oThis isn’t directly responsive to your comment but- I’ve gone to that particular edge of the map and poked around a bit. I think people who avoid looking into the question for the above reason typically sound like they expect that there plausibly be dragons. This is a PSA that I saw no dragons, so the reader should consider the dragons less plausible.
There certainly are differences in individual intelligence due to genetics. And at the species level, genes are what cause humans to be smarter than, say, turtles. It’s also true that there’s no law of reality that prevents unfortunate things like one group of sapients being noticeably smarter than another due to genetics. However, I’m pretty sure that this is not a world where that happened with continent-scale populations of homo sapiens[1]. I think it’s more likely that the standard evidence presented in favor instead indicates psychiatrists’ difficulty in accounting for all non-genetic factors.
I don’t mean to argue for spending time reading about this. The argument against checking every question still applies, and I don’t expect to update anyone’s expectations of what they’d find by a huge amount. But my impression is people sound like their expectations are rather gloomy[2]. I’d like to stake some of my credibility to nudge those expectations towards “probably fine”.
I feel like I ought to give a brief and partial explanation of why: Human evolutionary history shows an enormous “hunger” for higher intelligence. Mutations that increase intelligence with only a moderate cost would tend to rapidly spread across populations, even relatively isolated ones, much like lactose tolerance is doing. It would be strange this pressure dropped off in some locations after human populations diverged.
It’s possible that there were differing environmental pressures that pushed different tradeoffs over aspects of intelligence. Eg, perhaps at very high altitudes it’s more favorable to consider distant dangers with very thorough system-2 assessments, and in lowlands it’s better to make system-2 faster but less careful. However at the scale corresponding to the term “race” (ie roughly continent-scale), I struggle to think of large or moderate environmental trends that would affect optimal cognition style. Whereas continent-scale trends that affect optimal skin pigments are pretty clear.
Adding to this, our understanding of genetics is rapidly growing. If there was a major difference in cognition-affecting mutations corresponding to racial groupings, I’d have bet a group of scientists would have stumbled on them by now & caused an uproar I’d hear about. As time goes on the lack of uproars is becoming stronger evidence.
I suspect this is due to a reporting bias by non-experts that talk about this question. Those who perceive “dragons on the map” will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up. So people who calmly state facts on the matter instead of shouting about bias are disproportionately the ones convinced of the genetic differences, which heuristically over-weights their position.
The asymmetry that @Ben Millwood points to below is important, but it goes further. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they’ve found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence A finds is very convincing to them, but then B shows how they’ve been misinterpreting it. Except this doesn’t work on taboo topics:
Many sensible people have (what I interpret as) @NickLaing’s perspective, and people with that perspective will only participate in the public evidence reconciliation process if they failed to find dragons. I don’t know, for example, whether this is your perspective.
You wrote essentially the opposite (“Those who perceive ‘dragons on the map’ will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up.”) and I agree some people will think this way, but I think this is many fewer people than are willing to publicly argue for generally-accepted-as-good positions but not generally-accepted-as-evil ones.
Many people really do or don’t want dragons to exist, and so will argue for/against them without much real engagement with the evidence.
Good faith participation in a serious debate on the existence of dragons risks your reputation and jeopardizes your ability to contribute in many places.
So I will continue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence or arguments on whether there are dragons.
Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they’ve found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence A finds is very convincing to them, but then B shows how they’ve been misinterpreting it.
This is a bit discourteous here.
I am not claiming that A is convincing to me in isolation. I am claiming that after a hundred similarly smart people fit different evidence together, there’s so much model uncertainty that I’m conservatively downgrading A from “overwhelmingly obvious” to “pretty sure”. I am claiming that if we could somehow make a prediction market that would resolve on the actual truth of the matter, I might bet only half my savings on A, just in case I missed something drastic.
You’re free to dismiss this as overconfidence of course. But this isn’t amateur hour, I understand the implications of what I’m saying and intend my words to be meaningful.
Many sensible people have (what I interpret as) @NickLaing’s perspective, and people with that perspective will only participate in the public evidence reconciliation process if they failed to find dragons. I don’t know, for example, whether this is your perspective.
You wrote essentially the opposite… and I agree some people will think this way, but I think this is many fewer people than are willing to publicly argue for generally-accepted-as-good positions but not generally-accepted-as-evil ones
I think this largely depends on whether a given forum is anonymous or not. In an alternate universe where the dragon scenario was true, I think I’d end up arguing for it anonymously at some point, though likely not on this forum.
I was not particularly tracking my named-ness as a point of evidence, except insofar as it could be used to determine my engagement with EA & rationality and make updates about my epistemics & good faith.
Good faith participation in a serious debate on the existence of dragons risks your reputation and jeopardizes your ability to contribute in many places.
Sure. I understand it’s epistemically rude to take debate pot-shots when an opposing team would be so disadvantaged, and there’s a reason to ignore one-sided information. There’s no obligation to update or engage if this comes across as adversarial.
But I really am approaching this as cooperatively communicating information. I found I had nonzero stress about the perceived possibility of dragons here, and I expect others do as well. I think a principled refusal to look does have nonzero reputational harm. There will be situations where that’s the best we can manage, but there’s also such a thing as a p(dragon) low enough that it’s no longer a good strategy. If it is the case that there are obviously no dragons somewhere, it’d be a good idea for a high-trust group to have a way to call “all clear”.
So this is my best shot. Hey, anyone reading this? I know this is unilateral and all, but I think we’re good.
Thanks. There’s an asymmetry, though, where you can either find out that what everyone already thinks is true (which feels like a bit of a waste of time), or you can find out something deeply uncomfortable. Even if you think the former is where most of the probability is, it’s still not a very appealing prospect.
(I’m not sure what the rhetorical import of this or what conclusions we should draw from it, just felt like explaining why a lot of people find investigating distasteful even if they think it won’t change their mind.)
I think I wasn’t entirely clear; the recommendation was that if my claim sounded rational people should update their probability, not that people should change their asymmetric question policy. Edited a bit to make it more clear.
oThis isn’t directly responsive to your comment but- I’ve gone to that particular edge of the map and poked around a bit. I think people who avoid looking into the question for the above reason typically sound like they expect that there plausibly be dragons. This is a PSA that I saw no dragons, so the reader should consider the dragons less plausible.
There certainly are differences in individual intelligence due to genetics. And at the species level, genes are what cause humans to be smarter than, say, turtles. It’s also true that there’s no law of reality that prevents unfortunate things like one group of sapients being noticeably smarter than another due to genetics. However, I’m pretty sure that this is not a world where that happened with continent-scale populations of homo sapiens[1]. I think it’s more likely that the standard evidence presented in favor instead indicates psychiatrists’ difficulty in accounting for all non-genetic factors.
I don’t mean to argue for spending time reading about this. The argument against checking every question still applies, and I don’t expect to update anyone’s expectations of what they’d find by a huge amount. But my impression is people sound like their expectations are rather gloomy[2]. I’d like to stake some of my credibility to nudge those expectations towards “probably fine”.
I feel like I ought to give a brief and partial explanation of why: Human evolutionary history shows an enormous “hunger” for higher intelligence. Mutations that increase intelligence with only a moderate cost would tend to rapidly spread across populations, even relatively isolated ones, much like lactose tolerance is doing. It would be strange this pressure dropped off in some locations after human populations diverged.
It’s possible that there were differing environmental pressures that pushed different tradeoffs over aspects of intelligence. Eg, perhaps at very high altitudes it’s more favorable to consider distant dangers with very thorough system-2 assessments, and in lowlands it’s better to make system-2 faster but less careful. However at the scale corresponding to the term “race” (ie roughly continent-scale), I struggle to think of large or moderate environmental trends that would affect optimal cognition style. Whereas continent-scale trends that affect optimal skin pigments are pretty clear.
Adding to this, our understanding of genetics is rapidly growing. If there was a major difference in cognition-affecting mutations corresponding to racial groupings, I’d have bet a group of scientists would have stumbled on them by now & caused an uproar I’d hear about. As time goes on the lack of uproars is becoming stronger evidence.
I suspect this is due to a reporting bias by non-experts that talk about this question. Those who perceive “dragons on the map” will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up. So people who calmly state facts on the matter instead of shouting about bias are disproportionately the ones convinced of the genetic differences, which heuristically over-weights their position.
The asymmetry that @Ben Millwood points to below is important, but it goes further. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places, make different errors, and there are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our approach that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they’ve found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence A finds is very convincing to them, but then B shows how they’ve been misinterpreting it. Except this doesn’t work on taboo topics:
Many sensible people have (what I interpret as) @NickLaing’s perspective, and people with that perspective will only participate in the public evidence reconciliation process if they failed to find dragons. I don’t know, for example, whether this is your perspective.
You wrote essentially the opposite (“Those who perceive ‘dragons on the map’ will often feel their integrity is at stake unless they speak up. Those who didn’t find any will lose interest and won’t feel their integrity is at stake, so they won’t speak up.”) and I agree some people will think this way, but I think this is many fewer people than are willing to publicly argue for generally-accepted-as-good positions but not generally-accepted-as-evil ones.
Many people really do or don’t want dragons to exist, and so will argue for/against them without much real engagement with the evidence.
Good faith participation in a serious debate on the existence of dragons risks your reputation and jeopardizes your ability to contribute in many places.
So I will continue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence or arguments on whether there are dragons.
This is a bit discourteous here.
I am not claiming that A is convincing to me in isolation. I am claiming that after a hundred similarly smart people fit different evidence together, there’s so much model uncertainty that I’m conservatively downgrading A from “overwhelmingly obvious” to “pretty sure”. I am claiming that if we could somehow make a prediction market that would resolve on the actual truth of the matter, I might bet only half my savings on A, just in case I missed something drastic.
You’re free to dismiss this as overconfidence of course. But this isn’t amateur hour, I understand the implications of what I’m saying and intend my words to be meaningful.
I think this largely depends on whether a given forum is anonymous or not. In an alternate universe where the dragon scenario was true, I think I’d end up arguing for it anonymously at some point, though likely not on this forum.
I was not particularly tracking my named-ness as a point of evidence, except insofar as it could be used to determine my engagement with EA & rationality and make updates about my epistemics & good faith.
Sure. I understand it’s epistemically rude to take debate pot-shots when an opposing team would be so disadvantaged, and there’s a reason to ignore one-sided information. There’s no obligation to update or engage if this comes across as adversarial.
But I really am approaching this as cooperatively communicating information. I found I had nonzero stress about the perceived possibility of dragons here, and I expect others do as well. I think a principled refusal to look does have nonzero reputational harm. There will be situations where that’s the best we can manage, but there’s also such a thing as a p(dragon) low enough that it’s no longer a good strategy. If it is the case that there are obviously no dragons somewhere, it’d be a good idea for a high-trust group to have a way to call “all clear”.
So this is my best shot. Hey, anyone reading this? I know this is unilateral and all, but I think we’re good.
Thanks. There’s an asymmetry, though, where you can either find out that what everyone already thinks is true (which feels like a bit of a waste of time), or you can find out something deeply uncomfortable. Even if you think the former is where most of the probability is, it’s still not a very appealing prospect.
(I’m not sure what the rhetorical import of this or what conclusions we should draw from it, just felt like explaining why a lot of people find investigating distasteful even if they think it won’t change their mind.)
Agreed.
I think I wasn’t entirely clear; the recommendation was that if my claim sounded rational people should update their probability, not that people should change their asymmetric question policy. Edited a bit to make it more clear.