I Hate Politics and Want It to Die

Nobody should have to think about politics.
Governance and security should just be a solved problem, like running water, or supermarkets, something you can take for granted.

This year, the weather here decided it was satisfied with summer and bit-flipped to fall. This fact should be far more relevant to my life, my experiences, and my future decisions than the beliefs of some asshole in a fancy building.

When I was a kid, fall meant something. Even still I feel a few echoes - fall feels more serious than summer. Like nontrivial events can't occur during summer, like nobody looks too deeply into things during summer, and like a project started in summer can't be undertaken with a deep commitment to finish it. Though, these are all events, by which I can only vaguely point at the feeling with.

Not only should the events of summer changing to fall be far more important, even exploring that feeling should be far more important than politics. I should be able to rationally put all thought of politics from my mind and simply wonder what causes fall to feel like fall, and if that feeling in turn means anything about fall.

Instead, I get to explore what it feels like to have some apathetic narcissist living hundreds of miles away try to take all my responsibility away, 'for my own good,' they say. And succeed, of course, giving it all to themselves, naturally. To reverse this is to explore what it feels like to try to change the mind of that apathetic narcissist. As a bonus, while they've taken moral and physical responsibility they refuse to be held responsible (again, successfully) for their predictable and repeated failures and abuses.

No. That is Wrong, with a Capital Fuck. Off.

Of course this is but an ideal. Theft won't ever be completely eliminated either. However, today Anglophone society deliberately promotes politics. Just as you won't ever eliminate theft by a combination of actions that all cause more of it, promoting politics doesn't end well.

But what bothers me the most isn't the asshole. Of course assholes are going to make life hard for everyone else, and are no more eradicable than thieves. What bothers me the most is that...doesn't everyone else have feelings too? Maybe I'm just immature...but I have to ask, why? Why isn't it obvious that a conversation about how fall feels is vastly more satisfying and potentially useful than a conversation about whether Libya is worse or better off, or what the exact optimum value of minimum wage is?

Obviously, we talk about minimum wage because it makes certain voters money. Vested interest and incentives and all that.
But why is that respectable? Only a few blatantly selfish idiots feel the cash incentive. Minding your own business is actually a majority philosophy, and yet the minimum wage is considered important and suggesting that politicians are busybodies is gauche.

Why do so many side with the asshole? 

Not that I want to impose essentially poetic conversations as high fashion. You should get to decide for yourself what you find important, if you want to. Pick whatever you...feel like.

But politics? Really?


Who do you think actually feels the happiest, the most satisfied with their life, as they grow old?

This guy?

How about this guy?

Maybe guys like this?

 

Or lastly, this guy?

Response to an Apparent Critic of the Sophistic Enlightenment

A fellow who goes by Joseph Fouche said, "I find this historical reconstruction unconvincing." I disagree - I fully support all his points. His links are fantastic.

"If there was a point at which sophistry broke back into European society, it was in the 1100s with the revival of Classical learning in the “twelfth century renaissance”."

Neither do I buy this whole "everyone was dumb, and then suddenly VENICE!" narrative. It seems clear that, as a rule of thumb, everything considered good is much older than portrayed in modern times - I specifically avoided putting a date on this enlightenment. Also, Clark's arguments regarding the industrial revolution likely apply to several other revolutions. For instance, actually the enlightenment started with the Scholastics or thereabouts, but they were in the habit of reading and writing in Latin, containing the damage.


Rienzi studied Latin rhetoric, got infected with sophism, and then acted like a democratic politician. Well...yes, exactly. Also note that insofar as Rienzi was successful, it was an ad-hoc implementation of democracy.

Ha! La Wik even uses the phrase, "intoxicated his understanding," though not realizing how early that happened - they think it was due to 'power corrupts.' No, corruption corrupts, and then the corrupt seek power. (And win, because they're corrupt.)

And, more Ha! "Finally, layered on top of this was a popular ideological view of the time that property, wealth and inequality was against the teachings of God, as expressed through the teachings of the Franciscans." Progressivism - 1209 edition.

Using La Wik to support Sith talking points is a fun game.


It is tempting to tie together the Scholastics, the Franciscans, and the popular revolts. So tempting I'm going to actually do it.

Note that Francis crafted this anti-property sophism, and successfully used it to gather intellectual power. Having done so, the idea has survived as a fossil into modern minds. While it is necessary to pay tribute to the idea to get power, the idea itself barely serves anyone.

Francis got started a century after the Scholastics - it beggars the imagination to think he wasn't influenced.

"The 13th and early 14th centuries are generally seen as the high period of scholasticism. The early 13th century witnessed the culmination of the recovery of Greek philosophy."

Indeed? And when was that wave of popular uprisings again...? The first one was 1277, and they really got going in the 1300s.

At this point, as a reader, I'd be doubting that the author of the sophism->democracy thesis didn't already know about the causes of these revolts and their timing. But I didn't! Honest! (Though yes, you'll just have to take my word for it.) Until now, I was only vaguely aware of these revolts, and my only explanation was in line with La Wik's, regarding oppression. 


Returning to Joseph's summary, emphasis mine:

"Lowborn churchmen, educated but often barred by class from rising in the Church hierarchy, often provided the charismatic and rhetorical leadership for the masses. Often this was in the name of restoring the purity of the primitive Christian church as portrayed in the book of Acts where all believers were equal and all goods were held in common."

Precisely. Reading ancient philosophy is dangerous. The sophistic contaminants literally make you crazy. "In the end, they were almost always defeated and the nobles ruled the day." After the first few revolts, the peasants should have gotten tired of dying pointlessly and stopped. Their losses were easily predictable, but they failed to predict it. It is essentially a case of murder by ancient books.

Modern philosophy is vastly more dangerous. Pessimistically, atomic weapons have killed 240 000 people. Modern ideology has killed easily one thousand times that many.

As a bonus, most everyone is already steeped in it.


So what would a society purged of sophistry look like? Ironically, La Wik shows the way, (I call the three orders merchant, scholar, warrior; they seem to be natural human divisions, based on different preferred status hierarchies.)

"This was an entirely new social stratification from earlier times when society had been based on the three orders, those who work, those who pray, and those who fight, when being a peasant meant being next to God, just as the other orders."

A modern version wouldn't include God explicitly, because the scholar order has so much trouble taking God seriously nowadays, but it would the same idea of all three order having intrinsic and equivalent virtue.

Methodology of Thought-Disease Discovery; A Case Study in Sunk Cost

I have an opportunity to illustrate both how I am extracting the thought diseases, and to illustrate how they're diseases. Also, I'll find out how well my ideas hang together by explicitly writing them out. (For example, I found out that now I have an explicit model to compare, I end up more charitable and make finer distinctions between minor and severe infections.)

"Here’s a classic litmus test for the sunk cost fallacy:"

If it is indeed classic, then these diagnoses apply to many individuals. While I'm going to focus on dreeves (Daniel Reeves) here, because I can be certain of his symptoms, the analysis will likely apply widely. I'd prefer not to pick on an individual. I certainly hold dreeves no malice - to the contrary. However, this method catches easily-overlooked important details; while at first such details look like idiosyncratic symptoms, subsequent detailed diagnoses will show the important details are common in function, even if they differ in detail. Attempting to focus on probable commonalities will only cause me to make false assumptions about the details; which I should probably add to the symptoms of abstraction intoxication.

"Do you go anyway, so as not to have wasted the money on the ticket? Probably you shouldn’t."

Reeves should explain why, otherwise I have to assume a justification to be able to properly analyze the idea. Secondly, this case study will mainly involve me enumerating plausible assumptions that mean you should go anyway - the issue is nowhere near cut and dry enough to blithely dismiss these possibilities from discussion.

After hopefully demonstrating his factual errors, I will go on to show how the various afflictions caused the error, and then detail the process I went through to refine out the disease characterization.

"Going to the show lets you avoid some painful cognitive dissonance — though this one doesn’t really accord with my notion of rationality."

Goals are arational.
There is no rational justification for wanting to go to the theatre at all. There is neither a rational justification for not wanting to go.
Rather, the desire is justification.
The usual point of the theatre is to enjoy yourself - hence the 'feel like going' terminology. Desiring to avoid pain is also justification for doing so.

Of course, Reeves is correct heuristically. If your goal is to avoid pain, facing cognitive dissonance is usually more effective than conceding to it, and it won't often matter whether you had good reasons for facing down the dissonance or if you did it by habit or heuristic.

This is probably a minor case of ingroup suite disease. Rationalists are perceived as seeing emotions as in opposition to reason. Daniel thinks of himself as a rationalist, therefore believes this, therefore makes statements that amount to 'avoiding pain is irrational.'


I found this pattern because I made a habit of checking articles like these against my recent experiences, and I found that it made for bad strategy. When I analyzed the logic for errors, to try to distinguish between them being wrong and me making mistake or misunderstanding, I found that all the rationalists made the same error. (Mutatis mutandis for other groups.) As a bonus, reading the error felt the same, to the point where if I felt the feeling I could accurately pigeonhole the author on that evidence alone.

"3. You might not remember what all persuaded you to buy the ticket but the more you spent the better reasons you must have had. [...]
But mostly those are rationalizations and, rationally, you shouldn’t go."

Predictably missed the biggest one. You don't feel like going, but if you went, you'd get over it and enjoy yourself anyway. Feelings are weird sometimes. Predictable because of rationalist ingroup suite disease - they discount emotions, and so the nuances of emotional states escape them.

Appreciating your own consciousness is important so that you can tell the difference between what it feels like to not want to go, and what it feels like to not be able to enjoy the show. 'Going' and 'being at' are two different things, especially in terms of subjective associations. Here, Reeves is heuristically wrong - if you start coming up with these rationalization, it is a sign you should go and you'll enjoy yourself. If you're right to go, again it won't often matter if you make the decision for good reason or from rationalization.

Reeves could also be suffering from some abstraction intoxication, his dazzling ideas blinding him to the nuances of his own experience. He thinks in terms of science paper jargon, rationality, fallacies, prudence, and budgets. Sadly the human working memory is only so large, and these considerations can easily overflow by themselves - making them all that is perceivable, giving the impression that they're all that's there to be perceived.

Let me concretely realize the alternative conception. He should have mentioned something about being able to enjoy the show, but knowing you'd enjoy something else better. If you think about it in terms of what you'll actually experience, can the sunk cost fallacy even get a word in edgewise? Reeves finds himself strung up in a Gordian knot; for me, this concrete analysis cuts the knot.


The first step for conceptualizing the abstraction intoxication pattern was that I realized that if I couldn't think of a concrete instance of a thing, I didn't understand it. (I thought of doing this in the first place because I prefer to reason about instances and then generalize.) However, when I asked for or otherwise brought up instances, authors seemed indifferent, incapable, and occasionally even hostile to the practice. Over time I developed a counter-hostility to abstractions, which triggered the observation of how common are empty abstractions.

"The lesson here is: Don’t throw good money (or effort/energy) after bad."

The lesson here is, apparently, that thinking about sunk cost fallacies is strategically unsound. This is the essence of anti-bias bias disease. Are most individuals better off trying to out-think their sunk cost biases, or just going with the flow? The anti-bias bias sufferer never checks and doesn't care anyway.

As I note below, I don't think Reeves actually has this one; he doesn't have the full symptomology.


I found anti-bias bias by successfully getting into the habit of checking my assumptions. The exact purpose of countering biases isn't important, but it is important that you define that purpose. So: does countering biases actually serve that purpose for the layhuman, and secondly does having that purpose itself even serve the layhuman?

I try to counter my biases because I value truth above just about everything - if it were at all painful for me, it would be a waste of time. Countering biases is often inefficient.

Once I realized this, I set it as a test to anti-bias proponents, and the majority failed. They spend far, far more effort attempting to counter biases than they do reaping the rewards. No matter how virtuous honesty and correctness are, spending more stuff correcting biases than you get back can't possibly be virtuous.

"Everyone agrees on Scenario 2. Of course you do. No one’s on such a tight budget that an unexpected change in wealth of $10 changes their utility for theater.

But many people refuse (I’ve checked) to see that Scenario 1 is fully equivalent."

That's because they're not equivalent. People may not be able to articulate why, but I was curious so I also went and checked. (Luckily, I'm a people too.)

Again, abstraction intoxication dazzles Reeves. The abstract economic equivalence it sufficient for him, blinding to factors of human psychology, among others.

First, let me assume that if you lose ten bucks, the displeasure you feel motivates you to correct your error so you don't do it again, regardless of whether you lose it in the form of a ticket or bank notes.

However, after losing ticket-form wealth, buying a ticket sends yourself a message, "It's fine to lose cheap tickets, I'll just buy another." It reinforces losing tickets as a habit. Do it enough times and it will become standard; you'll habitually buy an early ticket, forget it, and then buy another on the spot.

Buying another ticket when you lose a bank note doesn't form this habit. Your brain keeps the issues separate, it doesn't associate them. Is this rational? It doesn't matter, because it happens regardless; what's irrational is not taking it into account.

Evolution is smarter than you. It is dangerous to assume your urges are dumb and animalistic unless you understand their mechanics. Out-thinking your own subconscious is very tricky.

Moreover, the pain of overcoming that reluctance to repurchase can ruin the show. Similarly, do you find that once you know the relevant psychology, you can weigh the risk of forming a habit against the joy of seeing the show that day? Taking the event out of the abstract 'sunk cost fallacy' bucket and putting it into concrete alternatives helps immensely, for me at least.

There some other non-equivalences as well. Most everyone has pseudo-lost something. I've lost my glasses on my head and as a kid I once lost something I was actually holding in my hand. (I had gotten used to the feeling and my fingers were blocking sight.) Losing keys in the coat you're wearing. Buying another ticket destroys the chance you'll re-discover your old one. Buying a ticket does not reduce the chance you'll re-discover your tenner - in fact it increases it, as you may discover it while hunting for your wallet.
Forming a habit of buying tickets on the spot is risky, as tickets aren't always immediately available or cheap. (I do it anyway; I find the costs of buying early, such as the risk of not feeling like going or losing the ticket, aren't worth it.)

Contra Reeves, situations that feel different usually are, even if you can't immediately verbalize how.


To truly support the idea that these are diseases, I have to reject the hypothesis that they're accidents. In this case, I find the patterns and predictive power to be contradictory to the idea they're random. Brains glitch now and then - if you do fifty simple addition problems, some of them will be wrong, even though you are perfectly capable of addition - you have to check your work. But nobody can predict which ones you'll get wrong. However, someone who has ignored emotional considerations, or privileged abstractions over their details, or opposed a bias for its own sake, is very likely to get something else wrong for the exact same reason.

I similarly don't like the missing information explanation, because it would mean I have privileged access to some kind of information. That would be fun, but I'm mostly just some guy with an internet connection, so it doesn't seem likely.

"3. “I’m willing to blow off the flight if it was cheap enough.”"

First note that if you've heard of sunk cost before, the intended answers to these puzzles are probably obvious to you. (On a real test I might have got #4 wrong because I wasn't feeling the wording, and Reeves admits it wasn't good.)

Getting into the habit of blowing off expensive flights is a bad idea. If you know ahead of time you'll take the flight even if you don't want to, if it is expensive, it will motivate you to do your due diligence - and possibly realize ahead of time you shouldn't buy the ticket. If instead you know, "I might ditch this ticket due to appreciation of the sunk cost fallacy," you may buy it 'just in case.' One can't be rational at every moment - and human biases are already balanced against each other. Mess with the system and the outcome is hardly guaranteed to be better overall.


It seems Reeves doesn't have an actual case of anti-bias bias disease, because I don't think he'd become irate if confronted on it. Rather, I would guess he was simply surrounded by the infected, making up the bulk of his information sources. His case of abstraction intoxication made him vulnerable to the skew, minor though it is. Similarly his rationalist in-grouping is pretty minor - I found a good example and a nearly good example of emotional appreciation. These minimal infections are consistent with my finding that his reasoning is generally pretty good. Severe cases promote secondary infections.

The Cutting of the Traveler's and Prisoner's Gordian Knot

I've observed a widespread impression that the traveler's dilemma is not solved as rationally as the arguments make it seem. Similarly, the prisoner's dilemma. (Inspiration.)

I've worked out that this intuition is correct. The solution really is to cooperate. The reason nobody thinks of that is that we can imagine a real-world situation, where the solution is deviate, and we can imagine a pure rationality situation only imperfectly...most of the time.

From the inspiration: "Assume all the usual ridiculous things: common knowledge of rationality, risk neutrality, pure selfishness, etc."

Common knowledge of rationality is the key. You're both familiar with the Nash argument to deviate, but this is a failure of meta-strategy. If you want to maximize your own payoff, you need to pick the strategy with the highest Nash equilibrium. If you're both rational and know the other's rational, you'll both pick the same strategy.

The strategy with the highest payoff Nash equilibrium is to cooperate. (Further, this strategy is fairly robust against failures of rationality.)

In essence, the classical solution assumes deviation when it says that choosing $99 'dominates' $100. Actually, choosing the deviation strategy equilibrates at $2, and choosing cooperate equilibrates at $100, and so choosing $99 implies a strategy that is worse than the strategy that chooses $100. Going further, the problem was that they stopped when they found a solution. Ratiocination requires you to keep going, to work out further consequences, mainly to check for contradictions. Lo and behold, an answer is not the answer.

I idly wonder if this is related to the axiom of choice in set theory, or if that axiom is ludicrously badly named.

Update: "What’s funny is that that’s so hyperrational that it’s insanely and literally idiotic. An actual person could never possibly do that." An actual hyper-rationality wouldn't do it either. This is probably a case of intuition sneaking in the back door. Update: apparently he agrees with the $100 strategy but doesn't fully understand why it's optimal.

Modal Reality: Yet God Isn't in Any of Them

Modal Realism's proponents must be greatly confused. Normally, the theory would call forth an in-depth post to attest to its intricate design. However the theory suffers from being forthright, so only warrants a couple paragraphs.

"Possible worlds are causally isolated from each other."

We can't ever interact with another world, by definition. By definition, modal realism is immune to experiment. It is metaphysics. QED.

I suspect delusions of this type get privileged over the competition because they erode the citizen's confidence in their own perceptions and judgments. If a physicist says it is true, who are we to question? Makes it easier when it comes time to sell quantitative easing. In reality, if one can't understand it is normally the fault of the explanation, not the skeptic.

Many-Worlds suffers from exactly the same flaw, mitigated somewhat by offering an opportunity to make fun of Rationality Czar Yudkowsky.

"The debate should already be over. It should have been over fifty years ago. The state of evidence is too lopsided to justify further argument. There is no balance in this issue. There is no rational controversy to teach. The laws of probability theory are laws, not suggestions; there is no flexibility in the best guess given this evidence. Our children will look back at the fact that we were STILL ARGUING about this in the early 21st-century, and correctly deduce that we were nuts."

Ahem.

The laws of experimentation are laws, not suggestions. The evidence says that particles have spooky comm systems, that wave functions collapse, that the past is different from the future, and that only one thing happens. No experiment has ever shown otherwise. DEAL WITH THE EVIDENCE.

It turns out that seeing no argument and there existing no argument are two different things. It is much easier to correctly describe the experimental results than to correctly explain them. The many-worlds explanation appears to assume the description is wrong, and contradicts key properties of the description. If I'm trying to exploit quantum mechanics in a new kind of car engine, the key property for me is that wave functions collapse, not whether "the same laws govern at all levels". If I get it right, the car will go from point A to point B regardless of whether I have quantum clones.

Arrogance is an occupational hazard of all scholarly professions, especially philosophy. It is imperative I keep this hazard in mind; but either the worlds are causally isolated and nobody ever need consider them; or we're both wrong, they're not causally isolated, and someone could show me an experiment reflecting the interaction. Someone can build a quantum device that does require its clones to function properly. But even without considering evidence, I can know that the fancy explanation is far, far more likely to be wrong than the simple description.

Until then, those who forget philosophy (denigrate it, in this case) are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

Nosology of Human Thought

If a statement follows logically from all relevant empirical facts, it must be true, which is why anyone bothers with logic and experiment in the first place, and so I would say strictly speaking every untrue philosophical statement must stem from a mistake empirical or logical. I also think David Stove was right. As one of those empirical matters, reasoning depends heavily on the subconscious. While it is possible to consciously apprehend and appreciate every assumption, it is painstaking work; plausible but disastrous statements are far too cheap and abundant to counteract so inefficiently. (Though I recommend a bracing dose of serious logical archaeology from time to time.)

While happily the list of conscious logical fallacies seems comprehensive, and indeed we similarly have a relatively accurate about biases, for the most part the fallacies of subconscious reasoning remain unexplored.

"We will know what is wrong with our thoughts when, and only when, we have identified (for example) all the five different things (or however many there are) which go wrong in a paragraph of Berkeley intended to prove that physical things cannot exist 'without the mind'."

Alrighty then, Stove. Let's stop screwing around and start this thing up.

As the work of a sole individual, I don't expect it to be particularly accurate for some time. The main purpose at this point is to collect hypotheses to refine.

First, a general hypothesis: the laws of logic, being an immutable fact of the universe, are easily accessible to evolution and so it isn't surprising that even the smallest children can appreciate and use them. However, humans are also masters of hypocrisy and falsehood, which over time can generate corrupt heuristics which replace previously logical habits.

This means there should be patterns to ill-logic; if I correctly diagnose an illness, it should predict how a sufferer will incorrectly reason in other situations. (This in turn means it may eventually be possible to use a list such as this to generate a diagnostic set of logical problems.)



Nosology


Machine-Brain Disease
Overview: Privileges institutions, algorithms, or recipes over their own reasoning.
Reality: Institutions and processes must necessarily be designed by humans, using judgment. Results of these processes can only be evaluated by human judgment.
Symptoms: Heavy reliance on simple statistics to explain complex phenomena. Worship of trusted authorities, such as inability to question science journalism. Becomes irate if presented with doubters. In severe cases, inability to generate own ideas, entirely dependent on logical authorities.
Source: Naive conclusion from observing abuse of authority.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.


Sacrificial Materialism Disease
Overview: Materialism contaminated with religious crusade propaganda, privileges ideals over the individuals that created those ideals.
Reality: Materialism cannot justify human-external values. If a materialist doesn't satisfy a human need or desire, then nobody is being satisfied and the effort is wasted.
Symptoms: Sacrifices material well-being for abstract ideals. Struggles with inner conflict between desires and ideal. Attempts to proselytize ideal in an attempt to assuage guilt. Becomes irate if ideal is questioned; has difficulty even considering a compromise truth. In severe cases, sufferers become bitter and lash out against non-believers for being happy.
Source: Enlightenment philosophy.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.

Note: The moral against guns and shooting found in TV and movies is a good example - shooting is opposed even when it saves innocent lives.


Abstraction Intoxication Disease
Overview: Privileges abstract logic and discussion over concrete details.
Reality: All abstractions either apply to concrete reality or are pointless. Often caused by exposure to socially-respected abstraction-intoxicated individuals.
Symptoms: Inability to or disinterest in relating thoughts or writings to actual experiences. When pressed, evades and deprecates the necessity. Inspires audience to name them sophomoric. Often absorbed with extreme idealistic discussions with little or no bearing on their actual behaviour. Becomes confused and uncertain when asked for clarification or details. For severe cases, consult an academic paper; look for extreme intricacy and an inability to write clearly, applied to describing little or nothing.
Source: Working memory limitations, see note.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown, though prevention is likely easy.

Note: When the abstractions alone overflow the working memory it can give the impression one has appreciated all there is to appreciate about an issue, by contrast to day-to-day tasks, which fit entirely in working memory by dint of practice even if not by dint of simplicity. (E.g, driving is complex but well-practiced and the problem of getting from A to B fits easily in human memory.)


Connotive Logic Disease
Overview: Privileges the connotations or associations, such as emotions or group identity, over the logical denotations of words.
Reality: While symbolism is nifty and sometimes important, symbolic meaning depends on concrete manifestation, but not vice versa. Causes extreme communication difficulties for anyone who does not share their specific associations. Often co-morbid with abstraction intoxication.
Symptoms: When confronted with logical denotations, sufferer will agree, but will not admit to using them incorrectly. Sufferer will usually be able to reason forward correctly from explicitly presented logical denotations, but revert to a contradictory stance once strongly-associated word is substituted back in. Becomes irate if confronted with with the contradiction. Sufferers can often deliver inspiring speeches, spreading or worsening the infection. Severe cases often cause a complete disconnect between words and actions.
Source: Implication of properties of human genome; error in affective balance.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.


Liquid-Phase Belief Disease
Overview: Sufferer's beliefs are insensitive to new evidence they explicitly agree with.
Reality: One of several learning-disabling diseases. This is an extremely common disease.
Symptoms: Sufferer will agree with provider of new information, sometimes even able to entertain light discussion of new idea. After a period of ten to thirty minutes, sufferer will revert to previous misconceptions, like a liquid flowing back to the shape of its container. Appears oblivious if confronted with the difference - either declares there's no difference, or insists the provider asserted their current belief. Becomes outraged about wrong test answers. Becomes scared if pressed by concrete evidence of the discrepancy. Luckily, even severe cases cannot affect acquisition of all information.
Source: Uncertain.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Possibly incurable. Best case scenario, caused by public schooling.



Right, that should do for a start.
Update: Naturally, I immediately thought of two more.



Anti-Bias Bias Disease
Overview: Privileges conscious logical deduction over everyday reasoning strategies.
Reality: Every single bias exists for a reason; you had potential ancestors without them, but they all died.
Symptoms: Attempts to consciously reason through problems far beyond their conscious reasoning skill, resulting in pain for themselves or others. Frequent inconsistencies between actions and logic due to keeping previously working solutions, no matter how biased. Declarations of superiority by reason of being reasonable. Becomes irate if the perceive a proposed solution is biased, especially if it works, in which case they issue comically dire warnings of future trouble.
Source: Enlightenment philosophy.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.


Pyrrhic Bias Cure Syndrome
Overview: A catch-all for poor decisions and false assertions that could have been avoided by being biased, instead of curing the bias.
Reality: Similarly, biases are not independent, but rather each bias takes for granted all biases formed before it, which means that curing one bias alone tends to cause more problems than it solves.
Symptoms: Rejecting common solutions and habits in exchange for even worse solutions and habits. Feeling all superior about the intention despite the inferior results.
Source: Enlightenment philosophy.
Treatment: Biases don't go away. Release it from its cage, and experiment with side-by-side comparisons between 'rational' solutions and the reflex solution; adopt the more effective one.
Cure: The cure will involve identifying which realms and goals each specific bias in fact impedes, so that curing biases can be undertaken strategically instead of idealistically.

Note: Often co-morbid with materialistic crusade disease - the sufferer believes being unbiased is an end unto itself, instead of a means.



As you can doubtlessly imagine, this list is going to get very, very long. Where a cure is even possible, it is not well known or anywhere explicitly written down. It is of utmost importance to not contract them in the first place, which means identifying and practising intellectual hygiene.



Ingroup Suite Disease
Overview: Beliefs adopted due to identifying with a group.
Reality: Human beings instinctively try to identify themselves by comparison with other individuals and groups, and additionally seek respect from groups. Humans uncritically mimic anything they identify with, and even if that fails, will often intentionally conform to perceived group norms to attain perceived respect.
Symptoms: Beliefs arranged in suites; each suites is easily identifiable as belonging to a group. Presence of one suite member predicts the presence of all members. Criticism of one suite member is seen as criticism and skepticism of all members; if cornered, no choice is seen but to reject suite wholesale. Use of counter-arguments of the form "That's not very X," where X can be Christian, rational, progressive, patriotic, et cetera. In severe cases, all beliefs will be predictable from a single question.
Source: Implied by properties of human genome.
Treatment: Isolation from or effective smear campaign against identified group. In rare cases, debunking the logical links between suite members can be effective.
Cure: Unknown.

Note: The simplest suite has two members, "I am part of a group, G" and "Everyone who's a G believes B." Showing evidence against B, causing doubt, also causes sufferer to believe they're not really in G. If sufferer depends on G-ist identity for perceived respect, effective criticism on B will be seen as an attack on the sufferer, e.g. "You're just trying to make me doubt my faith!"


Intuition Validation Disease
Source Via
Overview: Privileges feeling a certain way over accurate beliefs.
Reality: It is always possible to have accurate beliefs AND validate the intuition - usually the problem is misinterpreting the intuition. In the rare case that, for example, economic optimism is entirely unwarranted, denigrating the evidence also denigrates high-level values: do you prefer feeling optimistic, or do you prefer appreciating reality so you can do something about it?
Symptoms: Intuitive conclusions that are taken as given; the world must be shaped to reflect them. Evidence that feels contrary is rejected through argument, denunciation, or outright wilful ignorance. Rebuttals are often simple and monotone. Once inflamed, monotone rebuttals can often spread to logically unrelated discussion; feelings subside slowly, which means the feeling of being under attack hasn't gone away, which causes continuation of the counter-assault. In severe cases, criticism of intuitive idea is seen as personal insults.
Source: Uncertain.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.

Note: Ironically, in severe cases, measured criticism is a personal insult: the sufferer recognizes the reasonableness of their critic at some level; rejecting reasons for emotional satisfaction is something the sufferer themselves holds in contempt.
It is sometimes strategically sound to feel a certain way rather than to think certain well-supported thoughts. For example, unwarranted confidence can sometimes cause success where measured doubt causes failure; it is a quirk of the neuronal belief system's interaction with the behaviour bits.
Strongly related to cognitive dissonance. 


Novelty Aversion Disease
Overview: Privileges evidence for existing beliefs over evidence for new beliefs.
Reality: One of several learning-disabling diseases, possibly related to the necessity of repetition for growing axons and dendrites.
Symptoms: Imbalanced criticism of new ideas, and scoffing at evidence against old ideas, characterized by attempts to whitewash the rejection as reasonable. Age is a risk factor. Shows placid confidence in the face of overwhelming evidence, if the evidence is new. I've never observed a severe case.
Source: I hesitantly guess that it is due to being repeatedly hurt by novelty, hence 'aversion.'
Treatment: Repeated exposure both erodes the novelty and gives the idea an air of social acceptability and relevance.
Cure: Possibly incurable.

Note: It is often strategically sound both to doubt new evidence and to hold onto time-tested beliefs. However, if the novel proponent knew how to find their measurement or logic error, they wouldn't have committed it in the first place, which means both accurate and wrong proponents will find no errors in themselves. The onus to find the error and tell the difference falls on the skeptic, because nobody else is capable.


Criticism-Supremacy Disease
Overview: Privileges plausible criticism over plausible confirmations.
Reality: Charitable interpretations are almost always more useful for the reader. New ideas or ways of doing things can be extracted from even the most heavily diseased/biased/fallacious subjects, and it appears that everyone can recount usefully unique experiences.
Symptoms: Confuses criticism with refutation. Especially, confuses criticism of side-points with a refutation of the main thrust, due to associating the feeling of valid criticism with refutation. Will contradict previous refutations to pursue new criticisms. Routinely misunderstands complex ideas as simpler-to-refute ideas. Usually unable to apply critical methods reflexively to criticism: severe cases are post-modernism and nihilism; criticism targeted at own ideas results in no conscious beliefs in anything.
Source: See note; implications thereof.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown

Note: A subtype of intellectual dominance syndrome. The overarching goal is social dominance along the scholar hierarchy, at the expense of accurate beliefs - or at least accurate assertions. 



Oh hey, I found an ur-disease. I should probably record intellectual dominance as well.



Sinthought Syndrome
Overview: The idea that some ideas are morally wrong. A disease group covering many varieties of specific sinthoughts and interactions with other diseases.
Reality: You can't know a priori which ideas are morally wrong; they must be evaluated. You need a concrete realization of the idea to evaluate. If some ideas are wrong, it is wrong to (find out)/(know if) they're wrong.
Symptoms: Reliably responds to certain ideas with moral outrage or crimestop. Often refuses to believe allies think the thought or refuses to believe enemies don't. Use of, "But that implies [sinthought]!" as a refutation.
Source: Standard human genome; sinthoughts are defined by the culture you're raised in.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.


Intellectual Dominance Syndrome
Overview: Discounting the ideas of perceived social inferiors in an attempt to realize social superiority. A disease group covering many varieties of specific tactics.
Reality: The scholar dominance hierarchy is determined by who submits to whose arguments. Scholars often attempt to hack the process by rejecting sound arguments.
Symptoms: Various. Can be seen as a specific kind of ad authoritam fallacy, as the sufferer will often asymmetrically accept arguments from indisputably higher-status scholars.
Source: Human desire for status combined with scholar values.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.



Philosopher's Arrogance Disease
Overview: Radically overestimating how often you're right, due to thinking you're good at logic.
Reality: Logic does make you better at being right. However, first learn how surprisingly high is the baseline rate of being wrong.
Symptoms: Lack of curiosity and experimentation. Lack of fact-checking. Frequent inconsistencies with objective sources combined with resistance to any presentation of those sources. Severe cases are self-contradictory, resulting in behaving as if formally using logic isn't necessary to reach good conclusions. Such severe cases can cause total epistemic shutdown.
Source: Primarily caused by wanting to be seen as good at logic. Can also be caused by actually being good at logic, then concluding too much.
Treatment: Falsify the Ignorance Hypothesis. Assume you don't know until the evidence forces you to change your mind.
Cure: Unknown.

Note: Could also call it Rationalists' Disease. However, it would be solely because all the instances of the disease I've seen have been due to rationalism.


Affect Blindness Disease
Overview: The belief that one's subjective states, such as emotions, don't strongly affect one's behaviour.
Reality: The limbic system and insula are permanently wired into the rational parts of the brain.
Symptoms: Specific denials of biased judgment, often unprompted. Alternatively, passionate denials of feeling passionate. Stubbornly sticking by declarations no longer agreed with.
Source: Also caused by wanting to be seen as good at logic.
Treatment: Uncertain. Sleeping on it can be a patch job.
Cure: Unknown

Note: Reference.



Uncertainty Acceptance Disease
Overview: Excessive doubt in one's own judgments and perceptions.
Reality: In fact, most get through life fine, without any epistemic training (or equivalent) at all. Their first instincts must be good enough, no matter how objectively bad they are overall.
Symptoms: Repeatedly concluding against obvious and true conclusions. Occasional inability to even think of the obvious; insensitivity to certain nuances; they cannot ever be verified and so they're not even noticed. Inability to have confidence without corroborating evidence, even if such evidence is impossible to obtain. Hesitation in the face of unimportant decisions. In severe cases...I don't know, because: see implications of note.
Source: A result of noting the errors in the judgments and perceptions of others, and reflecting on one's self.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.

Note: This is one I've got a full-blown case of, so I can describe the symptoms in uncomfortable detail. This disease makes thoughts feel softer, the opposite of hard-and-fast. It's relaxing until there's a need to rely on that thought. It's somewhat terrifying when everyone around me believes a thing and just moves forward assuming it, and I cannot. Especially when it should be obvious.

I would say it's worthwhile overall, because concluding wrong is usually far more harmful than concluding right is helpful.



Epistemic Hypocrisy Disease
Overview: Makes false claims about how they have learned certain conclusions.
Reality: Actions are predictable based on beliefs not claimed relevant.
Symptoms: The sufferer is unable to decouple beliefs they believe should be decoupled. Inability to disavow parent belief. Inability to accept evidence about child belief due to immovable parent belief.
Source: Usu. tribal affiliation. Tribe requires parent belief; sufferer wishes to remain in tribe.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.

Note: Possibly always a symptom of another disease; not independent.



Ontological Hypocrisy Disease
Overview: Makes false claims about what they believe.
Reality: Actions are found to be inconsistent with claims.
Symptoms: Inability to see logical connection between hypocritical belief and personally relevant actions. Forms a rift between logical realms - logic and argument style will differ between realm near belief and all other realms.
Source: Advanced form of epistemic hypocrisy.
Treatment: Uncertain.
Cure: Unknown.

Note: Usu. unaware belief is not really believed.



18

Convenience Template Disease
Overview:
Reality:
Symptoms:
Source:
Treatment:
Cure:

Note:

Lottery Paradox vs. Carbonic Warming

I just heard about the lottery paradox, and at first I was a little dumbfounded that anyone could take it seriously. However, it offers an exceptionally clear demonstration of why climate modelling is generally a waste of time.

This vein of criticism turned out very rich, running into Cauchy distribution territory - measuring more weather doesn't make your models more accurate.


The solution to the 'paradox' is simple; it is a violation of mathematics. Logic demands that probabilities sum to one, and if you approximate 0.1% as 0%, they don't. Put another way, the rounding error is 100% of the measurement. Why is anyone surprised that when you sum over 100% measurement errors, you get total nonsense?

In physical measurements, the rounding error often cancels out, because the normal rounding rule (0-4 down, 5-9 up) is well chosen for randomly distributed numerals. However, in chaotic systems, a small error (2%, say) in measurement usually has a large error in prediction, even in excess of 100% after enough computation. The measurement errors amplify each other, instead of cancelling out, essentially the output state is the sum over all previous, increasingly-erroneous input states.

Say you have a 2% error in your prediction of the weather next Wednesday. Taking these measurements, this gives you a 100% error of Wednesday three years from now. To predict Wednesday six years from now, you have no choice but to use your 100% wrong Wednesday from three years from now. And so on.

Apologists would point out that weather and climate are not the same. It's actually kind of difficult to get three years from now that badly wrong because the range of weather August can produce is constrained. No snow, for example. If your prediction at three years is as wrong as possible, the six year prediction can't get any more wrong. Unfortunately, this only holds in constant climate; the whole point of studying climate is to track how the constraints move. To find out what the constraints are themselves constrained by.

Moreover, weather follows the Cauchy-Lorentz distribution, which has this property: "the sample mean will become increasingly variable as more samples are taken, because of the increased likelihood of encountering sample points with a large absolute value." In human English, the longer you look at thermometers, the more likely you'll see eye-popping temperatures, in fact so likely that they will cancel out any settling toward an average you saw before. (For example, say you have nine December records of about zero Celsius, and then suddenly you see a new record of -20C. The average is now -2.) The distribution, compared to a usual Gaussian, slices bits away from the middle and layers them on the tails. This in turn means that as temperature records continue, we'll see an endless chain of high-temperature records...and a similar parade of low-temperature records, though you normally won't hear about those. Not convinced? They proudly boast of 150 years of predictions, yet almost all the extreme records were in the last forty years, looking exactly as a Cauchy distribution should look.

(Climate almost certainly also follows a Cauchy distribution. One technical point is that it will have a median and a mode, but because we're supposedly measuring its change, the mode will be hidden and the median will have an error proportional to how fast it is changing. A more positive technicality is that a true Cauchy distribution is infinite, and temperature cannot be - one thousand below is physically impossible and getting to one thousand above would require vaporizing the oceans.)

So. We could predict climate in a general sense, though never specifically, if we already knew its meta-climactic constraints. Even then, the odds of extreme climate rise quickly the longer climate is measured - even if the meta-climate isn't itself changing.
It is almost impossible to measure climate or meta-climate, because it is a Cauchy distribution. More and better ice cores and trees rings don't help - you're exactly as likely to find a random spike as to get a reliable baseline.
Any mathematical modelling will only amplify these fundamental errors.

Truth is not Beauty's Enemy

Progressive philosophy is thoroughly twisted. As a philosophy of those in power, it serves power-grabs, not truth. In this example, it convinces the plebes to give up their own desires in favour of 'reason,' as officially defined. Since the philosophy so consistently trumpets the opposite of the truth, you can be sure that progressive power is the opposite of legitimate.

"The careful analytical thoughts I had hours before now seem, no matter what their care or basis, trivial and small by comparison."

It was hubris all along to think that these ridiculous abstractions were more than a hobby, to pass the time. The whole point of any healthy system is to put more beauty in the world. Most abstract analyses can add at most marginally, and even then only with meticulous attention to detail.

"This all horrifies the part of me that wants to believe what is true, based on some coherent and fair use of reasons and analysis."

"It horrifies me that I might like likeable things."

Progressive philosophy is specifically about having scholars in power. Naturally anything that conflicts with scholar status hierarchies must be 'horrifying,' while complicated abstract thought is disturbingly lionized.

"If I needed to believe beauty was stronger or more moral or better for the world, reasons would be found"

Uhhh...if your morality isn't beautiful, you're doing it wrong. If your strength isn't beautiful, you're doing it wrong. Imagine the counterfactual; the ugly, dirty, parochial baseness of Soviet daily life was in fact the pinnacle of morality. Imagine that the pride the Victorian Englishman had in a clean, well-maintained house, however modest, was misplaced pride. In this world, morality would be purposeless or even counter-productive. The point of morality is to improve subjective well-being, to remove ugliness and allow the true beauty of the world to shine through; if that counter-factual were true, we'd have to invent something new to replace our defective morality.

The only time to choose ugliness over beauty is in a local sense. Sometimes, it is impossible to beautify one thing except by uglifying much else. In these cases, allow instead that local ugliness to stand for all the beauty we're not destroying by allowing it to be.


Let's run the beauty bias through this purpose filter.

All these 'analytical thoughts,' such as this most disturbing conception of 'beauty bias,' are in fact barriers to realizing that the world is already quite beautiful. Aside from one caveat, a contented, rich life full of that beauty sensation is already possible for nearly everyone - without thinking one single 'analytical thought.'

You don't need to be exactly right, or even roughly right. Ignorance and happiness are far from incompatible. The only good reason for pursuing philosophy is because you like doing it. I submit as obvious that uglifying your own life by actively opposing beauty like that is not worth the minor increases in beauty others can expect from advances in abstract analytics.

Therefore, not only is being wary of beauty unnecessary, it is actually counter-productive.

The caveat being the endemic violent busybodies that will constantly shove their selfish desires down your throat, and their handmaiden sophistry, which causes most observers to take their side over yours if you object.