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David_Gerard comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is a bit of a tangential ramble on why diversity might be kind of a good idea.
Different evidence accrues to people with different experiences.
A Bayesian agent who goes through an upbringing as a boy and one who goes through an upbringing as a girl will probably not possess identical beliefs about society, the world, humanity, and so on. This is not because one has been held back or misled, nor because one is less rational than the other ... but because two different partial explorations of the same territory do not yield the same map.
This does not mean that "men's truth" and "women's truth" (or "European truth" and "African truth") are different truths. Nor does it mean that any map is just as good as any other. Some people really do sit down and scribble all over their map until it is useless.
But since nobody's map is equivalent to the territory, overall we can expect that we will navigate the territory better if we can get help from people whose maps are different from our own.
That means that if we spend our time hanging out only with people whose experiences are a lot like our own, and going all Robber's Cave on anyone whose map doesn't look like ours, we are probably going to end up kinda ignorant. At the very least we will not have as complete a picture of the landscape as a group who has shared maps from lots of different paths.
This matters if we care about possessing accurate maps; and it also matters a great deal if what we are trying to map includes things like "the good of humanity" or "coherent extrapolated volition of humankind" or things like that.
The apparent inconceivability (in this thread) of the notion that someone might disagree on a deep level with local memes without being insane is quite amazing. Typical mind fallacy, the lack of realisation that there exist unknown unknowns.
Yes. This thread reads like LW is aimed at realising the CEV of well-off programmers in the Bay Area. If you're serious about working for all of humanity, it may conceivably be useful to seriously listen to some who don't already agree with you.
I don't think that's the case. If people would find that notion inconceivability I doubt that the thread would be upvoted to 19 at the point of this writing.
I would also point out that the kind of ideology that expressed in the linked post comes from the Bay Area. As far as core differences in ideologies goes pitting one Bay Area ideology against another Bay Area ideology isn't real diversity of opinion.
I considered posting a third-hand account in the rationality quotes of a blind couple who, in a public park and not hearing anyone else nearby, decided to have sex. They told the judge they did not know that anyone could see them; maybe they didn't, what with plausibly having no idea what vision is capable of.
It felt too lengthy, and it wasn't originally intended as a parable, so I decided against posting it. I think it more easily explains itself in this context, though.
I don't see where those who disagree with local memes are being accused of insanity, and not noticing something like that scares me. Could you please point out where it's happening?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jfr/link_why_im_not_on_the_rationalist_masterlist/aakh - found with a quick Ctrl-F for "insan".
Oh, well that actually looks fine and I think I agree with it. I was worried the comment you were replying to implied some stuff that was invisible to me due to biases.
Well, in several places Eliezer uses "insane" and synonyms to mean irrational (according to his view). Search for "people are insane".
Another example
That post is at negative karma, and is about US conservatives rather than about people who disagree with local memes.
To be fair to Lumifer, that comment now has zero karma, and US conservatives plausibly are a group of "people who disagree with local memes", given that they're in a tiny minority here (about 2%; in the 2012 survey there were 20 self-identified US conservatives, out of 1001 responses giving both a country and a political alignment).