“The survival value of seeing the world as it is would have inclined humans to evolve into pure truth-seekers.” In all of nature humans are the only irrational creature. Even where there is chaos in the universe, it isn’t irrational by choice. Imagine a flock of geese wherein some “decide” to only stay alert for threats from the air (hawks) since threats on the ground are less prevalent. The goose who is no longer alert on the ground ends up a pile of feathers, punished by epistemic rationality that Williams notes.. As humans drift further away from the natural world (e.g, screen time), it becomes easier to pretend the world is something it isn’t, even if it imperils overall well-being.
"... it becomes easier to pretend the world is something it isn’t ..."
Moreover, it's as if a whole part of the mind that used to store up knowledge of natural phenomena - is now empty and idle ... ready to be filled with either nonsense or frivolity, like a diet Coke version of the world.
Think of the paucity of nature description, or agricultural description, in modern novels (unless the author, many months of research only too evident, is laboriously trying to mine a particular subculture or something). This was just second nature to someone like Shakespeare.
In 1984, tellingly to me, Orwell has the one scene of least tension, or of brief, transient near-release from control - take place in a meadow, with appropriate nods to specific flowers and birds. Which seem rather sweeter even than the still-corrupted love scene.
I feel this is an underrated crisis, this removal from nature; it is so easy for people to file it away as mere "aesthetics". What if aesthetics was more important than they thought? What if we've evolved to know truth (and beauty too, if you like) via contact with nature - and the knack of it diminishes without that contact, and with the steady diminishment of nature itself through human action?
You have falsely equated truth seeking with rationality. They are not the same. The whole issue is that sometimes it is more rational not to seek truth.
Great piece. This is really interesting thinking. Believing in stories is how humans coordinate on a group level so this behavior is baked into DNA. I also think it is worse now because you have a large generation of younger people slowly taking power from a large generation of older people holding onto it.
Morality trumps reality. That’s fine as long as society’s guiding principles align with nature and nature’s laws. But when acknowledging that two and two are four is seen as a sign of immorality, society is in trouble. Luxury beliefs won’t keep us alive if they trickle down to the people who take out the garbage and keep the lights on.
"A good argument for strong norms of free expression is not that it leads to truth, but that it’s a form of system design that protects against the harms produced by small but well-organised groups that impose self-serving orthodoxies and taboos on the broader population."
This is for me the best argument for enduring the trolls, small-time propagandists and ignoramuses that plague Twitter/X and take the time to engage with them however painful that is.
Language only represents reality, so it cannot be reality. The word "chair" is not a chair, and no description of a chair can be identical to any real chair. However, there are degrees of accuracy. I can describe the chair more accurately, or I can describe it totally incorrectly by calling it a table. I can generalize about chairs accurately by saying that most of them have four legs and a seat, but this can be critiqued by someone who points out many instances of chairs without four legs (such as a modern chair with a thick base and no legs at all), or by describing stools that jut out from a bar that could also be chairs, and so on and so forth.
Describing myths as lies doesn't really make sense except from the standpoint of a literate people; and myths are well-known to be a preliterate form of expression. Without the reference point of text and other fixed media, the standard of an untrue myth doesn't really make sense, because for an oral people, the myth might be more true to the oral history of the people than a tall fishing tale based on the personal experiences of members of a tribe who are actually present. The term "lie" also implies bad faith and intent to deceive that is not usually present in the myth-telling mode of thinking. It is rather like saying that all poems are lies: it's missing the point of the thing.
"Group-level irrationality clearly poses a threat to overall well-being. The antidote is norms and institutions that foster a competitive marketplace of ideas. We see such norms and institutions in science, adversarial legal proceedings, markets for goods and services, and in media."
This is the postmodern point of view masquerading as a faded enlightenment view. The clue to this should be that the Google nGram for "marketplace of ideas" skyrockets from almost nothing in the mid to late 1960s. It doesn't really make sense to complain about losing market share to people who are better at using violence than your group if you support this concept of open cultural competition. Violence is fair game and winners in this competition do not hesitate to use it whenever it benefits them.
I am not quite sure your argument regarding the "postmodern point of view masquerading as a faded enlightenment view" holds water. Simply because the terminology of "marketplace of ideas" to describe debate and other more real world tests of ideas doesn't show up much before doesn't mean that the activity was there or seen as important. Quite possibly it just never occurred to people to name the phenomenon; the phrase "dating market" probably doesn't show up much in the past either, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a functional competitive market for spouses previously, or that people didn't compete for such things. Certainly most Enlightenment thinkers (at least in the Scottish or American version... hard to tell with the French) were very much against using violence to change minds about what is or is not true.
This is the most interesting post I have ever seen on this site. Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis is also worth mining on this aspect of human individual and social psychology. His: "Little Lawyer" inside your head and 'Games' like "Let's You and Him Fight" and "Ain't it Awful" are examples that spring to mind. But there are many more.
“I like to say that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. We are especially inclined to believe people who are close to us in the small group layer of society—our friends and family. Our desire relative to the group is to belong. We adopt false beliefs that enable us to belong.” Beautiful paragraph Arnold. Thank you.
I recently listened to a podcast about gambling in the Napoleonic army. I had not thought of it before, but in addition to letting off steam there seems to have been a norm to distrust anyone that wouldn't gamble recklessly. The theory goes that if a man isn't willing to gamble a months wages, how can you rely on him to gamble his life when the order to charge comes.
Blutcher, fresh off defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, apparently lost the equivalent of 12 million dollars in a Paris casino.
I am always a bit skeptical of these sorts of interpretations. I have never read any accounts saying anything to the effect of "We don't trust that guy Steve over there... he seems like a good guy but he never gambles, so I don't think he is willing to die." On the other hand, many accounts describe war as roughly "months of boredom punctuated by moments of absolute terror". It seems to me that if you put lots of men in a situation where they have money and very little to do that isn't work, gambling is going to become a regular feature, no matter the circumstances. People seem to find gambling very enjoyable, or at least many do, and it is a relatively easy thing to do with no real requirements on materials to be hauled around, so it seems obvious that an army would do a lot of it. Not like they could easily carry books or had tvs and iphones to fill the time with.
DW: "They signal our commitment to cooperative social norms and advertise our loyalty to our coalition. They enable us to persuade other agents of our social value."
AK: "I see the more dangerous assault as coming from the social justice faction on the left."
Like the ubiquitous pronouns in people's email signatures (especially in universities) supporting "inclusivity" of the gender dysphoric and just deluded. Like construing the statement "Only females menstruate" as hate speech (Academy at Penguin Hall, Wenham, MA). Like other schools requiring that all staff affirm as "100% women" those males who claim to be women and "denounce Whiteness." Like permitting biological males to participate in women's sports and access women's private spaces--despite the very real threats they pose to women's safety. Like celebrating the purchase of babies through surrogacy, etc., etc.
Clearly, this is the best time to be a sexual predator, a misogynist, a voyeur, a fetishist, an autogynephile. 'Passing' as women and infiltrating women's spaces is a game to these men; it's great fun to erase real women by demanding phrases like "people with uteruses" and "people who menstruate," and women, in misplaced compassion, promote this absurdity, women's own eradication.
"Daniel Kahneman influenced economists and others to think of irrationality in individual terms. He described a set of biases embedded in individual minds, and in order to be more rational we have to overcome those biases.
Instead, Williams is suggesting that irrationality is a group phenomenon. We should explain epistemic irrationality by looking at the group layer of society, not at the individual layer."
I see this as being more of a both/and situation. not an either/or situation. We have individual irrationalities for various reasons, self interested or just natural wiring, and those irrationalities are driven both by the natural world and the social world. The social world is special in that our individual irrationalities can change the social world to favor them, such as the case of deeming those who don't agree with personal level biases on a matter to be the out group, defining the in group as those who share the same irrationality at the personal level.
Ideally, enlightenment philosophy, behind "the Constitution of Knowledge" would have constantly pushed the Overton window in the direction of truth & rationality.
Philosophers dropped the ball. They told us that there is the nomenal & phenomenal are distinct. While pretending to save rationality, they undermined it. The strengths of rationality meant it took many generations to undermine it. It's an ongoing project.
The subjectivists' dirty secret is that they actually want many citizens using rationality to execute the irrational whims of their leaders. And yet, that's hard to do: the only way is to breed engineers & scientists who buying to at least some of the subjectivists' ideology. People who keep their nose to the grind while thinking the humanities are subjective anyway.
As for deciding who to believe and false beliefs making one a part of the group, I've heard exactly the same elsewhere, probably Freakonomics Radio, though it could have been Hidden Brain or even Jordan Peterson.
The threats from Trump supporters and progressives are very different and hard to compare but there is a very strong tendency for conservatives and liberals to see the other side as the greatest threat even if they see the threat on their own side. For that reason I'd be curious to know what people like Romney and Haidt, who are vocal about the threat on their side, think about the threat on the other side.
"Suppose that a high school clique adopts the belief that ordinary heterosexual preferences are low status. ... In fact, that is my explanation for the growth in self-reported non-binary sexual identities."
Is there evidence that heterosexual preferences are considered low-status among high school students?
There seems to be some, though I would have added that the heterosexual preferences are also considered low status to the administrators and teachers of school, so there is other incentives to pretend to be in a category one is not.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! Truth seekers listen up! Dan Williams has professed truth! Rob Henderson had professed truth! Bryan Caplan has professed truth! And Arnold Kling has professed truth! Let’s acknowledge and examine these truths.
1. Sometimes group loyalty is valued over truth. (Dan Williams)
2. People often hesitate to speak truth if doing so will likely lower their status. (Rob Henderson)
3. In order to fit in, people gravitate towards saying and thinking, whatever sounds good. (Bryan Caplan)
4. We adopt false beliefs that enable us to belong. (Arnold Kling)
Realize the importance of these one-liners. They are accurate and concise descriptions of our enemy! Speak these truths so as to shame our enemy and crush their hopes!
What are the best questions to ask about these truths?
[Feel free to continue the heretic’s speech in the comments below, or propose what you think are the most important questions to ask next].
Re: "Anyone can profess a true belief—doing so does not signal your membership in a group."
Professing a true belief, when various groups are bonding around false beliefs, signals one's membership in the group of truth-seekers. Why can't scientists and other truth-seekers, if indeed they seek justifiable true beliefs, constitute a group on that basis?
Re: "We are especially inclined to believe people who are close to us in the small group layer of society—our friends and family."
News reports about Thanksgiving family gatherings suggest that conflict about beliefs emerges if the circle of family is larger than the household.
"Why can't scientists and other truth-seekers, if indeed they seek justifiable true beliefs, constitute a group on that basis?"
That would be great, but we have certainly been seeing, in recent years, many scientists placing getting along in elite society (supporting BLM, maybe supporting Hamas in some cases) over objective truth.
I think the answer to that question is that scientists get status and other rewards from people who are not scientists and who do not want truth so much as scientists to confirm that what they want to do is the right thing. If one says "scientists are those who seek truth instead of social rewards" then you have a circular problem of how to identify scientists who disagree as opposed to people with knowledge who are lying or irrational for social rewards. Anyone with money can find experts to support their case, so long as there isn't an actual reality test in the offing.
“The survival value of seeing the world as it is would have inclined humans to evolve into pure truth-seekers.” In all of nature humans are the only irrational creature. Even where there is chaos in the universe, it isn’t irrational by choice. Imagine a flock of geese wherein some “decide” to only stay alert for threats from the air (hawks) since threats on the ground are less prevalent. The goose who is no longer alert on the ground ends up a pile of feathers, punished by epistemic rationality that Williams notes.. As humans drift further away from the natural world (e.g, screen time), it becomes easier to pretend the world is something it isn’t, even if it imperils overall well-being.
"... it becomes easier to pretend the world is something it isn’t ..."
Moreover, it's as if a whole part of the mind that used to store up knowledge of natural phenomena - is now empty and idle ... ready to be filled with either nonsense or frivolity, like a diet Coke version of the world.
Think of the paucity of nature description, or agricultural description, in modern novels (unless the author, many months of research only too evident, is laboriously trying to mine a particular subculture or something). This was just second nature to someone like Shakespeare.
In 1984, tellingly to me, Orwell has the one scene of least tension, or of brief, transient near-release from control - take place in a meadow, with appropriate nods to specific flowers and birds. Which seem rather sweeter even than the still-corrupted love scene.
I feel this is an underrated crisis, this removal from nature; it is so easy for people to file it away as mere "aesthetics". What if aesthetics was more important than they thought? What if we've evolved to know truth (and beauty too, if you like) via contact with nature - and the knack of it diminishes without that contact, and with the steady diminishment of nature itself through human action?
You have falsely equated truth seeking with rationality. They are not the same. The whole issue is that sometimes it is more rational not to seek truth.
Humans are also the only rational creature. Rationality and irrationality are two sides of the same coin.
Agreed.
Great piece. This is really interesting thinking. Believing in stories is how humans coordinate on a group level so this behavior is baked into DNA. I also think it is worse now because you have a large generation of younger people slowly taking power from a large generation of older people holding onto it.
Not sure how that's different than in the past and even if it is I don't see why that makes it worse.
Morality trumps reality. That’s fine as long as society’s guiding principles align with nature and nature’s laws. But when acknowledging that two and two are four is seen as a sign of immorality, society is in trouble. Luxury beliefs won’t keep us alive if they trickle down to the people who take out the garbage and keep the lights on.
"A good argument for strong norms of free expression is not that it leads to truth, but that it’s a form of system design that protects against the harms produced by small but well-organised groups that impose self-serving orthodoxies and taboos on the broader population."
This is for me the best argument for enduring the trolls, small-time propagandists and ignoramuses that plague Twitter/X and take the time to engage with them however painful that is.
Language only represents reality, so it cannot be reality. The word "chair" is not a chair, and no description of a chair can be identical to any real chair. However, there are degrees of accuracy. I can describe the chair more accurately, or I can describe it totally incorrectly by calling it a table. I can generalize about chairs accurately by saying that most of them have four legs and a seat, but this can be critiqued by someone who points out many instances of chairs without four legs (such as a modern chair with a thick base and no legs at all), or by describing stools that jut out from a bar that could also be chairs, and so on and so forth.
Describing myths as lies doesn't really make sense except from the standpoint of a literate people; and myths are well-known to be a preliterate form of expression. Without the reference point of text and other fixed media, the standard of an untrue myth doesn't really make sense, because for an oral people, the myth might be more true to the oral history of the people than a tall fishing tale based on the personal experiences of members of a tribe who are actually present. The term "lie" also implies bad faith and intent to deceive that is not usually present in the myth-telling mode of thinking. It is rather like saying that all poems are lies: it's missing the point of the thing.
"Group-level irrationality clearly poses a threat to overall well-being. The antidote is norms and institutions that foster a competitive marketplace of ideas. We see such norms and institutions in science, adversarial legal proceedings, markets for goods and services, and in media."
This is the postmodern point of view masquerading as a faded enlightenment view. The clue to this should be that the Google nGram for "marketplace of ideas" skyrockets from almost nothing in the mid to late 1960s. It doesn't really make sense to complain about losing market share to people who are better at using violence than your group if you support this concept of open cultural competition. Violence is fair game and winners in this competition do not hesitate to use it whenever it benefits them.
When I sit on a table, it becomes a chair.
I am not quite sure your argument regarding the "postmodern point of view masquerading as a faded enlightenment view" holds water. Simply because the terminology of "marketplace of ideas" to describe debate and other more real world tests of ideas doesn't show up much before doesn't mean that the activity was there or seen as important. Quite possibly it just never occurred to people to name the phenomenon; the phrase "dating market" probably doesn't show up much in the past either, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a functional competitive market for spouses previously, or that people didn't compete for such things. Certainly most Enlightenment thinkers (at least in the Scottish or American version... hard to tell with the French) were very much against using violence to change minds about what is or is not true.
This is the most interesting post I have ever seen on this site. Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis is also worth mining on this aspect of human individual and social psychology. His: "Little Lawyer" inside your head and 'Games' like "Let's You and Him Fight" and "Ain't it Awful" are examples that spring to mind. But there are many more.
“I like to say that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. We are especially inclined to believe people who are close to us in the small group layer of society—our friends and family. Our desire relative to the group is to belong. We adopt false beliefs that enable us to belong.” Beautiful paragraph Arnold. Thank you.
I recently listened to a podcast about gambling in the Napoleonic army. I had not thought of it before, but in addition to letting off steam there seems to have been a norm to distrust anyone that wouldn't gamble recklessly. The theory goes that if a man isn't willing to gamble a months wages, how can you rely on him to gamble his life when the order to charge comes.
Blutcher, fresh off defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, apparently lost the equivalent of 12 million dollars in a Paris casino.
I am always a bit skeptical of these sorts of interpretations. I have never read any accounts saying anything to the effect of "We don't trust that guy Steve over there... he seems like a good guy but he never gambles, so I don't think he is willing to die." On the other hand, many accounts describe war as roughly "months of boredom punctuated by moments of absolute terror". It seems to me that if you put lots of men in a situation where they have money and very little to do that isn't work, gambling is going to become a regular feature, no matter the circumstances. People seem to find gambling very enjoyable, or at least many do, and it is a relatively easy thing to do with no real requirements on materials to be hauled around, so it seems obvious that an army would do a lot of it. Not like they could easily carry books or had tvs and iphones to fill the time with.
"Go For Broke" happens to be the motto of one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history, the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
DW: "They signal our commitment to cooperative social norms and advertise our loyalty to our coalition. They enable us to persuade other agents of our social value."
AK: "I see the more dangerous assault as coming from the social justice faction on the left."
Like the ubiquitous pronouns in people's email signatures (especially in universities) supporting "inclusivity" of the gender dysphoric and just deluded. Like construing the statement "Only females menstruate" as hate speech (Academy at Penguin Hall, Wenham, MA). Like other schools requiring that all staff affirm as "100% women" those males who claim to be women and "denounce Whiteness." Like permitting biological males to participate in women's sports and access women's private spaces--despite the very real threats they pose to women's safety. Like celebrating the purchase of babies through surrogacy, etc., etc.
Clearly, this is the best time to be a sexual predator, a misogynist, a voyeur, a fetishist, an autogynephile. 'Passing' as women and infiltrating women's spaces is a game to these men; it's great fun to erase real women by demanding phrases like "people with uteruses" and "people who menstruate," and women, in misplaced compassion, promote this absurdity, women's own eradication.
"Daniel Kahneman influenced economists and others to think of irrationality in individual terms. He described a set of biases embedded in individual minds, and in order to be more rational we have to overcome those biases.
Instead, Williams is suggesting that irrationality is a group phenomenon. We should explain epistemic irrationality by looking at the group layer of society, not at the individual layer."
I see this as being more of a both/and situation. not an either/or situation. We have individual irrationalities for various reasons, self interested or just natural wiring, and those irrationalities are driven both by the natural world and the social world. The social world is special in that our individual irrationalities can change the social world to favor them, such as the case of deeming those who don't agree with personal level biases on a matter to be the out group, defining the in group as those who share the same irrationality at the personal level.
Ideally, enlightenment philosophy, behind "the Constitution of Knowledge" would have constantly pushed the Overton window in the direction of truth & rationality.
Philosophers dropped the ball. They told us that there is the nomenal & phenomenal are distinct. While pretending to save rationality, they undermined it. The strengths of rationality meant it took many generations to undermine it. It's an ongoing project.
The subjectivists' dirty secret is that they actually want many citizens using rationality to execute the irrational whims of their leaders. And yet, that's hard to do: the only way is to breed engineers & scientists who buying to at least some of the subjectivists' ideology. People who keep their nose to the grind while thinking the humanities are subjective anyway.
As for deciding who to believe and false beliefs making one a part of the group, I've heard exactly the same elsewhere, probably Freakonomics Radio, though it could have been Hidden Brain or even Jordan Peterson.
The threats from Trump supporters and progressives are very different and hard to compare but there is a very strong tendency for conservatives and liberals to see the other side as the greatest threat even if they see the threat on their own side. For that reason I'd be curious to know what people like Romney and Haidt, who are vocal about the threat on their side, think about the threat on the other side.
"Suppose that a high school clique adopts the belief that ordinary heterosexual preferences are low status. ... In fact, that is my explanation for the growth in self-reported non-binary sexual identities."
Is there evidence that heterosexual preferences are considered low-status among high school students?
There seems to be some, though I would have added that the heterosexual preferences are also considered low status to the administrators and teachers of school, so there is other incentives to pretend to be in a category one is not.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! Truth seekers listen up! Dan Williams has professed truth! Rob Henderson had professed truth! Bryan Caplan has professed truth! And Arnold Kling has professed truth! Let’s acknowledge and examine these truths.
1. Sometimes group loyalty is valued over truth. (Dan Williams)
2. People often hesitate to speak truth if doing so will likely lower their status. (Rob Henderson)
3. In order to fit in, people gravitate towards saying and thinking, whatever sounds good. (Bryan Caplan)
4. We adopt false beliefs that enable us to belong. (Arnold Kling)
Realize the importance of these one-liners. They are accurate and concise descriptions of our enemy! Speak these truths so as to shame our enemy and crush their hopes!
What are the best questions to ask about these truths?
[Feel free to continue the heretic’s speech in the comments below, or propose what you think are the most important questions to ask next].
Sharp post.
Re: "Anyone can profess a true belief—doing so does not signal your membership in a group."
Professing a true belief, when various groups are bonding around false beliefs, signals one's membership in the group of truth-seekers. Why can't scientists and other truth-seekers, if indeed they seek justifiable true beliefs, constitute a group on that basis?
Re: "We are especially inclined to believe people who are close to us in the small group layer of society—our friends and family."
News reports about Thanksgiving family gatherings suggest that conflict about beliefs emerges if the circle of family is larger than the household.
"Why can't scientists and other truth-seekers, if indeed they seek justifiable true beliefs, constitute a group on that basis?"
That would be great, but we have certainly been seeing, in recent years, many scientists placing getting along in elite society (supporting BLM, maybe supporting Hamas in some cases) over objective truth.
I think the answer to that question is that scientists get status and other rewards from people who are not scientists and who do not want truth so much as scientists to confirm that what they want to do is the right thing. If one says "scientists are those who seek truth instead of social rewards" then you have a circular problem of how to identify scientists who disagree as opposed to people with knowledge who are lying or irrational for social rewards. Anyone with money can find experts to support their case, so long as there isn't an actual reality test in the offing.