Cognitive processes vs right answers; Median vs top thinkers
My frame here is “what cognitive strategy is useful for the median person to find the right answers”.
I think that people I’ve argued against here were focused more directly on “What are the right answers?” or “What should truthseekers with high standards and philosophical sophistication do?”.
I expect there to be a significant difference between the median academic and the sort of person participating in this conversation.
I think the median academic is running on social cognition, which is very weak. Fixing that should be their top priority. I think fixing that is cognitively very different from “not being academically dishonest.” (Though this may depend somewhat on what sort of academic dishonesty we’re talking about, and how prevalent it is)
I think the people I’ve argued with probably disagree about that, and maybe think that ‘be aligned with the truth’ is a central cognitive strategy that is entangled across the board. This seems false to me for most people, although I can imagine changing my mind.
Arranging coordinated-efforts-that-work (i.e. Stag Hunts) is the most important thing, most other things are distracting and mostly not-the-point
Another central disagreement seemed to have something to do with “there are deontological or virtue-ethics norms you should be following here, about not lying, etc”.
I think it is important to follow your society’s existing norms. But when it comes to trying to improve society’s status quo, virtues and rules are much less important than the virtue of “figure out how to actually coordinate on changing things, and then do that.”
Related to the “cognitive process” point, I think people who get focused on following the exact virtues/rules mostly waste a lot of time on unimportant virtues/rules. The exceptions are when those virtues/rules happen to be particularly important, or bootstrap into stag hunts. But this requires moral luck.
My family cares a lot about recycling and buying local. A lot of the arguments I had heard about this post seemed more like the sort of cognitive algorithm that outputs ‘recycle and buy local’ than ‘Be Richard Feynman or Eliezer Yudkowsky’, when implemented on the average person.
Framing disagreements
Cognitive processes vs right answers; Median vs top thinkers
My frame here is “what cognitive strategy is useful for the median person to find the right answers”.
I think that people I’ve argued against here were focused more directly on “What are the right answers?” or “What should truthseekers with high standards and philosophical sophistication do?”.
I expect there to be a significant difference between the median academic and the sort of person participating in this conversation.
I think the median academic is running on social cognition, which is very weak. Fixing that should be their top priority. I think fixing that is cognitively very different from “not being academically dishonest.” (Though this may depend somewhat on what sort of academic dishonesty we’re talking about, and how prevalent it is)
I think the people I’ve argued with probably disagree about that, and maybe think that ‘be aligned with the truth’ is a central cognitive strategy that is entangled across the board. This seems false to me for most people, although I can imagine changing my mind.
Arranging coordinated-efforts-that-work (i.e. Stag Hunts) is the most important thing, most other things are distracting and mostly not-the-point
Another central disagreement seemed to have something to do with “there are deontological or virtue-ethics norms you should be following here, about not lying, etc”.
I think it is important to follow your society’s existing norms. But when it comes to trying to improve society’s status quo, virtues and rules are much less important than the virtue of “figure out how to actually coordinate on changing things, and then do that.”
Related to the “cognitive process” point, I think people who get focused on following the exact virtues/rules mostly waste a lot of time on unimportant virtues/rules. The exceptions are when those virtues/rules happen to be particularly important, or bootstrap into stag hunts. But this requires moral luck.
My family cares a lot about recycling and buying local. A lot of the arguments I had heard about this post seemed more like the sort of cognitive algorithm that outputs ‘recycle and buy local’ than ‘Be Richard Feynman or Eliezer Yudkowsky’, when implemented on the average person.