Analects

Chat GPT as cultural criticism:

It throws in our faces: why do we have so many jobs and school assignments that can be done by a non-thinking probability machine? Why do our students (even the ones paying a jillion dollars!) want to skip their lessons?

More in thread.

A simple theory of which thinkers support the elites, or not:

Most “heterodox” thinkers like to think they are encouraging a more nuanced understanding of when the elites are right and when they are wrong. And indeed that is what some of their more perceptive readers take away. But their overall important gross effect is typically to raise the status of elites. They make the public discussion of issues better and more vibrant (one hopes). And thus, if only in a longer run, the status of elites goes up. Sorry buddy, I know that wasn’t exactly your goal!

The cases against free will. Good introduction to determinism.

Tibetan Buddhism wasn’t so friendly:

squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership … But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? … A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.”

I don’t know that this is that surprising. Nice to know we’re all as likely to murder each other as anyone else.

Fewer people want to stand out from others:

Recent research and polling suggest that people may be more reluctant to express themselves and stand out than in previous years … Across the 20-year period, participants who completed the survey more recently reported a lower need for uniqueness, particularly in terms of not wanting to defend their beliefs in public forums and caring more about what others think about them.

Link to the actual paper is here.

Politicising on twitter makes you a less credible scientist. A “monotonic” penalty! Link is a PDF.

The virtues of propaganda, because facts don’t change minds. See also why do people believe true things:

Propaganda, be it for good purposes or bad, is a specific form of persuasion that taps into the nonrational and emotive sides of human beings. Persuasion that functions in this way is propaganda … people are fundamentally irrational and guided by their senses … A better understanding of propaganda and how to use it as a tool to change or educate people could advance the world in a positive way.

Bit aristocratic, isn’t it. Plato would be thrilled.

Why Do People Believe True Things? Interesting argument for an epistemological inversion:

Many people in social epistemology are concerned with the following question: Why do people believe false things? … “The truth about distant or complex matters,” writes Walter Lippmann, “is not self-evident.” Given this, “The pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.”

Reminds me of that Muad’Dib saying:

The mind imposes this framework which it calls ‘reality’. That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.

A Comprehensive List of Sociological Theories, Concepts, and Frameworks. Like psychology, and maybe even more explicitly, sociology provides frames through which to interpret human behaviour. Here’s a list.

Spotting Logical Fallacies. Talks about seven. Wikipedia also has a good entry on this. Wikipedia also has an article on arguments we see from advocates of fringe theories, which puts some of this into context.

A short list of heuristics or principles for doing good creative research work.

Book review of the Educated Mind: notes on doing education differently:

We might sum these up by asking what’s at the very center of schooling. For a socializer, the answer is “society”. For an academicist, the answer is “content”. And for a developmentalist, the answer is “the child” … of those three jobs, which should we give to schools? … Egan wants you to know they’re all crap. None of them, by themselves, can give us the kinds of schools we want.

Academics (content) makes school brutal. Development (the child) won’t be entirely robust to the meanness of other kids and wider society. Socialisation works best, but doesn’t capture the complexity or trajectory of the society they’ll be thrust into.

Trying to aim for the three means sacrificing in one area to support another—historically they were ideas that supplanted one another, put together they sabotage each other.

Egan instead suggests we try schooling based on the kinds of things kids use to understand the world:

1. Somatic: mimesis, emotions, humour, and the senses to kick things off.
2. Mythic: stories, metaphors, binaries, and jokes to step things up.
3. Romantic: extremes, gossip, heroes, and idealism to sharpen.
4. Philosophic: simple questions, general schemas, and dialectics to move to a more analytic place.
5. Ironic: ambiguity, skepticism, balance.

“Educational development, I am suggesting, is a process whose focus on interest and intellectual engagement begins with a myth-like construction of the world, then ‘romantically’ establishes the boundaries and extent of reality, and then ‘philosophically’ maps the major features of the world with organizing grids.”

And then add to that the early somatic learning of small children, and the later meta-understanding that allows these kinds of understanding to co-exist without destroying each other.

On philosopher Derek Parfit: the most important philosopher you’ve never heard of.

he has almost no reputation outside of academic philosophy, despite the fact that so many modern moral concerns—long-termism, altruism, existential risk, our moral obligation to people in other times and places—are essentially Parfitian

More useful critiques of Freud than the usual ones:

His fundamental – and completely mistaken – insight was that all dreams express wish fulfilment. In the chapter “Distortion in Dreams” he confidently explains away, with convoluted inventions, the fact that so many dreams are nightmares, filled with anxiety. How can they possibly express wishes? … He tells us that when his patients had unpleasant dreams it was because their unconscious was trying to resist their analysis. Their dreams were fulfilling the wish that their dreams were not about wish-fulfilment. Heads I win, tails you lose. … Freud had to invent repression and infant polymorphic sexuality, castration anxiety, penis envy, the Oedipus complex and so forth, to justify his dogma that all dreams express disguised desires and can be decoded by the initiated.

How military planning works. Excellent several part read. I admit, I use the military appreciation process to plan almost everything complex. It doesn’t need much tinkering to solve for more than clearing an enemy off that hill. I’ve used it for wedding planning, consulting projects, and camping trips too.

Psychological capabilites for resilience. Studies from the Ukraine war:

Many of the psychological capabilities to improve societal resilience can be integrated into three broad focus areas: education, information, and inclusion. Education should not only raise awareness about trends that may affect national safety or potential threats to sovereignty, but it should emphasize a country’s unique strengths, national history, culture, and values … A psychologically resilient population must also be informed about the modern information environment and how it plays a role in shaping thinking and behavior … A whole-of-society and whole-of-government approach is inherently inclusive. Inclusion efforts often focus on bolstering national identity to give people a sense of pride and belongingness, but it can simultaneously train critical skills.

How to become wise. Insights from eastern traditions (by a white person?)—a trite trope, but some interesting insights.

The Messiah Of Zooming Out. On Alexander Grothendieck, a mathematician who saw more than most:

the philosophy was this: If a phenomenon seems hard to explain, it’s because you haven’t fully understood how general it is. Once you figure out how general it is, the explanation will stare you in the face.

and

his commitment to the principle that all problems become easy if only you can find the right generalizations. Another, as we’ve also seen, is his willingness to redefine classical objects like points and curves in order to make them more susceptible to being generalized. The third, which is equally central, is Grothendieck’s lifelong insistence that mathematical objects are intrinsically uninteresting — instead it’s the relations between mathematical objects that matter. The internal structure of a line or a circle is boring; the fact that you can wrap a line around a circle is fundamental.

Chomsky & Hermann’s five filters in the modern era. A better version of my chomsky manufacturing consent today, and in video form.

A nice overview of audience capture:

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one’s own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity.

Weeks don’t make sense:

A duration of seven days doesn’t align with any natural cycles or fit cleanly into months or years. And though the week has been deeply significant to Jews, Christians, and Muslims for centuries, people in many parts of the world happily made do without it, or any other cycles of a similar length, until roughly 150 years ago …

[my] hypothesis, which I’m a little more drawn to because I’m a historian: that our sense of what is an appropriate amount of time to wait between activities has been conditioned by the week.

What if Marx and Freud never existed?

the proposition that as the ego is navigating the external world (the Reality Principle) it also has to fight a two-front war against the impulses coming from the id (Pleasure Principle) and the punitively severe impulse control exercised by the superego (Conscience). This idea is original, profound and true.

An intro to Confucius.

Stop caring about single bad articles. A good paper on the rationale for thinking about trends. Same advice I give students on their literature—it’s much harder and less compelling to build an argument based on one study than to slide through the trends.

Godfrey-Smith on animal sentience. Implications on how we treat them.

People sometimes dismiss arguments for ameliorating the lives of animals because these ideal outcomes are unclear. And some of the hard questions in this area will stay hard or get harder. Views presently looking to change our relationships with animals often focus on the category of sentience, where some animals are inside this category, deserving protection, and others are outside. But sentience itself is very probably something that exists in borderline forms and by degree; it is not a matter of yes or no. Something part-way to sentience – hemi-demi-sentience, as the US philosopher Daniel Dennett would call it – is probably present in vast numbers of tiny invertebrate animals around us. How are concern and protection to be conceived in cases like those? But the fact that we can’t tie up every question does not prevent a proactive approach to issues that many paths forward from here will agree on.

Malcolm X on racism, capitalism and Islam.

On zombie science:

zombie science as mindless science. It goes through the motions of scientific research without a real research question to answer, it follows all the correct methodology, but it doesn’t aspire to contribute to advance knowledge in the field. Practically all the information about hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic falls into that category, including not just the living dead found in preprint repositories, but also papers published in journals that ought to have been caught by a more discerning eye … Zombie science bestows an aura of credibility on results not answering real scientific questions.

With many more examples. Science to avoid.

Postgenomics as the new evolutionary theory. Using the old ‘gay gene’ notion to emphasise that post-genetic accounts, speaking to the range of genetic, social, and environmental factors we now use to explain human behaviour, are just another version of ‘whatever I want to explain it explains it’:

Postgenomics today is thus playing out the rationalising functions that scientific inquiries into rather historically contingent identities and behavioural patterns always perform. Accordingly, the paradigm can generate some relatively valid postulates – it’s likely that our sexualities and genders are textured by a mix of social experience, the firings off of neurons, hormonal swirls and the transcription of DNA. But such science also allows defenders of the status quo – in all its libidinally liberated, economically devastated glory – to cast the world as it appears as the way that the world was meant to be. For all the high-powered machinery, impressive statistical methods and massive datasets that go into this knowledge production, we have inherited once again a collection of ‘just-so stories’ – that is, accounts of human nature depicted through a diverse confluence of causes rather than strictly genetic factors – now updated for our postgenomic age.

“People instinctively tend toward solutions that consist of adding something rather than subtracting something, even if the subtraction would be superior”.

An insight into the New Right. Vox profile of Curtis Yarvin. There’s a lot here behind the noise and clutter. It’s worth listening to Peter Thiel for this reason. He says the same things over and over again, but occasionally lets slip something that hints at the kind of depth that characterised his early essays. Worth paying attention to.

Inventing New Particles Is Pointless.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions, giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”. … All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter … Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist … the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science.

Pop-ideas to think about when considering improving science.

The best overview of Judith Butler I’ve ever come across.

1,600 Years Of Medical Hubris. On thie scientific ritual in medicine.

Kuhn challenged the perception that the accumulation of scientific data leads us closer and closer to “truth.” Rather, in his paradigm, science is more of a metaphor for reality—an imperfect lens with which we examine a universe whose complexities are and will always be well beyond our grasp … In some ways, medicine has always been especially resistant to the process that Kuhn enunciated.

See also the scientific ritual and everything is ideology.

On Oligopoly And Social Norms.

At least after they reach a certain point, distributional coalitions have an incentive to be exclusive … whatever quantity an entrant would sell must either drive down the price received by those already in … [or] there will be more to distribute to each member of the coalition if it is a minimum winning coalition

With implications for aristocratic intermarriage:

if the sons and daughters of the ruling group are induced to marry one another, the growth of the ruling group can be constrained in ways that preserve a legacy for all the families in it

On the value of reading dead philosophers.

What credence should we assign to philosophical claims that were formed without any knowledge of the current state of the art of the philosophical debate and little or no knowledge of the relevant empirical or scientific data?

For example, Plato’s critique of democracy as we have discussed was not based on modern or developed democracies, nor “formal theorems regarding collective decision making and preference aggregation, such as the Condorcet Jury-Theorem, Arrow’s Impossibility-Results, the Hong-Page-Theorem, the median voter theorem, the miracle of aggregation, etc.; Existing studies on voter behavior, polarization, deliberation, information; Public choice economics, incl. rational irrationality, democratic realism” and so on.

Perhaps we should discount them more than we do?

A fun enough comparison of the new LoTR series and Western (US) culture. The really interesting part is a series of quotes though:

As Durkheim and other sociologists have argued, we can never really remove the sacred from life. We can only change what we hold sacred. As historian Eugene McCarrher explores in ‘The Enchantments of Mammon’, in much of the world capitalism has come to replace religion.

As summarised by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins in The Nation, McCarrher argues that ’the mysteries and sacraments of religion were transferred to the way we perceive market forces and economic development… a “migration of the holy” to the realm of production and consumption, profit and price, trade and economic tribulation. Capitalism, in other words, is the new religion, a system full of enchanted superstitions and unfounded beliefs and beholden to its own clerisy of economists and managers, its own iconography of advertising and public relations, and its own political theology.“

Republicans/Conservatives are not more likely to believe conspiracy theories:

In no instance do we observe systematic evidence of a political asymmetry. Instead, the strength and direction of the relationship between political orientations and conspiricism is dependent on the characteristics of the specific conspiracy beliefs employed by researchers

All History Is Revisionist History. A useful reminder.

many people are … offended to learn that at least some of what they were taught early in life as “history” is no longer fully accepted by historians and is instead taught in different ways. Like all humans, families, peoples, and nations—like many historians, too—they want to believe what they learned when young, especially since it long served as an adhesive of their identity.

Ten types of arguments commonly used by advocates of fringe concepts (from Wikipedia editors). Very interesting.

At the present time, Wikipedia does not have an effective means to address superficially polite but tendentious, long-term, fringe advocacy. Some contend that this is a main flaw of Wikipedia; that unlike conventional encyclopedias, fanatics can always get their way if they stay around long enough and make enough edits and reversions.[3] In this sense, Wikipedia’s ‘commitment to amateurism’ does not always work for the best interests of the project.

Thaler speaks about his nudges. He compares his version of libertarian paternalism to giving directions when asked, but of course no one is asking and who is to say his directions are the right ones. He is right that everything is a choice architecture though, so perhaps it doesn’t matter so much whether we like it. Also fun critique of old-school econ theory—rational actors posed as unscrupulous ‘Econs’.

A detailed, multi-part critique of utilitarianism

Rules for weird ideas: dismissing them out of hand will lead you down a path of stagnation because when they’re right, they’re often important.

Another update on Herman and Chomsky’s filters in the modern age.

How and why fringe theories stack:

believing that Earth is flat essentially requires that you think that NASA’s achievements are part of an elaborate conspiracy: there is no ability to travel to the Moon, nor are the photographs of a globular Earth from space authentic.

Reminds me of the contrarian cluster.

On the Jesuit tradition: the creation of an “unparalleled network of knowledge which superseded religious tensions”

Land Acknowledgement as moral exhibitionism:

It is difficult to exaggerate the superficiality of these statements

“if [one is] going to acknowledge a debt, [one] should also pay it

The ‘marshmallow test’ has consistently failed the replication challenge. Even the author wasn’t sold on it.

“[Mischel] also didn’t think that any simple measure of individual differences was going to be very good at predicting behavior,” Benjamin continues. “Despite the popular perception that the marshmallow test is a crystal ball,” he clearly expected only to see only weak correlations with marshmallow test results in the latest study

This blog, called ‘Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science’ has a ‘Zombies’ category, and it’s great.

Was Caligula Depraved as Suetonius Would Have Him?:

it is hard to resist the conclusion that, whatever kernel of truth they might have, the stories told about him are an inextricable mixture of fact, exaggeration, willful misinterpretation and outright invention — largely constructed after his death, and largely for the benefit of the new emperor, Claudius.

Was Caligula depraved as Suetonius would have him? Or was he an example of what Hermann and Chomsky would call an anti-ideology. New archaeological evidence points us a little more to the latter than the former.

Ethics are a means to outperform those who adhere to baser Hobsian instincts. Competition is a constraint too.

Not all sunk cost fallacies are fallacies.

Christopher Alexander and his patterns.