In case the link to my comment inadvertently implies otherwise:
I also agree it would be fantastic to have sequences which explain economics from first principles, especially the results of informed consensus, such as the value of markets, which are not yet non-expert consensus. Educating people, even on controversial topics, would be much less mind-killing than starting from the question of how we can fix all those mistaken people. Keep the Principle of Charity in mind.
When you compare market- and non-market-oriented economics you’re talking about centuries-old disagreements that contributed to wars and the Cold War, mistakes that led to massive famines, philosophies that underpin whole political parties, and concerns that still have angry people marching and camping out in political protests in cities around the globe. If you think that the topic isn’t political or that its connection to politics was a sudden development, you haven’t been paying attention. Maybe no amount of careful reasoning from first principles will convince Charlie Stross (or anyone already committed to anti-market beliefs) that those “smugly self-satisfied hypercapitalists” might be on to something after all, but it’s important to at least write while keeping in mind that your audience and theirs overlap.
Maybe no amount of careful reasoning from first principles will convince
Nitpick: when it comes to social sciences, probably no amount of careful reasoning from first principles should convince anyone. Theory is useful, but when it comes to applying it to something as messy as human behavior, you’ll want to have lots of experimental data to back it up before being convinced.
If you think that the topic isn’t political or that its connection to politics was a sudden development, you haven’t been paying attention.
I was talking about this site not the world. We are non-mindkilled on many things that are incredibly political in the wider world. One of the few things we are mindkilled and tribal about is Feminism/PUA/Gender relations. I want to make sure economics doesn’t join it.
but it’s important to at least write while keeping in mind that your audience and theirs overlap.
I think it would be hard to forget considering 2/3s of LW are either “liberal” or “socialist”. While we have extremely high quality thinkers with right wing ideas and they are a key feature of our community they are still a minority (Vladimir_M for example) so most readers are if anything probably biased against such ideas. But I think I see your point when it comes to economics in particular since we have many “libertarians” and our “liberals” being mostly American are likely more pro-free market than is the center in Europe let alone say some Third World countries.
There is this strange relationship between politics, mindkilling, and education...
When a topic becomes political, people get mindkilled about it. Then they tell many stupid things. And the sane person, who wants to avoid discussing with idiots or even the risk of being pattern-matched as one of the idiots, avoids the topic. But if sane people avoid the topic, all information is replaced by noise. And if people are uneducated about the topic, but they still think parroting a phrase of their leader makes them smart, of course politicians will use the topic for their advantage.
You cannot use “2+2=4” as your party banner, if everyone agrees with that. And you also cannot use “2+2=5″ as your party banner, if everyone disagrees with that. But you can use “evolution” or “free market”, because people are divided about this topics, because many of them just lack the basic knowledge. Of course by using these topics as party banners, the education becomes more difficult; or more precisely it becomes trivially easy to label people as “parrotting their party line” even in those situations where they just honestly evaluate the evidence. Also, such environment makes honestly evaluating the evidence more difficult for humans.
Sometimes I feel like smart people avoiding the mindkilling topics indirectly contribute to the topics being mindkilling, by leaving the politicians of various kinds unopposed. Though of course I understand the motive to avoid toxic things. Also I understand that there are too many things fucked up with this world, and one has to pick their battles. But we really should educate people at least about the basic, easiest to understand stuff. Because many of them didn’t hear even some trivial ideas; or they heard them once and then forgot.
Raising the sanity waterline while avoiding sensitive topics—maybe it’s like trying to clean your room without entering the room.
Let’s just take each topic as far as we have solid evidence. Just like there is no “conservative” or “liberal” position on whether 2+2=4, we could try to see how far this neutral region of knowledge can go.
Anyway, didn’t Ayn Rand use “A=A” something like that as a slogan?
Yeah, you are right. Somehow the level of “2+2=4” was skipped in political discourse (nobody argues against that, except some villains in Orwell’s novel), but some people go more meta and deny that there is such thing as a correct answer or truth, etc.
In their case there is probably no bottom level where the education could start. Just like you can’t educate rocks. It still can be worth educating the people who did not fall that deep.
The Soviet Union, during the first Five Year Plan, had the motto “two plus two equals five,” meaning “we will achieve the five year plan in four years.” Real totalitarians are nearly as creepy as the ones Orwell imagined.
But you can use “evolution” or “free market”, because people are divided about this topics, because many of them just lack the basic knowledge.
Evolution is true, in the sense that there is overwhelming evidence that men evolved from apes, and that likenesses between kinds is a literal family resemblance, the result of ancestral shared blood or sap. “Evolution” is untrue, in that use of the word “evolution” tends to be almost perfectly correlated with distaste for the implications of Darwinism, and complete disbelief in the implications of Darwinism for humans and human nature, tends to be a codeword for denial of Darwinism.
Darwinism, however, is true, for the same reasons as evolution is true, and, unlike “evolution”, is not a codeword for a collection of pious politically correct beliefs. Hence Dawkins, despite his otherwise progressive beliefs, calls himself a Darwinist, not an evolutionist.
However any discussion of the difference between “evolution” and Darwinism would produce a mind killing response that makes the discussion of gender differences harmless by comparison.
Um, I’m completely unaware of any difference between evolution and Darwinism. Are you using the latter to mean “The theory of evolution is true, plus eugenics is desirable”?
Um, I’m completely unaware of any difference between evolution and Darwinism. Are you using the latter to mean “The theory of evolution is true, plus eugenics is desirable”?
Evolution was fairly popular (at least, in some places) before Darwin and arguably many modern people have a pre-Darwinian (teleological) understanding of the idea. Darwin’s grandfather wrote poems about evolution before Charles was born, and some of his school mates were followers of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. There seem to be many people that wear “evolution” as attire (presumably to identify with some “educated”, “scientific”, or “secular” tribe), but that don’t really understand natural selection or think it stopped operating on humans some tens-of-thousands of years ago.
“Common descent”, “natural selection”, and “speciation through reproductive separation” are distinct elements of evolutionary theory. The idea of common descent is a lot older than the idea that effectively all biodiversity stems from variable survival and reproduction, and the formation of isolated gene pools.
Might this not just mean it changed direction, faced with an environment where strength size and intelligence were all now less reproductively important than resistance to disease?
Might this not just mean it changed direction, faced with an environment where strength size and intelligence were all now less reproductively important than resistance to disease?
If you mean that there was no such decrease, then that contradicts what I’ve read.
I do not mean that. I assumed MixedNuts was parodying the people I was referring to that don’t understand Darwinian evolution (but think they do), since his argument makes the same kind of error (“directional”, teleological evolution) I was lamenting.
When you compare market- and non-market-oriented economics you’re talking about centuries-old disagreements that contributed to wars and the Cold War, mistakes that led to massive famines, philosophies that underpin whole political parties, and concerns that still have angry people marching and camping out in political protests in cities around the globe.
The same is true of religion, but that doesn’t stop us from talking about it.
Yeah. I’d guess the key difference between religion-on-LW and economics-on-LW is a more boring one: opinion homogeneity. As of a year ago we had something like consensus on atheism (92.3% atheist & agnostic vs. 6.3% deist/pantheist/theist) but a more even split on politics, a proxy for economic opinions (32.3% libertarian, 27.1% socialist & communist, 34.5% liberal, and 2.8% conservative).
Were 92% of us libertarian, but >25% theist, we might regard economics as a basically solved issue that rarely caused arguments, while repeatedly bickering about theism and wondering why theism was relatively mindkilling.
Yeah. I’d guess the key difference between religion-on-LW and economics-on-LW is a more boring one: opinion homogeneity.
This is because of selection effects more than anything else.
Were 92% of us libertarian, but >25% theist, we might regard economics as a basically solved issue that rarely caused arguments
I would advise you to be careful about deciding whether an issue is solved on the basis of whether the people on the other side of it happen to hang out in the same place you do.
I would advise you to be careful about deciding whether an issue is solved on the basis of whether the people on the other side of it happen to hang out in the same place you do.
I’m describing what could happen on a counterfactual LW, not what should happen.
I don’t intend to decide whether an issue’s solved on the basis of whether people I hang out with agree with me. But I recognize that I’m human (as are you), with the accompanying cognitive biases, and the reference class forecast isn’t a sunny one.
You’re absolutely right, but how would we avoid talking about it if we wanted to?
Religions are typically anti-reductionist in some way. You generally can’t can’t discuss how to take reality apart into pieces without conflicting with someone’s religion.
Religions typically specifically deal with eschatology. There’s little room for agreement about instrumental rationality or existential risk if your utility function is overwhelmed by “what happens to their souls for eternity after death” or if you consider the fate of humanity to be an actual fate decided by higher powers rather than our own actions.
(There might still be room to talk about religion more politely, though.)
In case the link to my comment inadvertently implies otherwise:
I also agree it would be fantastic to have sequences which explain economics from first principles, especially the results of informed consensus, such as the value of markets, which are not yet non-expert consensus. Educating people, even on controversial topics, would be much less mind-killing than starting from the question of how we can fix all those mistaken people. Keep the Principle of Charity in mind.
When you compare market- and non-market-oriented economics you’re talking about centuries-old disagreements that contributed to wars and the Cold War, mistakes that led to massive famines, philosophies that underpin whole political parties, and concerns that still have angry people marching and camping out in political protests in cities around the globe. If you think that the topic isn’t political or that its connection to politics was a sudden development, you haven’t been paying attention. Maybe no amount of careful reasoning from first principles will convince Charlie Stross (or anyone already committed to anti-market beliefs) that those “smugly self-satisfied hypercapitalists” might be on to something after all, but it’s important to at least write while keeping in mind that your audience and theirs overlap.
Nitpick: when it comes to social sciences, probably no amount of careful reasoning from first principles should convince anyone. Theory is useful, but when it comes to applying it to something as messy as human behavior, you’ll want to have lots of experimental data to back it up before being convinced.
Sticking to micro avoids most politics.
I was talking about this site not the world. We are non-mindkilled on many things that are incredibly political in the wider world. One of the few things we are mindkilled and tribal about is Feminism/PUA/Gender relations. I want to make sure economics doesn’t join it.
I think it would be hard to forget considering 2/3s of LW are either “liberal” or “socialist”. While we have extremely high quality thinkers with right wing ideas and they are a key feature of our community they are still a minority (Vladimir_M for example) so most readers are if anything probably biased against such ideas. But I think I see your point when it comes to economics in particular since we have many “libertarians” and our “liberals” being mostly American are likely more pro-free market than is the center in Europe let alone say some Third World countries.
There is this strange relationship between politics, mindkilling, and education...
When a topic becomes political, people get mindkilled about it. Then they tell many stupid things. And the sane person, who wants to avoid discussing with idiots or even the risk of being pattern-matched as one of the idiots, avoids the topic. But if sane people avoid the topic, all information is replaced by noise. And if people are uneducated about the topic, but they still think parroting a phrase of their leader makes them smart, of course politicians will use the topic for their advantage.
You cannot use “2+2=4” as your party banner, if everyone agrees with that. And you also cannot use “2+2=5″ as your party banner, if everyone disagrees with that. But you can use “evolution” or “free market”, because people are divided about this topics, because many of them just lack the basic knowledge. Of course by using these topics as party banners, the education becomes more difficult; or more precisely it becomes trivially easy to label people as “parrotting their party line” even in those situations where they just honestly evaluate the evidence. Also, such environment makes honestly evaluating the evidence more difficult for humans.
Sometimes I feel like smart people avoiding the mindkilling topics indirectly contribute to the topics being mindkilling, by leaving the politicians of various kinds unopposed. Though of course I understand the motive to avoid toxic things. Also I understand that there are too many things fucked up with this world, and one has to pick their battles. But we really should educate people at least about the basic, easiest to understand stuff. Because many of them didn’t hear even some trivial ideas; or they heard them once and then forgot.
Raising the sanity waterline while avoiding sensitive topics—maybe it’s like trying to clean your room without entering the room.
Let’s just take each topic as far as we have solid evidence. Just like there is no “conservative” or “liberal” position on whether 2+2=4, we could try to see how far this neutral region of knowledge can go.
http://xkcd.com/263/ (read the tooltip text). (Anyway, didn’t Ayn Rand use “A=A” or something like that as a slogan?)
Yeah, you are right. Somehow the level of “2+2=4” was skipped in political discourse (nobody argues against that, except some villains in Orwell’s novel), but some people go more meta and deny that there is such thing as a correct answer or truth, etc.
In their case there is probably no bottom level where the education could start. Just like you can’t educate rocks. It still can be worth educating the people who did not fall that deep.
The Soviet Union, during the first Five Year Plan, had the motto “two plus two equals five,” meaning “we will achieve the five year plan in four years.” Real totalitarians are nearly as creepy as the ones Orwell imagined.
Victor Hugo used 2+2=5 politically before Orwell. In Hugo’s case, the dictator playing silly-buggers with the math was Napoleon.
Evolution is true, in the sense that there is overwhelming evidence that men evolved from apes, and that likenesses between kinds is a literal family resemblance, the result of ancestral shared blood or sap. “Evolution” is untrue, in that use of the word “evolution” tends to be almost perfectly correlated with distaste for the implications of Darwinism, and complete disbelief in the implications of Darwinism for humans and human nature, tends to be a codeword for denial of Darwinism.
Darwinism, however, is true, for the same reasons as evolution is true, and, unlike “evolution”, is not a codeword for a collection of pious politically correct beliefs. Hence Dawkins, despite his otherwise progressive beliefs, calls himself a Darwinist, not an evolutionist.
However any discussion of the difference between “evolution” and Darwinism would produce a mind killing response that makes the discussion of gender differences harmless by comparison.
Um, I’m completely unaware of any difference between evolution and Darwinism. Are you using the latter to mean “The theory of evolution is true, plus eugenics is desirable”?
Evolution was fairly popular (at least, in some places) before Darwin and arguably many modern people have a pre-Darwinian (teleological) understanding of the idea. Darwin’s grandfather wrote poems about evolution before Charles was born, and some of his school mates were followers of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. There seem to be many people that wear “evolution” as attire (presumably to identify with some “educated”, “scientific”, or “secular” tribe), but that don’t really understand natural selection or think it stopped operating on humans some tens-of-thousands of years ago.
“Common descent”, “natural selection”, and “speciation through reproductive separation” are distinct elements of evolutionary theory. The idea of common descent is a lot older than the idea that effectively all biodiversity stems from variable survival and reproduction, and the formation of isolated gene pools.
But it did! Look at the decrease in height, weight, and bone and dental health just after agriculture took off.
Might this not just mean it changed direction, faced with an environment where strength size and intelligence were all now less reproductively important than resistance to disease?
I’m pretty sure MixedNuts was joking.
If you mean that there was no such decrease, then that contradicts what I’ve read.
I think they mean MixedNuts drew the opposite conclusion to the one his referenced facts support.
I do not mean that. I assumed MixedNuts was parodying the people I was referring to that don’t understand Darwinian evolution (but think they do), since his argument makes the same kind of error (“directional”, teleological evolution) I was lamenting.
The same is true of religion, but that doesn’t stop us from talking about it.
Yeah. I’d guess the key difference between religion-on-LW and economics-on-LW is a more boring one: opinion homogeneity. As of a year ago we had something like consensus on atheism (92.3% atheist & agnostic vs. 6.3% deist/pantheist/theist) but a more even split on politics, a proxy for economic opinions (32.3% libertarian, 27.1% socialist & communist, 34.5% liberal, and 2.8% conservative).
Were 92% of us libertarian, but >25% theist, we might regard economics as a basically solved issue that rarely caused arguments, while repeatedly bickering about theism and wondering why theism was relatively mindkilling.
This is because of selection effects more than anything else.
I would advise you to be careful about deciding whether an issue is solved on the basis of whether the people on the other side of it happen to hang out in the same place you do.
I’m describing what could happen on a counterfactual LW, not what should happen.
I don’t intend to decide whether an issue’s solved on the basis of whether people I hang out with agree with me. But I recognize that I’m human (as are you), with the accompanying cognitive biases, and the reference class forecast isn’t a sunny one.
You’re absolutely right, but how would we avoid talking about it if we wanted to?
Religions are typically anti-reductionist in some way. You generally can’t can’t discuss how to take reality apart into pieces without conflicting with someone’s religion.
Religions typically specifically deal with eschatology. There’s little room for agreement about instrumental rationality or existential risk if your utility function is overwhelmed by “what happens to their souls for eternity after death” or if you consider the fate of humanity to be an actual fate decided by higher powers rather than our own actions.
(There might still be room to talk about religion more politely, though.)