This is a special post for quick takes by CraigMichael. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Richard Hanania mentions Metaculus at like 10:05 here. Was just happy to see discussion of predictions markets in this context.
Do you know how to say “Chesterton’s fence” in Latin? It’s “quod supplantandum, prius bene sciendum” which translates to "You must thoroughly understand that which you hope to supplant.”
I came across it on the Wikipedia list of Latin phrases. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Latin_phrases_(full)&previous=yes
If you've been following the FLCCC/Ivermectin story, this interview with Eric Osgood and David Fuller will likely be interesting to you. Eric was part of the FLCCC and recently left over their views on Covid vaccines. https://rebelwisdom.podbean.com/e/ivermectin-the-backstory-of-the-flccc-eric-osgood/
I believe there's a lot we can learn about rationalism from this saga, and I'm anxious to write a full article dissecting some of the lessons. There's something like the failure of the Information Hypothesis, and the problem of "smarter" and more educated people tending to become polarized more easily.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/36/9587
A point David made towards the end (paraphrasing) "if you know anything about human psychology, you know that shaming people doesn't change their minds" should be surfaced as discussed more often. I've seen this phenomenon where people, when attacked, just dig in their heels more. I feel a bit like there should be a term for this, but I'm not currently aware of one.
Anyway-- I feel like that's what's happened with Bret, Heather and other rationalist-adjacent people here: they're very smart, educated, and heterodox thinkers, but they were attacked in a vicious way and became more polarized. It reminds me a bit of effort justification or sunk cost, but it's not exactly either of those.
If you're looking for a solid take from the Israeli side regarding the current conflict, I would start here:
https://www.jewishagency.org/special-briefing-05-2021/
It was cut short because the air-raid sirens started going about 22 minutes in. As far as I know everyone on the video is safe at the moment.
I was in Israel in February of 2020, just slightly before the world changed, and had an opportunity to meet Michael Oren (I suppose you could say I had some bias because my wife is related to him in a roundabout way... which I suppose means I'm related to him in a... circuitous way?). I don't agree with him on everything, but I can speak to quality of his character.
Since traveling there, my take on all things Israeli-Palestinian conflict--if the person talking about it hasn't spent time in Israeli and Palestine, seen the area, and talked to people there... I hate to sound close-minded, but I'm likely to discount what they say, especially since taking one side or the other in the US is sometimes more about virtue signaling than genuine concern.
Trust me, I had plenty of opinions on the matter and was well aware of the counter points to them that are common in the US. Every idea I had fell flat when I encountered the on-the-ground complexity.
The larger problem--even for the people who are genuinely concerned--the conflict there is not sufficiently analogous to other historical situations (or current and better understood political conflicts) that I'm aware of. If you're in North America and have never been there, whatever model you have of it in your mind almost certainly has significant gaps.
I left with some vague ideas of different ways of looking at it that might help, but was more or less thinking "wow... I'm not a stupid person, but this situation is really complicated and I have no idea what the next best move is. I'm scared to even hazard a guess because I'd hate for anyone to misconstrue it as advice and share some burden for things potentially going sideways."
I know very little of and have no stake/opinion in the conflict - I'm just curious about what kind of complexities you encountered on-the-ground that you did not anticipate beforehand, which might have led to you revising your ideas and conceptions. Thank you for your time and words.
I can't do it justice keeping it short, but will try to.
Israelis and Palestinians are very very very far from monolithic cultures (not to forget about other people that live in the area like Druzes). I can speak to more to the Israeli side than the Palestinian side, but can say it's true for both.
If you've heard or hear a story about Israelis or Palestinians doing something wrong that seems clear cut, it almost certainly has a long back story, context, motives and confusion due to some amount of information of uncertain reliability. To properly sort out whatever that was would easily take days and you will get mostly biased accounts. In many cases it's deep enough that you could dig in it to it for years and never feel completely satisfied that you understood fully it. A small example -- I stayed near the Hassan Bek Mosque for a few days and heard conflicting information about who paid for it and for various restorations of it, as well as different accounts about Israeli Arabs (or Arabs that used it before the area was Israel) who used it to snipe Israeli Jews. I thought it would be a small example of something I could figure out.. I'm still not sure what the truth is. Everything seems to be like that.
Perhaps in a similar way to how you can't just tell someone to stop feeling depressed, you can't discount the historical trauma and expect people move on, and you will encounter a lot of it there. Every building in Israeli cities I was in had a bomb shelter built in, they're a constant reminder of... the predicament. Even in kibbutzim there are bomb shelters.
There is a complicated spider-web of international optics in local politics. Some of it is religious interest (most major Abrahamic religions have some kind of presence in Jerusalem), some of it is political, some of its from Jews from parts of the world that recently made Aliyah (e.g. French Jews).