Have no heroes, and no villains

No-one is a villain in their own mind, of course.

I've spent several years deep in the bowels of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. (It's jolly good and I'm very proud to have had some small part in what we've achieved and continue to achieve.) Wikipedia has the rule "assume good faith", which is of course a restatement of Hanlon's razor, "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice." Wikimedia is 100% made of sincere people who really believe in what they're doing. Per Dumas' razor, "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, as rogues sometimes rest," this means that when one of these sincere, smart, dedicated people is doing something that's actually blitheringly stupid, it's ten times as hard to get across to them that they are in fact having a towering attack of dumbarse.

Every politician I've ever met has in fact been a completely sincere person who considers themselves to do what they do with the aim of good in the world. Even the ones that any outsider would say "haha, leave it out" to the notion. Every politician is completely sincere. I posit that this is a much more frightening notion than the comfort of a conspiracy theory.

There are few, if any, villains. There are people being stupid and foolish. These are frequently us. LessWrong's catalogue of cognitive biases is to remind you that you, yes you, are in fact an idiot. As am I.

The hard part is to set the bozo bit on people in parts, rather than over the whole person. And allow for the notion of cluifiability.

The thing is there are people who are more or less likely to be worth listening to. Even if no one is actually evil, some people don't have ideas that are generally worth listening to. They might occasionally have a good idea. And even people with generally good ideas might have a few really bad ones. The question that needs to be asked is not "is this person good or evil" or even "is this person smart or dumb" but rather "what is the probability that I will learn something interesting and correct from listening to this person?"

Given what I know about Gould I suspect he likes group selection for the same reason he dislikes sociobiology. Namely, because group selection is moral.

As for your main point while I agree that it's dangerous to get into affective death spirals around your heroes and anti-affective death spirals about your villains, it is also true that the fact that someone doesn't care about the truth of a theory because he finds it immoral is Bayesian evidence that his other statements aren't necessarily reliable. After all he might only be making them because he finds them moral.

I find this also hard with acquaintances. One who has done some really awful things but is also in many ways an interesting and sometimes very selfless and generous person. There's pressure to either say "oh, they're all right really" or "oh, they're not really generous". Ultimately for all that they deny it, people want to know what side you're on.

I remember distinctly having the same discrete epiphany, and it is indeed incredibly frustrating. But take heart--this way, you get more than two markers with which to color in your map. :)

Gould turned Goldschmidt's "hopeful monster" hypothesis from pariah to mainstream with his theory of punctuated equilibrium - which has been well-borne-out in every good, gene-level-detailed computer simulation of evolution that I've seen.

That is simply bizarre. I'm going to have to ask for references. Two references, in fact.

One would be a quote from any mainstream evolutionary biologist other than Gould which uses the phrases "hopeful monster" and "punctuated equilibrium" in the same paragraph. If you cannot find one, a quote from Gould would do. According to wikipedia, the association of the two ideas is a creationist distortion. Googling the two phrases seems to bear that out.

The second would be a link to any paper reporting a good, gene-level-detailed computer simulation of evolution which backs up your claim.

Amorality is a lovely way to protect science from ideology. All the heroes subscribe to it nowadays.

Great post, thanks.

I try to remember my heroes for the specific heroic act or trait, e.g. Darwin's conscientious collection of disconfirming evidence.

Computer geeks have a term for this: "flipping the bozo bit".

Related: The Trouble With "Good".

I think seeing Bad Guys should especially be avoided. Nobody's an evil mutant; as a first approximation, prominent scholars have good intentions and are not stupid. So seeing Stephen J. Gould as a villain or a fool is as wrong as Stephen J. Gould seeing Edward Wilson as a villain or a fool.

Accepting that fact of many people who loudly disagree with each other can be difficult, but I think the proper response isn't to decide that one particular subgroup is right and one subgroup is wrong (a decision often made with very little information), it's to lower our base estimate that any particular scholar is right, and lowering even more our estimate that we can form a correct opinion on that subject with even less information on the scholars.

Ah yes, haha, I used to have the same hypothesis with the Dawkins vs Gould camp, but I shattered it some time ago.

Incidentally, does anyone else here feel the same narrative with respect to the Democrats vs Republicans? I frequently have to refrain from thinking of the Republicans as "bad guys", even though they sometimes do have legitimate economic policies.

How about no villains after a certain age?

If I had no heroes and no villains in my wild and reckless youth, I would not be able to have pre-cognitions which stopped me from ever reading the bible, the Quran, Freud, and Skinner.

Nowadays, after reading the sequences, after grasping bayes, After having sharper ideas about how we cluster objects into categories in our minds, I consider myself somewhat vaccinated.

Now, as a grown man, I am able to stop having villains and heroes. But when I was younger and had chosen my three heros (Dennett, Russell, and Bostrom) and my few dozen villains, this had extremely valuable consequences.

Is it painful for me to admit that Russell didn't have a great theory of the Mind? you wouldn't believe how much.

But I am happy to suffer this mild pain now rather than having had to go through the impossible process of telling the wheat from the chaff when I was 16 bit by bit.

I loved reading Stephen Jay Gould as a kid, and later I had to learn that, no, he wasn't right about everything. I still feel a knee-jerk pull to trust him over Dawkins or Wilson, which I have to consciously resist.

I know someone who knew Gould. She said he was absolutely brilliant. Not flawless; absolutely brilliant. I always thought the spandrel tale was interesting. Not compelling; but very interesting.

(I do have heroes though; I try not to project infallibility upon them.)

I don't think it was even personal - I didn't care who would be the Good Guys and who would be the Bad Guys. I just want there to be Good Guys and Bad Guys.

I have difficulty with this, too. I see the problem as related to correspondence bias.

In a single situation, you observe one person as being the Good Guy, and the other being the Bad Guy. This judgement gets locked into place as how they should always act. It gives you the false expectation for the same guy to be good, and the same guy to be bad. It doesn't matter who, individually, plays which role - just that they are consistently either Good or Bad, all the time.

We are all imperfect and we all have good stuff and bad stuff. If we focus on the good, then that is what we will tend to receive in our personal relationships. It doesn't make us perfect. And it's all perspective sine the majority if us choose which side of the fence we will be on.

This post, which concentrated on people's commentary about a field of inquiry, could have been improved by including some summary of the field being commented on.

Actually, EY has me as a villain.

think good guys and bad guys, like good guys and bad guys in long tv shows or even worse.. like in professional wrestling.. they keep changing roles.. not to any extent of actually thinking along those terms, but just to make the point that the roles keep on changing.. at any rate, there are and most probably always will be categories of people whose interests/beliefs/motivations are aligned with ours and those categories of people whose interests/beliefs/motivations will be diametrically opposite..

There are no Good guys and Bad guys, only Smart guys and Dumb guys.

The problem is discerning the two, for to a human mind there is no Truth and Falsehood, only Normal beliefs and Strange beliefs.

So in order to have a fighting chance you must study to align Normality with Reality. Practice Lightness and Scholarship.

/guru