On Priesthoods - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
Some recent political discussion has focused on “the institutions” or “the priesthoods”. I’m part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here’s an inside look on what these are and what they do.
In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of “individualists”. Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on one’s own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each other’s mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other.
For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed?
Individual: The wellspring of everything else. Eccentric individuals can go on expeditions into unlikely regions of ideaspace and come back with unique insights. And this is the only size class with much hope of avoiding groupthink entirely. But it’s also the size class at the most risk of going on crazy tangents and getting everything wrong. And it fails to produce consensus - if a million different people argue a million different things, the average spectator has learned nothing.
Society-wide: The marketplace of ideas! This is where everyone gets to have their say. New hypotheses get stress-tested, bounced off against each other, and only the strongest survive. This level also produces true learning - if only one idea survives the marketplace, then average spectators can easily pick it out (although of course it can still be wrong). Its disadvantage is that it’s impossible for several billion people to hold a true “discussion” among themselves. Also, many of these people are extremely stupid, their ideas are bad, and they fill the conversation with noise.
