Quarks, the only allowed causally efficacious entities in the universe, have a lot to answer for. Quarks are causing the US economy to falter, quarks are killing our soldiers in Iraq, quarks are behind communism, nazism, racism, and people who drive too slow in the fast lane. Quarks made me write this obnoxious and inane comment. Damn you, quarks!
mtraven
While trying to avoid bitter partisan sniping is probably a good thing, I think the goal of avoiding politics is naive. Everyone is enmeshed in politics, like it or not. To deny politics is a form of political ideology itself. There seems to be a strong libertarian bias to this crowd, for instance. Libertarians seek to replace politics with markets, but that is in itself a political goal.
Another sad truth: even if we disavow responsibility for the actions of our political leaders, others will hold us responsible for them, given that we are a democracy and all. See here for some thoughts on how we are forced into group identification whether we like it or not.
Politics is not optional and if you are interested in overcoming bias I suggest that it’s better to acknowledge that fact than bury it.
Greene and Haidt have coauthored papers together, so I would guess they are aware of each other’s work!
Of course water flows downhill because it wants to be lower. It just is not in its nature to be able to want anything else, which distinguishes it from more flexible want-systems like ourselves.
As to the supernatural, I suggest a useful analogy is mathematical objects, like 5, pi, the complex plane, or the Pythagorean theorem. These objects are not physical; they are not made of quarks nor reducible to them, even though any concrete instantiation of them (or instantiation of a thought about them) must involve some physical process; they are non-natural even though they pervade nature. Nobody here would deny the right of mathematicians to be pragmatic Platonists who treat mathematical objects as real things that they can think about and perform mental manipulations on. By analogy, I would at least consider the possibility that theologians have a similar right to make statements about their non-physical, non-natural object of study.
Not to steal Elezer’s thunder, but people here would be interested in Gary Drescher’s book Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics, which treats quantum physics, the free-will illusion, Newcomb’s Problem, and a number of other relevant areas, from a strictly materialist viewpoint (which I’ve tried to label, unsucessfully so far, as ultramaterialism).
Rationality fights on the side with the heaviest artillery. —Napoleon Blownapart
A nit: people with polydactyly or trisomies are still human. But that supports the larger point. See also George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things which develops a prototype model of categorization.
Susan Sontag pointed out that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t cowards a week after the event, and took an enormous amount of shit for it. And in fact there were a great many people engaging in relatively sane, measured reactions after 9/11. But they were drowned out by the much louder negative death spiral.
Many conflicts are really formed out of two mutually reinforcing negative death spirals. In this case, our overreaction to 9/11 caused us to take actions that produced more hatred of us in the Islamic world, leading to more conflict, leading to further hatred on both sides. This is a very basic dynamic underlying war.
A few points:
Philisophy is (by definition, more or less) meta to everything else. By its nature, it has to question everything, including things that here seem to be unuqestionable, such as rationality and reductionism. The elevation of these into unquestionable dogma creates a somewhat cult-like environment.
Often people who dismiss philosophy end up going over the same ground philosophers trode hundreds or thousands of years ago. That’s one reason philosophers emphasize the history of ideas so much. It’s probably a mistake to think you are so smart you will avoid all the pitfalls they’ve already fallen into.
I agree with the linked post of Eliezer’s that much of analytic philosophy (and AI) is mostly just slapping formal terms over unexamined everyday ideas, which is why I find most of it bores me to tears.
Continental philosophy, on the other hand, if you can manage to make sense of it, actually can provide new perspectives on the world, and in that sense is worthwhile. Don’t assume that just because you can’t understand it, it doesn’t have anything to say. Complaining because they use what seems like an impenetrable language is about on the level of an American traveling to Europe and complaining that the people there don’t speak English. That said, Sturgeon’s law definitely applies, perhaps at the 99% level.
I’m recomending Bruno Latour to everyone these days. He’s a French sociologist of science and philosopher, and if you can get past the very French style of abstraction he uses, he can be mind-blowing in the manner described above.
This is a guy who calls for the assassination of politicians on his blog. I’m not sure you want him on your side, for both tactical and ethical reasons. Not to mention that an easy resort to violence doesn’t really suggest rationalism, but YMMV.
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.
This seems like an odd point in time to be singing the glories of how smart elites are. The presumably pretty smart elites in the financial industry have just screwed up big time. This has become so common that it has generated an entire subgenre of finance books. Are these guys “full of life”, or full of something else?
Intelligence is often devoted to optimizing the wrong things. It’s overrated. The ability to optimize some quantity is not what you should be optimizing.
This post is based on the (very common) mistake of equating religious practice and religious faith. Religion is only incidentally about what you believe; the more important components are community and ritual practice. From that perspective, it is a lot easier to believe that religion can be beneficial. What you think about the Trinity, for instance, is less important than the fact that you go to Mass and see other members of your community there and engage in these bizarre activities together.
There is an enormous blindspot about society in the libertarian/rationalist community, of which the above is just one manifestation.
The Amazon example doesn’t seem to be that illustrative of the concept you are trying to get across, mostly because the reason academic institutions don’t sell computation is that they aren’t set up for it, not that commerce is considered evil. They have no problem charging for other services, such as tuition.
Here’s a better one: police, military, and government in general. Everyone in that role has slightly different moral codes than the rest of us, in that they are able to legitimately employ violence in various forms, and for the most part we are willing to cede that role to them. The government is our shabbos goy, although too often a master rather than servant.
There is a movement called Taking Children Seriously that advocates that a parent should never deploy arbitrary authority, but always reason a child into doing what they ought to do. I think they are nuts, but some people I respect respect them, and it might appeal to rationalists. They are somehow based on Popperian epistemology.
In a related vein I just made a Facebook page for the Association of Anarchist Parents, an organization that I have envisioned ever since my own kids were old enough to have wills of their own.
There is no such thing as a free market.
“Try to think the thought that hurts the most.”
This is exactly why I like to entertain religious thoughts. My background, training, and inclination are to be a thoroughgoing atheist materialist, so I find that trying to make sense of religious ideas is good mental exercise. Feel the burn!
In that vein, here is an audio recording of Robert Aumann on speaking on “The Personality of God”.
Also, the more seriously religious had roughly the same idea, or maybe it’s the opposite idea. The counterfactuality of religious ideas is part of their strength, apparently.
The obvious example of a horror so great that God cannot tolerate it, is death—true death, mind-annihilation. I don’t think that even Buddhism allows that.
This is sort of a surprising thing to hear from someone with a Jewish religious background. Jews spend very little attention and energy on the afterlife. (And your picture of Buddhism is simplistic at best, but other people have already dealt with that). I’ve heard the interesting theory that this stems from a reaction against their Egyptian captors, who were of course obsessed with death and the afterlife.Religion aside, I truly have trouble understanding why people here think death is so terrible, and why it’s so bloody important to deep-freeze your brain in the hopes it might be revved up again some time in the future. For one thing, nothing lasts forever, so death is inevitable no matter how much you postpone it. For another, since we are all hard-core materialists here, let me remind you that the flow of time is an illusion, spacetime is eternal, and the fact that your own personal self occupies a chunk of spacetime that is not infinite in any direction is just a fact of reality. It makes about as much sense to be upset that your mind doesn’t exist after you die as it does to be upset that it didn’t exist before you were born. Lastly, what makes you so damn important that you need to live forever? Get over yourself. After you die, there will be others taking over your work, assuming it was worth doing. Leave some biological and intellectual offspring and shuffle off this mortal coil and give a new generation a chance. That’s how progress gets made—“a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”. (Max Planck, quoted by Thomas Kuhn)
Interesting post. Judaism has managed to survive for thousands of years, and maybe part of that is a high copying fidelity for its memes. It seems there are two ways for cultures to ensure long-term survival—extreme rigidity (as in this case) or in extreme adaptability (which is better at learning but may not be able to preserve group identity).
Not sure what that has to do with overcoming bias, except to suggest that it may be in a culture’s interest to maintain their biases.
And what’s weird is that when Judaism historically encountered the Enlightenment, it resulted in people who are notably smart and adaptable as individuals and as a group.
Here’s the exact opposite advice. I wouldn’t even bother posting it here except it’s from one of the major rationalists of the 20th century:
“In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.… Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.” —Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy