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Closet survey #1
What do you believe that most people on this site don't?
I'm especially looking for things that you wouldn't even mention if someone wasn't explicitly asking for them. Stuff you're not even comfortable writing under your own name. Making a one-shot account here is very easy, go ahead and do that if you don't want to tarnish your image.
I think a big problem with a "community" dedicated to being less wrong is that it will make people more concerned about APPEARING less wrong. The biggest part of my intellectual journey so far has been the acquisition of new and startling knowledge, and that knowledge doesn't seem likely to turn up here in the conditions that currently exist.
So please, tell me the crazy things you're otherwise afraid to say. I want to know them, because they might be true.
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Comments (653)
In what is probably an increasing order of controversial beliefs:
Libertarianism is correct, at least in the broader sense of the word (in the sense under which Milton Friedman qualifies as a libertarian). I know this isn't the most controversial belief, but it's still a minority belief, according to the 2012 survey.
Productivity (in the sense of "improve your productivity" LW posts) isn't that important as long as you're above a certain threshold, the threshold needed to do enough work to support yourself, save for the future, and have money to spend for fun. Excessive optimization for productivity (which describes many productivity posts on LW) leads to a less happy life.
The differences between men and women are overblown and are mostly socially caused. They are not so great that men and women should be treated differently. Normative gender roles should be abolished. Feminism is good.
The arguments commonly presented in favor of vegetarianism/veganism are weak. They presuppose that people care more about animal suffering than they really do (and subtly and unintentionally try to shame those that don't care as much), and that people are more capable of reducing animal suffering with their dietary choices than they really are.
Human value isn't irreducibly complex. It boils down to pleasure/happiness. Wireheading is the optimal state.
There is an objective morality (for humans), and it's ethical egoism.
I'd love to subscribe to your newsletter.
I can't shake off the suspicion of solipsism.
Don't worry, you're not the one who exists.
I don't think what I'm about to post is strictly in keeping with the intended comment material, but I'm posting it here because I think this is where I'll get the best feedback.
The majority of humans don't have a concrete reason for why they value moral behavior. If you ask a human why they value life or happiness of others, they'll throw out some token response laden with fallacies, and when pressed they'll respond with something along the lines of "I just feel like it's the right thing". In my case, it's the opposite. I have a rather long list of reasons why not to kill people, starting with the problems that would result if I programmed an AI with those inclinations. Also the desire for people not to kill and torture me. But where other people have a negative inclination to killing people, flaying them alive, etc. I don't. Where other people have an neural framework that encourages empathy and inconsequential intellectual arguments to support this, I have a neural framework that encourages massive levels of suffering in others and intellectual arguments restricting my actions away from my intuitive desires.
On to my point. Understandably, it is rather difficult for me to express this unconventional aspect of myself in fleshy-space (I love that term). So I don't have any supported ideas of how common non-conventional ethical inclinations are, or how they're expressed. I wanted to open this up for discussion of our core ethical systems, normative and non-normative. In particular I am interested in seeing if others have similar inclinations to mine and how they deal / don't deal with them.
Many singularitarians have a bias toward expecting a singularity in their own lifetime or shortly after it. (I assign a single-digit to singularity before 2100 and something like 25-40 in the next 500 years
Old Culture gets way too little credit, but most of the people who realize this or appear to realize this are reactionaries who either can't imagine different, much better Old Cultures or are neither utilitarian nor consensual with respect to participation in said cultures. (
Late to this (only by 4 years... so fifty smartphone generations), but LOVE the idea.
I believe - firmly, and with conviction - that the modal politician is a parasitic megalomaniacal sociopath who should be prevented at all costs from obtaining power; that the State (and therefore democracy) is an entirely illegitimate way of ameliorating public goods problems and furthering 'social objectives'.
Hence my nick (which I invented).
the optimal political/social structure is one in which we encourage megalomaniacal sociopaths to do good, because they tend to be effective. This is the best part of capitalism.
I'm not so sure about that. The outcomes implied by an ASPD diagnosis (not quite identical to "sociopath", but close enough for use here, I think) are better than some disorders, but still pretty rough -- including in measures of occupational success.
We might object that these are self-selected as people whose lives have been damaged enough by their problem that they seek treatment, but personality disorder criteria are so vague that I can't think offhand of a better way of grounding the word.
(Meta-comment.) These 2009-era comments raise political/controversial points and meta-commentary I associate with latter-day LW, not OG LW, which surprises me a bit. (Examples below.) Given the more recent signs of escalating political tensions on LW, I wouldn't have expected these older comments to hit the same beats as, say, Multiheaded's analogous thread from this year, but a bunch did.
It looks like the political/controversial points provoked less argument here than in the 2012 post. I'd guess this is down to increasing political heterogeneity on LW over time, but maybe it's just because there are more people here now. (Or maybe Multiheaded's more dramatic framing in the 2012 post primed people to argue more vigorously? Dunno.)
"the most important application of improving rationality is not projects like friendly AI or futarchy, but ordinary politics"
"Forbidden topics!"
"I've heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren't necessarily as harmful as they may seem."
"In western societies, it's an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad."
"within [sic?] human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, [sic] and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations"
"it's important to not downvote contributors to this survey if they sound honest, but voice silly-sounding or offending opinions"
"That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false."
"I believe that there are very significant correlations between intelligence and race. [...] I believe that the reasons white people enslaved black people, and not the other way around is due to average intelligence differences."
"There is a very strong pressure to be "Politically Correct", and it seems that most beliefs that would be tagged with "Politically Correct" are tagged with that because they cannot be tagged with "Correct"."
"Men and women think differently. Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy."
"As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information. Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished."
"Bearing children is immoral."
"All discussion of gender relations on LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or any similar forum, will converge on GenderFail." (This last one's from April 2010, but still.)
[emphasis added]
Wow. Essentially, they prophesied Elevatorgate.
It isn't prophecy if you have a large-n sample.
It's unclear to me that this is that LW specific. If you asked any large sample of western Internet users for anonymous and unaccountable statements of controversial opinions would you get results that are that different? If not, then it's more a description of the Internet.
The only thing that's LW specific is the suggestion that the most effective use of rationality is going to be politics.
I do not believe that the Singularity is likely to happen any time soon, even in astronomical terms. Furthermore, I am far from convinced that, even if the Singularity were to happen, the transhuman AI would be able to achieve quasi-godlike status (i.e., it may never be able to reshape entire planets in a matter of minutes, rewrite everyone's DNA, travel faster than light, rewrite the laws of physics, etc.). In light of this, I believe that worrying about the friendliness of AI is kind of a waste of time.
I think I have good reasons for these beliefs, and I operate by Crocker's Rules, FWIW...
Anything that does not have sufficient intelligence to be considered a threat does not even remotely qualify as a 'Singularity'. (Your 'even if' really means 'just not gonna happen'.)
Anything that cannot "reshape entire planets in a matter of minutes, rewrite everyone's DNA, travel faster than light, rewrite the laws of physics, etc" cannot possibly be intelligent enough to qualify as a threat? That seems an odd statement, given that some of those are thought to be impossible.
No. That isn't implied by what I said.
The relevant sentence is "In light of this, I believe that worrying about the friendliness of AI is kind of a waste of time". If that to which the label 'singularity' is applied is not sufficiently powerful for worrying about friendliness then the label is most certainly applied incorrectly.
As I'd already mentioned, I am far from convinced that a sufficiently powerful AI will emerge any time soon. Furthermore, I believe that such an AI will still be constrained by the laws of physics, regardless of how smart it is, which will put severe limits on its power. I also believe that our current understanding of the laws of physics is more or less accurate; i.e., the AI won't suddenly discover how to make energy from nothing or how to travel faster than light, regardless of how much CPU power it spends on the task. So far so good; but I am also far from convinced that bona fide "gray goo" self-replicating molecular nanotechnology -- which is the main tool in any Singularity-grade AI's toolbox -- is anything more than a science fictional plot device, given our current understanding of the laws of physics.
Maybe supersmart AI's are so good at disregarding the known laws pof phyisc that they exist already.
Creating working AGI software components is a necessary step towards making AGI, and you don't have any hope of understanding the problem of AGI until you've worked on it at the software level.
Fertility and intelligence are negatively correlated.
Religiosity and intelligence seem to be negatively correlated.
Therefore all the efforts of Dawkins, Yudkowsky etc. to make the world more rational seem to be futile or at least inefficient. Pretty scary...
Fertility and intelligence may be correlated, but that does not state much about intelligence and birth rate. Just because two -things are correlated, does not imply causation, and even if they are, their may be non-listed effects which cause results opposite those that would be anticipated with only two factors taken into consideration.
I believe that every single social interaction is linked to power/hierarchy. (see Robert Greene book's)
I also believe that most on LW simply opt-out their local/most proximate hierarchy (and they may actively and/or secretly seek to discredit it), as Paul Graham in high-school. In one of his articles he talked of how wanted to be more intelligent than popular. That is dominance in one field instead of another. (A tip to entrepreneurs is to aim to be #1 in your field or not start at all.)
If it's not their most proximate hierarchy then it is the one they internalized during their youth. Parents? Friends?
I believe that's human, good and perhaps to an extent "WEIRDÂÂ". I remember reading an old quote of an amerindian chief talking of the unrest in the eyes of europeans, also how Thomas Jefferson (or was it Franklin?) talked of the indolence of amerindians.
Culture is an internalization of the power/hierarchy in place/followed natural or not. As is everything else of social nature, pretty much everything else manmade. (In theory not science, that's what I love about it. If you take out the "In theory" and the human nature of scientists.)
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
His argument boils down to nerd kids being exceptionally smart, and caring much more about being smart than being popular, hence failing at the latter.
I think this argument is overly general, as it can be applied to any kind of excellence: jock kids are exceptionally athletic, and they care much more about being athletic than being popular, hence, according to Graham's argument, they should be failing at being popular, while in the American school system they succed.
I wonder whether this "popular jock, unpopular nerd" phenomenon is specific to the American, and perhaps to a lesser extent Western, culture. AFAIK, in East Asian cultures such as Japan and South Korea, school popularity is positively correlated with scholastic performance, probably with good reason, since in these countries scholastic performance is highly correlated with future income and social status.
The closest Japanese equivalent to the Western 'nerd' or 'geek' is the 'otaku'. The word otaku typically refers to social ineptitude, an excessive fixation on pop culture items such as manga, anime, videogames and associated paraphernalia, and general tendency to withdraw from normal social interactions and escape to a fantasy world.
While perhaps many Western nerds can be considered otaku or near-otaku, Japanese otaku are not, in general, nerds, in the Western meaning of "socially awkward smart person". I don't know about IQ scores, but AFAIK, otaku usually have lower-than-average scholastic performance.
I suppose that escapism is the result of social isolation, which results from being underperforming in whatever measure of success your local society values. Different societies value different things.
It's true that athletics are very demanding (I remember vividly the absurd amounts of time my high school's football team demanded of its members), but in practice, athletics does seem to somehow escape the double-bind of 'you cannot serve two masters'.
Is it general physical fitness and attractiveness? Yes, I bet that's part of it (although it makes one wonder if there's a causation/correlation confusion). Is it immediate advantages from intimidation due to physical size? I remember the football players at my highschool benefited a bit from this, from simply being huge, but it doesn't seem adequate. Is it the tribal nature of sports, in warring against the enemy school, where athletics short-circuits the need to earn popularity the hard way by players wrapping themselves in the proverbial flag? It'd explain why the competitive sports like football seem to elicit the most admiration of its athletes (and huge donations from alumni), and various track and field events ignored by most students. I like this as the biggest factor.
If I were going the correlation route, I'd probably appeal to the same excuses universities make in choosing on non-academic merits: the kids who do aggressive sports are generally more likely to succeed spectacularly in business or life and earn lots of money which they can donate back. (Consider the Terman study which found massive lifetime income returns to being extraverted.) So when the girls flock helplessly around the football team, making them 'popular' even though they are specializing in football and not 'being popular', they are executing an effective choice of future allies and boyfriends. (How many football stars marry their highschool sweetheart and go on to success...?)
I can only speak from my extensive anime-watching experience (he said, self-mockingly), but I get the impression that athletics is a great way to popularity and girls in Japan as well. Yes, the 'ideal student' archetype will be great at sports and academics, but that's true in the US as well, and it seems that if you can't have both, better to go with sports.
There are far fewer well-defined mathematical relations and operations on the set of "utilities" (aka "utility values", although the word 'value' is misleading since it suggests a number) than most self-stated utilitarians routinely use; for example, multiplying utilities by a scalar makes no sense, the sum of two utilities can only be defined under very strict conditions, and comparing two utilities under only slightly less strict ones.
Consequently, from a rigorous point of view utilitarianism makes very little sense and is in no way intellectually compelling. Most utilitarians satisfy themselves with a naive approach that allows it to build an internally consistent rule set, much in the same way as theology or classical physics. But the "utilities" they talk about have lost most of their connection to reality - to subjects' preferences/happiness - and more closely resemble an imaginary karma score.
I would have chosen the original ending of Three World Collide over the "true" ending, and would be, if not entirely pleased, at least optimistic with respects to the outcome of Failed Utopia #4-2.
Judging from the comments on Failed Utopia #4-2, you are far from alone on that one. Even EY, for all that he asserted that people were just claiming to be OK with it to be contrary, eventually conceded that he would choose that world over the current state of affairs. As would I.
That was because they didn't have the same impending doom of existential risk hanging directly over their heads and people weren't dying all the time, it wasn't a function of "yay more people are HAPPY".
Yes.
I didn't mean to suggest that you viewed it as a perfect win condition, nor that you believed peoples' HAPPY level was the most important factor; sorry if it came across that way.
I believe there's a significant probability of economic collapse in large developed countries in the next fifty years. (Possibilities: fiscal collapse, default, financial crash resulting in a true depression.) I believe that it's worth effort and money to plan for this eventuality.
I believe that choosing to focus attention on uplifting things is the most practical use of one's mind. (This is more controversial than it sounds: it means placing a noticeably higher value on high culture than low culture, and it means that making cynical observations corrodes most people's ability to be productive.)
I believe that the personal really is political. That is, many "political" isms are actually total sets of values about interpersonal relationships and the good life. So you can't really talk about values and ethics without ever bringing up contemporary politics, because often people's personal creeds in daily life actually are libertarian, feminist, conservative, socialist, etc. Therefore rules like "don't talk politics" imply that we don't talk about values either.
I do not believe in utilitarianism of any sort, as an account of how people should behave, how they do behave, or how artificial people might be designed to behave. People do not have utility functions and cannot use utility functions, and they will never prove useful in AGI.
Bayesian reasoning is no more a method for discovering truth than predicate calculus is. In particular, it will never be the basis for constructing an AGI.
Almost all writings on how to build an AGI are nothing more than word salad.
In common with most people here, I expect AGI to be possible. However, I may be unlike most people here in that I have no idea how to build one.
The bar to take seriously any proposed way of building an AGI is at least this high: a real demo that scares Eliezer with what could be done with it right now, never mind if and when it might foom.
All discussion of gender relations on LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or any similar forum, will converge on GenderFail. (Google "RaceFail" to see what I'm comparing this to. The current GenderFail isn't as bad as LiveJournal's great RaceFail 2009, but it's the same process in miniature.)
Some things are right, some things are wrong, and it is possible to tell the difference.
In your opinion, what might be some methods for discovering truth?
Observing, thinking, having ideas, and communicating with other people doing these things. Nothing surprising there. No-one has yet come up with a general algorithm for discovering new and interesting truths; if they did it would be an AGI.
Taking a wider view of this, it has been observed that every time some advance is made in the mathematics or technology of information processing, the new development is seized on as a model for how minds work, and since the invention of computers, a model for how minds might be made. The ancient Greeks compared it to a steam-driven machine. The Victorians compared it to a telephone exchange. Freud and his contemporaries drew on physics for their metaphors of psychic energies and forces. When computers were invented, it was a computer. Then holograms were invented and it was a hologram. Perceptrons fizzled because they couldn't even compute an XOR, neural networks achieved Turing-completeness but no-one ever made a brain out of them, and logic programming is now just another programming style.
Bayesian inference is just the latest in that long line. It may be the one true way to reason about uncertainty, as predicate calculus is the one true way to reason about truth and falsity, but that does not make of it a universal algorithm for thinking.
I didn't get the impression that Bayesian inference itself was going to produce intelligence; the impression I have is that Bayesian inference is the best possible interface with reality. Attach a hypothesis-generating module to one end and a sensor module to the other and that thing will develop the correctest-possible hypotheses. We just don't have any feasible hypothesis-generators.
I do get that impression from people who blithely talk of "Bayesian superintelligences". Example. What work is the word "Bayesian" doing there?
In this example, a Bayesian superintelligence is conceived as having a prior distribution over all possible hypotheses (for example, a complexity-based prior) and using its observations to optimally converge on the right one. You can even make a theoretically optimal learning algorithm that provably converges on the best hypothesis. (I forget the reference for this.) Where this falls down is the exponential explosion of hypothesis space with complexity. There no use in a perfect optimiser that takes longer than the age of the universe to do anything useful.
Thank you, that was very enlightening. I see now where you were coming from.
I still think that some breakthroughs are more -equal- fundamental and some methods are more correct, that is, efficient in seeking the truth. Perhaps attempts to first point out some specific interesting features of human consciousness (or intelligence, or brain) and only then try to analyse and replicate them would meet more success. In that sense logic and neural networks are successful, while bayesian inference is not.
I wonder if you are familiar with TRIZ? It strikes me as positively loony, but it is a not-outright-unsuccessful attempt at a general algorithm for discovering new, uh, counterintuitive implications of known natural laws. Not truths per se, but pretty close.
It would be a significant part of an AGI. Even the hardest part. But not enough to be considered an AGI itself.
Corporations literally get away with murder. The corporation is a recent innovation, not something that has always been with us. This recent social contract that governs corporations is deeply flawed, in that it holds no one accountable for consequences that would be regarded as criminal if resulting from the actions of a person. A recent case in point is the wave of suicides in the French national telecom giant.
(Ideas below are still works in progress, listed in descending order of potential disagreement:)
Bearing children is immoral. Eliezer has stated that he is not adult enough to have children, but I wonder if we will ever be adult enough, including in a post-singularity environment.
The second idea probably isn't as controversial: early suicide (outside of any moral dilemma, battlefield, euthanasia situation, etc.) is in some cases rational and moral. Combined with cryonics, it is the only sensible option for, e.g., senile dementia patients. But this group can be expanded, even without cryonics.
Some have mentioned modern school systems to be broken, but I'll go even further and say that mandatory education is a huge waste of time and money, for all involved. Many, perhaps most, need to know only basic literacy and arithmetic. The rest should be taught on a want-to-know basis or similar. As a corollary, I don't think many or even most people can be brought into the fold of science or rationality.
(Curiously, the original poster wondered if our crazy beliefs might be true, but many responses, including my own, are value, not fact, judgments.)
I love saying crazy things that I can support, and I thrive on the attention given to the iconoclast, so I find it impossible to answer this.
The only beliefs that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying here are beliefs that I want to be true, want to argue for, but I know would get shredded. This is one reason I try to hang out with smart, argumentative people - so that my concern about being shredded in an argument forces me to more carefully evaluate my beliefs. (With less intelligent people, I could say false things and still win arguments).
I've had a bone to pick with Yudkowski* ever since reading Three Worlds Collide. I haven't gathered all of my thoughts yet, or put them in a proper essay, but since you asked, here's a quick synopsis (paraphrasing Clausewitz).
I think people nowadays overestimate the value of human life. Generally speaking, we ain't worth that much - and up until about four-hundred years ago, killing each other was our primary source of entertainment.
As long as we have individuals, conflict is inevitable; and a society where the conflict's extremes have been narrowed down to nothing but sassy comments and politicking, well... that seems like a pretty boring place to live.
Speaking from experience, yelling at people solves a lot of problems. And I know a few individuals whom would be much less of a trainwreck if they'd been given the punch in the face they deserved. I think we've got no call to be judging the Baby Eaters for their biology - anymore than the Orgasmiums have for judging us. Misery can be just as much fun, if you approach it with the proper mindset, and I think HBO Rome does a brilliant job of describing a society with more reasonable standards. At the end of the day, it beats playing checkers, doesn't it?
:-) Just look at our entertainment - we love a protagonist who suffers.
*It's a very small bone. A chicken bone, really.
To whom?
You may want to read some of the Romantics, if you haven't already. Especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nietzsche, who don't necessarily normally fall into that category.
I was hoping to get more interesting replies to this post.
It seems you all more or less agree about how the world works, and what's left is people mooning about their personal ethical preferences or niggling issues in already vague areas, or minor doubts about this and that.
I believe jesus is entirely mythical, quarks don't exist, 9/11 and the london tube bombings were inside jobs, and flying saucers are the manifestation of a non-human, superior intelligence.
This rationalist community is a dry husk of libertarians, mathematicians, and various other people who don't get invited to parties. I find it very depressing...
I don't have much of a vested interest in being or remaining human. I've often shocked friends and acquaintances by saying that if there were a large number of intelligent life forms in the universe and I had my choice, I doubt I'd choose to be human.
I'm going to be an elven wizard.
Are there (many) people on here who don't agree with you?
Depending on how we define "human," I might... I'm not sure. But I'm fairly confident that if I did, my definition of "human" would come out so broad that it would shock swestrup's friends and acquaintances even more.
Whenever I hear an unsupported vote against conventional wisdom on a web forum, e.g. "adult-preteen intercourse isn't very harmful", I don't update my view much. Absent a well-argued case for the unconventional position, I assume that such beliefs reflect some strong self-interested bias (sufficient to overcome strong societal pressure) and not fearless rational investigation - to say nothing of trolls.
I also strongly discount unreasoned votes in favor of the consensus, especially on issues subject to strong conformity pressure.
It seems that this survey is not intended to solicit arguments for particular controversial anthropological or political beliefs. Does the site accept them at all? I'd expect not, except as case studies for some general claim, due to the risk of attracting cranks.
I agree. See my comment for this post. My position is controversial, but pretty coherent. At least, no one came up with a counter argument, I was just downvoted alot. So, my opinion is a pretty good example of what the poster is looking for, yet such opinions inherently will not do well. Really, this forum is antithetical to this post.
I think school, as conventionally operated, is a scandalous waste of brain plasticity and really amounts mostly to a combination of "signaling" and a corral.
I'm not sure what should replace it. There are things kids need to know - math, general knowledge, epistemology, reasoning, literacy as communication, and the skills of unsupervised study and research. (School doesn't overtly teach most of the above - it puts you under impossible pressure and assumes that like a tomato pip you will be squeezed into moving in the right direction.)
There are also a ton of things they might like to learn, out of interest.
I am not sure those two categories of learning ought to be bundled up. Especially, while I can understand forcing a study of the first category, it seems obviously counterproductive to force the second.
I've read some responses touching on the same issue, but my point is different enough that I thought I'd do my own.
I believe that posession of child, or any other kind of pornography should be legal. I don't have enough information to decide whether the actual making of child pornography is harmful in the long term to the children, but I believe that having easy access to it would allow would-be child molesters to limit themselves to viewing things that have already happened and can't be undone.
I would say that the prominence of hentai and lolicon in Japan is a smaller step in the same direction, and seems to have worked well there.
In context it's interesting that Japanese children's manga routinely has bawdy jokes, sexualized slapstick and "fan service". This may be an outsider's mistaken view but there doesn't seem to be any serious attempt to fence children into a contrived asexual sandpit.
I agree that's interesting, but remember these manga are not actually written by children, nor bought or read exclusively by children.
I don't know how many people here would agree with the following, but my position on it is extreme relative to the mainstream, so I think it deserves a mention:
As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.
Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished. The same applies to laws on libel, slander and exchange of child pornography.
Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.
People and companies exposing buggy software to untrusted parties deserve to have it exploited to their disadvantage. Maliciously attacking software systems by submitting data crafted to trigger security-critical bugs should not be illegal in any way.
Limits: The last paragraph assumes that there are no langford basilisks; if such things do in fact exist, preventing basilisk deaths may justify censorship - based on the purely practical observation that fixing the human mind would likely not be possible shortly after discovery.
All of the stated policy opinions apply to societies composed of roughly human-intelligent people only; they break down in the presence of sufficiently intelligent entities.
In addition, if it was possible to significantly ameliorate existential risks by censorsing certain information, that would justify doing so - but I can't come up with a likely case for that happening in practice.
Isn't yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater a kind of langford basilisk?
Agreed.
Normally, when people say they believe "all information should be free", I suspect they don't really mean this, but since you claim your position is very "extreme", perhaps you really do mean it?
I think information, such as what is the PIN to my bank account, or the password to my LessWrong.com account, should not be freely accessible.
You don't believe there is value in anonymity? E.g. being able to criticize an oppressive government, without fear of retribution from said government?
You make a good point; I didn't phrase my original statement as well as I should have. What I meant was that there shouldn't be any laws (within the limits mentioned in my original post) preventing people or companies from using, storing and passing on information. I didn't mean to imply keeping secrets should be illegal. If a person or company wants to keep something secret, and can manage to do so in practice, that should be perfectly legal as well.
As a special case, using encryption and keeping the keys to yourself should be a fundamental right, and doing so shouldn't lead to e.g. a presumption of guilt in a legal case.
I believe there can be value in anonymity, but the way to achieve it is by effectively keeping a secret either through technological means or by communicating through trusted associates. If doing so is infeasible without laws on use of information, I don't think laws would help, either.
I think governments that would like to be oppressive have significantly more to fear from free information use than their citizens do.
When you use the PIN to your bank account you expect both the bank and ATM technicians and programmers to respect your secret. There are laws that either force them not to remember the PIN or impose punishment for misusing their position of trust. I don't see how such situations or cases of blackmail would be resolved without assuming one person's right to have their secrets not made public by others.
I'm not just nitpicking. I would love to see a watertight argument against communication perversions. Have you written anything on the topic?
I very strongly agree, except for the matter of trademarks. Trademarks make brand recognition easier and reduce transaction costs. Also enforcing trademarks is more along the lines of preventing fraud, since trademarks are limited only in identifying items in specific classes of items (rather clumsily worded, but I'm trying to be concise and legalities don't exactly lend themselves to concision.)
Agreed.
Also, if you pile on technological improvements but still try to keep patents etc, you end up in the crazy situation where government intrusiveness has to grow without bounds and make hegemonic war on the universe to stop anyone, anywhere from popping a Rolex out of their Drexlerian assembler.
I don't agree with it. You can't believe everything you read in Wired. The "information should be free" movement is just modern techno-geek Marxism, and it's only sillier the second time around.
All software is buggy. All parties are untrusted.
That may be so now, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to change it. That the current default state for software is "likely insecure" reflects the fact that the market price for software security is lower than the cost of providing it.
Laws against software attacks raise the cost of performing such attacks, and therefore lower the incentives for people to ensure the software they use is secure. I think it would be worth a try to take that illegality away, and see if the market responds by coming up with ways to make software secure.
You can't get really good physical security without expending huge amounts of resources: physical security doesn't scale well. Software security is different in principle: If you get it right, it doesn't matter how many resources an attacker can get to try and subvert your system over a data channel - they won't succeed.
There is no such thing as a consumer-driven economy.
meaning what?
Something that I don't so much believe as assign a higher probability than other people.
There is a limit to how much technology humans can have, how much of the universe we can understand and how complicated of devices we can make. This isn't necessarily a universal IQ limit but more of an asymptotic limit that our evolved brains can't surpass. And this limit is lower, perhaps substantially so, than what we would need to do a lot of the cool stuff like achieve the singularity and start colonizing the universe.
I think it's even possible that some sort of asymptotic limit is common to all evolved life, this may well be a solution to the fermi paradox, not that they aren't out there, but no one is smart enough to actually leave their rock.
I have wondered about the assumption that technological / scientific / economic progress can continue forever, and I am also suspicious of the idea that arbitrary degrees of hyper-intelligence are possible. I suspect that all things have limits, and that mother nature long ago found most of those limits.
With probability 50% or greater, the long-term benefits of the invasion of Iraq will outweigh the costs suffered in the short term.
Do you still maintain the statement, in 2015 with ISIL attacks?
I can see the reasoning though I don't quite agree for two reasons.
1) If the Lancet report is at all accurate that's a lot of deaths for the long-term benefits to make up for.
2) How much more extreme has that made the rest of the middle east? How has it hurt the possibility of peace in Israel.
I was, and still am against the start of the war, though I've been fairly consistent in thinking they should stay since then. (Oddly enough I thought the surge was a good idea when virtually no-one else did, though have since started to think it didn't really do anything now that everyone is moving on board!).
Costs and benefits to whom? America and allies, Iraq, or the world in general?
I believe that some improvements in rationality have negative consequences which outweigh their positive ones.
That said, it might be easy to make too much of this. I agree that, on average, marginal improvements in rationality lead to far superior outcomes for individuals and society.
Could you give an example of such a negative consequence?
I sometimes suspect that mass institutionalized schooling is net harmful because it kills off personal curiosity and fosters the mindset that education necessarily consists of being enrolled in a school and obeying commands issued by an authority (as opposed to learners directly seeking out knowledge and insight from self-chosen books and activities). I say sometimes suspect rather than believe because my intense emotional involvement with this issue causes me to doubt my rationality: therefore I heavily discount my personal impressions on majoritarian grounds.
I don't actually believe it as such, but I think J. Michael Bailey et al. are onto something.
OK, you're the second person in this thread I've seen advocating this view, so maybe my pro-school view is the minority one here.
The idea of curiosity is very compelling, but how often does productive curiosity actually occur in people who don't go to school? Modern society has lots of things to be curious about: television, video games, fan fiction, skateboarding, model rockets, etc. The level of interesting-ness doesn't correlate with the level of importance (examples of fields with potential large improvements for humanity: theoretical physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, etc.) If you believe model rockets are a sure lead-in to theoretical physics or chemistry, I think you're being overly optimistic.
The most important effect of school is providing an external force that gets people to study these (relatively) boring but important fields. Also, you get benefits like learning to speak in public, being able to use expensive school facilities, having lots of other people to converse with on the topics you're learning, etc. To do boring things on your own, you need self-discipline, which is hard to come by. School does a great job of augmenting self-discipline.
By the way, I thought about school much the same way you did until I left high school (two years early) and went to community college. I can't explain why, but for some reason it's a million times better.
Well, in community college, you're now the "customer", and determine what you want to study, and how to study. It still provides a framework, but you're much freer in that framework. The question is to what extent can we get similar benefits in earlier schooling. AFAICT, the best way to do so would be to make more of it optional. (Another pet project of mine would be to separate grading/certification and teaching. They're very different things, and having the same entity do both of them seems like a recipe for altering one to make the other look good.)
"...separate grading/certification and teaching...."
John Stuart Mill advocates that in the last chapter of On Liberty. He wanted the state to be in charge of testing and certification, but get out of the teaching business altogether (except for providing funding for educating the poor). I like the idea.
I should really get around to reading On Liberty one of these days.
I really think this is the domino that could trigger reform throughout the entire system. The problem is that there are only a few professions that require a specific, critical skill-set which can be easily tested and which completion of a degree does not guarantee.
I agree in principle. The problem is kids in the workplace. When you're gardening and making necklaces, the children can float around among the adults, learn by observation, and from one another. When both parents are sitting in front of a computer all day...
So you found OB and his other writings 40 years ago?
Also, kudos for spending a lot of time studying theoretical physics.
I think people should be allowed to sell their organs if they want to. We don’t consider it immoral to pay a surgeon to transplant a kidney, or to pay the nurse who helps him, so I don’t see why it’s immoral to pay the person who provides that kidney. I also think we should pay people in medical experiments. Pharmaceutical companies could hire private rating agencies to judge proposed Human experiments much as Standard and Poor rates bonds; that way people would know what they’re getting into. The pain \ danger index would range from slightly uncomfortable \ probably harmless to agony \ probably fatal and payment would be tied to that index. A market would develop open to anybody who was interested. It would be in the financial interest of the drug companies to make the tests as safe and comfortable as possible. All parties would benefit, medical research would get a huge boost and everybody would have a new way to make money if they chose to do it.
I also think that if you believe in capital punishment it is foolish to kill the condemned before performing some medical experiments on him first.
Maybe I'm just projecting, but I doubt the first thing is a controversial position here.
I think we do pay people in medical experiments.
Cryonics membership is a rational choice.
My chances of surviving death through resuscitation are good (as such things as chances to beat death go), but would be better if I convinced more people that cryonics is a rational choice.
In my day to day I am more concerned with my job than convincing others on the subject of cryonics, even though the latter is probably more valuable to my long term happiness. Am I not aware of what I value? Why do I not structure my behavior to match what I believe I value? If I believed that cryonics would buy me an additional 1000 years of life wouldn't 10 years of total dedication to its cause be worthwhile? Does this mean that I do not actually believe in cryonics, but only profess to believe in cryonics?
Americans no longer significantly value liberty and this will be to the detriment of our society.
A large number of Americans accept the torture of religious enemies as necessary and just.
Male circumcision is more harmful than we realize and one cause (among many) of sexual dysfunction among couples.
Most humans would be happier if polyamory was socially acceptable and encouraged.
Responding to the question "What do you believe that most people on this site don't?":
I believe that people who try and sound all "edgy" and "serious" by intoning what they believe to be "blunt truths" about race/gender differences are incredibly annoying for the most part. I just want to roll my eyes when I see that kind of thing, and not because I'm a "slave to political correctness", but because I see so many poorly defined terms being bandied about and a lot of really bad science besides.
(And I am not going to get into a big explanation right here, right now, of why I think what I think in this regard -- I'm confident enough in this area here to take whatever status hit my largely-unqualified statement above brings. If I write an explanation at some point it will be on my own terms and I frankly don't care who does or doesn't think I'm smart in the meantime.)
Racial differences and gender differences are very different topics. Especially if we are interested in discussing whether, or the extent to which, they are rooted in biology.
I agree (and I see sex/gender as far more valid of a biological concept than "race", for the record), but I've noticed a correlation between people who would describe themselves in terms like "race realist" and people who think there's good evidence for women being "less suited" to math and science than men, cognitively speaking. (And again, getting deeply into this right now is not something I'm going to do, it would be wandering off-topic for one thing.)
I don't think this qualifies as a belief; it's just something I have noticed.
My dreams are always a collection of images (assembled into a narrative, naturally) of things I thought about precisely once the prior day. Anything I did not think about, or thought about more than a single time, is not included. I like to use this to my advantage to avoid nightmares, but I have also never had a sex dream. The fact that other people seem to have sex dreams is good evidence that my experience is rare or unique, but I have no explanation for it.
My nightmares are some of my most interesting dreams, so I don't try to avoid them.
I used to have really interesting nightmares too. Unfortunately, nightmares need a charge of fear to sustain them, and I haven't really been afraid of anything in the last few years, so no more nightmares. My dreams have been a lot more disorganized and less memorable since.
Here's something else I can't normally say in public:
Infants are not people because they do not have significant mental capacities. They should be given the same moral status as, say, dogs. It's acceptable to euthanize one's pet dog for many reasons, so it should be okay to kill a newborn for similar reasons.
In other words, the right to an abortion shouldn't end after the baby is born. Infants probably become more like people than like dogs some time around two years of age, so it should be acceptable to euthanize any infant less than two years old under any circumstances in which it would be acceptable to euthanize a dog.
There have been several studies indicating that the neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for self-awareness. People with a lesion on the Visual 1 section of their cortex are "blind" but if you toss a ball at them they'll catch it. And if you have them walk through an obstacle-laden hallway, they'll avoid all obstacles, but be completely unaware of having done so. They can see, but are unaware of their own sight. So I would say the point at which a baby cannot be euthanized is dependent on the state of their neocortex. Further study needs to be done to determine that point, but I would say by two years old the neocortex is highly developed.
Meh, this is why I tend to endorse speciesism. I mean I can pretend that I actually value humans over X in a situation because of silly reasons like "intelligence" or ability to suffer or "having a soul" or just mine one excuse after the other, but at the end of the day I'm human so other stuff that I recognize as human gets an instant boost in its moral relevance.
Given that substantial variance may exist between individuals, isn't birth (or within a day of birth) a rather efficient bright line? I fail to see the gain to permitting more widespread infanticide, even taking your argument as generally correct.
I would put the cutoff at ~1 week after birth rather than 2 years, simply for a comfortable margin of safety, but yes.
However, as I've written about before elsewhere, this kind of thinking does lead to the amusing conclusion that cutting off a baby's limb is more wrong than killing it (because in the former case there's a full-human who's directly harmed, which is not true in the latter case).
This suggests the following argument: if it's wrong to cut off a baby's limb, surely (the possibility of negative quality of life aside) it's wrong to give the baby a permanent affliction that prevents it from ever thinking, having fun, etc? That's exactly the kind of affliction that death is.
I think many philosophical questions would be clearer, or at least more interesting, if we reconceptualized death as "Persistent Mineral Syndrome".
No, because the baby (by assumption) has no moral weight. The entity with moral weight is the adult which that baby will become. Preventing that adult from existing at all is not immoral (if it were, we'd essentially have to accept the repugnant conclusion), whereas causing harm to that adult, by harming the baby nonfatally, is.
Well, on this view the baby does grow into an adult, it's just that the adult is a death patient (and, apparently, discriminated against for this reason).
Too pseudo-clever?
This isn't an argument for death being the worst of the possible outcomes. For example, you may be turned into a serial killer zombie, which is arguably worse than being dead.
There should be an option to downvote your own comments.
Do you mean that you no longer believe that being a serial killer zombie is arguably worse than being dead? I believe that.
Who do I get to kill as said zombie?
To achieve the same effect with current technology, upvote everyone else.
Being turned into a serial killer zombie actually sounds pretty awesome, assuming an appropriate soundtrack.
I didn't present it as one. I agree death isn't the worst of the possible outcomes.
You say that like it's an unexpected conclusion. Which is more wrong: cutting off one of a dog's legs, or euthanizing it? Most people, I suspect, would say the former.
What happens is that we apply different standards to thinking, feeling life forms of limited intelligence based on whether or not the organism happens to be human.
Personally, I would say that neither of those is wrong (per se, anyway), and I don't think the situations are very analogous. But I certainly agree with your last sentence (both that we apply different standards, and that we shouldn't).
Do you really deny that there are probably benefits, given limits to average human condition, to at least some hard legal lines corresponding to continuous realities?
/me shrugs... I suppose it is useful to have a line, and once you decide to have a line, you do have to draw it somewhere, but I don't see why viability is a particularly meaningful place to draw it.
Similar arguments are often used to argue in favor of animal rights; some humans don't have brains that work better than animals' brains, so if humans with defective or otherwise underdeveloped brains (the profoundly mentally retarded, infants, etc.) have moral status, then so do animals such as chimpanzees and dogs.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_marginal_cases
Here's why this is distasteful:
That infant has either experienced enough to affect their development, or has shown individuality of some kind that will be developed further as they mature. An infant is always in the stage of 'becoming,' and as such their future selves are to some degree already in evidence. Lose the infant, lose the future -- and that is the loss that most people find tragic.
My daughter was showing personality and preferences in the womb. Kicking in time with music she liked (which she continued to like after birth), kicking out of time with music she didn't like (which she continued to dislike after birth).
I was amazed. I'd had this vague notion that babies were sort of uninteresting blobs and didn't manifest a personality until maybe a year old. I have no idea why I thought that, but I was utterly wrong.
Of course, I am strongly predisposed to think highly of my offspring in all regards, and I do try to allow for this. But from birth on, she was manifesting sufficient personality for us to regard her as an individual human with her own preferences. Waiting until age two years to accept such a thing is simply incorrect.
"Responds to musical stimuli", assuming it's true, is hardly an argument about being a person. A parrot could have similar ability to discriminate between types of music, for all I know.
Edit in response to downvoting: Seriously. There could be correct arguments for your statement, but this is clearly not one of them. This is a point of simple fact: ability to discriminate types of music is not strong (let alone decisive) evidence for the property of being a person. Non-person things can easily have that ability. That this fact argues for a conclusion that offends someone's sensibilities (or even a conclusion that is clearly wrong, for other reasons!) is not a point against the fact.
It was in response to the assertion that babies could reasonably not be regarded as individual humans until age two. That assertion is ridiculous for all sorts of reasons. It was also noting that until I had actual experience of a baby, my assumptions had also been ridiculous, and that really doesn't need me putting "and by the way, it's possible that you're just saying something simply incorrect due to lack of experience" on the front. I am finding your response difficult to distinguish from choosing to miss the point.
Even accepting the premise that this is an indication of having a distinct personality, I don't think that's an adequate basis to afford infants personhood. Cats have distinct personalities as well, although this fact suggests that we could really use a better word than "personality." In fact, while there might be counterexamples that are not coming to mind, I'm inclined to suspect that every properly functioning vertebrate organism, as well as many invertebrates, has a distinct personality, albeit not necessarily one recognizable to humans.
Which is a really good argument for granting other vertebrates personhood.
In America, infants have a special privileged moral status, as evidenced by the "Baby On Board" signs people put on their autos. "Oh, there's a baby in that car! I'll plow into this car full of old people instead."
I don't like libertarianism. It makes some really good points, and clearly there are lots of things government should stay out of, but the whole narrative of government as the evil villain that can never do anything right strikes me as more of a heroic myth than a useful way to shape policy. This only applies to libertarians who go overboard, though. I like Will Wilkinson, but I hate Lew Rockwell.
I think the better class of mystics probably know some things about the mind the rest of us don't. I tend to trust yogis who say they've achieved perfect bliss after years of meditation, although I think there's a neurological explanation (and would like to know what it is). I think Crowley's project to systematize and scientifically explain mysticism had some good results even though he did go utterly off the deep end.
I am not sure I will sign up for cryonics, although I am still seriously considering it. The probability of ending up immortal and stuck in a dystopia where I couldn't commit suicide scares me too much.
I have a very hard time going under 2-3% belief in anything that lots of other people believe. This includes religion, UFOs, and ESP. Not astrology though, oddly enough; I'll happily go so low on that one it'd take exponential notation to describe properly.
I like religion. I don't believe it, I just like it. Greek mythology is my favorite, but I think the Abrahamic religions are pretty neat too.
I am a very hard-core utilitarian, and happily accept John Maxwell's altruist argument. I sorta accept Torture vs. Dust Specks on a rational but not an emotional level.
I am still not entirely convinced that irrationality can't be fun. I sympathize with some of those Wiccans who worship their gods not because they believe in them but just because they like them. Of course, I separate this from belief in belief, which really is an evil.
Plenty of libertarians agree with you on #1.
Personally I'd prefer an eternity of being tortured by an unFriendly AI to simple death. Is that controversial?
I'm curious about your personal experiences with physical pain. What is the most painful thing you've experienced and what was the duration?
I'm sympathetic to your preference in the abstract, I just think you might be surprised at how little pain you're actually willing to endure once it's happening (not a slight against you, I think people in general overestimate what degree of physical pain they can handle as a function of the stakes involved, based largely on anecdotal and second hand experience from my time in the military).
At the risk of being overly morbid, I have high confidence (>95%) that I could have you begging for death inside of an hour if that were my goal (don't worry, it's certainly not). An unfriendly AI capable of keeping you alive for eternity just to torture you would be capable of making you experience worse pain than anyone ever has in the history of our species so far. I believe you that you might sign a piece of paper to pre-commit to an eternity of torture vice simple death. I just think you'd be very very upset about that decision. Probably less than 5 minutes into it.
If I have surgery, I want anesthesia; if I have a pain flare at 6 or above, I take sleeping pills and try to sleep. So I prefer losing a few hours of conscious life to experiencing moderate to severe pain for a few hours. I would not want to be anesthetized for six months I'd otherwise spend at a 6, but I would if it was a 7.
I think the criterion is "Yeah, screaming in pain, but can I watch Sherlock?". If I can do moderately interesting things then I can just get used to the pain, but if the pain is severe enough to take over my whole mind then no dice. Transhuman torture is definitely the latter.
I'm not sure I'd call it controversial, but I have the opposite preference myself. Come to think of it, from my point of view, the fairly commonly-pushed myth of control-freak gods (insert &hellfire_preacher) looks rather similar to being tortured by an uFAI, and makes simple nonexistence look like an attractive alternative.
Apparently it is.
I agree with you, and when I brought the subject up elsewhere on this site I was met with incredulity and hypotheticals which seemed calculated to prove I didn't actually feel that way.
I think that most people, including rationalists, have significant psychological problems that interfere with their happiness in life and impair their rationality and their pursuit of rationality. What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional, and it is dysfunctional in many more ways than just being irrational and subject to cognitive biases.
I think furthermore that before devoting yourself to rationality at the near exclusion of other types of self-improvement, you should devote some serious effort to overcoming the more mundane psychological problems such as being overly attached to material trinkets and measuring your self-worth in material terms, being unaware of your emotions and unable to express your emotions clearly and honestly, having persistent family and relationship problems, having chronic psychosomatic ailments, etc. Without attending to these sorts of issues first (or at the same time), trying to become a rationalist jedi is like trying to get a bodybuilder physique before you've fixed your diet and lost the 200 extra pounds you have.
I'm inclined to believe that rationality is more an instrument rather than a goal, as you try to describe it. Being attached to material trinkets, (or not) will be a rational choice for the one who developed his rationality and was able to think his choice through, while irrationally dismissing the utility of mundane gadgetry as well as wholeheartedly embracing it, most likely as a result of an induced bias, exposes the undertaker to unconsidered, not-yet-evaluated risks - hence the label "irrationally".
There is some seed of truth in what you're saying - the balance between the effort of developing a rational art and the likely impact of that development on one's goal has to receive the necessary attention.
To go with the example provided (the body-builder [the rationalist jedi]) - going straight towards his final goal (obtaining an Adonis physique [being a rational jedi]) will help him develop more muscle mass [more powerful rational skills] which would mean more fat-burning cells in his body [more chances to make the right decisions when various day-to-day challenges arise] to deal with the extra 200 pounds [whatever skewed perception or behavioural pattern one has], which, in my opinion is more close to optimal than a simple diet [blunt choice of "what is right" based on commonly-accepted opinion].
I fear this may be wishful thinking; you can get much further than I would have thought a priori in a sub-art of rationality without developing a strong kick as well as a strong punch.
It would be interesting to try to diagram the "forced skill development" - for example, how far can you get in cognitive science before your ability to believe in a supernatural collapses - and of course the diagram would be very different for skills you studied from others versus skills you were able to invent yourself.
I'm not sure how much you mean by the doing without a kick analogy. If you mean, for example, that a rationalist should overcome something like social anxiety that impedes his research career by developing techniques from scratch rather than engaging in something like cognitive behavioral therapy, then I disagree. Ditto for the other sorts of psychological problems I mentioned.
The reason is not that I think you couldn't address anything from first principles, building up techniques as you go, but that this would be hugely inefficient, like developing calculus from first principles rather than studying a textbook.
When I really get depressed I speculate that drug abuse could be the explanation of the Fermi Paradox, the reason we can't find any ET's. If it were possible to change your emotions to anything you wanted, alter modes of thought, radically change your personality, swap your goals as well as your philosophy of life at the drop of a hat it would be very dangerous.
Ever want to accomplish something but been unable to because it's difficult, well just change your goal in life to something simple and do that; better yet, flood your mind with a feeling of pride for a job well done and don't bother accomplishing anything at all. Think all this is a terrible idea and stupid as well, no problem, just change your mind (and I do mean CHANGE YOUR MIND) now you think it's a wonderful idea.
Complex mechanisms just don't do well in positive feedback loops, not electronics, not animals, not people, not ET's and not even Jupiter brains. I mean who wouldn't want to be a little bit happier than they are; if all you had to do is move a knob a little what could it hurt, oh that's much better maybe a little bit more, just a bit more, a little more.
The world could end not in a bang or a whimper but in an eternal mindless orgasm. I'm not saying this is definitely going to happen but I do think about it a little when I get down in the dumps.
Doubtful. The first person to invent an 'expansionist' drug, that turned users into hyper-competitive, rapidly-reproducing, high-achieving types -- basically, a pill for being a Mormon -- would have lots of offspring, lots of success, etc. Many people choose to abuse heroin, but many people also choose to abuse Adderall, or to use Piracetam or other similar substances. The success-druggies will outbreed and outcompete the orgasm-druggies, leading to more intense success-drugs and perpetuating the cycle.
What you've just said is a perfect example of the way in which the "far" brain's intuitive modeling of minds, inaccurately predicts REAL human behavior, especially with respect to emotions.
Positive motivation actually consists of associating a positive emotion with goal completion... and this requires you to have a taste of the feeling you'll get when you complete the goal. (i.e., "Oh boy, I can almost taste that food now!").
So what actually happens when you give yourself the feeling of pride in a job well done, before the job is done, you get more motivated, not less, as long as you link that emotion to the desired future state, as compared to the current state of reality.
It's worth us worrying about as far as our future is concerned, but to be the sole explanation of the Fermi Paradox (rather than just a contributing factor) it would have to have happened to at least an overwhelming majority of extraterrestrial civilizations, many of whom would presumably have considered the problem beforehand.
Killing people, and locking them in prison for 20 years, are both worse than torturing them.
Killing enemy soldiers is not much better than killing enemy civilians.
It is immoral not to put a dollar value on life.
The rate of technological change has been slowing since 1970.
It can't be true that both universal higher education and immigration are social goods, since it is cheaper to just not educate some percentage your own people.
Increasing the population density makes the cost of land rise; and this is a major factor in the cost and quality of life.
Men and women think differently.
Ditto that modern Western women hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy.
War is not good for your economy (unless you aren't fighting in it).
This comment perplexed me until I realized you were assuming that the average education level of immigrants is lower than that of "natives" (that is, the pre-existing population of the country). But that need not be the case. To borrow from personal experience — many immigrants from the former Soviet Union are quite a bit more educated than the national average in the U.S. Surely immigrants who bring an above-average education with them are good for the society (assuming that they intend to become productive members of society)? Doesn't it follow that both of the things you mention can, in fact, be true, conditional on certain contingent properties of immigration?*
*And of higher education, presumably. I mean, we could say "higher education can't be a social good if we do it wrong in ways X, Y, Z", to which the obvious response is "we shouldn't do it like that, then."
"War is not good for your economy (unless you aren't fighting in it)."
That's pretty well accepted in some economics circles. See the broken window fallacy by Frédéric Bastiat.
I tried hard to think of something that I haven't already talked about, so here goes:
I have a suspicion that the best economic plans developed by economists will have no effect or negative effect, because the ability of macroeconomics to describe what happens when we push on the economy is simply not good enough to let the government deliberately manipulate the economy in any positive way.
Update: You could call this half right in retrospect. Fiscal policy is ineffective except when monetary policy is ineffective, and the Federal Reserve didn't print nearly enough money but the money they did print did prevent another Great Depression. We would not have been better off if the Federal Reserve had done nothing, thinking all their plans ineffective. There might be some kind of lesson here about EAs who fret about "What if we can't model anything?" whose despair seems kind of similar to Eliezer_2009's.
To clarify, "the money they did print did print another Great Depression" should (probably) read "the money they did print did prevent another Great Depression", right? The version with the typo sounds unfortunately like "The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression".
Right. (Also the Federal Reserve totally did cause the original Great Depression, but this is a mainstream stance.)
What's the minimum amount of information you could send Eliezer_2009, that he would agree with you?
Civilians should be considered legitimate targets in warfare, with the decision whether or not to attack them based entirely on expediency. If a cause isn't worth killing civilians over, it's not worth killing soldiers over, either.
I might agree with that if human civilization as a whole was much more rational than it is now.,(especially the institutions that deal with political and military power - this includes organized religion to a certain degree in most places).
If I believed that warfare would only be used to attain noble goals that nothing else can reach (a "cause worth killing for", as you say), then yeah, if it's worth killing soldiers, it might be worth killing civilians too.
But right now, it seems that war is mostly about small politics, personal status (both for dictators and democratically elected leaders), xenophobia, and money.
I feel that if civilians had been a legitimate target in most recent wars, the outcomes would only have been worse, not better, and so I can't support it.
I think there is a huge amount of wisdom in the core ideas of Buddhism. self is a convenient fiction and a source of much confusion and suffering; subtle forms of attachment are frequent sources of suffering; meditation can improve attention/concentration and meta-cognitive awareness, and some Buddhist techniques are effective in this regard; our experience in life is much more determined by our mind than we believe; compassion can and should be cultivated.
Is this really controversial among rationalists?
The question wasn't whether it's controversial, but whether most people on the site believe it.
If we just mean that most rationalists would agree that there is (considerable?) wisdom in Buddhism, I'm sure we'd find at least half. If we mean the much stronger assertion that Buddhism is worthy of serious attention, much more than reading a book or two and browsing Wikipedia, then I don't think most people believe it.
Thought of a few more:
Circumcision may be harmful, and may cause more harm than benefit.
It's generally not worth your time to ask a doctor questions about treatments; the responses you'll get will be soothing but non-informative.
Doctors probably cause more harm than good, considered over all interventions.
Annoyance, do you intend the last sentence to broadly mean "treatment is less effective than prevention," or "Western medicine is a crock," or "Doctors specifically are not as effective as other aspects of modern medicine," or something else?
Western medicine isn't a crock because it has a lot of valuable content; in contrast, (for the most part) 'alternative' medicine does not. A lot of that value comes from coping with sudden crises that would normally result in quick death.
But if you added up all of the benefits that come directly from all medical interventions, and compared them to the harms that come directly from all medical interventions, I very strongly believe the ratio would be far smaller than most people would expect, and I weakly believe the ratio would be less than 1:1.
There is no such thing as a free market.
Yeah there is, they are just really small. Just the other day I asked if someone would come in on their day off from work in order to cover for me. I paid them, and they performed the service. All this went down without any government intervention, coercion, or use of force.
If you mean that there is not a single country on Earth that contains ONLY free markets then you are absolutely right.
I see a dilemma here.
If I think of your transaction in isolation, it's free but not a market: it's a bargaining problem.
If I think of your transaction as part of the broader labour market, it's not really free; it's influenced by government regulations & macroeconomic policies, if only through their effects on the general price level, the general wage level, and the supply & demand for labour.
I reckon your transaction is an example of what mtraven's talking about rather than a counterexample!
I believe I'm immortal (and so is everyone else). This is from a combination of a kind of Mathematical Platonism (as eujay mentions below) and Quantum Immortality.
This believing in 'all possible worlds' and having a non-causal framework for the embedding of consciousness means that just because of the anthropic principle and perhaps some weird second-order effects, it is quite possible that we will experience rather odd phenomena in the world. Hence, things like ghosts, ESP and such may not be so far-fetched.
Also, I am not a Bayesian. I simply do not think the mind really operates according to such quantitatively defined parameters. It is fuzzy and qualitative. I, for one, have never said I believed in something at, say, 60% probability - and if I did, I would be lying.
Just because odd things occur, does not mean other odd things, like ghosts and ESP, exist. What mechanisms for these do you believe in and why do you believe in them? Why do humans have ESP and what mechanism fuels this? What exactly are ghosts and why should the chemical processes in the human brain transfer over to this this 'ghost' mechanism after they cease functioning? I guess I just want to ask, what do you believe and why do you believe it? Just because extraordinarily odd things have happened does not remove the need for extraordinary evidence to explain other extraordinarily odd things.
You are saying that "being a Bayesian" describes a belief about how the mind works. That's like saying you're not a Calculian because you don't believe the mind natively uses calculus. Most Bayesians would probably say it's a belief about how to get the right answer to a problem.
Surely you have varying degrees of confidence in various statements. Think about what sort of odds you would need to bet on various predicted future events. You need to read up on calibrating your estimates.
Suffering is not evil per se, and we are free to make drastic distinctions in the moral value of suffering depending on the sufferer. In other words, if an AI spawned billions of copies of conscious beings that want to make huge cheesecakes, it may be right to just kill them all off. (I'm not sure about trillions.) On a more relevant note, that means second degree murder of Stephen Hawkins is a far worse action than first degree murder of Joe Plumber.
As a more inflammatory phrasing, I view the world largely in terms of intelligence, and feel that the smart are (typically) "worth more" than the average and below.
I also believe it is naive and wishful to believe that races, which developed (propensities towards) many distinct genetic traits (not just skin color, also hair color, facial shape, disease resistances, etc) do not have differences in intelligence distribution. Affirmative action is therefore racist, and accusations (against employers, scholarship committees, etc) of racist selection merely based on previous selectees (current employees, past scholarship winners, etc) are unfounded.
Hmmm....remove the inflammatory phrasing, and those sound like things I'd get a decent amount of agreement on.
(This also makes me wonder what makes certain phrasings inflammatory -- because the opposition to societal positions which require defense is explicitly acknowledged?)
Lastly though, I have a qualified belief in eugenics. I greatly fear the Idiocracy scenario, and thus shudder every time I hear about some genius having few or no children, or women on food stamps having octuplets.
The qualification is that I am a libertarian, and would fear any government eugenics programs as well. Combining the two yields an awkward desire to have lots of children for the sake of having lots of children and a desire for a free-market form of eugenics, such as a private institution which pays the unintelligent to undergo voluntary sterilization.
On a similar note, while it may be justified to characterize a given black person as below-average intelligence (a stereotype) before meeting that person, that characterization still has sizable error bars, and making active judgements based on race is wrong.
I'd donate to that.
However, measured intelligence can also change over time within a single race, depending on the external environment. I can't find it now, but recently saw an article pointing out that the average IQ of students from one of the Scandinavian countries (Denmark?) had increased measurably over the last 50 years. Like everything else, intelligence has both biological and societal components. I certainly don't know enough about intelligence to comment with confidence on its biological bases and how immutable (or mutable) they are, but as long as there is a societal component, then I see no inherent moral problem in trying to provide disadvantaged racial groups with the same favorable milieu that other groups have already profited from.
(And, for that matter, I think the actual harm suffered to white people by affirmative action on behalf of other groups is probably fairly small. There might be a zero-sum calculation about a specific job or specific slot at a college, but whites aren't being systematically shut out of every opportunity they might have. There's also a difference between promoting people who are blatantly unqualified for the positions they're given because of their race, and favoring people who are perhaps at the margin of qualified but could easily improve. The spirit of American affirmative action appears to be the latter, although it's surely implemented with greater and lesser degrees of faithfulness to that ideal.)
Isn't that just the Flynn effect? It's true of far many more countries than just Denmark.
I am an atheist who does not believe in the super natural. Great. Tons of evidence and well thought out reasoning on my side.
But... well... a few things have happened in my life that I find rather difficult to explain. I feel like a statistician looking at a data set with a nice normal distribution... and a few very low probability outliers. Did I just get a weird sample, or is something going on here? I figure that they are most likely to be just weird data points, but they are weird enough to bother me.
Let me give you one example. A few years ago I had a dream that I was eating and out of the blue I discovered a shard of glass in my mouth. The dream bothered me so much that I had a flash back to the dream the next day as I was walking down the road. For me that's extremely unusual. It's rare that I can even remember a dream, and when I do they certainly don't bother me the next day. So, the day after that I was eating a salad and crunch. I spat out what was in my mouth and there was a seriously nasty looking slither of glass. I didn't cut my mouth or anything, no harm done. I just hit it with my tooth.
To the best of my knowledge that was the only time I've ever found glass in something I was eating, and it was the only time I've had a vivid dream about it that bothered me the next day (or any dream about it all). I didn't have any particular glass eating phobia before all this took place (except for a normal aversion to the idea), and I haven't been worried about it since (ok, except for looking rather carefully at salads from that particular cafeteria for a few weeks afterwards). Was this all just a really weird coincidence? As far as I can make out the probabilities are just too low to be ignored. To make matters worse, I have a few other stories that I find just as difficult to explain away as coincidence.
Now, I wouldn't say that I "believe" that something seriously weird is going on here. That would be much too strong. However, because I don't feel that I can adequately account for some of my observations of the world, I think I must assign a small probability that there is something very seriously strange going on in the universe and that these events were not weird flukes.
I have other things to say but that would get into topics currently banned from this blog :-/
I'll answer with a koan.
Of all the people who live in the world, should the lucky thousand who witness the events that are a million times too unlikely to witness for any single individual, start believing in supernatural, while the rest shouldn't?
No, but if those thousand people don't know if they are part of the thousand or not, after all in any normal situation I wouldn't tell these stories to anybody, shouldn't they assume that they probably aren't part of the 1 in 1000 and thus adjust their posterior distribution accordingly?
That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.
I'm curious - is your personal evidence anecdotal, qualitative, quantitative...?
Michael Vassar also makes a good point - the values and implications of "traditional roles" vary a great deal across time, and especially across socioeconomic status. There are certainly career women in the West who perceive taking time off to care for children as a relief from the rat race and a chance to contribute to society in another positive way. They might feel differently had they been, say, a 12-year old Zimbabwean girl who never attended school, was married to an older man to help her family's finances, developed an obstetric fistula in childbirth, and never left her husband's compound again. That isn't just traditional, it's an active reality for millions of poor women around the world. There are also many happy, healthy, educated African career women and stay-at-home-moms, of course. The context of "tradition" is very important.
I agree. But even though feminists (and other women exposed to the rhetoric) may say they want gender "equality" to increase their happiness, it is not necessarily the real reason. Once it becomes possible for women to enter the workplace (for any reason), competition will force other women to follow suit. Elizabeth Warren's research shows, for instance, that positional goods (housing, education) have experienced tremendous inflation since the '70s. The quality of these goods hasn't improved commensurately.
How traditional? 1600s Japan? Hopi? Dravidian? Surely it would be quite a coincidence if precisely the norms prevalent in the youth and culture of the poster or his or her parents were optimal for human flourishing.
If anything, I have the convert's bias in this regard, Michael, not the true-born believer's. I'm fairly young and was raised in quite a progressive household. I'd suspect myself more of overstating my case because it has come to me as such a revelatory shock. But that's neither here nor there, as I'm not advocating for any specific "tradition."
I'll posit that gender roles and dynamics since the feminist movement began in earnest in the 60s and 70s have proven to be a sizable and essentially unprecedented break from the previous continuum in Western societies going back at least a couple thousand years. I don't know enough about 1600s Japan or Hopi or Dravidian societies to speculate as to whether they fit into that pattern too. I understand there are arguments that feminist regimes are actually more original to the human species and that patriarchy only appears with the advent of agriculture and monarchy/despotism. My understanding is that this is an open question, and again beyond my expertise. So I should readily concede that "traditional" is a highly suspect term.
So I'll be even more blunt, since this is our comment thread to not worry about whether or not these views are currently acceptable, right?
My rather vague comment is based in a more specific belief that women like to be dominated by men, that these feelings are natural and not pathological (whether or not that makes them "right" is of course another question) that they are unhappy when their man is incapable of domination and are left feeling deeply sexually unfulfilled by the careerism which empowers them elsewhere in their lives, that the current social education of both women and men (at least in the circles of the US in which I move) teach everyone that it's abhorrent and wrong for a man to assert power over a woman, that men who enjoy it are twisted assholes and that women who enjoy it are suffering from deep psychological damage, and that it is practically inexcusable for a woman to admit that her limbic system gives her pleasure signals when a man arouses her this way.
Naturally, I am basing the perception of this relatively new regime, at least in its current extreme form, on my interpretation of what came immediately before in the society in which I was raised (I don't know firsthand as I was born well into the current regime), so your point stands, I suppose. But I don't really think using this as a starting off point merits any twinkling snark.
The second sentence of my original post, however, contains the more important point. Regardless of whatever "norm" anyone has in mind, be it Basque, Dravidian, or Branch Davidian, the real problem is that the current norm actively teaches unhappiness-increasing lies. If the last regime was imperfect too, I'd counter that two wrongs don't make a right.
Though as Z M Davis notes, not all beings value happiness highest. I readily concede that too.
You might be Generalizing From One Example -- just because you like that doesn't mean all women do, and in fact I strongly believe that some women do and some don't, where by "some" I mean "more than 5% and less than 95%".
What I personally have observed is that there are plenty of men and women who have a need or desire to be dominated. And that a minority of these people can't deal with the idea that it's "just" a sexual fetish or personal quirk, but must convince themselves instead that the entire world would be happier or much better off if only our entire society were male supremacist or female supremacist, accordingly.
I've also observed that there are plenty of people who have a leadership or followership preference in a relationship... but the desire to be the follower is both more widespread and more gender-balanced than the desire to be the leader.
So I guess what I'm saying is, the fact that there's a large unsatisfied market of females wishing to be dominated (sexually or otherwise) should NOT be mistaken for an indicator that this is somehow "the way the world should be".
That market is unsatisfied for the same reason its male counterpart is: there simply aren't enough people of either gender with the inclination, experience, self-awareness, etc. to meet the demand.
This makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking of the dilemma my husband and I had when I wanted him to learn to swing dance, but neither of us wanted to learn to lead. Or my 6'4" male friend who told me sadly that sometimes, he just wants someone who's bigger than him, whose shoulder he can lean on.
It's my impersonal understanding that the ratio of male submissives to female dominants is way worse than the ratio of female submissives to male dominants - both kinds of submissives will have trouble finding a dominant counterpart, but the heterosexual males have it way worse.
This is very much my impression also - as a switch, I'm topping a lot more than would be my natural inclination because that's where the demand is.
That's why I said the desire to be a follower is more gender-balanced than the desire to be a leader. I also used "leader" and "follower" because "dominant" and "submissive" carry more sexual overtone than is actually relevant to my point... but also because it's way easier for men to find socially "leading" partners than sexually leading ones.
Also, to make things more complex... there are plenty of people who like to go both ways... and there are people who want to be sexually dominant but socially submissive or vice versa... if you've actually met and spoken with enough real people (without the self-selection bias that occurs when people with identical kinks get together), it quickly cures you of any idea that you can just say, "This Is The One True Way Relationships Should Be."
(My wife owns a lingerie and adult toy/video store, and we've socialized with a lot of kinky and swinger folk, including gay, transgendered, etc. -- for a fairly broad definition of "etc.")
I believe that many if not most people value some things more than happiness.
"Man does not seek happiness, only the Englishman." -Nietzsche, on Utilitarians.
I think most people would agree with that statement, if you ask them to think about it a little more. Happiness, or "expected happiness" is just one term in the utility function. There is also "expected unhappiness" which might encompass things like suffering, pain, negative emotions. The concept of utility tries generalize enough to add these things together, but at an everyday conceptual level these seem to be different things (nevermind about how emotions manifest physically.) For instance, we can be happy about one thing and yet about another e.g. "my infant daughter is beautiful, but I'm sad that my parents did not live long to share this joy with us." People seem to understand this: in English we have the word "bittersweet", and the juxtaposition of joy and melancholy seems to be present in many other languages and cultures.
Back to the question of value: are people more eager to avoid loss than to pursue potential gains (of the same order of magnitude?) Experience points to most people putting more effort into keeping what they have, even if they are relatively unhappy with their situation. Part of this is probably evolved defaults of the brain influencing even what you might call conscious decision making.
And don't forget about morality. Although we might try to reconcile the two, there is often some tension between doing what is "right" and doing what we expect may make us happier.
I know for a fact that I value truth over happiness . I tend to do things that other people often point out to me would have "gone better" if I did it some other way or if I did something else entirely .
Fortunately, my training as a philosopher left little room for embarrassment about my beliefs (my mentor was a Popperian - of the 'say it loud' sort). So there really isn't anything I could say here that hasn't come out elsewhere. But a lot of it is somewhat unpopular:
Ethics: eudaimonist egoism - objectivist in the sense that there are facts about ethics, but relativist in the sense that there's no reason to assume all humans are the same ethically. Consequently, I think it's fine that I care more about my cats' welfare than most humans' - as long as it doesn't lead to a lack of virtue on my part (which, of course, is an empirical question).
Economics: Markets really are the most efficient way of getting the relevant information, due to methodological individualism and local, distributed knowledge. And my spending really does indicate my preferences, which are some of the best data about ethics.
Politics: Classical liberal (preferring Locke over Mills); freedom is paramount - other people should fight for my freedom, so that I might have room to become more awesome. I acknowledge the tension between this and Nietzsche's contention that democracy is bad because it does not provide an environment where one can learn to overcome. But I'm not a big fan of democracy anyway, and I see the political history of the US primarily in terms of a struggle between 'freedom' and 'equality'.
Furthermore, governments are inherently bad - it is part of their telos. One of the great things about the US government is that it's huge and bloated with checks and balances to make it difficult for anything to get done, which makes it a bad government. A trim, efficient government just does a good job of oppressing its people.
Life is a lot more nuanced than a lot of young rationalists or idealogues would think. There is room in the world for all sorts of people, and the diversity of even mistaken opinions leads to interesting and wonderful things. Example: while 'christian rock' tends to suck, most religious music is genuinely inspiring like little else. Ditto for architecture. When trying to trim falsehoods from the world, don't accidentally lose some awesome.
On the same subject, history does matter. He who doesn't remember history is doomed to something something... Just calling yourself an 'atheist' doesn't mean you've pruned religion out of your language and culture - and if you do manage that, don't be so confident that it will all still stand without it.
Sorry, was this the 'soapbox' thread? I'll stop now.
Here's one on a very different topic:
England's offenses against the American colonies did not justify the American Revolution.
I believe that the end results of the American Revolution were beneficial enough to justify it in hindsight. However at the time it was initiated, the projected benefits were indeed to little to justify what occurred.
Well, if we're going into history... I believe (despite being a northern democrat) that the Civil War was fundamentally unjust. It makes a mockery of the principles of the Declaration of Independence if secessionary states will be outright invaded.
(If slavery was an issue, then the North should've just bought out the South - likely would've been much cheaper than the actual war.)
I believe that neither side had the foggiest idea of how costly in lives and money the Civil War would turn out to be.
The North (well, congress) tried to buy out the South (well, slaveowners). The South rejected it. There were actually multiple attempts at this, some before the war, some during the war.
The thing is, the War between the States really truly was about slavery, nothing else. The dodge that it was about states' rights comes down to exactly one right -- the right to keep slaves. Compare with such travesties as the fugitive slave acts, which they pushed through congress, which actually did greatly infringe the rights of the northern states. The southern states, despite some of their propaganda, did not generally support the right of secession. Their Constititution explicitly forbade it. Every single article of secession passed by their state legislatures explicitly called out slavery as the reason for secession.
The odd thing is that slavery was not in any immediate danger. But with the election of Lincoln the southern states saw that their grip on the country was not as absolute as they desired, and they threw a tantrum, because they demanded not only the right to have slaves, but that the rest of the country not judge them for it.
Not about expanding or preserving the personal power of the most prominent decision makers? Wow. The war between the states sounds truly exceptional!
Okay, sure, in some sense it was about that, just as we can talk about the cause of the war being the laws of physics plus the entire past light-cone.
But that's not usually what we mean by "cause of war". I don't see how this is a cause in any truly useful or predictive sense. Expanding and protecting personal power certainly is necessary for wars, but it's pretty much vacuously satisfied: the prominent decision makers almost always want to expand and preserve their power. Although it often leads to wars, it often doesn't. What made or let it lead to war this time, rather than more peaceful politicking?
It's a bit more complicated than that.
I was struck by one quote from Lincoln's first inaugural address (emphasis added):
In other words, as long as they rendered unto Caesar and didn't take his stuff, Lincoln was willing to abandon all other federal government functions no matter how constitutionally mandated. This seems like secession in all but name.
Remember also that the casus belli was that Fort Sumter was supposed to be handed over to the Confederacy, but the federal government refused to.
Both seem more consistent with a power theory than a slavery theory.
I am suspicious of any monocausal theory of historical events. Surely slavery is by far the most important cause of the war. But there were a lot of other reasons.
Nitpick: The South shot first. Just a nitpick, though ;)
If we're going to nitpick, then the South shooting first is as propagandistically misleading as saying Germany shot first in WWI or Japan in WWII. Yes, it's true, if you ignore the things like supplying arms to Britain or embargoing Japan or lying to the South about evacuating Ft. Sumter:
The justification was the tremendous economic potential needed local, independent government given the constraints of communication and transport at the time. That's what they taught me in high school History, anyway. Also, that about 1/3 of colonists supported the revolution, 1/3 the crown, and 1/3 weren't aware it was going on.
By the way: I'm new here, and I notice there's no way to neutralvote once you've already voted. e.g. I voted you up and then changed my mind, but don't want to vote you down. So you get a freebie.
Clicking on the bold "vote up"/"vote down" undoes it.
Thanks. I thought I was doing that, but I must have been switching to the other link because the score was incrementing by 2.
I might agree with this. But would you say that it was justified on other grounds and that these were just used as the "sellable to the public" excuse?
It worked out fairly well, but considering the results of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Iranian Revolution, among others, I'd say we got lucky.
I don't know if I actually believe this, but I've heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren't necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:
Similarly, I've heard second-hand accounts about people who report that they actually had loving relationships with pedophiles as kids. That didn't traumatize them, but the follow-up "psychological care", where the psychiatrists automatically assumed that the experience must have been horrible, did.
It would seem reasonable, on the face of it. There's no automatic reason for why we should assume sexual relations with children must automatically be harmful and unpleasant to the kids, if not for the cached thought of all sexual relations being abuse. And in the current political climate, just about nobody will have the courage to voice such an opinion in public, so studies such as these should carry extra weight.