Any particular reason? To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith—it just shapes deep reflexes of salience, attention and sensemaking. I feel like Wei Dai would actually agree with this to some extent, since he’s always going on about status motivations.
Huh, actually surprised by the disagreevotes. I would’ve thought this would be relatively uncontroversial. Can’t help but suspect this is a big blindspot here. Like, I’m being interpreted as attacking the locally sacred value of idiosyncratic thinking, or local high-status people, or something?
On the original question—there are also other factors, of course, like the world being so big/complex that the right worldview is underdetermined by the evidence, and skill in a domain (here, verbal thinking) allowing more nuanced and specific expression of one’s aesthetic preferences and personality.
I don’t think this is a big component of the explanation.
Any particular reason? To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith—it just shapes deep reflexes of salience, attention and sensemaking. I feel like Wei Dai would actually agree with this to some extent, since he’s always going on about status motivations.
Huh, actually surprised by the disagreevotes. I would’ve thought this would be relatively uncontroversial. Can’t help but suspect this is a big blindspot here. Like, I’m being interpreted as attacking the locally sacred value of idiosyncratic thinking, or local high-status people, or something?
On the original question—there are also other factors, of course, like the world being so big/complex that the right worldview is underdetermined by the evidence, and skill in a domain (here, verbal thinking) allowing more nuanced and specific expression of one’s aesthetic preferences and personality.