One of the most common mistakes I see intellectuals making is getting caught in a short-sighted bubble, and thus tending to overconfidence in their worldview, and disregard for heritage and future. The symptoms are familiar:
- Belief that one and one’s ingroup (and possibly some enlightened outsiders) are the only people to have figured out the answer to some important question(s).
- Learning from and collaborating with only local, contemporary intellectuals, who are often mostly of the same ingroup. Generally getting one’s opinions from only a small set of sources.
- Disagreement with >90% of people who have ever lived.
- Rationalizations against taking outside thought seriously; “We are so far ahead of them, they have nothing to teach us”. “Ignorant backwards pre-enlightenment thought”. “Everyone else is insane”. “They didn’t have <proprietary cognitive tool X>”. Etcetera.
Despite being near-universal among intellectuals, and often justifiable (for scientists especially but not at all universally), this pattern of isolating oneself within the “one true school of thought” is usually pathological. Seeing as the pattern is likely still present in myself and my readers, this will need some argument:
By default, the set of facts and insights encountered and raised to importance by the investigations of an intellectual acting alone or with similar-thinking contemporaries will have small overlap with the set of important facts and insights overall. This is by inherent limitations of investigation, as well as quirks of human reasoning.
Most serious intellectual work does discover important facts and produce valuable insight. Influence is generally a good proxy for importance, though far from perfect.
Most intellectual work will have some added arational insanity and bad insights besides its important insights. This comes from circumstance, path dependence, entryism, tribal signalling, human irrationalities, and so on.
The errors in unconnected non-contemporary intellectual works are in a large part uncorrelated. Convergent or eternal patterns of failure, and relatively repeatable human biases will remain as sources of error, but the set of reliable sources of error is small compared to all possible sources of error. Sampling from work from a wider range of circumstances reduces the set of reliable errors.
Generally, when provided with only one view of something, it is very difficult to tell that it is insane, or to even notice that one believes it. However, when presented with multiple uncorrelated views, it is much easier to notice the question and the insanity of some of the possible answers. This means we can separate the bad insights from the good by comparison between schools of thought that do not make the same mistakes.
Existing thinking is a much cheaper source of raw insight than trying to reason things out from scratch. One has to be very substantially more rational than average for this to not be true.
Therefor, sampling from as wide a range of influential works as possible for raw facts and insight, and using critical contrasting to select mostly the good stuff, is a much better idea than the default of isolating oneself and failing to explore. This is obvious once stated. The hard part is noticing and caring that you’ve isolated yourself in a bubble of contemporary thought.
This is simply a more self-contained and explicit argument for the doctrine of Slow History:
- Read old books, primary sources, and distant outsiders.
- Take them seriously.
- ???
- Achieve wisdom.
The second step is to remind us that we tend to read outsiders “framed” in a patronizing or deconstructing way, by which we avoid challenging ourselves and learning what they have to say. This is to be avoided.
The ideal result of this is seeing the world sub specie aeternitatis, “from the perspective of eternity”. Most of us have unfortunately not achieved anything like the eternal perspective, but it seems wise to try. Unbound from temporal concerns, fashion, and particular mistakes, what would the world look like and what would seem important?