In the time of the Roman Empire, civic life was divided between the Blue and Green factions.  The Blues and the Greens murdered each other in single combats, in ambushes, in group battles, in riots.  Procopius said of the warring factions:  "So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colors be brothers or any other kin."  Edward Gibbon wrote:  "The support of a faction became necessary to every candidate for civil or ecclesiastical honors."

Who were the Blues and the Greens?  They were sports fans—the partisans of the blue and green chariot-racing teams.

Imagine a future society that flees into a vast underground network of caverns and seals the entrances.  We shall not specify whether they flee disease, war, or radiation; we shall suppose the first Undergrounders manage to grow food, find water, recycle air, make light, and survive, and that their descendants thrive and eventually form cities.  Of the world above, there are only legends written on scraps of paper; and one of these scraps of paper describes the sky, a vast open space of air above a great unbounded floor.  The sky is cerulean in color, and contains strange floating objects like enormous tufts of white cotton.  But the meaning of the word "cerulean" is controversial; some say that it refers to the color known as "blue", and others that it refers to the color known as "green".

Robin Hanson recently proposed stores where banned products could be sold.  There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals.  But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of 5 children is going to go into these stores and buy a "Dr. Snakeoil's Sulfuric Acid Drink" for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.

I was just making a simple factual observation.  Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?

Greg Burch said:

"I think people should have a right to be stupid and, if they have that right, the market's going to respond by supplying as much stupidity as can be sold."

Lady Justice is widely depicted as carrying a scales.  A scales has the property that whatever pulls one side down, pushes the other side up.  This makes things very convenient and easy to track.  It's also usually a gross distortion.

In human discourse there is a natural tendency to treat discussion as a form of combat, an extension of war, a sport; and in sports you only need to keep track of how many points have been scored by each team.  There are only two sides, and every point scored against one side, is a point in favor of the other.  Everyone in the audience keeps a mental running count of how many points each speaker scores against the other.  At the end of the debate, the speaker who has scored more points is, obviously, the winner; so everything he says must be true, and everything the loser says must be wrong.

In recent posts, I have predicted that, if not otherwise prevented from doing so, some people will behave stupidly and suffer the consequences:  "If people have a right to be stupid, the market will respond by supplying all the stupidity that can be sold."  People misinterpret this as indicating that I take a policy stance in favor of regulation.  It indicates no such thing.  It is meant purely as guess about empirical consequences - a testable prediction on a question of simple fact.

Perhaps I would be less misinterpreted if I also told "the other side of the story" - inveighed at length about the reasons why bureaucrats are not perfect rationalists guarding our net best interests.  But ideally, I shouldn't have to go to such lengths.  Ideally, I could make a prediction about a strictly factual question without this being interpreted as a policy stance, or as a stance on logically distinct factual questions.

Bostrom recently noted the problem of the commons in labeling efforts "important"; each managerial player has an incentive to label their project world-shakingly important, even though this devalues the priority label as used at other times or other projects, creating positive feedback in inflated labels.

This reminds me of how my grandfather, a pioneer in quantitative genetics, regularly bemoans the need to write more and more grant proposals to maintain a constant level of funding.  It's not that the funding is drying up in his field.  But suppose there's money for 20 grants, and 21 scientists in need of grants - or one scientist who'd like to run two projects, or receive more funding for one project...  One scientist doesn't get his first grant proposal funded, so he writes another one.  His second grant proposal does get funded, which uses up a grant that could have gone to another scientist, who now also has his first grant proposal denied, and has to write and send off a second grant proposal too...

The problem here is that, while some initial level of effort is beneficial, all effort beyond that is marginally zero-sum; there's a marginal return to the individual on additional efforts, but no marginal return to the group.  If there are 20 grants, then ultimately only 20 grant proposals are going to be funded.  No matter how many grant proposals anyone writes, the total funding available remains the same.  Everyone would be better off if everyone agreed to write only one grant proposal.  But in this case, there wouldn't be much competition for any given grant, and the rewards for writing another two or three grant proposals would be huge... until everyone else started doing the same thing.

I have so far distinguished between belief as anticipation-controller, belief in belief, professing and cheering.  Of these, we might call anticipation-controlling beliefs "proper beliefs" and the other forms "improper belief".  A proper belief can be wrong or irrational, e.g., someone who genuinely anticipates that prayer will cure her sick baby, but the other forms are arguably "not belief at all".

Yet another form of improper belief is belief as group-identification—as a way of belonging.  Robin Hanson uses the excellent metaphor of wearing unusual clothing, a group uniform like a priest's vestments or a Jewish skullcap, and so I will call this "belief as attire".

In terms of humanly realistic psychology, the Muslims who flew planes into the World Trade Center undoubtedly saw themselves as heroes defending truth, justice, and the Islamic Way from hideous alien monsters a la the movie Independence Day.  Only a very inexperienced nerd, the sort of nerd who has no idea how non-nerds see the world, would say this out loud in an Alabama bar.  It is not an American thing to say.  The American thing to say is that the terrorists "hate our freedom" and that flying a plane into a building is a "cowardly act".  You cannot say the phrases "heroic self-sacrifice" and "suicide bomber" in the same sentence, even for the sake of accurately describing how the Enemy sees the world.   The very concept of the courage and altruism of a suicide bomber is Enemy attire—you can tell, because the Enemy talks about it.  The cowardice and sociopathy of a suicide bomber is American attire.  There are no quote marks you can use to talk about how the Enemy sees the world; it would be like dressing up as a Nazi for Halloween.

Yesterday, someone said that my writing reminded them of George Orwell's Politics and the English Language.  I was honored.  Especially since I'd already thought of today's topic.

If you really want an artist's perspective on rationality, then read Orwell; he is mandatory reading for rationalists as well as authors.  Orwell was not a scientist, but a writer; his tools were not numbers, but words; his adversary was not Nature, but human evil.  If you wish to imprison people for years without trial, you must think of some other way to say it than "I'm going to imprison Mr. Jennings for years without trial."  You must muddy the listener's thinking, prevent clear images from outraging conscience.  You say, "Unreliable elements were subjected to an alternative justice process."

Orwell was the outraged opponent of totalitarianism and the muddy thinking in which evil cloaks itself—which is how Orwell's writings on language ended up as classic rationalist documents on a level with Feynman, Sagan, or Dawkins.

Followup to:  Rationality and the English Language

George Orwell saw the descent of the civilized world into totalitarianism, the conversion or corruption of one country after another; the boot stamping on a human face, forever, and remember that it is forever.  You were born too late to remember a time when the rise of totalitarianism seemed unstoppable, when one country after another fell to secret police and the thunderous knock at midnight, while the professors of free universities hailed the Soviet Union's purges as progress.  It feels as alien to you as fiction; it is hard for you to take seriously.  Because, in your branch of time, the Berlin Wall fell.  And if Orwell's name is not carved into one of those stones, it should be.

Orwell saw the destiny of the human species, and he put forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path.  Orwell's weapon was clear writing.  Orwell knew that muddled language is muddled thinking; he knew that human evil and muddled thinking intertwine like conjugate strands of DNA:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification...

Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:

A few days ago, the Nobel Laureate, Dr. James Watson, made a remark that is now generating worldwide uproar, especially among blacks.  He said what to me looks like a self-evident truth.  He told The Sunday Times of London in an interview that in his humble opinion, black people are less intelligent than the White people...

An intriguing opening.  Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?

I do not know what constitutes intelligence.  I leave that to our so-called scholars.  But I do know that in terms of organising society for the benefit of the people living in it, we blacks have not shown any intelligence in that direction at all.  I am so ashamed of this and sometimes feel that I ought to have belonged to another race...

Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility.  Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless.  But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.

Later in the article came this:

As I write this, I do so with great pains in my heart because I know that God has given intelligence in equal measure to all his children irrespective of the colour of their skin.

This intrigued me for two reasons:  First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction.  And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?