For whatever reason, the community here (so-called “rationalists”) is heavily influenced by overly-individualistic ideologies (libertarianism, or in its more extreme forms, objectivism). This leads to ignoring entire realms of human phenomena (social cognition) and the people who have studied them (Vygotsky, sociologists of science, ethnomethodology). It’s not that social approaches to cognition provide a magic bullet—they just provide a very different perspective on how minds work. Imagine if you stop believing that beliefs are in the head and locate themselves in a community or institution. If interested, you could start with How Institutions Think by Mary Douglas.
I would say Robin Hanson’s views on status fit quite well into the gap you perceive. I do find it interesting that status isn’t talked about more on Less Wrong.
Maybe I can tie this into what I think about the article. LW’s articles do currently take an individualist stance on rationality (although I doubt objectivism has any role in this). The “refinements” they propose are mostly alterations of cognitive habits, not suggested ways of changing group dynamics. But LW as a whole is not simply a bunch of iconoclasts. Rather, there appears to be a clear attempt to collectively change patterns of thought. People write stuff, get +/- karma, feel good/bad, update their beliefs and try again. So even though the content of LW is individually applicable, posters will naturally develop preferred topics of expertise, subjects on which they know enough to benefit the community by what they write. And developing expertise does benefit from the martial arts analogy.
I would say Robin Hanson’s views on status fit quite well into the gap you perceive. I do find it interesting that status isn’t talked about more on Less Wrong.
Was there a time when we neglected status as a topic? wow. I don’t remember that.
Imagine if you stop believing that beliefs are in the head and locate themselves in a community or institution. If interested, you could start with How Institutions Think by Mary Douglas.
This sounds to me a lot like “Imagine if you stop believing that information is in the genes and locate it in a species.”
I don’t think institutional effects on thought are a bad thing to study- institutions definitely have massive effects on the environments individuals operate in- but I think assigning thinking entity status to institutions is a bad way to approach that study. Thinking about information stored in species has a long and storied history of making worse predictions than thinking about information stored in genes.
But institutions certainly apply selection pressure on memes, and influence how memes replicate themselves and propagate. The analogy is also somewhat tenuous- institutions are far more fluid (almost by definition) in their boundaries than species. Because of their tremendous impact, institutional design deserves comparable attention to environmental design (architecture, agriculture, lots of smaller fields).
(We do already have those fields, though; the economy is the environment commercial institutions are built for (and other institutions reside in as well), and economists try to study it and design it. Public choice theorists help study the design of (primarily democratic) political institutions.)
For whatever reason, the community here (so-called “rationalists”) is heavily influenced by overly-individualistic ideologies (libertarianism, or in its more extreme forms, objectivism). This leads to ignoring entire realms of human phenomena (social cognition) and the people who have studied them (Vygotsky, sociologists of science, ethnomethodology). It’s not that social approaches to cognition provide a magic bullet—they just provide a very different perspective on how minds work. Imagine if you stop believing that beliefs are in the head and locate themselves in a community or institution. If interested, you could start with How Institutions Think by Mary Douglas.
I am guilty as charged in being much more familiar with individualistic than socially oriented ideologies.
Why don’t you write some posts about techniques or discoveries from socially-oriented science that could help rationalists?
I would say Robin Hanson’s views on status fit quite well into the gap you perceive. I do find it interesting that status isn’t talked about more on Less Wrong.
Maybe I can tie this into what I think about the article. LW’s articles do currently take an individualist stance on rationality (although I doubt objectivism has any role in this). The “refinements” they propose are mostly alterations of cognitive habits, not suggested ways of changing group dynamics. But LW as a whole is not simply a bunch of iconoclasts. Rather, there appears to be a clear attempt to collectively change patterns of thought. People write stuff, get +/- karma, feel good/bad, update their beliefs and try again. So even though the content of LW is individually applicable, posters will naturally develop preferred topics of expertise, subjects on which they know enough to benefit the community by what they write. And developing expertise does benefit from the martial arts analogy.
Was there a time when we neglected status as a topic? wow. I don’t remember that.
The flaw in that is that ignores dissenters- to some extent, minorities in a community can dissent from the common belief.
This sounds to me a lot like “Imagine if you stop believing that information is in the genes and locate it in a species.”
I don’t think institutional effects on thought are a bad thing to study- institutions definitely have massive effects on the environments individuals operate in- but I think assigning thinking entity status to institutions is a bad way to approach that study. Thinking about information stored in species has a long and storied history of making worse predictions than thinking about information stored in genes.
But institutions certainly apply selection pressure on memes, and influence how memes replicate themselves and propagate. The analogy is also somewhat tenuous- institutions are far more fluid (almost by definition) in their boundaries than species. Because of their tremendous impact, institutional design deserves comparable attention to environmental design (architecture, agriculture, lots of smaller fields).
(We do already have those fields, though; the economy is the environment commercial institutions are built for (and other institutions reside in as well), and economists try to study it and design it. Public choice theorists help study the design of (primarily democratic) political institutions.)