I wasn’t paying that much attention to this...because it wasn’t promoted to me as an important trend until recent years.
Yes, this is what it looks like when a community’s attention is diverted. Similarly, academics might have said “AGI wasn’t promoted to me as an important trend until recent years”, but in fact plenty of rationalists were trying to promote it, it’s just that academia as a whole was very good at diverting its attention away from weird people saying weird things. Same for LW and right-wing stuff.
I have an internal grimace whenever anyone uses the word “misinformation”, because it’s so clearly a framing device that skips over the hard part of epistemology
This feels directionally correct but far from sufficient. Like, if you were in the USSR and people started talking about misinformation or hate speech, thinking “oh man the authorities are using framing devices that are epistemologically unsound” would radically underestimate the scope of the problem. The thing you actually need to be tracking is the extent to which this is part of an implicitly or explicitly coordinated power play—see Arctotherium’s article for much more.
Re Zvi, yepp, he’s less bad at this than almost all rationalists. But there’s still this basic mental step of thinking “huh, isn’t it weird that the whole system is run by quote lying liars unquote. How did it get that way?” which he doesn’t even attempt as far as I can tell. The proximate mechanism here is that modern people have absorbed a bunch of propaganda about how unethical the past was re race and gender, and have therefore generalized to thinking that if the modern world is dysfunctional in some way, something like that was probably also true in the past. But if you examine even your intuitive mental model of, say, how much people in the past cared about “honor” (e.g. to the point of duelling to the death over it), then you’d notice some confusion about the idea that the West in past centuries was run primarily by the modern variety of lying liars.
Similarly, Eliezer’s stuff on inadequate equilibria is extraordinarily uncurious about the history of civilizational inadequacy.
how much people in the past cared about “honor” (e.g. to the point of duelling to the death over it)
Honor cultures are not generally seen as enlightened liberal Western stuff, so I’m a bit confused by this connection. Would you call gang members shooting each other in the streets over small slights today an example of this good thing you’re pointing at? (EDIT: Oh, I guess you mean specifically that they’re more honest)
Yes, this is what it looks like when a community’s attention is diverted. Similarly, academics might have said “AGI wasn’t promoted to me as an important trend until recent years”, but in fact plenty of rationalists were trying to promote it, it’s just that academia as a whole was very good at diverting its attention away from weird people saying weird things. Same for LW and right-wing stuff.
This feels directionally correct but far from sufficient. Like, if you were in the USSR and people started talking about misinformation or hate speech, thinking “oh man the authorities are using framing devices that are epistemologically unsound” would radically underestimate the scope of the problem. The thing you actually need to be tracking is the extent to which this is part of an implicitly or explicitly coordinated power play—see Arctotherium’s article for much more.
Re Zvi, yepp, he’s less bad at this than almost all rationalists. But there’s still this basic mental step of thinking “huh, isn’t it weird that the whole system is run by quote lying liars unquote. How did it get that way?” which he doesn’t even attempt as far as I can tell. The proximate mechanism here is that modern people have absorbed a bunch of propaganda about how unethical the past was re race and gender, and have therefore generalized to thinking that if the modern world is dysfunctional in some way, something like that was probably also true in the past. But if you examine even your intuitive mental model of, say, how much people in the past cared about “honor” (e.g. to the point of duelling to the death over it), then you’d notice some confusion about the idea that the West in past centuries was run primarily by the modern variety of lying liars.
Similarly, Eliezer’s stuff on inadequate equilibria is extraordinarily uncurious about the history of civilizational inadequacy.
Honor cultures are not generally seen as enlightened liberal Western stuff, so I’m a bit confused by this connection. Would you call gang members shooting each other in the streets over small slights today an example of this good thing you’re pointing at? (EDIT: Oh, I guess you mean specifically that they’re more honest)