Comment by hoorayimhelping
10 years ago
>There is a large chunk of society who're easily swayed by purely emotional rhetoric based on in-groups and out-groups
I think this sentence is the biggest indicator of the problem. The Problem being not that there are large parts of society swayed by emotional rhetoric, but that to most people, the emotional swaying happens to others. It's never me who's swayed by emotions, it's always less rational people, and if only those people could get their shit together, like me, we'd be in a much better place.
You're just as swayed by emotion as those non nerds, you're just swayed on different values. Pretending like you're above it gets us nowhere, because it perpetuates an unhelpful me vs everyone else mentality. It's very satisfying to the ego but it just serves to further drive a wedge between you and everyone else.
That's what struck me most about the article, as well. Russell's essay is very flattering, until you realize the we that he terms "the best men of the present day" are probably not the we of Hacker News.
In particular, when Russell writes about "the philosophical radicals ... who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are[, who] dominated politics and ... advanced [the world] rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being," he is very likely writing about people who would definitely be a Hacker News they, given what I know about his politics and given statements like "if at any future time there should be danger of a Labour Government that meant business, [the British Fascists] would win the support of most of the governing classes."
So, if this essay leaves you with a warm and fuzzy feeling about your "wider and truer outlook" and the feeling that you are being oppressed because of your "skepticism and intellectual individualism", well, congratulations! You've discovered the power of emotional rhetoric.
Great point.
It's why the Elon Musk's, Larry Page's and Bill Gates of the tech world retreat into their own private dreamlands as far away from the politics of the real world as possible, cause they know they don't stand a chance against the rhetorical snake charmers that are Bush, Obama, Clinton and now Trump.
I'll leave here, Matt Taibbi's more modern take on this that blames the media or what I like to call the rhetoric amplification industry. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dum...
The solutions are complex but eventually we'll have to start looking at China. Cause no one else seems to be working on alternatives to what the media has become today.
>It's why the Elon Musk's, Larry Page's and Bill Gates of the tech world retreat into their own private dreamlands as far away from the politics of the real world as possible, cause they know don't stand a chance against the rhetorical snake charmers that are Bush, Obama, Clinton and now Trump.
Elon Musk: capitalist. Larry Page: capitalist. Bill Gates: capitalist. Obama and Clinton: capitalists. Bush: capitalist with special emphasis on heavy resource-extraction industries. Trump: capitalist with special emphasis on finance and real-estate.
Honestly, what do the above list of men even disagree about? Gay marriage, and maybe one or two other minor cultural issues.
I mean, maybe Elon Musk could be seen as having a few leftist sympathies in naming his spaceships after Iain Banks characters, but I'm pretty sure he didn't actually mean to shout-out anarcho-communism.
Ah yes, because Chinese media is so well known for its balanced, neutral and thorough investigation of political issues.
Hate on western media if you like, but just remember the same industry that gave the world Fox News also gave it The Intercept and The Economist.
Wow. Democracy can be ugly, but to look to an oligarchy for the solution? I think this is the antithesis of Russell’s thrust.
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Musk, Page, and Gates are masters of real-world politics; otherwise they would never be in the positions they've held. In fact, if they were at all inclined to private dreamlands, they would not have done what they have, so far. Admittedly, I don't know any of them personally, but those top-end executives I have known make "rhetorical snake charmers" and understatement.
On the other hand, none of Bush, Obama, Clinton or Trump are stupid (although I have no evidence that Bush is especially sharp). And none of them are any more evil (or more good, for that matter) than any of your apparently favored three.
There is no solution to this; politics is how humans make large-scale and not-so-large-scale social decisions. Get used to it.
Personally, I think I'll pass on China as an example. I'm a bit too constitutionally unwilling to give up my crabby individuality.
I think he's really talking about aristocracy/gentry whether he realises it or not.
Doubt is inherent in the process of intelligent reasoning. A highly intelligent person cannot come to correct conclusions about a topic without thoroughly examining it from as many sides as they can. They weigh up the pros and cons and then come to a conclusion. But even after all of that they will be aware of its flaws and downsides and thus doubt themself.
So why do I say aristocracy? Because the upper classes, the gentry and the wealthy were born into a position of power and confidence. Just because of who they were in society, they believed they were right. And as they were wealthy, they also made up the vast majority of scientists/philosophers/etc. The downfall of the aristocracy throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries led to the new thinkers no longer having that inbuilt "born-to-rule" mindset, that while arrogant, also lent an arrogant confidence to their position that a common intelligent man may not have.
In short, it's not confidence that led the thinkers of old to undoubting - it's arrogance. And maybe a little bit of that is always necessary to get things done...
The philosophical radicals were a group of progressive thinkers who ran a journal that publicised Darwin and debated the rights of women and the trade ofs between lazzie-fair capitalism and socialist ideals (see my links elsewhere).
I'm not sure who you think we is on HN, but if you consider HN to be mostly populated by people who prefer some kind of evidence-based reasoning then I'd think they would fit in very well.
This just strikes me as post modernist / relativist bullshit. You're claiming that the real problem is not a population largely persuaded to vote against it's own interests inside a voting system which fundamentally empowers party insiders at the expense of the population.
No the problem is ALL OF US, we're just as emotional as these manipulated people!!11 Stop worrying about the broken voting system, the owned press and mislead population. Instead worry about your own emotionally driven mind.
It appears like a wise argument against HN hubris but you're really trying to derail people from a clear view of a problem and instead move the debate into introspection.
Epistemic status: attempting to point at a thing that I can't fully articulate
Whenever one side is totally in the right and the other side is totally in the wrong, you'll get people calling for moderation. "There are two sides to every story," they say. "How can you be sure that you're so different from your opponents?"
Whenever two sides are exactly the same, you'll get people calling for action. "Look at the atrocities they commit! You can't justify that."
And in the first case, you'll also get people calling for action. "Look at the atrocities they commit! You can't justify that." And the people calling for moderation will further say: "whenever two sides are exactly the same, you get people calling for action..."
And in the second case, you'll also get people calling for moderation. "There are two sides to every story." And the people calling for action will further say: "whenever one side is totally in the right and the other side is totally in the wrong..."
So it goes.
You've just created an infinite loop here, you know?
My takeaway is: just disregard what everyone is saying and focus on the consequences of the actions proposed.
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> Epistemic status: attempting to point at a thing that I can't fully articulate
Oh come on: stop stealing Scott Alexander's lines.
As to the rest, well yes, the whole point is that levels of contrarianism and meta-contrarianism, the location of a position on today's political landscape, indicate basically nothing at all about the actual merits of the idea.
Except if it's a Republican idea, in which case it's been carefully optimized to be wildly insane. But they're a special case: other country's right-wing parties often aren't like that (say, the Christian Democrats in Germany).
If everyone thinks they aren't the ones being misled, and the problem is with other people, how are you going to help them realise what's really going on?
The best type of leading is leading by example. Encouraging introspection by doing it, regardless of whether you think the problem is with you or not, is more likely to bring in good habits faster than telling people they're wrong.
This is why liberal intelectuals are so paralyzed. Yes of course we're emotional too. And yes we can be swayed. But life is not black and white. The best of us has managed to develop a resistance to this kind of rhetoric by a life of study, debate, examining common rhetorical tricks etc. And it's not just different values that drives us. It's values that has carried us through a century of carnage into a much better life. We need to stop apologising and invoking bullshit relativistic cultural arguments and show some pride in basic values like equality for women, freedom of speech etc. I kind of think that's the central point that Bertrand Russell is making we paralyze each other by focusing on any potential error instead of realising that the things we value is mostly aligned and has been refined over a long time. We can trust most of our values.
I would argue it was only through 'bullshit relativistic cultural arguments' that equality for women and freedom of speech are even considered basic values to begin with.
Please explain, I can't even imagine what you could be referring to.
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Russell was pretty close to the definition of a liberal intellectual, so I'm a little unclear what your point is?
Don't you think it's possible that through diligent study of human interaction and how the mind works you could gain a better understanding of how biases are formed and reinforced and stand a chance of recognizing when your own rational decision making is being bypassed? And in fact there is a large group of people (mainly the nerds, as it happens) who are working daily towards exactly that? And haven't they earned at least a little bit of the right to call themselves more rational than the person who has never even thought in these terms for a single moment of their life?
>It's never me who's swayed by emotions, it's always less rational people, and if only those people could get their shit together, like me, we'd be in a much better place.
That is true, though I would amend it to "even if they got their shit together, like me, we would still have a long ways to go in that regard. But it sure would help if everyone knew what confirmation bias was so that politicians and the media couldn't so easily use it to convince people of things that might not be true!"
Diligent study of how biases are formed? Sure.
Nerds working daily towards that? Lol, no. Psychologists, maybe.
"Nerds" of the Hacker News variety are every bit as susceptible to various psychological failings as anyone else. There's nothing special about programming or physics or chemistry that makes you into some sort of uber-rational superhuman and it's very dangerous to believe that.
As time goes by, the more it seems to me that deep down we're all pretty much the same. The spectrum of human nature is pretty small: the gap between the most intellectual and moral and the least isn't anywhere near as big as some would like to think. For every intellectual with a convoluted theory that leads to an unintuitive conclusion, there's a man on the street armed with common sense and a degree from the University of Life who can blow it out of the water with a single sharp observation.
I don't know. If we're talking about the self-described "rationalist" technologist clique, you have a point. Their relative insularity and elitism sometimes serves to intensify their own biases.
However, I think it's too pessimistic to say that people can't learn to be better at this. Just knowing that bias exists is a step in the right direction. I can have productive discussions with those self-described rationalists, (although I have to learn their terms of debate first since they keep making up their own). But there's something admirable in people trying to adapt these great intellectual traditions to their lives now.
And furthermore, who else are you going to turn to? Maybe there will eventually be professional bias-shattering specialists you can call on, but for now we all have to do what we can.
> Diligent study of how biases are formed? Sure.
> Nerds working daily towards that? Lol, no.
You realize that the only difference between those two is a piece of paper? Getting a college education is - or rather, was - literally being a nerd of $SUBJECT_MATTER.
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Simple miscommunication. I didn't mean that all nerds are like that. I meant that of those who are like that, they are disproportionately nerds.
I'd like to point to the "Effective Altruism" movement as a counterpoint. It's a bunch of nerds that decided on a rational approach to charity. But nowadays, these mostly male, white, Silicon-Valley-type, science-loving and science-fiction-reading do-gooders have found the threat of runaway AI as one of their supposedly objective main issues. Artificial Intelligence which, as it happens, is also something that these people have an interest in. What are the chance?
(Not that there aren't parts of EA that I think are worthwhile, such as givewell.org. Just as an example of how hard it seems to be to arrive and any purely rational outcome).
>But nowadays, these mostly male, white, Silicon-Valley-type, science-loving and science-fiction-reading do-gooders have found the threat of runaway AI as one of their supposedly objective main issues. Artificial Intelligence which, as it happens, is also something that these people have an interest in. What are the chance?
The chances are 5%. That is, 5% of people involved in EA actually put any money towards the AI stuff. 80%, on the other hand, consider global poverty worth throwing money at.
>Don't you think it's possible that through diligent study of human interaction and how the mind works you could gain a better understanding of how biases are formed and reinforced and stand a chance of recognizing when your own rational decision making is being bypassed?
No. That requires knowing what the rational decision would actually be, if you would only make it. Knowing exactly how emotionally distraught you are about your grandmother dying during a physics exam doesn't give you any information about physics.
The question I was pondering in the comment was whether the tragic cycle of progress and destruction is true or not. I'd love to learn otherwise - but data paints a bleak picture. It took just about twenty years after the 'war to end all wars' for the second World War to begin. Even though there isn't a World War at the moment, UN recently published a report stating that the displacement of humans due to war and persecution is at an all time high in recorded history (http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html). The question so is whether we are we simply doomed to repeat history.
But as you noted, there is a degree of hidden bias in my statement. I will be more careful in such thoughts in the future. However, one cannot think about the world in a completely detached manner without making any sort of personal value judgements. We have to ascribe some degree of validity to people's opinions and decisions, and to where we personally stand in that spectrum. It is just that such judgements should be made after deliberation, and not slip in as a patterned thought as I have erred here.
We should indeed recognize that we are all prone to the effect, but here you have replaced one sweeping generalization with another.
All positions have a political dimension into them. Real world is not computable - hence, opinions and beliefs dominate.
From a purely mathematical point of view, any political grouping is arbitrary and non-exact.
Until someone figures out a social calculus - in effect, an algorithm to compute what is good and what is evil - there really is no scientific high ground for thinking fascists are in absolute terms worse than 'computer geeks'.
What we can do - and improve on- is recognise we have different opinions and that's ok (although pathological behaviour which sometimes stems from certain political beliefs is not).
You beautifully illustrate Bertrand's point. Of course we can think geeks is better. We've got a ton of data to look at.
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I think this post is the biggest indicator of the problem, as set out by Russell.
> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.