“the non-clique clique” is vulnerable to outgroup-homogeneity and related biases. It’s all too easy to think that they are a clique with simplistic views, wereas we (our own tribe) are a diverse group with a variety of opinions and well-argued viewpoints.
Which is exactly my point. Everyone thinks this, and most of them are wrong. What I’m hoping for is some data point that suggests, from the outside view, that our approach of focusing on the underlying heuristics and biases is more effective at preventing actual affective death spirals than Rand’s axiomatization or SJ’s focus on symptoms. Once again, knowledge of bias isn’t well correlated with reduction of bias, and there’s very little consistency here in actual epistemic hygiene practice. The minicamps might have data, but I’m not involved in those.
Objectivism was not in fact the first known attempt at “rigorous axiomatized” philosophy—so the outside view should’ve been fairly clear [...] Besides, it’s not clear what you (or perhaps Rand herself) mean by “ideology”: informally, rigorous axiomatization seems to be a recipe for absolute-sounding, black-and-white statements.
Rand was looking for absolute-sounding statements; indeed, she was looking for absolute statements, things you could treat as theorems and therefore wouldn’t need to worry about bias in. It’s not too far wrong to describe Objectivism as an attempt to axiomatize political philosophy (and to a lesser extent other branches of philosophy, though her attempts at these were much weaker) along mathematical lines. This had been tried before (I believe Leibniz took a whack at it), but not successfully, and not famously.
Which is exactly my point. Everyone thinks this, and most of them are wrong. What I’m hoping for is some data point that suggests, from the outside view, that our approach of focusing on the underlying heuristics and biases is more effective at preventing actual affective death spirals than Rand’s axiomatization or SJ’s focus on symptoms. Once again, knowledge of bias isn’t well correlated with reduction of bias, and there’s very little consistency here in actual epistemic hygiene practice. The minicamps might have data, but I’m not involved in those.
Rand was looking for absolute-sounding statements; indeed, she was looking for absolute statements, things you could treat as theorems and therefore wouldn’t need to worry about bias in. It’s not too far wrong to describe Objectivism as an attempt to axiomatize political philosophy (and to a lesser extent other branches of philosophy, though her attempts at these were much weaker) along mathematical lines. This had been tried before (I believe Leibniz took a whack at it), but not successfully, and not famously.