Maybe it’s just me, but on a meta level I’m very suspicious of any argument where the counterarguments are being delivered by “Mr Retard”. What’s the point of having Simplicio here?
Simplicio, a dedicated follower of Ptolemy and Aristotle, presents the traditional views and the arguments against the Copernican position. He is supposedly named after Simplicius of Cilicia, a sixth-century commentator on Aristotle, but it was suspected the name was a double entendre, as the Italian for “simple” (as in “simple minded”) is “semplice”.[8] Simplicio is modeled on two contemporary conservative philosophers, Lodovico delle Colombe (1565–1616?), Galileo’s opponent, and Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631), a Paduan colleague who had refused to look through the telescope.[9] Colombe was the leader of a group of Florentine opponents of Galileo’s, which some of the latter’s friends referred to as “the pigeon league”.[10]
I note that this doesn’t really justify Simplicio being there.
My rough sense is that Simplicio’s existence in Inadequate Equilibria is mostly a joke/reference (with the “real work” of the dialog mostly being done by the other characters). I think having him as a mostly-a-joke is fine but I’m curious if anyone would defend him on stronger / more interesting grounds.
Sadly, my favorite Simplicio line was cut from the book. But I think Simplicio plays an important role of raising real objections; often it is the case that someone will propose we “all just” coordinate on a thing. The CCC has a systems dynamics view in which people might be willing to pollute in order to enrich themselves, but harming yourself to harm another is bizarre, whereas Simplicio has a moral worldview where such spite is common (in the form of the wicked) and also morally correct behavior involves working against incentives. Like, I don’t think Cecie could have written No, It’s not The Incentives—It’s you.
Yeah, to be clear, I don’t think everything Simplicio says is obviously wrong, and I think a more interesting (and much longer) version of this dialogue would have tried harder to understand and steelman various Simplicio-models, regardless of whether it ended up siding against Simplicio.
I think calling the character “Simplicio” was a joke. I think that the main function the character is meant to serve is to distinguish “civilizational inadequacy” pessimism from other forms of pessimism. If the discussion were just “person talking about how things are broken vs. person who doesn’t expect things to be broken by default”, it would be easier to round off the former perspective to “generic pessimism/cynicism” or “the forms of pessimism/cynicism I’m most familiar with”.
Inadequate Equilibria was Eliezer trying to explain the perspective he’d previously tagged “civilizational inadequacy” and before that “people are crazy, the world is mad”. One of the main ways he’d previously been misunderstood when he used those phrases was that people took them as “generic cynicism” or “the kind of cynicism I’m used to”, so my model of Eliezer considered it particularly important to differentiate those two things now that he was finally properly explaining the view.
I also think it’s valuable to include strawmen in some stories, as long as you include the steelmen alongside them. Typically, the issue with strawmanning is that you don’t present the strongest version of your opponent’s arguments. But if you present the straw and steel side by side and explicitly distinguish them, I have no problem with it.
Maybe it’s just me, but on a meta level I’m very suspicious of any argument where the counterarguments are being delivered by “Mr Retard”. What’s the point of having Simplicio here?
It’s a nod to Galileo’s “Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems”:
I note that this doesn’t really justify Simplicio being there.
My rough sense is that Simplicio’s existence in Inadequate Equilibria is mostly a joke/reference (with the “real work” of the dialog mostly being done by the other characters). I think having him as a mostly-a-joke is fine but I’m curious if anyone would defend him on stronger / more interesting grounds.
Sadly, my favorite Simplicio line was cut from the book. But I think Simplicio plays an important role of raising real objections; often it is the case that someone will propose we “all just” coordinate on a thing. The CCC has a systems dynamics view in which people might be willing to pollute in order to enrich themselves, but harming yourself to harm another is bizarre, whereas Simplicio has a moral worldview where such spite is common (in the form of the wicked) and also morally correct behavior involves working against incentives. Like, I don’t think Cecie could have written No, It’s not The Incentives—It’s you.
Yeah, to be clear, I don’t think everything Simplicio says is obviously wrong, and I think a more interesting (and much longer) version of this dialogue would have tried harder to understand and steelman various Simplicio-models, regardless of whether it ended up siding against Simplicio.
I think calling the character “Simplicio” was a joke. I think that the main function the character is meant to serve is to distinguish “civilizational inadequacy” pessimism from other forms of pessimism. If the discussion were just “person talking about how things are broken vs. person who doesn’t expect things to be broken by default”, it would be easier to round off the former perspective to “generic pessimism/cynicism” or “the forms of pessimism/cynicism I’m most familiar with”.
Inadequate Equilibria was Eliezer trying to explain the perspective he’d previously tagged “civilizational inadequacy” and before that “people are crazy, the world is mad”. One of the main ways he’d previously been misunderstood when he used those phrases was that people took them as “generic cynicism” or “the kind of cynicism I’m used to”, so my model of Eliezer considered it particularly important to differentiate those two things now that he was finally properly explaining the view.
Update: both Vaniver’s and Rob’s comments make sense.
I also think it’s valuable to include strawmen in some stories, as long as you include the steelmen alongside them. Typically, the issue with strawmanning is that you don’t present the strongest version of your opponent’s arguments. But if you present the straw and steel side by side and explicitly distinguish them, I have no problem with it.