We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.
Here is the link. I like that phrase, "rationality ruin." I am, of course, more of a pragmatist and less of a Platonist than is Robin. But still, Robin is the daily tonic I wish to take.
Excellent – if I had only learned this before I began to hate most pop music I probably would have had far more dates…
But really, this is great advice. It may be tough to implement for me personally. And note that this feeling is closely related to Nationalism, well just about all isms.
And why does that last phrase remind me of Eric Hoffer?
The question I always have after hearing such thoughts from Robin Hanson is: what about the pleasure I take from feeling virtuous for believing the things that Robin says when the majority of people do not?
We really do need more conformity of thought. If one guy gets and idea that is not in line with the majority then he should jsut try to forget about it and allign himself with the majority. We need institutions to help us with this…that is why I was so relieved that many other agree with many and soon we may have a national voluntary service program where we can hlep the youth conform to good ideals. It is EVIL to oppose this.
How quickly things turn post election. I have heard already that “unnamed” and “anonymous” sources are untrustworthy and/or just plain BAD (with regard to stories on Obama), despite them being the norm for the past 8 years. Tax cuts, which have been derided in the United States for years now, are suddenly GOOD things to give to 95% of the population. ENCOURAGING consumption at the individual level, which was the stuff of years of scorn when – or because – Bush mentioned it is now something we NEED to do, even at the cost of reversing savings growth, even when we are Nobel prize winning economists who have been arguing the opposite for years. And now, of course, it’s EVIL to go against the grain, just in general.
Hey, I thought EVIL was one of those scary words that made people uncomfortable. Or is that only when it’s said with a little Texas twang?
obviously should say “obscure”.
“Rationality ruin” be damned. I agree with other commentors: being right and crowing about it is one of the few free pleasures in life.
In that vein, MM is speaking in tongues or something. You lost, get over it.
The Catholic Church files this under Pride.
The man is worse than Lucy with the football with his threats to quit blogging, but in case he is serious this time I think it is vital that you get him on a Blogginheads, sniffles be damned!
Robin has made comments like this before, and I tend to agree, especially in the frame of experts dissenting with other experts. Most of the time when many experts disagree with few experts the many will be right and the few will be wrong. This isn’t to say that one should conform his/her thoughts to other experts, but just to take extra care when forming an “absurd belief” as the GMU lunch group calls it.
The Catholic Church files this under Pride.
Pride is a bad sin for many reasons, including that it interferes with forgiveness of others, and also leads to assumptions of “being sinless” and that no forgiveness is needed, i.e., I do no wrong.
Pride is the flip side of despair, also a big sin.
“Pride is the excessive love of one’s own excellence. It is ordinarily accounted one of the seven capital sins. St. Thomas, however, endorsing the appreciation of St. Gregory, considers it the queen of all vices, and puts vainglory in its place as one of the deadly sins.”
Pride: from the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908
Despair: from the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908
Actually I regret my rush to judgement and snarky attitude. I’ve been reading star wars books with my kids and this is the same thing they teach padawans(jedi apprentices). It is ok to disagree, but do not take pleasure in it, it clouds the mind, just be coldly factual. It is what it is, you are lucky to have seen better evidence or have better logic teachers, do not delight in others being ignorant and do not feel bad for your own ignorance…just do as you must.
That said, the jedi are tremendously bad ass compared to most the other life forms in thier universe and they do seem to enjoy hanging out with one another, especially when some siths destroy the majority of the good ones in the universe.
Robert and meter,
I think you guys are miss-interpreting Robin. He’s saying its “wrong” to take pleasure in holding an opinion because it is aligned with your favored group, or demonizes a disfavored group. Humans take pleasure in favoring “us” over “them”, and that pleasure often leads to irrational outcomes.
Thats not to say there can’t be rational reasons to favor or disfavor a group’s consensus, or that being happy about being right is a bad thing. Just be sure your happiness actually stems from factual superiority, and not from a desire to believe what your friends believe.
In other words, if we want to be more rational we should hold opinions which are based on fact. We should not hold opinions because of what they signal to others.
But there is a distinctive pleasure in being one of the very few people to get it right.
At least, I think there is. (I wouldn’t know; it’s never happened to me.)
Bob Murphy,
Sorry. My comment was unclear, or maybe even obscure. It was a response to josh who said Hanson was not obscure. I thought I quoted josh, but I see I didn’t.
The only point was that when people interpret a short paragraph in different ways, or find it puzzling, I think it’s fair to say it is obscure.
the interior rednecks, the persona they projected on Sarah Palin
I don’t see how you can say this. Have you been to Wasilla? Are you Alaskan? Do you have relatives in small-town Alaska? I can say yes to all three, and I agree 100% with this “projected” image.
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2008/09/04/palin%E2%80%99s-wasilla-a-small-town-with-attitude/
The anything-goes attitude is also part of its draw. Many residents boast that they have escaped the stifling regulations and frou-frou trappings of the big city they dismissively call “Los Anchorage.†
Such antigovernment attitudes helped launch Palin’s political career as a “hard-core conservative† who resisted controls on business.
An acknowledged Alinskyist group, the Southern Manitoba Education Group Management Association (SMEGMA) in Canada says on its website that Obama shares its radical views, and explains how they believe Alinskyite principles will be implemented by Obama in his administration.
http://www.smegma.ca
Robin is basically saying: feeling smug about the out-group when you’re hanging out with your in-group peers takes you further away from honestly pursuing truth.
There’s something to that. But “evil” is waaaayyyyy too strong. I still laugh at the Daily Show, which is pretty darn smug (there is occasionally self-parody). I laugh at their jokes even though I know some of it’s unfair. It feels good. Who cares? You can feel good about something while still receiving it critically.
I find that being a contrarian about 40% of the time is a pretty good strategy to keeping the gears of critical thinking properly greased.
When someone presumes to speak for me by using “we”, I automatically discount anything he/she says. That’s just me, you may react differently.
Actually, I tend to feel despair, not pleasure, when the majority disagrees with (or is blissfully indifferent to or unaware of) the things I care about or believe to be obviously true.
Some wrong beliefs can persist indefinitely; others, however, especially those related to economics or investing or financial speculation, eventually lead to an impasse and a collective rethink. Figuring out such developments in advance can be rewarding, and I don’t mean psychologically.
It’s not worth arguing with a majority that’s wrong. If you are patient and have a long-term outlook, you should be able to profit from them instead. And it’s not evil to feel pleasure if you do.
I’ll get back to you when I can find that elusive person I can agree with.
A lovely sentiment ruined by a stylistic solecism.
“Rationality ruin.”
What the hell is that?
Robin needs to read his Fowler and avoid
modifying nouns with other nouns.
“Robin needs to read his Fowler and avoid modifying nouns with other nouns.”
Either that, or he needs to become a German.
“Das RationalitatRüin!”
I don’t know if it’s a male thing, but it’s definitely a rationalist thing. Most people are too invested in their positions for disagreement not to hurt their feelings. “I worked hard for these beliefs, therefore they must have value.”
I’d rather get everything out on the table and have someone point out my fallacies, even if I don’t always behave that way. So, I argue with a lot of people, can’t help it, and I don’t think I’ve every convinced someone they are wrong. Someone should tell me that arguing with people doesn’t help.
They basically have to change their own mind. This takes FOREVER, which is why the only people I think I’ve had an effect on are close friends who are now almost all vastly more libertarian than before they knew me.
So, disagreeing with someone to the point they don’t like you undermines your cause. However, if you only go along to get along, noone ever improves their thinking. So, it’s a fine line.
This is an interesting statement. It closely parallels a similar warning from CS Lewis – not usually a comrade of Robin Hanson’s. This is from a memorial lecture Lewis gave at Kings College in 1944, titled “The Inner Ring”:
He developed the same idea in his novel That Hideous Strength, where it provides the mechanism that draws the protagonist into moral danger and away from his wife.
Lewis didn’t call the thing exclusively evil. He thought that the same sort of shared difference was the essence of friendship, which was such an important part of his life. (This is from the lecture again.)
In The Four Loves he wrote:
(In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes such a moment of discovery, of a mutual love of Norse mythology, with his childhood friend Arthur.)
It’s interesting that Lewis and Hanson can arrive at the same insight and even language from practically opposite directions.
One benefit of the quote is that for the first time it provided a sense of the philosophical reasons Manichaism was considered a heresy.
One of my enduring beliefs, although clearly flawed at some level, is that one of the fundamental traits associated with intelligence is smart people should have some internal version of Conlon’s Law (part of the Book of Murphy’s Laws) –
Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity/ignorance/poorly defined prior distributions.
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