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Persuasion through status rather than argument

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Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#61

Post by Kye »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
tsimionescu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the main point about the hyperloop was the vacuum tube, not the maglev part. And the vacuum tube doesn't actually work. It's not actually feasible to create a vacuum tube hundreds of km long. It's just about physically possible, but it's not really technologically feasible - not for a system that is supposed to be in constant operation all year long. It's also important to remember that vacuum tube trains a…

And besides that you don't have to have a really good vacuum, you just have to have a 'good enough' vacuum that you can attain high speed without losing the stabilizing effect of a bunch of air constrained by the walls of a tube. Bonus points of you can get the air to move at a speed a bit slower than your vehicle, more bonus points if you can use the air to propel your vehicle. But: it's probably still a dumb idea,…

I'm still waiting on the giant pneumatic tubes from Futurama.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#62

Post by jacquesm »

Apocryphon wrote: post #46
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But super conductors do exist and room temperature superconductors may be possible. Nobody has ruled that out at all.

Yeah but why did so many people take those guys so seriously before their work was replicated? Shouldn’t extraordinary claims be filtered early before we give them the time of day?

I'm pretty sure that most people that have a basic idea of materials science were simply intrigued (myself amongst them) because there wasn't anything that ruled it out and it seemed like a potentially promising path. And obviously: the truth would come out anyway given enough time. The HN threads of the time make for interesting reading: I think a lot of people approach technological progress from the point of something very close to wishful thinking, their enthusiasm isn't proportional to the likelihood of the thing being true but to the perceived good a particular invention would do if it were real. And that then overwhelms any kind of reasoning ability. Incidentally: that may well be as good an answer as I can provide to the original question posed by this article.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#63

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #37
hcks wrote: post #2

Can the author provide example of dumb ideas? Or is it "dumb ideas" == "ideas I disagree with" More generally, it seems like the recipe of this breed of substack author is to take a basic object level opinion e.g. "I don’t like pronoun people" or "AI people are dumb" and turn it a whole pseudo intellectual rant without ever getting to the point.

If you can remember it, the American media and foreign policy establishment was fully in support of the war in Iraq. That actually is a really good example of what the author describes because I'm sure many knew it was a bad idea but went along with it to preserve their careers. I think we should be charitable with the author and not assume a "dumb idea" is something he disagrees with, but rather is something that wa…

Well - he quotes The Cato Institute. And the graphic is clear enough, I think.

The rhetorical sleight of hand is that it's not true that feeling you're being censored - and needing to self-censor - is the same as actually being censored.

Self-censorship and self-selection are endemic in the corporate world, and the associated beliefs are mostly taken for granted without dissent.

You're not going to get far in fintech, management consulting, or media channels such as Fox if you start questioning why so many people are poor, ill, and homeless.

Similarly, if you work for FAANG you're not going to have a job for long if you start suggesting these BigCos should reinvent themselves as worker co-ops.

That's a very different kind of argument to the one about pronouns, because most people are not actually threatened in real terms by (say) LGBTQIA+ or unionisation.

Of course plenty of people are just fine with how things are and the article is right to the extent that it points out that ideological conformity is a middle class luxury.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#64

Post by ethanbond »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #37
hcks wrote: post #2

Can the author provide example of dumb ideas? Or is it "dumb ideas" == "ideas I disagree with" More generally, it seems like the recipe of this breed of substack author is to take a basic object level opinion e.g. "I don’t like pronoun people" or "AI people are dumb" and turn it a whole pseudo intellectual rant without ever getting to the point.

If you can remember it, the American media and foreign policy establishment was fully in support of the war in Iraq. That actually is a really good example of what the author describes because I'm sure many knew it was a bad idea but went along with it to preserve their careers. I think we should be charitable with the author and not assume a "dumb idea" is something he disagrees with, but rather is something that wa…

I mean you can also just read the author’s other content which is mostly whining about woke-ism but with lots of Substack intellectualism piled on top.

Edit: Just to specifically point out the effects of this author’s “motivation,” the cited article on myside bias actually doesn’t say this:

> Students and graduates of top universities are more prone to myside bias. They are more likely to “evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes.”

It says everyone is prone to myside bias, and that more intelligent people are less prone to detecting it in themselves. This is important due to what it implies about the inverse. If it’s true that the woke lib professors are more prone to forming their beliefs based on their social surroundings, it’d suggest they’re more liable to be wrong. If, however, everyone is liable to form beliefs in this way (which they are), then there’s no implication whatsoever about truthfulness on either side, at least not stemming from this effect.

And in fact, if anything, it’d suggest the exact opposite of what the author implies by virtue of a really simple, obvious fact: an expert’s social circle is more likely to be well-informed on the domain of expertise than the social circle of a complete outsider.

Exceptions obviously exist and experts ought to be questioned vigorously, but to suggest that social circles are have spent collectively zero time learning about and thinking about an area are going to have a better grasp on that area than a group of individuals who have spent careers in it is really just dismissing the entire concept of expertise — the concept of learning — altogether.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#65

Post by jacquesm »

imtringued wrote: post #50
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But super conductors do exist and room temperature superconductors may be possible. Nobody has ruled that out at all.

You are missing the point of the article. People gobbled it up with the justification that random researchers on twitter "replicated" the results under the assumption that these anonymous researchers are putting their entire career on the line and therefore should be paid attention to. That is literally playing into the point the article is making. I.e. people believing lies because the information came from a higher…

Some did, but not everybody did. I recall those threads vividly and I tried very hard to keep an even keel and to keep it all grounded in evidence. But a lot of wishful thinking happened as well as categorical rejection and these had the same element in common: a lack of evidence. Though the categorical rejection faction had history on their side I still think that that's just an argument from statistics without any relevant insight in to the subject matter.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#66

Post by ethanbond »

Tainnor wrote: post #60
fallingknife wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't read any criticism of capitalism because there is basically none. 99% of it is just people claiming that some abstract bad thing in human society is due to "capitalism" without any sort of argument that would actually rise to the level of what I would call criticism.

In an unregulated market, capital very naturally tends to accumulate more capital - while, if you have nothing, it's very hard to build up capital in the first place. Which means that, if this continues indefinitely, more and more things belong to fewer and fewer people - which is exactly what we've been seeing over the last couple of decades.

Also: externalities.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#67

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #49

We should not conflate what is ostensibly “intelligence” with wisdom, virtue, and character. Without genuine virtue, the mind cannot function properly. Without a spine, without virtue, temptations to throw the truth under the bus for the sake of lesser goods easily overwhelm. It leads to the misuse and abuse of intelligence. It leads to skillful evasion of the truth. It leads to rationalization rather than reason. Th…

I thought about that myself since I actually self-censored lately despite my free-speech belief. As I am learning, the belief is not as strong as the drive to survive and comfort. It is disheartening in a way. I was expecting more of myself. On the other, it offered a look into the mirror.

I an easily argue it is wisdom or even that there is good and right of me to focus on my family's well-being, but I know those are still just rationalizations.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#68

Post by rsynnott »

cornholio wrote: post #38
quickthrower2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Madoff, WeWork, Theranos, NFTs, … Looking ahead… Probably these vector db company valuations, most companies doing AWS competitor DX plays.

All of those listed were well executed financial frauds. I don't think successful people are particularly more likely to fall for scams - they just have the necessary capital/disposable income and are targeted by more sophisticated scammers. I think the author thinks more along the lines of Steve Jobs trying to cure his cancer with herbal tea, Elon Musk sleep depriving himself into a twittering idiot, Scientology, NL…

I mean, define “well executed”. Theranos, in particular, it’s notable that very little of their money came from _conventional_ sources (traditional VCs, sovereign wealth funds etc). It was largely, essentially, _personal_ investment by stupid rich people; often via a family office, but ultimately at the direction of the stupid rich person. IIRC one attempt by Theranos to get investment from a real VC collapsed because they _could not provide audited accounts_. Like, they didn’t even have a fake set, they were not providing them to their investors _at all_.

I don’t think that any of the named ones were particularly well-executed, and people were trying to warn that all of them were problems for a while. Madoff might be the closest, but even there it was verging on being an open secret that there was something up; again, Madoff’s investors were not actually that sophisticated.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#69

Post by lettergram »

hcks wrote: post #2

Can the author provide example of dumb ideas? Or is it "dumb ideas" == "ideas I disagree with" More generally, it seems like the recipe of this breed of substack author is to take a basic object level opinion e.g. "I don’t like pronoun people" or "AI people are dumb" and turn it a whole pseudo intellectual rant without ever getting to the point.

IMO the author wrote a list of reasons to avoid the real intellectual discussion around debating ideas. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever a “dumb idea”, it’s really poor reasoning or lack of information that I see as the issue.

For instance, take the “moon deniers” that is the idea being dismissed by “correct” people. When in reality there a whole range of arguments — “we landed on the moon, recordings were faked” to “aliens told us to tell everyone we landed”, etc it’s the reasoning that matters. Quite often “smart” people have the same information as everyone else. That’s also why IMO “smart” people are equally likely to believe in conspiracies as anyone else, they have the same info.

Re: Persuasion through status rather than argument

#70

Post by jacquesm »

cinntaile wrote: post #45
eatonphil wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various folks into the 21st century. Edit: point taken. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_...

The replies don't make a ton of sense, did you change the contents of your comment?

Yes, the comment was changed considerably. Originally it gave Leonardo Da Vinci's attempts to create a perpetual motion machine as an example of a smart and successful person falling for a dumb idea.
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