JoshuaZ comments on Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think - Less Wrong

15 Post author: WrongBot 13 July 2010 04:44AM

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Comment author: WrongBot 13 July 2010 03:03:20PM *  6 points [-]

I am grouping together "everything that goes into your brain," which includes lots and lots of stuff, most of it unconscious. See research on priming, for example.

This argument is explicitly about encouraging people to justify ignoring relevant data about reality. It is, I recognize, an extremely dangerous proposition, of exactly the sort I am warning against!

At risk of making a fully general counterargument, I think it's telling that a number of commenters, yourself included, have all but said that this post is too dangerous.

  • You called it "deeply worrisome."
  • RichardKennaway called it "defeatist scaremongering."
  • Emile thinks it's Dark Side Epistemology. (And see my response.)

These are not just people dismissing this as a bad idea (which would have encouraged me to do the same), these are people are worrying about a dangerous idea. I'm more convinced I'm right than I was when I wrote the post.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 13 July 2010 03:14:05PM 2 points [-]

"Deeply worrisome" may have been bad wording on my part. It might be more accurate to say that this is an attitude which is so much more often wrong than right that it is better to acknowledge the low probability of such knowledge existing but not actually deliberately keep knowledge out.