[kragen]

I would argue exactly the contrary: the real world, the seasons and stars and seeds, is pitilessly rational. It cannot be tricked, pleaded with, or emotionally manipulated. It is harsh, but equally so to everyone, and according to an inexorable logic that cannot be altered but can be exploited. It is the special contexts the humans have created, like churches, courts, and tribes, where the laws of rationality can be imperfectly and temporarily suspended, replaced by a "virtual reality" that is merely a social consensus.

[PeterisP]

Humans and other primates are social animals, and pretty much all aspects of personal success and ability to influence the external world - survival and safety, access to nutrition, mates and other resources, and general power - are mostly determined by social factors, so "winning" at the social factors has been more important than what a single individual can achieve by exploiting the "real world" even since before homo sapiens existed. "Individual fitness" at the expense of social fitness is maladaptive in the environment where humans live and lived; Starving or not starving depends on social factors more than on individual hunting prowess, the same for procreation, the same for changing the world in various ways, most of which depend on how many other people you can motivate to go along with your plans. These "special contexts the humans have created" have dominated the human life as long as humans have existed and before that, as we can see in non-human primate communities where living or dying in a power struggle or inter-tribal war is largely a factor of social aspects and not the strength of some individual ape.

There's no "merely" social consensus, quite on the contrary, the social consensus has always dominated all the things that matter; being exiled from the tribe was effectively a death sentence even if the tribe did not directly kill you, and a dominant position in the tribe gains larger benefits than dominating against the real world, both in a hunter-gatherer environment and in modern society.

[kragen]

Almost everything in your first paragraph is correct (though you accidentally capitalized "starving".)

But everything in your second paragraph is incorrect. Even before the industrial revolution, it was commonplace for banished people to find a new place to live, either as hermits or as part of a new tribe; the outlawing and persecution of individual refugees and "stateless persons" is a Late Modern aberration. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, a subordinate position in a tribe like Japan that is very "dominant against the real world" gains larger benefits than a dominant position in a tribe like the Wola that is much less "dominant against the real world". For example, as a Japanese person, you live twice as long, you probably won't get raped, you are at no risk of being executed for witchcraft if you fall from favor, and if at some point the two tribes come into armed conflict, the Wola will be entirely at the mercy of the Japanese.

Even in the first paragraph, though, there is a significant error. You say, "Starving or not starving... procreation... [and] changing the world in various ways [mostly] depend on how many other people you can motivate to go along with your plans." But in fact they do not. These things depend jointly on whether you get teamwork on plans, a social question, and on whether the plans are any good in the first place, a rational question. This is what sunk the Great Leap Forward: Mao was suffering from the delusion that you so clearly expressed here. He evidently motivated people to go along with his plans to an almost unprecedented degree, but many objective, non-social aspects of the plans (notably backyard smelting, the Four Pests campaign, deep plowing, and close planting) were destined to produce catastrophe, especially if they were executed thoroughly. The greatest famine in human history was the predictable consequence, killing some 40 million people.

The industrial revolution was a consequence of Galileo's rebellion against this subjectivist view: he dared to look through his telescope at the real world and believe what he saw, despite its incompatibility with the socially constructed virtual reality of his time. It took some time, but Italy paid for its rejection of Galileo with centuries of penury and destitution. Ultimately Galileo influenced the external world, as you say, far more than the crabbed Inquisitors who persecuted him.

I stand with Galileo and against Mao. Will you join me?

[PeterisP]

I'd argue that even in the horrific example of the Great Leap Forward, Mao and those who went with him mostly succeeded with their personal goals and ensured all kinds of long-term benefits to themselves granted by a higher social status in the party, while those who went against him and had better plans failed in all their goals, often starting with the primary goal of immediate survival. In this scenario having the better plan was not useful, and trying to execute it was not rational as it only hurt your interests.

Using your example of Galileo, his effectiveness in propagating his science was severely limited by a scientifically irrelevant feud with church officials. Had he been more politically savvy, he would have been able to avoid tying the scientific issues with the personal conflict, and would not have provoked the church into this conflict - IMHO what we have in historical evidence indicates that it was perfectly plausible for him to get the church to support his position, which would have supported both his personal interests and the general progress of science, but he failed at that due to his personal qualities w.r.t. social aspects.

[kragen]

Often that does happen in the short term, although in this particular case, it led to Mao losing control of the Party for six years and arguably delayed Mainland China's economic boom by 20 years. Certainly many of the people who tried to resist the Great Leap Forward died as a result, but so did many of the people who most enthusiastically practiced it.

I don't think a Galileo who spent much of his time acquiring political savvy and currying allies would have been able to make the progress he did make. Such a Galileo might have simply decided not to believe what he saw through the telescope, or to keep quiet about it. The Church had already burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for possessing the writings of Erasmus, and there are many other such stories: Bach was imprisoned for refusing to resign from his Kapellmeister post; Swartz committed suicide to escape imprisonment for downloading too many academic papers; Turing committed suicide to escape persecution for being openly gay; Newton lived to a ripe old age but certainly had a life full of interpersonal conflict; Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs while awaiting trial for treason.

Fundamentally, rationality is insubordinate, and social graces frequently demand dishonesty, so that those who most love the truth are never those who get along best with others.

And those are my heroes, not Donald Trump or Mao Zedong.

There's a better-written essay on this topic at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-....

[nathias]

I really find it entertaining that all naive science supporters believe this myth about Galileo. The real story is very different, he wasn't prosecuted, he was put in house arrest, not for daring to science, but because he publically mocked his friend the pope. Anyway, it's a really interesting time to take a deep dive in.

[kragen]

As usual, the people posting smug dismissals to HN claiming to find it entertaining that someone might disagree with them, and to themselves know "the real story", are not well versed in the subject. While of course in some sense the real reason for any interpersonal conflict can never be disagreement over a question of facts, Galileo was in fact prosecuted, and the overt justification for his prosecution was, as my unfortunate interlocutor puts it, "daring to science." Quoting the introduction to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair:

> The Galileo affair (Italian: il processo a Galileo Galilei) began around 1610 and culminated with the trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633. Galileo was prosecuted for his support of heliocentrism, the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the universe. ...

> Galileo's discoveries were met with opposition within the Catholic Church, and in 1616 the Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be "formally heretical." Galileo went on to propose a theory of tides in 1616, and of comets in 1619; he argued that the tides were evidence for the motion of the Earth.

> In 1632 Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which defended heliocentrism, and was immensely popular. Responding to mounting controversy over theology, astronomy and philosophy, the Roman Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633 and found him "vehemently suspect of heresy" sentenced him to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642. At that point, heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas after the trial.

The rest of the article provides an even more thoroughgoing rejection of the confused ideas in the comment to which I am regrettably replying; the atom of truth in it is that, 16 years after first being prosecuted, he included the new Pope's own counterarguments in his book along with a rebuttal, which displeased the Pope, who had previously favored Galileo.

[nathias]

Ah yes, in the long run it's all rational, but in the long run we're also all dead. Even if that were the case, you are not a star, you are not near equilibrium, you are alive and don't have time to play long term rational games.

[kragen]

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

If you try to walk across the desert without drinking water you will be dead in two days. That's not "the long run."

If you carry water and salt with you, you can make it a week or more, but not if you strategize poorly: walking during the day instead of at night will deplete your water much more rapidly, and if you treat your canteen carelessly you will lose the water. If you have the knowledge to navigate to places with drinkable water along the way, or the knowledge and materials to distill water from crushed plants, you can make it for months, longer if you brought food or can find it. (Me, I caught and ate raw grasshoppers.) You cannot emotionally manipulate the desert; you cannot trick it; it will not treat you more gently because you beg it for mercy. Rationality (knowledge, skill, heedfulness, and above all epistemic humility) is your only hope. It's no guarantee, because a rattlesnake or a hailstone may strike you at random, but it's your only hope.

It's not just the desert. The same is true of the ocean, of mushroom hunting, of wasp's nests, and of the frozen North with its alpine sweetvetch. Nature's ways are subtle and merciless, but they are amenable to understanding, and rationality permits you to order your life in harmony with them and thus survive and prosper a little while; though not, as you say, in the long run.

The whole world is like this, all except for tiny special contexts humans have created where the ruthless laws of Nature are suspended a little bit, where mercy and humanity and fellow-feeling hold sway.

[nathias]

That's not really the concept of rationality I or the article is talking about (consistency, non-bias etc.) knowledge or it's use isn't the same, it's more like the a priori knowledge where the concept is immediately applied by universal rules etc. This specific rationality is good in formal games where the rules are universal and the concept should be immediately applied, but doesn't work for empirical contexts (life, science, engineering, etc.).

[kragen]

They aren't really different concepts of rationality; consistency and non-bias are about not fooling yourself, so that you can come to the conclusions that the available evidence would justify. That's how people as a group can empirically acquire knowledge about the world. Of course, for individual people, social aspects are often even more important, since learning from someone else's experience can be much cheaper than learning from your own—as in the case of alpine sweetvetch; but even resisting deception and knowing whose opinion to listen to benefit from consistency and non-bias. Indeed, perhaps even more so, since the alpine sweetvetch isn't trying to emotionally manipulate you into believing it.

[nathias]

You use bias as a dirty word, but it's really just a weight of the opinion, there is no knowledge without bias. As for consistency, it comes secondary to categorization, it's easily abused for 'foolish' consistencies that can also be created with framing effects.

[kragen]

Sorry, I'm using "bias", "consistency", and "rationality" in the statistical, logical, and philosophical senses, respectively. So, I think, is the article. Your use of different definitions for those words probably explains why you reached conclusions that read as obvious nonsense to me. You might think about rereading the article with those definitions in mind.

I can also recommend reading about alpine sweetvetch.