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NMJablonski comments on So You've Changed Your Mind - Less Wrong
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I have to say, I was also a little puzzled that the idea being accepted here was communism. To give it a favorable interpretation, I just assume it's being used as an cultural idiom to convey the idea of preferring death to submission to an ideological opponent.
Basically this, I'm surprised to find people taking it literally, my bad. If you'd like to put it into Eliezer's conventional terminology, you could try "better dead than blue".
I actually meant that the use of the idiom (I'm confident that it's only an idiom) would bias people against "red" ideas. Mocking "red" ideas with this routine idiom might lead someone to more firmly entrench themselves in a belief that "red" ideas are perpetually and eternally wrong, and that as someone opposed to "red" ideas they are perpetually and eternally right. Very minor, but I felt compelled to mention it for the purpose of completeness.
For what it's worth, my 0th-order reaction to "Better dead than Red" is a bias in the opposite direction. I grew up during the Vietnam war, in the U.S., so I got to watch my government repeatedly lie through its teeth, and the US was the opposition to the Reds - so, when I hear, "Better dead than Red", I expect it paired with deceit. (It's a low level bias - the Soviets are gone, and the cold war has been replaced by other conflicts, so this reaction is largely moot at this point)