I watched him for years coming into weekly colloquia and seeming to tune out reading papers. But, occasionally there would be a speaker that was less than credible, and you could feel the entire hall close off. But, my advisor would hear a tidbit of a good idea (even amongst loads of bunk), and look up from his journals and ask a genuinely curious clarifying question. This would often lead to new lines of research in our labs.
In the end, many of these speakers were on the wrong overall track, but they definitely had insights that were incredibly valuable. Those who dismissed them entirely missed out, while my advisor had a knack for finding the signal in the noise and moving forward with that without missing it due to judgement.
I noticed something similar: You can find papers by clearly crazy people that have nuggets of good ideas in them. Odd bits of mathematics they reference might be an interesting rabbithole to go down, even if it ultimately leads nowhere.
The whole thing reminds me of the passtime of the hyper-intelligent Minds in the Culture series. They play in Infinite Fun Space, which is vaguely like coming up with new rules of physics and "seeing what happens". The rules don't have to be realistic, just fun.
I've found that practising physicists seem allergic to any such notion, too quick to dismiss unorthodox approaches. So what if they're wrong? They're fun, and maybe not that wrong in some rare cases.
The easiest way to get killed by people in rage is to tell them the naked truth.
That's a hard rule since humanities dawn.
People claiming to be brutally honest, are often far more interested in being brutal than in being honest.
It makes a big difference whether someone only claims to be honest or is actually honest.
My current set of candidate pet theories are all based on a vaguely similar foundational notion that the physical universe isn't made up of "matter on top space-time", but rather that there is a single space-time-matter fabric.
For example, to create matter, space-time must be affected (curved). Or to put it another way, all particles have mass-energy (spacetime curvature) because they are space-time-matter curvature. The idea is to unify QM and GR by making fundamental particles have geometric properties that satisfy GR at all scales.
Some of these notions are present in Wolfram's ToE implicitly, so it's possible that there is a connection. However, he isn't yet at the point where he can derive, say, the mass of an electron from first principles based on how much its specific topology curves space-time-matter.
> For example, to create matter, space-time must be affected (curved). Or to put it another way, all particles have mass-energy (spacetime curvature) because they are space-time-matter curvature. The idea is to unify QM and GR by making fundamental particles have geometric properties that satisfy GR at all scales.
I also think this is the "obvious solution". Came to the same mental picture of "space-time-energy quants" long ago.
But I guess the main problem is to formulate this in a meaningful mathematical way. (Physics always needs some "stage" on that "things" can happen. GR did not change that; it made the "stage" just more dynamic, and alone that proved to be very hard to formulate in math, which is all about static relations between objects).
BTW: Something that I found very inspirational, and what makes very much sense to me, was this here:
http://www.platonia.com/research.html
(Mr. Barbour has also some pop-science books on his topics).
The basic idea is that there is nothing besides pure geometry on the fundamental level.
That makes sense because to me as what else could be there at all? Anything that is needs to come form somewhere. Only pure structure, something that "just happens" given the idea of "things in a space" could imho resolve this problem. (Which is also quite in line with Wolframs ideas, btw).
That leads to the idea that things "are" because they "must be" alone from the fact that you try to describe their relations.
Contrary to that all physics concentrate on things that aren't "pure". Almost everything in physics is "afflicted" by some "units". But how do you explain the "units"? You can't! They're a given. So imho, even the smallest set of them can't be fundamental. Only pure "proportions", from which "structures" and "shapes" emerge, make sense on the fundamental level. Because such structures "just are", as they're mathematical objects. (Mathematical objects and structure "exist" without being created; nor they can be ever changed or destructed. That makes "very good material" for the fundamentals of a universe, imho).
Also this way to look at things explains one of the most weird and quasi not understood parts of our world, namely time.
Time is a big mystery. Mr. Barbour's ideas were to me the first explanation ever that didn't produce more questions than answers.
;)
All in good fun. I greatly enjoy the sentiment of your comment and it’s parent that great ideas can come from anywhere. At the risk of creating a segue into controversial topics, I think this plays a huge part of why it’s important that a team of programmers be made up of folks with different backgrounds. I am so often caught completely off guard by how different a valid idea is than mine. “I totally never would have thought of that.”
My theory is that physics is stuck in a local minima where it's not sufficient to change just one, or even two or three fundamental things to get unstuck. That's too big a leap via traditional incremental publishing of new theories. Any one change to the status quo won't work, and is rejected. Multiple changes are too complex, and might need to have occurred too early in the timeline. It simply might not occur to people that the whole industry took a run turn... 100 years ago.
This is why I like crazy papers. They make you reconsider fundamental notions, the type that were in textbooks decades ago and are seen as foundational and unquestionable.
[1] This literally happened in New South Wales. For decades(!) nobody could cross the Blue Mountains, until Blaxland, Lawson, and Wentworth tried walking on the ridge tops instead of the valleys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1813_crossing_of_the_Blue_Moun...
Makes me think of Stephen Wolframs current work. Guy's a genius, who's current stuff kind of reads like he's a crank. But at the same time I'm kind of rooting for a revolutionary paradigm that's gonna totally upend things.
My approach is more akin to assigning a lower probability of validity to papers that have long been generally accepted as 100% true. Then I try to hold all of them in my brain simultaneously while reassigning joint probabilities, almost like those computer game map generators that use "quantum decoherence".
The idea is to find a parallel path that goes through most of established physics but avoids the trap of local minima. The challenge is that it's really unclear which existing theories are the traps, and which are true and need to be kept.
Something like this is clearly needed, because existing theories are either contradictory or inconsistent. They can't all be right. Something somewhere must be discarded.
Who isn't a member of a group? We're all members of a number of groups.
It's refreshing that Kahneman honestly admits that he doesn't change his mind either, and his tastes were formed when he was relatively young. He's not putting himself above the rest of humanity. He could easily say, "Well I'm a famous and distinguished scientist, so obviously my beliefs are rational, unlike everyone else", but he doesn't.
Not everyone is brainwashed to accept group think no matter in what cirles they have to evolve in.
There are individuals and then there are the parrots who mindlessly repeat what the group says.
You might be a "rational, fully self-realized, and atomized" individual but your behaviors and thoughts are certainly influenced by those around you. Here's a simple example: https://dictionary.apa.org/social-facilitation
If you prioritize truth over group membership, you are more likely to see your own flaws, the flaws in others, and prevent yourself from making catastrophic errors in your inevitable ignorance.
If you prioritize group membership over truth, you are more likely to fall prey to lies that have only short term benefits for one or more members of the group and eventually lead to catastrophic errors.
The best groups are the groups of people who are legitimately pursuing the truth, even if they are temporarily ignorant, which again, is inevitable due to information constraints.
We've become so saturated with power dynamical thinking we've forgotten that it is possible to be motivated to try to see the world accurately so as to best cooperate with it regardless of power differentials.
I've come to realize that "white male software engineer" is one of the groups with the highest ratio of priviledge versus priviledge awareness.
(Disclosure: I belong to that group as well.)
> The power of reasons is an illusion. The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated.
So privilege plays an interesting role. Unaware privilege - failing to see ones own circumstances, failing to assess how we fit in the world - is almost the same thing as non-reason. I suppose there could be a class of people who are like, "I am totally privileged, and somehow I delude myself and don't notice, but in every OTHER way I am totally reasonable." That could be a subgroup. But probably not a big one?
> I don't feel like I'm a member of many groups.
And this part:
> I suppose you could say I'm part of the group of Caucasian males by birth or part of the group of software engineers by trade,
So, you are belonging to three priviledged groups. Male, Caucasian, software engineer. It's easy to overlook this group membership, since it silently represents priviledge. Those outside these groups definitely notice that they are not in them. Ask a discriminated woman, a discriminated non-white, or an amazon warehouse worker.
That's why I pointed out that it's easy to forget group membership that confers priviledge.
> Also you're assuming a lot about my background
No, I went by exactly the information you conveyed yourself. See above.
Invariably, in every discussion, they'll trot out this sentence: "You <opponent group name> people always think <notion>".
For example: "You Liberal party voters always support lowering taxes" or somesuch sentence.
I point out that I didn't vote for the Liberal party.
"The Labour party voters are the same!"
I point out I didn't vote for Labour either in the most recent election either.
"Err..."
-- at this point their brain locks up, because they're expecting a tribe-vs-tribe fight and they have no idea what to do when they discover I don't actually belong to their "enemy tribe".
Oh, an agnostic.
There is something to be said about groups of people that hold similar ideas because their similar way of thinking lead them to similar conclusions. It's a very important exception to the OP's description, where the group came first, and may even be the most common kind.
(Of course, the question to answer is why do those people think in similar ways.)
> part of the group of software engineers by trade
I'd bet that one lead you into adopting some values.
You probably also have some abhorrence towards formal chaos (the ones that causes unpredictability; many are not even able to accept it exists) and want to improve every system (simple or not) you see.
On the more traditionally politics kinds of thing, you probably value freedom of expression to a very high amount, like other highly educated groups, but also probably value personal freedom and personal initiative. Those often come in an intensity that leads to some bullshit levels of belief in self-determination (like in not believing you share group values) and personal responsibility; but beliefs change faster than values, and many people tame those down with time.
Even saying you’re !group makes you explicitly a member of the !group group!
> almost not worth listening to their arguments
At the same time, their arguments are likely the-least-dumb / most-intelligent things they've been able to come up with, to rationalize their group's ideas -- so at least you have a chance to get to know what those least-dumb-things are
Never Split the Difference. And Nonviolent Communication.
Because just listening to others, and showing that you care about and understand what they're saying, can go a long way. Not always a need to actually do anything in the real world (or to say or pretend that you agree).
Maybe theoretically this won't place you in their old group, still, you'll a bit form a new group where you and that other person are friends
These tactics are just that, they are not strategies. They are not long term successful or sustainable.
It seems you haven't read any of the books.
I did use the listening technique in Never Split... and it worked well, and long term good effects too for everyone. -- When listening to the other person, one gets a bit more open oneself -- sometimes the other person does have (partly) good ideas (although not in that case) and it's simpler to find something that works.
And while it is true that some groups hold language and ideas that are both infectious and dangerous, arms-length exposure to many such ideas is much less likely to result in pathology than close exposure to one. Refusing to learn an enemy tribe's language is an uninformed bet that you lucked into the best tribe by default.
Anyway, he has a lot to say on the subject and on incentives and human psychology broadly.
A better way to phrase it would be a year when you don't challenge your idea is probably a failed year. It might still win the challenge.
Or, another way of looking at it, your knowledge of so many areas is superficial and a deep dive into any one would let you know how you weren't even wrong, as the saying goes.
You can find people doing it in any HN thread about almost anything - often shows up as "why didn't they just do X". A non-domain expert with a "obvious solution" is almost always missing something major.
Jordan Peterson’s zebra story
http://stephendavies.org/writings/mitterederEtAl.pdf
We referred to it as "issue alignment" but its gone by other things, IIRC. Basically, in theory, one could end up supporting positions that would make 0 sense outside the context of "well, I support "X" cause "team green" supports "X."
I've seen it happen often online, a lot less IRL.
Three mentioned in the article: * Enigma of Reason * The Knowledge Illusion * Denying to the Grave
Actually, everything contemporary mentioning egregores is probably relevant - they're also called 'AI autocults', but the concept existed long before group communication became enmeshed with computer infrastructure - though the dynamics are different now than in enlightenment-era Europe, and the pre-Newtonian assumptions of the older publications throws most modern readers off.
There's a survival instinct that we can't get away from. That being in groups is innate to the core of our being and to go against the group or even change a group's mind requires potentially breaking that bond and losing the safety that the group represents.
Rather I would say that high agreeableness (and maybe to some degree conscientiousness or extroversion) [1] is correlated with the likelihood that someone will change their opinions in order to conform with a group.
So if you don't like that personality trait, you can seek out less agreeable people, there are plenty of them out there. The only trouble will be that if you need to collaborate with them, you may have a hard time getting anything done!
There is survivor bias among groups - if a bunch of people all have different opinions and aren't willing to modify them, they're unlikely to remain a group for long.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
I suspect this is why over time all members of a political party become near carbon-copies of each other. Even if the party started "big tent" over a single issue, natural forces will cause it to coalesce into "same thought on all issues".
One solution for the individual is to forcefully prevent yourself from associating with the group, but this often requires drastic action and gets you shunned by all groups. Compare the vitriol against someone who "votes wrong" vs "votes third party" vs "refuses to vote at all".
For example: Someone born and brought up in the West would think that children don't owe anything to their parents because it was their parent's choice to have them.
While someone born and brought up in the East would think that they owe everything to their parents because they gave them the gift of life and because of all the sacrifices they made for their kids.
You can't convince someone in the West to think anything otherwise than that stated above. They are utterly convinced that that is is truth and likewise the reverse for someone born and brought up in the East.
I live in Canada, but I can't imagine it's that much different in the US.
That isn’t at all a uniform view in the West. I grew in a community where people expressed a great deal of what might be called filial piety. Not everyone held or maintained that belief though.
"We are all individuals"
"I am not!"
I tend to agree with you, but based on the way you have worded this, I am curious if you think that people have conscious awareness (which is required to form intent) of this?
And as a follow-up: if this phenomenon is sub perceptual, might that change how one might go about addressing it, or even discussing it (it is a fairly common point raised in these sorts of discussions)?
Some people will be self aware, and not take arguments or positions too seriously - their own or others - they know they hold the points of view for group membership - they tend to not to like to debate them, aware of the futility.
More common though is ego-defense/group-defense reaction. This is the zealot. Both a person's ego (you're wrong) and their group (your group is wrong) is on the line. This is in addition to losing their membership of a group if they adopt a different position.
If we don't even try (including if the idea doesn't even cross our minds), we may never succeed.
The best you can do may be to find a group that is based on something entirely outside everything else, but that's quite hard to locate.
Sure, of course!
That's why "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
And we can be happy with at least that!
In anything outside science there is no progress at all. Humans in general behave exactly the same since thousands of years.
You could read some thousands of years old drama and the story will be very familiar. Lust, greed and power struggles, and the other typical human traits.
We did not manage to solve even one none technical problem since we came down the trees. But that's nothing unexpected actually given we're a horde of apes. I'm old enough to know that nothing will ever change as we had already more than enough time to easily mange at least some "humanity scale" issues by now. But we as a species are seemingly bound to our ape nature.
The few statistical outliers here and there could not and can not change the course of events. They never had any realistic chance. Because they're outnumbered by the billions. That's just how it is.
Eugenics would be a small chance. Or we'll become some day the "wet bootloader" of some truly intelligent beings. But both is not very likely.
Or, of course, we just kill our species eventually by some stupid mistake, or just out of rage; which is frankly the most likely outcome in the long run given human nature and its current technological possibilities.
There are no other realistic outcomes one could come up. Apes will stay apes. Likely to their very end. Time already proved that we just can't do better.
Now, anybody who likes to argue that I'm too pessimistic needs to explain away why there wasn't any substantial progress up until now (besides tech, which is something almost exclusively driven by singular people). I say it's all about human nature, psychological phenomena and that. Which is something coded by our common gene pool. And that's something that just can't change on any time scale that is meaningful to humanity as it is. (Besides doing this through tech, which isn't a realistic option at all given said human nature. My guess here would be that it's more likely that we'll go "the Borg path" than that we would try to re-engineer our-selfs to become a more generally friendly and intelligent species). Like said, it's imho already proved by time that we don't want maximize joy for everybody. Quite the contrary actually! We seek ever since only more efficient ways to extinguish our enemies. That's the one constant in human history. Actually, even most of our technological breakthroughs are direct results of this pursuit. Go figure…
Hmm, now I have the opening scene of "2001: A Space Odyssey" on my head. Not sure why.
Counter-example: The use of slavery as an energy source replaced by the use of electricity as an energy source.
When you want to listen to music, you open up Youtube (or Spotify, or your carefully curated collection of FLAC files, or whatever) and press play.
When Romans wanted to listen to music, they would tell the slaves to pick up the instrument and start playing.
That's a significant change, IMO.
EDIT: also, written language went from non-existant to 8 billion humans and 86% of them can read in a few thousand years.
"Think about what it takes to claw your way into America’s elite strata. Unless you were born into the upper-middle class, your surest route is to pursue an elite education. To do that, it pays to be exquisitely sensitive to the beliefs and prejudices of the people who hold the power to grant you access to the social and cultural capital you badly want. By setting the standards for what counts as praiseworthy, elite universities have a powerful effect on youthful go-getters."
"As the senior assistant director of admissions at Yale recently observed, “for those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice. We encourage them to be vocal when they see an opportunity for change in our institution and in the world.” Picture yourself as an eager high schooler reading these words, and then jotting down notes. You absorb, assuming you hadn’t already, what it takes to make your way in contemporary elite America. And as you grow older, you lean into the rhetorical gambits that served you so well in the past. You might even build a worldview out of them."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-utilit...
Would you want anything less in an academic institution? That's the entire point of places of higher learning.
As the parent indicated, they're not willing to even communicate with people who don't parrot their own ideas.
> As the parent indicated, they're not willing to even communicate with people who don't parrot their own ideas.
That's the exact opposite of what I quoted. They invite criticism of the status quo, and push for greater justice in the world. Most decent human beings agree with that.
Since you seem to know enough to call it lip service, I assume you went there. what do you think should be done to ensure that those in charge actually made changes that you and your peers advocated for?
You can decide you -disagree- with the ideas of 'social justice', or the implementation, or whatever, but I think you'll need a stronger case than "it's political" to warrant the dismissal of an educational institution trying to incorporate the term.
Woke Racism is a really good book about that. Don’t worry it’s written by a black guy who’s been fighting for social justice for decades. The fact I have to say that is one of his points/arguments.
Try this sometime - choose a position (in politics or whatever). Use the terminology and dog whistles of the "other camp", but argue the opposite policy.
Then he wrote a book called "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America".
So, they were right after all?
Kids are supposed to be in universities to learn and develop their critical thinking, not to be brainwashed by the most fashionable ideology of the time. Sorry if this is such a provocative line of thinking these days.
People opposed to social justice aren't apolitical or morally neutral. Banning books, getting educators fired, and forcibly de-transitioning children are all charged political agendas in and of themselves. They all fall under the umbrella of "anti-SJW/woke" brigadism.
I also know some 18 year old robotics kids that are just truly indifferent about this stuff. I suspect some of them will grow out of it, but even for the ones that don't, I don't think that says much about their qualifications for Yale. Climate change is a massively important issue yet we don't ask random humanities students what they've done to improve climate research.
However, I'm not sure I'm okay with the idea that feeding complex hormones to children who are not old enough to vote, drive, or get tattoos and/or piercings, or as you so put it is wise, and if this is what you mean by "forcibly de-transitioning children", then I'm actually okay with it.
Hormone therapy, like tattoos and/or piercings has a very permanent effect of the body. I believe such long term changes should only be allowed if the person is old enough to take the decision as an "informed adult".
Put more bluntly, if all of a sudden some new condition is discovered called "un-inked skin skin dysphoria", where not having a tattoo is believed to cause deep psychological trauma, I'd still make my kid wait to be a legal adult before they get a tattoo.
Is it really "higher learning" when LITERAL groupthink is required?
(Maybe you're being sarcastic and I'm just not getting it)
A mayor was once asked what he was doing to help minorities in his city. He replied “I don’t have minorities in my city, we all are all equal”.
At first you say sometuing akin to “to become part of the elite you need to accept the elite's point of view and beliefs”, citing higher education as a gateway for elites, and the you use the discourse “social justice” as an example of what young people must believe in to get to higher education. But “social justice” is definitely not a foundational belief of the elite, because otherwise the US wouldn't work the way it does otherwise, for the elite is the one who actually shapes the society.
If anything, it's much more likely that Yale wants to attract young people by advertising values the young care about (young people being naturally much more progressive than older ones).
The selection committees at universities certainly believes in social justice or they wouldn't consider race so heavily for admissions.
So, higher education is definately bad, and whether social justice is bad or not depends on whether you open the box and find out if the cat is a Republican or a Democrat?
That's P ^ !P, which is a contradiction. Your reading doesn't make any sense.
They're complaining about people doing the right thing. And they know that. So they have to complain they're doing the right thing wrong, or doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Or the right thing is only a cover for a nefarious plot.
Which only re-inforces that it's the right thing, even before you examine the decades long track record of people arguing against it.
I don't personally subscribe to that narrative - dividing the losers of the new economic reality might have been an incidental goal, but the idea that social justice is a solution to elite overproduction[1] makes more sense to me. And as a means of curbing elite overproduction I actually like it - just as Edwardian scandal culture selected for self-control, cancel culture selects for a lot of the qualities we'd want in a successful elite. But I've yet to hear a good argument why it's not a cynical play by the elite to divide the poorest citizens against each other. Most who subscribe to the tenets of the system refuse to acknowledge the argument at all.
It's very hard to argue that social justice isn't designed to divide the poorest people against each other, since intended or not that's an effect it has[2]. I imagine the best counterargument to the belief I put forth in my first paragraph would be an alternate explanation for why these ideas arose when they did - does anyone who doesn't believe it's a cover for a nefarious plot have one?
[1] as argued very eloquently by, I believe, Charles Eisenstein in an essay I wish I could locate.
[2] and it puts one in the position of arguing that Yale isn't a racist institution, which is a losing position from the outset.
But anyway, even if this is true, that doesn't mean that it's the current Elite's views, just likely to be the future Elite's views (assuming that higher education pays a significantly higher role than the set of other Elite's beliefs they'll encounter later in their lives and that they'll mimic too in order to be successful later, since the process you're describing occurs over and over and over in someone's life).