I’m new to this blog, still making my way through the Sequence Highlights, so I’m still going through the process of applying rationalist critiques to myself for the first time. In this spirit, I asked myself if I avoid my beliefs’ real weaknesses when I attempt to challenge my political ideology (I am not religious, so that seemed like the next best thing). The answer is: no, of course I don’t. But I think it for reasons not described in this post. Frankly, the reason I instinctively challenge the strongest points of my political ideology is because these are the reasons I subscribe to the ideology in the first place. Most people are happy to admit that their political ideology is imperfect; after all, a coherent ideology is like a web of ideas, where no single idea can really be separated. When you accept a political ideology, you generally accept the good with the bad. Where losing faith in some aspects of a religion is enough to shake your faith entirely, the same is not true with political ideology...
...unless it should be. Perhaps we should only strive to believe in individual policy ideas and solutions, wholly separated from political ideologies. Perhaps we should only seek to construct the most accurate model of the world and then seek to make individual improvements, instead of conceiving of entirely different models. But I fear that this approach forces us into the status quo. It may be true that, for instance, abolishing capitalism in favour of some version of socialism would generally improve the world, but forcing ourselves to only think in terms of modifications to capitalism would never allow us to even consider it. It precludes us from making the necessary systemic critiques to get us there. Our sincere attempt at unideological rationality turns out to be deeply ideological in practice.
Again, I am new here, so if this topic actually covered somewhere else on LessWrong (or my criticisms are addressed indirectly by something else posted here), then I would love to read it.
I’m new to this blog, still making my way through the Sequence Highlights, so I’m still going through the process of applying rationalist critiques to myself for the first time. In this spirit, I asked myself if I avoid my beliefs’ real weaknesses when I attempt to challenge my political ideology (I am not religious, so that seemed like the next best thing). The answer is: no, of course I don’t. But I think it for reasons not described in this post. Frankly, the reason I instinctively challenge the strongest points of my political ideology is because these are the reasons I subscribe to the ideology in the first place. Most people are happy to admit that their political ideology is imperfect; after all, a coherent ideology is like a web of ideas, where no single idea can really be separated. When you accept a political ideology, you generally accept the good with the bad. Where losing faith in some aspects of a religion is enough to shake your faith entirely, the same is not true with political ideology...
...unless it should be. Perhaps we should only strive to believe in individual policy ideas and solutions, wholly separated from political ideologies. Perhaps we should only seek to construct the most accurate model of the world and then seek to make individual improvements, instead of conceiving of entirely different models. But I fear that this approach forces us into the status quo. It may be true that, for instance, abolishing capitalism in favour of some version of socialism would generally improve the world, but forcing ourselves to only think in terms of modifications to capitalism would never allow us to even consider it. It precludes us from making the necessary systemic critiques to get us there. Our sincere attempt at unideological rationality turns out to be deeply ideological in practice.
Again, I am new here, so if this topic actually covered somewhere else on LessWrong (or my criticisms are addressed indirectly by something else posted here), then I would love to read it.