Hot Take #44: Preaching to the choir is ‘good’ actually.
Almost anything that has a large counterfactual impact is achieved by people thinking and acting different from accepted ways of thinking and doing.
With the exception of political entrepeneurs jumping into a power vacuum, or scientific achievements by exceptional individuals most counterfactual impactful is done made by movements of fanatics.
The greatest danger to any movement is dissipation. Conversely, the greatest resource of any movement is the fanaticism of its members.
Most persuasion is non-rational, based on tribal allegiances and social consensus.
It follows that any group, movement, company, cult, etc that has the aspiration to have large counterfactual impact (for good or ill) must hence direct most of preaching, most of its education and information processing inward.
The Catholic Church understood this. The Pontifex Maximus has reigned now for two thousand years.
Stability over potential improvement, tradition over change, mutation over identical offspring, settling in a local maximum over shaking things up, and specialization vs generalization.
It seems like a hyperparameter. A bit like the learning rate in AI perhaps? Echo chambers are a common consequence, so I think the optimal ratio of preaching to the choir is something like 0.8-0.9 rather than 1. In fact, I personally prefer the /allPosts suburl over the LW frontpage because the first few votes result in a feedback loop of engagement and upvotes (forming a temporary consensus on which new posts are better, in a way which seems unfairly weighted towards the first few votes). If the posts chosen for the frontpage use the ratio of upvotes and downvotes rather than the absolute amount, then I don’t thing this bias will occur (conformity might still create a weak feedback loop though).
Hot Take #44: Preaching to the choir is ‘good’ actually.
Almost anything that has a large counterfactual impact is achieved by people thinking and acting different from accepted ways of thinking and doing.
With the exception of political entrepeneurs jumping into a power vacuum, or scientific achievements by exceptional individuals most counterfactual impactful is done made by movements of fanatics.
The greatest danger to any movement is dissipation. Conversely, the greatest resource of any movement is the fanaticism of its members.
Most persuasion is non-rational, based on tribal allegiances and social consensus.
It follows that any group, movement, company, cult, etc that has the aspiration to have large counterfactual impact (for good or ill) must hence direct most of preaching, most of its education and information processing inward.
The Catholic Church understood this. The Pontifex Maximus has reigned now for two thousand years.
This seems like an argument in favor of:
Stability over potential improvement, tradition over change, mutation over identical offspring, settling in a local maximum over shaking things up, and specialization vs generalization.
It seems like a hyperparameter. A bit like the learning rate in AI perhaps? Echo chambers are a common consequence, so I think the optimal ratio of preaching to the choir is something like 0.8-0.9 rather than 1. In fact, I personally prefer the /allPosts suburl over the LW frontpage because the first few votes result in a feedback loop of engagement and upvotes (forming a temporary consensus on which new posts are better, in a way which seems unfairly weighted towards the first few votes). If the posts chosen for the frontpage use the ratio of upvotes and downvotes rather than the absolute amount, then I don’t thing this bias will occur (conformity might still create a weak feedback loop though).
I’m simplifying some of these dynamics though.