What to do if you spot a harmful ideology is a political question, and in some cases the answer might be pretty orthogonal to rationality. (although you might mean the more specific subquestion of “how to stop harmful ideologies while maintaining/raising the sanity waterline.” i.e. many people fight harmful ideologies with counter ideologies).
Right, politics as usual seems to imply a sequence of ideologies replacing each other, and it might just be a random walk as far as how beneficial/harmful the ideologies are. My question is how to do better than that.
It seems like you have more specific questions in mind (would be curious what your motivating examples are).
My original motivating examples came from contemporary US politics, so it’s probably better not to bring them up here, but I’m now also worried about the implications for the “long reflection” / “great deliberation”.
first try to make the environment conducive to argument
By doing what? I mean it seems possible to build environments conducive to argument for a relatively small group of people, like LW, but I don’t know what can be done to push a whole society in that direction, so that’s part of my question.
The way I’d have carved up your question space is less like “how to stop/fight ideologies” and more like “what to do about the general fact of some sets of beliefs becoming sticky over time?”
I think I’m still more inclined to use the first framing, because if we make beliefs less sticky, it might just speed up the cycles of ideologies replacing each other, and it seems like the bigger problem is “beliefs as rallying flags” (i.e., beliefs can selected for because they are good rallying flags instead of for epistemic reasons).
Right, politics as usual seems to imply a sequence of ideologies replacing each other, and it might just be a random walk as far as how beneficial/harmful the ideologies are. My question is how to do better than that.
My original motivating examples came from contemporary US politics, so it’s probably better not to bring them up here, but I’m now also worried about the implications for the “long reflection” / “great deliberation”.
By doing what? I mean it seems possible to build environments conducive to argument for a relatively small group of people, like LW, but I don’t know what can be done to push a whole society in that direction, so that’s part of my question.
I think I’m still more inclined to use the first framing, because if we make beliefs less sticky, it might just speed up the cycles of ideologies replacing each other, and it seems like the bigger problem is “beliefs as rallying flags” (i.e., beliefs can selected for because they are good rallying flags instead of for epistemic reasons).