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JoshuaZ comments on David Deutsch on How To Think About The Future - Less Wrong
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This sort of claim seems to run into historical problems. A lot of major expansionist violent empires have done quite well for themselves. In modern times, some of the most "bad" groups have done well as well. The Nazis in many ways had much better technology than the Allies. If they hadn't been ruled by an insane dictator they would have done much better. Similarly, if they had expanded just as much but waited to start the serious discrimination and genocide until after they already had won they would have likely won. Similarly, in WW2, Japan did quite well for itself, and if a handful of major battles had gone slightly differently, the outcome would have been very different.
Or to use a different, but potentially more controversial example, in North America and in Australia, the European colonizers won outright, despite having extremely violent, expansionist policies. In North America, you actually had multiple different European groups fighting amongst themselves as well and yet they still won.
Overall, this is a pleasant, optimistic claim that seems to be depressingly difficult to reconcile with actual history.
It's worth noting that most of the Nazi superiority in technology wasn't actually due to Nazi efforts, but rather due to a previous focus on technological and scientific development; for example, Germans won 14 of the first 31 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, the vast majority of initial research into quantum mechanics was done by Germans, etc. But Nazi policies actually did actively slow down progress, by e.g. causing the emigration of free-thinking scientists like John von Neumann, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Max Born, Erwin Schrodinger, and Albert Einstein, and by replacing empirically based science with inaccurate political ideology. (Hitler personally believed that the stars were balls of ice, tried to avoid harmful "earth-rays" mapped out for him with a dowsing rod, and drank a toxic gun-cleaning fluid for its supposed health benefits, not to mention his bizarre racial theories.) Membership in the Society of German Natural Researchers and Physicians shrank nearly in two between 1929 and 1937; during World War II, nearly half of German artillery came from its conquered neighbors, its supply system relied in part on 700,000-2,800,000 horses, its tanks and aircraft were in many ways technologically inferior to those of many of its neighbors, etc.
"If they hadn't been ruled by an insane dictator they would have done much better. Similarly, if they had expanded just as much but waited to start the serious discrimination and genocide until after they already had won they would have likely won."
But that's Deutch's entire point- that that's what the "bad guys" do, what makes them the "bad guys". Sure if Hitler hadn't been Hitler, or somehow not been human, German science wouldn't have been at a massive disadvantage. But I don't see much evidence that the "bad guys" have an advantage; at best, if you assume best case conditions and that the "bad guys" don't act like humans, you get an equal playing field.
(And we see similar things among the other "bad guys" of history- Lysenkoism, the Great Leap Forwards, etc.)
"Or to use a different, but potentially more controversial example, in North America and in Australia, the European colonizers won outright, despite having extremely violent, expansionist policies."
Conditions then no longer hold; nations are no longer isolated, the ideas of science/democracy/capitalism are fairly generally known, etc. And it's also worth noting that the colonizers have generally been transformed into "good guys".
According to this article published by the German Federal Archives, 2.8 million horses served in the German armed forces in WW2. The article also notes how successfully the German wartime propaganda portrayed the Wehrmacht as a high-tech motorized army, an image widely held in the public to this day, while in reality horses were its main means of transport.
You make a very strong case that the Nazi example does go in the other direction. I withdraw that example. If anything it goes strongly in favor of Deutsch's point.
I'm not convinced by the relevancy of your point about the historical state during the colonization of North America. The point is not whether or not someone eventually transformed, the point is that violent, expansionist groups can win over less expansionist groups.
Deutsch's definition of "the bad guys" is not the most expansionist groups.
He would regard the colonizers as the good guys (well, better guys) because their society was less static, more open to improvement, more tolerant of non-conformist people, more tolerant of new ideas, more free, and so on. There's a reason the natives had worse technology and their culture remained static for so long: they had a society that squashes innovation.
You'd have to convince me that they were more open to non-conformists. A major cause of the European colonization was flight of non-conforming groups (such as the Puritans) to North America where they then proceeded to persecute everyone who disagreed with them.
I'm curious what you think of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" or similar works. What causes one society or another to adopt or even make innovations can be quite complicated.
The Renaissance/much of modern science originated in Italy, not in England (thus, e.g. Galileo, da Vinci, etc.) And the Italian city-states of the time were fairly free: Pisa, Milan, Arezzo, Lucca, Bologna, Siena, Florence, and Venice were all at some point governed by elected officials. They were also remarkably meritocratic: as the influential Neapolitan defender of atomism Francesco D'Andrea put it, describing Naples:
(Even if he's only boasting about his own city-state, it's significant that meritocracy was considered worth boasting about.)
Similarly, merchants, not priests, politicians, etc. were considered the highest status group: nobles up to and including national leaders (e.g. the Doge of Venice) dressed like merchants.
(Incidentally, the other factors you mentioned below also played a role: competition between city-states and the influence of outside science from Byzantium and the Islamic world showing what could be done. Nevertheless, Italian freedoms were also necessary: e.g. Galileo was only able to publish his ideas because he lived in the free Republic of Venice, where Jesuits were banned and open inquiry encouraged; he was persecuted and forced to recant his theories when he moved to Tuscany.)
read The Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch. It discusses that Diamond book and other similar works.
Yes European society was not favorable to non-conformists. One period I've studied, which is later (so, i think, better in this regard) is around 1790 ish. At that time, to take one example, the philosopher william godwin's wife died in childbirth and he published memoirs and people got really pissed off because she had had sex out of wedlock and stuff along those lines. when godwin's daughter ran off with shelley there were rumors he had sold her. meanwhile, for example, there was lots of discrimination against irish catholics. i know some stuff about how biased and intolerant people can be.
but what i also know is a bit about static societies (again, see the book for more details, or at least check out my website, e.g. http://fallibleideas.com/tradition).
when a society doesn't change for thousands of years that means it's even harsher than the european society i was talking about. preventing change for such a long period is hard. stuff is done to prevent it. the non-conformists don't even get off the ground. everyone's spirits are squashed in childhood -- thoroughly -- and so the adults don't rebel at all. if there were adults who were eccentric then the society simply wouldn't stay the same so long. european society was already getting fairly near fairly rapid changes (e.g. industrial revolution) when it started colonizing the new world.
This doesn't follow. (Incidentally, I don't know why you sometimes drop back to failing to capitalize but it makes what you write much harder to read.) For example, if one doesn't have good nutrition then people won't be as smart and so won't innovate. Similarly, if one doesn't have free time people won't innovate. Some technologies and cultural norms also reinforce innovation. For example, having a written language allows a much larger body of ideas, and having market economies gives market incentives to coming up with new technologies.
Moreover, innovation can occur directly through competition. When you are convinced that your religion or tribe is the best and that you need to beat the others by any means necessary you'll do a lot better at innovating.
There's also a self-reinforcing spiral: the more you innovate the more people think that innovation is possible. If your society hasn't changed much then there's no reason to think that new technologies are easy to find.
There's no reason to think that Native American populations were systematically preventing change. There's a very large difference between having infrastructural and systemic issues that make the development of new technologies unlikely and the claim that "everyone's spirits are squashed in childhood -- thoroughly".
Minor remark: Your essay about tradition is much more readable than a lot of the other material on your site. I'm not sure why but if you took a different approach to writing/thinking about it, you might want to apply that approach elsewhere.
I think the difference is you. I wrote that entire site in a short time period. I regard it as all being broadly similar in style and quality. I attempted to use the same general approach to the whole site; I didn't change my mind about something midway. I think it's a subject you understand better than epistemology directly (it is about epistemology, indirectly. traditions are long lived knowledge). The response I've had from other readers has varied a lot, not matched your response.
I do know how to write in a variety of different styles, and have tried each in various places. The one I've used here in the last week is not the best in various senses. But it serves my purpose.
The first example that comes to mind for me is the collapse of the Roman empire. The Romans might have been "bad", being aggressive and expansionist, but the people they fell to were markedly worse from the perspective of truth seeking and pursuit of enlightenment, the standard Deutsch and curi are applying, and their replacements ushered in the Dark Ages.
But different conditions hold today. The Gothic armies were virtually identical to the armies of the earlier Celts/Gauls who the Romans had crushed; even the Magyars (~1500's CE) used more or less the same tactics and organization as the Cimmerians (~ 700 BCE), though they did have stirrups, solid saddle trees, and stiff-tipped composite bows. Similarly, IIRC, the Roman armies didn't make use of any major recent technological innovations. This no longer holds today; the idea of an army using technology hundreds of years old being a serious military threat to any modern nation is frankly ludicrous. Technological and scientific development has become much, much more important than it was during Roman times.
(And, btw, it's not really accurate to say that, in practice, the barbarians were all that much much worse than the Romans in terms of development and innovation; technological development in Europe didn't really slow down all that much during the Dark Ages and the Romans had very few scientific (as opposed to engineering) advances anyways- most of their scientific knowledge (not to mention their mythology, art, architecture, etc.) was borrowed from the Greeks.)
Yes, but the culture of enlightenment and innovation within Greek and Roman culture had already been falling apart from within. The culture of Classical Antiquity was outcompeted by less enlightened memes.
How so? I'm not sure when, specifically, you're talking about, but the post-expansion Roman Empire still produced such noted philosophers as Marcus Aurelius, Apuleius, Boethius, St. Augustine, etc.
I'm thinking of the decline of Hellenist philosophy, especially the mathematical and empirical outlooks propounded by those such as Hypatia.
As far as I know, Hypatia was a Neoplatonist like Saint Augustine. What evidence do you know of that she had an empirical outlook?
That was a position she had attributed to her in a book in which I first read about her; I no longer remember the details and may have been mistaken.
In any case, the development of new technology and naturalistic knowledge based on empirical investigation and mathematics declined in the Dark ages. Whether I was mistaken about Hypatia's position in particular or not doesn't change the issue of whether an inferior tradition of intellectual investigation replaced a superior one.
Was it by any chance Cosmos by Carl Sagan? His treatment of the topic is complete nonsense. (I understand Sagan is held in some respect by many people here, but he definitely wasn't above twisting facts and perpetuating myths to advance his agenda.) A good debunking of the whole "Hypatia as a rationalist martyr" myth can be found on Armarium Magnum.
In that case, I won't update my beliefs. Was that from a blurb in a science textbook by chance? I too have been the victim of false history from my science textbooks.
What time period are you referring to when you use the term Dark Ages? If you are referring to the Middle Ages, then I disagree that it is an example of a time when a superior intellectual tradition was replaced by an inferior one (at least in terms of natural philosophy/science).
Well of course the previously dominant branch of philosophy declined- that happens all the time in philosophy. But I don't think that there's grounds for proclaiming Hellenist philosophy to be significantly better than its successors: it was hardly empirical (Hypatia herself was an anti-empirical Platonist) and typically more concerned with e.g. confused explanations of the world in terms of a single property (all is fire! no, water!) or confusion regarding words (e.g. the Sorites paradox) than any kind of research valuable/relevant today.
And the group which continued the legacy of Hellenist/Roman thought, the Islamic world, did in fact continue and, IMHO, vastly augment the level of empirical thought; for example, it's widely believed that the inventor of the Scientific Method was an Arab scientist, Alhazen. Even though Europe saw a drop in learning due to the collapse of the unsustainable centralized Roman economy and the resulting wars and deurbanization, all that occurred was that its knowledge was passed onto new civilizations large/wealthy/secure enough to support science/math/philosophy. (Specifically, Persia and Byzantium, and later the Caliphates.)
The technological and empirical tradition of Islam pretty much died out due to the success of The Incoherence of the Philosophers though. My point is that innovative and empirical traditions have given way in the past to memetically stronger anti-innovative traditions. That doesn't mean that the same will happen to present day scientific culture, I highly doubt that would happen without some sort of catastrophic Black Swan event, but innovative traditions have not historically consistently beaten out non innovative ones.
I think this is caused by the fact that innovative societies are that way because their more open to new ideas. But being open to new ideas means that your memetic defenses are by definition weaker.
Notice also that innovative societies generally aren't defeated until they stop innovating.
But there were still significant Islamic achievements in science after The Incoherence of the Philosophers was published- e.g. Ibn Zuhr's experimental scientific surgery, Ibn al-Nafis's discovery of pulmonary circulation, etc. And The Incoherence of the Philosophers probably didn't have much of an impact, at least immediately, on Islamic science- Al-Ghazali only critiqued Avicenna's philosophy, while expressing support for science.
I think a more persuasive reason for the decline of Islamic science is the repeated invasions by outsiders (Crusaders, Mongols, Beduins, and the Reconquista, plus the Black Plague), which pretty much ended the golden age of Islamic civilization. But today, as I said earlier, there are no powerful yet unknown barbarian hordes around today.
(Though yes, I agree wrt Black Swans like the Black Plague.)
You are wrong about this. Even if every single American ship magically got sunk at some point in 1941 or 1942, and if every single American soldier stationed outside of the U.S. mainland magically dropped dead at the same time, it would only have taken a few years longer for the U.S. to defeat Japan. Once the American war production was up and running, the U.S. could outproduce Japan by at least two orders of magnitude and soon overwhelm the Japanese navy and air force no matter what their initial advantage. Starting the war was a suicidal move for the Japanese leadership, and even the sane people among them knew it.
I think you're also overestimating the chances Germans had, and underestimating how well Hitler did given the circumstances, though that's more controversial. Also, Germany lost the technological race in pretty much all theaters of war where technology was decisive -- submarine warfare, cryptography, radars and air defense, and nuclear weapons all come to mind. The only exceptions I can think of are jet aircraft and long-range missiles, but even in these areas, they produced mostly flashy toys rather than strategically relevant weapons.
Overall, I think it's clear that the insanity of the regimes running Germany and Japan hampered their technological progress and also led to their suicidal aggressiveness. At the same time, the relative sanity of the regimes running the U.K. and the U.S. did result in significant economic and technological advantages, as well as somewhat saner strategy. Of course, that need not have been decisive -- after all, the biggest winner of the war was Stalin, who was definitely closer to the defeated sides in all the relevant respects, if not altogether in the same league with them.
Ok. So all my World War 2 examples have now decisively been shown to be wrong. I don't have any other modern examples to give that go in this direction. All other modern examples go pretty strongly in the other direction. I withdraw the claim wholesale and am updating to accept the claim for post-enlightenment human societies.
Athens lost to sparta. But it was a close call. Sparta excelled at nothing but war. Athens spread its efforts around and was good at everything. And it was close! That's how much more powerful Athens was: it did tons of other stuff and nearly won the war anyway.
If Athens had had an extra 100 years to improve, it would have gotten a big lead on Sparta. Long term, that kind of society wins.
Not long term.
They were up against closed societies that were much worse than they themselves were in pretty much every respect including morally. The natives were not non-violent philosophers.