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Neo comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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The significance of the Flynn effect is disputed, and some claim that the course of the 20th century saw a decline in innovation. Unfortunately, the divide on these matters, at least in the lay blogosphere, aligns with a political division. Those who want to say that the world is going to hell in a handbasket point to a decline in reaction times (which are correlated with intelligence) and claim scientific stagnation, those who believe that we've never had it so good and will have it better in the future point to Flynn and the modern cornucopia. Is evidence producing worldviews or are worldviews selecting evidence?
Those who advocate that the world is going to hell, do they point to a certain era as the most rational time, and what would have caused the downturn?
EDIT: Mainly asking this question in order to find out how they measure rationality, as right now I find the point of view rather surprising.
I don't think the world is going to hell, but I do think that wealth and power can give you more luxury to hold irrational beliefs. So perhaps people were more rational back in the days of our noble savage ancestors and it's been downhill ever since. :)
Since holding irrational beliefs tends to result in eventually loosing one's wealth and power, this tends to work as a negative feedback effect.
I'm not sure this is true because of standby-rationality mode. Also known as hypocrisy.
Agreed. Powerful people (especially politicians) seem to hold plenty of irrational beliefs. Of course we can't really tell the difference between lying about irrational beliefs and hypocrisy, if there's a meaningful difference for the outside observer at all.
The problem is that the politician who honestly holds a popular irrational belief (assuming said belief isn't directly related to the mechanisms of election campaigns) is better able to signal it and thus more likely to get elected than the politician who merely false claims to hold it.
I'm not sure about that. As Granny Weatherwax points out in Wyrd Sisters, "Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things."
Or, to put it a different way, if one concentrates on the signalling, and if one is reasonably competent at acting, and isn't caught in the act of breaking character, one can signal a belief a lot better than someone who merely holds said belief.
That depends on whether you're trying to fool outsiders or fellow believers.
Deliberate intent is more likely to produce a superstimulus than chance, yes. Stack the modifiers. Politicians tend to be those who happened to already hold something close to the ideal belief, then deliberately took steps to refine their faith in it as well as their ability to present it to others.
Faking sincerity isn't easy. The person who seems like he's putting effort into proving that he has a certain belief looks different than the person who isn't out to prove that he's holding the belief and simply believes.
Presenting a belief as an unspoken assumption in a very light way is something that usually happens with a true believer but not with someone who acts like he believes.
You can tell a joke in a way that the person who listens laughs for a few seconds. You can also tell it in a way that the person suddenly get's a realization when he comes home after a few hours. The subtlety that you need for the brain spending hours processing the joke is a hard skill.
It's not impossible to learn. I don't know excatly what Obama does to get the kind of emotional effects in his audience he does. That's more than just being reasonably competent at acting. On the other hand not every politician is at that rhetorical level.
I'd expect politicians to be much better at occlumency than the general population, though.
Standby-rationality mode isn't nearly as good as actual rational reasoning. Also hypocrisy creates cognitive dissonance (both in individuals and institutions) that tends to be resolved by actually adopting the (false) beliefs one is claiming to believe.
Can you give me a couple concrete examples of this?
Same question. TIA
I'm referring to the reactosphere, of course, which I don't actually follow, but am aware of. Some trace the fall to the Enlightenment, some to the Reformation. Moldbug, on the other hand, has a lot of time for writers up to the 19th century, as people who knew what was what and from whose state of grace we have fallen. He has mentioned many times the persistent leftwards trend since then but the last I saw, still considered it a mystery. Others look to prehistory when men were men and women were chattels, and think that things started going downhill with the invention of agriculture, with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the 20th century being but further headlong descent down the rings of hell.
Leftists, in contrast, read the persistent leftwards trend as the inevitable march towards truth. At least, when they aren't crying "help, help, I'm being oppressed!", which requires portraying their opposition as the ones with power.
You accept the leftard trend as fact, but the economics of the left have been abandoned, while their social policies have been accepted.
"Leftard" :)
What do you mean by economics of the left? Do you mean state capitalism like in China, or a generous welfare state like in Sweden? Arguably both are quite successful.
I think I stopped paying attention to Moldbug somewhere around the time he said he was too cool to respond to Scott's demolishing of neoreaction.
I mean state communism, nationalization, the govt co strolling the means of production.
How has nationalization and the government controlling the means of production been abandoned? Have you seen what Russia and China are up to?
The history of the 19th and 20th century has seen a continuous movement towards welfare and labor reforms, which are broadly "leftist" (or at least a part of the liberal project -- the neoreaction types will agree). In other words, what the heck are you talking about?
Nationalization etc have been abandoned by the parties of the left in western democracies. Putin acts for Putin. China is state CAPITALISM.
The past 100 years have seen a trend towards labour reform. The past 30 years have seen capitalist economics accepted by everyone. Free market economics was imposed on Russia in the 90s, as the obvious choice of system. Because of prevailing inequalities, that led to the oligarchs. Putns threats of nationalization are part of a power struggle with them.
Edit: do you think western countries could have the kind of capitalism they one have with an unreformsd labour market of downtrodden serfs, bonded for life to a single overlord? Much labor reform came about because capitalism was evolving to a form where employers needed an educated and flexible workforce. Some reforms were pushed by government, but much just had to happen, because you can't plug Jethro the serf into the job done by Josh the freelance web designer.
Here is how this conversation played out:
you: "The economics of the left have been abandoned."
me: "What do you mean by 'economics of the left?"
you: "Nationalization, the government controlling the means of production, etc."
me: "What about Russia, China, etc?"
you: "Russia is actually not a true Scotsman, and I am going to apply the label 'capitalism' to China in such a way that it trumps the fact that a huge amount of economic capacity activity there is directly controlled by the state, many many firms are nationalized, or effectively nationalized, etc."
re: edit: 19th-20th century reforms are a very complicated subject, I don't think you can give a good analysis in one paragraph. Reforms in Russia went very differently from reforms in the Ottoman empire, which went very differently from reforms in Hapsburg Austria, and so on.
For example, Russia abolished the serfs because they noted that their army was pathetic during the Crimean war, and they wanted to have an army that is competitive with the West. And of course the process wasn't even complete until 1907, which is amazing if you think about it because it implies Russia was part-feudal into the 20th century.
One view on the current Crimean crisis is that Russia is still playing conceptual catchup with the West. When the West was living in the 19th century, Russia was living in the 16th. Now that the West is living in the 21st century, Russia is living in the 19th. At any rate, Russia's trajectory has very little in common with, for instance, England's trajectory. England started on the path of restricting the power of the King back during the Magna Carta days. Russia is still not fully on board with this being a good idea today, 8 centuries later.
You can't just talk about "labor reform [unqualified]."
Your "huge amount" is less than the everything the Chinese government used to control.
Edit: if China had been mostly ccapitalist 50 years ago, you could say it had moved to the left. But 50 years ago, it was under Mao....
Russia also had free market economics imposed on it in the nineties, in line with pretty much everyone seeing it as the only option. So much for relentless leftwardsness.
Just stating Moldbug's view, but I do think he has a point here. Compare current policies everywhere with those of 100 to 150 years ago (which is the timescale he is viewing things on).
Social or economic policies?
Either. Consider government budget as a percentage of GDP today versus 100 years ago. No, left-wing economic policies haven't been abandoned.
Hmmm. Is that policy, or just size? Consider the money spent on beaurocracy by large corporations as opposed to small ones.
The increase in the size of government is the left-wing policy I'm referring to.
And it's theinevitable and politically neutral organic change I am talking about. One fact, two interpretations.