Ideologies are slow and necessary, for now

post by Gabriel Alfour (gabriel-alfour-1) · 2024-12-23T01:57:47.153Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://cognition.cafe/p/ideologies-are-slow

Contents

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Thinking through an ideology makes one dumber than they would otherwise be. Nevertheless, they remain an important tool for scaling coordination on beliefs.
How can we do better?

Just an essay detailing this dynamic.

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comment by StartAtTheEnd · 2024-12-23T22:41:00.546Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've noticed that your essay doesn't differentiate beliefs (about truth), and values (subjective preferences). This implies that ideologies approximates truth, or that truth makes people change their mind, or that you can calculate which preferences are best, and I think all of these assumptions are wrong as value judgements and pure knowledge are entirely separate.

You could argue that having a belief X results in behaviour Y which leads to better well-being for a group of people, but this is unrelated to the truth value of a belief (if it were not so, we'd be able to prove the existence of god by measuring the outcomes of people who believed in him vs those who didn't), but this might depend on the type of belief