Astral Codex Ten is having a fun contest with solicited book reviews. The reviewers are kept anonymous to keep their identities (presumably quite recognisable to the group) from biasing the voting. They are long, and this may take a while. But ACX has very good commenters in addition to Dr. Siskind, and I think it will be worth it.
The first one I am reading is a review of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, and while the reviewer finds many good things in the book, he is generally negative, finding it inadequate and weak rather than wrong. I am a fan of Haidt, and have written about him with approval a couple of dozen times over the years, including that book in specific. Yet as I read along I found myself agreeing with the criticisms and wondering how much to reevaluate.
In particular, I agreed with how inadequate Haidt's understanding of the psychology of conservatives is. The reviewer grew up in a Fundamentalist/Pentecostal culture and now seems to be a liberal with New Atheist sympathies. He claims he could give a much better description of what the motivations are than Haidt does in this book - and I think he succeeds. Perhaps I have been grateful that a liberal (now centrist) social psychologist had any reasonable words for conservatives and religious people at all when I first encountered him.
Update: For example
As a result, he engages with neither rank-and-file God’n’guns religious conservatism nor the intellectual conservative tradition of “what is good for the masses to believe is not identical to what’s fundamentally true, please consult my 60,000 word essay on decision theory, game theory, computational load, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for details, therefore Catholicism”. He doesn’t really seem to realise that either of these positions exists, and “steel-mans” conservatism into some sort of superposition across “group selection informs us as to normative ethics” and “group selection is teleological towards utilitarian human flourishing”, both of which are utterly insane positions that I think almost nobody actually holds.
It's a good take, and good writing.
Thanks. He noticed things I didn't, partly because I know very little about the field and partly because the author clearly spent a lot more time thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteI did have criticisms of Haidt right from the start, and treated them as things he had overlooked and could still incorporate into his model. This reviewer exposes them as real problems with the theory, and I think he saw more clearly than I. In my meager defense, I was writing this a decade ago before some of the later phenomenon were manifest. I saw them in earlier stages.
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