No-one is a villain in their own mind, of course.
I've spent several years deep in the bowels of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. (It's jolly good and I'm very proud to have had some small part in what we've achieved and continue to achieve.) Wikipedia has the rule "assume good faith", which is of course a restatement of Hanlon's razor, "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice." Wikimedia is 100% made of sincere people who really believe in what they're doing. Per Dumas' razor, "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, as rogues sometimes rest," this means that when one of these sincere, smart, dedicated people is doing something that's actually blitheringly stupid, it's ten times as hard to get across to them that they are in fact having a towering attack of dumbarse.
Every politician I've ever met has in fact been a completely sincere person who considers themselves to do what they do with the aim of good in the world. Even the ones that any outsider would say "haha, leave it out" to the notion. Every politician is completely sincere. I posit that this is a much more frightening notion than the comfort of a conspiracy theory.
There are few, if any, villains. There are people being stupid and foolish. These are frequently us. LessWrong's catalogue of cognitive biases is to remind you that you, yes you, are in fact an idiot. As am I.
The hard part is to set the bozo bit on people in parts, rather than over the whole person. And allow for the notion of cluifiability.
This is simply not what I observe to be the case from my experience with politicians and high-level business people.
People quite consciously play and want to play varied parts in life, some of which are villain parts.
There are certainly a fairly large group of people who are inclined to refer to others as "do-gooders" but I think this usually this is a consequence of not thinking of things in terms of wrong and right, but in terms of winners and losers. They adopt stereotypically villainous traits mockingly, to display their contempt for people they think are inferior to them. I know and see a lot of businessmen and commentators like that, but not many politicians, at least above the level of the president of the Young Tory or Debating society.
Similarly people who decide that the most important thing to do is to smash some "the other side" they can't credibly be cast as oppressive tend to adopt villainous traits.
Here is a This American Life episode about just such a real-life group of people: a collection of various chemical company executives arranging and implementing an international price fixing scheme that lasted years.
The episode focuses on an informant, a junior executive with one of the companies, who captured an enormous amount of footage of the executives jovially discussing the various ways and means they'd be using to knowingly screw over their customers and, in turn, a great deal of the agricultural and industrial economies that depended on their products. The footage is justly described as "probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act".
Everyone has reasons for the things they do, post-hoc or otherwise; I think what distinguishes a villian is a callous acceptance of their own selfishness and a pointed indifference to, or even enjoyment of, the suffering inflicted upon others due to their actions.
Every politician is completely sincere. I posit that this is a much more frightening notion than the comfort of a conspiracy theory.
Hear, hear.
I think of self-deception and ill will as lying on a continuum with no bright line separating them. Bad Jackie in slacktivist's "Jackie at the crossroads" is a "bad person", or at least a person who does a clearly bad thing and does not repent, but she will be quite upset with herself if she ever realizes this.
The thing is there are people who are more or less likely to be worth listening to. Even if no one is actually evil, some people don't have ideas that are generally worth listening to. They might occasionally have a good idea. And even people with generally good ideas might have a few really bad ones. The question that needs to be asked is not "is this person good or evil" or even "is this person smart or dumb" but rather "what is the probability that I will learn something interesting and correct from listening to this person?"
Given what I know about Gould I suspect he likes group selection for the same reason he dislikes sociobiology. Namely, because group selection is moral.
As for your main point while I agree that it's dangerous to get into affective death spirals around your heroes and anti-affective death spirals about your villains, it is also true that the fact that someone doesn't care about the truth of a theory because he finds it immoral is Bayesian evidence that his other statements aren't necessarily reliable. After all he might only be making them because he finds them moral.
the fact that someone doesn't care about the truth of a theory because he finds it immoral is Bayesian evidence that his other statements aren't necessarily reliable.
True. I don't want to go overboard and say that we shouldn't accumulate evidence about what people have done in the past. But I was not being a rational Bayesian. I wanted to be a Good Guy and feel righteous.
I find this also hard with acquaintances. One who has done some really awful things but is also in many ways an interesting and sometimes very selfless and generous person. There's pressure to either say "oh, they're all right really" or "oh, they're not really generous". Ultimately for all that they deny it, people want to know what side you're on.
I remember distinctly having the same discrete epiphany, and it is indeed incredibly frustrating. But take heart--this way, you get more than two markers with which to color in your map. :)
Gould turned Goldschmidt's "hopeful monster" hypothesis from pariah to mainstream with his theory of punctuated equilibrium - which has been well-borne-out in every good, gene-level-detailed computer simulation of evolution that I've seen.
That is simply bizarre. I'm going to have to ask for references. Two references, in fact.
One would be a quote from any mainstream evolutionary biologist other than Gould which uses the phrases "hopeful monster" and "punctuated equilibrium" in the same paragraph. If you cannot find one, a quote from Gould would do. According to wikipedia, the association of the two ideas is a creationist distortion. Googling the two phrases seems to bear that out.
The second would be a link to any paper reporting a good, gene-level-detailed computer simulation of evolution which backs up your claim.
It appears that you're right about my misstating the connection between hopeful monsters and punctuated equilibria. I'm not familiar with Goldschmidt's work, and inferred (and overstated) the similarity with punctuated equilibrium based on my spotty understanding of it. I removed that sentence.
About simulations reproducing punctuated equilibrium: By "gene-level" I only mean that they simulate organisms with many genes, not that they're accurate to the level of genes. The presence of other organisms in the simulation will also suffice. One good reference is "Co-evolution to the edge of chaos: Coupled fitness landscapes, poised states, and co-evolutionary avalanches", by Stuart Kauffman & Sonke Johnson, in Artificial Life 2, 1991. I stopped following this literature about 15 years ago, so maybe things have changed.
Approaches such as Jonnal & Chemero ("Punctuation Equilibrium and Optimization: An A-life Model") are fundamentally incorrect. The mechanism shown in simulations is not that the mutation rate changes; it is that the size of "avalanches" released in an equilibrium state where different genes and/or species are co-adapted has a power-law distribution.
Amorality is a lovely way to protect science from ideology. All the heroes subscribe to it nowadays.
Great post, thanks.
I try to remember my heroes for the specific heroic act or trait, e.g. Darwin's conscientious collection of disconfirming evidence.
Computer geeks have a term for this: "flipping the bozo bit".
Related: The Trouble With "Good".
I think seeing Bad Guys should especially be avoided. Nobody's an evil mutant; as a first approximation, prominent scholars have good intentions and are not stupid. So seeing Stephen J. Gould as a villain or a fool is as wrong as Stephen J. Gould seeing Edward Wilson as a villain or a fool.
Accepting that fact of many people who loudly disagree with each other can be difficult, but I think the proper response isn't to decide that one particular subgroup is right and one subgroup is wrong (a decision often made with...
Ah yes, haha, I used to have the same hypothesis with the Dawkins vs Gould camp, but I shattered it some time ago.
Incidentally, does anyone else here feel the same narrative with respect to the Democrats vs Republicans? I frequently have to refrain from thinking of the Republicans as "bad guys", even though they sometimes do have legitimate economic policies.
How about no villains after a certain age?
If I had no heroes and no villains in my wild and reckless youth, I would not be able to have pre-cognitions which stopped me from ever reading the bible, the Quran, Freud, and Skinner.
Nowadays, after reading the sequences, after grasping bayes, After having sharper ideas about how we cluster objects into categories in our minds, I consider myself somewhat vaccinated.
Now, as a grown man, I am able to stop having villains and heroes. But when I was younger and had chosen my three heros (Dennett, Russell, and Bost...
I loved reading Stephen Jay Gould as a kid, and later I had to learn that, no, he wasn't right about everything. I still feel a knee-jerk pull to trust him over Dawkins or Wilson, which I have to consciously resist.
I know someone who knew Gould. She said he was absolutely brilliant. Not flawless; absolutely brilliant. I always thought the spandrel tale was interesting. Not compelling; but very interesting.
(I do have heroes though; I try not to project infallibility upon them.)
I don't think it was even personal - I didn't care who would be the Good Guys and who would be the Bad Guys. I just want there to be Good Guys and Bad Guys.
I have difficulty with this, too. I see the problem as related to correspondence bias.
In a single situation, you observe one person as being the Good Guy, and the other being the Bad Guy. This judgement gets locked into place as how they should always act. It gives you the false expectation for the same guy to be good, and the same guy to be bad. It doesn't matter who, individually, plays which role...
We are all imperfect and we all have good stuff and bad stuff. If we focus on the good, then that is what we will tend to receive in our personal relationships. It doesn't make us perfect. And it's all perspective sine the majority if us choose which side of the fence we will be on.
This post, which concentrated on people's commentary about a field of inquiry, could have been improved by including some summary of the field being commented on.
think good guys and bad guys, like good guys and bad guys in long tv shows or even worse.. like in professional wrestling.. they keep changing roles.. not to any extent of actually thinking along those terms, but just to make the point that the roles keep on changing.. at any rate, there are and most probably always will be categories of people whose interests/beliefs/motivations are aligned with ours and those categories of people whose interests/beliefs/motivations will be diametrically opposite..
"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!"
When Edward Wilson published the book Sociobiology, Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould secretly convened a group of biologists to gather regularly, for months, in the same building at Harvard that Wilson's office was in, to write an angry, politicized rebuttal to it, essentially saying not that Sociobiology was wrong, but that it was immoral - without ever telling Wilson. This proved, to me, that they were not interested in the truth. I never forgave them for this.
I constructed a narrative of evolutionary biology in which Edward Wilson and Richard Dawkins were, for various reasons, the Good Guys; and Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould were the Bad Guys.
When reading articles on group selection for this post, I was distressed to find Richard Dawkins joining in the vilification of group selection with religious fervor; while Stephen J. Gould was the one who said,
"I have witnessed widespread dogma only three times in my career as an evolutionist, and nothing in science has disturbed me more than ignorant ridicule based upon a desire or perceived necessity to follow fashion: the hooting dismissal of Wynne-Edwards and group selection in any form during the late 1960's and most of the 1970's, the belligerence of many cladists today, and the almost ritualistic ridicule of Goldschmidt by students (and teachers) who had not read him."
This caused me great cognitive distress. I wanted Stephen Jay Gould to be the Bad Guy. I realized I was trying to find a way to dismiss Gould's statement, or at least believe that he had said it from selfish motives. Or else, to find a way to flip it around so that he was the Good Guy and someone else was the Bad Guy.
To move on, I had to consciously shatter my Good Guy/Bad Guy narrative, and accept that all of these people are sometimes brilliant, sometimes blind; sometimes share my values, and sometimes prioritize their values (e.g., science vs. politics) very differently from me. I was surprised by how painful it was to do that, even though I was embarrassed to have had the Good Guy/Bad Guy hypothesis in the first place. I don't think it was even personal - I didn't care who would be the Good Guys and who would be the Bad Guys. I just want there to be Good Guys and Bad Guys.