In this shortform post I will pontificate about some sentiments I sometimes see on twitter. It feels important for me to say, but I can’t promise that it will be a good use of any readers’ time.
The Fourth Virtue of Rationality is Evenness. One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.” If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider. If you first write at the bottom of a sheet of paper “And therefore, the sky is green!” it does not matter what arguments you write above it afterward; the conclusion is already written, and it is already correct or already wrong. To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization. Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself. Listen to hypotheses as they plead their cases before you, but remember that you are not a hypothesis; you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there.
It’s a really nice ideal to strive toward. In my personal experience, it does require a whole lot of striving. And sometimes it seems to have hidden, tragic tradeoffs with things like loyalty, in such a way that the rationalist and EA scenes end up with costly discomforts when it comes to human relations and interpersonal connection. I could go on about the challenges, but the point is that, to me, Evenness is something worthy of seriousness and gravity. Read the following tweets and take a moment to feel your immediate reactions, both positive and negative.
I think the first time I saw these tweets, I think I felt some faint positive affect. It’s not a novel sentiment and it doesn’t challenge me to become better, but it’s still a very nice sentiment. But rereading it later, I feel irritated and triggered. So what’s my problem?
The problem is that I don’t know anything about Michael Curzi, and I have historically been unimpressed by Eliezer’s Evenness on twitter. I think a more virtuous EY would have replied to Curzi saying that it’s a really nice ideal to strive toward, but very difficult in practice, and prone to pitfalls—not something to boast about blithely. (Although if I’m imagining a powered up Eliezer, I will tend to imagine him writing blog posts instead of tweets.)
I mean, if you think that EY’s self description here is basically reasonable, that’s a crux for me. Maybe he’s gotten better in recent years, but in the past when I’ve read his tweets, they have not added up to an edifice of obvious Evenness. (Either way, I would still find it questionable to tersely grandstand about it on twitter, but not much more questionable than most activity on twitter.) Importantly, this is a shortform post and not a top-level post because I don’t feel like putting in the effort to gather and present a bunch of tweets to justify my opinion.
I’m probably just getting triggered by social media itself again. Well, if so then my rationalization right this moment is that EY seemed to be a pretty decent exemplar of a few virtues, including Evenness, when he was writing the sequences and arguing in the comments therein. I think he earned some amount of bragging rights from that, but nowadays he’s not keeping the budget balanced. Or to make a much weaker claim: I wouldn’t advise anyone to emulate his twitter activity if they wanted to get better at Evenness. (I might, however, have them read the Virtues passage quoted above and then skim EY’s twitter just to show just how very strong the temptations of Unevenness are.)
Okay, that was a whole lot of complaining about a couple of random, low-effort tweets. So what? If they hadn’t tweeted that, would I feel fine about this? No, this was just the clearest recent example of a bothersome trend I’ve been seeing for a while. It’s passe by now to complain about cheap online virtue signaling, but damn, it seems like a bad sign that people I respect still slip into it so blindly. It’s cool and good to hold Evenness up as an ideal, to write about it with the style and reverence of the Twelve Virtues. It’s not so cool to simply assert that it’s how your own mind works. I think that Curzi and EY are implying basically false things about their tribal impulses and their reliability, and I think this distracts from serious efforts to have correct beliefs.
As usual, I think a big part of the problem is that social media and mobile devices have altered people’s mental and emotional routines. Lots of things have become twitterized (right?), and the days of patiently writing evenhanded posts for a reliably patient audience are largely behind us.
I have historically been unimpressed by Eliezer’s Evenness on twitter… if you think that EY’s self description here is basically reasonable, that’s a crux for me
Note that Eliezer is saying that evenness is a “fellowship cue”, not that he is very even.
In this shortform post I will pontificate about some sentiments I sometimes see on twitter. It feels important for me to say, but I can’t promise that it will be a good use of any readers’ time.
It’s a really nice ideal to strive toward. In my personal experience, it does require a whole lot of striving. And sometimes it seems to have hidden, tragic tradeoffs with things like loyalty, in such a way that the rationalist and EA scenes end up with costly discomforts when it comes to human relations and interpersonal connection. I could go on about the challenges, but the point is that, to me, Evenness is something worthy of seriousness and gravity. Read the following tweets and take a moment to feel your immediate reactions, both positive and negative.
I think the first time I saw these tweets, I think I felt some faint positive affect. It’s not a novel sentiment and it doesn’t challenge me to become better, but it’s still a very nice sentiment. But rereading it later, I feel irritated and triggered. So what’s my problem?
The problem is that I don’t know anything about Michael Curzi, and I have historically been unimpressed by Eliezer’s Evenness on twitter. I think a more virtuous EY would have replied to Curzi saying that it’s a really nice ideal to strive toward, but very difficult in practice, and prone to pitfalls—not something to boast about blithely. (Although if I’m imagining a powered up Eliezer, I will tend to imagine him writing blog posts instead of tweets.)
I mean, if you think that EY’s self description here is basically reasonable, that’s a crux for me. Maybe he’s gotten better in recent years, but in the past when I’ve read his tweets, they have not added up to an edifice of obvious Evenness. (Either way, I would still find it questionable to tersely grandstand about it on twitter, but not much more questionable than most activity on twitter.) Importantly, this is a shortform post and not a top-level post because I don’t feel like putting in the effort to gather and present a bunch of tweets to justify my opinion.
I’m probably just getting triggered by social media itself again. Well, if so then my rationalization right this moment is that EY seemed to be a pretty decent exemplar of a few virtues, including Evenness, when he was writing the sequences and arguing in the comments therein. I think he earned some amount of bragging rights from that, but nowadays he’s not keeping the budget balanced. Or to make a much weaker claim: I wouldn’t advise anyone to emulate his twitter activity if they wanted to get better at Evenness. (I might, however, have them read the Virtues passage quoted above and then skim EY’s twitter just to show just how very strong the temptations of Unevenness are.)
Okay, that was a whole lot of complaining about a couple of random, low-effort tweets. So what? If they hadn’t tweeted that, would I feel fine about this? No, this was just the clearest recent example of a bothersome trend I’ve been seeing for a while. It’s passe by now to complain about cheap online virtue signaling, but damn, it seems like a bad sign that people I respect still slip into it so blindly. It’s cool and good to hold Evenness up as an ideal, to write about it with the style and reverence of the Twelve Virtues. It’s not so cool to simply assert that it’s how your own mind works. I think that Curzi and EY are implying basically false things about their tribal impulses and their reliability, and I think this distracts from serious efforts to have correct beliefs.
As usual, I think a big part of the problem is that social media and mobile devices have altered people’s mental and emotional routines. Lots of things have become twitterized (right?), and the days of patiently writing evenhanded posts for a reliably patient audience are largely behind us.
Note that Eliezer is saying that evenness is a “fellowship cue”, not that he is very even.
Now this is more like it.