I noticed a strategy that many people seem to use; for lack of a better name, I will call it “updating the applause lights”. This is how it works:
You have something that you like and it is part of your identity. Let’s say that you are a Green. You are proud that Greens are everything good, noble, and true; unlike those stupid evil Blues.
Gradually you discover that the sky is blue. First you deny it, but at some moment you can’t resist the overwhelming evidence. But at that moment of history, there are many Green beliefs, and the belief that the sky is green is only one of them, although historically the central one. So you downplay it and say: “All Green beliefs are true, but some of them are meant metaphorically, not literally, such as the belief that the sky is green. This means that we are right, and the Blues are wrong; just as we always said.”
Someone asks: “But didn’t Greens say the sky is green? Because that seems false to me.” And you say: “No, that’s a strawman! You obviously don’t understand Greens, you are full of prejudice. You should be ashamed of yourself.” The someone gives an example of a Green that literally believed the sky is green. You say: “Okay, but this person is not a real Green. It’s a very extreme person.” Or if you can’t deny it, you say: “Yes, even withing the Green movement, some people may be confused and misunderstand our beliefs, also our beliefs have evolved during time, but trust me that being Green is not about believing that the sky is literally green.” And in some sense, you are right. (And the Blues are wrong. As it has always been.)
To be specific, I have several examples in my mind; religion is just one of them; probably any political or philosophical opinion that had to be updated significantly and needs to deny its original version.
My strategy is to avoid conversations of this form entirely by default. Most Greens do not need to be shown that the belief system they claim to have is flawed, and neither do most Blues. Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. Are they good people? Are they important enough that bad epistemology on their part directly has large negative effects on the world? If the answers to these questions are “yes” and “no” respectively, then who cares what belief system they claim to have?
If the answers to these questions are “yes” and “no” respectively, then who cares what belief system they claim to have?
I’m really going to try and remind myself of this more often. Most of the time the answers are “yes” and “no” and points are rarely won for pointing out bad epistemology.
Yes, like moving-the-goalposts, this is an annoying and dishonest rhetorical move.
Yes, even withing the Green movement, some people may be confused and misunderstand our beliefs, also our beliefs have evolved during time, but trust me that being Green is not about believing that the sky is literally green.
Suppose some Green says:
Yes, intellectual precursors to the current Green movement stated that the sky was literally Green. And they were less wrong, on the whole, then people who believed that the sky was blue. But the modern intellectual Green rejects that wave of Green-ish thought, and in part identifies the mistake as that wave of Greens being blue-ish in a way. In short, the Green movement of a previous generation made a mistake that the current wave of Greens rejects. Current Greens think we are less wrong than the previous wave of Greens.
Problematic, or reasonable non-mindkiller statement (attacking one’s potential allies edition)?
How much of that intuition is driven by the belief that Bluism is correct. If we change the labels to Purple (some Blue) and Orange (no Blue), does the intuition change?
If, after realizing an old mistake, you find a way to say “but I was at least sort of right, under my new set of beliefs,” then you are selecting your beliefs badly. Don’t identify as a person who iwas right, or as one who is right; identify as a person who will be right. Discovering a mistake has to be a victory, not a setback. Until you get to this point, there is no point in trying to engage in normal rational debate; instead, engage them on their own grounds until they reach that basic level of rationality.
For people having an otherwise rational debate, they need to at this point drop the Green and Blue labels (any rationalist should be happy to do so, since they’re just a shorthand for the full belief system) and start specifying their actual beliefs. The fact that one identifies as a Green or a Blue is a red flag of glaring irrationality, confirmed if they refuse to drop the label to talk about individual beliefs, in which case do the above. Sticking with the labels is a way to make your beliefs feel stronger, via something like a halo effect where every good thing about Green or Greens gets attributed to every one of your beliefs.
There’s a further complicating factor: often when this happens, both modern Blues and Greens won’t exactly correspond to historical Blues and Greens even though both are using the same terms. Worse, when the entire region of acceptable social policy has changed, sometimes an extreme Green or Blue today might be what was seen as someone of the other type decades ago.
Yes, the first wave of a movement may have many divergent descendents, which end up on different sides of a current political dispute. And the direct-est descendent might be on the opposite side of the political divide from what we would predict the first-wave proponents would adopt. But for that to happen, there needs to be significant passage of time.
By contrast, if the third wave of a movement cannot point to an immediately prior second wave that actually believed the position criticized (and which the third wave has already rejected), then Villiam_Bur’s moving-the-goalposts criticism has serious bite, to the point that an outsider probably should not accept the third wave as genuinely interested in rational discussion or true beliefs.
And here we were having a very nice discussion without pointing out any potentially controversial/mindkilling examples. Using the phrasing of second and third wave doesn’t make it less subtle or less potentially mindkilling.
In the specific case which you are not so obliquely referencing, there’s a pretty strong argument that much of thirdwave feminism has strands from first and second wave, while also agreeing on the most basic premises.
It is also worth noting in this context, that movements (wherever they are politically) aren’t in general after rational discussion or true beliefs but at accomplishing specific goal sets. You will in any diverse movement find some strains that are more or less interested in rational discussion, but criticizing a movement for its failure to embody rationality is not by itself a very useful criticism.
It is the big obvious current example where the ideological battle is between “second wave” and “third wave” and the first wave is barely mentioned. I encounter it in relation to the UK social justice Twittersphere, which is tangential to the more Kankri Vantas stretches of Tumblr. (Or, more accurately, the Porrim Maryam stretches.)
Edit: Can anyone think of another field described as having numbered waves where the battle was between second and third?
I’m pretty sure that’s what TimS was talking about given his use of the phrases “second wave” and “third wave”. It is especially clear because if one was going to be talking about a generic example and using the term wave, one would in the same context have likely discussed the first wave v. the second wave. The off-by-one only makes sense in that specific historical context.
Oppositely, the second and third waves immediately screamed ‘feminism’ to me, but I couldn’t assemble the rest of the analogy. The third wave has plenty of legitimate differences and similarities with both the first and second waves. I’m still not sure what TimS was getting at.
Ideologies and theo-philosophical schools are rarely if ever defined precisely enough to exclude true facts about the world or justifications for genuinely good ideas. They’re more collections of rules of thumb, methods, technical terms and logics. If mathematically formulated scientific theories are under-determined then ideologies are so, but ten-fold. The problem of inferential distance when it comes to worldviews isn’t really about shear decibels of information that need to be communicated. It’s that the interlocutors are playing different games and speaking different languages. And I suspect most deconversions are more like picking up a new language and forgetting your old one, than they are the product of repeated updates based on the predictive failures of the old ideology/religion. It’s a pseudo-rational process which is why it doesn’t reliably occur in just one direction.
Back to your point: since people have egos, memetic complexes usually have self-perpetuating features and applause lights don’t constrain future experience it makes sense that if anything is held constant it will be Greens being really sure they are right. That’s non-optimal and definitely irksome to people like all of us. It’s inefficient because we’re spending a resources on constructing post-hoc justifications for how the real Green answer is the true one and the corrections to our model may not be more curve-fitting. That is, what ever beliefs and assumptions that led the Greens to be wrong in the first place may still be in place. Plus, it is kind of creepy in a “we’ve always been at war with Eurasia” kind of way.
But on the other hand it is sort of okay, right? At least they’re updating! You can think of academic departments of philosophy, religion, law and humanities as just the cost of doing business to mollify our egos as we change our minds. And changing people’s minds this way is almost certainly much easier than making them convert to the doctrine of the hated enemy and engage in extend self-flagellation. It’s a line of retreat.
Making the modern Green cop to the literal beliefs of her intellectual ancestor seems like an exercise in scoring points, not genuine persuasion. Who needs credit? The curve fitting is still an issue but you might be better off trying to make room for better beliefs and assumptions within the context of Green thought. Especially since it isn’t obvious the opposing movement did anything other than get lucky.
A few out-there scholars think Descartes was an atheist. He almost certainly wasn’t. But there is a reason they suspect him even though much of the Meditations is an extended argument for the existence of God. The thing is that the practical upshot of his non-empirical argument for God is that we should completely abandon the Christian-Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition and use our senses to discover what the world is really like. “The sky is certainly Green and this proves that the ideal method for discovering the color of things is visual examination and use of a spectrometer.”
Ideological multi-lingualism is a crucial skill; I’d like to hear ideas for cultivating it.
Let’s avoid object level examples until we resolve how to distinguish this dishonest rhetorical move from honest updates on the low validity of prior arguments now abandoned. Otherwise, we get bogged down in mindkiller without any general insight into how to be more rational.
Politics. Social issues. You see a lot of it when circumstances change and a political party or activist organisation has to then reconcile the conflict between consequentialism and deontology, and somehow satisfy both sets of followers.
I discussed this with coffeespoons yesterday; the trouble is that political leaders often speak much less ambiguously than religious ones, so there’s a lot less room to say “Well, what Marx really meant was...”
I dunno. I am reluctant to name present-day political examples on LW, but you doubtless feel a slight urge to throw your computing device against the wall when you see some current eloquent bit of black-has-always-been-white spin from our esteemed leaders here in the UK.
I found myself at our local church a couple of Sundays ago, where the sermon was a really very good polemic conclusively demonstrating that Galatians 2 rules racism as unChristian. I thought it was marvellously reasoned and really quite robust, except for the problem of large chunks of observed Christian history. (The resolution: you can, of course, prove anything and its opposite from a compilation that size.)
I think there’s a related rhetorical trick that’s something like redefining the applause lights, or brand extension.
Greens believe the sky is green. I want them to believe the entire world is green. I will use their commitment to sky greeness and just persuade them it means something slightly different.
Clouds are kind of like the sky so should really be considered green if you’re being fair about things. And rain is in the sky, who are you to say it’s not green? Rain falls on the ground, which is therefore also part of the sky.
After a while, you can persuade people that, since the sky is green, obviously rocks are green.
This explanation isn’t great but more practical examples are somewhat mindkilling.
Some selection effects: I wonder if the perceived solidarity of most identity-heavy groups is due to vague language that easily facilitates mind projection within the group. Surviving communities will have either reduced their exposure to fracturing forces, or drifted towards more underspecified beliefs as a result of such exposure. I think religious strains fall very nicely into these two groups, but I’m not so sure about political groups.
Being specific is a good rationalist tool and a bad strategy for social relations. The more specific one is, the fewer people agree with them. The best social strategy is to have a few fuzzy applause lights and gather agreement about them.
I’ll try to find a less sensitive political example. Some people near me are fans of “direct democracy”; they propose it as a cure for all the political problems. I try being more specific and ask whether they imagine that people in the whole country will vote together, or that each region will vote separately on their local policies… but they refuse to discuss this, because they see that it would split their nicely agreeing group into disagreeing subgroups. But for me this distinction seems very important in predicting the consequences of such system.
If you talk with a rationalist about making decisions via intuition, he has to grant you that their are domains of problems where intuition is very useful. Rationalism is about winning, so of course a good rationalist will use intuition for those domains.
If you look at medicine, In the last decade Cochrane has finally found that chiropractors can successfully treat back pain, even through their mental model of the human body conflicts with the model of mainstream medicine.
Most big mental systems get updated over time. As long as you do update towards new evidence, you don’t have to trash your old beliefs completely.
I noticed a strategy that many people seem to use; for lack of a better name, I will call it “updating the applause lights”. This is how it works:
You have something that you like and it is part of your identity. Let’s say that you are a Green. You are proud that Greens are everything good, noble, and true; unlike those stupid evil Blues.
Gradually you discover that the sky is blue. First you deny it, but at some moment you can’t resist the overwhelming evidence. But at that moment of history, there are many Green beliefs, and the belief that the sky is green is only one of them, although historically the central one. So you downplay it and say: “All Green beliefs are true, but some of them are meant metaphorically, not literally, such as the belief that the sky is green. This means that we are right, and the Blues are wrong; just as we always said.”
Someone asks: “But didn’t Greens say the sky is green? Because that seems false to me.” And you say: “No, that’s a strawman! You obviously don’t understand Greens, you are full of prejudice. You should be ashamed of yourself.” The someone gives an example of a Green that literally believed the sky is green. You say: “Okay, but this person is not a real Green. It’s a very extreme person.” Or if you can’t deny it, you say: “Yes, even withing the Green movement, some people may be confused and misunderstand our beliefs, also our beliefs have evolved during time, but trust me that being Green is not about believing that the sky is literally green.” And in some sense, you are right. (And the Blues are wrong. As it has always been.)
To be specific, I have several examples in my mind; religion is just one of them; probably any political or philosophical opinion that had to be updated significantly and needs to deny its original version.
My strategy is to avoid conversations of this form entirely by default. Most Greens do not need to be shown that the belief system they claim to have is flawed, and neither do most Blues. Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. Are they good people? Are they important enough that bad epistemology on their part directly has large negative effects on the world? If the answers to these questions are “yes” and “no” respectively, then who cares what belief system they claim to have?
I’m really going to try and remind myself of this more often. Most of the time the answers are “yes” and “no” and points are rarely won for pointing out bad epistemology.
Yes, like moving-the-goalposts, this is an annoying and dishonest rhetorical move.
Suppose some Green says:
Yes, intellectual precursors to the current Green movement stated that the sky was literally Green. And they were less wrong, on the whole, then people who believed that the sky was blue. But the modern intellectual Green rejects that wave of Green-ish thought, and in part identifies the mistake as that wave of Greens being blue-ish in a way. In short, the Green movement of a previous generation made a mistake that the current wave of Greens rejects. Current Greens think we are less wrong than the previous wave of Greens.
Problematic, or reasonable non-mindkiller statement (attacking one’s potential allies edition)?
How much of that intuition is driven by the belief that Bluism is correct. If we change the labels to Purple (some Blue) and Orange (no Blue), does the intuition change?
If, after realizing an old mistake, you find a way to say “but I was at least sort of right, under my new set of beliefs,” then you are selecting your beliefs badly. Don’t identify as a person who iwas right, or as one who is right; identify as a person who will be right. Discovering a mistake has to be a victory, not a setback. Until you get to this point, there is no point in trying to engage in normal rational debate; instead, engage them on their own grounds until they reach that basic level of rationality.
For people having an otherwise rational debate, they need to at this point drop the Green and Blue labels (any rationalist should be happy to do so, since they’re just a shorthand for the full belief system) and start specifying their actual beliefs. The fact that one identifies as a Green or a Blue is a red flag of glaring irrationality, confirmed if they refuse to drop the label to talk about individual beliefs, in which case do the above. Sticking with the labels is a way to make your beliefs feel stronger, via something like a halo effect where every good thing about Green or Greens gets attributed to every one of your beliefs.
There’s a further complicating factor: often when this happens, both modern Blues and Greens won’t exactly correspond to historical Blues and Greens even though both are using the same terms. Worse, when the entire region of acceptable social policy has changed, sometimes an extreme Green or Blue today might be what was seen as someone of the other type decades ago.
Yes, the first wave of a movement may have many divergent descendents, which end up on different sides of a current political dispute. And the direct-est descendent might be on the opposite side of the political divide from what we would predict the first-wave proponents would adopt. But for that to happen, there needs to be significant passage of time.
By contrast, if the third wave of a movement cannot point to an immediately prior second wave that actually believed the position criticized (and which the third wave has already rejected), then Villiam_Bur’s moving-the-goalposts criticism has serious bite, to the point that an outsider probably should not accept the third wave as genuinely interested in rational discussion or true beliefs.
And here we were having a very nice discussion without pointing out any potentially controversial/mindkilling examples. Using the phrasing of second and third wave doesn’t make it less subtle or less potentially mindkilling.
In the specific case which you are not so obliquely referencing, there’s a pretty strong argument that much of thirdwave feminism has strands from first and second wave, while also agreeing on the most basic premises.
It is also worth noting in this context, that movements (wherever they are politically) aren’t in general after rational discussion or true beliefs but at accomplishing specific goal sets. You will in any diverse movement find some strains that are more or less interested in rational discussion, but criticizing a movement for its failure to embody rationality is not by itself a very useful criticism.
Um, I had not linked the parent of your comment to any specific movement until you pointed out the possible existence of such a link …
It is the big obvious current example where the ideological battle is between “second wave” and “third wave” and the first wave is barely mentioned. I encounter it in relation to the UK social justice Twittersphere, which is tangential to the more Kankri Vantas stretches of Tumblr. (Or, more accurately, the Porrim Maryam stretches.)
Edit: Can anyone think of another field described as having numbered waves where the battle was between second and third?
I’m pretty sure that’s what TimS was talking about given his use of the phrases “second wave” and “third wave”. It is especially clear because if one was going to be talking about a generic example and using the term wave, one would in the same context have likely discussed the first wave v. the second wave. The off-by-one only makes sense in that specific historical context.
Oppositely, the second and third waves immediately screamed ‘feminism’ to me, but I couldn’t assemble the rest of the analogy. The third wave has plenty of legitimate differences and similarities with both the first and second waves. I’m still not sure what TimS was getting at.
This process can be a stage in the process of leaving the Greens—I’ve heard stories of deconversion which sounded a lot like that.
Karl Popper came up with the Falsifiability Principle as a direct response to watching Marxists, Freudians, and others do exactly this.
Ideologies and theo-philosophical schools are rarely if ever defined precisely enough to exclude true facts about the world or justifications for genuinely good ideas. They’re more collections of rules of thumb, methods, technical terms and logics. If mathematically formulated scientific theories are under-determined then ideologies are so, but ten-fold. The problem of inferential distance when it comes to worldviews isn’t really about shear decibels of information that need to be communicated. It’s that the interlocutors are playing different games and speaking different languages. And I suspect most deconversions are more like picking up a new language and forgetting your old one, than they are the product of repeated updates based on the predictive failures of the old ideology/religion. It’s a pseudo-rational process which is why it doesn’t reliably occur in just one direction.
Back to your point: since people have egos, memetic complexes usually have self-perpetuating features and applause lights don’t constrain future experience it makes sense that if anything is held constant it will be Greens being really sure they are right. That’s non-optimal and definitely irksome to people like all of us. It’s inefficient because we’re spending a resources on constructing post-hoc justifications for how the real Green answer is the true one and the corrections to our model may not be more curve-fitting. That is, what ever beliefs and assumptions that led the Greens to be wrong in the first place may still be in place. Plus, it is kind of creepy in a “we’ve always been at war with Eurasia” kind of way.
But on the other hand it is sort of okay, right? At least they’re updating! You can think of academic departments of philosophy, religion, law and humanities as just the cost of doing business to mollify our egos as we change our minds. And changing people’s minds this way is almost certainly much easier than making them convert to the doctrine of the hated enemy and engage in extend self-flagellation. It’s a line of retreat.
Making the modern Green cop to the literal beliefs of her intellectual ancestor seems like an exercise in scoring points, not genuine persuasion. Who needs credit? The curve fitting is still an issue but you might be better off trying to make room for better beliefs and assumptions within the context of Green thought. Especially since it isn’t obvious the opposing movement did anything other than get lucky.
A few out-there scholars think Descartes was an atheist. He almost certainly wasn’t. But there is a reason they suspect him even though much of the Meditations is an extended argument for the existence of God. The thing is that the practical upshot of his non-empirical argument for God is that we should completely abandon the Christian-Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition and use our senses to discover what the world is really like. “The sky is certainly Green and this proves that the ideal method for discovering the color of things is visual examination and use of a spectrometer.”
Ideological multi-lingualism is a crucial skill; I’d like to hear ideas for cultivating it.
This sounds very much like religion—I’d be interested in hearing about a solid non-religious example.
Let’s avoid object level examples until we resolve how to distinguish this dishonest rhetorical move from honest updates on the low validity of prior arguments now abandoned. Otherwise, we get bogged down in mindkiller without any general insight into how to be more rational.
But aren’t we all agreed the specific examples are super-helpful for understanding a general phenomenon?
Politics. Social issues. You see a lot of it when circumstances change and a political party or activist organisation has to then reconcile the conflict between consequentialism and deontology, and somehow satisfy both sets of followers.
I discussed this with coffeespoons yesterday; the trouble is that political leaders often speak much less ambiguously than religious ones, so there’s a lot less room to say “Well, what Marx really meant was...”
I dunno. I am reluctant to name present-day political examples on LW, but you doubtless feel a slight urge to throw your computing device against the wall when you see some current eloquent bit of black-has-always-been-white spin from our esteemed leaders here in the UK.
I found myself at our local church a couple of Sundays ago, where the sermon was a really very good polemic conclusively demonstrating that Galatians 2 rules racism as unChristian. I thought it was marvellously reasoned and really quite robust, except for the problem of large chunks of observed Christian history. (The resolution: you can, of course, prove anything and its opposite from a compilation that size.)
I think there’s a related rhetorical trick that’s something like redefining the applause lights, or brand extension.
Greens believe the sky is green. I want them to believe the entire world is green. I will use their commitment to sky greeness and just persuade them it means something slightly different.
Clouds are kind of like the sky so should really be considered green if you’re being fair about things. And rain is in the sky, who are you to say it’s not green? Rain falls on the ground, which is therefore also part of the sky.
After a while, you can persuade people that, since the sky is green, obviously rocks are green.
This explanation isn’t great but more practical examples are somewhat mindkilling.
Some selection effects: I wonder if the perceived solidarity of most identity-heavy groups is due to vague language that easily facilitates mind projection within the group. Surviving communities will have either reduced their exposure to fracturing forces, or drifted towards more underspecified beliefs as a result of such exposure. I think religious strains fall very nicely into these two groups, but I’m not so sure about political groups.
Being specific is a good rationalist tool and a bad strategy for social relations. The more specific one is, the fewer people agree with them. The best social strategy is to have a few fuzzy applause lights and gather agreement about them.
I’ll try to find a less sensitive political example. Some people near me are fans of “direct democracy”; they propose it as a cure for all the political problems. I try being more specific and ask whether they imagine that people in the whole country will vote together, or that each region will vote separately on their local policies… but they refuse to discuss this, because they see that it would split their nicely agreeing group into disagreeing subgroups. But for me this distinction seems very important in predicting the consequences of such system.
If you talk with a rationalist about making decisions via intuition, he has to grant you that their are domains of problems where intuition is very useful. Rationalism is about winning, so of course a good rationalist will use intuition for those domains.
If you look at medicine, In the last decade Cochrane has finally found that chiropractors can successfully treat back pain, even through their mental model of the human body conflicts with the model of mainstream medicine.
Most big mental systems get updated over time. As long as you do update towards new evidence, you don’t have to trash your old beliefs completely.