This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm starting to think that Futurama was rather prescient in calling the turn of the century from 20th to 21st as the Stupid Ages. More and more of the facade of credibility of organizations, institutions, people, ideas, etc. that people used to believe were not stupid - justifying using them to guide their decisions to be less stupid - have revealed themselves to be deeply stupid. I hope that LLMs will become so cheap and reliable that all the previously hidden stupidity will be aired out for all to see soon enough. I just dread what unexpected stupidity will be found - sociology, [x] studies, psychology are the obvious no-brainer candidates which have already largely gone through the process, but what if it turns out even very "hard" or concrete fields like electrical engineering or chemistry are built on a bunch of stupidity that has just enough facade to be convincing to the in-field expert and certainly more than enough to the layman?
Most institutions become incoherent because of Goodhart’s Law, so as long as we disprove that one first, we should be fine.
More seriously, you don’t hear about all the industrial processes and social tricks that work on a day to day basis. Selection bias tells you about the factory which fails and not the ones which are chugging along according to the boring sort of science.
More importantly, reversed stupidity is still not intelligence. Disregard the institutions insofar as they have been Goodharted. Doubting the boring ones with no social status attached is how you become a crackpot.
More options
Context Copy link
Longtime readers will know what my take on this is.
The institutions in question have not be held accountable for outcomes in decades, don't hold their internal staff accountable, and oftentimes don't measure outcomes at all. The Institutions generally in charge of holding people accountable and punishing the misdeeds are, themselves, usually compromised as well. I suspect everyone prefers an arrangement where the institutions shamble along based on their prior reputation, everyone getting paid to maintain a facade, than risk collapsing it by exposing the extent of the rot. To the extent there are punishments and consequences they're rarely sufficient and proportional enough to truly dissuade the behavior in question.
And finally the institutions that manage to maintain integrity eventually get outnumbered and even if they are able to hold some people to account, can't possibly keep up with the volume of the problem. If that becomes widely known, even average people will be inclined to cheat/defect since not doing so makes you a bit of a sucker and there's rarely true consequences for doing so.
Re-insert skin in the game.
The good news is that in such hard fields, nature itself tends to have a correction mechanism for this, where the feedback loop for doing something wrong is tight and the punishments can be harsh.
Synthesize the wrong chemical, the reaction won't work, and you possibly kill yourself. Design the plane wrong it crashes, eventually. Reducing your safety margins too much will eventually come back to bite you, and possibly remove you from the system, and provide a warning to the next guy.
I'm sure there's stupidity to be found there, but when the real world REQUIRES you get things right in order to actually succeed, the accountability is to some extent baked into the cake, even if various institutions will try to put a few layers of obsfuscation between themselves and the outcomes.
That's exactly why if all that turned out to be a facade, it would be absolutely wild and crazy and turn my world upside down. I'd guess that the odds are low, but also, I'm quite sure that the true believers in those already-discredited fields would also judge the odds as being low for whatever field they're a true believer to.
Yeah solid point.
If it turned out that foundational papers in Engineering and studies in chemistry were false and everyone else had just been winging it and lucking out (or maintaining a massive coverup) then I would have to re-examine a lot of my core assumptions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No matter how stupid people are today, I'm sure they were dumber pre-1900, especially before we normalized hand-washing. Although if you want to call the entire history of humanity "the stupid ages" I'd agree to that.
I'd be surprised if these didn't have subtle errors that will be corrected later, but they (even the slightly incorrect old models) have already been replicated and extrapolated into new discoveries, unlike much of psychology, so I wouldn't call them "stupid" and certainly not useless.
I think it could make sense to call the ages the Stupid Ages if the cause of us being stupid was the very thing that was for the purpose of addressing/avoiding/escaping stupidity, which is sort of what's happening with academia, which are ostensibly for the purpose of something like addressing stupidity, even if, overall, we're less stupid than any other age. There's something to hubris that is extra stupid than just being plain old stupid. Especially since hubris is, itself, a concept that is taught in academia as something bad and to avoid.
As flawed as academia is, I still think we'd be stupider without it. For example, imagine if we didn't have the psychological fallacies (although even today people fall for them way too frequently, imagine if you couldn't even point them out because they weren't established, and AFAIK these haven't been debunked).
I have seen exactly 0 people convinced anytime anywhere by an argument via someone else saying they are committing a psychological fallacy. It's nice to have them labeled but I'd put the real world impact as pretty de minimis
More options
Context Copy link
I think you're right. But:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your phone works, doesn't it? Everything from the 5G radio protocols through the processors and OLED screens here isn't trivial and relies on a lot of in-field expertise that can demonstrably be taught, but isn't obvious to the layman.
If it's a facade, it's one that is at least very functional and works reliably day in and day out. Sociology isn't demonstrating it's functional correctness billions of times per second on each of billions of devices.
Right, and imagine just how you'd react if it were proven to you that this was indeed all a facade? My model of the world doesn't have much room for something like that, where something that works literally quadrillions of times a day in basically exactly the way that all the scientists and engineers and experts and my own limited expertise say they do, and yet all of those are complete lies. This would be a revelation that comes close to - not quite, but close - to waking up in a pod and discovering that you had been in The Matrix.
Significantly, I'd wager that the belief by the typical non-stupid layman believer in those already-proven-to-be-stupid fields like sociology, [x] studies, psychology, etc. is about as strong and about as confident as mine is to electrical engineering. It's both reinforced by and causal to the constant defense such people run against scrutinizing such things with basic scientific/academic concepts like "evidence" and "logic." And if those people can be fooled into such stupid beliefs about sociology, then I could be fooled into an equally stupid belief about electrical engineering.
I don't know about electrical engineering, but at least in math, I expect it's far easier to change someone's mind with evidence than it is in a social science. Even with informal proofs, there's a greater shared understanding and trust of axioms that, when put together, invalidate (or confirm) an argument.
Occasionally a math paper gets retracted for errors, but it seems far rarer than psychology, and with much less controversy. Meanwhile, many theorems are getting formalized in Lean, effectively "replicating" the proofs, many are successful and the vast majority are successful or pending.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
LLMs are one of the things making people stupider (and are themselves very stupid), so you shouldn't hold your breath on that.
I think LLMs making people stupider doesn't have much relation to LLMs' ability detect past stupidity that had been sufficiently hidden via exploiting human biases. As long as it doesn't uniformly make all the smartest people stupid (possible, but I think LLMs likely have an effect that's bifurcated on smart/stupid people in terms of their intelligence, if at all), some smart people will exist who can direct the LLMs towards detecting and revealing that stupidity.
I suppose the depressing possibility (likelihood?) is that the populace will be so stupid due to LLMs that all the revealing-of-stupidity just makes the smart people feel like they have no mouth and they must scream. Probably a better apocalypse than the AM takeover? In any case, to avert the apocalypse, perhaps the thing to do is to accelerate the revealing of stupidity and discrediting of these institutions even more, faster than LLMs can make everyone stupid (though we may already be too late on that, even in the pre-LLM times).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link