I'd break motivations for belief into a few categories.
1) Because it makes you feel like you belong [social follower]
2) Because it makes you feel powerful and important [social leader]
3) Because it makes you feel righteous
4) Because it justifies why deserve what you do or do not already possess.
5) Because it models realty in a way not directly contradicted by experience.
Enlightenment philosophy seemed to think that only #5 mattered when the law doesn't directly regulate speech or conduct. Marxists emphasize #4 but only from the direction of justifying ownership rather than the reverse.
Progressive policy-making is a sort of epistemic super-cocktail that empowers, ennobles, and enrich their advocates all at the same time. The sexier and less practical the means the better. This is why nuclear power / carbon capture or geoengineering is so unpopular despite being far more effective at reducing carbon emissions.
Conservative policy making isn't pure truth either (nothing is) but it is usually limited to picking at most 2 and usually only 1 leg at a time. (e.g. Tax cuts #4 or school choice #3)
#1 is just the default capstone for anyone not interested in ideas or in a position to make or advocate for a change. It's the ideas marketplace equivalent of passive investing. It's also why public opinion is an effect and not a cause. Most people don't think things through and shouldn't be expected to in the same way they can't be expected to make a profit on tactical stock trades.
#5 is limited to testable hypotheses and train-autists. People who think this way systematically are rare, very valuable, and have a very hard time understanding people who reason socially or morally.
"The benefit that they get from espousing an opinion comes from social approval." Not necessarily a contradiction since social approval is a big proxy for future material prospects.
I'll stick my neck out and be one who doesn't agree, though I do about implementation being everything.
" and the pundits who accumulated the most points for good intellectual hygiene would produce winning teams."
That's fine to produce the objective that Mr Kling is after .. a fair debate. I've got no personal experience but my guess would be that (excluding 20/20 hindsight), the Oxford Union Society debate held on 9 February 1939 would be high in intellectual hygiene but the result (including 20/20 hindsight) was dead wrong, or at least arguably not collectively beneficial for England.
While it is a reasonable assumption to make that intellectuals who employ poor debate technique or make fallacious arguments are often wrong, it's not a given, and certainly not a substitute for checking arguments against history and reality. I can imagine a debate over current US policy towards Israel, for example, that would be high in intellectual hygiene while uncritically accepting the "Gaza Health Ministry" aka Hama propagandists figures of civilian casualties, and would produce a rather biased result.
I much prefer grading pundits and intellectuals on whether they show their work, admit biases, and provide evidence their conclusions are drawn from facts regardless of how polemic they sound (Peter Zeihan being a current example of a guy whose arguments and predictions raise people's blood pressure but has his ducks in a row on those factors)
Nonetheless, I *think* (just an impression) that many of those debaters went on to fight and some even to die, even perhaps a handful who tried to be conscientious objectors but found their consciences pulled them another way - perhaps not for King nor even Country, but for honor of some other kind.
Thinking about it further, "intellectual hygiene" is an odd phrase. And I am not going to re-read the OG post about it, but I believe AK meant something like: making sure that you are doing your mental housecleaning in order to be certain your thoughts withstand some amount of rigor, or don't become tendentious or whatever. That you give examples. That you don't overreach rhetorically beyond what your 5-paragraph book report can support. What he wished to outsource to his GPT. I can grasp the concept while knowing that sort of abstraction is not open to me.
But certain intellectuals, as Paul Johnson noticed, do not conduct their personal lives with much "hygiene", in ways not wholly unrelated to their ideas. Of course, they may be the exceptions. And yet the exceptions are quite exceptional. They are often the very people for whom the term "intellectual" must have been invented - since intellectuals are still talking about them and invoking them to this day.
And so it's not obvious that mental tidyness, nor even glibness in debate - or if that's not charitable, a well-ordering of your ideas, and knowledge of their sources, and their limitations - is necesssarily the hallmark of either an intellectual, or - to put it more modestly - a generator of more good ideas than bad.
I think of someone like C.S. Lewis, who because so popular is downgraded and thus escapes being labeled an intellectual. But - we all know he had a formidable intellect, so that's neither here nor there unless you want to posit that a moralizer cannot by definition be an intellectual. Those of his books that I've read are worth saving. He says a good many striking things. Yet I recall once reading the transcript of a debate he participated in - and I can't even recall the subject, so poor is my memory - but my recollection is that he performed rather poorly, if perfectly genially - and that he would perhaps always perform poorly in such a setting.
Expanding the idea I through out in yesterday’s comments, why don’t Kling and other open-minded souls sponsor an AI persona which will perform its functions and answer complex questions in a way which meets their standards? This persona could then compete with other (more biased) AI personas for our attention and use?
I think people will eventually start doing stuff like this, but if the bots get too good I think various people from various three letter governmental agencies will be showing up shortly after for a "chat", and that will be the end of those bots.
Skilled thinking is the last thing the people that run our countries want, they're having enough trouble keeping everyone immersed in the narrative as it is.
"Because people tend to value reliable information relevant to their interests, these incentives generally favour the social transmission of accurate and helpful information."
I hope more readers look at Specialization & Trade, since S & T is so much more relevantly T-true than most macro, tho macro is often more policy / news relevant. The FI team idea remains good, and actually it would be good to be working with Ethan Mollick or others to create multiple Essay graders / (blog) post graders. I can easily imagine all of the 3 good AIs that he works with to be able to create similar, yet different (like professors!), graders and run various essays thru them, to learn how to make the graders grade better / more like Arnold Kling likes.
My own TG grader would add points for brevity -- the idea that most posts would be better if longer is contrary to the spirit of "news" articles and especially contrary to many rules of news publishers with word limits.
I would also like to see more clear examples of whatever Dan is talking about. Tho it's likely that in choosing examples he'll either show bias or have examples that some of his readers don't like. He's actually a good example of a pundit who has a great idea, the Marketplace of Rationalizations, who at the same time is acting in that marketplace to provide rationalizations for those who think the near-hysteria against misinformation is misplaced. Since a lot of misinformation is actually elite lies (Russia Hoax, Fake Insurrection*, lies of H. Biden's laptop to justify censorship), downplaying "misinformation" reduces examination of these election affecting narratives. All 3 of the prior elections ('18, '20, '22) were preceded by elite supporting lies. To some extent, his audience is the elites looking for rationalizations that prior elite misinformation wasn't so bad.
Yet a huge amount of "misinformation" also concerns definitions. Was the Stop The Steal protests against election fraud an insurrection? I say no, like the DoJ which has not indicted anybody for insurrection, yet others say it was, especially elites. Then there's endless debate about the word insurrection, which is mostly irrelevant. "Truth" always depends on such definitions of words, and applicability of words to actual reality.
A huge reason for rationalization is to assert Moral Superiority, which could be used to "justify self-serving narratives" tho Arnold seems more correct that self-serving implies more materialistic causes. Tho Moral Superiority also is not 'social approval". In fact, it's often used by Woke folk despite social approval, and as a way to discredit the current approval process. So the smaller elite approval dominates the wider, populist, normal, existing & working approval.
Luxury beliefs are based on this anti-populist higher morality - Moral Superiority. And once it's gained the moral high ground, and become sacred, then cost-benefit evaluation goes out the window. Which is part of the goal.
Weeeelllll…. Yes and no. Measuring inflation is a really nebulous process, and lots of people, even economists, do disagree about it, as well as whether it even makes sense to say there is a single number for inflation to begin with, as opposed to different numbers for different areas and even income brackets.
Plus, the people measuring and reporting inflation are roughly the same people who are in charge of managing it, which is always a conflict of interest.
I'd break motivations for belief into a few categories.
1) Because it makes you feel like you belong [social follower]
2) Because it makes you feel powerful and important [social leader]
3) Because it makes you feel righteous
4) Because it justifies why deserve what you do or do not already possess.
5) Because it models realty in a way not directly contradicted by experience.
Enlightenment philosophy seemed to think that only #5 mattered when the law doesn't directly regulate speech or conduct. Marxists emphasize #4 but only from the direction of justifying ownership rather than the reverse.
Progressive policy-making is a sort of epistemic super-cocktail that empowers, ennobles, and enrich their advocates all at the same time. The sexier and less practical the means the better. This is why nuclear power / carbon capture or geoengineering is so unpopular despite being far more effective at reducing carbon emissions.
Conservative policy making isn't pure truth either (nothing is) but it is usually limited to picking at most 2 and usually only 1 leg at a time. (e.g. Tax cuts #4 or school choice #3)
#1 is just the default capstone for anyone not interested in ideas or in a position to make or advocate for a change. It's the ideas marketplace equivalent of passive investing. It's also why public opinion is an effect and not a cause. Most people don't think things through and shouldn't be expected to in the same way they can't be expected to make a profit on tactical stock trades.
#5 is limited to testable hypotheses and train-autists. People who think this way systematically are rare, very valuable, and have a very hard time understanding people who reason socially or morally.
"The benefit that they get from espousing an opinion comes from social approval." Not necessarily a contradiction since social approval is a big proxy for future material prospects.
Arguably social approval is the point of material acquisition past subsistence for the most part.
Yes, we know. We agree. Next step? Implementation is everything.
I'll stick my neck out and be one who doesn't agree, though I do about implementation being everything.
" and the pundits who accumulated the most points for good intellectual hygiene would produce winning teams."
That's fine to produce the objective that Mr Kling is after .. a fair debate. I've got no personal experience but my guess would be that (excluding 20/20 hindsight), the Oxford Union Society debate held on 9 February 1939 would be high in intellectual hygiene but the result (including 20/20 hindsight) was dead wrong, or at least arguably not collectively beneficial for England.
While it is a reasonable assumption to make that intellectuals who employ poor debate technique or make fallacious arguments are often wrong, it's not a given, and certainly not a substitute for checking arguments against history and reality. I can imagine a debate over current US policy towards Israel, for example, that would be high in intellectual hygiene while uncritically accepting the "Gaza Health Ministry" aka Hama propagandists figures of civilian casualties, and would produce a rather biased result.
I much prefer grading pundits and intellectuals on whether they show their work, admit biases, and provide evidence their conclusions are drawn from facts regardless of how polemic they sound (Peter Zeihan being a current example of a guy whose arguments and predictions raise people's blood pressure but has his ducks in a row on those factors)
Nonetheless, I *think* (just an impression) that many of those debaters went on to fight and some even to die, even perhaps a handful who tried to be conscientious objectors but found their consciences pulled them another way - perhaps not for King nor even Country, but for honor of some other kind.
Thinking about it further, "intellectual hygiene" is an odd phrase. And I am not going to re-read the OG post about it, but I believe AK meant something like: making sure that you are doing your mental housecleaning in order to be certain your thoughts withstand some amount of rigor, or don't become tendentious or whatever. That you give examples. That you don't overreach rhetorically beyond what your 5-paragraph book report can support. What he wished to outsource to his GPT. I can grasp the concept while knowing that sort of abstraction is not open to me.
But certain intellectuals, as Paul Johnson noticed, do not conduct their personal lives with much "hygiene", in ways not wholly unrelated to their ideas. Of course, they may be the exceptions. And yet the exceptions are quite exceptional. They are often the very people for whom the term "intellectual" must have been invented - since intellectuals are still talking about them and invoking them to this day.
And so it's not obvious that mental tidyness, nor even glibness in debate - or if that's not charitable, a well-ordering of your ideas, and knowledge of their sources, and their limitations - is necesssarily the hallmark of either an intellectual, or - to put it more modestly - a generator of more good ideas than bad.
I think of someone like C.S. Lewis, who because so popular is downgraded and thus escapes being labeled an intellectual. But - we all know he had a formidable intellect, so that's neither here nor there unless you want to posit that a moralizer cannot by definition be an intellectual. Those of his books that I've read are worth saving. He says a good many striking things. Yet I recall once reading the transcript of a debate he participated in - and I can't even recall the subject, so poor is my memory - but my recollection is that he performed rather poorly, if perfectly genially - and that he would perhaps always perform poorly in such a setting.
Expanding the idea I through out in yesterday’s comments, why don’t Kling and other open-minded souls sponsor an AI persona which will perform its functions and answer complex questions in a way which meets their standards? This persona could then compete with other (more biased) AI personas for our attention and use?
The timing is perfect. The need is there.
I think people will eventually start doing stuff like this, but if the bots get too good I think various people from various three letter governmental agencies will be showing up shortly after for a "chat", and that will be the end of those bots.
Skilled thinking is the last thing the people that run our countries want, they're having enough trouble keeping everyone immersed in the narrative as it is.
"Because people tend to value reliable information relevant to their interests, these incentives generally favour the social transmission of accurate and helpful information."
Did he seriously mean this? Accurate?
I hope more readers look at Specialization & Trade, since S & T is so much more relevantly T-true than most macro, tho macro is often more policy / news relevant. The FI team idea remains good, and actually it would be good to be working with Ethan Mollick or others to create multiple Essay graders / (blog) post graders. I can easily imagine all of the 3 good AIs that he works with to be able to create similar, yet different (like professors!), graders and run various essays thru them, to learn how to make the graders grade better / more like Arnold Kling likes.
My own TG grader would add points for brevity -- the idea that most posts would be better if longer is contrary to the spirit of "news" articles and especially contrary to many rules of news publishers with word limits.
I would also like to see more clear examples of whatever Dan is talking about. Tho it's likely that in choosing examples he'll either show bias or have examples that some of his readers don't like. He's actually a good example of a pundit who has a great idea, the Marketplace of Rationalizations, who at the same time is acting in that marketplace to provide rationalizations for those who think the near-hysteria against misinformation is misplaced. Since a lot of misinformation is actually elite lies (Russia Hoax, Fake Insurrection*, lies of H. Biden's laptop to justify censorship), downplaying "misinformation" reduces examination of these election affecting narratives. All 3 of the prior elections ('18, '20, '22) were preceded by elite supporting lies. To some extent, his audience is the elites looking for rationalizations that prior elite misinformation wasn't so bad.
Yet a huge amount of "misinformation" also concerns definitions. Was the Stop The Steal protests against election fraud an insurrection? I say no, like the DoJ which has not indicted anybody for insurrection, yet others say it was, especially elites. Then there's endless debate about the word insurrection, which is mostly irrelevant. "Truth" always depends on such definitions of words, and applicability of words to actual reality.
A huge reason for rationalization is to assert Moral Superiority, which could be used to "justify self-serving narratives" tho Arnold seems more correct that self-serving implies more materialistic causes. Tho Moral Superiority also is not 'social approval". In fact, it's often used by Woke folk despite social approval, and as a way to discredit the current approval process. So the smaller elite approval dominates the wider, populist, normal, existing & working approval.
Luxury beliefs are based on this anti-populist higher morality - Moral Superiority. And once it's gained the moral high ground, and become sacred, then cost-benefit evaluation goes out the window. Which is part of the goal.
Weeeelllll…. Yes and no. Measuring inflation is a really nebulous process, and lots of people, even economists, do disagree about it, as well as whether it even makes sense to say there is a single number for inflation to begin with, as opposed to different numbers for different areas and even income brackets.
Plus, the people measuring and reporting inflation are roughly the same people who are in charge of managing it, which is always a conflict of interest.