A few examples (in approximately increasing order of controversy):
If you proceed anyway...
- Identify knowledge that may be dangerous. Forewarned is forearmed.
- Try to cut dangerous knowledge out of your decision network. Don’t let it influence other beliefs or your actions without your conscious awareness. You can’t succeed completely at this, but it might help.
- Deliberately lower dangerous priors, by acknowledging the possibility that your brain is contaminating your reasoning and then overcompensating, because you know that you’re still too overconfident.
- Spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking contradictory evidence. If believing something could have a great cost to your values, make a commensurately great effort to be right.
- Just don’t do it. It’s not worth it. And if I found out, I’d have to figure out where you live, track you down, and kill you.
It's hard to find proof of what most people consider obvious, unless its part of the Canon of Great Moments in Science (tm) and the textbook industry can make a bundle off it. Tell you what -- if you like, I'll trade you a promise to look for the citation you want for a promise to look for primary science on anthropogenic global warming. I suspect we're making the climate warmer, but I don't know where to read a peer-reviewed article documenting the evidence that we are. I'll spend any reasonable amount of time that you do looking -- 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 90 minutes -- and if I can't find anything, I'll admit to being wrong.
Slavery, genocide, and factory farming are examples of imperfect democracy -- the definition of "citizen" simply isn't extended widely enough yet. Fortunately, people (slowly) tend to notice the inconsistency in times of relative peace and prosperity, and extend additional rights. Hence the order-of-magnitude decrease in the fraction of the global population that is enslaved, and, if you believe Stephen Pinker, in the frequency of ethnic killings. As for factory farming, I sincerely hope the day when animals are treated as citizens when appropriate will come, and the quicker it comes the better I'll be pleased. On the other hand, if you glorify dictatorship, or if you give dictatorship an opening to glorify itself, it tends to pretty effectively suppress talk about widening the circle of compassion. Better to have a hypocritical system of liberties than to let vice walk the streets without paying any tribute to virtue at all; such tributes can collect compound interest over the centuries.
The Vietnam war is generally recognized as a failure of democracy; the two most popular opponents of the war were assassinated, and the papers providing the policy rationale for the war were illegally hidden, ultimately causing the downfall of President Nixon. The drug war seems to be winding down as the high cost of prisons sinks in. The war on Iraq is probably democracy's fault.
True enough, but it also pushes some of the real responsibility onto the powerful. I would much rather kill one person than stand by and let ten die, but I would much rather let one person die than kill one person -- responsibility counts for something.
God forbid, if you'll excuse the expression. I'm not paying anybody to butcher for me, although sometimes, despite my best efforts, they take my tax dollars for the purpose. So far as I can manage it without being thrown in jail, it's not in my name; I vote against any incumbent that commits atrocities, and campaign for people who promise not to, and buy renewable energy from the power company and fair-trade imports from the third world and humanely-labeled meat from the supermarket. I'm sure that I still benefit from all kinds of bloody shenanigans, but it's not because I want to.
Finally, are you any relation to Michael Vassar, the political philosopher and scholar of just war theory? You seem to have a mind that is open like his, and a similarly agile debating style, but you also seem considerably bitterer than his published works.
I don't know if you're still looking for this, and if this would be an appropriate place to post links. But:
Primary Evidence: