Wow, this post really got me thinking. Dealing with this kind of pervasive filtering seems super important and also difficult. Thanks for writing it.
Your proposal that you can clue other people into your filtering mechanism seems hard in practice. Any effort in this vein means that you are saying that you suspect the consensus is misleading, which means that you are saying that non-consensus beliefs are more likely to be true, and people can pick up on this. I tried to come up with ways to express “this is cherry-picked, but” without triggering that but I couldn’t figure out ways that seemed plausible.
Approaches like Raemon’s, where you say “I’m just never going to talk about controversial thing X” seem mentally hard to update on—in a world where there are a million people who say “I’m never going to talk about X” and a thousand who are constantly presenting cherry-picked evidence about X, it’s very difficult for my mind to interpret the filtering disclaimers as object-level evidence about X that can fight with the evidence provided by the cherry-pickers.
One outcome might be that you live in a particular rationalist filter bubble where everyone can’t-say similar sets of things, or that maybe you can take the things people say in aggregate and see that they form a fairly digestible pattern.
(I suspect I’m not alone in avoiding talking about mainstream politics, and I’d suspect there’s roughly four groups in my circles that are something like “avoid politics”, “disproportionately lean social leftist”, “disproportionately lean libertarian”, and “disproportionately lean edgy and contrarian”, or something kinda like that, and if you can get a sense of how many of each group there are you can turn that into an overall heuristic.”)
Wow, this post really got me thinking. Dealing with this kind of pervasive filtering seems super important and also difficult. Thanks for writing it.
Your proposal that you can clue other people into your filtering mechanism seems hard in practice. Any effort in this vein means that you are saying that you suspect the consensus is misleading, which means that you are saying that non-consensus beliefs are more likely to be true, and people can pick up on this. I tried to come up with ways to express “this is cherry-picked, but” without triggering that but I couldn’t figure out ways that seemed plausible.
Approaches like Raemon’s, where you say “I’m just never going to talk about controversial thing X” seem mentally hard to update on—in a world where there are a million people who say “I’m never going to talk about X” and a thousand who are constantly presenting cherry-picked evidence about X, it’s very difficult for my mind to interpret the filtering disclaimers as object-level evidence about X that can fight with the evidence provided by the cherry-pickers.
One outcome might be that you live in a particular rationalist filter bubble where everyone can’t-say similar sets of things, or that maybe you can take the things people say in aggregate and see that they form a fairly digestible pattern.
(I suspect I’m not alone in avoiding talking about mainstream politics, and I’d suspect there’s roughly four groups in my circles that are something like “avoid politics”, “disproportionately lean social leftist”, “disproportionately lean libertarian”, and “disproportionately lean edgy and contrarian”, or something kinda like that, and if you can get a sense of how many of each group there are you can turn that into an overall heuristic.”)