[HN Gopher] Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
___________________________________________________________________
Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
Author : yamrzou
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-03-13 17:06 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (astralcodexten.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (astralcodexten.substack.com)
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Is it just me or does anyone else find the "just-so" style of
| explaining phenomenon in this article irritating?
|
| Edit:
|
| Less snarky response here. The "just-so" style that the author
| uses to explain psychological phenomena appeals to the readers'
| cognitive biases and avoids confronting the reader with the more
| rigorous, mechanistic (perhaps evidence-based?) explanations that
| the same author proposes as a way to combat said cognitive
| biases. This strikes me as mildly ironic.
| BaseS4 wrote:
| It's a neuromyth being applied to political domains so that the
| believers of political narratives don't have to feel
| accountable for anything.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The "just-so" style that the author uses to explain
| psychological phenomena appeals to the readers' cognitive
| biases and avoids confronting the reader with the more
| rigorous, mechanistic (perhaps evidence-based?) explanations
| that the same author proposes as a way to combat said cognitive
| biases. This strikes me as mildly ironic._
|
| This is endemic to the rationalist community. It's actually
| quite humorous once you begin to notice it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| So, can you stick the cynophobe in the room with the well-behaved
| Rottweiler and also give them some drug that reduces their
| anxiety just while they're in the room?
| adav wrote:
| Is the Rottweiler particularly anxious to be in the room?
| philipkglass wrote:
| Rationality in service to what end, though? You can't just build
| some complicated instruments to record measurements of the ideal
| polity, the way you can refine measurements of the electron's
| mass. Most political disagreements are about values more than
| wonkish policymaking.
|
| _But in fact many political zealots never accept reality. It 's
| not just that they're inherently skeptical of what the other
| party says. It's that even when something is proven beyond a
| shadow of a doubt, they still won't believe it._
|
| This could describe cognitive error [1] or it could describe
| someone who's using deontological reasoning more than
| consequentialist reasoning. (And perhaps lacking the vocabulary
| to say "consequentialist arguments won't sway my values.")
|
| It is probably a good strategy to refuse to be talked into
| positions against your fundamental values by mere evidence. I'm
| joking but also serious. I have a vague sense that torturing
| suspects doesn't work to prevent terrorist attacks, but that's
| not the root of my opposition to torture. Maybe clever torturers
| could make it work more often than not. That wouldn't sway me,
| because torturing suspects is against my values. Documenting how
| well it can "work" won't make me reconsider.
|
| [1] Further food for thought: "cognitive error" and "revealed
| preference" may also be different names for the same thing. Are
| they experimentally distinguishable?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Rationality as a tool to serve yourself. A lot of SSC and AC10
| is around this idea that rational intelligent thinking with
| self awareness of bias allows you to model the world
| accurately.
|
| As for the rest, yes, I agree with you. Often, after having
| considered a great deal of evidence, I condense the finding
| into some strength of belief about something. Now, absent the
| original evidence I have a position. This is usually fine since
| I actually lack the ability to summon all evidence on demand.
|
| It's okay, though, since I (and I suspect most people
| intuitively) have both a likelihood notion and a certainty in
| likelihood notion analogous to a Confidence Interval and
| P-value, if you will.
|
| So I might hold the belief that GME is going to be between 120
| and infinity on Jan 13 2022 and have a certainty in that belief
| that is like 10% but lose the evidence that made me think that.
|
| This is also sort of a failure mode for fast Aumann Agreement
| even in co-incentivized individuals - the fact that memory is
| short.
|
| So the problem is that my certainty holding is not well done.
|
| Thanks for the thought prompt.
| astrange wrote:
| I've always found it odd that the people called
| "rationalists" are not rationalist. Talking about evidence
| and realistic priors all the time is good (they don't do
| enough evidence gathering though) but it is not rationalism,
| it is empiricism.
|
| Surely a rationalist would be into logic and actively refuse
| to read studies, like the Austrian economists did.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's just a terminology thing. Sort of like how atheist
| actuaries still account for Acts of God.
| [deleted]
| drdeca wrote:
| Even if you shouldn't be convinced of a terminal value thing
| based on evidence, doesn't mean you shouldn't be convinced of
| an empirical thing that happens to be associated with or
| championed by those who are promoting different values.
|
| So, for example, in the climate change example he gives, while
| it is of course appropriate to take into account possible
| biases of people promoting one position or another, and ways
| that those may result from the different values that the people
| with those biases, one should nonetheless endeavor to have a
| tendency to believe what is actually true about the factual
| matter, even if it were that the people with the wrong values
| were biased as an (indirect) result of those values, in a way
| that led them to be more likely to reach the correct conclusion
| about the empirical facts, than those with the good values.
|
| (Not to say that I think this is the case in this example.
| Just, hypothetically. Or, what do you call something that is
| like a hypothetical but without expressing any position about
| whether the thing is actually true?)
|
| In addition, while they may get tangled up and which is which
| may change for a given person over time (due to human thought
| being fuzzy and wobbly), I think it still makes sense to make a
| distinction between terminal values and instrumental values.
| Further, if one values something instrumentally, because one
| believes that it is instrumentally beneficial for one's
| terminal values, and it is demonstrably true that it actually
| does not benefit one's terminal values, then one should come to
| believe this truth, and so no longer instrumentally value the
| thing.
|
| I also don't think cognitive error can be entirely reduced in
| all cases to revealed preferences, because, uh, -- well, ok,
| one can, of course, model all behavior as arising from a
| preference to take exactly the sequence of actions that one
| takes. But I think you will agree that this is not a reasonable
| model.
|
| People will sometimes understand their past behavior as arising
| from a cognitive error, and endeavor to address this. I suppose
| you could regard this as simply conflicting preferences, or
| preferences about preferences, but I don't think this is the
| best way to understand things.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _Even if you shouldn 't be convinced of a terminal value
| thing based on evidence, doesn't mean you shouldn't be
| convinced of an empirical thing that happens to be associated
| with or championed by those who are promoting different
| values._
|
| That's true, and I have been convinced of some of those
| things. For example, I am empirically convinced that mass
| shootings by spree killers are shocking but not a major issue
| of public health or safety in the US. Even though I believe
| that Democratic politics gives disproportionate attention to
| mass shootings, weirdly mirroring how Republican politics
| gives disproportionate attention to Islamist terrorism, I'm
| not going to say so in the company of many Democrats. Because
| _another thing_ I have been empirically convinced of is that
| people build effective political coalitions by emphasizing
| common ground and judiciously overlooking their allies '
| faults. I want action on climate issues, so I'm not going to
| alienate my natural allies by lecturing them about their
| irrational fear of semi-automatic rifles. Effective politics
| is almost the thematic opposite of a personal quest to
| aggressively probe all things in search of Truth.
|
| _I also don 't think cognitive error can be entirely reduced
| in all cases to revealed preferences, because, uh, -- well,
| ok, one can, of course, model all behavior as arising from a
| preference to take exactly the sequence of actions that one
| takes. But I think you will agree that this is not a
| reasonable model._
|
| It's a model that doesn't lend itself to mathematically
| grounded predictions. But is it actually _not reasonable_?
| Without access to another person 's qualia it's really easy
| to misattribute whether their more surprising decisions are
| revealing a preference, demonstrating cognitive error, or
| servicing a fundamentally different value orientation. Like
| Hume's Problem of Induction I can't effectively grapple with
| it but I can't exactly dismiss it either.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I agree that a lot of political discussions boil down
| ultimately to values. But along the way people make irrational
| evaluations that could be improved or corrected, and that may
| lead to different politics even if the values remain stable.
|
| A good concrete example of political zealots being detached
| from reality is the George Floyd/BLM situation. Floyd had high
| levels of drugs in his system, COVID-19, and was complaining
| about breathing in the car before there was a knee on him.
| Chokeholds are also a very standard and typically non lethal
| form of getting a suspect under control. There's no evidence of
| race playing a part in this incident (no evidence of motive) or
| it even being an instance of police brutality (standard and
| typically safe procedures were used), because of these
| complicating factors. The news media focus, social media
| virality, sustained legal protests, and sustained violent
| rioting have corrupted people's ability to judge this situation
| rationally, to the point that people overestimate the number of
| unarmed black people killed by police by over 50x
| (https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/poll-44-of-liberals-
| say-...). Better rational thinking from the general population
| might have changed the last 10 months, and also avoided the
| embarrassing and dangerous cycle of Minneapolis first defunding
| and then refunding their police department.
|
| Then there's the possibility that people's values are variable
| as well, but I've not put much thought into that. I suspect
| however that sustained rational thinking over a period of time
| can affect values and so it would change politics.
| smolder wrote:
| Your post claims to describe a good example of political
| zealotry and then goes on to be one. To frame Floyd's killing
| by police as some routine accident is ignorant of the
| evidence made available to you, probably because you
| discounted such evidence as untrustworthy and biased. Guesses
| about how many die to police per year are irrelevant to
| whether the force used was excessive.
| elefanten wrote:
| GP actually laid out a full argument while you dismissed it
| out of hand as zealotry. It really feels like you're
| proving GPs point.
| ggreer wrote:
| I think his argument is that it's a freak accident, not a
| routine one. If it were routine, the stats for unarmed
| people dying during arrest would be much higher.
| smolder wrote:
| My phrasing was off. His argument was that the accident
| was nothing but a freak occurrence, and that the manner
| in which Floyd was restrained was routine and
| appropriate, which, as performed, it was not.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I believe that the author makes the basic assumption that
| rationality _is_ the end.
| jbay808 wrote:
| A lot of the time, this might not be a property of the update
| process so much as the prior itself.
|
| A conspiracy theory is often something that can explain any lack
| of observational evidence for itself (because it's covered up!).
| If the prior on the conspiracy being true is too high, the update
| on contrary evidence will be very weak just because the
| conspiracy theory makes weak predictions about upcoming
| observations, so it loses probability mass _very slowly_ as a
| whole, with probability mass mostly just being shifted within the
| context of the theory.
|
| ("They're covering up aliens!" --> no evidence of this after
| fifty years? --> "It's worse than I thought; they must be using
| mind control!")
|
| The only cure for this might be preventative -- just maintaining
| a strong doubt on deep conspiracy theories. But that also means
| resigning yourself to never believing in one before it's
| revealed. If it turns out you live in a reality where the
| government _is_ using mind control to conceal aliens, you 'll not
| be the one who realizes it before everyone else.
| yorwba wrote:
| > the conspiracy theory makes weak predictions about upcoming
| observations, so it loses probability mass very slowly as a
| whole
|
| That may be the case for conspiracy theories, but I'd expect
| the theory that dogs are dangerous to make much stronger
| predictions. On the other hand, maybe people who're afraid of
| dogs _don 't_ expect them to behave differently, they just
| think that everything dogs do is scary (which is true, since
| they're scared by everything dogs do.)
| Siira wrote:
| It's about power; Dogs being violent isn't super rare, and if
| a dog decides to get violent, I have no control over it. The
| probability of the danger is low, but it is sufficiently bad
| even in mild cases that I do not want to take any chances.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I think you're right; it could be either.
|
| In this example, if their fear of dogs causes them to
| misperceive a dog's excitement as anger, then it's closer to
| the scenario in the article. But if their paranoia is such
| that they perceive the dog is acting friendly but interpret
| that as the dog luring them into a sense of safety to bite
| them later, then it's more like the conspiracy theory case.
| getpost wrote:
| > I wonder if it's the equivalent of making trauma victims
| describe the traumatic event in detail; an attempt to give higher
| weight to the raw experience pathway compared to the prior
| pathway.
|
| > The other promising source of hope is psychedelics.
|
| For me, what this part if the essay points to is that everyone
| needs to do their own work, in whatever context, and there's no
| getting around that.
|
| Experts, authorities, and managers need to find the line between
| facilitating a process and doing the process themselves. You
| can't make anyone believe anything or do anything. You can only
| hope to facilitate the conditions where helpful beliefs and
| accomplishments arise.
|
| I hope this is one significant cultural shift during my lifetime.
| The 20th century was about creating expertise and giving that
| expertise authority, which is just another expression of the
| dominator paradigm.
| analog31 wrote:
| Has Bayesian verbiage become a form of virtue signaling?
|
| Don't get me wrong. I took statistics in college, and we covered
| Bayesian methods. They can't be controversial because Bayes'
| Theorem is a theorem, meaning it's proven. But the attempt to
| apply its terminology to lengthy but "soft" arguments seems like
| pure clutter.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| I don't know if virtue signaling is the right term. The better
| term might be "shibboleth" for so-called rationalists. It's as
| if you took the kids who loved lists of logical fallacies and
| told them they could resolve all disputes if they just reduced
| them to first principles and used words like "prior."
|
| Nevermind that the first principles lose all context of the
| original issue - we're in a world of pure logic, where we can
| use _theorems_! To the rationalist community, everything looks
| like a good opportunity to write a lengthy essay reinventing
| the wheel with Bayes theorem. It 's a cargo cult of basic
| statistics dressing up otherwise uninteresting arguments.
|
| It's very tedious for people like myself who actually studied
| statistics and apply it professionally. Bayes theorem is barely
| even a theorem - it's literally a basic rearrangement of the
| axioms of probability. It's not some supreme revelation that
| imbues arguments with more credibility. Most of the time I see
| it invoked in discussion, it's not even rigorously quantified.
| You can choose arbitrary priors, so at the end of the day you
| never arrive at an objective truth. It's profundity for its own
| sake, and nothing is really achieved.
| sega_sai wrote:
| No, I don't think it is. Separately from rationalist community,
| there is substantial amount of work showing that Bayesian
| updating and reasoning is in some sense the optimal way of
| operating under uncertainty.
|
| It is also certainly true that garbage in and garbage out, i.e.
| if you feed garbage inputs, you'll get garbage out (Bayesian or
| not), but the advantage in my opinion of having a framework for
| making decisions in cases of uncertainties is extremely useful.
| It is often hard to really apply this for ordinary life
| situations, (and maybe often not worth it), but even then it's
| useful to think about priors/evidence, even if you don't
| particularly care about the final number.
| analog31 wrote:
| That's fair. A lot of what I read about "Bayesian reasoning"
| boils down to: Check your assumptions, and update your
| beliefs when faced with new evidence. But those habits have
| been with us for millennia, and I'm not arguing against them.
|
| Being able to think about probabilities is useful, if they're
| quantifiable. And conditional probability plays a useful role
| in that process.
| astrange wrote:
| I see two main problems with the way the lesswrong-type
| people try to do Bayesianism as a life philosophy. The first
| is that claiming to be rational* and having "priors" and
| "updating" them instead of "beliefs" and "changing" them is
| humblebragging and doesn't admit that you have beliefs that
| might be wrong. Even if the original idea was to make you
| more humble, it's dangerous when it spreads to people like
| young male VCs and Elon Musk who already have the world's
| biggest egos.
|
| The second is there's no way to set priors for silly ideas
| and they won't admit some things just ain't gonna happen,
| which means they've accidentally started a religion by
| refusing to not believe in various silly things about Roko's
| basilisk, evil AI gods enslaving them, and so on. It's like
| someone presenting you Pascal's Wager and you taking it
| seriously.
|
| * for some reason they call themselves rationalist which
| implies being "rational", aka "always right", even though
| they are explicitly not rationalist, but empiricist!
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I think it's been common in the rationalist community for a
| while, in the 5-10 years that I've been aware of them.
| BaseS4 wrote:
| Every time I see one of these neuromyths about how the brain
| works being applied to politics, it always bends over backwards
| to make sure groups of people, when given huge media and
| financial resources and the motive to influence the decision-
| making behavior of hundreds of millions of people, are not
| liable, accountable, or involved in how effective their influence
| campaigns are. Example:
|
| > Segments of Group: Cut off your children's genitals.
|
| > Person: Well, uh... okay... for the good of the cause, I guess.
|
| > Other Segments of Group: We didn't tell you to cut off your
| children's genitals.
|
| > Apologists of Group: Anyone who would recommend such a thing
| would NEVER be part of our group!
|
| Those groups are absolutely liable for their influence campaigns.
| It's just that individuals have absolutely no recourse to hold
| these groups accountable.
|
| For proof of that, notice the frequency of active words like
| "revenge" and "wrath" decrease over time for neutral, passive,
| and nonthreatening words like "balance" and "equality". People
| are so demoralized, they just get fed bogus neuromyths about
| political behavior and accept them because they known there is
| fuck all they can do about it anyways other than acquiescence and
| servitude.
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Revenge%2Cveng...
| sideshowb wrote:
| Hey this voice sounds familiar... Yay!
| jhardy54 wrote:
| Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The problem that I always have with this author's material and
| most material in the "rationalist movement" is that after making
| very valid points about biases, irrational behavior, etc., he
| seems to leave things at some sort of implicit epistemological
| nihilism. Since people on the left and the right in American
| politics both have biases, and both believe their beliefs just as
| strongly as the other side, apparently we can't discern anything
| about their political views other than how their views make them
| feel? That's the vibe I'm getting from stuff like this:
|
| > I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-life
| conservative really cares about fetuses, they just want to punish
| women for being sluts by denying them control over their bodies.
| And I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-
| lockdown liberal really cares about COVID deaths, they just like
| the government being able to force people to wear masks as a sign
| of submission. Once you're at the point where all these things
| sound plausible, you are doomed.
|
| Apparently you're doomed if you believe one of those things
| describes reality more than the other? They're both extreme
| generalizations, obviously, and are defined imprecisely ("no true
| Scotsman"), but couldn't it be that one of those two groups of
| people have beliefs that correspond much more with reality? Or is
| the conclusion that, since this is politics, and political views
| is intensely personal and prone to bias, that both sides are
| equally correct?
|
| Isn't it possible that there actually are some powerful political
| groups who have honest and good intentions and others which do
| not? Isn't that possible even if most people have a tendency to
| believe that their own groups are the good ones, and that belief
| is just as strong for each group? Is it impossible for me to
| believe my group's intentions are honest and good, and you
| believe just as strongly that your group's intentions are honest
| and good, but that only one of us is correct? Is knowledge
| nothing more than a feeling of certainty? Or is knowledge simply
| impossible?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Agnosticism about particular partisan issues is very
| appropriate when discussing general patterns of thinking and
| failure modes. And I think he would agree with your last
| paragraph to the extent of thinking it too obvious to say out
| loud. His own politics are clear enough from his other writing.
| drdeca wrote:
| > Isn't it possible that there actually are some powerful
| political groups who have honest and good intentions and others
| which do not?
|
| There are people who have bad values, and want things that are
| bad, yes. (Though generally they don't want them because they
| think they are bad.)
|
| > Isn't that possible even if most people have a tendency to
| believe that their own groups are the good ones, and that
| belief is just as strong for each group?
|
| yes.
|
| > Is it impossible for me to believe my group's intentions are
| honest and good, and you believe just as strongly that your
| group's intentions are honest and good, but that only one of us
| is correct?
|
| I'm not sure what precisely you mean by intentions being
| "honest and good". If I believe that my intent is honest --
| well, I suppose I could be fooling myself, thinking that some
| behavior of mine is "honest" by twisting the meaning of the
| word "honest" in my mind, while still intending to cause others
| to have a belief which I believe to be false. Also, by
| intentions being "good", do you mean that the things one
| intends are actually good things, or that the one intending
| them thinks them good for those they impact, and intends them
| for that reason?
|
| > Is knowledge nothing more than a feeling of certainty? Or is
| knowledge simply impossible?
|
| Knowledge is more than a feeling of certainty, yes. And, either
| knowledge, or something very similar to knowledge, is possible.
|
| For example, both of the beliefs quoted, are false. There may
| be related claims which are true, but neither of the claims, as
| stated, are. (I don't see the no true Scotsman aspect of either
| though?)
|
| The point isn't that different sides are equally correct. The
| point is demonstrating a kind of error that can be made, and
| giving an example on multiple sides makes it easier to
| understand. If one only gave examples of a type of error being
| made by the side the reader agrees with, there would be a
| danger of this being interpreted as simply an attack on the
| side the reader agrees with, and so the reader would be less
| likely to appreciate the point. On the other hand, if one only
| gave examples of the type of error being made by the side the
| reader disagrees with, while the reader may take a more
| positive view of what is being written, they are less likely to
| internalize the point as a kind of error that they, or others
| on their side, are prone to.
|
| For something to be a general type of error, the type of error
| should be one that can be made in multiple
| contexts/directions/ways.
|
| Then, to demonstrate that something is a general type of error,
| why not demonstrate that, by showing that it can be made in
| multiple contexts/directions/ways ?
|
| The point isn't nihilism or relativism. The point is vigilance.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > I'm not sure what precisely you mean by intentions being
| "honest and good".
|
| It could mean something objectively moral, or if you're not
| into that sort of thing, it could just mean intentions that
| both groups in question would agree are good.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I think the author only means you're "doomed" in the sense that
| "your fate is sealed": you'll find it very hard to change your
| mind in the face of contrary evidence, because your
| observations will start to feel like they always reinforce your
| conclusion.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Right, but the implication is that your fate is sealed _and
| that your belief doesn't reflect reality or isn't
| "rational."_ I'm assuming the author wouldn't use the same
| terminology to describe one's unwillingness to change their
| views from something he considers "rational" to something he
| considers "irrational," e.g. he probably wouldn't say "if you
| believe the Earth is not flat, and you won't change your
| beliefs unless presented with compelling evidence and
| explanations that the Earth is flat, then you are doomed."
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Reflecting reality is different from being rational. It's
| related to the old idea that true knowledge is believing
| the right thing for the right reason. The problem is that
| if your reasoning process is incorrect, what you believe is
| independent of reality, so whether you believe the truth is
| mostly random. Your opponents have equally strong (i.e.
| not) reasons to believe what they do. You should aim to do
| better.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I think you're reading that implication in, when it wasn't
| there. Nobody can know with certainty what's really true or
| false, and the author isn't claiming to know either or
| judge people for disagreeing. We can only work on improving
| our processes for deciding what's true, and noticing that
| sometimes we can end up in a situation where our beliefs
| will become immune to contrary evidence is an important
| part of that. When that happens it doesn't mean those
| beliefs are certainly mistaken, but it does mean your fate
| is, more or less, sealed.
|
| If your faith in a flat earth is strong enough that you'll
| come up with new theories of optics to justify continuing
| to believe in it _even after you 're launched into orbit to
| see it firsthand_, your belief is unshakable. But that
| doesn't guarantee that you're wrong, maybe you're a genius
| who just revolutionized cosmology and optics. But you're
| probably wrong.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Nobody can know with certainty what's really true or
| false, and the author isn't claiming to know either or
| judge people for disagreeing.
|
| Yeah, that's the kind of epistemological meat we really
| need to slice into. My view is that certainty is
| impossible but that knowledge is possible, and that we
| get ourselves into a lot of messes when we confuse
| knowledge with certainty. The quest for knowledge should
| not be a quest for certainty (either in the emotional
| sense or the Bayesian sense) or a quest for a perfect
| method of obtaining or justifying knowledge.
| emmett wrote:
| That's not perfectly parallel as a belief. The parallel
| statement would be "If you believe that flat-Earth
| advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is
| flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to
| keep us trapped on Earth"...that would be equivalent. And I
| can't speak for Scott, but I think he'd say if you believed
| that, your ability to reason about the Earth being flat is
| basically dead. It happens to be that you have the right
| answer (the Earth is round), but only by chance...if you
| were wrong, you wouldn't be able to be convinced to change
| your mind.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > The parallel statement would be "If you believe that
| flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether
| the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space
| exploration to keep us trapped on Earth"
|
| But...isn't that statement either true or false, just
| like the statement "the Earth is flat" is either true or
| false? What's the difference between the two statements?
| Is knowledge about one statement possible, but not the
| other?
| drdeca wrote:
| It's the connection between the two statements.
|
| If you believe "flat-Earth advocates don't actually care
| about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to
| prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth" ,
| this would pose difficulty for changing the belief "the
| earth isn't flat".
|
| If someone believed "people who claim that 'flat-Earth
| advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is
| flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration
| to keep us trapped on Earth' don't actually care about
| whether flat-Earth advocates really [...], they just
| [idk, some absurd motivation for making the claim] ",
| that would pose difficulty for changing the belief "flat-
| Earth advocates really do believe that the Earth is
| flat".
| tshaddox wrote:
| > If you believe "flat-Earth advocates don't actually
| care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just
| want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on
| Earth" , this would pose difficulty for changing the
| belief "the earth isn't flat".
|
| I'm not sure why. The normal simple tests to distinguish
| between a flat Earth and a ball-shaped Earth ought to
| still work independent of what flat-Earth advocates
| believe.
| emmett wrote:
| That quote is NOT Scott saying that pro-life advocates are
| right about abortion or wrong about abortion. That quote is
| Scott saying that once you start to believe that "the enemy" is
| a cackling evil villain, who is lying about their true
| motivations and secretly is only advocating for their preferred
| policies because they want to do evil things...you are doomed,
| at least in terms of seeking truth. Because once you believe
| that, there is nothing that "the enemy" can ever say or do that
| will change your mind. It's always just a tactic to advance
| their evil plot.
|
| Of course, Scott could be _wrong_ about this thesis. It 's
| possible that maybe believing that pro-life conservatives don't
| care at all about fetuses doesn't actually indicate that you
| have a trapped prior that will prevent you from ever hearing
| new arguments on the abortion issue. But that is the argument
| that Scott is advancing, not that you can't form opinions about
| the truth or falsehood of someone's political views at all.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I guess my question is whether the author believes that it's
| possible to have knowledge about these sorts of things or
| not. Everything he says in this article sounds like he's
| saying that obtaining such knowledge is impossible, or at
| least that neither side _has_ obtained knowledge. He seems to
| only judge the validity of the opposing views by how strongly
| their proponents believe the views, and since the two views
| seem to be held equally strongly, he seems to conclude that
| there is no discernible difference in the validity of the
| views. But if it were possible to obtain such knowledge, then
| it would be possible to correctly say "both sides believe
| their views equally strongly, but side A is more correct and
| side B is less correct."
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > Isn't it possible that there actually are some powerful
| political groups who have honest and good intentions and others
| which do not?
|
| I think it's important to really carefully spell out what we
| mean by "not having good intentions". Because there are two
| different reasonable things that that can mean, and they're
| _really_ different, but the incentive to flip-flop between them
| can be strong.
|
| The first meaning sounds like "having bad ideas". For example,
| let's say I'm in favor of some new law to...promote the arts.
| (Trying to pick a bland example.) You might think my law is
| actually going to hurt the arts, and argue against it for that
| reason. Or maybe you agree that it'll help the arts, but you
| think its other downsides outweigh its upsides. At maximum
| generality, maybe you don't object to my law per se, but you'd
| just rather spend the same money on something else.
|
| The second meaning sounds like "having bad values". For
| example, you could claim that I'm not really trying to promote
| art at all, and just trying to divert money to my friends. Or
| maybe I could paint you as some sort of uncultured caveman, who
| can't appreciate art in the first place.
|
| When we put it that way, I think it's clear that we usually say
| "good intentions" to talk about the second meaning. Like, the
| whole point of saying it is usually to _contrast_ someone's
| good values with a bad outcome they're responsible for, right?
|
| On the other hand, it's much, much easier to take an
| argumentative position using the first meaning. The world is
| complicated, everything has downsides, etc. Plus object level
| arguments tend to be more sophisticated, since expertise and
| fancy math get involved. So the most tempting strategy is often
| to equivocate between "having bad ideas" and "having bad
| values", by making an argument about ideas and yet drawing or
| implying a conclusion about values. This is the fallacy that
| internet rationalists complain about constantly, calling it a
| "motte and bailey" or something like that. And I'm really
| sympathetic to that complaint: I think that it's very easy to
| make this sort of bad argument, that it's very hard _not_ to
| make it without some sort of shared community or commitment,
| and that the overall effect of this sort of argument on
| discourse is toxic and (when taken to an extreme) dehumanizing.
|
| So all that said, do I think that some groups objectively have
| bad values? I...oof...I feel kind of forced to admit that it's
| true sometimes. I can't sustain a really extreme position here
| like "everyone's values are special and lovely in their own
| way", at least not without diluting the concept of values so
| much that it's not very interesting anymore. But at the same
| time, I just feel...super skeptical of most "bad values"
| arguments in practice.
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