Do you feel "there are lots of other species" addresses the problem I'm raising? What do you think I, someone who (apparently) cares about species extinction, would say in response to "there are lots of other species"?
"People think I’m too breezy, dismissive, and overconfident.
I think [this] is largely an aesthetic thing. I prefer the style where one is clear and direct rather than adding extra words to hedge."
I think posing "breezy, dismissive, and overconfident" as stylistic (aligned with "clear and direct" and opposed to "adding extra words to hedge") rather than epistemic illustrates the problem! I'm not saying you should add a bunch of meaningless "in my opinion," "it seems to me," "I could be wrong"—I'm saying some of your arguments are weaker than they could be because you aren't really (to appearances anyway) thinking about whether they are responsive to what people are saying.
I think there are two sort of different criticisms. The first is that I believe things that are false. The second is that I'm overconfident. My response to the first is: I mean, it's surely right that I believe some false stuff, but I don't agree about any of the particular claims regarding false things. My response to the second is that I don't actually think I have abnormally high credences in things. If anything, I tend to be less confident in political and philosophical judgments than others.
I think I haven't expressed my own complaints clearly enough (can't speak for other people's). I'm not talking about the confidence you have in your ideas. I mean, I think the exercise of saying "I have 65% confidence in theism" or whatever is kind of meaningless, an imitation of epistemic humility, but it's not really what I'm talking about in any case. When I talk about glibness, I'm talking about your confidence that you've addressed your interlocutors' points in a satisfactory way. It feels like you think your job in a discussion or debate is to respond with a single devastating strike, like a kill shot in tennis, rather than something more Socratic where you're trying to lead your interlocutor to share your understanding (while also being open to learning from them and refining your points in response). I guess that choice makes sense in competitive debate, but I'm presuming that in these posts you're setting yourself the task of leading people to truth, and these quick-n-simple responses don't serve that purpose well, I feel.
Let me give an example that's stuck with me for a long time. I believe it was in a miracle discussion that someone brought up the problems with believing witness testimony, and your response (paraphrased), was, "Just because someone reports something unlikely doesn't mean it should be discounted. For instance, the odds of someone's phone number being 344-556-7799 are infinitesimal, but if someone told me that was their phone number I would believe them." To my recollection, that was the whole argument (I can't remember if it was the whole comment, but it was the entirety of your response to that point). For myself, before putting so much weight on that one analogy, I would want to ask: how convincing is this? Could there be good reasons why someone would believe someone reporting their phone number more readily than they would believe someone reporting a limb regrowing, say? If so, what are the differences between the cases, and how can I convince my interlocutor that the case I'm discussing is more like a phone number? That might involve you writing things like "Granted, a phone number isn't quite the same because…" but I don't think that would make your writing seem less clear or direct; on the contrary it would clarify your position to help spell out what you find convincing about the argument. You can call this an aesthetic preference, but I think it's fundamentally the difference between seeking the truth and seeking points on an imaginary scoreboard.
My biggest objection to you is the lack of extant historical documentation corroborating your existence. Most of the evidence for your existence is spurious and anecdotal. In fact, when you actually look at academic circles, few scholars have reported they believe in you.
As a producer of interesting media content, I think you’re very talented! You are philosophically competent and clever, and you understand utilitarianism well. I also find your work on animal ethics really compelling (I’m also vegan). I think where you run into trouble is in a lack of epistemic humility and graciousness with opponents. Respectfully, that misstep comes of being very clever too young. But as one ages they see that the things that were so obvious (or breezy and clear) are not so, and the world is messy and real, and many of the people you thought were simple and dismissible were in fact on to something important.
I used to love your posts, since I find them both insightful and reliable. Now I think they're reliable, but repetitive and boring. I can basically predict what you'll write about just by looking at the title, and sometimes even without looking at the title! Of course, I don't deny that you have good reasons to think that you're saying Big, Important Truths. But I think you're going for all the low-hanging fruit, with Trump, Shrimp, etc. In most of your posts recently, even you say something like "my argument is trivially true to anyone sane". Yeah. But if so, why should I pay to read what you write? By contrast, when I read Huemer, I find things that're both reliable AND interesting/insightful. His arguments often take me by surprise and force me to think. Your arguments are good, but they don't make me think. I'll still stick around though, and I look forward to your future writings, which I'm confident will be better.
PS: Maybe a reason for this is that you want to write posts that sound shocking and cool to the general reader, and thus gain more views/likes/subscribers/tribal validation. I get it. I just feel like you're made for better things, to be a true philosopher (not just a sharp-witted blogger) and put truly rigorous stuff out there (and I mean peer-reviewed stuff, regularly). I feel this way reading LessWrong too. People play around with a concept, write some stuff, and leave it at that. No laborious, painstaking research (the kind encountered in a top philosophy PhD program; the kind Huemer does first and foremost before being a semipopular writer). A bit disappointing.
Don’t dislike you but … It would be unusual for a teenager, even a really smart and talented one, to have novel and interesting contributions so often that he could fruitfully post several times a week. The result is what some have noted, lots of similar posts on a few core topics. It feels like you want to post frequently and find ways to make that happen. But good stuff!
Perhaps this could be the year to experiment with posting less frequent but more in-depth essays? No one, no matter how talented, can do a Scott-Alexander-style "more than you wanted to know" essay when posting every day. Just a thought.
A lot of the glibness and dismissiveness that I think I see your writing feels like the result of not spending enough time editing and using more detail. You can write clearly and directly while also appropriately addressing counter arguments in a sufficient level of detail. Often I read things you write that I agree with but don’t think would convince me if I didn’t simply because they do that spell out the argument and enough detail (notice this is different from hedging). I think you have valuable things to say that would be more convincing if you posted less often but spent more time adding detail
"Disagree that it’s a negative update. If some argument has convinced other smart people, that’s a positive update regarding its quality."
Linch's point is correct, if slightly ambiguous. Your retort also does not really disagree with it. The negative update is about the probability of the argument's conclusion, not the quality of the argument itself. Given that you already know the strength of the argument, a smart person making it should reduce your confidence in its conclusion as it is evidence that better arguments for the conclusion than the given one don't exist. This is completely compatible with your position that smart people adopting an argument is evidence for its strength.
This is most clear in domains where very smart people have a strong motivation to believe a thesis and adopt rubbish arguments to defend it. Look e.g. at Israel/Palestine: the fact that one side outwits the other comfortably and yet it is at best a draw in the war of ideas is evidence about who is (closer to being) right.
I don't agree. Linch's point is right that there's some sense in which it gives you a positive negative update (you should be suspicious that they couldn't think of anything better). But there's another positive update point (you should think it's better in quality if an argument convinces smart people). My guess is the second generally has more persuasive force than the first.
I'm going to spell it out more since I think people are confused; the point is slightly more subtle and nuanced than people give credit for it.
Suppose you are trying to decide whether to update on a position X given an argument X1 for it. If you know nothing about the arguers, you should look at the argument, think for yourself, and decide how good an argument it is. You should update upwards on X if X1 is a good argument, and downwards if X1 is a bad argument (If it's confusing why a bad argument should make you update downwards, read https://guive.substack.com/p/updating-on-bad-arguments)
What do you gain when you learn additional things about the arguer (including intelligence, experience with the subject matter, how much time they spent investigating the issue, etc)? I think there are different effects going on.
A) *For the same position, smart people are able to find and present the better arguments.* If an intelligent and experienced philosopher spends ten years on a field and gives me a terrible (non-trolling) argument for X, and moreover if other experienced philosophers agree with X, I might be more inclined to think "geez *this* is the best argument that the greatest minds can come up with?" In such a situation, X is probably false. Whereas if a dumb person gives me a terrible argument for X, I might just not update at all in either direction (eg, dumb person thinks evolution is true because they saw it on Pokemon. Doesn't mean much either way).
Conversely, if a very smart person gives me a really dazzling argument for X, and especially if the smart person is known for being general-purpose persuasive (like Sam Altman), I might be pretty skeptical of updating on X. Smart people are better at finding good arguments conditional on good arguments existing, but also better at finding persuasive arguments regardless of truth-value. A very smart person who can convince me of anything is a scary figure (and in a Bayesian sense, ought to be able to convince me of nothing). And I should just be very careful of their arguments.
Whereas if a stupid and not very dedicated thinker can give me a simple dazzling argument for X, I might be more like "jeez wow I could really take this argument at face value. " Plus if the stupid person came up with it, this might imply there are even better arguments I *haven't* heard of.
Furthermore, smart people are also better at strategic curation/presentation of which arguments you encounter. So if a smart and dumb person are each aware of the same five arguments for a position, a smart person is more likely to be able to identify the best argument (whether overall, or targeted at me specifically), whereas a dumb person might be much more likely to pick a random argument that's not very good/compelling.
B) *The argument tracks something deeper that is not legible,* and smart etc people have more access to the illegible cognition and intuitions behind the less legible parts of the argument. Suppose a very intelligent and experienced lab scientist gives me an argument for why "Z approach in molecular biology won't work" that sounds quite flimsy to me. If I otherwise trust this lab scientist's judgment, and moreover if most other lab scientists I trust agree with her, I might conclude that her visible verbal argument is only the surface presentation of a bunch of deeper knowledge, like many facts I don't know about molecular biology, or tacit knowledge about lab science research I don't understand. In contrast, I might defer less to a first-year molecular biology graduate student (she surely knows more than *me*, but if her arguments are stupid, it's probably not because the stupid arguments are tracking very deep knowledge).
In the realm of ideas that Bentham's and I are both interested in (e.g. philosophy, social science, politics, effective altruism), where most ideas can at least in theory be thought about and verified on a armchair in front of a computer, I think the first update is substantially larger than the second.
One reason I believe this is because I don't think the correlation between intelligence and holding true beliefs is very high. In particular, I believe the correlation between intelligence and argument quality is higher than the correlation between intelligence and accuracy, especially in domains I'm interested in. I believe this partially from studies on superforecasters, and partially from surveys on general knowledge. And partially from understanding intelligence is to a large degree a form of general-purpose optimization (some people might literally define it that way), and noting that people optimize far harder in these fields for convincing arguments than for truth.
But you can disagree with me here and still agree with the directional update.
The problem with causal decision theory is that since (assuming no libertarian free will) your actions are already predetermined by physics (and to they extent they aren't they're random), causal decision theory doesn't give defined answers to what you should do for the same reasons it doesn't two-box. If you try to fix this you end up getting FDT
Some of the hate is probably people finding out your age and being a little salty about your successes, or reflexive disgust from people who have opposing views.
I dislike you because you’re an extraordinarily lazy philosopher who’s far too enamored with embracing controversial views. You misunderstand the purpose of philosophy as an enterprise. Its purpose is to discover the truth, not to persuade people of the truth of beliefs you already agree with, and certainly not to drive views to your substack. Generally, when one finds oneself embracing a view that nearly everyone else rejects, it’s at least as likely as not that one is in the wrong. If you paused and thought harder about arguments that would refute your claims, and abandoned your emotional attachment to claims you’ve made just because you made them, I suspect you would notice a lot more of your errors in thought. However, as a result, you would also more often arrive at the conclusion that the conventional wisdom on a topic is correct so your takes would be less spicy and drive less engagement to your page.
Regarding controversial views, you’d do well to consider the example of other philosophers. Very often when a philosopher notices that a counterintuitive or otherwise odd result seems to follow from sounds reasoning from true premises, they don’t embrace the view; they call it a “paradox” and publish it for other philosophers to figure out a resolution for. You’d arrive at truth faster and more reliably if you were willing to sit with contradictions and question your assumptions rather than leaping to publish and then resolutely defend bugfuck insane ideas like the insect nonsense.
Let’s look at the insect suffering argument you’ve embraced. First of all, while I’m prepared to take you at your word that there is plenty of evidence that insects display behaviors consistent with the experience of suffering, you’ve moved far too quickly to conclude that insects actually experience suffering. Consider the basic drives humans have. We need oxygen, water, food, to reproduce and to avoid damage to our bodies, and we have evolved behavioral reward and punishment mechanisms to motivate us to pursue those needs. However, the mechanisms are wildly different from each other in ways that are relevant to the question of whether we could recognize suffering without direct conscious experience of the reward and punishment mechanisms.
The most obvious example is pain. We experience intense and acute punishment when our bodies are damaged, and as a result we avoid taking action that causes damage and learn very quickly which actions need to be avoided. So far so good.
However, consider sex drive. Males are rewarded quite intensely for expressing gametes. Females are not rewarded at all for expressing their gametes and are intermittently and unreliably rewarded for permitting males to express their gametes inside of them. Neither sex experiences anything like punishment for going a long time without expressing gametes.
Now consider thirst. We are “punished” for going a long time without water, but it’s not an extrinsic punishment in the same way orgasms are an extrinsic reward for copulation or pain is an extrinsic punishment for damage. Rather, we experience relatively mild distress at the intrinsic effects of dehydration on our bodies.
Hunger is odd in the sense that it employs both rewards and punishments in very different ways. When we go awhile without eating, we experience extrinsic discomfort well before we start to experience the intrinsic effect of lack of food. Even when extremely hungry we don’t experience any particular reward for eating per se. We still need to choke down unpalatable food no matter how hungry we are. However, we are extrinsically rewarded for our choice of foods. Our brains give us a little treat when we eat especially calorically dense foods. Conversely, there is little rhyme or reason to what punishments we receive for eating things that are poisonous or harmful. Some poisons taste good. Some have no taste at all. Some taste unpleasant, but more as a result of physical damage to our mouths than anything extrinsically evolved response. The only real extrinsic unpleasantness related to food is that disease and waste provoke an extrinsic reaction of disgust.
Strangest of all is breathing. Oxygen is the most important need we have. We die almost immediately without it. However, we have not evolved an extrinsic reward for seeking out oxygen or an extrinsic punishment for lack of oxygen. We are punished for failing to exhale carbon dioxide, but we don’t even notice oxygen loss until we experience its intrinsic effects. If you look at humans being suffocated, it would be very easy to conclude that oxygen deprivation causes intense suffering and to understand why, but this would be an error. When you tease out the difference between hypoxia and carbon dioxide poisoning, it turns out only the latter causes distress.
It is very easy to imagine a species of animal that’s very similar to us that experiences deprivation of food similarly to how we experience deprivation of sex or oxygen whose only motivation for food was not avoiding suffering but chasing a more intense version of the high we get from eating chocolate chip cookies or a well-cooked steak. If we deprived such an animal of food its resulting intrinsic lethargy might easily be mistaken for hunger pangs from the outside, but that doesn’t mean it’s suffering like we would if we went hungry. You mention the mayflies that spend their entire adult lives fucking and none of them eating. Maybe they experience it as starving to death in precisely the same way we would, or maybe the hunger drive disappears entirely when they’re pupating and they experience their entire adult lives in a horny frenzy of bliss. We have no idea one way or the other, and some epistemic humility is called for.
It not simply wrong, but obviously wrong. The reason it makes sense to press the two buttons serially but not one button that has the same effect as both buttons is that moral judgments are based on the state of the world and your knowledge about the state of the world. If you knew before pressing button 1 that Bob would never see a drop of that medicine, pressing button 1 would no longer be obligatory on the basis of the effect it would have on Bob. Similarly, your duty to press button 2 after having pressed button 1 relies on Frank’s being in existence in the interbutton interval. Before Frank exists you have no duty to extend his life. This is so plainly different from the situation in which pressing one button feeds one homeless person but pressing two buttons feeds two that it’s difficult to believe the comparison was made after a rigorous good faith examination.
You would not find argumentation of this quality compelling if it were offered in support of views you found morally repugnant, and I find it insulting to my intelligence that you’ve decided to offer it up in support of your argument. It suggests trickery, or a willingness to get by on sophistry. This mode of argument is common in politics and law, where one is acting as an advocate and guided only by what works. It has no place in a search for truth. If you’re familiar with the work of Harry Frankfurt, you’ll recall the name he gave to this mode of discourse. “Bullshit”
It happens of course that some critic raises good counterpoints to your views, but as regards those who make an overall negative (and typically very vague) judgement of you, I wouldn't worry too much, because they are clearly in over their heads. After double-checking that Joe Carlsmith must be a millennial, I state without hesitation that you are the best gen Z philosopher on my radar.
I would not be so quick to dismiss the evolutionary perspective — or, more broadly, what the behavioural sciences can tell us. All political theories implicitly rely on an account of human nature, so it is unwise to set aside the best available evidence about how humans actually behave. That evidence suggests humans are neither as infinitely flexible nor as easily perfectible as is sometimes assumed.
I recently published a short book that addresses these questions directly and sets out both the argument and the supporting evidence for taking the behavioural sciences seriously in political theory. If you would like a copy, I would be happy to send one (DM me with an appropriate address). It is deliberately concise and can be read in around two hours.
Uhh your discourse on theism and especially miracles was some of the most wretched shit I have ever seen on the internet and for that alone I will always despise you. But on everything else you're generally correct.
Besides some of your posts on foreign aid, practically everything you write makes me care about the subject less.
Everytime you present a knock-down argument for why morality is an infinitely bean counting exercise, I care about morals less. Because you are very good at making those arguments.
"I don’t see why destroying nature is irreversible. We can add back nature."
This is a pretty good example of the glibness I complained about. An extinct species, for instance, can't be added back in.
But reducing the amounts of nature won't cause a species to go extinct generally. Even if it does, there are lots of other species.
Do you feel "there are lots of other species" addresses the problem I'm raising? What do you think I, someone who (apparently) cares about species extinction, would say in response to "there are lots of other species"?
I agree that would be a cost on the margins to destroying nature prompting species extinction.
"People think I’m too breezy, dismissive, and overconfident.
I think [this] is largely an aesthetic thing. I prefer the style where one is clear and direct rather than adding extra words to hedge."
I think posing "breezy, dismissive, and overconfident" as stylistic (aligned with "clear and direct" and opposed to "adding extra words to hedge") rather than epistemic illustrates the problem! I'm not saying you should add a bunch of meaningless "in my opinion," "it seems to me," "I could be wrong"—I'm saying some of your arguments are weaker than they could be because you aren't really (to appearances anyway) thinking about whether they are responsive to what people are saying.
I think there are two sort of different criticisms. The first is that I believe things that are false. The second is that I'm overconfident. My response to the first is: I mean, it's surely right that I believe some false stuff, but I don't agree about any of the particular claims regarding false things. My response to the second is that I don't actually think I have abnormally high credences in things. If anything, I tend to be less confident in political and philosophical judgments than others.
I think I haven't expressed my own complaints clearly enough (can't speak for other people's). I'm not talking about the confidence you have in your ideas. I mean, I think the exercise of saying "I have 65% confidence in theism" or whatever is kind of meaningless, an imitation of epistemic humility, but it's not really what I'm talking about in any case. When I talk about glibness, I'm talking about your confidence that you've addressed your interlocutors' points in a satisfactory way. It feels like you think your job in a discussion or debate is to respond with a single devastating strike, like a kill shot in tennis, rather than something more Socratic where you're trying to lead your interlocutor to share your understanding (while also being open to learning from them and refining your points in response). I guess that choice makes sense in competitive debate, but I'm presuming that in these posts you're setting yourself the task of leading people to truth, and these quick-n-simple responses don't serve that purpose well, I feel.
Let me give an example that's stuck with me for a long time. I believe it was in a miracle discussion that someone brought up the problems with believing witness testimony, and your response (paraphrased), was, "Just because someone reports something unlikely doesn't mean it should be discounted. For instance, the odds of someone's phone number being 344-556-7799 are infinitesimal, but if someone told me that was their phone number I would believe them." To my recollection, that was the whole argument (I can't remember if it was the whole comment, but it was the entirety of your response to that point). For myself, before putting so much weight on that one analogy, I would want to ask: how convincing is this? Could there be good reasons why someone would believe someone reporting their phone number more readily than they would believe someone reporting a limb regrowing, say? If so, what are the differences between the cases, and how can I convince my interlocutor that the case I'm discussing is more like a phone number? That might involve you writing things like "Granted, a phone number isn't quite the same because…" but I don't think that would make your writing seem less clear or direct; on the contrary it would clarify your position to help spell out what you find convincing about the argument. You can call this an aesthetic preference, but I think it's fundamentally the difference between seeking the truth and seeking points on an imaginary scoreboard.
I'd need to see the context to comment on this case.
That's fair. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-im-not-a-christian/comment/110051533
My biggest objection to you is the lack of extant historical documentation corroborating your existence. Most of the evidence for your existence is spurious and anecdotal. In fact, when you actually look at academic circles, few scholars have reported they believe in you.
As a producer of interesting media content, I think you’re very talented! You are philosophically competent and clever, and you understand utilitarianism well. I also find your work on animal ethics really compelling (I’m also vegan). I think where you run into trouble is in a lack of epistemic humility and graciousness with opponents. Respectfully, that misstep comes of being very clever too young. But as one ages they see that the things that were so obvious (or breezy and clear) are not so, and the world is messy and real, and many of the people you thought were simple and dismissible were in fact on to something important.
I used to love your posts, since I find them both insightful and reliable. Now I think they're reliable, but repetitive and boring. I can basically predict what you'll write about just by looking at the title, and sometimes even without looking at the title! Of course, I don't deny that you have good reasons to think that you're saying Big, Important Truths. But I think you're going for all the low-hanging fruit, with Trump, Shrimp, etc. In most of your posts recently, even you say something like "my argument is trivially true to anyone sane". Yeah. But if so, why should I pay to read what you write? By contrast, when I read Huemer, I find things that're both reliable AND interesting/insightful. His arguments often take me by surprise and force me to think. Your arguments are good, but they don't make me think. I'll still stick around though, and I look forward to your future writings, which I'm confident will be better.
PS: Maybe a reason for this is that you want to write posts that sound shocking and cool to the general reader, and thus gain more views/likes/subscribers/tribal validation. I get it. I just feel like you're made for better things, to be a true philosopher (not just a sharp-witted blogger) and put truly rigorous stuff out there (and I mean peer-reviewed stuff, regularly). I feel this way reading LessWrong too. People play around with a concept, write some stuff, and leave it at that. No laborious, painstaking research (the kind encountered in a top philosophy PhD program; the kind Huemer does first and foremost before being a semipopular writer). A bit disappointing.
Did you try asking Twitter? You might be more likely to see actual haters on Twitter than here.
Thanks for the answers, I think I predicted all of them but it's still nice to see the debate laid out! :)
Don’t dislike you but … It would be unusual for a teenager, even a really smart and talented one, to have novel and interesting contributions so often that he could fruitfully post several times a week. The result is what some have noted, lots of similar posts on a few core topics. It feels like you want to post frequently and find ways to make that happen. But good stuff!
I don't think most things most people say are that novel.
He’s eleven. He won’t be a teenager for two more years.
Perhaps this could be the year to experiment with posting less frequent but more in-depth essays? No one, no matter how talented, can do a Scott-Alexander-style "more than you wanted to know" essay when posting every day. Just a thought.
A lot of the glibness and dismissiveness that I think I see your writing feels like the result of not spending enough time editing and using more detail. You can write clearly and directly while also appropriately addressing counter arguments in a sufficient level of detail. Often I read things you write that I agree with but don’t think would convince me if I didn’t simply because they do that spell out the argument and enough detail (notice this is different from hedging). I think you have valuable things to say that would be more convincing if you posted less often but spent more time adding detail
"Disagree that it’s a negative update. If some argument has convinced other smart people, that’s a positive update regarding its quality."
Linch's point is correct, if slightly ambiguous. Your retort also does not really disagree with it. The negative update is about the probability of the argument's conclusion, not the quality of the argument itself. Given that you already know the strength of the argument, a smart person making it should reduce your confidence in its conclusion as it is evidence that better arguments for the conclusion than the given one don't exist. This is completely compatible with your position that smart people adopting an argument is evidence for its strength.
This is most clear in domains where very smart people have a strong motivation to believe a thesis and adopt rubbish arguments to defend it. Look e.g. at Israel/Palestine: the fact that one side outwits the other comfortably and yet it is at best a draw in the war of ideas is evidence about who is (closer to being) right.
I don't agree. Linch's point is right that there's some sense in which it gives you a positive negative update (you should be suspicious that they couldn't think of anything better). But there's another positive update point (you should think it's better in quality if an argument convinces smart people). My guess is the second generally has more persuasive force than the first.
I'm going to spell it out more since I think people are confused; the point is slightly more subtle and nuanced than people give credit for it.
Suppose you are trying to decide whether to update on a position X given an argument X1 for it. If you know nothing about the arguers, you should look at the argument, think for yourself, and decide how good an argument it is. You should update upwards on X if X1 is a good argument, and downwards if X1 is a bad argument (If it's confusing why a bad argument should make you update downwards, read https://guive.substack.com/p/updating-on-bad-arguments)
What do you gain when you learn additional things about the arguer (including intelligence, experience with the subject matter, how much time they spent investigating the issue, etc)? I think there are different effects going on.
A) *For the same position, smart people are able to find and present the better arguments.* If an intelligent and experienced philosopher spends ten years on a field and gives me a terrible (non-trolling) argument for X, and moreover if other experienced philosophers agree with X, I might be more inclined to think "geez *this* is the best argument that the greatest minds can come up with?" In such a situation, X is probably false. Whereas if a dumb person gives me a terrible argument for X, I might just not update at all in either direction (eg, dumb person thinks evolution is true because they saw it on Pokemon. Doesn't mean much either way).
Conversely, if a very smart person gives me a really dazzling argument for X, and especially if the smart person is known for being general-purpose persuasive (like Sam Altman), I might be pretty skeptical of updating on X. Smart people are better at finding good arguments conditional on good arguments existing, but also better at finding persuasive arguments regardless of truth-value. A very smart person who can convince me of anything is a scary figure (and in a Bayesian sense, ought to be able to convince me of nothing). And I should just be very careful of their arguments.
Scott spells out the point more explicitly here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
Whereas if a stupid and not very dedicated thinker can give me a simple dazzling argument for X, I might be more like "jeez wow I could really take this argument at face value. " Plus if the stupid person came up with it, this might imply there are even better arguments I *haven't* heard of.
Furthermore, smart people are also better at strategic curation/presentation of which arguments you encounter. So if a smart and dumb person are each aware of the same five arguments for a position, a smart person is more likely to be able to identify the best argument (whether overall, or targeted at me specifically), whereas a dumb person might be much more likely to pick a random argument that's not very good/compelling.
B) *The argument tracks something deeper that is not legible,* and smart etc people have more access to the illegible cognition and intuitions behind the less legible parts of the argument. Suppose a very intelligent and experienced lab scientist gives me an argument for why "Z approach in molecular biology won't work" that sounds quite flimsy to me. If I otherwise trust this lab scientist's judgment, and moreover if most other lab scientists I trust agree with her, I might conclude that her visible verbal argument is only the surface presentation of a bunch of deeper knowledge, like many facts I don't know about molecular biology, or tacit knowledge about lab science research I don't understand. In contrast, I might defer less to a first-year molecular biology graduate student (she surely knows more than *me*, but if her arguments are stupid, it's probably not because the stupid arguments are tracking very deep knowledge).
In the realm of ideas that Bentham's and I are both interested in (e.g. philosophy, social science, politics, effective altruism), where most ideas can at least in theory be thought about and verified on a armchair in front of a computer, I think the first update is substantially larger than the second.
One reason I believe this is because I don't think the correlation between intelligence and holding true beliefs is very high. In particular, I believe the correlation between intelligence and argument quality is higher than the correlation between intelligence and accuracy, especially in domains I'm interested in. I believe this partially from studies on superforecasters, and partially from surveys on general knowledge. And partially from understanding intelligence is to a large degree a form of general-purpose optimization (some people might literally define it that way), and noting that people optimize far harder in these fields for convincing arguments than for truth.
But you can disagree with me here and still agree with the directional update.
The problem with causal decision theory is that since (assuming no libertarian free will) your actions are already predetermined by physics (and to they extent they aren't they're random), causal decision theory doesn't give defined answers to what you should do for the same reasons it doesn't two-box. If you try to fix this you end up getting FDT
Some of the hate is probably people finding out your age and being a little salty about your successes, or reflexive disgust from people who have opposing views.
I dislike you because you’re an extraordinarily lazy philosopher who’s far too enamored with embracing controversial views. You misunderstand the purpose of philosophy as an enterprise. Its purpose is to discover the truth, not to persuade people of the truth of beliefs you already agree with, and certainly not to drive views to your substack. Generally, when one finds oneself embracing a view that nearly everyone else rejects, it’s at least as likely as not that one is in the wrong. If you paused and thought harder about arguments that would refute your claims, and abandoned your emotional attachment to claims you’ve made just because you made them, I suspect you would notice a lot more of your errors in thought. However, as a result, you would also more often arrive at the conclusion that the conventional wisdom on a topic is correct so your takes would be less spicy and drive less engagement to your page.
Regarding controversial views, you’d do well to consider the example of other philosophers. Very often when a philosopher notices that a counterintuitive or otherwise odd result seems to follow from sounds reasoning from true premises, they don’t embrace the view; they call it a “paradox” and publish it for other philosophers to figure out a resolution for. You’d arrive at truth faster and more reliably if you were willing to sit with contradictions and question your assumptions rather than leaping to publish and then resolutely defend bugfuck insane ideas like the insect nonsense.
Let’s look at the insect suffering argument you’ve embraced. First of all, while I’m prepared to take you at your word that there is plenty of evidence that insects display behaviors consistent with the experience of suffering, you’ve moved far too quickly to conclude that insects actually experience suffering. Consider the basic drives humans have. We need oxygen, water, food, to reproduce and to avoid damage to our bodies, and we have evolved behavioral reward and punishment mechanisms to motivate us to pursue those needs. However, the mechanisms are wildly different from each other in ways that are relevant to the question of whether we could recognize suffering without direct conscious experience of the reward and punishment mechanisms.
The most obvious example is pain. We experience intense and acute punishment when our bodies are damaged, and as a result we avoid taking action that causes damage and learn very quickly which actions need to be avoided. So far so good.
However, consider sex drive. Males are rewarded quite intensely for expressing gametes. Females are not rewarded at all for expressing their gametes and are intermittently and unreliably rewarded for permitting males to express their gametes inside of them. Neither sex experiences anything like punishment for going a long time without expressing gametes.
Now consider thirst. We are “punished” for going a long time without water, but it’s not an extrinsic punishment in the same way orgasms are an extrinsic reward for copulation or pain is an extrinsic punishment for damage. Rather, we experience relatively mild distress at the intrinsic effects of dehydration on our bodies.
Hunger is odd in the sense that it employs both rewards and punishments in very different ways. When we go awhile without eating, we experience extrinsic discomfort well before we start to experience the intrinsic effect of lack of food. Even when extremely hungry we don’t experience any particular reward for eating per se. We still need to choke down unpalatable food no matter how hungry we are. However, we are extrinsically rewarded for our choice of foods. Our brains give us a little treat when we eat especially calorically dense foods. Conversely, there is little rhyme or reason to what punishments we receive for eating things that are poisonous or harmful. Some poisons taste good. Some have no taste at all. Some taste unpleasant, but more as a result of physical damage to our mouths than anything extrinsically evolved response. The only real extrinsic unpleasantness related to food is that disease and waste provoke an extrinsic reaction of disgust.
Strangest of all is breathing. Oxygen is the most important need we have. We die almost immediately without it. However, we have not evolved an extrinsic reward for seeking out oxygen or an extrinsic punishment for lack of oxygen. We are punished for failing to exhale carbon dioxide, but we don’t even notice oxygen loss until we experience its intrinsic effects. If you look at humans being suffocated, it would be very easy to conclude that oxygen deprivation causes intense suffering and to understand why, but this would be an error. When you tease out the difference between hypoxia and carbon dioxide poisoning, it turns out only the latter causes distress.
It is very easy to imagine a species of animal that’s very similar to us that experiences deprivation of food similarly to how we experience deprivation of sex or oxygen whose only motivation for food was not avoiding suffering but chasing a more intense version of the high we get from eating chocolate chip cookies or a well-cooked steak. If we deprived such an animal of food its resulting intrinsic lethargy might easily be mistaken for hunger pangs from the outside, but that doesn’t mean it’s suffering like we would if we went hungry. You mention the mayflies that spend their entire adult lives fucking and none of them eating. Maybe they experience it as starving to death in precisely the same way we would, or maybe the hunger drive disappears entirely when they’re pupating and they experience their entire adult lives in a horny frenzy of bliss. We have no idea one way or the other, and some epistemic humility is called for.
Take the button argument you discuss here: https://benthams.substack.com/p/its-good-to-create-happy-people-a
It not simply wrong, but obviously wrong. The reason it makes sense to press the two buttons serially but not one button that has the same effect as both buttons is that moral judgments are based on the state of the world and your knowledge about the state of the world. If you knew before pressing button 1 that Bob would never see a drop of that medicine, pressing button 1 would no longer be obligatory on the basis of the effect it would have on Bob. Similarly, your duty to press button 2 after having pressed button 1 relies on Frank’s being in existence in the interbutton interval. Before Frank exists you have no duty to extend his life. This is so plainly different from the situation in which pressing one button feeds one homeless person but pressing two buttons feeds two that it’s difficult to believe the comparison was made after a rigorous good faith examination.
You would not find argumentation of this quality compelling if it were offered in support of views you found morally repugnant, and I find it insulting to my intelligence that you’ve decided to offer it up in support of your argument. It suggests trickery, or a willingness to get by on sophistry. This mode of argument is common in politics and law, where one is acting as an advocate and guided only by what works. It has no place in a search for truth. If you’re familiar with the work of Harry Frankfurt, you’ll recall the name he gave to this mode of discourse. “Bullshit”
It happens of course that some critic raises good counterpoints to your views, but as regards those who make an overall negative (and typically very vague) judgement of you, I wouldn't worry too much, because they are clearly in over their heads. After double-checking that Joe Carlsmith must be a millennial, I state without hesitation that you are the best gen Z philosopher on my radar.
I would not be so quick to dismiss the evolutionary perspective — or, more broadly, what the behavioural sciences can tell us. All political theories implicitly rely on an account of human nature, so it is unwise to set aside the best available evidence about how humans actually behave. That evidence suggests humans are neither as infinitely flexible nor as easily perfectible as is sometimes assumed.
I recently published a short book that addresses these questions directly and sets out both the argument and the supporting evidence for taking the behavioural sciences seriously in political theory. If you would like a copy, I would be happy to send one (DM me with an appropriate address). It is deliberately concise and can be read in around two hours.
Uhh your discourse on theism and especially miracles was some of the most wretched shit I have ever seen on the internet and for that alone I will always despise you. But on everything else you're generally correct.
Besides some of your posts on foreign aid, practically everything you write makes me care about the subject less.
Everytime you present a knock-down argument for why morality is an infinitely bean counting exercise, I care about morals less. Because you are very good at making those arguments.