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Should we expect more anti-rationalism in the future? I believe that we should, but let me outline what actual observations I think we will make.
Firstly, what do I mean by 'anti-rationality'? I don't mean that in particular people will criticize LessWrong. I mean it in the general sense of skepticism towards science / logical reasoning, skepticism towards technology, and a hostility to rationalistic methods applied to things like policy, politics, economics, education, and things like that.
And there are a few things I think we will observe first (some of which we are already observing) that will act as a catalyst for this. Number one, if economic inequality increases, I think a lot of the blame for this will be placed on the elite (as it always is), but in particular the cognitive elite (which makes up an ever-increasing share of the elite). Whatever the views of the cognitive elite are will become the philosophy of evil from the perspective of the masses. Because the elite are increasingly made up of very high intelligence people, many of whom with a connection to technology or Silicon Valley, we should expect that the dominant worldview of that environment will increasingly contrast with the worldview of those who haven't benefited or at least do not perceive themselves to benefit from the increasing growth and wealth driven by those people. What's worse, it seems that even if economic gains benefit those at the very bottom too, if inequality still increases, that is the only thing that will get noticed.
The second issue is that as technology improves, our powers of inference increase, and privacy defenses become weaker. It's already the case that we can predict a person's behavior to some degree and use that knowledge to our advantage (if you're trying to sell something to them, give them / deny them a loan, judge whether they would be a good employee, or predict whether or not they will commit a crime). There's already a push-back against this, in the sense that certain variables correlate with things we don't want them to, like race. This implies that the standard definition of privacy, in the sense of simply not having access to specific variables, isn't strong enough. What's desired is not being able to infer the values of certain variables, either, which is a much, much stronger condition. This is a deep, non-trivial problem that is unlikely to be solved quickly - and it runs into the same issues as all problems concerning discrimination do, which is how to define 'bias'. Is reducing bias at the expense of truth even a worthy goal? This shifts the debate towards programmers, statisticians and data scientists who are left with the burden of never making a mistake in this area. "Weapons of Math Destruction" is a good example of the way this issue gets treated.
We will also continue to observe a lot ideas from postmodernism being adopted as part of political ideology of the left. Postmodernism is basically the antithesis of rationalism, and is particularly worrying because it is a very adaptable and robust meme. And an ideology that essentially claims that rationality and truth are not even possible to define, let alone discover, is particularly dangerous if it is adopted as the mainstream mode of thought. So if a lot of the above problems get worse, I think there is a chance that rationalism will get blamed as it has been in the framework of postmodernism.
The summary of this is: As politics becomes warfare between worldviews rather than arguments for and against various beliefs, populist hostility gets directed towards what is perceived to be the worldview of the elite. The elite tend to be more rationalist, and so that hostility may get directed towards rationalism itself.
I think a lot more can be said about this, but maybe that's best left to a full post, I'm not sure. Let me know if this was too long / short or poorly worded.
Writing style looks fine. My quibbles would be with the empirical claims/predictions/speculations.
Is the elite really more of a cognitive elite than in the past?
Strenze's 2007 meta-analysis (previously) analyzed how the correlations between IQ and education, IQ and occupational level, and IQ and income changed over time. The first two correlations decreased and the third held level at a modest 0.2.... (read more)