Comment by nfw2
5 days ago
"The idea that something may be true, valuable, or good merely because it is common sense or inherited tradition is anathema to them"
This is reasonable though. Tradition and common sense suggest value perhaps more than rationalists think, but if tradition and common sense have value, there is an underlying reason.
Slate Star Codex's review of The Secret of Our Success, arguing specifically in favor of strong Chesterton's Fences, was voted #5 in the 2019 Best of LessWrong review. SSC's review of Seeing Like a State, presenting a similar argument and directly naming Chesterton, was a notable 2017 hit. "Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes" also argues in favor of maintaining traditional bright lines, hit 700 karma on LW, and is included in the "Best Essays of LessWrong" collection. "Schelling Fences versus Marginal Thinking" is a 2019 hit following these.
I apologize if this list of counterexamples ran too long.
The chesterton's fence principle is all about a tradition's underlying reason for existing. I'm not sure why you think it contradicts what I said?
I didn't intend to fully contradict what you said, but to make a stronger case, and address similar remarks by others--you made the best comment along those lines, regardless of your balance and nuance.
What G.K. Chesterton said is that, if you can't make an affirmative case for the tradition's origins and show why the cause no longer applies, you should leave the tradition in place.
In the listed examples, rationalists celebrate this principle with examples such as the bitter cassava preparations of the Tukanoan people, which were very labor- and time-intensive. A much shorter processing would have eliminated the obvious, short-term toxicity of the plant, so someone scientific experiments to determine how much processing was actually necessary would likely end up damaging themselves and their reproductive prospects in ways that wouldn't show up for years or decades.
So there's evidence that the rationalist community actually appreciates tradition more strongly than the average person, and searches harder before discarding it.
Hang on, your list of counter examples is “one rationalist gave another a thumbs up”?
The list of counter examples is some of the most popular and well-received posts in the rationalist community which are actually in favour of tradition having value.
"The Secret of Our Success" literally starts with how European explorers starved to death in environments that other humans thrived in because they lacked the cultural knowledge local hunter gatherers had, includes many other examples of how pure reason can be counter-productive to survival, and ends with a warning that the idea that now it's finally different may not be true.
There is also value in the abstract sense, meaning tradition can have value for the consensus and social understanding it causes.
Like, maybe Christmas as understood for Americans has no value. But the fact a Christmas exist does result in families getting together and provides a cohesive context for the winter season across pop culture, and that can have downstream value.
> for the consensus and social understanding it causes.
This is an underlying reason
I guess maybe, but it's not intrinsically linked to the event. Like maybe Christmas would be useless if only I celebrated it, but it has a purpose if lots of people celebrate it. Also Christmas is probably not a good example but you get the idea.
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The term "Chesterton's Fence" comes to mind.
There's no harm in critically examining why a tradition is there (especially if harmful in other ways). But a lot of the time, "it's a long story" does actually have a reasonable story.
Or a recipe at the end because SEO. Really long articles are a negative signal for me unless I know the author to be good.
OT, but my understanding is that recipe sites have long-winded blog posts in front of them because recipes alone are not copyrightable.
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Isn't this just the naturalistic fallacy?
Traditions can often encode good things, but they shouldn't be respected solely because they are tradition.
I think the corollary is that they shouldn't be disrespected just because they may be outdated.
One needs to actually spend the time and effort to understand what value is potentially encoded in traditions before suggesting a replacement.
To be fair, the Rationalists _do_ accept the two-word rebuttal "Chesterton's Fence," in principle.
...though yes, in practice if your invoke or, they're fairly likely to explain in elaborate length why it doesn't apply here.
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well yes, that is what the word "merely" in the original quote means.
I've seen rationalist adjacent tech twitter accept people who take openly awful ideas, and it seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate -- that is, if someone is willing to be verbose and pedantic enough to dissuade anyone from trying to argue against them.
> It seems as though the tolerance for rejection of norms is a really good cover to let horrible ideas proliferate
Thanks for sharing your opinion on what other people really think. Low openness people always see disagreements with high openness people as a moral failing on their part.
You need a combination of both openness and intelligence to distinguish good ideas from bad ones. We don't need to debate whether or not I'm secretly a dolphin.
Unfortunately most rationalists aren't as smart as they think and mistake verbosity for reason and judgment.
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That kind of response is exactly why the Rationalists aren't taken seriously.
It's a neat package of non-sequitur, moral grandstanding, and misdirection.
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I feel like there is a big overlap between being against common sense and believing you are better / more intelligent (more "rational" perhaps?) than other people. For me, at least, gaining a bit of humility / being a bit more down-to-earth about being a person like everyone else has made me significantly more likely to just pick the common sense path as a default.
The problem with "secret esoteric hacks/techniques" is that other people are not NPCs and are in fact also trying to achieve their goals, and for any goal you can imagine, there are a million people who have put in way more effort into figuring out the optimal path.
If there's a secret method of becoming good at an instrument quickly, why don't music schools teach that? If there's an obscure way to run a 4 hour marathon without much training, why doesn't every training plan include that? The common sense approach is usually right on the inflection point of the 80/20 rule, where you get the easy, simple way to get decent results.
Of course, there are sometimes real constraints (i.e. popular apps like Duolingo are bad for learning a language, because most people who use it are not serious about becoming fluent and not willing to put in time) but even then, the reasonably effective answer is usually 1 layer below the surface (learn the basics through a textbook/course/online material, then just use the language a lot and actively study new vocab/grammar/concepts), not in some obscure rabbit hole.
But even if we don't know the underlying reason, they are still valuable by dint of having survived for so long
Things survive for no good reason. It is very common in evolution.
For example, our eyes are wired the wrong way, that is, the optic nerve goes in front of the retina, causing a blind spot and other issues. From a design perspective, it is really stupid and there is no "good" reason why we are like this, it would be like making a monitor with the connectors in front of the display. Octopus eyes are wired the correct way and it works better.
Eyes have evolved like this out of random chance, as an imperfect but functional solution, and we are too advanced for evolution mechanisms to fix the problem now.
> Things survive for no good reason.
And sometimes the “good reason” that something survives for a long time is that the better alternative was difficult to invent/discover/implement. Which is obviously not a “good reason” to oppose the introduction of better alternatives.
Not knowing an underlying reason isn't the same as denying that reason's existence
I don’t think it’s reasonable. The age of an idea does not imply that it’s true, valuable, or good.
It usually does because other people are also intelligent beings that are usually trying to have a good life and succeed in whatever area they're pursuing. Whatever field it is - earning money, becoming athletic, becoming a musician, becoming a good cook, becoming a good writer or public speaker - there are uncountably many people with a strong desire to succeed in that area and a subset of those that have dedicated their lifes to it.
Unless you're a world-class expert and one of the best in the world already, any insight you can come up with has been had by other people and if they're not doing it anymore it's usually for a good reason.
Even when the the "common sense" route is not optimal along whatever metric your measuring, there's probably something else you're not noticing: the classic dinner of potatoes/rice, cooked vegetables, and a piece of meat might not be the best in terms of health or nutrients or taste, but when you take into account things like ease of cooking, low cost, low mental effort, easy to make bigger portions, it very clearly becomes obvious why basically every civilization has traditional grain/potato-vegetable-meat type meals.
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Of course there is tremendous value in many traditions. However, when the world is changing quickly as it is today, it is also very important to check in frequently with reality, to face facts, as it were.
Many people also use tradition as a cover for bias, bigotry, and bullying. When one has been on the other end of that, one learns to view blind tradition with a healthy dose of skepticism.
And yet, still, there is much of value there. Ironically it takes some wisdom to learn which is worth keeping and which is not.