The order of thoughts
We will never agree
The local garbage dump is one of my favorite places in the world. I get such a nice feeling of relief when I see my former belongings disappear into a container. I passionately dislike things that aren't obviously useful.
Anders also likes the garbage dump, but for a totally different reason: For him, the garbage dump is a place where useful stuff can be found. He and I have countless arguments about what to throw away and what to keep. While I'm concerned with order and being able to find the things I need, he is concerned with not throwing away what might be useful.
Some people, like my mother, are even worse than that: They actually like things. They hoard things because they are "nice". My mother thinks old sofas are so nice so she has bought five of them in different flea markets. She also saves things like an old, hand-smithen sprint, 3000 varieties of plants and a miniature Christmas tree made of metal because they are all "nice", according to her.
Hoarders and purists of ideas
Until recently I thought that the tensions between hoarders and pedants only existed in the world of things. A couple of rather vitriolic comments on Astral Codex Ten against the idea of group selection made me change my mind:
"FFS, group selection was taken out behind the woodshed and shot decades ago. Occasionally, someone comes and pokes at its putrid corpse once in a while, and old-timers like Wilson visit it to mourn and imagine twitches of life the decomposing carcass, but it's so dead that even John Cleese stopped complaining to the pet shop owner about it." /Cerastes
"I've been reading "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins. And he definitely has his willow switch out and is beating group selection... to death."/Georg Herold
Those people apparently hate ideas that aren't obviously necessary as much as I hate material things that aren't obviously necessary. They seem to hate them even more, actually, because I seldom imagine sadistic violence against material things, Office Space printer scene-style. Thinking about it, I often hear people speaking in strong language about ideas they don't like. "That idea belongs on the trash heap of history" is a common thing people say. I didn't understand the full meaning of that expression until now: Many people actually want to throw ideas away and never think of them again.
I didn't understand that before, because I, like most people, tend to guess that everybody is just like me. It doesn't help that Anders is exactly that way too: As much as he and I disagree about what to do with material things, we completely agree about what to do with ideas: Hoard them, without exception. We both think all ideas are "nice", one way or another and would never throw an idea away. If an idea can't be used for something for the moment, we put it on the shelf for curiosities. And who knows? Sooner or later it might be useful. While I'm a bit obsessed with order in the material world, I have never held any qualms against hoarding one idea upon another: Somehow I tend to find the idea I need when I need it anyway.
Tell me what you think of group selection, and I will tell you who you are
The divide between hoarders and purists of ideas is often not very noticeable, since there are both hoarders and purists around almost every idea. The difference between the two groups will only be seen around marginal ideas: Ideas that are not essential to any point of view. Idea-hoarders will instinctively like marginal ideas, because they are ideas. Idea-purists will instinctively dislike marginal ideas, because they are ideas. Group selection is such an idea on the margin. Almost everyone who cares about evolutionary theory agrees that most evolution takes place on the level of the individual. Selection between individuals is the main track. Then some people welcome additional tracks as well, while others see any track beside the main track as a threat that should be eliminated.
No matter how much both sides are rationalists. No matter how much both sides have committed to norms for charitability and civilized debate. As long as one side wants as many ideas as possible and the other side wants as few ideas as possible, the two sides won't even understand each other's argument. I think this is what happens in this debate, for example: Steven Pinker really makes an effort to prove that the idea of group selection is not worthy of existence. Jonathan Haidt answers, more or less, that the concept is actually useful. Pinker focuses on keeping his ideas in order, while Haidt relaxedly defends his use of yet another concept, seemingly oblivious to the irritation such conceptual disorder creates among many fellow intellectuals.
When hoarders and purists of ideas start discussing the value of a certain idea, they will agree no more than my mother and I do when we discuss the value of yet another sofa. When some people want to minimize the number of ideas in use and others want to maximize the number of ideas in use, the two groups will always disagree on ideas on the margin.
Who is right, then?
The question is, of course: Who will be less wrong? The idea-purists or the idea-hoarders? Being a hoarder of ideas myself, I can't assess that question impartially.
Still, I have my reasons to be a hoarder: Ideas are just approximations. Some ideas will predict reality better and some a lot worse. But no idea describes objective reality in all its complexity. For that reason, I think openness and flexibility is the key to being less wrong. The more ideas we are willing to test in every situation, the higher the probability that we find the idea that makes most justice to reality in all its complexity.
Not killing ideas is an act of humility in favor of reality. Observations of reality should always guide our usage of ideas, not the other way around. For that reason, I think we should store as many ideas as possible: You never know when reality shows up and hints that one or another of them was useful after all.
Edit: I have changed the last paragraph of this post because I wrote that I think “killing an idea is a sin”. A commenter called Apple Pie pointed out that this is an absurd claim and I fully agree, so I rewrote that sentence.
When Enlightenment thinkers developed the theories that serve as the foundation for the hard sciences today, they were able to use simple models to explain a vast diversity of phenomena. However difficult were the questions answered by men like Newton, Mendeleev, or Darwin, the theories they developed were low-hanging fruit: single, first order explanations for a diversity of previously unexplained phenomena.
As science continues to progress into the soft domains like sociology, medicine, economics, or psychology, major effects are the exception rather than the rule. Granted, one still does get lucky even in those fields, as Charles Spearman did a hundred years ago with the discovery of g - but this was still a discovery made early on in the history of its field, and since then there has been nothing with comparable explanatory power to emerge in the entire field of psychology.
My own findings in the soft sciences are that, if there are five imaginable explanations for some effect - five reasonable answers to some question - then at least four of them are true to some degree. So I definitely endorse your position, in contrast to the skeptics and naysayers of all stripes: If one desires to understand a world where virtually every idea has some explanatory power, the wiser course is, inevitably, to remember more than we forget.
(Edit: This post references an earlier draft of the article and no longer really makes any sense. I would delete it, but the blog owner informs me that killing posts is a sin.)
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"For that reason, I think killing an idea is a sin"
Wow lady you are hard core. Seriously, killing ideas is sinful? If it's a sin, what do we do after we kill an idea? Undertake a pilgrimage or ritual cleansing? Make a memorial?
Incidentally I'm reminded of those poor Georgia Guidestones which now only exist on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones . I think whoever blew them up was the kind of person I'd personally rather didn't exist, and I'm glad the ideas written down on those guidestones are still around in electronic form. So I'm with you 90%. I'm a big fan of keeping far-out, off-the-wall, unpopular ideas around. But this talk about sin is itself really far out. Yes, even bad ideas are mostly worth keeping around - but not all ideas.
So this response I'm writing right here is me, challenging you, to justify your idea that throwing away ideas is sinful. Hard mode: Follow through and justify the idea that throwing away obvious stupid ideas like "2 + 4 = 9" is a sin. I don't think you can do it.