Desrtopa comments on Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: passive_fist 23 November 2013 06:04AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (295)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Desrtopa 27 November 2013 05:56:12PM 6 points [-]

How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?

I don't think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.

The tendency to see society as being in a constant state of decline, descending from some golden age, is positively ancient, and seems to be capable of arising even in cases where there is no real golden age to look back on, unless society really started going downhill with the invention of writing. There is no shortage of compelling biases to motivate individuals to adopt a Reactionary viewpoint, so for someone attempting to judge how likely the narrative is to be correct, they need to look, not for whether there are arguments for Reaction at all, but whether those arguments are significantly stronger than they would have predicted given a knowledge of how well people tend to support other ideologies outside the mainstream.

Comment author: jaime2000 27 November 2013 10:44:26PM 3 points [-]

I don't think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.

Of course not; even if you reject the current conventional narrative, it still takes a lot of evidence to pinpoint Reaction as a plausible alternative (nevermind a substantially correct one). But Mathias was basically saying that the models and case studies of monarchy he studied in his history classes provided him with such a high prior probability that monarchy "doesn't work" that he couldn't imagine why anybody could possibly be a monarchist in this day and age. I was arguing that the evidence he received therein might not have been quite as strong as he felt it to be.