No worries, and thank you for clarifying. :) I didn’t reply because I was leaving the next day for Vibecamp and didn’t have spare time. I’m back now and will post a reply tonight.
Eneasz
Karma: 3,451
Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #55 (Tuesday 10/28)
Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #54 (Tuesday 10/21)
Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #53 (Tuesday 10/14)
Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #52 (Tuesday 10/7)
Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #51 (Tuesday 9/30)
Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #50 (Tuesday 9/23)
Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #49 (Tuesday 9/16)
Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #48 (Tuesday 9/2)
This dates back to 2019. I have had a lot of updates and changed views since then, yes.
How To Believe False Things
TBC episode w Dave Kasten from Control AI on AI Policy
John came on The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast to talk with us about this a couple weeks ago, and it’s now available for anyone who’d like to hear the conversation :)
SuperBabies podcast with Gene Smith
I don’t expect the factors to change, they are downstream of our social fabric. A different society won’t have these factors, but ours does
(sorry for the long delay)
This is part of my point. Our culture will not survive such measures. A different culture will result.
I’m familiar, have interviewed them twice, and linked to them in the OP in the culture-ectomy section. :) I don’t think their lives work as a model for the majority of people in our culture, and suspect their children either will revert to mean in TFR, or will be drastically different culturally and thus an example of what I’m pointing at with this post.
Revealed preference is my cheeky answer here. “If I had infinite time/money” and “what I am willing to do IRL” are two different types of “want”, and I was talking more about the latter.
The point of the post is that much of what we believe is acquired from social proof (Everything Everyone Says vs Science Illiterate Jerks), plus we update on synthetic data (via Fictional Evidence) all the time, esp when that evidence aligns with social proof. The few counter observations we personally make are easily overwhelmed by the weight of everyone who is smarter and more numerous + the true observations we make that confirm + observations we make on synthetic data.
I’ll address your individual points below, but you seem to be making the same mistake you accuse me of making. You say I was just making excuses for not seeing things and defending my past self as being reasonable instead of identifying how I could have gotten the correct answer. Then you go on to list individual things and demanding to know what my excuse is for nothing seeing those things. Calling me to defend my past ignorance. I’ll go ahead and do that (because, full disclosure, I already wrote that part, then realized it’s useless crap, but didn’t want to delete an hour of typing), but it won’t be satisfying because it’s exactly what you say you don’t want more of.
My thesis remains that the preponderance of evidence available to me supported the consensus of my social milieu, and this was not an accident. I was presented with a false world, explanations for the seams in the presentation, with strong incentives to accept confirming evidence and discount the relatively sparse disconfirming evidence. How could I have gotten the correct answer? By withdrawing from the social reality that guided my interactions with the world and being exposed to a social reality with a different narrative to explain the same observations. This is, in fact, how I eventually got to the correct answer. The post was pointing out that this was what happened.
Is it unreasonable to accept the world we are presented with? I don’t think one has any other option. The best you can hope for is enough discernment to swallow the fruit of knowledge when you finally stumble upon it, rather than spitting it out and returning to the garden where it’s safe.
On to the excuses:
1. Sure, to an extent. I don’t think a toddler can beat up an adult. I do (did?) think Jackie Chan can beat up Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. And if Jackie Chan can do that, a woman with the right training and determination should be able to beat up an average man. Size isn’t everything, and I thought size was far less important back then.
2. In my younger years I certainly had argued with people about this, and I thought I had won. Chyna could beat me up. Xena could def beat up teenage Eneasz, and maybe even current-day Eneasz (I have no experience in combat, I’ve never thrown a punch post-puberty). As for arguing with people re world cup… what would I argue about? The question was about pay for the womens vs mens teams. That’s mostly about men being too sexist to watch womens sports even tho they’re equally good (I thought). A match would be cool to see but it wouldn’t change their sexism, any more than the Battle of the Sexes in tennis did (yes, I now know why that match doesn’t represent a real contest. I didn’t know that before, and neither did David Letterman https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IfM9x2WxLFU ). Also I think people do talk about the world’s strongest woman and the world’s fastest woman and etc all the time. Like, I even thought that until reading your comment. They do, right?
3. So.… not really? Literally did not fight with any women, never had direct tests of strength. My female friends were all just as feminist as me. They did not ask for men to do things for them. When I moved I would invite my female friends to help move as well. They came and hauled heavy boxes back and forth with the rest of us. They helped move furniture, and didn’t complain. Likely they were working harder and I didn’t notice. If they preferentially took lighter loads I didn’t notice. You act like I had innumerable occasions to witness vast differences in feats of strength but how often do you and a female friend actually try doing the exact same physical feat sequentially? If it happens once or twice per year then even if you notice it you can chalk it up to a fluke. I was a nerdy out-of-shape accountant & video gamer, not a farmer. When I started working out in my 30s I definitely noticed I could do pullups in a way that astounded my gf/wife, but that already fit under “Men have a bit more upper body strength.” I could lift heavier things than her now, but that’s because I trained on lifting heavy things! She did not. Regular day-to-day outperformance was easily covered by “I’m now a person that works out to cultivate muscle, she’s still a person who doesn’t so she’s stuck back at the muscle levels of sedentary Eneasz.”
And yes, that sounds stupid to both of us NOW. That’s the point of the post. When all your evidence for 30 years goes one way, and then some small observable things trend against that later in life but all the other evidence (social proof, expert consensus, observed fitness levels) continues to support the old priors, who are you gonna believe?
4. How did slaves that were physically far stronger than their owners, and outnumbered them, remain enslaved? Every single type of revolt you mentioned—how did the oppressed classes end up in that position? It wasn’t because the oppressors had a massive genetic advantage in grip strength and arm-reach. How does a single tyrant with tiny percentage of the population as loyalists keep an entire nation under a reign of terror for decades, sometimes centuries via dynasty? Honestly all you have to do is look at any leftist rhetoric about oppressors right now and see exactly the arguments they use. Why do the capitalists continue to immiserate the 99%, or whatever? I bought these arguments. Many people still do.
5. Men went to war because men are violent monsters. Women aren’t. Individual women could still fight if they really wanted to, and some did. We had plenty of hero women that hid their gender and went off to fight and did just as good as the men. The US military was less sexist than most and DID have female soldiers! There was a whole damn movie about the first ones let in that demonstrated the ones willing to dedicate themselves to it were just as good as the men, and plenty of glowing media coverage of the first women in combat.
I could have stayed in this mindset forever, and many people are still in it. This is why I value the rationalist community so much. There isn’t any social good here that’s so important that it overrides trying to be (eventually, cumulatively) less wrong.