"The first thing I noticed is that it’s strange to rank things like “reading,” “science,” and “non-expert intuitions” in the same list, but having thought about it, it kinda makes sense. We might consider the elements in this chart as answers to the question, “If I want to know something, what techniques can I use?”, conflated with answers for “How does human civilization produce new knowledge?” This conflation makes things a little confusing, but the list is interesting nonetheless."
Thank you for agreeing it's interesting! :P In case you're curious, the main impetus for writing the post is that I wanted a "non-foundational foundation" on how to view the world[1]. There are many reasons for this, but one is to showcase how an analytic, scientifically-minded person might attack "scientism" (or other modern flavors of trying to systematize everything, like Bayesianism) without becoming postmodernist or otherwise nihilistic about science and truth.
I think a common failure mode of systematization is taking a specific way that people successfully seek truth (eg the scientific method, or Bayesian updating) and try to argue that all other methods of belief formation are just bastardizations of the better method. I think this is wrong-headed and confused. Which is why I tried to improve on it!
This is also why reading was on the top of the tier list, in addition to being what I object-level believed. Because nobody (except maybe a few theologians) would take seriously the idea that the only way to seek truth is through reading.
I was pretty disappointed by the reception of the post after writing it. It was one of my worst-performing posts initially (in terms of early views and likes), and it was panned on LessWrong and r/philosophyofscience (which liked an earlier post of mine).
But over the last month, I noticed a steady stream of new views on the post, it's gotten positive reception in private comments by subscribers and people I respect on these issues (eg academic epistemologists), and now there's an entire high-quality substack post critiquing it! So I'm going to reserve judgment on whether the post failed for now.
Thanks again for the critique!
[1] Here's an earlier version of the intro that I decided to not include in the main post because it was too long and too genealogical:
"How do you reach true beliefs about the world? Here's how I do it:
I'm born. I look around the world. I try to form true beliefs. I use a variety of methods to form true beliefs, and I try my best to reach consilience between them. As I change my beliefs about the world, I also change my degree of trust in different methods that can arrive at such beliefs. (When I use a ruler to measure a table, I'm learning more about both the table and the ruler)
I think what I said above should be extremely unsurprising! You almost certainly use a very similar method, consciously and otherwise, to form beliefs and opinions, change your mind, and make day-to-day decisions.
Yet I think people often tie themselves in knots when thinking about "epistemology" or how they know things. People talk about the scientific method, or AIXI and/or Bayesian Decision Theory, or some other extreme formalism, as if that's how they actually form beliefs or make decisions! Or they have a form of extreme methodological pluralism and take a "who's to say, man?" attitude about which methods are right, as if all methods are equally "valid!"
Or worse, they reject truth altogether! (Which is a fun conceptual lens for a few days, but a poor way to live life!)
Thanks, it's good to have some light on your thought process! I do think it's an interesting list, flawed in some ways but definitely though-provoking. I think I agree with you that failure mode of systematization. Every time I learn about some new form of epistemology I end up a bit disappointed shortly after that (most recently with Popper).
I like this breakdown of knowing, between the superorganism (cultural groups) and its nodes (individual people). Surely our lower levels of abstracted organization also have their own way of learning, whether it’s our immune system reading and recording the genetic signatures of infectious diseases, or something more subtle that the rest of our cells do which we file under the broader category of “trial and error” or biological feedback loops. Natural selection happens at all scales - a taxonomy of its specific mechanisms is definitely a fruitful chain of curiosity.
What an amazing post, thank you so much for this! I think it's quite uncommon I learn more from somebody else's post than my own writings* on an issue. And this is a great post. I thought it'd just be another nitpick-y attack on not liking a specific tier of my tier-list, but you addressed both a central issue with the post and also provided your own alternatives to the tier list! Awesome stuff, will recommend.
*is this hypocritical given I put reading at S+ tier? Maybe!
In *Seeing Like a State*, James C Scott talks about a kind of practical, localized knowing that he calls Métis. Unlike abstract, theoretical knowledge (techne), Métis is instantiated in the local environment and provides adaptable solutions to real problems (as opposed to the generalizable problems one might prefer to have due to the fact that broad principles can address them). One learns about the quality of the soil and climate cycles and what your ancestors did in such and such a situation, giving you a toolkit for dealing with the problems that you personally might encounter. As much as I would like to proclaim the superiority of book learning as a book learner myself, I must admit that out me on a farm and I would find Métis a lot more useful.
As you say, there are lots of ways to combine and divide categories. Métis overlaps with cultural evolution and folk wisdom. Cultural evolution broadly describes how it happens — people iterate on their practical solutions to real world problems are they muddle through and find what works, which then gets passed around. It also results in some amount of folk wisdom — ideas that become detached from their direct practice and may or may not work but persist because they don’t force an epistemological outcome when applied.
Short answer, yes, probably. I’m loathe to admit it, but most things humans have figured out in history were just muddling through, bashing our attempts against reality without the abstraction of science or theory (as powerful as those things may be).
Nice clarification. However, if 'cultural evolution' encompasses all human knowledge not contained within the genome, then the term is less useful than I thought!
I had the same mistaken definition as @Linch, which I also arrived at via Henrich: mimetic knowledge which either doesn't have any underlying explanation (we do it this way cos that's how we've always done it), or where the explanation is wrong (it protects your baby from being born with a tail).
It seems important to be able to separate this out from what David Deutsch would call explanatory knowledge, which has infinite reach and can accumulate on much faster timescales. Coming back to Linch's original point, I think we really should rank that 'way of knowing' much higher than the clumsy mimetic kind.
A more precise definition is that cultural evolution is an explanation or description of how knowledge accumulates in groups of humans. Like I said in the post, it's not very interesting to try to make it encompass everything; it's fine to reserve the term for cases where there's an mechanism akin to natural selection that comes into play, which is a reasonable description of what Henrich does. But yes, that includes both rational and anti-rational memes in the Deutschian sense.
(Note also that there is knowledge that is neither cultural or genetic, i.e. things that never get shared.)
Thanks re the Fiji point! I didn't have access to a copy of the book when I wrote it so I relied on a combination of memory and other reviews (and I think I skimmed rather than read the book too carefully anyway). But I do strive to be more accurate. Will correct.
An expert must, at a minimum, have studied the history and techniques of their field—otherwise, they have no foundation and are merely reinventing the wheel (which is why postmodernism obstructs history, just as Proletkult and the Cultural Revolution did in their respective periods).
"The first thing I noticed is that it’s strange to rank things like “reading,” “science,” and “non-expert intuitions” in the same list, but having thought about it, it kinda makes sense. We might consider the elements in this chart as answers to the question, “If I want to know something, what techniques can I use?”, conflated with answers for “How does human civilization produce new knowledge?” This conflation makes things a little confusing, but the list is interesting nonetheless."
Thank you for agreeing it's interesting! :P In case you're curious, the main impetus for writing the post is that I wanted a "non-foundational foundation" on how to view the world[1]. There are many reasons for this, but one is to showcase how an analytic, scientifically-minded person might attack "scientism" (or other modern flavors of trying to systematize everything, like Bayesianism) without becoming postmodernist or otherwise nihilistic about science and truth.
I think a common failure mode of systematization is taking a specific way that people successfully seek truth (eg the scientific method, or Bayesian updating) and try to argue that all other methods of belief formation are just bastardizations of the better method. I think this is wrong-headed and confused. Which is why I tried to improve on it!
This is also why reading was on the top of the tier list, in addition to being what I object-level believed. Because nobody (except maybe a few theologians) would take seriously the idea that the only way to seek truth is through reading.
I was pretty disappointed by the reception of the post after writing it. It was one of my worst-performing posts initially (in terms of early views and likes), and it was panned on LessWrong and r/philosophyofscience (which liked an earlier post of mine).
But over the last month, I noticed a steady stream of new views on the post, it's gotten positive reception in private comments by subscribers and people I respect on these issues (eg academic epistemologists), and now there's an entire high-quality substack post critiquing it! So I'm going to reserve judgment on whether the post failed for now.
Thanks again for the critique!
[1] Here's an earlier version of the intro that I decided to not include in the main post because it was too long and too genealogical:
"How do you reach true beliefs about the world? Here's how I do it:
I'm born. I look around the world. I try to form true beliefs. I use a variety of methods to form true beliefs, and I try my best to reach consilience between them. As I change my beliefs about the world, I also change my degree of trust in different methods that can arrive at such beliefs. (When I use a ruler to measure a table, I'm learning more about both the table and the ruler)
I think what I said above should be extremely unsurprising! You almost certainly use a very similar method, consciously and otherwise, to form beliefs and opinions, change your mind, and make day-to-day decisions.
Yet I think people often tie themselves in knots when thinking about "epistemology" or how they know things. People talk about the scientific method, or AIXI and/or Bayesian Decision Theory, or some other extreme formalism, as if that's how they actually form beliefs or make decisions! Or they have a form of extreme methodological pluralism and take a "who's to say, man?" attitude about which methods are right, as if all methods are equally "valid!"
Or worse, they reject truth altogether! (Which is a fun conceptual lens for a few days, but a poor way to live life!)
"
Thanks, it's good to have some light on your thought process! I do think it's an interesting list, flawed in some ways but definitely though-provoking. I think I agree with you that failure mode of systematization. Every time I learn about some new form of epistemology I end up a bit disappointed shortly after that (most recently with Popper).
I like this breakdown of knowing, between the superorganism (cultural groups) and its nodes (individual people). Surely our lower levels of abstracted organization also have their own way of learning, whether it’s our immune system reading and recording the genetic signatures of infectious diseases, or something more subtle that the rest of our cells do which we file under the broader category of “trial and error” or biological feedback loops. Natural selection happens at all scales - a taxonomy of its specific mechanisms is definitely a fruitful chain of curiosity.
What an amazing post, thank you so much for this! I think it's quite uncommon I learn more from somebody else's post than my own writings* on an issue. And this is a great post. I thought it'd just be another nitpick-y attack on not liking a specific tier of my tier-list, but you addressed both a central issue with the post and also provided your own alternatives to the tier list! Awesome stuff, will recommend.
*is this hypocritical given I put reading at S+ tier? Maybe!
Aw thanks! It was a fun post to write, just like yours was fun to read!
In *Seeing Like a State*, James C Scott talks about a kind of practical, localized knowing that he calls Métis. Unlike abstract, theoretical knowledge (techne), Métis is instantiated in the local environment and provides adaptable solutions to real problems (as opposed to the generalizable problems one might prefer to have due to the fact that broad principles can address them). One learns about the quality of the soil and climate cycles and what your ancestors did in such and such a situation, giving you a toolkit for dealing with the problems that you personally might encounter. As much as I would like to proclaim the superiority of book learning as a book learner myself, I must admit that out me on a farm and I would find Métis a lot more useful.
Interesting! Do you think it métis should be another item in the tier list then?
As you say, there are lots of ways to combine and divide categories. Métis overlaps with cultural evolution and folk wisdom. Cultural evolution broadly describes how it happens — people iterate on their practical solutions to real world problems are they muddle through and find what works, which then gets passed around. It also results in some amount of folk wisdom — ideas that become detached from their direct practice and may or may not work but persist because they don’t force an epistemological outcome when applied.
Short answer, yes, probably. I’m loathe to admit it, but most things humans have figured out in history were just muddling through, bashing our attempts against reality without the abstraction of science or theory (as powerful as those things may be).
Nice clarification. However, if 'cultural evolution' encompasses all human knowledge not contained within the genome, then the term is less useful than I thought!
I had the same mistaken definition as @Linch, which I also arrived at via Henrich: mimetic knowledge which either doesn't have any underlying explanation (we do it this way cos that's how we've always done it), or where the explanation is wrong (it protects your baby from being born with a tail).
It seems important to be able to separate this out from what David Deutsch would call explanatory knowledge, which has infinite reach and can accumulate on much faster timescales. Coming back to Linch's original point, I think we really should rank that 'way of knowing' much higher than the clumsy mimetic kind.
A more precise definition is that cultural evolution is an explanation or description of how knowledge accumulates in groups of humans. Like I said in the post, it's not very interesting to try to make it encompass everything; it's fine to reserve the term for cases where there's an mechanism akin to natural selection that comes into play, which is a reasonable description of what Henrich does. But yes, that includes both rational and anti-rational memes in the Deutschian sense.
(Note also that there is knowledge that is neither cultural or genetic, i.e. things that never get shared.)
OMG you even made your own tier lists! That's awesome
Thanks re the Fiji point! I didn't have access to a copy of the book when I wrote it so I relied on a combination of memory and other reviews (and I think I skimmed rather than read the book too carefully anyway). But I do strive to be more accurate. Will correct.
To be totally fair, I never managed to read the book in its entirety either, only some of the chapters, so that is totally understandable :)
An expert must, at a minimum, have studied the history and techniques of their field—otherwise, they have no foundation and are merely reinventing the wheel (which is why postmodernism obstructs history, just as Proletkult and the Cultural Revolution did in their respective periods).
Playing & Bricolage