your wife make?” “Well,” answered the man, “she decides what jobs I apply for, what sort of house we live in, what furniture we have, where we go for our holidays, and things like that.” His friend was surprised. “Oh?” he said. “And what do you consider important decisions then?” “Well,” answered the man, “I decide who should be Prime Minister, whether we should increase our help to poor countries, what we should do about the atom bomb, and things like that.”
I disagree with that. For example, suppose you are hunting in the woods and you find 10 gold coins. According to your village elders, Crom the grim gloomy unforgiving god commands that you donate any such windfall to the Village Shrine to Crom, and that to do so will guarantee you eternal paradise. And that to fail to do so will guarantee eternal damnation.
If your mental model of the universe includes Crom the grim gloomy unforgiving god, then of course you will make the donation. Otherwise you are likely to keep the windfall to yourself. Of course a decision must be made.
Of course you might object that those days are gone, that nobody is expected to follow religious precepts anymore, at least not in the United States. And I would disagree with that too. In today’s United States, you must still decide where to live and whom to do business with. Does your mental model of the universe include the fact that certain groups are more prone to crime and disruptive behavior than others? If so, you would be wise to have a rationalization in mind for why you don’t want to live anywhere near such groups. Or at least a few euphemisms.
Anyway, please answer my question from before:
If you are an atheist or an agnostic, and you are in a time or place where everyone is expected to be a theist, especially anyone who wants to get ahead in life, then that’s a potential problem. Agreed?
Unless your model of the world includes people ostracizing you for doing so.
I completely agree, but you are kinda fighting the hypothetical here.
Oathes do work as a commitment device if you think that the God on which you swear is real and will punish you really exists. No automatic tracking like Beeminder, but still a decent alternative.
But such punishment is even further away in time than staying fat or failing the exam, so if the latter can’t motivate you to diet or study...
Not talking about religion, politics and sex is position that’s acceptable in many places.
Being an atheist is also an identity label. You don’t need an identity label to have accurate beliefs. If you label yourself as an atheist than you will feel uncomfortable doing certain to participate in certain religious rituals because your family expects you to be at church.
If you just don’t believe the ritual becomes a silly game that won’t make you uncomfortable.
How skillful you need to be at lying depends on the culture you’re in and the personalities of the people you’re surrounded by.
Some cultures leave a lot of room for hypocrisy.
Hm, an atheist who hides his atheism, from his father who also seems to be an atheist (aka non-believer) but acts hostile towards atheists? Just out of curiosity, do you also act hostile towards atheists when you’re around him?
I think you’ve identified a special case of a more general problem, which is that true beliefs do not have equal value, and that their values can vary wildly with your circumstances. To borrow blacktrance’s example: if you’re living in 6th-century Rome then it’s useful to know that Jews aren’t inherently evil...but it’s more useful to know what happens to people who say so. And if you don’t know how to profess that Jews are inherently evil without being corrupted by that lie, then it’s more important to learn that than it is to believe true things about Jews.
This discipline, of predicting the value of information before you’ve learned it, is very difficult. For me, it’s the most difficult thing. But it’s also the center of the art; if it weren’t, we could all level up endlessly by browsing Wikipedia.
It is just you and the universe. “Other people” are a part of the universe.
(I actually kind of agree with you, though—the larger point is that your beliefs can impact outcomes directly rather than only via predictions. A non-sentient example of this would be Placebo effects. This seems not to have been included in the OP’s discussion.)
Having correct beliefs does not mean expressing them. If I traveled back in time to medieval Rome, I would still believe that Jews aren’t inherently evil and that Christ did not rise from the dead, but it would be unwise for me to be too public about those beliefs.
Nickpick: my understanding is that even in medieval Rome a lot of people didn’t consider Jews inherently evil. At least to the extend that they were willing to engage in business dealings with them.
The concept is called ‘ketman’—that term was popularized by Czeslaw Miłosz, who wrote about its practice under Communism.
I’m not sure if the pressure comes from lying per se—it’s not as if the practice is recent or uncommon—or from having no place to go where you can escape the necessity to lie. Dalrymple was on to something when he said that the purpose of forcing public profession of the official idea under Communism was to humiliate; any place to tell the truth is a blow against the regime’s goal of humiliation. Underground acts of non-public defiance aren’t a new concept.
Secret societies aren’t a new concept either; they don’t seem to be as common anymore as they once were (but then again, how would I know?), but that’s because they’ve been replaced by open but obscure/anonymous pseudosocieties online.
But there’s a problem with the act of practicing ketman and going underground. Say you get n utility from having a secret society or similar, having an outlet to assert the truth outside the watch of the authority demanding that you lie—but you’d get n^2 utility from getting the official lies dethroned. But you’d lose a great deal of utility if you got caught not believing in the lie.
That’s a difficult coordination problem, since you clearly can’t dethrone the official idea yourself. Perhaps it is deserving of study.
I believe it’s the latter. On emotional level, if I can’t speak openly with a person, I have a feeling like they “don’t belong to my tribe”, they are a stranger. There is a difference between being sometimes with strangers, and being alone among strangers, all the time.
It is much easier to have clear rules about when to use my “public” face, and when to relax and be myself. Using my “public” face increases my internal pressure; I need a place to talk about it and relax. If I don’t have that place, then I will lose attention in random moments, and expose my internal heresies. It is easier to keep control, if I have clear boundaries for when the hypocrisy begins and when it ends.
Having just one person to talk honestly with already helps a lot. (I am tired to google now, but there is probably some article on LW about how the first voice of dissent is most important.) It is much easier for me to think, if I can talk. Talking makes my thought processes much clearer. Not having a sane person to talk with is like not having a part of brain, or for a more realistic analogy, like being drunk or exhausted all the time.
The recent history of getting homosexuality mainstreamed is an interesting example.