I’m listening to the Minds Almost Meeting podcast episode on Paternalism.

I think Robin is missing or misemphasizing something that is central to the puzzle that he’s investigating. Namely, I think most regulation (or most regulation that is not rooted in special interest groups creating moats around their rent streams), is made not with a focus on the customer, but rather with a focus on the business being regulated.

The psychological-causal story of how most regulation comes to be is not that the voter reflects on how to help the customer make good choices, and concludes that it is best to constrain their options. Instead the voter hears about or imagines a situation in which a company takes advantage of someone, and feels outraged. There’s a feeling of “that shouldn’t be allowed”, and that the government should stop people from doing things that shouldn’t be allowed.

Not much thought is given to the consideration that you might just inform people to make better choices. That doesn’t satisfy the sense of outrage at a powerful party taking advantage of a weaker party. The focus of attention is not on helping the party being taken advantage of, but on venting the outrage.

What You See Is All There Is, and the question of “what costs does this impose on other people in the system, who might or might not be being exploited”, doesn’t arise.

Most regulation (again, aside from the regulation that is simple rent-seeking) is the result of this sort of thing:

Successfully propagandized people don’t think they’ve been propagandized; if you would expect to feel the same way in either case, you have to distinguish between the two possibilities using something other than your feelings.

– Duncan Sabien

I wish my dad understood this point.

But it’s pretty emotionally stressful to live in a world where you can’t trust your info streams and you can’t really have a grasp on what’s going on.

Like, if I tell my dad not to trust the New York times, because it will regularly misinform him, and that “science” as in “trust the science” is a fake buzzword, about as likely to be rooted in actual scientific epistemology as not, he has few reactions. But one of them is “What do you want me to do? Become a rationalist?”

And he has a point. He’s just not going to read covid preprints himself, to piece together what’s going on. That would take hours and hours of time that he doesn’t want to spend, it would be hard and annoying and it isn’t like he would have calibrated Bayesian takes at the end.

(To be clear, I didn’t do that with covid either, but I could do it, at least somewhat, if I needed to, and I did do little pieces of it, which puts me on a firmer footing in knowing which epistemic processes to trust.)

Give that he’s not going to do that, and I don’t really think that he should do that, what should he do?

One answer is “just downgrade your confidence in everything. Have a blanket sense of ‘actually, I don’t really know what’s going on.’ ” A fundamental rationalist skill is not making stuff up, and saying “I don’t know.” I did spend a few hours tying to orient on the Ukraine situation, and forcing myself to get all the way to the point of making some quantiative predictions (so that I have the opportunity to be surprised, and notice that I am surprised). But my fundamental stance is “I don’t understand what’s going on, and I know that I don’t understand. (Also here are some specific things that I don’t know.)”

…Ok. Maybe that is feasible. It’s pretty hard to live in a world where you fundamentally don’t know what’s happening, where people assume you have some tribal opinion about stuff and your answer is “I don’t know, I think my views are basically informed by propaganda, and I’m not skilled enough or invested enough to try to do better, so I’m going to not believe or promote my takes.”

But maybe this becomes easier if the goal of your orientation in the world is less to have a take on what’s going on, but is instead to prioritize uncertainties: to figure out which questions seem most relevant for understanding, so that you have _some_ map to orient from, even if it is mostly just a map of your uncertainty.