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 (1329)
I'm increasingly inclined to use reactions to data that Communist economies did no worse on average than Capitalist economies as a new litmus test.
People who as their first reaction start pulling excuses why this must be wrong out of their asses get big negative points on this rationality test.
I don't need to explain why this is not mainstream. It is also extremely unlikely to be significantly wrong.
I think you have a point there. Planned economy is called a "failed experiment" with much greater confidence than justified. Not so sure about "extremely" and what "significantly" should mean here, though.
My current position after updating on the evidence form skimming through that paper is that capitalism probably is better for some things, planned economy better for others, and that whether the historical performance of socialist planned economies lags behind that of capitalism depends on what assumptions you make, which countries you hold as comparable and so on, but the answer probably is somewhere between "no" and "yes, but not by all that much".
It's not a good litmus test until you also point to what you consider the best honest skeptical response - albeit this is often damned hard to do with poor skepticism, cryonics being exhibit A in point.
You should offer a reward for the best top-level anti-cryonics post. Something to entice quiet dissenters to stick their necks out.
You can post it together with a pro-cryonics reading list, so people know what they're up against and only post arguments that haven't already been refuted.
EDIT: reworded for clarity, punctuation
Well, if people are absolutely, definitely rejecting the possibility that this might ever be true, without looking at the data, then they are indeed probably professing a tribal belief.
However, if they are merely describing reasons why they find this result "unlikely", then I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that. They're simply expressing that their prior for "Communist economies did no worse than capitalist economies" is, all other things being equal, lower than .5.
There are several non-obviously-wrong reasons why one could reasonably put a low prior on this belief. The most obvious is the fact that when the wall fell down, economic migration went from East to West, not the other way round (East-West Germany being the most dramatic example).
Of course, this should not preclude a look at the hard data. Reality is full of surprises, and casual musings often miss important points. So again, saying "this just can't be so" and refusing to look at the data (which I presume is what you had in mind) is indeed probably tribal. Saying "hmmm, I'd be surprised if it were so" seems quite reasonable to me. Maybe I'm just tribalised beyond hope.
This can be legitimate for a reporter wanting someone to read the story, and to show why the subject of the story matters practically.
Perhaps, but to the same extent, we should discount reporters' accounts as informative or worthy of being taken as serious arguments. In other words, you want to play-a the grownup game, you play-a by the grownup rules; if your editor says you can't, too bad, go sit at the kids' table.
Huh, I had completely forgotten that P&T did an anti-cryonics bit. Disappointing. On the other hand, their basic point ("Why not spend that $125,000 on hookers?") reminded me of Reedspacer's Lower Bound.
I was just quoting P&T's number. That show aired in 2004 so I assumed the price would be lower today (not to mention the neuro discount).
Of course, that's why it's a lower bound :)
$80K USD for Alcor neuro, $9K for some Russian organization, and $50K for Trans Time, which has a rather shoddy website. Other organizations only seem to offer full-body cryopreservation. What institution charges 30,000?
Cryonics Institute. (Edit: they don't offer neuro, but I'm guessing they're the source of the $30K figure.)
There's still hope for Penn and Teller; their last episode is going to be a bunch of miscellaneous retractions for the times they've been wrong on their show. Which is a good sign in itself.
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.
Heh. My tribal beliefs are from reading Spider Robinson books as a teen. Ciphergoth is an example of the sort of person I grew up thinking of as normal, and I've always felt a little guilty about not being bisexual. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to go outside that mainstream, which is one reason I went to the lengths of postulating legalized rape in Three Worlds Collide.
*smiles* I'm sure you know this, but I don't think it makes any sense to think you should enjoy X. And I agree, alt-sex is not a useful discriminator here. I've been having a lot of arguments about cryonics with my friend David Gerard who is also an alt-sex community member, and this article could have been written specifically with him in mind (as well as other contributors to the "RationalWiki" article on cryonics).
There's a warning flag you don't mention: the logical rudeness of the skeptical Gish Gallop. I have over and over again begged David to pick one counter-argument to cryonics and really press it home. Instead he insists on picking up everything that looks to him like shit and flinging it as fast as he can, and it appears to give him no pause at all when one argument after another turns out to be without merit.
Why doesn't it make sense? If there were a pill to turn me bisexual, I'd take it, modulo the fact that in general I take almost no pills (it'd have to be really really safe, but I hold all mind-affecting substances to that standard, don't drink etcetera, it's not a special case for the bisexuality pill).
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that idea (I haven't felt guilty about being straightish, but I've wished I were more bisexual once in a while, and succeeded in pushing myself in that direction in some cases), but I'm curious now: is gender the only dimension you'd apply that to? Would you also take a pill (again assuming it's really really safe) that would make all outward physical attributes irrelevant to how attractive you find someone? Would you take a pill that would make you enjoy every non-harmful sexual practice/fetish (not necessarily seeking them out, but able to enjoy it if a partner initiated it)?
(I originally started writing this comment thinking something like "hmm, I'd take the bi-pill, but let's take that reasoning to its vaguely-logical conclusion and see if it's still palatable", but now I'm actually thinking I'd probably take both of those pills too.)
Well, to ask the non-mainstream-relative-to-this-community version of the question, ask "Would I take the loli pill?"
Does "loli" mean non-persons and emotionally mature persons who look like a child, or are actual children (of average or below average emotional maturity) included by the effect?
Loli means actual preteen girls.
If I understand correctly, loli only refers to cartoon depictions of preteen girls (and maybe roleplaying with that theme). Being attracted to actual preteen girls is just pedophilia.
(At least that's what loli fans say. I've always been a bit confused by the distinction — I've known people into loli and shota who seemed to find actual children as unappealing as any normal person does, but I can't quite figure out why a person would be turned on only by a cartoon and not the real thing.)
This is a really a frustrating exchange given the number of terms that need googling and the fact that I am in a public library.
If it meant the former, I would take the loli pill if the (unlikely) circumstances called for it. Why not? If it meant the latter, then you would have to tell your libido "no" a lot, but it wouldn't necessarily lead to doing bad things. I doubt it would be worth the hassle, though, except in very special circumstances.
Actually, the biggest drawback to either version of the loli pill would probably be how society would react if they ever found out. It probably wouldn't matter if the one you're sleeping with is really 700 years old; you'd still get put on every sex offender registry out there, and shunned vigorously, at the very least. People are damn tense on this subject. Just look at how much trouble Christopher Handley got in for his manga collection.
Edit: I felt pretty uncomfortable writing this post, even though I know I shouldn't be. Looks like this really is a good question.
How about the anti-Westermark effect pill? ;)
I can't believe I had never heard of that before. Fascinating.
A question if you can answer it. Wikipedia says:
The addition of "highly" seems to suggest that separated brothers and sisters find themselves especially or unusually attracted to one another. Is that the case or is Wikipedia just adding unnecessary adjectives?
There is a hypothesis that claims that, but the evidence is dubious.
There are clearer language and relevant citations at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction)
The two pills I proposed are mainstream relative to this community?
I'm surprised yet not surprised. Good to know, anyway.
(So, alright, would you take the loli pill?)
I'd definitely take all three of the above pills. In fact, I wonder how much harm such pills would have to do for me not to take them.
There is a well-established mechanism within the transformation fetish subculture making use of devices which work a bit like temporary tattoos, altering the subject's body and/or personality in ways both profound and fully reversible. Like most magic intended to make a story possible rather than to make it interesting, the patches in question are entirely without negative side effects.
As demonstrated with Clippy, I would be willing to provide further information even if doing so does not serve my long-term interests in any obvious way.
Why would you take such a pill? So that you can have more fun, or for some other reason?
So I wouldn't miss out on half the fun.
How do you distinguish the sort of fun it's worth changing your values to enjoy from the sort of fun (like wireheading) it's worth not having access to?
Of course, it's nothing like half the fun you're missing. Adding a gender would increase your fun by less than 100% since it's not that different in many ways. Adding all the sexual variation in the world would be a humongous amount of fun, but you'd start to hit diminishing returns after a while.
Technically, given that most people are heterosexual, Woody Allen's quote - "The good thing about being bisexual is that it doubles your chance of a date on a Saturday night." - is inaccurate. It only increases your chances by the percentage of people of your gender who are open to same-sex encounters.
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, gay men are so much more promiscuous than straight women that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a man to have sex. But your point is well taken and certainly applies to chances for a monogamous relationship.
But what if you're female?
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, straight men are so much more promiscuous than gay women that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a woman to have sex.
:-)
Edit: On reflection, this might not be right. But yeah, my point doesn't exactly apply to straight women.
I think I have enough evidence to say this confidently without unfairly stereotyping: On balance, straight men are so turned on by the idea of girl on girl sex that being bisexual really might double or triple the opportunities for a woman to have sex.
Well, not really. The having enough evidence part at least.
Point of curiosity if anyone knows the answer: How promiscuous are bisexual men and do they tend to have more m-m than m-f sex because the m-m sex is much easier to obtain? If not, why not?
We'll have to make enough bi-pills for everyone, then.
Actually, what you really need is the sexchange pill, but that's a lot harder than it sounds.
(See also)
Ah, Spider Robinson. I remember buying a stack of his books at Borders around age 12 and having the clerk give my mother an alarmed look. Mom just waved her hand ....
I think it's pretty normal for science-fiction-reading middle- to upper-middle-class kids to think that alternative sexuality is "normal" and to feel guilty for being vanilla/monogamous/whatever. (I used to feel a lot of pressure to be polyamorous.) Interestingly, though, there still seems to be a lot of internalized stigma about certain forms of sexuality, as demonstrated for example in my coming-out story. I would imagine that most people here fit that tribal group.
Still, within that tribal group I still encounter a lot of people with assumptions I'd call weird and/or irrational, which is why I asked specifically what kind of sexuality-related arguments would lead you to consider someone to be defending a non-mainstream belief. I think your legalized rape post (it was forwarded to me last year, actually, and I still haven't decided how I feel about it) is a definite example of defending a non-mainstream belief, but I wonder if there are less dramatic ones.
I call that a win for literature.
open thread
Hi Clarisse, and Welcome to LessWrong! I've seen your blog, and I'm happy to see you commenting here. (I comment as "Doug S." on various feminism-related blogs - I'm not very prolific, but you may have seen a couple here and there.)
Hi Doug! Yes, I remember you. I've actually read a number of posts here, and I've commented once here before, but I was too angry and irrational and in feminist-community mode during that little fracas, so I decided to give myself lots of time to cool off before posting again. (Note that the original post has been edited to the point where it is no longer clear what pissed me off.) (I also discussed some of the cultural differences between this site and the feminist blogosphere that contributed to that blowup in the comments here.)
Cultural norm for me is "sexuality is a matter of choice between consenting adults".
Non-mainstream beliefs around sexuality that I'm currently curious about include PUA lore, and this interesting site.
I agree about what my cultural norm is.
I disagree with it on two points. I'm pretty sure the legal age of consent is set considerably too high, though I'm not sure where it should be, or whether there should be a legal age of consent.
I think the "enthusiastic consent" standard in Yes Means Yes makes sense.
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.
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.
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.
It's just as dysfunctional as non-vaginal straight sex is.
Your position may be valid; but in the context of the current distribution of opinions on sexuality, it does not in itself signal rationality to me. And that's what we're discussing.
How far can you judge a person's rationality by what sort of evidence they use to support their beliefs about sexuality?
That's a specific instance of what this post is about, right?
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.
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.
Not necessarily - I don't think of myself as a consequentialist but as a contractarian. Although I'm less than firm in my metaethical convictions.
Still, I have the clear intuition that someone who would assert a claim against me, based on who I chose to spend time in bed with, isn't all right in the head. They wouldn't deny me the right to have dinner with whomever I choose, and (within some reasonable bounds on consent, privacy, and promises made to other people) I see no sound basis to distinguish sex from another sensual experience like dinner.
At the moment I am straight, monogamous, and in fact legally married (for fiscal reasons mostly), but I see no reason to elevate my personal choices and inclinations to the status of universal moral law.
I'm not the first to point this out, but by that reasoning, rape is no worse than forcing someone to eat broccoli.
I'd appreciate if you would read my parenthetical qualifications before making misleading comments about my "reasoning".
I disapprove of coercion in general, but it seems clear that people in general experience sex as a much more significant experience than eating, to the extent that rape can make for life-threatening emotional trauma. Given these (possibly local) facts of human nature, we would clearly not agree to a social contract that provided no protection from rape.
There really do exist those who consider who you're having dinner with, and what you're eating to be valid regulatory targets.
Consuming human meat is generally disapproved of...
Hey, good idea. New question for getting evidence of rationality: "How do you feel about cannibalism? Not killing people, just the act of eating human meat. Imagine that the meat was vat-grown, or you're a starving survivor of a plane crash, or something."
If you uploaded, would you be willing to let someone else eat your body if they were, y'know, into that sort of thing?
I don't see any reason to either. The problem is I'm not sure I see a reason not to. Rationality governs our degrees of belief and how we incorporate new evidence into our degrees of belief. I don't see how rationality can govern our terminal values. You're right that there is no sound basis to distinguish sex from dinner, but there is also no sound basis to distinguish sex from murder. To say otherwise requires a pretty untenable kind of moral naturalism. Moral acts and immoral acts aren't natural kinds. PhilGoetz's original point is fully generalizable to all claims about terminal values. Policy positions are indicative of irrationality only when they are inconsistent with the subscriber's own values.
Thus, in my comment elsewhere on this post, I hedged when it came using support for immigration as an indicator of rationality among conservatives because opposition to immigration may well be the right position to hold if you don't value the welfare of immigrants or value cultural homogeneity.
"It's too good to be true" seems a more common reaction for AI and nano.
Now obviously "too good to be true" isn't strictly a good argument, but it can be a useful first-order rule of thumb, can't it?
By using it you are recognizing (a) that people who are trying to sell you something fishy usually make it sound like a panacea; (b) that if you really like the idea you should be all the more wary of it.
"Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE pill?" - The Matrix.
Not good enough evidence. If alien ships actually got close enough to earth to observe, they would quickly notice that you annihilate each other based on minor differences in your makeup, realize that they are far more different, and then decide it's in their best interest to leave immediately before they are detected.
Just trust me on this one.
I found it difficult to dig up any convincing claims in support of UFOs: Have aliens from outer space visited Earth?
As you can see so far, the claims on the "agree" side are frankly pretty embarrassing. Please suggest some good experts in favor of this hypothesis if you know of them.
I was only criticizing Editor:Eliezer_Yudkowksy's reasoning, not trying to argue that non-human intelligences exist (although they do).
You're talking here about dolphins, pigs, dogs, etc.?
Remember that Clippy is a paperclip maximizing AI.
I'd still like to see an enumerated list of what Clippy considers to be non-human intelligences, starting with those it considers the most intelligent by the measure it considers most appropriate.
Okay. Here is the enumerated list of what I consider to be non-human intelligences, ranked in order of decreasing intelligence, by the measure I deem most appropriate:
Clippys
The singularity is here already; Clippy's replicating!
Nothing that travels from one star to another has cause to be scared of us. If they're worried about future war, they'd just wipe us out, and in any case wouldn't do fancy acrobatics with their exterior lights on.
People do weird things to animals in order to find out what will happen. Not only are those things incomprehensible to the animals, the rationale for the details of lot of them wouldn't make sense to most people, either because the explanation is technical or because it's a badly thought out experiment.
On the non-scientific side, I don't think an insect can make sense of getting caught in a cup and dumped out a window.
It's at least plausible that aliens want to study relatively undisturbed human societies-- how a particular intelligent species behaves could still be very hard to predict, even for aliens capable of space travel. It's not that they'd be afraid of us, it's that we're interesting enough without adding in reactions to aliens.
I have heard it suggested, in jest, that abduction and anal-probing of humans found alone on rural roads is a sign that even societies sufficiently advanced to travel between solar systems still can't figure out how to efficiently allocate research grant money.
"Stop! We have reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us." One of my favourite Simpsons quotes.
I like the HHGTTG explanation: They're just idiots like Zaphod pranking us.
I don't believe it. I just like it.
They don't have telescopes? They can't watch our TV? If the aliens need to hover around in front of some Idaho farm boy and maybe give him an anal probe in order to figure out that humans are sometimes violent, they're idiots.
You can always make up some loophole. Ockham's razor should mitigate against it though.
Don't you mean the "bad old days"?
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.
Brilliant!
Did you ever figure out what it was (not that one has to)?
Reminds me very much of Trisha's experience in HHGTTG.
The only other thing I ever heard about it was on a local news channel. It didn't really help one way or the other because they said it was military flares, but they claimed they were shot off after I saw the lights and the video they showed of the flares didn't resemble what I saw (they were much too small and moved too fast). I honestly wish I never saw the damn thing.
I totally empathize with the psychology, but there's no good reason to regret seeing it. You saw something you didn't understand. You still don't understand it. Such things will happen. I think it's admirable that you hope for a rational explanation even when one isn't forthcoming - moreover, in the teeth of our human need for some explanation, even if it's a bad one.
To extend on Eliezer's point here, it's trivially easy to be a skeptic when the believer's epistemic position is foreign to you. Much harder when you're the experiencer-of-experiences, and the object of scrutiny.
We're nearly all of us materialists here; how many of us would still be if we had a powerful religious experience? And yet we (rightly) reject the truth claims of people who have had such experiences.
I once experienced "Hag syndrome", I must have been around eleven. I woke up during the night, unable to move and convinced I had a witch sitting on me.
The next day when I could think about it in bright daylight I thought it was kinda cool that my brain could make me believe something so clearly supernatural, but it seemed just as obvious it had only been the same kind of thing as a nightmare, only more powerful. I didn't mention it to my parents or anything, just filed it as "one of those things". (It was downright scary at the time though; I don't recommend the experience, which as you can see still, um, haunts me.)
I've also had sleep paralysis (multiple times). No hallucinations, though. I just couldn't move.
This sounds like you're a bit too scared that it has an "unnatural" explanation. If it did happen, there's a normal explanation for it. Curious, yes, scared, no.
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.
Was the sun setting? It could have been illuminating the underbellies of a flock of geese.
On second thoughts the sun would provide too much light, street lights maybe?
it is a grave mistake to believe that ultra-rationality means immediate dismissal of sensory experiences that (currently) have no good explanation.
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).
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...
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.
Are educated people really that badly informed? I would believe it but sometimes I overestimate how much my own knowledge is representative.
I went looking for polls to answer your question; the only one I could find was this outdated one. So on the basis of that one, I'm wrong. But there's no breakdown there for level of education.
However, I suspect based on my anecdotal experience that educated people might be worse than the general public.
That wouldn't surprise me. Ignorance of bad information can be a good thing. There are political reasons to neglect genetic influence (easier to blame people while avoiding charges of racism and sexism). There are are also ideological motivations for such a preference (see pjeby's emphasis on learned responses rather than genetic influences).
True. In that respect I think part of the problem might also be the Science News Cycle as it applies to genetics. The geneticists know what they mean by "a gene for X" - merely a shorthand, that the presence of the gene affects the expression of X along with umpteen other factors. But inevitably the news media report a "gene for intelligence" as though the gene was a switch to turn intelligence on or off. Probably that type of thing has undermined any & all innatist ideas.
That's primarily an issue in the titles (often set by editors). The body of the text usually has the standard litany of basic caveats.
I've found that, in general, yes, people really are that badly informed about basically everything.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
That's what I meant with argument about climate models, different models suggest different mixes of positive and negative feedback.
Actually I'd be much more worried about CO2 emissions if I was convinced there was a strong dampening effect of unknown origin. That suggests the system might potentially be stressed to the breaking point, and afterwards a runaway process might result in vesusification. Even a very small risk of that would dominate all other climate related risks.
That's just about what I was thinking. Anything that pointed out that the "all other things being equal" clause doesn't describe reality would be sufficient.
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
Not particularly remarkable. Homeostatic systems are the norm in the world, not the exception; and there are plenty of negative feedback mechanisms for CO2, starting from the most trivial one of more CO2 -> more photosynthesis -> (hopefully) more biomass not biodegraded back into carbon circulation.
I think it's widely accepted such mechanism will bring CO2 levels back to their original equilibrium once anthropogenic emissions end, unfortunately over thousands of years. But - similar mechanisms for methane and CFCs are far faster and we might be already past peak atmospheric methane/CFC.
You can tell someone is irrational if they don't believe global warming is happening. You can't conclude much if they believe it is caused by human action, as this is now de rigeur for any one democratic/liberal/educated/cosmopolitan. I don't know what you can conclude if they believe it is happening but aren't convinced that it's caused by human action; but this is a small enough percentage of cases that you don't really need to classify them.
It's not like a normal person can observe such changes - we're talking fraction of a degree over lifetime so far (Wikipedia says 0.74 ± 0.18 °C over entire 20th century).
It's a matter of your level of trust in "mainstream" scientists, and there's nothing particularly irrational about not having terribly much trust here.
And even global warming is real, it's still instrumentally rational to be wrong - let other people limit their carbon emissions, the world in which you drive SUV and everyone else overpays for Priuses is the optimal world for you to live in. (it would be even better to believe correctly in global warming, but be cynical enough to not give a shit about it, but many people have some sort of cynicism limit...)
I'd describe that as a rationalization of egoism, wouldn't you?
What do you mean by egoism?
Key word there was rationalization. If terminology is the problem, replace "egoism" by "selfishness" and my point remains the same.
I don't buy rational egoism. What is rational is whatever advances one's goals - goals which may or may not be selfish. Considering our inbuilt empathy & love for our families, the general case is that our goals will not be purely selfish.
Even if I was a rational egoist, though, actually believing something against evidence (as distinct from declaring belief or not caring) is utterly irrational.
That's not necessarily true - first, the temperature change is not uniform everywhere, and second, the effects of such changes on weather may be noticeable in ways other than simple warming (e.g. more extreme weather events). Certainly day-to-day observations cannot support the kind of confidence that many scientists have in their conclusions about global warming, but they can lend slight credence to such statements.
I think we can agree that "instrumentally rational" is irrational.
It is irrational in a way that it recognized limitations of human rationality, and decides that sometimes you're better off not knowing. Perfect rational being would not need it - human being sometimes might.
"Oh all right," said the old man. "Here's a prayer for you. Got a pencil?"
"Yes," said Arthur.
"It goes like this. Let's see now: 'Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decide not to know about. Amen.' That's it. It's what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open."
"Hmmm," said Arthur. "Well thank you --"
"There's another prayer that goes with it that's very important," said the old man, "so you'd better jot this down, too."
"Okay."
"It goes, 'Lord, lord, lord...' It's best to put that bit in just in case. You can never be too sure. 'Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.' And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part."
In all seriousness, ignorance may sometimes be bliss, but conscious, willful ignorance is reprehensible. Let's actually make an effort to be all right with the way the world is, before we throw up our hands.
I choose to be ignorant about certain things all the time - every moment of my life spent on anything except reading Wikipedia is a choice of selective ignorance.
How much does your life improve by having more accurate view of global warming research, as opposed to being vaguely aware of it but fairly skeptical either way like most educated people? I'd guess improvement will be tiny, and the risk of such knowledge triggering your world-saving instincts is not worth it.
True, but that is ignorance-of-omission. You seemed to be advocating a conscious decision to keep yourself ignorant of certain well-defined areas of knowledge. Apologies if this is not so.
Well, here's the hedonistic vs. goal-oriented view of rationality again. Not everything I do is directly related to satisfying immediate whims. I am a voter and also an engineer, as it happens. Both of these circumstances imply I have an ethical obligation to be at least somewhat conversant on questions of public policy & the environment.
If my "world-saving instincts" should be triggered, I want them triggered. Again, as a bare minimum, public policy depends on an informed public, and GW is a policy problem. But uninformed consent in a democracy is pointless, it doesn't count. We might just as well save money on ballot paper and install a grand Doge for all the functional difference it would entail.
If democracy depended on informed voters, then we could as well give it up and set up a single party government.
Fortunately it does not.
You don't have to be especially cynical, just recognize the situation as the collective action problem that it is. I'm not that cynical but I'm also not a dupe.
Also, not believing in global warming, if global warming is real, is likely to lead you to do stupid things like accepting certain bets on global mean temperature fifty years out and purchasing coastal properties. So I don't think it is instrumentally rational, either.
I don't think this is a fair assessment. I was a global warming supporter up until I saw that awful movie by Al Gore; his inept, unscientific presentation drove me to start looking into the situation.
What I found was a great deal of controversy over the figures - some of the charts cited by Gore tended to suggest the opposite of his thesis (assuming he even had a thesis - that man's all over the place); that CO2 follows warming, rather than triggers it.
After looking into it further - and hearing a dozen different sets of conflicting data - I eventually gave up on understanding. I don't know enough about the subject matter to make an accurate judgement, and various sources on all sides of the debate have proved themselves to be biased or incompetent. Alcor I trust to lay out factual information on 'vitrification' - whatever the hell that is. The IPCC on the other hand has a political motivation, as (probably) do many of the scientific skeptics.
As a rough estimate, I'd assign a 60% chance that global warming is occuring, while maybe a 10% chance that the climate's cooling. This is completely ignoring the probabilities of it A) being man made, B) being catastrophic (or even bad), and C) of being correctable by current policies.
Unless if you're a climatologist or a meteorologist, I'd be very suspicious of strong stances on the matter. Perhaps a better test would be whether somebody supports A) cap-and-trade or B) using a 'science fiction' solar-umbrella satellite to cool off the earth.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
You're right that that was too strong; I should have said it's determined largely by the mother's genetics (but also to lesser degrees by the father's genetics and environmental factors.) But note that the strongest known environmental factor, alcohol consumption, is at least somewhat genetic (http://psychiatry.healthse.com/psy/more/alcoholism), and other factors like susceptibility to smoking addiction probably are as well.
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.
Looking at the totality of facts without letting my wishes color my judgment.
Believing in "stereotype threat" as the main reason for the black/white IQ gap is like believing in Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God.
Anyway, I'm going to try to avoid getting into the details of the debate, but this little snippet is worthy of note.
In my earlier comment, I talked about genetics "play[ing] a significant role" When you respond with evidence that "genetics are not the whole story," you are not contradicting me in the slightest.
Instead you are attacking a strawman. Why would a person who ordinarily thinks intelligently and logically make such a glaring error? Respectfully, I submit to you that it's because your thinking is muddled on this issue.
The problem is that people today are afraid to believe that genetics play a significant role in the black/white IQ gap. As Eliezer would say, it's not like going to school wearing black -- it's like going to school wearing a clown costume. It's like being an atheist back in the day.
The reasonable and helpful interpretation of Alicorn's question was "What evidence are you basing this strongly-held belief on?" Asserting that you are basing your belief on evidence is not an answer. We get that you think this position is tantamount to being an atheist in the past. You don't have to keep making that analogy. Instead, give us the evidence. We can handle the ugly truth if you're right.
Basically you are right. I tried to answer the question without saying anything which would invite a debate on the actual race/iq question.
Looking back at my response, I should have made it clear that I wasn't giving the answer Allicorn was looking for. But I admit it now.
I'm a bit torn, but I will try to put together a blog post which lays out my case and link to it.
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".
I don't have a clue either way.
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.
Are some claims/people just not worth arguing against?
"On what planet do you spend most of your time?" is often a very effective rebuttal. ;)
Possible typo:
(Emphasis added.)
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)
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".
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 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.
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.
You should clarify that you're talking about epistemic rationality a lot sooner than the 8th paragraph.
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.
In matters not related to Catholic dogma, the Catholic Church is (or at least used to be) a consistently skeptical organization.
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.
I agree with the sentiment here.
However, in a community like this one, Aumann's agreement theorem would suggest that most of the commonly held views, at least the views commonly held to be very likely, rather than just somewhat likely, should be correct.