5 ms·

I don't know how best to speak to these rationalist types. Here's a new attempt; There is a ---Dawkins----Gould--- political spectrum, and Scott and his people

I don't know how best to speak to these rationalist types. Here's a new attempt; There is a ---Dawkins----Gould--- political spectrum, and Scott and his people are in the Dawkins camp, in terms of the content certainly, but also in terms of the personal relationships, if one were to make a big over time social graph. The Gould camp however I think is the better / more correct / more insightful one.

exolymph 5y ago
We rationalist types already know that you think Gould is better, but that doesn't raise our opinion of you :P The guy has lied too many times (Google it, the takedowns abound). Back to the drawing board, I'm afraid.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Aye, at least existence of the spectrum confirmed, tribe identity confirmed!
tempestn 5y ago
Could you elaborate what you see as the salient differences, and why you believe the Gould camp is more correct? Personally I agree pretty strongly with almost everything in the post, but I'm interested to hear the counter-argument.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Well to start, it's not that I would say the Gould camp is against that list. The core differences are of method, and the outcome / end opinion differences are therefore of less importance. I am just going to go down the list and write some off the cuff thoughts > It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over? > … who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops? Also, GMO this or Nuclear that I would not consider a point of disagreement. (I have no idea what Gould thought of those, but if he disagreed I suppose I would chalk that up to the era and say they are not the point of my construction.) A Gould person might be skeptical of "world hunger" as a concept, or the implicit characterization of it as something that has to do chiefly with how food is produced. > who wants to smash systems of entrenched privilege in college admissions … and believes that the SAT and other standardized tests are the best tools ever invented for that purpose? This might be a specifically Scott Aaronson thing. Personally speaking, I would say there was a time in elementary school (in California, too!) I was pissed they ended the skipping ahead in math program just as I hit the relevant age. But I feel like I was able to still end up doing plenty of advanced Math, so I am not too salty today. It's certainly not the keystone of my politics or world view. Maybe there is a larger story to tell here---I guess if I had to generalize I am more concerned with jobs being stupid and education being "supply without demand" absent 0-sum credentials rat race than the quality of the education itself---but then again maybe there isn't. I am not sure. > who feels a personal distaste for free markets, for the triviality of what they so often elevate and the depth of what they let languish, but tolerates them because they’ve done more than anything else to lift up the world’s poor? "world's poor" jumps out like "world hunger". How to characterize pre-industrial/modern/colonial consumption is very methodologically fraught. And China being the place where the absolute majority of this happened also muddies the water. Markets are interesting for allowing small scale social experiments, but whatever the story is on poverty without arbitrarily cropping history a Gould person would say is a lot more nuanced than Aaronson is giving it credit for. > … who’s happiest when telling the truth for the cause of social justice … but who, if told to lie for the cause of social justice, will probably choose silence or even, if pushed hard enough, truth? Mainstream culture war rots brains and wastes time. I am skipping this. > … who wants to legalize marijuana and psychedelics Sure > and also legalize all the promising treatments currently languishing in FDA approval hell? Yet merely promising stuff that gets out of FDA hell also slurps out of Medicare's teat in worrisome ways. Moreover, "treatments" is a very myopic way to look at public health. Some combination of: - Public healthcare - Abolition of car culture and other underlying causes of widespread unhealthiness - Separation of "treatment being good enough to make legal" and "treatment being good enough that the state should pay for it" - Drug bounties vs foisting all the risk on the private sector so it has to rent seek to recoup is more interesting to focus on > … who feels little attraction to the truth-claims of the world’s ancient religions, except insofar as they sometimes serve as prophylactics against newer and now even more virulent religions? Dawkins people are so hung up on religiosity as cause, not mere symptom. It also seems counter-productive tactically, even if it were true. Secularism does well when society rapidly technically advances and people are socialized enough to not need to search for alternatives. Darwins people seem to want to just indoctrinate secularism in ignorance of understanding the social processes that created it. > … who thinks the covid response of the CDC, FDA, and other authorities was a historic disgrace—not because it infringed on the personal liberties of antivaxxers or anything like that, but on the contrary, because it was weak, timid, bureaucratic, and slow, where it should’ve been like that of a general at war? No disagreement. But Gould people would say this is 0 surprise and fits large pattern of emaciated state and civil service, going back decades. > … who thinks the Nazi Holocaust was even worse than the mainstream acknowledges it to be, because in addition to the staggering, one-lifetime-isn’t-enough-to-internalize-it human tragedy, the Holocaust also sent up into smoke whatever cultural process had just produced Einstein, von Neumann, Szilard, Born, Meitner, Wigner, Haber, Pauling, Ulam, Tarski, Erdös, and Noether, and with it, one of the wellsprings of our technological civilization? No disagreement. Yeah important to realize the US intellectual spoils of war was still very sad and lost a lot of value. Don't extrapolate from Von Neumann loving the US that it was otherwise. This is a funny thing because Darkins people seem very in the Anglo-American intellectual tradition. Gouldists are open to more continental things, which I would argue probably are closer (not just geographically) to the pre-Nazi Central European intellectual tradition. Obviously Jews did have a huge and outsized contribution, but in the general strain of "19th Century nationalism was a mistake" I would argue it was a very pluralist tradition, in a region that had very complex ethnic and linguistic boundaries. > … who supports free speech, to the point of proudly tolerating views that really, actually disgust them at their workplace, university, or online forum? Kind of like secularism, no firm disagreement but less emphasis, and questioning of cause versus effect. Doctrinaire Liberalism holds that free speech must be self-supporting, and equivalence of moral good and sustainability. Other strands are less self-assuredly optimistic. > … who believes in patriotism, the police, the rule of law, to the extent that they don’t understand why all the enablers of the January 6 insurrection, up to and including Trump, aren’t currently facing trial for treason against the United States? This is kinda odd. "Treason" as a crime has very shaky foundations under liberalism. Where is the free speech/assembly/association absolutism now?! > … who’s (of course) disgusted to the core by Trump and everything he represents, but who’s also disgusted by the elite virtue-signalling hypocrisy that made the rise of a Trump-like backlash figure predictable? Thinks "elite hypocrisy" as a cause of Trump sounds like a lot of idealism and not very much materialism. > … who not only supports abortion rights, but also looks forward to a near future when parents, if they choose, are free to use embryo selection to make their children happier, smarter, healthier, and free of life-crippling diseases (unless the “bioethicists” destroy that future, as a previous generation of Deep Thinkers destroyed our nuclear future)? This stuff receives too much attention a la "trolley problem"s. But if one does support it, saying nothing about maintaining generic diversity, filtering absent full understanding of consequences, and evolution fundamental about optimizing against a dynamic and unpredictable metrics is rather poor tactics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law generalized, folks! > … who, when reading about the 1960s Sexual Revolution, instinctively sides with free-loving hippies and against the scolds … even if today’s scolds are themselves former hippies, or intellectual descendants thereof, who now clothe their denunciations of other people’s gross, creepy sexual desires in the garb of feminism and social justice? More culture war diversions. Hippie -> neoliberal pipeline I suppose could be interesting, but not in that way.
lalaland1125 5y ago
What is the difference between those two camps?
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Hegel /s I don't have a great idea how to sum up, these ideas are still a bit raw in my head. I am not sure to what extent this line of inquiry in intellectual history is well-studded. I suppose a concrete place to to begin is how to connect micro and macro phenomena. The Dawkins camp is very keen on the micro stuff, and wants to study the micro stuff very hard and then extrapolate. The Gould camp spends more time thinking about the macro stuff alone before trying to connect the two. That makes bridging the gap harder, and it could well be argued the Gould camp hasn't spent enough time working on that harder problem they made for themselves. But at least their description of the macro is a bit less biased by micro considerations.
  - TOMDM 5y ago
    If you do end up giving this some more thought, I'd be interested in hearing about meaningful differences of opinion on cultural or policy issues. I've never heard of this spectrum before.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      I left another long comment going through Scott's list. I looked around and found https://www.marxist.com/marx-darwin-and-gould-the-revolution-of-evolution-pt-1.htm https://www.marxist.com/marx-darwin-and-gould-the-revolution... which has some neat quotes but is written at times in a bit a rigid way that I think would be a cringy rhetorical misfire for this audience. But as I am currently taking some economics classes, the biology--economics relationships are top of mind. Dawkin's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfoundations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfoundations along with neoclassical economics writ large have some pretty clear parallels.
TOMDM 5y ago
Can you give some policies or social values that you would consider more "Gouldian", that differ from/oppose the ones Scott highlights?

exolymph 5y ago

We rationalist types already know that you think Gould is better, but that doesn't raise our opinion of you :P The guy has lied too many times (Google it, the takedowns abound). Back to the drawing board, I'm afraid.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Aye, at least existence of the spectrum confirmed, tribe identity confirmed!

tempestn 5y ago

Could you elaborate what you see as the salient differences, and why you believe the Gould camp is more correct? Personally I agree pretty strongly with almost everything in the post, but I'm interested to hear the counter-argument.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Well to start, it's not that I would say the Gould camp is against that list. The core differences are of method, and the outcome / end opinion differences are therefore of less importance. I am just going to go down the list and write some off the cuff thoughts > It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over? > … who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops? Also, GMO this or Nuclear that I would not consider a point of disagreement. (I have no idea what Gould thought of those, but if he disagreed I suppose I would chalk that up to the era and say they are not the point of my construction.) A Gould person might be skeptical of "world hunger" as a concept, or the implicit characterization of it as something that has to do chiefly with how food is produced. > who wants to smash systems of entrenched privilege in college admissions … and believes that the SAT and other standardized tests are the best tools ever invented for that purpose? This might be a specifically Scott Aaronson thing. Personally speaking, I would say there was a time in elementary school (in California, too!) I was pissed they ended the skipping ahead in math program just as I hit the relevant age. But I feel like I was able to still end up doing plenty of advanced Math, so I am not too salty today. It's certainly not the keystone of my politics or world view. Maybe there is a larger story to tell here---I guess if I had to generalize I am more concerned with jobs being stupid and education being "supply without demand" absent 0-sum credentials rat race than the quality of the education itself---but then again maybe there isn't. I am not sure. > who feels a personal distaste for free markets, for the triviality of what they so often elevate and the depth of what they let languish, but tolerates them because they’ve done more than anything else to lift up the world’s poor? "world's poor" jumps out like "world hunger". How to characterize pre-industrial/modern/colonial consumption is very methodologically fraught. And China being the place where the absolute majority of this happened also muddies the water. Markets are interesting for allowing small scale social experiments, but whatever the story is on poverty without arbitrarily cropping history a Gould person would say is a lot more nuanced than Aaronson is giving it credit for. > … who’s happiest when telling the truth for the cause of social justice … but who, if told to lie for the cause of social justice, will probably choose silence or even, if pushed hard enough, truth? Mainstream culture war rots brains and wastes time. I am skipping this. > … who wants to legalize marijuana and psychedelics Sure > and also legalize all the promising treatments currently languishing in FDA approval hell? Yet merely promising stuff that gets out of FDA hell also slurps out of Medicare's teat in worrisome ways. Moreover, "treatments" is a very myopic way to look at public health. Some combination of: - Public healthcare - Abolition of car culture and other underlying causes of widespread unhealthiness - Separation of "treatment being good enough to make legal" and "treatment being good enough that the state should pay for it" - Drug bounties vs foisting all the risk on the private sector so it has to rent seek to recoup is more interesting to focus on > … who feels little attraction to the truth-claims of the world’s ancient religions, except insofar as they sometimes serve as prophylactics against newer and now even more virulent religions? Dawkins people are so hung up on religiosity as cause, not mere symptom. It also seems counter-productive tactically, even if it were true. Secularism does well when society rapidly technically advances and people are socialized enough to not need to search for alternatives. Darwins people seem to want to just indoctrinate secularism in ignorance of understanding the social processes that created it. > … who thinks the covid response of the CDC, FDA, and other authorities was a historic disgrace—not because it infringed on the personal liberties of antivaxxers or anything like that, but on the contrary, because it was weak, timid, bureaucratic, and slow, where it should’ve been like that of a general at war? No disagreement. But Gould people would say this is 0 surprise and fits large pattern of emaciated state and civil service, going back decades. > … who thinks the Nazi Holocaust was even worse than the mainstream acknowledges it to be, because in addition to the staggering, one-lifetime-isn’t-enough-to-internalize-it human tragedy, the Holocaust also sent up into smoke whatever cultural process had just produced Einstein, von Neumann, Szilard, Born, Meitner, Wigner, Haber, Pauling, Ulam, Tarski, Erdös, and Noether, and with it, one of the wellsprings of our technological civilization? No disagreement. Yeah important to realize the US intellectual spoils of war was still very sad and lost a lot of value. Don't extrapolate from Von Neumann loving the US that it was otherwise. This is a funny thing because Darkins people seem very in the Anglo-American intellectual tradition. Gouldists are open to more continental things, which I would argue probably are closer (not just geographically) to the pre-Nazi Central European intellectual tradition. Obviously Jews did have a huge and outsized contribution, but in the general strain of "19th Century nationalism was a mistake" I would argue it was a very pluralist tradition, in a region that had very complex ethnic and linguistic boundaries. > … who supports free speech, to the point of proudly tolerating views that really, actually disgust them at their workplace, university, or online forum? Kind of like secularism, no firm disagreement but less emphasis, and questioning of cause versus effect. Doctrinaire Liberalism holds that free speech must be self-supporting, and equivalence of moral good and sustainability. Other strands are less self-assuredly optimistic. > … who believes in patriotism, the police, the rule of law, to the extent that they don’t understand why all the enablers of the January 6 insurrection, up to and including Trump, aren’t currently facing trial for treason against the United States? This is kinda odd. "Treason" as a crime has very shaky foundations under liberalism. Where is the free speech/assembly/association absolutism now?! > … who’s (of course) disgusted to the core by Trump and everything he represents, but who’s also disgusted by the elite virtue-signalling hypocrisy that made the rise of a Trump-like backlash figure predictable? Thinks "elite hypocrisy" as a cause of Trump sounds like a lot of idealism and not very much materialism. > … who not only supports abortion rights, but also looks forward to a near future when parents, if they choose, are free to use embryo selection to make their children happier, smarter, healthier, and free of life-crippling diseases (unless the “bioethicists” destroy that future, as a previous generation of Deep Thinkers destroyed our nuclear future)? This stuff receives too much attention a la "trolley problem"s. But if one does support it, saying nothing about maintaining generic diversity, filtering absent full understanding of consequences, and evolution fundamental about optimizing against a dynamic and unpredictable metrics is rather poor tactics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law generalized, folks! > … who, when reading about the 1960s Sexual Revolution, instinctively sides with free-loving hippies and against the scolds … even if today’s scolds are themselves former hippies, or intellectual descendants thereof, who now clothe their denunciations of other people’s gross, creepy sexual desires in the garb of feminism and social justice? More culture war diversions. Hippie -> neoliberal pipeline I suppose could be interesting, but not in that way.

lalaland1125 5y ago

What is the difference between those two camps?

Ericson2314 5y ago
Hegel /s I don't have a great idea how to sum up, these ideas are still a bit raw in my head. I am not sure to what extent this line of inquiry in intellectual history is well-studded. I suppose a concrete place to to begin is how to connect micro and macro phenomena. The Dawkins camp is very keen on the micro stuff, and wants to study the micro stuff very hard and then extrapolate. The Gould camp spends more time thinking about the macro stuff alone before trying to connect the two. That makes bridging the gap harder, and it could well be argued the Gould camp hasn't spent enough time working on that harder problem they made for themselves. But at least their description of the macro is a bit less biased by micro considerations.
- TOMDM 5y ago
  If you do end up giving this some more thought, I'd be interested in hearing about meaningful differences of opinion on cultural or policy issues. I've never heard of this spectrum before.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    I left another long comment going through Scott's list. I looked around and found https://www.marxist.com/marx-darwin-and-gould-the-revolution-of-evolution-pt-1.htm https://www.marxist.com/marx-darwin-and-gould-the-revolution... which has some neat quotes but is written at times in a bit a rigid way that I think would be a cringy rhetorical misfire for this audience. But as I am currently taking some economics classes, the biology--economics relationships are top of mind. Dawkin's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfoundations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfoundations along with neoclassical economics writ large have some pretty clear parallels.

TOMDM 5y ago

Can you give some policies or social values that you would consider more "Gouldian", that differ from/oppose the ones Scott highlights?