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The Left already is doing such things while mouthing banal principled platitudes, and has been for decades. It has won them near-complete control of the knowledge-making and -legitimating institutions in the country, including academia, journalism, with significant inroads into corporations and the legal profession. It has enabled the Left to take its social program from radical fringe to state-enforced orthodoxy. They have hijacked bureaucracies, lied about their intentions, ignored or subverted laws they did not agree with, including court decisions, and more.
They did these things not even for such a good reason as revenge, but instead out of pure will-to-power.
Remove the beam from thine own eye before complaining about the mote in another's.
Is revenge a good reason to do things you find immoral? I think a lot of us more principled folk would disagree.
If I am attacked, it is good to use force against my attacker to both defend myself but also to establish future deterrence. If I am cheated, it is good to sue not just for the value of what was denied me but also for punitive damages - to take the cheater's money. If I am stolen from, it is good not just to retrieve what was stolen, but also to incapacitate the thief to prevent their ability to do these things again.
How certain are you that you're actually being attacked and it's not underdog bias?
I know and see plenty of leftists online who say similar things in the way you're saying now. That the powerful conservatives are attacking everyone and that their left wing censorious behavior is justified in defense. They're just as convinced as themselves as you are.
Knowing that people delude themselves into the very same style of bias perceptions you currently hold, knowing that there are studies and evidence suggesting that this happens on both sides of pretty much every topic, how certain are you that you're not just experiencing an underdog bias and failing to see the ways your own side might hold institutional powers unfairly? And how does any answer you give look differently than what a leftist under the bias would give?
This is true. Is not the proper response to look at the evidence available and draw one's own conclusions?
I would hope others in a rationalist community are aware of how our own biases can impact our perception. Maybe you haven't read things like the lens that sees it's flaws and other parts of the sequences before, I recommend it
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it. How sure are you that you're uniquely immune?
I would hope that others in a rationalist community would, having examined their own biases and framed their efforts in a prudent level of epistemic humility, then proceed on to engage with what evidence is available to them.
I do not claim to be uniquely immune. I know that I have been wrong in the past, and that biases have played a part in my previous errors. I aim to be less wrong in the future, and I make considerable efforts to minimize my own bias as much as I can.
On the other hand, one way to assess one's understanding of reality is to make predictions about what one thinks is likely to happen next. I think I've done tolerably well at that, and so my confidence in my model has increased over the years. On this topic in particular, I think I have a great deal of reasonably solid evidence at hand to support the conclusions I'm drawing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm entirely deluded. But I've made a considerable effort over a considerable period of time to get as good a picture as possible, and I don't think either is the case.
I've considered the possibilities you've raised, and discarded them as incompatible with my understanding of the best evidence available. I'm open to substantive arguments that I've discarded them prematurely, but that would require something with a bit more to it than you're offering so far. If you would like to see that evidence, by all means let's examine it. But if you're wedded to meta-epistemic doubt for its own sake, after more than a decade of fairly intensive conversation on this subject with a variety of opposites, that doesn't seem like a very fruitful avenue to me. I'm much more interested in trying to get the best picture possible of what happens next.
That's a great way to go about it, but it still has an issue. I'll call it the "9/11 truther effect" because I see it in conspiracy theories a lot. People will have some sort of low evidence idea in their head that is disagreed with because of a personal bias or issue of theirs, and then update later with the claim of "Ahah, I was right all along. This proves 9/11 was manufactured!" because of course, the standards and biased thinking that led them to believing 9/11 was fake to begin with also lead them to judge they are proven correct later.
I'll give you the same thought experiment I came up for with someone else.
With your knowledge as a rational actor aware that this self perception bias is both extremely common to the point of being basically universal and it's hard to see one's own bias, what would you place the odds of the neutral alien reality knowing arbiter choosing your side being correct when they check reality?
Ok, how about if we replaced you and your side with a third party discussion, with say a flame war between PlayStation and Xbox gamers or a flame war between Twilight fans. What is the odds the alien will say the Edward stans have the underdog bias vs the Jacob stans having the underdog bias?
I'd say equal, even if I'm one of the participants. Maybe my side started the shitslinging all along and I didn't know.
But good news, the answer doesn't even matter anyway if you choose the option to have principles! If you stick up for freedom no matter when and who, the alien won't rule against you no matter what. You can't be the one who started the shitslinging if you aren't slinging shit. Join the side of keeping your principles and you'll always be a winner in this alien court.
All epistemic methods I'm aware of have issues. I'm not aware of one with fewer issues than weighing evidence, making predictions, and tracking results. Certainly you have not presented an alternative, nor explained why that alternative is better.
You are pointing out that peoples' assessment of evidence can be flawed, and their assessment of outcomes can also be flawed, and that correlation between these flaws can compromise their assessments. This is true. Unfortunately, there is no general solution to the epistemic problem, and all the evidence I've seen indicates that this is as good as it gets.
When I was much younger, I was a deep-blue progressive atheist deeply embedded in the Blue Tribe narrative machine. I believed that Bush did 9/11, that he was a fascist, and that he intended to overthrow American democracy, probably by conducting another false-flag terror attack and then using it as a pretext to suspend elections. This was a quite popular belief among Blues back then, and I bought it all hook, line and sinker. I believed it so firmly that I moved to Canada and seriously considered renouncing my American citizenship. Only, none of the things I believed would happen, the things the people I was listening to predicted would happen, actually happened. There never was another major terror attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11, false-flag or otherwise. Bush was re-elected in an election I and most of my social circle was certain was rigged, but then four years later Obama trounced Romney, and power transferred as normal.
I had invested heavily in predictions that were decisively falsified. Much that I had theorized, much that I had assumed was true, came apart. I took a hard look at much of the information economy I'd been patronizing, and downgraded the voices who had clearly fed me bad data and bad predictions. I updated my model of how the world worked. Nor was there much room for ambiguity in these predictions.
In 2016, immediately following the election of Donald Trump, I had a considerable amount of savings, and wanted to invest it. I'd been reluctant to do so for years, due to distrust in the economy after living through both the dotcom crash and the housing crisis. Still, it seemed to me that my fear of economic conditions was increasingly irrational, and I thought I should probably bite the bullet and put my money to work. While researching the question online, I found Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's post-election predictions that Trump was absolutely going to trash the market and destroy the American economy. I looked around and found plenty of other economic authorities offering the same line. Having spent well over a decade immersed in Blue Tribe culture, and having spent considerable time reading and discussing Rationalist literature, I had great respect for Credentialed Experts. I sat on my money, and missed out on one of the best stock market runs of my adult life.
Again, I had invested (or not invested, as it were) heavily in the predictions of a particular data stream. That data-stream's predictions were falsified very thoroughly. I noted this, and updated accordingly: I no longer listen to Paul Krugman, nor to people who employ or cite Paul Krugman, and I place significantly less weight on the opinions of economists generally. This has stood me in good stead ever since, from holding crypto to noting the presence of inflation that was officially denied, to refusal to accept the economic case against Trump in the 2024 election.
What predictions have you invested in? Where have you been wrong? What have you learned?
I would place the odds of the reality-knowing alien agreeing with me fairly high. You are correct that all humans are biased, and that it is hard to see one's own bias. That does not mean it is impossible, and I have spent a long time testing my understanding in a fairly rigorous and notably adversarial environment, while going a fair distance out of my way to encounter and engage with contrary opinions and perspectives. I do my best to maintain epistemic humility, and to consider that I might be wrong, but at this point I do not think it is unreasonable to expect something more concrete than a looping claim of "maybe you're wrong even if you can't see how or why and no evidence has been presented". Yes, maybe I am wrong. Maybe all the evidence I've accumulated and all the predictions I've tracked and all the outcomes I've updated off were flawed in some subtle way. And if so, then the best way to know it is to see outcomes that falsify my expectations or evidence that contradicts my understanding, not to reject assessment and action due to endless, self-referential doubt.
What is the alien in this model? You are familiar with the is/ought problem, yes? It seems that your scenario only makes sense if the alien is "ought", if the alien represents moral correctness, and you are asking "are you confident in your moral judgements". As it happens, I am reasonably confident in my moral judgements and, from the way you write, somewhat skeptical of yours, but I do agree that the best way to ensure one maintains the moral high ground is to stick to one's principles. Unfortunately, I have also learned that actual principles are exceedingly costly, and I find that I cannot afford to maintain very many of them. It has proved crucial to choose which to keep and which to discard, and while you have not even begun to adequately define this "freedom" you speak of, I am pretty sure that's not one of the ones I'm holding on to. "Freedom", as popularly understood and as taught to me in my youth, is a spook, a non-entity, a linguistic confusion. It seems to me there are some specific freedoms worth paying dearly for, but the model you appear to be appealing to here and certainly have appealed to elsewhere in the thread is, in my assessment, worthless, pointless and hopeless.
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