Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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> it follows that 10% or so of the population are, well, nuts. Another 10% are so are willing to do anything to become famous. It has always been this way.

Not sure that's true, though. Here's a cloud to cover your sunshine: what if the very concept that beliefs have to correspond to observable reality is a relatively new one, or a relatively unpopular one (with a 10% of the population subscribing to it)? What if it's an unchanging constant that people believe whatever works for them in the immediate, observable way? What if it's natural for people to believe in lies, if these lies don't seem to cause obvious, instant hurt to them, and especially if these lies benefits them socially (going along better with their tribe, finding their in-group, raising status)?

I worry that for most of history, we could get away with believing in bullshit. And now we've scaled up and advanced our societies to the point they need accurate beliefs to function. Problem is, holding inaccurate beliefs doesn't usually hurt you in an immediately obvious ways, so our monkey brains don't connect the failures of our institutions with the bullshit individuals spread to each other.

Thank you for saying this. It takes the discussion in a different, but I think more useful, direction. Suffering is caused when you believe something that isn't true, and the rational idealists don't want to accept "it's natural for people to believe in lies", as you say. (There is a juicy irony here, which I will leave as an exercise for the reader.)

The key innovation we require, as a society, are better feedback mechanisms to correct inaccurate beliefs. This means more frequent, but smaller, pain in response to mistakes. To those who object, the alternative isn't no pain, but rather, the catastrophic pain of collapse. Society is really a collection of institutions, and somehow in all institutions, loyalty has usurped principle, and accountability fails because the accuser is shunned, hated, feared. So, institution by institution, we weaken.

The solution, for example in academia, is to shun (fire, blacklist, etc) those "researchers" who cheat, lie, and distort their findings. In the justice system, lawyers, police, and judges who break the rules should be punished more, not less, severely than the rest of us. Again, these are not changes born of malice, or a desire to see more suffering, but rather a price we must accept to maintain healthy institutions with high standards, and so, prevent societal collapse.

In some ways I think "cancel culture" is a reaction to this lack of accountability, as an attempt to replace it, to ape it, almost like a cargo cult. Of course, there are huge problems with this, not the least of which there is not an institution behind it, but rather just mob rule that answers to no-one, not even itself.

> The key innovation we require, as a society, are better feedback mechanisms to correct inaccurate beliefs.

I have come to the conclusion that managing our collective delusions is more important than correcting them. Reality is unbearable to the human psyche. Most collective delusions are benign or even beneficial to society.

I’ve been wondering for some time if all cognitive biases are necessary for us to function; some socially, some because evidence is extremely scarce compared to scientific standards, some because of the need to avoid negative effects of exploration, etc.

I definitely agree on the cancel culture aspect. I'm just out of college, and for people my age and younger, there is such a desperate and helpless anger towards the people in power.

There is absolutely nothing concrete that I can do on a day-to-day basis to protect my world, my friends, my family from people that I watch lie, cheat, and steal on national television. It's absolutely sickening.

I vote, and I canvass, and I donate. But man, when I see someone on twitter talking about how they think gay people should be shot like animals or something equally insane, it feels like there's one small right thing I could do, which is to make that person feel like shit. I don't, mostly -- it's just a toxic cycle for my personal wellbeing -- but I see the attraction. Yelling at people online (and to a further extent, excluding them from your world) feels like the only thing you can do sometimes.

I'm 20 years out of college, and I feel the same way. At my best, I remember to scale my energy according to proximity: things nearer to me get more energy. Part of the problem is that we're presented with a parade of information about stuff that isn't happening here, around me. That, coupled with the aching feeling that you're a bad person if you don't pay attention to what's happening in the world, even its far away. That is really sick, because it's guilting you into paying attention to stuff you cannot, by definition, control.

And then we, the techno-futurists, don't want to deal with what's in front of us because its too small, doesn't scale, or because this problem will go away once we reach the economic Singularity or have flying cars or whatever utopian dream is in fashion.

Personally, I think we need better systems to leverage people's real, concrete pain into actionable change. Like, you should be able to donate money or time to fixing the things that really hurt you. Maybe its the DMV. Or maybe its traffic court. Or maybe its a late fee on a credit card. Or maybe its finding out that a fact you believed was made up. Right now, everything is so siloed. Imagine if everyone hurt by the DMV could pledge money to fix the problem.

This is my line of thinking. Which is why I see professions that deal with the real world (engineers, doctors, lawyers to some extent) remaining more grounded in their thinking when compared to those that focus on people's opinions (politicians, media, academics, professional moralisers). The former are regularly conditioned to think in terms of unavoidable realities, while the later are repeatedly conditioned to drift further and further into their collective delusions.

I don’t actually know if this is true. Do you have studies to back this claim up? I don’t trust that the medical system is more grounded in their thinking- the Public Health Service purposefully withheld medical treatment for syphilis for hundreds of black men for over 40 years. They willfully decided to target black men with this disease and then refused to treat them when a cure became available, going so far as to prevent the military from informing or treating these men during war time. Even at the time the experiment began, the ethical guidelines recommended syphilis be treated with what they had at the time, and the doctors knowing ignored this ethical recommendation, and continued on passing through the hands of multiple doctors working on preventing healthcare from being issued to black men for over 40 years. The medical community promoted people participating in this act and it was only after repeated whistleblower attempts was the extent of this horrific behavior uncovered. Indeed it was only when the media started to cover it that the full extent of the inhumane, unjustifiable behavior at the hands of doctors came to light.

To this day we know that the medical field is systematically unable to accurately treat black and female patients equivalently to white and male patients. (Unable for example to realize heart attacks in female patients represent differently for decades).

I don’t buy without formal study that the average deviation from basic opinions of reality deviate more in certain fields of study than others. Claiming it without any evidence is itself a form of deviating from observed reality.

> Which is why I see professions that deal with the real world (engineers, doctors, lawyers to some extent) remaining more grounded in their thinking when compared to those that focus on people's opinions (politicians, media, academics, professional moralisers).

I very much agree. However, a largely unrealized ~fact is that people from these professions (well, ones who hold the "right" ideas) are regularly portrayed by politicians and the media as flawless, omniscient, beyond reproach (which is increasingly being physically enforced on the internet, with a net that grows ever larger). The downstream consequences of this likely well-intended behavior are extremely complex - sure, censorship will provide a setback to conspiracy theorists' ability to speak their ideas freely, but how much fuel does this provide to their resolve, and how many mainstream people will see what is clearly happening and dip their toes into the pool, and have their eyes opened even further when they discover the vast amount of actually truthful information that doesn't make it into the "trustworthy mainstream news" (even further reinforcing the idea in their mind that the public is lied to, and illustrating that this is done regularly)?

A meme war approach to governance seems like not the best approach for the sole (for now) superpower on the planet, and they have a very delicate balancing act to truth-proof the internet without the mainstream masses noticing and starting to ask questions.

We've been warned about this behavior many times throughout history by people wiser than ourselves, perhaps as a species it might be an opportune time to pause for a moment and consider where the path we are currently heading down at stop speed eventually leads.

"A liar should have a good memory." - Quintilian

"If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything." - Mark Twain

"The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later thousandfold." - Aristotle

Programming teaches to check own believes, program executes as defined.

Verifiable history of changes teaches to check twice before blaming another.

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