Here is a person who documents his (her?) changes of mind.
I’m skipping the religion section. He’s an atheist and gives reasons you typically hear from atheists.
The American Revolution:
The Revolution was a bloodbath with ~100,000 casualties or fatalities followed by 62,000 Loyalist refugees fleeing the country for fear of retaliation and their expropriation… Independence was granted to similar English colonies at the smaller price of “waiting a while”: Canada was essentially autonomous by 1867 less than a century later) and Australia was first settled in 1788 with autonomous colonies not long behind and the current Commonwealth formed by 1901. (Nor did Canada or Australia suffer worse at England’s hands during the waiting period than,say, America in that time suffered at its own hands.
He cites a few of Bryan Caplan’s arguments for the long term costs of the Revolution. Fighting the war removed the last real check on aggression toward the Native Americans, and without it we would have expected slavery to end earlier and more peacefully. The first claim I’m not sure of, the second is more clearly true.
Communism:
He, like many others, had sympathy for communism. It just seems so right, doesn’t it? For many communism is synonymous with altruism. But…
the practical results with economies & human lives spoke for themselves: the ideas were tried in so many countries by so many groups in so many different circumstances over so many decades that if there were anything to them, at least one country would have succeeded. In comparison, even with the broadest sample including hellholes like the Belgian Congo, capitalism can still point to success stories like Japan.
But I’m sure the real communism is waiting to be tried.
Skipping the occult.
Fiction:
What has changed in what I read - I now read principally nonfiction (philosophy, economics, random sciences, etc.), where I used to read almost exclusively fiction… I, in fact, aspired to be a novelist. I thought fiction was a noble task, the highest production of humanity, and writers some of the best people around, producing immortal works of truth. Slowly this changed. I realized fiction changed nothing, and when it did change things, it was as oft as not for the worse.Fiction promoted simplification, focus on sympathetic examples, and I recognized how much of my own infatuation with the Occult (among other errors) could be traced to fiction. What a strange belief, that you could find truths in lies.
I had the same transformation from fiction to non-fiction. I ready non-fiction pretty exclusively. Even my writing style has changed. I used to analyze the elegance of each sentence as I wrote. I was not careful to test them for truth. Some have managed to combine the two (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), but I find that task difficult.
Nicotine:
I had naturally assumed, in line with the usual American cultural messages, that there was nothing good about tobacco and that smoking is deeply shameful, proving that you are a selfish lazy short-sighted person who is happy to commit slow suicide (taking others with him via second-hand smoke) and cost society a fortune in medical care. Then some mentions of nicotine as useful came up and I began researching it. I’m still not a fan of smoking, and I regard any tobacco with deep trepidation, but the research literature seems pretty clear: nicotine enhances mental performance in multiple domains and may have some minor health benefits to boot. Nicotine sans tobacco seems like a clear win. (It amuses me that of the changes listed here, this is probably the one people will find most revolting and bizarre.)
He seems careful and honest enough that I can trust him on his claims about the benefits of nicotine.
Skipping centralized black markets.
He continues with beliefs he has come to less certainty about.
The near singularity:
there are many troubling long-term metrics. I was deeply troubled to read Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment pointing out a long-term decline in discoveries per capita (despite ever increasing scientists and artists per capita!), even after he corrected for everything he could think of. I didn’t see any obvious mistakes. Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation twisted the knife further, and then I read Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. I have kept notes since and see little reason to expect a general exponential upwards over all fields, including the ones minimally connected to computing. (Peter Thiel’s “The End of the Future” makes a distinction between “the progress in computers and the failure in energy”;
Neo-luddism:
He basically agrees with Tyler Cowen that labor inputs are going to decrease in value while wealth as a whole grows, making inequality a serious concern.
The specification seems fairly clear: the Neo-Luddite claim, in its simplest form predicts that ever fewer people will be able to find employment in undistorted free markets. We can see other aspects as either tangents (will people be able to consume due to a Basic Income or via capital ownership?) or subsets (the Author thesis of polarization would naturally lead to an overall increase in unemployment). The due date is not clear, but we can see the Neo-Luddite thesis as closely linked to artificial intelligences, and 2050 would be as good a due date as any inasmuch as I expect to be alive then & AI will have matured substantially
I.Q. and Race:
I never doubted that IQ was in part hereditary (Stephen Jay Gould aside, this is too obvious - what, everything from drug responses to skin and eye color would be heritable except the most important things which would have a huge effect on reproductive fitness?), but all the experts seemed to say that diluted over entire populations, any tendency would be non-existent. Well,OK, I could believe that; visible traits consistent over entire populations like skin color might differ systematically because of sexual selection or something, but why not leave IQ following the exact same bell curve in each population?
Mu:
If, like most people, you’ve only read a few papers or books on it, your opinion (whatever that is) is worthless and you probably don’t even realize how worthless your opinion is…
So why be interested in the topics at all? If you cannot convince anyone, if you cannot learn the field to a reasonable depth,and you cannot even communicate well what convinced you, why bother? In the spirit of keeping one’s identity small, I say: it’s not clear at all. So you should know in advance whether you want to take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole you go before you finally give up, or you take the blue pill and be an onlooker as you settle for a high-level overview of the more interesting papers and issues and accept that you will only have that and a general indefensible assessment of the state of play.
My own belief is that as interesting as it is, you should take the blue pill and not adopt any strong position but perhaps (if it doesn’t take too much time) point out any particularly naive or egregious holes in argument, by people who are simply wrong or don’t realize how little they know or how slanted a view they have received from the material they’ve read.
He does not believe knowledge is an end in and of itself. He wants to belittle the value of time and brain power spent on abstract topics, especially for non-experts who can’t change a mind or further the discussion. My problem with this is that he doesn’t replace it with a better use of time – perhaps family and friends, but those things too are not lasting. It’s all just consumption.
I think there are many, though, who don’t find intellectualism rewarding – people who are out to confirm their biases and convince others. This kind of mindset can easily lead down the rabbit holes he is talking about. I’ve been there. But if you find satisfaction in progressing through the nuances of ideas, never stop.
Value of Information:
Final genetic studies of I.Q. are coming, so just wait it out because trying to figure it out is expensive and not very beneficial.
