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[SEQ RERUN] Tolerate Tolerance
Today's post, Tolerate Tolerance was originally published on 21 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
One of the likely characteristics of someone who sets out to be a "rationalist" is a lower-than-usual tolerance for flawed thinking. This makes it very important to tolerate other people's tolerance - to avoid rejecting them because they tolerate people you wouldn't - since otherwise we must all have exactly the same standards of tolerance in order to work together, which is unlikely. Even if someone has a nice word to say about complete lunatics and crackpots - so long as they don't literally believe the same ideas themselves - try to be nice to them? Intolerance of tolerance corresponds to punishment of non-punishers, a very dangerous game-theoretic idiom that can lock completely arbitrary systems in place even when they benefit no one at all.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
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Comments (20)
Lunatics and crackpots don't necessarily have seriously flawed thinking. Different priors, different information, and small biases can lead to entirely different conclusions. Most people avoid crackpot status by never venturing to attempt an original thought, or any thought, really, and just going along with conventional wisdom.
Most of the canonical sources here, like Korzybski, Jaynes, and Everett, were seen as crackpots at one time, and some still are in some quarters.
In my experience, what leads to becoming a crackpot is when one's ego significantly exceeds one's intelligence. Now, If only I had a way to measure both on the same scale...
"Crackpot" has been leveled as an epithet against just about every major thinker. Had the epithet existed then, Galileo surely would have qualified even by the most conservative use of the term.
I regard the term as indicating that somebody is going very far afield of established thinking. 99.9% of all crackpots will be wrong. But it may be worth listening to them anyways.
I guess Galileo had read and understood Aristotle, he just disagreed with him. Conversely, the cranks who infest Usenet and similar places usually have at most a very vague idea of what Einstein said. So I don't think the two are analogous. (See also)
I understand quantum theory (the specific theory of quantized energy, not the catch-all way it's used to commonly encapsulate modern physics), I just disagree with it. Yes, it's been pretty much a million for a million out of its predictions. I still disagree with it.
Am I or am I not a crackpot?
Why do you disagree with it? That is very much a relevant question...
Because it privileges our -scale- in something the same way we used to privilege our planet and then our sun, as having some special place in the universe, is one answer, and the reason I started looking for alternatives. (Hey, I noticed a trend.)
It's hard to communicate the why - essentially, however, I found a brilliant physicist who was contemporary to the development of the theory who had been working on an alternative explanation which drew on his subject expertise (Johannes Rhydberg). I found him because I had independently came to the same alternative explanation and was looking for the mathematics to prove it out and found his work on hydrogen atoms. (His work is what the mathematics for predictions of what light spectra are emitted by given atomic configurations at given energy levels are based upon)
I haven't sat down to crunch it out, but I'm pretty sure that if you use modern atomic models with a couple minor tweaks, his theories would, for scales above the Planck scale, make the same predictions as quantum physics, and have explanatory power for light frequency emissions, without privileging scale. (Essentially the difference would be that Planck scales of energy are those necessary to shift electrons between shells, if you'll pardon my use of the simpler non-Standard Model model for descriptive purposes, and sub-Planck scales of energy appear as quantum-random Planck-scale events when enough energy gathers or dissipates through sub-Planck emissions to cause Planck-scale events, such as an electron rising or falling a shell - essentially particles "hide" sub-Planck energy levels).
Or, in short, I have the same answer as most crackpots: I find the standard theory inelegant, and have an alternative I prefer.
That's rather better considered than most crackpot theories. What different predictions do you have, and how much data, if any, are you currently defying?
Biggest prediction would be that "spontaneous emissions" should be predictable. Unfortunately, quantum field theory already says they're predictable, just not to the same extent,
The data shouldn't be defied at all. I'm not going to say it -doesn't-, since, as previously mentioned, I haven't actually crunched it out, but if it does, it's wrong. It would mostly be an update to the mechanisms - replacing the second quantization of quantum field theory with something a little less abstract. (I'll add, somewhat sardonically, that there are already two different mechanisms of calculating quantum field theory which both make the same predictions, and there used to be something like nine before most of them were generalized into a single approach. So quantum field theory already has a long history of such substitutions without impacting predictions.)
You are not a crackpot, unless there are major factual errors in your explanation of your theory.
It does render the two-slit experiment invalid for its intended purpose, even if it doesn't affect the data, if that helps my case.