Right. This is why I think it's under-ratedly important for contrarians who actually believe in the potential efficacy of their beliefs to not seem like contrarians. If you truly believe that your ideas are underrepresented then you will much better promote them by being appearing generally "normal" and passing off the underrepresented idea as a fairly typical part of your ostensibly coherent worldview. I will admit that this is more challenging.
Great debate starter.
One quibble, I don't think that it's even ostensibly normal to have or aspire to have a coherent worldview.
Couldn't do it if I tried for a hundred years. Not disagreeing, though.
Actually, I'd say that you do a much better job at this than many contrarians on the Internet, MW notwithstanding. At least, you have the "passing off the underrepresented idea as a fairly typical part of your ostensibly coherent worldview" part down.
Use the try harder, Luke.
It's a good link. But I would strongly recommend Eliezer did not try harder to do this. Some considerations:
Most smug contrarians have many contrarian beliefs, not just one. If we average over all the various beliefs of smug contrarians, what level of accuracy will we find? (Could we find data on smug contrarians from a century ago?) I suspect accuracy will be far too low to justify such smugness. Even if we limit our attention to high IQ smug contrarians, I suspect accuracy will also be low. Yes the typical objection to smugness is probably to the cockiness of asserting higher status than one has been granted, but the typical reason people are smugly contrarian is also probably wanting to defy current status rankings. You can't assume that because they are hypocrites and disagree with you that you are not a hypocrite.
Adding a rhetorical concession to the original article, something like: "As someone who is, academically, less-credentialed, upsetting the credentials hierarchy would be be to my advantage. My subconscious may be twisting my beliefs in a self-serving direction. However [... and so on...]" might make the original article stronger.
That would be fake humility used for the purposes of supplication, not improving the strength of the article. The main use of such an addition would be to demonstrate Contrarian Status Catch 22b. If you are asked why you disagree with a high status person and your answer is not "I was being smug and arrogant and I must be wrong" then you are being smug and arrogant.
The effectiveness of this ploy explains why "How do explain the fact that disagrees with you?" is such a popular form of one-upmanship. It works even when there is a good answer (and usually even when doesn't disagree).
Assuming collapse is quantitatively unlike assuming the existence of God. The collapse postulate is extremely unlikely a priori, in terms of the usual probabilities humans deal with, but the order of magnitude of unlikeliness is not even in the same order of magnitude as for an intelligent creator. Collapse is easy to describe (if you are careful and use thermodynamic degrees of freedom rather than consciousness to check when it will happen) and consistent with all observations. Of course MWI is way simpler, so I would bet on it against overwhelming odds; so would Scott Aaronson. That said, we still have huge unexplained things (the Born probabilities; the coexistence of GR and quantum) whose improbability a priori is very large compared to the gap between many worlds and collapse. So it is conceivable that we could discover a formulation with collapse which accounts for the Born probabilities and which is simpler than any formulation without collapse. I would bet anything against this, but it is certainly more likely than discovering that the world is flat or that God exists.
Human experience with quantum mechanics has been confined to experiments with extremely low entanglement. T...
The quantum interpretation debate is merely the illustrative starting point for this article, so perhaps it is boorish of me to focus on it. But...
the obvious absurdity of attempts to make quantum mechanics yield a single world.
Even if some form of many worlds is correct, this is going too far.
Eliezer, so far as I can see, in your life you have gone from a belief in objective-collapse theories, derived from Penrose, to a belief in many worlds, derived perhaps from your extropian peers; and you always pose the theoretical choice as a choice between &...
What I'm uncomfortable with isn't the idea of a god-free physical universe, it's the air of satisfaction that atheists give off.
There are many who are uncomfortable with the air of satisfaction that the faithful give off. I'm not convinced there's an asymmetry here.
The instinctive status hierarchy treats factual beliefs in pretty much the same way as policy proposals.
Bingo. Like I've harped on and on about, humans don't naturally decouple beliefs from values, or ought from is. If an ought (esp. involving distribution of resources ) hinges on an "is", it's too often the "is" that gets adjusted, self-servingly, rather than the ought.
Take note, Wei_Dai and everyone who uses could-should-agents as models of humans.
I came up with quote for a closely related issue:
"Don't let the fact that idiots agree with you be the sole thing that makes you change your mind, else all you'll have gained is a different set of idiots who agree with you."
Naive people (particularly contrarians) put into a situation where they aren't sure which ideas are truly "in" or "out" or "popular" may become highly confused and find themselves switching sides frequently. After joining a "side", then being agreed with by people whose arguments were po...
As the post is written, Eliezer seems too quick to presume that if people do not want to affiliate with a belief because of the low status of folks who hold that belief, that must mean those people admit that the evidence favors the belief. Yes if the belief happens to be correct then having the wrong sort of early enthusiasts will sadly discourage others from accepting a correct belief. But this same process will also play out if the belief is wrong.
Note that not all new beliefs first gain the interest of low status folks - many new beliefs are first ...
Thanks for writing this, Eliezer.
I consider it so informative I wrote a note to myself to re-read it in 6 months.
Huh? That is not at all what I read from Scott Aaronson on this and I don't see how your interpretation can be supported upon a close reading.
My interpretation about this is that people who are smugly contrarion suffer from their own rationality bias that leads them to a higher likelihood of truth but at the cost of a much, much higher variance.
Sure, the smug contrarians taught to wash our hands between surgery & discovered America, but they were also the ones who ushered in the French Revolution, the Cambodian Genocide & the Zimbabwe Land Reforms.
Hi Eliezer,
I personally like many worlds because it helps me count on quantum immortality in case I get hit in the head by a falling 2x4 before the singularity comes. However, I was disturbed when I read about the Ashfar experiment, as it seems to disprove many worlds.. I couldn't find anything on your blog about it.. What do you think about it?
I personally like many worlds because it helps me count on quantum immortality ...
I worry whenever someone proclaims to "like" a theory because it predicts high utility, that they are conflating the concepts of "it would be nice for me if this theory were true", and "I believe this theory is true".
But is MWI really contrarian? At least according to the Wikipedia page, several polls have shown a majority of quantum physicists accept it.
What may be bothering people about MWI is the question of what it actually means for these other worlds to exist: are they just theoretical constructs, or are they actually "out there" even though we can't ever interact with them?
Also, I've seen a great deal of confusion about what worlds actually exist: a number of people seem to think that MWI means that any world you can verbally describe exists somewhere, rather than just worlds that have split off from quantum events. No, there is not necessarily a world out there in which the Nazis won WWII.
I don't agree with the interpretation of Scott's comment.
Scott Aaronson doesn't object to Many Worlds because he associates it with particular contrarian group characteristics, he objects to it because (1) he disagrees with Many Worlds by his way of thinking and (2) doesn't like the idea that people who do believe Many Worlds with another way of thinking are projecting superiority.
..."What you've forced me to realize, Eliezer, and I thank you for this: What I'm uncomfortable with is not the many-worlds interpretation itself, it's the air of satisfacti
I think that, while there's some truth in what you say, you're twisting yourself into intellectual knots to avoid having to reify (and thus admit to) arrogance. As far as atheism goes, I think you were much more on the money with your post about untheism and antitheism: in a secular society, untheism is rarely an issue, but antitheism (like all proselytising belief-systems) is very annoying to the recipients.
to me this sounds an awful lot like: "Sure, many-worlds is the simplest explanation that fits the facts, but I don't like the people who believe it."
Then, sorry to put it this way, but you have a hearing problem! :-) All he said was "many worlds could be true". Not "I would believe it if only I could let myself do so". He's agnostic about the truth; he considers many worlds a possibility; and he's put off by people who consider it a certainty.
I prefer to abstract the dynamic to "oppositional state" rather than personify into a "contrarian". That is, a contrarian is someone who places themselves in an oppositional state to another.
It used to puzzle me that Scott Aaronson still hasn't come to terms with the obvious absurdity of attempts to make quantum mechanics yield a single world.
I should have realized what was going on when I read Scott's blog post "The bullet-swallowers" in which Scott compares many-worlds to libertarianism. But light didn't dawn until my recent diavlog with Scott, where, at 50 minutes and 20 seconds, Scott says:
"What you've forced me to realize, Eliezer, and I thank you for this: What I'm uncomfortable with is not the many-worlds interpretation itself, it's the air of satisfaction that often comes with it."
-- Scott Aaronson, 50:20 in our Bloggingheads dialogue.
It doesn't show on my face (I need to learn to reveal my expressions more, people complain that I'm eerily motionless during these diavlogs) but at this point I'm thinking, Didn't Scott just outright concede the argument? (He didn't; I checked.) I mean, to me this sounds an awful lot like:
Sure, many-worlds is the simplest explanation that fits the facts, but I don't like the people who believe it.
And I strongly suspect that a lot of people out there who would refuse to identify themselves as "atheists" would say almost exactly the same thing:
What I'm uncomfortable with isn't the idea of a god-free physical universe, it's the air of satisfaction that atheists give off.
If you're a regular reader of Robin Hanson, you might essay a Hansonian explanation as follows:
Although the actual state of evidence favors many-worlds (atheism), I don't want to affiliate with other people who say so. They act all brash, arrogant, and offensive, and tend to believe and advocate other odd ideas like libertarianism. If I believed in many-worlds (atheism), that would make me part of this low-prestige group.
Or in simpler psychology:
I don't feel like I belong with the group that believes in many-worlds (atheism).
I think this might form a very general sort of status catch-22 for contrarian ideas.
When a correct contrarian idea comes along, it will have appealing qualities like simplicity and favorable evidence (in the case of factual beliefs) or high expected utility (in the case of policy proposals). When an appealing contrarian idea comes along, it will be initially supported by its appealing qualities, and opposed by the fact that it seems strange and unusual, or any other counterintuitive aspects it may have.
So initially, the group of people who are most likely to support the contrarian idea, are the people who are - among other things - most likely to break with their herd in support of an idea that seems true or right.
These first supporters are likely to be the sort of people who - rather than being careful to speak of the new idea in the cautious tones prudent to supplicate the many high-status insiders who believe otherwise - just go around talking as if the idea had a very high probability, merely because it seems to them like the simplest explanation that fits the facts. "Arrogant", "brash", and "condescending" are some of the terms used to describe people with this poor political sense.
The people first to speak out in support of the new idea will be those less sensitive to conformity; those with more confidence in their sense of truth or rightness; those less afraid of speaking out.
And to the extent these are general character traits, such first supporters are also more likely to advocate other contrarian beliefs, like libertarianism or strident atheism or cryonics.
And once that happens, the only people who'll be willing to believe the idea will be those willing to tar themselves by affiliating with a group of arrogant nonconformists - on top of everything else!
tl;dr: When a counterintuitive new idea comes along, the first people to support it will be contrarians, and so the new idea will become associated with contrarian traits and beliefs, and people will become even more reluctant to believe it because that would affiliate them with low-prestige people/traits/beliefs.
A further remark on "airs of satisfaction": Talk about how we don't understand the Born Probabilities and there are still open questions in QM, and hence we can't accept the no-worldeaters interpretation, sounds a good deal like the criticism given to atheists who go around advocating the no-God interpretation. "But there's so much we don't know about the universe! Why are you so self-satisfied with your disbelief in God?" There's plenty we don't understand about the universe, but that doesn't mean that future discoveries are likely to reveal Jehovah any more than they're likely to reveal a collapse postulate.
Furthermore, atheists are more likely than priests to hear "But we don't know everything about the universe" or "What's with this air of satisfaction?" Similarly, it looks to me like you can get away with speaking out strongly in favor of collapse postulates and against many-worlds, and the same people won't call you on an "air of satisfaction" or say "but what about the open questions in quantum mechanics?"
This is why I think that what we have here is just a sense of someone being too confident in an unusual belief given their assigned social status, rather than a genuine sense that we can't be too confident in any statement whatever. The instinctive status hierarchy treats factual beliefs in pretty much the same way as policy proposals. Just as you need to be extremely high-status to go off and say on your own that the tribe should do something unusual, there's a similar dissonance from a low-status person saying on their own to believe something unusual, without careful compromises with other factions. It shows the one has no sense of their appropriate status in the hierarchy, and isn't sensitive to other factions' interests.
The pure, uncompromising rejection merited by hypotheses like Jehovah or collapse postulates, socially appears as a refusal to make compromises with the majority, or a lack of sufficient humility when contradicting high-prestige people. (Also priests have higher social status to start with; it's understood that their place is to say and advocate these various things; and priests are better at faking humility while going on doing whatever they were going to do anyway.) The Copenhagen interpretation of QM - however ridiculous - is recognized as a conventional non-strange belief, so no one's going to call you insufficiently humble for advocating it. That would mark them as the contrarians.