Crony Beliefs
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meltingasphalt.com
Philosophical beliefs in the realms of politics, social, religious, are long thought not to be a discovery of the truth but a creation of a system in which the believers want to live in. It is not true that "thou shalt not kill" in the sense that is is not a law of the universe, but it sure makes living together a lot more desirable.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem - discovering a cronyism might generate a knee jerk reaction to eliminate it without understanding the full consequences of doing that. The data involved in a problem is practically infinite. Better the devil you know might be exemplified like this: sure, Bob is kind of lazy and he costs you 5k$ to employ him at you textile factory, but outsourcing your production to Asia, even though 1/5th of the cost for same productivity, might introduce problems you are not aware of at the time like: child labor, local workers not affording to buy your products any more, the outsourcing company controlling or taking over your business, etc.
So just discovering a belief isn't an universal truth or that it generates some problems does not necessarily justify destroying it.
If you look at the real world these risks get even invented on the fly (e.g. if we were to accept that immidiately $badthing would happen), so using the terms of the author: We can invent new crony believes with the purpose of protecting other (bigger) crony believes.
If you think about conspiracy nuts, their drama lies exactly in the flexibility. Their core crony believe isn't e.g. that the earth is flat or that reptilians control politics, but a deeper underlying believe that something is wrong. Which is why they often switch out their myths like other people change their clothes.
See this section for responses to the objection: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/#Nat...
For example, it is a fact that I'm currently sitting on my chair, writing this comment. However, answering the question "why am I writing this comment?" is deeply subjective even for me to answer. And yet, many people would consider it a "fact" that I want to sound smart, for example.
The language that we use also affects our understanding and models our environment. The previous example can be a fact for all of us only because we have a shared view of "what a chair is" through culture and language.
First, ask yourself "Can I clearly articulate and convey my belief, both to myself and to others?"
Continue to the next step only after you can answer the above with definite "Yes".
Next, ask yourself: "What evidence would make me change my mind about this belief?"
If the answer is "practically none" then you have discovered a crony belief.
If the evidence shows up and as a result you just move the goalposts to keep the original belief, then you are still infected...
We all need to model reality to survive. The problems begin when we worship the model instead of the reality it is meant to approximate. Any belief is a model that we are invested in and can have various levels of "staying power". A Zen (or other spiritual practitioner) would tell you that strongest of those and the one we usually are most invested in is the belief of a believer...
The best antidote to crony or otherwise any false beliefs is deciding the benefit of uncovering of what is True is more important than any other benefit.
All the above of course is a belief as well, which I will gladly change given a good counter argument/evidence :)
But seriously - if you are presented with evidence that when not all citizens have human rights then everyone is more well-off and happier than when all citizens have human rights, and after finding no errors in the data or logic, will you automatically dismiss it or reassess your belief?
If you would reassess your belief then it's not a crony belief. Of course, you might never need to reassess it, but being open to the possibility that it might need rethinking is what keeps it from being a crony belief
I simply do not believe that anyone would be "more well-off and happier" by themselves being stripped of the protection afforded by their own human rights. This is a contradiction in terms.
Argument against human rights are always targeted at some powerless underclass, such as immigrants or non-citizens, who are felt not worthy of this protection. The person making this argument typically feels that the leopard would surely never eat _their_ privileged face, but would only punish, you know, _those people_.
Isn't this just a battle of crony beliefs? The crony belief in rights vs the crony belief that people aught to be more well off and happier.
Kidding aside, as I mentioned earlier I suggest the antidote to crony or any other false beliefs is an uncompromising and unrelenting skepticism in every belief. This neti-neti approach can continue until what remains is not a belief anymore, but a recognition of something that is prior to any belief.
It's actually very easy to do this.
If I believe that "it is good to reduce net human suffering so others can live fulfilling lives" I'm not sure what evidence there is to give to refute. Some beliefs are "it should" rather than "it is" and in those cases it feels like they fail the crony belief sniff test just as a category.
I think that if an argument is clear, one can always think of counter-evidence or construct at least a hypothetical experiment which can test it.
Ultimately though, my (probably controversial) answer to increasingly abstract ethical questions would be that when the goal is to find what is True then reducing suffering (human or other) as well as other ethical endeavors becomes a necessary by-product.
I saw people in distress -> I thought "that doesn't look fun, I could try to minimize that" -> belief formed.
I struggle to find a devil's advocate position for this let alone any utility in doing so.
The answer is that this is not a factual statement about reality. It's a statement about ethics - is this ethical according to your ethical system and beliefs? Ethical beliefs are subjective and always boil down to "I feel this is good".
So this is really a question about what emotions you feel.
I'm struggling to find the purpose of the article, it seems like beliefs of any nature can occupy the title "crony"?
An ethical framework does the epistemological work of observing what humans are and how they feel and behave in various situations and forming generalizations that hopefully aren't too wrong.
This is why arguing ethics across ethical frameworks is so frustrating; the semantics aren't compatible enough.
This belief makes you very approachable, more than if you didn't believe it.
I guess to undo that belief you'd have to move to an environment where that wasn't rewarded.
Completely and totally wrong. We can vote for politicians who will implement policies, or even implement some changes via initiative that are liable to be disadvantageous to us personally in terms of higher taxes or a slower growing economy for a longer term payoff even if the perceived payoff is for our progeny. We can incur costs in exchange for benefits. It MAY be a crony belief but it isn't categorically so.
If you look at the payoff for society as a whole then voting is worth it, because it potentially affects an enormous number of people.
But your individual payoff of your individual vote can easily be a million times smaller, practically irrelevant.
In fact people's perceptions of the relative importance of their actions is generally bigger that it really is from a global view. Their natural scope is the tiny world they inhabit not a birds eye view of society.
That's an education issue. Consider that voting means you're deciding about the government's budget, which translates to handsome sum of money per vote.
As a crude US-scale example, imagine that a hundred million people vote about the allocation of a trillion dollars. Each vote allocates 1e12 / 1e8 = $10,000. So voting is clearly worth it.
But that $10,000 doesn't end up with the voter, it ends up diffused across all of society. $10,000 is the society-wide payoff of your vote. Your individual payoff of your own vote is only 1e4 / 1e8 = $0.0001. Your vote barely affects yourself.
So there's an altruistic payoff to voting, but not any egoistic payoff to speak of. And we're specifically talking about individual reward here.
No we are not. Altruistic payoff is also part of it, you're calculating it wrong by dividing it twice. Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them.
In democracy, you're effectively deciding of the fate of certain amount money. Yes, it is distributed, but it doesn't matter, it is still lot of money. It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made.
That's too indirect. It's a tragedy of the commons style situation: if nobody votes then everybody is much worse off, but if any one person doesn't vote that barely hurts them individually.
The concrete incentive to vote is social. If you don't vote then people will consider you a freeloader. That changes the equation: while there's still barely any individual election result payoff of your individual vote, there's a social cost of not voting that's higher than the cost of voting, so voting is worth it even for purely selfish reasons.
And that takes it into crony belief territory. You're doing it for social reasons, not just because you think it's correct, but because your social group thinks it's correct.
(That doesn't make it wrong, or bad. It's a useful mechanism.)
> It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made.
The difference is that coordinating with myself is much easier than coordinating with other people. There's no way to freeload off myself in the long term, but freeloading off other people is a real possibility with all kinds of countermeasures. Social pressure is one such countermeasure.
Indeed I'm reminded of earlier in the piece where the author argues that 'crony beliefs' encompasses the tendency to "bristle and hold unorthodox beliefs, in order to demonstrate that we're independent thinkers" earlier in the piece. In this case, it's not to difficult to see how the edgy example of how everyone else might be acknowledging well established scientific fact in bad faith (or due to inappropriately motivated reasoning) validates the rationalist community's core beliefs in prediction markets and how superior their way of reasoning is to the average person
That argument also, incidentally, actually fails the author's own implicit test for a 'merit' belief (i.e something the author actually acts on or would with better incentive structures).
But it sure feels good to tell people that we're skipping that foreign holiday and switching to wind power for our home. BTW, I switched to renewable for my home years ago ;)
Most people who call flat-earthers stupid do so based on a weak foundation of consensus knowledge that they pulled out of a few junior-school-level textbooks and space movies; they never actually read serious scientific research about the subject or did their own experiments.
One's inability to distinguish which parts of one's own knowledge is built purely on social consensus from those parts that are built on first-hand observable evidence and critical experimentation is a sign of stupidity.
The same author later co-wrote a book, in 2018, called The Elephant in the Brain, which expands on some related ideas.
I've been thinking about it for a while and I just can't crack it. Plenty of non-religious people in my friend and acquaintance circle believe that after they die their souls will leave this world and... well they won't actually die, I guess.
I just don't see the social value in that. The subject comes up so rarely that it doesn't really matter. If I had to guess how it works, it looks more like some sort of self-defense mechanism than anything - avoiding thinking about (potentially) depressing things that aren't actionable.
So I guess my problem is that I can't find a way to fit that in the proposed framework, unless I missed something?
_edit_
If my assumption about how it works is correct (self-defense) than it would have near 0 social value, but a lot of practical value (not worrying about things beyond one's control). Yet it still sounds like a crony belief - it's most likely not how the universe works imo.
(The following is my opinion taken from anecdotes about myself and reading about other philosophical works. I am not an expert on this subject).
The idea of "having a soul" is a core belief that is needed to hold up ideas of morals and debt. It's an idea perpetuated because people want to be flattered and people in positions of power can use it to influence the masses. As an example, think about when a person refuses to vote "for the lesser of two evils" in the US presidential election. From a utilitarian perspective, voting for the lesser does have benefit: it mitigates damage. But to the voter, it doesn't feel that way. "Having a soul" Does provide social value. Not voting for the lesser of two evils preserves ones integrity.
Granted I'm not saying people should transition to Realpolitik.
Of course, religions and this kind of grass-root spiritual beliefs are mutually reinforcing too, but the latter seems to predate (and direct) the former.
I think ethics do not need to be 'truthy'. Sometimes science is used for an ethical argument, but often it is just a weapon to make a certain impression. People care about other people not because they believe they we'll be rewarded for it. My great-grandmother was saved when Nazis occupied the city she lived in by her friend, who risked her life to do so. Was it because of "true" belief? Of course not. Or was it 'good impressions' - well nobody predicted at the time that the Nazis will lose. People have agency which stems from their life experience.
For example author worked at Palantir for seven years. Was it 'rational' to do so? Probably, such companies may be a great place to work and compensation would be nice. Would it be 'irrational' to decline job offer from such company on ethical grounds?
My point is that social reality is a fiction, point well-understood in certain traditions, but that fiction is what really our lives are, something as quite real as outcomes of scientific experiments. The absence of Truth as a bedrock of our experience may be problematic but it really opens up a horizon for change.
""Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather
For example, it's possible to construct the same reductionist argument about market economics (or any other conceptual discipline): the concepts have no physical existence beyond patterns of neurons and electrical signals in our minds, electrical patterns in our machines, and the ink on the pages of books we've created. Grind all of those down and there would be no trace of market economics.
And yet, the effects of market economics are all around us. So is it real or not?
If you did the grinding experiment you'd also find no trace of life left in the powder, especially not if you take it to its logical conclusion at the subatomic level.
Does that mean there is no such thing as life?
It's absolutely both. I think a lot more people would cite Pratchett as a direct influence on their philosophy of life than you'd expect.
> is it real or not?
Yes, this is a convincing argument against both reductionism and the unqualified use of "real". Emergent and non-atomisable things have to be considered as "real" for reasoning purposes or you collapse in a pile of logic.
I don't doubt you're right, but that doesn't make it a necessarily great idea.
And, by the way, I'm not dismissing every philosophical point wrapped up in a Pratchett novel as nonsense (for one thing, I can't remember them all, and there are a few of his books I haven't read). But I am saying that in this specific instance the argument is weak and shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Still, I stand by my point: the main purpose of these books is that they're fun, not that they're a handbook for thinking and living.
We have pre-linguistic young-child emotional experiences: envy, distrust, trust, unfairness, etc.
And onto these we attach the ideals, "Justice" etc.
It is more that before we can cognise so abstractly, as children, we have to attach, "Santa Clause".
The question isn't whether we have been taught lies (too easy, too conspiratorial) -- but rather, the emotions we have been taught -- whether those are accurate.
This is much more precisely the problem, and so, why it is so difficult to solve
...freedom.
the trick is that these are aspirations. they are not realities and they will never be due to being perfect ideals ("idealities"). so IMO we must acknowledge that we must always pursue them, yet never reach them.
It's like asking if atoms exist; well no they don't. Protons, neutrons, and electrons exist. But do protons and neutrons exist? Well no, but quarks do. Really? Well there's a wave-function. Oh? Well, whatever it is behaves a lot like a norm on a wave-function most of the time (away from strong gravitational fields).
also, I like exercising my freedom of belief (a personal individual freedom). I have a right to believe whatever crazy thing I want to; but I have no right to escape the consequences of any false beliefs I might hold.
People who watch/read right-wing media sources get an entirely different set of facts than people who watch/read left-wing media sources. Both are biased one way or the other. Both get confirmation from their social peers who share their beliefs.
Religion, for example. If you live in a society that is mostly religious then you will encounter proof of god's existence every day. If you live in a society that is mostly atheist, you will never encounter any proof of god's existence, and you'll wonder how anyone believes that crap.
Which is the belief based on truth?
Whose truth? Many people will tell their beliefs are based on truth, even people with conflicting beliefs will both defend their viewpoints by claiming "truth". Your assumption that all truths are self-evident (or that all instances of self-evidence are truths) seems invalid to me.
>>Even mild incentives, however, can still exert pressure on our beliefs. Russ Roberts tells the story of a colleague who, at a picnic, started arguing for an unpopular political opinion — that minimum wage laws can cause harm — whereupon there was a "frost in the air" as his fellow picnickers "edged away from him on the blanket." If this happens once or twice, it's easy enough to shrug off. But when it happens again and again, especially among people whose opinions we care about, sooner or later we'll second-guess our beliefs and be tempted to revise them.
It might have been true in a previous age, but in our Internet age, where there’s a big enough corpus of people somewhere that agrees and reinforces you, you won’t have this result. The guy in this example would just shrug off everyone at the picnic as hipster liberals and go back to the virtual place where everyone is agreeing with him. I think that’s exactly what Trump team understood. It’s not just about lying long enough to make a lie true, but more interestingly, to lie and create enough support for that lie for people to feel reinforced in their beliefs even if their closer friend and relatives try to convince them otherwise.
Obviously they perceived the social cost of acknowledging that they were wrong as higher than the gain of getting their friends and family back. And obviously there's places they can go on the internet where this continued belief is socially rewarded.
I see correlations here with "being weak", where "strength" is correlated with not giving in, not accepting that the other person was right, not changing your opinion in the light of better evidence, etc. For some people, the ego cost of being wrong is much higher than for others. Their self-esteem is somehow connected to this belief. It's less about social, and more about ego.
In a sufficiently-large workplace, you'll start to encounter office politics and the office "culture", both of which end up influencing the makeup of the employees in that workplace - be it through hiring decisions, promotion/demotion decisions, and even terminations (voluntary or otherwise). Before you know it, the overall culture and political environment of that workplace becomes entrenched. It's a sort of internal cronyism - one which maintains consistency within the organization, rather than a pursuit of meritocracy or an attempt to appease an external force.
Taking this metaphor to the brain, once a belief is "hired", there's a certain barrier to "firing" it; even assuming there are no labor laws in the State of Brainia, there's a bit of a sunk cost in each belief that makes it undesirable to "fire" that belief, and therefore each belief has some impact on the "workplace culture" and "office politics" of the mind: each belief will impart its pressure on other beliefs, forming cliques and pushing out beliefs that don't conform.
Thus lies the path from reasonable things like "I believe pharmaceutical companies will do whatever they believe will maximize profit" to... less reasonable things like "I believe Bill Gates is using COVID vaccines to inject 5G tracking chips in the global population". And worse, that's what makes it so difficult to actually convince someone about the craziness of such beliefs: those beliefs are already entrenched. Instead of trying to un-entrench such beliefs, it's better to address the proliferation of misinformation at the source: by propagating "inoculation" beliefs that entrench themselves before the "crazier" beliefs can take hold.
And yet, when I flick a switch, lo and behold, there is light
That’s a pretty fucking good religion.
Flicking a switch is a very powerful and revealing experiment.
That mindset is wrong, because the world is much more complex than simple axioms, and there is a qualitative part on everything too. Plato's cave, you don't see the world but its distorted image.
For example, the statement "vaccines cause autism"(pesticides create autism is a fact) can be real in some amount like one in a million and also the statement "if you don't vaccinate you have a significant probability of dying from a virus, bigger than 1%".
Both statements could be true. It does not need to be pure true or pure false just because my thoughts are binary.
If I go B.A.S.E jumping or diving or downhill skying or biking there is a probability of me dying. People just accept the risk and do it anyway because they weight the advantages against the risks.
X-rays create cancer. But they are also very useful, so they are used anyway, trying to minimize the risk.
If you believe the statements "x-rays are safe" or "skying is safe" as 100% true, you are wrong, but the belief will be more useful than the opposite belief, that is also wrong, "if you get x-rays, you will get cancer".
You don't need to belief in bipolar beliefs.