The Modern-Day Mind-Killer
keaganstokoe.com
keaganstokoe.com
In Heinrich's book "The Secret of our Success" on cumulative cultural evolution, he gives an example of pre-Columbus American cultures whose diet was based on bitter manioc (a.k.a. cassava).
Like the name suggests, in its raw form it's too bitter to eat, but these cultures evolved a set of traditions around the correct way to prepare it, and any deviation was taboo. The traditions involved pounding, scraping, straining and boiling the manioc over several days, most of the steps could only be performed by women (at least in the studied Tukanoa culture) and the women seem to have spend half their waking lives processing manioc.
So let's say you decide all the traditions are obviously bogus, do an experiment and find that just boling the thing for a couple of hours removes the bitter taste just as well.
The problem is the bitterness comes from cyanide, and boiling removes the taste but not the cyanide itself - something which the traditional process is really good at (Heinrich has studies and graphs to support this claim). Ten years later, you and the small pre-modern rationalist community you've founded are all in an advanced state of degeneration from cyanide poisoning.
The general principle here is called Chesterton's Fence (see the obvious wiki page for details), which is that if you come across a fence in a field and think it's stupid, make sure you really understand why it's there before you tear it down.
There are more examples like this in the book, such as a taboo in Polynesia on pregnant women consuming porpoises. It turns out that they do in fact contain chemical compounds that increase the risk of birth defects.
To quote a review in the now-deleted Slate Star Codex blog by Scott Alexander Ocasio-Cortez: "For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed."
My own view is that "don't take anything on faith ever" is as bad a life plan as "always follow traditions without question", and it's easy to think of lots of freshman philosophy level arguments why (your 5-year old is too young to properly understand electricity, would you want them to question your house rule against poking things in power sockets).
_P.S. it's become a kind of in-joke among SSC followers to invent a surname when they mention him now._
I used to read PC magazines, the kind that were available in grocery stores (because I'm old), then I discovered USENET, then RSS, then Reddit, then HN, and a bunch of other more and more esoteric infotainment sources more aligned with my tastes. But so many people get on Facebook and just stay there.
I used to watch news networks. Then I started reading political blogs. Then I got onto Twitter and started following people with best leaks, insider info, and wittiest comments. Finally, I realized it's pointless and stopped following it at all. But so many people stay watching the news networks which just launder all that other stuff you can so easily get directly. Worse, they allow the media to capture their minds.
Sure, not everyone can be a groundbreaking innovator but, in this age of massive choice, why do people choose anything other than hyper hipsterdom?
UPDATE: I see this explanation is covered more thoroughly in other comments.
You will never be a completely rational being, no matter how hard you try. You are very good at tricking yourself, and it happens all the time. If you attempt to "think, don't believe", you will fail, and along the way yield all control over what you believe.
This is not how logic works.
For me, this is sort of the ultimate somewhat Zen like lesson I've distilled from the skeptical movement. It's good to know you have these faiths and biases. But it's only less naive to think you have the time or the capacity to out-think them all.
It's troubling to me that I see a lot of the folks in the modern rationalist movement go hard at other people for not being "rational" or not using "facts" when what they should've learned is to be tremendously suspicious of their own conclusions and to hold them very loosely.
Relevant to this is the analogy by Phil Goetz of reason as a memetic immune disorder [1]:
> The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it.
> A little reason can be a dangerous thing. The landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it. Sometimes, reason lets us see the dangerous aspects of our memes, but not the blind spots that protect us from them. Sometimes, it lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conclusions.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-...
The hive mind is an interesting phenomenon, it seems that there isn't a right or wrong way to do things. Anything we do is a behavior which ripples its effects way beyond our understanding. One thing seems certain though; if a behavior is there, it's been selected by evolution. So, there has to have some advantage at some level even if it isn't obvious at all.
Regarding Chesterton's Fence, it's something I've been noticing myself as my understanding grows. Though I didn't know the term, I do see it more and more around me. I have the feeling that one example of this behavior can be spotted in today's strict Muslim society, where women are covered head to toe. As westerners, we see it as a very absurd thing to do for the sake of a religion. But do we really understand the whole story? Seeing how we ourselves quickly rushed to cover our faces to avoid catching a contagious disease, I'm speculating that something similar might have been the initiative for such a cultural artifact. Which are the most vulnerable and most valuable people in a society? Women, obviously, we have to protect them. Perhaps in similar disease outbreaks in the Middle East, people figured out that by reducing contact with your environment actually reduces the possibility for illness and death.
It perhaps then, eventually creeped its way into religion, because you had to make sure people would follow the advice even if they didn't understand it, and that was the institution people listened to at those times and was more likely to be passed on to next generations. Survival supersedes freedom, so, there you have it.
[0]: https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/stanford-b...
Forager ants, Galileos and people who just boil their cassava are the explorers I guess, and probably humanity needs a proportion of them because every now and then one of them will find a herb with amazing medicinal properties or something. That may be an evolutionary advantage even if 90% of explorers die eating something poisonous before they've found anything useful.
Maybe startups are today's explorers? Being very generous to VC-backed startups, possibly 90% of them fail, but on average they're still a good investment - just ask Paul Graham.
I'm less sure about the full veil as an example because there's a lot of debate about what exactly the Prophet's instruction for women to cover their head meant; it's certainly interpreted differently across different Islamic cultures (a hijab is not an abaya is not a burqa etc.); and covering of the face as opposed to the hair is definitely not universal in Islam (the headscarf/hijab leaves the face free for example).
But many women in burqas consider it liberating not to be obliged to wear makeup and track fashion. Invisibility can be a power, in context. Maybe everyone should have a burqa on hand, for those times. You can conceal a lot in there that no one suspects.
Or, we can just stop 'selling' women?
I don't think 'natural selection' makes a bidirectional claim in this way. Not every gene expression is an advantageous mutation. In other words, a lot hinges on your interpretation of 'advantage'. Darwin's observations of advantage explained difference, whereas a mutation which leads to similar traits in organisms would not have an advantage per se--it's just mutation, replication, selection. repeat.
This is not my field of study. Maybe someone else can correct me or say this better...
My only take away from it is that people don't really have as strong a preference for buffet food as they might think. I'd also wager that avoiding "bad" food is much more important than finding particularly "good" food.
I don’t want sausages and eggs, but if I get to the end of the line and find out Janine has made off with the last of the Cheerios and pastries again my whole day will be ruined and I’m not taking that chance.
Plus, the point of a buffet (for me at least, being the fatass I am) is to try a little bit of everything, so unless it's something I already know I don't like, I'm probably gonna grab it.
A friend of mine is a vegetarian; I don't imagine putting the ham first in the buffet line would affect her much either.
If I roll out of bed and open reddit or facebook first thing in the morning, I feel like I am priming my mind for failure. Lately I have been trying to read more enriching material in the morning, and slowly move into less useful material as the day goes on. For example, I usually wake up and have my first coffee while reading HN and WSJ. Mid morning break I may read a chapter of whatever non-fiction book I am currently working on. Lunch may be Ars, TC, or hackaday. And finally in the evening I will start moving towards reddit, facebook, etc.
Maybe there are more disciplined people out there that can completely avoid non-enriching material, but for some reason I can't shake it. I can however move it to the least productive part of my day, and I generally feel better for it.
You can read blogs (RSS feeds) and email newsletters on your Kindle. It allows you to wake up and read long form content without needing your phone. I personally find that whenever I have my phone on me I almost always end up getting distracted so my solution is to just not have my phone anywhere near me when I wake up in the morning (or throughout the parts of the day where I'm trying to be productive).
I just launched it a few weeks ago. Any feedback would be great.
I think it depends. I've ditched my telly when I was about twenty. I neither use Facebook nor Twitter nor any other social media, unless you want to count HN as such. But I do consume selected entertainment products, and I don't think such material is really "non-enriching". It's part of recreation, and as such I think it counts as a kind of enrichment in it's own right.
Otherwise this is 100% explainable as a hoarding instinct because there is uncertainty about what else is available. Depending on a given person’s risk aversion, it’s entirely rational to take this view of the opportunity cost of passing on early choices you can’t revisit later.
Which might take a long time, and by the time you're back at $item, it may be out.
I -could- go back and forth 30 times and end up with a satisfaction-maximizing plate.
But I'm not gonna do that. I'm going to stack some lettuce because I know it's a good base for whatever I get next (though cheap for the restaurant). I'm going to pick a quantity that leaves room for unexpected yummies ahead out of sight, but also is sufficient that if I find few things I like ahead I'll still be happy with my salad.
I don't even manage to maximize the outcome at buffets that I've been at before with mostly static contents.
While Cass and Sunstein argue for government action in framing healthier choices, this post puts the onus on us to a.) recognize that information consumption involves choices, and b.) be more active thinkers consumers of information.
A small example is the DMV person failing to tell you about an option you have that costs them more work. A big one is the Rick Scott administration's design of the unemployment system in Florida:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/florida-unemployment...
I applaud the idea of deliberately thinking about this stuff; one reason why governmental programs go off the rails is that programs are implemented in bad faith (or just "lazy faith"). So insofar as you actually want competent government, bringing attention to this stuff is positive. I'm a bit less optimistic about improving individual behavior that way, but then I'm a pessimist about that topic in general.
You will also find a lot of literature saying these things don't work. What they mean is "they don't work in the way they were sold to the people buying the end cap." But they sure do have an effect.
I do look in advance whether there is something awesome worth longer wait, typically it is just more of the same.
The traditional way to mitigate misinformation's harm was education and a respect for the educated.
I think three things have happened that have prevented this from working:
- We decided decades ago that people needed college degrees to enter much of the workforce. This has reduced education to an employment gateway in the minds of the majority of non-independently wealthy society. It may not have done so if people actually needed the degrees for their jobs and alternate career-starting things like apprenticeships were more available/known.
- Education for all is seen as a method of making society for equal and therefore the solution of a number of social ills. It really is, but has to be done properly otherwise it doesn't work. Children who do not keep up tend to be socially promoted. Children who are outcasts for various reasons, including parental problems at home, drop out or degrade the experience for others in the school. This either causes or is because many of the non-independently wealthy masses see public school as a public babysitter, and they more or less have to see things this way if they are living paycheck to paycheck, because they can't afford to have someone stay home for their children.
- The Internet has accelerated and likely caused fragmentation and in some cases destruction of mass media, and has made mass media have to sell out and become sensationalized to survive. Thus there is less and less of a common media between people, and therefore less of an opportunity to provide any substrate of a common culture. Social media bubbles exacerbate this.
Education is essential, and yet is not a panacea for thinking well. So when experts can't seem to give people a straight answer, they'll simply turn to their peer group and hope for the best. And right now, as you noted, peer groups primarily consist of highly self-selected social media groups.
Second issue is tendency to take the first confident guy with simple answer as expert. The folding expert is pretty often not considered expert by people who deal with the field - he is typically just someone confident and well spoken.
Second thing is, if too many credentialed people object, there might be issue.
Third, lack of nuance, lack of asterisk and too much confidence are bad signs.
- A less bitter variety of Brussels sprouts became widespread about a decade ago
- Any water-based method of cooking Brussels sprouts is convenient but terrible compared to pan-frying with some onion and salt
That was my assumption too. But having researched further (or more specifically entered "why do you put a cross on sprouts" into an internet search engine) I get information like "Contrary to popular opinion, Brussels sprouts do not benefit from having a cross cut into the bottom of them. Instead of helping them to cook evenly, the cross can make the sprouts waterlogged"[0].
The more I read this article, the more uncomfortable I began feeling with the tone it had, which I could see being used by the conspiracy/anti-science types of the world. This idea that we all believe crazy ideas as a result of overconfident experts is the same fallacy addressed by Isaac Asimov in his essay “The Relativity of Wrong” [1]. The whole thing is worth a read, but I’ll include the most relevant passage below.
> In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.
What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
[1] https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...
There are no actual actionable takeaways from reading this. As the article says, we have an abundance of information. This, coupled with bad actors who intentionally inject misleading, false, and emotionally charged information into our incoming data stream, means our lizard brains are overloaded and basically do the easiest thing possible: revert to emotion and agree with information that confirms our already held biases.
The only thing that has been helpful to me is two fold: one, to revisit technological triumphs of previous eras. I’m listening to 13 minutes to the moon with my kids. It brings me to tears the focus, determination, and pure dedication to science required to pull off such engineering feats. Second, I push myself to read books. Mostly books about espionage because I find them both entertaining and I like to think it helps me make sense of the noise today. Currently I’m reading Ben Macintyres books - highly recommended.
This doesn’t mean that a non-recognized expert cannot cultivate this knowledge independently, but rather that it is exceedingly difficult to have both and independent and valuable opinion of a wide variety of topics. Now, while this does not account for the possibility of blind spots in fields or bias in experts, it does mean that to have truly independent yet accurate thoughts, you must account for that expertise in the thinking, which is a large task.
Do I think it makes more sense to directly read experts rather than secondary and tertiary sources when creating opinions? Yes! However, that isn’t independent thought. Perhaps my counter-proposal is independent thought in areas of expertise, educated opinions based on expertise on topics about which you care, and maintain humility in areas outside that sphere.
It also seems to imply that majority opinions are things to reject, rather than interrogate. It applies a sort of inherent "don't be a sheep" mentality, but if it's very cold outside then covering yourself in wool and keeping your calorie ingestion up might actually be the most reasonable way to stay warm.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I think this realization leads to the need to challenge everything about your environment, accept the idea that different points of view exist, and carefully evaluate if ideas are good and truthful independently of their popularity. Implicitly siding with the minority opinion every time leaves you just as open to manipulation as trusting the majority every time, and we see both approaches used in many nation's politics.
If you understand systems-- why and how they work-- you don't need to necessarily challenge everything. In fact, if you don't sufficiently understand a system then "challenging everything" can signal a lack of awareness and tacitly limit your options.
For example, the local mechanic can look at the queue of other customers and decide it isn't worth the time to attempt to convince Socrates that fixing the steering fluid leak is urgent.
In fact it's "turtles all the way down," because even when Socrates told me of that encounter, I could see just how deep down the rabbit hole I'd have to go to have any effect on their course of action. So I did my due diligence with the weaker position of, "I've never gotten a suspicious estimate from that mechanic." Same with at least two other people Socrates talked to.
Then one morning Socrates was late to work because the same car wouldn't run. Socrates had to skip lunch and pay extra for a tow out to that same mechanic.
It was odd how Socrates suddenly seemed so reluctant to delve into the exact nature of the problem with the car at that point.
But how would you reach that recognition of the system with confidence without interrogating it? What if your confidence in the system itself was informed by coincidence, bias and genetic fallacies?
> For example, the local mechanic can look at the queue of other customers and decide it isn't worth the time to attempt to convince Socrates that fixing the steering fluid leak is urgent.
Oh my, "something something Engels was wrong..."
Nevermind that, Socrates might still be inclined in an era of plentiful information to get a second opinion and quote on a damage car if the bill is quite large. This is not at all unusual. Perhaps we might appeal to a parent who says, "Oh yeah, that mechanic has never left me dissatisfied" and then at least we are slightly decreasing the chance that pure proximity and chance defined our preferences?
Which you in fact suggest, in the next paragraph. Is this not at least some form of interrogation?
> In fact it's "turtles all the way down," because even when Socrates told me of that encounter, I could see just how deep down the rabbit hole I'd have to go to have any effect on their course of action. So I did my due diligence with the weaker position of, "I've never gotten a suspicious estimate from that mechanic." Same with at least two other people Socrates talked to.
It seems though like even this modest decision is something the article urges us not to do, because evidence self-doubt or deliberation is itself a novel "mind killer". The article itself is somewhat incoherent on this point, suggesting that:
>> We live in the age of abundance. It's never been easier to passively consume the opinions of others. It's also never been more dangerous.
Isn't a professional and authoritative opinion exactly what Socrates is paying his mechanic Euthyphro for here? I think maybe you've misinterpreted the article. The article urges folks to avoid consuming the opinions of people who don't agree with you already, because their opinions might be compelling.
>> Our minds - when fed the first piece of information you come across - are like crops without a ring of protection. They’re vulnerable and waiting to be destroyed. By being deliberate about what we consume and what we believe, we develop a ring of protection.
Which is a bit weird because, well, did these opinions the author wants to defend emerge from a perfect void housing only the spirit of Descartes? Is not the ultimate implicit and coincidental bias the one our parents furnished us with? The author is arguing that people dare not consider any opinions than these, because they might be invalidated.
But it's not clear why that would be so bad. Who says changing your mind when new information presented is bad? If we're prone to proximity biases, genetic fallacies and post-hoc rationalizations; then aren't we approaching something closer to objectivity by re-evaluating our opinions over time? While we will never remove all bias, we can certainly strive to remove some and that seems somehow better if we accept the article's premise that it's somehow bad to be manipulated by others.
Honestly, I wonder if you read the article carefully.
1. your selections don't radically change what the buffet offers in real time like, say, Google search.
and
2. Unless you take pains to anonymize, your buffet options are already skewed to support your biases, say to starches.
My wife and I will research the same topic at the same time on our respective workstations and get radically different results. The internet echo chamber feeds back two very different experiences, side by side (Never mind what happens when I fire up a non-US VPN)
One of us adds a single negative keyword to their search phrase and the results are dishearteningly dystopic. Coworkers who rely on Facebook for their daily dose of tribal information have an extremely different set of 'facts' for any topic I care to mention.
What I find most disturbing about this is that few people can/will take the time to compare notes across tribal or socioeconomic divides in a meaningful way -- we're all consuming a different buffet and its becoming more difficult by the minute to be sure of the chefs and suppliers.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Also, interesting fact: this is a Wansink paper. Wansink is a bullshit artist of the highest order. So I think there's quite a meta-lesson here.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/br...