Making History Available

This is all very zen. Do you have buddhist sympathies, Eliezer?

I have buddhist empathies, but not sympathies. The connection isn't a mystical one - I was not there and we are not all really the same person - and that, in my view, makes all the difference.

That sense of "so strange yet true" is very hard to convey in fiction, exactly because it seems too strange to be believable. Which is exactly why we say "truth is stranger than fiction." I wonder if one could describe in enough detail a fictional story of an alternative reality, a reality that our ancestors could not distinguish from the truth, in order to make it very clear how surprising the truth turned out to be.

To quibble just a bit I think that it is occasionally (tho probably not in the terminator examples the paper briefly mentioned) reasonable to use a very throughly fleshed out fictional account as evidence of plausibility. I mean by giving a detailed narrative you rule out the possibility the idea is internally incoherent or requires some really really implausible things to be true.

Still, I don't think this is a very strong effect and is overestimated all the time by people who think that literature gives more than entertainment/enjoyment but actually gives insight.

There is an awful lot of history. Preliminary to whether we imagine the past vividly enough for it to carry proper weight, we must select a cannon of ``important'' events to which we turn our attention.

In a recent thread on Reddit: http://reddit.com/info/2k77b/comments/c2k80o

I drew attention to Argentina because the story of Argentina's 20th century economic disappointments jars uncomfortably with the cultural tradition in which I swim. I swim in a cultural stream in which the misfortunes which may befall a country live in a hierarchy. At the top are the bad misfortunes, losing wars, and fighting wars. Somewhere near the bottom are petty misfortunes: many countries are under the thumb of absolute rulers and if the caudillo retains power by pursuing popular policies then his rule is not so bad.

I know little of Argentinian history and understand it even less. What little I know threatens my hierarchy of misfortune. It looks as though well meaning but economically unsophisticated absolute rulers are the top misfortune. They are much worse than wars, which are intense, but brief.

I want to overcome my bias by learning about Argentinian history. I find myself struggling. There is a standard way of looking at recent history with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Great War etc. I notice that I'm very dependent on social support and just get sucked into that looking at history from that point of view because it is the common one.

So there is a second sense in which History may or may not be available. Frist it is important to feel the force of history sufficiently strongly. But this could make things worse if we cultivate our feeling for a limited selection of history, chosen to support our standard narratives. The second requirement is for breadth, and this is very difficult if the people around you aren't interested.

This is very reminiscent of a C.S. Lewis quote (I think from The Abolition of Man) about "chronological snobbery." Of course, I can't supply the quote. But it had to do with thinking that all cultures that existed before yours were inferior, that everything only gets better, and that, since your civilization was the most recent in history, your way of perceiving the world is inherently more accurate.

I think I am a chronological snob, then, for I much agree with this comment:

"I occasionally come across an attitude of almost religious veneration for ancient civilizations, a sense that they know better than we do. However, is it not trivially true that we ourselves are the most aged civilization this planet has yet seen? Does not the present enjoy a longer history than the past?" -- Xiaoguang "Mike" Li

Eliezer-

Are you serious? Repudiating your usual earnest rationality for flippancy in this comment seems uncharacteristic. I didn't think Kyle was advocating 'religious veneration' and epistemological deference to ancient civs. However the quote continues into inanity

"...is it not trivially true that we ourselves are the most aged civilization?"

How will we reduce bias with words like these? Modern people who venerate ancient cultures should instead venerate their own because it happens to exist at a later point in time? In any case who can point to a specific place and time and say, 'Our civilization began Here.' It's not even good sophistry.

The more serious bias regards conflating collective and individual achievements and beliefs vis-a-vis 'civilization' coupled with a temporal bias. Kyle defines 'chronological snobbery' as the thought that:

"...since your civilization is the most recent in history, your way of perceiving the world is inherently more accurate"

The idea of Progress is that Knowledge compounds, we are the most recent, ergo we have the most Knowledge. (Western) Civilization's collective scientific progress has had a regrettably limited impact on the accuracy of the average individual's private perception of the world. Yes, there are tools now like Bayesian reasoning, particle accelerators and fMRI through which the physical world can be perceived more accurately than ever. But seeing the world accurately results from a process of discovery and reasoning that each must do for themselves. Temporal position does not change that. If our 'civilization' so accurately views the world, why are so many hostile to the theories of the scientific experts who use these incredible tools? Despite the progress of empirical science, each new human starts at 0 and as they mature, they must decide what they are willing to accept. Many seem unwilling to accept the radically unintuitive universe that is being rolled back (or are even unaware). Hell, religious fundamentalists think it is less accurate than the cosmology of near eastern cults' myths.

The point is our empirical science allows us to view the world more accurately, though the degree to which we all must become reductionists eventually is debatable and apart from science our civilization is no better than any other. The individuals in a society define it, and our society is pretty banal. The past still has value.

C.S. Lewis quotes that Kyle didn't look for..;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_snobbery

Does not the present enjoy a longer history than the past?

Repudiating your usual earnest rationality for flippancy in this comment seems uncharacteristic.

You realize you're saying this the same day I proposed that thievery should be punishable by spanking.

Despite the progress of empirical science, each new human starts at 0 and as they mature, they must decide what they are willing to accept.

Yes, but if you live in a society with a more mature science, which knows more because knowledge compounds, then you'll get a chance to accept more science. Especially if you happen to start out in the Traditional Rationality subculture. No matter how rationally minded you are in the 11th century, there won't be much sanity to absorb.

You can complain all you want about the glory and danger of individual choice, but this is still - even collectively, and even outside Rationalist subculture - the most ancient civilization the world has ever known, and the wisest.

"I had not remembered, until that time, how the Roman Empire rose, and brought peace and order, and lasted through so many centuries, until I forgot that things had ever been otherwise; and yet the Empire fell, and barbarians overran my city, and the learning that I had possessed was lost. The modern world became more fragile to my eyes; it was not the first modern world."

I think the Romans, at least the more philosophical and intellectual ones, were perfectly well aware that this would happen to them eventually. After the fall of Carthage:

"Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Ilium, once a prosperous city, to the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately or the verses escaping him, he said:

A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,

And Priam and his people shall be slain.

And when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human. Polybius actually heard him and recalls it in his history." - Appian, Punica

When I finally realized whose shoes I was standing in, there was a sudden shock of unexpected connection with the past. I realized that the invention and destruction of vitalism - which I had only read about in books - had actually happened to real people, who experienced it much the same way I experienced the invention and destruction of my own mysterious answer.

This behavior mirrors the behavior described in Correspondence Bias:

We tend to see far too direct a correspondence between others' actions and personalities. When we see someone else kick a vending machine for no visible reason, we assume they are "an angry person". But when you yourself kick the vending machine, it's because the bus was late, the train was early, your report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten your lunch money for the second day in a row. Surely, you think to yourself, anyone would kick the vending machine, in that situation.

I think there is a key difference, however, in the former quote shows a case where correspondence bias is giving the other person an invalid benefit of the doubt. The correlating case would be incorrectly applying the principles described in Correspondence Bias to explain away an angry person kicking a vending machine because they are angry. Vending machines are not too important; domestic violence and abuse is very important. Saying that there is a scenario where anyone would beat their spouse is only valid when it is actually True.

In the case of your Evil Mysteriousness, the error is more hindsight bias, which you note and to which you have included a link. I thought the behavior pattern was interesting and comparing the two revealed a nugget I had missed.

I wonder if this means that recoding, historical events via more realistic mediums will, ceteris paribus, seem more real. For example WWII feels more real to me than say the revolutionary war. Obviously there are quite a few other factors to consider, but it seems likely that the fact that I've seen footage of WWII, lots of footage(I used to watch the History channel) rather than just reading about it and seeing some paintings/woodcuts is pretty significant as well.

The inverse error is to treat history as mere story, process it with the same part of your mind that handles the novels you read.

For good and bad, I think we're stuck with that error. We don't have separate imagining and experiencing systems for fictional and historical stories.

It has the potential to be liberating and empowering, by finding stories that empower and move you. But another way to describe such stories is historical porn, always more action packed, meaningful, and moving than real life, so that real life no longer motivates. I had recently been excited by the possibilities of fiction to change a life for the better, and now I'm seeing something of the other side of the pancake.

So (I thought), to feel sufficiently the force of history, I should try to approximate the thoughts of an Eliezer who had lived through history -

That's a start. The next step is that you have a good bit in common with other people, but also substantial differences. They lived through history as themselves.

As for "America always having existed", I heard somewhat from a book about the geological history of the English Channel. It took a number of sentences to explain that there was a time before there was an England or a France and I was getting impatient, and then I realized that the amount of repetition probably was needed to bring the point home.

A bit of free association.... did you know there was a nation of Burgundy which has been all but forgotten? I found this out from Mary Gentle, whose Ash novels have some intellectual horror so awful that I stopped reading.

N uvfgbevna/nepunrbybtvfg svaqf fbzr irel fgenatr fghss, naq fur'f orggvat ure erchgngvba ba vg.... naq gura nyy gur rivqrapr qvfnccrnef. V unira'g svavfurq ernqvat gur frevrf, ohg vg qvqa'g frrz yvxr n pbairagvbany zlfgrel, jvgu fbzrbar fgrnyvat gur rivqrapr-- zber yvxr ernyvgl fbsgravat naq erivfvat vgfrys.

Actually, sometimes people do make accurate predictions, but they also make a lot of false predictions. The accurate predictions are much more apt to be remembered than the false predictions.

If you want to see a major effort to view past people as being themselves rather than modern people, see Ta-Nahisi-Coate's writings on the Civil War.

I think that this era is the best in general for a lot of people, but there are specific things which were done better in the past. People in the middle ages and the Renaissance were better at dressing up. It's possible that Eastern European Jews before the Nazis were better at producing mathematical geniuses than we are. Was there something about the educational system? Europe before WWI produced classical music so good that no one has been able to compete with it (for classical music, not music in general) since then.

 '

Ludwig van Beethoven       1770-1827
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart    1756-1791
Johann Sebastian Bach      1685-1750
Richard Wagner             1813-1883
Joseph Haydn               1732-1809
George Frideric Handel     1685-1759
Igor Stravinsky            1882-1971
Claude Debussy             1862-1918
Franz Liszt                1811-1886
Franz Schubert             1797-1828
Robert Schumann            1810-1856
Hector Berlioz             1803-1869
Arnold Schoenberg          1874-1951
Johannes Brahms            1833-1897
Frédéric Chopin            1810-1849
Claudio Monteverdi         1567-1643
Giuseppe Verdi             1813-1901
Felix Mendelssohn          1809-1847
Carl Maria von Weber       1786-1826
Christoph Willibald Gluck  1714-1787
---
Thomas Simpson             1710-1761
John Hothby                1410-1487
Marbrianus de Orto         1460-1529
Joannes Gallus             fl. 15xx
Mattheus le Maistre        1505-1577

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Eliezer, I love how you can write passionately and poetically about a topic that many people consider stone cold. It really shows how important this all is to you, and it's much more fun to read.

I'm so glad that you lived your life the way you did and made the mistakes you did and became the person that you are, because if you didn't have your background and your skill set I might never have learned about rationality or Bayes' theorem, or read the best fan fiction there is.

Thank you so much for being you, it makes being us just that much better.

Is it productive if I say I love your work? I want to learn as much as I can and I am doing exactly that

I should try to think as if everything I read about in history books had actually happened to me.

It looks to me that this requires to consciously force yourself to believe the historical events to have happened in the exact way the material you're reading describes them; which is basically leaning into a fallacy "comprehending an argument tends to make people believe it" as described in an experiment in this post [? · GW]

I realized that the invention and destruction of vitalism—which I had only read about in books—had actually happened to real people, who experienced it much the same way I experienced the invention and destruction of my own mysterious answer

This realization makes the Stephen Pinker-esque stories about the extent of violence in the middle ages and earlier that much more surreal.

Photons and history books both descend by causal chains from the event itself.

Right, but history books are a much lossier source of information.