Statements of (purported) empirical fact are often strong Bayesian evidence of the speaker’s morality and politics (i.e., what values one holds, what political coalition one supports), and this is a root cause of most group-level bad epistemics. For example someone who thinks eugenics is immoral is less likely (than someone who doesn’t think that) to find it instrumentally useful to make a statement like (paraphrasing) “eugenics may be immoral, but is likely to work in the sense that selective breeding works for animals”, so when someone says that, it is evidence for them not thinking that eugenics is immoral and therefore not belonging to a political coalition that holds “eugenics is immoral” as a part of its ideology.
I think for many people this has been trained into intuition/emotion (you automatically think that someone is bad/evil or hate them if they express a statement of fact that your political enemies are much more likely to make than your political allies) or even reflexive policy (automatically attack anyone who makes such statements).
This seems pretty obvious to me, but some people do not seem to be aware of it (e.g., Richard Dawkins seemed surprised by people’s reactions to his tweet linked above) and I haven’t been able to find any discussion on LW about this.
(Given the above, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that bad social epistemics abound, and what needs explaining is how good epistemic norms like “free inquiry” and “civil discourse” ever became a thing.)
what needs explaining is how good epistemic norms like “free inquiry” and “civil discourse” ever became a thing.
An idea for explaining this: some group happened to adopt such norms due to a historical accident, and there happened to be enough low hanging epistemic fruit that could be picked up by a group operating under such norms that the group became successful enough for the norms to spread by conquest and emulation. This also suggests that one reason for the decay of these norms is that we are running out of low hanging fruit.
I haven’t been able to find any discussion on LW about this.
I discuss this in “Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her” (“Reality itself isn’t on anyone’s side, but any particular fact, argument, sign, or portent might just so happen to be more easily construed as “supporting” the Blues or the Greens [...]”).
Richard Dawkins seemed surprised
I suspect Dawkins was motivatedly playing dumb, or “living in the should-universe”. Indignation (e.g., at people motivatedly refusing to follow a simple logical argument because of their political incentives) often manifests itself as expression of incomprehension, but is distinguishable from literal incomprehension (e.g., by asking Dawkins to bet beforehand on what he thinks is going to happen after he Tweets that).
Robin Hanson also doesn’t seem to be aware of what I wrote in the parent comment:
“Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them =… You say ‘By X, I don’t mean Y,’ but when you say X, they will still hear Y.” More precisely, they CHOOSE to hear Y, knowing enough associates also choose that
The rest of us can choose the opposite, & we should not accept their claim that they can decide what words mean & how language works.
But why are some people low-decouplers? I think it’s because “Statements of (purported) empirical fact are often strong Bayesian evidence of the speaker’s morality and politics” so we can’t simply “choose the opposite” without understanding this and its implications.
To put it another way, a lot of times when someone says “By X, I don’t mean Y” they actually secretly do believe Y, so if another person “CHOOSE to hear Y”, that’s not a completely unreasonable heuristic, and we can’t just “not accept their claim that they can decide what words mean & how language works” without acknowledging this.
Copy-pasting a followup to this with Robin Hanson via DM (with permission).
Robin: You can of course suspect people of many things using many weak clues. But you should hold higher standards of evidence when making public accusations that you say orgs should use to fire people, cancel speeches, etc.
Me: My instinct is to support/agree with this, but (1) it’s not an obvious interpretation of what you tweeted and (2) I think we need to understand why the standards of evidence for making public accusations and for actual firing/canceling have fallen so low (which my own comment didn’t address either) and what the leverage points are for changing that, otherwise we might just be tilting at windmills when we exhort people to raise those standards (or worse, making suicide charges, if we get lumped with “public enemies”).
Statements of (purported) empirical fact are often strong Bayesian evidence of the speaker’s morality and politics (i.e., what values one holds, what political coalition one supports), and this is a root cause of most group-level bad epistemics. For example someone who thinks eugenics is immoral is less likely (than someone who doesn’t think that) to find it instrumentally useful to make a statement like (paraphrasing) “eugenics may be immoral, but is likely to work in the sense that selective breeding works for animals”, so when someone says that, it is evidence for them not thinking that eugenics is immoral and therefore not belonging to a political coalition that holds “eugenics is immoral” as a part of its ideology.
I think for many people this has been trained into intuition/emotion (you automatically think that someone is bad/evil or hate them if they express a statement of fact that your political enemies are much more likely to make than your political allies) or even reflexive policy (automatically attack anyone who makes such statements).
This seems pretty obvious to me, but some people do not seem to be aware of it (e.g., Richard Dawkins seemed surprised by people’s reactions to his tweet linked above) and I haven’t been able to find any discussion on LW about this.
(Given the above, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that bad social epistemics abound, and what needs explaining is how good epistemic norms like “free inquiry” and “civil discourse” ever became a thing.)
An idea for explaining this: some group happened to adopt such norms due to a historical accident, and there happened to be enough low hanging epistemic fruit that could be picked up by a group operating under such norms that the group became successful enough for the norms to spread by conquest and emulation. This also suggests that one reason for the decay of these norms is that we are running out of low hanging fruit.
I discuss this in “Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her” (“Reality itself isn’t on anyone’s side, but any particular fact, argument, sign, or portent might just so happen to be more easily construed as “supporting” the Blues or the Greens [...]”).
I suspect Dawkins was motivatedly playing dumb, or “living in the should-universe”. Indignation (e.g., at people motivatedly refusing to follow a simple logical argument because of their political incentives) often manifests itself as expression of incomprehension, but is distinguishable from literal incomprehension (e.g., by asking Dawkins to bet beforehand on what he thinks is going to happen after he Tweets that).
Robin Hanson also doesn’t seem to be aware of what I wrote in the parent comment:
But why are some people low-decouplers? I think it’s because “Statements of (purported) empirical fact are often strong Bayesian evidence of the speaker’s morality and politics” so we can’t simply “choose the opposite” without understanding this and its implications.
To put it another way, a lot of times when someone says “By X, I don’t mean Y” they actually secretly do believe Y, so if another person “CHOOSE to hear Y”, that’s not a completely unreasonable heuristic, and we can’t just “not accept their claim that they can decide what words mean & how language works” without acknowledging this.
Copy-pasting a followup to this with Robin Hanson via DM (with permission).
Robin: You can of course suspect people of many things using many weak clues. But you should hold higher standards of evidence when making public accusations that you say orgs should use to fire people, cancel speeches, etc.
Me: My instinct is to support/agree with this, but (1) it’s not an obvious interpretation of what you tweeted and (2) I think we need to understand why the standards of evidence for making public accusations and for actual firing/canceling have fallen so low (which my own comment didn’t address either) and what the leverage points are for changing that, otherwise we might just be tilting at windmills when we exhort people to raise those standards (or worse, making suicide charges, if we get lumped with “public enemies”).