Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

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I will defend "orthodox privilege."

The problem with unorthodox thinkers, as Graham defines them, is that they are often not grounded in expertise. For example, I will take an unorthodox opinion of my own: Neither socialism nor capitalism are great economic systems and we need novel thought on new economic systems that are not based in industrial revolution assumptions.

(Another, to give a guttural rather than intellectual reaction from some: I believe we should change the culture that gender is not presented publicly until the child chooses a gender. They are also given provisional names that are unisex and are allowed to choose their own name at puberty.)

However, I have not spent the years of deep thought to truly develop the arguments. While I have a lot more invested into gender studies than the average human, I am not an expert. Expert goes far further than reading a few books and watching some YouTube videos. The burden on me is far higher than just saying, "this is what I believe" because they are unsubstantiated.

The truth is that if you have a plethora of unorthodox views, it is likely because you have not performed in-depth research to be an expert. You likely do not understand the landscape of the arguments, the historical context and critiques, and the nuances to the argument because understanding all of that can take months of study and interaction with the experts.

That doesn't mean that you need some sort of degree: An unorthodox opinion that is well-substantiated, for example, is Tim Ferriss's examination of psychedelics. He has obviously put in the work and has put money in experts' hands to validate those ideas. This is in stark contrast to the work that many put into their unorthodox opinions.

But ultimately, most people would do better if they acknowledged that their opinions in places outside their expertise are largely shallow.

Regarding your unorthodox opinion on gender, I think the net effect of such a parenting strategy will simply be more confusion and identity crises, and the increased likelihood of sterilizing the genetic line. The number of people who have suffered gender dysphoria is vanishingly small, especially in older generations, so this policy would benefit few children. Moreover, we can see that gender dysphoria rates increase depending on peer group and culture, suggesting it is not simply a genetic idiosyncrasy and can spread as a social contagion.

There is also a philosophical assumption that removing all social impositions frees someone to be their authentic self, but the question is what is authenticity? There are many branching paths our lives take that shape how we evolve. If you had parents that took great interest in instilling good values and education, you would end up authentically different than if they had taken a laissez-faire approach and told you to figure it out yourself. The left seems to take the contradictory perspective that humans are generally blank slates shaped by their environment, yet also pushes a kind of genetic determinism on gender and sexuality.

I think the examples you name aren't what pg has in mind. It's more like saying "God doesn't exist" in the year 1800. It was highly taboo to say something like this, and doing so would immediately damage your social standing.

The other point is: he doesn't argue one should ignore expert opinions in general. He just says that what is sayable in public likely has important blindspots, to which any expert is subject to as well.

This is a great point. Not the final answer, maybe, but an important observation: that paradox often stems from ignorance.

It could be argued (it is sometimes argued) that ignorance fuels creativity ("he did it because he didn't know it was impossible", etc.); but more often than not, creativity stems from a deep familiarity with a given topic, and the ability to detect / invent connections between different subject matters that are not obvious, or indeed visible to anyone else.

The problem with the idea that unorthodox ideas should only be adopted after deep thought, is that if it takes years of deep thought to convince yourself of the idea, you'll never convince anybody else of it.

What I've come to understand is that a good unorthodox thinker is not one that is a deep thinker. A good unorthodox thinker is one that puts their theories into practice, experiments, self-promotes, and plays politics. Sometimes their ideas work out, sometimes they don't, but heterodoxy is the engine of change, liberalism, and progress.

The problem with orthodoxy is that you can virtually always make a case that it's better to go with the tried and true. The orthodoxy is going to be correct more often than the heterodoxy, regardless of the subject. The problem is that setting all these high standards people must pass before challenging the status quo, like only having a new idea after thinking about it for years, results in society getting staid, stagnant, behind the times, and poorly adapted to changing circumstances.

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