pearls before swine >:[
I assume that the whole flat earth thing will lose its contrarian luster and fall out of style in the next few years. But suppose that's wrong. How soon until there are significant numbers of flat-earther kids enrolling in kindergarten? Will they be like existing fringe religious minorities? Will they mostly be homeschooled? My real best guess is that flat-earthers don't have kids so this won't happen.
Some smart, scrupulous, rational news junkie should write a periodical report on the state of anti-epistemology. I sort of worry that memeplexes, including anti-epistemic ones, have tipping points whereat they become popular (or dominant) very suddenly.
I followed a link to an article about how Facebook was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar. I got a few paragraphs into it and then thought, "Wait, the New York Times is telling me a scandalous but murky story about Big Tech and world events...and I’m just condensing that as 'known facts of public record.' Isn’t this Gell-Mann amnesia?"
So then I felt myself searching for reasons why the NYT could be trusted more about this kind of thing, but found it difficult to come up with a single specific reason that I actually believed. So then I supposed that it was worth reading anyway, since the basic facts were important, and I wasn’t at that much risk from whatever biased framing the NYT might take. But I realized that I didn't really believe that either--I imagined the future in which I turn out to have been utterly misled by the article, and that hypothetical future felt entirely plausible.
So I didn’t read it.
It was an effortful and unrewarding decision, but I endorse it, and I’m hopeful that it will be easier next time. For news stories of this sort, I expect to fall short of my own epistemic standards unless I check 3 or 4 diverse sources. But I didn’t want to do an hour of responsible research, I wanted to spend a leisurely 10 minutes on a single, highly consumable, authoritatively-voiced article and then enjoy the feeling of being informed.
Uh oh, do you really leave the news playing in your living room all the time? Don't you know it's corrosive to your epistemics and agency? Plane crashes are overrated and chronic stress is underrated!
This is pretty much my default attitude, but...SSC once wrote that smoking possibly mitigates schizophrenia, and that "[t]his should be a warning to anyone who’s too quick to tell patients that their coping strategies are maladaptive."
News does have those downsides, just like smoking does cause cancer. But it's good to remember that load-bearing bugs are the rule, not the exception.
What good thing happens if you read The Sequences?
[1] Cynical About Cynicism isn't in the Sequences, but the same general attitude still comes up.
When i’m walking around through my daily life, it helps me to think of myself as a character in a cyberpunk weirdtopia.
Hiro Protagonist, the protagonist of Snow Crash wouldn’t complain about these things; he would go on a sassy, sciencey, poetic monologue about it and appreciate it all for what it was.
I like this post; words are important.
Often I have witnessed people encountering new information, apparently accepting it, and then carefully explaining why they are going to do exactly the same thing they planned to do previously, but with a different justification. The point of thinking is to shape our plans; if you’re going to keep the same plans anyway, why bother going to all that work to justify it? When you encounter new information, the hard part is to update, to react, rather than just letting the information disappear down a black hole.
In some contexts, this is exactly right. It is right and proper to see major, real-time belief updates in the climax of a rational fic. And one hopes that executives in a high-stakes meeting will be properly incentivized to do the same. But in many ordinary cases, the most extreme concession one should hope to hear is, "okay, you've given me something to think about," followed by a change of subject. (If this seems unambitious, consider how rarely people make even such small concessions.)
I think it's important to mind the costs--both psychological and social--of abruptly changing one's plans or attitudes. "Why bother going to all that work to justify [staying the course]?" Indeed, I wish it were more normal for people to say, "well, that's a good point but it's probably not worth the switching costs" or even just, "I don't feel like thinking that hard about it."
… yesterday, you said Q, and Q implies not P. So you were wrong yesterday or today. So you’re wrong.
I sort of want to try developing (the valid version of) this into a deliberate skill. I think that of all the mundane forms of hypocrisy, one of the most vexing might be inconsistency at the 24h+ timescale. It's just hard to say, "hey, you're trying to have it both ways!" if the violation in question is spread out over multiple days. So naturally, everyone does it all the time.
"Top Forecasting Team Says World Population in 2050 Will be Only Six Thousand!" there's a good chance that they will just write "Top Forecasting Team Says World Population will massively decrease in the middle of the century".
Ok that's probably true. This idea was meant mostly as a joke, but still...I can't help but wonder if there might be some cool Straussian tactic to push a tiny signal through the Great Distorter.
I wonder if this post would have gotten a better reception if the stooge had been a Scientologist or a conspiracy theorist or something, instead of just a hapless normie.