= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Sawin comments on Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (186)
Genuinely nice people who still prevent people who, like me and (presumably) you, are cognitively atypical, from finding similar people across the world to socialize with.
and the thousand other awesome things about the world we have created for ourselves.
and the thousand other awesome things about the world we will create.
I don't want to tile the world with tiny genuinely nice people.
Consider various other groups that are presently in the process of demographic and migratory expansion, and whose typical members are similarly different from you, but whom it is low-status to rail against (and apt to invoke accusations of bigotry and extremism), unlike when it comes to fringe Christian groups. Does contemplating them fill you with similar fear and hostility?
I can think of groups but I am not sure if they count as similarly different from me.
I experience fear and hostility but it is dissimilar and weaker. I consciously suppress it because I am aware that it is silly. It sometimes takes me a period of time to realize that a specific instance is silly.
It seems like the question at issue is whether fringe Christian groups are different enough that it is right to fear them or whether they are similar enough that it is wrong to fear them.
So when you catch yourself feeling fear and hostility towards some demographically expanding group that is not a fringe Christian group, so that in polite society it would be seen as disreputable and extremist to dislike and fear them, you start with the a priori assumption that it is silly and wrong to fear them and you try to suppress your fear consciously. In contrast, when it comes to demographically expanding fringe Christian groups, you start with the a priori assumption that it is eminently reasonable to dislike and fear them. And it doesn't seem to you like there might be some slight bias there?
(I tried to come up with a more charitable interpretation of your comment, but this looks like the plain meaning of what you wrote.)
I object to your use of "a priori". I am aware of ironclad arguments that it is incorrect to dislike and fear certain groups. These arguments are not fully general - they do not apply to all groups.
Is it obvious to you that these cases are symmetrical? It is not obvious to me.
I never claimed to be unbiased. I, in fact, went out of the way to state a lack of confidence in my local rationality.
Seeing your reply to Eugine Nier, I must admit that your position is more thought out than I had assumed. I still disagree with your view, and I think your arguments are significantly biased. However, as much as I'd like to try and straighten out the issue, I think getting into this discussion would lead too far into problematic ideologically sensitive topics. So I guess it would be best if we could respectfully agree to disagree at this point.
Could you summarize, at whatever level of detail is possible without problematic idealogically sensitive topics, where you differ from my views and what statements I made you disagree with?
It seems to me that your criteria for evaluating the potential for trouble with various groups, given the present global demographic, ideological, and other trends, are seriously flawed. But getting into concrete details here is impossible without making a whole bunch of controversial and potentially inflammatory statements, so I really think the topic is best left alone.
Really, I'm skeptical. Can we hear them?
The argument is one of symmetry.
a.These groups are genetically almost identical to me. In the same situation as me, they would behave no worse than me.
b. Most of my cultural differences from these groups are morally insignificant. For instance, I would prefer that they speak my language so that I can more easily understand them, but from an objective perspective it makes just as much sense to demand that I speak their languages.
c. The other differences are memetically weak. Take the example of women's rights. Some developing countries have attitudes towards women's rights worse than any developed country, but they are not worse than past attitudes in developed countries. The same cultural changes that enabled us to free ourselves from these bad memes will enable them to free themselves as well.
Therefore, these people, if given resources, will put them to a use no worse than people from my culture would.
The Amish rejection of modern technology meme appears to me to be: 1, morally significant - leads to badstuff, and 2, memetically strong, having won its founding battle with Post-Enlightenment memes and showing no signs of losing any others.
I do not understand why it is obvious to the apparent majority here that my views are unreasonable. I have not seen any strong arguments why the Amish meme does not lead to badstuff or why it is memetically weak.
Instead it is argued that they are happy and nice - but happy and nice aren't all the good in the world - and that I am biased - but I already know that I am biased.
Hopefully my arguments above are clear enough that people will be able to provide me with helpful counterarguments.
I sometimes feel like there is a shadowy half-underground group of LWers that is intelligent enough to stay away from bad signalling and has altruistic intentions, but has to deal every now and then with a slight twitch, reading something knowing they can't really state a proper response. It feels like there is almost a court nod when we read and comment each other's posts and hope inferential distance keeps disturbances away. It so tempting some times, it is almost like I just have to say out loud the unspeakable and a few will contact me and I'll be sure.
Other times I'm just afraid I'm sitting in a room having tea with the socoioeconomic Eldrich abominations teasing me with a wicked grin as everyone else moves obliviously to them, asking me if I'm certain that I haven't lost it.
Suppose this is a test, anyone who knows what I'm talking about please PM the right answer.
The next time you feel that way, make yourself another identity, and use it to say the things you wouldn't otherwise. It really is quite liberating. It's very rare for a delusion to really be too strong to attack, especially here; it is only that you fear backlash.
As for the discussion this appeared in, let me get the unpleasant truths out of the way so we can stay meta: Intelligence is mostly heritable! Knowing someone's race conveys nonzero information about their their social status, suitability for jobs, wealth, and criminality! The gender imbalances in many professions are the result of innate differences, not discrimination! When groups with bad values and lower intelligence breed too much, it harms the future! These are all truths that any sufficiently advanced rationalist will recognize. And if you disagree with any of these, please direct your complaints to no one in particular.
All the 'unpleasant truths' you list seem to be facets of a single underlying issue of genetics. I consider none of them particularly shocking, especially in the weak forms you use there. Damn near any observable fact related to a given person will 'convey nonzero information about their their [sic] social status," so if you're going to use this persona to say what you otherwise couldn't get away with, how about you fill out your theory with some policy suggestions, or at least more specific predictions?
That is an outright brilliant idea, and the next time LW does one of these ridiculous "Everyone post your ever-so-supposedly controversial but rational opinions that actually just amount to outright misanthropy" threads, I'm going to do it.
I think the most common socially acceptable thing that is best correlated with being a member of that group is being pro-PUA. What's the best shibboleth we can think of, analogous to asking if someone likes the taste of beer?
If there is a group of lesswrongers who covers up their true opinions like so, I am not in it, and my post was not an example of that.
Depending on which groups you're talking about this isn't completely obvious.
I think you're looking only at the superficial memes. It's entirely possible that there are more subtly cultural factors, e.g., belief in progress, openness to new ideas, that are responsible for both our development of modern technology and our adoption of different attitudes toward women. Of course, now that the technology has been invented, they can import it without necessarily importing the memetic baggage.
Also, as Eliezer pointed out here even the most liberal person from the 18th century, say Ben Franklin, if transported to today would be so shocked by all the changes to prevailing morality that he might even conclude that the monarchists were right about man not being fit to govern himself. Well, Franklin didn't get to see the future so we live in a democracy today. However, the people in developing countries can see where our path leads, and they may very well choose not to follow it.
Well, that is basically the modern prevailing doctrine, though of course it's never spelled out so bluntly. The contemporary respectable opinion pays lip service to the idea of democracy in the abstract, but as soon as any really important issues are raised, it is considered incontrovertible that policy should be crafted by professional bureaucracies under the gentle and enlightened guidance of accredited experts. In fact, one of the surest paths to being scorned as a low-status extremist or troglodyte is to argue that an expression of popular will should override the decisions favored by the expert/bureaucratic establishment in some particular case.
Is this as true in non-US countries at is true in the US?
This is an extremely good comment.
Well we may all be well and truly doomed. Or we may not be.
We don't have a lot of evidence one way or another in this regard.
I THINK our memes are strong enough that we can incrementally lift people out of the shadows.
I think that a belief in progress in European culture was the result, not the cause, of progress.
But I don't know.
& aren't Amish people exactly those Ben Franklins?
I don't think so at all. Many become ex-Amish. Yet during the 18th century it wasn't an option to become ex-18th century. Likewise, no matter how innately conservative an American is, very few will be monarchist, and will instead espouse positions that were once only espoused by those with contrarian or radical natures. See also evaporative cooling of group beliefs.
Not to mention the Amish at least know of so many modern things.
I haven't studied the Amish in very much detail, but I mostly have a positive impression of them - the impression I get is not that they reject technology as much as they value community over technology, and will reject innovation that risks disrupting the community. What I read of their views some years ago seemed quite reasonable.
Modernity can be quite disruptive (look at Africa), and lot of people claim that some things are fundamentally wrong in modern American society (though they might disagree about what exactly, and arguably people have been saying similar things since the start of Civilization), so it makes sense to be cautious. I don't see that as leading to badstuff, especially if it stays a minority.
Should we become Amish? If you were teleported into an Amish person's life, would you leave?
My visceral fear is created not by their existence, but by the potential that they will not remain a minority. Could you see badstuff resulting from them becoming a much larger percentage of the population?
Should we become Amish? Probably not. If I were teleported into an Amish person's life, would I leave? No, I think I would stay. In some ways I think it would suit my personality better than the life I currently live.
I would like to "flag" this post as the point where "experienc[ing] fear and hostility" was warped into "feeling fear and hostility towards". That makes comments below subject to equivocation. It does not mean anything, at least not any one thing, to "[feel] fear and hostility towards" anything. The fear and hostility are in the brain and do not emanate therefrom.
This is more than a semantic quibble. Consider the fallacy of composition. It is possible for a liberal to hate all poor people and love the poor, and for a Confederate soldier to have hated blacks and loved all blacks.
I don't think "dislike and fear certain groups" is precise enough to have an non-careful conversation about because it is more than one thing.
I don't understand the relevant linguistic distinction here; it might be some finesse of English grammar that eludes me. Does saying "fear and hostility towards X" imply some observable action motivated by these feelings?
The sort of "fear and hostility" I had in mind is of the same sort as your hypothetical liberal's love of the poor.
I'm a native English speaker, and I did not understand the comment either.
Beats the word eventually being tiled with very genuinely not nice people.
That is a true moral statement.