Violence was quite common during much of the ancient farming era. While farmers retained even-more-ancient norms against being the first to start a fight, it was often not easy for observers to tell who started a fight. And it was even harder to get those who did know to honestly report that to neutral outsiders. Fighters were typically celebrated for showing strength and bravery, And also loyalty when they claimed to fight “them” in service of defending “us”. Fighting was said to be good for societies, such as to help prepare for war. The net effect was that the norm against starting fights was not very effective at discouraging fights during the farming era, especially when many “us” and “them” were in close proximity.
What types of disagreement are you referring to? E.g. just the kinds of things you could bet on, or also more far beliefs? (E.g. religious beliefs, which you've argued might become more common in the future, iirc)
Then could we have different disagreement norms for different types of beliefs? I'm not sure how the analogy with violence would work here.
Isn't the fact that disagreement is a sanctioned option fundamental to effective communication?
I say something I think is true, you agree or disagree. Even when I'm not asking a direct question, implicitly any statement of fact or opinion always is open to be challenged, a discussion invited.If you're heavily disincentivized from disagreeing with what I say to you, then almost no information can be transmitted other than my high relative status.And if you actually agree with me, because what I'm saying is correct/good/sensible..... well, I wouldn't be better off, since I knew you'd agree even if I was being wrong/bad/stupid, too. Telling the (best personally available approximation of the) truth should be considered the "cooperate"-move, not telling it the "defect"-move.A society full of open agreement must be where noone trusts each other very much.*cough* China *cough*
I couldn't quite make sense out of this post:If disagreement is punished, then making any claims is punished (since there's always person A disagreeing with Person B), then communication is punished and thus reality can only be grasped by an individual who can’t unbias himself (one is the loudest echo chamber) and safely explore, test and discuss his ideas and the sharpness of his observations.
another interpretation:You're saying that endless clever discussion of ideas is highly overrated and if it gets heated so regularly, it shows that it's all hot air, anyway. So it might as well be discouraged on the margins.You think that people talk too much about their beliefs and do too little with them.Winning arguments is too easy for people (and two smart people arguing will end up rationalizing themselve to "have won" after, anyway). Talk is cheap and seductively easy and not all that constructive and people should do less of it. People shouldn't waste time making claims, they should prove claims and that's much harder, challenging and constructive thus a worthwhile use of time.
I like this "show, don't tell"-style thought. Not sure that's what you were getting at, though.
It's very possible that people have different modes of truth-seeking that are grounded in biological variation (genetic or through biographically acquired modification). It certainly seems that even genuine people won't come together to a Bayesian conclusion. On top of that, there's epistemic parasitism, some of which has plausible deniability, so not all of it can be cheaply disincentivized. If so, it's not surprising that the societies with less official agreement are the ones where the incentives point in the direction of dishonest conformity, and we should be wary of people who try to optimize for conformity through coercive means.
People have much more control over their aggressive actions than they have over their beliefs. They can avoid fighting if they try, but they cannot so readily make themselves believe something. Peace is more readily attainable than agreement.
And many issues are so obscure--the evidence bearing on them is so complex--that general agreement will be unattainable in practice.
I'm happy to oppose governments putting guns to people's heads to force them to parrot official dogma. But in our world that just isn't the main cause of whether there is more or less disagreement. Really, there can be other things going on.
Idk if lack of interest is the right characterization.
Everyone cares what is true they just care more that they get to eat today. Most of the time not eating today isn't in the cards but we are good at abstracting the "I need to get mine" type thoughts into all manner of not food related subjects.
Per https://mises.org/library/i..."If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." I think our basic difference here is that you judge men, and in particular men in government, to be more angelic than I do. I think human history is a better fit to my skepticism than to your optimism.
First some background points I'd like to make about Aumann's theorem etc:
1. It's not enough for people merely to be honest and sufficiently rational, you also need people to trust each other to be honest and sufficiently rational - for full convergence you even need this trust to be common knowledge. Perhaps a minor point since probably in many cases the chain fails at the rationality/honesty level, but see point 2.
2. The level of disagreement we see is generally not the base disagreement before convergence, but after some level of convergence. It's possible that some significant level of convergence does occur despite the remaining disagreement. There is plenty of evidence that humans are strongly influenced by the views of other humans, though how much of this is conformity v. truth seeking is up for debate.
3. When convergence under Aumann's theorem does occur through opinion sharing, the common opinion converged onto is not necessarily the same as the (generally more accurate) opinion that would be agreed upon if people actually shared their evidence. That's because with opinion sharing the parties have to guess at what amount of evidence they separately have must be discounted due to it being in common, while if they share evidence they can directly determine this. Even more accuracy could be obtained if evidence that didn't seem significant were compared between people to check if it becomes significant when combined with other insignificant evidence, but this is probably not achievable.
4. As pointed out by other commenters, a norm of non-disagreement would, on its own, result in conformity, not truth-seeking, by default and would thus make beliefs less accurate.
There was a phase of Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong history where Aumann's theorem was in fashion and lots of writers made a big point of stating their opinions about everything. This was really annoying and, in view of points 3 and 4, unlikely to be productive in terms of improving accuracy. Open debate where people are encouraged to bring up previously neglected evidence and discouraged from just flatly stating conclusions is much more likely to be beneficial.
Of course, this doesn't mean that open debate couldn't be improved on, or that ego and impressiveness-seeking doesn't impact the quality of debate. But we have to be really careful about how we fix things because most policies would be far worse.
And yeah, I realize you probably thought of this already and just didn't want to massively increase the length of your post with disclaimers, but maybe these comments could be helpful, and much more importantly, perhaps slightly impressive and ego-boosting for me.
What types of disagreement are you referring to? E.g. just the kinds of things you could bet on, or also more far beliefs? (E.g. religious beliefs, which you've argued might become more common in the future, iirc)
Then could we have different disagreement norms for different types of beliefs? I'm not sure how the analogy with violence would work here.
Isn't the fact that disagreement is a sanctioned option fundamental to effective communication?
I say something I think is true, you agree or disagree. Even when I'm not asking a direct question, implicitly any statement of fact or opinion always is open to be challenged, a discussion invited.If you're heavily disincentivized from disagreeing with what I say to you, then almost no information can be transmitted other than my high relative status.And if you actually agree with me, because what I'm saying is correct/good/sensible..... well, I wouldn't be better off, since I knew you'd agree even if I was being wrong/bad/stupid, too. Telling the (best personally available approximation of the) truth should be considered the "cooperate"-move, not telling it the "defect"-move.A society full of open agreement must be where noone trusts each other very much.*cough* China *cough*
I'm not talking about or suggesting to discourage communication or exploration.
In any case, I shall take it to heart and waste less time loudly disagreeing so often in public or in my head.
I couldn't quite make sense out of this post:If disagreement is punished, then making any claims is punished (since there's always person A disagreeing with Person B), then communication is punished and thus reality can only be grasped by an individual who can’t unbias himself (one is the loudest echo chamber) and safely explore, test and discuss his ideas and the sharpness of his observations.
another interpretation:You're saying that endless clever discussion of ideas is highly overrated and if it gets heated so regularly, it shows that it's all hot air, anyway. So it might as well be discouraged on the margins.You think that people talk too much about their beliefs and do too little with them.Winning arguments is too easy for people (and two smart people arguing will end up rationalizing themselve to "have won" after, anyway). Talk is cheap and seductively easy and not all that constructive and people should do less of it. People shouldn't waste time making claims, they should prove claims and that's much harder, challenging and constructive thus a worthwhile use of time.
I like this "show, don't tell"-style thought. Not sure that's what you were getting at, though.
It's very possible that people have different modes of truth-seeking that are grounded in biological variation (genetic or through biographically acquired modification). It certainly seems that even genuine people won't come together to a Bayesian conclusion. On top of that, there's epistemic parasitism, some of which has plausible deniability, so not all of it can be cheaply disincentivized. If so, it's not surprising that the societies with less official agreement are the ones where the incentives point in the direction of dishonest conformity, and we should be wary of people who try to optimize for conformity through coercive means.
Some people say they can't help themselves, they get mad and must punch someone. I'm skeptical about them as well as you.
People have much more control over their aggressive actions than they have over their beliefs. They can avoid fighting if they try, but they cannot so readily make themselves believe something. Peace is more readily attainable than agreement.
And many issues are so obscure--the evidence bearing on them is so complex--that general agreement will be unattainable in practice.
I'm happy to oppose governments putting guns to people's heads to force them to parrot official dogma. But in our world that just isn't the main cause of whether there is more or less disagreement. Really, there can be other things going on.
I claim it is true in a wide range of situations.
Would this question also apply to the legal/trial proceedings we have in the USA?
Or perhaps in that context, have we perhaps see something of a shift from physical violence (fighting) to that of intellectual violence?
I didn't say anything about empowering states to limit criticism of them.
Idk if lack of interest is the right characterization.
Everyone cares what is true they just care more that they get to eat today. Most of the time not eating today isn't in the cards but we are good at abstracting the "I need to get mine" type thoughts into all manner of not food related subjects.
If every foreseen disagreement means at least one side isn't being fully truth-seeking, we can want to search for which party that is.
Per https://mises.org/library/i..."If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary." I think our basic difference here is that you judge men, and in particular men in government, to be more angelic than I do. I think human history is a better fit to my skepticism than to your optimism.
First some background points I'd like to make about Aumann's theorem etc:
1. It's not enough for people merely to be honest and sufficiently rational, you also need people to trust each other to be honest and sufficiently rational - for full convergence you even need this trust to be common knowledge. Perhaps a minor point since probably in many cases the chain fails at the rationality/honesty level, but see point 2.
2. The level of disagreement we see is generally not the base disagreement before convergence, but after some level of convergence. It's possible that some significant level of convergence does occur despite the remaining disagreement. There is plenty of evidence that humans are strongly influenced by the views of other humans, though how much of this is conformity v. truth seeking is up for debate.
3. When convergence under Aumann's theorem does occur through opinion sharing, the common opinion converged onto is not necessarily the same as the (generally more accurate) opinion that would be agreed upon if people actually shared their evidence. That's because with opinion sharing the parties have to guess at what amount of evidence they separately have must be discounted due to it being in common, while if they share evidence they can directly determine this. Even more accuracy could be obtained if evidence that didn't seem significant were compared between people to check if it becomes significant when combined with other insignificant evidence, but this is probably not achievable.
4. As pointed out by other commenters, a norm of non-disagreement would, on its own, result in conformity, not truth-seeking, by default and would thus make beliefs less accurate.
There was a phase of Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong history where Aumann's theorem was in fashion and lots of writers made a big point of stating their opinions about everything. This was really annoying and, in view of points 3 and 4, unlikely to be productive in terms of improving accuracy. Open debate where people are encouraged to bring up previously neglected evidence and discouraged from just flatly stating conclusions is much more likely to be beneficial.
Of course, this doesn't mean that open debate couldn't be improved on, or that ego and impressiveness-seeking doesn't impact the quality of debate. But we have to be really careful about how we fix things because most policies would be far worse.
And yeah, I realize you probably thought of this already and just didn't want to massively increase the length of your post with disclaimers, but maybe these comments could be helpful, and much more importantly, perhaps slightly impressive and ego-boosting for me.