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The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

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Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#61

Post by red_admiral »

stagas wrote: post #54
red_admiral wrote: post #17

Since this is freshman-level "think, don't believe", here's an equally valid counterargument at roughly the same level. In Heinrich's book "The Secret of our Success" on cumulative cultural evolution, he gives an example of pre-Columbus American cultures whose diet was based on bitter manioc (a.k.a. cassava). Like the name suggests, in its raw form it's too bitter to eat, but these cultures evolved a set of tradition…

"Think for yourself" is humanity's adaptation of forager ants[0]. Sure, many will be lost, but we need those people that hunt for novelty because it eventually benefits everyone else. You could even think of historical figures that advanced society as the forager ants of our culture. I'm not sure what the benefit would be if everyone chose to be one, though. The hive mind is an interesting phenomenon, it seems that t…

I recently watched a lecture series on Machine Learning and the speaker talked about how one of the deeper principles is balancing exploration and exploitation. Spend all your time doing one or the other and you'll never get anywhere, but the optimal balance depends on the problem and the environment (no free lunch etc.)

Forager ants, Galileos and people who just boil their cassava are the explorers I guess, and probably humanity needs a proportion of them because every now and then one of them will find a herb with amazing medicinal properties or something. That may be an evolutionary advantage even if 90% of explorers die eating something poisonous before they've found anything useful.

Maybe startups are today's explorers? Being very generous to VC-backed startups, possibly 90% of them fail, but on average they're still a good investment - just ask Paul Graham.

I'm less sure about the full veil as an example because there's a lot of debate about what exactly the Prophet's instruction for women to cover their head meant; it's certainly interpreted differently across different Islamic cultures (a hijab is not an abaya is not a burqa etc.); and covering of the face as opposed to the hair is definitely not universal in Islam (the headscarf/hijab leaves the face free for example).

Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#62

Post by red_admiral »

yellowapple wrote: post #50
Smithalicious wrote: post #36

The buffet example is bad. You can't really go back in a buffet, so it's a gamble where the certain outcome those first things (which you can see). Furthermore it doesn't factor in the cost of having to walk more to get the later items. My only take away from it is that people don't really have as strong a preference for buffet food as they might think. I'd also wager that avoiding "bad" food is much more important t…

Not to mention that the way the article presents that "study" doesn't make it sound like they controlled for the very real possibility of "everything in the buffet is appealing to around 75% of buffet eaters, so any reordering will result in 75% grabbing the first thing they see". Plus, the point of a buffet (for me at least, being the fatass I am) is to try a little bit of everything, so unless it's something I alre…

In a breakfast buffet, I always go for savoury over sweet, so I'm immune to someone putting the muffins first. I'm probably "vulnerable" to croissants versus sliced bread first though.

A friend of mine is a vegetarian; I don't imagine putting the ham first in the buffet line would affect her much either.

Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#63

Post by jancsika »

KirinDave wrote: post #20

Is the thesis of this article: "it's important not to consume media or accept popular opinions that trigger cognitive dissonance BECAUSE our preferences are often determined by arbitrary aspects of our environment, bolstered by post-hoc rationalization?" If so, that seems like the exact opposite of a good idea, because the dissonance is probably there because of the exact same arbitrary forces. It also seems to imply…

> Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I think this realization leads to the need to challenge everything about your environment,

If you understand systems-- why and how they work-- you don't need to necessarily challenge everything. In fact, if you don't sufficiently understand a system then "challenging everything" can signal a lack of awareness and tacitly limit your options.

For example, the local mechanic can look at the queue of other customers and decide it isn't worth the time to attempt to convince Socrates that fixing the steering fluid leak is urgent.

In fact it's "turtles all the way down," because even when Socrates told me of that encounter, I could see just how deep down the rabbit hole I'd have to go to have any effect on their course of action. So I did my due diligence with the weaker position of, "I've never gotten a suspicious estimate from that mechanic." Same with at least two other people Socrates talked to.

Then one morning Socrates was late to work because the same car wouldn't run. Socrates had to skip lunch and pay extra for a tow out to that same mechanic.

It was odd how Socrates suddenly seemed so reluctant to delve into the exact nature of the problem with the car at that point.

Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#64

Post by markoman »

Smithalicious wrote: post #36

The buffet example is bad. You can't really go back in a buffet, so it's a gamble where the certain outcome those first things (which you can see). Furthermore it doesn't factor in the cost of having to walk more to get the later items. My only take away from it is that people don't really have as strong a preference for buffet food as they might think. I'd also wager that avoiding "bad" food is much more important t…

I have a hard time accepting that had they placed cabbage or broccoli (or other unpopular items) at the head of the offerings, it would still be taken so often.

Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#65

Post by watwut »

Fellshard wrote: post #41
watwut wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First problem is expecting expert answer to be simple, easy to understand, without asterisks and conditions. Experts often disagree about nuances or have competing theories. Second issue is tendency to take the first confident guy with simple answer as expert. The folding expert is pretty often not considered expert by people who deal with the field - he is typically just someone confident and well spoken.

And how is the layman supposed to differentiate between the two? It's a fairly intractable problem. Credentializing ends up having the opposite effect of creating an orthodoxy that freezes the ability to think.

Well, credentials would be one thing. The lack of credentials sometimes is not grave, but most of confident non experts don't have right ones. They may be experts on something else.

Second thing is, if too many credentialed people object, there might be issue.

Third, lack of nuance, lack of asterisk and too much confidence are bad signs.

Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#66

Post by ncmncm »

red_admiral wrote: post #61
stagas wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Think for yourself" is humanity's adaptation of forager ants[0]. Sure, many will be lost, but we need those people that hunt for novelty because it eventually benefits everyone else. You could even think of historical figures that advanced society as the forager ants of our culture. I'm not sure what the benefit would be if everyone chose to be one, though. The hive mind is an interesting phenomenon, it seems that t…

I recently watched a lecture series on Machine Learning and the speaker talked about how one of the deeper principles is balancing exploration and exploitation. Spend all your time doing one or the other and you'll never get anywhere, but the optimal balance depends on the problem and the environment (no free lunch etc.) Forager ants, Galileos and people who just boil their cassava are the explorers I guess, and prob…

The Greeks in Socrates's time also shrouded and secluded women in high-status families, for similar reasons as Muslim extremists do today. There was no religious smokescreen in thar case.

But many women in burqas consider it liberating not to be obliged to wear makeup and track fashion. Invisibility can be a power, in context. Maybe everyone should have a burqa on hand, for those times. You can conceal a lot in there that no one suspects.

Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#67

Post by l0b0 »

red_admiral wrote: post #17

Since this is freshman-level "think, don't believe", here's an equally valid counterargument at roughly the same level. In Heinrich's book "The Secret of our Success" on cumulative cultural evolution, he gives an example of pre-Columbus American cultures whose diet was based on bitter manioc (a.k.a. cassava). Like the name suggests, in its raw form it's too bitter to eat, but these cultures evolved a set of tradition…

How could you distinguish between pointless or even damaging customs and advantageous ones? Spending vast resources looking for basically anything at all which gives the in-group a statistical advantage is not going to be cost-effective – researchers could probably come up with millions of different reasons which would all have to be tested. My expectation would be that the vast majority of weird customs are not useful, and that we are interested in examples like manioc processing because they are the rare exception rather than the rule.

Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#69

Post by FeepingCreature »

stagas wrote: post #59
FeepingCreature wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what to tell you. This is not how logic works.

We don't run on logic, trust me. I've spent the week writing a text editor. I can trash logic completely. If you want to know, all absolutely logical pieces of first-pass code failed terribly at edge cases that were completely invisible and counter-intuitive. Not because the code was wrong, but because it was right. I had to re-examine what I held to be true and came to realize that we make sense of the world by assu…

Well, since we don't run on logic, I'll just go ahead and disregard this argument regardless.

Re: The Modern-Day Mind-Killer

#70

Post by KirinDave »

jancsika wrote: post #63
KirinDave wrote: post #20

Is the thesis of this article: "it's important not to consume media or accept popular opinions that trigger cognitive dissonance BECAUSE our preferences are often determined by arbitrary aspects of our environment, bolstered by post-hoc rationalization?" If so, that seems like the exact opposite of a good idea, because the dissonance is probably there because of the exact same arbitrary forces. It also seems to imply…

> Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I think this realization leads to the need to challenge everything about your environment, If you understand systems-- why and how they work-- you don't need to necessarily challenge everything. In fact, if you don't sufficiently understand a system then "challenging everything" can signal a lack of awareness and tacitly limit your options. For example, the local mechanic can look…

> If you understand systems-- why and how they work-- you don't need to necessarily challenge everything. In fact, if you don't sufficiently understand a system then "challenging everything" can signal a lack of awareness and tacitly limit your options.

But how would you reach that recognition of the system with confidence without interrogating it? What if your confidence in the system itself was informed by coincidence, bias and genetic fallacies?

> For example, the local mechanic can look at the queue of other customers and decide it isn't worth the time to attempt to convince Socrates that fixing the steering fluid leak is urgent.

Oh my, "something something Engels was wrong..."

Nevermind that, Socrates might still be inclined in an era of plentiful information to get a second opinion and quote on a damage car if the bill is quite large. This is not at all unusual. Perhaps we might appeal to a parent who says, "Oh yeah, that mechanic has never left me dissatisfied" and then at least we are slightly decreasing the chance that pure proximity and chance defined our preferences?

Which you in fact suggest, in the next paragraph. Is this not at least some form of interrogation?

> In fact it's "turtles all the way down," because even when Socrates told me of that encounter, I could see just how deep down the rabbit hole I'd have to go to have any effect on their course of action. So I did my due diligence with the weaker position of, "I've never gotten a suspicious estimate from that mechanic." Same with at least two other people Socrates talked to.

It seems though like even this modest decision is something the article urges us not to do, because evidence self-doubt or deliberation is itself a novel "mind killer". The article itself is somewhat incoherent on this point, suggesting that:

>> We live in the age of abundance. It's never been easier to passively consume the opinions of others. It's also never been more dangerous.

Isn't a professional and authoritative opinion exactly what Socrates is paying his mechanic Euthyphro for here? I think maybe you've misinterpreted the article. The article urges folks to avoid consuming the opinions of people who don't agree with you already, because their opinions might be compelling.

>> Our minds - when fed the first piece of information you come across - are like crops without a ring of protection. They’re vulnerable and waiting to be destroyed. By being deliberate about what we consume and what we believe, we develop a ring of protection.

Which is a bit weird because, well, did these opinions the author wants to defend emerge from a perfect void housing only the spirit of Descartes? Is not the ultimate implicit and coincidental bias the one our parents furnished us with? The author is arguing that people dare not consider any opinions than these, because they might be invalidated.

But it's not clear why that would be so bad. Who says changing your mind when new information presented is bad? If we're prone to proximity biases, genetic fallacies and post-hoc rationalizations; then aren't we approaching something closer to objectivity by re-evaluating our opinions over time? While we will never remove all bias, we can certainly strive to remove some and that seems somehow better if we accept the article's premise that it's somehow bad to be manipulated by others.

Honestly, I wonder if you read the article carefully.

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