Comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 20:02:07 GMT

The obvious evolutionary argument that comes to mind is that not believing in bullshit, particularly the bullshit believed by powerful people in your tribe, could get you killed in the ancestral environment. Domains of human knowledge in which bullshit is not tolerated are those where that knowledge is constantly being tested against reality - computer programming is a good example, since you can't bullshit a compiler - and in other domains terrible things can happen.

Not so obvious. From all I've read, hunter-gatherer societies were and are largely governed by consensus although no doubt there are sometimes extremely dominant personalities. What you're describing is more like early civilization (e.g. Aztec), and what we used to see in Tarzan movies.

I have quite a different theory about the evolutionary advantage of tending towards orthodoxy, but that seems like a different issue anyway.

Global warming in particular seems to me to be a case where most people hold beliefs one way or the other primarily to signal affiliation with either the pro- or anti-global warming tribes. That belief certainly doesn't get tested against reality in any meaningful way in many people's lives.

My construction: The "AGW is a hoax" meme is exhibit A in movement conservatism's massive (most of you probably have no idea how massive and thorough) and mostly spurious argument that the MSM (Mostly sane Media), Academia, and every left-of-Milton Friedman institution are joined in one big lie factory aimed at bringing about one-world socialist government. That, I believe is why GOP congressmen are so nearly unanimous, or at best tiptoeing around if if they know the thing is a crock. Toe the line or be called a RINO and then "primaried"

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