Decoupling

Carefully, correctly LessWrong

Singularity blues

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Cognitive decoupling is not what happens when your polycule breaks up (that would be Conscious uncoupling). It is LessWrong rationalist jargon for considering whether a proposition is true or false separately from the ethics of acting on that proposition. The terms high-decoupling and low-decoupling seem to go back to 1998 academic paper by Keith Stanovich and Richard West but entered the rationalist community via a 2014 blog post by Sarah Constantin^[1] and a 2018 blog post by John Nerst.^[2] Nerst's topic was a debate on The Bell Curve between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein. (Klein is a co-founder of Vox Media and came to work for the New York Times, Harris trained as a neuroscientist but is best known for arguing for secularism and against Islam). Rationalists tend to admire high decouplers.^[3]

Obviously the appeal to consequences is an (informal) fallacy, and good scientists and technicians are high decouplers in their area of work. Its frustrating to watch a debate which bounces around from topic to topic without focusing on and resolving one question at a time (either "is X true?" or "if X were true, what should we do about it?"). But Scott Alexander himself pointed out some problems with decoupling in an essay on epistemic learned helplessness.^[4] You can't be an expert on everything, and there are lots of topics where you have no way to verify what a smooth talker is saying. If you don't rely on expert consensus for things outside your education and experience, and ask yourself questions like "why are they raising this topic?" you will be taken advantage of by one swindler after another or be pulled into crank magnetism. Someone who approaches you with an investment opportunity usually wants your money (even indirectly, as when other people buying GameStock stock raises the value of the first person's holdings of stock). Someone telling you good things about Amway is probably not doing so out of pure passion for the truth. Debates about differences between the sexes or races in the United States are almost always cover for arguments about whether Black people and women are hard-done by and need help and protection. They are almost never pure academic debates that nobody involved would dream of acting upon. A person without time and technical knowledge would be very reasonable to say "this study of IQ in Botswana seems fishy" and reject it, just like they might refuse a date's invitation somewhere private without being able to prove that their date was criminal or insane. Internet race crank Steve Sailer commented on the original essay by Nerst.

Before raising topics like this, its important to demonstrate good faith and give your interlocutor reasons to trust you. And it is the interlocutor not some neutral third party who decides if that is enough. Far too many LessWrongers present human worth and ability as hierarchies, fret that technology may have made low-IQ people into useless eaters, complain about restrictions on biomedical research, then wonder why outsiders think their questions about race and IQ or eugenics might have an agenda.^[5]

Ezra Klein and Sam Harris both have successful careers writing and speaking to large audiences to try to change culture and policy. If Harris had wanted a purely theoretical discussion with a trained statistician or social scientist, he should have tried an academic conference.

In practice, LessWrongers often beg people to open-mindedly consider eugenics, bitcoin, or AI foom, but not socialism or the possibility that climate changes could be worse and less predictable than in the IPCC reports (a collapse of the gulf stream, for example, would cause temperatures in the UK to drop while world temperatures rose, and preparing for steady mild temperature increases could make things worse). Marxists and Communists ask people to consider these ideas in the abstract and separate from the horrors of actually existing communism in the USSR, China, Cuba, and Vietnam. Many people want you to consider their unusual ideas with an open mind, but don't extend that charity to your unusual ideas.

See Also

• Big Bang: Cosmologists talk about thermal decoupling (when two parts of a system cease to be in thermal equilibrium). LessWrongers often adapt terms from math and science.
• James Damore: while Damore never denied that he wrote his paper about sexism in software development to change Google's policies, response to his essay hinged on the question whether a wealthy young white man with a US passport could really understand gender, race, and class relations in the United States by reading a lot of academic research in his spare time.
• Degrowth: people who want economic growth to continue often imagine carbon decoupling, where growth in GDP ceases to be linked to growth in greenhouse gas emissions.

References