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mattnewport comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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Looping back to the starting point of this discussion, from which we are in danger of drifting too far, what I wanted to say is that people who take an intolerant position on the subject of (say) homosexuality do not seem to do so after having held up their own ethical intuitions to anything like the kind of scrutiny you and others here are clearly capable of.
Rather, they seem to rationalize an immediate "eww" reaction and look for any ammunition they can find supporting their intution that "people shouldn't do that". That strikes me as irrational. This comment seemed to be saying much the same thing.
My stance, I guess, could be summarized as "Show me someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, or polyamory." That is, consistent reasons, stable under reflection.
The best general argument for conservativism I've encountered is that we should pay attention to established social customs and innate moral intuitions because the world is a complex place and practices that persist over time probably exist for a good reason. The fact that we don't fully understand the reason for a practice is not enough to discard it, we should exercise caution when messing with established customs because we don't fully understand what customs are key to society achieving whatever level of success it has so far achieved.
I don't fully buy this argument but I think it has some merit. Thus it is not necessarily irrational to see an intuitive "eww" reaction as a reason to think that we should exercise caution when liberalizing attitudes towards the provoking practice. I think the generous interpretation of the social conservative attitude to homosexuality is that the "eww" reaction probably exists for some 'good' reason and should not be totally ignored. Generating hypotheses to explain why the "eww" is beneficial is not necessarily an irrational first step to understanding what's really going on.
Relatively few social conservatives can articulate this argument but some can and I don't think it is fair to dismiss them as irrational. Indeed the more thoughtful conservatives tend to think that most people are not capable of thinking rationally about the costs and benefits of certain behaviours and so social customs must do the work of preserving the 'good' society.
-- John Brunners
mattnewport's comment was much more broad and insightful than "This is old therefore it is good".
His point (paraphrasing the general conservative thesis) is that social customs arise as solutions to difficult problems and have highly immodular interplay. Therefore, before relaxing them, you should at least identify what problem it was (believed to be) solving, and how it interplays with the other customs and factors (including the ick factor in others).
In the case of homosexuality, the taboo against it is extremely common across cultures, which suggests some kind of mechanism like, "Cultures that didn't have a taboo against it were outbred or otherwise dominated by a more populous culture."
Of course, no one actually argues for such a taboo against it today on that basis, though it has the trappings of a good argument: "If we don't have pro-reproduction customs, we'll be unable to withstand the memetic overload from cultures that do, and will be unable to perpetuate our values across generations." (Several European countries provide good examples of cultures slowly losing their ability to protect Western values by being outbred by those who don't share those values.)
But even so, if this is the concern, there are much better, Pareto-surperior ways to go about it: e.g., require everyone to either have children, help with the raising of other's children, or pay a tax after a certain age that goes toward relieving the burden of others' childbearing.
Unfortunately, the debate on the issue is nowhere near this point.
I'm sorry if you felt I was advocating a position when instead I understood and was in agreement with his points. I was merely supplying an interesting quote about half of them.
I do not appreciate being called a fool when you make no attempt to discern my reasoning.
Tell me what reasoning I was supposed to find your comment, as it related to the parent's point, and if we can agree there's something non-foolish about it, I'll revise my comment. Sound good?
There are two kinds of fools:
One says, "This is old therefore it is good.": Conservatism, when the person is holding beliefs for irrational reasons (fear, ick-factor, a desire to avoid all change, etc.)
The other one says, "This is new therefore it is better.": Change advocates, when they fail to take into account the possibility that conservative positions may be robust or long standing solutions to difficult problems that made sense for a large period of time or in certain cultures.
Both sides can hold the correct position for irrational reasons, and one should put thought into it, and obtain more knowledge, before deciding which is correct.
So it didn't say anything that the parent of your quotation comment hadn't already said?
Yes. It's almost as if I was merely supplying an interesting quote.
And as much as I do not appreciate being called a fool when you make no attempt to discern my reasoning, likewise, I do not appreciate passive aggressive questions whose intent is apparently to state my comment is worthless to you.
I'm sorry that I took the valuable 4 seconds it took to read the quote, and that it spawned this subthread where you have continued to complain about my posting of the comment. I'm sorry that it bothers you enough that you feel the need to indirectly call me a fool, and to indirectly say my comment is worthless.
I apologize for giving you grief about the quote.
When I initially saw it, the tone of the quote seemed to reveal a lack of assimilation of the insight mattnewport gave; to the extent that the quote is doing so in this context, such oversimplification does count as a (3rd) kind of foolishness. I do not, however, deem you a fool.
While I still don't think the quote was helpful, I will remove the remark that implies you are a fool. And, as standard practice, I didn't mod down any of your comments in this thread because I was involved in the thread's argument.
Please do not take offense.
"Discrimination when considering changing things is important" is what I got from it.
That is a severe undercounting of types of fools.
-- Unknown
Lame quote because everyone I have ever met who starts indexes at 0 says "2 types": it is just that they call them Type 0 and Type 1 instead of Type 1 and Type 2.
ADDED. I am not saying that writers should start indexes at 0, just that the fact alluded to in the quote (that, e.g., the "1" in "Type 1", is different from "2") is not a good reason for avoiding the practice. A good reason to avoid the practice is that diverging from a long-standing stylistic convention distracts without contributing anything substantial to your point.
It's a joke.
I approve of the potential for humor and found the joke amusing until I noticed that it is flawed.
Then I noticed that the humor itself is a powerful persuader, it nearly distracted me from both those obvious flaws despite their familiarity with the subject. The fact that pointing this out would in most contexts be a faux pas demonstrates a risk that the abuse of humor entails. In fact, even here the "It's a joke" reply is upvoted to 3. Humor as a conversation halter is (epistemically) undesirable when it conveys false meaning.
I thought the error in logic contributed to the humour in the joke. A perfect parallel to a joke I'd already heard (the binary one) would be less amusing.
I saw the joke before the context so I can't really say how it affected the conversation, but it didn't look sufficiently related to the parent to be either misleading or informative about how many types of fools there are. At worst it could be distracting.
I agree with you about jokes in general having a risk of being misleading. I think a good response to a joke that's misleading in a way you care about is to acknowledge that it's a joke and respond seriously anyway. And distinguish between replying to the joke and the joke-teller, unless you're willing to assume the teller agrees with the joke's implications.
This advice is targeted at the context of lesswrong discussions, where the joke's been there for minutes or hours,. I don't know that it would be a faux pas in general, but it would changing conversation tone to a serious mood to respond in real-time like that. Also I don't know that I'd use it in a hostile environment.
What would be your suggestion for repairing the situation?
Ignore it. At the margin such effort would be far better spent on bigger, easier to fix issues. On average humor seems (to me) to push away from bullshit rather than towards it so counters would need to be fine tuned.
Something most of us do automatically is reduce association with people who don't share our sense of humor. People who actively use humor for anti-epistemic purposes (ie. not you) I tend to avoid unconscously. They feel evil.
It would probably work well if you rattle it off quickly in a real-time conversation because it would show that you are engaged and have some wits about you, but what does it contribute to a conversation in which participants have hours to formulate a reply before the reply becomes stale?
Maybe I'm missing something: is there a truth or half-truth buried in, "There are 1 types of people in the world: those who start indexes at 0, and those who don't," that I have missed?
The potential for humor. Is this not an acceptable purpose on Lesswrong? If so, I will cease posting potentially humorous or interesting quotes and other miscellany outside of Quote and Open Threads.
I don't think most people object to humour here, I think the complaint was not that this was a joke but that it was not a very good joke.
I don't think it's a very good joke for the same reason as rhollerith but then I'm a dyed-in-the-wool C++ programmer so I can't understand why anyone would start indexes at 1...
Speaking just for myself -- well, speaking for myself and for anyone who upvotes this comment -- I have a slight preference for you to restrict your humor and interesting quotes to Rationality Quotes, which by the way I do not read. (I do not have a way to avoid reading humorous comments in Open Thread without avoiding all the other comments there.)
I hope I have not made you feel unwelcome, Rain. I find what you have to say interesting in general, and I am glad you are here.
ADDED. And I admire anyone who donates to the Singularity Institute.
Right, but it's obviously inferior to the common "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who use binary, and those who don't."
Or as G. K. Chesterton may have put it:
(It's a good summary of the linked passage, but I can't find evidence that he ever expressed it in this form, which is variously attributed.)
That is perhaps a good argument in favor of conservatism in general, but it falls short of my request to point at someone who has rational reasons to oppose homosexuality, at the very least as practiced in private.
I'm not saying that anyone who opposes, say, gay marriage or gay adoption is irrational by virtue of having that position. But it seems clear that people who allow their "eww" reaction to become an excuse to "pick on the queer", as is seen for instance in cases of workplace harassment, are simply not using their heads, to put it mildly.
If you believed that
then you might oppose homosexuality, including as practiced in private.
Disclaimer: I do not hold the above view, for fairly standard Libertarian reasons, and also do not believe all the premises are true.
There's one more belief needed for that complex to make sense-- that the costs (both to homosexuals and to heterosexuals) of suppressing homosexuality are low enough to counterbalance the benefits.
I was considering adding it in, but I think the costs of the missed 'lives worth living' would likely exceed it greatly, assuming the first premise is true.
Edit: I just editted it in, and then re-removed it. Firstly, it makes the whole thing trivial, and secondly, I was only presenting a sketch of a case- really, we'd need a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, this is outlining one of the benefits.
If you're trying to convey a system of thought you don't agree with, you might as well include all the bits and pieces.
The interesting thing about that anti-homosexual argument is it considers the costs of repressing homosexuality to be so low for homosexuals that they aren't even generally conscious for the conservative.
Also, there are costs to non-homosexuals-- frex, it's rough for a heterosexual to be married to a homosexual who'd hoped (with support from their culture) that they'd get over their homosexuality.
And if a homosexual is driven to suicide, it's very hard on their family.
I'm not familiar with this word but I've seen you use it a couple of times now. Google didn't enlighten me either. Is it short for for example?
Yes. I didn't realize it was so rare.
Well, part of the idea may be that you're not repressing, you're curing: they cease to be homosexual. They're ex ante pleased to be cured, and the cost of healing/oppressing is one-time rather than life-long.
Whatever the suicide rate would be, I doubt it's high enough to make up for the loss of potential-children.
I'm sure that's part of the premise, but my point was that the low cost is simply assumed rather than examined. Also, the possibility of a failure rate isn't considered.
None of the premises are examined; they're all assumed. Clearly, as we all agree the argument is unsound at least one of them (including those implied but not delineated) must be false, and it's not particularly important which. What Morendil asked for, more or less, was a rational argument against private homosexuality.
Obviously, no unsound argument should be stable under reflection, but from the point of view of Classical Logic this seems to satisfy the requirements.
If you'd like it more formally, I'll write out all the premises in full and come up with a cost/benefit analysis / natural deduction proof - but it wouldn't help answer the request, because we're not discussing whether or not private homosexuality is bad, but whether there are any (close enough to) rational arguments for the other side.
Mostly agree, but what exactly is "the" libetarian reason for rejecting that chain of reasoning? A libertarian (and I consider myself one) would tend to reject the premises, but not the deductions you made based on the premises.
Also, as a libertarian, do you believe something like, "If rampant homosexuality/ childless/ etc. leads to a libertarian society being undermined and outbred, so be it -- that means the whole program was flawed to begin with"? What's your general position on libertarian-permitted acts that, at the large scale, would undermine the ablity of a society to remain libertarian?
(Btw, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a "hardcore" libertarian drew a lot of criticism for his position that practioners of non-family-centered lifestyles would have to be "physicallly removed" from a libertarian society for it to function.)
Usual disclaimer: the chain of reasoning you gave still wouldn't justify opposition to homosexuality, but rather, a kind of compromise like I proposed before, where you can either have/adopt children of your own, or pay a tax after a certain age.
Things like the utility homosexuals get from freely expressing themselves, and the various Public Choice problems with implementing the system. But I also think the first premise is false, and third is at least a simplification.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t adopt the nearest stable system, which could be Libertarianism without sexual freedom.
I would bite the HHH bullet and say that we'd have to do something about it. Things like SeaSteading provide non-coercive alternatives, in basically the same way that making property rights totally secure would prevent being outnumbered being a problem.
However, Minarchists are quite happy to accept taxes to defend liberty, and I know the President of the Oxford Libertarians would accept conscription, and I don't think there's that much difference. It may well be that we should adopt a consequentialist deontology: we act in such a way as to maximise rule-following. The danger here is that in breaking rules to try to enforce them, we might undermine them further.
In general, I don't think Libertarianism has much chance without a culture of individual responsibility, quite possibly family-based.
I would imagine the general form of an argument to that effect would be that taboos against homosexuality must exist for a reason and despite not fully understanding that reason we should preserve the taboos for fear of causing unintended damage to society. If you are the kind of person who believes that society should formalize its taboos as legal prohibitions then you might support laws against the private practice of homosexuality.
To be clear, I'm a staunch libertarian and so firmly oppose laws against any kind of sexual activity between consenting adults but the libertarian position on prohibitions on the activities of individuals is neutral on the question of whether any activity is in the best long term interests of the participants or on the pros or cons of indirect consequences on society as a whole. I also support the right of an employer to refuse to employ homosexuals or the proprietor of a business to refuse to serve them for example.
It is fairly common on both the left and the right to oppose practices that are considered harmful both through social taboos and through legal prohibition on private activity. The only real difference is in the types of activities that are considered harmful. I see little difference between a social conservative arguing that homosexuality should be illegal because we don't know the potential consequences for society and a left liberal arguing that GM foods should be illegal because we don't know the potential consequences for society. In both cases it arguably should be an empirical question but in practice it is driven largely by the "eww" response in the majority of people.