One of my odder strongly-held but controversial beliefs is that I think studying social reality is much more amenable to ordinary empiricism scientific reasoning than to vibes.
The one exception I’ll make is the field of social psychology: we have both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that lay psychology is reasonably good compared to p-hacked papers.
But most of the time when people talk about social reality they aren’t talking about that: they are often referring to factual or normative beliefs, preferences, dispositions that either humanity overall holds or a defined cluster of people (eg “conservatives”, “EAs”, “my friends”, “women”, “AI safety people”, “coastal elites”) believe.
When “social reality” is defined that way, I’m pretty skeptical that people’s vibes here are actually good at tracking “true” social reality, whether in the abstract or compared to polling data.
Sometimes when I bring this up people react with some combination of derision and extreme confusion: isn’t social reality just what people believe it to be?
But from my perspective for any definition of social reality that isn’t basically tautological I think it’s amenable to empiricism and scientific reasoning.
Consider the following beliefs.
#1. The emperor has no clothes.
#2. Most people believe the emperor has no clothes.
#3. Most people in positions of power believe the emperor has no clothes.
#4. Most people in positions of power believe most people in positions of power believe the emperor has no clothes.
Imo every belief from #1-#4 is a falsifiable empirical claim about the world (in this case the social world), rather than something that is tautological whatever you believe it to be.
Thus, it is amenable to ordinary scientific reasoning. Now it might be the case that direct empiricism by doing polling on this question is dicey. In that case what you should do is what I call “ordinary scientific reasoning”: trying to extrapolate from polling that you do have and other things you know from nearby topics to try to answer this question indirectly.
I believe this is more likely to be successful at answering questions #2-#4 than trying to introspect based on looking at the vibes or your gut feelings about what people’s beliefs are like.
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From the perspective of studying persuasion and manipulation this is also directly relevant: a common move for manipulators is making you falsely believe that some crazy belief or action is totally normal.
In addition to manipulators being (obviously) better at manipulating social reality than actual reality; it’s usually much easier for them to manipulate your perception of social reality than actual social reality. The latter requires convincing hundreds to billions of people, the former requires convincing just one.
So it’s helpful to drop the mistaken belief that your perception of social reality is idempotent with “social reality”, in almost all practical cases.
I feel like I agree with you here, but something also feels plausibly off, though I find it hard to pin down. Can you write a few sentences on the “vibes” view you are arguing against?
I think the people who believe the vibes view are correct often have enough confidence in that position that they don’t feel a need to justify it. But it might help to give some examples:
Once in a while, I’ll see people make a strong psychological claim about large groups of people based on light personal experience. I’ll ask them why they believe this, and they tend to laugh at me, ignore me, or just say “it’s obvious”
Imo this is rarely obvious. To the extent it’s “obvious” I’ve usually found that people’s intuitions are the opposite of correct.
As a recent-ish example, it’s (commonly?) believed in some corners of the internet that EAs are unusually neurotic. When I ask for evidence of this ppl will either say it’s obvious or point to some anecdote of some specific EA being neurotic, rather than any attempt to do objective measurement.
Usually these actions are fairly normal within what I’d consider the top 1-5% of neuroticism! And these are extremely selected samples!
In fact this isn’t a situation where we have no evidence, we actually have consistent survey evidence that EAs are less neurotic than average!
Whenever I bring this up people find some other way to excuse this.
Often people assert some action or another (eg saving money, or vegetarianism) is more “white.” Often when I bothered to investigate their answers are the opposite of correct.
Politically interested people often say “the vibes” are for or against some political candidate. I just don’t see how highly selected groups of people (online or offline) are good at tracking vibes, compared to survey data.
It’s not like most politically engaged people are regularly talking to statistically representative samples of Americans!
And in fact we have pretty strong empirical evidence that aggregated polling beats almost all punditry!
Academic philosophers often claim the results of so-and-so thoughts experiments are “intuitive.” I just don’t see why, and often when people (sometimes decades later) try to replicate this by asking normal people, or philosophy students, the same questions, it gets the opposite results of what the philosophers blithely assert.
During the Altman firings it was extremely commonly asserted on the internet that the social reality went against the board and everybody supported Altman. Of course, nobody tried to do any polling.
My own intuition there was that it was an obvious/laughable psy-op. Though I don’t see a strong outside view reason to privilege my intuition over that of other people’s.
One of my odder strongly-held but controversial beliefs is that I think studying social reality is much more amenable to ordinary empiricism scientific reasoning than to vibes.
The one exception I’ll make is the field of social psychology: we have both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that lay psychology is reasonably good compared to p-hacked papers.
But most of the time when people talk about social reality they aren’t talking about that: they are often referring to factual or normative beliefs, preferences, dispositions that either humanity overall holds or a defined cluster of people (eg “conservatives”, “EAs”, “my friends”, “women”, “AI safety people”, “coastal elites”) believe.
When “social reality” is defined that way, I’m pretty skeptical that people’s vibes here are actually good at tracking “true” social reality, whether in the abstract or compared to polling data.
Sometimes when I bring this up people react with some combination of derision and extreme confusion: isn’t social reality just what people believe it to be?
But from my perspective for any definition of social reality that isn’t basically tautological I think it’s amenable to empiricism and scientific reasoning.
Consider the following beliefs.
#1. The emperor has no clothes.
#2. Most people believe the emperor has no clothes.
#3. Most people in positions of power believe the emperor has no clothes.
#4. Most people in positions of power believe most people in positions of power believe the emperor has no clothes.
Imo every belief from #1-#4 is a falsifiable empirical claim about the world (in this case the social world), rather than something that is tautological whatever you believe it to be.
Thus, it is amenable to ordinary scientific reasoning. Now it might be the case that direct empiricism by doing polling on this question is dicey. In that case what you should do is what I call “ordinary scientific reasoning”: trying to extrapolate from polling that you do have and other things you know from nearby topics to try to answer this question indirectly.
I believe this is more likely to be successful at answering questions #2-#4 than trying to introspect based on looking at the vibes or your gut feelings about what people’s beliefs are like.
__
From the perspective of studying persuasion and manipulation this is also directly relevant: a common move for manipulators is making you falsely believe that some crazy belief or action is totally normal.
In addition to manipulators being (obviously) better at manipulating social reality than actual reality; it’s usually much easier for them to manipulate your perception of social reality than actual social reality. The latter requires convincing hundreds to billions of people, the former requires convincing just one.
So it’s helpful to drop the mistaken belief that your perception of social reality is idempotent with “social reality”, in almost all practical cases.
I feel like I agree with you here, but something also feels plausibly off, though I find it hard to pin down. Can you write a few sentences on the “vibes” view you are arguing against?
I think the people who believe the vibes view are correct often have enough confidence in that position that they don’t feel a need to justify it. But it might help to give some examples:
Once in a while, I’ll see people make a strong psychological claim about large groups of people based on light personal experience. I’ll ask them why they believe this, and they tend to laugh at me, ignore me, or just say “it’s obvious”
Imo this is rarely obvious. To the extent it’s “obvious” I’ve usually found that people’s intuitions are the opposite of correct.
As a recent-ish example, it’s (commonly?) believed in some corners of the internet that EAs are unusually neurotic. When I ask for evidence of this ppl will either say it’s obvious or point to some anecdote of some specific EA being neurotic, rather than any attempt to do objective measurement.
Usually these actions are fairly normal within what I’d consider the top 1-5% of neuroticism! And these are extremely selected samples!
In fact this isn’t a situation where we have no evidence, we actually have consistent survey evidence that EAs are less neurotic than average!
Whenever I bring this up people find some other way to excuse this.
Often people assert some action or another (eg saving money, or vegetarianism) is more “white.” Often when I bothered to investigate their answers are the opposite of correct.
Politically interested people often say “the vibes” are for or against some political candidate. I just don’t see how highly selected groups of people (online or offline) are good at tracking vibes, compared to survey data.
It’s not like most politically engaged people are regularly talking to statistically representative samples of Americans!
And in fact we have pretty strong empirical evidence that aggregated polling beats almost all punditry!
Academic philosophers often claim the results of so-and-so thoughts experiments are “intuitive.” I just don’t see why, and often when people (sometimes decades later) try to replicate this by asking normal people, or philosophy students, the same questions, it gets the opposite results of what the philosophers blithely assert.
During the Altman firings it was extremely commonly asserted on the internet that the social reality went against the board and everybody supported Altman. Of course, nobody tried to do any polling.
My own intuition there was that it was an obvious/laughable psy-op. Though I don’t see a strong outside view reason to privilege my intuition over that of other people’s.