Sorry, under the helpless approach you cannot conclude anything, much less on the basis of something as complex as a cross-cultural comparative religion analysis. If you are helpless, you do what people around you do and think what people around you think. The end.
It seems like we are thinking of two different views, then. Let’s keep the name ‘helpless view’ for mine and call yours ‘straw helpless view’.
The idea behind helpless view is that you’re very irrational in many ways. Which ways?
You’re biased in favor of your ingroups and your culture. This feels like your ingroups are universally correct from the inside, but you can tell that it is a bias from the fact that your outgroups act similarly confident.
You’re biased in favor of elegant convincing-sounding arguments rather than hard-to-understand data.
Your computational power is bounded, so you need to spend a lot of resources to understand things.
There are obviously more, but biases similar to those are the ones the helpless view is intended to fight.
The way it fights those arguments is by not allowing object-level arguments, arguments that favor your ingroups or your culture over others and things like that.
Instead, in helpless view, you focus on things like:
International mainstream consensus. (Things like cross-cultural analysis on opinions, what organizations like the UN say, etc.)
Expert opinions. (If the experts, preferably in your outgroup, agree that something is wrong, rule it out. Silence on the issue does not let you rule it out.)
Things that you are an expert on. (Looking things up on the web does not count as expert.)
What the government says.
(The media are intentionally excluded.)
Oh-oh. I’m failing this test hard.
evil grin
Besides, are you quite sure that you want to make an untestable article of faith with zero practical consequences the criterion for rationality? X-/
Nah, it was mostly meant as a semi-joke. I mean, I like the criterion, but my reasons for liking it are not exactly unbiased.
If I were to actually make a rationality test, I would probably look at the ingroups/outgroups of the people I make the test for, include a bunch of questions about facts where each there is a lot of ingroup/outgroup bias, and look at the answers to that.
That’s an argument against the helpless view, right? It sure looks this way.
Except that we live in the current world, not the counterfactual world, and in the current world the helpless view tells you not to believe conspiracy theories.
Well, yes, I’m going to notice and I generally have little trouble figuring out who’s stupid and who is smart. But that’s me and my personal opinion. You, on the other hand, are setting this up as a generally applicable rule. The problem is who decides. Let’s say I talk a bit to Charlie and decide that Charlie is stupid. Charlie, on the basis of the same conversation, decides that I’m stupid. Who’s right? I have my opinion, and Charlie has his opinion, and how do we resolve this without pulling out IQ tests and equivalents?
It’s essentially a power and control issue: who gets to separate people into elite and masses?
I dunno.
For what purpose are you separating the people into elite and masses? If it’s just a question of who to share dangerous knowledge to, there’s the obvious possibility of just letting whoever wants to share said dangerous knowledge decide.
In your setup there is the Arbiter—in your case, yourself—who decides whether someone is smart (and so is allowed to use the independent approach) or stupid (and so must be limited to the helpless approach). This Arbiter has a certain level of IQ. Can the Arbiter judge the smartness/rationality of someone with noticeably higher IQ than the Arbiter himself?
I don’t know, because I have a really high IQ, so I don’t usually meet people with noticeably higher IQ. Do you have any examples of ultra-high-IQ people who write about controversial stuff?
Instead, in helpless view, you focus on things like: International mainstream consensus.
Hold on. I thought the helpless view was for the “dumb masses”. They are certainly not able to figure out what the “international mainstream consensus” is. Hell, even I have no idea what it is (or even what it means).
A simple example: Western democracy. What’s the “international mainstream consensus”? Assuming it exists, I would guess it says that the Western-style democracy needs a strong guiding hand lest it devolves into degeneracy and amoral chaos. And hey, if you ask the experts in your outgroup (!) they probably wouldn’t be great fans of the Western democracies, that’s why they are in the outgroup to start with.
I have a feeling you want the helpless view to cherry-pick the “right” advice from the confusing mess of the “international consensus” and various experts and government recommendations. I don’t see how this can work well.
in the current world the helpless view tells you not to believe conspiracy theories.
Heh. You know the definitions of a cult and a religion? A cult is a small unsuccessful religion. A religion is a large successful cult.
In exactly the same way what gets labeled a “conspiracy theory” is already a rejected view. If the mainstream believes in a conspiracy theory, it’s not called a “conspiracy theory”, it’s called a deep and insightful analysis. If you were to live in a culture where Holocaust denial was mainstream, it wouldn’t be called a conspiracy theory, it would be called “what all right-minded people believe”.
For what purpose are you separating the people into elite and masses?
For the purpose of promoting/recommending either the independent view or the helpless view.
Hold on. I thought the helpless view was for the “dumb masses”. They are certainly not able to figure out what the “international mainstream consensus” is. Hell, even I have no idea what it is (or even what it means).
The “dumb masses” here are not defined as being low-IQ, but just low-rationality. Low-IQ people would probably be better served just doing what people around them are doing (or maybe not; I’m not an expert in low-IQ people).
A simple example: Western democracy. What’s the “international mainstream consensus”?
Well, one of the first conclusions to draw with helpless view is “politics is too complicated to figure out”. I’m not sure I care that much about figuring out if democracy is good according to helpless view. The UN seems to like democracy, and I would count that as helpless-view evidence in favor of it.
I would guess it says that the Western-style democracy needs a strong guiding hand lest it devolves into degeneracy and amoral chaos.
I would guess that there is an ambiguously pro-democratic response. 48% of the world lives in democracies, and the places that aren’t democratic probably don’t agree as much on how to be un-democratic as the democratic places agree on how to be democratic.
For the purpose of promoting/recommending either the independent view or the helpless view.
Whoever does the promoting/recommending seems like a natural candidate, then.
It seems like we are thinking of two different views, then. Let’s keep the name ‘helpless view’ for mine and call yours ‘straw helpless view’.
The idea behind helpless view is that you’re very irrational in many ways. Which ways?
You’re biased in favor of your ingroups and your culture. This feels like your ingroups are universally correct from the inside, but you can tell that it is a bias from the fact that your outgroups act similarly confident.
You’re biased in favor of elegant convincing-sounding arguments rather than hard-to-understand data.
Your computational power is bounded, so you need to spend a lot of resources to understand things.
Mount Stupid
There are obviously more, but biases similar to those are the ones the helpless view is intended to fight.
The way it fights those arguments is by not allowing object-level arguments, arguments that favor your ingroups or your culture over others and things like that.
Instead, in helpless view, you focus on things like:
International mainstream consensus. (Things like cross-cultural analysis on opinions, what organizations like the UN say, etc.)
Expert opinions. (If the experts, preferably in your outgroup, agree that something is wrong, rule it out. Silence on the issue does not let you rule it out.)
Things that you are an expert on. (Looking things up on the web does not count as expert.)
What the government says.
(The media are intentionally excluded.)
evil grin
Nah, it was mostly meant as a semi-joke. I mean, I like the criterion, but my reasons for liking it are not exactly unbiased.
If I were to actually make a rationality test, I would probably look at the ingroups/outgroups of the people I make the test for, include a bunch of questions about facts where each there is a lot of ingroup/outgroup bias, and look at the answers to that.
Except that we live in the current world, not the counterfactual world, and in the current world the helpless view tells you not to believe conspiracy theories.
I dunno.
For what purpose are you separating the people into elite and masses? If it’s just a question of who to share dangerous knowledge to, there’s the obvious possibility of just letting whoever wants to share said dangerous knowledge decide.
I don’t know, because I have a really high IQ, so I don’t usually meet people with noticeably higher IQ. Do you have any examples of ultra-high-IQ people who write about controversial stuff?
Hold on. I thought the helpless view was for the “dumb masses”. They are certainly not able to figure out what the “international mainstream consensus” is. Hell, even I have no idea what it is (or even what it means).
A simple example: Western democracy. What’s the “international mainstream consensus”? Assuming it exists, I would guess it says that the Western-style democracy needs a strong guiding hand lest it devolves into degeneracy and amoral chaos. And hey, if you ask the experts in your outgroup (!) they probably wouldn’t be great fans of the Western democracies, that’s why they are in the outgroup to start with.
I have a feeling you want the helpless view to cherry-pick the “right” advice from the confusing mess of the “international consensus” and various experts and government recommendations. I don’t see how this can work well.
Heh. You know the definitions of a cult and a religion? A cult is a small unsuccessful religion. A religion is a large successful cult.
In exactly the same way what gets labeled a “conspiracy theory” is already a rejected view. If the mainstream believes in a conspiracy theory, it’s not called a “conspiracy theory”, it’s called a deep and insightful analysis. If you were to live in a culture where Holocaust denial was mainstream, it wouldn’t be called a conspiracy theory, it would be called “what all right-minded people believe”.
For the purpose of promoting/recommending either the independent view or the helpless view.
By the way, you asked for a helpless-view deconversion. TomSka just posted one, so...
The “dumb masses” here are not defined as being low-IQ, but just low-rationality. Low-IQ people would probably be better served just doing what people around them are doing (or maybe not; I’m not an expert in low-IQ people).
Well, one of the first conclusions to draw with helpless view is “politics is too complicated to figure out”. I’m not sure I care that much about figuring out if democracy is good according to helpless view. The UN seems to like democracy, and I would count that as helpless-view evidence in favor of it.
I would guess that there is an ambiguously pro-democratic response. 48% of the world lives in democracies, and the places that aren’t democratic probably don’t agree as much on how to be un-democratic as the democratic places agree on how to be democratic.
Whoever does the promoting/recommending seems like a natural candidate, then.