People who haven’t practiced the art of analyzing people’s decision policies in terms of signaling games, Schelling points, social psychology &c. simply don’t have the skills necessary to determine whether they’re justified in strongly disagreeing with someone.
I can’t tell whether you’re implying that I specifically don’t have those skills, or whether you’re just making some general observation or something.
As far as I can tell, Will’s a stronger epistemic majoritarian than most nerds, including us LW nerds. If a bunch of people engage in a behavior, his default belief is that behavior is adaptive in a comprehensive enough context, when examined at a meta-enough level.
Will spend a lot of time practicing model-based thinking. Even with that specific focus, he doesn’t consider his own skills adequate to declare the average person’s behavior stupid and counterproductive. I’m an average LW’ian, I’ve read The Strategy of Conflict and the sequences and Overcoming Bias had a few related insights in my daily life. I don’t have enough skill to dissolve the question and write out a flowchart that shows why some of the smartest and most rational people in the world are religious. So Will’s not going to trust me when I say that they’re wrong.
And as for you, at this point I really just have no idea what you believe.
I’m just left wondering why you’re still here, just as many other people probably have been, and of course also left wondering what sort of revolutionary idea you may be hiding.
He suspects himself of prodromal schizophrenia, due to symptoms like continuing to post here.
Some of my majoritarianism is in some sense a rationalization, or at least it’s retrospective. I happened to reach various conclusions, some epistemic, some moral, and learned various things that happened to line up much better with Catholic dogma than with any other system of thought. Some of my majoritarianism stems from wondering how I could have reached those conclusions earlier or more reliably, without the benefit of epistemic luck, which I’ve had a lot of. I think the policy that pops out isn’t actually majoritarianism so much as harboring a deep respect for highly evolved institutions, a la Nick Szabo. There’s also Chesterton’s idea of orthodoxy as democracy spread over time. On matters where there’s little reason to expect great advancement of the moderns over older cultures, like in spirituality or morality, it would be foolish to adopt a modern-majoritarian position that ignored the opinions of those older cultures. I don’t actually have all that much respect for the “average person”, but I do have great respect for the pious and the intellectually humble. I honestly see more rationality in the humble creationist than in the protypical yay-science boo-religion liberal.
He’s a prospective modal catholic—replace each instance of “amen” with “or so we are led to believe.”
Though I think my actually converting is getting less likely the more I think about the issue and study recent Church history.
He suspects himself of prodromal schizophrenia, due to symptoms like continuing to post here.
More due to typical negative symptoms and auditory hallucinations and so on most prominent about six months ago, among a few other reasons. But perhaps it’s more accurate to characterize myself as schizotypal.
I think I can translate, a bit:
As far as I can tell, Will’s a stronger epistemic majoritarian than most nerds, including us LW nerds. If a bunch of people engage in a behavior, his default belief is that behavior is adaptive in a comprehensive enough context, when examined at a meta-enough level.
Will spend a lot of time practicing model-based thinking. Even with that specific focus, he doesn’t consider his own skills adequate to declare the average person’s behavior stupid and counterproductive. I’m an average LW’ian, I’ve read The Strategy of Conflict and the sequences and Overcoming Bias had a few related insights in my daily life. I don’t have enough skill to dissolve the question and write out a flowchart that shows why some of the smartest and most rational people in the world are religious. So Will’s not going to trust me when I say that they’re wrong.
He’s a prospective modal catholic—replace each instance of “amen” with “or so we are led to believe.”
He suspects himself of prodromal schizophrenia, due to symptoms like continuing to post here.
Some of my majoritarianism is in some sense a rationalization, or at least it’s retrospective. I happened to reach various conclusions, some epistemic, some moral, and learned various things that happened to line up much better with Catholic dogma than with any other system of thought. Some of my majoritarianism stems from wondering how I could have reached those conclusions earlier or more reliably, without the benefit of epistemic luck, which I’ve had a lot of. I think the policy that pops out isn’t actually majoritarianism so much as harboring a deep respect for highly evolved institutions, a la Nick Szabo. There’s also Chesterton’s idea of orthodoxy as democracy spread over time. On matters where there’s little reason to expect great advancement of the moderns over older cultures, like in spirituality or morality, it would be foolish to adopt a modern-majoritarian position that ignored the opinions of those older cultures. I don’t actually have all that much respect for the “average person”, but I do have great respect for the pious and the intellectually humble. I honestly see more rationality in the humble creationist than in the protypical yay-science boo-religion liberal.
Though I think my actually converting is getting less likely the more I think about the issue and study recent Church history.
More due to typical negative symptoms and auditory hallucinations and so on most prominent about six months ago, among a few other reasons. But perhaps it’s more accurate to characterize myself as schizotypal.