Correlation does imply some sort of causal link.
For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.
Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink
Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.
Replications prove there’s something new under the sun.
Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?
Are they both controlled by something already begun?
Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?
I don’t entirely disagree with you, but I find this explanation confusing. Take an urban homeowner in a single family zoned neighborhood.
They paid a large premium to buy it, and they must not like that. And if the land were up zoned, their property would suddenly be worth a lot more.
If land gets upzoned (or in this case built) in a faraway location, it doesn’t particularly effect them.
So I’m left to conclude, tentatively, that homeowners resist development for the actual reasons they give. They’re personally attached to their neighborhood. They don’t want to move. They like the way it looks, like the feeing of safety and intimacy, and don’t want to see that change too much. When they moved in, they were paying not only for the plot of land, but for the atmosphere of its surroundings, the local amenities, the view. They care about the environment, and don’t think we have adequate appreciation for its importance, or caution in appropriating it or tampering with it.
Now, maybe they could get all that and more at the price of some short-term disruption that would, in the long run, make conditions better for almost everybody. But they don’t want to deal with that disruption, to the tune of quite a lot of money.
It’s fine to say that the law is not an appropriate mechanism for enforcing the coordination feat of environmental protection or urban planning, or that you think these people have wrong opinions. But if you’re trying to model their true worldview, it seems more plausible to me that they’re revealing their honest preferences.
Moral Mazes is a book by a sociologist, but the topics in this theme just strike me as being basically sociological in nature. The study of social structures.
I’m not a sociologist, so no, I don’t have recommendations. But it’s very hard for me to imagine there’s nothing out there.
I guess my comment may have come off as a criticism or challenge, but that’s not what I intend. It’s just pointing out that sociology is the relevant field, and these posts are being written by folks who don’t have a strong background in those academic fields—although they may have canny personal insights from their own experience. It seems to me like the most tractable next step in terms of vetting is not to try and run new experiments, but to find out what kind of evidence already exists. Or to get some skin in the game and try it for oneself!
Again, that’s not a criticism or challenge—just my own thoughts after having spent a fair amount of time reading the posts you referenced here and reflecting on my experiences.
This is the first time I’ve ever been specifically encouraged to chime in for skimming, so I’d be crazy not to take you up on it!
Basically, I read this post, and the posts it links, as a bunch of non-sociologists realizing that a study of the sociology and psychology of organizations might be important, but then deciding to reinvent the discipline instead of engaging with it. My main concern is with tractability of understanding the problems of organizations and of finding neglected solutions. This set of posts doesn’t particularly address these tractability concerns. I’d also like to see deeper engagement with extant literature and empirical evidence on the subject of how to analyze or improve organizational structure.
In general, this line of thinking seems to point in a sort of waterfall model of organization-building, in which we first develop a well-vetted theory of organizational design, and then use it to replicably build high-functioning organizations.
It seems to me that most organizational success stories I’m aware of involved a small group of smart people getting together in a room with a vision and figuring it out as they went along.
The EBV paper does not appear to be gated!
Words of wisdom aren’t so wise
Unless it’s clear when it applies.
Timeless wisdom dies, in time
Unless you also make it rhyme.
The first thing that comes to mind are niche programming languages/libraries/frameworks. But there the people who feel passionate about them very well might already be in touch with each other.
My experience with the EA chats project was that, although there were lots of people who’d be happy to connect with likeminded folks, they were nervous about taking the initiative to reach out to specific people and ask to chat. Having a mechanism by which they could be assured of being connected with others who wanted the same thing seemed to eliminate this problem. Likewise, while I’m sure there’s an internet message board for almost every interest at this point, that doesn’t meant there’s a way for people interested in forming real-life relationships to do so.
When I was a kid, there are lots of reasons why internet chats didn’t turn into real-world connections, and I think that’s appropriate for children. So no, these experiences didn’t turn into phone calls. But I’ve had quite a few zoom calls, and one extended real-world friendship, that were the result of requesting to be contacted or contacting others via the EA and rationality forums and on Reddit. These have always been positive experiences.
In fact, that might be a way to start seeking out passionate people to connect via such a service: just find subreddits with a high activity-to-members ratio. Two I can think of off the top of my head are the 3D printing subreddit and the Anki (flashcard) subreddit. I could easily imagine that devotees of these technologies might enjoy forming real-life friendships with others who share their hobbies. And I could also imagine that few people in those communities have consciously realized this desire—there’s little to no cultural concept of “the 3D printing community,” much less the “flashcard community,” as a resource for finding friendships and for dating, although there’s lots of community to support the use of the technology itself.
Creating technology to support that becoming a thing seems like a relatively easy win. And it makes sense. After all, it’s not just a love of memorization and plastic sculptures that draws these people together, but a sense of creativity, passion, and a certain idealism/valus that they find realized in the technology itself.
If you continue with this, you should probably also ask some of the questions my collaborator and I tried to address. If the tech catches on, how will you deal with trolls, thieves, complaints, and so on? I’m not sure why these services aren’t more common—like why doesn’t Reddit facilitate this on its platform? I’m sure there are interesting answers here that bear on the tractability of such technology, but I don’t know what those answers are!
I’m thinking now that doing it for small communities like that makes a lot more sense than what I tried. I expect that in small communities like the EA community, where there is some existing sense of connection and where it is a pretty safe assumption that people are like-minded, people would be a lot more willing to meet over video-chat, and would probably get more out of it.
This is a good point—maybe it’s best to start by creating tech to build connections within a niche community with a strong sense of identity. This reminds me of the origin story of Facebook, building connections just within Harvard. I can see how the questions you were asking could be viewed as ways of finding subsets of developers with a strong sense of shared perspective as coders. Given how large and diverse the world of software development is, I can see how this would be necessary.
Second version of the “simplify” idea—what if you worked to discover the most unusually passionate, specific, and niche “developer identity” you could find, and created a micro-targeted app just for them? The most important feature for such an app might be creating a description and name for the app and the community it’s designed for that most compellingly describes that identity. It would be a description where its users will read it and have a powerful reaction of “YES, THOSE ARE MY PEOPLE!”
You already have the software, so it seems like the main part of the work would be in figuring out what that identity is. A combination of intuition, surveys, and interviews might let you make progress. I’m guessing you’d be looking for people interested in open source, niche languages, creative coding (generative artwork?). I imagine that professional developers and students in CS departments already tend to have a lot of opportunity to connect with other programmers, so figuring out the subset of programmers who don’t feel they have that social outlet would be key.
Huh. Care to elaborate, or point me to any resources? I’m interested to hear more about that.
I’m remembering my childhood experiences of the internet, with group chats with strangers and also applications that would serve up random web pages. Now that I’m thinking about it more, I’m less confident about how random it really was—that was just my childhood impression! The internet used to feel more wild, perhaps, and so open-ended exploration felt more valuable. Now, finding the needle of interest in the haystack of content is more challenging.
Thank you for pointing this out. Here’s a source for the first claim.
Finitely repeated games with an unknown or indeterminate number of time periods, on the other hand, are regarded as if they were an infinitely repeated game. It is not possible to apply backward induction to these games.
And here’s a source that at least provides a starting point for the second claim about ϵ-Nash equilibria.
Given a game and a real non-negative parameter ϵ, a strategy profile is said to be an ϵ-equilibrium if it is not possible for any player to gain more than ϵ in expected payoff by unilaterally deviating from his strategy. Every Nash Equilibrium is equivalent to an ϵ-equilibrium where ϵ = 0.
Another simple example is the finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma for T periods, where the payoff is averaged over the T periods. The only Nash equilibrium of this game is to choose Defect in each period. Now consider the two strategies tit-for-tat and grim trigger. Although neither tit-for-tat nor grim trigger are Nash equilibria for the game, both of them are ϵ-equilibria for some positive ϵ. The acceptable values of ϵ depend on the payoffs of the constituent game and on the number T of periods.
One thing you might have tried is to simplify. Instead of asking all the survey questions, just randomly match developers with no additional criteria. Give them the opportunity to write a short self-description, put in their email address, and then send introductory emails containing contact info and short self-descriptions to each pair of people who match. A friend and I did this for the EA community, and it got quite a bit of use. People also sent us pretty extensive feedback, indicating they were getting substantial value out of it. We didn’t even automate it. Just did it with a Google form and manually sent the emails. Our bottleneck was coding, hosting, and getting institutional support. The internet used to have much more in the way of random connection with strangers for open-ended conversation, and I think people miss it.
Right, I am including that aspect in my summary. I put it in different words (“shallow acting” vs. “attention to signals”) to make the concepts a little easier to work with for my style of writing.
My impression was that you agreed that dropping efforts to signal brought the main benefits you’re concerned with here, by changing the signals you’re sending, typically in ways that come across as more trustworthy. Here are some additional quotes that gave me this impression:
Maybe I bias toward signals that (a) are harder for a dishonest version of me to send and (b) that Bob can tell are harder for sleazy-me to send.
One result is that those signals that would be costly to sleazy-me to send would appear much, much more effortlessly here… They just happen, because the emphasis is on letting truth speak simply for itself.
Even if this latter scenario works, it can’t work as efficiently as dropping all effort to signal and just being honest does. The signals just automatically reflect reality in the latter case.
Raymond D: My main takeaway from this post is that it’s important to distinguish between sending signals and trying to send signals, because the latter often leads to goodharting.
You: That is a wonderful summary.
As such, I interpret “drop all efforts to signal,” which I labeled as “authenticity,” as an approach to generating signals, which you’re claiming is morally and instrumentally better than signal manipulation (labeled “shallow acting”). You claim that what makes shallow acting/attention to signals problematic is that it “tends to create Goodhart drift,” and alleviating this problem is what makes dropping efforts to signal a superior way to generate signals. The brevity of your response makes me think you perceive me as having fundamentally misunderstood your post, but it doesn’t give me a lot to go on as far as updating my understanding, if so.
Odd to me that “truth,” “believe,” and “sense” are considered “intuition” words, along with other words describing physical sensation and terms relevant to Baysian updating. From the article:
flag-words related to intuition, believing, spirituality, sapience: spirit, imagine, wisdom, wise, hunch, mind, suspicion, believe, think, trust, faith, truth, true, belief, doubt, hope, fear, life, soul, heaven, eternal, mortal, holy, god, pray, mystery, sense, feel, soft, hard, cold, hot, smell, foul, taste, sweet, bitter, hear, sound, silence, loud, see, light, dark, bright
flag words related to rationality, science, and quantification: science, technology, scientific, chemistry, chemicals, physics, medicine, model, method, fact, data, math, analysis, conclusion, limit, result, determine, transmission, assuming, system, size, unit, pressure, area, percent
To obtain suggestions for populating the belief, spirituality, and intuition cluster we also used a thesaurus algorithm available at relatedwords.org (combining search techniques such as word embedding and Concept-Net)...
[O]ur list of 5,000 most common words and the emotional ranking of words was determined in recent years and therefore reflects relatively recent language use. Still, probably the most important caveat of using book texts is that they are a biased representation of language, a bias that may change over time.
I’m skeptical of their operationalization of the “intuition/believing/spirituality/sapience” cluster, and the authors don’t provide sufficient explanation or theoretical grounding for their choice. Since the entire exercise depends heavily on this aspect of the study design, and as words have multiple meanings heavily informed by context, and with all the usual worries about reproducibility, I’m reluctant to read too much into this result.
If coordination services command high wages, as John predicts, this suggests that demand is high and supply is limited. Here are some reasons why this might be true:
Coordination solutions scale linearly (because the problem is a general one) or exponentially (due to networking effects).
Coordination is difficult, unpleasant, risky work.
Coordination relies on further resources that are themselves in limited supply or on information that has a short life expectancy, such as involved personal relationships, technical knowhow that depends on a lot of implicit knowledge, familiarity with language and culture, access to user bases and communities, access to restricted communication channels and information, trust, credentials, charisma, money, land, or legal privileges.
Coordination is most intensively needed in innovative, infrastructure-development work, which is a high-risk area with long-term payoffs.
Coordination is neglected due to systematic biases on an individual and/or institutional level. Perhaps coordination is easy to learn, but is difficult to train in an educational context, and as such is frequently neglected by the educational system. Students are therefore mis-incentivized and don’t engage in developing their coordination skills to anywhere near the possible and optimal level. Alternatively, it might be that we teach coordination in the context of centrally coordination-focused careers (MBAs, for example), but that many other careers less obviously centrally focused on coordination (bench scientists) would also benefit—a problem of interdisciplinary neglect.
Note that, if the argument in my review of interfaces as scarce resources is correct, then coordination can also be viewed as a subtype of interface—a way of translating between what a user wants and how they express that desire, into the internal language or structure of a complex system. This makes sense. Google translates natural-language queries into the PageRank algorithm, Facebook translates “friends” into databases and networks, and Amazon, like any store, translates the user’s desire to “buy a product” into an extremely complex sequence of supply-chain actions.
Not all resources/interfaces are best viewed as forms of coordination, although virtually all forms of economic activity depend heavily on coordination to get things done. A non-coordination purpose of some resources is to meet basic individual survival needs, such as agricultural production. While this is obviously necessary to facilitate coordination as well, I don’t think most people would tell you that they avoid starvation in order to better coordinate.
The most actionable advice I can take away from these thoughts stems from point (3) and (5) above. As people proceed in their careers, they naturally gain access to skills, contacts, and other information that is translatable to other roles and jobs. Each job is a chance to “harvest information” that is locally abundant in one environment and port it to another environment where that information is scarce.
In considering what job to take, applicants should form a detailed model of what information they’ll be able to harvest from their employer. Employers likewise should consider what information they can harvest from their new employee. This puts a new spin on the increasing tendency of employees to change employers and even careers. Rather than a sign of disloyalty or fickleness, it’s just the natural result of an economy efficiently incentivizing and engaging in valuable information exchange.
If coordination is indeed a neglected skill, then it’s important to figure out whether it’s teachable, but neglected by the educational system; or unteachable, but learnable. Figuring out what is useful and what skills are required to coordinate effectively in a particular line of work seems like a key component of useful experience, and a topic to steer conversations toward in dialog with mentors and more experienced peers.
It may be more possible to argue against this sort of post than you think. Let’s start by trying to identify its central point, using quotes.
Men (especially when younger) slightly prefer shorter-term casual relationships and vice versa, but overall the differences are just not that big.
Claim 1: Survey results show that relationship orientation (RO) differences exist between men and women, but these differences are small.
There do exist real differences in mating psychology between men and women but they don’t imply mutually hostile needs. A lot of differences are complimentary...
Claim 2: RO differences between men and women do not imply intersexual competition.
Western society mostly has norms and laws (e.g. economic freedom for women, decriminalizing infidelity, outlawing polygamy) that reduce intersexual conflict while potentially increasing intrasexual competition...
Claim 3: Norms and laws mainly reduce intersexual competition (stronger assertion). They may also increase intrasexual competition (weaker assertion).
Almost everyone else would do better not by trying to trick or coerce what they selfishly want out of reluctant members of the opposite sex, but by finding those of the other sex who want to give it to them...
Claim 4: Intersexual trickery and coercion is a worse tactic than finding an RO-compatible partner.
Dating selflessly is often unfair, painful, high variance, and much harder than it used to be. There are many reasons why people fail, although a lot of them are individually fixable and not a result of the “top 20%” stealing all your partners.
Claim 5: Dating nevertheless involves a lot of suffering, and has become more difficult over time.
There are two assumptions we could make about relationship orientation. If RO is rigid, people prefer dating nobody to dating a partner of incompatible RO. If RO is relaxed, people will accept a partner of incompatible RO.
I don’t have access to the data in Jacob’s survey, but it looks like the approximate proportions are:
“Not Looking:” 2:1 female:male
“Sex/play only:” 2:1 male:female
“Casual dating:” 5:4 male:female
“Serious relationship:” 10:9 male:female
Since people in the “not looking” category automatically succeed in actualizing their RO, and all other categories are male-skewed, it is men who will consistently fail to find partners under the “rigid RO” model. “Sex/play” looks like about 5% of men, “casual dating” like it’s about 30% of men, and “serious relationship” like it’s about 50%. Using the eyeballed ratios I gave above, that means that 2.5% of men seek and fail to find “sex/play” relationships, 6% seek and fail to find casual dating relationships, and about 5% seek and fail to find serious relationships, for a total of about 13.5% of men who cannot find the type of relationship they want due to a dating pool of incompatible size.
I lean against the notion of people having “positive rights,” but relationships and jobs are two important categories for people’s sense of wellbeing. For context, a 14% unemployment rate in the US has been observed in 1937 (2 years before the end of the Great Depression), 1940 (1 year after the end of the Great Depression), and has consistently been under 10% since then, although there have been brief periods within a given year in which the unemployment rate spiked up, such as April 2020 (COVID lockdowns).
So if we think that 13.5% complete, numerical inability to find a compatible relationship is roughly as bad as being an unemployed job-seeker, then, exclusively examining RO and ignoring any questions of how “good” the RO-compatible is, it’s about as bad for men as we saw in moderately bad years of the Great Depression.
Men who cannot find a partner have two options. One is to not have a partner at all, and the other is to relax their constraints and accept partners from an incompatible RO. However, this will still leave about 10% of men unable to find any partner at all—as bad as the worst years for unemployment since 1941.
There’s a crucial caveat to this analysis. Men in the “sex/play” and “casual dating” categories may not actually want or need a partner on 100% of days. If “sex/play” men can tolerate having that experience only on 50% of the days that women in that category do, then they’ll have their needs met. Men in the “casual dating” category” need to tolerate only a relatively modest imbalance. It’s really the 5% of men who want serious relationships and simply cannot find one who will truly be SOL—a rate that we tend to see as quite tolerable when it comes to unemployment.
However, this doesn’t account for other forms of potential rigid orientations, such as monogamy vs. polyamory. Let’s generalize.
Imagine we have 100 men and 100 women. 60 of the 100 men and 40 of 100 women want a serious relationship; the rest want a casual relationship. Let’s say that a preference for monogamy vs. polyamory is independent of gender and serious vs. casual preference, with 2⁄3 of men and 3⁄4 of women preferring monogamy.
Then 40 of the 60 men and 30 of the 40 women in the “serious relationship” category want monogamy, as do 27 of the men and 45 of the women in the “casual” category. The remainder (20 men and 10 women in the “serious relationship” category, and 13 men and 15 women in the “casual relationship” category) want a polyamorous relationship.
Before we considered polyamory vs. monogamy, a total of 40 people (20 serious men and 20 casual women) couldn’t find a compatible relationship. Once we add in this second constraint, that number increases to 42 people. If we continue adding further rigid constraints, we have fewer and fewer people able to find a compatible relationship.
We also need to take into account gender ratios, which may exacerbate or cancel out these incompatibilities. For example, a town with more women than men will tend to cancel out some of the relationship-seeking disparities we see in Jacob’s survey data. A town with more men than women, of course, will see even worse problems.
Jacob’s analysis in another post where he estimates the impact of gender imbalance on the “quality” of one’s partner also seems incomplete to me, because it doesn’t account for the common notion that men and women are not, generally, “equal” in terms of the distribution of mate quality. It may be correct as far as rank order goes, but we may care about an absolute rather than ordinal match.
A blame-based narrative seems inappropriate for considering this issue. This is a problem of the distribution of rigid preferences in the population for a pie that cannot be made bigger. Note also that it’s possible to argue against this post without resorting to any particularly CW/taboo topics or tone.
I wonder if Georgism might offer some sort of lens on this, since it also is meant to analyze and deal with problems of another critical resource that has a fixed supply?
First, I will summarize what seems to be your core thesis.
In a comment below, Dagon said:
I don’t think you’re “dropping all effort” to signal, you’re rather getting good at signaling, by actually being truthful and information-focused.
You reply:
I agree with what I think you’re saying. I think there’s been a definitional sliding here. When I say “Drop all effort to signal”, I’m describing the experience on the inside. I think you’re saying that from the outside, signaling is still happening, and the benefits of “dropping all effort to signal” can be understood in signaling terms.
I agree with that.
So you seem to be focused in this post on ways to generate signals. You seem to suggest that there are two broad strategies, and that we have a choice about which to engage in:
Authentic (“drop all effort to signal!”, “I feel care for someone”, “I don’t have to put in effort. It just happens, kind of like drinking water from my cup in my hand when I’m thirsty just happens.”, “having taken the truth all the way into your body”, “grokked it”, “transparent”).
Shallow acting (“the Goodhart thing”, “seems innocent enough”, “make more of an effort”, “in fact doesn’t care about these others and is only interested in how he benefits from others’ actions”, “”appreciation”“, “(correctly!) feel dehumanized”, “control his signals”, “come across as genuine”, “”feeding psychopaths””, “manipulating their signals”).
Method acting. “Hacking your own signal” can allow acting to perhaps (“people pick up on this stuff pretty automatically”) accurately produce the same results as authentic signal generation, as long as “you happen to never notice and fear this, and the people you’re expressing appreciation for never pick up on this.” This is probably a temporary success at best (“It’s just very unstable”).
You also claim that authentic signal generation is “almost strictly more effective,” because “If there’s an answer… it’ll be much, much easier to find. If there isn’t a solution, we correctly conclude that much, much more quickly and effortlessly,” and also because ”… you end up quite a bit ahead if you let some of these communications fail instead of sacrificing pieces of your integrity to Goodhart’s Demon.”
It feels like there’s also an implication that authentic signal generation is more virtuous than acting, but that’s never explicitly stated.
So as a summary of these claims:
Signals can be generated via authenticity, method acting, or shallow acting. Authenticity is typically more effective and reliable than either form of acting at achieving the results you want, and is also perhaps more virtuous.
This tends to frame authenticity and acting as opposites (“just be yourself”). Others, of course, frame acting as a means by which we can achieve authenticity (“fake it ’til you make it”). Here’s the first convenient post on Psychology Today, which says “However, it turns out that the relationship between your emotions and your behavior is a little more reciprocal than that. This means that if you force a smile when you are feeling down, you will lift your mood, and alternatively, if you frown when you are happy, you will feel down.”
So a more charitable explanation for Raymond’s response is that Raymond is trying to “fake it ‘til he makes it.” By “making more of an effort,” he is trying to cultivate authenticity. It might be wise to affirm that possibility, or to make an argument directly against the “fake it ’til you make it” strategy if that is your intention.
Of course, “authenticity” and “caring” are ill-defined terms, referring both to a short-term emotional state and a longer-term intention or sense of meaning about a relationship. Pinning down which is meant might allow us to draw upon the psychology literature to see if there is any strong consensus on whether or not “fake it ‘til you make it” is an effective way to alter one’s own internal state or as a method of creating perceptions in other people. My prior is that it’s unlikely that a sufficiently broad and deep evidence base exists to conclusively answer these questions conclusively, but that there’s at least some evidence in favor of some versions of the “fake it ’til you make it” strategy in some contexts.
This post’s claim seems to have a strong and weak version, both of which are asserted at different places in the post.
Strong claim: At some level of wealth and power, knowledge is the most common or only bottleneck for achieving one’s goals.
Weak claim: Things money and power cannot obtain can become the bottleneck for achieving one’s goals.
The claim implied by the title is the strong form. Here is a quote representing the weak form:
“As one resource becomes abundant, other resources become bottlenecks. When wealth and power become abundant, anything wealth and power cannot buy become bottlenecks—including knowledge and expertise.”
Of course, knowing arbitrary facts (N values of an infinite sequence of randomly generated numbers) is not what’s meant by “knowledge and expertise.” What is?
I’d suggest “sufficient and necessary knowledge to achieve a given goal.” A person who can achieve a goal, given some reasonable but not excessive amount of time and money, is an expert at achieving that goal.
As others pointed out, just because a person calls themselves an expert in goal G doesn’t mean that they are. John’s point is that being able to identify an expert in goal G, or an expert in identifying experts in goal G, when you yourself wish to achieve goal G, is its own form of expertise.
This in turn suggests that finding, sharing and verifying expertise is a key problem-solving skill. At any given time, we have:
Questions nobody can answer.
Answers nobody can understand.
Answers nobody can verify.
To these short statements, insert the qualifiers “crucial,” “presently,” “efficiently,” and so on. Some of the most important questions are about other questions, such as “what questions should we be asking?”
I expect these problems to be simultaneous and mutually-reinforcing.
Theories of truth are motivated by questions such as:
Why is ‘snow is white’ true?
Correspondence theories of truth generally say something like ‘snow is white’ is true because it maps onto the whiteness of real snow. A general description of such theories is the idea that “truth consists in a relation to reality.”
In your proposal, it appears that reality is defined as an individual’s experience, while the relation is prediction. The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true because that sentence predicts (relation) experience (reality). As such, it would be beneficial to my understanding if you either:
Emphasized that you are proposing a particular correspondence theory of truth, rather than an alternative to correspondence theory, OR
More clearly described why this is not a correspondence theory of truth.
I’d enjoy talking this out with you if you have the stamina for a few more back-and-forths. I didn’t quite understand the wording of your counter argument, so I’m hoping you could spell it out in a bit more detail?
I haven’t seen these analyses into definitions and causes done with rigor. It also seems very hard to achieve rigor in these analyses, given that the information into individual psychology and sociology of specific institutions we’d need to do so successfully is hard to come by.
As such, the tack these authors take is often not to attempt such a rigorous analyses, but instead to go straight from their current model, composed of guesswork, to activist claims about how to improve the world and the level of destruction caused by that guesswork-based model.
The analysis, then, seems to be of a guesswork-based, ill-defined model with limited predictive power or falsifiability, involving a lot of arguing with organizations and people you perceive as propagandists for empirically and morally wrong views. It also seems to involve a tendency to discourage behaviors that could disconfirm the assumptions.
But I don’t want to tear into it too deeply. I recognize that simulacra levels point at something real. I also think that doing this too much would be hypocritical.
If I saw more attempts to falsify the model or use it to make predictions, I’d be happier with it.
I think it depends on the category of belief. My gut says that fiction is particularly good at instilling beliefs about things like:
What constitutes moral behavior
Normal and effective modes of social interaction; the mechanics of social status
What constitutes a normal level of beauty, power, wealth, intelligence, wit
I think that fiction can be powerfully misleading on these subjects. Nevertheless, I don’t agree with the OP’s argument that we should avoid fiction. That seems to me an example of safety culture taken to an extreme. I don’t feel a need to helicopter parent my own mind!