(Original blog post is here)
On March 20th, Dominic Cummings, chief of staff for the British Government, tweeted:
Thanks for your Seeing Smoke blog. It and ScottA on 2 March helped me and some others in no. 10 realize we were going terribly wrong.
“Your” in this tweet referenced Jacob Falkovich. “ScottA” to Scott Alexander (Aaronson didn’t post about covid on the second of March).
Jacob wrote that his first thoughts in response to this were: holy shit! His second: if I had known you will read it, I would have written a better post!
A less immediate response was: The four hours I spent writing Seeing the Smoke on a whim were more impactful than projects I spent months of my life on.
That’s how it is sometimes. Fortune favors the prepared, but it’s still fortune: fickle and unpredictable.
And we might ask: why was this necessary? The UK has a public health office, much like the US CDC. Back to Jacob:
Social reality is what is normal, accepted, cool, predictable, expected, rewarded, agreed upon. Physical reality is what is out there determining the outcomes of physical experiments, such as whether you get COVID or not if you wear a mask.
My best guess of the typical experience is being in social reality 99.9% of the time. The 0.1% are extreme shocks, cases when physical reality kicks someone so far off-script they are forced to confront it directly. These experiences are extremely unpleasant. One looks for the first opportunity to dive back into the safety of social reality, in the form of a communal narrative that “makes sense” of what happened and suggests an appropriate course of action.
I think this explains why so many people don’t seem to notice or care that even institutions they consider to be “on their side”, like the CDC, are wrong or lying all the time. People look to those sources not for “truth” about physical reality but for coordination of social reality. The CDC’s job is to tell other institutions which policies they can implement and not get blamed for, not which policies will keep their clients healthy.
Seeing the Smoke came out during the 0.1% of the time when physical reality was manifesting and the institutions of social reality hadn’t reacted adequately yet by spinning it into the narrative.
I think that Rationality gives people two important things: the tools to evaluate original thinkers without relying on mere credentials, and the permission to occasionally shoot for physical-reality-based insight themselves.
Byrne Hobart in a post about how Rationalists got COVID right and early, writes:
[yes, I’m quoting Jacob quoting Byrne]
This puts the rationalists in a uniquely prosocial position. They’re a sort of distributed, mostly open-source monastic order, spending a lot of time contemplating the world and passing down important observations, but less time directly interacting with it. The influence of people who read rationalist blogs, but don’t self-identify as rationalists, is quite wide.
Byrne goes on to say that “identifying as a Rationalist is a losing move”, but I think that he presupposes that everyone is playing the same game. Joining a monastic order is a “losing move” if your goal is to inherit titles and command knights, but the life of a monk has much to recommend it over the life of the medieval court and battlefield.
I identify as a Rationalist so that I am held to the high standards of epistemology and ethics of our monastic order. It’s an identity that, on the margin, nudges me slightly away from the pursuit of power and toward the pursuit of wisdom. In the long run it’s the better pursuit. Rationality has a long game.
This concludes the quoting-Jacob part of the speech, for those of you keeping track.
There’s a lot of flexibility in the rationality community. High standards of epistemology are pretty core, but identity, purpose, strategy and time discounting all vary freely from person to person.
So I read all this not to say that we should all become Jacob – that would be kind of awesome, but a net loss with, you know, the diversity – but to point at how we do have a place in the here and now… and a perspective for the next five thousand years.
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