This would be easier if We and Them simply differed in arbitrary preferences. But I fear that when We and Them disagree on basic epistemology, we simply sound crazy to each other.
And this irreconcilable difference, if it exists, will eventually always come out if you talk long enough.
The problem with Us vs. Them thinking isn't that there is a group of people that you fundamentally disagree with, but rather that you've constructed a somewhat nebulous "them" which you've ascribed all negative qualities about "them".
The way to recognise this is to ask yourself if you can actually name any particular example of the "them" you're arguing against. Because if not, you risk arguing against a straw man you yourself created.
We're at the point where whole communities are being erected to argue against a "them", usually with an opposing community arguing against a similarly distorted image of the "us".
> The way to recognise this is to ask yourself if you can actually name any particular example of the "them" you're arguing against.
Unfortunately, I think what can often compound this line of thinking is a willingness to speculatively ascribe qualities to people we've just met in an attempt to put them into a box we can relate to (either positively relate or negatively relate).
Asking someone to think of a particular example of "them" might simply lead to an example of someone they've judged on first impressions.
That's a fair point. I guess the real problem is that any claims about "them" can't really be refuted by anyone. So a better method would be to ask yourself if there's someone who could reject your claims. If not your statements are not falsifiable, which makes debating them somewhat pointless.
Perhaps along the same lines, elimination of us vs. them thinking shouldn't be predicated on elimination of all differences. Mainly because it's totally unrealistic to think that will ever happen.
Instead, we should be able to move beyond the us vs. them approach to the world without first making sure that the "them" are exactly like"us".
Perhaps we should come up with better methods that people can use to critique/improve their own epistemology as needed, and spread the idea that it is highly worthwhile to do so? The mindset that "realizing you are wrong" can be a joy, not something to fear.
After reading Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", it seems to me this difficulty could also be described as people operating from different base layer paradigms.
E.g. "Natural laws are sufficient to explain everything we see" vs "A supernatural element is needed". Or "Power dynamics are the primary force that steer human activity" vs "There are many important factors to consider".
This exactly. Critical thinking, psychology, and interpersonal communication (with emphasis on building shared understanding) need to be explicitly taught in schools. We already have children memorize state capitals: they can memorize cognitive biases, mental models, meta-models/heuristics, empathy/communication techniques, and the a basic explanation of the psychology/neuroscience that backs them up. This will allow children to effectively deal with their own flaws, and those of others. Combining that with practical online/offline research skills and more hands-on experience of macro/microeconomics would leave children much more equipped to deeply and intuitively understand people and the world.
It's definitely not beyond their capacity either, all children figure out a smattering of these for themselves anyways, they just don't learn the names. Even the rather sharp ones only have a few more, or maybe one especially-honed one, but that's all it takes to make a big difference.
"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points" - Alan Kay
As an aside, children that develop significantly advantageous models early on often end up over-relying on them later, another potential-wasting issue we could avoid by making those children aware of what's going on in their brains.
> they can memorize cognitive biases, mental models, meta-models/heuristics, empathy/communication techniques, and the a basic explanation of the psychology/neuroscience that backs them up. This will allow children to effectively deal with their own flaws, and those of others.
This reads like a parody.
Memorizing a list of definitions isn’t going to accomplish much of anything, any more than memorizing a list of equipment names will turn someone into a doctor or engineer. These are tricky concepts/tools, and wielding them properly takes serious expertise.
Students need (years of copious) experience reading, making, and analyzing increasingly subtle and sophisticated arguments with significant amounts of feedback from other students and expert teachers/mentors to come to a journeyman-level understanding of logic and rhetoric. Critical introspection is even harder; adults have trouble with it after decades of liberal arts education, professional school, work, personal relationships, meditation, therapy, ....
Adults have trouble with all this stuff because mostly they don't learn it at all, even with a liberal arts education or any of the other things you mention. The entire rationalism movement is essentially founded based on the fact that ostensibly educated people don't realize how badly their brains work by default.
The greatest superpower we have as humans is that we have the ability to introspect, and second guess our immediate responses in light of what we've learned. That allows us to jump to conclusions much quicker on shoddy evidence, because we can course correct later as we gather more, and it's super effective as a learning strategy. Learning how to better correct our initial hypotheses helps us perform even better, but it requires us to actually study the things that humans tend to get wrong. Most education, professions, and life experiences do not support that goal, so it's an easy win if you go outside the system to do so.
Judging from the people I know who identify themselves with the “rationalism movement”, occasionally reading topical blog posts doesn’t inherently teach introspection (or even reasoning) any better than high school, though its adherents are pretty good at rattling off lists of logical fallacies and getting distracted by meta-arguments about which particular one applies in a given situation.
[Or by “rationalism movement” are you talking about, say, philosophy / sociology / anthropology / behavioral economics / history Ph.Ds or licensed psychiatrists? That would be something like the years of dedicated training I was talking about, though those fields have different modes of inquiry and different subjects of study, and some are surely better at reasoning / rhetoric / self reflection than others.]
You're right, reading occasional blog posts doesn't do anything for anyone, on pretty much any topic. I'd argue that anyone professing to be a rationalist on those grounds is lying to themselves.
Also worth pointing out that the rationalist community has a lot of issues and biases that mostly spring from focus problems - like any group, they tend to hyper-analyze a few pet issues that draw their attention and then ignore the rest of the world. Even if they're correctly analyzing those issues, the social problem of biased community focus ends up thwarting the goal of overall rationality. I don't think this is a problem specific to rationalists, rather a general failure of human communication (for any -ism, you'll find that people have tunnel vision and tend to force everything they see and hear through the lens of that -ism), but it is rightly criticized more there because the movement claims to be better at seeking truth than others. I have no idea how to solve that problem, it's really an emergent result of what gets people hot and bothered and draws their attention and analysis, which is an innate human irrationality and extremely hard to think your way around.
I'm not trying to say that if they memorize some definitions they'll have a deep understanding of the human condition. I'm saying that by simply normalizing that level of analysis and understanding of human behavior, we can begin shaking off a lot of unproductive cultural baggage. It helps to know to categorize the ineffective behavior you experience as pathological as opposed to attribution to gender, race, religion, political persuasion, or other culturally-encouraged fallacies.
Also, it's not like being better able to understand people is an unattractive concept to kids: most of them naturally attempt to make sense of the world, and helping them internalize the completely natural multi-faceted fallibility of humans (including themselves) will pay off enormously in their future interactions with people.
How do you get to the years and years of focused work?
Vocabularies are the building blocks and mapping points of our knowledge stores. I think the suggestion is that emphasis on awareness and, at least some symbolic reverence to the concepts in grade school may offer a better path that what is traditional now.
Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path. Memorizing the capitals offers one of many maps to understanding more about what America is, and how it’s government works. Knowing the names encourages curiosity and inspires asking questions that otherwise could not be asked.
It sounds entirely reasonable to me that this could be what we need. I agree years and years is what is required, but I notice many people my age (early 30s) still lack basic vocabulary of these topics, so I have a hard time opposing teaching exactly that, but certainly agree many years, and a significant curiosity seems necessary. How do help that along?
> Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path.
“Major derailment”? You can’t be serious. Nobody at my school ever memorized state capitals, and as far as I can tell they’re all doing about as well as you would expect (a couple decades later) in their various careers, including careers as lawyers, activists, policy analysts, journalists, politicians, scholars of political science, ...
Anyone who does the real work (reading hundreds of topical books, keeping up with current events for decades, getting involved in political activism, engaging with peers in years of university seminars about related topics, ...) is going to end up having a reasonable grasp of the names of most states and their capitals, but being able to rattle off a list is mostly useless, except as a stunt.
> Knowing the names encourages curiosity and inspires asking questions that otherwise could not be asked.
Memorizing lists of random trivia engenders boredom and makes kids think school is bullshit. The questions they ask are things like “why are we doing this pointless busywork?” and “why doesn’t my teacher respect kids’ intelligence?”
I think your point is good, and I would restate my assertion. As trivia without context, it’s useless, I agree.
Knowing what a capital is and how to find the name when needed is important. But, history is much more important.
I never memorized state capitals as an assignment in school, but I do know most of them from my interest in the nation’s history and geography. I correlate these things but not in the rigorous trivial way I think my earlier comment suggested. Your input brings clarity to that.
People with sub-100 IQs are probably not going to be able to achieve the level of critical thinking you're talking about. There's a genetic component to that level of intelligence, and it's not an easy problem that can be solved by teaching people a few tips and tricks. On top of that, the public education system is not designed to produce critical thinking people, but rather people who can memorize and follow orders. Not that things can't ever change, but there's a lot more work to do than making a few tweaks to a curriculum.
Remove control of education from the federal level and return the money and decision-making power to the local levels. Stop all the one-size-fits-all programs that don’t work and make schools highly competitive and merit-based.
If the federal level is involved it should be to grant scholarships to high performing students, and invest more in trade schools for students that may not achieve high academic marks but have other talents that could be developed.
End welfare programs that subsidize r-selected birth rates, and give tax cuts and incentives to R-selected birth rates, with the goal of boosting the national average IQ. Finally, invest heavily in genetic testing and editing research which would allow parents to select or modify embryos to have genes that correlate with higher intelligence, like China has promised to do.
Basically, go all in on intelligence and address the issue at the biological rather than the cultural level.
>"Natural laws are sufficient to explain everything we see" vs "A supernatural element is needed".
Both of those positions share the base epistemology of seeing and explaining, fortunately for discussions between the two very large groups that believe each of them.
It depends on the religion. The modern Catholic Church now accepts that evolution through natural selection occurs, and they no longer claim that the Earth was created in 6 days a few thousand years ago.
Yes, it is official position, confirmed in a few documents by Pope John Paul II (google "Fides et ratio"). But of course you can still many priests arguing against that :)
Religious texts can be revered studied like mythology (because they are). Critiques of biblical literalism are already fairly old-fashioned and surprisingly unnecessary.
I have a very religious family, which was uncomfortable for me when I was younger. But, that didn’t last long. Once I began studying more art history, mythology and theology, the ‘Us vs. Them’ around the topic has largely dissipated. I participate in all the happenings and have helped my cousins of similar age in contextualizing it all. I feel like I am ushering a healthy shift forward and new atheism now feels old. I’m open to critique of this, of course.
I just recently read a bit about different ways that human understand and I think there is an interesting point you can make in this 'us vs them' in relation to this. I'm still digesting it but it's a very interesting view of the mind.
I will try to keep this short, so bare with the simplifications. The idea is that humans understand in many different types of ways and they are connected/overlapped. These ways are: mythic, romantic, philosophic, ironic and somatic. Mythic understanding comes out of oral culture and brings along with it narrative, fantasy, metaphors, binary structuring, etc. Romantic understanding came out of literacy and brings romantic rationality, humanized knowledge, transcendence within reality, etc. Ironic understanding brings self-reflection, and so on. One type of understanding is not better/worse than the other, they are important in different ways. For those who are interested, check out "The Educated Mind" by Kiearn Egan.
So, us-vs-them comes out of a mythic understanding of the world. The gut reaction is often to reject the source from which the bad behaviour comes from completely. But mythic understanding and it's binary structuring (along with fantasy, metaphors, abstract thinking) is crucial for human sense-making. So I don't think we should suppress mythic understanding and all that comes along with it, we need to have a balance between these different ways of understanding. Just imagine how many great things invented started as fantasy and strange metaphors in someones head!
That's the epistemological view of it, then you have the political one, that's a totally different beast and so I will end my comment here.
If states secede why not parts of a state? Why not cities? Why not neighborhoods. You're pretty much advocating the end of civilization and the return to tribal groupings. But tribal warfare was actually much more violent and unstable than the nation state.
That's a reductio ad absurdum. There are reasonable levels of division well above tribal levels. Singapore is basically a city state, and I don't notice a collapse of civilization there.
Territories with strong social identity would maintain political union, territories with weak social identity and severe political disagreements would split. As much as is possible, no one is ruled by people they hate.
I don't understand the downvoting of this comment. What is being described is effectively tribalism.
Tribalism worked well for humans for roughly 350,000 years. Then we idiots come along and think that we've got a better way that is already showing its weaknesses and strain after just a couple of thousand years. Really? Maybe, just maybe our ancestors were on to something and there's something we can learn from them. No that couldn't possibly be it.
Tribalism is red in tooth and claw, it's the culture of might makes right. Technology stops tribalism being a viable or desirable culture today. Tribalism scaled up as technology necessarily permits and forces it be scaled up is fascism.
Those are some pretty extreme claims that have no basis in fact. I tend to look at the other way around: tribalism becomes viable (again) because of technology.
Because of course, today's society is completely free of violence now that we've eliminated tribalism?
I have noticed that nothing that I say on HN, except for saying that the scientific evidence is that intelligence is mostly genetic and heritable, gets more downvotes more quickly than discussing secession.
I think the topic has been successfully in the mind of college educated people, so any mention of it immediately brings to mind both slavery and, somewhat amusingly, fascism.
It is too bad. As I said above, I see it as the best way to avoid violence.
Because they won't want to. Breaking down at that granular level would be too inconvenient to be worth it, even before considering the issues you laid out yourself.
If we all believe that government requires consent of the governed, why structurally require violence to achieve that state? That's the status quo you're defending.
Meta: this is how a real-life slippery slope argument and response should go. It's not a fallacy, it's just not always applicable, just like every other concept
It has little to do with epistemology. The main cause for human conflicts is the fact that we are playing zero-sum games. Humans are constantly fighting/jockeying for status, acquiring resources for themselves, and simply getting ahead of the others.
Depends on resources. When resources are plentiful, we happily work together to maximise them. But when you're starving, you'll kill your siblings and eat them.
With inequality rising, expect more anti-social behaviour.
Inequality will by itself fuel resentment even if the number of people in absolute poverty is low. And resentment causes people to disengage from the political process or to be more extreme in their politics.
And this irreconcilable difference, if it exists, will eventually always come out if you talk long enough.