Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
The Enlightenment was significant because it gave us a wedge. It allowed us to say 'religion is about the spiritual, about the ephemeral and ineffable, and science is about material reality'. That is a difference larger than modern people can easily understand. If your religious beliefs are beliefs about your everyday life and the visceral world you live in, you see things very differently. You can't simply live next door to someone with a different set of beliefs from your own. That person is an agent of evil, a soldier fighting in the cosmic and Earthly war between Good and Evil which will either see an eternity of peace and paradise (here, on this planet, not somewhere else) or an eternity of suffering depending upon who wins the war.
While Kolmogorov might have been able to build a bubble, those before the Enlightenment could not. It was impossible to defer judgement to some never-to-come 'afterlife'. It was impossible to extend to others a tolerance for their differing views. It was impossible for considering different ideas about how reality worked to not have a moral and religious consequence. The Enlightenment was so profoundly and deeply successful that those who grew up in societies where it took root can't even conceive of how different it would be to believe that everything which occurs in the world is the direct and immediate expression of the will of a god which suffuses all things and which the material world is but a slim skin over.
The trouble with whisper networks, though, is that they breed poorly-supported misinformation (fake news?) that may or may not have anything to do with whether thunder or lightning comes first.
Seems like if you want to reduce the incentive to create fake-news-breeding whisper networks, you should do what you can to not incentivize whisper-network creation.
Said another way, society often prefers falsehood over truth, because many times the truth is more immediately painful. (I would argue that in the long term truth is always superior)
In modern Western thought, voices aren't suppressed. Instead, they are politicized and used to put the speaker on a "side". Then the people on that side will defend their side (although not always the speaker) using that person as a proxy for their side.
We see this in global warming, in nuclear power, in gender equality, in free speech rights, in gun rights, in nurture vs nature.
I can think of only two examples where something similar to the behavior called out in this article occurs in the modern West. The first is the "neural network conspiracy" where CIFAR funded research for years, until they suddenly won. The other is cold fusion, where there are persistent rumors that this wasn't perhaps the dead end it was made out to be (I don't have the expertise to evaluate that and tell if it is crackpots or not though).
It's not true that voices aren't suppressed in the modern Western world, though. The original post by Scott Aaaronson, the one from which this post takes it title, was a response to present-day suppression of opinions. Both Scotts have opted to write their posts in a very general tone (even though they're obvious responses to some recent events), but I'll nevertheless spell it out in concrete terms: if you express your disagreement with the current feminist/social justice ideology on a public forum, you risk losing your job to an angry Twitter mob.
Can you point to that?
if you express your disagreement with the current feminist/social justice ideology on a public forum
While I agree that kind of behavior is what he is referring to, I'd note that is a perfect example of exactly what I said.
In the case of Damore specifically, yes, he lost his job but in return picked up numerous speaking engagements and is now a player in the culture wars. That's a long way from being executed!
He's suing Google, and being represented by Harmeet Dhillon, "a prominent San Francisco Republican who was considered for a post in the Trump administration" who is "a member of the Republican National Committee". Is it possible to be more entrenched in the mainstream culture wars than that?
Far from being Kolmogorov or Giordano Bruno, it seems to me he is closer to Kanye West circa the 2006 "Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" interview, or the Dixie Chicks anti-war comments, or Judith Miller's pro-Iraq war NY Times columns. All made some people really, really mad, and had some consequences for their authors, but long term just solidified their position for the other side.
Kolmogorov also becomes more relatable if you consider Damore's computer-science-related activities at Google science, and the role he's now cast into as politics. We don't execute, but we can blacklist and exclude. (Consider what might happen if he wanted to present a paper at a conference.)
In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.
Clearly 2009 and 2017 are pretty different worlds.
We don't execute, but we can blacklist and exclude. (Consider what might happen if he wanted to present a paper at a conference.)
This is precisely my point. There is no we - there are multiple groups, and while some may exclude others will welcome him.
As a specific - real world - example I'd note the rapturous reception any anti-climate change paper gets, and how authors get invited to present at anti-climate change conferences.
Yes, they maybe excluded and blacklisted from orthodox scientific conferences, but they have an entire separate world open to them. That's very different to being suppressed.
For example if you believe that climate change is a conspiracy by the Chinese to weaken the American economy, then even if you can go to anti-climate change conferences and be popular among climate change denialists, you won't be very happy because you will believe that in the end the Chinese are still going to destroy your country.
You could gain some social power but lose all your structural power[1]. For the sort of people who care more about objective reality than about popularity contests, that is a bad deal.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-mean...
As for Damore, it looks like he is being advised by socially savvy people. A nobody who expressed that opinion and didn't attract the attention of powerful allies would get fired unceremoniously without us ever hearing about them.
"Free speech" doesn't and shouldn't protect you from facing personal consequences for your speech. If you publicly profess stupid and/or offensive ideas, other people have a right to form opinions of you because of them, and those people have a right to choose not to do business with you.
My argument is that the personal consequences of that speech aren't what people think. Yes he lost his job, but he is now celebrated in some part of (fairly mainstream) politics.
That's pretty different to the examples in the linked article.
Fortunately nowadays Galileos are much more common than Brunos.
Well, "incorrect" voices are still suppressed. There are still things you can't say [1]. The first question is whether the number of things you can't say is greater today in the West than it is elsewhere or it was in the past. The second question is whether that number is increasing or decreasing over time.
In fact, the assertion that we don't punish speech is a pernicious one, because it puts the burden on the other person to prove you wrong... at which point you can punish them!
Sue me.