Are the elite universities so marginalized and powerless that they need help from a blog run by amateurs to spread the word about their output?
Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their “output”? I mean, you surely know about the trouble they are having trying to win the propaganda fight against creationism, and against global warming denial. And then there’s anti-vaccination and the moon landing conspiracy.
In fact the statement that I quoted seems to so obviously deserve the answer “yes, they are unable to spread the word” that I wonder whether I am missing something.
Perhaps you were thinking that elite universities only need to spread the word amongst, say, the smartest 10% of the country for it to matter. But even in that demographic, I think you will find that few people know about this stuff. Perhaps with the release of books such as Predictably Irrational things have improved. But still, such books seem somewhat inadequate since they don’t aim to cleanly teach rationality, rather they aim to give a few cute rationality-flavoured anecdotes. If someone reads Predictably Irrational I doubt that they would be able to perform a solid analysis of the Allais Paradox (because Predictably Irrational doesn’t teach decision theory in a formal way) and I doubt that their calibration would improve (because Predictably Irrational doesn’t make them play calibration games).
There are very, very few people employed at universities whose job description is “make the public understand science”. As far as I am aware there is literally no-one in the world whose job title is “make the public understand cognitive-biases-style rationality”
Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their “output”?
Mencius Moldbug has convincingly argued on his blog, that intellectual fashion among the ruling class follows intellectual fashion on Harvard by an offset of about one generation. A generation after that the judicial and journalist class exiles any opposition to such thought from public discourse and most educated people move significantly towards it. A generation after that through public schools and the by now decades long exposure to media issuing normative statements on the subject, such beliefs are marginalized even among the uneducated, making any populist opposition to society wide stated value or policy changes a futile gesture destined to live only one season.
It is indeed is a wonderful machine for generating political power through opinion in Western type societies. While I generally have no qualms about Harvard being an acceptable truth generation machine when it comes to say Physics, in areas where it has a conflict of interest, like say economics or sociology let alone political science or ethics it is not a reliable truth generating machine. It is funny how these fields get far more energetic promotion than say Physics or Chemistry.
I am fairly certain the reason creationism is still around as a political force in some US states is because creationism is not a serious threat to The Cathedral. However I do think modern style rationality is indeed only the honest interest of a small small part of academia, a far larger fraction of academia is busy engaged in producing anti-knowledge in the most blatant form of something studies departments and a more convoluted form of ugh field rationalizations found in everything from biology to philosophy.
Academia taken as a whole has no incentives to promote modern rationality, cargo cult rationality and worship of science so anti-knowledge factories can syphon status from say Computer Scientists or Mathematicians perhaps. But not actual rationality.
So yes LessWrong should spend effort on promoting that, however it should not abstain, from challenging and criticizing academia in places where it is systematically wrong.
As Moldbug has convincingly argued on his blog, intellectual fashion among the ruling class follows intellectual fashion on Harvard by an offset of about one generation. A generation after that the judicial and journalist class exiles any opposition to such thought from public discourse
then
creationism is still around
Contradiction much?
because creationism is not a serious threat to The Cathedral
If the “judicial and journalist class” only attacks popular irrational ideas which are “a serious threat to The Cathedral”, then what other irrationalities will get through? Maybe very few irrational ideas are a “serious threat to The Cathedral”, in which case you just admitted that academia cannot “proselytise it’s output”. What about antivax? Global warming denial? Theism? Anti-nuclear-power irrationality? Crazy, ill-thought-through and knee jerk anticapitalism of the OWS variety? So many popular irrational beliefs…
Maybe very few irrational ideas are a “serious threat to The Cathedral”, in which case you just admitted that academia cannot “proselytise it’s output”. What about antivax? Global warming denial? Theism? Anti-nuclear-power irrationality? Crazy, ill-thought-through and knee jerk anticapitalism of the OWS variety? So many popular irrational beliefs...
At the very least crazy ill-thought through knee jerk anticapitalism and anti-nuclear-power irrationality often are “the output of academia”. I mean you can take classes in them and everything. ;)
Sure one can cherry pick and say that only this and that part of academia is or isn’t trustworthy and deserves or dosen’t our promotion of its output, but hey that was my position remember?
What about antivax? Global warming denial? Theism?
Antivaxers irrationality is just garden variety health related craziness which is regrettable since it costs lives but springs up constantly in new forms. Its cost is actually currently pretty low compared to others.
Global warming or at least talking vaguely about “global warming denial” is considered somewhat mind-killing on LW. Also much as with MM I suggest you do a search and read up and participate in previous debates. My personal position is that it is happening yet spending additional marginal effort on solving it or getting people to solve it has negative net utility. Suggest you read up on optimal philanthropy and efficient charity to get a better feeling of what I mean by this.
Theism, meh, I used to think this was an especially dangerous kind of crazy, yet now I think it is mostly relatively harmless compared to other craziness at least in the context of Western cultures. When happy new atheists first stumble upon LW I sometimes find myself in the awkward position of smiling nervously and then trying to explain that we now have to deal with real problems of irrationality. Like society rationalizing death and ageing as something good or ignoring existential risk.
I am fairly certain the reason creationism is still around as a political force in some US states is because creationism is not a serious threat to The Cathedral.
But the following part of your response amused me and further more provoked some thought on the topic of conspiracy theories so have a warm fuzzy.
Let’s at least be consistent about our conspiracy theories …
And finally it is a convenient tool to clearly and in vivid colours paint something as low status, it is a boo light applied to any explanation that has people acting in anything that can be described as self-interest and is a few inferential jumps away. One could argue this is the primary meaning of calling an argument a conspiracy theory in on-line debates.
I’m going to be generous and assume that this last meaning wasn’t the primary intended one since you have since edited the line out of your reply.
Tying the content of the linked post back to our topic, I will admit Moldbug shows off his smarts and knowledge with silly, interesting and probably wrong ideas when he talks about his proposals for a neocameralist state. He can be a bit crankish talking about it, but hey show me a man who made a new ideology and wasn’t a bit crankish about it! But no I think when he talks recent history, politics and sociology he is a most excellentmap maker and not a “conspiracy nut” (though the pattern match is an understandable one to make in ignorance).
First there is a reason I talked about a “power machine” and not a sinister cabal. If you have a trusted authority to which people outsource their thinking from where they upload their favoured memeplexes, then allowing even for some very limited memetic evolution you will see the thing (all else being equal) try and settle. Those structures that aren’t by happen-stance built so that the memeplexes they emit increase trust of the source will tend to be out-competed by those who do. Don’t we have a working demonstration of this in organized religion? Notice how this does not require a centuries spanning conspiracy of Christian authorities consistently and consciously working to enhance their own status and nothing else while lying to the masses, nope I’m pretty sure most of them honestly believed in their stated map of reality. Yet the Church did end up working as such a belief pump and it even told us it was a belief pump that could be derived as true and necessary from pure reason. Funny how that worked out. Also recall the massive pay-offs in a system where the sillies in the brains of the public or experts directly matter in who the government allots resources to. Not much coordination needed for those peddling their particular wares to individually exploit this, or for them to realize which soap box is the best one to be standing on. If anything like a trusted soap box exists there will be great demand to stand on it, are we sure the winner of such a fight is actually someone who will not abuse the soap boxes truth providing credentials? Maybe the soap box comes equipped with some mechanisms to make it so, still they better be marvellously strong since they will probably be heavily strained. Secondly it is not a model that anthropomorphizes society or groups needlessly, indeed it might do well to incorporate more of it, since large chunks of our civilization where redecorated by the schemes of hundreds of petty and ambitious historically important figures that wanted to mess with … eh I mean optimize power distribution.
On the story thing, well I do admit that component is present in biasing me and others on LW towards making it seem more plausible. MM is a good if verbose writer. Speaking of verbosity you should consider my current take as a incomplete and abridged version not the full argument, it is also possible I plain misremember some details so I hope other posters also familiar with MM will correct me. I have the impression you simply aren’t familiar with his thinking since you so seem to attack a very weak and mangled form of his argument seemingly gleaned only from a ungenerous reading of the parent posts. I strongly recommend, even if you judge the value of additional information gained out of reading his writings low, to do a search on LW for other discussion of these ideas in various comment sections and so on, since a lot has been written on the subject. Browsing the comment history of people who often explicitly talk about such topics also seems like a good idea. Remember this is just some dude on the internet, but this is a dude on the internet that Robin Hanson considered worth debating and engaging and is someone who many LWers read and think about (note I didn’t say agree with). Discussions debating his ideas are also often up voted. You will also see respected and much more formidable rationalists than myself occasionally name drop or reference him. If you have some trust in the LessWrong rationalist community, you probably need to update on how seriously you should take this particular on-line hobo distributing photocopied essays.
Note: This reply was written before edits of parent. I will respond to the added edited material in a separate post.
Edit: Abridged text by storing the analysis of conspiracy theory failure mode in a open discussion post.
I am fairly certain the reason creationism is still around as a political force in some US states is because creationism is not a serious threat to The Cathedral.
But the following part of your response amused me so also feel free to consider yourself forgiven.
Let’s at least be consistent about our conspiracy theories …
Conspiracy theories are generally used to explain events or trends as the results of plots orchestrated by covert groups or organizations, sometimes people use the term to talk about theories that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public. Ah poor me alas I seem to have been taken in by crank who ignores the difficulty of coordination, seeks esoteric explanations when plain ones will do and shows off his smarts by spinning tales.
I will admit Moldbug shows of his smarts with silly and probably wrong ideas when he talks about his hypothetical neocameralist state, he can be a bit crankish talking about it, but hey show me a man who made a new ideology that wasn’t crankish about it! But no I think when he talks recent history and sociology he is a most excellent map maker.
I have a sneaking feeling that you simply aren’t familiar with Moldbugs thinking or extensive LessWrong discussion of it or even Robin Hanson’s criticism of it.
I fail to see how this applies since Moldbug’s description of political reality needs no wicked men crackling behind the curtain, indeed he elegantly shows a plausible means of how it arises
Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their “output”?
I reversed a downvote to this because other people should also suffer by seeing a question this stupid. Fifteen members of the 111th Congress earned bachelor’s degrees from Harvard, 11 current congressmen called Stanford home during their undergraduate days, ten members of Congress got their bachelors from Yale. This includes neither MBAs nor JDs Source here
So? There are powerful people with degrees from prestigious universities. That doesn’t necessarily imply that
those people care about spreading scientific knowledge and that they’re willing to use their power to accomplish that goal. Nor does it imply that the universities themselves care about spreading scientific knowledge in an accessible way (just publishing academic papers doesn’t count).
But as I said in my comment, there are numerous issues (creationism, moon landing hoax, antivax, global warming denial, and I should add theism) where a large amount of public opinion is highly divergent from the opinions of the vast majority of academics. So clearly the elite universities are not actually that good at proselytizing their output.
Perhaps it has been downvoted because people see elite universities with large endowments and lots of alumni in congress? But still, that money cannot be spent on proselytizing. And how exactly is a politician who went to Stanford or Harvard supposed to have the means and motive to come out against a popular falsehood? Somehow science is not doing so well against creationism. As an example, Rick Santorum went to Penn State (a Public Ivy), but then expressed the view that humans were not evolved from “monkeys”. Newt Gingrich actually was a lecturer, and said intelligent design should be taught at school.
EDIT: Also, Yes, I am stupid in an absolute sense. If I were smart, I would be rich & happy ;-0
Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their “output”? I mean, you surely know about the trouble they are having trying to win the propaganda fight against creationism, and against global warming denial. And then there’s anti-vaccination and the moon landing conspiracy.
In fact the statement that I quoted seems to so obviously deserve the answer “yes, they are unable to spread the word” that I wonder whether I am missing something.
Perhaps you were thinking that elite universities only need to spread the word amongst, say, the smartest 10% of the country for it to matter. But even in that demographic, I think you will find that few people know about this stuff. Perhaps with the release of books such as Predictably Irrational things have improved. But still, such books seem somewhat inadequate since they don’t aim to cleanly teach rationality, rather they aim to give a few cute rationality-flavoured anecdotes. If someone reads Predictably Irrational I doubt that they would be able to perform a solid analysis of the Allais Paradox (because Predictably Irrational doesn’t teach decision theory in a formal way) and I doubt that their calibration would improve (because Predictably Irrational doesn’t make them play calibration games).
There are very, very few people employed at universities whose job description is “make the public understand science”. As far as I am aware there is literally no-one in the world whose job title is “make the public understand cognitive-biases-style rationality”
Mencius Moldbug has convincingly argued on his blog, that intellectual fashion among the ruling class follows intellectual fashion on Harvard by an offset of about one generation. A generation after that the judicial and journalist class exiles any opposition to such thought from public discourse and most educated people move significantly towards it. A generation after that through public schools and the by now decades long exposure to media issuing normative statements on the subject, such beliefs are marginalized even among the uneducated, making any populist opposition to society wide stated value or policy changes a futile gesture destined to live only one season.
It is indeed is a wonderful machine for generating political power through opinion in Western type societies. While I generally have no qualms about Harvard being an acceptable truth generation machine when it comes to say Physics, in areas where it has a conflict of interest, like say economics or sociology let alone political science or ethics it is not a reliable truth generating machine. It is funny how these fields get far more energetic promotion than say Physics or Chemistry.
I am fairly certain the reason creationism is still around as a political force in some US states is because creationism is not a serious threat to The Cathedral. However I do think modern style rationality is indeed only the honest interest of a small small part of academia, a far larger fraction of academia is busy engaged in producing anti-knowledge in the most blatant form of something studies departments and a more convoluted form of ugh field rationalizations found in everything from biology to philosophy.
Academia taken as a whole has no incentives to promote modern rationality, cargo cult rationality and worship of science so anti-knowledge factories can syphon status from say Computer Scientists or Mathematicians perhaps. But not actual rationality.
So yes LessWrong should spend effort on promoting that, however it should not abstain, from challenging and criticizing academia in places where it is systematically wrong.
then
Contradiction much?
If the “judicial and journalist class” only attacks popular irrational ideas which are “a serious threat to The Cathedral”, then what other irrationalities will get through? Maybe very few irrational ideas are a “serious threat to The Cathedral”, in which case you just admitted that academia cannot “proselytise it’s output”. What about antivax? Global warming denial? Theism? Anti-nuclear-power irrationality? Crazy, ill-thought-through and knee jerk anticapitalism of the OWS variety? So many popular irrational beliefs…
At the very least crazy ill-thought through knee jerk anticapitalism and anti-nuclear-power irrationality often are “the output of academia”. I mean you can take classes in them and everything. ;)
Sure one can cherry pick and say that only this and that part of academia is or isn’t trustworthy and deserves or dosen’t our promotion of its output, but hey that was my position remember?
Antivaxers irrationality is just garden variety health related craziness which is regrettable since it costs lives but springs up constantly in new forms. Its cost is actually currently pretty low compared to others.
Global warming or at least talking vaguely about “global warming denial” is considered somewhat mind-killing on LW. Also much as with MM I suggest you do a search and read up and participate in previous debates. My personal position is that it is happening yet spending additional marginal effort on solving it or getting people to solve it has negative net utility. Suggest you read up on optimal philanthropy and efficient charity to get a better feeling of what I mean by this.
Theism, meh, I used to think this was an especially dangerous kind of crazy, yet now I think it is mostly relatively harmless compared to other craziness at least in the context of Western cultures. When happy new atheists first stumble upon LW I sometimes find myself in the awkward position of smiling nervously and then trying to explain that we now have to deal with real problems of irrationality. Like society rationalizing death and ageing as something good or ignoring existential risk.
No. I dislike repeating myself:
But the following part of your response amused me and further more provoked some thought on the topic of conspiracy theories so have a warm fuzzy.
I am not quite sure what you mean with that phrase. Can you please clarify?
I’m going to be generous and assume that this last meaning wasn’t the primary intended one since you have since edited the line out of your reply.
Tying the content of the linked post back to our topic, I will admit Moldbug shows off his smarts and knowledge with silly, interesting and probably wrong ideas when he talks about his proposals for a neocameralist state. He can be a bit crankish talking about it, but hey show me a man who made a new ideology and wasn’t a bit crankish about it! But no I think when he talks recent history, politics and sociology he is a most excellent map maker and not a “conspiracy nut” (though the pattern match is an understandable one to make in ignorance).
First there is a reason I talked about a “power machine” and not a sinister cabal. If you have a trusted authority to which people outsource their thinking from where they upload their favoured memeplexes, then allowing even for some very limited memetic evolution you will see the thing (all else being equal) try and settle. Those structures that aren’t by happen-stance built so that the memeplexes they emit increase trust of the source will tend to be out-competed by those who do. Don’t we have a working demonstration of this in organized religion? Notice how this does not require a centuries spanning conspiracy of Christian authorities consistently and consciously working to enhance their own status and nothing else while lying to the masses, nope I’m pretty sure most of them honestly believed in their stated map of reality. Yet the Church did end up working as such a belief pump and it even told us it was a belief pump that could be derived as true and necessary from pure reason. Funny how that worked out. Also recall the massive pay-offs in a system where the sillies in the brains of the public or experts directly matter in who the government allots resources to. Not much coordination needed for those peddling their particular wares to individually exploit this, or for them to realize which soap box is the best one to be standing on. If anything like a trusted soap box exists there will be great demand to stand on it, are we sure the winner of such a fight is actually someone who will not abuse the soap boxes truth providing credentials? Maybe the soap box comes equipped with some mechanisms to make it so, still they better be marvellously strong since they will probably be heavily strained. Secondly it is not a model that anthropomorphizes society or groups needlessly, indeed it might do well to incorporate more of it, since large chunks of our civilization where redecorated by the schemes of hundreds of petty and ambitious historically important figures that wanted to mess with … eh I mean optimize power distribution.
On the story thing, well I do admit that component is present in biasing me and others on LW towards making it seem more plausible. MM is a good if verbose writer. Speaking of verbosity you should consider my current take as a incomplete and abridged version not the full argument, it is also possible I plain misremember some details so I hope other posters also familiar with MM will correct me. I have the impression you simply aren’t familiar with his thinking since you so seem to attack a very weak and mangled form of his argument seemingly gleaned only from a ungenerous reading of the parent posts. I strongly recommend, even if you judge the value of additional information gained out of reading his writings low, to do a search on LW for other discussion of these ideas in various comment sections and so on, since a lot has been written on the subject. Browsing the comment history of people who often explicitly talk about such topics also seems like a good idea. Remember this is just some dude on the internet, but this is a dude on the internet that Robin Hanson considered worth debating and engaging and is someone who many LWers read and think about (note I didn’t say agree with). Discussions debating his ideas are also often up voted. You will also see respected and much more formidable rationalists than myself occasionally name drop or reference him. If you have some trust in the LessWrong rationalist community, you probably need to update on how seriously you should take this particular on-line hobo distributing photocopied essays.
Note: This reply was written before edits of parent. I will respond to the added edited material in a separate post.
Edit: Abridged text by storing the analysis of conspiracy theory failure mode in a open discussion post.
No. Note that I hare repeating myself:
But the following part of your response amused me so also feel free to consider yourself forgiven.
Conspiracy theories are generally used to explain events or trends as the results of plots orchestrated by covert groups or organizations, sometimes people use the term to talk about theories that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public. Ah poor me alas I seem to have been taken in by crank who ignores the difficulty of coordination, seeks esoteric explanations when plain ones will do and shows off his smarts by spinning tales.
I will admit Moldbug shows of his smarts with silly and probably wrong ideas when he talks about his hypothetical neocameralist state, he can be a bit crankish talking about it, but hey show me a man who made a new ideology that wasn’t crankish about it! But no I think when he talks recent history and sociology he is a most excellent map maker.
I have a sneaking feeling that you simply aren’t familiar with Moldbugs thinking or extensive LessWrong discussion of it or even Robin Hanson’s criticism of it.
I fail to see how this applies since Moldbug’s description of political reality needs no wicked men crackling behind the curtain, indeed he elegantly shows a plausible means of how it arises
I reversed a downvote to this because other people should also suffer by seeing a question this stupid. Fifteen members of the 111th Congress earned bachelor’s degrees from Harvard, 11 current congressmen called Stanford home during their undergraduate days, ten members of Congress got their bachelors from Yale. This includes neither MBAs nor JDs Source here
So? There are powerful people with degrees from prestigious universities. That doesn’t necessarily imply that those people care about spreading scientific knowledge and that they’re willing to use their power to accomplish that goal. Nor does it imply that the universities themselves care about spreading scientific knowledge in an accessible way (just publishing academic papers doesn’t count).
Also, don’t insult people.
But as I said in my comment, there are numerous issues (creationism, moon landing hoax, antivax, global warming denial, and I should add theism) where a large amount of public opinion is highly divergent from the opinions of the vast majority of academics. So clearly the elite universities are not actually that good at proselytizing their output.
Perhaps it has been downvoted because people see elite universities with large endowments and lots of alumni in congress? But still, that money cannot be spent on proselytizing. And how exactly is a politician who went to Stanford or Harvard supposed to have the means and motive to come out against a popular falsehood? Somehow science is not doing so well against creationism. As an example, Rick Santorum went to Penn State (a Public Ivy), but then expressed the view that humans were not evolved from “monkeys”. Newt Gingrich actually was a lecturer, and said intelligent design should be taught at school.
EDIT: Also, Yes, I am stupid in an absolute sense. If I were smart, I would be rich & happy ;-0