I Changed My Mind about Error-Correcting Debate, Misogyny and More: Updates from a Former Student of David Deutsch
I changed my mind about some things. These examples are illustrative of potential weaknesses of focusing on error correction and critical discussion like Karl Popper advised. I don’t think the weaknesses are inherent or unavoidable. They’re practical issues that don’t require different epistemology principles to address. They’re just ways you can go wrong if you don’t know enough.
The errors involved expectations around other people as well as underestimating the amount of knowledge needed for things.
Sharing Evidence
I used to think if I said something to people, and they had evidence that I was wrong, they would tell me. I took a lack of any negative responses as indicating they didn’t have key evidence that I was missing. That has implications. E.g. if there are a dozen reasonable people present (who are active forum posters who say they value rational, critical discussion) who have thousands of hours each of workplace experience, and I say “sexism is rare”, and no one contradicts me, I thought that meant that all of their workplaces lacked blatant sexism. I now think I was wrong. Even people who are aware of sexism, in their opinion, often don’t share their evidence.
In general, we all have a pretty limited amount of experience with the world. Many people only have much experience with a few workplaces which isn’t a good random sample, so information about other people’s experiences is important. But I now believe this type of information, based on people failing to share their experiences that contradict your claim, is highly unreliable.
To some extent, I was expecting people to share information that I would share or that Popperian epistemology says is valuable to share. I particularly had expectations if they said they were Popperians or said they had values like mine. I wasn’t expecting people who weren’t interested in criticism or rationality to share contradictory evidence; I was specifically talking on forums for rational discussion and debate. I also had low expectations for people who rarely or never posted anything or who were on a break; my expectations were mostly for people who were currently actively participating in discussions. It’s common for a forum to have over 200 members but under 20 people actively posting this week.
Finding Good Arguments
A related issue is that I thought that you could look at the arguments made by a school of thought and then judge it accordingly. Now I believe that the arguments made by thought leaders are often bad even though better arguments are available. People, including authors, pundits and academics, will use bad examples and bad evidence despite much better stuff being available. They’ll make low quality arguments while ignoring better arguments made by people on their own side which end up never being popular or well known. So the best arguments that exist can be hard to find, even if they’re published and publicly available, especially when just reviewing a school of thought you disagree with and don’t study in depth.
Overconfidence
The issues about sharing evidence and finding good arguments are two factors that helped lead me to overconfidence. It’s crucial to recognize when the readily available information and discussion isn’t good enough, and then to either be aware that you don’t know much or do deeper research. It’s important to have a sense of how much knowledge is needed to deal with an issue well, and to know you might not reach that bar even if you consider things said by public figures, professors, authors, experts, and other successful people with good reputations who work in the field and ought to have a lot of knowledge. Information available in internet discussions is also frequently inadequate.
My attitude was roughly that you take the current state of the debate – books, papers, essays, online discussion or debate from the best people actually willing to participate – and you evaluate that, and that’s how you reach the best conclusions available given currently existing human knowledge. I overestimated how good current human knowledge is in some areas, but that’s only the secondary problem. The main problem is a lot of good knowledge is hard to find and there’s not enough productive debate taking place. Merit often doesn’t rise to prominence.
You can read the books that people on a side of an issue recommend and still miss better information; you’re trying to be fair by listening to what they say their best arguments are, but there are actually much better arguments that they don’t know about. In a lot of cases, better knowledge exists but few people have it (including many “experts” don’t have it). Often some good knowledge was created by someone but it never spread to most people. If you get information by talking to people and looking at popular recommendations (including reading books that summarize topics or review many ideas), you’ll often miss good but unpopular ideas.
Another common issue is that people can’t tell which literature and arguments on their side are good or bad. So they might recommend twenty books, one of which is good, and nineteen of which are bad, but they don’t understand which is good or why. So even if you check several of the books they recommend, you could easily miss the good one. Often, they’ll just tell you one or several books, not twenty, so there’s a good chance they won’t even tell you the name of the good book, even though they’re familiar with it and like it. Either way, whether they give you a long list or narrow it down for you, it’s easy to miss a good one that they don’t recognize as superior to the rest.
It helps to read citation chains: look up multiple sources that a book or paper cites, then for each of those look up multiple things it cites, and keep following citations back to early work repeatedly. This is one example of the kind of much higher effort research that can be more effective. But it’s still not enough: lots of good work isn’t receiving citations.
These problems affect all popular positions on all sides of all controversial issues.
Pesticide
I missed some important knowledge that is well known and popular. I thought Silent Spring was a bad book. I believed secondary source summaries criticizing it. I put too much trust in people who were either dishonest and irrational or else were themselves misled by secondary sources. This is a hard issue because I don’t have time to personally review every book that I hear is bad. In this case, I managed to fix my mistake myself. On my own initiative, I read Silent Spring and, despite my skepticism, after a few chapters I discovered that I liked it. I try to sometimes read things I expect to be bad to check whether they actually are bad. I try not to only read things that I agree with or that people similar to me recommend. But I was more than five years too late to actually get a response from Alex Epstein about Silent Spring. Now it turns out that I can’t really get anyone to debate me about it.
When I thought Silent Spring was a bad book, I couldn’t get any useful criticism of my position or productive debate from fans of the book. And now that I take the opposite position, I also can’t get useful criticism or debate. The underlying theme here is it’s hard to get good feedback about errors or disagreements, and productive debate is scarce. Judging the pro-Silent Spring people for not debating would be a mistake because the anti-Silent Spring people also don’t debate. I do debate, but I’m the weird exception and my willingness to debate shouldn’t lead me to conclude that the side of an issue I agree with is open to debate; I should check whether other people besides me will debate (preferably people who aren’t my fans and aren’t on my forum).
So I was wrong about pesticides and DDT (even if it turns out I’m wrong now, and they’re somehow good, I was still also wrong before because I didn’t know enough to refute Silent Spring). I was also wrong about nutrition. I believed a bunch of things my former mentor, David Deutsch, told me about food (and about environmentalism; he’s on the anti-Silent Spring side). I was open to debate and error correction about nutrition but that didn’t lead to me being corrected. I only got better ideas about nutrition after finding and reading some books and papers that aren’t the popular, mainstream recommendations. It took a lot of work to find less well known knowledge and learn about it.
Misogyny
I was also wrong about feminism, sexism and misogyny (and also racism). My mentor David Deutsch, like many right wingers, is the type of person to deny that sexual assault is a common problem today. I thought that, if it was common, I would find out from debate, from discussion, from being open to error correction, and from hearing and engaging with some arguments from the other side. I did read some books, have some discussions, consider some criticisms, and so on. But I was missing a lot. It turns out that many women have compelling stories but that evidence wasn’t reaching me. I’ve now seen a lot of evidence primarily on Reddit and TikTok. I’m now convinced that sexual assault is rampant, misogyny is present at most workplaces (from coworkers, bosses, and systemic company policies), there is a gender pay gap (and a racial one), and that pick up artists (PUAs) like Mystery encouraged sexual assault and misogyny.
As with many people, Mystery’s misogyny mistakes were partly unintentional but not done with full innocence. There are tons of other people who are bad too, and many are worse, so I don’t think Mystery should be singled out; I just brought him up because I liked some of his work. I still think his attempt to study social rules with a semi-scientific attitude, and talk about them explicitly, had value. Mystery-era PUA wasn’t as bad as the manosphere and “red pill” content that’s much more popular today than old school PUA ever was (the manosphere has been flooded with late adopters). A lot of the manosphere stuff also is a lot more blatantly and intentionally misogynist than the misogyny of Mystery or of most internet posters in 2000.
One of the types of PUA misogyny I didn’t recognize well enough was how much PUAs were applying social dynamics ideas only to women (and dating), not to men (and other contexts like job interviews and office politics). I always applied the social dynamics concepts to men and to other contexts, and to me the broader applicability was a major part of the appeal. In retrospect, I think applying some of the PUA social dynamics ideas to men on my forum offended them: they intuitively felt like I was calling them irrational women.
Why didn’t I get social dynamics ideas from somewhere else that wasn’t focused on sex and dating? Because I still don’t know where to find enough knowledge elsewhere. Useful, explicit discussion of social rules is unusual, especially with significant counter-culture, anti-mainstream themes. You can learn about social dynamics from psychologists but that has various advantages and disadvantages rather than just being better.
Some of my old posts use the term “red pill”, so I also want to say that I think “red pill” (or “manosphere”) in 2026 is awful. It was always flawed, but the meaning of the term changed over time and got worse. I guess there used to be multiple different meanings of “red pill” in different internet subcultures, and now red pill and manosphere are a larger movement with more of a clear, bad meaning.
I’m interested in social dynamics ideas from other sources when I manage to find something that I think is good, like alimcforever’s idea and analysis of low talk. I’ve also liked some of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s discussion of social dynamics, but there isn’t a lot; he focuses more on other topics like Bayes, AI and rationality. I do think there is some good information about social dynamics mixed into his books Inadequate Equilibria, Rationality: From AI to Zombies, and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (disclaimer: his books contain some terrible ideas, too). Yudkowsky approaches social dynamics more from a theoretical point of view with logical analysis, whereas PUA and alimcforever approach it more from experience. I think both approaches have value.
Another place I’ve found useful analysis of social dynamics is neurodivergent content on TikTok. People who identify as autistic or similar will sometimes explicitly discuss social rules because they’ve been trying to learn the rules in a fairly explicit way as an adult rather than learning them intuitively as a child. Sometimes they’re trying to figure out the social rules so they can get along with society better and sometimes they’re critical of social rules.
Right Wing
All large political groups are super flawed, and I’ve thought that since shortly after meeting David Deutsch. You can’t just stay away from the flawed stuff because then you’d never engage with anything. Deutsch basically told me that it goes without saying that everything has lots of flaws and that you have to focus on the positives to get value where you can. He even applied this to Ann Coulter: he encouraged me to focus on her good points. I think that was bad advice that actually affected my life. I read a bunch of her books, which I thought had some good parts, but now I think she intentionally lies sometimes and I don’t know which facts to trust from her books. I did make multiple efforts to check if her information was true, search for criticism of it, and fact check her citations (which on average are noticeably better than most authors) more than once. But I now think that checking was inadequate and she’s deceptive and manipulative sometimes and (like many well known smart people) uses her cleverness and scholarship skills to help support her deceit.
I think some of Coulter’s bad points (like misogyny, homophobia and attacking evolution) are red flags that can serve as useful warnings. In retrospect, I think Deutsch was wrong to advise me to ignore them and just focus on the parts where she appeared to be using facts and logic.
I now think Deutsch was always a biased right-wing tribalist and he fooled me in the past with his Popperian talk about rationality. I withdraw my past recommendations for right-wing material that Deutsch got me to read like Coulter and Frontpage Magazine. Sorry.
This retraction doesn’t include Objectivism, Austrian economics, and other material which is closer to being classical liberal than right wing. I remain a fan of classical liberalism, and I think it should be emphasized more that it’s not actually right wing. I think Ayn Rand had various flaws including misogyny and bad ideas about sex, but I still like her overall.
As one more related comment, I think Deutsch’s non-aggressive Christianity and Judaism have significant value type of atheism had some good points, and I think one shouldn’t be hateful towards religion, but I also now think Deutsch partly held that view because of his right wing biases. He was dismissive of all other religions, including major religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism. He was only actually friendly towards two specific religions (the same two that the Republican party likes).
Cars
I recently heard the idea that the U.S.A. is car-centric, without enough use of trains, because of systemic racism. I thought that was plausible but would take too much research to actually reach a conclusion about (and it’d be basically impossible to get useful online debates about it, or to put much trust in most things I could find to read about it). I think I was always open to this kind of idea (given a few paragraphs of explanation which I’m not including here) but in some sense I was waiting for it to come to me, or be popular, instead of searching it out in effective ways (which is hard). I’ve always done a lot more than most people to seek out unpopular ideas, but there was (and no doubt still is) room for improvement.
Israel
Another thing I may have been wrong about is Israel and its violent conflicts. My former mentor David Deutsch taught me that Israel is in the right. He was actually quite aggressive and pushy about that early on in our discussions. I think that was poor mentorship: even if he was right about it, it wasn’t a topic I needed to learn about at that time (or maybe ever). It would have been better for me if he’d focused on epistemology more in our discussions.
I have some skepticism of the morality of Israel’s violence now, but I haven’t gone back and researched it enough to say much. I’m trying to be more humble and recognize that it’s complicated and I don’t know enough about it. I used to think my participation in political debates, engaging with people on both sides, and reading materials on both sides (pro-Israel and anti-Israel articles and books) was adequate to reach a good conclusion. Now I think that was inadequate. Regarding Israel’s war that started on October 7, 2023, I have some major concerns about it, and I also have major concerns about Hamas and Hezbollah, and I know that I don’t know enough about it. Finding out enough would be a ton of work, in part because I couldn’t rely on a lot of accessible resources and discussion that I no longer trust. And this isn’t a priority for me to research.
I also dislike how a lot people on the left pressure social media content creators, who don’t know much about it, to speak out against Israel. In general, I think people should be respected for knowing their limits, recognizing their ignorance, and being neutral on issues, especially issues that aren’t directly part of their life. I wish people would have more respect for studying issues and being thoughtful, and also for having the humility to know that they don’t know about a topic. Instead, a lot of respect is given for being on the same side as someone, being in the same tribe, supporting the same conclusions as them, like it’s about cheering for the same sports team rather than an intellectual issue where you ought to understand things.
Note: I think what I said here is capable of seriously offending many people on both the left and the right. There are substantial incentives not to say it. I think that’s a big problem with debate and free speech: too many people are way too intolerant. Nuanced, neutral or modest (admitting ignorance) views can get you hated by both sides, so a lot of the smarter people with nuanced views don’t want to talk in public, which is one of the reasons it’s hard to get high quality debates. In general, I think most people should have fewer strong views, but they’re pressured into taking sides and joining a big tribe.
TCS and ARR
My former mentor David Deutsch was a founder of Taking Children Seriously (TCS) and of Autonomy Respecting Relationships (ARR).
I changed my mind about TCS and wrote criticism of it. I also changed my mind about the wisdom of polyamorous ARR relationships. I did criticize polyamorous relationships early on after Deutsch advocated them to me, but my views have also evolved more since then.
Corporations and Capitalism
I changed my mind about what big companies are like and about how capitalist, rights-respecting and law-abiding our society is. I wrote Capitalism Means Policing Big Companies. I lowered my opinion of billionaires in general. And I lowered my opinion of anarcho-capitalism. I see errors in the anarcho-capitalist literature that I don’t want to associate with.
These changes go against ideas I learned from my former mentor, David Deutsch, who is a libertarian anarcho-capitalist.
Note that I did not change my core values or principles regarding freedom, rights, non-aggression, limited government, peace, social harmony or abstract capitalist economic theory.
Willing to Change my Mind
I think, for each of these issues, I was mostly rational in a key sense but many of the people around me (friends, debate partners, authors I read) were less rational than me. The key way I was being rational is that if I found out about new evidence or arguments, I was willing to change my mind without a lot of resistance. After changing my mind, I’ve witnessed other people heavily resist change when encountering a lot of the same information that changed my mind. So they were less open to error correction than I was. I didn’t know in advance that they’d be like that, and it’s relevant to why past discussion with them was less effective at learning new ideas than I’d expected. Their resistance means some of them probably saw or found evidence and arguments in the past that would have changed my mind, but instead of telling me or changing their own minds they were dismissive. That’s relevant to my estimates about what evidence and arguments exist and how available they are.
I’m not going to go into details on all these topics because I don’t want this to turn into a lecture where I try to tell you the right answers on these hard topics that are outside of my expertise. I don’t have the time to research every topic adequately! I’ve been writing primarily about epistemology and rationality for the last few years, and I purposefully brought up philosophical themes in this essay too. But I’m still open to some discussion about these other topics on my forum. If you think you have adequate knowledge and you want to share it, you can go ahead; I’ll ask questions and share criticisms and if your knowledge meets my standards I’ll appreciate the help.
Rational Learning
In some sense, I thought you could use the methods of rationality to organize existing knowledge and debate and reach good conclusions. But now I think a lot of the inputs to that process are too biased and problematic, and a lot more work is needed to have effective knowledge. Just getting a list of the arguments and evidence, and then evaluating the right conclusion given that list, isn’t a good enough approach because a lot of important knowledge won’t make it onto the list. It’s still a good, useful skill to be able to do that, but better search strategies are also needed, as well as better research.
Some areas have never had anyone competent do much work, so there’s still room for a lot of new knowledge to be created quickly. Focusing on learning existing knowledge makes more sense for areas where a lot of people have already tried really hard and found almost all the ideas that are easy or medium difficulty to create, but I now think few areas are actually like that since there aren’t enough competent people doing productive work.
Misquotes
Also, overall, I’ve become less trusting of what other people say. People lie about factual matters more than I realized. People give more inaccurate summaries about ideas they dislike than I realized. And they misquote. I didn’t used to know that David Deutsch put misquotes in his books and academic papers. Now I know that lots of intellectuals do that, so it’s hard to find anything to read where you can trust much, even quotations or cited facts.
Deutsch gave me the false impression that putting misquotes in books was socially unacceptable, that he would never do it, and that criticizing misquotes would be received well. And he communicated similar things about other issues like factual and logical errors. That was all false.
Astrology
Also, the better I get at thinking, the less I can expect other people’s work to be the same quality I would do. So, for example, I’ve never researched astrology. People like David Deutsch say astrology is stupid: basically just an unscientific mindset combined with Barnum statements. But I don’t think I should trust the haters without doing any of my own research. I’ve never read a pro-astrology book to check whether astrology is being misrepresented by its opponents. I’ve certainly never done deeper research to see if perhaps there are some more reasonable astrology ideas mixed in with some more popular dumb ideas. I don’t consider astrology a promising lead and have no plans to research it. I’ve always been open to debate about it but I don’t recall ever having a debate about it. I think I shouldn’t be aggressively anti-astrology since I don’t really know anything about it. I should just not bring it up in general and I generally shouldn’t use it as an example to attack.
This is just one example where I’m trying to recognize my inadequate knowledge for making confident statements. I purposefully used an example (astrology) where a lot of people are extremely dismissive, and I would have been more dismissive in the past. I’m saying that even for astrology you shouldn’t just trust the haters and secondary sources without doing any of your own research. You should also be aware of your own lack of substantial knowledge for many other topics too. Any topic where you’re less confident about jumping to conclusions than for astrology is a topic where more research or acknowledgment of your ignorance may be warranted.
Approximations
Thinking of issues in terms of sides or tribes is not ideal but is a useful approximation for writing in a short, understandable way. Similarly, my language like “good arguments” is short, loose, understandable speech, not advocacy of indecisive, weighted factor epistemology. Using concepts familiar to our culture is important when writing so that you can focus on a few issues without arguing about fairly-irrelevant off-topic issues that most people would find confusing and disagree with (they’re the kind of topics that require their own essay or book to explain well, not something suitable for explaining in a one paragraph note). For more information about my epistemology ideas, see Critical Fallibilism.
Conclusion
I’ve raised my standards and decided that a lot of knowledge isn’t good enough, such as the criticisms of Silent Spring I knew about. Good ideas can be hard to find even when they exist. Thought leaders often don’t talk about the best ideas on their own side. In discussions, people often don’t share important, relevant evidence with you, even though they have the evidence and aren’t blocked from sharing by privacy concerns. Methods like debate and looking at the other side’s arguments are still good methods, but they’re less effective than I thought. There aren’t easily available better methods to switch to. So be more humble.
There is a thing I was thinking a lot about recently, that I have never seen written, until now.
The non-aggression principle says that people should not initiate violence or fraud. The libertarians I see online keep complaining about violence (especially when talking about tax) all the time. But they are suspiciously silent about fraud. Or customer manipulation, which is basically fraud-lite. If there is a debate about fraudulent businesses, the only contribution of local libertarians is typically something like “I hope you do not suggest that the government do something about it, because government is funded by taxes, and taxation is violence”.
This asymmetry makes me think that many libertarians are probably quite okay with fraud and manipulation; that they see them as an essential part of the sacred freedom. Perhaps not consciously; but unconsciously, thinking about regulations of fraud makes them angry, thinking about fraud itself does not. Perhaps the idea is that smart people would research everything carefully, and the stupid people kinda deserve it.
(Even when I think about the books describing libertarian utopias, e.g. written by Heinlein, the protagonist is often a super skillful lawyer or amateur lawyer, reads all his contracts carefully, notices all suspicious parts, and can craft his own bulletproof contracts. So there is a strong “fraud—that could never happen to me” vibe.)
From my perspective, even exploiting someone’s stupidity is not fundamentally different from exploiting someone’s weakness. Stupidity is a weakness of mind, and fraud is a violence against mind. I would even go so far that in my utopia, if your advertisement confuses an IQ 80 person to believe something, and then you go like “ha ha, the small print says otherwise”, you should be treated as if your contract literally said what your ad says, ignoring the small print. (The small print can provide additional details, not fundamentally change the nature of the contract.) If you said it, and the other person heard it, own it. If it’s knowingly false, don’t put it in print.
Yeah. I now think most people with similar views wouldn’t change their mind when presented with the same sort of evidence that changed my mind.
This also applies to pro-capitalist Republicans, who are more numerous than libertarians.
And I’ve noticed something sort of similar applies to a ton of anti-capitalist left wing people: a lot of them think that big companies use lawyers to find holes in the law to get away with being evil while not actually breaking the law. They think we need to pass new laws to prevent the bad behavior of companies instead of believing that companies are routinely violating existing laws. For example, I was debating a vegan from Effective Altruism who hates factory farms but said one of the reasons it’s hard to fight them is they’re careful to follow the law. He changed his mind after I sent him a report from a lefty pro-animal charity investigating and documenting tons of law violations at factory farms. But his default belief was that the big companies that he hates are law abiding. When a lot of the people who are biased against the companies believe the companies largely follow the law, it makes more sense that it’s hard to get people who are biased in favor of the companies to see them as frequently breaking laws.
So both pro- and anti-capitalist people seem to underestimate how much big companies break the law? Pro-capitalists, because they want to defend all companies (they don’t realize how much an essential part of capitalism is that bad companies fail). Anti-capitalists, because they see the problem with companies per se, or market per se, so they don’t care much about details.
Yeah, I would expect that big companies win unfairly by lobbying and changing the laws in their favor, not by simply breaking the laws. But it makes sense that if you can bribe the legislative part of the government, you can probably bribe the judicial part, too. So breaking the law and not getting punished is easier than waiting for the law to be changed in your favor, and gives you more of an advantage against competitors.
I am not familiar with the American justice system, so I can’t comment on it. Here in Slovakia, the justice system is utterly corrupt. We had situations like the mother of a local crime boss was the regional judge, and she always ruled in favor of her son, no matter what he did. There is also a big company famous for winning all big construction contracts from the government, giving all the actual work to subcontractors, and often simply not paying the subcontractors—putting not just the profit but the entire budget in their own pockets. I kinda hoped it was better in other countries.
Cynically speaking, when you break the law as a CEO, you have multiple lines of defense:
you may simply not get caught
the prosecution may decline to prosecute you
your expensive lawyers may find a way to win
you may bribe the judge
worst case, the company (i.e. the shareholders) will pay the penalty, not you
Yeah. I’ve run into that not-caring-about-the-details-of-things-you-dislike thing before in other contexts. For example, Ayn Rand fans generally dislike Karl Popper (while not knowing accurate criticisms or summaries of his work). I tried posting Popper criticisms on a Rand forum and got negative reactions: people thought it was boring and pointless since they already thought they knew he was bad. I was hoping to show that I thought critically about Popper, and knew more than them about Popper, before bringing up some of Popper’s good ideas, but it didn’t work.
Also anti-capitalists tend to be pro-government. There’s a pro-company, anti-government tribe against an anti-company, pro-government tribe. Liking government gets in the way of seeing the government as enforcing laws poorly and being ~half of the problem. My view (that the companies and government are both bad) doesn’t fit with either tribe.
I see more systemic non-enforcement of old laws than direct bribes or law changes. Fraud was illegal before the US was a country, but a common reaction to new types of fraud is to think we need a new law to make them illegal.
Also, when companies get caught doing fraud (and various other awful things) and it’s acknowledged as illegal, they often pay fines that are far too small to disincentivize bad behavior. I think most elite businessmen and politicians are part of the same social hierarchy that tends to protect their own without consciously realizing they’re doing something wrong.
I’m American. I think most court cases are biased not corrupt, but we do have corruption too. I think our politicians take more bribes than our judges do. What’s tricky is that systemic bias overlaps with systemic corruption. For example, for-profit prisons lobby politicians and make friends in high places. They seek a greater supply of profitable inmates, then as a downstream consequence the average judge is more biased and worse laws are passed. Then more black and brown people are put in jail. The cause and effect is often indirect without a bribe or kickback for the judge. Direct corruption happens sometimes, and it’s hard to know how often, but at least it’s a scandal once it gets into newspapers, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
My guess is that taking seriously the very concept of manipulation often makes [the type of person you’re talking about] uncomfortable, because it undercuts an ethically load-bearing abstraction of rational agency, and its fuzziness threatens to license paternalism with (what might feel like) no principled limit. (This is a genuinely hard problem.) This cashes out similarly to ‘people who are manipulated deserve it’, but I think isn’t quite the same thing.
I’m not convinced that manipulation should be handled by law (but I am concerned about it – I have several articles about creative adversaries who don’t initiate force particularly when they have big budgets behind the manipulation). But I don’t think that’s the right debate to start with anyway.
I think there is a ton of stuff which isn’t fuzzy, isn’t near a gray area, in which the company clearly violates both the letter and spirit of the law or contract. So we could start policing that and see how it goes. I suggesting focusing on the easier cases first. Also in general ambiguous contracts are (rightly) adjudicated in favor of the person who didn’t write them or have any lawyers or power, so we could also tackle those without getting into the trickier cases. (Unfortunately, even in these clearer cases there is still a lot of resistance to policing companies. But I still think they are easier cases to address than mere manipulation.)
I could give examples if people dispute that there’s a lot of blatant fraud, law breaking and contract breaking in the world.
This is also my answer to Eli Tyre who said that fine print can address legitimate edge cases in a sibling comment at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/beDDK8MNxkkB7yfQY/i-changed-my-mind-about-error-correcting-debate-misogyny-and?commentId=MqKthhrMBHhXopwht
This is a bit tricky, because often the fine print is going to adjudicate legitimate edge cases, and people may feel rug pulled if they end up in one of those edge-cases, even if the overall contract wasn’t meaningfully deceptive.
I have wondered if there should be a special symbol or font or something, which implies a higher-than-default-speech standard of reliability, backed by the courts. Anyone marking text with that symbol is committing that what that text says is literally precisely true, and anyone who can demonstrate otherwise can sue for damages.
eg if you call your business “24 hour fitness”, with the symbol, and actually you are closed at night on the weekends anyone who notices can claim the bounty. But without the symbol, that’s just a zany name you picked for your gym.
I replied at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/beDDK8MNxkkB7yfQY?commentId=qj7qfAvbZcs9wBexT
I think libertarianism implicitly assumes a high-trust society where fraud either doesn’t exist at massive scale or isn’t tolerated at all. There are offshoots that don’t seem to lean towards that, but they’re much less popular outside of D.C. think tanks. There are countless takes on legal system reform, so neither of us can pose that one of them represents the “libertarian position”.
I think the most elegant solution, here, is to say that fraud represents a form of violence, in the same way that taking something important that belongs to someone else and then sprinting off with it represents a form of violence. This is grey and ambiguous, but the same critiques apply to the NAP even in ideal scenarios—“violence” is not a fundamental physical law that can be quantified and thresholded, and treating it as such makes countless ‘not touching you’ behaviors possible, which libertarians want to avoid.
Again, difficult for me to group-steelman a term that encompasses hundreds of mutually-opposed camps, but I think “What happens if you defraud someone is the same thing that happens if you steal from them” is a reasonable solution to what you’re asking.
FYI, this has already been said by relevant thought leaders. Rand calls fraud “indirect use of [physical] force” and a “[violent] crime”. Mises calls fraud a form of “aggression” and views it as one of the main things to protect the free market against. Fraud is often explicitly prohibited by the NAP.
The Virtue of Selfishness, ch. 14, The Nature of Government, by Ayn Rand:
Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution in “Political” Crimes, by Ayn Rand:
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics by Ludwig von Mises:
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis by Ludwig von Mises:
I’ve talked with many people who do consider fraud a type of aggression, indirect physical violence or initiation of force, but who still generally don’t apply that to companies like Amazon or Wells Fargo.
I like this post. A few thoughts:
I read “Change” by Damon Centola recently. They wrote about some of their sociology work demonstrating that politics is indeed the mind killer, but also that centralized “fireworks” social networks for communication prevent spread of ideas. Peer to peer “fishing net” social networks do much better at spreading ideas and changing minds, but only if there is not a politically charged context.
I suspect you have already heard of it, but I really like This Video Will Make You Angry for describing a memetic phenomena preventing discourse across disagreeing groups. A much longer treatment of the idea is found in The Toxoplasma Of Rage.
I know you lampshade this towards the end of the post, but I dislike “argument” and “debate” as contexts for discussing discourse. As implied in Centola’s book, more minds are changed by discourse than by debate. I know it’s obtuse to use a phrase like “collaborative truth seeking” but it would be nice if there were more people standing up for the “collaborative truth seeking” vibes.
Speaking of standing up for vibes, thank you for standing up for the “people should be allowed to not take strong stances on things they know nothing about” and “not every person needs to be informed about every issue” vibes. I feel they are required as we are moving into the global hivemind era of civilization.
Not knowing things that are important to know is painful. Disinformation campaigns are effective. This is awful, but the solution is not to pretend we can know things we cannot, but to try to find solutions to make disinformation less effective and collaborative truth seeking more effective.
Social Dark Matter has some similar ideas I think are valuable about the dynamics we can expect surrounding taboos.
About PUA themes, I liked “Models: Attract Women Through Honesty” by Mark Manson. I think it approaches the problem of men wanting to attract women with a fairly healthy perspective. I think it might help pull some people who are susceptible to “red pill” and “manosphere” vibes towards healthier places.
About descriptions of social systems being kinda awful in ways that are not commonly described, I like Zvi’s Immoral Mazes Sequence
Regarding “there aren’t enough competent people doing productive work”.… I think it is more polite (and maybe more accurate and useful) to frame the issue as “doing productive work is actually super difficult for subjects where verifying correctness is difficult, and verifying correctness is almost always difficult”.
I think public, social media based discourse, is pretty badly broken in many ways. It is still doing a lot of good, but it is for sure doing a lot of bad. I feel it would be very difficult to determine if it’s doing more harm or good. I’m trying to write a sequence describing how I view the problem and potential social media ideas that could help solve them. But unfortunately writing takes a long time and this isn’t the top of my priorities right now.
Thanks for your comments and links.
Most debate that gets much attention is toxic (like the PETA activism in the Toxoplasma article) but I think the concept of debate is important. Finding a point of contradiction, and knowing that at least one of you is wrong, and talking critically about it using arguments and evidence (topical reasoning not ad hominems), is a good activity. It’s not the same as collaboration and can still be productive even if the participants don’t have collaborative or friendly attitudes, which is a feature with some positive potential. There are many ways debate can go wrong but I don’t think they’re insurmountable.
I skimmed some of your writing on critical fallibilism and related topics. I like it. Maybe I’ll try to find time to read more sometime : )
I forgot to mention I do have affection for the term “argument” as it is used in logic and proof. I also like incentivization structures that promote people who are not friendly towards one another to work towards shared goals. And I think competition can be useful both in incentivization structures, and can be intrinsically fun. But the things that “debate” normally points to in natural language doesn’t seem worth trying to salvage. There might be some kind of hyperstition cascade thing going on with the word “debate”, but it feels in some way more complex than a simple slur type cascade.
I’d say you have to do a lot of work to have enough shared context to know that at least one of you is wrong. I like the “at least one” sentiment, since both people can be wrong, but both people can also be right and just using language differently and failing to really connect with one another. The parts doing all the work are sharing world models, synchronizing terminology, locating differences in world modelling, and looking at evidence. The debate framing doesn’t seem to add much to that.
Awesome.
I wrote a response essay about debate: https://criticalfallibilism.com/in-defense-of-debate/
This is awesome. Thank you. I’m sorry I won’t be responding with the same level of effort.
I would like to engage more with this sometime in the future. I’m especially interested in the claims about indecisive and decisive epistemology. Am I understanding correctly that “critical fallibalism” is the name you’ve given to your decisive epistemology?
I’ll also give a few thoughts on a few parts that stuck out to me.
I think debate implies opposing claims defended by people representing those claims. This representation doesn’t seem like a good incentive. Any participant should be incentivized to point out relevant flaws or reinforcing evidence wherever they see it.
I feel like nontrivial claims are not usually well stated enough to actually create a shared understanding. So either people make statements without actually getting on the same page and then need to either work backwards to get on the same page, or argue past each other without realizing.
I really like this sentiment. I wish to be less wrong, and welcome help!
I really like this as well. I feel it is productive to think of language and communication and coordination as technologies. I think our communication technology is getting more powerful which leads us both to new communication strategies and new communication issues. I am hopeful that someday our communication technology will be sufficiently advanced that we can meaningfully have large scale consensus, rather than the awkward indirect, representative, and generally cumbersome and ineffectual ways that people currently must communicate with other people and systems they feel the need to understand and influence.
Yes.
Great.
I agree that it’s better if people think critically about their own position/side and share the results, rather than focusing on winning, but I think debate can still be productive without that.
Yeah I’d like to see that. There’s a lot of room for improvement. I’d like a world where government policies usually have 80%+ support instead of commonly being pushed through with under 60% support. Relevantly, Claude claims:
Sounds like we got worse at consensus in the last 50 years :(
Here is mostly unedited draft of an unpublished post idea I had some years ago now. I think it’s a great explanation of your observation “thoughts leaders don’t talk about the best ideas on their own sides” (it was drafted in the language of memes rather than ideas, but the two are close enough) :
Definition : some memes would crumble / have a drastically lower fitness without other memes. I call those other memes the epistatic blanket of a meme (I choose the name as a mix of epistasis in genetics, and markov blanket in statistics). This phenomenon is obvious and impossible to miss in science and mathematics (“standing on the shoulder of giants”), but is universal. As a trivial example, language is in the epistatic blanket of almost every meme.
Law of Epistemic Decline : the epistatic blanket of a meme or memeplex in the process of being fixed is not the same as the epistatic blanket required for maintaining that fixation. This is true both in the fixation inside a single mind and inside a large group of persons.
We do not teach mathematics and science by following the exact path that past scientists and mathematicians followed ; that path is way too convoluted. Individually, once we reach a conclusion, we tend to forget the complicated reasons leading to that conclusion, retaining (at best) a simple narrative to justify that conclusion. In general, both in individuals and groups, the epistatic blanket maintaining fixation is (relative to the one leading to fixation) simpler, cleaner, and full of bullshit (oversimplistic narratives, circular beliefs “I believe A is true because B is true, I believe B is true because C is true, I believe C is true because A is true”). In the individual, it manifests mostly as mediocre justifications for a belief (“the successor of the primorial of n is prime, so there is no biggest prime”). In groups, it manifests mostly as conformism (“I believe X because everyone knowns that X is true” — you do not believe that the earth is round because you have followed complicated philosophical and scientific arguments why it is so, you believe it because every respectable person around you says so, first of all scientists and the NASA).
Note that while I mostly presented it in a pejorative way, it is a necessary and mostly beneficial fact ; if you had to hold in your mind the full complex and correct justification of all your beliefs, the most complex belief you could hold in your mind would probably be approximately around the level of “the sum of two even numbers is even” (geniuses could maybe reach high school calculus).
Yeah this makes sense. It reminds me of an article I wrote about memes: https://curi.us/2265-third-type-of-meme-static-companion-memes
David Deutsch claimed memes have to either be rational/useful or suppress criticism of themselves. He said those are the only two effective replication strategies that can give a meme high fitness. To criticize this, I proposed that some memes could be adapted for an environment in which other memes suppress criticism, but they don’t suppress criticism themselves. In your words, they require a specific epistemic blanket to have good fitness.