Undiscriminating Skepticism

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

Tl;dr:  Since it can be cheap and easy to attack everything your tribe doesn't believe, you shouldn't trust the rationality of just anyone who slams astrology and creationism; these beliefs aren't just false, they're also non-tribal among educated audiences.  Test what happens when a "skeptic" argues for a non-tribal belief, or argues against a tribal belief, before you decide they're good general rationalists.  This post is intended to be reasonably accessible to outside audiences.

I don't believe in UFOs.  I don't believe in astrology.  I don't believe in homeopathy.  I don't believe in creationism.  I don't believe there were explosives planted in the World Trade Center.  I don't believe in haunted houses.  I don't believe in perpetual motion machines.  I believe that all these beliefs are not only wrong but visibly insane.

If you know nothing else about me but this, how much credit should you give me for general rationality?

Certainly anyone who was skillful at adding up evidence, considering alternative explanations, and assessing prior probabilities, would end up disbelieving in all of these.

But there would also be a simpler explanation for my views, a less rare factor that could explain it:  I could just be anti-non-mainstream.  I could be in the habit of hanging out in moderately educated circles, and know that astrology and homeopathy are not accepted beliefs of my tribe.  Or just perceptually recognize them, on a wordless level, as "sounding weird".  And I could mock anything that sounds weird and that my fellow tribesfolk don't believe, much as creationists who hang out with fellow creationists mock evolution for its ludicrous assertion that apes give birth to human beings.

You can get cheap credit for rationality by mocking wrong beliefs that everyone in your social circle already believes to be wrong.  It wouldn't mean that I have any ability at all to notice a wrong belief that the people around me believe to be right, or vice versa - to further discriminate truth from falsity, beyond the fact that my social circle doesn't already believe in something.

Back in the good old days, there was a simple test for this syndrome that would get quite a lot of mileage:  You could just ask me what I thought about God.  If I treated the idea with deeper respect than I treated astrology, holding it worthy of serious debate even if I said I disbelieved in it, then you knew that I was taking my cues from my social surroundings - that if the people around me treated a belief as high-prestige, high-status, I wouldn't start mocking it no matter what the state of evidence.

On the other hand suppose I said without hesitation that my epistemic state on God was similar to my epistemic state on psychic powers: no positive evidence, lots of failed tests, highly unfavorable prior, and if you believe it under those circumstances then something is wrong with your mind.  Then you would have heard a bit of skepticism that might cost me something socially, and that not everyone around me would have endorsed, even in educated circles.  You would know it wasn't just a cheap way of picking up cheap points.

Today the God-test no longer works, because some people realized that the taking-it-seriously aura of religion is in fact the main thing left which prevents people from noticing the epistemic awfulness; there has been a concerted and, I think, well-advised effort to mock religion and strip it of its respectability.  The upshot is that there are now quite wide social circles in which God is just another stupid belief that we all know we don't believe in, on the same list with astrology.  You could be dealing with an adept rationalist, or you could just be dealing with someone who reads Reddit.

And of course I could easily go on to name some beliefs that others think are wrong and that I think are right, or vice versa, but would inevitably lose some of my audience at each step along the way - just as, a couple of decades ago, I would have lost a lot of my audience by saying that religion was unworthy of serious debate.  (Thankfully, today this outright dismissal is at least considered a respectable, mainstream position even if not everyone holds it.)

I probably won't lose much by citing anti-Artificial-Intelligence views as an example of undiscriminating skepticism.  I think a majority among educated circles are sympathetic to the argument that brains are not magic and so there is no obstacle in principle to building machines that think.  But there are others, albeit in the minority, who recognize Artificial Intelligence as "weird-sounding" and "sci-fi", a belief in something that has never yet been demonstrated, hence unscientific - the same epistemic reference class as believing in aliens or homeopathy.

(This is technically a demand for unobtainable evidence.  The asymmetry with homeopathy can be summed up as follows:  First:  If we learn that Artificial Intelligence is definitely impossible, we must have learned some new fact unknown to modern science - everything we currently know about neurons and the evolution of intelligence suggests that no magic was involved.  On the other hand, if we learn that homeopathy is possible, we must have learned some new fact unknown to modern science; if everything else we believe about physics is true, homeopathy shouldn't work.  Second:  If homeopathy works, we can expect double-blind medical studies to demonstrate its efficacy right now; the absence of this evidence is very strong evidence of absence.  If Artificial Intelligence is possible in theory and in practice, we can't necessarily expect its creation to be demonstrated using current knowledge - this absence of evidence is only weak evidence of absence.)

I'm using Artificial Intelligence as an example, because it's a case where you can see some "skeptics" directing their skepticism at a belief that is very popular in educated circles, that is, the nonmysteriousness and ultimate reverse-engineerability of mind.  You can even see two skeptical principles brought into conflict - does a good skeptic disbelieve in Artificial Intelligence because it's a load of sci-fi which has never been demonstrated?  Or does a good skeptic disbelieve in human exceptionalism, since it would require some mysterious, unanalyzable essence-of-mind unknown to modern science?

It's on questions like these where we find the frontiers of knowledge, and everything now in the settled lands was once on the frontier.  It might seem like a matter of little importance to debate weird non-mainstream beliefs; a matter for easy dismissals and open scorn.  But if this policy is implemented in full generality, progress goes down the tubes.  The mainstream is not completely right, and future science will not just consist of things that sound reasonable to everyone today - there will be at least some things in it that sound weird to us.  (This is certainly the case if something along the lines of Artificial Intelligence is considered weird!)  And yes, eventually such scientific truths will be established by experiment, but somewhere along the line - before they are definitely established and everyone already believes in them - the testers will need funding.

Being skeptical about some non-mainstream beliefs is not a fringe project of little importance, not always a slam-dunk, not a bit of occasional pointless drudgery - though I can certainly understand why it feels that way to argue with creationists.  Skepticism is just the converse of acceptance, and so to be skeptical of a non-mainstream belief is to try to contribute to the project of advancing the borders of the known - to stake an additional epistemic claim that the borders should not expand in this direction, and should advance in some other direction instead.

This is high and difficult work - certainly much more difficult than the work of mocking everything that sounds weird and that the people in your social circle don't already seem to believe.

To put it more formally, before I believe that someone is performing useful cognitive work, I want to know that their skepticism discriminates truth from falsehood, making a contribution over and above the contribution of this-sounds-weird-and-is-not-a-tribal-belief.  In Bayesian terms, I want to know that p(mockery|belief false & not a tribal belief) > p(mockery|belief true & not a tribal belief).

If I recall correctly, the US Air Force's Project Blue Book, on UFOs, explained away as a sighting of the planet Venus what turned out to actually be an experimental aircraft.  No, I don't believe in UFOs either; but if you're going to explain away experimental aircraft as Venus, then nothing else you say provides further Bayesian evidence against UFOs either.  You are merely an undiscriminating skeptic.  I don't believe in UFOs, but in order to credit Project Blue Book with additional help in establishing this, I would have to believe that if there were UFOs then Project Blue Book would have turned in a different report.

And so if you're just as skeptical of a weird, non-tribal belief that turns out to have pretty good support, you just blew the whole deal - that is, if I pay any extra attention to your skepticism, it ought to be because I believe you wouldn't mock a weird non-tribal belief that was worthy of debate.

Personally, I think that Michael Shermer blew it by mocking molecular nanotechnology, and Penn and Teller blew it by mocking cryonics (justification: more or less exactly the same reasons I gave for Artificial Intelligence).  Conversely, Richard Dawkins scooped up a huge truckload of actual-discriminating-skeptic points, at least in my book, for not making fun of the many-worlds interpretation when he was asked about in an interview; indeed, Dawkins noted (correctly) that the traditional collapse postulate pretty much has to be incorrect.  The many-worlds interpretation isn't just the formally simplest explanation that fits the facts, it also sounds weird and is not yet a tribal belief of the educated crowd; so whether someone makes fun of MWI is indeed a good test of whether they understand Occam's Razor or are just mocking everything that's not a tribal belief.

Of course you may not trust me about any of that.  And so my purpose today is not to propose a new litmus test to replace atheism.

But I do propose that before you give anyone credit for being a smart, rational skeptic, that you ask them to defend some non-mainstream belief.  And no, atheism doesn't count as non-mainstream anymore, no matter what the polls show.  It has to be something that most of their social circle doesn't believe, or something that most of their social circle does believe which they think is wrong.  Dawkins endorsing many-worlds still counts for now, although its usefulness as an indicator is fading fast... but the point is not to endorse many-worlds, but to see them take some sort of positive stance on where the frontiers of knowledge should change.

Don't get me wrong, there's a whole crazy world out there, and when Richard Dawkins starts whaling on astrology in "The Enemies of Reason" documentary, he is doing good and necessary work. But it's dangerous to let people pick up too much credit just for slamming astrology and homeopathy and UFOs and God.  What if they become famous skeptics by picking off the cheap targets, and then use that prestige and credibility to go after nanotechnology?  Who will dare to consider cryonics now that it's been featured on an episode of Penn and Teller's "Bullshit"?  On the current system you can gain high prestige in the educated circle just by targeting beliefs like astrology that are widely believed to be uneducated; but then the same guns can be turned on new ideas like the many-worlds interpretation, even though it's being actively debated by physicists.  And that's why I suggest, not any particular litmus test, but just that you ought to have to stick your neck out and say something a little less usual - say where you are not skeptical (and most of your tribemates are) or where you are skeptical (and most of the people in your tribe are not).

I am minded to pay attention to Robyn Dawes as a skillful rationalist, not because Dawes has slammed easy targets like astrology, but because he also took the lead in assembling and popularizing the total lack of experimental evidence for nearly all schools of psychotherapy and the persistence of multiple superstitions such as Rorschach ink-blot interpretation in the face of literally hundreds of experiments trying and failing to find any evidence for it.  It's not that psychotherapy seemed like a difficult target after Dawes got through with it, but that, at the time he attacked it, people in educated circles still thought of it as something that educated people believed in.  It's not quite as useful today, but back when Richard Feynman published "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" you could pick up evidence that he was actually thinking from the fact that he disrespected psychotherapists as well as psychics.

I'll conclude with some simple and non-trustworthy indicators that the skeptic is just filling in a cheap and largely automatic mockery template:

  • The "skeptic" opens by remarking about the crazy true believers and wishful thinkers who believe in X, where there seem to be a surprising number of physicists making up the population of those wacky cult victims who believe in X.  (The physicist-test is not an infallible indicator of rightness or even non-stupidity, but it's a filter that rapidly picks up on, say, strong AI, molecular nanotechnology, cryonics, the many-worlds interpretation, and so on.)  Bonus point losses if the "skeptic" remarks on how easily physicists are seduced by sci-fi ideas.  The reason why this is a particularly negative indicator is that when someone is in a mode of automatically arguing against everything that seems weird and isn't a belief of their tribe - of rejecting weird beliefs as a matter of naked perceptual recognition of weirdness - then they tend to perceptually fill-in-the-blank by assuming that anything weird is believed by wacky cult victims (i.e., people Not Of Our Tribe).  And they don't backtrack, or wonder otherwise, even if they find out that the "cult" seems to exhibit a surprising number of people who go around talking about rationality and/or members with PhDs in physics.  Roughly, they have an automatic template for mocking weird beliefs, and if this requires them to just swap in physicists for astrologers as gullible morons, that's what they'll do.  Of course physicists can be gullible morons too, but you should be establishing that as a surprising conclusion, not using it as an opening premise!
  • The "skeptic" offers up items of "evidence" against X which are not much less expected in the case that X is true than in the case that X is false; in other words, they fail to grasp the elementary Bayesian notion of evidence.  I don't believe that UFOs are alien visitors, but my skepticism has nothing to do with all the crazy people who believe in UFOs - the existence of wacky cults is not much less expected in the case that aliens do exist, than in the case that they do not.  (I am skeptical of UFOs, not because I fear affiliating myself with the low-prestige people who believe in UFOs, but because I don't believe aliens would (a) travel across interstellar distances AND (b) hide all signs of their presence AND THEN (c) fly gigantic non-nanotechnological aircraft over our military bases with their exterior lights on.)
  • The demand for unobtainable evidence is a special case of the above, and of course a very common mode of skepticism gone wrong.  Artificial Intelligence and molecular nanotechnology both involve beliefs in the future feasibility of technologies that we can't build right now, but (arguendo) seem to be strongly permitted by current scientific belief, i.e., the non-ineffability of the brain, or the basic physical calculations which seem to show that simple nanotechnological machines should work.  To discard all the arguments from cognitive science and rely on the knockdown argument "no reliable reporter has ever seen an AI!" is blindly filling in the template from haunted houses.
  • The "skeptic" tries to scare you away from the belief in their very first opening remarks: for example, pointing out how UFO cults beat and starve their victims (when this can just as easily happen if aliens are visiting the Earth).  The negative consequences of a false belief may be real, legitimate truths to be communicated; but only after you establish by other means that the belief is factually false - otherwise it's the logical fallacy of appeal to consequences.
  • They mock first and counterargue later or not at all.  I do believe there's a place for mockery in the war on dumb ideas, but first you write the crushing factual counterargument, then you conclude with the mockery.

I'll conclude the conclusion by observing that poor skepticism can just as easily exist in a case where a belief is wrong as when a belief is right, so pointing out these flaws in someone's skepticism can hardly serve to establish a positive belief about where the frontiers of knowledge should move.

Comments (1329)

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Comment author: Jiro 05 May 2015 03:50:43PM 1 point [-]

Responding to an old post:

If I recall correctly, the US Air Force's Project Blue Book, on UFOs, explained away as a sighting of the planet Venus what turned out to actually be an experimental aircraft. No, I don't believe in UFOs either; but if you're going to explain away experimental aircraft as Venus, then nothing else you say provides further Bayesian evidence against UFOs either. You are merely an undiscriminating skeptic. I don't believe in UFOs, but in order to credit Project Blue Book with additional help in establishing this, I would have to believe that if there were UFOs then Project Blue Book would have turned in a different report.

This is wrong. Explaining away a single experimental aircraft as Venus doesn't mean that you're an undiscriminating skeptic or that whether there are UFOs doesn't make any difference to what you would say. It just means that you've made one mistake. And estimates based on probability are going to turn out to be wrong sometimes; there could very well be one that is an aircraft but where the available information indicates that Venus is more likely than an aircraft. Someone using this available information would legitimately (although incorrectly) deduce that the object is Venus.

Comment author: christopherj 14 October 2013 06:37:27PM 5 points [-]

Want to know if someone is a good rationalist? Ask them what the best arguments are for a belief he strongly opposes on a complex issue. See if the arguments he gives are the strongest ones, or the weak ones. To strongly oppose a belief on a complex issue, requires hearing the best arguments from both sides. Being unaware of the best opposing arguments, or being unwilling to speak them, is pretty good evidence that he let his biases get in the way of his reasoning.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 14 October 2013 07:08:06PM 4 points [-]

It helps if, prior to using this technique, I've given them reason to trust me to be primarily interested in something other than scoring points off of them by "winning" arguments.

Comment author: Jiro 23 April 2013 07:40:20PM 2 points [-]

If a lot of crazy people believe in UFOs, it's probably not because every crazy person picked a random page in the dictionary and said "I'll have a crazy belief about that". Rather, it's probably because the human mind has intrinsic flaws for which characteristics of the UFO meme happen to be a good match. If I conclude that UFOs exist, it is more likely that my reasoning process was corrupted by these intrinsic human flaws and therefore that my argument has an unnoticed flaw than if I conclude something else which isn't a subject of cult behavior. Of course, if I assume that my mind is unflawed, this doesn't apply, but I really shouldn't go around assuming that my mind is unflawed.

And even if I assume that my mind doesn't contain any UFO-leaning flaws, I can't assume the same about other people. Any evidence they provide is more likely to be biased. Even if I just try to analyze the arguments made by other people for UFOs, that set of arguments will contain a larger proportion of bad arguments than a similar set of arguments for a non-cultish proposition. Assuming that I am equally good at detecting bad arguments for UFOs and for the non-cultish proposition, it is then more likely overall that a bad UFO argument will slip by my filters than a bad argument for the non-cultish proposition. Again, if I assume that I'm perfect at reasoning and never let bad arguments of any type pass my filters, this doesn't apply, but I can't assume that.

Comment author: TheatreAddict 22 January 2012 04:43:53AM 1 point [-]

Okay, so astrology to me sounds extremely unscientific. But I haven't read anything on the subject, and other than knowing that it's something a lot of scientists thing is.. unscientific. To be perfectly fair, I can't just dismiss it because other people dismiss it.

I'd like to be able to dismiss it for scientific reasons. Because I was reading my horoscope, and I was like, "Hmm, well these are extremely vague statements that could apply to anyone and I don't particularly identify with." But then I was reading a friends, and I majorly freaked out because of how accurate it was.

So because of that, I now want to know the truth. Either astrology works or it doesn't. Does anyone know how I could go about determining this? I mean, does anyone have any books or online articles that they would recommend? I'd really appreciate it. I just want to understand.

Comment author: PhilosophyTutor 23 January 2012 12:12:58AM *  4 points [-]

Here's a link:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Astrology

In brief, there is no evidence from properly conducted trials that astrology can predict future events at a rate better than chance. In addition physics as we currently understand it precludes any possible effect on us from objects so far away.

Astrology can appear to work through a variety of cognitive biases or can be made to appear to work through various forms of trickery. For example when someone is majorly freaked out by the accuracy of a guess (and with a large enough population reading a guess it's bound to be accurate for some of them) that is much more memorable and much more likely to be shared with others than times when the prediction is obviously wrong. As such the availability heuristic might make you think that such instances are far more common than they actually are, while the actual frequency is entirely explicable by chance alone.

Comment author: Incorrect 21 April 2012 05:23:33PM 1 point [-]

In addition physics as we currently understand it precludes any possible effect on us from objects so far away.

So our world would look exactly the same without astronomy? (I'm kidding of course but that statement should require further qualification)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 22 January 2012 04:53:17AM 13 points [-]

A simple exercise to see whether further theoretical research is justified might be to have a friend print out the horoscopes for all the Zodiac signs or whatever, remove identifying characteristics from each one, and have you rank all of them every day for a month in terms of how accurate they are. Then see whether the horoscope accuracy correlates better with the ones for your sign than the ones for other signs.

Comment author: Anubhav 22 January 2012 05:38:46AM 3 points [-]

More doable than my idea. Upvoted.

Comment author: Salivanth 26 April 2013 04:45:09PM *  1 point [-]

How'd it go?

EDIT: My bad, I thought this was posted on 22 January 2013, not 22 January 2012. I'll leave this up just in case though.

Comment author: DSimon 22 January 2012 07:31:51AM *  5 points [-]

Here's a really neat chart from OkTrends (a blog discussing data from the dating website OkCupid) showing match percentages between people of various astrological signs, based on similarity between the users' answers to a wide range of questions:

http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/races_and_religions/Match-By-Zodiac-Title.png

The data there implies pretty strongly that astrological sign has no predictive ability when it comes to a person's self-description.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 January 2012 03:48:14PM *  2 points [-]

Unless they had several thousand couples for each one of the 144 cells, I'm very surprised there weren't bigger fluctuations due to chance alone. (And that single “59” shows that they didn't round all numbers to the nearest ten.)

Comment author: DSimon 22 January 2012 05:10:32PM *  6 points [-]

Sorry, I should have linked the article earlier instead of just the chart.

On sample size: Keep in mind that it isn't couples that are being looked at here, just comparisons between users' self-reports. Specifically, each question has two answers: The user's self-report, and what they would want a potential date to answer. The compatibility percentage is based on matching from A's wants to B's reports and vice-versa.

For the article, data was collected from a randomly selected pool of 500,000 straight users. The gender balance among straight users is about 60% men, 40% women, so that's about 25,000 men in each row and 17,000 women in each column. So each cell has about 400 million comparisons.

Comment author: arundelo 22 January 2012 05:27:52PM *  4 points [-]

Indeed they did -- about 868 million couples per cell by my reckoning, or about half that if they're only pairing based on preferred gender:

Here are the grouped match percentages for a random pool of 500,000 users. Astrological sign has no effect whatsoever on how compatible two people are.

[...]

We're showing you this table, as dull as it is, because the uniformity neatly illustrates how beefy our data set is. There are 144 pools considered above, and they all match the mean plus or minus 0.5%.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 22 January 2012 05:01:17AM 4 points [-]

As OtherDave said, all you need is a blind-test. You need to read the horoscopes WITHOUT KNOWING WHICH ONE IS WHICH; then grade them on "accuracy" still without knowing which one is which. Only after you've written the grades down, you should check whether they correspond better than chance would allow.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 18 November 2011 03:15:33PM 16 points [-]

No, I don't believe in UFOs either

Sometimes things are in flight and the observers can't identify them. What we don't believe in is paranormal or space alien explanations for UFOs.

I've seen undiscriminating skepticism applied to doubting the reports of slightly weird things in the sky.

Comment author: komponisto 13 July 2011 02:46:33AM 1 point [-]

Note: this post should be not only included in, but at the top of, lists like this. This is one of the most important posts on the site.

Comment author: Eoghanalbar 03 September 2010 03:31:16AM 7 points [-]

Awesome. =]

If say, "This isn't about a test of rationality itself, but a test for true free-thinking. All good rationalists must be free-thinkers, but not all free-thinkers are necessarily good rationalists", is that a good summary?

Comment author: CarlShulman 01 May 2010 09:21:26PM *  4 points [-]

Here's a discussion of this post at the James Randi forums. Reaction seems net negative with high variance: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=5726673

Comment author: PhilGoetz 24 March 2010 08:30:17PM *  6 points [-]

If you disagree with your tribe, you get rationality points for independent thinking; but you lose rationality points for failing to update. Is the total positive or negative?

Comment author: gelisam 19 March 2010 08:03:19PM 6 points [-]

I've been following Alicorn's sequence on luminousness, that is, on getting to know ourselves better. I had lowered my estimate of my own rationality when she mentioned that we tend to think too highly of ourselves, but now I can bump my estimate back up. There is at least one belief which my tribe elevates to the rank of scientific fact, yet which I think is probably wrong: I do not believe in the Big Bang.

Of course, I don't believe the universe was created a few thousand years ago either. I don't have any plausible alternative hypothesis, I just think that the arguments I have read in the many popular science physics book I have read are inconclusive.

First, these books usually justify the Big Bang theory as follows. Right now, it is an observable fact that stars are currently moving away from each other. Therefore, there was a time in the past where they were much closer. Therefore, there was a time where all the stars in the universe occupied the same point. It is this last "therefore" which I don't buy: there is no particular reason to assume that if the stars are moving away from each other right now, then they must always have done so. They could be expanding and contracting in a sort of sine wave, or something more complicated.

Second, the background radiation which is said to be leftover stray photons from the big bang. If the background radiation was a prediction of Big Bang theory, then I might have been convinced by this experimental evidence, but in fact the background radiation was discovered by accident. Only afterwards did the proponents of Big Bang theory retrofit it as a prediction of their model.

Third, the acceleration. The discovery that the expansion was accelerating was a surprise to the scientific community. In particular, it was not predicted by Big Bang theory, even though it seems like the kind of thing which an explanatory model of the expansion of the universe should have predicted right away.

Fourth, the inflation phase. This part was added later on, once it had been observed that Big Bang theory did not fit with the observed homogeneousness of the cosmos. To me, this seems like a desperate and ad hod attempt to fix a broken theory.

Now, it could be that all these changes are a progression of refinements, just like Newtonian physics was adjusted to take into account the effects of relativity, and just like the spherical Earth was adjusted to make it an elliptical Earth. But the adjustments which Big Bang theory has suffered seem like they should change the predictions completely, rather than, as in the other cases, increasing the precision of the existing theory.

I am, of course, open to being convinced otherwise. If Big Bang theory really is true, then I wish to believe it is true.

Comment author: orthonormal 20 March 2010 06:02:43PM *  25 points [-]

There is no particular reason to assume that if the stars are moving away from each other right now, then they must always have done so. They could be expanding and contracting in a sort of sine wave, or something more complicated.

The key is there at the end of your quote. From the first set of observations (of relatively close galaxies), the simplest behavior that explained the observations was that everything was flying apart fast enough to overcome gravity. This predicted that when they had the technology to look at more distant galaxies, these too should be flying away from us, and at certain rates depending on their distance.

When we actually could observe those more distant galaxies, we did in fact see them red-shifted as predicted. This alone should be enough to put the "sine wave" theory in the epistemic category of "because the Dark Lords of the Matrix like red shifts", because the light left these galaxies at all different times! It would take a vast conspiracy for them all to line up as red-shifted right now, from our perspective.

With strong evidence in hand that the galaxies had been flying apart for billions and billions of years, the scientists then noticed an irregularity: the velocities of those distant galaxies were different from the extrapolation made on the early data! However, they differed in a patterned way, and the simplest way to account for this discrepancy was a variant of Einstein's "cosmological constant" idea.

Additional support for the Big Bang:

  • Stephen Hawking calculated that there would have been no way for matter to fly towards a point, "miss" colliding with itself, and fly apart in an apparent expansion without a singularity and Big Bang. (This is somewhere in A Brief History of Time, but Google Books won't let me find it.)

  • We can roughly estimate our galaxy's age by other means (i.e. how much hydrogen has been used up in stars, how much is left). Have you looked into this, to see whether the estimates thus derived are consistent with the estimate of about 10 billion years that the Big Bang theory implies?

  • Finally, the cosmic background radiation gives us way more than one bit of data; its spectrum is precisely the black-body radiation one expects from a Big Bang.

ETA: Also, this seems like exactly the sort of issue where the "physicist-test" applies, as described above. For example, being critical of QM on common-sense grounds (of course the electron has to go through one slit or the other!) doesn't make for discriminating skepticism, since one should assign high probability to physicists having strong evidence to this effect if they're claiming something weird, or else one should have strong evidence that common sense usually beats the consensus of the physics community. Needless to say, I wouldn't hold my breath on the second claim.

Comment author: gelisam 20 March 2010 11:58:17PM *  28 points [-]

You win. I did not realize that we knew that galaxies have been flying apart for billions and billions of years, as opposed to just right now. If something has been going on for so long, I agree that the simplest explanation is that it has always been going on, and this is precisely the conclusion which I thought popular science books took for granted.

Your other arguments only hammer the nail deeper, of course. But I notice that they have a much smaller impact on my unofficial beliefs, even thought they should have a bigger impact. I mean, the fact that the expansion has been going on for at least a billion years is a weaker evidence for the Big Bang than the fact that it predicts the cosmic background radiation and the age of the universe.

I take this as an opportunity to improve the art of rationality, by suggesting that in the case where an unofficial belief contradicts an official belief, one should attempt to find what originally caused the unofficial belief to settle in. If this original internal argument can be shown to be bogus, the mind should be less reluctant to give up and align with the official belief.

Of course, I'm forced to generalize from the sole example I've noticed so far, so for the time being, please take this suggestion with a grain of salt.

Comment author: orthonormal 22 March 2010 12:53:41AM 28 points [-]

I prefer the meme where you've just won by learning something new; you now know more than most people about the justifications for Big Bang cosmology, in addition to (going meta) the sort of standards for evidence in physics, and (most meta and most importantly) how your own mind works when dealing with counterintuitive claims. I won too, because I had to look up (for the first time) some claims I'd taken for granted in order to respond adequately to your critique.

I take this as an opportunity to improve the art of rationality

Good idea! It's especially helpful, I think, that you're writing out your reactions and your analysis of how it feels to update on new evidence. We haven't recorded nearly as much in-the-moment data as we ought on what it's like to change one's mind...

Comment author: DSimon 11 March 2011 01:47:33PM *  20 points [-]

When two people argue, and they both realize who is actually right, without drama or flaring tempers, then everybody wins. Even people down the block who weren't participating at all, a bit; they don't know it yet, but their world has become slightly awesomer.

Comment author: simplicio 20 March 2010 07:55:44AM *  9 points [-]

If the background radiation was a prediction of Big Bang theory, then I might have been convinced by this experimental evidence, but in fact the background radiation was discovered by accident. Only afterwards did the proponents of Big Bang theory retrofit it as a prediction of their model.

Not true; Alpher & Gamow predicted the radiation, although they were off by a few kelvins.

there is no particular reason to assume that if the stars are moving away from each other right now, then they must always have done so. They could be expanding and contracting in a sort of sine wave, or something more complicated.

True, but this lacks parsimony, & the mechanism by which the "sine wave" (or whatever) could be produced is unknown. The universe is expanding now, implying some force behind the expansion. Gravity is attractive only. Celestial objects almost all have net electric charge as close to 0 as makes no odds, so they do not repel each other. The strong nuclear force is always attractive too. You see what I mean? What could possibly cause the outward oscillation, if not extreme density? It's not like when stars come close to each other they suddenly feel a repulsion.

I don't see how you can make sense of this without the Big Bang, except by positing unknown physical forces or something.

Very interesting post though. You seem curious; I'd recommend Jonathan Allday's book "Quarks, Leptons & the Big Bang" on this subject. It's reasonably technical, given that it's not a textbook.

Comment author: gelisam 20 March 2010 02:52:33PM 7 points [-]

Thanks! I had only heard about the accidental discovery by two Bell employees of an excess measurement which they could not explain, but now that you mention that it was in fact predicted, it's totally reasonable that the Bell employees simply did not know about the scientific prediction at the moment of their measurement. I should have read Wikipedia.

The probability of predicting something as strange as the background radiation given that the theory on which the prediction is based is fundamentally flawed seems rather low. Accordingly, I should update my belief in the Big Bang substantially. But actually updating on evidence is hard, so I don't feel convinced yet, even though I know I should. For this reason, I will read the book you recommended, in the hope that its contents will manage to shift my unofficial beliefs too. Thanks again!

Comment author: wedrifid 20 March 2010 12:29:52AM 9 points [-]

but now I can bump my estimate back up. There is at least one belief which my tribe elevates to the rank of scientific fact, yet which I think is probably wrong: I do not believe in the Big Bang.

I don't think we can reasonably elevate our estimate of our own rationality by observing that we disagree with the consensus of a respected community.

Second, the background radiation which is said to be leftover stray photons from the big bang. If the background radiation was a prediction of Big Bang theory, then I might have been convinced by this experimental evidence, but in fact the background radiation was discovered by accident. Only afterwards did the proponents of Big Bang theory retrofit it as a prediction of their model.

I am wary of this kind of argument. I should not be able to discredit a theory by the act of collecting all possible evidence and publishing before they have a chance to think things through.

Comment author: gelisam 20 March 2010 03:44:24PM *  4 points [-]

I don't think we can reasonably elevate our estimate of our own rationality by observing that we disagree with the consensus of a respected community.

But isn't Eliezer suggesting, in this very post, that we should use uncommon justified beliefs as an indicator that people are actually thinking for themselves as opposed to copying the beliefs of the community? I would assume that the standards we use to judge others should also apply when judging ourselves.

On the other hand, what you're saying sounds reasonable too. After all, crackpots also disagree with the consensus of a respected community.

The point is that there could be many reasons why a person would disagree with a respected community, one of which is that the person is actually being rational and that the community is wrong. Or, as seems to be the case here, that the person is actually being rational but hasn't yet encountered all the evidence which the community has. In any case, given the fact that I'm here, following a website dedicated to the art of rationality, I think that in this case rationality is quite a likely cause for my disagreement.

I should not be able to discredit a theory by the act of collecting all possible evidence and publishing before they have a chance to think things through.

I agree that if a piece of evidence is published before it is predicted, this is not evidence against the theory, but it does weaken the prediction considerably. Therefore, please don't publish this entire collection of all possible evidence, as it will make it much harder afterwards to distinguish between theories!

Comment author: thezeus18 21 March 2010 12:19:50AM 6 points [-]

"But isn't Eliezer suggesting, in this very post, that we should use uncommon justified beliefs as an indicator that people are actually thinking for themselves as opposed to copying the beliefs of the community? I would assume that the standards we use to judge others should also apply when judging ourselves.

On the other hand, what you're saying sounds reasonable too. After all, crackpots also disagree with the consensus of a respected community."

Eliezer didn't say that we should use "disagreeing with the consensus of a respected community" as an indicator of rationality. He said that we should use disagreeing with the consensus of one's own community as an indicator of rationality.

Comment author: Kevin 18 March 2010 08:40:53AM 1 point [-]

Post alternative tl;dr's here.

Comment author: Pavitra 03 August 2011 04:13:39AM 5 points [-]

People tend to believe things that are popular to believe. If you want to find out whether someone's actually smart, rather than if they're just going along with the crowd, then look at their unpopular beliefs. If they believe unpopular true things, they're probably actually smart.

Comment author: Kevin 18 March 2010 08:40:47AM 1 point [-]

As per http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1193450, this could use a catchier title.

Post alternative title suggestions here.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 18 March 2010 05:26:29PM *  2 points [-]

I'm pretty sure the commenter there is referring to the title with which it was posted on Hacker News ("First write the crushing counterargument, then conclude with mockery."), not the title here.

Comment author: Kevin 19 March 2010 12:08:51AM 1 point [-]

Right, but I predict that if submitted to Hacker News at the same time of day with the actual title and no one commenting here that it was resubmitted, then it will receive even fewer upvotes. "Undiscriminating Skepticism" isn't as catchy of a title as Less Wrong's last general audience article and Hacker News hit, "What is Bayesianism?"

Comment author: RobinZ 18 March 2010 12:51:36PM 2 points [-]

"Groupdoubt", but that's fairly horrible.

Comment author: Hook 17 March 2010 08:24:50PM 3 points [-]

Another test:

Could smoking during pregnancy have a benefit? Could drinking during pregnancy have a benefit? It's not necessary that someone know what the benefit could be, just acknowledge the nicotine and alcohol are drugs that have complex effects on the body.

As for smoking, it's definitely a bad idea, but it reduces the chances of pre-eclampsia. I don't know of any benefit for alcohol.

Comment author: bluej100 08 May 2012 10:39:20PM 2 points [-]

I'll reply two years later: Light drinking during pregnancy is associated with children with fewer behavioral and cognitive problems. This is probably a result of the correlation between moderate alcohol consumption and iq and education, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 17 March 2010 04:22:53PM 2 points [-]

OK, now here's one that might be interesting. Is there a gap, or is the date a lie?

Comment author: Christian_Szegedy 28 May 2010 03:18:22AM *  6 points [-]

This is quite an old "thesis" by Illig originally stemming from a very simple arithmetic misunderstanding. (No: Pope Gregory aligned his calendar to match eastern date as at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, not with the original beginning of the Julian calendar)

There is no need for radiocarbon dating to refute it, since a lot of evidence could easily pinpoint it as a crackpot theory, especially:

  • Comparison with historical recordings of oriental (esp. Chinese) civilizations.
  • Synchronization by well known astronomical events, like Halley comet, eclipses, etc
Comment author: orthonormal 20 March 2010 06:50:00PM 5 points [-]

Making up an additional 200 years of Roman imperial history, in a way that duped generations of later historians, sounds to me prima facie very unlikely.

Comment author: ciphergoth 17 March 2010 04:50:05PM *  2 points [-]

Is there ice core data to cover the gap?

EDIT: radiometric dating would present another big problem for this thesis. Still, it's very unfortunate that the dendrochronology data isn't public.

Comment author: RobinZ 17 March 2010 04:35:13PM 1 point [-]

The data proposed to support the gap is awfully weak - and I think that is the correct response for an educated layperson.

Comment author: Yvain 16 March 2010 09:28:00PM 43 points [-]

Two more non-trustworthy indicators:

  • Ask the person in question which of the several ridiculous ideas they reject they find least ridiculous - for example "Which do you think is more likely to be true - astrology, or UFOs?" I've found people trying to signal affiliation have a hard time with this sort of question and will even be flustered by it, saying something along the lines of "They're both stupid" or "Is this some sort of trick to make me sound like I believe a crazy idea?". A rationalist will say something more like "Well, I don't believe either, but UFOs at least make sense with our idea of the universe, whereas astrology is just plain crazytalk" (or ze may refuse to answer on the grounds that you're wasting zir time; it's not a perfect test).

  • Observe the circumstances in which the person involved brings up the belief. If they just go to atheist forums and say "Man, those religious people sure are stupid," higher probability of signaller. If they actively talk to religious people, try to use atheism as a starting point for building new ideas, and don't bring it up much when it's not relevant, higher probability they believe it for the right reasons.

Comment author: Strange7 27 June 2011 06:15:12AM 4 points [-]

I'd be willing to seriously consider astrology in the sense that what time of year someone was born, and thus the weather and food their mother was exposed to in utero or that they had to deal with during some early developmental window, could have consistent effects on personality.

I've heard enough conflicting explanations for "UFOs" that I think there probably is some real phenomenon to explain, even if it's just neurological.

Comment author: DanielLC 19 March 2012 12:11:13AM 5 points [-]

I've heard enough conflicting explanations for "UFOs" that I think there probably is some real phenomenon to explain, even if it's just neurological.

What makes you think there's only one?

Comment author: MichaelVassar 17 March 2010 08:36:47PM 10 points [-]

A sufficiently good rationalist should probably decompose astrology and UFOs into different possible definitions and discuss both priors and the nature of the processes that probably produce the two beliefs.

Comment author: goodside 17 March 2010 12:44:37PM *  11 points [-]

I wouldn't answer the astrology/UFO question. Extraterrestrials visiting in flying human-vehicle-sized ships from human-visible distances is so horribly anthropomorphic as to make it immeasurably improbable. Both propositions are far less likely than me winning the lottery, and that's the best I can get from my wetware. Anything further is like asking, "Which are you more certain is a European country, France or Spain?"

Also, I'm inclined to avoid questions of this form on principle. It's like Yudkowsky's "blue tentacle" in Technical Explanation: Being able to find outs for a theory that doesn't fit evidence is anti-knowledge, and the more practice you get at it the crazier you become.

Comment author: RobbBB 24 April 2013 10:26:14AM 3 points [-]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'anthropomorphic' here. One way to think about framing the comparison is to note that if intelligent extraterrestrials have visited us, we have to update strongly in favor of their intelligence playing an important role in our intelligence. In any universe that isn't completely teeming with intelligent life, this will hold for anthropic reasons; two intelligences are immeasurably more likely to encounter each other if one had a causal role in the other's coming to existence (via panspermia and/or guided evolution). So some of the bizarre anthropomorphism here can be dispensed with.

But note that if we want to pull a similar trick regarding astrology -- and I think there's several orders of magnitude more reason to be inclined to do this in the astrology case than in the UFO case -- then we'll need to posit an intelligent designer for our entire universe, not just for our species. In the one case our understanding of the origin of life on Earth is wrong; that's not surprising as these things go, since most scientists have already noted their current and ongoing confusion about the timeline for life on Earth's origination. In the other case, however, our understanding of the fabric of the universe is completely wrong. We are not in the least bit confused, at this point, about how it is that our psychological dispositions sometimes correlate with astronomical phenomena. To discover that there is a causal connection would mean that Approximately Everything You Know Is A Lie. That's a bigger deal, I think.

Comment author: jhuffman 26 September 2011 09:03:43PM 10 points [-]

UFOs are possible given what we know of the universe. Unlikely, yes, but its possible to have them without us learning much new about the universe. Astrology, not so much. Astrology means we have totally whiffed on science and have to integrate all the contradictory information we have in ways that are unimaginable.

Comment author: RobinZ 17 March 2010 12:50:07PM *  16 points [-]

Spain is more Middle-Eastern than France and France was on the European front of both World Wars, so France. I can see your point, though.

Comment author: DonGeddis 16 March 2010 10:06:06PM 27 points [-]

Proposed litmus test: infanticide.

General cultural norms label this practice as horrific, and most people's gut reactions concur. But a good chunk of rationality is separating emotions from logic. Once you've used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are "just" meat machines, and abortion is an ok if perhaps regrettable practice ... well, scientifically, there just isn't all that much difference between a fetus a couple months before birth, and an infant a couple of months after.

This doesn't argue that infants have zero value, but instead that they should be treated more like property or perhaps like pets (rather than like adult citizens). Don't unnecessarily cause them to suffer, but on the other hand you can choose to euthanize your own, if you wish, with no criminal consequences.

Get one of your friends who claims to be a rationalist. See if they can argue passionately in favor of infanticide.

Comment author: Chrysophylax 29 December 2013 07:16:51PM *  3 points [-]

This doesn't argue that infants have zero value, but instead that they should be treated more like property or perhaps like pets (rather than like adult citizens).

You haven't taken account of discounted future value. A child is worth more than a chimpanzee of equal intelligence because a child can become an adult human. I agree that a newborn baby is not substantially more valuable than a close-to-term one and that there is no strong reason for caring about a euthanised baby over one that is never born, but I'm not convinced that assigning much lower value to young children is a net benefit for a society not composed of rationalists (which is not to say that it is not an net benefit, merely that I don't properly understand where people's actions and professed beliefs come from in this area and don't feel confident in my guesses about what would happen if they wised up on this issue alone).

The proper question to ask is "If these resources are not spent on this child, what will they be spent on instead and what are the expected values deriving from each option?" Thus contraception has been a huge benefit to society: it costs lots and lots of lives that never happen, but it's hugely boosted the quality of the lives that do.

I do agree that willingness to consider infanticide and debate precisely how much babies and foetuses are worth is a strong indicator of rationality.

Comment author: Ishaan 05 October 2013 08:28:08PM *  2 points [-]

Are you allowed to use moral questions as litmus tests for rationality? Paper clippers are rational too.

It isn't inconceivable that a human might just value babies intrinsically (rather than because they possess an amount of intellect, emotion, and growth potential).

If anyone here has been reading this and trying to use more abstract values to try to justify why one should not to harm babies, and is unable to come up with anything, and still feels a strong moral aversion to anyone harming babies anywhere ever, then maybe it means you just intrinsically value not harming babies? As in, you value babies for reasons that go beyond the baby's personhood or lack thereoff?

(By the way, the abstract reason i managed to come up with was that current degree of personhood and future degree of personhood interact in additive ways. I'll react with appreciation to someone poking a hole in that, but I suspect I'll find another explanation rather than changing my mind. It's not that I necessarily value babies intrinsically - it's more that I don't fully understand my own preferences at an abstract level, but I do know that a moral system that allows gratuitous baby-killing must be one that does not match my preferences. So if you poke a hole in my abstract reasons, it merely means that my attempt to abstractly convey my preferences was wrong. It won't change the underlying preference.)

<But a good chunk of rationality is separating emotions from logic

Even if I insert "epistemic", i find this only partially true.

Edit: Although, my preferences do agree with yours to the extent that harming a young child does seem worse than harming a baby (though both are terrible enough to be illegal and punishable crimes). So I might respect the idea of merciful killing (in times of famine, for example) at a young age to prevent future death-inducing-suffering.

Comment author: taw 23 July 2011 10:51:07AM 13 points [-]

That's an amusing example because infanticide was extremely common among human cultures, so all good cultural relativists should be fine with this practice.

Usually there was a strong distinction between actually killing a baby (extremely wrong thing to do), and abandoning it to elements (acceptable). I'm not talking about any exotic cultures, ancient Greece and Rome and even large parts of Christian Medieval Europe practiced infant abandonment. There are even examples of Greek and Roman writers noting how strange it is that Egyptians and Jews never kill their children - perfect stuff for any cultural relativists. It was only once people switched from abandoning infants to elements to abandoning them at churches when it ceased being outright infanticide.

Anyway, pretty much the only reason babies are cute is as defense against abandonment. This shows it was never anything exceptional and was always a major evolutionary force. By some estimates up to 50% of all babies were killed or abandoned to certain death in Paleolithic societies (all such claims are highly speculative of course).

Infant abandonment is normal, and people should have the same right to abandon their babies as they always had. Especially since these days we just put them into orphanages. Choosing infanticide over abandonment is pretty pointless, so why do it?

A lot of sources can be easily found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide

Comment author: wedrifid 19 March 2010 11:16:00PM 8 points [-]

Don't unnecessarily cause them to suffer, but on the other hand you can choose to euthanize your own, if you wish, with no criminal consequences.

Yes, I should also be allowed to kill adults. Especially if they have it coming. After all, the infant still has a chance to grow up to make a worthwhile contribution while there are many adults that are clearly a waste of good oxygen or worse!

Comment author: Rain 19 March 2010 06:47:35PM *  5 points [-]

Real world test of human value along similar lines: Ashley X.

Comment author: Clippy 17 March 2010 11:20:32PM 13 points [-]

Infanticide and abortion are okay, as long as doing so increases paperclip production.

However, infanticide and abortion are obviously not alone in that respect.

Comment author: mattnewport 17 March 2010 11:25:54PM 26 points [-]

How do you feel about the destruction of a partially bent piece of steel wire before it has been bent fully into paperclip shape?

Comment author: Clippy 17 March 2010 11:29:20PM 26 points [-]

Is that some kind of threat???

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 March 2010 06:31:14PM 28 points [-]

Despite some jokes I made earlier, things that could arguably depend on values don't make good litmus tests. Though I did at one point talk to someone who tried to convert me to vegetarianism by saying that if I was willing to eat pork, it ought to be okay to eat month-old infants too, since the pigs were much smarter. I'm pretty sure you can guess where that conversation went...

Comment author: MugaSofer 05 November 2012 09:20:12AM 2 points [-]

That guy clearly asked you those questions in the wrong order.

  • Do you believe killing animals for food is OK?
  • Killing animals for food is the same as eating babies!
  • Do you believe killing babies for food is OK?

... is obviously going to activate biases leading to the defense of killing animals for food, whether by denying they are equivalent or claiming to accept killing children for food. Thus the chance of persuading someone eating babies is morally acceptable depends on how strongly you argue the second point.

However...

  • Do you believe killing babies for food is OK?
  • Killing animals for food is the same as eating babies!
  • Do you believe killing animals for food is OK?

... leads to the opposite bias, as if the listener cannot refute your second point they must convert to vegetarianism or visibly contradict themselves.

Comment author: Fallible 12 December 2011 05:08:56AM 2 points [-]

It isn't a question of current intelligence, it's a question of potential. Pigs will never grow beyond human-infant-level comprehension. Human babies will eventually become both sapient and sentient.

Saying a baby and a pig can be considered equally intelligent is like saying a midget and an 11-year-old of the same height are equally likely to become basketball players.

Comment author: Baughn 26 January 2012 01:06:20AM 1 point [-]

How about fertilized egg cells?

Caviar made from fertilized human egg cells, yum.

Comment author: pedanterrific 12 December 2011 05:33:26AM 15 points [-]

No, saying a baby and a pig can be considered equally intelligent is like saying a midget and an 11-year-old can be considered equally tall.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 March 2010 01:09:42AM 3 points [-]

this is sounding like a copout....

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 19 March 2010 09:38:14PM 14 points [-]

Option zero: "There's an interesting story I once wrote..."

Option one: "Well then, I won't/don't eat pork. But that doesn't mean I won't eat any animals. I can be selective in which I eat."

Option two: "mmmmm... babies."

Option three: "Why can't I simply not want to eat babies? I can simply prefer to eat pigs and not babies"

Option four: "Seems like a convincing argument to me. Okay, vegetarian now." (after all, technically you said they tried, but you didn't say the failed. ;))

Option five: "actually, I already am one."

Am I missing any (somewhat) plausible branches it could have taken? More to the point, is one of the above the direction it actually went? :)

(My model of you, incidentally, suggests option three as your least likely response and option one as your most likely serious response.)

Comment author: DanielLC 18 March 2012 11:54:26PM *  11 points [-]

Option six: "I was a vegetarian, but I'm okay with eating babies, and if pigs are just as smart, it should be okay to eat them too, so you've convinced me to give up vegetarianism."

This reminds me of the elves in Dwarf Fortress. They eat people, but not animals.

Comment author: Desrtopa 29 May 2011 04:22:56PM 11 points [-]

I actually did a presentation arguing for the legality of eating babies in a Bioethics class.

And I don't eat pigs, on moral grounds.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 March 2010 10:59:15PM 29 points [-]

Well, not quite option two, but yes, "You make a convincing case that it should be legal to eat month-old infants." One person's modus ponens is another's modus tollens...

Comment author: ciphergoth 18 March 2010 09:00:14AM 10 points [-]

I'm imagining this conversation while you're both holding menus...

In seriousness, there are good instrumental reasons not to allow people to eat month-old infants that are nothing to do with greatly valuing them in your terminal values.

Comment author: Psy-Kosh 19 March 2010 09:38:47PM 1 point [-]

Both menus being "vegetarian and non vegetarian" or "pork menu and baby menu"? :)

Comment author: ata 17 March 2010 09:52:27PM 28 points [-]

I'm pretty sure you can guess where that conversation went...

You started eating month-old infants?

Comment author: MichaelVassar 17 March 2010 08:34:11PM 14 points [-]

A key point is that they don't need to advocate the legalization of infanticide, they just need to be able to cogently address the arguments for and against it. Personally, I think that in the US at this time optimal law might restrict abortion significantly more than it currently does and also that in many past cultural contexts efforts to outlaw or seriously deter infanticide would have been harmful. Just disentangling morality from law competently gets a person props.

Comment author: Strange7 18 March 2010 12:51:48AM 5 points [-]

I'd say the primary value of an infant is the future value of an adult human minus the conversion cost. Adult humans can be enormously valuable, but sometimes, the expected benefits just can't match the expected costs, in which case infanticide would be advisable.

However, both costs and benefits can vary by many orders of magnitude depending on context, and there's no reliable, generally-applicable method to predict either. No matter how bad it looks, someone else might have a more optimistic estimate, so it's worth checking the market (that is, considering adoption).

Comment author: Morendil 17 March 2010 09:15:06AM 26 points [-]

Time of birth serves as a bright line.

Comment author: ciphergoth 17 March 2010 10:15:21AM 12 points [-]

Very much agreed. This is also why we place much more moral value in the life of a severely brain-damaged human than a more intelligent non-human primate.

Comment author: simplicio 17 March 2010 04:03:57AM *  31 points [-]

Once you've used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are "just" meat machines, and abortion is an ok if perhaps regrettable practice ...

Kudos to you for forthrightness. But em... no. Ok, first, it seems to me you've swept the ethics of infanticide under the rug of abortion, and left it there mostly unaddressed. Is an abortion an "ok if regrettable practice?" You've just assumed the answer is always yes, under any circumstances.

I personally say "definitely yes" before brain development (~12 weeks I think), "you need to talk to your doctor" between 12 and 24 weeks, and "not unless it's going to kill you" after 24 weeks (fully functioning brain). Anybody who knows more about development is welcome to contradict me, but those were the numbers I came up with a few years ago when I researched this.

If a baby/fetus has a mind, in my books it should be accorded rights - more and more so as it develops. I fail to see, moreover, where the dividing line ought to be in your view. Not to slippery-slope you but - why stop at infants?

*(Also note that this is a first-principles ethical argument which may have to be modified based on social expedience if it turns into policy. I don't want to encourage botched amateur abortions and cause extra harm. But those considerations are separate from the question of whether infants have worth in a moral sense.)

Once you've used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are "just" meat machines...

This gave me a nasty turn, because probably the most annoying idea religious people have is that if we're "just" chemicals, then nothing matters. One has to take pains to say that chemicals are just what we're made of. We have to be made out of something! :) And what we're made of has precisely zero moral significance (would we have more worth if we were made out of "spirit"?).

I mean, I could sit here all day and tell you about how you shouldn't read "Moby Dick," because it's just a bunch of meaningless pigment squiggles on compressed wood pulp. In a certain very trivial sense I am absolutely right - there is no "élan de Moby Dick" floating out in the aether somewhere independent of physical books. On the other hand I am totally missing the point.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 March 2010 01:19:04AM *  4 points [-]

.

Comment author: wnoise 20 March 2010 05:42:30AM 11 points [-]

If a baby/fetus has a mind, in my books it should be accorded rights - more and more so as it develops. I fail to see, moreover, where the dividing line ought to be in your view. Not to slippery-slope you but - why stop at infants?

The standard answer is that at that point there is no longer a conflict with the rights of the women whose body the infant was hooked into. We don't generally require that people give up their bodily autonomy to support the life of others.

Comment author: simplicio 20 March 2010 07:00:19AM 4 points [-]

We don't generally require that people give up their bodily autonomy to support the life of others.

The complication here is that a responsible, consenting adult tacitly accepts giving up her bodily autonomy (or accepts a risk of doing so) when she has sex. That's precisely the same reason men are required to pay child support even if they didn't wish for a pregnancy. (Yes, I see the asymmetry; yes, it sucks).

Case-by-case reasoning is probably a good thing in these circs, but unless the mother was not informed (minor/mental illness) or did not consent, then the only really tenable reason for a late-term abortion I can think of is health. In which case the relative weighing of rights is a tricky business, a buck I will pass to doctors, patients & hospital ethics boards.

Comment author: thomblake 10 October 2012 06:11:24PM 2 points [-]

The complication here is that a responsible, consenting adult tacitly accepts giving up her bodily autonomy (or accepts a risk of doing so) when she has sex.

The complication there is that on the standard view, one cannot give up one's bodily autonomy permanently. You cannot sell yourself into slavery. The pregnant person always has the right to opt-out of the contract.

Though the fetus would presumably be able to get damages. I guess those get paid to the next-of-kin.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 10 October 2012 06:35:35PM 4 points [-]

I guess those get paid to the next-of-kin.

Upvoted entirely for this line, which made me spit coffee when it finally registered.

Comment author: wnoise 20 March 2010 07:57:37AM *  6 points [-]

but unless the mother was not informed (minor/mental illness) or did not consent,

This is already a significant retreat from your previously stated position. ("not unless it's going to kill you" after 24 weeks)

The complication here is that a responsible, consenting adult tacitly accepts giving up her bodily autonomy (or accepts a risk of doing so) when she has sex.

That's a hell of an assertion. I don't really see any reason to accept it as other than a normative statement of what you wish would happen.

That's precisely the same reason men are required to pay child support even if they didn't wish for a pregnancy. (Yes, I see the asymmetry; yes, it sucks).

As you say, there is an asymmetry. Garnishing a wage is a bit different, and seems appropriate to me.

Case-by-case reasoning is probably a good thing in these circs,

Yes, it is, so long as it is reasoning rather than assertions that this case is different. We have to specify how it is different, and how those differences make a difference. The easiest way for me to do this is to use analogies. This is dangerous of course, as one must keep in mind that they can ignore relevant differences while emphasizing surface similarities.

So, in this case the relevant specialness you're calling out is that a risky activity was knowingly engaged in that created a person who needs life support for some time, as well as care and feeding far after that. So I'm going to try to set up an analogous situation, but without sex being the act (which I think is irrelevant) coming into the mix. This will also mean another difference: the person will not be "created" except metaphorically from a preëxisting person. I personally don't see how that would be relevant, but I suppose it is possible for others to disagree.

Suppose a person is driving, and crashes into a pedestrian. This ruptures the liver of the pedestrian. A partial transplant of the driver's liver will save the pedestrian's life. Is the driver expected to donate their liver? Should it be required by law?

Note that the donor's death rate for this operation is under 1%. When we compare this to the statistics for maternal death, we see it is similar to WHO's 2005 estimate of world average of 900 per 100,000, though developed regions have it far lower at 9 per 100000.

Comment author: BarbaraB 16 April 2012 10:53:58AM 2 points [-]

"Suppose a person is driving, and crashes into a pedestrian. This ruptures the liver of the pedestrian. A partial transplant of the driver's liver will save the pedestrian's life. Is the driver expected to donate their liver? Should it be required by law?"

For organ transplantations, the body biochemistries of the organ donor and acceptor must be somewhat compatible, otherwise the transplanted organ gets rejected by the immune system of the acceptor. The best transplantation results are between the identical twins. For unrelated people, there are tests to estimate the compatibility of organs, and databases. A conclusion: The driver is not generally expected to donate their liver, because in the majority of the cases, it would not help the victim.

Imagine an alternate universe, where all the human bodies are highly compatible for transplantation purposes. - Yes, I believe it might become a social norm in this alternate universe, or even a law, that the driver must donate their liver to the victim.

Comment author: simplicio 20 March 2010 09:09:11PM 4 points [-]

This is already a significant retreat from your previously stated position. ("not unless it's going to kill you" after 24 weeks)

Is it? I suppose it is. I contain multitudes. No, honestly, I just didn't name all my caveats in the previous post (my bad). Clearly there are two people's interests to take into consideration here. Also, as I noted, that was an ethical rather than legal argument. I don't have any strong opinions about what the law should do wrt this question.

That's a hell of an assertion. I don't really see any reason to accept it as other than a normative statement of what you wish would happen.

I don't think it's unreasonable, although you're right it's not a fact statement. But I think it's a fairly well-established principle of ethics & jurisprudence that informed consent implies responsibility. Nobody has to have unprotected sex, so if you (a consenting adult) do so, any reasonably foreseeable consequences are on your shoulders.

Suppose a person is driving, and crashes into a pedestrian. This ruptures the liver of the pedestrian. A partial transplant of the driver's liver will save the pedestrian's life. Is the driver expected to donate their liver? Should it be required by law?

It's a reasonably good analogy I guess. There are two separate questions here: what should the law do, and what should the driver do. I don't think anybody wants the law to require organ donations from people who behave irresponsibly. However, put in the driver's shoes, and assuming the collision was my fault, I would feel obligated to donate (if, in this worst-case scenario, I am the only one who can).

There is a slight disanalogy here though, which is that an abortion is an act, whereas a failure to donate is an omission. It's like the difference between throwing the fat guy on the tracks and just letting the train hit the fat guy.

Comment deleted 20 March 2010 09:56:31AM [-]
Comment author: simplicio 20 March 2010 09:11:24PM 5 points [-]

Just an example: In Austria by default all deceased people are potential donors -- you have to file an explicit opt-out.

I am very much in favour of this sort of policy; it would do no end of good.

Comment author: DonGeddis 17 March 2010 05:56:29PM 15 points [-]

Is an abortion an "ok if regrettable practice?" You've just assumed the answer is always yes, under any circumstances.

Sorry, you have a point that my test won't apply to every rationalist.

The contrast I meant was: if you look at the world population, and ask how many people believe in atheism, materialism, and that abortion is not morally wrong, you'll find a significant minority. (Perhaps you yourself are not in that group.)

But if you then try to add "believes that infanticide is not morally wrong", your subpopulation will drop to basically zero.

But, rationally, the gap between the first three beliefs, and the last one, is relatively small. Purely on the basis of rationality, you ought to expect a smaller dropoff than we in fact see. Hence, most people in the first group are avoiding the repugnant conclusion for non-rational reasons. (Or believing in the first three, for non-rational reasons.)

If you personally don't agree with the first three premises, then perhaps this test isn't accurate for you.

Comment author: MugaSofer 10 October 2012 12:43:59PM 1 point [-]

So your point is that anyone who feels there is a moral difference between infanticide and abortion is irrational?

Because most pro-lifers already say that, in my experience.

Comment author: CronoDAS 16 March 2010 11:20:27PM *  22 points [-]

Basically, this is a variant on the argument from marginal cases; infants don't differ from relatively intelligent nonhuman animals in capabilities, so they ought to have the same moral status. If it's okay to euthanize your dog, it should also be okay to euthanize your newborn.

(The most common use of the argument from marginal cases is to argue that animals deserve greater moral consideration, and not that some humans deserve less, but one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.)

Comment author: khafra 24 March 2010 06:12:36PM 5 points [-]

Professor Mordin Solus solves marginal cases by refusing to experiment on any species with at least one member capable of Calculus, which is a bit different from criticism, "argument from species normality."

Comment author: wnoise 24 March 2010 06:19:57PM *  10 points [-]

any species with at least one member capable of Calculus,

Any species with at least one member who has demonstrated to humans the capability of Calculus.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 24 March 2010 06:35:59PM *  15 points [-]

So it's perfectly acceptable to use a time machine to gather your experimental subjects from before the 17th century.

Also, once a human solves the problem of friendly AI, aliens will stop abducting us and accept us as moral agents.

Comment author: khafra 24 March 2010 07:26:58PM 5 points [-]

That sounds like a reasonable conclusion--compared to an intelligence capable enough of introspection and planning to make a friendly AI, the overwhelming majority of my actions arise purely from unreasoning instinct.

Comment author: Jack 17 March 2010 06:36:37PM *  22 points [-]

(The most common use of the argument from marginal cases is to argue that animals deserve greater moral consideration, and not that some humans deserve less, but one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.)

Cerca 1792 after Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Women a philosopher name Thomas Taylor published a reductio ad absurdum/ parody entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes which basically took Wollstonecrafts arguments for more gender equality and replaced women with animals. It reads more or less like an animal rights pamphlet written by Peter Singer.

Comment author: Larks 18 March 2010 12:15:08AM 3 points [-]

(The most common use of the argument from marginal cases is to argue that animals deserve greater moral consideration, and not that some humans deserve less, but one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.)

This is a hand, this is an inviolate right to life...

Comment author: DonGeddis 17 March 2010 05:49:19PM 3 points [-]

Your parenthetical comment is the funniest thing I've read all day! The contrast with the seriousness of subject matter is exquisite. (You're of course right about the marginal cases thing too.)

Comment author: Alicorn 16 March 2010 10:19:07PM 22 points [-]

I like this test, with the following cautions:

The regrettability of abortion is connected to the availability of birth control, and so similarly, the regrettability of infanticide should be connected to the availability of abortion. A key difference is that while birth control may fail, abortion basically doesn't. I can think of a handful of reasons for infanticide to make sense when abortion didn't, and they're all related to things like unexpected infant disability the parents aren't prepared to handle, or sudden, badly timed, unanticipated financial/family stability disasters.

In either case, given that the baby doesn't necessarily occupy privileged uterine real estate the way a fetus must, I think it makes sense to push adoption as strongly preferred recourse before infanticide reaches the top of the list. Unlike asking a woman who wants an abortion to have the baby and give it up for adoption, this imposes no additional cost on her relative to the alternative.

Additionally, I think any but the most strongly controlled permission for infanticide would lead to cases where one parent killed their baby over the desire of the other parent to keep it. It seems obvious to me that either parent's wish that the baby live - assuming they're willing to raise it or give it up for adoption, and don't just vaguely prefer that it continue being alive while the wants-it-dead parent deal with its actual care - should be a sufficient condition that it live. I might even extend this to other relatives.

Comment author: Jack 16 March 2010 11:41:52PM *  11 points [-]

I'll be the first to disagree outright.

First, when a woman is pregnant but will be unable to raise her child we do not force a woman to give birth to give up the baby for adoption. This is because bringing a child to term is a painful, expensive and dangerous nine-month ordeal which we do not think women should be forced into. In what possible circumstances is infanticide ethically permissible when the baby is born, the woman has already paid the cost of pregnancy and giving birth, and adoption is an option?

In general, I'm not sure it follows from the fact that persons aren't magic that persons are less valuable than we thought. Maybe babies are just glorified goldfish. Maybe they aren't valuable in the way we thought they were. But I haven't seen that evidence.

Comment author: lispalien 16 March 2010 11:32:29PM 8 points [-]

My mother made this argument to me probably when I was in high school. Given my position as past infanticide candidate, it was an odd conversation. For the record, she was willing to go up to two or six years old, I think.

And let us not forget the Scrubs episode she also agreed with: "Having a baby is like getting a dog that slowly learns to talk."

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 March 2010 06:37:03PM 21 points [-]

My mother made this argument to me probably when I was in high school. Given my position as past infanticide candidate, it was an odd conversation.

Hey, now you know you were kept around because you were actually wanted, not out of a dull sense of obligation. It's like having a biological parent who is totally okay with giving up children for adoption - and stuck around!

Comment author: Multiheaded 16 March 2012 09:54:21AM *  1 point [-]

Hey, now you know you were kept around because you were actually wanted, not out of a dull sense of obligation.

Eliezer, your thought processes and emotions are quite a bit different from those of most currently living humans. And that mostly leaves you quite well-off, but you've always got to account for that before you say something like this.
How the hell do you know what others, especially children, would feel in an odd situation like that? Me, I know for sure that I'd MUCH rather have a cold/distant but dutiful and conscientous parent than one who could really, seriously plan to kill Pre-Me for their own convenience.

(If that was supposed to be a joke, I claim that it was in bad taste, just like an anti-AI LessWronger's joke about planning to assassinate you and your colleagues would be.)

Comment author: lispalien 25 March 2010 05:47:09AM *  6 points [-]

That's an interesting take. She clearly loves me and my siblings and has never hurt anyone to the best of my knowledge, besides. So, it wasn't an uncomfortable topic--only a bit of an odd position to be in.

Although, I also have to point out adoption does not carry the death penalty, so I can imagine a situation in which my hypothetical parent opts not to kill me because they think the fuzz will catch them.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 17 March 2010 08:29:54PM 6 points [-]

Sounds like it would be interesting to have your mother make some comments on LW, if you think she would be interested.

Comment author: lispalien 25 March 2010 05:37:04AM 2 points [-]

That's very unlikely, I think. She's not interested in rationalism.

Comment author: wnoise 17 March 2010 06:27:02AM *  13 points [-]

I have said before "I'm a moderate on abortion -- I feel it should be okay up to the fifth trimester." While this does shock people into adjusting what boundaries might be considered acceptable, I no longer think it is something useful to say in most fora. Too much chance of offending people and just causing their brains to shut off.

Comment author: khafra 24 March 2010 05:50:19PM 3 points [-]

It should be safe to use on Philip K. Dick fan forums.

Comment author: FAWS 16 March 2010 10:15:07PM 4 points [-]

Voted up, but I think abortion shouldn't be legal once the fetus is old enough to have brain activity other than for medical reasons (life of the mother), and I'm an unrepentant speciesist.

Comment author: taryneast 27 June 2011 01:42:48PM 2 points [-]

As I recall (I haven't gone to check), fetuses have "brain activity" about the same time they have a beating heart... ie about one week after conception. The brain activity regulates the heartbeat.

The problem with your definition is that it's very vague - it doesn't carve reality at the joints.

I myself prefer the "viability" test. If a foetus is removed form the mother.... and survives on it's own (yes, with life support) then it is "viable" and gets to live. If it's too undeveloped to live... then it doesn't. This stage is actually not very far prior to birth - somewhere around 34-36 weeks (out of 40) (again as I recall without having to look it up).

This is very similar to (but gives just a bit more wiggle room) to the "birth" line... ie it disentangles the needs of the mother from the needs of the child, and can be epitomised by the "which would you choose to save" test.

If you had to choose between the life of the mother or the life of the child: if the child is not viable without the mother - then there is no choice necessary: you choose the mother, because choosing the child will result in them both dying. But if the child is viable - then you actually have to choose between them as individual people.

Comment author: Strange7 14 December 2013 05:56:51AM 1 point [-]

So, as technology improves and artificial substitutes become viable progressively earlier in the developmental process, you'll eventually be advocating adoption as an alternative to the morning-after pill?

Comment author: [deleted] 27 June 2011 01:48:34PM 2 points [-]

This stage is actually not very far prior to birth - somewhere around 34-36 weeks (out of 40) (again as I recall without having to look it up).

Actually a good bit earlier than that. Like 24, 25 weeks I think is the age where you get 50% survival (with intensive medical care, but you seem to say that's ok).

Comment author: byrnema 16 March 2010 11:13:29PM 3 points [-]

Don't unnecessarily cause them to suffer,

Aren't abortions unnecessarily painful? This is as strong an argument pro-life as pro-infanticide.

I agree there a continuum between conception and being, say, 2 years old that is only superficially punctuated by the date of birth. Yet our cultural norms are not so inconsistent...

General cultural norms label [infanticide] as horrific, and most people's gut reactions concur.

For example, many of these same people would find it horrific to kill a late-stage fetus. And they might still find it horrific to murder a younger fetus, but nevertheless respect the mother's choice in the matter.

Comment author: CronoDAS 16 March 2010 10:17:33PM 3 points [-]

If I agreed with this logic, should I be reluctant to admit it here?

Comment author: byrnema 16 March 2010 11:04:02PM 2 points [-]

Agreeing with the logic is OK, but the problem with reductionism is that if you draw no lines, you'll eventually find that there's no difference between anything.

Thus the basic reductionist/humanist conflict: how does one you escape the 'logic' and draw a line?

Comment author: pengvado 16 March 2010 11:46:48PM 10 points [-]

Draw a gradient rather than a line. You don't need sharp boundaries between categories if the output of your judgment is quantitative rather than boolean. You can assign similar values to similar cases, and dissimilar values to dissimilar cases.

See also The Fallacy of Gray. Now you're obviously not falling for the one-color view, but that post also talks about what to do instead of staying with black-and-white.

Comment author: byrnema 17 March 2010 01:38:31AM *  7 points [-]

Sure. But I was referring to my worry that if you don't allow your values to be arbitrary (e.g., I don't care about protecting fetuses but I care about protecting babies), you may find you wouldn't have any. I guess I'm imagining a story in which a logician tries to argue me down a slippery slope of moral nihilism; there'll be no step I can point to that I shouldn't have taken, but I'll find I stepped too far. When I retreat uphill to where I feel more comfortable, can I expect to have a logical justification?

Comment author: pengvado 17 March 2010 03:52:19AM 16 points [-]

I'm not sure what "arbitrary" means here. You don't seem to be using it in the sense that all preferences are arbitary.

a story in which a logician tries to argue me down a slippery slope of moral nihilism

If the nihilist makes a sufficiently circuitous argument, they can ensure that there's no step you can point to that's very wrong. But by doing so, they will make slight approximations in many places. Each such step loses an incremental amount of logical justification, and if you add up all the approximations, you'll find that they've approximated away any correlation with the premises. You don't need to avoid following the argument too far, if you appropriately increase your error bars at each step.

In short: "similar" is not a transitive relation.

Comment author: byrnema 18 March 2010 06:09:52PM 4 points [-]

From your answer, I guess that you do think we have 'justifications' for our moral preferences. I'm not sure. It seems to me that on the one hand, we accept that our preferences are arational, but then we don't really assimilate this. (If our preferences are arational, they won't have logical justifications.)

Comment author: gregconen 18 March 2010 06:42:56PM *  4 points [-]

I'm not sure what "arbitrary" means here. You don't seem to be using it in the sense that all preferences are arbitary.

That seemed to be exactly how he's using it. It would be how I'd respond, had I not worked it through already. But there is a difference between arbitrary in: "the difference between an 8.5 month fetus and a 15 day infant is arbitrary" and "the decision that killing people is wrong is arbitrary".

Yes, at some point you need at least one arbitrary principle. Once you have an arbitrary moral principle, you can make non-arbitrary decisions about the morality of situations.

There's a lot more about this in the whole sequence on metaethics.

Comment author: byrnema 18 March 2010 07:35:44PM *  6 points [-]

I am generally confused by the metaethics sequence, which is why I didn't correct Pengvado.

at some point you need at least one arbitrary principle. Once you have an arbitrary moral principle, you can make non-arbitrary decisions about the morality of situations.

Agreed, as long as you have found a consistent set of arbitrary principles to cover the whole moral landscape. But since our preferences are given to us, broadly, by evolution, shouldn't we expect that our principles operate locally (context-dependent) and are likely to be mutually inconsistent?

So when we adjust to a new location in the moral landscape and the logician asks up to justify our movement, it seems that, generally, the correct answer would be shrug and say, 'My preferences aren't logical. They evolved.'

If there's a difference in two positions in the moral landscape, we needn't justify our preference for one position. We just pick the one we prefer. Unless we have a preference for consistency of our principles, in which case we build that into the landscape as well. So the logician could pull you to an (otherwise) immoral place in the landscape unless you decide you don't consider logical consistency to be the most important moral principle.

Comment author: gregconen 18 March 2010 08:03:39PM 3 points [-]

But since our preferences are given to us, broadly, by evolution, shouldn't we expect that our principles operate locally (context-dependent) and are likely to be mutually inconsistent?

Yes.

I have a strong preferences for simple set of moral preferences, with minimal inconsistency.

I admit that the idea of holding "killing babies is wrong" as a separate principle from "killing humans is wrong", or holding that "babies are human" as a moral (rather than empirical) principle simply did not occur to me. The dangers of generalizing from one example, I guess.

Comment author: simplicio 17 March 2010 04:30:44AM 3 points [-]

Each such step loses an incremental amount of logical justification, and if you add up all the approximations, you'll find that they've approximated away any correlation with the premises. You don't need to avoid following the argument too far, if you appropriately increase your error bars at each step.

In short: "similar" is not a transitive relation.

This was rather elegantly put.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 16 March 2010 10:54:40PM *  14 points [-]

Did anyone read this post and worry whether they're one of the poseurs and not one of the true-blooded rationalists?

I could believe I'm a poseur with respect to this group, i.e. adopting the opinions of the average Less Wrong reader without doing much thinking myself. But this might be rational in the case of issues where the average Less Wrong reader has done more thinking than me, right?

But I do propose that before you give anyone credit for being a smart, rational skeptic, that you ask them to defend some non-mainstream belief. And no, atheism doesn't count as non-mainstream anymore, no matter what the polls show. It has to be something that most of their social circle doesn't believe, or something that most of their social circle does believe which they think is wrong.

Maybe we should have a thread where we all do this? Heh, what a cult initiation ceremony that would be: loudly proclaim to the cult what they're wrong about.

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 March 2010 11:37:48PM 1 point [-]

Of course. If you know others who share your belief, that's a cause for worry, and if you know no-one who does, that's also a cause for worry.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 16 March 2010 05:18:00PM 16 points [-]

Of course, once you pick a test you have to keep it secret - a well known test will be memorized as a shibboleth.

Comment author: Morendil 16 March 2010 12:57:17PM 9 points [-]

On reflection, polyamory really is just wrong. Count me as a skeptic on this unnatural alliance.

(Yes, yes, I can hear the comebacks already: "Playing with the use-mention distinction" isn't "everything in life, you know".)

Comment author: thomblake 16 March 2010 01:25:33PM 8 points [-]

Geh - It's the new "pun".

"polyamory" really is just wrong.

Really? Do you have the same problem with "television"? What about zoological binomial nomenclature?

Comment author: RobinZ 16 March 2010 03:13:46PM 3 points [-]

C'mon - there's much worse than that. "Ombudsperson", for one.

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 March 2010 01:37:13PM 4 points [-]

Homosexuality is also wrong, as are many other things...

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 March 2010 02:53:56PM *  5 points [-]

I can see that it would be useful to have a fast filter for rationality, but how possible is it?

There are some opinions which are irrational (frex, there doesn't seem to be any solid arguments for the idea that homosexuality is bad, and if it can't be eliminated, it should at least be kept out of public view), but that's not the same thing as having a positive test for rationality.

There comes a point when there's no substitute for actual knowledge, and in this case, it means looking at people's thinking rather than their opinions.

I suggest asking people what they've changed their mind about, and why. The opinion change could be tribal, too, but at least it's not a completely static view of the other person's mind.

One other test-- does the person judge the things they like by the most attractive examples, and the things they dislike by the least attractive examples? This test is faster than asking questions.

Comment author: Morendil 16 March 2010 03:08:56PM 4 points [-]

ISTM that we could summarize Eliezer's post, conclusions, subsequent discussion, and much previous LW material thus: "there are no reliable epistemic shortcuts".

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 March 2010 04:22:43PM 4 points [-]

I was wondering if there was a top level post explicitly about the need to have tools for checking the territory now and then because your map is necessarily incomplete.

The messy thing is that you need to have tools and habits for being able to notice it when reality is tugging on your sleeve or bashing you about the head and trying to find out what important thing you've missed -- but if you formalize that procedure, you're in a map again.

Comment author: orthonormal 16 March 2010 01:12:41AM 46 points [-]

I think we've achieved a new record for "most distinct subthreads that would be flamewars anywhere else on the Internet, but somehow aren't yet".

The previous recordholder, I'm pretty sure, is also on Less Wrong.

Comment author: Jack 16 March 2010 01:57:13AM *  44 points [-]

A partial list to compare to future record breaking attempts: Global Warming, Meredith Kercher's murder, atheism, gun control, race and IQ, Pick-up artists, cryonics, Scandinavian social welfare, nuclear deterence, sweatshops, industry bailouts, immigration, UFOs, homosexuality, polyamory, bisexuality, pedophilia, necrophilia, cannibalism, rape, 2 girls 1 cup, sex change, generalizations about promiscuity, straight men like lesbians, masochism, incest, people getting off to cartoons, people getting off to cartoons of pre-teen girls, 9/11 was an inside job, and Communism.

Comment author: Bill_McGrath 26 September 2011 10:44:29AM 5 points [-]

Eugenics; that ought to be a fun one as well.

Comment author: Laoch 14 November 2013 10:30:26AM *  3 points [-]

This reminds of the supposed spectre of "designer babies".

Non-sceptic rationalist: "Oh don't do that scientific research it'll end in designer babies!!!!"

Rationalist: "So what if it does?"

Comment author: ciphergoth 24 March 2010 12:50:30PM 4 points [-]

We should try gun control some time...

Comment author: BenAlbahari 16 March 2010 02:09:16AM 23 points [-]

Don't forget the biggest of them all: "questioning our raison d'etre"; i.e. we debated the value of rationality, whilst remaining civil and keeping the discussion meaningful. For comparison, imagine suggesting that "tennis isn't all that great" on a tennis forum.

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 01:22:59AM 4 points [-]

That is so true. & that is why I bloody love this site.

Still, I think to get the perfect compendium, somebody ought to mention fascism.

Comment author: CronoDAS 16 March 2010 02:16:49AM *  15 points [-]

Fascism was never a well-defined political philosophy, as far as I can tell. It seems that, today, it seems to be a synonym for "non-Communist government I don't like".

Comment author: Jack 16 March 2010 02:28:20AM *  5 points [-]

I'd say it became increasingly less well-defined after it's creation.

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 02:54:44AM 1 point [-]

I always thought of it as basically a reaction to communism, wherein the state takes control of industry but sort of for the benefit of industry rather than labour. But yeah, definitely a pretty amorphous thing.

Anyway, it's mentioned now! Hurrah!

Comment author: CronoDAS 16 March 2010 02:59:28AM 5 points [-]

I've seen it defined, perhaps ironically, as "When the government takes over the corporations, that's called communism. When the corporations take over the government, that's called fascism."

Comment author: RobinZ 16 March 2010 03:03:30AM *  2 points [-]

I always thought of it as basically a reaction to communism [...]

From Jack's link in the previous comment:

By the time Mussolini returned from Allied service in World War I, he had decided that socialism as a doctrine had largely been a failure. In 1917, Mussolini got his start in politics with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5, the British Security Service; this help was authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare. In early 1918, Mussolini called for the emergence of a man "ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep" to revive the Italian nation. Much later in life Mussolini said he felt by 1919 "Socialism as a doctrine was already dead; it continued to exist only as a grudge". On 23 March 1919, Mussolini reformed the Milan fascio as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Squad), consisting of 200 members.

No further comment. :)

Comment author: Psychohistorian 15 March 2010 10:25:08PM *  27 points [-]

There's an additional issue of subtlety that isn't addressed here. People will typically reveal "improper" views by starting small and seeing if their audience is sympathetic, not because they are irrational, but because they aren't stupid and they care about consequences.

That is, if I'm in some highly religious town, I'm not going to open my conversation with, "So, this whole God thing makes about as much sense as Santa Claus, am I right?" I'm going to open with, "You know, there's something about the story of Job that just doesn't sit right with me," or something else small, safe, and exploratory.

Comment author: Shae 16 March 2010 02:05:16PM 10 points [-]

Agreed. There's another reason why people might give religion the "respect" of treating it worthy of debate, while not doing so with astrology. One might feel that religious people are taking their agendas into politics and school classrooms to the detriment of society in a way that astrologists are not, and might therefore give religionists the respect necessary to engage them in debate and hopefully change their minds.

Comment author: Emile 15 March 2010 10:56:45AM 37 points [-]

Another good indicator (as djbc said) is the level of certitude : if someone expresses more certitude on a complex topic like gun control than on a slamdunk like God - then I won't trust their confidence much.

Does that mean only hardcore atheists are worth listening to? Maybe, but some claims about religion are not that obvious - for example, is religion good or bad for society in terms of enforcing moral behaviour, facilitating cooperation, raising children, etc. ? I don't consider that question a slamdunk.

Another red flag for me is "clannish" language, presenting issues in terms of "group A vs group B" ("this is a victory for us", "hah, that shows them", etc.). It's a sign that the wrong part of the brain is being used.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 15 March 2010 07:55:21PM 6 points [-]

Democracy is my litmus test.

Comment author: FAWS 15 March 2010 08:04:25PM 6 points [-]

Do you mean being willing to consider the possibility that some other form of government might be better at pursuing the interests of a society as a whole?

People also value democracy simply for being democratic, so saying that democracy is best is to some extent just stating your values.

Comment author: nazgulnarsil 15 March 2010 08:27:05PM *  6 points [-]

Yeah, but even just in people's reaction to the topic. I try to avoid framing the issue and just feel people out. For example I would take someone responding to the subject like you did to be a very positive sign. Someone immediately jumping to the possibility of alternatives followed by a reasoning on how normative statements work is not exactly a common reaction.

Comment author: Nirgal 15 March 2010 01:36:55PM 11 points [-]

Poincare said: “To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.”

Comment author: aretae 15 March 2010 04:08:44PM *  5 points [-]

This is clearly a good way to do skepticism, if you're going to do it. However, I wonder, at my blog (http://aretae.blogspot.com/2010/03/cognitive-antivirus.html), whether skepticism is generally wise at all, and whether religion is a much more useful and effective cognitive antivirus system (especially for the only normally intelligent) than anyone else here seems to give it credit for.

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 02:32:11AM 4 points [-]

religion is a much more useful and effective cognitive antivirus system (especially for the only normally intelligent) than anyone else here seems to give it credit for.

That is at least plausible, and it is certainly better in a sense to have one piecewise-sane dogma than to be swept away in a deluge of weird and wacky truth claims about crystals and auras. But problems will arise, in god's good time. The stem cell "controversy" for example is the result of a prima facie pretty innocuous doctrine that life begins at conception. How many more harmless little bits of scripture are waiting in the wings to impede us? Are they not pathogenic as well?

Nonetheless I think you have a point that it's pretty hard to imagine a majority of people adopting the skeptical procedure used here. I think our best hope is actually to press for the private-ization of spirituality: it's "true for you" and "metaphorical." But that will involve a lot of training our gag reflex.

Comment author: nerzhin 16 March 2010 02:42:44PM 9 points [-]

The stem cell "controversy" for example is the result of a prima facie pretty innocuous doctrine that life begins at conception.

Let's suppose that cryonically preserved human brains are found to be especially useful for the treatment of several terrible diseases, because of some quirk of the vitrification process. Should we haul out cryonically suspended people and use them for medicine?

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 02:55:54PM *  11 points [-]

I think this is pretty disanalogous. We're basically talking about killing people who are unconscious in the cryonics case, versus harvesting non-to-semi-differentiated cells in the other.

Let me clarify that although ''life" is a good, quick word, it doesn't really capture what we value morally, which is mind or consciousness. That's why we don't cry when our appendix is taken out, and why we remove people from ventilators when they're braindead, even though they are "still alive" in the sense of breathing and having a pulse. A frozen brain is a conscious entity that's temporarily unconscious. The stem cells never were in the first place.

You have to choose if you value actual fellow humans, or just fetishize that blip on a monitor.

Comment author: nerzhin 16 March 2010 03:17:38PM 6 points [-]

You basically answered my question when you said

what we value morally, which is mind or conciousness.

But I'm going to pick at you one more time and then shut up. Both an embryo and a cryonically suspended person are presently unconcious. If what you value is past conciousness, then there's no problem, you're consistent. If you value potential (or long-future) conciousness, there might be a problem. I'm guessing that you value short-future conciousness - a suspended person (or a sleeping person) can in principle be concious in five minutes, while an embryo cannot.

The next stage of the argument asks about infants and animals and so on, but I said I'd shut up.

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 04:08:13PM 10 points [-]

I'm guessing that you value short-future conciousness - a suspended person (or a sleeping person) can in principle be concious in five minutes, while an embryo cannot.

I think there is a more salient difference, which is that it's not the embryo that will be conscious in ~20 weeks, whereas it is the brain.

The next stage of the argument asks about infants and animals and so on, but I said I'd shut up.

By all means continue, I always enjoy parsing these things. My friends are so sick of hearing about trolley cases they'd throw themselves on the tracks.

Comment author: nerzhin 16 March 2010 07:31:44PM 2 points [-]

it's not the embryo that will be conscious in ~20 weeks, whereas it is the brain.

I don't understand this. What specifically is the important difference between embryo (now) and non-embryo (in 20 weeks)? Conciousness? Memories? Physical structure? How is it that they are different things, while brain (now) and brain (future) are the same thing?

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 11:11:24PM 2 points [-]

What specifically is the important difference between embryo (now) and non-embryo (in 20 weeks)? Conciousness? Memories? Physical structure?

Consciousness. Basically, I want to know if there is a reflective "experiencer" there to care about. If not, I don't give the thing moral standing.

Your cryonically frozen brain presents an odd situation, because the experiencer is sort of "paused." But I think it's still clear that in killing that brain you're ending somebody's (conscious) life prematurely.

I like this discussion for its own sake, but I am curious: do you disagree with something I've said? Or are we just monkeying with scenarios for the sheer hell of it? (Not that that is in any way a bad thing - they are lots of fun.)

Comment author: nerzhin 17 March 2010 01:55:37PM 2 points [-]

If I understand you correctly, you are arguing that the suspended brain is concious (just "paused", as you say). So there is some property of a system that we can call "concious" even if it's asleep, suspended, etc., and that embryos (before 20 weeks or so) lack this property.

If this a fair statement, I don't have anything more to say. The infants, animals etc. stuff is being covered in the "infanticide" sub-thread on this page.

Mostly we're monkeying with scenarios for the fun of it. I have somewhat less certainty than you about embryonic stem cell research - I estimate some chance that it is morally problematic.

Comment author: Rain 16 March 2010 03:38:58PM *  1 point [-]

To maintain consistency in my views on the definition of humanity, I've recently begun arguing that children should not be considered human until around the age of 5. It tends to elicit a laugh and some interesting discussions thereafter, as I present it semi-seriously.

For the cryonics vs. embryo comparison, it would likely be down to the desires of the people involved and the future costs. A suspended consciousness has the potential for many more people who care about it directly as opposed to a hypothetical consciousness which has yet to influence anyone outside its parents, and is typically cared about in the abstract. The cost of reviving a cryonically frozen consciousness is currently unpayable, so it can't really be compared with the cost of generating a whole human from scratch (natural birth).

For the ability to do a real world comparison, I would use the cost of birthing consciousness against the cost of bringing someone back from general anesthesia, which is very close to, and perhaps exactly, suspended consciousness. In that comparison, reviving the anesthetized patient has significantly lower costs and has many more people directly preferring it to occur.

This model also applies different values to different levels of consciousness and amount of experience contained within the mind due to the costs involved in obtaining and verifying it.

Comment author: nerzhin 16 March 2010 07:34:37PM 4 points [-]

To maintain consistency in my views on the definition of humanity, I've recently begun arguing that children should not be considered human until around the age of 5.

I'm intrigued. What specific inconsistency drives you to this? I'm imagining you put a high value on something in order to publicly (even if jokingly) say such a thing, and I'm wondering what that something is.

Comment author: Strange7 16 March 2010 06:32:29PM 4 points [-]

I would say that we should conduct trials on equivalent use of vitrified pig or chimpanzee brains before proceeding, or maybe a nonfunctional mockup of a human brain based on organ-printing techniques. I mean, if somebody discovered that it was possible to get high by snorting powdered high-density hard disks, I'd recommend grinding up blanks rather than the last copy of some valuable data.

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 11:17:00PM 4 points [-]

Good point, but probably not the Least Convenient Possible World.

Comment author: Strange7 17 March 2010 12:12:40AM *  10 points [-]

If it turns out that pig and chimp brains don't have the same effect, that would be less convenient, yes. I still wouldn't regret having run the trials.

In such a case, the next step would be to run tests on volunteers (that is, suicides) or people sentenced to be executed. If it turns out that criminals and those who wanted to die are also unsuitable, I'll allow people with those horrible diseases to sign up for treatment on the condition that, if it doesn't work, they get their brains vitrified and used to treat the next generation of patients, as a stopgap measure until strictly synthetic treatments becomes available.

The real world is not maximally inconvenient. Training your mind to respond to binary decisions by ruling out any options not explicitly presented is a deliberate subversion of the drive to cheat, which might, in the long term, compromise your ability to win.

More generally, if I were put in some sadistic moral dilemma (say, choosing between rescuing my love-interest or my sidekick) where either option is repugnant but inaction is somehow worse than both of them put together, I've got no reason to believe I'd have either enough knowledge of the consequences or enough time for my moral calculus to run in full. Under those circumstances, I would flip the fairest coin I had handy and decide between the two least-repugnant options on that basis, then try not to get backed into such situations in the future.

Comment author: simplicio 17 March 2010 05:08:01AM 6 points [-]

Training your mind to respond to binary decisions by ruling out any options not explicitly presented is a deliberate subversion of the drive to cheat, which might, in the long term, compromise your ability to win.

That is actually a really good point. Getting in the habit of "accepting the problem as stated" could be a very bad thing.

However, this scenario was contrived right from the beginning. A magical cure from eating frozen brains? Unlikely. It was a question about where to draw the line on the ethical worth of living things, that was illustrated with a little story.

Comment author: Strange7 17 March 2010 05:22:02AM 3 points [-]

However, this scenario was contrived right from the beginning.

Not necessarily. I've heard it seriously suggested that societies sufficiently advanced to safely revive cryopreserved people might find ... more interesting things to do with them. "Spare parts" is one of the possibilities.

Comment author: CronoDAS 15 March 2010 08:42:57PM 6 points [-]

In matters not related to Catholic dogma, the Catholic Church is (or at least used to be) a consistently skeptical organization.

Comment author: gregconen 15 March 2010 08:02:22PM 2 points [-]

I agree with the sentiment here.

However, in a community like this one, Aumann's agreement theorem would suggest that most of the commonly held views, at least the views commonly held to be very likely, rather than just somewhat likely, should be correct.

Comment author: simplicio 15 March 2010 04:02:40AM 34 points [-]

I'll bite the bullet and say global warming is the perfect example here. It's pretty clear to me that many people hold their positions on this issue - pro and contra - for political/social reasons rather than evidential ones.

Unfortunately that often seems to be the case when there are vested interests in the answer going one way or the other.

The impact of genetics on behaviour is another example. Most of the educated people I know are ultra-behaviorists, so if I see somebody argue that genes matter (but aren't everything), they definitely get brownie points. Especially since such a view tends to be seen as vaguely quasi-racist.

Comment author: jimmy 16 March 2010 03:45:58AM *  25 points [-]

The problem with asking race related questions is that there's a much stronger social pressure to shut up if you believe something that comes off as racist.

If you support cryonics, the worst that happens is that you come off as having strange beliefs. Take most any factual claim about race and you're an asshole for even thinking about it.

Of course, once the person is confident that you won't attack them for holding politically incorrect views, you can start to get some information flow, but that takes time to develop comfort. That's actually my litmus test for how comfortable someone is with me- whether they'll actually say something that is really unPC.

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 04:09:40AM 14 points [-]

The problem with asking race related questions is that there's a much stronger social pressure to shut up if you believe something that comes off as racist.

I'm at a loss as to what to do about that, because I do get where that pressure is coming from. In presenting such data, you can hedge and qualify all you want, but what many people are going to hear is just a lot of wonderful reasons why their prejudices were right all along, and how science proved it. What can anybody do? A remedial course in ethics ("moral equality does not require literal sameness")?

Sometimes I do think discussions of race and gender-related fact questions are best not done "in front of the goyim." It's a vexing question.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 16 March 2010 12:15:06PM 17 points [-]

There's an additional problem-- there's a social circle where the consensus is that believing in race and gender differences in ability is proof of rationality, so if you're trying to do a counter-tribe rationality check, you'd need to know which tribe has a stronger influence on a person.

If Africa has the most genetic variation for humans, does that imply it's likely that the smartest human subgroup is likely to be African?

Comment author: Strange7 27 June 2011 08:00:54AM 12 points [-]

All else being equal, yes. However, many regions of Africa have ongoing problems with public health, availability of education, etc. that would wash out any advantages in genetic predisposition for intelligence.

Comment author: AlexMennen 16 March 2010 03:21:15AM 10 points [-]

"I'll bite the bullet and say global warming is the perfect example here. It's pretty clear to me that many people hold their positions on this issue - pro and contra - for political/social reasons rather than evidential ones."

I used to think that global warming was a poor example of this because while the right wing has plenty of reasons to oppose actions to fight global warming, and thus irrational reasons to force themselves to believe that global warming does not exist, the left wing does not have any reasons to support actions to fight global warming aside from evidence that global warming is a threat. Then it occurred to me that many people on the left actually do have alternate motives for pushing anti-global warming actions: other people on the left support it too (see Eliezer's The Sky is Green/Blue parable, and this article too, I suppose). This is even more irrational, but due to the stunning level of irrationality among humans on all sides of the political spectrum, is probably a factor for some.

Comment author: Larks 19 March 2010 11:15:46AM 8 points [-]

Fighting global warming can be used to justify the creation of 'green' jobs, in a new spin on the old keynesian make work ideas.

Alternatively, it can be used to provide justification for 'green protectionism'.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 18 March 2010 05:38:40PM *  4 points [-]

the left wing does not have any reasons to support actions to fight global warming aside from evidence that global warming is a threat.

However, someone who believes that global warming is a threat, and who has a poor grasp of ethics, has a motive to exaggerate the evidence, to compensate for others having too strict evidential standards or not doing cost-benefit analysis correctly.

Also, the image of oneself as on the vanguard of saving the world is a strong motivation to believe the world is endangered (overlapping with but distinct from group identity).

(Disclaimer: I don't think this is most of what's going on with AGW believers. Not having studied the issue, I default (albeit tentatively) to believing the scientific consensus.)

This is even more irrational, but due to the stunning level of irrationality among humans on all sides of the political spectrum, is probably a factor for some.

It's absolutely a factor. People are crazy, the world is mad, you shouldn't be surprised by this or hesitant in calling it as you see it.

Comment author: Jack 16 March 2010 03:40:59AM 16 points [-]

the left wing does not have any reasons to support actions to fight global warming aside from evidence that global warming is a threat.

The story conservatives usually tell here is that the left wants to fight global warming as a way to further their economic agenda and narrative: corporations are bad and the government needs to stop them and control them. You see slogans like "Green is the new red".

Comment author: simplicio 16 March 2010 03:27:32AM 5 points [-]

Then it occurred to me that many people on the left actually do have alternate motives for pushing anti-global warming actions: other people on the left support it too

Bingo. The Michael Moore-style crowd is engaged in nothing less than an immense progressive circle-jerk, if you'll excuse my Klatchian. It's too bad we can't just throw them at the Limbaughistas and liberate gamma rays.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 15 March 2010 05:26:27PM 11 points [-]

Most of the educated people I know are ultra-behaviorists

I'm pretty sure you're misusing the word "behaviorist".

Comment author: simplicio 15 March 2010 05:32:45PM 11 points [-]

On reflection, you're right. It's a pars pro toto thing I guess, since behaviourism is associated with the idea that personality comes from the environment alone.

"Nurturist" is probably a better term.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 03 October 2012 01:46:45AM 1 point [-]

And has "Naturist" as a convenient antonym...

Comment author: brazil84 15 March 2010 06:18:37PM *  5 points [-]

I agree. Anyway, it's easy to talk about the God test now because you won't get burned at the stake or anything.

One modern equivalent to the God test is whether the person believes that genetics play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference. This has become an area where stating the (obvious) and rational truth will get you in a lot of social/career trouble.

Heck, it might even get you downvoted on Lesswrong :)

Comment author: Sarokrae 26 September 2011 10:04:32AM *  11 points [-]

The problem with discussing racial differences is that when people say "black", they're already making inherent assumptions about genetics. "Black" incorporates an incredible amount of genetic diversity, far more than the label "white". The common error in these debates is that an awful lot of the population will see the label "black" and fail to distinguish between all people labelled as such. People distinguish between, say, east Asians and south-east Asians and Indians, but they say "black" as if all of Africa are the same.

Look at the performance at the Olympics running races. Would you note the fact that "100m winners are always black"? Would you be willing to make the statement that "black people are naturally better sprinters"? How about distance runners? As it turns out, the good sprinters are usually Jamaican or African-American, with little success from Africa itself. The good distance runners almost entirely come from the Nandi area of Kenya - hardly representative of Africa as a whole. Plenty of areas of Africa have fewer good runners, and probably lots of areas have just the same proportion as European countries.

I'd venture to say that there might be black ethnicities which are on average less intelligent, or have behavioural differences - after all, there are black ethnicities that average around 4ft tall. But will that difference makes any meaningful average when you're talking about "black" people? There are for more genetic variations within racial groups than between them, if you're willing to count "black" as a racial group. I personally don't like generalising in such a non-meaningful way. Compare to people of a specific ancestral origin, if you must compare. Comparing with the average of every ethnicity in Africa, without concern for your sampling bias giving you an inaccurate average (by using statements like "blacks are..." or "blacks have..."), does seem a bit, well, racist.

Comment author: brazil84 26 September 2011 11:02:46AM *  12 points [-]

The problem with discussing racial differences is that when people say "black", they're already making inherent assumptions about genetics. "Black" incorporates an incredible amount of genetic diversity, far more than the label "white".

I don't see why this is necessarily a problem. For example, if I observed that generally speaking, the South is warmer than Minnesota, I would be correct even though the South incorporates a lot more geographic diversity than Minnesota.

People distinguish between, say, east Asians and south-east Asians and Indians, but they say "black" as if all of Africa are the same.

For purposes of this discussion, it's a reasonable category. If there were a large subgroup of blacks which was highly intelligent, then it might be appropriate to use different categories.

Would you note the fact that "100m winners are always black"?

Generally speaking, yes.

Would you be willing to make the statement that "black people are naturally better sprinters"?

Probably not, since sprinting ability seems concentrated in a subgroup of blacks. (Relatively) low intelligence does not seem to be this way.

Perhaps more importantly, either way you look at it, it doesn't change the fact that genetics is partly responsible for the black/white sprinting gap.

But will that difference makes any meaningful average when you're talking about "black" people?

I would say "yes" in the same way that the South is generally warmer than Minnesota. Put another way, I'm not aware of any subgroup of blacks which stands out in terms of intelligence. But even if there were, it would not change the fact that there is a black/white IQ gap and genetics is responsible for a lot of it.

There are for more genetic variations within racial groups than between them,

Assuming that's true, so what?

Comment author: Sarokrae 26 September 2011 11:40:00AM *  6 points [-]

It means that there are few contexts where you might ask me "are blacks less intelligent than whites on average" without me saying anything more than "insufficient data: error bars too big".

And any scientist who researches the issue (or indeed anyone taken seriously who discusses the issue) and uses the term "black people" without considering whether or not they really mean "all black people" or even "a representative average of all black people" are being very misleading if they report it using that wording, considering the biases of the general public.

Comment author: brazil84 26 September 2011 03:47:11PM 6 points [-]

It means that there are few contexts where you might ask me "are blacks less intelligent than whites on average" without me saying anything more than "insufficient data: error bars too big".

I'm not sure I understand this. Are you denying that there is a statistically significant difference in intelligence (as measured by IQ) between blacks and whites?

considering the biases of the general public.

So you are saying that special rules need to apply when discussing race and intelligence?

Comment author: CarlShulman 16 March 2010 10:42:40AM *  14 points [-]

Talk to the experts in psychometrics, and they'll tell you that this is still an open question. It was a plurality (not majority or consensus) view in psychometrics that there was some genetic influence (beyond the obvious, e.g. black skin attracting discrimination, etc) back in 1984, but since then there has been other work that changes the picture, e.g. that of James Flynn, Will Dickens, and Richard Nisbett. It's unclear what a poll done today would reveal.

The experiments that would give huge likelihood ratios just haven't been done. Transracial adoption studies have been very few, flawed in design, and delivered conflicting results. And so far, genomics has revealed almost nothing positive about the genetic architecture of intelligence in any ethnicity, much less differences between ethnicities. Cheap genome sequencing may well bring answers there in the next 5-7 years, pinning down this debate with utterly overwhelming evidence, but it hasn't done so yet.

Comment author: Morendil 16 March 2010 11:39:59AM *  2 points [-]

Can you make an effort to state in more detailed terms what it would mean to find that "genetics play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference", in other words what precise predictions this theory makes? (And more precisely, what predictions it makes that distinguish it from the predictions of alternative theories, such as "environmental differences resulting from e.g. discrimination play a significant role in the black/white IQ difference".)

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 15 March 2010 07:40:01PM *  25 points [-]

Obvious truth? Maybe it is given all available information — I don't know — but certainly not given the information most people have. (And "rational truth" is just a positive-affect type error.)

I would agree, if "believes" were replaced by "is willing to entertain the hypothesis" or "doesn't think one must be a racist to believe".

Comment author: Alicorn 15 March 2010 06:33:11PM 10 points [-]

What makes you think this is obvious? While racial IQ differences certainly aren't ruled out a priori (Ashkenazi Jews are the quintessential example), Occamian reasoning about the black/white divide doesn't indicate that genetics is part of the best and most parsimonious explanation. There are adequate other factors at work - you can pick up a lot of data from studies on things like stereotype threat, for instance. And the fact that biracial children do better on IQ when the mother is the white parent than when the mother is black seems strong evidence to me that genetics are not the whole story, if they play any part at all.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 March 2010 07:07:21AM *  9 points [-]

.

Comment author: Alicorn 18 March 2010 05:51:56PM 10 points [-]

This would predict that the difference would be seen in biracial boys, but not in biracial girls. I've never heard anything to that effect - have you?

Comment author: [deleted] 18 March 2010 11:47:33PM *  3 points [-]

.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 March 2010 11:51:08PM *  1 point [-]

.

Comment author: Alicorn 19 March 2010 12:08:43AM 2 points [-]

You can edit comments - there's a button to the right of the "parent" link at the bottom of each. That way you can make prompt additions like this without having to double-post.

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 March 2010 11:33:21AM 15 points [-]

What sort of human variable doesn't correlate with race? Are any of weight, height, blood pressure, athletic ability, or any other more measurable characteristic uncorrelated? How about if we measure these at birth, to work around environmental effects?

Comment author: [deleted] 26 September 2011 05:48:12AM 1 point [-]

I'd like to suggest you taboo "athletic ability", as it seems more like a reference to a common stereotype about black people than a well-defined trait (if nothing else, long-jumping, hockey, cross-country skiing, soccer, distance swimming and mountain climbing seem like very different tasks that nevertheless might get called "athletic")

Comment author: ciphergoth 26 September 2011 07:31:29AM 4 points [-]

The point holds if you focus on just one particular tests rather than generalizing across many sports.