In the 20st century serious intellectual thought mostly became thought backed up by academia. Academia then had a custom that it didn’t really like interdisciplinary departments but it tried to organize itself into nonoverlapping departments. Many departments were also pressured into doing research that’s directly useful to corporations and that can produce patents.
General Semantics and also Cybernetics are fields that lost as a result.
I think there a good case that times change. With the Giving Pledge there a lot of Billionaire money that wants to fund new structures. OpenAI is one example of a well funded projected that likely wouldn’t have existed in that form in the past. Sam Altman also wants to fund other similar research projects.
The OpenPhilantrophy project is sitting on a lot of money that it wants to funnel into effective project without caring at all about departmental overlapping.
A world where a lot of people live in their own filter bubble instead of living in the bubble created by mainstream media might also lack what we call mainstream at the moment.
Yesterday I was at a Circling meetup in Berlin. I also read at the same day about the experience of an old Facebook friend that lives in the US that did a circling trainers training. In my filter bouble Circling is a global trend at the moment but that doesn’t mean that it’s mainstream.
If we look at general semantics it’s also worth noting that it both succeeded and failed. The phrase “The map is not the territory” is very influential. Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is named that way because of Korzybski usage of the term neuro-linguistic. NLP is based on general semantics but it evolved a lot from that point. NLP is today an influential intellectual framework outside of the academic mainstream.
Academia then had a custom that it didn’t really like interdisciplinary departments but it tried to organize itself into nonoverlapping departments.
I could imagine some good reasons for doing so. Sometimes scientists who are experts in one field become crackpots in another field, and it may be dificult for the new colleagues to argue against them if the crackpot can euler them by using the arguments from their old field.
On the other hand, there is the saying that a map is not the territory, and this seems like suggesting that the existing maps can be modified in the middle, but the boundaries are fixed. But we have already seen e.g. computer science appearing at the boundary of mathematics; biochemistry appearing on the border between biology and chemistry; or game theory somewhere at the intersection of mathematics, economy, and psychology.
My argument is primarily about whether that historical development was good or bad. It was that there are reasons why certain memes won over others that aren’t directly about the merit of the memes. Additionally I make the prognosis that those reasons are less likely to hold in the next 40 years the way they did in the last 40.
But we have already seen e.g. computer science appearing at the boundary of mathematics
Today computer science is very much a subfield of math. Heinz von Foerster had a psychatrist in his Biological Computer Laboratory. He wanted to study computing, system theory, cybernetics or whatever word you want to use broadly.
The Biological Computer Laboratory was shut down when the military came to the point of deciding that funding it doesn’t produce militarily useful results.
But we have already seen e.g. computer science appearing at the boundary of mathematics; biochemistry appearing on the border between biology and chemistry; or game theory somewhere at the intersection of mathematics, economy, and psychology.
As far as I know we don’t have professors for game theory as a discipline. We have economic professors who study game theory, mathematics professors who study it and psychology professors who study it.
We don’t have departments of game theory.
Never heard of Circling until your post. Looked it up, initially find nothing going on in San Diego (California US). I wonder if it is more of a European thing?
If you know how I can find something local to San Diego CA US, please let me know.
Ease of applicability. If the average middle manager cannot apply a technique easily or straightforwardly while working, the major pressure to use a technique will be social signalling (cf. corporate buzzword speak).
Measurable outcomes. If the average middle manager cannot easily observe that the technique makes her job easier (either the productivity of subordinates or her control over them), then she will have no reason to emotionally or intellectually invest in the technique.
I do think rationality is a niche. I had a conversation with a not-particularly-bright administrative assistant at work where she expressed the teachings of Jehovah’s Witness as straightforward truth. She talked some of the chaos of her life (drugs, depression) before joining them. As I expressed the abstract case for, essentially, being careful about what one believes, it seemed clear enough to me that she had little or nothing to gain by being “right” (or rather adopting my opinion which is more likely to be true in a Bayesian sense) and she seemed to fairly clearly have something to lose. I, on the other hand, have a philosopho-physicist’s values and also value finding regular (non-theological) truths by carefully rejecting my biases, so I was making a choice that (probably) makes sense for me.
When my 14 year old daughter (now 16 and doing much better) was “experimenting” with alcohol, marijuana, and shop-lifting, I had a “come to Jesus” talk with my religious cousin. She told me that I knew right from wrong and that I was doing my daughter no favors by teaching her skepticism above morality. I decided she was essentially correct, and that some of my own “skepticism” was actually self-serving, letting me off the hook for some stealing I had done from employers starting when I was about 15.
I view rationality as a thing we can do with our neocortex. But clearly we have a functional emotional brain that “knows” there are monsters or tigers when we are afraid of the dark and “knows” that girls we are attracted to are also attracted to us. I continue to question whether I am doing myself or my children any real favors by being as devoted to this particular feature of my neocortex as I am.
Yeah, I guess LW rationality should be filed under “intellectual fads” rather than “cults”.
What are the dynamics that produce a fad rather than growth into the mainstream? It might be worth CFAR thinking about that.
In the 20st century serious intellectual thought mostly became thought backed up by academia. Academia then had a custom that it didn’t really like interdisciplinary departments but it tried to organize itself into nonoverlapping departments. Many departments were also pressured into doing research that’s directly useful to corporations and that can produce patents.
General Semantics and also Cybernetics are fields that lost as a result.
I think there a good case that times change. With the Giving Pledge there a lot of Billionaire money that wants to fund new structures. OpenAI is one example of a well funded projected that likely wouldn’t have existed in that form in the past. Sam Altman also wants to fund other similar research projects.
The OpenPhilantrophy project is sitting on a lot of money that it wants to funnel into effective project without caring at all about departmental overlapping.
A world where a lot of people live in their own filter bubble instead of living in the bubble created by mainstream media might also lack what we call mainstream at the moment. Yesterday I was at a Circling meetup in Berlin. I also read at the same day about the experience of an old Facebook friend that lives in the US that did a circling trainers training. In my filter bouble Circling is a global trend at the moment but that doesn’t mean that it’s mainstream.
If we look at general semantics it’s also worth noting that it both succeeded and failed. The phrase “The map is not the territory” is very influential. Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is named that way because of Korzybski usage of the term neuro-linguistic. NLP is based on general semantics but it evolved a lot from that point. NLP is today an influential intellectual framework outside of the academic mainstream.
I could imagine some good reasons for doing so. Sometimes scientists who are experts in one field become crackpots in another field, and it may be dificult for the new colleagues to argue against them if the crackpot can euler them by using the arguments from their old field.
On the other hand, there is the saying that a map is not the territory, and this seems like suggesting that the existing maps can be modified in the middle, but the boundaries are fixed. But we have already seen e.g. computer science appearing at the boundary of mathematics; biochemistry appearing on the border between biology and chemistry; or game theory somewhere at the intersection of mathematics, economy, and psychology.
My argument is primarily about whether that historical development was good or bad. It was that there are reasons why certain memes won over others that aren’t directly about the merit of the memes. Additionally I make the prognosis that those reasons are less likely to hold in the next 40 years the way they did in the last 40.
Today computer science is very much a subfield of math. Heinz von Foerster had a psychatrist in his Biological Computer Laboratory. He wanted to study computing, system theory, cybernetics or whatever word you want to use broadly.
The Biological Computer Laboratory was shut down when the military came to the point of deciding that funding it doesn’t produce militarily useful results.
As far as I know we don’t have professors for game theory as a discipline. We have economic professors who study game theory, mathematics professors who study it and psychology professors who study it. We don’t have departments of game theory.
Never heard of Circling until your post. Looked it up, initially find nothing going on in San Diego (California US). I wonder if it is more of a European thing?
If you know how I can find something local to San Diego CA US, please let me know.
Likely strong factors include:
Ease of applicability. If the average middle manager cannot apply a technique easily or straightforwardly while working, the major pressure to use a technique will be social signalling (cf. corporate buzzword speak).
Measurable outcomes. If the average middle manager cannot easily observe that the technique makes her job easier (either the productivity of subordinates or her control over them), then she will have no reason to emotionally or intellectually invest in the technique.
Becoming a niche is a third possibility if ideas are suitable to one area but hard to expand to different areas.
I do think rationality is a niche. I had a conversation with a not-particularly-bright administrative assistant at work where she expressed the teachings of Jehovah’s Witness as straightforward truth. She talked some of the chaos of her life (drugs, depression) before joining them. As I expressed the abstract case for, essentially, being careful about what one believes, it seemed clear enough to me that she had little or nothing to gain by being “right” (or rather adopting my opinion which is more likely to be true in a Bayesian sense) and she seemed to fairly clearly have something to lose. I, on the other hand, have a philosopho-physicist’s values and also value finding regular (non-theological) truths by carefully rejecting my biases, so I was making a choice that (probably) makes sense for me.
When my 14 year old daughter (now 16 and doing much better) was “experimenting” with alcohol, marijuana, and shop-lifting, I had a “come to Jesus” talk with my religious cousin. She told me that I knew right from wrong and that I was doing my daughter no favors by teaching her skepticism above morality. I decided she was essentially correct, and that some of my own “skepticism” was actually self-serving, letting me off the hook for some stealing I had done from employers starting when I was about 15.
I view rationality as a thing we can do with our neocortex. But clearly we have a functional emotional brain that “knows” there are monsters or tigers when we are afraid of the dark and “knows” that girls we are attracted to are also attracted to us. I continue to question whether I am doing myself or my children any real favors by being as devoted to this particular feature of my neocortex as I am.