6 ms·

I'm inclined to agree it's not limited to government, but what's incredible about fringe theories is that the very same people who espouse "trust no-one" also l

I'm inclined to agree it's not limited to government, but what's incredible about fringe theories is that the very same people who espouse "trust no-one" also lend enormous amounts of credibility to terrible sources. Disclaimer: I think hacker communities have some soul-searching to do here: "trust no one" and "gubbermint bad" enjoy far too cosy an acceptance, in vast disproportion to the reasoning or evidence behind them. Trusting no one isn't feasible, so all we're doing is transferring trust, on the basis on anecdote at best and usually just memes, from organisations with flawed but improvable accountability to organisations with none whatsoever.

mistermann 6y ago
The meme war between the two camps on either side of the conspiracy theory divide is quite interesting if you're able to view it from a truly disinterested (disable your priors) and abstract (observe the nature of the discussions, not the topic) third party perspective. The anti-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual conspiracy theory and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. Similarly, the pro-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual mainstream news article and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. And then when observing each other's camps (in sufficient qualtities over a long period of time), they each consider the other community to be foolish (and unaware of it) in an aggregate sense. And they're both correct. The anti-conspiracy-camp is correct in that if one spends any time in the conspiracy community, it is not difficult to observe that many of them clearly and passionately believe things, with absolute certainty, for which there is not sufficient conclusive supporting evidence. Similarly, the pro-conspiracy camp is correct in that if one spends any time in mainstream communities, it is not difficult to observe that many of them clearly and passionately believe things, with absolute certainty, for which there is not sufficient conclusive supporting evidence (aka: axioms). Members from both communities will take offence (usually "quite" passionately) at some portion of the above, and attempt to rebut the assertion in the standard form: [rhetoric, narrative, "logic", "common sense", "facts"/axioms/intuitions presented as facts] + [and then therefore we shall conclude...]" ...but there will almost always be a flaw in the respective rebuttals: invalid epistemology. At least part of the reason these two camps cannot have a productive dialogue and agree to a compromise somewhere "in the middle"...to agree on some things (that which they agree on) and only disagree, explicitly and precisely, on the subset of points where disagreement actually(!!) exists, is because both camps suffer from loose epistemology - a willingness (and often, extreme eagerness) to believe things (that are consistent with their priors) to be True(!!!), without adequate and conclusive supporting evidence. So, the minds then seem to develop a kind of all-or-nothing, total war defence of each respective comprehensive idea they hold (each of which is typically riddled with errors and untruths), and hilarity inevitably ensues. I think the same argument is also quite applicable to many other realms, politics being perhaps the most obvious. I wonder...if members of the two camps could come to realize the above, might it diminish the ability of those in power to so easily pit them against each other in a never ending cultural meme war, and in turn free up their minds and time to be able to more closely and skilfully observe and analyze the actions of those in power (who can currently operate largely unmonitored, unanalyzed, and unopposed, who can censor anything that gets too dangerous to their interests with <some semi-plausible reason>...something which is in the best interests both camps, and typically the majority of all peoples regardless of group affiliation? And if we extended this principle even more broadly, across all current hot-button topics in the country, and in the international world, could we maybe usher in an era of more calm, reasoned, cooperation between various parties who disagree on a few specific details, but largely agree (but don't realize it) on the vast majority of issues from the "big picture" perspective?
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  could you out forward a hypothetical example of say a flat earther and a mainstream earth is round camp finding common ground in the middle?
  - mistermann 6y ago
    I could, but I will pass because: 1. I believe that it is not a productive use of mental energy (for myself, or others) 2. My account is rate-limited on HN, so I have to use the few posts I am allowed per day wisely (and yes, I am aware of the irony in this statement) 3. Due to the nature of how the mind seems to work, I believe this runs the risk of allowing minds who are looking for "an escape" from the above an opportunity to resume normal "all is well, nothing to see here" operations Rather, I encourage people who are "reckoning about the problems of the world" to spend less time thinking (and arguing) about relatively trivial object-level matters like this (instances of problems), and spend more time in a more abstract, systems analysis and decomposition mindset (what is the nature of these problems), with an end goal of gaining greater understanding of how the system we've built for ourselves to live in actually works (as opposed to our axiomatic beliefs of how it works)...and just how and why it is that it seems to produce so many outcomes (some of them plausibly existential risks) that are counter to the true, innermost desires of most people who are living within the system. This overall situation seems like a rather large paradox - my wish is that more people could find a way to become curious about it, and approach it with the same engineering mindset (but applied at the abstract level) that we use every day in our respective lines of work.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    Earth is a hemisphere, obviously :)
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Its impossible to construct a world view without axioms. Its impractical to construct a usefully large model of the world in the tiny slice of time afforded us without accepting far more uncritically based on prior performance of agent, apparent validity, credentials, social position etc etc and only discarding or doubting when given reason to. Everyone is mostly a somewhat crappy model based on time and brain constraints. People can be viewed as a graph of agents collecting information about subjects along with meta information about other agents needed to construct a much larger pool of information. Conspiracy theorists who come into a discussion with a default disbelieve position on a particular agent are likely to spend much more time finding fault and may actually be more accurate at identifying correct faults the same way you are I are more apt to correctly identify a variety of conspiracy theorists as kooks and find immediate fault with their arguments. Unfortunately kooks are apt to have a broken model of whom is trustworthy and to have built up a large collection of incorrect facts. A particular challenge is the fact that they are possessed of a large collection of "facts" that they aren't learned enough to have come up with in the first place and don't really have an accurate model of. See the moon landing truthers as a particular example. It's trivial to collect "facts" that require only a small amount of bad understanding to "get" but require a substantial understanding of science to actually refute. Since they can't build an accurate enough model of the world to actually understand they would have to accept the expertise of others as valid in order to correct their model of the world. Having already rejected such there is no hope for them. These "facts" act like prions corrupting their model. When they see people providing true and valid info they are predisposed to discard that agents information as corrupted because it contradicts prior beliefs. Since their prior beliefs predispose them to believe bad agents and disbelieve good agents their model inevitably gets worse until it is unrecoverable.

mistermann 6y ago

The meme war between the two camps on either side of the conspiracy theory divide is quite interesting if you're able to view it from a truly disinterested (disable your priors) and abstract (observe the nature of the discussions, not the topic) third party perspective. The anti-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual conspiracy theory and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. Similarly, the pro-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual mainstream news article and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. And then when observing each other's camps (in sufficient qualtities over a long period of time), they each consider the other community to be foolish (and unaware of it) in an aggregate sense. And they're both correct. The anti-conspiracy-camp is correct in that if one spends any time in the conspiracy community, it is not difficult to observe that many of them clearly and passionately believe things, with absolute certainty, for which there is not sufficient conclusive supporting evidence. Similarly, the pro-conspiracy camp is correct in that if one spends any time in mainstream communities, it is not difficult to observe that many of them clearly and passionately believe things, with absolute certainty, for which there is not sufficient conclusive supporting evidence (aka: axioms). Members from both communities will take offence (usually "quite" passionately) at some portion of the above, and attempt to rebut the assertion in the standard form: [rhetoric, narrative, "logic", "common sense", "facts"/axioms/intuitions presented as facts] + [and then therefore we shall conclude...]" ...but there will almost always be a flaw in the respective rebuttals: invalid epistemology. At least part of the reason these two camps cannot have a productive dialogue and agree to a compromise somewhere "in the middle"...to agree on some things (that which they agree on) and only disagree, explicitly and precisely, on the subset of points where disagreement actually(!!) exists, is because both camps suffer from loose epistemology - a willingness (and often, extreme eagerness) to believe things (that are consistent with their priors) to be True(!!!), without adequate and conclusive supporting evidence. So, the minds then seem to develop a kind of all-or-nothing, total war defence of each respective comprehensive idea they hold (each of which is typically riddled with errors and untruths), and hilarity inevitably ensues. I think the same argument is also quite applicable to many other realms, politics being perhaps the most obvious. I wonder...if members of the two camps could come to realize the above, might it diminish the ability of those in power to so easily pit them against each other in a never ending cultural meme war, and in turn free up their minds and time to be able to more closely and skilfully observe and analyze the actions of those in power (who can currently operate largely unmonitored, unanalyzed, and unopposed, who can censor anything that gets too dangerous to their interests with <some semi-plausible reason>...something which is in the best interests both camps, and typically the majority of all peoples regardless of group affiliation? And if we extended this principle even more broadly, across all current hot-button topics in the country, and in the international world, could we maybe usher in an era of more calm, reasoned, cooperation between various parties who disagree on a few specific details, but largely agree (but don't realize it) on the vast majority of issues from the "big picture" perspective?

gameswithgo 6y ago
could you out forward a hypothetical example of say a flat earther and a mainstream earth is round camp finding common ground in the middle?
- mistermann 6y ago
  I could, but I will pass because: 1. I believe that it is not a productive use of mental energy (for myself, or others) 2. My account is rate-limited on HN, so I have to use the few posts I am allowed per day wisely (and yes, I am aware of the irony in this statement) 3. Due to the nature of how the mind seems to work, I believe this runs the risk of allowing minds who are looking for "an escape" from the above an opportunity to resume normal "all is well, nothing to see here" operations Rather, I encourage people who are "reckoning about the problems of the world" to spend less time thinking (and arguing) about relatively trivial object-level matters like this (instances of problems), and spend more time in a more abstract, systems analysis and decomposition mindset (what is the nature of these problems), with an end goal of gaining greater understanding of how the system we've built for ourselves to live in actually works (as opposed to our axiomatic beliefs of how it works)...and just how and why it is that it seems to produce so many outcomes (some of them plausibly existential risks) that are counter to the true, innermost desires of most people who are living within the system. This overall situation seems like a rather large paradox - my wish is that more people could find a way to become curious about it, and approach it with the same engineering mindset (but applied at the abstract level) that we use every day in our respective lines of work.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Earth is a hemisphere, obviously :)
michaelmrose 6y ago
Its impossible to construct a world view without axioms. Its impractical to construct a usefully large model of the world in the tiny slice of time afforded us without accepting far more uncritically based on prior performance of agent, apparent validity, credentials, social position etc etc and only discarding or doubting when given reason to. Everyone is mostly a somewhat crappy model based on time and brain constraints. People can be viewed as a graph of agents collecting information about subjects along with meta information about other agents needed to construct a much larger pool of information. Conspiracy theorists who come into a discussion with a default disbelieve position on a particular agent are likely to spend much more time finding fault and may actually be more accurate at identifying correct faults the same way you are I are more apt to correctly identify a variety of conspiracy theorists as kooks and find immediate fault with their arguments. Unfortunately kooks are apt to have a broken model of whom is trustworthy and to have built up a large collection of incorrect facts. A particular challenge is the fact that they are possessed of a large collection of "facts" that they aren't learned enough to have come up with in the first place and don't really have an accurate model of. See the moon landing truthers as a particular example. It's trivial to collect "facts" that require only a small amount of bad understanding to "get" but require a substantial understanding of science to actually refute. Since they can't build an accurate enough model of the world to actually understand they would have to accept the expertise of others as valid in order to correct their model of the world. Having already rejected such there is no hope for them. These "facts" act like prions corrupting their model. When they see people providing true and valid info they are predisposed to discard that agents information as corrupted because it contradicts prior beliefs. Since their prior beliefs predispose them to believe bad agents and disbelieve good agents their model inevitably gets worse until it is unrecoverable.