I think your example of Bible interpretation is a counter-example. The experts at the time of the Reformation were so utterly corrupt, and so well-coordinated in their corruption, that the clear and correct answer was "don't believe anything the experts say".
I think this is not uncommon.
I don't think it's wise to have a strong prior for the correctness of experts in general. In many domains, experts are highly valuable and reliable. Say, electrical engineering, or auto mechanics. But in many domains, experts are especially ignorant.
- Are the experts on what is happening in the world today, journalists? They are not much incentivized to inform us impartially on what is happening in the world today.
- In the 20th century, many experts in literary theory did not read much literature, and believed that literature was inherently harmful because it prevents the masses from developing revolutionary consciousness. For instance, Georg Lukacs, Derrida, and Louis Althusser. In the late 20th century, this came to be the dominant position, as measured by whose essays were published in the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, and in the Proc. of the Modern Language Association. For example, Terry Eagleton, Lennard Davis, John Beverley, and all the identity politics activists and anti-colonialists in the NAT&C. Vincent Leitch renamed the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory to the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism just to make the point that literary theory is no longer about literature; he said so in the introduction to the 2nd edition. He also wrote that he entered the field of literature because he cared so much about political activism.
- Philosophers today are wholly ignorant of information theory, probability theory, and statistics, which are the bare fundamentals one must have to tackle epistemology. This is much worse than in the early 20th century, when the logical positivists were mathematically literate.
- Today, experts on any sect of Christianity are ignorant even of their own sect, as they listen only to the word of other experts from their own sect, and never hear the critiques that other sects make of them.
I'm not even inclined to have a strong prior for the correctness of experts in a specific field. In medicine, where any doctor knows more about medicine than almost any non-doctor, I've nonetheless run into many problems just in my own life for which I had to develop my own cures, because in order to be licensed as experts, doctors must conform to the current consensus, to the extent of never even considering any therapies which are out of favor, or which have not yet been thought of by a doctor. They are strongly discouraged from thinking independently or taking chances, and restrained by insurance and federal regulation. Consider Eliezer's experience with light-therapy for winter depression (SAD).
Talarico has told the story of his grandfather telling the young James that practicing Christianity is hard, but it’s simple. To me, being human is hard, but it’s simple. To thrive, all we need to do is adhere to the moral principle (treat others the way you would want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot) in every context.
In his book, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (2001), Christopher Boehm wrote that “humans were egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear” (page 5). There is precisely one way for two people to treat each other as equals. They both need to adhere to the moral principle.
Boehm also wrote that “a distinctively egalitarian political style is highly predictable whenever people live in small, locally autonomous social and economic groups (hunter-gatherer bands), and in my opinion this situation is likely to have a single causal explanation” (page 35). I suggest that the single causal explanation is not that bands were adhering to a set of Paleolithic-era cultural norms.
Charles Darwin wrote, “The very essence of instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.” What if the single causal explanation is that, independently of reason, our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors were following a genetically inherited instinct that told them to adhere to the moral principle within their genetically heterogeneous and culturally homogeneous band-sized social systems? Is there a better explanation? I can’t think of one.
If that is true, then civilization is struggling to survive because our (acquired at conception) nature is working at cross purposes with our (learned through experience) nurture, and it will thrive if (and when) we get nature and nurture working in harmony.
In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (2011), Steven Pinker argues that, beginning roughly 100 centuries ago (the dawn of the Neolithic Period), the rate of violence trended upward until an inflection point roughly 25 centuries ago. Since then, the violence rate has trended downward.
In Pinker’s words, “We’ve done something right. Let’s figure out what it is and keep doing it.” Is it possible that we are culturally plastic enough to have moved in the direction of our egalitarian nature?
I agree. If lower violence is the observed effect, then there are many potential causes. But if "more egalitarian" (aka "less authoritarian") is the cause, then I suggest that the observed effect has been lower violence.
This is contrarian and interesting, but I think requires much more data analysis.
First, I think there is not 1, but 4 important questions, none of which can be made independently of the others:
- whether to follow conscience, or reason, as an individual
- whether to be selfish or altruistic
- whether to follow your own judgement, or that of experts
- whether to choose a policy for each of these things, or to judge case-by-case
Second, your collection of cases is small, and all dealt with superficially. A necessity in putting out a post a day, yes. But I don't think people should even get into this question unless they're prepared to invest a lot of time and study into it, because the landscape is very rough. I mean that for each choice on each big question, you can enumerate many cases which seem to clearly support it; and all of these cases will turn out to have long and complicated histories and relevant facts. I tried addressing just the Bible case, and quickly wrote 1500 words just trying to outline the history of the debate.
Yes. Our conscience is driven by our expectations about consequences. But we are bad at perceiving the indirect and long-term consequences of things, so we make a lot of mistakes. (For example this is why people support rent control.) Culture and tradition act to correct a lot of these.
Some of this may just be an artifact of how debates get settled in analytic philosophy. They don't directly tell you this until grad school, but basically, in every debate there are certain "Moorings" - sort of like intuitions that, if you abandoned them, you'd be basically without any bearings at all to get traction in the debate. These were named by David Lewis after GE Moore and his famous proof-by-waving that he has two hands. This technique basically takes the Moorings as an unavoidable starting point, without giving you a method for determining how to recognize Moorings (since the method would be less secure in content than the Moorings themselves). Even Lewis kind of stuck to this methodology, but he argued pretty persuasively that often, the Moorings in a given field make an incoherent set of propositions. In that case, you're supposed to make a coherent view that preserves most of them, and then reject the ones that contradict what you preserved. As Lewis says, "to the victor [the best theory] go the spoils [getting to reject a subset of what we initially took to be Moorings because they don't fit the theory]."
Obviously at the core of this method are basically intuitions that get defended rhetorically and not rationally. When students question Moorings, it's ok to just bully them in front of the class, and the rest fall into line. And modern theories of ethics became exactly what one would predict once you realize that this is the contest that the theories must win.
I think your example of Bible interpretation is a counter-example. The experts at the time of the Reformation were so utterly corrupt, and so well-coordinated in their corruption, that the clear and correct answer was "don't believe anything the experts say".
I think this is not uncommon.
I don't think it's wise to have a strong prior for the correctness of experts in general. In many domains, experts are highly valuable and reliable. Say, electrical engineering, or auto mechanics. But in many domains, experts are especially ignorant.
- Are the experts on what is happening in the world today, journalists? They are not much incentivized to inform us impartially on what is happening in the world today.
- In the 20th century, many experts in literary theory did not read much literature, and believed that literature was inherently harmful because it prevents the masses from developing revolutionary consciousness. For instance, Georg Lukacs, Derrida, and Louis Althusser. In the late 20th century, this came to be the dominant position, as measured by whose essays were published in the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, and in the Proc. of the Modern Language Association. For example, Terry Eagleton, Lennard Davis, John Beverley, and all the identity politics activists and anti-colonialists in the NAT&C. Vincent Leitch renamed the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory to the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism just to make the point that literary theory is no longer about literature; he said so in the introduction to the 2nd edition. He also wrote that he entered the field of literature because he cared so much about political activism.
- Philosophers today are wholly ignorant of information theory, probability theory, and statistics, which are the bare fundamentals one must have to tackle epistemology. This is much worse than in the early 20th century, when the logical positivists were mathematically literate.
- Today, experts on any sect of Christianity are ignorant even of their own sect, as they listen only to the word of other experts from their own sect, and never hear the critiques that other sects make of them.
I'm not even inclined to have a strong prior for the correctness of experts in a specific field. In medicine, where any doctor knows more about medicine than almost any non-doctor, I've nonetheless run into many problems just in my own life for which I had to develop my own cures, because in order to be licensed as experts, doctors must conform to the current consensus, to the extent of never even considering any therapies which are out of favor, or which have not yet been thought of by a doctor. They are strongly discouraged from thinking independently or taking chances, and restrained by insurance and federal regulation. Consider Eliezer's experience with light-therapy for winter depression (SAD).
Talarico has told the story of his grandfather telling the young James that practicing Christianity is hard, but it’s simple. To me, being human is hard, but it’s simple. To thrive, all we need to do is adhere to the moral principle (treat others the way you would want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot) in every context.
In his book, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (2001), Christopher Boehm wrote that “humans were egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear” (page 5). There is precisely one way for two people to treat each other as equals. They both need to adhere to the moral principle.
Boehm also wrote that “a distinctively egalitarian political style is highly predictable whenever people live in small, locally autonomous social and economic groups (hunter-gatherer bands), and in my opinion this situation is likely to have a single causal explanation” (page 35). I suggest that the single causal explanation is not that bands were adhering to a set of Paleolithic-era cultural norms.
Charles Darwin wrote, “The very essence of instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.” What if the single causal explanation is that, independently of reason, our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors were following a genetically inherited instinct that told them to adhere to the moral principle within their genetically heterogeneous and culturally homogeneous band-sized social systems? Is there a better explanation? I can’t think of one.
If that is true, then civilization is struggling to survive because our (acquired at conception) nature is working at cross purposes with our (learned through experience) nurture, and it will thrive if (and when) we get nature and nurture working in harmony.
Yes egalitarianism probably lives deep in us. But we are culturally plastic enough to have moved far away from that for at least ten thousand years.
In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (2011), Steven Pinker argues that, beginning roughly 100 centuries ago (the dawn of the Neolithic Period), the rate of violence trended upward until an inflection point roughly 25 centuries ago. Since then, the violence rate has trended downward.
In Pinker’s words, “We’ve done something right. Let’s figure out what it is and keep doing it.” Is it possible that we are culturally plastic enough to have moved in the direction of our egalitarian nature?
Lower violence isn't at all the same as more egalitarian.
I agree. If lower violence is the observed effect, then there are many potential causes. But if "more egalitarian" (aka "less authoritarian") is the cause, then I suggest that the observed effect has been lower violence.
This is contrarian and interesting, but I think requires much more data analysis.
First, I think there is not 1, but 4 important questions, none of which can be made independently of the others:
- whether to follow conscience, or reason, as an individual
- whether to be selfish or altruistic
- whether to follow your own judgement, or that of experts
- whether to choose a policy for each of these things, or to judge case-by-case
Second, your collection of cases is small, and all dealt with superficially. A necessity in putting out a post a day, yes. But I don't think people should even get into this question unless they're prepared to invest a lot of time and study into it, because the landscape is very rough. I mean that for each choice on each big question, you can enumerate many cases which seem to clearly support it; and all of these cases will turn out to have long and complicated histories and relevant facts. I tried addressing just the Bible case, and quickly wrote 1500 words just trying to outline the history of the debate.
Yes. Our conscience is driven by our expectations about consequences. But we are bad at perceiving the indirect and long-term consequences of things, so we make a lot of mistakes. (For example this is why people support rent control.) Culture and tradition act to correct a lot of these.
Some of this may just be an artifact of how debates get settled in analytic philosophy. They don't directly tell you this until grad school, but basically, in every debate there are certain "Moorings" - sort of like intuitions that, if you abandoned them, you'd be basically without any bearings at all to get traction in the debate. These were named by David Lewis after GE Moore and his famous proof-by-waving that he has two hands. This technique basically takes the Moorings as an unavoidable starting point, without giving you a method for determining how to recognize Moorings (since the method would be less secure in content than the Moorings themselves). Even Lewis kind of stuck to this methodology, but he argued pretty persuasively that often, the Moorings in a given field make an incoherent set of propositions. In that case, you're supposed to make a coherent view that preserves most of them, and then reject the ones that contradict what you preserved. As Lewis says, "to the victor [the best theory] go the spoils [getting to reject a subset of what we initially took to be Moorings because they don't fit the theory]."
Obviously at the core of this method are basically intuitions that get defended rhetorically and not rationally. When students question Moorings, it's ok to just bully them in front of the class, and the rest fall into line. And modern theories of ethics became exactly what one would predict once you realize that this is the contest that the theories must win.
Yes, I'm aware of that practice. And that these "moorings" actually depend lots on the particular cultures people come from.
Is it a Sin that I hate Donald J. Trump?
Yes, it is a sin to hate DJT. That's the bad news. The good news is that it is a virtue to hate what DJT does.