7 ms·

The Emperor's New Clothes: a story of motivated stupidity

77 points by dash2 5y ago

hootbootscoot 5y ago
front-end build toolchains and the alleged difficulties in coding es5, cough cough...
- dash2 5y ago
  Tell me more. I can think of so many examples from my own area of work....
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - notpachet 5y ago
    React Hooks.
- jetsetgo 5y ago
  let me tell you about horrors of react-native
1cvmask 5y ago
The last paragraph: But as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, ignorance is hardest to eradicate when someone’s breakfast depends on it. Individual dumbness is worth getting rid of. Collective stupidity’s future is assured. It pays for itself.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Sometimes it isn't even their breakfast, it's just their ego.
blondin 5y ago
very interesting write-up! social media could be accelerating groupthink. it's so easy for people to form a group that shares the same beliefs and opinions. in the past it may have taken years. nowadays it's a matter of minutes. that sentence at the end about rationalists got me thinking. there is a group of people identifying themselves as rationalists on twitter. i have been very surprised how similar they are in their way thinking and doing. they recommend the same books, share the same ideas, do the same things, etc. a self-fulfilling prophecy. just something i have been thinking about lately...
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  As a counterpoint I left religion in part because of recurring encounters with different evidence and perspectives online. It's possible I'd still believe in invisible friends without such low friction opportunities to interact outside my geographic bubble.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    How important do you consider the "invisible friends" aspect of religion to be in your overall calculation of the value (as opposed to the ~"objective correctness") of it at the individual &/or societal level?
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Regardless of level I now see only negative value in all aspects of religion.
      - mistermann 5y ago
        In Hindu, this phenomenon is referred to as Maya. https://www.britannica.com/topic/maya-Indian-philosophy https://www.britannica.com/topic/maya-Indian-philosophy To me, this is an extremely valuable insight into the nature of reality, although it is generally frowned upon by scientific materialists even though neuroscience and psychology agree (traditional religious people aren't the only ones who don't follow their scripture to perfection).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toss1 5y ago
>>BWhen collective beliefs meet new evidence, the most sensible thing to do is often ignore it. If you think the Emperor is naked, and everyone else is acting as if he isn’t, you get no benefit from stepping out of line. Even if you think everyone else can see the Emperor is naked, it is still risky to say so. Even if you think everyone else thinks that, and also thinks you think so, that is still no help unless you’re sure they are going to act on it. This is especially true in autocratic regimes (political, corporate, or social). The repeating of a lie is both a loyalty test and a loyalty builder. Even if everyone knows that it is a lie, to get someone to repeat it both commits them to a risk for 'the cause' or 'the leader', and simultaneously demonstrates their loyalty to the cause and leader. The bigger the lie, the bigger the commitment needed to repeat it, and the bigger the demonstration of loyalty. It also has the simultaneous effect of successively isolating the followers from other factions. Eventually, the only ones who will tolerate 'those crazies' or 'the faithful' are the group of followers, which provides further motivation for everyone in the group to stick with the group. When leaders of any sort ask directly or by implication to do something sketchy or morally compromising, run the other way; the path you're being asked to follow is never good.
- dash2 5y ago
  Vaclav Havel made this point in Living in Truth. The truly political act is the grocer who refuses to put a political slogan up in his window. But I think liberal democratic societies suffer from this problem too. * One way to solve coordination problems is to have a leader, and everyone follows his plan. Advantage: the leader can update the plan in the light of evidence. Disadvantage: the leader biases the group's plan to favour himself. * Another approach is to have no leader but to agree on some collective beliefs as the basis to plan from. (Forms of words like "this house believes...", "this committee resolves" are an example.) Advantage: everyone gets input at the start. Disadvantage: belief-updating gets more complex, because unless we all do it together, we end up miscoordinating. Hence it can become easier to ignore new evidence. In the story, the Emperor can't admit he has no clothes on, because he's constrained by his political rivals. A truly unconstrained Emperor would be able to be honest, but of course that might bring its own dangers....
  - 5y ago
JamisonM 5y ago
"Individual expectations needn’t be stored in linguistic form: you can have a feeling about which horse will win the race, without thinking up a sentence about it." Are we sure about this? This sounds made up, I don't know. Does the idea of a race even exist in one's mind in a non-linguistic form?
- cee_el123 5y ago
  > Does the idea of a race even exist in one's mind in a non linguistic form ? Yes, especially in visual form. Language is often a big handicap - it is linear, inefficient and usually biased towards some worldview (imo)
- MattPalmer1086 5y ago
  I rarely think about things in words and sentences. Only when I have to really nail something down logically or communicate it to someone else does it get expressed that way. Concepts and ideas are more like some kind of abstract space, with relationships between things, but not visual. It's a model. Hard to describe really. I was amazed to learn that many other people apparently have some kind of continuous monologue going on in their heads. I
- cymian 5y ago
  Using a term like concept instead of "linguistic" to denote a mental representation (which could be "auditory", "visual", "kinesthetic", "feeling", etc). Then you are absolutely correct.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  What goes on in the minds of people who never learned a language? Like a deaf and blind child who still hasn't been taught communication methods yet. Surely their mind can still form concepts.
  - JamisonM 5y ago
    You can think without language, for sure, but the idea of a race - can you construct that without it? You almost certainly possess the idea from it being communicated to you via language and it is a social construct.
streamofdigits 5y ago
There is a cure that works 100%. Its called diversification of collective stupidity risk. Never let empires grow too large. Whenever you hear / see something is "scaling" throw a spanner in the works, pull the plug, burn a fuse. No questions asked, no justifications provided, no evaluation of good or evil, just an automatic breaker that is based on "N", the scaling unit. Having lots of little emperunculi running around with no clothes is fun and it doesn't put us all in great, potentially existential, danger
- mostertoaster 5y ago
  Yeah maybe instead of big nation, we could divide into like 50 sovereign states. Those could be divided up into smaller counties, and those into cities. Then each could democratically decide what is best for themselves. Nah that’s crazy. It’s better to have 49% of a nation be unhappy with things, even in cities where 80% think one way, they must do what the 20% want because at the national level that 20% is the 51%.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    Unfortunately in my state, the party of small government does not like cities deciding what to do for themselves and has taken away a lot of our city's power to make rules for itself. I for one am in favor of the kind of division you mention, for precisely the reasons you mention. But some people are not happy just deciding things for themselves. They are only happy when they also can decide for others. Lots of people from all walks of life and government like this.
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
    If it wasnt obvious, the pandemic demonstrated beyond any doubt that the distribution of decision making power in society is completely broken. The nation-state in particular is way too dominant and distorting, especially when you have a bunch of self-absorbed "meta-nations" Think about governance as a spectrum, we need it to be more flatly distributed, from the smallest unit (neighborhood dealing with local issues) to the largest (United Nations dealing with collective threats)
wrnr 5y ago
What a great article, finally someone with the courage to speak through to power!
prewett 5y ago
This is in contrast to Victor Havel's essay on Communism, "The Power of the Powerless". Everyone except the boy in this story is Havel's green-grocer, who puts up a sign he doesn't believe in because that's how the incentives are aligned. Havel says that the only real solution is to not live a lie; it will probably result in more hardship for you, but it is the only way to avoid losing your humanity. [0] https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23 https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...
cortesoft 5y ago
This made me think of one of my favorite quotes from “The Wire”: “if it’s a lie, we fight on that lie” The point was that they can’t stop the war, so it is counterproductive trying to expose that the thing they are fighting over wasn’t actually true. https://youtu.be/oOQCuRdWt-A https://youtu.be/oOQCuRdWt-A
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Reminds me of the Abilene Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

77 points by dash2 5y ago

hootbootscoot 5y ago

front-end build toolchains and the alleged difficulties in coding es5, cough cough...

dash2 5y ago
Tell me more. I can think of so many examples from my own area of work....
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- notpachet 5y ago
  React Hooks.
jetsetgo 5y ago
let me tell you about horrors of react-native

1cvmask 5y ago

The last paragraph: But as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, ignorance is hardest to eradicate when someone’s breakfast depends on it. Individual dumbness is worth getting rid of. Collective stupidity’s future is assured. It pays for itself.

SyzygistSix 5y ago
Sometimes it isn't even their breakfast, it's just their ego.

blondin 5y ago

very interesting write-up! social media could be accelerating groupthink. it's so easy for people to form a group that shares the same beliefs and opinions. in the past it may have taken years. nowadays it's a matter of minutes. that sentence at the end about rationalists got me thinking. there is a group of people identifying themselves as rationalists on twitter. i have been very surprised how similar they are in their way thinking and doing. they recommend the same books, share the same ideas, do the same things, etc. a self-fulfilling prophecy. just something i have been thinking about lately...

paulryanrogers 5y ago
As a counterpoint I left religion in part because of recurring encounters with different evidence and perspectives online. It's possible I'd still believe in invisible friends without such low friction opportunities to interact outside my geographic bubble.
- mistermann 5y ago
  How important do you consider the "invisible friends" aspect of religion to be in your overall calculation of the value (as opposed to the ~"objective correctness") of it at the individual &/or societal level?
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Regardless of level I now see only negative value in all aspects of religion.
    - mistermann 5y ago
      In Hindu, this phenomenon is referred to as Maya. https://www.britannica.com/topic/maya-Indian-philosophy https://www.britannica.com/topic/maya-Indian-philosophy To me, this is an extremely valuable insight into the nature of reality, although it is generally frowned upon by scientific materialists even though neuroscience and psychology agree (traditional religious people aren't the only ones who don't follow their scripture to perfection).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

toss1 5y ago

>>BWhen collective beliefs meet new evidence, the most sensible thing to do is often ignore it. If you think the Emperor is naked, and everyone else is acting as if he isn’t, you get no benefit from stepping out of line. Even if you think everyone else can see the Emperor is naked, it is still risky to say so. Even if you think everyone else thinks that, and also thinks you think so, that is still no help unless you’re sure they are going to act on it. This is especially true in autocratic regimes (political, corporate, or social). The repeating of a lie is both a loyalty test and a loyalty builder. Even if everyone knows that it is a lie, to get someone to repeat it both commits them to a risk for 'the cause' or 'the leader', and simultaneously demonstrates their loyalty to the cause and leader. The bigger the lie, the bigger the commitment needed to repeat it, and the bigger the demonstration of loyalty. It also has the simultaneous effect of successively isolating the followers from other factions. Eventually, the only ones who will tolerate 'those crazies' or 'the faithful' are the group of followers, which provides further motivation for everyone in the group to stick with the group. When leaders of any sort ask directly or by implication to do something sketchy or morally compromising, run the other way; the path you're being asked to follow is never good.

dash2 5y ago
Vaclav Havel made this point in Living in Truth. The truly political act is the grocer who refuses to put a political slogan up in his window. But I think liberal democratic societies suffer from this problem too. * One way to solve coordination problems is to have a leader, and everyone follows his plan. Advantage: the leader can update the plan in the light of evidence. Disadvantage: the leader biases the group's plan to favour himself. * Another approach is to have no leader but to agree on some collective beliefs as the basis to plan from. (Forms of words like "this house believes...", "this committee resolves" are an example.) Advantage: everyone gets input at the start. Disadvantage: belief-updating gets more complex, because unless we all do it together, we end up miscoordinating. Hence it can become easier to ignore new evidence. In the story, the Emperor can't admit he has no clothes on, because he's constrained by his political rivals. A truly unconstrained Emperor would be able to be honest, but of course that might bring its own dangers....
- 5y ago

JamisonM 5y ago

"Individual expectations needn’t be stored in linguistic form: you can have a feeling about which horse will win the race, without thinking up a sentence about it." Are we sure about this? This sounds made up, I don't know. Does the idea of a race even exist in one's mind in a non-linguistic form?

cee_el123 5y ago
> Does the idea of a race even exist in one's mind in a non linguistic form ? Yes, especially in visual form. Language is often a big handicap - it is linear, inefficient and usually biased towards some worldview (imo)
MattPalmer1086 5y ago
I rarely think about things in words and sentences. Only when I have to really nail something down logically or communicate it to someone else does it get expressed that way. Concepts and ideas are more like some kind of abstract space, with relationships between things, but not visual. It's a model. Hard to describe really. I was amazed to learn that many other people apparently have some kind of continuous monologue going on in their heads. I
cymian 5y ago
Using a term like concept instead of "linguistic" to denote a mental representation (which could be "auditory", "visual", "kinesthetic", "feeling", etc). Then you are absolutely correct.
lifeformed 5y ago
What goes on in the minds of people who never learned a language? Like a deaf and blind child who still hasn't been taught communication methods yet. Surely their mind can still form concepts.
- JamisonM 5y ago
  You can think without language, for sure, but the idea of a race - can you construct that without it? You almost certainly possess the idea from it being communicated to you via language and it is a social construct.

streamofdigits 5y ago

There is a cure that works 100%. Its called diversification of collective stupidity risk. Never let empires grow too large. Whenever you hear / see something is "scaling" throw a spanner in the works, pull the plug, burn a fuse. No questions asked, no justifications provided, no evaluation of good or evil, just an automatic breaker that is based on "N", the scaling unit. Having lots of little emperunculi running around with no clothes is fun and it doesn't put us all in great, potentially existential, danger

mostertoaster 5y ago
Yeah maybe instead of big nation, we could divide into like 50 sovereign states. Those could be divided up into smaller counties, and those into cities. Then each could democratically decide what is best for themselves. Nah that’s crazy. It’s better to have 49% of a nation be unhappy with things, even in cities where 80% think one way, they must do what the 20% want because at the national level that 20% is the 51%.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Unfortunately in my state, the party of small government does not like cities deciding what to do for themselves and has taken away a lot of our city's power to make rules for itself. I for one am in favor of the kind of division you mention, for precisely the reasons you mention. But some people are not happy just deciding things for themselves. They are only happy when they also can decide for others. Lots of people from all walks of life and government like this.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  If it wasnt obvious, the pandemic demonstrated beyond any doubt that the distribution of decision making power in society is completely broken. The nation-state in particular is way too dominant and distorting, especially when you have a bunch of self-absorbed "meta-nations" Think about governance as a spectrum, we need it to be more flatly distributed, from the smallest unit (neighborhood dealing with local issues) to the largest (United Nations dealing with collective threats)

wrnr 5y ago

What a great article, finally someone with the courage to speak through to power!

prewett 5y ago

This is in contrast to Victor Havel's essay on Communism, "The Power of the Powerless". Everyone except the boy in this story is Havel's green-grocer, who puts up a sign he doesn't believe in because that's how the incentives are aligned. Havel says that the only real solution is to not live a lie; it will probably result in more hardship for you, but it is the only way to avoid losing your humanity. [0] https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23 https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...

cortesoft 5y ago

This made me think of one of my favorite quotes from “The Wire”: “if it’s a lie, we fight on that lie” The point was that they can’t stop the war, so it is counterproductive trying to expose that the thing they are fighting over wasn’t actually true. https://youtu.be/oOQCuRdWt-A https://youtu.be/oOQCuRdWt-A

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Reminds me of the Abilene Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox