If you are someone of median intelligence who just want to carry out a usual trade like making shoes or something, you can largely get by with recieved wisdom.
AFAICT, this only holds if you’re in a stable sociopolitical/economic context—and, more specifically still, the kind of stable sociopolitical environment that provides relatively benign information-sources. Examples of folks who didn’t fall into this category: (a) folks living in eastern Europe in the late 1930′s (especially if Jewish, but even if not; regardless of how traditional their trade was); (b) folks living in the Soviet Union (required navigating a non-explicit layer of recieved-from-underground knowledge); (c) folks literally making shoes during time-periods in which shoe-making was disrupted by the industrial revolution. It is to my mind an open question whether any significant portion of the US/Europe/etc. will fall into the “can get by largely with received wisdom” reference class across the next 10 years. (They might. I just actually can’t tell.)
It’s possible to be in a situation where the consensus is terrible and you have no ability to rebuild a better knowledge base. It’s tragic but tragedies happen.
It seems like we’re anchoring excessively on the question of sufficiency, when what matters is the net expected benefit. If we rephrase the question and ask “are there populations that are made worse off, on expectation, by more independent thought?”, the answer is clearly yes, which is I think the question that we should be asking (and that fits the point I’m making).
In order to research existential risk, and to actually survive, yes, we need more thought, although this is the kind of research I had in mind in my original comment.
Independent thought helps not just for x-risk, but for personal well-being things like not joining the army, not playing the slot machines, getting off Facebook. In other words, not just for accepting action requests culturally construed as exotic, but rejecting some normal action requests. “Stable sociopolitical/economic context” is actually a fairly strong requirement, given how much the current global narrative is based on exponential growth.
The question is, what do you mean by “independent thought”? If “independent thought” means “mistrust everyone” then clearly it can be a harmful heuristic. If “independent thought” means “use your own thinking faculties to process all evidence you have, including the evidence which consists of the expression of certain beliefs by certain other people” then it’s not clear to me there are significant populations that would be harmed by it. If there are, it means that the society in question has wise and benevolent leaders s.t. for large swaths of the population it is impossible to verify (given their cognitive abilities) that these leaders are indeed wise and benevolent. It seems to me that arriving at such a situation would require a lot of luck, given that the leadership of a society is ultimately determined by the society itself.
RyanCarey writes:
AFAICT, this only holds if you’re in a stable sociopolitical/economic context—and, more specifically still, the kind of stable sociopolitical environment that provides relatively benign information-sources. Examples of folks who didn’t fall into this category: (a) folks living in eastern Europe in the late 1930′s (especially if Jewish, but even if not; regardless of how traditional their trade was); (b) folks living in the Soviet Union (required navigating a non-explicit layer of recieved-from-underground knowledge); (c) folks literally making shoes during time-periods in which shoe-making was disrupted by the industrial revolution. It is to my mind an open question whether any significant portion of the US/Europe/etc. will fall into the “can get by largely with received wisdom” reference class across the next 10 years. (They might. I just actually can’t tell.)
It’s possible to be in a situation where the consensus is terrible and you have no ability to rebuild a better knowledge base. It’s tragic but tragedies happen.
It seems like we’re anchoring excessively on the question of sufficiency, when what matters is the net expected benefit. If we rephrase the question and ask “are there populations that are made worse off, on expectation, by more independent thought?”, the answer is clearly yes, which is I think the question that we should be asking (and that fits the point I’m making).
In order to research existential risk, and to actually survive, yes, we need more thought, although this is the kind of research I had in mind in my original comment.
Independent thought helps not just for x-risk, but for personal well-being things like not joining the army, not playing the slot machines, getting off Facebook. In other words, not just for accepting action requests culturally construed as exotic, but rejecting some normal action requests. “Stable sociopolitical/economic context” is actually a fairly strong requirement, given how much the current global narrative is based on exponential growth.
The question is, what do you mean by “independent thought”? If “independent thought” means “mistrust everyone” then clearly it can be a harmful heuristic. If “independent thought” means “use your own thinking faculties to process all evidence you have, including the evidence which consists of the expression of certain beliefs by certain other people” then it’s not clear to me there are significant populations that would be harmed by it. If there are, it means that the society in question has wise and benevolent leaders s.t. for large swaths of the population it is impossible to verify (given their cognitive abilities) that these leaders are indeed wise and benevolent. It seems to me that arriving at such a situation would require a lot of luck, given that the leadership of a society is ultimately determined by the society itself.