Overcoming Bias

Intellectuals get great motivation from big grand questions, and often do work adjacent to them, intending to be relevant to them. Such intellectuals mostly get prestige for the observable impressive detail of their work. Detail such as data collection, stat analysis, game theory models, agent-based models, case studies, phil analysis, engaging public essays, compelling keynote talks, and managing related orgs.When the world changes its mind on such questions, intellectuals who are sufficiently

Academia neglects interdisciplinary work that combines insights from multiple areas. Each field has expert versions which experts use among themselves, and public versions seen by outsiders, and people in field B won’t accept your using the expert version of A if that differs from the non-expert version of A that B folks have in mind. Also, if you hold an academic event on the topic of A intersect B, you’ll usually invite the most prestigious people you can get in A, and in B, but yo

In the past, authorities have authorized censorship on the basis of claims of substantial chances of social disruption or collapse if people were free to hear about religious heresy, alternate ideologies, sexually permissive art, losses in ongoing wars, looming disasters, and pandemic details. Quite often, those who pushed for such censorship benefited from it in ways well beyond the prevention of social collapse.Some say that the US govt has long known of strong evidence that some UFOs/UAPs are

Most see sacred quests as optional, to be considered only after one has sufficient security and comfort. But in fact, our civilization will plausibly fall, to be replaced by other quite different ones, if we cannot manage to sufficiently organize around a shared civ-level sacred goal. Making that quest pretty essential. Let me explain.Cultural drift threatens to topple our civilization, to be replaced by others with quite different values. I’ve talked often of three main solutions. But act

My analysis of cultural drift has (at least) three distinctive elements:We have a big problem: we broke our process for the evolution of (not in) cultures.Instead of reviving blind evolution, it might be better to evolve deliberatelyI have three concrete ideas for institutional mechanisms of deliberate evolution.I asked an LLM for book authors who have also made my #2 point, on deliberate cultural evolution. It gave 4: Skinner (’71), Cattell (‘87), Stewart (’00), Wilson (&#8217

I did a web search on the above phrase, in prep for a podcast, and in ten pages of results didn’t find anything I thought reasonable. Which promotes me to write this, hoping it can show up for others when they so search. This content isn’t new, just restated, maybe better. When considering purported evidence for meteors or ball lightning, we are much more forgiving than when considering purported evidence of telepathy or ghosts, as reasonable priors for the former are much higher tha

Individuals often have good reasons to indulge in delusions, such as re superstition, astrology, religion, or their own personal destiny. But society usually has less of a reason to indulge them in its policy analysis. For example, we shouldn’t be funding larger institutions of research to elaborate astrological theories. And even if people find value in their folk physics, folk econ, or folk psych, researchers shouldn’t be working to extend these frameworks, though we might want to

Unless we find new ways to drive adaptation besides mass death and fragmentation, our civilizations may keep falling and rising indefinitely. I see 3 new ways: let capitalism run most all life areas, run small groups by speculative market estimates of future group adaptive success, or run big groups by such price estimates of achieving big goals in conflict with civilization collapse. All three ways rely on strong selection among market traders creating information that lets groups stay adaptive

Though three weeks ago I outlined a story of the long-term history of changes to moral authority, I decided to study this in a bit more detail. So I collected this list of 20 candidate sources of moral authority: Activist/interest group, Hereditary elite, Artist/musician/storyteller, Business-leader/employer, Famous, Civic-frat/clubs/assoc, Doctor/therapist, Family/elder, Peer/Community, Govt leader/org, Heart/Conscience, Law, Market prices, News/Media, Public intellectual, Priest/Church/Sacredt

Compared to the ancients, we moderns less moralize our personal lives, but more moralize the bigger world around us. Wars and politics, for example, are more moralized to us. In particular, we tend to be eager to interpret big-scale trends in moral terms, and often do so if enough trend context factors can support such an interpretation. These moral interpretations often change how we respond to big tends, which often enhances these trends.For example, when gas prices rise, many are tempted to e

Imagine taking a big group of elites from the year 1700, giving them the tech, wealth, and economic options of today, also teaching them new facts that we have learned since then, but without putting them in contact with the people of today. If they held their values constant, and only adapted their behavior to these ways to achieve constant values, they would change many of their behaviors to adapt to this new context. However, it seems to me that their behaviors would be quite different from t

I’m wondering how well I might organize my cultural drift messages around a few key slogans. Consider the following slogans as placeholders for better worded versions.1. Adaptation Needs Variation, Selection, & StabilityHumanity’s superpower is cultural evolution. But such Darwinian evolution fails without sufficient variation or selection pressures, or if the context changes too fast. A few centuries ago we were fine; the world had 100Ks of peasant cultures, most facing frequen

Morality is collective; we coordinate together to define and then enforce shared morals. Due to rising wealth and an explosion of fiction, the modern world is way into morality; even when other needs are sated, we still crave self-righteousness. The modern world has also greatly raised the status of education, and thus of abstraction. Combining these two, the modern world is very into abstracting morality; we celebrate intellectual systems that try to organize how we think about our moral choice

The ancient world respected tradition, and was wary of most kinds of change. In contrast, our modern world looks down on tradition, and celebrates most change as innovation. And this, alas, will be our downfall. Hopefully some civ after ours will learn this key lesson: you should only innovate as fast as you get feedback on the changes that you try.With most technology and business practices, we can see most of their key consequences pretty locally and pretty fast. So we can get a lot of data fa

I asked Grok4.6 to summarize the usual human pattern of “othering”:Humans typically other out-groups differing by ethnicity, nationality, religion, politics, class, or status. We stereotype them as less fully human, more threatening or inferior, reducing empathy and moral concern. This justifies suspicion, exclusion, discrimination, or hostility toward them while granting in-group members greater trust, resources, and benefit of the doubt.In fact, we often treat outsiders as beasts o

We are now in the modern era, a brief but consequential few centuries in the history of Earth civilization, between the long ages of a pre-modern era, and an as-yet-hard-to-envision post-modern era. For my purposes, the key distinction here is that the modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture. The pre- era is b

I don’t see why people concerned with value drift should be especially focused on AI. … Your real problem is that you want long term stability in a universe that more naturally changes. (Me in 2018)The last week has seen an explosion of talk on the scenario of AIs killing all humans; many say “P(doom)” is high, and argue for slowing and regulating AI. My last post said why AI regs look risky. Here I consider the main argument for AI doom, and compare it to the issue I&#82

People dislike AI for many reasons, but one extreme fear is that AIs will escape control from those who make, buy, or rent them, and then hurt others. We usually deal with such problems via legal liability, when law is available, or via threats of retaliation, when law is not available. But while those work among communities of comparably powered agents, some fear that out-of-control AIs might eventually get powerful enough and coordinate well enough to basically take over the world, and then en

My book with the excellent co-author Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, was published almost nine years ago, and has sold >60K copies so far. Our main thesis was that we humans are quite often wrong about our motives re many big common practices and institutions.Reviewers classified our book as psychology, and said that our thesis had long been well-known and accepted in psychology. We thought our contribution was to show how those who study most areas o

I’ve previously outlined three ways we might fix cultural drift. But each way seems quite a big ask, and I’ve been pondering what is our biggest obstacle here. What I’ve come up with is this: we will need to learn to stop treating conscience as if it were direct evidence on morality.Evidence can be more vs less direct. For example, in a murder trial, direct evidence may include bodies, bullets, or videos, while testimony of people about these things, or by those who saw the mur