In light of research that indicates how the highly educated and highly credentialed tend to cling to their opinions in defiance of evidence (more than the less educated and less credentialed do), I'm skeptical of about intellectuals, especially when not taking critics seriously and respectfully.
I'm more inclined to resonate with the idea of our basic socio-biological programming doing what it does in response to the environment. This process has been going on long before we humans and our bigger brains came on the scene.
I appreciate the respectful and open-minded tone of this post. I see this as more of an exception to the main trend in the research cited above than as an illustration of it. But then again, I just may be automatically defending something I'm already inclined to agree with.
Great piece! This also connects with hagioptasia - our evolved tendency to perceive certain people, places, objects, institutions, and ideas as inherently charged with a sense of extraordinary 'specialness'.
Once that perceptual glow is triggered, the stimulus doesn’t just seem high-status - it starts to feel deeply meaningful, even profound, as if it contains some higher truth.
Status-seeking then disguises itself as wisdom, moral seriousness, or insight.
In this sense, much of modern intellectual culture becomes less about truth, and more about managing aura.
You make me think of Kahlil Ghibran's The Prophet and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. "it starts to feel deeply meaningful, even profound, as if it contains some higher truth."
Very interesting back and forth. I find myself clearly closer to the Pinsofian view on this. It feels like even if the disagreement is small, the implications are quite large for what we should expect from institutions and intellectual culture. Since the podcast with Daniel Nettle I’ve been wondering how much room is really left for maladaptive explanations.
The work of Aaron Sell on formidability cues is intriguing. The idea that upper body strength calibrates anger and even attitudes toward redistribution seems plausible in small scale settings. But today strength is not a meaningful proxy for power considering modern weapons while seemingly still affecting our judgement. This is likely not a large effect size on its own toward affecting a political stance and you would have to look longer at the evidence to even determine if this replicates (probably not enough out there to be confident either way). Yet at least this would be clearly maladaptive if true I think.
I tend to find myself so much in agreement with Pinsof it is starting to worry me, as from past negative experiences, I have an inclination to putting brutal bounds on how much reliability I grant to even the most persuasive and convincing of narrations on how societies and individuals work.
The highly evolved hawk’s eye doesn’t prevent him from flying into a wall of glass. This is a very different problem than occasionally or even frequently failing to catch a pigeon. A highly evolved ability to automatically adapt to novel contexts is not necessarily the ability to automatically adapt to novel context above a certain level of complexity. My highly evolved ability to pursue my self interest (or the good of all mankind) may not work so well in a world whose increasing complexity is beyond my ability to understand.
On the positive side, I have met very smart people working on the problem of how to make things better in a complex and changing world who have no interest in acquiring more money or esteem.
A made longer comment on the restock, but also wanted to add…
… can we dispense with the “arc of history” argument? It seems rife with selection bias — specifically, what in stats is called “optional stopping.” Specifically, people don’t write ‘arc of history” arguments at the low points of human history. For example, during WWI or right after the Holocaust. Or, soon perhaps, in the midst of a climate apocalypse or AI takeover. Imagine that AI takes over and defeats us in a struggle for supremacy, and then the AI writes a history of humanity. What are the chances that this narrative is “there was a long arc of progress and then abruptly, only in the last few years, was that broken.’ I think, low. It would see our species as either having ups and downs or having an arc of progress that then lead to some “tipping” point of demise.
On the Dan’s side here. I think the differences are much larger than David says, but that’s from a bystander perspective.
Main misalignment with David: degree of human ability is not featured well at all. This degree gives all the flavor. It’s not just italics.
Sure, we all have some innate skill for this and that. But majority of people are too far below the mean that is needed to maintain the world, cities, infrastructure and cultural milieu we’re in. Left to our own devices, we would descend very low.
Even folks with otherwise good decision making fall and break under the avalanche of noise that our world is. Their brains make bad decisions because clarity can disappear very quickly as soon as you wake up and try to think about your day. Guidance is needed, even from our own selves thru notes and rituals.
Invention of hierarchy, where people can make decisions by being led by an expert is one of the greatest meta-technologies we have.
Sure, we have capacity for this and that, but we need a dispatcher or ideas, organizer, decision maker.
We all suck. We really do.
Tongue in cheek, why do we need all these articles and literature itself, if our capabilities are oh so sufficient for modern world? Down with intelligentsia! Throw your pots in the cannon forge! ☺️
Everything is different, clairvoyant blah psychology, philosophers have been here before and will continue to be here, let's accept the fact that we are animals homo sapiens stupidus occasionally using reason.
In light of research that indicates how the highly educated and highly credentialed tend to cling to their opinions in defiance of evidence (more than the less educated and less credentialed do), I'm skeptical of about intellectuals, especially when not taking critics seriously and respectfully.
I'm more inclined to resonate with the idea of our basic socio-biological programming doing what it does in response to the environment. This process has been going on long before we humans and our bigger brains came on the scene.
I appreciate the respectful and open-minded tone of this post. I see this as more of an exception to the main trend in the research cited above than as an illustration of it. But then again, I just may be automatically defending something I'm already inclined to agree with.
Great piece! This also connects with hagioptasia - our evolved tendency to perceive certain people, places, objects, institutions, and ideas as inherently charged with a sense of extraordinary 'specialness'.
Once that perceptual glow is triggered, the stimulus doesn’t just seem high-status - it starts to feel deeply meaningful, even profound, as if it contains some higher truth.
Status-seeking then disguises itself as wisdom, moral seriousness, or insight.
In this sense, much of modern intellectual culture becomes less about truth, and more about managing aura.
You make me think of Kahlil Ghibran's The Prophet and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. "it starts to feel deeply meaningful, even profound, as if it contains some higher truth."
Absolutely - both evoke that sense of depth.
What fascinates me is how that feeling of "this contains a higher truth" gets generated, and how it can attach to very different kinds of things.
Very interesting back and forth. I find myself clearly closer to the Pinsofian view on this. It feels like even if the disagreement is small, the implications are quite large for what we should expect from institutions and intellectual culture. Since the podcast with Daniel Nettle I’ve been wondering how much room is really left for maladaptive explanations.
The work of Aaron Sell on formidability cues is intriguing. The idea that upper body strength calibrates anger and even attitudes toward redistribution seems plausible in small scale settings. But today strength is not a meaningful proxy for power considering modern weapons while seemingly still affecting our judgement. This is likely not a large effect size on its own toward affecting a political stance and you would have to look longer at the evidence to even determine if this replicates (probably not enough out there to be confident either way). Yet at least this would be clearly maladaptive if true I think.
I tend to find myself so much in agreement with Pinsof it is starting to worry me, as from past negative experiences, I have an inclination to putting brutal bounds on how much reliability I grant to even the most persuasive and convincing of narrations on how societies and individuals work.
The highly evolved hawk’s eye doesn’t prevent him from flying into a wall of glass. This is a very different problem than occasionally or even frequently failing to catch a pigeon. A highly evolved ability to automatically adapt to novel contexts is not necessarily the ability to automatically adapt to novel context above a certain level of complexity. My highly evolved ability to pursue my self interest (or the good of all mankind) may not work so well in a world whose increasing complexity is beyond my ability to understand.
On the positive side, I have met very smart people working on the problem of how to make things better in a complex and changing world who have no interest in acquiring more money or esteem.
A made longer comment on the restock, but also wanted to add…
… can we dispense with the “arc of history” argument? It seems rife with selection bias — specifically, what in stats is called “optional stopping.” Specifically, people don’t write ‘arc of history” arguments at the low points of human history. For example, during WWI or right after the Holocaust. Or, soon perhaps, in the midst of a climate apocalypse or AI takeover. Imagine that AI takes over and defeats us in a struggle for supremacy, and then the AI writes a history of humanity. What are the chances that this narrative is “there was a long arc of progress and then abruptly, only in the last few years, was that broken.’ I think, low. It would see our species as either having ups and downs or having an arc of progress that then lead to some “tipping” point of demise.
On the Dan’s side here. I think the differences are much larger than David says, but that’s from a bystander perspective.
Main misalignment with David: degree of human ability is not featured well at all. This degree gives all the flavor. It’s not just italics.
Sure, we all have some innate skill for this and that. But majority of people are too far below the mean that is needed to maintain the world, cities, infrastructure and cultural milieu we’re in. Left to our own devices, we would descend very low.
Even folks with otherwise good decision making fall and break under the avalanche of noise that our world is. Their brains make bad decisions because clarity can disappear very quickly as soon as you wake up and try to think about your day. Guidance is needed, even from our own selves thru notes and rituals.
Invention of hierarchy, where people can make decisions by being led by an expert is one of the greatest meta-technologies we have.
Sure, we have capacity for this and that, but we need a dispatcher or ideas, organizer, decision maker.
We all suck. We really do.
Tongue in cheek, why do we need all these articles and literature itself, if our capabilities are oh so sufficient for modern world? Down with intelligentsia! Throw your pots in the cannon forge! ☺️
Everything is different, clairvoyant blah psychology, philosophers have been here before and will continue to be here, let's accept the fact that we are animals homo sapiens stupidus occasionally using reason.