Episode 95: On Morality, Moralizing, and Elephant Jockeys (Round Table)
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Blue: Hello out there. This time, on the Theory of Anything podcast, I invited some of the coolest and smartest people I know to have a freewheeling discussion on morality, loosely centered on Jonathan Heights’ writer and the elephant metaphor. We take a deep dive into this idea that reason is a slave to our passions. Three hours flew by with these humans, and I appreciated their diverse perspectives so much, and I hope someone out there gets something out of this. We may be a self -indulgent podcast, but we have a lot of fun. Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. Hey, everyone. Howdy. Hello.
[00:00:51] Red: Hi there.
[00:00:52] Blue: All right.
[00:00:54] Red: We’re here for the party.
[00:00:56] Blue: Today, we are going to talk about morality versus moralizing. This is a roundtable discussion. So we’ve got, let’s see, five people here, six people here, including myself, I think. I can’t tell you how exciting this is to me. This is a strange, strange life, and I’ve got some imposter syndrome here to get this many smart people in one room to talk about whatever I want to talk about. I just, and these are all my first choices, I should say. None of you are our second choices. So before we get started into our discussion on morality, I’d like to first introduce each of these wonderful guests. First up, in no particular order, we’ve got Luley Tannit. From the Reason Is Fun podcast, please stop what you’re doing and go listen to that. It’s probably one of the coolest things online, in my opinion. They are all of the episodes, if I’m not mistaken, our conversations with David Deutch. And I can’t wait to go and binge it again, listen again. It seems like the kind of thing you want to listen to two or three times at least. Luley, it seems like a central theme of the podcast is relating to sort of a friendly disagreement you have with David Deutch about the nature of feelings. I think you’ve described it as something like an, what was the word, epistemic crisis or something similar on your part?
[00:02:35] Green: I would say that my how I described it for myself was an epistemology crisis. OK, OK, necessarily describe the disagreement, but yeah.
[00:02:45] Blue: OK, well, perhaps you could describe the nature of the disagreement if that’s possible to easily summarize for us.
[00:02:53] Green: Yeah, I don’t know how much we actually disagree as opposed to just coming from different places, kind of on the same thing. But in general, David’s view tends to be coming from this. How do we understand the world intellectually? How do we understand the abstracts, like the most fundamental things about the world? And and I found and so but what I’m interested in, especially anyway, is the inexplicit ideas, the emotional ideas, the this embodied wisdom or whatever you want to call it. And and so I’ve been trying to understand how does that sort of sphere of knowledge work, because it seems to work in a somewhat different way from the the more intellectual abstract. But maybe it doesn’t work in a different way. And maybe it is exactly the same in everything. And that’s part of the thing that I’m working through with him about when when we’re talking about conjectures and reputations, how how much is that a we have in our minds these propositions and and everything that we’re thinking about is sort of. How do I call it? Like like arguing about these these intellectual objects, these these propositional things, or is there a type of knowledge that is not in in the form of like words and theories and it’s something more like in how an organism reacts to something or and and what is what are emotions and which category do they fall into? Are they are emotions basically ideas or are emotions more like biological responses or some kind of weird mixture? And yes, I’m I’m going on a lot a lot from your question. And I know this is just introductions, but that’s that’s the basic thing that I’m wondering about.
[00:04:55] Blue: Well, no, that’s a very cool perspective. And I think we’ll I think it will apply to what we talk about here. And we’ll hope to get into that a little more. Thank you, Lily. Appreciate that. Next up, we have Ivan Phillips, third time on the podcast. We’re really excited to talk to you again, Ivan. Ivan has written a book in case you don’t anyone doesn’t know called Textbook Rationality, Rationality and Why We Should Teach It in School. Ivan, can you explain the thesis of the book and how do you teach someone to be rational?
[00:05:38] Orange: I will do my best to raise the idea big question. I’m sure. Yeah, I know. So I’ve been involved in critical thinking outreach in the Chicago area for, you know, a couple of decades. And when I came across ideas about Bayesian inference and cognitive bias, I was I was pretty shocked. I have a background in physics and I was not taught this in high school or college or graduate school. Now, I was a theoretician. So that would be one reason why maybe I wouldn’t have seen all of these methods before. But it seemed like if I’m interested in critical thinking and I hadn’t heard of these things, then, you know, how is anybody else supposed to get access to this? And I guess the what I realized is that there seems to be this cultural deficit where we don’t talk about rationality. For most people, I think, being rational means they have a reason why they did something or they have a they can point to a reason why they believe something. But that’s not really what rationality is. I mean, I think that, I mean, obviously, rationality is a word and we can get into essentialism like Boris has done on the podcast before. But to me, rationality should be more. There should be something more normative about it. Like we know something about rationality that we’re not communicating to the general public. And so it it’s not that I think that if we were to teach rationality in schools, everybody would suddenly become epistemically rational overnight. But they would at least know something more about what the process is supposed to look like. And it seems that we know enough that there’s there’s something there to teach.
[00:07:30] Orange: I think that my approach to rationality is probably not as compatible with critical rationalism as you guys would like. But but but that’s that’s the general gist of the book.
[00:07:44] Purple: I was going to say we recently did an excellent video podcast with Ivan where he he went over his Bayesian epistemology for critical rationalists and try to put it into terms that I can understand.
[00:07:55] Blue: I was just going to say, that’s why we want you here, Ivan. We want diverse voices all keeps the much more interesting conversation. Thank you, Ivan. And next up, we have Vaden Maserati. From the increments podcast, Vaden, your podcast is so awesome. I love your series on conjectures and refutation. You’re one on recycling. You get into the so -called patriarchy on another one and so many other great topics. Tell me, do you ever sick to get sick of hitting home runs? Does winning at life day after day ever become repetitive?
[00:08:37] Teal: It’s burdensome. Yeah, it is tough that we we all do have a cross to bear. And you got to struggle through. So
[00:08:44] Blue: OK, OK, I’m sure. No, a more serious question, though. After you finish your series on conjectures and refutations, which I love and I’ve gone and reread all the essays after I listen to your your your podcasts on them, is there another book you might consider moving on to Open Society or or something
[00:09:04] Teal: else? Yeah, well, we haven’t actually announced that, but we’re definitely going to do Open Society next and that is probably going to take us a decade. So hold on to your past listeners. So I got it right.
[00:09:16] Blue: Wow. Yeah, well, very cool. Yeah,
[00:09:18] Teal: conjectures and refutations, I think, has taken us four years and we’re about seventy five percent of the way through Open Society is at least two acts the size of conjectures and refutations. And we’re going to do it linearly, too. So Open Society, you can’t just skip around in the same way that you can with conjectures and refutations. So we’re planning a going chapter by chapter and just walking through yeah, Plato, Hegel and Marx. Yeah, it’ll be great.
[00:09:44] Blue: Yeah. Well, there’s so many like hidden gems in both of those books, so many essays like and that you don’t really like or passages of Open Society that kind of don’t hit you the first time, but then you go back and you read it and you’re like, oh, this is just and the and the footnotes.
[00:09:59] Teal: Oh, my God, the footnotes are so packed with insights and wisdom, but like you just can tell the man is just overflowing with things to say and you can’t squeeze it all into a central narrative. And so he has to have these footnotes that are just like emissions of interesting thoughts that go off the main trunk. So yeah, we’re really excited to get to go to that. And that’s the next one.
[00:10:17] Blue: Okay. Well, that’s that’s something to look forward to. Wow. Next up, Ray Scott Percival. I think of you as the enigmatic renegade of optimistic philosophy. You wrote a book, which is just excellent. Just read it for the second time called Myth of the Closed Mind where you make the provocative, but very sensible, I think, case that humans are essentially rational creatures. I don’t know why that’s so controversial, but even even people who are religious or might seem to be immune from reason in certain ways. I just loved it. There’s so many books out there that are the premise seems to be more like denigrating humans in a way, making the case that we’re not really that great. We’re nothing that special. And you know, sometimes some of these books make a pretty good case on there. But I just love how in your book, you really you just turn it upside down and examine all the ways that even normal humans with our Paleolithic minds might actually be rational creatures who care about truth seeking. It’s brilliant the way you turn that around. And I thank you for that. Do you think you could summarize your thesis for us in your own words?
[00:11:48] Red: Yes, I’ll try. Thank you very much for that evaluation of my book. Means a lot to me. Thank you, Peter. Like Popper, I like to start with a problem. So when I’m talking about some issue, I want to anchor it to an interesting problem. So my problem of rationality as we all know, I mean, we know that the word reason or rationality or rationality, they have a plethora of meanings. But if I if I can tie my problem or my theory to a particular problem or give it a context, historical problematic context, then I can feel that I’m saying something more substantial, that something that has information content that may well be open to critical argument itself. So I know it must seem like I’m skirting around here. But so if I say that rationality for me is not so much about getting things right and irrationality is not so much about getting things wrong. It’s about the question of the Enlightenment project. The problem of the Enlightenment project is is it possible for human beings to progress indefinitely principally through the growth of knowledge? My answer is yes, but how do I answer that in the context of the question or rather the common nihilism about people’s rationality is that we are infested, as it were, with systematic biases which continually trip us up, make us clumsy, we’re making mistakes all of the time. My answer to that, my thesis is that despite the fact that we are infinitely stupid, we’re also infinitely capable or in principle of correcting, always correcting, we’re in principle always capable of correcting our errors and then making progress. This is quite different from if you were looking at systematic biases say in
[00:14:51] Red: animals, the beasts, it’s quite different because they would revisit the systematic errors whereas we can make a study, an explicit scientific study of our systematic tendency to fall into error and then we can design neuristics and institutions which will correct, more than compensate for that, enabling us to continually grow knowledge, in other words to continually progress. So that’s where I overlap with David Deutch’s very wonderful conception of infinite progress. So that in a nutshell is where I’m coming from.
[00:15:48] Blue: Well that’s very cool and I have a couple of questions, other questions that relate to your books so I hope we can come back to that more and like I said it’s a wonderful book, I would encourage everyone to read that. Okay so thank you guys, morality versus moralizing, why are we talking about this? I don’t know, I’m just following the fun really but it seems somehow, I thought that a good way to frame this conversation to kick it off would be to look at Jonathan Haidt’s book, I forgot to write down the year but I think it was 2014 or something like that, The Righteous Mind. When I first read that book I thought it was, I mean that book made really an impact on me. I thought this guy’s got it right. I saw him, 2012 by the way, I believe in 2018 or so where he gave his lecture on The Righteous Mind which was very cool to see him in person. I love the way he expressed himself and even into a Seattle audience he asked them, okay who agrees with Trump on anything or something? I think there’s like 5 % of the audience face there he had or something but yeah that was,
[00:17:32] Teal: it was very cool
[00:17:33] Blue: to see that. Over time I guess I have sort of come away from his way of thinking about humans. I guess I’ve just wondered if it is a little bit too pessimistic which I’ll get into that in a sec. I’m thinking about the elephant and the rider hypothesis in particular. I assume everyone is kind of familiar with what that is even if they have not read the book. The idea is that behind his version of moral psychology is that we have an elephant which really makes our moral decisions for us and then the rider who kind of does post hoc reasoning I guess to justify what the elephant wants to do. I mean I can’t quite say that there’s not a lot of truth in that. I think that and I think that at least Bruce and probably others here will agree that humans like to do a lot of moralizing. We’re very tribal preachers. We like to feel superior to other people and to feel like part of a tribe and you know perhaps we still have some of the same kinds of feelings that led our chimpanzee ancestors to tear apart limb from limb, the other chimps who wander into their territory. I just find that to be somewhat, I can’t escape that there seems to be a lot of truth to this view of humans and morality that hypothesizes. I don’t know but maybe it’s just related to my overly active BS detector, overly active according to my wife but rightly or wrongly I just can’t stand to be in a room where I agree with everyone and maybe it’s why I’m not more popular. I don’t know.
[00:19:51] Blue: But anyway I wanted to get some voices, divergent voices together and let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about morality and moralizing and explore these ideas.
[00:20:06] Purple: Could I just maybe quickly summarize his view on the Elephant Rider thing? Yes, please. So I actually looked it up so I could get it in his words. So the Elephant Rider is obviously a metaphor and you kind of latched on to the idea that it’s post -hoc reasoning for what the Elephant wants to do and that is a part of his theory but really he’s talking using the metaphor for the existence of what he says is two processes, controlled processes and automatic processes where controlled processes is limited, it’s consciousness, it’s one thing at a time. He says requires language then he walks that back a little bit and says well sometimes you can do it with just images if you don’t have language and then he lays out three principles of moral psychology. One is intuitions comes first, strategic reasoning second. Obviously the intuitions come from the automatic processes which are the feelings and things like that that you feel similar to what Lily was talking about, the inexplicit knowledge and he also points out that it happens in parallel so your whole body deals with the automatic processes, what he’s calling automatic processes whereas the controlled reasoning is something that’s purely conscious and then the second principle is there is more to morality than harm and fairness. Note here he doesn’t actually mean morality itself, he means moral feelings in context and then the third is morality binds and blinds so that was what I pulled out as a summary of his view. Thank you Bruce,
[00:21:41] Blue: that’s perfect, yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention before I get on to my questions is that I think one of the other reasons I wanted to talk about this is that height has become a really prominent intellectual where a lot of just very normal people I know so -called normies know about his arguments about phones in school, it’s his big thing right now video games and free -range parenting as well, I mean he seems to think that our democracy is in peril by social media and these phones and all this and it just seems to me that I think that the righteous mind is a pretty clear distillation of his view of humans where maybe a lot of these ideas kind of stemmed from that I think that are agreed I think largely by the right and the left it’s really just a few crazies on the fringes who might want to poke holes in his hypothesis but maybe we have a few crazies here, I hope. I might be one of them, I don’t know. But anyway let’s start off with my first question here and hopefully we’ll find at least some of these questions compelling, like I said I’ve got 17 of them and I think that Bruce has some too and if anyone else wants to jump in with a question please feel free. So rather than start out with a definition of morality I’d like to start with a definition of humans. I hate height, did I say hate before? I hope I didn’t.
[00:23:32] Blue: Height says many times in the book that we are 90 % chimp and 10 % bee so meaning that the 10 % bee comes into the tribal I guess part of the way we organize our societies and all this. But is this definition leaving something out? How does this square with Deutsche’s conception of humans as universal explainers? I mean you could say well we’re a bit of both but I don’t know that doesn’t seem quite satisfying to me. I want to know what humans are. Are we just another animal or are we something special in the known universe? I want to know what my children are. So what are we? Are we 90 % chimp and 10 % bee or universal explainers? What do you guys think?
[00:24:27] Green: Why not both? Okay.
[00:24:32] Orange: We’re featherless bipeds.
[00:24:35] Blue: Okay.
[00:24:37] Green: I mean this is at the heart of my epistemology crisis so I don’t claim to have answers. That said, it seems very clear to me that we have partly this sort of animal stuff of like I don’t know when you’re hungry then you might get kind of irritated and sort of more whatever and when you’re you know in this state and what and so your your biology does affect thinking and ideas and decisions and it doesn’t affect it like ultimately in the sense that if you have the right knowledge then usually you can think your way around whatever biological default interpretation if there is such a thing. So yeah, why not both?
[00:25:27] Blue: Well it sounds like you kind of agree with some of what we’ve talked about on this podcast before. I kind of agree. I think there’s a there’s room for something like evolutionary psychology and a universal explainer hypothesis. I mean there’s some truth to both maybe.
[00:25:47] Green: I’m not sure about evolutionary psychology in particular but okay okay you’re more skeptical of like
[00:25:53] Blue: maybe a very light version of it. Okay.
[00:26:00] Orange: I wonder if there’s one distinction that might be helpful in framing the discussion has to do with I guess contrasting my view with Reyes is that when you talked about this pessimism about human reason right and you might think of this you’re looking at humans as 90 % chimp and 10 % bee as saying that humans are nothing more than that right or like saying that because we have these you know because we are predictable predictably irrational in these ways that that we are therefore irrational beings and I think I would disagree with that. I see actually a lot of alignment with what Ray said is that these are things that can be overcome right and I think that overcoming them in understanding those biases and then understanding the processes when we think allows us to see you know to overcome these barriers and I think that a lot of the pessimism that I hear in these discussions it’s almost like a reaction like oh I don’t like this talk of cognitive biases because it’s like doom saying like we will never be rational we’ll never be able to think our way past this but I don’t think that’s the case it’s I think it’s really more like as individuals it’s difficult for us to overcome bias it’s difficult for a single individual I think to be a universal explainer but I think we can create institutions or we can create groups of people we can create processes whereby we can reach that state so I think that chimpanzees are not
[00:27:52] Orange: universal explainers as individuals or as a group but humans that there may be rare individuals who are who might be considered universal explainers there might be rare individuals who are highly rational but I think most individuals have like zone late they have tasks on which they can be rational especially when they get feedback you know they can their intuitions become rational but I think that it’s difficult for humans to be rational across many spheres especially if you start bringing in the emotions and politics and that sort of thing okay
[00:28:31] Blue: so it’s just a subset of humans that are universal explainers is that fair I
[00:28:37] Purple: think he’s saying well I even tell me if I’m wrong here but what you’re really saying is is that we’re collectively universal explainers
[00:28:44] Blue: okay collectively I
[00:28:45] Orange: think I think that’s right like I think that there are areas where I can perform a task that you would say oh that’s an example of a universal explainer solving this problem but I think that it’s sort of also preposterous to think that I would be a universal explainer across every domain
[00:29:04] Teal: yeah maybe I’ll just make a few comments kind of echoing some of what Lulie said so I totally agree that with her why not both comment maybe one reason is that like when you compare any two things you have to look at a subset of the properties of those things and depending on which properties you’re looking at things will either be similar or different and so yeah you can talk about how humans are completely different from the animals in that we can create explanations and computers and all that that’s one way to say that we’re different and that we would absolutely not be a chimp in that context but you could look at other properties and you could say we’re products of evolution we tend to our close kin we have 10 fingers etc etc and then in that context we are similar to chimpanzees but I think that we haven’t fully captured what hate means when he talks about the 90 % chimp and 10 % bee thing because there he’s making a claim about group selection compared to like individual selection so he’s making a group selectionist argument with his claim about the 10 the 10 % bee thing because when he’s talking about chimpanzees he’s talking about how chimpanzees evolve to basically protect the gene and work for what’s best for the individual whereas bees work for the collective bees are a collective species and so when he says that we’re 10 % bee he’s making the claim that not only are we products of like neo -dark winnie and like the selfish gene theory that’s the 90 % but there’s also a 10 % group selection thing that means that there’s reasons why as we’ve evolved as groups to evolve religion and evolve civilizations and stuff the group selection thing I think has been completely refuted group selectionism I would refer people to Stephen Pinker’s excellent essay on edge group selection is just wrong so to the extent that hate is positively advocating for a group selectionist view I think he’s just wrong about that and he is in fact arguing for a group selectionist view because when Pinker wrote his essay hate responded to it and so hate is very much in the pro group selection camp so just to to add that to the conversation that when he’s say as we’re 10 % bee that is another way of saying he is a pro advocate of group selectionism and that’s that’s right.
[00:31:33] Red: Astonishing.
[00:31:34] Green: Is that I’m wondering whether that’s necessary for his theory because when I watched the the video that that Peter sent which I assume will be in the show notes the focus was a lot more on on the human level stuff rather than talking about it biologically like he was talking about oh if you’ve got synchronized movement then this does activate some kind of thing but then if we’ve got synchronized movement and then that makes us more be like what percentage of bee are chimps but in any case it seems like there are these two different things there’s the biological stuff like the knowledge in the genes and then there’s the sort of emergent human factors and I thought that when he was talking about the emergent human factors a lot of that did sound a lot more plausible maybe the group selection less so but
[00:32:23] Teal: yeah so I think he makes a number of different claims in his book the first part is largely advocating for this elephant and rider thing which I’m actually totally in favor of I like that metaphor I think it’s it’s pretty close to true and just maybe to comment on something Peter said earlier it’s not the case that the elephant is entirely in control and the riders just along for the quote ride there is some role for the rider the rider does guide the elephant in some sense so it’s not just a unidirectional phenomenon so I like that component of his thesis but then when he goes to explain why we’re moral creatures and why we have a refined sense of morality then he has to talk about psychology and that’s where he starts leaning on the group selection stuff because the group selection claims to be an explanation for why our psychology is what our psychology is we’ve evolved because of group selectionist reasons to favor the well -being of the group over the individual and that’s how these kind of themes are are related so I sign off on the first half of his thesis but not the second half are the arguments against group selection do they also apply to mimetic group selection I
[00:33:31] Teal: was going to ask that no they don’t so I think mimetic group selection is very interesting and let’s just be clear what we’re talking about when we’re talking about group selection so group selection is essentially taking the idea of like genes are replicators like the fundamental property of evolution as we all understand it and then just making all of those properties very vague so you don’t have a concrete thing that is a replicator like a gene you have these more nebulous groups that split off and fracture you don’t have this uh yeah but so memes is like a separate north it’s a separate thing so I like the idea of memes as being an explanatory reason why humans aggregate and do stuff in groups and I’m pro pro meme meme stuff but group selection is not that so if you like memes then you shouldn’t like group selection essentially so
[00:34:24] Purple: let me just disagree with vaden here a little bit nice
[00:34:28] Teal: excellent
[00:34:28] Purple: so um I agree with the way vaden is understanding group selection I completely agree with vaden so I haven’t really found anything he’s saying I disagree with but when I read Haydn Haydn I do not take him as advocating for the kind of group selection that vaden is saying is wrong I think Haydn’s theories don’t interact well with meme theory that’s part of the problem right that he believes in some sort of group selection and he’s a little unclear what it is um but I think that you could easily as someone who if you believe strongly in group selection through memes I think that actually fits with what Haydn’s saying very well
[00:35:11] Blue: I interpreted the 10 percent b thing as more saying that that’s how the humans think about morality at the level of the tribe or the group rather than the individual but maybe that’s very related to the whole group selection it
[00:35:34] Teal: is and it’s related to memes too right yeah so yeah let me just read a quote from the book so on page uh I don’t have the page numbers unfortunately um uh no page 13 he says but human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups as Darwin said long ago the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play and the implications are profound so this is in the first couple pages and then he expounds upon this in the later half of the book the major difference between group selection and meme theory is that group selection posits um that the reason we have the psychology that we do is because of uh groups competing with other groups not ideas competing with other ideas that’s a major distinction it’s actual groups of people competing with other groups of people um and so it’s very much on the tribal group stuff uh they don’t talk about the power of ideas or memes at all um and that’s uh I think one of the the big problems with group selection there’s many more no
[00:36:39] Blue: that’s interesting so you’re saying that that that that meme that the whole idea of of memes is in conflict direct conflict with the idea of group selection and that this is this is something that that like he said pinker and height disagree yeah
[00:36:58] Teal: well you can um you can go to the source so the concept of memes was invented by Dawkins and Dawkins is also one of the foremost um critics of group selectionism so he wrote an excellent essay critiquing E. O. Wilson actually that listeners can look up um because group selectionism uh attacks the very core of the selfish gene theory it says that it’s not about genes as replicators it’s groups as replicators Dawkins when he talks about memes doesn’t um oppose memes with genes he just says let’s take the same idea that we’ve come up with genes and apply that to ideas as well and that can be very fruitful but it does come into direct conflict when you say that it’s not the the fundamental unit of replication isn’t ideas or genes it’s groups of people groups that’s the the core idea of group selectionism um that’s why they they come into conflict yeah
[00:37:51] Blue: that’s interesting what what do you think Ray are you a are you a meme guy or a group selection guy
[00:37:57] Red: oh i’m totally uh pro meme
[00:37:59] Blue: yeah
[00:38:00] Red: well i think popper uh beat Dawkins to it with the his concept of world three
[00:38:07] Blue: yeah okay
[00:38:09] Red: and it’s a much more powerful analytical tool as well because it brings in logic and i thought bruce made a good point um about how heights psychological approach doesn’t interact well with the you know the the existence um or behavior of memes in a population memes not genes um and that’s one of the things i’ve tried to bring on board in my analysis is treating the evolution of memes meme systems of memes and looking at in my treatment of you know whether we can overcome our errors uh not only on an individual psychological basis but can so -called irrational systems of ideas or memes be corrected and it because there’s a competition going on in that that level of existence or world three um why why does heights approach not address that and it can’t because it can’t bring in the psychological effectiveness of psychology but psychology isn’t reducible to psychology it is something uh separate or with autonomous properties and relations it’s something that you the human mind uh on a psychological level interacts with and this is something that’s missing from uh well most accounts of rationality versus irrationality
[00:40:11] Purple: i really feel like his theory the way he writes it out i i can’t really disagree with vaden they’re technically speaking there’s no such thing as group selection because you’re not really selecting the group but there’s often not a lot of difference between group selection sorry between a meme and a group and so meme selection may look like group selection in certain circumstances and i i kind of suspect that’s what’s going on here and i think it goes a little deeper than that so if you were to try to understand why do humans even have moral feelings in the first place right i mean like there’s you could make a a case for um there’s just no reason for us to using regular um you know neo darwinian evolution that we would care about people who aren’t are you know that we aren’t related to um and that just doesn’t really happen in the animal world you can find cases of that but it’s almost always because they there’s been some sort of selection that’s taken place we’re normally in that group that would be their own genes that they’re defending because it would be a group of in where the genes are all similar within that group they’re all siblings or cousins or something like that right in selection yeah
[00:41:26] Purple: in selection so there is something weird going on with humans now i would say that that’s you know meme selection that that is what’s going on weird with humans animals do have memes but human memes are so much more complicated because we’re universal explainers but the way that’s played out in real life has happened because we have some genes that have evolved to allow for these memes to happen and exactly how that happened i don’t know it’s not too hard to make a few get good theory guesses but i think that’s it’s the least to me that’s what he’s talking about he’s he’s theories missing this meme component that’s necessary to make sense of it and so you end up talking about group selection which is the closest you can get to talking about it if you haven’t really refined your theory into a meme theory
[00:42:11] Teal: no i think kin selection can get you pretty far too i think both kin selection and meme selection offer some explanatory insight into what’s what’s going on like there’s the the subset of bugs i forgot what they’re called like i think starts with an h but bees and termites and wasps and over four colonies they all fit into this where you have like one queen and then a whole bunch of drones like worker bugs and the reason you have this strange dynamic is just due to how the genes propagate so it turns out that you have as much care i can get my genes into my sister in this circumstance the same way that humans get their genes into their kids so you have this effect where you want your mom to make as many sisters as possible and that’s how you propagate your genes and it’s a very funny thing because it would be like going to the bar and picking up somebody to impregnate your mom so that you get another sister but that’s the the drive for this species of bug and this is kin selection and this is a way to explain why
[00:43:24] Teal: worker bees and drones tend to the group in that sense and why i’m talking about this is that there’s no memetic explanation here right we don’t posit that bees have ideas but yet we can still explain certain kinds of behaviors through through kin selection and so too with some kinds of behaviors and in human beings as well where you’ll do some nice things for your brother and then you’ll do maybe half as many nice things for your cousin and then eight as many nice things for your second cousin etc etc that doesn’t go all the way i think you need a meme theory as well but i don’t think that one is necessarily the be all end all that can explain everything i think kin selection goes some of the way memetics goes further but group selection doesn’t take us anywhere
[00:44:08] Blue: okay kin selection is valid verb selection not correct yeah
[00:44:15] Teal: and just i’m kind of stating that without giving many reasons for that so i’ll just put a pointer so listeners should google steven pinker the false allure a group the false allure of group selection for an excellent essay and then many responses to that essay to see why i’m coming out so strongly against group selection
[00:44:32] Blue: okay well maybe i’ll move on to the next question then unless anyone else has has anything to add uh so in heights writer and the elephant hypothesis he says the writer’s job is to serve the elephant this goes back to uh kind of what vaden was saying about how it’s a two -way street or in humes words uh reason is a is the slave of the passions so moral reasoning is not about a debate between a platonic i between platonic ideas but about something post -hoc after the elephant has made up its mind he has numerous examples to illustrate this one of the um most memorable is the the twin or not twins but brother and sister who decide to sleep together and then you know everyone says oh that’s so wrong but then you know no one can people kind of have to make post -hoc explanations for for why it’s it’s so wrong and and he makes makes a big deal about those kinds of studies uh but anyway he he places morality in the context of moral foundations theory where we base our moral thinking on innate psychological foundations thinking of six of them such as care harm fairness cheating etc uh seems to me there’s a lot of truth in this but i can’t believe um it’s the whole story uh you know what is height even doing when he he’s he’s writing the book is he the the rider controlling the elephant how how do we how do we control our elephants what do you guys think
[00:46:21] Green: why do we want to control the elephant okay what do you get out of controlling it
[00:46:28] Teal: okay
[00:46:29] Green: no it’s an actual question like what’s the oh i think
[00:46:32] Teal: i think there’s all sorts of emotions that need to be bridled and controlled i think anger jealousy uh rage if uncontrolled disagree
[00:46:40] Green: really yeah very strongly yeah i think i think the the the bad thing about uh those emotions it’s not the emotions themselves it’s what you do with it or the way that you use it to control other people but the emotion them itself is like good uh yeah that’s what i mean when i say it has
[00:47:00] Teal: to be controlled right the consequences of the emotion have to be controlled um i want georgia to know what to do when she’s feeling angry that’s appropriate um i don’t want her to not feel that but i don’t want her to punch her uh kid in daycare for example
[00:47:17] Green: my my sense is that the the the problems with emotions and this might be too far away from the original topic but but the the problem with emotions usually comes from the uh the impacts of trying to control them but whereas when they are um uncontrolled then that allows your ideas around them to meet reality and then update and so there’s a way of having emotions that doesn’t require like controlling them in order for the appropriate thing to happen
[00:47:49] Teal: uh i mean i pride myself on emotional control frankly i i want to be able to not spin off into a rage whenever i feel angry i want to be able to recognize that emotion feel it that’s that’s okay but then act calmly and appropriately and i think arguably part of the like what we mean by the word civilization is controlling our emotions collectively so that we act in a civilized decent um uh way that is mutually beneficial rather than mutually destructive that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to feel them or we don’t have to like pretend like they’re not there it just means that we don’t have to let them bring out the absolute worst in us which i think takes effort i don’t think that just comes naturally
[00:48:37] Green: so while i would love to have a whole podcast on this uh topic maybe just you and me yeah but actually it ties into the the more fundamental thing of what um uh height is talk hate now now you guys confuse me i think it’s height but i don’t know um uh which is which is about and also relating to the um popperian way of thinking about things is this idea of control and whether that is effectively authoritarianism or does this counters not authoritarianism because oh the emotions aren’t ideas anyway or that they don’t count in the discussion because if you’re if you’re saying like yeah if you talk about like oh i’m trying to control my ideas about um doubting god uh then it becomes quite clear that like trying to control them like that’s not how the rational process of coming to uh like weighing up different ideas is and and so it’s not about controlling it’s about like trying to understand it and trying to understand the merits of the different things and and and so to draw this back to height uh this is the question that i’m asking which is is the thing that we want to do to control the elephant or is the thing that we want to do to better understand the elephant to help uh introduce the elephant to you know new information such that its impulses can function would
[00:50:06] Blue: you say the elephant is synonymous with in explicit ideas that
[00:50:12] Green: that’s how i’m understanding it not having read the book
[00:50:14] Blue: okay
[00:50:16] Green: having read the book i actually think that that fits
[00:50:19] Purple: pretty well
[00:50:20] Blue: yeah yeah so i mean i i think kind of what i kept thinking is well maybe there’s some really there’s nothing necessarily wrong with in explicit ideas i mean if you have an inner voice telling you not to sleep with your sister and you you don’t can’t really articulate exactly why well maybe there’s some pretty good reasons in that inner voice maybe you should listen i don’t know i mean uh but i
[00:50:49] Orange: was i was just going to say one of my favorite books on cognitive bias is uh mistakes were made but not by me by carol tavris and elliott aronson and it’s it’s about this process of rationalization where you for you know you have inexplicit ideas or emotions that cause you to leap to a belief or or maybe you just at random advocated for one side of a debate and this causes you to then sort of commit like i i’ve made this idea public now i have to defend it and so you it’s like you fell off one side of a pyramid and it’s like the slippery slope and that’s so you you end up reinforcing an idea just just because you had made the idea in the past right um so to me when i think of the elephant and the rider that’s what i’m thinking about is that for whatever reason it could be something um that’s you know maybe it’s an instinct maybe it’s something that’s due to my evolutionary history maybe it’s something from my upbringing or some some traumatic experience causes me to hold some belief and then the rider then is just someone who’s going oh well i have to justify this to everyone else like it’s behaving as as a as a mechanism for explaining why i hold this view or why other people should not blame me for for this for this choice
[00:52:27] Orange: and i think that that this is a i think everyone does this to some degree and and that it’s it’s something it’s not something that you cannot overcome right i think that that that having the right attitude to this is is more important um in in regard to what lulie said about like whether we should control the elephant at some point i the way i the way i i think of things is i like to make a sharp sharp distinction between epistemic rationality like what it is what is it rational to believe about the world given the evidence you have and instrumental rationality like how do i win and my feeling is that we we want we should try to be as realistic about the world as possible and have a more the the most accurate picture of the world that we can but when it comes to like how do i win i don’t know that there’s an objective answer to that and that if you were to ask well you know um what is winning maybe maybe that is just saying hey what does the elephant want right is there is there a better answer than the elephant wants what it wants um but what what i’m most concerned about is you shouldn’t have what the elephant wants lead you to be delusional about the way the world really is i
[00:53:59] Teal: just want to read another quote from from hate i feel like we’re not maybe fully um doing his thesis justice uh so one thing that he says is why he chose the sorry one thing he says with regards to why he chose the rider and the elephant metaphor um and why he didn’t choose the master and slave metaphor um which i think is interesting uh thing is is the following so a slave is not supposed to question his master but most of us can think of times when we questioned and revised our first intuitive judgment the rider and the elephant metaphor work well here the rider evolved to serve the client but it’s a dignified partnership and i like this it’s much more like a lawyer serving a client than a slave serving a master so good lawyers do what they can to help their clients but they sometimes refuse to go along with requests perhaps the request is impossible um perhaps the request is self -destructive um and the elephant is more powerful than the rider but it’s not an absolute dictator um so i just think it’s it’s important to think about metaphors he didn’t choose and why because when he says the rider and the elephant he’s not saying the elephant is entirely in absolutely in control and the rider’s just a flea on the back of the elephant trying to um to get a powerless flea it’s it’s more like a lawyer -client relationship so just with that added context i think it’s important to um include that yeah
[00:55:19] Red: i thought that um i think we can learn something from the stoics here i think we can bring the stoical idea um to bear on you know what is the elephant uh the tendencies within the elephant are um and but also uh sort of framing that from a critical rationalist point of view as well so what we would so the stoics that had the idea that all our emotions were full of ideas and our ideas are full of emotion so that they’re intimately woven together in every moment of our waking cognitive life now the critical rationalist comes in and we then frame those ideas as conjectural theories so there are theories that um frame or frame or make sense of if you like what we are feeling so we’re angry at something or someone for some reason in a given circumstance but all of that the someone the circumstance are all um all must be interpreted through a conjectural net that’s where theory comes in uh i don’t so it i thought that um um i made a few notes with regard to height’s um points about empathy i think he places too much weight on empathy in his assessment of the effectiveness of sound argument and reason um so if we’re coming if we’re coming at the the idea that the elephant’s emotions are filled their replete with reason because the replete with conjectural theories then i don’t see why height should emphasize empathy for example as a way a sufficient and necessary way in which sound argument can have
[00:57:59] Red: well can can convince our audience if you like so i made a couple of points one was that good arguments by our enemies are accepted nevertheless i mean in in treaties on war for example it’s well known that one of the first principles is don’t underestimate your enemy you should pay attention to their strategy what are the what are they thinking what are what are saying what’s their plan um and their assessment of the relative strength of you uh vis -a -vis them your enemy could very very well uh cause you to revise to correct your errors your hubris in going into battle and make you uh more susceptible to accepting uh terms of peace or surrender another one another point i thought was relevant here was that it takes reason to identify who and who is sorry who is showing empathy and how someone is being empathic so you know it it again we’re using the stoical stroke critical rationalist way of framing what we understand to be the passions of the or the elephant that that would that was the point i wanted to make
[00:59:43] Purple: thank you i’m curious how this contrasts with david deutch’s ideas about morality from the optimism chapter of beginning of infinity he seems to really tie in morality with with problem solving i think in a very very sensible way i mean all evils are due to um insufficient knowledge i you know it doesn’t really matter i mean kind of going back to louis point a little bit i doesn’t really matter what you’re you’re feeling inside i suppose i mean it does matter but you if you’re it matters from the perspective of of uh solving problems is what what really really matters rather than uh intent um is this do people see that as is opposed to height’s ideas about morality or can these be um uh rectified i guess i
[01:00:50] Blue: understand hiate as talking about only and he says this the psychology of moral moral feelings right he is not he actually makes a distinction between true morality and moral feelings that they aren’t the same thing he’s trying to work out how do people actually interact with their moral feelings he’s not trying to work out what’s actually the right thing to do you know what is the actual morally correct thing to do because of that i guess i don’t see deutch’s ideas or and hiates ideas about morality as um at odds with each other because i see them as talking about different things that would be my my view
[01:01:33] Teal: third point agreed yeah maybe just to echo that i totally agree with bruce um on that point um yeah height doesn’t talk too much about objective morality but it is kind of baked into his thought experiments though right because his thought experiments are set up such that they’re fundamentally icky and we all have like an intuitive uh that’s wrong reaction so maybe just for the listener one example that he gives is a scenario where a brother and sister um go out to a cabin and then end up making passionate love for a whole weekend with no kids and no negative consequences um and he asks a bunch of people what do you think about this and a lot of them say it’s wrong uh but then upon probing they can’t really give a reason why they think it’s wrong because he set up these all these thought experiments to not have any negative consequences that’s the main reason why the reader uh and the people upon being argued with can’t really give a good justification so the very fact that he set it up such that there’s nobody gets hurt and there’s no negative consequences presupposes a consequentialist objective morality right um and that i think just um shows that even though he doesn’t talk directly about uh where objective morality comes from as deutch tends to deal with uh he still kind of takes it as a given um even if he doesn’t spell it out explicitly um but uh but yeah i just want to echo what bruce said which is i don’t think these are in conflict i think they’re just studying different aspects of the the the phenomenon i completely by hate uh hate hate um john good old johnny’s thesis here in the sense that uh i think when people think about the word emotions they tend to think about things like love fear anchor jealousy etc and then the relationship between those emotions and reason um uh is maybe a bit hard to see but i think that’s just because we’re not thinking about the full suite of emotions um i think more epistemologically relevant emotions are ones such as a confusion or curiosity or obsession obsession with the problem in particular um or just interest in general these are all feelings first right these are fundamentally feelings these are fundamentally emotions but they’re so unbelievably epistemologically relevant because that it i go based on those feelings what i’m interested in what i’m curious about what i’m confused about what uh what i want to make sense those are all feelings first and then that determines what i put the rider towards what i start putting my more logical um rational um more conscious uh processing towards but that’s entirely my little rider sitting on top of my elephant of of confusion right and so i just think that when we think about the word emotions we should make sure to keep in mind those other emotions as well which are far more epistemologically relevant than the ones we tend to think of i
[01:04:27] Teal: wanted to actually go back to luli’s question because i i wanted to see if if we could i could maybe reframe it a little bit and see if i could put it back out there again so if i understand luli’s question she was asking um do we actually need to bridle the elephant here meaning the inexplicit ideas or the feelings however you want to try to frame it here and vaden initially said yes but upon a little closer inspection what vaden really meant was you should bridle what you do with those emotions not necessarily bridle the emotions it’s natural to feel angry etc i would actually like to maybe ask the question a little more directly using a thought experiment that comes from philip k dick’s book uh do androids dream of electronic sheep which was the basis for blade runner imagine in the future we have a device and i see that reason why this device couldn’t exist um that you can actually dial in whatever emotions you want so if you’re feeling an emotion and you find it objectionable you don’t you don’t need to accept the emotion and then find something productive to do with it you can change the emotion if you so choose
[01:05:38] Purple: um so let’s say that i’m feeling very jealous and i that’s an emotion i don’t want to have i’ve reason about it i decide you know what i don’t want to feel jealous anymore so i use this device and i make the jealousy just go away i’ve literally suppressed it and i’ve replaced it with something else using this advanced technology would that be a good or a bad thing and should we bridle emotions if we could so we’re not i’m not asking about bridling our reaction to the the emotions i’m asking about the emotion itself now
[01:06:09] Orange: oh so it’s a chesterton’s fence deactivator is that what this device is that’s exactly what i was thinking
[01:06:16] Teal: i guess yeah just what what’s your thoughts about that or an activator i guess right to turn emotions on if you don’t have them yeah it could be true right just
[01:06:28] Purple: i don’t know if you guys have actually read the book but in the book um the the wife of i forget the main character’s name but the wife feels upset and depressed because of the state of the world and how pessimistic it is and so many people had died in something and so um was it decker who’s the who’s the main character but he
[01:06:52] Blue: decker yeah
[01:06:53] Purple: he says to her well just dial yourself happy because they have this it’s literally a little dial like a phone you know the old skit style phones and she says no this is an appropriate emotion for this circumstance i should feel depressed over the fact that so many people have died and that we’re in a bad state so she actually chose not to change her emotions because she had reason this was an appropriate emotion but it’s really the device itself i’m asking about could there be emotions where so in this case maybe that was the appropriate emotion so she didn’t she was right not to change it but could there be circumstances where we have emotions that actually are inappropriate and it wouldn’t make sense to change them
[01:07:31] Blue: what seems to me emotions are so intertwined with who we are as people that i’m not sure that i would want to mess with that i guess that’s my initial thought
[01:07:47] Green: either emotions have epistemological content as in they are some kind of reflection of our models of the world in which case changing them sounds somewhat horrific to me because you’re just sort of changing like it’s it’s a basically a mind control device and it’s just like if we think of emotions as just um products of the inexplicit ideas or related to inexplicit ideas in some way then it’s just a mind control device so that seems weird to me um and then if emotions are something else then i would want to look at okay well what is that something else and what does that mean and i my current guess is that actually it is a mixture of these things so there are some feelings you get like physical feelings that you get that are more um like biological or kind of low level or something like um hunger or um uh pms or something that affects your thinking kind of because of how we interpret uh what happens like if i’m hungry i have a problem um and and so and so there’s the the sort of the raw sensation so like do we want to change our raw sensations i don’t know like it depends what we’re doing with them like maybe like if you don’t mind your raw sensations and you don’t mind being hungry and you can think well without it then maybe that’s fine i think there’s a genuine question of how could it possibly be that these physical biological processes affect our abstract reasoning and decisions what what is the mechanism there and that that’s the thing that i’m curious about uh but it certainly seems to me that there is some relationship between those two
[01:09:38] Teal: yeah i guess i just want to um say first of all that this hypothetical device is not hypothetical we already have it for certain emotions so for example i was going to say that actually
[01:09:49] Teal: yeah yeah for example three four methylene dioxide methamphetamine aka mdma aka ecstasy is a great device for triggering a certain subset of emotions such as love and empathy and joy and as a frequent practitioner of said device i think it’s great um and i think that uh there’s nothing wrong with putting yourself in environments in states where you artificially or technologically kindle certain emotions um because one is just fun not in the dutch incense in the raving at two o ‘clock in the morning sense it’s a lot of fun um and uh and two after the technology dissipates um you retain a lot of those skills um you retain a lot of the the the memories of what it felt like to feel that way and that’s why it’s often used in in ptsd treatment for for example um but i guess i would just want to the reason i’m saying that is i think that we’re being a little bit too broad when we talk about emotions in general different emotions have different values and different purposes and different reasons why you may want to feel more of it or feel less of it um and i think that uh yeah i’ll talk about mdma because it’s clear but meditation is a bit of a slower technology but it does work as well there’s i believe meta loving kindness where you can actually just bring about the feeling of love just by um through the practice of meditation and i think that’s great i would love it if everybody around me felt more love all the time i wouldn’t love it if everybody around me felt more jealous and angry all the time so i think we need to distinguish between different kinds of emotions and i know saying that is what’s gonna ping lulule a little bit but um but i uh i think different emotions have different value uh different purposes different uses some of them i want to feel more some of them want to feel less some of them i want to feel in particular circumstances etc etc and so there’s not i don’t think one size fits all solution to this to this question so
[01:11:48] Purple: let me just throw out there’s actually a second part to my question in probably the most extreme example of this case would be some like someone who has ocd where they have feelings that control them that if they’re going to step on a crack then they’re going to break their mother’s back so they have to step over every single crack or whatever right and they logically their universal explainer knows it’s not true and yet they find that they just have to keep doing this and we really don’t take such um impulses we see them as something that you should be rid of basically right and then a lot of the technologies around learning to try to change those circuits in the brain so that they lessen and become less strong so that it’s not such a strong impulse anymore so i i actually feel like i agree with what the way lulie framed this that it’s kind of somewhere in between that i think we can find extreme examples where yeah you absolutely do want to overcome the elephant and you want to bridle the elephant directly not just the the consequences the elephant itself needs to be changed but i think that the elephant is so valuable in so many things that um it would be a wildly dangerous thing to just decide i’m going to decide what my emotions are for every single moment that would probably be very poor survival value for you so um i think i have to agree with the way lulie framed that that it is somewhere in between is kind of where i’ve come to myself
[01:13:17] Green: i don’t know if i would frame it like that um to me this is just exactly the same question as is coercion ever justified like is is it ever okay to have an authoritarian way of deciding between ideas and so if you say something in between it means yes then sometimes
[01:13:39] Purple: that that is what i’m saying so in the case of ocd i’m saying yes you should absolutely coerce those feelings away if you’ve got a way to do that but that’s a fairly extreme case right like i’m not advocating in general for this but i think that you can pick really extreme cases like ocd where it would make sense to if you had a way to a technology where you could turn it off you would right you would be able to reason this is not good that i am this way that i’ve got this problem and i need to overcome it i need to change it in some way
[01:14:09] Green: to me this sounds like um before when we had slaves then people were saying oh if we stop having slaves then this is going to harm the economy and so on and so forth um but then we actually found solutions and actually the the economy is better without some proportion of the population as slaves and so i think to me this is more of a how do we solve the problem like i like if i had ocd i maybe i would want to like push the button to get rid of it but only because it’s a practical problem and i can’t think of the the solution but if it were the case that actually doing this uh coercing thing is slower is less effective uh is is less moral like it’s more unpleasant and so on uh then you know i wouldn’t push the button i would do the fast moral effective thing instead and um and i think that yeah so maybe we haven’t found the solution to all of that so i yeah i think maybe sometimes coercing uh allows a um less coercion overall because now you have a functional life and so on yeah and so sort of surface level but uh but ultimately and i wanted to put in in mind ultimately because we are talking about morality here uh there is a solution to this problem problems are soluble uh there is a way forward that doesn’t suck
[01:15:33] Orange: um i have a question for for literally about coercion like what counts as coercion here so if i have ocd isn’t my ocd coercing me
[01:15:46] Green: yeah which is why but
[01:15:49] Teal: then treating it would be doing away with coercion not coercing
[01:15:51] Green: right it depends i think there’s a there are different types of of treatment and it sort of depends on the exact details uh so first of all yes like there is some like uh i could imagine that the ocd is coercive to an individual i’m sure that not all people with ocd find it coercive but i’m sure like a great deal of them do because that’s why we have this label for it in the first place um and i could imagine there’s like treating these symptoms and then there’s uh addressing the sort of the underlying whatever maybe there’s some kind of psychological structure i don’t know it depends whether it’s biological primarily or whether it’s idea -based primarily i’m kind of inclined to think that a lot of these biological things can also be affected by ideas um so i i would like to think that if i had ocd then i would find the underlying uh idea -based thing and address that because i have a misconception there is a misconception that i’m holding and it’s not the surface level because more surface level i know that if i step on the cracks everything is going to be fine but there’s some in inexplicit world model there that is uh mistaken i don’t know if this answers your question i
[01:17:06] Orange: i guess i’m wondering if if coercion means that instead of being reflective across like a range of different motivations and ideas that we’re just being dominated by one of them instead is that what you mean by coercion rather than because something’s going to win and then how do i how do i just how do i describe the winner without saying the winner was coercive
[01:17:36] Green: something like true persuasion or like looking at all of the ideas and then actually preferring one thing uh not having any part of you that is objecting not having an unaddressed criticism perhaps okay
[01:17:53] Teal: without going on a freaking long round about how much i hate the word coercion i like this example because um i think it indicates nicely this elephant in the rider phenomenon in the sense that uh many people intrinsically view coercion as a bad thing bad bad bad this is the bad negative word um and so lulie had a strong i don’t want to speak for you but um strong view against treating um ocd and you’re i’m going to claim that was the elephant and then your rider then started using the coercion language as a means of justifying why treatment of ocd is a bad thing and then upon ivan’s question of well actually could you view ocd as the coercive force then the elephant shifted a little bit and now the rider switched um and now the rider says well actually maybe it isn’t coercive in that sense so the word coercion i think can be used by the rider to justify any movement of the elephant i guess which is why i find that word to be um unhelpful rant over sorry we’re we’re talking about morality not vain stupid opinions on coercion i recognize that
[01:19:02] Blue: well since we’re this mic the coercion conversation might segue into another question i had that i know that that ray has written about a little bit um so if we are studying moral psychology and we’re becoming more moral i suppose by it uh should should we install the heights of the world experts in morality as philosopher kings to help us follow the science is there something a little bit authoritarian and elitist about these kinds of uh hypotheses um is is it fair to say at the at the bottom of this kind of thinking it always leads to a justification for something like coercive state intervention thinking about his arguments against social media uh isn’t it true that just regular people can can go on social media and learn from their mistakes and and stop the doom scrolling or whatever that’s uh i know that harar that that you ray have written about about height height maybe not height in particular but harari and some of these other guys and uh criticized some of the authoritarianism involved um with that do you see some of that in his hypothesis here
[01:20:33] Red: um well i don’t know if i’ve read enough of him to detect um uh such a move but i’ve noticed with these other people um they do seem to be positioning themselves for selection for the the council some kind of um opinion council that the that the state might might might fund and in which case i would be i’m yeah i wouldn’t be in favour of that i i wait who who are
[01:21:10] Purple: you referring to i i i think i lost who you’re referring to here
[01:21:14] Teal: harari you all know harari
[01:21:15] Purple: oh okay okay now i know who you’re talking about
[01:21:19] Red: the historian who
[01:21:22] Teal: the historian and quotations exactly
[01:21:25] Red: seems to be presenting himself as an expert on everything more
[01:21:31] Teal: of a historicist and all of his future stuff after he was against but yeah
[01:21:37] Red: yeah so yeah i would be just i’m suspicious of that yeah and i think it would be um a better my my suspicion is kind of that’s just that’s not very um useful but uh i’m a more substantial point would be um to point out that even on discussions of morality a plurality a plurality of competing positions arguments on morality is is very important uh to to enable and and to sustain for humanity’s continued progress um to be even more explicit about that it’s not just a plurality of positions which you could get from a council set up by a state which has by definition a morality a monopoly on coercion to be more explicit it ought to be a a market of ideas that is open to it’s to new entrants and and and those entrants to the competition are not vetted by a special council set up by the state so i think i probably stated it quite explicitly there
[01:23:13] Blue: i’ve been asked kind of a similar question when we were discussing this he said uh is it moralizing when you tell people to avoid cognitive biases think critically and beware of conspiracy theories is that is that is that more could be a form of moralizing there
[01:23:36] Teal: sir could you define moralizing for me do you mind
[01:23:39] Blue: uh well yeah i try i tried to do that a little bit it’s i i would i think it’s more associated with sort of this tribal like thinking that it’s more associated with you know uh which can’t be good or bad i mean it’s it i think it’s important to care about what other people think and height actually makes that case in the book a little bit as he says well the best way to control your elephant is just to surround yourself with people who who um disagree with you which i think is perfectly in line with critical rationalism and and that’s actually one conclusion i really liked from the book but yeah the the moralizing i think is associated with maybe feeling part of a tribe and superior to other people who don’t have these these ideas um i think it’s quite common actually if
[01:24:34] Purple: if i were if i were to say that’s moralizing what does that mean in your minds is that a positive connotation or a negative connotation like i’m not even sure i can answer this quite i i’m pretty sure i it’s a negative connotation to me i’m negative right but but like i’m not even sure i could define it for you right and yet i know what it is
[01:24:53] Blue: i may be able to help a little okay thank you
[01:24:59] Red: i think i was going to say earlier i think this choice of topic is is actually brilliant because it does bring up this issue of the psychology versus world three difference and also between uh moralizing which is a psychological state or process or social process and morality as in standards or proposals for moral for morals and and i would urge you mentioned at the open society earlier i would highly recommend to read the chapter on the standards in that book because i keep going back to it because it’s brilliant it’s absolutely brilliant it doesn’t actually mention world three in that book but it’s it’s kind of it feels like a precursor in some respects it’s a it’s the it’s the moral it’s the morality section if you like of world three that he’s beginning to talk about the
[01:26:18] Purple: world’s briefly just in case somebody the audience doesn’t know what we’re talking about right
[01:26:21] Red: sorry world so popper had this um tentative theory or division of the the universe into three worlds or dumb domains overlapping to some degree but useful for analysis world one is the domain of physical processes and objects what you know stars magnetic field variation human beings walking down the street and and then there is this domain of psychology which includes are things like expectations dreams beliefs and then this other division world three which consists of their products of the human mind or psychology or world two but they once they are produced they kind of have their own autonomous properties so um an author of a story for example mark twain huckleberry huckleberry fin um the the story of huckleberry fin existed just as a psychological state or maybe a dream or a daydream um but once written it assumes a an objective existence and it continues to exist today um despite the fact that obviously mark twain no longer exists his psychological processes and states no longer exist um and so uh so once you have these objective or autonomous products or abstract products of the human mind out there that then you can start analyzing them in terms of the logical relationships between parts of those objects but for example books can contradict one another but that’s not a psychological process is it and yet that has an an indirect feedback effect on our psychology because we are interested to know and it will affect our psychology when we find that a book that we’ve come to love um and we think it’s a great account of moral the moral foundations you know the psychological foundations of morality and then we find that it’s in contradictory relationship with another book that we also love
[01:29:15] Teal: may I just add add a few details um yes a world two is the psychological um uh states that you were referring to I don’t know if you you labeled that as world world two but popper tends to use the
[01:29:27] Red: yeah
[01:29:27] Teal: um the the framing of subjective experience um as uh characterizing world two so um why that’s morally relevant is that’s where um conversations about suffering and love and joy reside so morality is firmly anchored in world two because without entities that can suffer then you wouldn’t have moral considerations at all um so that’s absolutely how that kind of ties into to the subject just want to add that detail yeah
[01:29:57] Red: absolutely but I’m but sorry I need to come back on that because yeah of course it our moral feelings um are anchored in our psychology in world two but with the with the the power of the tools of language where we are able to formulate um universal principles or not necessarily universal but anyway principles more general principles that uh that may capture uh some of our cycle the psychological wisdom that we have garnered through the the the moral dilemmas that we have faced as a challenge in our life and conquered or at least found some uh at least partial solution for and then we can put those proposals as as for standards on the table and and have and discuss them
[01:31:03] Blue: so just to summarize because I always get confused about this but I think I think I’ve got it now world one physical reality world two consciousness and then world three is basically the memes that are created by yeah yeah yeah it’s a rough memory
[01:31:21] Red: that that’s yeah absolutely and um yeah and popper said he wasn’t trying to create you know people coming to it for the first time tend to think that popper was creating these exclusive domains uh that but really the the tools of analysis so there’s a lot of overlap main for example this book uh by david hume I mean it exists in world one it’s made the abstract information content of david hume’s analysis of induction and so on can
[01:32:13] Teal: I just add one comment so it’s it’s not exactly accurate to say that world three consists of memes because memes are ideas that replicate and spread but not all ideas replicate and spread so for example even really bad memes are in right so
[01:32:28] Blue: world
[01:32:29] Teal: three is the product of human cognition and it’s ideas ideas so a bad meme a meme that doesn’t spread isn’t a meme it’s just an idea if I tell a bad joke it’s not replicating it just falls flat and it doesn’t spread anywhere so a meme is by definition is ideas that replicate and spread and move from mind to mind to mind but not all inhabitants of world three have that property well
[01:32:51] Purple: and like a trade secret may not ever become a meme precisely because it’s such valuable knowledge right so you want to keep it to yourself because it gives you a competitive advantage or something like that
[01:33:01] Green: didn’t you say that morality is also a product of world two question what do you mean by that
[01:33:07] Teal: morality is anchored in world two so morality is we can say objective things about how to reduce suffering in the world so we could talk objectively about how best to reduce suffering but the suffering component is a discussion about subjective experience so the relationship between these things is slightly tricky if you read a book you have the subjective experience of love and laughter and joy then there’s the objective contents of said book if you come up with a theory about how to reduce poverty then that is an objective thing about the world but then it’s objectively referring to subjective human experience
[01:33:45] Green: so your theories about morality are world three but the theories themselves refer to well -to phenomena exactly
[01:33:55] Purple: by
[01:33:57] Green: the way
[01:33:57] Purple: i i feel like i totally maybe derailed raid because by asking him to explain the worlds he was just starting to talk about how open sighting its enemies was a was a world three product of morality i can’t remember exactly what you were saying ray but i want to make sure that you got that thought out
[01:34:16] Red: yeah i think i i was recommending um to look at poppers open society book because there is a section in it on standards they so talks about the difference between um say a society uh actually going along with certain certain standards as in in its conventions or institutions which is just a sociological thing and the standard itself which is a world he doesn’t say world three there he just says that it’s an autonomous it’s autonomous from sociology because it the standard you can talk about how that standard as formulated on the table conflicts with logically with say other uh or or maybe coherent with other standards or logically indifferent with other uh standards that on but you can’t talk about how those institutions are logically so for two institutions can’t be logically incompatible but two standards can be so that they are they must be different may i i would highly recommend because i keep going back to because going your first read you think no surely they’re the same thing but no you can’t put them they’re not the same thing a moral standard is not the same as a morally sorry an accepted institutional uh embodiment of the moral standard yeah
[01:36:09] Teal: may may comment on that and then ask a question to the group um so yeah so the uh i totally agree with what you’re saying um this whole notion of logical relationships between ideas is entirely a world three thing because that world three deals with the products of the human mind so ideas ideas have logical content and it’s the logical content which can agree or contradict within each other but that’s only in the realm of the third world and ideas you can’t have feelings contradicting each other in a logical sense nor can you have blueberries contradicting batteries say it doesn’t make sense to talk about contradictions of physical stuff or feelings but it does make sense to talk about contradictions in the the space of ideas and so i just to to echo that but um but the question i want to get back to is just the difference between moralizing and morality and can i give two examples and i’m curious if these count as moralizing so one example is in our tribe we don’t eat shellfish or pork but these other guys they do eat shellfish and they do eat pork and that’s bad that’s immoral boo boo this other team so that’s maybe one example i think of moralizing but i open that’s a question to the group um if i’m if i’m correct but that the second example would be in our tribe we don’t kill women if they’re not virgins on their wedding day these other guys do kill women if they’re not virgins on their wedding day that’s bad boo these other guys do both of these things count as moralizing
[01:37:47] Purple: i’m not answering this one i’m i came here to find out what people were going to say to some form of this question so i’m going to be quiet here but i would really like to hear people try to think you don’t necessarily have to answer vaden’s question directly but try to explain how you see morality versus moralizing to
[01:38:06] Green: me moralizing just seems like using the claims of morality in order to try to pressure or coerce or something it’s a little bit like moralizing is the equivalent in morality to scientism in science where in scientism you’re taking the claims of or you’re using the form of science to try and justify some non -scientific thing moralizing is using the form of morality to actually just be pressuring that makes
[01:38:43] Teal: sense both of those could be and
[01:38:45] Green: and yeah depending on exactly how you say it and what the social context is and so on
[01:38:51] Teal: i’m realizing i have no idea what people mean by the word moralizing anymore so this is fascinating
[01:38:54] Purple: i i kind of filled the same way i mean like i know what it means but i don’t know what it means and so i i’m really curious why the people thought about it
[01:39:05] Green: and like true pop hearings we will argue the definition of the
[01:39:15] Teal: yeah i mean if no one else has a comment i can maybe explain why i use those two examples just to
[01:39:20] Blue: yes please yeah
[01:39:21] Teal: um so when i think about moralizing i thought of it as is having strong moral convictions and then telling other people what to do that’s kind of just like i know what’s right and that’s a moral that is moral that’s not moral that’s what
[01:39:36] Teal: and when framed that way okay sure yeah it’s a bad thing because we’re presupposing we know what’s right and the other guys don’t and we can be wrong and that’s why use the shellfish example because obviously it’s maybe once upon a time when there was a lot of bacteria and stuff it made sense but now it doesn’t make sense to call people who eat shellfish and moral um ea and vegans aside uh but then the second one is uh a place where i think we absolutely have objective knowledge about what’s moral what is it moral and i think that it is fundamentally a moral thing to do to kill a woman if she’s not a virgin on her wedding day and i will happily go to bat for that and argue with whoever wants to be argued with on that point um but absolutely i’m going to tell people who are advocating the opposite that they’re wrong that they shouldn’t do it and i’m going to be pretty steadfast in my conviction that i’m right on that particular subject uh but i bring that up example because now if that also counts as moralizing the moralizing isn’t intrinsically a bad thing right uh especially when it overlaps with what we take to be our best objective moral moral knowledge so i put that to the team because i get the impression could be wrong that lulie and i have some really fundamental disagreements in this space which is exciting um and uh and so if lulie if i don’t want to speak for you but if your view is that anytime you try to persuade or anyone that is tantamount to coercion and thus wrong i’m curious how you square the circle there
[01:41:00] Green: yeah i mean i feel like a broken record because it turns out today all of my opinions are through this coercion lens because yeah i was thinking like oh yeah you’re doing what you’re doing to that other tribe what you’re also advocating that we do towards our emotions um and i think in in both cases like uh yes like like uh have have your views uh try to persuade people and then i i don’t know maybe this is like a a tactics thing or something um just because i don’t think being like uh the the sort of the the pressuring or the coercive thing is actually a route to persuasion because in order for persuasion to work you need to hear what their ideas are and you need to reply to them and and and doing this according to the other person’s view of things like you need to make arguments that that fit with uh the way that they think about things instead of are just like completely um uh based on on premises but they don’t even agree with and so even just on a practical level yeah
[01:42:01] Teal: in the case of honor killings i would be happy to use the state to prevent it
[01:42:06] Green: yeah well so i’m in favor of coercion in some situations that basically allows for less coercion overall and but i do want to yeah but but i do want to just like highlight again and again this is is some authoritarian mechanism being used and like very sometimes we want that sometimes we want to kill people who are killing us but uh but it is quite an intense thing i
[01:42:37] Teal: personally think we should we should blacklist words like coercion and authoritarianism in this particular conversation i feel like it’s uh muddies more than clarifies but
[01:42:46] Red: can i just make a point a bit i mean this the the concept of coercion crops up in discussions of liberty you know how do we just define liberty as well and it’s too vague um well i think it’s it’s it’s too
[01:43:06] Teal: uh it’s vague and morally loaded and that combination is dangerous i think
[01:43:10] Red: yeah but also uh it’s also completely innocent sometimes because think of boxing mike tyson did not win by non -coercion i thank you that he did i mean to me that just blows the concept over the water i mean i think there’s
[01:43:30] Green: the boxing is is consensual and and completely non -coercive
[01:43:34] Red: that’s it the consensualness the mutual reciprocal contract or agreement that’s what’s crucial not coercion
[01:43:44] Purple: so let me so i’ve talked with vaden about this quite a bit so i know i probably agree with vaden entirely and yet i i really don’t feel like i misunderstood anything lily said like everything lily said i think i agreed with right i i don’t really like the word coercion either but when she used it she conveyed a concept to me and i suspect i agree with her on that concept you know even if maybe i would choose different words to try to go about it so i i honestly don’t feel like i disagree with either vaden or lily on this in is my honest opinion
[01:44:16] Teal: maybe i might be the one who’s the problem here talking about coercion because morality and moralizing is is potentially the is more the subject matter i guess so i apologize if i derailed uh to a yet another rant on coercion
[01:44:31] Purple: we’re a very self -indulgent podcast i have no problem with can i actually
[01:44:35] Purple: grab grab your point though vaden and and maybe pull it back to morality versus um moralizing so one of the reasons why i disliked the word coercion although i’m not necessarily against other people using it i think in some context it just makes perfect sense and it might be the best word to convey what you mean and i felt like lily was doing that very well the issue i think i have with with the word coercion is that i do feel like there is people not in this conversation who do use the term as an outright moralizing of all sorts of things try to shut down conversations okay and i guess that’s really i’m like i’m i’m struggling to explain what i mean by moralizing right but if i if you were to ask me you know bruce do you think that in political discussion today there is too much moralizing there’s over moralizing and that’s a bad thing i’d answer yes like absolutely i believe that and then if you pushed me and said what do you even mean by that i’d struggle to explain exactly what i mean i would probably say something similar to what i just did i feel like people tried to use morality to shut down completely legitimate conversations which is what i felt like lily was talking about right um in fact i think that’s a massive problem today probably it’s always been a massive problem we always have these kind of you know rose -covered glasses about how great things were you know a few decades ago or whatever um there probably are some things that are worse today than a few decades ago i think height makes some good points about that but i don’t really believe that things are you know going to hell in a hand basket i think i’ve heard him say that that things are going to hell in a hand basket he’s he is too pessimistic for me in that regard so i guess i’d like to know what other people think like if if i were to ask you each do you think that in political discussions today we over moralize and that is a bad thing give me a yes or no just just even though those words could mean all sorts of different things you could probably safely answer yes or no just go with your gut yes or no and then what do you think you mean by that right like what exactly is wrong with moralizing
[01:46:44] Purple: if you answer that there’s too much moralizing i’m sorry
[01:46:49] Orange: um no i mean so when uh when peter proposed this this round table he gave a couple of examples and kind of set up i i so i was pretty confused about like where the conversation was going to go because on the one hand there was a there was a conversation about rationality which i usually take to be mostly a discussion about epistemic rationality like what should we believe given the evidence i think that’s a lot easier problem in many ways than instrumental rationality like how do i best satisfy my values it’s very very difficult to satisfy values because values are a moving target right like if you if you have you know opinions about animal welfare right and you study it more it’s going to change your values but it’s not clear to me that that change in values was inevitable or even correct right like you can fall down a rabbit hole right um so there’s there’s this epistemic rationality and then there’s the question of morality and moralizing and the two topics that peter brought up were one was about vaccination and the other was about climate change and so
[01:48:19] Orange: what i think the debate is really like what i think that the topic is that we’re not like being explicit about is when um when scientists say that vaccine vaccines are safe and that humans are causing climate change and then people go on social media and say neither of those things are true how much should those those ideas be censored i think that they’re obviously you’d you’d like to have some balance you don’t want to suppress ideas but at the same time i think that that people’s lack of rationality can be gained by people that have bad motives and that there’s some trade -off between these two things
[01:49:11] Blue: a couple things i might push back on a little bit about that i mean i think that people who okay so you’re really talking about without getting into a more of a debate about the politics of climate change or some or vaccines or something you’re really talking about people who are wrong right or you you perceive them to be wrong but doesn’t doesn’t in the as we move closer to truth don’t people in terms of truth seeking doesn’t don’t wrong opinions have a very valuable place in that process i mean i want to i want to hear wrong opinions i mean i i think the the answer is to me something more along the lines of free speech absolutism
[01:50:08] Purple: whatever you might call
[01:50:10] Blue: it i think uh i i don’t think that the kind of shutting down of opinions you’re talking about has has any place at all i i i mean part of this is my crazy optimistic view of humans i i like what what i think that’s why i like to raise book so much is that he really really makes the case that even even fanatics and weirdos you can’t convince them that the the moon is is made of cheese you know people people people do fundamentally care about what is is true so anyway i guess that’s my response to ivans comment there
[01:50:56] Teal: yeah um yeah let me just uh echo what you said but i’m gonna take a few seconds to get there though if you don’t mind i was kind of being tongue -in -cheek when i said i didn’t know what moralizing meant and let me give an example um so i think that in our lifetimes we’ve seen the question about whether or not masks are effective go from something that wasn’t moralized to something it’s pretty damn moralized now in the sense that that discussion that debate um people feel very strongly about it and if you are on the other side you are the bad guy um it’s a tribalistic thing because of um just the nature of covid and the debate has now unfortunately fallen along political lines etc etc um so that is kind of what i think when i think about moralizing is is taking a conversation and imbuing it with this sense of um people who disagree with me are bad people um and making it not just like what’s effective enough is what’s ineffective but um it is now a question of like goodness and badness um and
[01:52:01] Teal: that can be problematic because it can uh make conversations much more difficult right it can make it much more hard to actually figure out what is true when if you disagree with me you’re a bad person um that makes things harder um then to get to the free speech stuff um my view of moralizing is kind of like it is an inevitable um i i can’t help but moralize certain conversations such as honor gilling for example um or the female genital mutilation that is an intrinsically moralistic conversation to me and i i actually do think that people who disagree with me are bad people on that particular subject and i can’t change that um but uh so if we take this fact that moralizing is kind of going to be inevitable but it also is going to disable or make certain conversations more difficult then the question of free speech kind of comes into play so how like what should we do as a society given that this is necessarily going to flare up every one or two years with different kinds of conversations um and i’m not a free speech absolutist in the sense that i can absolutely imagine circumstances where we need to curtail free speech in particular in emergency circumstances um so during um war war two when the united states was in a total war they had a propaganda machine um and that propaganda machine made sure that everybody in the united states was very directly aligned rah rah rah americans and uh down with fascism but that is a necessary strategy of war because you need to have your whole populace in lockstep because we’re in an extreme circumstance so too with covid i believe um and so i kind of want to think about the fact that moralizing is going to be an inevitable makes things more difficult but it’s not always wrong um and then how do we build an edifice on top of that that allows for the most rational discussions to take place given that sometimes we’re in emergency circumstances but most of the time we’re not and in the second case when we’re not in emergency circumstances then yeah i think most ideas should flow most of the time but you still need to have um warning labels on youtube videos you still need to provide extra information because anti -rational memes are very potent beasts right um and treating that that naively is just let the actual anti -rational memes flow and the good ideas will weigh out when out in the end well no sometimes the good ideas evolve recognizing that conspiracy theory videos needs to be accompanied with warning labels um and extra information and so sometimes the best way to deal with anti -rational memes is to quote b coercive literally i know i’m saying certain things that are uh are uh triggering in uh and i want to be saying such things um but but yeah sometimes the way that you battle these ideas is by um limiting their spread and i don’t think that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that we just have to be freaking careful because it’s so easy to do that um unnecessarily but i do want to limit the spread of trial pornography i do want to limit the spread of um uh isis videos for example yeah i do um and i don’t uh think that a pure free speech approach um let everything just be completely free is the right um strategy there
[01:55:18] Teal: may i just say it’s worth repeating what Churchill said in the state of war that jaw jaw is better than war war so even in an emergency situation we we need to have some mechanism of ordinary conversation whereby we can get out of conflict
[01:55:42] Green: there is a difference between having a law that prevents uh vile acts and pointing to someone and saying you are bad for doing that and to me the word moralizing and maybe i’m just using it in a very particular way um is referring to the like the pressure of saying you are bad and you should feel bad and you should have like shame about this and um and uh you are not allowed to have your views be exposed to actual criticism instead you will be forced to i’m trying to not use the word coercion forced to uh and and and it’s not just forced to do a different action because i don’t think that’s moralizing that is just rule of law the thing is being forced to not like freely think yourself which actually prevents you from coming to the ideas that that we want these people to have so uh i think that there is a value in um forcing people to do certain actions or to not do certain actions um
[01:56:54] Green: and i don’t i i haven’t heard so far what is the value of um forcing them to think in a different way and and maybe there is a value to that but but that’s what i would uh be interested in because that’s what it seems that moralizing is meant to do like and if we draw this back to the the hate thing um so because he talks about these tribes and or tribalism and so do we want to be tribalist because we have danced together and therefore we have a we’ve synced up on something and he gives the example of um of how uh protestants are quite nice to people because they want to have converts to their religion um and and and then this other way of doing things where with the with the more uh uh foresee coercive foresee religions um and and do we actually need this kind of forcing thing like do we need to say hey you’re bad don’t think about that and just like do do this other thing but also like don’t look at what your current existing ideas on this are so that i feel like that was slightly uncharitable to to what vaden was saying but that that’s yeah no that’s great that’s
[01:58:09] Teal: great um
[01:58:10] Green: so
[01:58:11] Purple: vaden actually um i was gonna ask you about the the mask thing right because i actually think that i i would agree with you that’s a good example of what i have in mind when i talk about over moralizing is the fact that that trying to discuss our mouths masks effective you know should we wear masks or not very quickly becomes tribal and moralized and people immediately start getting mad at each other and friendships break up that certainly seems to me like an example of over moralizing okay what’s the correct way to do this then though right like what does it mean to there is moral consequences to one way or the other with let’s at least say mask laws okay there’s moral consequences so how do we have that conversation without over over moralizing
[01:58:57] Teal: yeah let me split the um the question into two parts so um i think that one conversation is what is the best thing for oneself to do and i think that oneself should resist moralizing as much as one can um with a mask conversation i don’t personally feel very moralized about it in the sense that i haven’t looked into it too strongly um and if someone had really strong opinions on either side i would just honestly just want to hear what they have to say so i think that oneself should minimize it as much as possible but i don’t think one can get it to zero necessarily but then the second component is what should we as a society do given that such conversations will become moralized um and that second or what should we do with our friends who are very moralized about masks um and that second one is obviously more difficult um but that’s where i think the conversation now becomes questions of free speech and how do we best deal with the plurality of different views and angry disagreements etc etc so on that second conversation that’s where i think we firmly just switch into conversations about free speech and how much we should regulate different kinds of ideas um maybe i should respond a bit to lulie too given that your comments were directed to me which is great and fair and i um taking my comments in a
[02:00:16] Teal: mediumly charitable sense is awesome i love that so totally do that more often um i don’t think i’m in favor of ever forcing people to think anything i can’t actually think of an example where i’d want someone by i know how you do that except using like north korean propaganda style techniques which i don’t think are very effective um but in terms of say limiting certain information that is a different that’s different to me than forcing people to think certain things so um do we want uh say someone like a gnome chomsky to have a huge platform in 1942 1943 uh do we want them to be able to be spreading as much information about how bad and evil the united states is in that particular time i would argue probably not um that’s not the same as forcing chomsky to think something else but i think that yeah during wartime it absolutely makes sense for even democratic governments to um have some sort of um uh influence over who has louder and quieter voices and i just think of that as different than forcing people to think any particular thing so
[02:01:26] Green: yeah i totally agree
[02:01:28] Purple: by the way today to relate this to hi greg lukey on off i don’t know how to pronounce that name is the president of fire and he was also co -author with hiate on the coddling of the american mind so the coddling of american mind is a book i have read i didn’t like it as much as the first two but i i he was kind of trying to dig into the question that vaden’s talking about here and greg lukey on off with fire obviously he’s not he’s in interviews he’ll say i’m not a free speech absolutist in the sense that you can have any speech but i am an idea absolutist so an opinion absolutist it seems like maybe there’s a little bit of a
[02:02:15] Blue: uh conflict between heights ideas about social media ruining i mean he literally says that social media is going to ruin our democracy unless we um take take steps to to limit limit it especially with children and then he’s also a seems to be quite pro free speech i don’t know it just seems like there’s a little bit of a conflict between those you
[02:02:45] Teal: know what he seems to me he seems to be a rather sloppy scholar uh because i’ve been going through his most recent book and when he cites studies that show causally that social media is bad for people like i’ve started to go through the studies and they i’ll give one example so um one of the studies consisted of like 120 grads undergrads in the first and second week of
[02:03:09] Teal: school and when he says that they limit social media and show that these undergrads were happier all they did was limit twitter and facebook messenger but they didn’t limit instagram they didn’t limit snapchat they didn’t limit a thousand other social medias um and from this he draws the conclusion that we should ban phones in schools everywhere um so he’s just like when deutch says so -and -so has said such and such and i go and read the citation it’s rock solid i can trust anything that deutch cites hate you can’t do that um so like you you read it and then you’re like okay well the sample size is tiny and he’s making claims about all of social media but they only study the effect of limiting twitter and facebook and that isn’t all of social media and so hate’s just sloppy um and that’s something i’ve just noticed now that i’m doing a deeper dive into his most recent book so i think all of that needs to be kept in mind yeah i think that needs to be kept in mind when we’re talking about hate because it’s not we’re not dealing with a careful scholar um pinker is a careful scholar doige is a careful scholar harris is careful but hate isn’t and so all of that needs to be acknowledged when we’re talking about what he thinks about stuff it’s just not as rock solid as uh as other people yeah yeah i’ve found especially a lot
[02:04:22] Blue: of that phone stuff to be just i don’t know well the ps detector just goes crazy just
[02:04:28] Teal: take anything any study that he writes about just spend um two or three minutes scrolling through it and see if even the discussion section in the paper if that accurately is reflected by hate and uh it’s often not so
[02:04:41] Purple: yeah so jonathan roush and i mentioned his book the constitution of knowledge is actually addressing the very same subject that jonathan height is trying to address but his conclusion is that um so he he actually does take the stance that social media is potentially a danger to democracy but his stance is way more critical rationalist because he is a critical rationalist and he he’s looking at it from the standpoint of if you did nothing it would be a danger but of course we’re going to do something and then the constitution of knowledge is this idea that um that you you do tilt things so that the it’s not how do i put this that social media if you don’t do anything at all then he takes that he takes the stance that um what spreads through the nodes is going to be the bad stuff it’s going to be the stuff that’s not true but that it would with just some simple institutions that you put into place that will no longer be true and then he uses examples from
[02:05:44] Purple: science or journalism or whatever where we have uh networks where truth spreads better than what’s out outrageous so it’s interesting and i that they’re talking about the exact same thing the the potential danger of social media but height came away with this idea that we should keep children off of social media to save democracy and jonathan roush came away with this idea that we should that social media should implement certain types of institutions such as the ones that vaden has mentioned to be honest like where maybe you leave the video up but you put the warming on it and say here’s information about uh to truth to back check what’s in this video can
[02:06:26] Teal: i add uh or just refine the last thing you said which is i think that social media companies should continue to um refine their product such that they dampen down the negatives and improve the the the positives but it’s not as if these platforms are static they are constantly changing what they do um to reflect the most recent round of criticism for example tristan harris who’s kind of gone off the deep end but when he first started he made some very um fair observations about um the addictive nature of um some of these platforms and some of their more dirty tricks one example is this like snap streak thing that um snapchat was doing as far as i know they’re not doing it as much anymore um my kids sure do it okay snap streaks with all that snap is it still going okay and i don’t
[02:07:20] Blue: by
[02:07:21] Green: the way a wonderful feature wonderful feature which i use on on vreel
[02:07:26] Teal: so okay so i haven’t used it i can’t comment and if that’s a bad example i’ll just talk about more like the um we just have to
[02:07:32] Purple: accept that vaden is very sloppy in his starship on social media
[02:07:41] Teal: but so let me move off that example because clearly i don’t know what i’m talking about there um and just say that after tristan harris came into the public eye um all of the big tech companies started putting in like monitor your screen usage stuff and making it easier to disable certain apps and they took on board a lot of his criticisms as my main point and so too with um i have to say his name but even elan musk has done something right in this particular space with his community notes feature that’s an excellent feature um and so uh the last plug is um scott alexander wrote a piece which i don’t remember the title of it but he basically said like it is impossible to have a fully unregulated platform about anything you have like even fourchan moderates some of the content on fourchan um because to have a completely neutral platform is an unusable platform no one would use it it just doesn’t work there’s so much content out there you have to triage somehow so you can’t just be neutral um and uh and so just the pure free speech absolutist thing is a fiction because any product that is usable has some sort of triaging and then you’re just in a question of what are you going to elevate and what are you going to de -elevate and you have to make a choice um and so there there is no free speech absolute position that you can sensibly take if you want a product that anyone’s going to use um is my main point
[02:09:00] Green: at least when when it gets big enough because otherwise you can do it by by subculture does uh does eightchan moderate i i thought that there were some websites out there but i
[02:09:14] Teal: used to be a very active on eightchan but i’m not as active anymore so i have no idea how many i haven’t used it having to step aside i don’t know
[02:09:22] Blue: okay well i thought i’d move on just one more question and then maybe bruce has some questions too i this is it’s a bit of a tangent here but i just we’re talking about morality and it’s just what i’m curious about your thoughts on so i’m just gonna go here it’s probably the oldest and most cliche question amongst philosophers maybe not the oldest but i don’t know i’m thinking of the whole utilitarian versus de -anthological question um of of ethics and morality i you know i um i used to be more of a i guess you know when hitchhens and dockens and all these people came out i read all their books i thought they were great as i’ve gotten older i guess i’ve just been more even though i am an atheist i guess i’ve got just as i’ve gotten through more have more life experiences and including some some tough times in my life i guess i’ve gotten i will straight up say that i’ve become much more almost envious of people with a religion like like bruce maybe or he’s probably the only one here i would imagine but i
[02:10:43] Orange: that you know just to have a
[02:10:46] Blue: moral code and a community to to to be a part of seems to me a really um desirable thing until you actually start going to church and realizing how boring it is but you know it’s still at least at least theoretically i i feel like i get it and in fact it’s theoretically boring i i i get it more and i i i found myself what i’ll do is in certain circumstances will write down like a a code like a like a code to live by kind of a thing and then i’ll just make like a 10 point code and then keep that on my phone and then like just really get that in my brain when i’m in confusing situations and it’s just something that i found i found helpful um and so i’m curious what what you is this a false dichotomy some kind of false dichotomy between utilitarian and deontological or or should should rational people avoid i avoid these kinds of religion or or or similar kinds of things or or is there some value in in in living by a with a moral framework i
[02:12:12] Orange: was i was just going to say that i think that i guess i would describe myself as a moral subjectivist so i think that morality is sort of in the same class as aesthetics in terms of epistemology it’s just that it’s aesthetics that i’m willing to fight people about um i don’t so i don’t think that there’s any one correct moral system um i treat you know i i have some i’m sure some of my ethics would be considered deontological some of it utilitarian if something if utilitarianism says that something in my world is is not right i see that as like a a warning light on my moral dashboard i don’t think that it’s necessarily true i think that it’s something that you know requires me to take a closer look at as far as religion is concerned i wonder if it’s not so much having a moral code but having an identity that asks something of you so that um i mean i so i’ve been one actually one of the inspirations for this i’ve been thinking about this a lot the last couple of years was i read jonathan height’s other book the happiness hypothesis where he talks about people being happier when they have a religious framework of some kind and some of that appealed to me when i when i read about it but the question is like what how would that work for me i’m also an atheist and so i had to start thinking about well what what is the deepest value maybe if i had a deontological ethic what would it be and i think it’s that it’s the primacy of epistemic rationality over instrumental rationality that i think that it’s important to know what’s true that
[02:14:24] Orange: that in in all but like very extreme cases is more important than winning like i would rather know than be happy now i don’t expect that other people should feel this way i don’t think that i’m that it’s an objectively right thing but i think that for me it’s it’s a value it’s like if i was going to create a sort of quote unquote religious identity around something it would be around this i mean there are other there are other other things too like uh my like like an optimism about humanity i think is important to have and so i think that’s part of an identity that i would better want and it’s not that i would have specific moral rules but that i’d look at that identity and say how can i how can thinking about this make my life better like how can i how can i live a better life in light of this this identity thank you luli
[02:15:31] Green: i actually have a piece on my website answering this very question um and and it’s not just the ontological versus utilitarianism there’s a ton of other different um normative ethic systems um my my view is that if you if you take pop here in epistemology really seriously you can just think of all of these different um versions of ethics and morality as things to criticize your moral theories by and so you can kind of take um well what we want is the uh we want fallibilism and the correction of errors and and then what helps that and then all of these systems are just ways of like giving us hints about which of our ideas our normative ideas will actually work and then as for the religion question it’s hard to do it alone it’s like like if i imagine just writing out 10 you know 10 to 12 principles to live by um and i’m doing that alone yeah there’s a sort of a uh because religion is more than just the the morality of it there’s there’s this whole system um and i would have thought you need to kind of replace more like the entire system for that to be satisfying but uh i don’t know
[02:17:03] Red: yeah i i was i do resonate somewhat with what luli was saying um that we can use these uh general theories of morality to or criticize our our feelings is that what is that what you were saying um yeah i think that and but i would say that it does um that’s part of it um but under let let me show something with you that for some years well when i wrote this chapter on uh sam harris um for the the book on i wrote a chapter on sam harris’s idea that you could um come up with a scientific morality which would mean that you were you had a set of universal principles or laws of morality that you then could apply to each moral dilemma or problem that you face in life but and my thought was that perhaps just like we cannot achieve a unified final theory in in science perhaps that is also beyond our reach in morality maybe we’re always um clumsily getting our way through our moral challenges uh more or less well and this is an is um will always be the case and it’s it’s not possible to and and i my guess i’m still working on this because i think it’s a fundamental problem um is that life the universe has both these two radically different things it has particular events or processes and it then and it also has these universal aspects or structures and as moral beings we’re constantly sort of bouncing between one and the other so we were trying to as deontontologists like cant we want to be able to just have a rule that covers each and each in every uh moral dilemma and then we can just apply it
[02:19:56] Red: but i don’t think we can’t really do that but i wouldn’t scrap the deontological principles like ludely we can use them as tools um to come to um and with to get by as it were but but it’s all it’s always going to be humans just getting by the best that they can when we can improve we can continually improve and get better but i don’t think we’ll ever get to a unified theory of morality yeah
[02:20:33] Teal: nice um so i um 100 percent um sam harris moral landscape guy that that is i’ll defend that to the hilt too um and i don’t think that you accurately represented his thesis if i dare say right um because he isn’t advocating for deontology nor does he say that there’s a set of rules that we can apply to figure out all of our moral problems he’s just saying that moral questions are um amenable to the scientific method in the same way that any other kinds of questions are and so why he uses the metaphor of a moral landscape is that we um there are peaks there are troughs we don’t necessarily know where we are and we don’t necessarily know how to get to where we want to be it’s just that that searching process is exactly the same as in science um so whatever tools we use for science as popper says there’s no one method um but there are ways to make progress and because the brain is a physical object we can understand it in the same way that we can understand anything anything else but then back to peter’s comments um i wasn’t entirely sure how we connect the thread of choosing a moral framework so i’m a consequentialist sam harris style consequentialist
[02:21:55] Teal: how that thread was connected to the comments about religion and community and um uh frameworks i guess um because yeah moral systems are when i say i’m a consequentialist that doesn’t give me everything i need that that helps me in some kinds of problems but i need other tools to solve other kinds of problems and to think about the world and so i guess when you were talking about um uh atheism and moral frameworks and stuff sounds more like this is maybe a question to you peter um it sounds more like you’re looking for like uh like a worldview or a set of values um and or envious of bruce and religious uh people more generally because they have that kind of given to them by nature being born into said community that’s already there um they don’t have to find it themselves uh bruce if i’m speaking for you or if i’m miss miss um no i think that’s an experience yeah um then please please uh correct me um but for me ethical frameworks aren’t the same as a worldview um nor do they tell me what to do in every circumstance it’s just a way to think through ethical problems but there’s all sorts of other problems as well um and i absolutely agree that people need a worldview and a value system and without that you’re kind of just blowing in the wind but maybe my question is does not the international network of critical rationalists and the ideas that of popper um does that not kind of fill the hole that you’re looking for um the community there’s six members of the community right here um and every two saturdays you and bruce get together and discuss things that you’re passionate about and interested in and how is that different than every sunday getting together and discussing things that you’re interested in and passionate about and so i guess i my question is just how do the questions about ethical frameworks match or relates to the search for communities and worldviews and stuff in in your mind
[02:23:46] Blue: well now that’s an excellent point and let’s do let’s do this every week now about that
[02:23:53] Teal: well sundays are taken for bruce but we can do it every saturday
[02:24:00] Purple: we’re kind of long on time but once you’re done with your questions i was actually going to see if if we still have time which we may not i was going to read a summary of height’s views from okay uh the righteous mind that i actually just wanted to get people’s take on that summer all right here is his summary says six six areas of experimental research demonstrating that um brains evaluate instantly and constantly social and political judgments depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental as can anything that makes people think about purity and cleanliness psychopaths reason but do not feel and are severely deficient morally babies feel but don’t reason and have the beginnings of morality effective reactions effective reactions with an a are in the in the right place at the right time in the brain i had to check what that actually meant but it was referring to the fact that you instantly like or dislike something in a flash even before you even know what that thing is and that was his summary of the studies that he reviewed prior to that point in the book i was curious does does anybody disagree with anything in here strongly somewhat do you find much here that you actually agree with
[02:25:34] Teal: uh yeah i agree with all of that with the exception of the smell and taste stuff i think that has been killed in the replication crisis but you don’t even necessarily need those examples because i think it is generally true that your bodily states will determine what you view to be moral and and not moral um this is a bit of a crude example forgive me but it’s the only one i can think of at the moment another person i’m very influenced by is dan savage is a name that doesn’t come up too often in in this circle but um in uh when you are in a aroused state during sex you will participate in behaviors that when you’re not in that aroused state you would find gross or icky and that just shows that if there’s a relationship between grossness and echinus and morality then there’s absolutely a relationship between your physical body and your emotional judgment about certain activities i guess um and so uh so i sign off on everything with the exception of maybe tweaking his example because i think that’s dead down with the replication crisis no
[02:26:40] Blue: that was interesting to bring up the the replication crisis though because i keep you know whenever i uh am reading something about education i will oftentimes um just it just doesn’t sit right with me the way they always want to bring everything back to neuroscience and oh this the studies indicate this and that and you know i’m just i just find myself thinking this that that means nothing the studies do these random studies that they’re using it’s they’re trying to it’s almost like they’re trying to immune immunize immunize their their arguments from criticism by making them sound more uh scientific than they are and i i guess i kind of found this last time reading the the righteous mind i kind of found myself triggered in a in a similar way how he he’s just making too much of these these studies and i would be curious how they would hold up to the replication crisis to
[02:27:44] Teal: be to be fair to him in 2012 i think that uh there was such um there’s so many methodological errors in the field of psychology that everyone was just kind of taking these to be true and i wouldn’t necessarily fault him in particular for that um but a rough heuristic is any psychological thing you’ve heard in a ted talk that came out between like 2012 and 2016 it’s probably not true um most of those have have all died but uh but the entire field was was um confused about this because of just p hacking and all this statistics stuff so i can’t necessarily fault him for that although it does indicate that he’s not dutch wouldn’t have fallen for that because dutch and pinker are careful scholars but um but the majority of scholars in that field dutch seems to doubt the whole whole of psychology i mean he doesn’t that’s too strong from my perspective yeah but yeah he does do that yeah i mean like so there are robust psychological findings um well an example i like to use is um false memories very real thing um and very uh relevant in the legal system it’s entirely changed the way that um professionals that including my wife actually um illicit interviews from people uh because it’s very easy to put false memories in um very important finding from psychology absolutely has replicated has massive ramifications in the legal and justice system uh so it’s not that all psychology is bunk it’s just that um a lot of it suffered from these mistakes yeah
[02:29:16] Blue: okay now that’s an interesting perspective by
[02:29:22] Red: the way i was re reading um david hume’s book um which i showed earlier i just happened to read a section where he he’s actually makes this point that passions different passions very different passions can can reinforce one another which is similar to the point that uh height is making there about smells or a revulsion or disgust may and may heighten some other passions for in in in this case a moral passion he
[02:30:07] Blue: seems to make a big deal about the left versus right thing and and and his his findings about uh the the maybe um conservatives are more disgusted by certain smells or something like that i don’t know what do you think what do you think vaden is that all bs too or
[02:30:25] Teal: um i haven’t studied that one in particular but it is i’ve noticed that my left leading friends and right leading friends tends to have different things that they focus on with regards to core values like purity for example so purity tends to be on the left more associated with food natural um unnatural gmo’s chemicals and on the right tends to be more associated with sexual values family um uh that kind of thing um and so there’s a number of different examples that height gives with regards to these fundamental concepts that manifest in different ways on the left and the right um and that seems to jive decently well with my experience of talking to people on the right so yeah
[02:31:11] Blue: yeah yeah okay fair enough well
[02:31:20] Green: i mean i could answer i could go through views um which is so brains evaluate instantly and constantly seems legit uh social and political judgments depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes yep uh our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments yes but um bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental as can anything that can make people think about purity and cleanliness so so now we’re starting to get to uh it depends on what the individual and the society how they interpret physical sensations and physical uh like senses and um and and once we start talking about purity and cleanliness and it’s kind of in this sort of somewhat metaphorical way because like you’re you’re you have dirty thoughts like there’s a sort of uh because that’s what the the moral judgmental thing is um so there i think i would i’d be like hold on let’s let’s get actually a lot more precise here to to see if he’s saying something that i would agree with or not um psychopaths reason but don’t feel so i i don’t know how how much of a natural category psychopaths is like whether it’s just a label that we put on some people who behave in a certain way or whether it is actually the case like they must be able to feel because there’s a condition where you actually don’t feel anything physically um you know and you can get a wound and then you don’t feel it they don’t have that thing they have a different thing they have they don’t feel emotionally but then empathy empathy yeah empathy and so then how is that different from elexithymia and like is it the same and and so what what actually is a psychopath um and i don’t know if that has a sharp uh thing or whether that is just a kind of very loose label that we use for practical reasons um i’m not i’m not sure that it is possible to reason and not feel in the limit i i think feeling is required for reasoning is my current guess of things uh then it says babies feel but don’t reason uh and that also seems to me to be a misunderstanding of what emotions and reasoning is um because the the sort of the feeling thing the the inexplicit ideas that’s that’s where it all kind of starts and then like what are we calling reason like are we calling it like being able to verbally explain your thought process or yeah fair point asking
[02:33:58] Green: too much
[02:33:59] Purple: in in context he does sort of use the word reason to really mean the conscious reasoning with words so yeah i i i agree that the wording here is pretty vague and you could probably take it different ways
[02:34:11] Teal: it’s a big comment there so i totally have observed with georgia that her and forgive me for saying the words eq and iq but just bear with me for a second like her ecu was developed at like so fast in the sense that um if i came home and had a bad day and just didn’t have the same it’s just the vibe man you know when someone just has like a prickly feel like the kids can pick up on that so quickly and it was like eerie to see how she got that at like age like three months or something um and it’s much much later that language developed and i think all of the difficulties with reason definition of reason aside i think it’s not unreasonable to say that you need some sort of linguistic way to represent your thoughts um to be able to reason about stuff um and so if we can use language development as a rough proxy out ray shaking his head so i’d love to hear your yeah um but it yeah so i was gonna go and say if we can use language development as a rough proxy that before you can reason you have to have some sort of primitive language um then just totally strikes it’s true but but rafi disagreed i’d love to know to know uh where it went wrong
[02:35:22] Red: yeah and i would reference uh this great book by ellison gop gopnik the scientist in the crib that’s a great that’s where she did
[02:35:33] Teal: the shapes she did the shapes thing yeah
[02:35:35] Red: especially for people who are already on board with popper she
[02:35:41] Teal: went with paul bloom right was she with paul bloom um as a developmental psychologist
[02:35:45] Red: yeah i didn’t know about the personal uh connection there
[02:35:51] Teal: sorry sorry i cut you off yep sorry
[02:35:53] Red: yeah uh yeah so with you know popper’s approach is that organisms not well never mind babies all organisms seem to enter life at birth with expectations which are kind of rudimentary theories and they then are those expectations are modified by experience through what you might call rudimentary uh refutations then i’m saying rudimentary because obviously there’s a difference between what a a baby’s expectations and refutations of their expectations and a scientist uh form you know explicitly linguistically formulated theories and then explicitly arranged experimental setups and refutations so that but there’s a gradation isn’t there and i think that this is the best approach um to looking at what reason is
[02:37:08] Teal: yeah well so reason is deliberate in the sense that i know when i’m in a state where i’m reasoning about stuff and i know when i’m just in a dreamlike state where i’m just uh just not thinking about anything or i’m ideating or i’m just in flow state for example and so if we use reason to being something like consciously trying to think about something to work through a problem then i would want to sharply distinguish between um all of the innate non -blank slate stuff that we have such as our ability to distinguish between objects such as our ability to hear taste touch feel smell such as our ability to have expectations about what’s going to happen i know that i think it was gopnik that um shows like intuitive physics like if you move a ball behind a a wall and stuff that it doesn’t disappear so all of that definitely disproves the blank slate hypothesis but i think that’s sharply different than reasoning about things because like you know when you’re reasoning about something and when you’re not reasoning about something there’s a very different psychological state of mind just in yourself when you’re in the process of reasoning about stuff right
[02:38:10] Red: however i think poppers Darwinian approach to psychological development is dead on so this great this because it’s it’s the psychological development of our cognitive abilities to reason to know things to to test um is an incremental process ray
[02:38:30] Purple: are you saying that you feel that even even though you not i don’t hear you necessarily disagreeing with vaden here but i i what i think i hear you saying and correct me if i’m wrong is that there’s some sort of commonality between the two processes and it is no
[02:38:44] Red: because it’s not
[02:38:45] Purple: commonality they are you saying they are the same process the
[02:38:48] Red: Darwin’s point was there is no cut there is no essence there’s no commonality this is where we get misled by looking at we tend to and it’s a natural thing that’s actually evolved through a Darwinian process this is the irony of it our uh inclination to think about problems in terms of what is the essence of this what is the essence behind this all this object or this type of object or what is the essence of this meaning to this word this comes naturally to us it has evolved but we now know that that’s the wrong way of approaching these problems i think that Darwin showed us that if we we can apply that approach to human reasoning we can think of it think that there are rudimentary levels of reasoning developing to more self -conscious linguistic you know involving language and so on
[02:39:57] Teal: in his um in his book all of life is problem solving he fleshes out a lot about what he means when he talks about like evolutionary epistemology and the through line between amoeba and einstein i think is his exactly that’s what i’m saying but he says that but but he says that all like yeah amoebas solve problems and they have expectations and disappointed expectations but nowhere does he think that amoebas reason though he thinks that einstein reasons but amoebas don’t and so there’s a difference between problem solving and having expectations and inbuilt stuff but that is he’s never claimed that that amoebas can
[02:40:33] Red: monopolize that you can take that word reason take that i’ll i’ll use thinking instead the word thinking it’s not so the problem is it’s not solving any problem you’re just making an arbitrary distinction which is fine but
[02:40:49] Teal: no problem are you
[02:40:50] Red: actually solving with that
[02:40:51] Teal: but he would claim that a plant solves problems when it has to figure out where to put its roots but he wouldn’t claim that a plant thinks though that’s the main thing i’m trying to emphasize well
[02:41:02] Blue: here’s here’s what jonathan height says about about reason anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason we need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is a little bit later um by skilled arguers are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views this explains why the confirmation bias is so powerful and so ineradicable how hard could it be to teach students to look on the other side to look for evidence against their favorite view in fact it’s very hard and no one has found a way to do it it’s hard because the confirmation bias is a built -in feature of an argumentative mind not a bug that can be removed from a platonic mind ah geez but you know i think i disagree i like i like i think reason is fine like lulisa’s i think
[02:41:58] Green: well well i have a different definition of reason to to okay
[02:42:02] Blue: okay
[02:42:02] Green: i was actually agreeing with what he was saying up until the the last bit where where it then kind of went off the um this does feel like it brings us back to the to the moralizing thing um because he’s kind of he said so so what was his criticism of reasoning
[02:42:22] Blue: well i think he thinks that it reasoning about morality is kind of pointless so all you can really do is lead your elephant to other elephants that might yeah no
[02:42:33] Green: i think it has a it has a bidirectional thing like i think you can’t say ah yes only the elephant is in charge or ah yes only the the riders in charge like they they both affect each other
[02:42:44] Blue: i i think he
[02:42:46] Teal: would agree with that but
[02:42:47] Blue: yeah
[02:42:47] Teal: yeah if we place ourselves back 12 years um to the audience that he’s writing to he’s writing primarily about people who don’t think that emotions have any role to play whatsoever and it’s all about just this cold logical just think think think and you’ll get there and i think he’s doing a valuable thing to say that it’s not just about cold hard reasoned man like your emotions are going to pull you in different directions and until you fully understand that you’re maybe not going to be reasoning um as as objectively as you as you think you are so when he says that reasoning doesn’t do all of it i think he means it’s not just the rider the elephant is there too um but if as lulie has done successfully if you broaden your conception about what reasoning means to include the emotional side um then i don’t think it’s in contradiction i think it’s uh about who he’s writing to and what time he’s
[02:43:38] Blue: yeah fair point well it’s been three hours so i think that went by really quickly even unless anyone else has any final thoughts perhaps we could wrap it up luli
[02:43:51] Green: i have a final thing to to submit to you all uh which is related to the um i’ve just dropped it in the chat it’s related to the moralizing topic so this is an editorial cartoon um with uh with two two ships at war and it says our blessed homelands their barbarous wastes our glorious leaders their wicked despot our great religion their primitive superstition our noble populace their backwards savages our heroic adventurers their brutish invaders and when i first saw this i was kind of like almost like feeling a bit nationalistic like yeah our glorious leader and then i thought wait well hold on and and my my view of this now is that um basically this attitude is something that prevents us from uh actually like hearing the other side and listening and this even applies to the most horrific cases you can think of like you know vaden was talking about people who produce child pornography or you could think of um terrace or you know your favorite outgroup and there is such a an impulse to think of it in this way and i just think that is a there is something like there’s something kind of fun and nice about it but there is also something mistaken about it because it’s sort of it’s it’s blocking from really understanding in a kind of in a deep way
[02:45:26] Green: yeah we’re doing concluding thoughts is that yes please yeah um yeah this is just that maybe a nice opportunity to plug the work of hugo mercy which is a name that doesn’t get as much recognition as it should but when height was saying that no one’s figured out how to do this yet with regards to overcoming confirmation bias and what he calls my side bias which i think is a slightly better way to think about it um he was writing before mercy came out with this book the enigma of reason but i just want to absolutely plug that because um or if you don’t want to read it you can listen to our podcast uh where we where we go through it um but mercy talks a lot about how uh we are absolutely terrible at evaluating um arguments that come from our own side that’s where all of the cognitive biases stuff kicks in we’re not nearly as self -critical as we should be but we’re very very very good at evaluating the reasons coming from the other side um and in that way we can start to overcome the problem that hate said was not possible to be overcome in the sense that let’s just bake that in okay we’re not going to evaluate our own arguments very well but we’re going to evaluate the other side’s arguments pretty damn well and so talk to people who are different from you and let them spot holes in your reasoning and you do it to them and in that way we can actually overcome the problem that hate said is is around so just a plug for
[02:46:47] Blue: uh
[02:46:48] Teal: another name
[02:46:49] Blue: seems very compatible with carapace it
[02:46:52] Teal: is yeah what what’s just a side thing it’s what’s cool is that i look through all his citations i don’t think he is aware of poppers work but i think he’s rediscovered a lot of the same ideas in a new way and so it’s beautifully compatible with poppers stuff um and it’s nice that he unlike myself isn’t so biased and quoting popper every third sentence um and so you get like a fresh a fresh uh insight and so a huge plug for hugo mercy a brilliant brilliant scholar
[02:47:18] Blue: okay well i really really appreciate everyone showing up and answering all my weird crazy random questions about this and uh i really appreciate that and it’s really been nice to connect with you all and i i hope we can do it again thank you
[02:47:39] Red: thank you so much peter yeah thanks so much for creating this beautiful context for our discussion yeah thank you right and
[02:47:51] Blue: thank you thank you yes thank you thank you okay okay bye bye guys take care
[02:47:57] Red: bye bye
[02:48:05] Blue: hello again if you’ve made it this far please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes as you probably know we are a podcast loosely tied together by the popper dutch theory of knowledge we believe david dutch’s four strands tie everything together so we discuss science knowledge computation politics art and especially the search for artificial general intelligence also please consider connecting with bruce on x at b neilson 01 also please consider joining the facebook group the mini worlds of david dutch where bruce and i first started connecting thank you
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