I think that art is an important medium by which to communicate ideas, and for rationality to be successful as a meme it’s going to need “carrier wave” works of art to help it compete with religion for the general population’s passion and understanding.
Trouble is, you can’t do that without the message becoming, well, irrational in the process. (Which is not without historical precedent!)
Not to disparage your artistic aspirations, but your poem is certainly an example. I won’t even get into various relatively minor distortions of human history it presents. I’ll just comment on its basic theme of technical progress, which it presents as a constant bringer of good fortune and improved life, and the expected source of a bright utopian future. This picture is just too remote from reality. Of course, it would be silly to deny the benefits of technical progress and economic growth since the Industrial Revolution, and various ideological attempts to argue otherwise are an awful pile of nonsense. However, in other periods in history, the connection has been less clear—and more importantly, there is no guarantee that these historically recent favorable trends will continue into the future. The future technical progress may result in anything from human extinction to a grim Malthusian scenario, and in fact, a strong case can be made that such outcomes are more likely than “the world that we all long for” (whatever that is).
Now, you could say that in order to maximize the chances of bright future, we should raise awareness along these lines, promote humanism, etc. This however seems to me like an unproven assertion. Why would you believe this, and how would you justify this belief?
Also, another significant point of disconnect from reality in your article and poem is the belief that average people care for seeking truth beyond their own practical needs, or that they can be made to do so. Regardless of all the progress in science and technology, I see no indication whatsoever that average people in modern developed countries are less superstitious and less prone to high-status delusional beliefs than their ancestors centuries ago. In fact, I don’t think this is true even of most highly educated people outside their particular fields of expertise, and I certainly don’t believe it’s true of most people who attach to themselves labels of rationalists, skeptics, free-thinkers, etc.
I think you’re slightly missing the point of what this is supposed to do. Music is not for communicating facts, it’s for instilling emotions. It’s main purpose for a rationalist is presumably to make somehting you already know more salient and generally install it emotionally, not for deducing those probabilities and facts in the first place. Sort of.
This, mostly. I think your concerns are valid (I’ve pondered them myself) and I upvoted your comment.
I will admit that this first and foremost a humanist song—I’m willingly to sacrifice a bit of “technically correct rationality” for the sake of humanist ideals. Also worth noting that I am explicitly an instrumental rationalist—I value epistemic rationality only insofar as it is useful, and I think there are areas where its more important to be confident than to be strictly correct.
I also don’t think my phrasing is strictly wrong (where dark malthusian futures are concerned—I take responsibility for my artistic licenses with history and don’t consider them that big a deal). There are plenty of possible bad futures, and many of them are even likely. The wording of the song is not that a great glorious humanist dawn is inevitable. It’s that it CAN happen. And whether it does happen depends on the choices we make. Making the right choices requires us to believe that success is possible, and to be passionate about it.
I may be wrong about the number of people who care about reason growing—I lack adequate research to compare across the ages. But I’m pretty confident that the growth of literacy and education has radically increased the upper limit on people who even COULD be rational if they wanted to, and even if the majority are still parroting high-status ideas, I think the quality of those ideas has improved over time. That’s still valuable even if there’s plenty of room for improvement.
It is my belief (I won’t pretend that it’s much more than faith) that humanity is capable of solving the problems before it, and that if we fail, it’s not because we weren’t smart enough or strong enough, it’s because we were too lazy or didn’t care enough. It’s the job of intellectuals to figure out the right thing to do. It’s the job of artists to make people care. And we have our work cut out for us if we want to compete with religion as something that people are inspired by.
And as magfrump said, independent of whether any of the above turns out to be realistic, there is still the joy in music itself, and that is valuable regardless of the other benefits I hope for.
Very well said! Some notions in there that I’ve been hoping LW will absorb for quite a while now.
I’m not quite able o take the same epistemic stance as you in the second paragraph, but I do believe it is valuable for the community to contain individuals that do. There are some signs LW suffers from everyone trying to become the next Eliezer, while really only the top smartest 10% should do that and the rest specializing in helping the community other ways.
Artistic license is not the same as lying. I wouldn’t write a song that communicated an idea that I didn’t think was supported by rationality, but the purpose of the lyrics is not to communicate the idea accurately, it’s to communicate the emotion associated with that idea.
Insistence that all art meet Less Wrong standards for technical accuracy is not a meme that will successfully spread to the general population. And I do not think that’s a bad thing.
Whether or not music is a good medium for spreading a message and whether or not that is an efficient goal to pursue, I for one enjoy listening to music and would be happy if there were songs like this in existence and if they were accessible to me. That amount of utility seems worth going after.
It seems likely to me that there will be positive externalities of the type you dispute, but in my mind that’s orthogonal to the goal of creating art which allows this community as it exists to confirm and exult in its identity.
The second paragraph of the parent comment (minus the first two sentences) might work well as an inspirational song if someone rearranged it and fixed the meter.
Trouble is, you can’t do that without the message becoming, well, irrational in the process. (Which is not without historical precedent!)
Not to disparage your artistic aspirations, but your poem is certainly an example. I won’t even get into various relatively minor distortions of human history it presents. I’ll just comment on its basic theme of technical progress, which it presents as a constant bringer of good fortune and improved life, and the expected source of a bright utopian future. This picture is just too remote from reality. Of course, it would be silly to deny the benefits of technical progress and economic growth since the Industrial Revolution, and various ideological attempts to argue otherwise are an awful pile of nonsense. However, in other periods in history, the connection has been less clear—and more importantly, there is no guarantee that these historically recent favorable trends will continue into the future. The future technical progress may result in anything from human extinction to a grim Malthusian scenario, and in fact, a strong case can be made that such outcomes are more likely than “the world that we all long for” (whatever that is).
Now, you could say that in order to maximize the chances of bright future, we should raise awareness along these lines, promote humanism, etc. This however seems to me like an unproven assertion. Why would you believe this, and how would you justify this belief?
Also, another significant point of disconnect from reality in your article and poem is the belief that average people care for seeking truth beyond their own practical needs, or that they can be made to do so. Regardless of all the progress in science and technology, I see no indication whatsoever that average people in modern developed countries are less superstitious and less prone to high-status delusional beliefs than their ancestors centuries ago. In fact, I don’t think this is true even of most highly educated people outside their particular fields of expertise, and I certainly don’t believe it’s true of most people who attach to themselves labels of rationalists, skeptics, free-thinkers, etc.
I think you’re slightly missing the point of what this is supposed to do. Music is not for communicating facts, it’s for instilling emotions. It’s main purpose for a rationalist is presumably to make somehting you already know more salient and generally install it emotionally, not for deducing those probabilities and facts in the first place. Sort of.
This, mostly. I think your concerns are valid (I’ve pondered them myself) and I upvoted your comment.
I will admit that this first and foremost a humanist song—I’m willingly to sacrifice a bit of “technically correct rationality” for the sake of humanist ideals. Also worth noting that I am explicitly an instrumental rationalist—I value epistemic rationality only insofar as it is useful, and I think there are areas where its more important to be confident than to be strictly correct.
I also don’t think my phrasing is strictly wrong (where dark malthusian futures are concerned—I take responsibility for my artistic licenses with history and don’t consider them that big a deal). There are plenty of possible bad futures, and many of them are even likely. The wording of the song is not that a great glorious humanist dawn is inevitable. It’s that it CAN happen. And whether it does happen depends on the choices we make. Making the right choices requires us to believe that success is possible, and to be passionate about it.
I may be wrong about the number of people who care about reason growing—I lack adequate research to compare across the ages. But I’m pretty confident that the growth of literacy and education has radically increased the upper limit on people who even COULD be rational if they wanted to, and even if the majority are still parroting high-status ideas, I think the quality of those ideas has improved over time. That’s still valuable even if there’s plenty of room for improvement.
It is my belief (I won’t pretend that it’s much more than faith) that humanity is capable of solving the problems before it, and that if we fail, it’s not because we weren’t smart enough or strong enough, it’s because we were too lazy or didn’t care enough. It’s the job of intellectuals to figure out the right thing to do. It’s the job of artists to make people care. And we have our work cut out for us if we want to compete with religion as something that people are inspired by.
And as magfrump said, independent of whether any of the above turns out to be realistic, there is still the joy in music itself, and that is valuable regardless of the other benefits I hope for.
Very well said! Some notions in there that I’ve been hoping LW will absorb for quite a while now.
I’m not quite able o take the same epistemic stance as you in the second paragraph, but I do believe it is valuable for the community to contain individuals that do. There are some signs LW suffers from everyone trying to become the next Eliezer, while really only the top smartest 10% should do that and the rest specializing in helping the community other ways.
So what you’re saying is that you’re willing to lie to people to get them on board with your ideology!
Artistic license is not the same as lying. I wouldn’t write a song that communicated an idea that I didn’t think was supported by rationality, but the purpose of the lyrics is not to communicate the idea accurately, it’s to communicate the emotion associated with that idea.
Insistence that all art meet Less Wrong standards for technical accuracy is not a meme that will successfully spread to the general population. And I do not think that’s a bad thing.
I don’t think this is meant for people who don’t already believe in what it says anyway.
Whether or not music is a good medium for spreading a message and whether or not that is an efficient goal to pursue, I for one enjoy listening to music and would be happy if there were songs like this in existence and if they were accessible to me. That amount of utility seems worth going after.
It seems likely to me that there will be positive externalities of the type you dispute, but in my mind that’s orthogonal to the goal of creating art which allows this community as it exists to confirm and exult in its identity.
The second paragraph of the parent comment (minus the first two sentences) might work well as an inspirational song if someone rearranged it and fixed the meter.
Is that a challenge?
This is the first time my literary output has been set to music, so thanks for this unexpected honor.
This is the most inspiring thing I have heard all day.
This is awesome and you should be a part of my mathematics/extropian punk band when it finally forms.
Nice! Voted up.
What steve said.
Less Wrong should integrate flattr so that I wouldn’t have to say “I would upvote this 214 times if I could”.