Herein, I Criticize the Governor of Florida

Florida bill HB991 has not yet become law as I write this article. However, if it does pass, please consider my statement made in this post to be repeated the day after the law goes into effect. And that statement is that not only is Ron Desantis a bad governor, he is also not a true Christian.

Denialisms Are About Moral Authority, Not Truth

Sovereign citizens (hereafter sovcits) stick out among the various species of denialists.  Other denialisms are at least about matters of fact - even if the denialists demonstrate poor critical thinking, at least their core assertion is a truth claim.  The Earth is round, or it is flat.  Vaccines cause autism, or they do not.  9/11 was an inside job, or it was not. 

But sovcits extend their beliefs into having a kind of power of their own; that their legal pronouncements have some kind of magic power to them. When surfing Youtube for "sovereign citizen" you won't have to look long for Youtube videos of the form:

1. Sovcit gets pulled over, stopped, or otherwise detained by police.
   
   
2. Sovcit recites their legal incantation.
   
   
3. Sovcit, quite amazingly, somehow manages to be shocked when the police break their window, tase them, arrest them, etc. (Here is a perfect example, but don't watch it unless you are ready to see police violence.)

Creationists and Flat Earthers mostly agree with the same basic observations of the world, and they mostly don't make different decisions about how to live in the world based on their claims. I've never seen a creationist argue against the existence of island gigantism or dwarfism, or a flat Earther against the existence of the horizon - they just have a different explanation.

You might make the argument that as a denialism, the "theories" of sovereign citizens have domain-specific characteristics. After all, law requires a belief in its legitimacy to work, and they just claim legitimacy for a different set of rules, rules which affect our behavior on a daily basis. But this still doesn't really address the way in which sovcits seem different from the rest. Imagine that an evil neuroscientist plants in your head the belief that vaccines cause autism. Once under the spell of that denialism, you can predict that you would act the same way as other anti-vaxxers, avoiding immunizations, attending anti-vaccine protests, etc. But the thought experiment doesn't work for sovcits. The evil neuroscientist puts the belief in your head that the current American government is illegitimate. You STILL wouldn't think that you could Jedi-mind-trick your way out of a traffic stop, even though you would be frustrated by living under the thumb of the current regime. In fact we don't need an evil neuroscientist to demonstrate this - assuming you believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegitimate, then you consider the political authority of the Russian government in the occupied territories to be similarly illegitimate. If you found yourself in Ukraine, would you go walking across an open field into the occupied territories loudly reciting "The U.N. says this is an illegal war and you can't be here" and then adding with surprise "Hey, you shot me!" No, because you recognize the physical reality even if you disagree as to who the legitimate authority is. But that's exactly what these sovereign citizens are doing.

And there, exactly, we see what DOES unite all these denialisms. In all of them, including the sovereign citizens, the core aspect is a disagreement as to the true source of moral authority. The different truth claims are a symptom of that underlying disagreement, and only in the sovereign citizens is the root cause so exposed.

A lot of other seemingly unrelated aspects of denialism start to snap into place now. Creationists believe the source of authority on the story of our origin is the Bible (or Quran), and by undermining religious cosmogony, ultimately we undermine religious morality (hence why creationists are overwhelmingly religious, hence their bizarre non sequiturs that teaching evolution leads to drug culture and promiscuity.) And I'm not sure who the moon landing people or 9/11 truthers think is a good moral authority, but I'm damn sure they do NOT think it's the United States government. And if you think the people telling you to wear a mask and get vaccinated are the same immoral elites making your favorite President look bad by calling attention to the pandemic, then no mask and no vaccines for me! Some people have a psychological makeup that is so polarized toward respect for authority that not only does it dominate truth, it becomes conflated with it. Sovereign citizens think that objective truth equals objective and irresistible authority, which is why they're inevitably shocked when physical reality disagrees with their perceived moral authority.

We neglect and misunderstand the complicated and ancient relationship between truth and authority at our peril.

Don't Paralyze Myths into Images

Cthulhu's city of R'lyeh, by Marc Simonetti

I made a decision last week not to draw my young daughter a picture of her imaginary friend.

I've drawn other monsters and fairies from her rich inner world - one was the Magic Space Pickle. Another was Bad Plus, an incorrigible villain who eats garbage. Thusfar all have been well-received. But despite having talked several times about drawing Sussa, her octopus friend from Neptune, I changed my mind. I think it would be cruel. I would be taking something away from her.

By summoning these creatures into the real world, or at least the concrete sensory world, you nail them down. You take the emotional experiences that are the important things about them - what they're really made of, what they're for - and you neuter them, constrain them, and tame them. You trap their unbound and supernatural essence inside something mundane and concrete. You've stolen it and broken it.

So here's an example: Grendel, in Beowulf. In the poem, Grendel is utterly terrifying. But even when it's rendered accurately according to the text, it loses something. 2005's Beowulf included the sinew-and-bone-chewing noises which at that time I didn't remember were actually in the text. But the distorted misshapen creature they dragged into the light just didn't feel like the vaguely sort of spiny reptilian insectoid thing I had imagined. It's not that the CGI people did a bad job; they could not, in principle, have done a good job. In the same vein, many otherwise enthusiastic fans of the movie Alien feel similarly deflated when the overall shape of the xenomorph is revealed as disappointingly humanoid as it disintegrates in the glare of the shuttle's engines.

I think my daughter understands this too. She did harass me for an image of the Space Pickle once I mentioned drawing him. But, interestingly enough, she has colluded with me in forgetting the decision to draw Sussa.

For this reason, Sussa and her ice cream powers and solar-system-spanning tentacles will remain forever as words and feelings in my daughter's mind - where they belong and flourish.

Professional Sports: Salary Distributions and Relationship to Team Size and League Revenues

Some casual fans of pro sports are actually much more interested in the business and psychology of the leagues than the action on the field. IF that's you, read on! I started wondering 1) what is the minimum you could make in each sport? What was the relationship between size of team in each sport, player salaries, and profitability? and 2) that if any of the figures in my table are glaringly wrong, please comment below and I will correct it (and my written conclusions if they're affected.)

Leag	Max/min	avg/med	rev, $B	sal/rev	rev/plyr	rev/pl / avg sal
NFL	76	1.28	18.0	0.10	10,613,208	9.68
MLB	56	2.92	9.56	0.40	10,988,506	2.51
NHL	21	1.04	5.2	0.42	7,065,217	2.36
NBA	44	1.97	10.0	0.34	22,222,222	2.96

Observations:

1. The smaller the team roster size, the better players get compensated (both in terms of minimum income, median, and average.) That is to say: if you're a player, the NBA is the best place to be.
   
   
2. To get an idea of the salary spreads in each sport, we can look at the max:min ratio. (Minimum salaries in each case are determined by the players union contract with the league.) A catchier name for this would beis the "J.P. Morgan index"*, is highest in football, then baseball and not far behind basketball, with the NHL the lowest.
   
   To get a Gini index (to see income inequality within the league) we'd need all the individual salary data. While that may be available, and I welcome you to find it and crunch the numbers yourself, for my level of curiosity a quick-and-dirty index of average salary divided by median will work. Despite the NFL having some outgroup super-earners giving it the highest J.P. Morgan index, baseball is the most unequal (suggesting the most high-earning outliers) at almost 3, followed by the NBA, NFL, and NHL. In the NHL the average and median are almost the same, and the top earner is an outlier among all the leagues at only $16M. (The J.P. Morgan index is also the lowest there.)
   
   As an additional thought, I wonder how closely real output (measured in goals, sacks, strike-outs etc.) correlates with pay - and does this explain why the NHL is so much more egalitarian in pay than the MLB or NFL? (Again there could be contract or business-specific reasons that I'm not aware of, rather than the nature of the sport.) It also raises the question of whether relative status has more of an effect in some sports, i.e. are there more positional effects in hockey?
   
   To explain this concretely: if you look at say, a brick-making factory, there will be people who are faster at making bricks, and people who are slower. If they're salaried, then you would expect rationally that someone who makes twice as many bricks as the median would get paid twice as much, and similarly someone who makes half as many bricks would get paid half as much.
   
   But that's not what we see - the curve is sigmoidal, flattening out at both ends, with the most productive people not making as much per unit as the people in the middle of the distribution, and the slowpokes getting more per unit. How does this make sense? The theory (as described by Robert Frank in Choosing the Right Pond) is that part of the compensation the fast workers are getting is status - they can strut around the factory with everyone knowing they're the best - and similarly to keep the humiliated slowpokes coming back day after day, you have to give them a premium to pay for the humiliation they suffer. So does a quarterback who throws for twice as many yards or scores twice as many touchdowns get twice as much? It's easy to tell just-so stories in other directions before we look at the data - yes, obviously status is a massive part of sports played for an audience, so the effect would be greater - or, people want to play sports professionally and the status of being a professional athlete more than offsets the humiliation of being the worst quarterback, paid commensurate with miserable stats. But again, I would need data at individual salary levels and have to compare stats (which differ for different positions), so if that's interesting enough to you to gather and crunch the numbers, I invite you to do it and post a link in the comments.
   
   
3. I was also curious about whether player salary or team payroll made a difference, and fortunately other people have been too and already crunched the numbers. Keep in mind that what matters to a franchise's owners is how much money they make, and winning or losing is just a means to that end (if it actually matters to the fan's expenditures at all - and the more loyal the fans, the less it matters - see more here.) But it turns out that baseball has the highest gap between payrolls, and it also makes the biggest difference to team performance; the NFL has the least gap, and it makes the least difference. According this article, the low-payroll teams actually made it to the Final Four more often than the high-payroll teams. (More data on MLB payroll-performance relationship here; yes payroll does help you win in MLB.
   
   
4. The most important thing is how much does each player produce? As someone involved in a league or franchise from a business standpoint, you might think of your sport this way: players are machines that produce revenue. In this analysis, using the average salary and number of players per league, as well as the overall revenue, we can see how much of the revenue is taken by salaries, and how efficient each league's players are at producing profit. Interestingly, here the NFL is in a league of its own. Its salaries are only about 10% of its revenue, compared to the other three which range 34-42%, and players in the NFL produce a share of the revenue 9.7 times their salaries, as opposed to the other three, who range from 2.36 to 2.96 times their salaries. Why is this? Does the NFL have better merchandising? More expensive tickets? Or it's just an inherently better TV sport so there's a bigger audience?
   
   (College football is obviously ideal in this regard. The individual player's share of revenue generated-to-salary ratio is nearly infinite. We might all be forgiven for dismissing the overwrought pleas not to pollute the moral purity of the sport by paying the players coming from the administrators of these programs, or the business office of the learning institutions that for some reason host them. It will be interesting to see, with college football consolidating essentially into two superleagues, how they'll keep the rankings and championships opaque in order to continue maximizing the number of bowls and profits therefrom.)

*Wasn't it J.P. Morgan who said the CEO should not make more than a certain multiple of what the lowest paid employee makes? I couldn't find the quote so if I'm misattributing it please correct me in the comments.

List of New Concepts

Here are some of the concepts I've discussed on this blog.

Dolphin belief - an utterance where the apparent propositional, truth-claim part of it is less impotant than the emotional or group signaling content. The person saying a dolphin is not aware that this is what they're doing. Much of what humans say is like this, with the content of the statement just window-dressing for its true purpose. An actual meaningful truth claim is like a fish, while one of these utterances with decorative verbal content looks superfically the same, but is actually something completely different - like a dolphin. (More here.)

Viceroy authorities - there is a spectrum of justification of authority, from people who actually try to derive their authority from making true claims, and others whose principal aim is to manipulate others, regardless of the truth. Those who want to manipulate of course want to seem like (and often believe they are) justified authorities, so they imitate justified authority. Justified correct authorities are like monarch butterflies, and dogmatists aiming at manipulation are like viceroys trying to mimic them. (More here.)

White beast - the opposite of a bête noire. A white beast is a sacred object or event in the history of an identity-forming community - it is a usually a tragedy that has negative consequences for the community down to the modern day. The paradox is that when an outgroup suggests a remedy, even though a demand for justice over this tragedy is central to the group's identity, a remedy ironically threatens that identity, and is met with outrage from the outgroup which puzzles the outgroup. (More here.)

Inherent cyclic crisis - A process by which any dynamic organized entity (living things, organisms, individual humans and their beliefs, human organizations) must have inherent contradictions between the drive to avoid damage and dissolution, and the way they represent aversive stimuli, leading to a distorted model of the external world which results in either paroxysmal suffering or death. (More here.)

The ISE theory of dealing outsiders - humans have only devised three ways of dealing with other humans that do not follow the same moral authority - remaining Ignorant, treating them as Subhumans outside of moral consideration, or Evangelizing (assimilating) them.

The tyranny of territory stops us from having true choice and therefore brings competition between governments for human capital close to zero. Since social organization rests ultimately on the threat of violence, no one has thought of an effective way to have individuals be able to choose which agency they would like involved in which aspect of their life (i.e. I like the Nebraska DMV better than Idaho's, so I'll get my license there.) Rare exceptions exist such as international tax law but this applies to legal entities. The closest solution has been charter cities. A similar argument applies to living in a simulation - the hardware where your experience originates has to reside in physical space somewhere, even if distributed.

A substate of inherent cyclic crisis above: states demonstrate a 200 to 250 year cycle. This is most obvious in the case of China, only because China has a large fertile plain which lends itself to political unification and few neighboring states that can threaten them (with obvious exceptions.) But the same cycle can be seen applying to other states when it has the opportunity to run without interruption.

Population drops off west of the 100th meridian in the U.S. because around the time people reached that point, trains became a practical means of getting all the way to the coast.

When discussing the simulation argument, "simulation" is almost always poorly defined, and in a meaningful way, if you feel pain pleasure or emotion, you are in a simulation. Simulation argument proponents also smuggle in characteristics and motivaitons of the simulators (including the assumption that they exist and have intentions) similar to theology.

We should stop METI, or any attempt to actively alert aliens to our presence.

CLAHSF (pronounced "CLASH EFF") - the Coordinated Labor and Agriculture Hypothesis of State Formation. The nuclei of early civilizations was generally in agriculturally marginal environments (deserts with a river, arid cold plateaus.) In these environments, centrally coordinated agriculture (e.g. planting or harvesting in large numbers based on river flooding) could actually result in population growth, and there was no ability to leave the group and survive outside of the system. Centralized states with more coordination in warfare developed and dominated neighbors. This explains why places like Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, central Mexico or the Andes produced growing civilizations when more productive areas did not. The exception is China, but there, the chosen crop of rice demands similar central coordination. Could be thought of as the counterpart to Scott's Seeing Like a State. (More here.)

The Bad Stripe - in the U.S. there is a zone of low human development stretching from the southeast corner of Pennsylvania, down the Appalachians through West Virginia into Kentucky and Tennessee, where it turns west through Arkansas and into Oklahoma. This corresponds roughly to the areas settled by Border Reavers in Fischer's Albion's Seed, and could be called Greater Appalachia. (More here.)

Most "Emergent Properties" Are Either Ignorance (or, Once We Understand Them, Merely Shorthand)

Searle's famous example of an emergent property is that a single water molecule is not wet. It's only when there are a lot of them together under certain conditions that they occur in something meaningfully called a liquid.

More generally in this view: emergence occurs when the interaction of multiple entities (often ones outside the direct perceptual abilities of humans, like water molecules), produces a behavior qualitatively different from the single entities, which can be perceived directly (like water.)

This concept has been rightly rejected but it's worth being clear about exactly why it should be rejected, in order to make a general argument against the idea.

Viewed in terms of predicting the behavior at the more complex (usually directly perceived macro) level, from the simpler entities, emergence is only, and always, ignorance. By "ignorance" I mean "an inability to predict that is based on limited knowledge of the observer, rather than a property of the entity that is lacking when the entity exists in isolation, but apparent when the entity interacts with other entities." Water's behavior in aggregate as a liquid is determined by the masses and electrochemical properties of its atoms It is determined by the water molecules, inherent to their properties. If the water molecules are replaced with ammonia or methane, the properties of those atoms and their relationship in ammonia or methane molecules, create a different sort of liquid, with different properties.

Of course, we CAN now predict fairly well from the intermolecular forces of water molecules at various temperatures and pressures (or of multiple molecules) where they will be liquids, and how those liquids will behave. Now that we can predict it, does this mean it's no longer emergent? And for those places (still in the large majority) in chemistry where we cannot yet make the prediction, does that mean reality is fundamentally irrational with no causal association between the simple entity and the aggregate, or we just aren't smart enough to see it yet? Therefore, the superficial countenance of an "emergent" property has nothing to do with the entities themselves, it's just the result of our own provincial limits on cognition that keep us from predicting how they will behave together.

Viewed in reverse (trying to apply the property we think has emerged at the higher complex level to the simple entities), it's clear that "wet" is shorthand for aggregate interactions of myriad small entities. In principle, you could understand (read: predict) the bucket of water at the level of individual molecules, but we use a (in this case, very good) approximation for their behavior which we describe as "wet". This is based entirely on the provincial bounds on human perception, cognition, and the tools we have to observe water molecules. In fact it is the cases where evolution has given us very good cognitive and perceptual approximations that the appearance of emergence is most compelling. But leave the realm of entities and events that our ancestors needed good cognitive/perceptual shorthand for, and the idea starts getting less interesting. I haven't heard anyone saying that quantum entanglement, or Bose-Einstein condensates at near-absolute-zero temperatures are examples of emergent properties, even though they weren't immediately predictable - though they fulfill the conditions for "emergency" seen above, both the simple and complex entities are outside of our meter-second-kilogram realm of experience, and there's no cognitive/perceptual shorthand for them. In the same way, we could talk about a building a Gothic or art deco instead of describing the spatial relationships of every brick (that is to say - a brick is not Gothic or art deco but this is equally "emergent" as wetness from water.)

A charitable interpretation of the traditional idea of emergence then does exist: we directly perceive certain properties like wetness at the macro level in the manifest world. We can actually predict the occurrence of this directly-perceived property based on what we observe at a simpler, smaller level. But the provincial limitations of our eyes and brains do not constitute a dividing line between properties where the universe carves itself at its joints.

This paper by Darley refers to work on cellular automata (of course) and argues that it is not Turing-decidible whether an infinite system would demonstrate emergence, and is "only" NP-hard whether a finite system is. I will go out on a limb and say this is at least in practice a reductio ad absurdum for such a property, and shows at least that ignorance can (formally!) never be ruled out in cases of apparent emergence of this type. What's more, the "emergent" phenomenon (emergent by this definition) is often not really that interesting - for example, the behavior of a three-body system. Does unpredictability really put it on another "level" of understanding? Actually, the opposite - in such a case it is only the individual elements that seem to form a unified entity. If each body is a water molecule, then there is no analogous "wetness" in the holistic full three bodies.

Darley, V. Emergence Phenomena and Complexity.

Toward a Unified Account of Finding the Truth: Quine and Bayes on Dogma Versus Good Authority

Scott Alexander recently posted a great account (and critique) of reasoning and communication, beginning with criticism of science communication. He then expands this into an argument about how a real Bayesian evaluation of truth claims requires us to sometimes reject "higher standards" of evidence that produce results in conflict with what we think we already know. In so doing he begins to unify every day reasoning within a Bayesian framework. This is valuable, because honest rationalists have noticed gaps between what we consider high-quality evidence, and what we actually use to update - not because we are hypocrites, but because there are other considerations when we want to really get the right answer.

To begin with a critique of simplistic "levels of evidence": even those of us most enthusiastic about peer-review make almost every decision in life without it. You don't insist on a peer-reviewed journal when figuring out how to give yourself administrator rights to a PC you just got for free (a situation I just found myself in.) Your decision process is a combination of evaluations of the cost, time, and likely consequences of whatever you do, along with deciding what sources to trust based on the decisions' specialization beyond daily experience of subject matter, speed of feedback, and possible perverse incentives. In this case, I just watched a Youtube video and it worked like a charm. It's a free computer I'm playing with so I didn't care much if it was ruined by the attempt.

Taking all these things into account is actually Bayesian even if we aren't thinking explicitly about the Bayes equation. But it turns out the model we use in science is actually a special case of Bayesian reasoning - and even victims of dogmatism are using Bayesian reasoning. The second statement is much more controversial than the first; scroll down to that section if you like.


Recasting Popperian Falsification in Bayesian Terms

Karl Popper's model of hypothesis testing is that we can only falsify a hypothesis, we can never be sure it's true. Looking at Anscombe' quartet above, you can see that there are multiple data sets which can produce the same statistics. Stopping after inadequate positive predictions may lead you to the wrong equation. Therefore, the only answer that provides certainty is to falsify a hypothesis.

There are two important aspects to this approach to finding out the truth. The first, and the more underemphasized, is its appreciation of human psychology. Stephen Toulmin noted that the way humans actually reason is to start with premises and conclusion first, and then build a rhetorical bridge between them. If you're a rationalist, you make sure that your rhetorical bridge is not just verbal/emotional sleight of hand but rather an actual argument. The point is that even in Popperian science, we start with a conclusion. The difference is that we explicitly declare, in public, ahead of time, that we're not sure if the conclusion is right (it's less than a thesis - a "hypo" thesis, if you will.) Then you test it.

And, the way you test it is by creating an experience that will give you an unexpected result if it's wrong - to falsify it. The question is, does a hypothesis-supporting experiment (that produces the results we expect) really give us zero information? No, but it usually doesn't give us as much information as a falsification.

A falsification is usually more strongly weighted information - it "moves the needle" much more, because it's more likely to be surprising. Indeed to equate heavier weighting with surprise is almost tautology. So we can place Popperian hypothesis-testing in a Bayesian framework by saying, instead of a false binary of "support equals zero information equals bad" and falsification good", note that ideally an experiment is trying to create that experience which is most likely to produce a surprise, and most efficiently provide information.


Finding Truth in the Real World - Where Other Humans Also Live

But people don't always do this. We live in a complicated world and have had to learn to weight truth claims based on something besides immediate experience. You almost certainly have not done an experiment on biological evolution, and few if any true retrodictive studies.[1] You can't function otherwise, unless you live in a cabin in the wilderness by yourself.

One thing we use in the real world is a web of beliefs, in the Quinean sense. Recasting this in Bayesian terms, no belief is an island, with each belief in the web serving as part of the weighting for your prior. Most beliefs will have many other beliefs bearing on it, updating the belief in question and holding its prediction in place. If you have reasonable confidence in those many other beliefs, then a counterclaim or weird observation just doesn't outweight them. (I am not a statistician, but Elo ratings seem analagous to this. Just because the Packers had an off night and lost to the Detroit Lions doesn't mean you should bet against the Packers going forward - move your needle? Yes, but this is what it means for one loss to be a fluke.)[2] This is why in the linked article, Scott describes how it is right to reject peer-reviewed homeopathy studies - because they are on their face improbable, in large part because of our rich web of other beliefs about how the world works.

Another way we weight beliefs is by giving credence to authority. I think differing confidence in authorities (based partly on our innate cognitive/emotional makeup and partly on life experience) explains the majority of major differences people have in beliefs about the world - not their direct experience of things or reasoning ability. The truth is that people often say "I believe X because an authority I trust said so." In fact, fellow rationalist, you often say that. And again, to function, you must. (Education is a formal example of this. You don't need to do every experiment back to Newton to be a physicist.) Yet during the pandemic, it has become painfully clear that people differ in what authorities they listen to.


Why Dogmatists Are Actually Still Bayesians: Good Authorities and Bad Authorities

I once had the privilege to give a talk to the Sacramento Freethinkers, Atheists and Nonbelievers (SacFAN) about the function of beliefs. At one point I stated that to have good beliefs, you had to pick good authorities. An audience member asked me "How do you define a good authority?" At the time I answered humorously, deflecting the question only because of my discomfort at realizing I didn't have a ready answer.

First let's define authority: a personal source of data (a person or institution) whose truth claims you weight more heavily than others' without first requiring evidence.

We all have our authorities. To function, we must. Sometimes they are formal (academic scientists); more often they are informal (someone you hike with who seems to know the trails and conditions in your part of the world.)

But there are many claimed authorities with poor justification for their beliefs, that promulgate false beliefs, and if we are updating based on what they tell us, we will be wrong too. A current near-canonical example for my likely readers would be a religious leader claiming that mRNA vaccines will kill you. But scientists can be wrong too, and not just because they haven't generated enough data to update their beliefs. Nobel Prize winners going off the rails are something of an institution now, so how do we know to ignore Kary Mullis or Linus Pauling's weirder moments? Not so scary, you say: partly the conflict with the web of beliefs as noted before, and partly because they're speculating outside of their expertise or reproducible experiment. Fair enough.

Returning to the pandemic, the CDC said for at least first month that masks didn't help. (Was this deliberate obfuscation to keep non-medical people from hoarding masks, or an error? Either way, that's what they communicated, and in any event I'm not sure which is worse.) If you still think, despite this, that the CDC is still a better authority than a preacher, why?


Is Someone Who Calls Himself a Rationalist Claiming Dogmatists are Rational?

In an article about people in middle America who refused the vaccine and got severe COVID, I was struck by the following statement (paraphrasing since I can't find the original): "We didn't think it was real, just like everybody else."

When you are surrounded by people who believe X, all of whom (along with you) admire a leader who believes X, and only people who everyone around you has told you are liars are telling you not-X - then, in the absence of (thusfar) immediately contradictory experience, you will continue to believe X. This is the case for COVID victims like those I paraphrased. Given the information they have, they were being good Quineans and good Bayesians.


Early Life Experience and Emotional Makeup Clearly Influence Our Weightings

You might be asking incredulously: is this guy seriously arguing that people following bad authorities are good Bayesians? And (assuming that's true), does that mean people are really in an inescapable hole if they follow the wrong authority, absent any profound contradictory evidence? The respective answers are technically yes, and sometimes no.

To the first point, you might object that many of these people certainly did have experts providing them better information, and they incorrectly underweighted this information, so they were NOT good Bayesians. But there's a problem: large inferential distance. Everyone around them has told them that (Fauci, academics, etc.) are bad, lying, immoral people who are trying to harm you, and should be ignored. With this information, and very little information about how to identity good authorities, from their perspective, if they give credence to Fauci, they have no justification for not also listening to every crank who comes along. Similarly, it's hard to see how someone in North Korea should somehow just know that people in the West really don't have it out for them. These people do not have trapped priors in the sense that that a belief is somehow innately more inert - as if it has a higher specific epistemological gravity - but their priors are pinned down by a dense web of beliefs whose strands are numerous and have strong weightings because they date to early life experience.

To the second question about whether it's hopeless to get people with bad authorities out of their delusion box, as often happens with the rationalist community, in our public discussions we're playing catch-up centuries after salesmen, politicians and religious leaders figured these things out, though in fairness, they had a greater incentive with more immediate feedback loops. The trick is to find someone who they recognize as an authority. Usually this is as simple as finding people providing better information who share with their audience superficial markers of cultural affinity - afiliations with religions or regions, class, dress, language. Yes these people should understand how to select an authority, but the inferential distance is too great. Put them in touch with someone with the same accent instead. Concentrate forces by looking for people who do not demonstrate "authority monoculture." You can also decrease inferential distance by engaging with people who are already having doubts. (Again, not a news flash, but it may help rationalists to understand if I put it in these terms. See what I did there?)


How to Differentiate Dogmatists from Good Authorities

Let's define dogmatists (or charlatans, or whatever other term you like) as someone who wants the benefits of being an authority, but is not interested in the the truth of the beliefs they promulgate, in terms of actions and consequences. Whether or not they genuinely believe they are interested in the truth is irrelevant, and either way, they will certainly claim they are committed to the truth. There's an analogy here to the relationship between tribal team cheers (shibboleths) that appear on the surface to be truth claims, and proper truth claims, like dolphins and fish. Similarly, dogmatists do their best to masquerade[3] as good authorities, but they're really something else entirely - dogmatists might be considered the viceroys to the good authorities' monarchs.

But there are characteristics of good authorities which are "expensive" for dogmatists to maintain. These are:

1. They have some feedback loop betwen their claims and outcomes (and are interested in it.) Example: physicians and patient outcomes; politicians and legislative impact.
2. They do not avoid being tracked by others in their outcomes or predictions.
3. They minimally appeal to or rely on those early-life, emotional, identity-overweighted beliefs in their audience's web.
4. Their feedback loop is not distorted by perverse interests. Example: TV news pundits trying to get ratings by avoiding predictions that conflict with their audience's values. Paraphrasing Charlie Munger, when you're dealing with a business, you have to understand their business well enough to know their incentives. (More here.)
5. They have a way of seeking out "legitimate surprise" (not mere confusion - can also be accomplished with dopamine hacking, i.e. meth.) Example, hypothesis testing in science. (This may be the hardest of these to do consistently due to inherent contradictions within any information-seeking entity.)
6. They communicate clearly, and they do not hold up incomprehensibility as a positive. (See: descriptions of John von Neumann, the first of Asher's Seven Sins of Medicine.) Insistence of formal or especially foreign or arcane language is one pernicious form. (See: modern legal language, use of Latin in Church, legal French in late Medieval England.)
7. Their claims to authority are limited in scope. Henry Ford had some great industral ideas but also thought people should listen to his hang-ups about cows and horses. Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel but recognizing that his domain of expertise did not extend to politics he said no.

Seeking good authorities, and preparing to reject one you may have liked when you realize they are just a viceroy, is uncomfortable - it's "software" imposed on the factory settings of humans as we operated in small groups for millennia. People who are constitutionally high in the moral dimensions of loyalty and authority will always find this difficult - the idea of checking their proposed authority runs counter to their nature.


For further reading: more formal syntheses of Quinean and Bayesian models here and here. A useful discussion of a possible conflict here, which the resolution that Bayesian reasoning can be a satisfactory way to contruct a Quinean web without arguing that Bayes is necessarily optimal.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Retrodiction sometimes upsets Popperians, but hypothesis-testing is about making a prediction, based on your hypothesis, about something that the predictor does not yet know, even if it already happened. It is always about the state of knowledge of the claimant when the hypothesis is formulated; it's irrelevant if the events already happened, just that they are not yet known.

[2] The ELO rating used in sports not formally an example of a belief web but it is analogous to one, and in this case behaves similar to one. Just as a single peer-reviewed homeopathy study should not make us throw away the rest of science, a great team somehow losing to a bad one should not make us think the great team is now worse than the bad one.

[3] It is a testament to the success of science that viceroys, especially religious ones in the U.S., increasingly co-opt its language. It is very rare to see this happening in the opposite direction.