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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Thanks to Emile for suggesting I come here write something. I hope to get to the New York meetup on Sunday; I'm not ready for "rituals" and futuristic music just yet.
I just ran across LW by trying google terms along the lines of memetics "belief systems", etc., which led me to some books from late 90s like "Virus of the Mind", and in the last 2-3 years some just "OK" books on religions as virus-like meme systems. This kind of search to see what people may have said about some odd combination of thoughts that I suspect might be fruitful has brought me interesting results in the past. E.g. by googling ontological comedian, I discovered Ricky Gervais which has brightened my life (his movie "The Invention of Lying" out to be of interest to LW-ers). I'm interested in practical social epistemology -- trying to come up with creative responses to what looks like major chunks of the population (those pesky folks who elect presidents) being less and less moored in reality and going off into diverse fantasy lands -- or to put it another way, a massive breakdown in common sense about what sources are reliable.
I asked someone how she makes such decisions and she answered that she trusts people who are saying things consistent with what she already knows. Unfortunately, much of what she already knows isn't true.
I wonder why people have such a tin ear for bullshit. Someone kept sending me the latest "proof" that global warming is a big hoax, and as far as I'm concerned their own arguments are the best case against them. I.e. if this is the best they can do, they must not have a case. This sort of reasoning isn't part of classic epistemology, but I can hardly think of anything more important getting a quick read on a source as to its trustworthiness - esp. whether those contributing to it are truth seekers or propagandists. I think Alvin Goldman's Social Epistemology (which is far from the "social construction of reality" folks) can help with some of my concerns. I'd like to see an "economics of ideas" concerned with what makes ideas fly, whether they're true or not -- pretty close to memetics and from a different perspective, "media ecology", analogous to the set of topological T3 space and then find embedded within that [Social] Epistemology analogous to the more constrained T4 spaces.
I'm not so much interested in Philosophy 401 syllabi, but more interested in finding ways to teach truth seeking and bullshit avoidance in elementary schools. Also how to push back against the propagandists and liars with some viral techniques of our own - browsers that facilitate fact checking, maybe make it fun in some way; walling off purely factual data and building consensus that on one side of the wall the data really is factual; and building tools for synthesizing answers to particular questions based on that data.
I hope to learn something from the "black arts" threads on LW.
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.
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.
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.
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"