Beware of identifying with schools of thought

I'm not sure what work the word "sophisticated" is doing here.

Let's say the Greens advocate dispersing neurotoxins to eradicate all life on earth, and the Blues advocate not doing that. Is it "sophisticated" to say, "Well, there are certainly good arguments on both sides, for example if you assume this specific twisted utilitarian framework, or assume values that I don't possess, then the Greens have some good points!"? That doesn't seem sophisticated. That just indicates a pathological inability to "join a side" even when one side is the one you should join by your own ethical compunctions, you want to join, you would benefit from joining, and you would cause others to benefit by joining.

Also, what if you arrive at the party partway through, and the Green and Blue have already spoken, and also another Sophisticate has spoken and indicated that "both sides have some good points, perhaps the answer is in the middle". Are you allowed to just say, "I agree with the Sophisticate!" or does that make you a "sophisticate partisan" meaning you are obligated by the laws of being/appearing "sophisticated" to say, "Well, actually, the answer can't be in the middle, a 50-50 split just seems improbable, the Greens are probably 25% right and the Blues are probably 75% right."?

What I'm getting at is I'm not sure what the difference is being your usage of "sophisticated" and just being a contrarian.

You mention the attitudes implicit in certain styles of debate. I've written before about the dangers of certain styles of policy debate taught in American schools. I've always seen it as damaging that the point of US policy debate is to be able to argue from any position and against any position. It implicitly teaches the young mind that you can "win" an argument through cleverness and rule-lawyering without regard to whether your position is actually superior. The whole framework actively undermines the truthseeking mindset, because in a policy debate, you're not truthseeking, you're trying to obfuscate the opponents' inconvenient truths and distort facts that support your own argument to appear more important than they are. In short, I think there's definitely such a thing as "too much sophistication", and I blame this type of sophistication on why many of my former high school friends are now effectively insane.

Obviously I agree that it's dangerous to identify with a school of thought. Political parties in particular are coalitions of disparate interest groups, so the odds that a group of people who are only aligned for historically contingent reasons are going to come up with uniformly correct conclusions is near zero. That doesn't mean you can never be confident that you're right about something.

Additionally, I think to the degree that LWers identify as Bayesian, they are mostly just acknowledging the superiority of the Bayesian toolkit, such as maintaining some notion of a probability distribution over beliefs rather than exclusive and inviolable belief-statements, updating beliefs incrementally based on evidence, etc. None of us are really Bayesians anyway, because a thorough and correct Bayesian network for computing something as simple as whether you should buy Hershey's or Snickers would be computationally intractable.

There are two kids of -isms that are releantly different in this context. Philosophical isms tend to be groupings of answers to questions. Political -isms tend to be set of policies or policy production mechanisms that synergise.

In the philosphical style concepts like "materialism" are supposed to be connected to questions like "Is matter sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?" (with materialism corresponding to "yes" to this question). 

In this passge

If we take the perspective of hardcore materialism, a statement like: "One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood" wouldn't be a statement that can be objectively true because it's teleology. The notion of function isn't made up of atoms.

It reads as if it really meant "reductionism" which is connected to a question like "Does understanding the details of reality capture understanding reality?" (with reductionsim corresponding to "yes" to this question). In another sense it might be referring to less philosphical and more worldviewy isms.

You could answer "Is matter a sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?" "No, matter is how it functions and there is non-matteric functioning and reality is made of functions, so matter is insufficient.". But you could also mean with "One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood" that you don't mean "function" as an ontological entity. If you say a cardboard box has 6 sides you do not necessarily mean that in addition to the carton there would be non-paperic "side" entities extant.

That "function of the heart" is a sensible thing to talk about does take some philosophical stances. But those stances are not the narrow question about the sufficiency of matter. To those people that "that is quite reductive" is a negative assesment could answer "Does understanding the details of reality capture understanding reality?" "No, there are aspects of reality that is not seen from the parts". Reductionism and materialism are separate narrow philophical structures.

Some people do not mean the narrow philopshical question by "materialism". With very many such narrow philopshical questions one can wonder whether there are takes that could have the answer combinations "materialism yes, reductionism yes", "materialism yes, reductionism no", "materialism no, reductionism yes", "materialism no, reductionism no". And with more narrow questions even more combinations. Some people understand "materialism" to be a kind of "its gears all the way down" approach to things. Off-course its small gears, off-course all hands no reflection. The trouble can be that different people can disagree what narrow questions are answered and which way by this more umbrella category.

These "wide" takes can be connected with a single approach or imagination answering multiple facets. From a certain meme base some entrant memes might seem so natural that they might be assumed to be obvious or unavoidable. But the trouble is when different meme bases disagree about the naturalness of this meme creep. So these wide takes are no longer connected by objectioficable unambigious logical connections. Rather it is a known and recognised psychological fact. A definition is not sufficient to express these. Ideally these could be collapsed back or atleast be compatible with the narrow philosophical detail.

Then there are the memes which are bound together because they form a niche of existence for its carrier. You say the leader is dear because you would get smacked in the face otherwise. You kick down people in order to keep them having enough resources to repel effectively. You think people should give money to the goverment so that the extensive programs of it exist. Thinking that people should give money to the goverment that you have bigger payout when you embezzel it is another similar niche. A big thing about these is that they will have to fit to the total context of the life where it appears. If you embezzel people you might be guilty of a crime. If you kick down on people you might be verbally harassed. It is hard to check for local validity of these policies as they so heavily depend that the larger system survives and makes sense. If you are already doing criminal stuff then an extra embezzelment has a clear infrastructure to neatly slide into. If tax funds suffer from big corruption then pleading people to pay more taxes is an uphill battle.

"Materialism" in this sense can mean "I ain't going to church ever. And all those hippy sociologist HR types are stealing essential resources from actual hard sciences". And maybe you are an aggressive secularist because you are a "gears all the way down" person, formation of the belief system which hinged on question of "Can I dispence all bits of ontology I don't have math for?" which was decised by answer to "Is matter sufficent to constitute reality?". But you could have a person whos main spiritual belief is that "god does not play with dice" who laments that 3-body problem is not solved in closed form but can only be numerically simulated who thinks that electron psychism is exactly correlated with energic constitution and therefore matter is a complete set for ontological purposes. "Materialism" is very freaking wide and both can trace their systems roots to the same narrow binary question.

So I really dislike -isms and always struggle to unmuddle where they are used. Thoughts are important schools are not. Gears are not broken but systems are. So I will give the even more radical advice "beware referring to schools of thought". The equal and opposite of this advice is that if your head spins on complicated topics don't miss the woods for the trees.

The claim "People have an extra-computational ability to make correct judgements at better-than-random probability that have no logical basis." has the interesting angle about symbolic and non-symbolic information processing. With artificial neural networks it is cleaner to see that they don't have midsteps. To a large extent they just implement a function that gets refined point by point. Sure you could chain and apply them multiple times. But they also have the mode where they with a single activation produce their answer. Having a turing machine that never moves on the tape but just does one replacement of a starting symbol to a final symbol is a rather extreme one. We usually expect there to be a lot of reads and writes as the computation is "churned". A conception where peoples thoughts are driven by some "internal language", "saying words to themselfs" seems to be a churning process. Then the question arrises can all (significant) thought activity be captured with processes that are of this nature? All of propositional logic, existential logic, fuzzy logic would be just a different kind of churning process, but any systematic symbol dance would do. Is there any "single step dance", like neural networks can do, in human thinking?

You seem to fail Bildung as you contrast AngloAmerican and German ways of doing things. A true sophisticate would know the truth is not in picking one side and sticking to it :-P

I am also not sure why should I care about what's high-status in Germany (other than being Dr. Dr. Dr. Lumifer, of course).

I dunno, man. What are you gonna do if a school of thought is right? It seems dumb to precommit to being too cool to agree with them, but surely you would lose your GERMANWORD if you credulously accepted their conclusions.

This seems like a desirable feature of German culture. Have Germans always been like this? Do you know where this aspect of German culture might have originated? The closest thing I can think of in American culture is the satirical TV show South Park, which is known for lampooning both sides in political debates. Unfortunately, the show is not strongly associated with intellectual sophistication.

To sum up: invent a single sentence to summarize your opponent's position so that you condemn them as naive. For example, what you did to Phil Goetz.

I don't know German, but it sounds like the thing you mean by "Bildung" is something like "self-development".

Let me know if this sounds like the right idea:

If you want to be an excellent person, strong in various capacities, mature and able, then you want to think for yourself, and always keep looking for deeper/subtler/more powerful insights. There's a mental move of "yes, okay, but it could be even better" or "this is too easy, it's boring" that makes it seem unappealing to remain stuck in dogma. You don't want to flatten yourself or reduce yourself to a stereotype; you want to broaden and deepen your capacities.

The opposite mindset would be something like "I want to be Done, with all the thinking, forever, please don't make me get up from where I've plopped down. I'm on the side of the angels, and That is That."

Does that seem like the thing you're pointing at?

I suspect there is a trade-off between partisanship and "deep wisdom". You can make status moves of both kinds, you just have to choose the move that fits your audience.

Displaying sophistication by saying things like "there are also some interesting arguments against the statement 2+2=4" at every opportunity can perfectly kill any momentum. (Even if those arguments are technically valid, for example "there is no such thing as '4' in base 3; it's called '11' instead", as long as they don't contribute to solving the problem, only to signal the scholarship of the speaker.)

To the extent that using prior information about the world is useful in understanding the future, it's sort of nonsensical to say someone shouldn't think of themselves as Bayesian. To the extent someone is perhaps ignoring a correct methodological approach because of a misguided/misunderstood appeal to Bayesianism, that's fine.

For example, back in the academic world I worked on research forecasting the U.S. yield curve. We did this using a series of non-linear equations to fit each day (cross-section), then used filtering dynamics to jointly capture the time-series. Figuring out a way to make this already insanely complex model work within a Bayesian framework wouldn't only be perhaps too hard, but not particularly useful. There is no nice quantifiable information that would fit in a prior, given the constraints we have on data, math, and computational ability, that would make the model formally Bayesian.

Having said that, to the extent that we tweaked the model using our prior information on less structured scientific theories (e.g. Efficient market hypothesis) -- it certainly was Bayesian. Sometimes the model worked perfectly, computed perfectly, but something didn't match up with how we wanted to map it to reality. In that sense we had our own neural-prior and found the posterior less likely.

It's really hard for me to see under what model of the world (correct) Bayesian analysis could be misleading.

One classic example of an unsophisticated position that's common in analytic philosophy is the idea that all intellectual discourse is supposed to be based on logic. In Is semiotics bullshit? PhilGoetz stumbles about a professor of semiotics who claims: "People have an extra-computational ability to make correct judgements at better-than-random probability that have no logical basis."

I think the claim that people can make correct judgements at better-than random probability that have no logical basis is nonsensical. Lots of this sort of writing and theorizing of the world is from a time, and from people, who existed before modern computational powers and machine learning. In the past the view was that the human mind was this almost-mystical device for processing reality, and we had to ground our beliefs in some sort of formal logic for them to follow. At least in my experience from working with stuff like neural-nets, I only see vast amounts of information, which our brains can filter out to predict the future. To reason from analogy, sometimes when doing some sort of ML problem you'll add a bunch of data and you have no logical clue why it would improve your model... But then your predictions/classification score increase.

In this context what does it even mean to call this logical or non-logical? It's nothing more than using past observed information patterns to classify and predict future information patterns. It's strictly empirical. I can't think of any logical decomposition of that which would add meaning.