Content warning: conjunction fallacy. Trigger warning: basilisk for anxiety. Sources * https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/25/the-tilted-political-compass-part-2-up-and-down/ > Interestingly, I think I see the difference between leftists and liberals become more important for Americans as well — at least among the coastal, educated middle classes where outright conservatives are rare enough to make the other...
While there are more than a hundred thousand words on LW about the structure of good epistemology, as far as I can tell there is no nuts-and-bolts explanation of the most common anti-epistemology. I will try to rectify this omission, because I think I comprehended it. The prototypical question of...
Retrospectively, I'd say that I was doing counterintuitiveness-seeking. "Hey, look at this, the commonly used extremely simple model says that definitely P, while this more complex model (which seems to me to be more descriptive of the world) says that maybe not P." This is mildly dangerous on its own, because while it runs on truthseeking, it also subordinates that to contrarianism. And doing this on a political topic was particularly stupid of me.
Again, this is exactly the reason I put the references there. They are not a signalling device saying "look at me, I read all these things" but a tool so that I don't have to recreate their respective authors' arguments as to their respective models' degree of explanatory adequacy and why that makes sense in terms of what most of their readers already accept. This saves time for those readers of this post who have at some earlier point read some (or perhaps all) of these articles, as well as for me. The models are explicit.
The terms are, on the other hand, necessarily vague. This is a general... (read more)
Yes.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, "left" is commonly understood to mean the whole Thrive coalition. I figured that using "left" would be more confusing/absurd-looking than using "socialist".
For the purposes of the argument, I'm using a model where political behaviors are largely a result of personality traits (thrive/survive, cognitive decoupling, and cultural class membership) with most people using the theories as justification. I.e. theories have negligible influence, they are not causes but consequences of coalitions. This is a simplification, but not an unreasonable one ("all models are wrong, some are useful").
This is exactly why I put the sources, including the "tilted political compass" model I'm referring to, right at the top. Technically the author uses the label "left" for what I'm calling "socialist", but his description of the quadrant's internal logic very clearly fits with what is usually called socialism, including by many of the people the label refers to. He even remarks:
"This has lead to a game of linguistic musical treadmills where liberals try to claim an identity apart from the left without joining the right, while leftists try to prevent them from doing so."
I edited the post slightly, hopefully it will be less ambiguous.
Content warning: conjunction fallacy. Trigger warning: basilisk for anxiety.
Interestingly, I think I see the difference between leftists and liberals become more important for Americans as well — at least among the coastal, educated middle classes where outright conservatives are rare enough to make the other two turn on each other in fits of online culture warring, just like game theory would predict. In a pure Thrive environment the ways leftists and liberals agree become nothing more than background scenery and the divisions start to stand out.
Fundies – in all of their Bible-beating gun-owning cousin-marrying stereotypicalness – have so far served as the Lower Class With Which One Must Not Allow... (read 369 more words →)
By changing a mind, you can change what it prefers; you can even change what it believes to be right; but you cannot change what is right. Anything you talk about, that can be changed in this way, is not 'right-ness'.
If the characters were real people, I'd say here Obert is "right" while having a wrong justification. Just extrapolate the evolutionary origins of moral intuitions into any society in approximate technological stasis. "Rightness" is how the evolutionarily stable strategy feels like from the inside, and that depends on the environment.
If the population is not limited by the availability of food, thus single mothers can feed their children, some form of... (read more)
That is my point: the people who think in this way are not unreasonable, they are not evil mutants or anything. They just happened to "ask the wrong question" at the starting point, and if they follow it tenaciously, they wind up with insane conclusions.
Once you have a stable epistemology based on an observer-independent reality, you can say that "oh, by the way, minds are part of causality a.k.a. reality, thus people can have beliefs about what other people believe". In the cartographic analogy, this comes out clunky: "maps are part of the terrain, therefore maps can depict facts about other maps", which I suspect is intentional, to make the... (read more)
I'm not arguing against relying on other people and outsourcing knowledge. I'm barely arguing for any action; mostly I'm describing what tends to happen regrettably often to people who base the definition of "knowledge" around answering questions like "who is popular" rather than "what will this program do". In fact, both epistemologies will contain the concept of empirical verification! In the anti-epistemology, going to everyone in class and privately asking "hey, is Alice popular?" is the analog of empiricism.
I don't mean to inspire cruelty. If I successfully gave you understanding, you can use it for kindness, pity or cruelty as you see fit. Mostly I wrote the last paragraphs in the tone of "Humans are Cthulhu" as seen through the eyes of someone who thinks in this anti-epistemology.
Your answer to "objective popularity" is only slightly different from common knowledge, and it has the same properties of being fundamentally observer-dependent. Ask some Greens and some Blues separately "is X popular?" where X is a politician, and you get two very different results. Similarly, "possible joke #3852 is funny" is true for one audience, false for another.... (read more)
I was hoping to compress the description of behaviors that are otherwise baffling (surprising, difficult to explain, high-entropy) but common.
While there are more than a hundred thousand words on LW about the structure of good epistemology, as far as I can tell there is no nuts-and-bolts explanation of the most common anti-epistemology. I will try to rectify this omission, because I think I comprehended it.
The prototypical question of epistemology is some form of experiment, such as "what will I perceive when I pour these two liquids together?". After "what will I perceive" is packed into "what will happen", the question becomes observer-independent, and it is only natural that reality—the thing that answers the question—is itself observer-independent. The terrain would be there even if there were no maps of... (read 816 more words →)
This mostly reminds me of SSC's discussion of Jaynes' theory. An age where people talk out loud to their invisible personal ba/iri/daemon/genius / angel-on-the-shoulder, and which is -- in a similar manner as clothes -- are in practice considered loosely a part of the person (but not strictly). Roughly everyone has them, thus the particular emotional need fulfilled by them is largely factored out of human interaction. (I believe a decade or two ago there was a tongue-in-cheek slogan to the effect of "if the government wants to protect marriages, it should hire maids/nannies".) Social norms (social technology) adjust gracefully, just like they adjusted quickly and seamlessly to contraceptives factoring apart child-conception and sex. (Um.)
Separately: it would be an interesting experiment to get serial abuse victims to talk to chatbots at length. One of the strong versions of the unflattering theory says that they might get the chatbots to abuse them, because that's the probable completion to their conversation patterns.