Should we expect more anti-rationalism in the future? I believe that we should, but let me outline what actual observations I think we will make.
Firstly, what do I mean by ‘anti-rationality’? I don’t mean that in particular people will criticize LessWrong. I mean it in the general sense of skepticism towards science / logical reasoning, skepticism towards technology, and a hostility to rationalistic methods applied to things like policy, politics, economics, education, and things like that.
And there are a few things I think we will observe first (some of which we are already observing) that will act as a catalyst for this. Number one, if economic inequality increases, I think a lot of the blame for this will be placed on the elite (as it always is), but in particular the cognitive elite (which makes up an ever-increasing share of the elite). Whatever the views of the cognitive elite are will become the philosophy of evil from the perspective of the masses. Because the elite are increasingly made up of very high intelligence people, many of whom with a connection to technology or Silicon Valley, we should expect that the dominant worldview of that environment will increasingly contrast with the worldview of those who haven’t benefited or at least do not perceive themselves to benefit from the increasing growth and wealth driven by those people. What’s worse, it seems that even if economic gains benefit those at the very bottom too, if inequality still increases, that is the only thing that will get noticed.
The second issue is that as technology improves, our powers of inference increase, and privacy defenses become weaker. It’s already the case that we can predict a person’s behavior to some degree and use that knowledge to our advantage (if you’re trying to sell something to them, give them / deny them a loan, judge whether they would be a good employee, or predict whether or not they will commit a crime). There’s already a push-back against this, in the sense that certain variables correlate with things we don’t want them to, like race. This implies that the standard definition of privacy, in the sense of simply not having access to specific variables, isn’t strong enough. What’s desired is not being able to infer the values of certain variables, either, which is a much, much stronger condition. This is a deep, non-trivial problem that is unlikely to be solved quickly—and it runs into the same issues as all problems concerning discrimination do, which is how to define ‘bias’. Is reducing bias at the expense of truth even a worthy goal? This shifts the debate towards programmers, statisticians and data scientists who are left with the burden of never making a mistake in this area. “Weapons of Math Destruction” is a good example of the way this issue gets treated.
We will also continue to observe a lot ideas from postmodernism being adopted as part of political ideology of the left. Postmodernism is basically the antithesis of rationalism, and is particularly worrying because it is a very adaptable and robust meme. And an ideology that essentially claims that rationality and truth are not even possible to define, let alone discover, is particularly dangerous if it is adopted as the mainstream mode of thought. So if a lot of the above problems get worse, I think there is a chance that rationalism will get blamed as it has been in the framework of postmodernism.
The summary of this is: As politics becomes warfare between worldviews rather than arguments for and against various beliefs, populist hostility gets directed towards what is perceived to be the worldview of the elite. The elite tend to be more rationalist, and so that hostility may get directed towards rationalism itself.
I think a lot more can be said about this, but maybe that’s best left to a full post, I’m not sure. Let me know if this was too long / short or poorly worded.
Can you say a word on whether (and how) this phenomenon you describe (“populist hostility gets directed towards what is perceived to be the worldview of the elite”) is different from the past? It seems to me that this is a force that is always present, often led to “problems” (eg, the Luddite movement), but usually (though not always) the general population came around more in believing the same things as “the elites”.
The process is not different from what occurred in the past, and I think this was basically the catalyst for anti-semitism during the post industrial revolution era. You observe a characteristic of a group of people who seem to be doing a lot better than you, in that case a lot of them happened to be Jewish, and so you then associate their Jewish-ness with your lack of success and unhappiness.
The main difference is that society continues to modernize and technology improves. Bad ideas for why some people are better off than others become unpopular. Actual biases and unfairness in the system gradually disappear. But despite that, inequality remains and in fact seems to be rising. What happens is that the only thing left to blame is instrumental rationality. I imagine that people will look as hard as they can for bias and unfairness for as long as possible, and will want to see it in people who are instrumentally rational.
In a free society, (and even more so as a society becomes freer and true bigotry disappears) some people will be better off just because they are better at making themselves better off, and the degree to which people vary in that ability is quite staggering. But psychologically it is too difficult for many to accept this, because no one wants to believe in inherent differences. So it’s sort of a paradoxical result of our society actually improving.
I think a lot more can be said about this, but maybe that’s best left to a full post, I’m not sure. Let me know if this was too long / short or poorly worded.
Writing style looks fine. My quibbles would be with the empirical claims/predictions/speculations.
Is the elite really more of a cognitive elite than in the past?
Strenze’s 2007 meta-analysis (previously) analyzed how the correlations between IQ and education, IQ and occupational level, and IQ and income changed over time. The first two correlations decreased and the third held level at a modest 0.2.
Will elite worldviews increasingly diverge from the worldviews of those left behind economically?
Maybe, although just as there are forces for divergence, there are forces for convergence. The media can, and do, transmit elite-aligned worldviews just as they transmit elite-opposed worldviews, while elites fund political activity, and even the occasional political movement.
Would increasing inequality really prevent people from noticing economic gains for the poorest?
That notion sounds like hyperbole to me. The media and people’s social networks are large, and can discuss many economic issues at once. Even people who spend a good chunk of time discussing inequality discuss gains (or losses) of those with low income or wealth.
For instance, Branko Milanović, whose standing in economics comes from his studies of inequality, is probably best known for his elephant chart, which presents income gains across the global income distribution, down to the 5th percentile. (Which percentile, incidentally, did not see an increase in real income between 1988 and 2008, according to the chart.)
Also, while the Anglosphere’s discussed inequality a great deal in the 2010s, that seems to me a vogue produced by the one-two-three punch of the Great Recession, the Occupy movement, and the economist feeding frenzy around Thomas Piketty’s book. Before then, I reckon most of the non-economists who drew special attention to economic inequality were left-leaning activists and pundits in particular. That could become the norm once again, and if so, concerns about poverty would likely become more salient to normal people than concerns about inequality.
Will the left continue adopting lots of ideas from postmodernism?
This is going to depend on how we define postmodernism, which is a vexed enough question that I won’t dive deeply into it (at least TheAncientGeek and bogus have taken it up). If we just define (however dodgily) postmodernism to be a synonym for anti-rationalism, I’m not sure the left (in the Anglosphere, since that’s the place we’re presumably really talking about) is discernibly more postmodernist/anti-rationalist than it was during the campus/culture wars of the 1980s/1990s. People tend to point to specific incidents when they talk about this question, rather than try to systematically estimate change over time.
Granted, even if the left isn’t adopting any new postmodern/anti-rationalist ideas, the ideas already bouncing around in that political wing might percolate further out and trigger a reaction against rationalism. Compounding the risk of such a reaction is the fact that the right wing can also operate as a conduit for those ideas — look at yer Alex Jones and Jason Reza Jorjani types.
Is politics becoming more a war of worldviews than arguments for & against various beliefs?
Maybe, but evidence is needed to answer the question. (And the dichotomy isn’t a hard and fast one; wars of worldviews are, at least in part, made up of skirmishes where arguments are lobbed at specific beliefs.)
Postmodernism is basically the antithesis of rationalism, and is particularly worrying because it is a very adaptable and robust meme.
Rationalists (Bay area type) tend to think of what they call Postmodernism[*] as the antithesis to themselves, but the reality is more complex. “Postmodernism” isn’t a short and cohesive set of claims that are the opposite of the set of claims that rationalists make, it’s a different set of concerns, goals and approachs.
And an ideology that essentially claims that rationality and truth are not even possible to define, let alone discover, is particularly dangerous if it is adopted as the mainstream mode of thought.
And what’s worse is that bay area rationalism has not been able to unequivocally define “rationality” or “truth”. (EY wrote an article on the Simple idea of Truth, in which he considers the correspondence theory, Tarki’s theory, and a few others without resolving on a single correct theory).
Bay area rationalism is the attitude that that sceptical (no truth) and relativistic (multiple truth) claims are utterly false, but it’s an attitude, not a proof. What’s worse still is that sceptical and relativistic claims can be supported using the toolkit of rationality. “Postmodernists” tend to be sceptics and relativists, but you don’t have to be a “postmodernist” to be a relativist or sceptic. As non-bay-area, mainstream, rationalists understand well. If rationalist is to win over “postmodernism”, then it must win rationally, by being able to demonstrate it’s superioritiy.
[*] “Postmodernists” call themselves poststructuralists, continental philosophers, or critical theorists.
“Postmodernists” call themselves poststructuralists, continental philosophers, or critical theorists.
Not quite. “Poststructuralism” is an ex-post label and many of the thinkers that are most often identified with the emergence of “postmodern” ideas actually rejected it. (Some of them even rejected the whole notion of “postmodernism” as an unhelpful simplification of their actual ideas.) “Continental philosophy” really means the ‘old-fashioned’ sort of philosophy that Analytic philosophers distanced themselves from; you can certainly view postmodernism as encompassed within continental philosophy, but the notions are quite distinct. Similarly, “critical theory” exists in both ‘modernist’/‘high modern’ and ‘postmodern’ variants, and one cannot understand the ‘postmodern’ kind without knowing the ‘modern’ critical theory it’s actually referring to, and quite often criticizing in turn.
All of which is to say that, really, it’s complicated, and that while describing postmodernism as a “different set of concerns, goals and approaches” may hit significantly closer to the mark than merely caricaturing it as an antithesis to rationality, neither really captures the worthwhile ideas that ‘postmodern’ thinkers were actually developing, at least when they were at their best. (--See, the big problem with ‘continental philosophy’ as a whole is that you often get a few exceedingly worthwhile ideas mixed in with heaps of nonsense and confused thinking, and it can be really hard to tell which is which. Postmodernism is no exception here!)
Rationalists (Bay area type) tend to think of what they call Postmodernism[*] as the antithesis to themselves, but the reality is more complex. “Postmodernism” isn’t a short and cohesive set of claims that are the opposite of the set of claims that rationalists make, it’s a different set of concerns, goals and approachs.
Except that it does make claims that are the opposite of the claims rationalists make. It claims that there is no objective reality, no ultimate set of principles we can use to understand the universe, and no correct method of getting nearer to truth. And the ‘goal’ of postmodernism is to break apart and criticize everything that claims to be able to do those things. You would be hard pressed to find a better example of something diametrically opposed to rationalism. (I’m going to guess that with high likelihood I’ll get accused of not understanding postmodernism by saying that).
And what’s worse is that bay area rationalism has not been able to unequivocally define “rationality” or “truth”. (EY wrote an article on the Simple idea of Truth, in which he considers the correspondence theory, Tarki’s theory, and a few others without resolving on a single correct theory).
Well yeah, being able to unequivocally define anything is difficult, no argument there. But rationalists use an intuitive and pragmatic definition of truth that allows us to actually do things. Then what happens is they get accused by postmodernists of claiming to have the One and Only True and Correct Definition of Truth and Correctness, and of claiming that we have access to the Objective Reality. The point is that as soon as you allow for any leeway in this at all (leeway in allowing for some in-between area of there being a true objective reality with 100% access to and 0% access to), you basically obtain rationalism. Not because the principles it derives from are that there is an objective reality that is possible to Truly Know, or that there are facts that we know to be 100% true, but only that there are sets of claims we have some degree of confidence in, and other sets of claims we might want to calculate a degree of confidence in based on the first set of claims.
Bay area rationalism is the attitude that that sceptical (no truth) and relativistic (multiple truth) claims are utterly false, but it’s an attitude, not a proof.
It happens to be an attitude that works really well in practice, but the other two attitudes can’t actually be used in practice if you were to adhere to them fully. They would only be useful for denying anything that someone else believes. I mean, what would it mean to actually hold two beliefs to be completely true but also that they contradict? In probability theory you can have degrees of confidence that are non-zero that add up to one, but it’s unclear if this is the same thing as relativism in the sense of “multiple truths”. I would guess that it isn’t, and multiple truths really means holding two incompatible beliefs to both be true.
If rationalist is to win over “postmodernism”, then it must win rationally, by being able to demonstrate it’s superioritiy.
Except that you can’t demonstrate superiority of anything within the framework of postmodernism. Within rationalism it’s very easy and straightforward.
I imagine the reason that some rationalists might find postmodernism to be useful is in the spirit of overcoming biases. This in and of itself I have no problem with—but I would ask what you consider postmodern ideas to offer in the quest to remove biases that rationalism doesn’t offer, or wouldn’t have access to even in principle?
Except that it does make claims that are the opposite of the claims rationalists make. It claims that there is no objective reality, no ultimate set of principles we can use to understand the universe, and no correct method of getting nearer to truth.
The actual ground-level stance is more like: “If you think that you know some sort of objective reality, etc., it is overwhelmingly likely that you’re in fact wrong in some way, and being deluded by cached thoughts.” This is an eminently rational attitude to take - ‘it’s not what you don’t know that really gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’ The rest of your comment has similar problems, so I’m not going to discuss it in depth. Suffice it to say, postmodern thought is far more subtle than you give it credit for.
If someone claims to hold a belief with absolute 100% certainty, that doesn’t require a gigantic modern philosophical edifice in order to refute. It seems like that’s setting a very low bar for what postmodernism actually hopes to accomplish.
If someone claims to hold a belief with absolute 100% certainty, that doesn’t require a gigantic modern philosophical edifice in order to refute.
The reason why postmodernism often looks like that superficially is that it specializes in critiquing “gigantic modern philosophical edifice[s]” (emphasis on ‘modern’!). It takes a gigantic philosophy to beat a gigantic philosophy, at least in some people’s view.
Except that it does make claims that are the opposite of the claims rationalists make. It claims that there is no objective reality, no ultimate set of principles we can use to understand the universe, and no correct method of getting nearer to truth.
Citation needed.
Well yeah, being able to unequivocally define anything is difficult, no argument there
On the other hand, refraining from condemning others when you have skeletons in your own closet is easy.
But rationalists use an intuitive and pragmatic definition of truth that allows us to actually do things. T
Engineers use an intuitive and pragmatic definition of truth that allows them to actually do things. Rationalists are more
in the philosophy business.
It happens to be an attitude that works really well in practice,
For some values of “work”. It’s possible to argue in detail that predictive power actually doesn’t entail correspondence to ultimate reality, for instance.
I mean, what would it mean to actually hold two beliefs to be completely true but also that they contradict?
For instance, when you tell outsiders that you have wonderful answers to problems X, Y and Z, but you concede to people inside the tent that you actually don’t.
Except that you can’t demonstrate superiority of anything within the framework of postmodernism
That’s not what I said.
but I would ask what you consider postmodern ideas to offer in the quest to remove biases that rationalism doesn’t offer, or wouldn’t have access to even in principle?
There’s no such thing as postmodernism and I’m not particularly in favour of it. My position is more about doing rationality right than not doing it all. If you critically apply rationality to itself, you end up with something a lot less elf confident and exclusionary than Bay Area rationalism.
Citing it is going to be difficult, even the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says “That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism.” I’m forced to site philosophers who are opposed to it because they seem to be the only ones willing to actually define it in a concise way. I’ll just reference this essay by Dennett to start with.
On the other hand, refraining from condemning others when you have skeletons in your own closet is easy.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to here.
For instance, when you tell outsiders that you have wonderful answers to problems X, Y and Z, but you concede to people inside the tent that you actually don’t.
That’s called lying.
There’s no such thing as postmodernism
You know exactly what I mean when I use that term, otherwise there would be no discussion. It seems that you can’t even name it without someone saying that’s not what it’s called, it actually doesn’t have a definition, every philosopher who is labeled a postmodernist called it something else, etc.
If I can’t define it, there’s no point in discussing it. But it doesn’t change the fact that the way the mainstream left has absorbed the philosophy has been in the “there is no objective truth” / “all cultures/beliefs/creeds are equal” sense. This is mostly the sense in which I refer to it in my original post.
My position is more about doing rationality right than not doing it all. If you critically apply rationality to itself, you end up with something a lot less elf confident and exclusionary than Bay Area rationalism.
I’d like to hear more about this. By “Bay Area rationalism”, I assume you are talking about a specific list of beliefs like the likelihood of intelligence explosion? Or are you talking about the Bayesian methodology in general?
To which the glib answer is “that’s because it isn’t true”.
″ I’m forced to site philosophers who are opposed to it because they seem to be the only ones willing to actually define it in a concise way. I’ll just reference this essay by Dennett to start with.
Dennett gives a concise definition because he has the same simplistic take on the subject as you. What he is not doing is showing that there is an actually group of people who describe themselves as postmodernists, and have those views. The use of the terms “postmodernist” is a bad sign: it’s a tern that works like “infidel” and so on, a label for an outgroup, and an ingroup’s views on an outgroup are rarely bedrock reality.
On the other hand, refraining from condemning others when you have skeletons in your own closet is easy.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to here.
When we, the ingroup, can’t define something it’s Ok, when they, the outgroup, can’t define something, it shows how bad they are.
For instance, when you tell outsiders that you have wonderful answers to problems X, Y and Z, but you concede to people inside the tent that you actually don’t.
That’s called lying.
People are quite psychologically capable of having compartmentalised beliefs, that sort of thing is pretty ubiquitous, which is why I was able to find an example from the rationalist community itself. Relativism without contextualisation probably doesn’t make much sense, but who is proposing it?
There’s no such thing as postmodernism
You know exactly what I mean when I use that term, otherwise there would be no discussion.
As you surely know that I mean there is no group of people who both call themselves postmodernists and hold
the views you are attributing to postmodernists.
It seems that you can’t even name it without someone saying that’s not what it’s called, it actually doesn’t have a definition, every philosopher who is labeled a postmodernist called it something else, etc.
It’s kind of diffuse. But you can talk about scepticism, relativism, etc, if those are the issues.
If I can’t define it, there’s no point in discussing it. But it doesn’t change the fact that the way the mainstream left has absorbed the philosophy has been in the “there is no objective truth” / “all cultures/beliefs/creeds are equal” sense.
There’s some terrible epistemology on the left, and on the right, and even in rationalism.
My position is more about doing rationality right than not doing it all. If you critically apply rationality to itself, you end up with something a lot less elf confident and exclusionary than Bay Area rationalism.
I’d like to hear more about this. By “Bay Area rationalism”, I assume you are talking about a specific list of beliefs like the likelihood of intelligence explosion? Or are you talking about the Bayesian methodology in general?
I mean Yudkowsky’s approach. Which flies under the flag of Bayesianism, but doesn’t make much use of formal Bayesianism.
I have a feeling that perhaps in some sense politics is self-balancing. You attack things that are associated with your enemy, which means that your enemy will defend them. Assuming you are an entity that only cares about scoring political points, if your enemy uses rationality as an applause light, you will attack rationality, but if your enemy uses postmodernism as an applause light, you will attack postmodernism and perhaps defend (your interpretation of) rationality.
That means that the real risk for rationality is not that everyone will attack it. As soon as the main political players will all turn against rationality, fighting rationality will become less important for them, because attacking things the others consider sacred will be more effective. You will soon get rationality apologists saying “rationality per se is not bad, it’s only rationality as practiced by our political opponents that leads to horrible things”.
But if some group of idiots will choose “rationality” as their applause light and they will be doing it completely wrong, and everyone else will therefore turn against rationality, that would cause much more damage. (Similarly to how Stalin is often used as an example against “atheism”. Now imagine a not-so-implausible parallel universe where Stalin used “rationality”—interpreted as: 1984-style obedience of the Communist Party—as the official applause light of his regime. In such world, non-communists hate the word “rationality” because it is associated with communism, and communists insist that the only true meaning of rationality is the blind obedience of the Party. Imagine trying to teach people x-rationality in that universe.)
I don’t think it’s necessary for ‘rationality’ to be used an applause light for this to happen. The only things needed, in my mind, are:
A group of people who adopt rationality and are instrumentally rationalist become very successful, wealthy and powerful because of it.
This groups makes up an increasing share of the wealthy and powerful, because they are better at becoming wealthy and powerful than the old elite.
The remaining people who aren’t as wealthy or successful or powerful, who haven’t adopted rationality, make observations about what the successful group does and associates whatever they do / say as the tribal characteristics and culture of the successful group. The fact that they haven’t adopted rationality makes them more likely to do this.
And because the final bullet point is always what occurs throughout history, the only difference—and really the only thing necessary for this to happen—is that rationalists make up a greater share of the elite over time.
But if some group of idiots will choose “rationality” as their applause light and they will be doing it completely wrong, and everyone else will therefore turn against rationality, that would cause much more damage. (Similarly to how Stalin is often used as an example against “atheism”. Now imagine a not-so-implausible parallel universe where Stalin used “rationality”—interpreted as: 1984-style obedience of the Communist Party—as the official applause light of his regime. In such world, non-communists hate the word “rationality” because it is associated with communism, and communists insist that the only true meaning of rationality is the blind obedience of the Party.
Somewhat ironically, this is exactly the sort of cargo-cultish “rationality” that originally led to the emergence of postmodernism, in opposition to it and calling for some much-needed re-evaluation and skepticism around all “cached thoughts”. The moral I suppose is that you just can’t escape idiocy.
Not exactly. What happened at first was that Marxism—which, in the early 20th century, became the dominant mode of thought for Western intellectuals—was based on rationalist materialism, until it was empirically shown to be wrong by some of the largest social experiments mankind is capable of running. The question for intellectuals who were unwilling to give up Marx after that time was how to save Marxism from empirical reality. The answer to that was postmodernism. You’ll find that in most academic departments today, those who identify as Marxists are almost always postmodernists (and you won’t find them in economics or political science, but rather in the english, literary criticism and social science departments). Marxists of the rationalist type are pretty much extinct at this point.
I broadly agree, but you’re basically talking about the dynamics that resulted in postmodernism becoming an intellectual fad, devoid of much of its originally-meaningful content. Whereas I’m talking about what the original memeplex was about—i.e what people like the often-misunderstood Jacques Derrida were actually trying to say. It’s even clearer when you look at Michael Foucault, who was indeed a rather sharp critic of “high modernity”, but didn’t even consider himself a post-modernist (whereas he’s often regarded as one today). Rather, he was investigating pointed questions like “do modern institutions like medicine, psychiatric care and ‘scientific’ criminology really make us so much better off compared to the past when we lacked these, or is this merely an illusion due to how these institutions work?” And if you ask Robin Hanson today, he will tell you that we’re very likely overreliant on medicine, well beyond the point where such reliance actually benefits us.
postmodernism becoming an intellectual fad, devoid of much of its originally-meaningful content. Whereas I’m talking about what the original memeplex was about
So you concede that everyone you’re harassing is 100% correct, you just don’t want to talk about postmodernism? So fuck off.
This may be partially what has happened with “science” but in reverse. Liberals used science to defend some of their policies, conservatives started attacking it, and now it has become an applause light for liberals—for example, the “March for Science” I keep hearing about on Facebook. I am concerned about this trend because the increasing politicization of science will likely result in both reduced quality of science (due to bias) and decreased public acceptance of even those scientific results that are not biased.
I agree with your concern, but I think that you shouldn’t limit your fear to party-aligned attacks.
For example, the Thirty-Meter Telescope in Hawaii was delayed by protests from a group of people who are most definitely “liberal” on the “liberal/conservative” spectrum (in fact, “ultra-liberal”). The effect of the protests is definitely significant. While it’s debatable how close the TMT came to cancelation, the current plan is to grant no more land to astronomy atop Mauna Kea.
Agreed. There are plenty of liberal views that reject certain scientific evidence for ideological reasons—I’ll refrain from examples to avoid getting too political, but it’s not a one-sided issue.
As soon as the main political players will all turn against rationality, fighting rationality will become less important for them, because attacking things the others consider sacred will be more effective.
So, do you want to ask the Jews how that theory worked out for them?
Should we expect more anti-rationalism in the future? I believe that we should, but let me outline what actual observations I think we will make.
Firstly, what do I mean by ‘anti-rationality’? I don’t mean that in particular people will criticize LessWrong. I mean it in the general sense of skepticism towards science / logical reasoning, skepticism towards technology, and a hostility to rationalistic methods applied to things like policy, politics, economics, education, and things like that.
And there are a few things I think we will observe first (some of which we are already observing) that will act as a catalyst for this. Number one, if economic inequality increases, I think a lot of the blame for this will be placed on the elite (as it always is), but in particular the cognitive elite (which makes up an ever-increasing share of the elite). Whatever the views of the cognitive elite are will become the philosophy of evil from the perspective of the masses. Because the elite are increasingly made up of very high intelligence people, many of whom with a connection to technology or Silicon Valley, we should expect that the dominant worldview of that environment will increasingly contrast with the worldview of those who haven’t benefited or at least do not perceive themselves to benefit from the increasing growth and wealth driven by those people. What’s worse, it seems that even if economic gains benefit those at the very bottom too, if inequality still increases, that is the only thing that will get noticed.
The second issue is that as technology improves, our powers of inference increase, and privacy defenses become weaker. It’s already the case that we can predict a person’s behavior to some degree and use that knowledge to our advantage (if you’re trying to sell something to them, give them / deny them a loan, judge whether they would be a good employee, or predict whether or not they will commit a crime). There’s already a push-back against this, in the sense that certain variables correlate with things we don’t want them to, like race. This implies that the standard definition of privacy, in the sense of simply not having access to specific variables, isn’t strong enough. What’s desired is not being able to infer the values of certain variables, either, which is a much, much stronger condition. This is a deep, non-trivial problem that is unlikely to be solved quickly—and it runs into the same issues as all problems concerning discrimination do, which is how to define ‘bias’. Is reducing bias at the expense of truth even a worthy goal? This shifts the debate towards programmers, statisticians and data scientists who are left with the burden of never making a mistake in this area. “Weapons of Math Destruction” is a good example of the way this issue gets treated.
We will also continue to observe a lot ideas from postmodernism being adopted as part of political ideology of the left. Postmodernism is basically the antithesis of rationalism, and is particularly worrying because it is a very adaptable and robust meme. And an ideology that essentially claims that rationality and truth are not even possible to define, let alone discover, is particularly dangerous if it is adopted as the mainstream mode of thought. So if a lot of the above problems get worse, I think there is a chance that rationalism will get blamed as it has been in the framework of postmodernism.
The summary of this is: As politics becomes warfare between worldviews rather than arguments for and against various beliefs, populist hostility gets directed towards what is perceived to be the worldview of the elite. The elite tend to be more rationalist, and so that hostility may get directed towards rationalism itself.
I think a lot more can be said about this, but maybe that’s best left to a full post, I’m not sure. Let me know if this was too long / short or poorly worded.
(I thought the post was reasonably written.)
Can you say a word on whether (and how) this phenomenon you describe (“populist hostility gets directed towards what is perceived to be the worldview of the elite”) is different from the past? It seems to me that this is a force that is always present, often led to “problems” (eg, the Luddite movement), but usually (though not always) the general population came around more in believing the same things as “the elites”.
The process is not different from what occurred in the past, and I think this was basically the catalyst for anti-semitism during the post industrial revolution era. You observe a characteristic of a group of people who seem to be doing a lot better than you, in that case a lot of them happened to be Jewish, and so you then associate their Jewish-ness with your lack of success and unhappiness.
The main difference is that society continues to modernize and technology improves. Bad ideas for why some people are better off than others become unpopular. Actual biases and unfairness in the system gradually disappear. But despite that, inequality remains and in fact seems to be rising. What happens is that the only thing left to blame is instrumental rationality. I imagine that people will look as hard as they can for bias and unfairness for as long as possible, and will want to see it in people who are instrumentally rational.
In a free society, (and even more so as a society becomes freer and true bigotry disappears) some people will be better off just because they are better at making themselves better off, and the degree to which people vary in that ability is quite staggering. But psychologically it is too difficult for many to accept this, because no one wants to believe in inherent differences. So it’s sort of a paradoxical result of our society actually improving.
Writing style looks fine. My quibbles would be with the empirical claims/predictions/speculations.
Is the elite really more of a cognitive elite than in the past?
Strenze’s 2007 meta-analysis (previously) analyzed how the correlations between IQ and education, IQ and occupational level, and IQ and income changed over time. The first two correlations decreased and the third held level at a modest 0.2.
Will elite worldviews increasingly diverge from the worldviews of those left behind economically?
Maybe, although just as there are forces for divergence, there are forces for convergence. The media can, and do, transmit elite-aligned worldviews just as they transmit elite-opposed worldviews, while elites fund political activity, and even the occasional political movement.
Would increasing inequality really prevent people from noticing economic gains for the poorest?
That notion sounds like hyperbole to me. The media and people’s social networks are large, and can discuss many economic issues at once. Even people who spend a good chunk of time discussing inequality discuss gains (or losses) of those with low income or wealth.
For instance, Branko Milanović, whose standing in economics comes from his studies of inequality, is probably best known for his elephant chart, which presents income gains across the global income distribution, down to the 5th percentile. (Which percentile, incidentally, did not see an increase in real income between 1988 and 2008, according to the chart.)
Also, while the Anglosphere’s discussed inequality a great deal in the 2010s, that seems to me a vogue produced by the one-two-three punch of the Great Recession, the Occupy movement, and the economist feeding frenzy around Thomas Piketty’s book. Before then, I reckon most of the non-economists who drew special attention to economic inequality were left-leaning activists and pundits in particular. That could become the norm once again, and if so, concerns about poverty would likely become more salient to normal people than concerns about inequality.
Will the left continue adopting lots of ideas from postmodernism?
This is going to depend on how we define postmodernism, which is a vexed enough question that I won’t dive deeply into it (at least TheAncientGeek and bogus have taken it up). If we just define (however dodgily) postmodernism to be a synonym for anti-rationalism, I’m not sure the left (in the Anglosphere, since that’s the place we’re presumably really talking about) is discernibly more postmodernist/anti-rationalist than it was during the campus/culture wars of the 1980s/1990s. People tend to point to specific incidents when they talk about this question, rather than try to systematically estimate change over time.
Granted, even if the left isn’t adopting any new postmodern/anti-rationalist ideas, the ideas already bouncing around in that political wing might percolate further out and trigger a reaction against rationalism. Compounding the risk of such a reaction is the fact that the right wing can also operate as a conduit for those ideas — look at yer Alex Jones and Jason Reza Jorjani types.
Is politics becoming more a war of worldviews than arguments for & against various beliefs?
Maybe, but evidence is needed to answer the question. (And the dichotomy isn’t a hard and fast one; wars of worldviews are, at least in part, made up of skirmishes where arguments are lobbed at specific beliefs.)
Rationalists (Bay area type) tend to think of what they call Postmodernism[*] as the antithesis to themselves, but the reality is more complex. “Postmodernism” isn’t a short and cohesive set of claims that are the opposite of the set of claims that rationalists make, it’s a different set of concerns, goals and approachs.
And what’s worse is that bay area rationalism has not been able to unequivocally define “rationality” or “truth”. (EY wrote an article on the Simple idea of Truth, in which he considers the correspondence theory, Tarki’s theory, and a few others without resolving on a single correct theory).
Bay area rationalism is the attitude that that sceptical (no truth) and relativistic (multiple truth) claims are utterly false, but it’s an attitude, not a proof. What’s worse still is that sceptical and relativistic claims can be supported using the toolkit of rationality. “Postmodernists” tend to be sceptics and relativists, but you don’t have to be a “postmodernist” to be a relativist or sceptic. As non-bay-area, mainstream, rationalists understand well. If rationalist is to win over “postmodernism”, then it must win rationally, by being able to demonstrate it’s superioritiy.
[*] “Postmodernists” call themselves poststructuralists, continental philosophers, or critical theorists.
Not quite. “Poststructuralism” is an ex-post label and many of the thinkers that are most often identified with the emergence of “postmodern” ideas actually rejected it. (Some of them even rejected the whole notion of “postmodernism” as an unhelpful simplification of their actual ideas.) “Continental philosophy” really means the ‘old-fashioned’ sort of philosophy that Analytic philosophers distanced themselves from; you can certainly view postmodernism as encompassed within continental philosophy, but the notions are quite distinct. Similarly, “critical theory” exists in both ‘modernist’/‘high modern’ and ‘postmodern’ variants, and one cannot understand the ‘postmodern’ kind without knowing the ‘modern’ critical theory it’s actually referring to, and quite often criticizing in turn.
All of which is to say that, really, it’s complicated, and that while describing postmodernism as a “different set of concerns, goals and approaches” may hit significantly closer to the mark than merely caricaturing it as an antithesis to rationality, neither really captures the worthwhile ideas that ‘postmodern’ thinkers were actually developing, at least when they were at their best. (--See, the big problem with ‘continental philosophy’ as a whole is that you often get a few exceedingly worthwhile ideas mixed in with heaps of nonsense and confused thinking, and it can be really hard to tell which is which. Postmodernism is no exception here!)
Except that it does make claims that are the opposite of the claims rationalists make. It claims that there is no objective reality, no ultimate set of principles we can use to understand the universe, and no correct method of getting nearer to truth. And the ‘goal’ of postmodernism is to break apart and criticize everything that claims to be able to do those things. You would be hard pressed to find a better example of something diametrically opposed to rationalism. (I’m going to guess that with high likelihood I’ll get accused of not understanding postmodernism by saying that).
Well yeah, being able to unequivocally define anything is difficult, no argument there. But rationalists use an intuitive and pragmatic definition of truth that allows us to actually do things. Then what happens is they get accused by postmodernists of claiming to have the One and Only True and Correct Definition of Truth and Correctness, and of claiming that we have access to the Objective Reality. The point is that as soon as you allow for any leeway in this at all (leeway in allowing for some in-between area of there being a true objective reality with 100% access to and 0% access to), you basically obtain rationalism. Not because the principles it derives from are that there is an objective reality that is possible to Truly Know, or that there are facts that we know to be 100% true, but only that there are sets of claims we have some degree of confidence in, and other sets of claims we might want to calculate a degree of confidence in based on the first set of claims.
It happens to be an attitude that works really well in practice, but the other two attitudes can’t actually be used in practice if you were to adhere to them fully. They would only be useful for denying anything that someone else believes. I mean, what would it mean to actually hold two beliefs to be completely true but also that they contradict? In probability theory you can have degrees of confidence that are non-zero that add up to one, but it’s unclear if this is the same thing as relativism in the sense of “multiple truths”. I would guess that it isn’t, and multiple truths really means holding two incompatible beliefs to both be true.
Except that you can’t demonstrate superiority of anything within the framework of postmodernism. Within rationalism it’s very easy and straightforward.
I imagine the reason that some rationalists might find postmodernism to be useful is in the spirit of overcoming biases. This in and of itself I have no problem with—but I would ask what you consider postmodern ideas to offer in the quest to remove biases that rationalism doesn’t offer, or wouldn’t have access to even in principle?
The actual ground-level stance is more like: “If you think that you know some sort of objective reality, etc., it is overwhelmingly likely that you’re in fact wrong in some way, and being deluded by cached thoughts.” This is an eminently rational attitude to take - ‘it’s not what you don’t know that really gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’ The rest of your comment has similar problems, so I’m not going to discuss it in depth. Suffice it to say, postmodern thought is far more subtle than you give it credit for.
If someone claims to hold a belief with absolute 100% certainty, that doesn’t require a gigantic modern philosophical edifice in order to refute. It seems like that’s setting a very low bar for what postmodernism actually hopes to accomplish.
The reason why postmodernism often looks like that superficially is that it specializes in critiquing “gigantic modern philosophical edifice[s]” (emphasis on ‘modern’!). It takes a gigantic philosophy to beat a gigantic philosophy, at least in some people’s view.
Citation needed.
On the other hand, refraining from condemning others when you have skeletons in your own closet is easy.
Engineers use an intuitive and pragmatic definition of truth that allows them to actually do things. Rationalists are more in the philosophy business.
For some values of “work”. It’s possible to argue in detail that predictive power actually doesn’t entail correspondence to ultimate reality, for instance.
For instance, when you tell outsiders that you have wonderful answers to problems X, Y and Z, but you concede to people inside the tent that you actually don’t.
That’s not what I said.
There’s no such thing as postmodernism and I’m not particularly in favour of it. My position is more about doing rationality right than not doing it all. If you critically apply rationality to itself, you end up with something a lot less elf confident and exclusionary than Bay Area rationalism.
Citing it is going to be difficult, even the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says “That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism.” I’m forced to site philosophers who are opposed to it because they seem to be the only ones willing to actually define it in a concise way. I’ll just reference this essay by Dennett to start with.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to here.
That’s called lying.
You know exactly what I mean when I use that term, otherwise there would be no discussion. It seems that you can’t even name it without someone saying that’s not what it’s called, it actually doesn’t have a definition, every philosopher who is labeled a postmodernist called it something else, etc.
If I can’t define it, there’s no point in discussing it. But it doesn’t change the fact that the way the mainstream left has absorbed the philosophy has been in the “there is no objective truth” / “all cultures/beliefs/creeds are equal” sense. This is mostly the sense in which I refer to it in my original post.
I’d like to hear more about this. By “Bay Area rationalism”, I assume you are talking about a specific list of beliefs like the likelihood of intelligence explosion? Or are you talking about the Bayesian methodology in general?
To which the glib answer is “that’s because it isn’t true”.
Dennett gives a concise definition because he has the same simplistic take on the subject as you. What he is not doing is showing that there is an actually group of people who describe themselves as postmodernists, and have those views. The use of the terms “postmodernist” is a bad sign: it’s a tern that works like “infidel” and so on, a label for an outgroup, and an ingroup’s views on an outgroup are rarely bedrock reality.
When we, the ingroup, can’t define something it’s Ok, when they, the outgroup, can’t define something, it shows how bad they are.
People are quite psychologically capable of having compartmentalised beliefs, that sort of thing is pretty ubiquitous, which is why I was able to find an example from the rationalist community itself. Relativism without contextualisation probably doesn’t make much sense, but who is proposing it?
As you surely know that I mean there is no group of people who both call themselves postmodernists and hold the views you are attributing to postmodernists.
It’s kind of diffuse. But you can talk about scepticism, relativism, etc, if those are the issues.
There’s some terrible epistemology on the left, and on the right, and even in rationalism.
I mean Yudkowsky’s approach. Which flies under the flag of Bayesianism, but doesn’t make much use of formal Bayesianism.
I have a feeling that perhaps in some sense politics is self-balancing. You attack things that are associated with your enemy, which means that your enemy will defend them. Assuming you are an entity that only cares about scoring political points, if your enemy uses rationality as an applause light, you will attack rationality, but if your enemy uses postmodernism as an applause light, you will attack postmodernism and perhaps defend (your interpretation of) rationality.
That means that the real risk for rationality is not that everyone will attack it. As soon as the main political players will all turn against rationality, fighting rationality will become less important for them, because attacking things the others consider sacred will be more effective. You will soon get rationality apologists saying “rationality per se is not bad, it’s only rationality as practiced by our political opponents that leads to horrible things”.
But if some group of idiots will choose “rationality” as their applause light and they will be doing it completely wrong, and everyone else will therefore turn against rationality, that would cause much more damage. (Similarly to how Stalin is often used as an example against “atheism”. Now imagine a not-so-implausible parallel universe where Stalin used “rationality”—interpreted as: 1984-style obedience of the Communist Party—as the official applause light of his regime. In such world, non-communists hate the word “rationality” because it is associated with communism, and communists insist that the only true meaning of rationality is the blind obedience of the Party. Imagine trying to teach people x-rationality in that universe.)
I don’t think it’s necessary for ‘rationality’ to be used an applause light for this to happen. The only things needed, in my mind, are:
A group of people who adopt rationality and are instrumentally rationalist become very successful, wealthy and powerful because of it.
This groups makes up an increasing share of the wealthy and powerful, because they are better at becoming wealthy and powerful than the old elite.
The remaining people who aren’t as wealthy or successful or powerful, who haven’t adopted rationality, make observations about what the successful group does and associates whatever they do / say as the tribal characteristics and culture of the successful group. The fact that they haven’t adopted rationality makes them more likely to do this.
And because the final bullet point is always what occurs throughout history, the only difference—and really the only thing necessary for this to happen—is that rationalists make up a greater share of the elite over time.
Somewhat ironically, this is exactly the sort of cargo-cultish “rationality” that originally led to the emergence of postmodernism, in opposition to it and calling for some much-needed re-evaluation and skepticism around all “cached thoughts”. The moral I suppose is that you just can’t escape idiocy.
Not exactly. What happened at first was that Marxism—which, in the early 20th century, became the dominant mode of thought for Western intellectuals—was based on rationalist materialism, until it was empirically shown to be wrong by some of the largest social experiments mankind is capable of running. The question for intellectuals who were unwilling to give up Marx after that time was how to save Marxism from empirical reality. The answer to that was postmodernism. You’ll find that in most academic departments today, those who identify as Marxists are almost always postmodernists (and you won’t find them in economics or political science, but rather in the english, literary criticism and social science departments). Marxists of the rationalist type are pretty much extinct at this point.
I broadly agree, but you’re basically talking about the dynamics that resulted in postmodernism becoming an intellectual fad, devoid of much of its originally-meaningful content. Whereas I’m talking about what the original memeplex was about—i.e what people like the often-misunderstood Jacques Derrida were actually trying to say. It’s even clearer when you look at Michael Foucault, who was indeed a rather sharp critic of “high modernity”, but didn’t even consider himself a post-modernist (whereas he’s often regarded as one today). Rather, he was investigating pointed questions like “do modern institutions like medicine, psychiatric care and ‘scientific’ criminology really make us so much better off compared to the past when we lacked these, or is this merely an illusion due to how these institutions work?” And if you ask Robin Hanson today, he will tell you that we’re very likely overreliant on medicine, well beyond the point where such reliance actually benefits us.
So you concede that everyone you’re harassing is 100% correct, you just don’t want to talk about postmodernism? So fuck off.
This may be partially what has happened with “science” but in reverse. Liberals used science to defend some of their policies, conservatives started attacking it, and now it has become an applause light for liberals—for example, the “March for Science” I keep hearing about on Facebook. I am concerned about this trend because the increasing politicization of science will likely result in both reduced quality of science (due to bias) and decreased public acceptance of even those scientific results that are not biased.
I agree with your concern, but I think that you shouldn’t limit your fear to party-aligned attacks.
For example, the Thirty-Meter Telescope in Hawaii was delayed by protests from a group of people who are most definitely “liberal” on the “liberal/conservative” spectrum (in fact, “ultra-liberal”). The effect of the protests is definitely significant. While it’s debatable how close the TMT came to cancelation, the current plan is to grant no more land to astronomy atop Mauna Kea.
Agreed. There are plenty of liberal views that reject certain scientific evidence for ideological reasons—I’ll refrain from examples to avoid getting too political, but it’s not a one-sided issue.
So, do you want to ask the Jews how that theory worked out for them?