The language generally does sound a little strong, but I’d guess it to be directionally correct and that your points wouldn’t significantly change the post’s conclusions (though I admit I’ve only skimmed the post). Like, it’s true that a lot of people will change their minds if the social context changes, but if the ideology manages to maintain a stable-enough social context or one that shifts adaptively enough, then those people’s attitudes can stay quite resilient.
And even if huge numbers of people did change their minds, it’s possible for some not to, e.g. because their psychology for one reason or another ends up leaving them no line of retreat, so that anything ends up being less painful than changing one’s mind. The post also notes that it may be enough for a pretty small number of people to be fanatics, if those people end up in control of a state.
Generally I think that Duncan’s heuristic of betting on existence is a pretty good one that’s generally correct, and also applies for the case of “extreme fanatics do exist”.
I don’t know how I would differentiate paragraphs like the above from ravings of religious people talking about demons or devils.
It seems like in these posts all negative attributes must be assigned to these people, and all their cognitive leanings must be absolute and unwielding.
This seems like a strawman? The post was assigning some negative attributes to these people, not all of them. For one, extreme tribalism implies a loyalty to your own tribe, which is generally seen as a positive virtue. (Stereotypical demons don’t even have that quality.)
How to differentiate this from talk about demons or devils—well, most obviously, demons and devils are supernatural and incompatible with any naturalistic understanding of the world. Some variables within the brain getting stuck in an extreme setting is not. (I do find it a plausible claim that e.g. a superintelligence capable of arbitrarily manipulating such a person’s environment could always find some way of getting the person to change their mind, but I think the post is most reasonably read as “incapable of changing their minds for most practical purposes”.)
The language generally does sound a little strong, but I’d guess it to be directionally correct and that your points wouldn’t significantly change the post’s conclusions (though I admit I’ve only skimmed the post).
[...]
Generally I think that Duncan’s heuristic of betting on existence is a pretty good one that’s generally correct, and also applies for the case of “extreme fanatics do exist”.
I am not arguing against “there are literally no people who could meaningfully be described as having these attributes”, but the post goes on to classify over 500 million people worldwide as having these attributes!
My guess is you would agree with me here if you read the article beyond skimming.
In conclusion, accounting for potential overlap between categories, perhaps 500 million to 1 billion people, roughly 6-12% of the world population, may plausibly be classified as ideological fanatics
Again, their only definition of an “ideological fanatic” is that extremely extremely strong summary I linked above. There is no section of the post that’s like “of course, the vast vast majority of ideological fanatics do not think anything like this and are not well-described by this, and are largely behaving this way due to social momentum, and are maybe mildly on a spectrum in this direction”. It just creates an extremely intense boogeyman of “ideological fanatics” then classifies ~10% of the world population as matching that description.
their only definition of an “ideological fanatic” is that extremely extremely strong summary I linked above. There is no section of the post that’s like “of course, the vast vast majority of ideological fanatics do not think anything like this and are not well-described by this, and are largely behaving this way due to social momentum, and are maybe mildly on a spectrum in this direction”
I think these excerpts are saying something like that?
One overarching characteristic of the fanatical worldview is black-and-white thinking (good vs. evil, us vs. them) with no room for nuance. Let’s not make the same mistake. Like most phenomena, ideological fanaticism exists on a continuum. Furthest from fanaticism are those enlightened few who, following reason and evidence, act with benevolence towards all. A vast middle ground is occupied by religious traditionalists, hyper-partisan activists, conspiracy theorists, and many others. Indeed, a mild form of ideological fanaticism is arguably human nature: we are all somewhat prone to overconfidence, motivated reasoning, and tribalistic in-group favoritism and outgroup discrimination (e.g., Kunda, 1990; Diehl, 1990; Hewstone et al., 2002). [...]
Ideological fanaticism is not just a single sliding scale. Rather, it is multidimensional, that is, people can exhibit different levels of each fanatical triad component. The most dangerous form of ideological fanaticism requires elevated levels of all three characteristics. A hypothetical ‘Bayesian Nazi’, for instance, would lack absolute certainty and thus remain open to changing his mind. Similarly, without Manichean hatred, there is no motivation for mass harm, and without a willingness to use violence, even the most hateful beliefs remain inert.
Nor are fanatical movements monolithic.[13] While their leaders often were malignant narcissists, their followers are frequently ordinary people desperately seeking meaning and certainty in a chaotic, disappointing world (Hoffer, 1951; Kruglanski et al., 2014; Tietjen, 2023). Not all are true believers, either: some merely conform to group pressure, others are cynical opportunists, and many fall somewhere in between.[14] Many fanatics are capable of eventual reform, so we should not demonize them as irredeemably evil.
I agree these talk about potential scales, but it seems to me that they describe “ideological fanatics” as a pretty extreme point on that scale, and then classify at least hundreds of millions of people as falling on that side of the scale?
Not all are true believers, either: some merely conform to group pressure, others are cynical opportunists, and many fall somewhere in between.[14] Many fanatics are capable of eventual reform, so we should not demonize them as irredeemably evil.
These are not the right quantitative adjectives here. The correct ones to use would be:
Practically no people we classify as “ideological fanatics” are true believers
Virtually all (of the 500M+) fanatics are capable of eventual reform
Like, I don’t see how you could use the original quantifiers (“not all” and “many”), and after multiplying them through with the quantitative estimates not arrive at numbers at least 3 OOMs too high for these traits.
but it seems to me that they describe “ideological fanatics” as a pretty extreme point on that scale
I agree that the original text is ambiguous in this regard and that there are reasonable grounds for your reading. Personally I interpret sentences like
ideological fanaticism exists on a continuum
The most dangerous form of ideological fanaticism requires elevated levels of all three characteristics
their followers are frequently ordinary people
to mean something like “we are giving descriptions for the most extreme version of ideological fanaticism as that’s the easiest to gesture toward, but will also include people with less extreme versions when trying to estimate the sizes of the movements”.
I think it’s also relevant that the section on dogmatic certainty that you quoted beings with
The most ardent fanatics
implying that not all fanatics are this extreme; and of course the section on dogmatic certainty was one of the three sub-dimensions for ideological fanaticism rather than the overall definition.
But I think “which one of these readings is more correct” gets pretty subjective and impossible to resolve, so for me the more important test is something like… “if the authors could be read as making either a strong claim or a weaker one, how much do their conclusions depend on the stronger claim?”.
And it seems to me that on an interpretation where they only mean something like “virtually all fanatics are capable of eventual reform in principle, but in practice may be stuck in an environment where that is very unlikely”… then the various dangers that they outline, like “Ideological fanaticism increases the risk of war and conflict” or “Fanatical retributivism may lead to astronomical suffering”, still sound plausible.
Of course, it’s still fair to criticize the authors for e.g. being unclear about this or for implying a stronger claim when a weaker claim would suffice, but I wouldn’t strong-downvote them for that.
With regard to the bit about the 200-250 million Christians, that section does contain this paragraph
How many ideological fanatics are out there? Formulating a precise estimate is nearly impossible, as fanaticism exists on a multidimensional continuum with no clear demarcations, and because good data is sparse. Therefore, the numbers below are merely rough approximations based on limited research. For brevity, we focus here on support for ideological violence as the best proxy for ideological fanaticism. Endorsing ideological violence usually presupposes dogmatism and tribalistic hatred, since one needs to confidently believe the hated target group is deserving of punishment in order to justify violence. Another limitation is that we mostly rely on survey data[45], not actual behavior; this may overestimate fanaticism (if claimed support for violence is mere “cheap talk”) or underestimate it (“social desirability bias”).
I think a reasonable reading of this section/paragraph is also something like “for purposes of this section, we are defining an ideological fanatic as having some combination of these three traits that’s high enough for them to endorse ideological violence” [not implying that they would necessarily all be maxed out on the “dogmatic certainty” dimension].
Here we could apply a similar test of… “if we interpret the 200-250 million Christians narrowly as only being people who endorse ideological violence, rather than assuming that they’re necessarily incapable of changing their minds, does this still e.g. increase the risk of war and conflict?”. I think the answer is pretty clearly yes.
The language generally does sound a little strong, but I’d guess it to be directionally correct and that your points wouldn’t significantly change the post’s conclusions (though I admit I’ve only skimmed the post). Like, it’s true that a lot of people will change their minds if the social context changes, but if the ideology manages to maintain a stable-enough social context or one that shifts adaptively enough, then those people’s attitudes can stay quite resilient.
And even if huge numbers of people did change their minds, it’s possible for some not to, e.g. because their psychology for one reason or another ends up leaving them no line of retreat, so that anything ends up being less painful than changing one’s mind. The post also notes that it may be enough for a pretty small number of people to be fanatics, if those people end up in control of a state.
Generally I think that Duncan’s heuristic of betting on existence is a pretty good one that’s generally correct, and also applies for the case of “extreme fanatics do exist”.
This seems like a strawman? The post was assigning some negative attributes to these people, not all of them. For one, extreme tribalism implies a loyalty to your own tribe, which is generally seen as a positive virtue. (Stereotypical demons don’t even have that quality.)
How to differentiate this from talk about demons or devils—well, most obviously, demons and devils are supernatural and incompatible with any naturalistic understanding of the world. Some variables within the brain getting stuck in an extreme setting is not. (I do find it a plausible claim that e.g. a superintelligence capable of arbitrarily manipulating such a person’s environment could always find some way of getting the person to change their mind, but I think the post is most reasonably read as “incapable of changing their minds for most practical purposes”.)
[...]
I am not arguing against “there are literally no people who could meaningfully be described as having these attributes”, but the post goes on to classify over 500 million people worldwide as having these attributes!
My guess is you would agree with me here if you read the article beyond skimming.
Again, their only definition of an “ideological fanatic” is that extremely extremely strong summary I linked above. There is no section of the post that’s like “of course, the vast vast majority of ideological fanatics do not think anything like this and are not well-described by this, and are largely behaving this way due to social momentum, and are maybe mildly on a spectrum in this direction”. It just creates an extremely intense boogeyman of “ideological fanatics” then classifies ~10% of the world population as matching that description.
I think these excerpts are saying something like that?
I agree these talk about potential scales, but it seems to me that they describe “ideological fanatics” as a pretty extreme point on that scale, and then classify at least hundreds of millions of people as falling on that side of the scale?
These are not the right quantitative adjectives here. The correct ones to use would be:
Practically no people we classify as “ideological fanatics” are true believers
Virtually all (of the 500M+) fanatics are capable of eventual reform
Like, I don’t see how you could use the original quantifiers (“not all” and “many”), and after multiplying them through with the quantitative estimates not arrive at numbers at least 3 OOMs too high for these traits.
I agree that the original text is ambiguous in this regard and that there are reasonable grounds for your reading. Personally I interpret sentences like
to mean something like “we are giving descriptions for the most extreme version of ideological fanaticism as that’s the easiest to gesture toward, but will also include people with less extreme versions when trying to estimate the sizes of the movements”.
I think it’s also relevant that the section on dogmatic certainty that you quoted beings with
implying that not all fanatics are this extreme; and of course the section on dogmatic certainty was one of the three sub-dimensions for ideological fanaticism rather than the overall definition.
But I think “which one of these readings is more correct” gets pretty subjective and impossible to resolve, so for me the more important test is something like… “if the authors could be read as making either a strong claim or a weaker one, how much do their conclusions depend on the stronger claim?”.
And it seems to me that on an interpretation where they only mean something like “virtually all fanatics are capable of eventual reform in principle, but in practice may be stuck in an environment where that is very unlikely”… then the various dangers that they outline, like “Ideological fanaticism increases the risk of war and conflict” or “Fanatical retributivism may lead to astronomical suffering”, still sound plausible.
Of course, it’s still fair to criticize the authors for e.g. being unclear about this or for implying a stronger claim when a weaker claim would suffice, but I wouldn’t strong-downvote them for that.
With regard to the bit about the 200-250 million Christians, that section does contain this paragraph
I think a reasonable reading of this section/paragraph is also something like “for purposes of this section, we are defining an ideological fanatic as having some combination of these three traits that’s high enough for them to endorse ideological violence” [not implying that they would necessarily all be maxed out on the “dogmatic certainty” dimension].
Here we could apply a similar test of… “if we interpret the 200-250 million Christians narrowly as only being people who endorse ideological violence, rather than assuming that they’re necessarily incapable of changing their minds, does this still e.g. increase the risk of war and conflict?”. I think the answer is pretty clearly yes.