Re. “the reason most people don’t agree with us is that they’re just not smart enough”...totally aside from the question of whether this sort of sentiment is liable to be offputting to a lot of people, I’ve very often wondered whether anyone who holds such a sentiment is at all worried about the consequences of an “Emperor’s New Clothes” effect.
What I mean by “Emperor’s New Clothes” effect is that, regardless of what a person’s actual views are on a given subject (or set of subjects), there’s really nothing stopping said person from just copying the favored vocabulary, language patterns, stated opinions, etc., of those they see as the cleverest/most prominent/most respectable members of a community they want to join and be accepted in.
E.g., in self-described “rationalist” communities, I’ve noted that lots of people involved (a) value intelligence (however they define it) highly, and (b) appear to enjoy being acknowledged as clever themselves. The easiest way to do this, of course, is to parrot others that the community of interest clearly thinks are the Smartest of the Smart. And in some situations I suspect the “parroting” can occur involuntarily, just as a result of reading a lot of the writing of someone you like, admire, or respect intellectually, even if you may not have any real, deep understanding of what you are saying.
So my question is...does anyone even care about this possibility? Or are “communities” largely in the business of collecting members and advocates who can talk the talk, regardless of what their brains are actually doing behind the scenes?
For my own part: if hordes of people who aren’t really rationalists start adopting, for purely signaling reasons, the trappings of epistemic hygiene… if they start providing arguments in defense of their positions and admitting when those arguments are shown to be wrong, for example, not because of a genuine desire for the truth but merely because of a desire to be seen that way… if they start reliably articulating their biases and identifying the operation of biases in others, merely because that’s the social norm… if they start tagging their assertions with confidence indicators and using those indicators consistently without actually having a deep-rooted commitment to avoiding implicitly overstating or understating their confidence… and so on and so forth…
...well, actually, I’d pretty much call that an unadulterated win. Sign me up for that future, please.
OTOH, if hordes of people just start talking about how smart and rational they are and how that makes them better than ordinary people, well, that’s not worth much to me.
Re. “the reason most people don’t agree with us is that they’re just not smart enough”...totally aside from the question of whether this sort of sentiment is liable to be offputting to a lot of people, I’ve very often wondered whether anyone who holds such a sentiment is at all worried about the consequences of an “Emperor’s New Clothes” effect.
What I mean by “Emperor’s New Clothes” effect is that, regardless of what a person’s actual views are on a given subject (or set of subjects), there’s really nothing stopping said person from just copying the favored vocabulary, language patterns, stated opinions, etc., of those they see as the cleverest/most prominent/most respectable members of a community they want to join and be accepted in.
E.g., in self-described “rationalist” communities, I’ve noted that lots of people involved (a) value intelligence (however they define it) highly, and (b) appear to enjoy being acknowledged as clever themselves. The easiest way to do this, of course, is to parrot others that the community of interest clearly thinks are the Smartest of the Smart. And in some situations I suspect the “parroting” can occur involuntarily, just as a result of reading a lot of the writing of someone you like, admire, or respect intellectually, even if you may not have any real, deep understanding of what you are saying.
So my question is...does anyone even care about this possibility? Or are “communities” largely in the business of collecting members and advocates who can talk the talk, regardless of what their brains are actually doing behind the scenes?
I suspect answers vary.
For my own part: if hordes of people who aren’t really rationalists start adopting, for purely signaling reasons, the trappings of epistemic hygiene… if they start providing arguments in defense of their positions and admitting when those arguments are shown to be wrong, for example, not because of a genuine desire for the truth but merely because of a desire to be seen that way… if they start reliably articulating their biases and identifying the operation of biases in others, merely because that’s the social norm… if they start tagging their assertions with confidence indicators and using those indicators consistently without actually having a deep-rooted commitment to avoiding implicitly overstating or understating their confidence… and so on and so forth…
...well, actually, I’d pretty much call that an unadulterated win. Sign me up for that future, please.
OTOH, if hordes of people just start talking about how smart and rational they are and how that makes them better than ordinary people, well, that’s not worth much to me.