It purports to treat evidence the way it would be treated in a court of criminal law, where only some facts are ‘admissible’ and the defendant is to be considered innocent until proven guilty using only those facts. Other facts don’t count.
Relevant: Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence. It might be good to mention the reason why the domains of science and law have different standards for evidence, like Eliezer’s article does. I think they take those standards way too far, but it does seem helpful to have that context.
This is not an ‘honest’ mistake. This is a systematic anti-epistemic superweapon engineered to control what people are allowed and not allowed to think based on social power, in direct opposition to any and all attempts to actually understand and model the world and know things based on one’s information. Anyone wielding it should be treated accordingly.
I don’t get this impression. I have a hard time articulating why though. I just get the impression that people are genuinely confused. They are taught stuff about how science works. They think things “don’t count” until they pass some arbitrary threshold. Something like the doctor in this Overcoming Bias post. Some context: I’d guess I’m in the 95th percentile or higher amongst rationalists in how pissed I get when I hear “no evidence”.
I don’t see it as a control mechanism so much as a status competition. By this, I mean that these messengers aren’t all cowed before some sort of hierarchy or censor who’s dictating what they’re allowed to tweet. Instead, they are all feeling out a way of speaking that makes them sound, and be seen as, Very Serious People.
I think “superweapon” is a misleading frame, because it suggests a level of mechanistic repeatability and knowing-what-you’re-doing that I don’t think is there.
The cluster of concepts I think is more relevant include egotism, narcissism, playacting, social dominance, gravitas, and machismo. The point is not to disrupt a specific line of thinking, not terminally. It’s not to reify one idea at the expense of another. Instead, the point is to curry favor with and be recognized by specific others by projecting confidence. Sure, that can squelch other people’s thinking by doing this, but I don’t think they care as much about that nearly as much as they care about being socially recognized and winning any direct social challenges.
Where I think this distinction between superweapon and social competition really matters is in how to respond. The superweapon frame suggests a more organized effort to put down contrary viewpoints. The social competition frames suggests more a bunch of scientists shouting into the void of twitter, where one more voice with a contrary view won’t elicit an organized effort at suppression.
The superweapon, to me, is the top-down censorship by moderators of these platforms. That is clearly engineered to suppress specific ideas and voices at the will of the bureaucracy.
I’m not on twitter, so my understanding of the online dynamic is limited. My views here are more informed by real-world relationships with scientist, doctors, and healthcare administrators. They’re just mostly trying to preserve their professional image with each other by sounding serious, when in fact they’re often as desperately confused as everybody else. They just have to find something to say that makes them sound authoritative and thoughtful. So they want to frame it in such a way that their opinion sounds like there’s more thought and support for it than there really is.
Relevant: Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence. It might be good to mention the reason why the domains of science and law have different standards for evidence, like Eliezer’s article does. I think they take those standards way too far, but it does seem helpful to have that context.
I don’t get this impression. I have a hard time articulating why though. I just get the impression that people are genuinely confused. They are taught stuff about how science works. They think things “don’t count” until they pass some arbitrary threshold. Something like the doctor in this Overcoming Bias post. Some context: I’d guess I’m in the 95th percentile or higher amongst rationalists in how pissed I get when I hear “no evidence”.
I don’t see it as a control mechanism so much as a status competition. By this, I mean that these messengers aren’t all cowed before some sort of hierarchy or censor who’s dictating what they’re allowed to tweet. Instead, they are all feeling out a way of speaking that makes them sound, and be seen as, Very Serious People.
I think “superweapon” is a misleading frame, because it suggests a level of mechanistic repeatability and knowing-what-you’re-doing that I don’t think is there.
The cluster of concepts I think is more relevant include egotism, narcissism, playacting, social dominance, gravitas, and machismo. The point is not to disrupt a specific line of thinking, not terminally. It’s not to reify one idea at the expense of another. Instead, the point is to curry favor with and be recognized by specific others by projecting confidence. Sure, that can squelch other people’s thinking by doing this, but I don’t think they care as much about that nearly as much as they care about being socially recognized and winning any direct social challenges.
Where I think this distinction between superweapon and social competition really matters is in how to respond. The superweapon frame suggests a more organized effort to put down contrary viewpoints. The social competition frames suggests more a bunch of scientists shouting into the void of twitter, where one more voice with a contrary view won’t elicit an organized effort at suppression.
The superweapon, to me, is the top-down censorship by moderators of these platforms. That is clearly engineered to suppress specific ideas and voices at the will of the bureaucracy.
I’m not on twitter, so my understanding of the online dynamic is limited. My views here are more informed by real-world relationships with scientist, doctors, and healthcare administrators. They’re just mostly trying to preserve their professional image with each other by sounding serious, when in fact they’re often as desperately confused as everybody else. They just have to find something to say that makes them sound authoritative and thoughtful. So they want to frame it in such a way that their opinion sounds like there’s more thought and support for it than there really is.