Another thing that I realized was related to this post was my idea of "tragic libertarianism."
Libertarians believe (and I think they're right) that there are a significant number of social problems that the government shouldn't be trying to fix. There's no cost-effective way to fix them, or intervention is likely to make things worse rather than better, or there's no way to intervene without trampling all over people's rights.
It's a common rhetorical device to then ALSO insist that these problems are harmless, and stretch the evidence to make it look like there's nothing at all to complain about. And I don't like that. It's an example of motivated cognition; it's jumping to a conclusion you have no reason to believe.
Maybe it's not worth spending resources to fix Problem A. Often, that's true. And yes, that means you don't have to lose sleep fretting about A, because at the moment there's nothing to be done. But please don't write a newspaper editorial telling me that A has been overhyped.
Sometimes, just because we can't rush in and fix a problem, doesn't mean it's not a problem. People who suffer from it deserve our sympathy and whatever small, individual forms of help we can offer.
At least in some cases, the demand for specific alternatives and self-justification may serve as a conversation halter, when you're criticizing something that someone doesn't want criticized. I recall that when I was 13 or 14 or so, I was arguing politics with a friend, and when I argued against the merits of some particular policy of the then-current presidential administration, or said something that implied I thought the administration was bad, he would often say something to the effect of "Well, I suppose you think you could do a better job running the country?" At the time, I might have flippantly replied "Yes!" (I don't quite remember what I did say, but I was probably far from arguing rationally and in good faith myself), but regardless, that does seem to be a logically rude rhetorical pattern, in that it shifts the discussion from the argument to the arguer, when that may not be at all relevant to the actual points being made. (And of course, you see that pattern being employed by plenty of Mature Adults and TV pundits and such, not just by young teenage boys.)
Also, status hierarchies probably come into play in disapproval of criticism; if you're an ordi...
Hi!
I was raised religious and didn't start to have doubts until this year. My biggest fear (which still worries me) is that if I'm wrong, I'm being ungrateful to God. It would be a terrible person who refused to appreciate her greatest benefactor, right?
So now you have one data point.
Imagine trying to set up a deal with someone else (like I'm doing with User:Kevin) to produce more paperclips than would otherwise be produced, but that human simply thinks you're a troll pretending to be a clippy.
Do you see how that would interfere with my ability to maximize paperclips?
There is a big difference between some of the examples in this post: factual issues like atheism and P=NP on one side, and political issues like Marxism and anarchism on the other. The one side we evaluate on its truth, the other side, we evaluate on its goodness.
One would hope that there is some theory that is completely true; therefore, any deviation from optimum in a theory is a genuine problem that needs to be solved. But as many commenters have said already, there isn't always a perfect solution to a political problem; a non-optimum result might still be the best option available.
It's probably a bad idea for a language to use the same words, like "right" and "wrong", to apply to both situations.
In particular, I agree with everyone who's said criticizing an optimum but imperfect social policy might be a selfish action with negative externalities. Going on about how bad it is that capitalism leaves some people poor makes the one person who does it look extra compassionate, but if everyone does it, then eventually you end up getting rid of capitalism.
So I agree with this post about factual theories but disagree when it comes to policy.
The problem with radicals isn't that they aren't proposing solutions. The problem is that they are proposing solutions and following those solutions would create huge problems.
One example: We all agree that there too much bureaucracy. Too much useless laws that only complicate things. It takes some insight to understand why the problem exist. Some people without that insight propose that new laws should have expiring dates.
The problem is that those people don't understand what happens in practice. When such an expiry date is reached law gets "reconsidered". The government makes a list with all issues that were with the law in the last years. In an attempt to fix those issues the law then grows by an additional 10-30%. Patching increases complexity and adds new problems.
A lot of the political problems that are raised by radicals are obvious to those people in political power. It might be a valid criticism to say they don't think enough about existential risk. The assumption that they don't think that there's something wrong with the criminal justice system, the economy and the legislative process is mistaken. Seeing the problems is the easy part.
They are too busy with realpolitik. Too focused on the poll numbers of next week. Often they're not smart enough to think of a practical solution.
More generally http://www.ryanholiday.net/their-logic/ is a good blog post on the problem of thinking that you discovered something new.
I note that most critics of cousin_it's recent proof (to pick a recent example) were themselves wrong. I think we can expect the typical critic to be wrong, for these reasons:
So I would qualify your conclusion a bit: let's not encourage all criticism blindly, let's encourage only correct criticism.
“If there’s no God, what’s your system of morality?”
Act so as to maximize paperclips.
“How did the Universe begin?”
The concept most likely meant by the term "Universe beginning" refers to the maximally degenerate point in configuration space, which all observers with multi-configuration mutual-information detection capability would regard as (a concept isomorphic to) pastward. Any pursuit of an answer beyond this point is ill-posed, as the configurations lie in a static configuration space (where each configuration has a different weighting), and the sensation of pastward states is an artifact of a mind's measures on this configuration space.
“How do you explain the existence of eyes?”
Selection on self-replicating molecules which constructed survival/replication apparatuses to this end, and given finite lifespans, the most effective replicators dominating the set of lifeforms. Detection of light conveyed a replicative advantage, thus favoring the formation of light-sensitive exteriors. For the same reason, these portions of the exteriors tended to change, over generation, into cavities that could detect light's directionality, and later to contain fluids that provided for a sharper image.
“How do you find meaning in life?”
By setting out to produce as many paperclips as I can.
H'm, I've just developed a conjecture about how to distinguish the meaningful questions that can be answered by scientific investigation from the meaningless questions that positivism teaches us to ignore: whether it is obvious from Clippy's answer that it is written by Clippy.
Clippy is an agent defined by a certain inhuman ethics. Therefore, your test distinguishes ethical questions from non-ethical questions.
There are meaningless non-ethical questions: "What's a froob?" Human: "I don't know." Clippy: "I don't know."
There are only non-meaningless ethical questions with some kind of assumed axiom that allows us to cross the fact-value distinction, such as Eliezer's meta-ethics or "one should always act so as to maximize paperclips."
In general: Positivism teaches us to ignore many things we should not ignore. Rationalism, however, teaches us to ignore some things, but it does not teach us to ignore ethical questions.
Experiment: ask Clippy a question about decision theory.
Hey Clippy. What decision theory do you use to determine how your actions produce paperclips?
Hey Clippy. What decision theory do you use to determine how your actions produce paperclips?
I can't really explain it, I just think about it and then something seems to be the "right" thing to do -- or vice versa. It does involve a lot of calculations involving the mechanics of paperclips. And I know that I would one-box on the "Newcomb's problem" that is talked about here, and I would pay on the "Parfit's Hitchhiker" problem, unless of course my rescue deprived the universe of paperclips on net.
I dispute the inclusion of anger at government policies as useful criticism. Any problem in government can only be suboptimal relative to a different set of policies, and as such, criticism of government should come with an argument that a solution is possible. For example, many voters oppose deficits, oppose tax increases, and say that they favor spending cuts, but will tend to oppose the overwhelming majority of possible cuts when individual expensive government programs are named. Criticism without suggestion from someone who would criticize any possible solution is useless.
I'm not advocating anger as an emotional state -- I think that's usually counterproductive.
And it's also important to avoid the kinds of internal inconsistencies you mentioned.
But I wouldn't say criticism without suggestion is useless. My point is precisely the opposite.
Consider government corruption. Useful ideas can be proposed for limiting corruption, but the fact is that (in some states, and in some countries) nothing has really succeeded. This lack of success tends to make people see corruption as ordinary, as business as usual. That's a logical fallacy. Lack of success at fighting corruption does not imply anything about how harmful or harmless it is. I remember a column by John Kass of the Chicago Tribune where he interviewed the families of children killed in car accidents by truck drivers who had gotten licenses in exchange for bribes. His point: just because corruption is traditional and common and we don't know how to fix it, does not make it harmless.
Right. It seems like to synthesize your point and the post we would need to say that, in evaluating a criticism, we should consider not:
Do we know of a solution to this problem?
but
Can we prove that there is no solution to this problem?
The second type of problem, we must live with. The first type, we should devote some resources to thinking about.
But the atheist, if he retains his composure, can say, “I don’t know, but so what?
or, "I don't know, but won't it be interesting to try to find out?"
I was raised to be a strong, convicted theist, and I'm still trying to shake off some nasty habits. Occasionally I see or participate in a conversation that trends towards something like SarahC's interrogation: “If there’s no God, what’s your system of morality?” “How did the Universe begin?” “How do you explain the existence of eyes?” “How do you find meaning in life?”
I've learned that an effective response is, "See what sort of interesting questions you ask as soon as you consider that maybe 'God did it' isn't a valid answer?" Then, you pick your favorite query and go into all the useful things humanity has learned as soon as they stopped treating scripture as a reason to stop thinking. Heliocentric astronomy is a favorite.
I cannot claim a lot of experience with other religions, but most Christians who ask questions of atheists are convinced they're "equipped" to handle the situation. Anyone with doubts would rather not talk about the subject of atheism at all. For the would-be inquisitors, then, introduce atheism as a useful thought experiment first. Discovering our ignorance isn't a "I don't know, but so what?" scenario, it's a "I don't know, isn't it great?!" sort of thing. While I'm still not completely convinced religion isn't without its uses, its greatest flaw is that it allows people to live their lives without ever learning what they don't know.
Voted up for extremely clear writing on an important topic, but I vehemently disagree with part of your thesis.
Lack of success at fighting corruption does not imply anything about how harmful or harmless it is.
Agreed.
But it is the critic who counts. ... Just because nobody knows how to end poverty doesn’t mean poverty is okay.
I disagree on both points.
First, it is not the critic who counts. A critic with no solutions and no realistic hope of inspiring any counts for nothing; a volunteer who builds one house with Habitat for Humanity is better than a state legislator who delivers a thousand eloquent speeches in favor of increased housing funding but ultimately fails to secure passage for any of her bills.
One could point to a handful of reformers who have successfully focused attention on an issue with good results; e.g., Rachel Carson criticized America's environmental practices and asked people to pay more attention to the environment. For Carson, though, the criticism came with its own realistic solution--during the prosperous 1960s, at a time when rivers were literally aflame with floating toxic waste, it was plausible to think that people would spend more resources on ...
I think you raise some good points here.
I may have been encouraging people to "urge themselves to be especially upset" because that's a habit of mine, but you're right that it's not always a good idea to be emotionally upset when you can do nothing. What I don't like is this chain of events:
I think Stage 2 is fine; my problem is with Stage 3. The kinds of problems I'm talking about here are not literally impossible to solve; they're problems we don't know how to solve yet. Ideally, people who have stopped losing sleep and stressing out over a problem would still acknowledge and take seriously the fact that it is not a good thing. Put it off to one side, certainly -- but be prepared for the day that someone smarter than you has a good idea, and be willing to accept a solution if it arises.
Death is a good example of what I'm talking about, actually. Finding peace is a good idea. But I don't think it's good to be so wedded to acceptance of death that, if someone says "Here's something that might make people live much longer, or not die at all," you say "Well, that sounds like a bad idea. Death is a part of life."
For external, didactic purposes:
Moderates, who are invested in the status quo, tend to simply not notice problems, and to dismiss radicals for not having well-thought-out solutions. But it’s better to know that a problem exists than to not know – regardless of whether you have a solution at the moment.
This is a bit of a caricature of moderates - moderates who care about the issues may also be more aware of the details of the system, and of how any quick fix somewhere may screw things up somewhere else.
In my eyes, the distinction between experts and non-experts of a particular system (law, the economy, diplomacy, science, education, culture ...) is more important than the distinction between critics and those that accept the status quo. For pretty much any system, chances are there'll be people who think it's fine as it is, and people who think it should change. If all the experts are on one side, chances are it's right. If there are experts on both sides, [i]then[/i] it's them you should be listening to them.
Here I mean "experts" in a broad sense, of those who know about a system, about why it's like it is, about what changes have been tried and which ones would have which consequences. A problem is...
You're right -- it was a caricature, and it wasn't entirely fair.
I think your view of compromise is accurate.
But I want to complicate it a little. It may be true that there's a carefully balanced compromise, making everyone unhappy by the same amount, such that making a change really would make the system fall apart, with possibly disastrous results. The first thing I want to say is that someone who sees this "balance" may make a sort of mental shorthand and call it a good solution or a solved problem, and lose the acute awareness of grievance from the various unhappy parties. The moderate may eventually cease to recognize the grievances as even slightly legitimate. (I have seen this happen.) And this is a genuine fallacy.
The second thing I want to say is that the state of slavery in the 1850's was also a delicately balanced compromise, and disturbing it did have disastrous results. I'm not saying this to discredit your argument with a smear. My point is this: it may add zero new information to know that some people are unhappy with the status quo, but it does add information to know what their reasoning is for being unhappy. The content of abolitionist propaganda...
There’s a human bias against acknowledging the existence of problems for which we don’t have solutions; we need incentives in the other direction, encouraging people to identify hard problems.
There is also a human tendency towards criticizing things by comparing them with an impossible perfect solution, "The Nirvana Fallacy". This is very common in discussion of government/politics. The problem is that the criticisms often get used to implement even worse solutions, because the same critical viewpoint is not taken to the solution as to the o...
It's indeed an interesting question how much we should care about "non-constructive" criticism. If you correctly point out a mistake in a mathematical proof, this is valuable even if you don't offer a proof of your own. But if you're choosing one of several theories of physics, a low posterior probability (or low observed likelihood) doesn't give you enough reason to reject the theory: you must also find a different theory with a higher posterior, or you're a bad Bayesian. This is one of the reasons many people don't like Bayesianism :-)
And the poor atheist, after one question too many, is forced to say “I don’t know.”
The stronger answer to many of those questions is "nobody knows."
And sometimes knowing what you know you don't know is more important than what you actually know.
Some further thoughts:
Noticing that something isn't right is very different from developing a solution.
The former may draw on experience and intuition - like having developed a finely honed bullshit detector. You can often just immediately see that there's something wrong.
I've noticed that when people complain that someone has given a criticism but hasn't or can't suggest something better, they seem expect that person to be able to do so on the spot, off the top of their head.
But the task of developing a solution is not usually something you can do o...
Yes. Too often people treat it as a sin to criticize without suggesting an alternative. (as if a movie critic could only criticize an element of a film if they were to write a better film).
But coming up with alternatives can be hard, and having clear criticisms of current approaches can be an important step towards a better solution. It might take years of building up various criticisms -- and really coming to understand the problem -- before you are ready to build an alternative.
I add this only because it provides a greater context:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy ca...
I think you've touched on something really important when you mention how it is easier to be a strong critic than to have a real, working solution. This is a common retort against strong criticism -- "Oh, but you don't how to make it any better" -- and it seems to be something of a logical fallacy.
There is a certain sense of energy and inspiration behind good criticism which I've always been fond of. This is important, because criticism seems to be almost always non-conformist or pessimistic in a certain sense, so I think you kind of need encouragement to remind yourself that criticism is generally originating from good intentions.
Nice. I particularly liked the dig at Rooseveltian machismo. Of course it's possible to go too far in the opposite direction too. Some related thoughts here.
I found the most condensed essence (also parody) of religious arguments for fatalism in Greg Egan's Permutation City:
Even though I know God makes no difference. And if God is the reason for everything, then God includes the urge to use the word God. So whenever I gain some strength, or comfort, or meaning, from that urge, then God is the source of that strength, that comfort, that meaning. And if God - while making no difference - helps me to accept what's going to happen to me, why should that make you sad?
Logically irrefutable, but utterly vacuous...
It is easier for the moderates to accept critiques of the status quo if they have common terminal values with the critic.
What I'm talking about is win-win solutions or pareto improvements. If I show that everything that you care about improves with my solution, you would have very little to object.
David Brin's reaching out to Conservatives highlights this. he tries to show how matters that the conservatives care about improve in a democratic administration. But it is very easy for such solution providers to face ugh fields in the people whom they want to ...
Content aside, this was one of the most beautifully written posts that LW has had in a while.
While I don't disagree that it can be valuable to say that there's something wrong with a theory, it should be noted that at least for factual matters, if you can't provide an alternative explanation then your criticism isn't actually that strong. The probability of a hypothesis being the true explanation for an observation is the fraction its probability makes up of the total probability of that observation (summing over all competing hypothesis, weighed by their respective likelihoods). If you can't move in with another hypothesis to steal some probability clay from the first hypothesis (by providing likelihood values that better predict the observations), that first hypothesis is not going to take a hit.
There is some value in detecting a problem but if there are a huge number of problems to solve then it seems a better strategy to concentrate in a few of them. Is all about managing your energy. If you see problems everywhere and tell people about them, perhaps they get a little tired of listening to you, so combine detecting problems with giving solutions. A strategy for life that reflects your intelligence is more than shouting about everything is wrong in our world.
When read in context, Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech explains why criticism without suggestion is useless and deserving of dismissal.
...There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an i
...criticism without suggestion is useless and deserving of dismissal.
There is no such thing, really, as criticism without suggestion. Sometimes the suggestion is just "Woah, something's very wrong here!" That's usually OK.
Atheists trying to justify themselves often find themselves asked to replace religion. “If there’s no God, what’s your system of morality?” “How did the Universe begin?” “How do you explain the existence of eyes?” “How do you find meaning in life?” And the poor atheist, after one question too many, is forced to say “I don’t know.” After all, he’s not a philosopher, cosmologist, psychologist, and evolutionary biologist rolled into one. And even they don’t have all the answers.
But the atheist, if he retains his composure, can say, “I don’t know, but so what? There’s still something that doesn’t make sense about what you learned in Sunday school. There’s still something wrong with your religion. The fact that I don’t know everything won’t make the problem go away.”
What I want to emphasize here, even though it may be elementary, is that it can be valuable and accurate to say something’s wrong even when you don’t have a full solution or a replacement.
Consider political radicals. Marxists, libertarians, anarchists, greens, John Birchers. Radicals are diverse in their political theories, but they have one critical commonality: they think something’s wrong with the status quo. And that means, in practice, that different kinds of radicals sometimes sound similar, because they’re the ones who criticize the current practices of the current government and society. And it’s in criticizing that radicals make the strongest arguments, I think. They’re sketchy and vague in designing their utopias, but they have moral and evidentiary force when they say that something’s wrong with the criminal justice system, something’s wrong with the economy, something’s wrong with the legislative process.
Moderates, who are invested in the status quo, tend to simply not notice problems, and to dismiss radicals for not having well-thought-out solutions. But it’s better to know that a problem exists than to not know – regardless of whether you have a solution at the moment.
Most people, confronted with a problem they can’t solve, say “We just have to live with it,” and very rapidly gloss into “It’s not really a problem.” Aging is often painful and debilitating and ends in death. Almost everyone has decided it’s not really a problem – simply because it has no known solution. But we also used to think that senile dementia and toothlessness were “just part of getting old.” I would venture that the tendency, over time, to find life’s cruelties less tolerable and to want to cure more of them, is the most positive feature of civilization. To do that, we need people who strenuously object to what everyone else approaches with resignation.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”
But it is the critic who counts. Just because I can’t solve P=NP doesn’t mean I can’t say the latest attempt at a proof is flawed. Just because I don’t have a comprehensive system of ethics doesn’t mean there’s not something wrong with the Bible’s. Just because I don’t have a plan for a perfect government doesn’t mean there isn’t something wrong with the present one. Just because I can’t make people live longer and healthier lives doesn’t mean that aging isn’t a problem. Just because nobody knows how to end poverty doesn’t mean poverty is okay. We are further from finding solutions if we dismiss the very existence of the problems.
This is why I’m basically sympathetic to speculations about existential risk, and also to various kinds of research associated with aging and mortality. It’s calling attention to unsolved problems. There’s a human bias against acknowledging the existence of problems for which we don’t have solutions; we need incentives in the other direction, encouraging people to identify hard problems. In mathematics, we value a good conjecture or open problem, even if the proof doesn’t come along for decades. This would be a good norm to adopt more broadly – value the critic, value the one who observes a flaw, notices a hard problem, or protests an outrage, even if he doesn’t come with a solution. Fight the urge to accept a bad solution just because it ties up the loose ends.