Undiscriminating Skepticism
Tl;dr: Since it can be cheap and easy to attack everything your tribe doesn't believe, you shouldn't trust the rationality of just anyone who slams astrology and creationism; these beliefs aren't just false, they're also non-tribal among educated audiences. Test what happens when a "skeptic" argues for a non-tribal belief, or argues against a tribal belief, before you decide they're good general rationalists. This post is intended to be reasonably accessible to outside audiences.
I don't believe in UFOs. I don't believe in astrology. I don't believe in homeopathy. I don't believe in creationism. I don't believe there were explosives planted in the World Trade Center. I don't believe in haunted houses. I don't believe in perpetual motion machines. I believe that all these beliefs are not only wrong but visibly insane.
If you know nothing else about me but this, how much credit should you give me for general rationality?
Certainly anyone who was skillful at adding up evidence, considering alternative explanations, and assessing prior probabilities, would end up disbelieving in all of these.
But there would also be a simpler explanation for my views, a less rare factor that could explain it: I could just be anti-non-mainstream. I could be in the habit of hanging out in moderately educated circles, and know that astrology and homeopathy are not accepted beliefs of my tribe. Or just perceptually recognize them, on a wordless level, as "sounding weird". And I could mock anything that sounds weird and that my fellow tribesfolk don't believe, much as creationists who hang out with fellow creationists mock evolution for its ludicrous assertion that apes give birth to human beings.
You can get cheap credit for rationality by mocking wrong beliefs that everyone in your social circle already believes to be wrong. It wouldn't mean that I have any ability at all to notice a wrong belief that the people around me believe to be right, or vice versa - to further discriminate truth from falsity, beyond the fact that my social circle doesn't already believe in something.
Back in the good old days, there was a simple test for this syndrome that would get quite a lot of mileage: You could just ask me what I thought about God. If I treated the idea with deeper respect than I treated astrology, holding it worthy of serious debate even if I said I disbelieved in it, then you knew that I was taking my cues from my social surroundings - that if the people around me treated a belief as high-prestige, high-status, I wouldn't start mocking it no matter what the state of evidence.
On the other hand suppose I said without hesitation that my epistemic state on God was similar to my epistemic state on psychic powers: no positive evidence, lots of failed tests, highly unfavorable prior, and if you believe it under those circumstances then something is wrong with your mind. Then you would have heard a bit of skepticism that might cost me something socially, and that not everyone around me would have endorsed, even in educated circles. You would know it wasn't just a cheap way of picking up cheap points.
Today the God-test no longer works, because some people realized that the taking-it-seriously aura of religion is in fact the main thing left which prevents people from noticing the epistemic awfulness; there has been a concerted and, I think, well-advised effort to mock religion and strip it of its respectability. The upshot is that there are now quite wide social circles in which God is just another stupid belief that we all know we don't believe in, on the same list with astrology. You could be dealing with an adept rationalist, or you could just be dealing with someone who reads Reddit.
And of course I could easily go on to name some beliefs that others think are wrong and that I think are right, or vice versa, but would inevitably lose some of my audience at each step along the way - just as, a couple of decades ago, I would have lost a lot of my audience by saying that religion was unworthy of serious debate. (Thankfully, today this outright dismissal is at least considered a respectable, mainstream position even if not everyone holds it.)
I probably won't lose much by citing anti-Artificial-Intelligence views as an example of undiscriminating skepticism. I think a majority among educated circles are sympathetic to the argument that brains are not magic and so there is no obstacle in principle to building machines that think. But there are others, albeit in the minority, who recognize Artificial Intelligence as "weird-sounding" and "sci-fi", a belief in something that has never yet been demonstrated, hence unscientific - the same epistemic reference class as believing in aliens or homeopathy.
(This is technically a demand for unobtainable evidence. The asymmetry with homeopathy can be summed up as follows: First: If we learn that Artificial Intelligence is definitely impossible, we must have learned some new fact unknown to modern science - everything we currently know about neurons and the evolution of intelligence suggests that no magic was involved. On the other hand, if we learn that homeopathy is possible, we must have learned some new fact unknown to modern science; if everything else we believe about physics is true, homeopathy shouldn't work. Second: If homeopathy works, we can expect double-blind medical studies to demonstrate its efficacy right now; the absence of this evidence is very strong evidence of absence. If Artificial Intelligence is possible in theory and in practice, we can't necessarily expect its creation to be demonstrated using current knowledge - this absence of evidence is only weak evidence of absence.)
I'm using Artificial Intelligence as an example, because it's a case where you can see some "skeptics" directing their skepticism at a belief that is very popular in educated circles, that is, the nonmysteriousness and ultimate reverse-engineerability of mind. You can even see two skeptical principles brought into conflict - does a good skeptic disbelieve in Artificial Intelligence because it's a load of sci-fi which has never been demonstrated? Or does a good skeptic disbelieve in human exceptionalism, since it would require some mysterious, unanalyzable essence-of-mind unknown to modern science?
It's on questions like these where we find the frontiers of knowledge, and everything now in the settled lands was once on the frontier. It might seem like a matter of little importance to debate weird non-mainstream beliefs; a matter for easy dismissals and open scorn. But if this policy is implemented in full generality, progress goes down the tubes. The mainstream is not completely right, and future science will not just consist of things that sound reasonable to everyone today - there will be at least some things in it that sound weird to us. (This is certainly the case if something along the lines of Artificial Intelligence is considered weird!) And yes, eventually such scientific truths will be established by experiment, but somewhere along the line - before they are definitely established and everyone already believes in them - the testers will need funding.
Being skeptical about some non-mainstream beliefs is not a fringe project of little importance, not always a slam-dunk, not a bit of occasional pointless drudgery - though I can certainly understand why it feels that way to argue with creationists. Skepticism is just the converse of acceptance, and so to be skeptical of a non-mainstream belief is to try to contribute to the project of advancing the borders of the known - to stake an additional epistemic claim that the borders should not expand in this direction, and should advance in some other direction instead.
This is high and difficult work - certainly much more difficult than the work of mocking everything that sounds weird and that the people in your social circle don't already seem to believe.
To put it more formally, before I believe that someone is performing useful cognitive work, I want to know that their skepticism discriminates truth from falsehood, making a contribution over and above the contribution of this-sounds-weird-and-is-not-a-tribal-belief. In Bayesian terms, I want to know that p(mockery|belief false & not a tribal belief) > p(mockery|belief true & not a tribal belief).
If I recall correctly, the US Air Force's Project Blue Book, on UFOs, explained away as a sighting of the planet Venus what turned out to actually be an experimental aircraft. No, I don't believe in UFOs either; but if you're going to explain away experimental aircraft as Venus, then nothing else you say provides further Bayesian evidence against UFOs either. You are merely an undiscriminating skeptic. I don't believe in UFOs, but in order to credit Project Blue Book with additional help in establishing this, I would have to believe that if there were UFOs then Project Blue Book would have turned in a different report.
And so if you're just as skeptical of a weird, non-tribal belief that turns out to have pretty good support, you just blew the whole deal - that is, if I pay any extra attention to your skepticism, it ought to be because I believe you wouldn't mock a weird non-tribal belief that was worthy of debate.
Personally, I think that Michael Shermer blew it by mocking molecular nanotechnology, and Penn and Teller blew it by mocking cryonics (justification: more or less exactly the same reasons I gave for Artificial Intelligence). Conversely, Richard Dawkins scooped up a huge truckload of actual-discriminating-skeptic points, at least in my book, for not making fun of the many-worlds interpretation when he was asked about in an interview; indeed, Dawkins noted (correctly) that the traditional collapse postulate pretty much has to be incorrect. The many-worlds interpretation isn't just the formally simplest explanation that fits the facts, it also sounds weird and is not yet a tribal belief of the educated crowd; so whether someone makes fun of MWI is indeed a good test of whether they understand Occam's Razor or are just mocking everything that's not a tribal belief.
Of course you may not trust me about any of that. And so my purpose today is not to propose a new litmus test to replace atheism.
But I do propose that before you give anyone credit for being a smart, rational skeptic, that you ask them to defend some non-mainstream belief. And no, atheism doesn't count as non-mainstream anymore, no matter what the polls show. It has to be something that most of their social circle doesn't believe, or something that most of their social circle does believe which they think is wrong. Dawkins endorsing many-worlds still counts for now, although its usefulness as an indicator is fading fast... but the point is not to endorse many-worlds, but to see them take some sort of positive stance on where the frontiers of knowledge should change.
Don't get me wrong, there's a whole crazy world out there, and when Richard Dawkins starts whaling on astrology in "The Enemies of Reason" documentary, he is doing good and necessary work. But it's dangerous to let people pick up too much credit just for slamming astrology and homeopathy and UFOs and God. What if they become famous skeptics by picking off the cheap targets, and then use that prestige and credibility to go after nanotechnology? Who will dare to consider cryonics now that it's been featured on an episode of Penn and Teller's "Bullshit"? On the current system you can gain high prestige in the educated circle just by targeting beliefs like astrology that are widely believed to be uneducated; but then the same guns can be turned on new ideas like the many-worlds interpretation, even though it's being actively debated by physicists. And that's why I suggest, not any particular litmus test, but just that you ought to have to stick your neck out and say something a little less usual - say where you are not skeptical (and most of your tribemates are) or where you are skeptical (and most of the people in your tribe are not).
I am minded to pay attention to Robyn Dawes as a skillful rationalist, not because Dawes has slammed easy targets like astrology, but because he also took the lead in assembling and popularizing the total lack of experimental evidence for nearly all schools of psychotherapy and the persistence of multiple superstitions such as Rorschach ink-blot interpretation in the face of literally hundreds of experiments trying and failing to find any evidence for it. It's not that psychotherapy seemed like a difficult target after Dawes got through with it, but that, at the time he attacked it, people in educated circles still thought of it as something that educated people believed in. It's not quite as useful today, but back when Richard Feynman published "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" you could pick up evidence that he was actually thinking from the fact that he disrespected psychotherapists as well as psychics.
I'll conclude with some simple and non-trustworthy indicators that the skeptic is just filling in a cheap and largely automatic mockery template:
- The "skeptic" opens by remarking about the crazy true believers and wishful thinkers who believe in X, where there seem to be a surprising number of physicists making up the population of those wacky cult victims who believe in X. (The physicist-test is not an infallible indicator of rightness or even non-stupidity, but it's a filter that rapidly picks up on, say, strong AI, molecular nanotechnology, cryonics, the many-worlds interpretation, and so on.) Bonus point losses if the "skeptic" remarks on how easily physicists are seduced by sci-fi ideas. The reason why this is a particularly negative indicator is that when someone is in a mode of automatically arguing against everything that seems weird and isn't a belief of their tribe - of rejecting weird beliefs as a matter of naked perceptual recognition of weirdness - then they tend to perceptually fill-in-the-blank by assuming that anything weird is believed by wacky cult victims (i.e., people Not Of Our Tribe). And they don't backtrack, or wonder otherwise, even if they find out that the "cult" seems to exhibit a surprising number of people who go around talking about rationality and/or members with PhDs in physics. Roughly, they have an automatic template for mocking weird beliefs, and if this requires them to just swap in physicists for astrologers as gullible morons, that's what they'll do. Of course physicists can be gullible morons too, but you should be establishing that as a surprising conclusion, not using it as an opening premise!
- The "skeptic" offers up items of "evidence" against X which are not much less expected in the case that X is true than in the case that X is false; in other words, they fail to grasp the elementary Bayesian notion of evidence. I don't believe that UFOs are alien visitors, but my skepticism has nothing to do with all the crazy people who believe in UFOs - the existence of wacky cults is not much less expected in the case that aliens do exist, than in the case that they do not. (I am skeptical of UFOs, not because I fear affiliating myself with the low-prestige people who believe in UFOs, but because I don't believe aliens would (a) travel across interstellar distances AND (b) hide all signs of their presence AND THEN (c) fly gigantic non-nanotechnological aircraft over our military bases with their exterior lights on.)
- The demand for unobtainable evidence is a special case of the above, and of course a very common mode of skepticism gone wrong. Artificial Intelligence and molecular nanotechnology both involve beliefs in the future feasibility of technologies that we can't build right now, but (arguendo) seem to be strongly permitted by current scientific belief, i.e., the non-ineffability of the brain, or the basic physical calculations which seem to show that simple nanotechnological machines should work. To discard all the arguments from cognitive science and rely on the knockdown argument "no reliable reporter has ever seen an AI!" is blindly filling in the template from haunted houses.
- The "skeptic" tries to scare you away from the belief in their very first opening remarks: for example, pointing out how UFO cults beat and starve their victims (when this can just as easily happen if aliens are visiting the Earth). The negative consequences of a false belief may be real, legitimate truths to be communicated; but only after you establish by other means that the belief is factually false - otherwise it's the logical fallacy of appeal to consequences.
- They mock first and counterargue later or not at all. I do believe there's a place for mockery in the war on dumb ideas, but first you write the crushing factual counterargument, then you conclude with the mockery.
I'll conclude the conclusion by observing that poor skepticism can just as easily exist in a case where a belief is wrong as when a belief is right, so pointing out these flaws in someone's skepticism can hardly serve to establish a positive belief about where the frontiers of knowledge should move.
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Comments (862)
Here's a discussion of this post at the James Randi forums. Reaction seems net negative with high variance: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=5726673
If you disagree with your tribe, you get rationality points for independent thinking; but you lose rationality points for failing to update. Is the total positive or negative?
I've been following Alicorn's sequence on luminousness, that is, on getting to know ourselves better. I had lowered my estimate of my own rationality when she mentioned that we tend to think too highly of ourselves, but now I can bump my estimate back up. There is at least one belief which my tribe elevates to the rank of scientific fact, yet which I think is probably wrong: I do not believe in the Big Bang.
Of course, I don't believe the universe was created a few thousand years ago either. I don't have any plausible alternative hypothesis, I just think that the arguments I have read in the many popular science physics book I have read are inconclusive.
First, these books usually justify the Big Bang theory as follows. Right now, it is an observable fact that stars are currently moving away from each other. Therefore, there was a time in the past where they were much closer. Therefore, there was a time where all the stars in the universe occupied the same point. It is this last "therefore" which I don't buy: there is no particular reason to assume that if the stars are moving away from each other right now, then they must always have done so. They could be expanding and contracting in a sort of sine wave, or something more complicated.
Second, the background radiation which is said to be leftover stray photons from the big bang. If the background radiation was a prediction of Big Bang theory, then I might have been convinced by this experimental evidence, but in fact the background radiation was discovered by accident. Only afterwards did the proponents of Big Bang theory retrofit it as a prediction of their model.
Third, the acceleration. The discovery that the expansion was accelerating was a surprise to the scientific community. In particular, it was not predicted by Big Bang theory, even though it seems like the kind of thing which an explanatory model of the expansion of the universe should have predicted right away.
Fourth, the inflation phase. This part was added later on, once it had been observed that Big Bang theory did not fit with the observed homogeneousness of the cosmos. To me, this seems like a desperate and ad hod attempt to fix a broken theory.
Now, it could be that all these changes are a progression of refinements, just like Newtonian physics was adjusted to take into account the effects of relativity, and just like the spherical Earth was adjusted to make it an elliptical Earth. But the adjustments which Big Bang theory has suffered seem like they should change the predictions completely, rather than, as in the other cases, increasing the precision of the existing theory.
I am, of course, open to being convinced otherwise. If Big Bang theory really is true, then I wish to believe it is true.
The key is there at the end of your quote. From the first set of observations (of relatively close galaxies), the simplest behavior that explained the observations was that everything was flying apart fast enough to overcome gravity. This predicted that when they had the technology to look at more distant galaxies, these too should be flying away from us, and at certain rates depending on their distance.
When we actually could observe those more distant galaxies, we did in fact see them red-shifted as predicted. This alone should be enough to put the "sine wave" theory in the epistemic category of "because the Dark Lords of the Matrix like red shifts", because the light left these galaxies at all different times! It would take a vast conspiracy for them all to line up as red-shifted right now, from our perspective.
With strong evidence in hand that the galaxies had been flying apart for billions and billions of years, the scientists then noticed an irregularity: the velocities of those distant galaxies were different from the extrapolation made on the early data! However, they differed in a patterned way, and the simplest way to account for this discrepancy was a variant of Einstein's "cosmological constant" idea.
Additional support for the Big Bang:
Stephen Hawking calculated that there would have been no way for matter to fly towards a point, "miss" colliding with itself, and fly apart in an apparent expansion without a singularity and Big Bang. (This is somewhere in A Brief History of Time, but Google Books won't let me find it.)
We can roughly estimate our galaxy's age by other means (i.e. how much hydrogen has been used up in stars, how much is left). Have you looked into this, to see whether the estimates thus derived are consistent with the estimate of about 10 billion years that the Big Bang theory implies?
Finally, the cosmic background radiation gives us way more than one bit of data; its spectrum is precisely the black-body radiation one expects from a Big Bang.
ETA: Also, this seems like exactly the sort of issue where the "physicist-test" applies, as described above. For example, being critical of QM on common-sense grounds (of course the electron has to go through one slit or the other!) doesn't make for discriminating skepticism, since one should assign high probability to physicists having strong evidence to this effect if they're claiming something weird, or else one should have strong evidence that common sense usually beats the consensus of the physics community. Needless to say, I wouldn't hold my breath on the second claim.
You win. I did not realize that we knew that galaxies have been flying apart for billions and billions of years, as opposed to just right now. If something has been going on for so long, I agree that the simplest explanation is that it has always been going on, and this is precisely the conclusion which I thought popular science books took for granted.
Your other arguments only hammer the nail deeper, of course. But I notice that they have a much smaller impact on my unofficial beliefs, even thought they should have a bigger impact. I mean, the fact that the expansion has been going on for at least a billion years is a weaker evidence for the Big Bang than the fact that it predicts the cosmic background radiation and the age of the universe.
I take this as an opportunity to improve the art of rationality, by suggesting that in the case where an unofficial belief contradicts an official belief, one should attempt to find what originally caused to unofficial belief to settle in. If this original internal argument can be shown to be bogus, the mind should be less reluctant to give up and align with the official belief.
Of course, I'm forced to generalize from the sole example I've noticed so far, so for the time being, please take this suggesting with a grain of salt.
I prefer the meme where you've just won by learning something new; you now know more than most people about the justifications for Big Bang cosmology, in addition to (going meta) the sort of standards for evidence in physics, and (most meta and most importantly) how your own mind works when dealing with counterintuitive claims. I won too, because I had to look up (for the first time) some claims I'd taken for granted in order to respond adequately to your critique.
Good idea! It's especially helpful, I think, that you're writing out your reactions and your analysis of how it feels to update on new evidence. We haven't recorded nearly as much in-the-moment data as we ought on what it's like to change one's mind...
Not true; Alpher & Gamow predicted the radiation, although they were off by a few kelvins.
True, but this lacks parsimony, & the mechanism by which the "sine wave" (or whatever) could be produced is unknown. The universe is expanding now, implying some force behind the expansion. Gravity is attractive only. Celestial objects almost all have net electric charge as close to 0 as makes no odds, so they do not repel each other. The strong nuclear force is always attractive too. You see what I mean? What could possibly cause the outward oscillation, if not extreme density? It's not like when stars come close to each other they suddenly feel a repulsion.
I don't see how you can make sense of this without the Big Bang, except by positing unknown physical forces or something.
Very interesting post though. You seem curious; I'd recommend Jonathan Allday's book "Quarks, Leptons & the Big Bang" on this subject. It's reasonably technical, given that it's not a textbook.
Thanks! I had only heard about the accidental discovery by two Bell employees of an excess measurement which they could not explain, but now that you mention that it was in fact predicted, it's totally reasonable that the Bell employees simply did not know about the scientific prediction at the moment of their measurement. I should have read Wikipedia.
The probability of predicting something as strange as the background radiation given that the theory on which the prediction is based is fundamentally flawed seems rather low. Accordingly, I should update my belief in the Big Bang substantially. But actually updating on evidence is hard, so I don't feel convinced yet, even though I know I should. For this reason, I will read the book you recommended, in the hope that its contents will manage to shift my unofficial beliefs too. Thanks again!
I don't think we can reasonably elevate our estimate of our own rationality by observing that we disagree with the consensus of a respected community.
I am wary of this kind of argument. I should not be able to discredit a theory by the act of collecting all possible evidence and publishing before they have a chance to think things through.
But isn't Eliezer suggesting, in this very post, that we should use uncommon justified beliefs as an indicator that people are actually thinking for themselves as opposed to copying the beliefs of the community? I would assume that the standards we use to judge others should also apply when judging ourselves.
On the other hand, what you're saying sounds reasonable too. After all, crackpots also disagree with the consensus of a respected community.
The point is that there could be many reasons why a person would disagree with a respected community, one of which is that the person is actually being rational and that the community is wrong. Or, as seems to be the case here, that the person is actually being rational but hasn't yet encountered all the evidence which the community has. In any case, given the fact that I'm here, following a website dedicated to the art of rationality, I think that in this case rationality is quite a likely cause for my disagreement.
I agree that if a piece of evidence is published before it is predicted, this is not evidence against the theory, but it does weaken the prediction considerably. Therefore, please don't publish this entire collection of all possible evidence, as it will make it much harder afterwards to distinguish between theories!
"But isn't Eliezer suggesting, in this very post, that we should use uncommon justified beliefs as an indicator that people are actually thinking for themselves as opposed to copying the beliefs of the community? I would assume that the standards we use to judge others should also apply when judging ourselves.
On the other hand, what you're saying sounds reasonable too. After all, crackpots also disagree with the consensus of a respected community."
Eliezer didn't say that we should use "disagreeing with the consensus of a respected community" as an indicator of rationality. He said that we should use disagreeing with the consensus of one's own community as an indicator of rationality.
Another test:
Could smoking during pregnancy have a benefit? Could drinking during pregnancy have a benefit? It's not necessary that someone know what the benefit could be, just acknowledge the nicotine and alcohol are drugs that have complex effects on the body.
As for smoking, it's definitely a bad idea, but it reduces the chances of pre-eclampsia. I don't know of any benefit for alcohol.
OK, now here's one that might be interesting. Is there a gap, or is the date a lie?
This is quite an old "thesis" by Illig originally stemming from a very simple arithmetic misunderstanding. (No: Pope Gregory aligned his calendar to match eastern date as at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, not with the original beginning of the Julian calendar)
There is no need for radiocarbon dating to refute it, since a lot of evidence could easily pinpoint it as a crackpot theory, especially:
Making up an additional 200 years of Roman imperial history, in a way that duped generations of later historians, sounds to me prima facie very unlikely.
Is there ice core data to cover the gap?
EDIT: radiometric dating would present another big problem for this thesis. Still, it's very unfortunate that the dendrochronology data isn't public.
Two more non-trustworthy indicators:
Ask the person in question which of the several ridiculous ideas they reject they find least ridiculous - for example "Which do you think is more likely to be true - astrology, or UFOs?" I've found people trying to signal affiliation have a hard time with this sort of question and will even be flustered by it, saying something along the lines of "They're both stupid" or "Is this some sort of trick to make me sound like I believe a crazy idea?". A rationalist will say something more like "Well, I don't believe either, but UFOs at least make sense with our idea of the universe, whereas astrology is just plain crazytalk" (or ze may refuse to answer on the grounds that you're wasting zir time; it's not a perfect test).
Observe the circumstances in which the person involved brings up the belief. If they just go to atheist forums and say "Man, those religious people sure are stupid," higher probability of signaller. If they actively talk to religious people, try to use atheism as a starting point for building new ideas, and don't bring it up much when it's not relevant, higher probability they believe it for the right reasons.
A sufficiently good rationalist should probably decompose astrology and UFOs into different possible definitions and discuss both priors and the nature of the processes that probably produce the two beliefs.
I wouldn't answer the astrology/UFO question. Extraterrestrials visiting in flying human-vehicle-sized ships from human-visible distances is so horribly anthropomorphic as to make it immeasurably improbable. Both propositions are far less likely than me winning the lottery, and that's the best I can get from my wetware. Anything further is like asking, "Which are you more certain is a European country, France or Spain?"
Also, I'm inclined to avoid questions of this form on principle. It's like Yudkowsky's "blue tentacle" in Technical Explanation: Being able to find outs for a theory that doesn't fit evidence is anti-knowledge, and the more practice you get at it the crazier you become.
Spain is more Middle-Eastern than France and France was on the European front of both World Wars, so France. I can see your point, though.
Proposed litmus test: infanticide.
General cultural norms label this practice as horrific, and most people's gut reactions concur. But a good chunk of rationality is separating emotions from logic. Once you've used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are "just" meat machines, and abortion is an ok if perhaps regrettable practice ... well, scientifically, there just isn't all that much difference between a fetus a couple months before birth, and an infant a couple of months after.
This doesn't argue that infants have zero value, but instead that they should be treated more like property or perhaps like pets (rather than like adult citizens). Don't unnecessarily cause them to suffer, but on the other hand you can choose to euthanize your own, if you wish, with no criminal consequences.
Get one of your friends who claims to be a rationalist. See if they can argue passionately in favor of infanticide.
Yes, I should also be allowed to kill adults. Especially if they have it coming. After all, the infant still has a chance to grow up to make a worthwhile contribution while there are many adults that are clearly a waste of good oxygen or worse!
Infanticide and abortion are okay, as long as doing so increases paperclip production.
However, infanticide and abortion are obviously not alone in that respect.
How do you feel about the destruction of a partially bent piece of steel wire before it has been bent fully into paperclip shape?
Is that some kind of threat???
A key point is that they don't need to advocate the legalization of infanticide, they just need to be able to cogently address the arguments for and against it. Personally, I think that in the US at this time optimal law might restrict abortion significantly more than it currently does and also that in many past cultural contexts efforts to outlaw or seriously deter infanticide would have been harmful. Just disentangling morality from law competently gets a person props.
Despite some jokes I made earlier, things that could arguably be depending on values don't make good litmus tests. Though I did at one point talk to someone who tried to convert me to vegetarianism by saying that if I was willing to say it was okay to eat pork, it ought to be okay to eat month-old infants too, since the pigs were much smarter. I'm pretty sure you can guess where that conversation went...
Option zero: "There's an interesting story I once wrote..."
Option one: "Well then, I won't/don't eat pork. But that doesn't mean I won't eat any animals. I can be selective in which I eat."
Option two: "mmmmm... babies."
Option three: "Why can't I simply not want to eat babies? I can simply prefer to eat pigs and not babies"
Option four: "Seems like a convincing argument to me. Okay, vegetarian now." (after all, technically you said they tried, but you didn't say the failed. ;))
Option five: "actually, I already am one."
Am I missing any (somewhat) plausible branches it could have taken? More to the point, is one of the above the direction it actually went? :)
(My model of you, incidentally, suggests option three as your least likely response and option one as your most likely serious response.)
Well, not quite option two, but yes, "You make a convincing case that it should be legal to eat month-old infants." One person's modus ponens is another's modus tollens...
I'm imagining this conversation while you're both holding menus...
In seriousness, there are good instrumental reasons not to allow people to eat month-old infants that are nothing to do with greatly valuing them in your terminal values.
You started eating month-old infants?
I'd say the primary value of an infant is the future value of an adult human minus the conversion cost. Adult humans can be enormously valuable, but sometimes, the expected benefits just can't match the expected costs, in which case infanticide would be advisable.
However, both costs and benefits can vary by many orders of magnitude depending on context, and there's no reliable, generally-applicable method to predict either. No matter how bad it looks, someone else might have a more optimistic estimate, so it's worth checking the market (that is, considering adoption).
Time of birth serves as a bright line.
Very much agreed. This is also why we place much more moral value in the life of a severely brain-damaged human than a more intelligent non-human primate.
Kudos to you for forthrightness. But em... no. Ok, first, it seems to me you've swept the ethics of infanticide under the rug of abortion, and left it there mostly unaddressed. Is an abortion an "ok if regrettable practice?" You've just assumed the answer is always yes, under any circumstances.
I personally say "definitely yes" before brain development (~12 weeks I think), "you need to talk to your doctor" between 12 and 24 weeks, and "not unless it's going to kill you" after 24 weeks (fully functioning brain). Anybody who knows more about development is welcome to contradict me, but those were the numbers I came up with a few years ago when I researched this.
If a baby/fetus has a mind, in my books it should be accorded rights - more and more so as it develops. I fail to see, moreover, where the dividing line ought to be in your view. Not to slippery-slope you but - why stop at infants?
*(Also note that this is a first-principles ethical argument which may have to be modified based on social expedience if it turns into policy. I don't want to encourage botched amateur abortions and cause extra harm. But those considerations are separate from the question of whether infants have worth in a moral sense.)
This gave me a nasty turn, because probably the most annoying idea religious people have is that if we're "just" chemicals, then nothing matters. One has to take pains to say that chemicals are just what we're made of. We have to be made out of something! :) And what we're made of has precisely zero moral significance (would we have more worth if we were made out of "spirit"?).
I mean, I could sit here all day and tell you about how you shouldn't read "Moby Dick," because it's just a bunch of meaningless pigment squiggles on compressed wood pulp. In a certain very trivial sense I am absolutely right - there is no "élan de Moby Dick" floating out in the aether somewhere independent of physical books. On the other hand I am totally missing the point.
Sidetrack:
When one chooses subjective experience of pain and pleasure as one basic necessity for the privilege of taken into account when deciding moral matters, and if one assumes that this privilege is only gradually applicable (i.e. the pain/pleasure experience of a dog is less vivid than that of a human, etc.), than the immediate right/wrongfulness of an action like abortion/infanticide with regard to the fetus/baby should correlate to similar decisions on pets.
simplicio:
But, if, as I think, we also have a common ground by preferring consequentialist ethics, which also more or less leads to resolve "omission vs. act" as both being similary morally active, then one has to take into account that an abortion or infanticide will make it impossible for this person to develop, whereas a dog will never by itself, however long you wait, suddenly develop the vivid subjective experience of a human.
And then you have to take into account that consequentialism demands to take more factors into account, like the increase of bad-practice abortions and increased mental stress for many people.
DonGeddis:
However, if you do take those matters into account, then the conclusion is not "bad, but OK because of some reasons we do not like", but simply "OK". Or not. Whatever conclusion you may come. And yes, it would probably a case-by-case decision. Extremely complicated, and given the nature of human thought probably more open to manipulation than one would like.
Then, when we have failed to simplify the method to determine the consequences, we fall back to a "practical simplification", and here a common line of thinking is: Well, there may not be a sharp line between a fetus and a newborn, but we have exactly one criterium we can count on (birth), and it is sufficiently similar to the "real thing" one can use this metric without having too much of a problem. And yes, it works, in practice, not too bad (when compared with other legislations).
The standard answer is that at that point there is no longer a conflict with the rights of the women whose body the infant was hooked into. We don't generally require that people give up their bodily autonomy to support the life of others.
The complication here is that a responsible, consenting adult tacitly accepts giving up her bodily autonomy (or accepts a risk of doing so) when she has sex. That's precisely the same reason men are required to pay child support even if they didn't wish for a pregnancy. (Yes, I see the asymmetry; yes, it sucks).
Case-by-case reasoning is probably a good thing in these circs, but unless the mother was not informed (minor/mental illness) or did not consent, then the only really tenable reason for a late-term abortion I can think of is health. In which case the relative weighing of rights is a tricky business, a buck I will pass to doctors, patients & hospital ethics boards.
Sorry, you have a point that my test won't apply to every rationalist.
The contrast I meant was: if you look at the world population, and ask how many people believe in atheism, materialism, and that abortion is not morally wrong, you'll find a significant minority. (Perhaps you yourself are not in that group.)
But if you then try to add "believes that infanticide is not morally wrong", your subpopulation will drop to basically zero.
But, rationally, the gap between the first three beliefs, and the last one, is relatively small. Purely on the basis of rationality, you ought to expect a smaller dropoff than we in fact see. Hence, most people in the first group are avoiding the repugnant conclusion for non-rational reasons. (Or believing in the first three, for non-rational reasons.)
If you personally don't agree with the first three premises, then perhaps this test isn't accurate for you.
Well, my comment from http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1sek would probably be better here. I still dispute that argument, as I think this drop-off is justified, even for rationalists.
Basically, this is a variant on the argument from marginal cases; infants don't differ from relatively intelligent nonhuman animals in capabilities, so they ought to have the same moral status. If it's okay to euthanize your dog, it should also be okay to euthanize your newborn.
(The most common use of the argument from marginal cases is to argue that animals deserve greater moral consideration, and not that some humans deserve less, but one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.)
Professor Mordin Solus solves marginal cases by refusing to experiment on any species with at least one member capable of Calculus, which is a bit different from criticism, "argument from species normality."
Any species with at least one member who has demonstrated to humans the capability of Calculus.
Cerca 1792 after Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Women a philosopher name Thomas Taylor published a reductio ad absurdum/ parody entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes which basically took Wollstonecrafts arguments for more gender equality and replaced women with animals. It reads more or less like an animal rights pamphlet written by Peter Singer.
Your parenthetical comment is the funniest thing I've read all day! The contrast with the seriousness of subject matter is exquisite. (You're of course right about the marginal cases thing too.)
I like this test, with the following cautions:
The regrettability of abortion is connected to the availability of birth control, and so similarly, the regrettability of infanticide should be connected to the availability of abortion. A key difference is that while birth control may fail, abortion basically doesn't. I can think of a handful of reasons for infanticide to make sense when abortion didn't, and they're all related to things like unexpected infant disability the parents aren't prepared to handle, or sudden, badly timed, unanticipated financial/family stability disasters.
In either case, given that the baby doesn't necessarily occupy privileged uterine real estate the way a fetus must, I think it makes sense to push adoption as strongly preferred recourse before infanticide reaches the top of the list. Unlike asking a woman who wants an abortion to have the baby and give it up for adoption, this imposes no additional cost on her relative to the alternative.
Additionally, I think any but the most strongly controlled permission for infanticide would lead to cases where one parent killed their baby over the desire of the other parent to keep it. It seems obvious to me that either parent's wish that the baby live - assuming they're willing to raise it or give it up for adoption, and don't just vaguely prefer that it continue being alive while the wants-it-dead parent deal with its actual care - should be a sufficient condition that it live. I might even extend this to other relatives.
I'll be the first to disagree outright.
First, when a woman is pregnant but will be unable to raise her child we do not force a woman to give birth to give up the baby for adoption. This is because bringing a child to term is a painful, expensive and dangerous nine-month ordeal which we do not think women should be forced into. In what possible circumstances is infanticide ethically permissible when the baby is born, the woman has already paid the cost of pregnancy and giving birth, and adoption is an option?
In general, I'm not sure it follows from the fact that persons aren't magic that persons are less valuable than we thought. Maybe babies are just glorified goldfish. Maybe they aren't valuable in the way we thought they were. But I haven't seen that evidence.
Voted up, but I think abortion shouldn't be legal once the fetus is old enough to have brain activity other than for medical reasons (life of the mother), and I'm an unrepentant speciesist.
My mother made this argument to me probably when I was in high school. Given my position as past infanticide candidate, it was an odd conversation. For the record, she was willing to go up to two or six years old, I think.
And let us not forget the Scrubs episode she also agreed with: "Having a baby is like getting a dog that slowly learns to talk."
Hey, now you know you were kept around because you were actually wanted, not out of a dull sense of obligation. It's like having a biological parent who is totally okay with giving up children for adoption - and stuck around!
That's an interesting take. She clearly loves me and my siblings and has never hurt anyone to the best of my knowledge, besides. So, it wasn't an uncomfortable topic--only a bit of an odd position to be in.
Although, I also have to point out adoption does not carry the death penalty, so I can imagine a situation in which my hypothetical parent opts not to kill me because they think the fuzz will catch them.
Sounds like it would be interesting to have your mother make some comments on LW, if you think she would be interested.
That's very unlikely, I think. She's not interested in rationalism.
I have said before "I'm a moderate on abortion -- I feel it should be okay up to the fifth trimester." While this does shock people into adjusting what boundaries might be considered acceptable, I no longer think it is something useful to say in most fora. Too much chance of offending people and just causing their brains to shut off.
Aren't abortions unnecessarily painful? This is as strong an argument pro-life as pro-infanticide.
I agree there a continuum between conception and being, say, 2 years old that is only superficially punctuated by the date of birth. Yet our cultural norms are not so inconsistent...
For example, many of these same people would find it horrific to kill a late-stage fetus. And they might still find it horrific to murder a younger fetus, but nevertheless respect the mother's choice in the matter.
If I agreed with this logic, should I be reluctant to admit it here?
Did anyone read this post and worry whether they're one of the poseurs and not one of the true-blooded rationalists?
I could believe I'm a poseur with respect to this group, i.e. adopting the opinions of the average Less Wrong reader without doing much thinking myself. But this might be rational in the case of issues where the average Less Wrong reader has done more thinking than me, right?
Maybe we should have a thread where we all do this? Heh, what a cult initiation ceremony that would be: loudly proclaim to the cult what they're wrong about.
Of course, once you pick a test you have to keep it secret - a well known test will be memorized as a shibboleth.
On reflection, polyamory really is just wrong. Count me as a skeptic on this unnatural alliance.
(Yes, yes, I can hear the comebacks already: "Playing with the use-mention distinction" isn't "everything in life, you know".)
C'mon - there's much worse than that. "Ombudsperson", for one.
Homosexuality is also wrong, as are many other things...
Geh - It's the new "pun".
Really? Do you have the same problem with "television"? What about zoological binomial nomenclature?
I can see that it would be useful to have a fast filter for rationality, but how possible is it?
There are some opinions which are irrational (frex, there doesn't seem to be any solid arguments for the idea that homosexuality is bad, and if it can't be eliminated, it should at least be kept out of public view), but that's not the same thing as having a positive test for rationality.
There comes a point when there's no substitute for actual knowledge, and in this case, it means looking at people's thinking rather than their opinions.
I suggest asking people what they've changed their mind about, and why. The opinion change could be tribal, too, but at least it's not a completely static view of the other person's mind.
One other test-- does the person judge the things they like by the most attractive examples, and the things they dislike by the least attractive examples? This test is faster than asking questions.
ISTM that we could summarize Eliezer's post, conclusions, subsequent discussion, and much previous LW material thus: "there are no reliable epistemic shortcuts".
I was wondering if there was a top level post explicitly about the need to have tools for checking the territory now and then because your map is necessarily incomplete.
The messy thing is that you need to have tools and habits for being able to notice it when reality is tugging on your sleeve or bashing you about the head and trying to find out what important thing you've missed -- but if you formalize that procedure, you're in a map again.
I think we've achieved a new record for "most distinct subthreads that would be flamewars anywhere else on the Internet, but somehow aren't yet".
The previous recordholder, I'm pretty sure, is also on Less Wrong.
A partial list to compare to future record breaking attempts: Global Warming, Meredith Kercher's murder, atheism, gun control, race and IQ, Pick-up artists, cryonics, Scandinavian social welfare, nuclear deterence, sweatshops, industry bailouts, immigration, UFOs, homosexuality, polyamory, bisexuality, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, rape, 2 girls 1 cup, sex change, generalizations about promiscuity, straight men like lesbians, masochism, incest, people getting off to cartoons, people getting off to cartoons of pre-teen girls, 9/11 was an inside job, and Communism.
We should try gun control some time...
Don't forget the biggest of them all: "questioning our raison d'etre"; i.e. we debated the value of rationality, whilst remaining civil and keeping the discussion meaningful. For comparison, imagine suggesting that "tennis isn't all that great" on a tennis forum.
That is so true. & that is why I bloody love this site.
Still, I think to get the perfect compendium, somebody ought to mention fascism.
Fascism was never a well-defined political philosophy, as far as I can tell. It seems that, today, it seems to be a synonym for "non-Communist government I don't like".
I'd say it became increasingly less well-defined after it's creation.
There's an additional issue of subtlety that isn't addressed here. People will typically reveal "improper" views by starting small and seeing if their audience is sympathetic, not because they are irrational, but because they aren't stupid and they care about consequences.
That is, if I'm in some highly religious town, I'm not going to open my conversation with, "So, this whole God thing makes about as much sense as Santa Claus, am I right?" I'm going to open with, "You know, there's something about the story of Job that just doesn't sit right with me," or something else small, safe, and exploratory.
Agreed. There's another reason why people might give religion the "respect" of treating it worthy of debate, while not doing so with astrology. One might feel that religious people are taking their agendas into politics and school classrooms to the detriment of society in a way that astrologists are not, and might therefore give religionists the respect necessary to engage them in debate and hopefully change their minds.
Another good indicator (as djbc said) is the level of certitude : if someone expresses more certitude on a complex topic like gun control than on a slamdunk like God - then I won't trust their confidence much.
Does that mean only hardcore atheists are worth listening to? Maybe, but some claims about religion are not that obvious - for example, is religion good or bad for society in terms of enforcing moral behaviour, facilitating cooperation, raising children, etc. ? I don't consider that question a slamdunk.
Another red flag for me is "clannish" language, presenting issues in terms of "group A vs group B" ("this is a victory for us", "hah, that shows them", etc.). It's a sign that the wrong part of the brain is being used.
I wonder what you mean by "hardcore atheists"?
I'm guessing you don't mean hardcore as in "signaling group membership loudly", and Eliezer already argued the point that atheism is no longer a valid synonym for reliable, rational thought.
I'm not quite sure myself :D
I mostly meant "as opposed to agnostic" ("strong atheist" would be a better word then), but wanted to point out (as Eliezer had indeed already done) that extreme commitment (for example, blaming religion for all evils) was not necessarily a good signal.
I get it now, thank you.
You would expect rational thought to lead to a higher level of commitment on decisions about religion than gun control, but higher level of commitment on the topics is not a good signal for rational thought.
I think "hardcore atheist" generally means, "atheist who actively and loudly antagonizes religion." That is not consistent with the poster's usage, but I don't think any adjective would be - the point is that people who are not atheists may be worth listening to, not that some "not-hardcore" atheists are also worth listening to in addition to the hardcore atheists.
Democracy is my litmus test.
Do you mean being willing to consider the possibility that some other form of government might be better at pursuing the interests of a society as a whole?
People also value democracy simply for being democratic, so saying that democracy is best is to some extent just stating your values.
Yeah, but even just in people's reaction to the topic. I try to avoid framing the issue and just feel people out. For example I would take someone responding to the subject like you did to be a very positive sign. Someone immediately jumping to the possibility of alternatives followed by a reasoning on how normative statements work is not exactly a common reaction.
Poincare said: “To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”
This is clearly a good way to do skepticism, if you're going to do it. However, I wonder, at my blog (http://aretae.blogspot.com/2010/03/cognitive-antivirus.html), whether skepticism is generally wise at all, and whether religion is a much more useful and effective cognitive antivirus system (especially for the only normally intelligent) than anyone else here seems to give it credit for.
That is at least plausible, and it is certainly better in a sense to have one piecewise-sane dogma than to be swept away in a deluge of weird and wacky truth claims about crystals and auras. But problems will arise, in god's good time. The stem cell "controversy" for example is the result of a prima facie pretty innocuous doctrine that life begins at conception. How many more harmless little bits of scripture are waiting in the wings to impede us? Are they not pathogenic as well?
Nonetheless I think you have a point that it's pretty hard to imagine a majority of people adopting the skeptical procedure used here. I think our best hope is actually to press for the private-ization of spirituality: it's "true for you" and "metaphorical." But that will involve a lot of training our gag reflex.
Let's suppose that cryonically preserved human brains are found to be especially useful for the treatment of several terrible diseases, because of some quirk of the vitrification process. Should we haul out cryonically suspended people and use them for medicine?
I think this is pretty disanalogous. We're basically talking about killing people who are unconscious in the cryonics case, versus harvesting non-to-semi-differentiated cells in the other.
Let me clarify that although ''life" is a good, quick word, it doesn't really capture what we value morally, which is mind or consciousness. That's why we don't cry when our appendix is taken out, and why we remove people from ventilators when they're braindead, even though they are "still alive" in the sense of breathing and having a pulse. A frozen brain is a conscious entity that's temporarily unconscious. The stem cells never were in the first place.
You have to choose if you value actual fellow humans, or just fetishize that blip on a monitor.
You basically answered my question when you said
But I'm going to pick at you one more time and then shut up. Both an embryo and a cryonically suspended person are presently unconcious. If what you value is past conciousness, then there's no problem, you're consistent. If you value potential (or long-future) conciousness, there might be a problem. I'm guessing that you value short-future conciousness - a suspended person (or a sleeping person) can in principle be concious in five minutes, while an embryo cannot.
The next stage of the argument asks about infants and animals and so on, but I said I'd shut up.
I think there is a more salient difference, which is that it's not the embryo that will be conscious in ~20 weeks, whereas it is the brain.
By all means continue, I always enjoy parsing these things. My friends are so sick of hearing about trolley cases they'd throw themselves on the tracks.
I don't understand this. What specifically is the important difference between embryo (now) and non-embryo (in 20 weeks)? Conciousness? Memories? Physical structure? How is it that they are different things, while brain (now) and brain (future) are the same thing?
Consciousness. Basically, I want to know if there is a reflective "experiencer" there to care about. If not, I don't give the thing moral standing.
Your cryonically frozen brain presents an odd situation, because the experiencer is sort of "paused." But I think it's still clear that in killing that brain you're ending somebody's (conscious) life prematurely.
I like this discussion for its own sake, but I am curious: do you disagree with something I've said? Or are we just monkeying with scenarios for the sheer hell of it? (Not that that is in any way a bad thing - they are lots of fun.)
If I understand you correctly, you are arguing that the suspended brain is concious (just "paused", as you say). So there is some property of a system that we can call "concious" even if it's asleep, suspended, etc., and that embryos (before 20 weeks or so) lack this property.
If this a fair statement, I don't have anything more to say. The infants, animals etc. stuff is being covered in the "infanticide" sub-thread on this page.
Mostly we're monkeying with scenarios for the fun of it. I have somewhat less certainty than you about embryonic stem cell research - I estimate some chance that it is morally problematic.
To maintain consistency in my views on the definition of humanity, I've recently begun arguing that children should not be considered human until around the age of 5. It tends to elicit a laugh and some interesting discussions thereafter, as I present it semi-seriously.
For the cryonics vs. embryo comparison, it would likely be down to the desires of the people involved and the future costs. A suspended consciousness has the potential for many more people who care about it directly as opposed to a hypothetical consciousness which has yet to influence anyone outside its parents, and is typically cared about in the abstract. The cost of reviving a cryonically frozen consciousness is currently unpayable, so it can't really be compared with the cost of generating a whole human from scratch (natural birth).
For the ability to do a real world comparison, I would use the cost of birthing consciousness against the cost of bringing someone back from general anesthesia, which is very close to, and perhaps exactly, suspended consciousness. In that comparison, reviving the anesthetized patient has significantly lower costs and has many more people directly preferring it to occur.
This model also applies different values to different levels of consciousness and amount of experience contained within the mind due to the costs involved in obtaining and verifying it.
I'm intrigued. What specific inconsistency drives you to this? I'm imagining you put a high value on something in order to publicly (even if jokingly) say such a thing, and I'm wondering what that something is.
I would say that we should conduct trials on equivalent use of vitrified pig or chimpanzee brains before proceeding, or maybe a nonfunctional mockup of a human brain based on organ-printing techniques. I mean, if somebody discovered that it was possible to get high by snorting powdered high-density hard disks, I'd recommend grinding up blanks rather than the last copy of some valuable data.
Good point, but probably not the Least Convenient Possible World.
If it turns out that pig and chimp brains don't have the same effect, that would be less convenient, yes. I still wouldn't regret having run the trials.
In such a case, the next step would be to run tests on volunteers (that is, suicides) or people sentenced to be executed. If it turns out that criminals and those who wanted to die are also unsuitable, I'll allow people with those horrible diseases to sign up for treatment on the condition that, if it doesn't work, they get their brains vitrified and used to treat the next generation of patients, as a stopgap measure until strictly synthetic treatments becomes available.
The real world is not maximally inconvenient. Training your mind to respond to binary decisions by ruling out any options not explicitly presented is a deliberate subversion of the drive to cheat, which might, in the long term, compromise your ability to win.
More generally, if I were put in some sadistic moral dilemma (say, choosing between rescuing my love-interest or my sidekick) where either option is repugnant but inaction is somehow worse than both of them put together, I've got no reason to believe I'd have either enough knowledge of the consequences or enough time for my moral calculus to run in full. Under those circumstances, I would flip the fairest coin I had handy and decide between the two least-repugnant options on that basis, then try not to get backed into such situations in the future.
That is actually a really good point. Getting in the habit of "accepting the problem as stated" could be a very bad thing.
However, this scenario was contrived right from the beginning. A magical cure from eating frozen brains? Unlikely. It was a question about where to draw the line on the ethical worth of living things, that was illustrated with a little story.
Not necessarily. I've heard it seriously suggested that societies sufficiently advanced to safely revive cryopreserved people might find ... more interesting things to do with them. "Spare parts" is one of the possibilities.
In matters not related to Catholic dogma, the Catholic Church is (or at least used to be) a consistently skeptical organization.
Speaking as someone that has been going to a therapist off and on for the past three years I have come to be pretty skeptical of the idea. Pretty much all the progress I have made in coping with and solving my problems has been on my own. I currently see one mainly because it is required of me by my college and because of the entertainment value of talking about myself for an hour or so.
Therapy has worked well for me, but usually as a more effective means of rubber ducking, i.e. getting to discuss out loud problems that I'd been ruminating unproductively on. This often makes it clear which parts of my internal monologue actually make sense, and which parts might be covering up for my real priorities. A good therapist can help in other aspects, but I'd say most of the benefit just comes from this phenomenon.
The main reason therapy works for this and talking with friends doesn't is that I'm much more likely to filter my thoughts when talking to a friend, lest it come back to hurt me socially.
(Take this all with a grain of YMMV; I'm not contradicting your experience.)
For the same reason, it helps a lot to honestly write up one's understanding of one's ideas where no one is supposed to see them.
Yup, private journaling helps too; but having a listener is still better.
I think it's also important to mention that not having a (strong) opinion on something may be the best (rational) thing to do, when things are not so clear.
For many things (say, the AGW controversy) it's not so clear-cut as to where to find the 'truth' (I do happen to find it more likely that there is a thing called AGW and that it really could lead to great problems... but to what extent? Hard to say). Saying that you don't know may sometimes be the best answer.
Now all we need is a test to separate 'I don't know' from ignorance to 'I don't know' because your epistemic error margins are too big...
(btw, I found this an excellent article)
I'll bite the bullet and say global warming is the perfect example here. It's pretty clear to me that many people hold their positions on this issue - pro and contra - for political/social reasons rather than evidential ones.
Unfortunately that often seems to be the case when there are vested interests in the answer going one way or the other.
The impact of genetics on behaviour is another example. Most of the educated people I know are ultra-behaviorists, so if I see somebody argue that genes matter (but aren't everything), they definitely get brownie points. Especially since such a view tends to be seen as vaguely quasi-racist.
The problem with asking race related questions is that there's a much stronger social pressure to shut up if you believe something that comes off as racist.
If you support cryonics, the worst that happens is that you come off as having strange beliefs. Take most any factual claim about race and you're an asshole for even thinking about it.
Of course, once the person is confident that you won't attack them for holding politically incorrect views, you can start to get some information flow, but that takes time to develop comfort. That's actually my litmus test for how comfortable someone is with me- whether they'll actually say something that is really unPC.
I'm at a loss as to what to do about that, because I do get where that pressure is coming from. In presenting such data, you can hedge and qualify all you want, but what many people are going to hear is just a lot of wonderful reasons why their prejudices were right all along, and how science proved it. What can anybody do? A remedial course in ethics ("moral equality does not require literal sameness")?
Sometimes I do think discussions of race and gender-related fact questions are best not done "in front of the goyim." It's a vexing question.
There's an additional problem-- there's a social circle where the consensus is that believing in race and gender differences in ability is proof of rationality, so if you're trying to do a counter-tribe rationality check, you'd need to know which tribe has a stronger influence on a person.
If Africa has the most genetic variation for humans, does that imply it's likely that the smartest human subgroup is likely to be African?
"I'll bite the bullet and say global warming is the perfect example here. It's pretty clear to me that many people hold their positions on this issue - pro and contra - for political/social reasons rather than evidential ones."
I used to think that global warming was a poor example of this because while the right wing has plenty of reasons to oppose actions to fight global warming, and thus irrational reasons to force themselves to believe that global warming does not exist, the left wing does not have any reasons to support actions to fight global warming aside from evidence that global warming is a threat. Then it occurred to me that many people on the left actually do have alternate motives for pushing anti-global warming actions: other people on the left support it too (see Eliezer's The Sky is Green/Blue parable, and this article too, I suppose). This is even more irrational, but due to the stunning level of irrationality among humans on all sides of the political spectrum, is probably a factor for some.
Fighting global warming can be used to justify the creation of 'green' jobs, in a new spin on the old keynesian make work ideas.
Alternatively, it can be used to provide justification for 'green protectionism'.
However, someone who believes that global warming is a threat, and who has a poor grasp of ethics, has a motive to exaggerate the evidence, to compensate for others having too strict evidential standards or not doing cost-benefit analysis correctly.
Also, the image of oneself as on the vanguard of saving the world is a strong motivation to believe the world is endangered (overlapping with but distinct from group identity).
(Disclaimer: I don't think this is most of what's going on with AGW believers. Not having studied the issue, I default (albeit tentatively) to believing the scientific consensus.)
It's absolutely a factor. People are crazy, the world is mad, you shouldn't be surprised by this or hesitant in calling it as you see it.
The story conservatives usually tell here is that the left wants to fight global warming as a way to further their economic agenda and narrative: corporations are bad and the government needs to stop them and control them. You see slogans like "Green is the new red".
Bingo. The Michael Moore-style crowd is engaged in nothing less than an immense progressive circle-jerk, if you'll excuse my Klatchian. It's too bad we can't just throw them at the Limbaughistas and liberate gamma rays.
I'm pretty sure you're misusing the word "behaviorist".
On reflection, you're right. It's a pars pro toto thing I guess, since behaviourism is associated with the idea that personality comes from the environment alone.
"Nurturist" is probably a better term.
I agree. Anyway, it's easy to talk about the God test now because you won't get burned at the stake or anything.
One modern equivalent to the God test is whether the person believes that genetics play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference. This has become an area where stating the (obvious) and rational truth will get you in a lot of social/career trouble.
Heck, it might even get you downvoted on Lesswrong :)
There's something I want to say here that I think is really important to be said, but I'm having trouble finding the words. Please paraphrase and augment my message in a more coherent direction, if you can figure out how to, but what I want to say is along these lines:
I think it is really important that we bring up the fact that the statement we're arguing about is fundamentally racist and treating this question as just a question of fact lends way too much respectability to the question. I mean, who cares if one genetic group has a higher average IQ than another genetic group? It's NOT like discussing the third digit of pi, and not just because it's more complex.
I'm afraid we're offending minority groups reading this site and I feel acutely embarrassed by the possibility that we'll bring the subject up, dabble in it, and then won't argue carefully enough or fully enough because we don't have the resources, subtlety or interest. People will come here and think that Less Wrong doesn't really care. I realize that people in these threads are providing arguments, but they seem too calm and impartial, given the issues involved.
You mean not appearing to have been mind-killed is a bad thing?
Welcome to the world. Sanity is not always valued so highly here as you might be used to.
Don't confuse preference with prediction.
Where else have I been where sanity is valued more highly and how do I get back to it?
I see my joke fell flat.
In the world at large, sanity is valued much less than it is here at lesswrong. Absurd as it sounds, many people would value righteous indignation above rational debate, or even above positive results.
See the recent discussion on jokes with Rain. The joke implication missed.
I almost wish that did sound absurd.
Consider the point Brazil was making in the context, by making the claim more realistically comparable now to making the "no God" claim some time ago.
I would expect similar social pressure for the God question historically (in a god-denying but PC heavy context). It seems to me that the comparison is an accurate one.
I agree, byrnema. Speaking that way is status lowering.
It makes people feel bad. So it's no surprise site stumbler (from certain groups) are bound to sprint. But that wouldn't prove they couldn't talk controversials.
Side note: I have a mixed background.
For purposes of this discussion, the reason I care is that the racial IQ gap is the big taboo of our age just as the existence of God was the big taboo at some point in the past (and still is to a certain extent).
The real test for whether or not somebody is a "cheap credit" skeptic will necessarily involve inflammatory issues, it seems to me.
Wow, yeah. This suggests another Umeshism to me:
If you haven't horrified or offended anyone you care about, you're not a genuine skeptic.
(It goes without saying that the inverse of this statement is false.)
Talk to the experts in psychometrics, and they'll tell you that this is still an open question. It was a plurality (not majority or consensus) view in psychometrics that there was some genetic influence (beyond the obvious, e.g. black skin attracting discrimination, etc) back in 1984, but since then there has been other work that changes the picture, e.g. that of James Flynn, Will Dickens, and Richard Nisbett. It's unclear what a poll done today would reveal.
The experiments that would give huge likelihood ratios just haven't been done. Transracial adoption studies have been very few, flawed in design, and delivered conflicting results. And so far, genomics has revealed almost nothing positive about the genetic architecture of intelligence in any ethnicity, much less differences between ethnicities. Cheap genome sequencing may well bring answers there in the next 5-7 years, pinning down this debate with utterly overwhelming evidence, but it hasn't done so yet.
Can you make an effort to state in more detailed terms what it would mean to find that "genetics play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference", in other words what precise predictions this theory makes? (And more precisely, what predictions it makes that distinguish it from the predictions of alternative theories, such as "environmental differences resulting from e.g. discrimination play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference".)
Obvious truth? Maybe it is given all available information — I don't know — but certainly not given the information most people have. (And "rational truth" is just a positive-affect type error.)
I would agree, if "believes" were replaced by "is willing to entertain the hypothesis" or "doesn't think one must be a racist to believe".
What makes you think this is obvious? While racial IQ differences certainly aren't ruled out a priori (Ashkenazi Jews are the quintessential example), Occamian reasoning about the black/white divide doesn't indicate that genetics is part of the best and most parsimonious explanation. There are adequate other factors at work - you can pick up a lot of data from studies on things like stereotype threat, for instance. And the fact that biracial children do better on IQ when the mother is the white parent than when the mother is black seems strong evidence to me that genetics are not the whole story, if they play any part at all.
What sort of human variable doesn't correlate with race? Are any of weight, height, blood pressure, athletic ability, or any other more measurable characteristic uncorrelated? How about if we measure these at birth, to work around environmental effects?
Athletic ability at birth isn't really all that variable. Besides, "at birth" doesn't eliminate in utero environmental effects.
Correlation with race does not mean genetic causation. Having 100% recent African ancestry correlates highly with living in Africa.
It is not evidence for that at all; an alternative explanation for the difference is that a child's intelligence depends to a significant degree on the prenatal environment, which is determined by the mother's genetics exclusively. I predict that the extra degree of correlation between a mother's and child's intelligence over the correlation between a father's and child's intelligence will be very close to equal to the degree of correlation between a genetically unrelated surrogate mother and child's intelligence.
I don't know about exclusively.
As the mother is usually the more involved parent when it comes to raising the child, mother-based differences strongly suggest nurture-based differences, unless of course there is some specific and identifiable pathway by which the mother's genetic composition could play an outsized role. I'm not aware of any evidence that the prenatal environment provided by black women is systematically different from that of white women for any genetic reason. Though, in your defense, you were decent enough to make a falsifiable prediction based on this.
It may not be proof, but it's certainly evidence.
Err, what? Smoking? Just to name the most obvious counter example.
Mitochondrial DNA would also be a possibility ("white" mitochondria being optimized for neurons, "black" mitochondria for muscle cells, say), but environmental factors seems by far the most obvious explanation.
Anyone know if there is a racial IQ gap between blacks and whites in the UK?
I like that qualification. It's hard to make these calls out of the group context.
It isn't topical anymore but a couple years ago getting an American liberal's take on the Dubai Ports World controversy worked pretty well. Also, progressive criticisms of the Bush administration for not implementing more aggressive cargo inspections and airplane security were pretty much just about getting in shots at the administration and not based on evidence.
Last year's debates on bailouts for the automobile and banking sectors struck me as mostly consisting of political signaling with only a handful of people who actually had any idea what they were talking about. You'd see people arguing either side without actually making any reference to any of the economics involved. I.e. "We need to make sure these people don't lose their jobs!" versus "You're just trying to help out your fat cat friends!".
Getting someone on the center-left to admit certain advantages of free trade and market economies probably works as well. The brute opposition to "sweatshops" without offering any constructive policy to provide the people who work in such places with alternatives strikes me as another good example.
It's a little harder for me to do this for the American right-wing since a sizeable portion (definitely not all of it, just an especially vocal part) of it appears to hold their positions for exclusively non-evidential reasons. Some of these reasons don't event appear to have propositional content. (Maybe conservatives see the left this way, though. It might just be that I'm too far away from the right-wing to see this clearly).
A conservative's position on industry subsides- agriculture, textile, sugar etc. is a probably a decent indicator, though. I'd say immigration but the people who oppose it might have good reasons given their terminal values.
A lot of times you can tell when someone holds a position for political reasons just by their diction. It is a really bad sign If someone is using the same phrases and buzzwords as the candidates they support. This reminds me: A little over a year ago the college Democrats here held a debate for the Democratic Presidential Primary. Each candidate was represented by a student who was supporting that candidate. I thought it had potential since being unofficial representatives the students would be comfortable leveling some harsh criticisms and really diving into their reasons for supporting their candidate. The actual candidates are always too afraid of screwing up or alienating someone to diverge from their talking points. What actually happened isn't surprising once you think about the kind of people who are heavily involved in the college branches of political parties (especially at my university). If you haven't guessed it, what happened was this: Every student representative sat on the stage reciting the very same talking points their candidate was already using to dodge criticisms and spin issues in the real debates. It was like a horrifying training session where students learn to ignore evidence, reason in favor of political hackery and bullshit.
I can't quite summon up all the splenetic juices I need to hate that sort of thing the way it needs to be hated. I live in Canada, and crikey are our politicians langues-du-bois. You should have seen the candidates debate at the last election. Every one of them just hit their keywords, as I recall. The Conservative Harper tinkled the ivories about "tough on crime," "fiscal responsibility" and "liberal corruption" (mercifully not "family values"). The Liberal Dion played a crab canon about "environment" and "recession." And the NDP (Social-Democratic) Layton just did a sort of Ambrosian chant incorporating every word that has ever made a progressive feel warm and fuzzy inside: "rights" "working families" "aboriginals" "choice" "fat cats" and "social spending." It made me want to elect Silvio Berlusconi.
I did not understand any of this post, but I enjoyed all of it.
ETA: I am now envisioning a Canadian man just chanting those phrases, over and over, clapping his hands and stomping his feet.
I endeavour to give satisfaction. =)
Anything I can clarify? Probably did overdo the classical music metaphors a little...
Mostly I just didn't recognize any of the names, but I did recognize what you were talking about. I don't think clarification is what is really necessary here; since the purpose of your post seems to be more anecdotal evidence and venting than a fountain of new ideas.
If your post WAS supposed to be a fountain of new ideas, then it could use a little extra explanation.
I feel like that came off as a little more negative than I wanted it to so I'd like to note that I did enjoy and vote up your post.
Looking over your comments, the breadth of your vocabulary really is splendid. Do words like "splenetic" just come to your tongue or are you commenting away with a thesaurus open?
Heh, it's kind of you to say. Basically, I grew up on a steady diet of shows like Black Adder, Jeeves and Wooster, Fawlty Towers... and authors like Douglas Adams, Rex Stout & Terry Pratchett. So my way of expressing myself has become more than a bit idiosyncratic.
Do you Canadians use liberal like we Americans use it or like Europeans use it?
Very true. When I was fourteen years old, there were presidential elections after Mitterand's two terms (Did I tell you I was French? I'm French.). I remember a friend saying we needed change "after fourteen years of socialism", and at the time I thought there was no way that was his opinion, and that he was merely repeating what (most likely) his father said.
I guess it's even easier to recognize talking points in kids, because it's things they would never spontaneously say. I also remember my mom pointing out that a "letter to the editor" in a Children's newspaper was probably just the kid parroting a parent, because no child would write things like that - and I was mildly embarrassed because I hadn't noticed at first. Hmm, I'll have to point that kind of stuff to my kids too.
Is the causation really that clear?
The phrasing might be better in a different direction:
"...getting them to admit that Scandinavia is not doing something inherently wrong with it's high tax system, given that they have relatively high happiness and quality of life."
(in that right-wing conservatives state that high taxes inherently will cause reduction of standard of living/happiness)
Now this I would not have thought of. Nuclear energy perhaps...
Do you think the nuclear deterrent should be renewed or should not, & why is it a litmus test?
Whether or not the nuclear deterrent should in fact be renewed, inability to see the point of (as opposed to mere considered disagreement with) "if you want peace, prepare for war" seems like valid proof of political derangement.
Oh, I see! You mean that a deranged liberal is likely to say "nuclear armament cannot possibly be a solution for anything in principle?" Yeah, that makes sense.
Come to think of it, the fear of anything nuclear, period, is probably a good predictor of irrationality on the left, as is a knee-jerk negative response to, i.a., GE crops.
Simple ignorance can confuse the issue; the real indicator is how they deal with argument (assuming you really know your stuff and can present a compelling argument).
In reality you can make the bar even lower. Just ask the right wingers if they're even aware of an empirical study comparing the relative happiness of Scandinavians to others.
The overwhelming evidence for it being...?
The only thing happiness research has shown so far is that it's far more complicated than "tl;dr" summaries like that.
There seems to be plenty of motivated arguing on both sides. But even though climate science is complicated the basic mechanism for CO2 raising temperatures is really simple and well supported by basic science. No one is disputing CO2's absorption spectrum (that I know of). It's possible that CO2 might not have any such effect on aggregate in a complicated system, but that would be quite remarkable and I don't think any mechanism has been proposed (other than that global warming is miraculously balancing out a coming ice age).
My litmus test for whether someone even has the basic knowledge that might entitle them to the opinion that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening is: "All other things being equal, does adding CO2 to the atmosphere make the world warmer?"
The answer is of course "yes." Now, if a climate change non-skeptic answers "yes" the follow up question to see if they are entitled to their opinion that anthropogenic climate change is happening: "How could a climate change skeptic answer 'yes' to that question?" The correct answer to that is left as an exercise for the reader.
For example like this:
Most of the actual scientific debate seems to be centered around the reliability of the temperature record (and of different proxies) and of climate models (I consider it very likely that the skeptics are right on many of these issues), not around the question whether an anthropogenic climate change of some level is happening at all. At least I'm not aware of any climate scientist making the argument that no anthropogenic warming effect could possibly exist due to X (where X is some [proposed] physical reality, not something of the sort "that would be human hubris").
Richard Lindzen is a nut, but he's also an MIT professor of meteorology who has made arguments from physical reality (mostly) that AGW isn't real.
The closest thing I could find on that page and the the most promising looking links was the water vapor argument (which is more of an argument that AGW should be smaller than expected rather than non-existent) and he apparently doesn't subscribe to that anymore. Other than that he seems content to cast doubts and make accusations against the other side. If he has a new X, is there any good summary anywhere?
Just out of interest, what would have been the correct answer to the test (rot13 if you don't want to spoil it)?
The position of "sane" climate skeptics appears to be that rising CO2 levels' effects on temperature will be dampened by other regulatory causal effects; the evidence for the existence of such regulatory feedback is the overall stability of climate over long periods of time.
My main concern with that position is that it is whistling in the dark.
It's a good habit to avoid the Appeal To Ignorance of an opposing view.
I actually agree with your conclusion, but here's the evidence you need to back up the specific cases you brought up:
Does atmospheric CO2 cause significant global warming?
Do negative feedback loops mostly cushion the effect of atmospheric CO2 increases?
That is, they claim that the spectrum of CO2 has been faked? Or deny that there is such a thing as a spectrum?
I was aware of feedback loop proposals, but they seem to amount to arguing for a weaker AGW effect rather than none. I tend to mentally file them under squabbling about the exact models rather than AGW denial. Are there any such proposed loops that would result in zero or effectively zero warming? ITSM that all feedback loops that involve actual warming as a step would not qualify because to result in effectively zero warming the effect would have to be strong enough to drown out temperature changes from all other causes unless overwhelmingly strong.
The leading skeptics (e.g. Roy Spencer) claim that negative feedback loops (due to clouds that reflect heat back into space) will reduce the warming effect of CO2 to be within the fluctuations Earth naturally experiences. So it's a serious denial, rather than a minor squabble. And the views of the opposing experts (also in the link I sent) strongly indicate Spencer and his colleagues are mistaken (one such reason is that without a positive feedback, it's very hard to explain the rapid shift in temperatures we know occurred between glacials and interglacials).
The skeptics who deny CO2 actually has an effect at all are fringe. The link I sent has the most qualified expert I could find (Gerhard Gerlich) who holds that view. Given that even the NIPCC (Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change) hasn't subscribed to this position, I disregard its importance.
The arguments and experts are all summarized here (it's a wiki, so you can add to it yourself if you find something new):
http://www.takeonit.com/question/5.aspx
Here's explanation of my pro-ultra-behaviorist position.
First, I haven't seen any convincing evidence against ultra-behaviorism, but plenty against ultra-innatism. Look at Flynn effect for example. There's absolutely no way a universe in which ultra-innatism is true is compatible with Flynn effect. There has been so many drastic shifts in behavior without slightest shift in underlying genetic makeup of population - abandonment of violence, shift from large families and low offspring investment to small families and high offspring investment, shift from agricultural to urban lifestyle etc. - these are vastly greater than any of the proposed genetic variations. And not a single kind of proposed genetically-based behavioral variation had a convincing genetic marker found for it (yes, there are heredity studies on twins etc. but I find they highly unconvincing). So my estimate of the truth is far closer to ultra-behaviorist end than ultra-innatist end, so much closer than ultra-behaviorism might be a good "tl;dr" version, even if not 100% accurate.
And second, I find ultra-behaviorism instrumentally useful. Overestimating how much you can change your life leads to better outcomes than underestimating it and just giving up.
It's not true to say that those shifts took place without any "shift in underlying genetic makeup of population" - there has been significant human evolution over the last 6,000 years during the "shift from agricultural to urban lifestyle".
Of course, this isn't an argument for innatism, since evolution didn't cause the changes in lifestyle, but the common meme that human population genetics are exactly the same today as they were on the savannah isn't true.
Do you have the same opinion about gender-linked "genetically-based behavioral variation"?
Not to open a can of worms here, but the pickup-artist (PUA) community is all about how the innate behavior of (generally heterosexual) men and women differ, in dating scenarios. And, in particular, how those real behaviors differ from the behavior that is taught and reinforced by society and culture.
You can have an opinion that all behavior is changeable, and that it is shaped by society and culture. But that would lead you to one model of how men and women act during dating. (In particular, to a mostly gender-neutral model.) The PUA community has a different model of human dating behavior ... and I would say that theirs is a good deal more accurate at predicting actual observed behavior in the field.
True story: My lesbian roommate runs mad game with remarkable success.
I may be setting myself up for ridicule, but: mad game?
Do you mean she gets a lot of dates?
No worries, it's a colloquialism that is probably limited to American youth culture. I mean she does basically the kinds of things the Pick-Up Artist community would recommend men do to date and sleep with women. The remarkable success consists of her sleeping with different women multiple times a week.
That only follows if the societal pressures on men and women are mostly gender-neutral. This does not appear to be the case.
Just to clarify, in arguing against ultra-behaviourism I am not touting the opposite stupidity of ultra-innatism instead. So yeah, I agree. The 40-0-60 heuristic is closer to my view (40% of variance due to genes, 0-10% upbringing, 60% other environmental).
Yup. Culture and language is an incredible thing. Still, many traits are partially heritable, some strongly so. I refer you to Bouchard's meta-analysis. Why do you find twin/sibling/adopted sibling studies unconvincing?
That is exactly where we stand now. The problem is, genetics is getting important in public policy. The tl;dr version needs to lose the tl;d if educated people are going to make policy decisions based on it (which they are).
Mm... maybe. On the other hand knowing genes matter might prevent one taking needless risks. For example, my family is swarming with alcoholics going back 3 generations. Maybe if I wasn't a teetotaler I'd be fine... on the other hand, there's no good reason to fire a gun at your head even if you're pretty sure it's not loaded.
I'm very wary of this "instrumental usefulness" of beliefs though. It seems a slippery slope.
Arguing that the flynn effect shows that someone else should have a different opinion on the question of how much intelligence is heritable just shows misunderstanding of the meaning of the term of heritablity.
Otherwise it would be logical to say that all of intelligence is due to culture. Why? Let's say all individuals with IQ > 300 happen to be born past the singularity. Past singularity we have the technology to make people intelligent and therefore intelligence can't be truly innate.
Therefore modern biology defines heritability as the variance of a trait within a given population that's due to genetics. In it's essence the question of heritability doesn't only depend on genes but it also depends on the environment.
There nothing wrong with saying that the heritability changes over time. A society where every child can eat as much as it wants has probably a different heritability for IQ than a society where some children don't have enough food and other children who have wealthy parents do have enough food.
Are educated people really that badly informed? I would believe it but sometimes I overestimate how much my own knowledge is representative.
I'm not sure people are that badly informed, so much as people are unwilling to admit beliefs that contradict the beliefs they are "supposed" to have.
I've found that, in general, yes, people really are that badly informed about basically everything.
To what extent does "ability to choose the right tribe" mitigate "undiscriminating skepticism"? There are lots of different tribes with different beliefs, and people often explicitly choose what tribe to affiliate with...
As far as I can tell, "not-mainstream" (for the right value of "mainstream") is almost always a huge hurdle to overcome...
To my own great embarrassment, I have experienced a "UFO sighting". It was in the late 1990s in Phoenix, Arizona. What I saw was 7 or 8 bright orbs in the shape of a triangle traveling very slowly over the Phoenix/Scottsdale area (which is why I thought it was a blimp at first). After about a minute and comparing it to a nearby mountain I decided that it couldn't possibly be a blimp. The length and width were way too large. Next, I thought that perhaps it was flares, but after watching it for about 10 more minutes was sure they they had either floated higher into the sky or stayed the same altitude and were still in the same configuration with respect to each other (an isosceles triangle).
Before my personal experience, I had assumed that the people on those ridiculous documentary shows on the Discovery Channel were simply fools or people suffering from a psychological illness. I wasn't the kind of person who believed in that stuff. The next day I started questioning if I even saw it (after all, I would probably has ridiculed someone who told me they saw such a thing the previous day). It must have been a mistake. A few months later, I rationalized it by telling myself that it had been a dream. This worked until my mother (who also saw it) reminded me about something that happened on that same day.
I had a very similar UFO sighting, just a couple months ago. Fortunately I've been consuming rationalist media for a long time, and I was able to say "There is a non-magic answer to this question, just because I don't know the answer doesn't mean UFOs exist. My map is incomplete, but the territory isn't magic."
It doesn't make the creepy shiver-up-your-spine and cold-knot-in-your-stomach feelings go away, those are biological reactions. But it does let you accept them and ride them out, like the cramp you know will go away in a while that isn't ACTUALLY a knife in your leg, no matter how much it feels like it.
My father was once involved in an UFO sighting - he built the UFO, and did the sound effects too, when the other kids got close. Summer camp was involved.
Hope no one ever told those kids it was a flock of birds...
May be my confestion will spoil again my low reputation, but I should tell that I wrote an article about UFOs. And I think it was rational.
Because even slightest probability that we have unknown phenomena in our sky should be taken in account when we speak about existential risks. Also I use Baiesian path of weighting different hypothesis and calculating expected negative utility associated with each.
"UFO as Global Risk" Alexei Turchin, expert on global catastrophes of Russian Transhumanist Movement
Version 0.910, 5 Jan 2010.
Abstract In this article are discussed global risks – i.e. risks that could lead to the complete extinction of mankind, – associated with the problem of UFOs. Although the author is on 90 per cent sure that the UFOs are some common phenomena, the remaining 10 percent are forced him to consider these risks seriously. In the paper is suggested almost complete list of possible hypotheses explaining the nature of UFOs, including a number of new hypotheses (crown discharge around human body, ships from other dimensions covered by the shell of liquid metal, alien nanorobots, conspiracy of suppressed unconscious parts of self, parasites-symbionts from unknown forms of matter, bugs and viruses in the Matrix, etc.) and assessed the reliability of each of the hypotheses and the risk that relates to it. I consider several factors of global risk that may be associated with UFO (intelligence, energy, specific form of toxicity, informational effect, global power), based on observational data. The work is intended for a wide range of readers, as well as for anyone interested in existential risks. This work does not reflect the official position of the Russian Transhumanist Movement, or of any other organization and is only my personal research.
Permalink: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18221425/UFO-as-Global-Risk
it is a grave mistake to believe that ultra-rationality means immediate dismissal of sensory experiences that (currently) have no good explanation.
Well, not believing in "UFOs" is just silly to start. They are definitely up there. The disagreement is usually over what they are.
You should certainly not be embarrassed. What you describe doesn't even rank as a sign of foolishness or psychological illness. Probably at worst it means you're not used to looking at aerial phenomena, so you couldn't identify it. On a bad day, it's taken me a little while to identify the Moon.
If you would have discounted as crazy someone who made a report like you just did, that was a rationalist error. Strangely moving lights in the sky are often reported by multiple witnesses and captured on videotape.
What are some questions without a standard LW in-group response that I could use to prove my own conclusion-reaching soundness?
I know the Meredith Kurcher murder case has been offered as an example "rationality test".
I've used AI as a sniff test many times (>10 tests), along with better-than-human humans (posthumans) and engineered immortality (SENS). Very few people, even those who are smart and educated, are able to argue against them rationally. Every time I've been given more than 10 minutes to discuss the point with someone who disagrees they're possible, it comes down to some sort of mystical mysteriousness which humankind cannot fathom or recreate. Quite often (>20%), it's even revealed a religiosity in the person they don't express in any other way apparent to me (god of the gaps).
You should clarify that you're talking about epistemic rationality a lot sooner than the 8th paragraph.
Sorry if this is overly tangential, but as a sex educator I'm interested to know what you all think are your tribal beliefs around sexuality, and what kind of sexuality-related arguments would lead you to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief.
Emotionally, I feel I have two tribes: the meatspace upper-middle-class collegiate culture and my Internet circle of acquaintances.
In the meatspace tribe, vanilla heterosexuality or homosexuality are considered normal and unremarkable, things like 2 girls 1 cup, goatse, etc. are considered disgusting/gross-out material - and I cannot remember anyone acknowledging anything else.
In the Internet tribe, sexual relations of any kind between consenting adults are considered fine provided that they are carried out in private, sexual intercourse between teenage minors is considered normal (fine or not may vary), and crossing the line ... well, I haven't heard Snape/Hermione strongly condemned, but pedophilia is definitely out. I note that no-one I know talks about anything involving permanent damage, however.
Someone who believes that homosexuality is not immoral, but believes it is a dysfunction.
Actually I have more answers, but this question is just too toxic. So I'll go meta: Anyone who responds to this question either by saying that rationality is indicated either by signalling acceptance of more-outlandish sexuality, or by signalling intolerance, is indicating their own irrationality; they are turning this question into a tribal test.
How far can you judge a person's rationality by what sort of evidence they use to support their beliefs about sexuality?
I'm having difficulty parsing your meta observation.
There's a large community where you are expected to be open to anything except sex with children; and a large community where you are expected to not be open to anything except sex between a monogomous man and woman.
I'm not arguing whether either of these points of view is valid. But both have enough adherents that no position that can be characterized entirely as more liberal or less liberal can identify its holder as rational. Therefore, anyone who says that such a position (for instance, being open to polyamory) indicates rationality, is merely stating their tribal affiliation. The fact that they think that such a stance demonstrates rationality in fact demonstrates their irrationality.
I can think of a few possible exceptions (sexual practices that are far enough beyond the pale that even tongue-pierced goths disclaim them, yet which have no rational basis for being banned), but they're too toxic for me to mention.
"Merely" is incorrect. If people are employing consistent justifications for their beliefs, that indicates rationality. If their beliefs rely on inconsistent justifications, then they are not.
Suppose I believe polyamory is OK, because I believe that sex between consenting parties will make people happier. If you provided me with overwhelming evidence that most people who practice polyamory are especially miserable specifically because they practice polyamory, that would test my rationality. If I continue to be OK with it, I have an inconsistent belief system. If I cease being OK with it, I am consistently adhering to my beliefs.
Conversely, suppose I believe, "Homosexual sex is wrong because two men can't procreate." If you point out, "Post-menopausal women can't procreate," then, if I say, "Well, they shouldn't have sex either!" then I may be a bit crazy, but I'm consistent. If I say, "Well, that's different" without providing a very specific "that's different" principle, my beliefs are inconsistent, and I am irrational. If I say, "Homosexuality is wrong because the bible says so," then I'd better not be wearing clothing made from both cotton and wool while I burn oxen for the Lord.
I think most of what you see in the "internet crowd" is approval of any sexual activity between consenting adults, which is (usually) a highly consistent principle. I am not aware of any such consistent principle among the married hetero-only crowd. I'm not saying there aren't consistent principles that support a married hetero-only lifestyle, only that it is not my understanding that a large group of people embrace such principles.
If this observation is correct, beliefs about sexuality can be a very strong indicator of rationality if inconsistent, or (at least) a weak indicator if consistent. If they remain consistent through difficult or unusual hypotheticals, that is a strong indication of rationality.
The problem is if the supposedly rational beliefs also happen to be the tribal belief system of a large, pre-existing tribe. Then someone was rational, sometime back in the history, but it isn't necessarily the person you're talking to right now.
A better test would be to ask them to defend a sexual view of theirs that they see as unconventional, or at least, not a typical view of their tribe as yet.
This is absolutely true and I've changed the last paragraph to reflect that.
I wouldn't suppose that "being open to polyamory" per se indicates rationality. But I would consider someone rational who, having thought about the matter, and concluded on the basis of sound reasoning that there is no valid reason to condemn polyamory, decided to adopt that lifestyle even in the face of some cultural opposition.
And I would consider someone irrational who, having no sound reasoning behind that position, would act in such a way as to deny others the enjoyment of a non-straight-monogamous lifestyle.
Controversies involving third parties are a valid matter of debate, for instance, I'd concede that there is some grounds to ask whether gay couples should adopt. But to assert, without argument, an interest in what consenting adults do behind closed doors, and that doesn't cause anyone lasting harm, just because it concerns sex - that does strike me as irrational.
This all presupposes a consequentialist and libertarian ethic: that morality is about harm.
Almost every tribe tacitly accepts the assumption that it is healthy and appropriate to have a passionate interest in the sex lives of complete strangers. Disagreement with that assumption would lead me to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief.