twanvl comments on Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (311)
My motivation in writing this article was to attempt to dissuade others from courses of action that might lead them to become bigots, among other things.
But I am also personally terrified of exactly the sort of thing I describe, because I can't see a way to protect against it. If I had enough strong evidence to assign a probability of .99 to the belief that gay men have an average IQ 10 points lower than straight men (I use this example because I have no reason at all to believe it is true, and so there is less risk that someone will try to convince me of it), I don't think I could prevent that from affecting my behavior in some way. I don't think it's possible. And I disvalue such a result very strongly, so I avoid it.
I bring up dangerous thoughts because I am genuinely scared of them.
Group statistics gives only a prior, and just a few observations of any individual will overwhelm it. And if start discriminating against gays if they have low average intelligence, then you should discriminate even more against low intelligence itself. It is not the gayness that is the important factor in that case, it just has a weak correlation.