I think that some approaches to a situation do not result in any win condition. Essentially, by framing it as "when do I need to stop listening to my enemy’s arguments", you enter into a labyrinth of contradictions and paradoxes that will never resolve by design. You can loop and spiral, and feel like you are making progress, but there is no stability in whatever truth you might come to - something always seems to loop you back around. Things seem like progress, but it's a Shephard tone - the same octave, not higher orders.
The only way out is to change the precept. One where people with different views are not enemies to assimilate or conquer. We could grow past our first-order categorization of a view as right/correct/good or wrong/incorrect/bad, and dive into the fabrics that make up the textiles of each belief. If we stop seeking to evaluate and change, space becomes open to hear subtle notes.
You can stop listening to your enemy’s points at any time, just stop treating them like your enemy. It’s not so much about the belief as it is about the person you are engaging with. Instead of saying “there are smart people on both sides of the issue”, it may be more helpful to say “there is always someone who you could learn from on both sides of an issue”. Maybe you can stop listening to someone when you feel there isn’t more you can learn from them at this time.
Generally though, I'm not listening to Flat Earth podcasts to decipher what foundational value sets or experiences tend to lead to those beliefs, I simply don't have time to pay attention to everything. For the things I do choose to attend to, though, I have found the energy much better spent in curiosity than in compelling others to adopt my views. (I further believe that this type of observational curiosity brings an individual closer to the truths of existence, and it doesn’t matter whether you conduct that work through the path of listening to flat earthers or listening to rationalists).
---
There are two factions in conflict. An outsider comes in with superior knowledge, assuming common humanity will override cultural distance, only to realize that their categories of thought blinded them to local reality. Does the outsider gain a newfound humility and cease their judgements of how they thought things ought be?
(check out The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin)
I think I agree with your view of “enemies” and if Bentham phrased it with “there is always someone who you could learn from on both sides of an issue” then I’d agree and wouldn’t write this post!
But even though you don’t see views as the enemy, you still need to learn to stop listening to some of them sometimes! This is exactly because of the point you said: we only have so much free time to look at different arguments. A year ago, I’d argue Christianity with my friends multiple times per week, but I now see that as time I could’ve spent looking at other beliefs. If you want to find the truth, you have to classify your arguments somewhat like I say here, so you know how to prioritize your limited time.
I think one thing is less understood by younger people online (not specific to gen z/a, but just people who haven’t been online/thinking about issues for a long time) is that a lot of people are dismissive of arguments prima facie because they’ve heard them a million times.
I think that’s the main reason folks like BB get such a reaction, because lots of us have thought about these issues (admittedly not as deeply at times!) longer than he himself has been reading books period. He likes to assert that atheists think you can point out where an argument is wrong just by listening to it, which is kind of wrong…but also kind of right?
Like every argument falls into a species of arguments that all make the same or similar assumption, and a lot of popular apologetics that’s slightly higher brow than frank turek seems to be just more creative ways to formulate the same 5 species of arguments. So, sure, I can’t debunk it just by listening to it, but if you gave me 5-10 minutes, I probably could, not because I’m super smart, but because I’m familiar enough with the species of argument!
I started to write a post against BB’s post about “It’s hard to know why complicated arguments are wrong” by pointing out that complicated arguments you can’t understand for things you don’t believe in are pretty weak Bayesian evidence, but the post I was writing was getting way too long.
I compared it to those long math proofs of why 0 = 1. You know there’s a flaw SOMEWHERE, the flaw is probably dividing by zero SOMEWHERE, but without a very strong background you don’t know where. I feel this way about BB’s anthropic arguments for God, I don’t really understand why Tegmark’s mathematical view of the universe or some multiverse theories wouldn’t get around the issue, but he thinks these are bad objections.
Maybe I’ll clean up the post sometime and post it, we’ll see.
I was going to say none of these views are held by dumb (low iq) people, and quote (and find the source of) a statistic i heard saying that conspiracy theorists are actually smarter than average. But I wasnt able to find it on a cursory look.
I'll just leave this other bentham's bulldog article here. I think its hasty to say large swaths of people (conspiracy theorists) operate in bad faith. Or are dumb.
This is a good point, especially when “dumb” and “smart” aren’t defined very well. This is probably another example where epistemology is king, and was my judgement criteria.
When I think of someone being “dumb” about a topic, one important thing is that they can’t judge how good an argument is for the topic. This judgement of quality of an argument is a key aspect in being smart, in my eyes, because without that discernment I talk about in the article, the arguments are useless.
Flat Earthers can KNOW more literal arguments and still not see that the world and each individual persons actions makes far, far more sense if there is no grand conspiracy for something pointless.
Schizophrenic people can have high IQs! I don’t think they’re “intelligent” in the way I use it in this article. I’ll add a footnote to the article trying to clarify the term a little bit, thank you for the comment.
Before I settled on “moral uncertainty” I wanted to write my thesis on “expertise discernment” which has “motivated stopping” as an important sub-problem. I really tried to find a purely epistemic solution, approaching it from a zillion different angles, and I just couldn’t find one.
At the roots, epistemology is just a branch of value theory, even though we really try to pretend it’s not. This presents a solution no one wants to hear; don’t approach this from the perspective of an epistemologer, approach this from the perspective of an ethicist. Statements like:
but all I can say is that you must take each belief on a case-by-case basis
only work if we assume it’s cost free. The reason Liberals (in a philosophical sense) cling to the marketplace of ideas is the same reason they cling to markets overall. It’s fair/efficient (given some axioms), and they’re succeeding under this paradigm. This must be a wonderful feeling, being on top of the world and deserving it.
Unfortunately the axioms are wrong, and the efficient market hypothesis doesn’t hold in the real world; the agents in the market are not perfectly rational, information is not symmetric, and gathering information is not cost free. Worse, we cannot make them true: we cannot make everyone “overcome bias” by teaching them rationalist techniques, and we cannot make information symmetrical/cost-free by giving everyone internet access.
Various ghouls have already noticed and exploited this, some even acknowledging that they were doing so explicitly, e.g. “flooding the zone”. The Liberals, from their place of resource privilege/abundance, cannot believe that people are falling for it because they don’t realize that it takes enormous resources (time, education, nutrients) to parse through it, resources they have deprived much of the population of by letting their “fair/efficient” market create such overwhelming inequalities.
In a world where everyone has an equal chance of being heard and parsing didn’t require resources, like the efficient market model assumes, taking “each belief on a case-by-case basis” would be a fantastic strategy. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, money can buy you attention, and the resources are finite, which means people who use this approach will be vulnerable to “flooding the zone”-style strategies.
This comment is running a bit long, but hopefully you’re starting to see what I’m getting at. Debiasing techniques, syllogistic logic, RCTs, all of them can only take us so far, because:
1) Similar to other market issues (e.g. climate change), the Liberals’ tendency to put the problem at the feet of the consumers (e.g. just learn rationality techniques, just lower your carbon footprint) while being unwilling to tackle the producers (e.g. deplatforming terrible people, collectivizing terrible companies) only results in shifting the blame away from them.
2) They use up people’s finite resources.
If we want to live in a world with good epistemics we need to stop thinking as just epistemologers, and start thinking like ethicists (or “the woke” or whatever) too. Who is “polluting” our information landscape? Who has disproportionate access to the resources necessary for cognitive labor? Why only them? What caused there to be such epistemic injustice? Who benefits from this system? How do we dismantle this manufactured “pollution” and inequality?
It’s not sexy, you have to leave the nice platonic realm of logic and epistemology and enter the quagmire of politics and social justice. I’m sorry, I hated it too, there’s just no other way.
If you define smartness as rejecting certain conspiracy theories that are rather easy to falsify, then no one endorsing those conspiracy theories is smart.
But that’s a tautology.
And Joe Rogan has made a 100 million dollars while endorsing ideas like the fake moon landing, while many covid vaccine skeptics easily made a million by spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
Are those people not smart? Or would you rather say they are smart and dishonest?
It’s a tricky question, because it’s also hard to know the extent to which someone like Joe Rogan or Steve Kirsch believes their own bullshit.
I suppose I like BB’s take that there are high IQ people on both sides of many issues, though I think it might have been better if he had focused more on questions of fact and less on questions of morality.
But I do also agree with your point that some questions seem quite obvious and easy to answer, even if it’s not always easy to define the boundary of which questions fall into that category.
I dislike the type of person who’s “open minded” just for its own sake. That’s the 70-30 flat earther I talk about.
For what it’s worth, I hate Trump more than anyone else in politics here, because I feel like he’s uniquely corrupted truth in a way that’s going to ruin the game going forward.
But are you capable of noticing that Musk’s nazi platform for nazis has a lot of nazis on it? That doing a genuine salute of the form the nazis used for the purposes the nazis used it makes Musk a nazi? Because just because you hate Trump doesn’t mean you aren’t part of the cluster that fails to appreciate the fact of the fascism around Trump.
Musk cancelling PEPFAR, seemingly without caring about it, is one of the most patently evil things I’ve ever seen a politician do.
And yes, I think Twitter sucks. Fascism is a buzzword that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but ignoring the semantics, we can call it like it is: Trump’s resistance to comply with the Supreme Court is very, very bad, and could get worse if he keeps trying to do it. And people who are cheering for him to ignore the law are also bad.
You puzzle over the individual pieces without allowing them to add up: it was fascism all along, and you failed the basic political intelligence test, as surely as if you were a proponent of flat earth theory even as you admitted that ships disappear as they go over the horizon! What matters isn’t what fascism means to a lot of people, it’s what it means in common parlance and if you can join in that common parlance without hiding behind the infection of your willing semantic confusion. Maybe it was never that complicated actually: humans moving in xenophobic violence spirals around an authoritarian strongman hate democracy and don’t care about laws! Fascism was well understood by Woke people in 2016, why did you lose?
MAGA Militia assassinated a sitting democrat. How many lone wolves until it’s a pack of wolves? Why do you need martial law to ‘be declared’ before you notice the military on US soil? How are you so easily duped? “Fascism is a buzzword that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but ignoring the semantics” maybe if you addressed the semantics and used the word you would be taken seriously outside of your bubble online!
I think that some approaches to a situation do not result in any win condition. Essentially, by framing it as "when do I need to stop listening to my enemy’s arguments", you enter into a labyrinth of contradictions and paradoxes that will never resolve by design. You can loop and spiral, and feel like you are making progress, but there is no stability in whatever truth you might come to - something always seems to loop you back around. Things seem like progress, but it's a Shephard tone - the same octave, not higher orders.
The only way out is to change the precept. One where people with different views are not enemies to assimilate or conquer. We could grow past our first-order categorization of a view as right/correct/good or wrong/incorrect/bad, and dive into the fabrics that make up the textiles of each belief. If we stop seeking to evaluate and change, space becomes open to hear subtle notes.
You can stop listening to your enemy’s points at any time, just stop treating them like your enemy. It’s not so much about the belief as it is about the person you are engaging with. Instead of saying “there are smart people on both sides of the issue”, it may be more helpful to say “there is always someone who you could learn from on both sides of an issue”. Maybe you can stop listening to someone when you feel there isn’t more you can learn from them at this time.
Generally though, I'm not listening to Flat Earth podcasts to decipher what foundational value sets or experiences tend to lead to those beliefs, I simply don't have time to pay attention to everything. For the things I do choose to attend to, though, I have found the energy much better spent in curiosity than in compelling others to adopt my views. (I further believe that this type of observational curiosity brings an individual closer to the truths of existence, and it doesn’t matter whether you conduct that work through the path of listening to flat earthers or listening to rationalists).
---
There are two factions in conflict. An outsider comes in with superior knowledge, assuming common humanity will override cultural distance, only to realize that their categories of thought blinded them to local reality. Does the outsider gain a newfound humility and cease their judgements of how they thought things ought be?
(check out The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin)
I think I agree with your view of “enemies” and if Bentham phrased it with “there is always someone who you could learn from on both sides of an issue” then I’d agree and wouldn’t write this post!
But even though you don’t see views as the enemy, you still need to learn to stop listening to some of them sometimes! This is exactly because of the point you said: we only have so much free time to look at different arguments. A year ago, I’d argue Christianity with my friends multiple times per week, but I now see that as time I could’ve spent looking at other beliefs. If you want to find the truth, you have to classify your arguments somewhat like I say here, so you know how to prioritize your limited time.
I think one thing is less understood by younger people online (not specific to gen z/a, but just people who haven’t been online/thinking about issues for a long time) is that a lot of people are dismissive of arguments prima facie because they’ve heard them a million times.
I think that’s the main reason folks like BB get such a reaction, because lots of us have thought about these issues (admittedly not as deeply at times!) longer than he himself has been reading books period. He likes to assert that atheists think you can point out where an argument is wrong just by listening to it, which is kind of wrong…but also kind of right?
Like every argument falls into a species of arguments that all make the same or similar assumption, and a lot of popular apologetics that’s slightly higher brow than frank turek seems to be just more creative ways to formulate the same 5 species of arguments. So, sure, I can’t debunk it just by listening to it, but if you gave me 5-10 minutes, I probably could, not because I’m super smart, but because I’m familiar enough with the species of argument!
I started to write a post against BB’s post about “It’s hard to know why complicated arguments are wrong” by pointing out that complicated arguments you can’t understand for things you don’t believe in are pretty weak Bayesian evidence, but the post I was writing was getting way too long.
I compared it to those long math proofs of why 0 = 1. You know there’s a flaw SOMEWHERE, the flaw is probably dividing by zero SOMEWHERE, but without a very strong background you don’t know where. I feel this way about BB’s anthropic arguments for God, I don’t really understand why Tegmark’s mathematical view of the universe or some multiverse theories wouldn’t get around the issue, but he thinks these are bad objections.
Maybe I’ll clean up the post sometime and post it, we’ll see.
lol why is my comment posting as a note wtf i didn’t click that button
Vaccines Preventing Disease
Flat Earth
5G Causes COVID-19
Moon Landing was Fake
Holocaust was Fake
The Pyramids were Built by Aliens
I was going to say none of these views are held by dumb (low iq) people, and quote (and find the source of) a statistic i heard saying that conspiracy theorists are actually smarter than average. But I wasnt able to find it on a cursory look.
I'll just leave this other bentham's bulldog article here. I think its hasty to say large swaths of people (conspiracy theorists) operate in bad faith. Or are dumb.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zL5obvQMKLMFLiJaq/conspiracy-theorists-aren-t-ignorant-they-re-bad-at?utm_source=chatgpt.com
This is a good point, especially when “dumb” and “smart” aren’t defined very well. This is probably another example where epistemology is king, and was my judgement criteria.
When I think of someone being “dumb” about a topic, one important thing is that they can’t judge how good an argument is for the topic. This judgement of quality of an argument is a key aspect in being smart, in my eyes, because without that discernment I talk about in the article, the arguments are useless.
Flat Earthers can KNOW more literal arguments and still not see that the world and each individual persons actions makes far, far more sense if there is no grand conspiracy for something pointless.
Schizophrenic people can have high IQs! I don’t think they’re “intelligent” in the way I use it in this article. I’ll add a footnote to the article trying to clarify the term a little bit, thank you for the comment.
That makes sense! Thank you
Before I settled on “moral uncertainty” I wanted to write my thesis on “expertise discernment” which has “motivated stopping” as an important sub-problem. I really tried to find a purely epistemic solution, approaching it from a zillion different angles, and I just couldn’t find one.
At the roots, epistemology is just a branch of value theory, even though we really try to pretend it’s not. This presents a solution no one wants to hear; don’t approach this from the perspective of an epistemologer, approach this from the perspective of an ethicist. Statements like:
but all I can say is that you must take each belief on a case-by-case basis
only work if we assume it’s cost free. The reason Liberals (in a philosophical sense) cling to the marketplace of ideas is the same reason they cling to markets overall. It’s fair/efficient (given some axioms), and they’re succeeding under this paradigm. This must be a wonderful feeling, being on top of the world and deserving it.
Unfortunately the axioms are wrong, and the efficient market hypothesis doesn’t hold in the real world; the agents in the market are not perfectly rational, information is not symmetric, and gathering information is not cost free. Worse, we cannot make them true: we cannot make everyone “overcome bias” by teaching them rationalist techniques, and we cannot make information symmetrical/cost-free by giving everyone internet access.
Various ghouls have already noticed and exploited this, some even acknowledging that they were doing so explicitly, e.g. “flooding the zone”. The Liberals, from their place of resource privilege/abundance, cannot believe that people are falling for it because they don’t realize that it takes enormous resources (time, education, nutrients) to parse through it, resources they have deprived much of the population of by letting their “fair/efficient” market create such overwhelming inequalities.
In a world where everyone has an equal chance of being heard and parsing didn’t require resources, like the efficient market model assumes, taking “each belief on a case-by-case basis” would be a fantastic strategy. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, money can buy you attention, and the resources are finite, which means people who use this approach will be vulnerable to “flooding the zone”-style strategies.
This comment is running a bit long, but hopefully you’re starting to see what I’m getting at. Debiasing techniques, syllogistic logic, RCTs, all of them can only take us so far, because:
1) Similar to other market issues (e.g. climate change), the Liberals’ tendency to put the problem at the feet of the consumers (e.g. just learn rationality techniques, just lower your carbon footprint) while being unwilling to tackle the producers (e.g. deplatforming terrible people, collectivizing terrible companies) only results in shifting the blame away from them.
2) They use up people’s finite resources.
If we want to live in a world with good epistemics we need to stop thinking as just epistemologers, and start thinking like ethicists (or “the woke” or whatever) too. Who is “polluting” our information landscape? Who has disproportionate access to the resources necessary for cognitive labor? Why only them? What caused there to be such epistemic injustice? Who benefits from this system? How do we dismantle this manufactured “pollution” and inequality?
It’s not sexy, you have to leave the nice platonic realm of logic and epistemology and enter the quagmire of politics and social justice. I’m sorry, I hated it too, there’s just no other way.
If you define smartness as rejecting certain conspiracy theories that are rather easy to falsify, then no one endorsing those conspiracy theories is smart.
But that’s a tautology.
And Joe Rogan has made a 100 million dollars while endorsing ideas like the fake moon landing, while many covid vaccine skeptics easily made a million by spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
Are those people not smart? Or would you rather say they are smart and dishonest?
It’s a tricky question, because it’s also hard to know the extent to which someone like Joe Rogan or Steve Kirsch believes their own bullshit.
I suppose I like BB’s take that there are high IQ people on both sides of many issues, though I think it might have been better if he had focused more on questions of fact and less on questions of morality.
But I do also agree with your point that some questions seem quite obvious and easy to answer, even if it’s not always easy to define the boundary of which questions fall into that category.
Fascism denialists function to platform ambiguity about Trump's fascist actions.
Moderates are inclined to hear both sides out, shrug, and say "well the leftists really are woke scary" and let the fascists do whatever they want.
I dislike the type of person who’s “open minded” just for its own sake. That’s the 70-30 flat earther I talk about.
For what it’s worth, I hate Trump more than anyone else in politics here, because I feel like he’s uniquely corrupted truth in a way that’s going to ruin the game going forward.
But are you capable of noticing that Musk’s nazi platform for nazis has a lot of nazis on it? That doing a genuine salute of the form the nazis used for the purposes the nazis used it makes Musk a nazi? Because just because you hate Trump doesn’t mean you aren’t part of the cluster that fails to appreciate the fact of the fascism around Trump.
Musk cancelling PEPFAR, seemingly without caring about it, is one of the most patently evil things I’ve ever seen a politician do.
And yes, I think Twitter sucks. Fascism is a buzzword that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but ignoring the semantics, we can call it like it is: Trump’s resistance to comply with the Supreme Court is very, very bad, and could get worse if he keeps trying to do it. And people who are cheering for him to ignore the law are also bad.
You puzzle over the individual pieces without allowing them to add up: it was fascism all along, and you failed the basic political intelligence test, as surely as if you were a proponent of flat earth theory even as you admitted that ships disappear as they go over the horizon! What matters isn’t what fascism means to a lot of people, it’s what it means in common parlance and if you can join in that common parlance without hiding behind the infection of your willing semantic confusion. Maybe it was never that complicated actually: humans moving in xenophobic violence spirals around an authoritarian strongman hate democracy and don’t care about laws! Fascism was well understood by Woke people in 2016, why did you lose?
MAGA Militia assassinated a sitting democrat. How many lone wolves until it’s a pack of wolves? Why do you need martial law to ‘be declared’ before you notice the military on US soil? How are you so easily duped? “Fascism is a buzzword that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but ignoring the semantics” maybe if you addressed the semantics and used the word you would be taken seriously outside of your bubble online!