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Vladimir_M comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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Comments (231)
SarahC:
This is true only assuming that all beliefs that you suspect might be factually true are respectable. Espousing disreputable beliefs -- and sometimes merely being suspected of harboring them -- can hurt you very badly regardless of how good evidence you have for them. Even if you manage to hide your dangerous thoughts perfectly, there is still the problem that duplicity is very unpleasant for most people, if anything because it requires constant caution and self-discipline to watch your mouth.
Of course, this is irrelevant if there are absolutely no beliefs that a rational person might suspect to be true and that are at the same time disreputable to the point where expressing them might have bad repercussions. However, that's not what I observe in practice. Speaking as someone who happens to believe that some not very respectable views are factually true, or at least plausible, sometimes I can't help but envy people whose opinions are all respectable enough that they can relax and speak their mind openly in all situations.
(I raised the same point on OB a while ago.)
Oh, I have the same thing. I do have some nearly disreputable views, and I have accidentally hurt people's feelings by airing them. (Pretty mild stuff: "Walmart's not so bad" and "Physical resurrection doesn't make sense.") Now I'm pretty much housebroken, although I worry like wedrifid that it shows in my facial expressions.
But. Would any of you really trade being well-informed for the convenience of not having to hold your tongue? I know I wouldn't.
SarahC:
I'm curious whether you'd extend that principle to arbitrarily extreme hypothetical situations.
Imagine the most disreputable factual belief you can think of, and then suppose (for the sake of the argument) that there is in fact some strong evidence in favor of this or some equally disreputable view, which is however ignored or dismissed by all respectable people. Furthermore, suppose that if you find out about it and update your beliefs accordingly, this knowledge will not give you any practical benefit, but merely place you in a situation where your honest beliefs are closer to truth, yet extremely disreputable.
Mind you, we're not talking about your views merely causing some irritation or provoking heated arguments. We're talking about a situation where in most social and all professional situations, you are unable to look at people's faces without thinking that they would consider you an abominable monster unfit for civilized society if they knew your true honest thoughts. You have to live with the fact that people around you (except perhaps for a few close friends and confidants) respect you and are willing to work and socialize with you only insofar as they are misled about what you really believe and what you truly are.
Would you really prefer this outcome to staying blissfully ignorant?
Well, yes. You mean you don't want to secretly have a powerful and dangerous dark side?
Probably not. A sensible person ought to be willing to suffer for a few very important things... but very few. So a very disreputable belief ought to also, in some way, also be very important to be worth believing. In practice, when a contentious issue also seems not very important (or not very relevant to me) I don't bother investigating it much -- it's not worth becoming disreputable for.
Knowing whether disreputable beliefs are true is helpful in figuring out what intellectual institutions you can trust.
This, however, means that your above comment is in need of some strong disclaimers. Unless of course it's directed at someone who lives in a society in which all highly disreputable beliefs happen to be false and outright implausible from an unbiased perspective. (But would you bet that this is the case for any realistic human society?)
Well said. That's a 5-second response right there to quite a lot of people in the econoblogging community who think they're clever.
On a related note, I think too few people realize that it's OK to sometimes hold beliefs that are mistaken in a strongly disreputable direction. If all your errors fall on the reputable side of the line, you're missing out on accuracy. In a noisy world, sufficiently asymmetric suppression of falsehoods is indistinguishable from suppression of truths.
Twitter-worthy!
^necrobump
Is there a name for this theorem? It seems like it follows from invariance of information content (passed through a noisy channel) under permutation of symbols.
I agree and add that watching your mouth is not nearly enough. I, for example, are extremely good at watching my mouth when I am attempting to tow absurd party lines but I am irredeemably poor at controlling all the minute details of body language that must go with it. The only reliable way for most people to tell lies with adequate sincerity is to lie to themselves first.
Also, ignorance is bliss.
Awesome. Do tell! Allow me to join you in controversy.