[yitosda]

There's a ton of (especially early) nerd culture idolizing many forms of what most people know as the "Spock" character (somewhat more accurately, Vulcans in general). This is typically contrasted with emotions, sometimes as a mystical part of the human soul that exists outside of logic, sometimes as the source of evil.

It's a constant bother. The only way to apply pure logic to any problem is to pare it down to a mockery of the real world problem. That's why we have "gut" or "emotions": We apply imperfect patterns to complex issues, otherwise we'd never make it through a single day; it's an optimization.

Tech/nerd/stem types absolutely love to do this. We take a problem, pare it down to its essence and then solve it. When no one listens and no logical counterargument prevails, the cries for technocracy start to ring out. A classic attempt to dissect this fallacy was the old blog post "What color are your bits?" [1]

As technology companies continue to grow in power relative to all other companies and governments, I'm very interested in watching how this plays out.

[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

[SolaceQuantum]

"Tech/nerd/stem types absolutely love to do this. We take a problem, pare it down to its essence and then solve it."

In my experience, the tech/nerd/stem types being hypothesized about actually do not pare a problem down to its essence. They instead do the equivalent to attempting to solve the screaming of a hungry child by assuming the essence of the problem is that "too much sound", so we put the child in a soundproofed room.

In truth, it is entirely possible to apply pure logic to a problem if the problem is appropriately scoped to closely align with actual reality. In my experience, to deny the emotional aspects of something is actually irrational behavior- it makes incorrect assumptions that the only things that exist are what the tech/nerd/stem person understands themselves.

This results in the hypocritical behavior of a tech/nerd/stem type crying out (emotionally) to solve the problems of emotionality.

[yitosda]

I think we agree, but I appreciate that my wording wasn't perfectly clear.

"pare down to its essence" was a bad way of saying "disregard intersecting issues and focus on one logically resolvable issue." Your soundproofed room analogy is apt.

I also agree with applying pure logic to a scoped problem being not only possible but desirable... but I'd argue that properly scoped problems are rarely as useful to solve as the scoper might think. In many cases "merely" scoping the problem in a novel way leads directly to a truly useful course of action, and is most of the hard work.

I agree completely with emotions being something we should not deny, but rather be something to /include/ when trying to solve problems. (My complaints are around emotions being placed outside or opposed to the realm of logic, where accounting for them is "illogical")

[SolaceQuantum]

Yes, I agree- but what fo you mean by "merely scoping the problem in a novel way" and how does it differ from the way I describe scoping?

(Not attacking, genuinely curious because I'd love to find new and more useful courses of action when it comes to problems...)

[yitosda]

I think we are both arguing that some people narrow the scope of arguments to the point that they aren't useful to the original problem, merely more amenable to logic. Let's call this "not useful scoping".

I further argue that useful scoping (isolating the problem in a way that solving it provides a solution amenable to all those who proposed the problem) often /is/ the hard work, itself a product of much time and logic.

Far from proposing a useful course of action: I simply lament that we will often choose our scope to support simple logic, rather than use complex logic to improve the scope.

No surprise either: each life only has so many hours.

[SolaceQuantum]

Ah, ok, thanks for clarifying.

It is possible to genuinely enjoy scoping the problems out though, evaluating their complexities, etc. It's also possible to say "I don't have time to evaluate the thing, so I'm not going to conclude anything about it" (although the latter irritates lots of friends, haha)

[lordleft]

What's really interesting is that when the ancient Greeks spoke of 'reason', they didn't mean a cluster of intellectual processes divorced from our emotional lives, but an approach to the world that was informed by logic and also the noblest sentiments within us.

[jancsika]

Well, tech is full of famous smarties who, let's say, have famously underperformed in the emotions department.

If the tech world got filled with similarly emotionally unaware folks who idolize the smarties, it's quite likely they interpret those two traits as a package deal and emulate both.

Since most technies aren't famously smart, the emotional unawareness at least gets them 1 out of 2.

This rank speculation explains why technies get famously angry when asked to be even minimally aware of the effect their behavior has on others.

[manifestsilence]

The problem isn't even one of over-simplification; it's that logic does not inherently possess values. Logic can only tell you whether a conclusion follows from premises, not whether those premises are correct. It can tell you whether an idea is consistent but not whether it is good.

[yitosda]

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You've narrowed down the scope of logic to apply to everything !good, which is some emotional value that exists outside of logic. In reality "good" is a vast trove of information which differs in the minds of every party to the problem.

Logic absolutely applies to this set of information!

Wanna-be technocrats should understand that exploring that vast trove of information (which they can't actually do, in practice) will allow a more widely accepted solution.

Accounting for all these various "goods" logically results in messy compromises which run exactly counter to the technocratic dream.

Democracy is an imperfect attempt to distribute the logical calculation of all these "goods" and come up with a big ugly messy solution.

(Some parallels with capitalism exist here)

[manifestsilence]

Yep. Often when people take the time to have a more thoughtful argument where they seek common ground instead of "winning", they quickly find that the differences are not in the logic and semantic games they were playing, but were a difference in either values or assessment of some fuzzy probability or heuristic. They find that one of them didn't think a certain outcome was either A. likely, or B. important, and the other differed on that. If it's about the odds, common ground can be reached by comparing experience and knowledge. If it's about values, that's harder, unless those values are based on further assumptions that can be picked apart, like saying seat belts are good because they save lives. That can be verified statistically. If they say cherry ice cream is the best, it's a case of agree to disagree...

[jankotek]

This "spock" character is just another form of rationalism. It has a long history, for example french revolution.

[yitosda]

That's true, but it doesn't really have much to do with my points:

* Common (current) culture around rationalism fantasizes about the human using it being able to choose the best course of action in every situation (and examples to the contrary are typically full of woo-woo about human emotions and souls). This is computationally impossible for the brain.

* Hacker-news-audience-types will often discard important nuance on a topic in order to reduce it to something that can easily be rationalized about.

If historical cultures may have "suffered" from the same delusions, it would be more interesting to see how my points did or didn't apply than saying that they existed.

[jankotek]

My point was about "idolizing" Spock, as form of worship.

[dllthomas]

What's funny is, watching Star Trek, how obviously Vulcan "logic" isn't (usually?) logic. I've assumed that was intentional.

[mistermann]

Would Sam Harris be an example of a person who holds such beliefs? I would say definitely yes, but curious if others would agree.