It seems to me like a stretch to take Sean’s commitment to authenticity as being just like what a scientists does who’s committed to the truth.
I mean, all analogies are stretches; the question is in what way and how far. There’s a reason the post has ‘cousin’ in the title instead of ‘sibling’ or ‘distant relation.’
You could similarly describe the commitment to God of a catholic as Catholicism being like rationalism.
Specifically, the way I would do that is as follows:
Suppose for these paragraphs we use “Faith” to refer to ‘privileging model A over model B’ when we’re making decisions and those two models disagree with each other. This can be used to protectively shield beliefs from criticism (“Well, I get that you have all these detailed arguments for the historical record not being the way I think it is, but God Said So, and I have faith in God.”), and it can be used to integrate considerations that are too remote to be positively identified in a model but which can be easily labelled (“Well, I get that I am extremely confident that the experiment would go a particular way, but Empiricism Requires We Run It, and I have faith in Empiricism.”).
In my youth I got to see an example of this up close, where the church I was a member of was considering undergoing a major construction project; one of the members was a financial analyst and looked at the numbers and thought “this really doesn’t add up,” but put that against Bible verses that “God would provide” and reluctantly supported the project.
The difference between the Catholic and the Rationalist is not whether they have ‘multiple models’ (both do) and whether or not they have different weights for their models (both do), but what they think the weights should be and how they justify those weights. Importantly, it’s also not that the Rationalist has ‘tested’ the thing they have Faith in and the Catholic hasn’t; both Faith procedures described here are self-reinforcing (“Turns out, God says I should trust God!” and “Turns out, running experiments suggests that I should run experiments!”). It’s that empiricism has other coherence properties that seem pretty solid, and that trusting God doesn’t have those properties, and what other coherence properties it has seem much shakier.
Thus I think rationalists are doing the right thing, and Catholics are doing the wrong thing, because the rationalists are using this mechanism in order to make themselves predictably better off (according to me) and the Catholics are making themselves predictably worse off (according to me). When I turn my attention towards Circlers, I notice “huh, there’s an empiricism thing going on here, and a reflection thing; both of those seem like they have solid coherence properties.”
Eliezer argued in Beyond the Reach of God that rationalists shouldn’t believe in sacred principles that could be fundamentally more valuable.
I interpret that differently; I saw in it “the universe runs on system dynamics, not morality” and more weakly “there is no policy that you can follow that will guarantee good consequences.”
To be clear, “empiricism” is not a policy that guarantees good consequences. It’s a virtue, and virtues act by both only giving probabilistic guarantees and by shifting the standards of what ‘success’ even means.
I have a sense that you don’t have a good idea of what radical honesty is. I think there’s a good chance that you would be pleasantly surprised if you would do a workshop with someone like Taber Shadburne.
I think it’s worth separating “radical honesty” as understood by its originators and “radical honesty” as interpreted-by-default; I am not surprised to learn of people under that banner who are successfully doing something healthy and authentic.
The problem here is closer to “if you want to add an additional ‘should’ to an equilibrium, you should anticipate resistance in the form of reductios,” and I do not think that “authenticity is better than inauthenticity” means “always being completely honest,” and instead means a more nuanced and subtle thing.
I mean, all analogies are stretches; the question is in what way and how far. There’s a reason the post has ‘cousin’ in the title instead of ‘sibling’ or ‘distant relation.’
Specifically, the way I would do that is as follows:
Suppose for these paragraphs we use “Faith” to refer to ‘privileging model A over model B’ when we’re making decisions and those two models disagree with each other. This can be used to protectively shield beliefs from criticism (“Well, I get that you have all these detailed arguments for the historical record not being the way I think it is, but God Said So, and I have faith in God.”), and it can be used to integrate considerations that are too remote to be positively identified in a model but which can be easily labelled (“Well, I get that I am extremely confident that the experiment would go a particular way, but Empiricism Requires We Run It, and I have faith in Empiricism.”).
In my youth I got to see an example of this up close, where the church I was a member of was considering undergoing a major construction project; one of the members was a financial analyst and looked at the numbers and thought “this really doesn’t add up,” but put that against Bible verses that “God would provide” and reluctantly supported the project.
The difference between the Catholic and the Rationalist is not whether they have ‘multiple models’ (both do) and whether or not they have different weights for their models (both do), but what they think the weights should be and how they justify those weights. Importantly, it’s also not that the Rationalist has ‘tested’ the thing they have Faith in and the Catholic hasn’t; both Faith procedures described here are self-reinforcing (“Turns out, God says I should trust God!” and “Turns out, running experiments suggests that I should run experiments!”). It’s that empiricism has other coherence properties that seem pretty solid, and that trusting God doesn’t have those properties, and what other coherence properties it has seem much shakier.
Thus I think rationalists are doing the right thing, and Catholics are doing the wrong thing, because the rationalists are using this mechanism in order to make themselves predictably better off (according to me) and the Catholics are making themselves predictably worse off (according to me). When I turn my attention towards Circlers, I notice “huh, there’s an empiricism thing going on here, and a reflection thing; both of those seem like they have solid coherence properties.”
I interpret that differently; I saw in it “the universe runs on system dynamics, not morality” and more weakly “there is no policy that you can follow that will guarantee good consequences.”
To be clear, “empiricism” is not a policy that guarantees good consequences. It’s a virtue, and virtues act by both only giving probabilistic guarantees and by shifting the standards of what ‘success’ even means.
I think it’s worth separating “radical honesty” as understood by its originators and “radical honesty” as interpreted-by-default; I am not surprised to learn of people under that banner who are successfully doing something healthy and authentic.
The problem here is closer to “if you want to add an additional ‘should’ to an equilibrium, you should anticipate resistance in the form of reductios,” and I do not think that “authenticity is better than inauthenticity” means “always being completely honest,” and instead means a more nuanced and subtle thing.