Make it easier
"Make it easier" is a surprisingly powerful way to increase the probability of an action. Which systems, practices and habits make it easier to acquire accurate beliefs?
Peter Thiel on faith, reason and hyper-Christianity
When I think of the ten commandments, I often think that the two most important are the first and last. The first: only worship God, look up to one true God. The last: you should not look around at your neighbour, you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbour.
When you do not have a transcendent religious belief you end up just looking around at other people. And I think that is the problem with our atheist liberal world, it is just the madness of crowds. It's not reason, it's not rational, it's just mass insanity.
There's a contrast between evangelical Christian Bible study and the atheist rationalists. For the evangelicals, the outward-facing thing is often that people are somehow more moral or better. And the inward-facing thing is that you're kind of sinful and there's a lot of stuff you need to fix. [For the atheist rationalists], the outward-facing thing is that you're more rational than other people, and the inward-facing thing is that you're not capable of thought at all, that it's just spaghetti code.
To use the Thomistic Medieval distinction: the medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect, and the moderns believe in the power of the will but the weakness of the intellect. So I guess I think faith and reason are compatible and in fact when you get rid of faith you end up in a world where there's no reason either. And we're living in a much less rational world than we were living in 100 years ago.
[...]
I always think there are two different kinds of arguments. One is a metaphysical argument: God doesn't exist, so the Bible's not true. The second: the Christians aren't Christian enough. And we have to think of what we're struggling against as kind of hyper-Christianity, something like that. It's sort of an extreme deformation of it. There are all sorts of forms that this takes. I think it's not that there's a shortage of morality, it's that there is too much morality. I mean Greta [Thunberg] is so moral she wants to line up and shoot everybody who is not as committed to climate change. If you think of medieval Christianity, the two most important attributes of Christ were that he was divine and that he was poor. So anyone you saw who was poor might be Christ in disguise. But then in the 19th century you had people like Tolstoy or Marx who pushed this in a hyper-Christian direction—we had to do more than the Christians, we have to have a violent revolution, we're going to do more for the poor in this world, right away.
And so I think the Christian alternative is to come back to see that we're in this context, that it's only if you realise you're in a context in which things are pretty screwed up that you have any chance of moving beyond it. The two vignettes I always give on this subject: in the Ethiopian Coptic tradition, Pontius Pilate is seen as a saint. The reason is: you can't expect more from a politican. It's not that if you had lived in the time of Christ you would have done better. Which was the cause of medieval anti-semetism, you know, we should go after the Jews because if we had lived at the time we would have done better. Or more modern liberals say they would have been more tolerant in the middle ages, whereas its the people who style themselves as being part of the resistance—that very fact often tells you that they would have just been collaborators. And the second vignette: the Catholic doctrine of substantiation is super humbling, where it's literally the body and the blood of Christ and you're stilll no better than a cannibal, and still the problems of human nature, the problems of violence are this continuous with the past. And the only hope we have of doing better is to realise that we are still this contiguous with the past. And when we think we've set that behind us, we've transcended it, we're much better, we're hyper-Christian, we're communist, we're the tolerant people who would have been super tolerant in the middle ages, that's when you're simply worse.
Francis Fukuyama on boredom and sacrifice
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
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The pro-war demonstrations that took place in the different capitals of Europe in August 1914 can be seen in some measure as rebellions against that middle-class civilization, with its security, prosperity, and lack of challenge. The growing isothymia of everyday life no longer seemed sufficient. On a mass scale, megalothymia reappeared: not the megalothymia of individual princes, but of entire nations that sought recognition of their worth and dignity.
[...]
In reading German justifications for the war, one is struck by a consistent emphasis on the need for a kind of objectless struggle, a struggle that would have purifying moral effects quite independently of whether Germany gained colonies or won freedom of the seas. The comments of a young German law student on his way to the front in September 1914 were typical: while denouncing war as “dreadful, unworthy of human beings, stupid, outmoded, and in every sense destructive,” he nonetheless came to the Nietzschean conclusion that “the decisive issue is surely always one’s readiness to sacrifice and not the object of sacrifice.” Pflicht, or duty, was not understood as a matter of enlightened self-interest or contractual obligation; it was an absolute moral value that demonstrated one’s inner strength and superiority to materialism and natural determination.
Wolf Tivy on transhumanism and Henry David Thoreau
Wolf: Is mankind the perfect being? No, we are not. OK, are we eventually going to create—or create conditions that create—beings better than ourselves? Yes, we are.
Alex: Wouldn't it be healthier, though, if we thought we were the perfect being and just you know, kept it at that?
Wolf: But that's pride. It's pride and hubris and it's wrong.
Alex: It's Christianity, in a way.
Wolf: It depends what you identify with. Do you identify with the flesh or do you identify with the principle that is animating the flesh? If the latter then we can identify with futures with vastly different technological stacks. So we have vastly different flesh, it's silicon. I think ultimately we end up there. For now, I'm actually pretty anti-transhumanist, I think it's all fake. But in terms of taking the scientific worldview seriously and projecting our destiny forward, I think you end up there. But it's not this self-worshipping transhumanism which has I think become dominant, where it's like "oh we're going to use AI to enhance our pleasure"... these are just really stupid self-referential visions. It's like no, our glorious descendents that are smarter than anything else that has ever existed are going to wage nuclear war accross the heavens, that's like the glorious thing that's going to happen, right? You have to see it as an extension of natural law and the whole evolutionary process that we have undergone so far. And yeah it's going to be bloody, it's going to be crazy, it's going to be very dynamic and its going to take a long time. This is the process of creation, this is the process by which God is manifesting into the world the kind of beings he wants to have a relationship with.
Alex: You sound like you're gripped by religious ecstasy while you're saying this.
Wolf: I am an ideologue. I am a religious ideologue. [...] The bison sphere is a transitional step in this vision... it's also a joke, an April fools article that I wrote, but look... this is what I believe, right? That was like a fun version of it.
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We are not in the game of subversion. We are in the game of construction. Maybe circumvention. But construction. Visions and ideas that improve the world around us.
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Thoreau tackles head on one of the deepest pathologies in American society, the way in which we are sort of enslaved to our capital. What do you actually get out of your wealth?
He keeps things simple and ends up in a life of contemplation. He teaches a spartan life of philosophy. He doesn't dislike technology, he doesn't dislike wealth, he wants us to have a technologically enabled society, but he wants us to be worthy of it. He wants us to have ends that are glorious enough for our means.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/subversive-walex-kaschuta-alexandra-kaschuta-kBN0P1r8OHM/
Ronald Dworkin on Posner's doubts about the persuasiveness of moral arguments
Posner declares, as a matter of a priori psychological dogma, that moral arguments, no matter how sound or powerful, never convince anyone not already convinced anyway [...] no doubt many people are never moved by the logic of a moral argument, even once in their lives, but it is absurd to suppose that no one ever is.
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The most irritating section of the book is a long piece of psychobabble explaining why so many academics supported Clinton: Posner thinks they instinctively protected him as the enemy of their own enemies. He prefers cynical to simple explanations, but in this case a simple explanation is more persuasive. They were committed, not to Clinton, but to the Constitution.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/03/09/philosophy-monica-lewinsky/
Richard Posner on moral entrepreneurs
Moral entrepreneurs typically try to change the boundaries of altruism, whether by broadening them, as in the case of Jesus Christ and Jeremy Bentham, or by narrowing them, as in the case of Hitler (putting to one side his “zoophilia”). They don’t do this with arguments, or at least good ones. Rather, they mix appeals to self-interest with emotional appeals that bypass our rational calculating faculty and stir inarticulable feelings of oneness with or separateness from the people (or it could be land, or animals) that are to constitute, or be ejected from, the community that the moral entrepreneur is trying to create. They teach us to love or hate whom they love or hate.
The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory, p.42
Elisabeth Costello - The Philosophers and The Animals
'I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.'
[...]
'Both reason and seven decades of life experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking. And if this is so, if that is what I believe, then why should I bow to reason this afternoon and content myself with embroidering on the discourse of the old philosophers?'
[...]
'Do I in fact have a choice? If I do not subject my discourse to reason, whatever that is, what is left for me but to gibber and emote and knock over my water glass and generally make a monkey of myself?'
[...]
'Might it not be that the phenomenon we are examining here is, rather than the flowering of a faculty that allows access to the secrets of the universe, the specialism of a rather narrow self-regenerating intellectual tradition whose forte is reasoning, in the same way that the forte of chess players is playing chess, which for its own motives it tries to install at the centre of the universe?'
'Yet, although I see that the best way to win acceptance from this learned gathering would be for me to join myself, like a tributary stream running into a great river, to the great Western discourse of man versus beast, of reason versus unreason, something in me resists, foreseeing in that step the concession of the entire battle.''
[...]
'In the olden days the voice of man, raised in reason, was confronted by the roar of the lion, the bellow of the bull.''
[...]
'I often wonder what thinking is, what understanding is. Do we really understand the universe better than animals do? Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand. It makes sense if you live inside a Rubik cube, but if you don't...'
[...]
'It's been such a short visit, I haven't had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.'
She watches the wipers wagging back and forth.
'A better explanation,' she says, 'is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.'
'I don't follow. What is it you can't say?'
'It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. 'It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, "Yes, it's nice, isn't it? Polish-Jewish skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins." And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, "Treblinka--100% human stearate." Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this? 'Yet I'm not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma's, into the children's, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?'
She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her?
They are not yet on the expressway. He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. 'There, there,' he whispers in her ear. 'There, there. It will soon be over.'
Elisabeth Costello, Lesson 4 - The Lives of Animals
John Dewey on moral principles
The diffused or wide applicability of habits is reflected in the general character of principles: a principle is intellectually what a habit is for direct action. As habits set in grooves dominate activity and swerve it from conditions instead of increasing its adaptability, so principles treated as fixed rules instead of as helpful methods take men away from experience. The more complicated the situation, and the less we really know about it, the more insistent is the orthodox type of moral theory upon the prior existence of some fixed and universal principle or law which is to be directly applied and followed. Ready-made rules available at a moment's notice for settling any kind of moral difficulty and resolving every species of moral doubt have been the chief object of the ambition of moralists. In the much less complicated and less changing matters of bodily health such pretensions are known as quackery. But in morals a hankering for certainty, born of timidity and nourished by love of authoritative prestige, has led to the idea that absence of immutably fixed and universally applicable ready-made principles is equivalent to moral chaos.
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Morals must be a growing science if it is to be a science at all, not merely because all truth has not yet been appropriated by the mind of man, but because life is a moving affair in which old moral truth ceases to apply. Principles are methods of inquiry and forecast which require verification by the event; and the time honored effort to assimilate morals to mathematics is only a way of bolstering up an old dogmatic authority, or putting a new one upon the throne of the old. But the experimental character of moral judgments does not mean complete uncertainty and fluidity. Principles exist as hypotheses with which to experiment. Human history is long. There is a long record of past experimentation in conduct, and there are cumulative, verifications which give many principles a well earned prestige. Lightly to disregard them is the height of foolishness. But social situations alter; and it is also foolish not to observe how old principles actually work under new conditions, and not to modify them so that they will be more effectual instruments in judging new cases.
Human Nature and Conduct, Part 3: The Place of Intelligence - VII. The Nature of Principles https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1922/Dewey1922_21.html
Careless strawman due to inferential distance
A common area of overconfidence: judgements about what other people are thinking or valuing.
I often notice people concluding that someone they have some reasons to admire is either making a naive mistake, or else does not in fact share their values.
Often, the truth is that person 1 is weighing considerations that person 2 does not recognise, or pursuing a strategy person 2 has not thought of. And person 2 is not sufficiently adjusting for this possibility.
The mistake is especially common when two people are separated by greater inferential distance than they realise.
It's natural to assume that, if someone shares your values and is acting reasonably, it would be fairly easy to understand them. But there are strong reasons to doubt this. Everyone knows lots of things that you do not, everyone's brain is trained differently. Another person's reasoning may not be legible to you after a cursory or even a fairly close inspection—or even after you've asked them to state their reasons, and they have tried. Yet it may still be good.
Careless strawmanning can lead us to badly underrate people who—by our own lights—we ought to admire, or at least take seriously. I know many people who severely underestimate figures like Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel, partly due to this effect.
Things get especially bad for people who tend to overindulge in general cynicism about motives.
The principle of charity is a strong antidote. So is the general attitude of "Most of my judgements are mostly wrong—I must keep attending, I must keep listening".
John Vervaeke on rationality, relevance realisation and insight
You have to shift away from a framing of decision theory or quantitative analysis, because the fundamental problem is overcoming an ill-defined problem to generate a well-posed problem—and then you can have a numerical analysis.
Relevance realisation: relevance is a property that is central to all cognition. We face a combinatorially explosive amount of information both outside of ourselves and within long term memory—there are so many possible ways we could connect and access. If you tried to calculate all that you would never finish. But we're doing that right now. Somehow we ignore most of the irrelevant information, we shrink the problem space down so we are very often making the right connections, doing what's appropriate in the situation. And you also have a capacity for correcting that.
I take the phenomenon of insight to be a case where you've done the shrinking of the problem, you've done the framing, but you've done it incorrectly, you've zeroed in on the wrong information. And then you have an "aha", you realise you were treating X as irrelevant when its not, or Y as relevant when its not. The process of relevance realisation is dynamic and self-correcting.
The relevance of a proposition is constantly varying even though logical structure is constant.
We have to drop to a bioeconomic level, pay attention to the cost of computation—not just metabolic but also economic, the opportunity cost imposed by the environment. The brain is always trying to evolve how it constrains the problem space. It does this by a process—we argue—analogous to evolution. Variation then selective pressure.
Richard Rorty reviews Truth and Truthfulness by Bernard Williams
Nietzsche said that:
we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”—we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd.
If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of attempting to cope better with the world round about us, you are likely to ҄find yourself described as a danger to the health of society: philosophers sympathetic to this line of thought now ҄find themselves called Postmodernists, and are viewed with the same hostility as Spinozists were three hundred years ago. If you agree with Dewey that the search for truth is just a particular species of the search for happiness, you will be accused of asserting something so counter-intuitive that only a lack of intellectual responsibility can account for your behaviour.
Most non-philosophers would regard the choice between correspondence-to-reality and pragmatist ways of describing the search for truth as a scholastic quibble of the kind that only a professor of philosophy could be foolish enough to get excited about.
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Those who grow passionate on one or the other side of arcane and seemingly pointless disputes are struggling with the question of what self-image it would be best for human beings to have. So it is with the dispute about truth that has been going on among the philosophy professors ever since the days of Nietzsche and James. That dispute boils down to the question of whether, in our pursuit of truth, we must answer only to our fellow human beings, or also to something non-human, such as the Way Things Really Are In Themselves.
Nietzsche thought the latter notion was a surrogate for God, and that we would be stronger, freer, better human beings if we could bring ourselves to dispense with all such surrogates: to stop wanting to have ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ on our side.
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[Williams] has derided what he calls ‘the rationalistic theory of rationality’: the claim that rationality consists in obedience to eternal, ahistorical standards. His most widely read book, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, mocked Kantian approaches to moral philosophy.
Such remarks will convince many people that Williams has long since gone over to the dark side, and is hardly the right person to mount a defence of truth against the bad guys. Having conceded so much to the opposition, he has to work hard to secure a middle-of-the-road position – to avoid drifting either to the Platonist right or to the pragmatist left.
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[Williams] counts me among the ‘moderate deniers’ – by which he means, I think, that I share many more views with him than with Foucault. But he insists that we moderates ‘as much as the more radical deniers need to take seriously the idea that to the extent that we lose a sense of the value of truth, we shall certainly lose something, and may well lose everything.’
Williams argues that it is essential to the defence of liberalism to believe that the virtue he capitalises as ‘Sincerity’ has intrinsic rather than merely instrumental value. He defends this claim in the course of telling a ‘genealogical story’, one that attempts to ‘give a decent pedigree to truth and truthfulness’. We need such a story, he believes, since the notion of truth might be thought tainted by its associations with Platonism.
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[Williams] makes it ‘a sufficient condition for something (for instance, trustworthiness) to have an intrinsic value that, ҄first, it is necessary (or nearly necessary) for basic human purposes and needs that human beings should treat it as an intrinsic good, and, second, that they can coherently treat it as an intrinsic good.’
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He wants to retain the conviction, common among analytic philosophers who distrust pragmatism, that the quest for truth is not the same thing as the quest for justi҄fication.
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As he rightly suggests, the only answer the pragmatist can give to this question is that the procedures we use for justifying beliefs to one another are among the things that we try to justify to one another. We used to think that Scripture was a good way of settling astronomical questions, and pontifical pronouncements a good way of resolving moral dilemmas, but we argued ourselves out of both convictions. But suppose we now ask: were the arguments we offered for changing our approach to these matters good arguments, or were they just a form of brainwashing? At this point, pragmatists think, our spade is turned. For we have, as Williams himself says in the passage I quoted above, no way to compare our representations as a whole with the way things are in themselves.
Williams, however, seems to think that we philosophy professors have special knowledge and techniques that enable us, despite this inability, to show that the procedures we now think to be truth-acquiring actually are so. ‘The real problems about methods of inquiry, and which of them are truth acquiring . . . belong to the theory of knowledge and metaphysics.’ These disciplines, he assures us, provide answers to ‘the question, for a given class of propositions, of how the ways of ҄finding out whether they are true are related to what it is for them to be true’.
Williams would seem to be claiming that these metaphysicians and epistemologists stand on neutral ground when deciding between various ways of reaching agreement. They can stand outside history, look with an impartial eye at the Reformation, the Scieintific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and then, by applying their own special, specifically philosophical, truth-acquiring methods, underwrite our belief that Europe’s chances of acquiring truth were increased by those events. They can do all this, presumably, without falling back into what Williams scorns as ‘the rationalistic theory of rationality’.
Williams seems to believe that analytic philosophers have scrubbed metaphysics and epistemology clean of Platonism, and are now in a position to explain what makes various classes of propositions true. If there really were such explanations, then our spade would not be turned where the pragmatists think it is. But of course we who are labelled ‘deniers of truth’ do not think there are. We think the sort of metaphysics and epistemology currently practised by analytic philosophers is just as fantastical and futile as Plato’s Theory of Forms and Locke’s notion of simple ideas.
As far as I can see, Williams’s criticism of ‘the indistinguishability argument’ stands or falls with the claim that analytic philosophers really can do the wonderful things he tells us they can – that they are not just hard-working public relations agents for contemporary institutions and practices, but independent experts whose endorsement of our present ways of justifying beliefs is based on a superior knowledge of what it is for various propositions to be true. Williams would have had a hard time convincing Nietzsche, Dewey or the later Wittgenstein that they had any such knowledge.
The historical portion shows Williams at his best – not arguing with other philosophers, but rather, in the manner of Isaiah Berlin, helping us understand the changes in the human self-image that have produced our present institutions, intuitions and problems.
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He concedes to Foucault that ‘the “force of reason” can hardly be separated altogether from the power of persuasion, and, as the ancient Greeks well knew, the power of persuasion, however benignly or rationally exercised, is still a species of power.’ Williams’s appreciation of this Nietzschean point makes him wary of the Habermasian idea of ‘the force of the better argument’, and leads him to conclude the chapter by saying ‘It is not foolish to believe that any social and political order which effectively uses power, and which sustains a culture that means something to the people who live in it, must involve opacity, mystification and largescale deception.’
[...]
Williams has to work hard here to concede just enough to the opposition, but not too much. He needs carefully to distinguish between justified Nietzschean and Foucauldian suspicions about the supporting stories, and unjustified contempt for the Enlightenment’s political hopes. In making this distinction, he takes on the same complicated and delicate assignment previously attempted by Dewey, Weber and many others. He wants to show us how to combine Nietzschean intellectual honesty and maturity with political liberalism – to keep on striving for liberty, equality and fraternity in a totally disenchanted, completely de-Platonised intellectual world.
The prospect of such a world would have appalled Kant, whose defence of the French Revolution was closely linked to his ‘rationalistic theory of rationality’. Kant is the philosopher to whom such contemporary liberals as Rawls and Habermas ask us to remain faithful. Williams, by contrast, turns his back on Kant. So did Dewey. The similarity between Dewey’s and Williams’s conceptions of the desirable self-image for heirs of the Enlightenment is, in fact, very great, so I am all the more puzzled by his hostility to pragmatism in the ҄first half of his book.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n21/richard-rorty/to-the-sunlit-uplands
Nietzsche on the prospect of secular ethics (as quoted on the dedication of Reasons & Persons)
At last the horizon appears free to us again, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.
Nietzsche on love of truth, life, and perhaps even cultivating the species
Is it any wonder that we finally grow suspicious, lose patience, turn round impatiently? That we learn from this Sphinx how to pose questions of our own? Who is actually asking us the questions here? What is it in us that really wants to 'get at the truth'?
It is true that we paused for a long time to question the origin of this will, until finally we came to a complete stop at an even more basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Given that we want truth: why do we not prefer untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?
—Beyond Good and Evil, On the Prejudices of Philosophers.
There are some things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we nowadays learn as artists to forget well, to be good at not knowing! And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who make temples unsafe at night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, we have grown sick of this bad taste, this will to truth, to 'truth at any price', this youthful madness in the love of truth: we are too experienced, too serious, too jovial, too burned, too deep for that . . . We no longer believe that truth remains truth when one pulls off the veil; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, to be present everywhere, to understand and 'know' everything.
—The Gay Science, Preface
We do not object to a judgement just because it is false; this is probably what is strangest about our new language. The question is rather to what extent the judgement furthers life, preserves life, preserves the species, perhaps even cultivates the species; and we are in principle inclined to claim that judgements that are the most false (among which are the synthetic a priori judgements)* are the most indispensable to us, that man could not live without accepting logical fictions, without measuring reality by the purely invented world of the unconditional, self-referential, without a continual falsification of the world by means of the number-that to give up false judgements would be to give up life, to deny life. Admitting untruth as a condition of life: that means to resist familiar values in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that dares this has already placed itself beyond good and evil.
—Beyond Good and Evil, On the Prejudices of Philosophers.
Ash Milton on meritocratic elite selection
The middle class thinks in terms of money. Their personal status is not secure. You don't know quite what car you're going to get, what school you'll be able to afford.
If you have your entire society operating with a middle class brain you'll have a society that feels itself under threat all the time. A strong social climber mentality but not really on the ladders that matter—mainly on signalling ladders. It'll be a society that does not think in terms of whole of society advancement, but rather in terms of personal advancement.
[...]
An actually good elite system is based on privilege. You have some people who don't have to worry about their personal standing. And they are able therefore to use that position to worry about society. They are trained to worry on behalf of society.
https://palladiummag.com/2021/09/18/palladium-podcast-64-the-cultivation-of-elites/
Tetlock vs King & Kay on probabilistic reasoning
A cartoon dialog:
Philip Tetlock: "Vague verbiage is a big problem."
Mervyn King & John Kay: "Over-confidence and false-precision is a big problem."
Philip Tetlock: "Calibration training and explicitly quantifying credences makes decisions better on average."
Mervyn King & John Kay: "Explicitly quantifying credences makes decisions worse on average."
Is there more to it than this?
King and Kay sometimes speak as though there is a deep theoretical disagreement. But I don't see it.
I have a hard time conceiving of beliefs that are not accompanied by implicit credences. So when someone says "you can't put a subjective probability on that belief", my first thought is: "do I have a choice?". I can choose whether to explicitly state a point estimate or confidence interval, but if I decide against, my mind will still attach a confidence level to the belief.
In the book "Radical Uncertainty", King and Kay discuss Barack Obama's decision to authorise the operation that killed Bin Laden:
We do not know whether Obama walked into the fateful meeting with a prior probability in his mind: we hope not. He sat and listened to conflicting accounts and evidence until he felt he had enough information – knowing that he could expect only limited and imperfect information – to make a decision. That is how good decisions are made in a world of radical uncertainty, as decision-makers wrestle with the question ‘What is going on here?’
My first reaction is: of course Obama had prior probabilities in his mind. If he didn't, that'd be a state of total ignorance, which isn't something we should hope for.
King and Kay's later emphasis on "What is going on here?" makes me think that what they really mean is they don't want Obama to come into the meeting blinded by over-confidence (whether that overconfidence stems from a quantative model, or—I would add—from a non-quantitative reference narrative).
When it comes down to it, I think King and Kay should basically just be read as stressing the danger of the what they call "The Viniar Problem":
The mistake of believing you have more knowledge than you do about the real world from the application of conclusions from artificial models
They say this problem "runs deep". They think that The Viniar Problem is often caused or made worse by attempts to think in terms of maximising expected value:
To pretend to optimise in a world of radical uncertainty, it is necessary to make simplifying assumptions about the real world. If these assumptions are wrong—as in a world of radical uncertainty they are almost certain to be—optimisation yields the wrong results, just as someone searching for their keys under the streetlamp because that is where the light is best makes the error of substituting a well-defined but irrelevant problem for the less well-defined problem he actually faces.
Bayesian decision theory tells us what it means to make an ideal decision. But it does not tell us what decision procedures humans should use in a given situation. It certainly does not tell us we should go around thinking about maximising expected value most of the time. And it's quite compatible with the view that, in practice, we always need to employ rules of thumb and irreducibly non-quantitative judgement calls at some level.
It's true that expected value reasoning is difficult and easy to mess up. But King and Kay sometimes seem to say, contra Annie Duke, that people should never attempt to "think in bets" when it comes to large worlds (viz. complicated real-world situations).
This claim is too strong. Calibration training seems to work, and superforecasters are impressive, even if—per Tim Harford—it'd be better to call them "less terrible forecasters".
So sure—we are not cognitive angels, but serious concern about The Viniar Problem does not entail never put a probability on a highly uncertain event.
Later, King and Kay write:
We cannot act in anticipation of every unlikely possibility. So we select the unlikely events to monitor. Not by some metarational calculation which considers all these remote possibilities and calculates their relative importance, but by using our judgement and experience.
And my thought is: yes, of course.
A good Bayesian never thinks they have the final answer: they continually ask: "what is going on here?", "why is this wrong?", "what does my belief predict?", "how should I update on this?". They usually entertain several plausible perspectives, sometimes perspectives that are in direct tension with each other. And yes, they make meta-rational weighting decisions based on judgement, experience, rule of thumb, animal spirits—not conscious calculation.
All this seems compatible with the practice of putting numbers on highly uncertain events.
In a podcast interview, Joseph Walker asked John Kay to comment on Graham Allison's famous prediction in Destined for War?. Looking at the historical record, Allison found that in 12 / 16 cases over the past 500 years, when a rising power challenged an established power, the result was war. On that basis he says that war between the US and China is "more likely than not". Kay's comment:
I think that's a reasonable way of framing it. What people certainly should not do is say that the probability of war between these two countries is 0.75, i.e. 12 / 16. We distinguish between likelihood, which is essentially an ordinal variable, and probability, which is cardinal.
Wait... so I'm allowed to say "more likely than not", but not "greater than 50%" or "greater than 1 / 2"?
And... what is this distinction between "ordinal" likelihood and "cardinal" probability? I searched their book for the words "ordinal" and "cardinal" and found... zero mentions. And the passages that include "likelihood" were not illuminating. The closest thing I could find (but not make sense of):
Discussion of uncertainty involves several different ideas. Frequency – I believe a fair coin falls heads 50% of the time, because theory and repeated observation support this claim. Confidence – I am pretty sure the Yucatán event caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, because I have reviewed the evidence and the views of respected sources. And likelihood – it is not likely that James Joyce and Lenin met, because one was an Irish novelist and the other a Russian revolutionary. My knowledge of the world suggests that, especially before the global elite jetted together into Davos, the paths of two individuals of very disparate nationalities, backgrounds and aspirations would not cross.
In the context of frequencies drawn from a stationary distribution, probability has a clear and objective meaning. When expressing confidence in their judgement, people often talk about probabilities but it is not clear how the numbers they provide relate to the frequentist probabilities identified by Fermat and Pascal. When they ask whether Joyce met Lenin, the use of numerical probability is nonsensical.
The Bayesian would say that expressing 50% confidence in a belief is equivalent to saying "in this kind of domain, when I analyse the reasoning and evidence I've seen, beliefs like this one will be true about half of the time".
A skeptical response might insist on radical particularism (i.e. every belief is formed in a different domain, so it's impossible to build up a relevant track record). I think the performance of superforecasters disproves this.
Overall, my current take is: King and Kay offer a useful warning about the perils of probabilistic reasoning in practice, based on their decades of experience. But the discussion strikes me as hyperbolic, confusing and confused. Am I missing something?
Keynes on Economics and the Limits of Decision Theory
We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.
[...]
Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: Chapter 12
Trial and error is great until it kills you
Preserving the institutions that correct errors is more important than getting it right first time.
—David Deutsch
Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens—was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
David Deutsch, channelling Popper, is right to stress the importance of error correction. But I really hope it is not the only way we can learn. Because sometimes we face "one shot" problems, where we need to get it right first time.
As individuals, if we make a fatal mistake, it's bad for us, but it's not the end of humanity. As culture and as species, we "learn" from the mistakes of individuals; our norms and genomes evolve. And by this mechanism, our descendants become less likely—individually—to make fatal mistakes when faced with "one shot" problems. Centrally: individuals develop an ability to detect and avoid situations that involve risk of ruin.
On the most disturbing read, the Vulnerable World Hypothesis involves a claim that we are approaching one or more "one shot" problems, at the species level. If we err, we wipe ourselves out—we don't get a chance to try again.
If we are on track to develop technologies that generate "one shot" extinction risks, it seems clear that "trial and error" isn't a sustainable strategy. We probably need to develop our ability—as a species—to detect and steer away from situations that involve risk of ruin. And it'd be nice to do this by design—not by species-level selection.
Robin Hanson on the future as reality
The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in space-time. Its residents, like us, find their world mundane and morally ambiguous.
[...]
New habits and attitudes result less than you think from moral progress, and more from people adapting to new situations. So many of your descendants’ strange habits and attitudes are likely to violate your concepts of moral progress; what they do may often seem wrong. Also, you likely won’t be able to easily categorize many future ways as either good or evil; they will instead just seem weird. After all, your world hardly fits the morality tales your distant ancestors told; to them you’d just seem weird. Complex realities frustrate simple summaries, and don’t fit simple morality tales.
The Age of Em: Introduction
Nietzsche's mountain
Those who can breathe the air of my writings know that it is an air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made for it. Otherwise there is no small danger one may catch cold in it. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous . . . Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains—seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality.
—Nietzsche, Preface to Ecce Homo
