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PhilGoetz comments on Reason as memetic immune disorder - Less Wrong
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I agree with everything you say, but you vascillate between somewhat contradictory positions: that the default is to have disconnected beliefs; or that the default is to have particular "antibodies" preventing action on particular "beliefs." Could you elaborate on this?
I do agree that both are important phenomena. I think the default is disconnected beliefs. I'm not clear on the prevalence and role of "antibodies." Maybe they're just for over-verbal nerds infected with the Enlightenment. But I think they're more general.
"Antibodies" is a vague metaphor, by which I meant any aspect of your decision process that blocks or sidetracks a dangerous chain of reasoning. I didn't think about whether these blocks were active responses, or passive omission of a justified inference (eg., disconnected beliefs).
It operates as a metaphor by suggesting co-evolutionary dynamics as a way of looking at the problem. It's not a valid metaphor for trying to figure out the exact mechanism.
voted up for backing away from the details of the metaphor rather than trying to justify them. Not always an easy choice.
As it stands now, it's all omitted inference. But I think the monk is the default--almost all inferences are omitted. If that's the default, I think drawing attention to them and calling them "antibodies" is a figure-ground error. (But maybe you don't think it's the default.)
I might talk about co-evolution, not between beliefs and blind spots, but between actions and excuses. The excuses can't be too incoherent, because some people pay some attention to them. What I took to be "antibodies" were elaborate excuses, excuses for not drawing inferences between the first-order excuses, but I think the race example was the only example you gave of this. Maybe these are rare and most people just use first-order excuses for what they do, not excuses for why they don't actually follow the first-order excuses.