Walter Raleigh is also famous for leading an expedition to discover El Dorado. He didn’t find it, but he wrote a book saying that he definitely had, and that if people gave him funding for a second expedition he would bring back limitless quantities of gold. He got his funding, went on his second expedition, and of course found nothing. His lieutenant committed suicide out of shame, and his men decided the Spanish must be hoarding the gold and burnt down a Spanish town. On his return to England, Raleigh was tried for treason based on a combination of the attack on Spain (which England was at peace with at the time) and defrauding everyone about the El Dorado thing. He was executed in 1618.
For conflict theorists, the moral of this story is that accusing everyone else of being lying and corrupt can sometimes be a strategy con men use to deflect suspicion. For mistake theorists, the moral is that it’s really easy to talk yourself into a biased narrative where you are a lone angel in a sea full of corruption, and you should try being a little more charitable to other people and a little harsher on yourself.
I think the Vassarian–Taylorist conflict–mistake synthesis moral is that in order to perform its function, the English court system needs to be able to punish Raleigh for “fraud” on the basis of his actions relative what he knew or could have reasonably been expected to know, even while Raleigh is subjectively the hero of his own story and a sympathetic psychologist could eloquently and truthfully explain how easy it was for him to talk himself into a biased narrative.
Where mistake theorists treat politics as “science, engineering, or medicine” and conflict theorists treat politics as war, this view treats politics as evolutionary game theory: the unfolding over time of a population of many dumb, small agents executing strategies, forming coalitions, occasionally switching strategies to imitate those that are more successful in the local environment, &c. The synthesis view is mistake-theoretic insofar as the little agents are understood to be playing far from optimally and could do much better if they were smarter, but conflict-theoretic insofar as the games being played have large zero-sum components and you mostly can’t take the things the little agents say literally. The “mistakes” aren’t random and not easily fixable with more information (in contrast to how if I said 57 was prime and you said “But 3 × 19”, I would immediately say “Oops”), but rather arise from the strategies being executed: it’s not a coincidence that Raleigh talked himself into a narrative where he was lone angel who would discover limitless gold.
Agents select beliefs on the basis of either their being true (and therefore useful for navigating the world) or because they successfully deceive other agents into mis-navigating the world in a way that benefits the belief-holder. “Be more charitable to other people” isn’t necessarily great advice in general, because while sometimes other agents have useful true information to offer (Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guiana“includes some material of a factual nature”), it’s hard to distinguish from misinformation that was optimized to benefit the agents who propogate it (Discovery of Guiana also says you should invest in Raleigh’s second expedition).
Mistake theorists think conflict theorists are making a mistake; conflict theorists think mistake theorists are the enemy. Evolutionary game theorists think that conflict theorists are executing strategies adapted to an environment predominated by zero-sum games, and that mistake theorists are executing strategies adapted to an environment containing cooperative games (where the existence of a mechanism for externally enforcing agreements, like a court system, aligns incentives and thereby makes it easier to propogate true infromation).
I think you might be wrong about how fraud is legally defined. If the head of Pets.com says “You should invest in Pets.com, it’s going to make millions, everyone wants to order pet food online”, and then you invest in them, and then they go bankrupt, that person was probably biased and irresponsible, but nobody has committed fraud.
If Raleigh had simply said “Sponsor my expedition to El Dorado, which I believe has lots of gold”, that doesn’t sound like fraud either. But in fact he said:
For the rest, which myself have seen, I will promise these things that follow, which I know to be true. Those that are desirous to discover and to see many nations may be satisfied within this river, which bringeth forth so many arms and branches leading to several countries and provinces, above 2,000 miles east and west and 800 miles south and north, and of these the most either rich in gold or in other merchandises. The common soldier shall here fight for gold, and pay himself, instead of pence, with plates of half-a-foot broad, whereas he breaketh his bones in other wars for provant and penury. Those commanders and chieftains that shoot at honour and abundance shall find there more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with treasure, than either Cortes found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru. And the shining glory of this conquest will eclipse all those so far-extended beams of the Spanish nation.
There were no Indian cities, and essentially no gold, anywhere in Guyana.
I agree with you that lots of people are biased! I agree this can affect their judgment in a way somewhere between conflict theory and mistake theory! I agree you can end up believing the wrong stories, or focusing on the wrong details, because of your bias! I’m just not sure that’s how fraud works, legally, and I’m not sure it’s an accurate description of what Sir Walter Raleigh did.
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t trying to offer a legal opinion; I was just trying to convey worldview-material while riffing off your characterization of “defrauding everyone about the El Dorado thing.”
Sometimes it may take a thief to catch a thief. If it was written in 1592, Rayleigh was at his height then, and had much opportunity to see inside the institutions he attacks.
I’m reminded of a book review I wrote last week about famed psychologist Robert Rosenthal’s book on bias and error in psychology & the sciences.
Rosenthal writes lucidly about how experimenter biases can skew results or skew the analysis or cause publication bias (which he played a major role in raising awareness of & developing meta-analysis), gives many examples, and proposes novel & effective measures like result-blind peer review. A veritable former day Ioannidis, you might say. But in the same book, he shamelessly reports some of the worst psychological research ever done, like the ‘Pygmalion effect’, which he helped develop meta-analysis to defend (despite its nonexistence), and the book is a tissue of unreplicable absurd effects from start to finish, and Rosenthal has left a toxic legacy of urban legends and statistical gimmicks which are still being used to defend psi, among other things.
Something something the line goes through every human heart...
I’m confused by your confusion. The first paragraph establishes that Raleigh was at least as deceptive as the institutions he claimed to be criticizing. The second paragraph argues that if deceptive people can write famous poems about how they are the lone voice of truth in a deceptive world, we should be more careful about taking claims like that completely literally.
If you want more than that, you might have to clarify what part you don’t understand.
This account of Walter Raleigh’s life seems… misleading, at best (and in parts just plain inaccurate)—assuming, that is, that we can trust the Wikipedia page. There seems to be quite a bit of conflict (of interpretation, at least) between that page and this one about Raleigh’s book.
I don’t think we should draw any moral from this story, without first thoroughly verifying it from reliable sources. As it stands, we have several Wikipedia pages, which paint a murky and contradictory picture (and some of which are inconsistent with Scott’s summary).
What exactly is contradictory? I only skimmed the relevant pages, but they all seemed to give a pretty similar picture. I didn’t get a great sense of exactly what was in Raleigh’s book, but all of them (and whoever tried him for treason) seemed to agree it was somewhere between heavily exaggerated and outright false, and I get the same impression from the full title “The discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado)”
One thing I see: “Raleigh was arrested on 19 July 1603, charged with treason for his involvement in the Main Plot against Elizabeth’s successor, James I, and imprisoned in the Tower of London”
The Wikipedia article states that he was tried for treason at least two times, once for his involvement in the Main Plot, and once for the things he did on his El Dorado adventure. So I think that doesn’t contradict what Scott said.
Walter Raleigh is also famous for leading an expedition to discover El Dorado. He didn’t find it, but he wrote a book saying that he definitely had, and that if people gave him funding for a second expedition he would bring back limitless quantities of gold. He got his funding, went on his second expedition, and of course found nothing. His lieutenant committed suicide out of shame, and his men decided the Spanish must be hoarding the gold and burnt down a Spanish town. On his return to England, Raleigh was tried for treason based on a combination of the attack on Spain (which England was at peace with at the time) and defrauding everyone about the El Dorado thing. He was executed in 1618.
For conflict theorists, the moral of this story is that accusing everyone else of being lying and corrupt can sometimes be a strategy con men use to deflect suspicion. For mistake theorists, the moral is that it’s really easy to talk yourself into a biased narrative where you are a lone angel in a sea full of corruption, and you should try being a little more charitable to other people and a little harsher on yourself.
I think the Vassarian–Taylorist conflict–mistake synthesis moral is that in order to perform its function, the English court system needs to be able to punish Raleigh for “fraud” on the basis of his actions relative what he knew or could have reasonably been expected to know, even while Raleigh is subjectively the hero of his own story and a sympathetic psychologist could eloquently and truthfully explain how easy it was for him to talk himself into a biased narrative.
Where mistake theorists treat politics as “science, engineering, or medicine” and conflict theorists treat politics as war, this view treats politics as evolutionary game theory: the unfolding over time of a population of many dumb, small agents executing strategies, forming coalitions, occasionally switching strategies to imitate those that are more successful in the local environment, &c. The synthesis view is mistake-theoretic insofar as the little agents are understood to be playing far from optimally and could do much better if they were smarter, but conflict-theoretic insofar as the games being played have large zero-sum components and you mostly can’t take the things the little agents say literally. The “mistakes” aren’t random and not easily fixable with more information (in contrast to how if I said 57 was prime and you said “But 3 × 19”, I would immediately say “Oops”), but rather arise from the strategies being executed: it’s not a coincidence that Raleigh talked himself into a narrative where he was lone angel who would discover limitless gold.
Agents select beliefs on the basis of either their being true (and therefore useful for navigating the world) or because they successfully deceive other agents into mis-navigating the world in a way that benefits the belief-holder. “Be more charitable to other people” isn’t necessarily great advice in general, because while sometimes other agents have useful true information to offer (Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guiana “includes some material of a factual nature”), it’s hard to distinguish from misinformation that was optimized to benefit the agents who propogate it (Discovery of Guiana also says you should invest in Raleigh’s second expedition).
Mistake theorists think conflict theorists are making a mistake; conflict theorists think mistake theorists are the enemy. Evolutionary game theorists think that conflict theorists are executing strategies adapted to an environment predominated by zero-sum games, and that mistake theorists are executing strategies adapted to an environment containing cooperative games (where the existence of a mechanism for externally enforcing agreements, like a court system, aligns incentives and thereby makes it easier to propogate true infromation).
I think you might be wrong about how fraud is legally defined. If the head of Pets.com says “You should invest in Pets.com, it’s going to make millions, everyone wants to order pet food online”, and then you invest in them, and then they go bankrupt, that person was probably biased and irresponsible, but nobody has committed fraud.
If Raleigh had simply said “Sponsor my expedition to El Dorado, which I believe has lots of gold”, that doesn’t sound like fraud either. But in fact he said:
There were no Indian cities, and essentially no gold, anywhere in Guyana.
I agree with you that lots of people are biased! I agree this can affect their judgment in a way somewhere between conflict theory and mistake theory! I agree you can end up believing the wrong stories, or focusing on the wrong details, because of your bias! I’m just not sure that’s how fraud works, legally, and I’m not sure it’s an accurate description of what Sir Walter Raleigh did.
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t trying to offer a legal opinion; I was just trying to convey worldview-material while riffing off your characterization of “defrauding everyone about the El Dorado thing.”
Sometimes it may take a thief to catch a thief. If it was written in 1592, Rayleigh was at his height then, and had much opportunity to see inside the institutions he attacks.
I’m reminded of a book review I wrote last week about famed psychologist Robert Rosenthal’s book on bias and error in psychology & the sciences.
Rosenthal writes lucidly about how experimenter biases can skew results or skew the analysis or cause publication bias (which he played a major role in raising awareness of & developing meta-analysis), gives many examples, and proposes novel & effective measures like result-blind peer review. A veritable former day Ioannidis, you might say. But in the same book, he shamelessly reports some of the worst psychological research ever done, like the ‘Pygmalion effect’, which he helped develop meta-analysis to defend (despite its nonexistence), and the book is a tissue of unreplicable absurd effects from start to finish, and Rosenthal has left a toxic legacy of urban legends and statistical gimmicks which are still being used to defend psi, among other things.
Something something the line goes through every human heart...
I don’t understand how the second paragraph follows from the first at all.
I’m confused by your confusion. The first paragraph establishes that Raleigh was at least as deceptive as the institutions he claimed to be criticizing. The second paragraph argues that if deceptive people can write famous poems about how they are the lone voice of truth in a deceptive world, we should be more careful about taking claims like that completely literally.
If you want more than that, you might have to clarify what part you don’t understand.
This account of Walter Raleigh’s life seems… misleading, at best (and in parts just plain inaccurate)—assuming, that is, that we can trust the Wikipedia page. There seems to be quite a bit of conflict (of interpretation, at least) between that page and this one about Raleigh’s book.
I don’t think we should draw any moral from this story, without first thoroughly verifying it from reliable sources. As it stands, we have several Wikipedia pages, which paint a murky and contradictory picture (and some of which are inconsistent with Scott’s summary).
What exactly is contradictory? I only skimmed the relevant pages, but they all seemed to give a pretty similar picture. I didn’t get a great sense of exactly what was in Raleigh’s book, but all of them (and whoever tried him for treason) seemed to agree it was somewhere between heavily exaggerated and outright false, and I get the same impression from the full title “The discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado)”
One thing I see: “Raleigh was arrested on 19 July 1603, charged with treason for his involvement in the Main Plot against Elizabeth’s successor, James I, and imprisoned in the Tower of London”
The Wikipedia article states that he was tried for treason at least two times, once for his involvement in the Main Plot, and once for the things he did on his El Dorado adventure. So I think that doesn’t contradict what Scott said.