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thomblake comments on Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People - Less Wrong
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I consider this particularly selfish and evil. If you know there's a place where someone's map doesn't correspond to the territory, you should tell them before they inadvertently drive off a cliff. Even if it would be a status hit to yourself. And you can't tell me that's a part of their map they weren't even using, as they had just used it!
Line in the sand time. I can stomach advice to "let unimportant untruths slide" in other fora, but not here. Falsehoods left unchecked can cascade and corrupt one's entire epistemic landscape. If you're lucky, on encountering an inconsistency in your beliefs, you'll have a good enough framework to update in the right direction, but not all of us are so fortunate.
Can you think of any realistic example of how the specific mistaken belief that those two books had the same author could contribute to a cascade that would corrupt their entire epistemic landscape? Because it's certainly not difficult to see how a habit of confronting others on issues they see as trivial could cause them to marginalize your opinion, leading to a great loss of utility. Remember, we're not just trying to maximize truth, but utility, and if you're not advocating truth for an actual purpose, your rationality will be of little use.
That's a good analogy for a noble goal, but I think the topic at hand demands a bit more than a cliff. If someone's map doesn't mark bumps and cliffs marked on your superior map, don't spend the car ride pointing out all the little bumps when the person is unwittingly driving toward a cliff!
But how much utility does that portion of the map hold for them in any case? That specific mistake seems unlikely to ever have greater repercussions for them than causing a bit of embarrassment, and if you correct them in a public forum, that's exactly what you're going to cause. If you did not provide the correction, there are other ways in which the person might have made the same discovery without as much embarrassment, such as looking one of the authors or books up on Wikipedia, but I suspect that there is a low probability of them ever facing greater repercussions due to their mistake.
If you judge the correction to really have a positive expected utility for them, then it may be for the best, but if you make a general habit of correcting others without considering the necessity of each case, you're liable to lose status to no benefit.
It's about picking and choosing battles. It's like when someone is giving a presentation on money policy, and gets the current interest rate wrong by .1%. If it doesn't affect the main point, it's better to let it go. There world is full of mistakes and errors - if you stopped and corrected every one you saw, that'd be a full-time, nonstop job. And moreover, you'd waste a lot of people's time by bringing up minutia that doesn't make a difference.
So I think you have to pick and choose your battles, and let some things slide if they make no real-utility based difference. Mistaking the author of a 30 year old, not-all-that-important book doesn't lead someone off a cliff. That's basic prioritizing.
Evil? Really?
Yep. Ignorance kills. Seeing an opportunity to do good, and then avoiding it because of a perceived status hit to oneself, is evil.
Not if it is an inconsequential detail like who wrote what book...
Ignorance also saves lives. Depending on the culture I could save your life, for example, by refraining from giving you information. Fortunately we don't condone casual murder by leaders in western civilisation. So correcting people when it is inappropriate could just get you fired. Arrested too - don't correct cops on points of law unless you have a lot of witnesses present.
I disagree. I think this attitude is naive, bad math and dangerous.
Status matters. A lot. Really. I read this as similar to "because of a percieved potential loss of a limb" (calibrate limb loss probability to match the expected value of the status risk).
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
But it might be best to wait for an opportune time.
It's no accident that the aphorism says "should" and not "must".
Even when the thing that would be destroyed by the truth would be your daughter? Or 3^^^3 puppies?
When Eliezer first made that claim the sentiment appealed to me but at the same time I hoped there wouldn't be people who went and took it literally, without the clearly necessary disclaimers. Note that Eliezer censors things that are true when he believes it suits his purposes.
well said
What are your thoughts on WikiLeaks?
I must ask: to what degree do you act on your stated belief that not correcting someone's map when you can is evil as such? How assiduously do you attempt to correct error in interaction on the Internet? Please describe the process you apply in practice here. Is the cartoon an exaggeration, or your life? To what degree?
Given that sex helps you save the world this is a surprisingly important question! ;)
It's not a status hit to you. It's a status hit to them. Feel free to make whatever noble choices you want about being willing to make yourself look stupid in a public forum, but you don't have the right to make that choice for someone else.
Wow. I don't usually expect people to be more epistemilogically idealistic than I. Yet when I remember to curb my impulses I occasionally bite my tongue and let unimportant things go. I don't consider it evil. But come to think of it my personal emotional aversion is centred around bullshit - a different kind of 'evil'.