Bryan, what do you think of the limits of rationality?
I’m of the view that rationality is limited. There are facts, but facts are always subordinate to story. Certain stories align with facts better than others, but no story ever emerges from facts alone, no matter how large the collection of facts. In my view, the social movement known as Rationalism often devolves into something resembling a religion once it bumps up against this limit I describe.
I think where you, Huemer and probably most of the readers (including me) agree is that we probably shouldn't be prescribing how people live their personal lives, in *any* direction. There are, essentially, two sorts of social conservatism and two sorts of social liberalism.
Conservatism has:
- a prescriptive branch, that tries to force people into old social norms, and in its most extreme form is a kind of "back to the 1950s"
- a live-and-let-live branch, which tries to absorb diversity into the old structures (eg by promoting gay marriage as opposed to queer polycules)
Liberalism has:
- a live-and-let-live branch (which isn't really that different from the conservative version above, maybe there are more differences on things like immigration)
- a prescriptive branch, that wants to push everyone into nonconformism (which, of course, is nothing of the sort, it's just conformism to a different set of norms).
We're all live-and-let-live folk here, right? As stated above, it's difficult to slot us into the culture-war binary, we could be parsed as either conservative or liberal. Maybe we should just get away from thinking rigidly along this axis? (Ooh look, we discovered a spectrum rather than sticking to a rigid binary, the woke brigade will be all over that!)
Humer is a brilliant intellectual and I highly respect him, but on his blog it seems he goes out of his way to be incendiary and provocative. The best recent example is the recent post claiming that raising kids religiously is a "rights violation."
To steelman his approach, perhaps he's saying things that are wrong to make his audience think about why they are wrong. I certainly think that when he disagrees with you or David Friedman, all your readers get a real treat!
It looks to me you both might have been thinking of a strawman version of the opposite perspective (“liberal” / “conservative”) instead of the real, rational thing 🙂
"I referred to claims that premarital sex is wrong"
Bryan has noted in the past that the single largest number of sexual partners (the mode) is one. Amongst those likely to to have stable marriages and bear above replacement children, people that have low single digit number of sexual partners predominate (excluding the elite).
So I would say "premarital sex is wrong" is basically correct. Even when its not 100% correct, its mostly correct as far as "marginally correct social signaling" goes.
Within Europe, social conservatism by country is mildly negatively correlated with fertility: the statement of traditional roles and birth rates simply does not hold when looking at comparable national peers.
"[I]t is precisely because wisdom has to be accumulated in incremental steps that it cannot be centrally planned by any single political or religious authority, contrary to the aspirations of conservatives and collectivists alike. While the collectivists are indeed guilty of trying to rationalistically reconstruct society in defiance of tradition (a valid criticism of left-anarchists), conservatives on the other hand are guilty of trying to freeze old traditions in place. Conservatives have forgotten that the process of wisdom accumulation is an on-going one, and instead have opted for the notion that some existing body of traditions (usually Judeo-Christian) already represent social perfection."
The case for taking traditional values seriously is that they are a product of a long cultural evolution and that in some instances facilitate productive social interactions with others who are embedded within the same common culture. Abstract reasoning might occasionally give one clues on how to improve on values that are a product of the process of cultural selection that occurs in a free society, but you can't really know that such rational insights actually represent "progress" until you have personally experienced the consequences of deviating from the tradition in question. It is all too common for know-it-alls who experiment with social deviancy in their youth on the basis of plausible-sounding rationalizations to drift back to more traditional values as they gain experience and learn for themselves why the tradition took hold in the first place.
Likewise, some people may find that adhering to traditional values is a source of profound personal dissatisfaction, so of course they will be attracted to an anti-traditional counter-culture instead. They become permanent defectors from prevailing social norms. However, it is an error to infer from a personal experience of such dissatisfaction that other people will feel equally repressed by the observance of traditions. A custom that seems unduly repressive to you may in fact be essential to someone else's pursuit of happiness, and forcibly overthrowing that custom doesn't represent "progress" for most people in spite of your own experience.
The curious thing about traditions is that they are often justified on wildly irrational grounds. It seems that fears about an afterlife or about angering a powerful supernatural entity are more efficient at motivating the transmission of useful values to the next generation than any honest account of what previous generation felt about the various life choices they made in an attempt to instruct the young about the psychological nuances of human nature. Feelings are frequently demeaned as "sinful" by tradition-bound conservatives and as "irrational" by rationalizing progressives, but in fact they are the primary source of evidence that reason must operate on to generate new wisdom.
The compatibilist view of emotions and reason (in contrast to the popular Spock/McCoy dichotomy, to use a _Star Trek_ metaphor) is that they have to work together to generate values and attitudes that optimize one's pursuit of happiness. To the extent that human beings share a common innate psychological nature, there will be certain universal virtues that are instrumental to one's pursuit of happiness. To the extent that there are innately different personality types, there will also be a need for tolerance of deviant counter-cultures within the framework of more universally-acknowledged values. When a culture spontaneously evolves in a society that defends the personal moral autonomy of all adults, there emerges a presumption in favor of the resulting traditions, but those traditions aren't commandments that are carved in stone for all time. As I noted above, the process of wisdom accumulation is a gradual, incremental one.
The liberal view of sexuality is just the success sequence taken one step further. If it’s responsible to finish high school, work full-time, and be married before having kids because that mostly guarantees you won’t be in poverty in America, why not wait until you finish college, work in a career, and be married to someone you really like before having kids, as this mostly guarantees you will be at least middle-class and not just above the poverty line?
Having kids is fulfilling if you have the resources to go with it (enjoyable and flexible career, decent amount of money, good spouse). Otherwise it can be hellish. I think that’s why representative studies show that people with kids are less happy on average than those without kids while a lot of the relatively high-SES public intellectuals talk up the benefits of having kids. Having kids is indeed a lot of fun if you have the career, resources, and family to support it without too much stress.
Bryan, what do you think of the limits of rationality?
I’m of the view that rationality is limited. There are facts, but facts are always subordinate to story. Certain stories align with facts better than others, but no story ever emerges from facts alone, no matter how large the collection of facts. In my view, the social movement known as Rationalism often devolves into something resembling a religion once it bumps up against this limit I describe.
What say you?
I think where you, Huemer and probably most of the readers (including me) agree is that we probably shouldn't be prescribing how people live their personal lives, in *any* direction. There are, essentially, two sorts of social conservatism and two sorts of social liberalism.
Conservatism has:
- a prescriptive branch, that tries to force people into old social norms, and in its most extreme form is a kind of "back to the 1950s"
- a live-and-let-live branch, which tries to absorb diversity into the old structures (eg by promoting gay marriage as opposed to queer polycules)
Liberalism has:
- a live-and-let-live branch (which isn't really that different from the conservative version above, maybe there are more differences on things like immigration)
- a prescriptive branch, that wants to push everyone into nonconformism (which, of course, is nothing of the sort, it's just conformism to a different set of norms).
We're all live-and-let-live folk here, right? As stated above, it's difficult to slot us into the culture-war binary, we could be parsed as either conservative or liberal. Maybe we should just get away from thinking rigidly along this axis? (Ooh look, we discovered a spectrum rather than sticking to a rigid binary, the woke brigade will be all over that!)
"Claims that premarital sex is wrong, that sex should only be for reproduction, and things like that -- which are obviously silly."
And yet some studies show that very low numbers of sexual partners before marriage decrease likelihood of divorce.
Humer is a brilliant intellectual and I highly respect him, but on his blog it seems he goes out of his way to be incendiary and provocative. The best recent example is the recent post claiming that raising kids religiously is a "rights violation."
To steelman his approach, perhaps he's saying things that are wrong to make his audience think about why they are wrong. I certainly think that when he disagrees with you or David Friedman, all your readers get a real treat!
It looks to me you both might have been thinking of a strawman version of the opposite perspective (“liberal” / “conservative”) instead of the real, rational thing 🙂
"I referred to claims that premarital sex is wrong"
Bryan has noted in the past that the single largest number of sexual partners (the mode) is one. Amongst those likely to to have stable marriages and bear above replacement children, people that have low single digit number of sexual partners predominate (excluding the elite).
So I would say "premarital sex is wrong" is basically correct. Even when its not 100% correct, its mostly correct as far as "marginally correct social signaling" goes.
Are all mostly true things rational to believe?
Within Europe, social conservatism by country is mildly negatively correlated with fertility: the statement of traditional roles and birth rates simply does not hold when looking at comparable national peers.
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-value-of-family
Something I wrote a few decades ago which Bryan quoted in his anarchism FAQ (https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm) is relevant here:
"[I]t is precisely because wisdom has to be accumulated in incremental steps that it cannot be centrally planned by any single political or religious authority, contrary to the aspirations of conservatives and collectivists alike. While the collectivists are indeed guilty of trying to rationalistically reconstruct society in defiance of tradition (a valid criticism of left-anarchists), conservatives on the other hand are guilty of trying to freeze old traditions in place. Conservatives have forgotten that the process of wisdom accumulation is an on-going one, and instead have opted for the notion that some existing body of traditions (usually Judeo-Christian) already represent social perfection."
The case for taking traditional values seriously is that they are a product of a long cultural evolution and that in some instances facilitate productive social interactions with others who are embedded within the same common culture. Abstract reasoning might occasionally give one clues on how to improve on values that are a product of the process of cultural selection that occurs in a free society, but you can't really know that such rational insights actually represent "progress" until you have personally experienced the consequences of deviating from the tradition in question. It is all too common for know-it-alls who experiment with social deviancy in their youth on the basis of plausible-sounding rationalizations to drift back to more traditional values as they gain experience and learn for themselves why the tradition took hold in the first place.
Likewise, some people may find that adhering to traditional values is a source of profound personal dissatisfaction, so of course they will be attracted to an anti-traditional counter-culture instead. They become permanent defectors from prevailing social norms. However, it is an error to infer from a personal experience of such dissatisfaction that other people will feel equally repressed by the observance of traditions. A custom that seems unduly repressive to you may in fact be essential to someone else's pursuit of happiness, and forcibly overthrowing that custom doesn't represent "progress" for most people in spite of your own experience.
The curious thing about traditions is that they are often justified on wildly irrational grounds. It seems that fears about an afterlife or about angering a powerful supernatural entity are more efficient at motivating the transmission of useful values to the next generation than any honest account of what previous generation felt about the various life choices they made in an attempt to instruct the young about the psychological nuances of human nature. Feelings are frequently demeaned as "sinful" by tradition-bound conservatives and as "irrational" by rationalizing progressives, but in fact they are the primary source of evidence that reason must operate on to generate new wisdom.
The compatibilist view of emotions and reason (in contrast to the popular Spock/McCoy dichotomy, to use a _Star Trek_ metaphor) is that they have to work together to generate values and attitudes that optimize one's pursuit of happiness. To the extent that human beings share a common innate psychological nature, there will be certain universal virtues that are instrumental to one's pursuit of happiness. To the extent that there are innately different personality types, there will also be a need for tolerance of deviant counter-cultures within the framework of more universally-acknowledged values. When a culture spontaneously evolves in a society that defends the personal moral autonomy of all adults, there emerges a presumption in favor of the resulting traditions, but those traditions aren't commandments that are carved in stone for all time. As I noted above, the process of wisdom accumulation is a gradual, incremental one.
The liberal view of sexuality is just the success sequence taken one step further. If it’s responsible to finish high school, work full-time, and be married before having kids because that mostly guarantees you won’t be in poverty in America, why not wait until you finish college, work in a career, and be married to someone you really like before having kids, as this mostly guarantees you will be at least middle-class and not just above the poverty line?
Having kids is fulfilling if you have the resources to go with it (enjoyable and flexible career, decent amount of money, good spouse). Otherwise it can be hellish. I think that’s why representative studies show that people with kids are less happy on average than those without kids while a lot of the relatively high-SES public intellectuals talk up the benefits of having kids. Having kids is indeed a lot of fun if you have the career, resources, and family to support it without too much stress.
Looking forward to Huemer's new book.