Sociology degrees are not useful for much, but one of the things a good sociology education gives you is a healthy disrespect for sociology.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the young sociology student takes her first theory class. The first week, she reads Smith, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that the invisible hand of the market causes goods to be distributed in the way that best benefits everyone. The second week, she reads Marx, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that capitalism is a product of bourgeoisie ownership of the means of production which alienates the proletariat from their labor. The third week, she reads Durkheim, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that industrialization leads to anomie, a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals. The fourth week, she reads Weber, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that the capitalist spirit originates in a Calvinist urge to find signs whether or not one is a member of the elect. The fifth week, she reads Mills, who presents a plausible and insightful argument that the ordinary citizen is a powerless tool in the hands of corporate, military, and political leaders who control society for their own ends.
At this point, if all goes well, she storms into her professor’s office and says “okay, I can kind of harmonize Smith and Weber, or Marx and Durkheim, but mostly these authors not only don’t agree with each other, they don’t even seem to be describing they same thing! They are at utter disjoint! None of them even agree about what categories we should be using! And yet when I read Weber, he makes sense, and when I read Marx, he makes sense, and when I read Smith, he makes sense! HOW CAN THIS BE? AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”, and a sociologist is born.
Before I get into the meat of this post, I would like to make it clear that I am not criticizing Scott, Eliezer, or lesser writers of amateur sociology. Amateur sociology is fun. I’ve indulged in it myself quite a lot. And these are posts on their respective blogs, not peer-reviewed journal articles. Bullshitting about your grand theories of how society works is exactly what the essay form is designed for.
This post, in fact, is blaming everyone else.
Tossing out plausible hypotheses about how the world might work, with appropriate caveats, is perfectly reasonable behavior which advances the intellectual discourse. Deciding that these hypotheses are true because a smart charismatic member of your ingroup wrote them is not. And, frankly, if you identify as a rationalist, it is super-embarrassing.
This goes double if you’ve changed your behavior based on it.
I have often seen the post Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs discussed by rationalists when we are talking about how cults form. In many cases, this is discussed as if it is settled sociology: evaporative cooling of group beliefs is how cults form. Done.
Eliezer provides a cute analogy with the concept of Bose-Einstein condensates; while this is adorable, analogies to physics are not typically considered evidence. He references the classic “When Prophecy Fails”, which actually concludes that cults are a product of cognitive dissonance and not of evaporative cooling of group beliefs at all. While reinterpreting other people’s data is a perfectly reasonable exercise, one must have some reason to believe that your hypothesis is more likely than their hypothesis; otherwise, we might as well go with the conclusions of the people who actually did the ethnography in the first place.
Eliezer also provides an uncited description of the dynamics of the Nathaniel Branden/Ayn Rand split. I consulted my friend Shea Levy, a dissident Objectivist with contacts among other dissident Objectivists, who claims this description is inaccurate: Objectivists were actually evenly split between Branden and Rand, mostly based on personal loyalties, not based on who believed Rand most fervently. While it is certainly possible that Shea is mistaken, Eliezer’s lack of a citation makes this less than credible.
Finally, Eliezer presents an anecdote about a mailing list he was on. Forgive me if I do not find this terribly compelling.
Similarly, I have also seen people cite the Slate Star Codex post The Toxoplasma of Rage. Some Tumblr users have even adopted the habit of tagging “toxoplasma cw”.
Once again, much of the text of the essay is devoted to a cute, vaguely scientific analogy, this time to the disease toxoplasmosis. However, unlike Eliezer, Scott does give several examples of situations in which his model holds true: an instance of PETA being obnoxious; the Michael Brown shooting; the University of Virginia rape case; Tumblr’s reblogging dynamics; and which Slate Star Codex posts get the most hits.
With the exception of the last item, all these occurred within a few weeks of each other: indeed, this is, as best as I can tell, the articles that happened to be popular on Scott Alexander’s Tumblr dash one week. Like… instead of this whole complicated theory, perhaps we should just adopt the null hypothesis of that week being a really bad week for sympathetic people who were telling the truth being figureheads of social movements, and Tumblr being a totally nonfunctioning blogging platform. I mean, the last one is practically an axiom at this point.
Consider how much effort Scott puts into his posts about SSRIs or Alcoholics Anonymous. Imagine how much he would rip apart a study that consisted of only three participants deliberately selected because their response to a drug fit the narrative the person writing the paper preferred to push. Now consider why you think that is not sufficient evidence for whether a chemical influences people’s brains, and yet it is sufficient evidence for grand historical theories.
The next post I will address is Meditations on Moloch.
Meditations on Moloch refers to several thought experiments, mostly from economics and game theory: the prisoner’s dilemma; the tragedy of the commons; dollar auctions. Now, it is incontrovertible that these situations accurately describe some situations which happen in the real world. But that is a long way from saying that they cause all the problems– or even a significant number of problems– in the world. For instance, humans may be very good at coming to utility-maximizing solutions in those situations. (The actual commons that gave the tragedy of the commons its name did not become overgrazed, but instead was well-managed for centuries.) Or the suboptimal solution for the participants is optimal for everybody else. (The classic example, of course, is corporations fixing prices, which can be modeled as a prisoner’s dilemma/tragedy of the commons.) Or they might describe some problems very well, but not the most important, urgent, or common problems.
Scott gives a lot more examples in Meditations on Moloch than he does in Toxoplasma of Rage, so I’m only going to examine one of them, although I believe my argument applies to all his examples. He says:
13. Government corruption. I don’t know of anyone who really thinks, in a principled way, that corporate welfare is a good idea. But the government still manages to spend somewhere around (depending on how you calculate it) $100 billion dollars a year on it – which for example is three times the amount they spend on health care for the needy. Everyone familiar with the problem has come up with the same easy solution: stop giving so much corporate welfare. Why doesn’t it happen?
Government are competing against one another to get elected or promoted. And suppose part of optimizing for electability is optimizing campaign donations from corporations – or maybe it isn’t, but officials think it is. Officials who try to mess with corporate welfare may lose the support of corporations and be outcompeted by officials who promise to keep it intact.
So although from a god’s-eye-view everyone knows that eliminating corporate welfare is the best solution, each individual official’s personal incentives push her to maintain it.
Scott doesn’t provide a source on the number, but the Cato Institute has a paper that comes to the conclusion that $100 billion is spent on corporate welfare, so I’m going to assume he is using their calculations. The Cato Institute’s list of corporate welfare includes subsidies for the development of alternate energy sources; applied R&D conducted by groups such as NASA, the NIH, the NSF, and the Defense Department; subsidies for farmers; and support for minority-owned businesses. It seems to me that there are quite a lot of people who think, in a principled way, that these programs are a good idea.
But let’s grant to Scott that there is a bunch of corporate welfare that no reasonable person would support. Are we certain his explanation is correct? Perhaps the real mechanism is that congresspeople don’t understand all the businesses they’re supposed to be regulating, and so rely on help from lobbyists. Perhaps it’s because lobbyists are nice, charming people and people naturally want to do favors for people they like and believe what people they like say. Perhaps it is some other mechanism. Scott puts no effort into discussing or disproving alternate hypotheses.
Furthermore, he doesn’t examine empirical data. Some countries are autocracies which don’t have elections: do they have a lower rates of corporate welfare? Some countries have publicly funded elections: do they have lower rates of corporate welfare? Either way, are there alternate explanations?
Of course, I’m being kind of unreasonable here. Scott should not be expected to write a book about lobbying reform every time he wants to write an essay, particularly since he’d also have to write books about capitalism, the rise of agriculture, and the reform of both education and scientific research. The man has a day job.
But my point is that unless someone puts in that work, we can’t say that the hypothesis is true. Scott is saying, “I hypothesize that a lot of problems are caused by runaway optimization processes, and I hypothesize that one of these problems is corporate welfare.” That is importantly different from “one of the biggest problems in the world is runaway optimization processes, such as that which causes corporate welfare.”
Now, you might say to me “Ozy, I don’t believe these essays because of the evidence they cite! Those are just illustrative examples! I believe them because they explain observations I’ve made in my daily life.” That seems superficially reasonable. However, we’re running into the problem the young sociologist did at the beginning of this essay: something sounding plausible doesn’t mean a damn thing. Imagine if instead of Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs, Eliezer concluded:
When something happens that disproves the cult’s beliefs, all the doubts of moderate members come to a head. Once, they could think ‘well, maybe the cult leader is wrong about aesthetics, but they’re right about everything else, so it’s okay’; now, it is starkly obvious to them that they must choose between staying and leaving. But their friends are in the cult; they may have been isolated from people who aren’t cult members, or been lonely and disconnected to begin with. Humans are social animals, and leaving your group is terrifying. For this reason, after they receive evidence against the cult, moderate members tend to drop their doubts– which now, it is clear, entail leaving– and become hardcore members.
Imagine if instead of Toxoplasma of Rage, Scott had written an essay that could be summarized like this:
Because of confirmation bias, people tend to signal-boost stories that fit in with their preconceptions. Reading anecdotes that fit your model of the world is comforting; reading something that might disprove it is scary and leads to cognitive dissonance. So the feminist reads endless stories of oppressive white men, while the MRA reads stories of feminists creating oppressive laws that screw over men. And since writers know that they have to cater to their audiences, stories that don’t fit a convenient model get buried. The Internet has only made this worse, because we can get into tiny filter-bubbles. In the old days, we watched the conservative TV news network, and the libertarians had to watch stories that fit the evangelicals’ model of the world. Nowadays, even the ancaps and the minarchists get their news from different websites.
Imagine if instead of Meditations on Moloch, there was this essay:
Human beings evolved to know less than two hundred people. We have scope insensitvity: we didn’t evolve to understand the difference between two hundred humans and two hundred thousand. We don’t help the global poor, because in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness we would have no way of helping people whose faces we couldn’t see. We feel scared and threatened by ultimately harmless online dogpiling, because we evolved to know that if you were hated by two hundred people you would die. Humans, empirically, are quite good at sorting out tragedies of the commons within small groups, via compassion, guilt, social isolation, violence, etc. It’s only when we need to coordinate millions of people that we have coordination failures. Hell, even the famous nervousness of shy male nerds is an instance of this problem: their emotions haven’t caught up to the fact that if they fuck up with one girl, she’s not going to tell Literally Every Girl In The Whole Entire World.
I flatter myself that all of these are prima facie as plausible as their respective opposites. But they make completely different predictions! Do events that disprove the cult leader’s belief draw moderate members closer in to the fold, or drive them away? Do people seek out easy, clear-cut stories because of confirmation bias, or thorny, complicated stories because of controversy? Are runaway optimization processes a big deal, or merely the consequence of the natural human ways of dealing with their intuitions failing to scale?
You can’t tell, without more evidence. And evidence– good, strong evidence that leads one to believe something more complicated than “I don’t know”– is what those posts conspicuously fail to provide.
I picked three prominent posts, but there’s a lot more examples: pretty much anything that classifies itself as “insight porn”, for instance, is an example of the amateur sociology which I am critiquing. I think there are two sources of this toxicity: the love of meta and the wide gap between the level of knowledge required to have an opinion on sociology and the level of knowledge required to know things about sociology.
(Yes, I am fully aware of the irony of doing speculative amateur sociology in my post about how you shouldn’t do speculative amateur sociology.)
First, consider physics. The average person does not have that much of an opinion on physics: they don’t know a baryon from a fermion, and the math is tremendously intimidating. However, many of the things that trained physicists know they know for certain: discoveries regularly have a p-value of 1 in 3×10-7 and a strong theoretical grounding. Therefore, if someone tells you about physics, it’s very likely they’re telling the truth.
Conversely, everyone lives in a society [citation needed], and thus everyone feels qualified to have an opinion on sociology. Things like “marginalization”, “signalling”, “cults”, “social class”, and so on are the stuff of everyday life. On the other hand, sociology is really hard. You can’t do controlled experiments where you give five hundred societies public funding of elections and five hundred societies private funding of elections and see which one has the higher rate of corporate welfare: all your data is observational. Your sample sizes are tiny: there simply aren’t enough different countries, religions, wars, or what have you. And as soon as you get a conclusion that you think really holds, someone comes along and invents the birth control pill and fucks everything up for you.
So what happens is that you have a bunch of people talking about one of the disciplines it’s most difficult to know anything about for certain, based on their dozen friends and the last four newspaper articles they read. No wonder we end up falling into such difficulties.
Second, a lot of rationalists love “meta”.
They don’t want to say things about boring, object-level politics, like what sort of environmental regulations are a good idea or whether Trump is going to win in Iowa. They want to say things about Politics! About Discourse! About How People Think! About Memes!
Let’s compare it with biology. The object level of biology contains many fascinating articles about snail sex. The meta level of biology is, of course, the theory of evolution. The meta meta level of biology is the concept of the scientific method.
So I’d like to draw your attention to two points here. First, there is a lot of evidence behind the theory of evolution. On The Origin of Species covers, in depth, topics ranging from fancy pigeon breeding to slave-making ants, and today the evidence for evolution is even more varied. When you try to speculate about the meta level of biology without this sort of grounding in evidence, you wind up with “there is a Form of each species, which individuals may exhibit more or less well; these Forms have existed since the beginning of time, and all species have been in more-or-less the same situation since the Creation” which is, not too fine a point on it, exactly backwards.
Second, talking about meta is entirely throwing the virtue of narrowness out the door. It is said: “What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.” Similarly, while you can have endless conversations about snail sex, there’s really not a lot that can be said about the scientific method. It’s a good idea and we should do more of it. And far more can be said about how people talk to each other on Tumblr, or among rationalists, or in Timbuktu, than can be said about the concept of Conversations In General.
Of course, that’s assuming you don’t want to completely make up nonsense. If you don’t confine yourself to having opinions that are technically speaking ‘true’, you can say as much as you like about the meta meta level of biology, because nonsensespace is much larger than sensespace.
Again, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to hang out in nonsensespace shooting the shit. I’m literally doing it right now. It’s fun! But I think we need to keep a firm wall between the part of our brain that does amateur sociology and the part of our brain that has real grown-up endorsed opinions. I like classifying all my friends in sortinghatchats, but when it comes time to have a discussion of EA PR, I don’t say “how can we reach out to Gryffindor Primaries?” Similarly, you can have fun talking about toxoplasma of rage as much as you like, but it does not have a place in serious discussions.
skye said:
I think your critique assumes that people necessarily subscribe to one coherent picture of the world, which is not true in my experience. Nor should it be – the world is too complicated for one theory to present a complete picture of it. The map is not the territory*, etc. If I think the “toxoplasma of rage” theory is interesting and describes some things accurately (and I do), that doesn’t mean I subscribe to it at the expense of other models of the world. Different tools for different situations.
I also think you’re not fully distinguishing between “academic models of the world” and “models that help us understand our experiences”. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they aren’t, and I don’t think they should have to be. It’s bad when people elevate the latter to the former when it’s not deserved, but I don’t think that diminishes the latter’s value.
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danarmak said:
If you have different theories that apply in different situations, you also need a very-well-supported meta-theory that tells you when to apply each theory. Otherwise you’re just picking the theory that predicts what you actually see. And at least each of these sub-theories, like the toxoplasmosa of rage, don’t come with explicit applicability warnings that are clearly disjoint from the applicability of alternative theories.
Even if you come up with these conditions yourselves, they’re not part of the original source material, so how well supported are they, and how do you know other readers independently came up with the same conditions?
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ms said:
A good meta-theory here is not so much a theory but a practice: If you want to use an idea from a blogged essay in serious decision making then you should stop and consider all the simplifying assumptions and caveats that silently accompany the article. Easier said than done of course.
Once you have a good handle on the underlying assumptions and predictions that a model makes then you can start reasoning about where it’s applicable. I think this kind of judgement is a fuzzy and intuitive art rather than an explicit meta-theory.
Picking whatever model that happens to fit your observations is essentially the problem of overfitting. There are some good heuristics for avoiding this, like favoring simple explanations, as well as going out and testing your ideas. Unfortunately sociology isn’t machine learning and this is all hard to do 😛
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JuanPeron said:
Your summary definitely describes what I’m doing, and I think this post (while also a useful sociology theory) is proposing an excessively high bar for applying models. Having these models, even unproven, can be quite useful as a way to understand events and predict the outcomes of ongoing events.
Yes, it’s possible to tell a hundred convincing just-so stories without knowing which ones are right. That doesn’t mean all just-so stories are too informal to bring up (not assert, but bring up) in serious contexts. Many times, they’re relevant and accurate within certain limits. As an example, that story about “bubble effects” is almost certainly true, but it addresses in-group dynamics and Toxoplasma addresses cross-group dynamics.
Even in the academic case, I’m pretty comfortable saying something like “Smith and Marx are writing useful essays/just-so stories without recourse to proven facts”. If you want to reconcile those somewhat-conflicting narratives, you go read Stiglitz and see a breakdown of why the theorems of Welfare Economics can be true-but-irrelevant.
And yes, this is dangerous, because it gives us models without telling us when to apply them. That’s the problem with the future: it’s really hard to predict. I’d still rather face it with a bunch of tools I don’t quite trust or know how to use than with no tools at all.
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John said:
People who want the meta level abandoned typically have something really nasty they want to accomplish without being noticed or questioned.
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ozymandias said:
I am confused. You seem to be talking about ‘going meta’ on a moral level; I’m talking about it on an empirical level, and did not talk about morality once. Or do you believe that coming up with grand and poorly-evidenced theories of society is necessary to prevent nasty things from happening? That seems like a very bold claim; why do you believe it?
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John said:
Grand theories are needed to create and defend ethical injunctions, which are needed.
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ozymandias said:
This seems untrue to me. “Don’t lie even to defend a true statement, because you might be wrong and if you are you’re making it harder to figure out what’s true” does not require any grand theories of society (beyond the fairly defensible “lies make it harder to figure out what’s true”). Conversely, it’s unclear what ethical injunction toxoplasma of rage would support, beyond “don’t talk about controversial things”, which only makes sense if toxoplasma of rage is actually a thing. Not enough evidence is presented to make it clear that toxoplasma of rage is a thing, so it doesn’t make sense to change your behavior based on it.
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ChetC3 said:
People who reflexively go to meta-level usually have the same motivation.
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Ghatanathoah said:
When I read “The Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs” and “The Toxoplasma of Rage” I was never under the impression that they were intended to be grand meta-theories of cult formation and outrage formation. I assumed that they were describing one common mechanism that intensified cult and outrage formation, but that other common mechanisms existed as well. An analogy might be that there are different factors that contribute to a recession.
Was I being too charitable?
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ozymandias said:
Why do you believe they are common? Why do you believe they happen at all? There isn’t any *actual evidence*, and you can come up with a thousand plausible-sounding explanations, not *all* of which can be true. (It would be very odd if both Smith and Marx were correct.)
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arielbyd said:
But both Smith and Marx *are* correct (except for communism Not Actually Working, that’s it). Their models apply in different situations.
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ozymandias said:
The labor theory of value and the mainstream capitalist theory of value completely disagree with each other. They are not “applicable in different situations”, they just disagree. Therefore they cannot both be right.
I mean, do you accept that it’s possible to create a grand theory of society that is wrong?
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Fisher said:
How in the world can anyone think the labor theory of value is correct?
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Protagoras said:
Marx and Smith agree about a lot. As for the labor theory of value, it’s a theory on which people deserve to be rewarded for hard work; it’s very intuitive. Capitalist theory of value is very unintuitive, so it’s not just Marx but many proponents of capitalism who advocate forms of the labor theory of value (by pretending that they amount to the same thing as the capitalist theory of value, even though they clearly don’t; Locke is the most famous example that comes to mind of those attempting to square that circle).
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Patrick said:
“Equal pay for equal work.”
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Susebron said:
As somebody who has read approximately three or four pages of Capital (using https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf), I could be completely wrong about this. But as I understood it, Capital starts by defining use-value and exchange-value, then basically decides that labor-value is more useful because it is a property of the object rather than the rest of the world. It’s not that any one is wrong, unless you think “value” is a concept with a description outside of any particular conception of value. It’s just a matter of which one is more useful for a given context.
Is anybody here more acquainted with Marx, and if so could they correct any mistakes in the above summary?
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stargirlprincess said:
@Ozy its basically impossible to “know” anything in sociology/economics etc with confidence. There is STILL no serious consensus on what caused the great Depression and what we should learn from it.
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Fisher said:
As for the labor theory of value, it’s a theory on which people deserve to be rewarded for hard work; it’s very intuitive.
I guess, in the same way that the earth is the center of the universe is intuitive.
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Susebron said:
>I guess, in the same way that the earth is the center of the universe is intuitive.
Tell me, what empirical evidence exists on the topic of which value-form is correct? What would it even mean for a value-form to be correct?
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FrogOfWar said:
Marx didn’t do normative ethics.
The labor theory of value is not an attempt to explain who deserves what; it is part of a causal theory of where profit comes from (Marx thought it was the first successful such theory).
Unlike the normative claim ascribed to Marx above, the labor theory makes predictions, such as that industries will exhibit less profit if they become more capital intensive. It has been as falsified as just about anything in econ.
See: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#3
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Julie K said:
Smith actually believes the labor theory of value to a certain extent, though he thinks prices should be determined by the free market.
“The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.”
“But though labour be the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities, it is not that by which their value is commonly estimated. It is often difficult to ascertain the proportion between two different quantities of labour. The time spent in two different sorts of work will not always alone determine this proportion. The different degrees of hardship endured, and of ingenuity exercised, must likewise be taken into account… But it is not easy to find any accurate measure either of hardship or ingenuity. In exchanging indeed the different productions of different sorts of labour for one another, some allowance is commonly made for both. It is adjusted, however, not by any accurate measure, but by the higgling and bargaining of the market, according to that sort of rough equality which, though not exact, is sufficient for carrying on the business of common life.”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN2.html#B.I, Ch.5, Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities
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shemtealeaf said:
In your opinion, what would a serious discussion of sociology look like? I agree with virtually all of your points, but I end up drawing the conclusion that sociology discussions are just never going to be that serious when compared to physics discussions.
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ozymandias said:
It would be grounded in the literature and full of caveats like “however, in 14th century Osaka, we note…” and very very boring.
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davidmikesimon said:
Why does it have to be boring?
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stargirlprincess said:
Why title this “Against amateur sociology” iInstead of “against sociology” ?
Your opening paragraph basically concedes that academic sociology has a huge fundamental problem. Academic sociology still has not produced a sound clearly convincing argument to settle as Marx vs Smith vs Durkheim vs x etc.The field just does not have the sort of techniques powerful enough to force convergence of beleifs. For example it cannot get enough value out of things like “mathematical proof” or “repeated experiments.” (note I seriously doubt many sociologists actually like Smith since the field is about 90% left wing.)
I basically agree with your conclusions. At least I agree that is a be confidant that “evaporative cooling” is how cults form. And while I feel the urge to argue “no rationalist really thinks Elizier solved the problem of cult formation” I am pretty sure some rationalists do.
But I don’t think that Scott and Elizier have more problems than academic sociology in general. Eleizier seems to be about as problematic and Scott seems much better than the sociology average in terms of the issues you raised. Scott’s essays are short but he seems considerably more open to alternate hypothesis than most sociologists. He even started tagging the “epistemic status” of many of his posts. (Eleizer may actually be worse than average sadly. He is pretty “arrogant” about his positions)
So I honestly think your critique may or may not “prove too much.” I am open to the position that sociology is bad idea in general. But I basically think that sociology fills a human need. And that its basically impossible to live without some sociology view of the world. Given this it seems better to at least try to grapple with sociology problems even if considerable amounts of salt are required.
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ChetC3 said:
Sadly, Scott is worse than academic sociologists when it comes to logical rigor and to supplying supporting evidence. He does a much better job of appealing to the tastes and biases of libertarianish nerds, though.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
I could totally see how that would apply to modern academic sociologists, especially in the field of mathematical sociology like Scott E. Page, but I suspect that most modern bullshiters familiar with the concept of p-value are strictly better than Marx and Smith, who worked before it was even invented – heck, before even falsifiability was invented.
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cypher said:
The real problem is that such theories are needed by voters in democracies, and if you cede the theory-creation power to professional sociologists, then the field will become even more politicized than it is now, and you also let them decide the values.
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r said:
Can I just say that I really hate this thing in our modern narrowly-read society where anyone with some amount of essay-writing skill immediately becomes a charismatic cult leader? You’re supposed to write essays into a mutually-critical ecosystem of essayists, not a typical blog audience that reads essays to feel smart.
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Izaak Weiss said:
What evidence do you have for this being new? Do you really think that essayists of history had a different audience?
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callmebrotherg said:
//What evidence do you have for this being new? Do you really think that essayists of history had a different audience?//
I’d also like elaboration on this point, but at a guess it might have been when very few people were literate.
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davidmikesimon said:
Wait, is it really that different now? My impression was that there have always been far more essay reassess than writers.
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Ortvin Sarapuu said:
“You’re supposed to write essays into a mutually-critical ecosystem of essayists, not a typical blog audience that reads essays to feel smart.”
Well, you’re supposed to do a lot of things…
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stargirlprincess said:
Let me add to the above. It seems extremely rare that anyone avoids having an ideological view on society. I personally think, given that “sociology” is impossible to avoid reading Scott is a fine idea. By ther standards of sociology Scott is a fine source.
For example Ozy clearly holds Social Justice Feminism as an important part of their worldview. I would be very happy to have a prolonged debate on the resolution “What is a more rigorous and intellectually honest source, Scott or SJ-feminism.” Probably Ozy would agree that SJ-feminism has many problems. If so why don’t they write “against feminism.”
Even very high achieving practical people often have alot of ideological views on sociology. For example Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Bertrand Russel, Einstein, etc. [my sampling is not random. It is just the people who I have read alot about.] Richard Feynman I think is a counter-example though.
So I think one should not really try to avoid sociology. Humans are political. People should try to remain open minded etc but they shouldn’t purge themselves of any ideas that are not rigorously shown to be true. But at the very least they shouldn’t ask others to purge themselves unless they have done so themselves.
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MugaSofer said:
Now that I think about it, Ozy’s posts on sociology look a lot like Scott’s posts on psychiatry (lots of citations and specific examples digressions on Interesting Facts), while zer posts on psychiatry look a lot like his posts on society (very vague, often very personal, lots of examples of One Time This Happened To Me.)
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Jack V said:
Oh, good point! I still think of a lot of those speculative ideas as useful, especially Moloch, but I am persuaded to take myself much more sceptically.
In fact, it makes me more sympathetic to sociology, and to biology-before-Darwin, and other fields I’ve found to contain questionable stuff: it makes sense to me that generating hypotheses/guesses can be useful from Scott etc, so it makes sense for everyone else to generate guesses too, even if Scott’s guesses push my buttons better than Lamark’s.
But I’m trying to remind myself that “one guess for how things happen” might be a *bit* useful, but if it doesn’t make any clear predictions, I shouldn’t believe it more than slightly.
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Fisher said:
“sociology is really hard. You can’t do controlled experiments where you give five hundred societies public funding of elections and five hundred societies private funding of elections and see which one has the higher rate of corporate welfare: all your data is observational. Your sample sizes are tiny: there simply aren’t enough different countries, religions, wars, or what have you. And as soon as you get a conclusion that you think really holds, someone comes along and invents the birth control pill and fucks everything up for you.”
Yes, sociology is hard. Very hard. In fact, it is so hard that… well, has it ever been established that sociology is even possible?
And yet, people love to use sociology (which is very hard) as justification for policies that affects 3×10^8 actual human (not theoretical) human beings.
Yes, some people will bash sociology because “lol social sciences amirite?” But a lot of other people bash it because they feel (rightfully?) that it is a tool used by People Who Do Not Like Them for the express purpose of Fucking Them Over.
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raemon777 said:
Guilty as charged.
I think the question “what should actually be done about this?” (on my own personal level, or on a community-wide level) is a bit of a complex question that I don’t have the time to answer just yet.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
OK, yea, but what’s the alternative?
Amateur sociology has all the vices you name, but professional sociology worse.
But sometimes we actually do have to act according to sociological theories. We have to vote (or not). We have to choose what kind of language to use, knowing someone is going to take offense either way. We have to choose who to treat with respect and who to ostracize. We have to choose who to associate with and how to behave.
You can say those decisions shouldn’t be informed by persuasive essays, but if not that then what? Professional sociology? Whatever our culture defaults to?
Relative to the Objective Truth, persuasive essays are flawed. Relative to the other sources of sociological insight that are actually available, persuasive essays look good.
Just because you don’t have a good way of making a choice doesn’t excuse you from the need to make it.
I say:
* Read the essays.
* Don’t live in a bubble. Read the essays from people you disagree with.
* Don’t assume every attitude your culture hands down to you is right.
* Don’t assume every attitude your culture hands down do you is stupid just because you don’t understand the purpose of it
* Maintain an attitude of extreme epistemic paranoia on any topic with even a whiff of identity or politics. People want to lie to you and manipulate you. The memes want to lie to you and manipulate you. Your brain wants to lie to you and manipulate you. You can never be too paranoid.
* Then do what feels right.
I’ve behaved in stupid ways because of sociological bullshit I’ve read on the internet. I’ve also behaved in better ways and become a better person because of sociological essays I’ve read on the internet.
There’s no royal road, we just have to do the best we can.
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davidmikesimon said:
How did you distinguish the essays that made you behave stupidly from the ones that made you behave better ? Even after the fact that seems hard, because the evaluation is partly based on your sociological foundation.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
I’ve got two answers, a practical one and a philosophical one.
Practical: My own stupidity has a tendency to become painfully obvious in hindsight. Of course I could still be making all kinds of mistakes now. I’m sure I am. But at least they are new mistakes. In practice I credulously accept the idea that learning from my mistakes is possible and try to do that.
Philosophical: This problem has many faces, and you always see one of them whenever you try to dig down to the foundations of how a particular kind of knowledge is acquired. It’s like the problem of induction for empirical science, or the foundational crisis of mathematics.
I have an ideology about epistemological foundations that I don’t have a good name for but it goes something like this:
* Foundational theories are more useful as models or descriptions of epistemological practice than they are as proscriptions of the right way to reason. Ask not if ZFC is “true”. Ask how much of mathematical reasoning can be formalized inside of ZFC.
* But then again if a formal method is applicable to your work and you aren’t using it, you might want to ask yourself why.
* You don’t need a foundational theory of how knowledge is obtained to obtain knowledge. Children learn from observation without solving the problem of induction first. This is fine.
* You should find a theorem in arithmetic more convincing if it’s proven in PA than if it’s proven in ZFC.
* Knowledge is often cumulative, having the shape of a directed acyclic graph. For example, differential geometry is built on calculus, which is built on arithmetic and algebra, which is built on set theory. But if you go far enough back the chain it stops being acyclic. Nodes start pointing back on themselves in cycles. Arithmetic and algebra are “based on” set theory in the formal setting of ZFC, but they came way before set theory. We adopted set theory in part because it was capable of formalizing the numerical reasoning we already knew how to do. Foundation-level knowledge is usually corroborated from multiple directions, and it’s OK if the graph of “we know X because of Y” has cycles in it.
* Foundational theories try to replace that big messy cloud of mutually supportive beliefs at the center of your worldview with a couple axioms from which all else can be derived. Foundational theories are awesome and useful for lots of stuff and you should study them and think about them but you should never really buy into one. Keep your messy cloud!
* You should be very cautious when overturning common sense with knowledge gained from meta-reasoning, or formal methods. But you need to be able to do it if the evidence is good enough. For example, learning the earth is round by measuring things carefully, when common sense says the earth is flat. The right way to think about this is not that we overturned common sense with a new set of epistemological rules called Science, and since Science says the earth is round, we believe it. We believe the earth is round because science was able produce evidence that appealed to common sense beliefs that we held even more deeply than “It looks pretty flat to me”.
* It is possible that you were born with the wrong priors, or you randomly fell into a bad epistemological equilibrium and you are just stuck with the wrong beliefs and there’s nothing you can do about it. The universe is allowed to Kobayashi-Maru you. Try your best and pray it doesn’t.
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stargirlprincess said:
http://www.funnyjunk.com/channel/fucking-tumblr/40+kek/lfwYLys/
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davidmikesimon said:
@Lawrence, thank you, that was a very insightful answer, or at least it seemed like it to me. You get my vote for caliph. 🙂
I guess my main concern is that the theories may sometimes be bloated abstractions, including a bunch of extra stuff unnecessary for the purpose of suggesting actions to take in personal life (since we’re not working with any more data than that, out of practicality). If SJ or Hobbes or whatever tells me to do something and it works (for whatever definition of “works” aligns with my values), that’s helpful, but it’s hard to Occam out which parts of the theory were actually important to that vs. which parts might lead me astray later. But that’s life I guess.
@stargirlprincess, okay, point taken, asking a philosophy to justify itself all the way down to ground is not reasonable. Geez.
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Ortvin Sarapuu said:
“Amateur sociology has all the vices you name, but professional sociology worse.”
I think it’s pretty clear that Ozy is counting pretty much all existing sociology as amateur sociology regardless of whether or not people get paid to do it. Professional sociology exists only as a hypothetical, and possibly a hypothetical that will eternally remain hypothetical.
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ozymandias said:
No, I’m not. One should have a healthy disrespect for sociology, of course, but at least professional sociology makes an effort to collect empirical data and consider alternate hypotheses.
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Ortvin Sarapuu said:
“I have often seen the post Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs discussed by rationalists when we are talking about how cults form. In many cases, this is discussed as if it is settled sociology:”
Is this something that’s discussed in many cases, or in many cases by rationalists?
Because really it seems like your post has more to do with the rationalist community than sociology as a system of knowledge.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I think these are all just examples of how this can work, taken from a world the audience is likely to know. Other communities and broader societies have their own amateur sociology, like traditional beliefs about gender, or well-known feminist essays describing a particular gendered social dynamic, or literary aphorisms (“all happy families are alike” is my personal least favorite).
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nostalgebraist said:
I think there is a difference between “grand theories which are supposed to explain every case” and “general mechanisms which may be at work in any given” case, and I think grouping both of these together under “too meta, not epistemically careful enough” is a mistake.
I’m confronted with many, many different sorts of situations in my life. I find it invaluable to be able to apply things I have learned from previous experiences to new ones, even if the new experiences are different in various ways. How do I deal with these differences? By developing generalizations that work as a toolbox rather than a template. That is, I don’t just abstract some single idea of “how friendships work” from all of my friendships so far and expect that every future friendship will work in this way. Rather, I notice a variety of “dynamics” or “mechanisms” that happen sometimes in some friendships — without necessarily happening all the time in all friendships — and then use them as a toolbox when thinking about new friendships. I can notice when a familiar mechanism seems to be at work, while not expecting that mechanism come up every time.
The posts you’re criticizing here may go too far in claiming that the described mechanisms apply in every case (or in most cases, or in most important cases). But what I get out of them, personally, is just: “Here’s a mechanism. To sketch why it might be worth having in your toolbox, here are some important situations in which it at least plausibly may be at work.” So I don’t buy “toxoplasma of rage” as some general theory of conflicts, but I do sometimes find myself in specific situations where I think “hmm, the ‘toxoplasma of rage’ concept would explain this very well.”
Note two things here which may seem paradoxical, but aren’t. First, when I say “this particular situation looks like ‘toxoplasma of rage’ at work,” I’m able to be much more confident about this than I would be about some general theory of how “toxoplasma of rage” is how everything works. In that sense, “particular” is better than “general.” But second, I would never been able to have this particular insight if I hadn’t been exposed to the general concept! If I thought of it only as a model for some specific case, rather than an element of my toolbox, I would never be able to use it outside that one case.
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Watercressed said:
The value of this type of sociology is not that it predicts behavior with widespread accuracy. Its value is that when you see something that matches the theory, you can instantly recognize it instead of having to reason about it from scratch.
It is a mistake to think that, because you personally only know one mechanism for cult formation, all cults must form via evaporative cooling. However, knowing about this mechanism, and being able to recognize when it if it does happen makes you stronger.
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slatestarcodex said:
I agree with nostalgebraist upthread.
To put this in a framework I’ve used before, I think there’s a difference between crystallizing patterns and making truth-claims – see http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/15/can-it-be-wrong-to-crystallize-patterns/
By “crystallizing a pattern”, I mean pointing out a common thread among a lot of different things, putting it into words so people notice it, and suggesting it’s important (I’m using this here a little more loosely than I did in the original post, but I think it’s related). For example, the thesis of Meditations on Moloch was “systems sometimes end up in weird states that aren’t what anybody in the system wants”. I’m not sure this is really the sort of thing anyone wants to argue against – the contrary, “every state a system ends up in is because someone in the system wanted it” seems patently absurd – do animal populations undergo sudden crashes because some individual animal wanted the population to crash? So making an existence claim like this isn’t particularly novel – it’s just packaging an obvious truth in a way that people would notice it. You’ve done this very well with concepts like “cis by default” and “abundance mindset”. I think the crystallization is usually beneficial (and can remain so even if the examples in the post are false – for example, I think somebody found prisoners don’t actually behave the way the Prisoner’s Dilemma predicts, but that doesn’t discredit the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a useful model and explanatory tool.)
Then the claim that any particular example follows the pattern *is* a truth claim and *does* need evidence. For example, if I say “The US government is dysfunctional because of Moloch-style dynamics”, then I had better support it. On the other hand, I don’t think this is “amateur sociology” in the sense that we may not accept any evidence except a study by a a professional sociologist. “The US government is dysfunctional because of Moloch-style dynamics” doesn’t sound any weirder than claims like “The US government is dysfunctional because the rich control it” or “the US government is dysfunctional because Republicans are obstructionist” or “The US government is dysfunctional because the President is an idiot”. These are all the sorts of things that sociologists *should* study, but I don’t think it’s wrong for people to think that the US government is dysfunctional because of Republican obstructionism, if they cannot provide a study to that effect published by a professional sociologist.
I think there is definitely a possible failure mode where somebody hears about an idea like Moloch-type dynamics and then assumes that everything follows them, or assumes without evidence that some specific thing follows them. But that’s equally true of professional and well-established sociological theories (eg the idea of class conflict does not prove that any phenomenon is a result of class conflict). And so far I think people have been mostly pretty good about not doing this, although maybe I am just being hopelessly unobservant.
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ozymandias said:
I completely disagree with the crystallizing patterns post.
Like… do you accept the labor theory of value? The pop feminist concept of emotional labor? The idea of Nice Guys ™? The idea of mansplaining? All of those are pointing out a common thread among a lot of different things, putting it in words so people notice it, and suggesting it’s important– they’re all clearly different than e.g. claiming that a particular Twitter conversation is emotional labor, mansplaining, or being a Nice Guy ™. But I think there is a certain sense in which the pop feminist concept of emotional labor is just wrong, and my argument about why it is just wrong is something like “you are making a claim that things work this way without a lot of evidence to back it up, and I think that ‘this is a thing across a bunch of different situations’ requires first individually collecting some evidence that it happens in each individual situation you are claiming it applies to”.
It seems weird to me to claim that “this pattern occurs in a lot of different situations!” requires less evidence to believe than “this pattern occurs in one situation.” That seems like the exact opposite of how things are supposed to work.
Cis by default is totally a truth claim (I’m actually puzzled about what does count as a truth claim if it doesn’t): I’m saying “there exists a population of people who don’t have particularly strong gender identities”. There are tests I could run to see whether this is true: unethically, I could do a RCT of estrogen in men who claim to be cis-by-default; ethically, I could ask a bunch of cis people to introspect about their gender identities and see if they have one. (The latter I did sort of unofficially by writing a blog post about it.) “Abundance mindset” is not my concept, but it’s still a truth claim: “in general, you will have better romantic outcomes if you adopt a mindset in which sex and love are abundant than you would if you adopted a mindset where they were scarce.” This could be studied using, well, basically the same strategies that were used to study growth mindset; on a less sciencey level, individual people adopting the mindset and reporting back whether their romantic outcomes are any better provides some evidence.
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memeticengineer said:
Do you think the cis-by-default post is an equally objectionable example of amateur sociology as the examples in your post? (Or alternately – if people assume this is a valid and distinct category based on your post, is that the bad amateur sociology?)
If you think “cis-by-default” is different from “multipolar trap”, “toxoplasma of rage” or “evaporative cooling of group beliefs” then what do you think makes it different? I am not aware of any professional research studies on the subject.
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Guy said:
I think Scott and nostalgebraist are trying to take a third option between (or maybe orthogonal to) “this pattern occurs in a lot of different situations” / “this pattern occurs in this situation”.
If I understand correctly (and this is the sort of interpretation of the things you cited that I would back), they’re suggesting an interpretation of “here is a pattern which occurs in zero or more situations, it might have some explanatory power”. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a claim like that, but such a claim might cause problems further down the line a la hammers and nail-like objects (to borrow the toolbox analogy).
This also relies on the patterns not being exclusive. A (hypothetical) cult could cool evaporatively while also galvanizing some of its moderates through cognitive dissonance, depending on exactly how moderate they are, or who they are closest to inside the cult, or whether they had a conversation on the bus with that one guy the day before the nominal apocalypse. A person might be cis by default, and their neighbor might be cis-to-the-core, and their roommate might have some weird gender identity that doesn’t even really map on to cis/trans, and all of those people can coexist, at least in hypothetical land, as long as nobody tries to say everybody is cis by default or nobody is or whatever.
Potential issues come in when the patterns being discussed are about real problems people face, and the patterns imply solutions. The pattern of mansplaining naturally suggests that, at least in some discussions, women’s words should have priority over men’s. If this fails to solve the true problem in situations that match the pattern of mansplaining, or worse, if it causes positive harm with little/no benefit, then the pattern can be reasonably said to be bad. If it maps situations worse than some other pattern or set of patterns, then it should probably be dropped in favor of those, and might even be considered wrong in some sense. But mostly I think bad patterns are a different kind of bad than “false”; usually they’re closer to “harmful”. Which I guess is what you said in the title…
Anyway, I think there’s actually a lot less disagreement on this than there seems to be and I’m going to resort to my default of blaming the English language’s inability to clearly express nonbinary things, like truth claims that can (but don’t necessarily) coexist with each other.
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Lambert said:
Crystallising an idea does not preclude that idea being refuted. It’s hard to disprove what one cannot see. I think people are confusing ‘essay as positively asserting X’ with ‘essay as proposing that X is a thing that should be considered further’. [epistemic status] tags seem to be a way to differentiate the two.
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Robert Liguori said:
Crystallizing patterns can be used harmfully or tactically; Ozy brings up several examples of this being done. If you can get the idea of “Only Those Bad People There do this bad thing.” as the template, then people will have the vocabulary to describe it when it’s done by Them, and not when it’s done by Us.
But the answer to bad crystallized patterns is better patterns, based on evidence and observation. I mean, it’s trivially obvious to me that the Evaporative Cooling metaphor doesn’t work in all scenarios, just looking at a few of the group dynamics in my own experience. But it also does a very good job of describing and retro-predicting the behavior of certain types of groups, with certain types of mutual interaction, size, internal dynamics, and so forth. It’s not obvious to me, on first read, that the idea of groups being right makes them more radical.
Of course, the real problem is as you point out; actual sociologists are in the uncomfortable position of being able to make completely orthogonal well-cited well-researched claims based on which fraction of the big fuck-off data set of The Entire World they happen to look at, so I don’t know of how we can get past “This looks right in this limited set of situations.”
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Joe said:
I think you guys could stand to dissolve this question a bit. You could think of “moloch”, “cis by default”, etc. as all being “vocabulary words” that help one understand the world. It’s not always true that adding additional terms to your vocabulary is helpful. Sometimes someone can give you a vocabulary term that conflates two related concepts and makes your thinking more confused. Sometimes someone can give you a vocabulary term that pulls in connotations and makes you think something happens more frequently than it actually does. Etc., etc. I don’t think there’s a quick & easy heuristic to determine whether a particular term helps more than it hurts–you have to have a term-specific discussion to determine that.
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Jack V said:
“the thesis of Meditations on Moloch was “systems sometimes end up in weird states that aren’t what anybody in the system wants”. I’m not sure this is really the sort of thing anyone wants to argue against – the contrary, “every state a system ends up in is because someone in the system wanted it” seems patently absurd – do animal populations undergo sudden crashes because some individual animal wanted the population to crash? So making an existence claim like this isn’t particularly novel – it’s just packaging an obvious truth in a way that people would notice it. ”
FWIW, this is what I thought about Moloch. Once someone pointed it out, I found it hard to imagine it was _not_ true. But, surprise, people fall into a habit of assuming that societies events usually happen because someone meant them.
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MugaSofer said:
Yeah, I often read rationalist writers because they’re good at giving me useful names for things I already believe.
If you’d asked me why, say, Ireland has a bunch of empty, worthless houses lying around, and also a homeless problem –
Five, ten years ago I would have said “because politicians are too stupid to come up with solutions, because the system is set up in such a way that we can’t do that easily, because voters find themselves unable to settle on a candidate who satisfies their shared values so they settle for the least-worst of several identical candidates who then proceed to do nothing, because homelessness is a result of a bunch of different problems coming together and we can’t solve all of them at once so the other problems just rush back when you try to deal with one of them, because there’s no economic incentive to help them, because even if everyone would agree to their share of the price to deal with homelessness we’re divided among ourselves by suspicion.”
These days, I still usually say that. But sometimes I can just say “Moloch”.
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callmebrotherg said:
I also like that Moloch conjures up some nice imagery. One of the things that I genuinely lament about my shift from theism is that I’m suddenly bereft of a lot of imagery and ways of discussing things that, quite frankly I was *really good at*.
Moloch lets me get a small amount of that back. It’s a far cry from what I used to be able to do, mostly because the imagery is only metaphorical now and there’s something to be said for, say, selling Christians on Effective Altruism because it’s the most effective way to unseat the Devil, but it’s still something.
(And now I probably sound like a loon, from that second paragraph. Oh well.)
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Alex said:
Assuming the Avatar “starslatecodex” is controlled by the Author of the equally named blog:
” For example, the thesis of Meditations on Moloch was “systems sometimes end up in weird states that aren’t what anybody in the system wants”. I’m not sure this is really the sort of thing anyone wants to argue against – the contrary, “every state a system ends up in is because someone in the system wanted it” seems patently absurd – do animal populations undergo sudden crashes because some individual animal wanted the population to crash? ”
You know, claiming that _obviously_ you are right does not make you _actually_ right. There is no a priori reason that human society does, let alone should, function like animal populations. And Moloch was about society, not about population dynamics, no?
Empirically (hah!) I know people who indeed want to argue that the system we call society ended up in the state it is in because people wanted it to. Basically what you are trying to do is to dismiss my acquaintances by handwaving them as being absurd. Surely not a very charitable move.
For your appearent love of tribes, let me frame this in terms of “conspiracy theorists” vs. “believers in chaotic outcomes of complex systems”. Am I reading you unfairly, if I say, what you do is cheaply signalling membership in the latter camp? Capitalizing on the fact that all decent people already know that the former tribe consists only of crackpots, or something?
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glenra said:
You seem to have overlooked the word “every” in “every state a system ends up in…” (and possibly also the word “sometimes” in the original claim “systems sometimes end up…”)
There’s no reason we couldn’t have both Moloch AND a conspiracy or three among our collective set of tools for understanding the world.
Unless you really mean to suggest that *every* aspect of the current state of society is the result of specific people wanting it that way?
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sswatson said:
The claim that a phenomenon is present in many situations can, at least in principle, be easier to support that a claim that it is present in some particular instance.
This pattern is very common in mathematics: the pigeonhole principle allows you to say that there exist pigeonholes containing multiple pigeons while telling you nothing about any individual pigeonhole. More applicably, 100 coin flips will almost certainly include multiple heads, even though all the flips individually are unpredictable.
I don’t feel confident that this is necessarily what’s going on here, but it is worth noting that there is no fundamental obstruction to a proof of many being simpler than a proof of a particular one.
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Royal Night Guard said:
There are a large number of important social situations at play in the world at any given time, and this landscape changes rapidly over time (and the speed of that change is increasing). Given this situation, is it possible that even low quality knowledge of higher level sociological principles may be more valuable than high quality knowledge of more particular situations at the object level?
More may be said about apples than about all the different types of fruits, but if you have to work on a farm that grows many different fruit types and changes to a different set of fruit types each season, your time may be better spent learning about fruit in general than about any particular type of fruit.
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ozymandias said:
Yes, but in order to come up with abstractions over all fruit you’re going to have to learn about individual fruit first.
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anony mouse said:
This does a really good job articulating/summarizing my discomfort with SSC (which I do really like!) and similar blogs.
I went through a version of what your hypothetical sociology student went through when I began my career as a scientist. I remember coming up with what seemed like really smart, plausible hypotheses that were well grounded in the literature, coming up with a rigorous test for that hypothesis, testing it, and…having the results not support it. And going through that process a bunch of times (and seeing others around me go through it a bunch of times) really drives home the point that ideas that seem plausible and fit the evidence are still often wrong.
There are a few instances (two specific examples I am thinking of) where I’ve seen people in my field get a little huffy because someone did and published an experiment that was their idea. Not their idea as in, “carefully sat down and planned it out with the person who actually did it”, but there idea in the “talked about it when chatting in line for coffee” sense. And those people thought they should have gotten some kind of credit. And the overwhelming response to those people was “Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. Turning ideas into a rigorous hypothesis, running the actual tests, analyzing the results and getting them through publication is hard work.”
It’s obviously not a perfect parallel, but even thought this isn’t a dispute over credit (and I am NOT saying you shouldn’t cite blog posts!), I think there might be something useful to pull out of those exchanges, which is this: Smart ideas are all over the place. But generating those ideas is the (relatively) easy part. Actually showing that those ideas are likely true is a whole different beast.
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Watercressed said:
If everyone was coming up with rigorous tests and still failing, it seems like ideas are in fact the hard part.
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Desertopa said:
I think a lot of the ideas both Scott and Eliezer put forward fall less under the category of “hypotheses asserted to be true” than “concepts asserted to be useful.”
Take “evaporative cooling of belief” for example. For all I know it wasn’t a determinative factor in the increasing fanaticism of any of the groups Eliezer actually discussed. But being aware of the concept helps me to notice if I happen to be less comfortable in groups that I used to comfortable in because the culture has shifted following the departure of certain people who once acted as moderating influences, that if I myself leave, this is likely to shift the culture of the community further as I will also cease to be a moderating influence. This is a situation I actually do find myself in, and I draw on the concept of evaporative cooling when contemplating my incentives to stay.
Is the idea of evaporative cooling of beliefs “true?” It probably depends on how strictly you define it. There is no Theory of Evaporative Cooling of Beliefs which describes how often it happens, or at what rate, or allows rigorous prediction of the circumstances in which it will occur. If we put in enough research, we might be able to find those things out, but we’re a long way off from having that kind of data. On the other hand, it’s kind of hard to see how a reality where the phenomenon doesn’t happen at all could be consistent with everyday experience.
I think about most of the ideas they discuss in the same terms. They’re not complete models, they’re not even really incomplete models of phenomena, but it’s likely that a complete model would contain them as elements.
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mdaniels4 said:
Don’t knock sociology as not having a cohesive theory to explain it all. Its a combination of just about everything and relatively expressed by 3.5 billion individuals. It is more an art than science, although there is much science in it. But its defined within a time and space by politics, power, economics, hopes, fantasies and much more.
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dndnrsn said:
Another vote for “professional sociology ain’t that great either”. While I was in undergrad, I took a course that was on the sociology of the field I studied. There were a lot of articles and such assigned where the author(s) reached a really broad conclusion based on one or two examples, and didn’t consider counterexamples – even ones that seemed fairly obvious to me, at the time halfway through a BA, and at the time a pretty mediocre student.
Maybe that particular field had especially bad sociology, but I also had interactions with sociology types in other fields where it seemed rather obvious that they would look at a situation with multiple explanations, choose the explanation that fit best with their preferred theory, and call it a day.
Obviously a few anecdotes doesn’t prove anything, but I’ve definitely seen respectable university sociology that doesn’t feel massively different from classic four-beers-deep second-year undergraduate BS’ing, let alone a blog entry that somebody hopefully spent a bit of time on.
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stargirlprincess said:
I will note I found this opening line extremely cute “t-eyed and bushy-tailed, the young sociology student takes her first theory class.”
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blippityblap said:
I’m pretty curious now. What theories of sociology are empirically well supported? I’d wager that there aren’t any on the same level of evolution, QED or GR, but there has to be some that are a level or two below. Does anyone know of a sociological theory that is rigorously supported, such that it can be used as a role-model for the amateur ones?
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MugaSofer said:
^this?
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Matthew said:
I pointed this out once before, a long time ago, on Lesswrong, but EYs theory of Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs is not actually original to him. Although he didn’t use that term, actual professional political scientist Russell Hardin proposed something very similar to this mechanism in One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict, a book that won awards in its field in 1996. So the amateur sociologist is, in fact, proposing the same thing that a non-amateur already proposed.
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sovietKaleEatYou said:
Love the term “insight porn”. I like this post a lot, and think it points out something important about the need for intellectual humility. But I don’t think that amateur sociology is necessarily harmful per se, or even necessarily wrong (as you observed, sociological experiments are hard, and not that much is known). I think the problem with Marx, for example, is that he took himself so damn seriously and became his own echo chamber. If the attitude of a post is “here’s a cute hypothesis, use it if you like, disprove it if you can,” then it might actually be useful. Just like any of the cute psychological life hacks you read about can be helpful, despite being formulated by non-professional psychologists, or they can be total bunk.
I would be all for a strict separation of psychology and sociology into “tested” and “untested”, but if one accepts that it’s worthwhile to try to gain insights into the “untested” bucket absent sufficient data (which it seems like most sociologists would support, as the “tested” bucket is so small), various external points of view could be helpful. Granted, no one likes cranks coming into their field and saying, “actually, I can prove that pi = 3”, but it seems to me that in the case of Scott specifically, a decent number of people in sociology/psychology/economics who are considered good seem willing to engage with him (and I might be wrong about this).
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Simon said:
This articulates an issue I have with SSC and much of the rationality community when talking about social sciences and politics overall: It very often is the case that I find the resulting opinions airtight on the theoretical level, but the descriptions of matter-of-fact sociopolitical situations often strike me as slightly off. Which might be a matter of simply different experiences, but also because I don’t always categorize things exactly as most rationalists do… *and* the entire “focus on meta-level over object-level” thing Ozy addresses.
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Fossegrimen said:
I’m going to be a bit snarky now, stop if you’re feeling protective of LW-ism.
The way rational behaviour is supposed to work is:
1. Get interesting idea
2. Gather all the knowledge necessary to evaluate the idea
3. Apply a rational evaluation (if you will in, the form of Bayes’ Theorem)
4. Do the work
5. Profit
Step 2 is why we have people with PhDs, step 4 is why we have entrepreneurs.
The way LW style rationalism seems to work is:
1: Get interesting idea
2: Make shit up
3: Apply Bayes’ Theorem
4: Talk about how the work should be done
5: Complain about lack of profits
At first glance, the two are remarkably similar…
I think your complaints in this post is just a special case of my more general observation.
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Alexander Stanislaw said:
It’s quite disappointing how accurate this is. You do need quite a bit of rhetorical flair to pull it off though, which is why the LW crowd depends on a few talented writers to keep itself afloat.
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E said:
Hi, I’m a mathematical sociologist at a major research university. Anecdotal data and model-making are how hypotheses are created in the first place. As for quantitative sociology being the only valid kind, please consider that social network analysis is an INCREDIBLY young field and famously suffers from data aggregation problems, especially in non-formal networks. EZ & co are doing better work than much of what I see in academia. But more than that: they are sincere. They may have cultural and methodological problems, but they are ultimately sincerely trying to further the field. I don’t see any benefit to sarcastic mockery and discouragement of their work. And no, I am not a current LW frequenter nor have I ever spoken personally with any of the persons mentioned.
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Alex said:
Dear Author,
Last Paragraph kinda ruined it for me.
Indulging in amateur theories of everything and all is the only way to make sense of the world. Nobody has professional theories on more than half a subject. Not even giants the likes of Marx and Smith, that is part of the problem you’re calling out.
Who gets to decide what is a “serious discussion”? Who gets to decide what ought to be banned from serios discussion, if only as an act of courtesy? I find that to be a very dangerous way of thinking about things.
Rationalism might be a lot of things, one of which, as we have learned recently, might be the Caliphate of one of its prophets. But from my outsiders’ perspective in the light of your essay rationalism can be described as being explicit about the (most likely wrong) theories on models you have of the world. I find this very helpful in conversations because it saves us a lot of guesswork. Proposed catchphrase: Rationalism is about making Socratian Dialogue obsolete.
I might be totally mistaken, but my understanding of philosophy and sociology, in the sense you use it, is that it makes a catalogue of opinions on things about which one can reasonably have multiple opinions. This, I think, ties in nicely with your comparison of physics and sociology. Marx’ legacy, most of all, is that we now can refer to a complex set of ideas simply as “Marxism” which spares us a boatload of work. This is a good thing, regardless whether Marx is actually right. Admittedly it implies some loss of precision. No free lunch there.
The same is true for, here I’m coming back to your last paragraph, “toxoplasma”. The toxoplasma might be terribly broken. But having a name for it is useful. People using that name in “serious discussion” is also useful, worst case it informs their interlocutors about the particular misconception they are adhering to.
Im guessing between the lines of your piece there is a rant about people who think saying “toxoplasma” or something related to castles (see, I read the comments policy) lets them auto win. I’m with you on that part. Trying to taboo (in both the ordinary and I fear also the lw sense) the likes of toxoplasma and castles from discussion might be useful if you have a comment section to manage and have to make tradeoffs. But in general I think it is a mistake.
Sincerely
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micheal vassar said:
I actually see this post as actual aggression. When academics say ‘trust us, you can see our clear reasoning goes much further than yours and we have more complicated reasons for upon consideration rejecting your theory’, that’s legit, but if they say ‘ serve us for six years to join our club in order to have the right to value your own thoughts and opinions about something that everyone has to deal with and which we have no compelling expertise in’ I unhesitatingly see them as actually engaged in dangerous oppression. It’s the intellectual equivalent of sneer culture, but because of a superficial resemblance to opposition to cranks, it’s far more dangerous than the up intellectual version.
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Christopher said:
“You can have fun talking about toxoplasma of rage as much as you like, but it does not have a place in serious discussions.”
I find this sort of stifling. We’re not even talking about something phrenology here, where there’s real consensus to move on to talk about more sophisticated mechanisms.
Scott seems to have presented a model that matches a lot of what I see in the media, albeit particularly in my filtered little world. I don’t think he needs to “prove” it’s real to discuss it: if he hasn’t provided enough evidence, I don’t see the harm in having amateurs look into it. I do agree with you taking issue with certain folks pointing at things and saying something like “this is clearly, conclusively, just the toxoplasma of rage here, which is a definitively proven model of human behavior.”
But you are making a much stronger claim, which is that people shouldn’t talk about this hypothesis period if they want to be serious, which I don’t know, sounds kind of arrogant to me. If you think it’s a bullshit hypothesis, I wish you would spend time refuting it with other evidence (yay discourse!) without just rejecting it on the grounds of being done by someone who is not a “professional sociologist.”
Amateurs will form hypotheses, that’s just human nature. It’s not just “fun”, I find it meaningful to think about, and honestly don’t appreciate you calling it “porn.” I don’t think it is correct, or even in any sense coherently doable, to say that we have to suspend all of our opinions and insights and defer to the “literature” you reference.
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c0rw1n said:
“And yet when I read Weber, he makes sense, and when I read Marx, he makes sense, and when I read Smith, he makes sense! HOW CAN THIS BE? AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”
“He makes sense” – that’s your problem right there. No, no they don’t. And as Academic Sociology filters for people who take that nonsense seriously, it’s no wonder that the field has so few predictive theories, and that reasonably smart amateurs can write more sensical theories than the academic side.
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Good Burning Plastic said:
Baryons are fermions!
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