We do information cascades as an example (right after the magic of wisdom of the crowds). I’ve used the analogy of pollution and the tragedy of the epistemic commons. One thing I don’t do is talk like this thread (except to pose the @paulg question.)https://twitter.com/simpolism/status/1249047470686056448?s=20 …
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I notice that when students chose final projects, about half have Altria angle, in different (and often unexpected) ways.
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Simon DeDeo Retweeted Suspended Reason
It’s rude and possibly harmful to psychoanalyze someone without love! (No countertransference.) Very lovingly I might say that what’s unsayable in LW revolves around anxieties about being smart.https://twitter.com/suspendedreason/status/1249036753186492416?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
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Looking over this thread, I’m not clear enough in the distinction between psychoanalyzing an individual, and a group. But the spilt isn’t firm: we *can’t* think without a group—so the phenomenology of thinking mixes levels. The unconscious is both personal and collective.
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Simon DeDeo Retweeted Joshua Grochow
Mathematicians are obviously angels, spilling out onto our land after their spaceship crashed.https://twitter.com/joshuagrochow/status/1249010998842765312?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
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(More seriously, I think mathematicians come off pretty well—nobody tried to cancel us for that explosive proofs paper! There’s a kind of tragic humility to the ones I meet that I really love. Maybe they’re Cordelia!)
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Simon DeDeo Retweeted Sarah Grynpas
Yes! The analogy would be the people who say “we can’t be screwed up—they have taboos, but we don’t. Look at all the messed up things we do.”https://twitter.com/SarahGrynpas/status/1249061750793789442?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
Sarah Grynpas @SarahGrynpasReplying to @SarahGrynpas @SimonDeDeoAnd then isn’t there a metapurpose to the taboo? Community, the feeling of having secret knowledge, of peeking behind the curtain, stays within your group. Believing the taboo can help adherence to achieve ideal behaviours, so its valuable to believe in a taboo that doesn’t exist1 reply 0 retweets 3 likesShow this thread -
Simon DeDeo Retweeted Arbutus Tree
Harvard University, 1996: "We're here on merit". Not true, untrue, or really anything in between—but it was something many people believed or thought, but weren't allowed to say. It was declassé.https://twitter.com/aphercotropist/status/1249088826221432834?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo
I am pretty sure we can rustle up both statements of pride in Harvard meritocracy and statements that deeply question it, from within Harvard in 1996?
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Replying to @Plinz
Yes, *but*—very group dependent. Obviously the anti-affirmative action people were very into the meritocracy. And the administration too, in a different way. My memory of the student left back then neither questioned nor affirmed it at that time (changes came quickly.)
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Wrt your main point: did Harvard's internal culture effectively enforce the same totalitarianism as it does today [in public]? Or was Harvard a more liberal place in 1996? Your main thesis seems to be that a normative totalitarianism on political opinions is an immutable default.
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Replying to @Plinz
Eek! Joscha, this one-on-one psychoanalysis is rather off the mark. Obviously I miss our sessions, though—let's pick that all up in person?
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Replying to @Plinz @SimonDeDeo
Enforcement varies with how threatened an ideological regime is. If a regime derives legitimacy from ideas, and has internal enemies, it will get inflamed. If regime security is less hinged on ideas, more freedom is possible. But regime is always identified with some ideology.
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