161–170 of 232 posts
The world's lack of good tools for assessing the truthfulness of arguments is my fault. Some things came up that stopped my work on the next iteration of https://howtruthful.com/ but only temporarily. Expect some big changes in 2024.
Your site currently has little food for thought.
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> Scott specifically though, has an established history of thinking through arguments that I find much better than most He has an established history of writing down detailed articles about arguments, yes. Unfortunately, a significant number of his articles contain schoolboy errors that anyone who wants to claim they are better at thinking through arguments than the average person should never have made. I'll mention…
While Scott does make errors, I've found he works hard to avoid making them and forthright when he does (e.g., not everyone has a Mistakes page in the main navigation bar of their site[1]) What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people" (e.g., he also refers to it as a "reign of terror" a few times, like those of Robespierre, Stali…
I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper into the central claim of the arrticle. If you're going to make this claim, you need to ask whether the UK and US have actually avoided such things, or merely made sure they happened in other countries instead.
The US under Woodrow Wilson enabled the Soviet Union to exist by failing to support the Kerensky government, even though the US had troops in the area, and by discouraging the other allied powers from helping on the grounds that everybody was already too exhausted after four years of war. (Not to mention that Communism wasn't of Russian origin; it was exported to Russia by American and British intellectuals, such as Jack Reed. And one of their reasons for doing so was that Communism was supposed to be more "democratic".)
The US, UK, and France created the conditions for the Nazis to take power in Germany by imposing such harsh terms in the Treaty of Versailles (terms which were nothing like what the Armistice had implicitly promised).
The UK under Chamberlain, along with France, enabled Hitler's Germany to conquer Eastern Europe by pursuing a policy of appeasement.
The US under FDR allowed Stalin to take over all of Eastern Europe at the end of WW II (which, btw, made WW II a failure in Europe since the stated objective was to free Eastern Europe from tyranny, and Stalin by any measure was a worse tyrant than Hitler) because FDR wanted to suck up to Stalin and be his friend. (For example, read the historical book Stalin's War.) And even before that, FDR and his administration (and the press, such as the New York Times) systematically lied to the American people about the true nature of Stalin's regime, which was well known to the US government (and to reporters who were there) in the 1930s. If the American people had known what was actually happening in Stalin's Russia, they would never have agreed to having the USSR as an ally in WW II or allowing the USSR to take over Eastern Europe.
The US allowed Mao and his Communists to take over China by withdrawing support for Chiang Kai-Shek. If the US had supported Chiang, the entire country of China would have a government that's basically the government Taiwan has now (since Taiwan is where Chiang and his supporters went when Mao drove them out of China). Imagine how much better the geopolitical situation would be if that were the case.
Sure, if you want to make hairsplitting distinctions, none of these counted as "state-sponsored violence" against the people of the US or UK. But Scott's central claim in the article is that it is repressive monarchy, not "democracy", that causes reigns of terror. Before making such a claim and exonerating "democracies", one should at least examine the possibility that the "democracies" actually enabled the reigns of terror. And when you examine that claim historically, you find that, yep, "democracies" were doing exactly that.
Summary: Scott Alexander recounts his gullibility to various well-reasoned crackpot arguments on a topic, and describes how he to decided to trust experts instead of investing time into learning enough to assess the topic for himself. Then he reflects on the nature of argument-accepting and its relation to rationality. I don’t think the term “learned helplessness” fits well here. It suggests a lack of agency, whereas…
He talks about the pitfalls of pure rationality. There can be competing explanatory frameworks for the same thing, and they often contradict each other. Rational arguments may seem rigorous like math, but are in practice standing on shifting sands. It ultimately comes down to what you decide to believe in. This is where traditional values and religion come at play.
The basic thing is that arguments involve mustering a series of plausible explanation for all the visible pieces of evidence, casting doubt on alternatives, etc. Before Galileo, philosophy had a huge series of very plausible explanations for natural phenomena, many if not all of which turned out to be wrong. But Galilean science didn't discover more by getting more effective arguments but by looking at the world, judging models by their simplicity and ability to make quantitative predictions and so-on.
Mathematics is pretty much the only place where air-tight arguments involving "for all" claims actually work. Science shows that reality corresponds to mathematical models but corresponds only approximately and so given a model-based claim can't be extended with an unlimited number of deductive steps.
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> Some people deal with complexity through science. This sounds great, until you realize that science is currently systematic (step by step) and not systemic (whole picture). Reality is made of interconnected systems. A systematic approach leaves blind spots. The counter argument is that human minds are limited and very few people in history are able keep even a large % of the entire system in their head. A huge prob…
The problem we face is being a culture of many specialists, with few generalists. Generalists are capable of managing a wide range of information and have the ability to transfer skills and knowledge between domains. You don't have to model an entire system in your head to understand the dynamics. That's a specialist, systematic point of view. The technology will only help if we change the culture and change how we e…
Sadly different fields of science can each take a lifetime to master, and even closely related fields use different jargon[1] internally, meaning that a person can be an expert in something, read a journal article about that topic but written by an expert in another field, and not fully understand what is being said w/o significant mental work translating concepts from how one field talks about them vs the language and terms the reader is used to from their own field of study.
[1] Defined as specialized language to make communication within the field easier
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If anything, Scott is underselling himself, and could probably argue circles against the average educated person. Debates are the rationalists bread and butter, and you should expect them to be better at you the same way you would expect a trained boxer to beat you in a fistfight.
I've been to dozens of rationalist meetups (I don't know why), people are constantly talking out of their ass while constantly referencing contrived rhetorical devices. A lot of "just asking questions", confidently asserting solutions to e.g. palestine, cartels, etc. and contending with things TV pundits say. I like some of Scott Alexander's writing, but "rationalists" in general online or IRL have not been very impr…
And if you know Mensa's reputation....
I think it is a trope that engineering is "black or white". Having been a professional engineer for 35 years, it is anything BUT. Everything is a threshold for negotiation, there is give and take in every design decision. There is no black-white anywhere I've ever seen, except freshman-year logic texts. Even with digital logic, in reality, there is no such thing as digital: slopes, thresholds, manufacturing variation…
At the very least I've been in the room a few times when this happened. The engineer says a few things. The non-engineer suggests something outside their wheel house. The engineer explains why it won't work or would be too expensive to work. Non-engineer accuses engineers of living in a colorless world without imagination.
The black and white thinking accusation is similar to the 50-50 chance of winning the lottery (either you do or you don't). That is, engineers only say if something can work or won't work so they're black and white. It kind of misses the nuance in what's happening.
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I have a hard time engaging deeply with philosophy. I've tried to get a good overview, but whenever I read the real scholarly work I find an assumption I hate on page 3 and cannot bear to engage with that assumption for a thousand further pages of close reading. I don't want to be the philosophical equivalent of those guys who pester physics professors with "I've unified gravity with quantum mechanics and I just need…
> I can’t pick up Kant or Hegele or Sartre Ah, there’s your problem, at least in my opinion/experience. You have to start at the beginning, read Plato’s Republic followed by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. When you read them don’t take them as fact but as a “living” historical foundation that will help you set the stage for reading increasingly more recent books.
Philosophy is so hard that most people don’t ever start In fact in my experience people who can push past this “epistemological learned helplessness” also tend to have significant problems with day to day living In a manner of speaking, I boil this down to how often you spend in different levels of thinking. I’m gonna go ahead and share a back-and-forth chat I had with ChatGPT on this precise topic the other day: htt…
Broke: Reading books or attending classes on philosophy and cognitive science to learn from hundreds of years of combined research from the world's greatest minds. Woke: Pulling up a new theory of intelligence and for why everyone else is too damn stupid for "fourth order thinking" out of thin air, talking to it about an LLM and deeming it so important it has to be shared with an online community.
Take a shot anytime a “rationalist” invokes Bayes. Long article for him to basically say nothing insightful. Crazy people will say seemingly true things that attract more crazy people. OK. Thanks I guess. The two paragraphs about how good at arguments he is and how other educated people might be able to out argue him in topics if they’re specialists _maybe_ was so stupid I closed the tab, but then I decided to be adu…
I noticed this too. People that casually drop "Bayesian priors" into conversation seems to be a strong signal for someone who's up their own arse. Sam Bankman-Fried did it a lot.