Calibrating Confidence

I’ve been working on this project for the Liberty Fund, which involves researching the founding fathers. There’s been two divergent attitudes I’ve heard when talking to people about this. First, that the founding fathers are basically gods personified. Second, that the founding fathers are the progenitors of original sin. I don’t typically see people be neutral, slightly positive, or slightly negative.

This seems to happen a lot of the time with political issues. Issues that involve determining society’s values like critical race theory, abortion, capitalism seem to take on a religious emphasis to them. The rival religions (re: value systems) aren’t comfortable asserting neutrality to another’s building blocks. These ideas must be heretical. While this cognitive quirk seems to do really well for building coalitions and social ties, they seem to be pretty bad at discovering truth, and accuracy..

If status is ultimately what people are motivated by, status incentives are important to encourage truth-seeking behavior. Disconfirmation and contrarianism in all directions are probably important directives to achieve this goal. When people’s status isn’t reliant upon a specific set of values winning, the cognitive blinders may be lowered, just slightly.

At the same time, it’s not as if all truth lies somewhere in the middle of every conflict. It may lie out way farther to one specific, perhaps unexplored tail. It would seem odd to think that every epistemic disagreement would meet cleanly in the middle. The problem of induction lies large before truth seekers, in that if we refer to social heuristics, it’s probably the case that our society, like the one’s before it, has major blind spots. Yet, determining which blindspots, and wanting to implode the society before us is also not tenable because of the risks of doing so (famines, mass deaths, etc.).

One way of getting ahead of the curve, which I tend to like, is to look at which ideologies predict accurate events, and from that, winnow out ideas that fail to manifest. In a sense, this is what ideas like Fantasy Intellectuals, and betting markets do. Yet, this has it’s limitations if there is a good to follow.

I’m skeptical of the idea of a greater good, in large part because I think that people don’t all have the same ideas about what makes a society good. We try to aggregate the preferences of people in both market, and non-market (elections) approaches, but there remain questions of whether one approach is superior.

Not really sure what to think, but it seems to me that the meta-foundations of rationality are often ignored