The Emperor's New Clothes: a story of motivated stupidity
wyclif.substack.com
wyclif.substack.com
Never let empires grow too large. Whenever you hear / see something is "scaling" throw a spanner in the works, pull the plug, burn a fuse.
No questions asked, no justifications provided, no evaluation of good or evil, just an automatic breaker that is based on "N", the scaling unit.
Having lots of little emperunculi running around with no clothes is fun and it doesn't put us all in great, potentially existential, danger
Then each could democratically decide what is best for themselves.
Nah that’s crazy. It’s better to have 49% of a nation be unhappy with things, even in cities where 80% think one way, they must do what the 20% want because at the national level that 20% is the 51%.
Think about governance as a spectrum, we need it to be more flatly distributed, from the smallest unit (neighborhood dealing with local issues) to the largest (United Nations dealing with collective threats)
We can't avoid being subject to large-scale collective decisions. Humans can't live in hunter-gatherer bands any more. The individualist US, just like collectivist Sweden, spends large amounts on public goods via its government. Even in an anarcho-capitalist utopia, large firms and other collective bodies would emerge, and would have to coordinate upon collective decisions.
Haha I obviously didn't catch this. I guess then I missed your point. Between your essay and the parent comments, my takeaway is about the danger of enforcing collective decisions on everyone, because even if everyone says they agree, they can still all be delusional, or at least just too scared to speak out.
The problem is imagine if all the investment put into green energy was actually put into just making fossil fuels and their use far more efficient.
It might’ve had a far better impact on the environment, but it would’ve hurt the pocketbooks of the congressmen who have money invested in these specific solutions. (The other side pushing for more fossil fuels doesn’t actually care they just have their investments there).
An individual is still able to make the best decisions for themselves and the less you allow them to do this, the more danger and misuse of resources you’ll find.
Off-topic, but... this is Econ 101! I feel a bit like a programmer would feel when someone says "hey, our car is programmed using an HTML5 supercomputer". It alarms me that an argument which has been known for 250 years, and formalized for 60 years, still hasn't percolated to the educated general public. Markets can't magically work out the correct prices in the presence of externalities.
(To head off a nerdy counter-argument: yes, yes, Coase theorem, blah blah. If you think we can automatically negotiate to internalize all externalities, then fine - that seems wildly wrong to me but it's not a logically invalid argument. But if so, markets per se add nothing. Property rights plus individual contract law get you all you need.
Through human history, groupthink has led to lots of horrible things - maybe there are examples where individual rights have too, or maybe you could argue the benefits of collectivism outweigh the cases where it has led to trouble. It really depends on what you're trying to optimize for - which again depends on individual priorities.
But this precarious equilibrium is not technology independent. What works for blades and projectiles and missiles might not work for engineered viruses. If we don't find ways to quench this adversarial dynamic maybe our days are numbered...
you can't make a American seeking virus any more than yo can make a Chinese seeking virus. at that level we are all just bags of the same lipids proteins and ions. and all national boarders are porous and it will get through and kill your people.
viruses are in the same bucket of bad war ideas as mustard gas that we dont use because they kill everyone instead of who i point them at.
I mean, look at COVID response, Russia and China both have their own vaccines, what's to prevent them from sliding in something extra to prevent another disease which has been engineered?
To play devil's advocate:
This could be happening _right now_.
1) Create and release CoVid.
2) Engineer a vaccine, that also protects against a secondary, 100% deadly virus. (SinoVac?)
3) Vaccinate your own population.
4) Release the super-deadly, secret 2nd virus.
5) Profit.
> it is to big a project to not leak just based on everyone involved having to not tell anyone.
Yeah. This where it, and most of the other grand conspiracy theories, start to become unrealistic. It would be impossible to keep the secret from coming out.
But it would make a great plot for thriller novel.
This is what I would expect on any issue where there are large groups with strong feelings for and against intervention. Only if there is broad concensus or at least broad apathy would I expect uniform decision making.
It's certainly true that it's hard to make major interventions in such a decision making environment, but that's the system we set up. A benefit is that it's a lot easier to move to a different US state than to move to a different country if you don't like the government.
I for one am in favor of the kind of division you mention, for precisely the reasons you mention. But some people are not happy just deciding things for themselves. They are only happy when they also can decide for others. Lots of people from all walks of life and government like this.
And I also think that social media had kind of short-circuited the benefits of having our opinions/orthodoxy/norms more localized (I mean geographically, culturally, linguistically, etc) and led to, as you say, much greater danger or the whole world being able to coordinate on delusions.
Habitually embedding attenuation in any system we develop (social, political, financial etc) is likely the only generally applicable risk management strategy. The only one that does not require detailed, correct prior knowledge about a system and timely application
Detailed knowledge and just-in-time application is great in theory - its just not a real-life strategy of any kind...
But as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, ignorance is hardest to eradicate when someone’s breakfast depends on it. Individual dumbness is worth getting rid of. Collective stupidity’s future is assured. It pays for itself.
This is especially true in autocratic regimes (political, corporate, or social).
The repeating of a lie is both a loyalty test and a loyalty builder. Even if everyone knows that it is a lie, to get someone to repeat it both commits them to a risk for 'the cause' or 'the leader', and simultaneously demonstrates their loyalty to the cause and leader.
The bigger the lie, the bigger the commitment needed to repeat it, and the bigger the demonstration of loyalty.
It also has the simultaneous effect of successively isolating the followers from other factions. Eventually, the only ones who will tolerate 'those crazies' or 'the faithful' are the group of followers, which provides further motivation for everyone in the group to stick with the group.
When leaders of any sort ask directly or by implication to do something sketchy or morally compromising, run the other way; the path you're being asked to follow is never good.
But I think liberal democratic societies suffer from this problem too.
* One way to solve coordination problems is to have a leader, and everyone follows his plan. Advantage: the leader can update the plan in the light of evidence. Disadvantage: the leader biases the group's plan to favour himself.
* Another approach is to have no leader but to agree on some collective beliefs as the basis to plan from. (Forms of words like "this house believes...", "this committee resolves" are an example.) Advantage: everyone gets input at the start. Disadvantage: belief-updating gets more complex, because unless we all do it together, we end up miscoordinating. Hence it can become easier to ignore new evidence.
In the story, the Emperor can't admit he has no clothes on, because he's constrained by his political rivals. A truly unconstrained Emperor would be able to be honest, but of course that might bring its own dangers....
That example of the grocer who refuses to put up the slogan is excellent!
I'm not so sure the problems you cite for actual liberal (small-d) democratic societies are actually the same, although I agree there are similarities.
Trying to avoid the No True Scotsman fallacy, I don't think actual liberal societies are requiring false signalling in order to administer a government. To the extent that they are requiring spreading and repeating of outright lies, I'd say they are failing to behave as liberal democratic societies, and are instead and falling into autocracy.
social media could be accelerating groupthink. it's so easy for people to form a group that shares the same beliefs and opinions. in the past it may have taken years.
nowadays it's a matter of minutes.
that sentence at the end about rationalists got me thinking. there is a group of people identifying themselves as rationalists on twitter. i have been very surprised how similar they are in their way thinking and doing. they recommend the same books, share the same ideas, do the same things, etc. a self-fulfilling prophecy.
just something i have been thinking about lately...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/maya-Indian-philosophy
To me, this is an extremely valuable insight into the nature of reality, although it is generally frowned upon by scientific materialists even though neuroscience and psychology agree (traditional religious people aren't the only ones who don't follow their scripture to perfection).
The point was that they can’t stop the war, so it is counterproductive trying to expose that the thing they are fighting over wasn’t actually true.
Are we sure about this? This sounds made up, I don't know. Does the idea of a race even exist in one's mind in a non-linguistic form?
Yes, especially in visual form.
Language is often a big handicap - it is linear, inefficient and usually biased towards some worldview (imo)
Concepts and ideas are more like some kind of abstract space, with relationships between things, but not visual. It's a model. Hard to describe really.
I was amazed to learn that many other people apparently have some kind of continuous monologue going on in their heads.
I
[0] https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...