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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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simply

Ay, there’s the rub.

How would you implement such a change in perspective? How could you do so without significant change in the outside world?

I’m reminded of the teen pregnancy discussion a couple weeks back. It didn’t go down because everyone decided to make a societal change. Instead, the confluence of social signaling, costs, new technology, and coordinated efforts shifted the calculus.

One of the early touchstones of the community was raising the sanity waterline. Getting people, in general, to believe true things and avoid bias. This was rightly recognized as rather hard. Quite a bit of the early rationalist canon was dedicated to actually changing your mind. (Also, wow, the community was so much more vocally atheist back then.) Sociogenic mental illness fits right in: just get people to stop thinking in the bad way.

It’s also…kind of the steelman for therapy? Back in Freud’s day the strategy was digging up whatever had stunted emotional development in hopes that it would be resolved. Today we’re a little more sophisticated and try to teach strategies and mental patterns to redirect the mind. CBT, DBT, IFS…at least there’s some effort to measure and test their effectiveness.

But that’s the bar for changing people’s minds. At best, you’re operating in the same regime as modern therapy with all its pitfalls. At worst, you’ve got to rebuild a large chunk of culture to accommodate the new idea. It ain’t simple.

How would you implement such a change in perspective? How could you do so without significant change in the outside world?

I’m reminded of the teen pregnancy discussion a couple weeks back. It didn’t go down because everyone decided to make a societal change. Instead, the confluence of social signaling, costs, new technology, and coordinated efforts shifted the calculus.

I'm skeptical that you necessarily need to change everyone's sanity at once. Effective Altruism is a good example of a movement that can get a lot of narrow work done without making everyone involved significantly smarter. You get smart people at the top directing others, and build a hierarchy that (hopefully) selects for competence.

Now EA may be in troubled times, but it has certainly had a massive impact. If we could make this sort of awareness into a cause area I think we'd get significant movement. At least better than a counterfactual without some sort of movement.

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