Viliam_Bur comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong
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I don't think that gets Haidt off the hook prescriptively, since when he defends non-harm foundations, he doesn't do so by pointing to his emotions. And as I noted, it's just fine as a descriptive theory.
I'm not talking about any specific situation, where that indeed might happen. I'm talking about whether "When women have a succession of men coming through, their daughters will get raped" [emphasis in original]. That's the claim that I object to. If P(abuse|boyfriend) were even 0.3, it would be harder for mothers to deny what's going on, because their prior for it would be so much higher. When people see rape as rare, they are a lot less likely to believe any individual who claims to have been raped.
I think that's actually very likely. But the question is not P(boyfriend|abuse), but P(abuse|boyfriend).
Another reason I don't think much of Haidt's non-data, which I couldn't fit into the article, is that "street children", by definition, don't live in houses with their parents.
I didn't propose not discussing data on female sexual behavior. I suggested not linking to a site which has nothing but bad things to say about people of color, which is really quite different. VDARE is a political site; they do sometimes post articles by real scientists, but they would be unlikely to do so if those articles contradicted their basic premise. I also noted that I was trying to avoid filtering, by actually having women and people of color on Less Wrong.
My article did link to a book which mentions womens' boyfriends killing (but not, in the parts that I have read so far, raping) their infant children. So I'm certainly not opposed to data.
I appreciate your concern for the community's health. I did make one change to the article to remove a bit which was more specifically political (a bit about the Catholic church), and I think it was an error to put that in there in the first place. I think you might be pattern matching my comments in the other thread, rather than reading them. The typical liberal thing to do is to oppose "racism" and "sexism" (rather than actually opposing racism and sexism), on emotional purity grounds. That's because many liberals (as noted elsewhere) do think of these things in terms of purity instead of harm. That's also why a lot of radical feminists (for instance) reject liberalism; because it's focused on the symbol not the substance. But I don't identify as a liberal. And I genuinely do believe that there's a real harm to linking to sites like VDARE. It's not political, for me, but moral. And if ethics is the mind-killer, well, we've got more serious problems.
There is, in my opinion, but a different kind of harm. Accusations of racism, whether based on fact or not, are contagious. Being social species, we cannot afford to ignore the questions of status.
That's why I never call anyone a racist. We all fuck up and say racist things sometimes. But if we can't call each other on it, we'll never stop doing it. For a group of people who aim to be "Less Wrong" to say that we can't call something racism because we've been too mind-killed, or because our status would suffer, would be sad indeed.
When you say "a different kind of harm", can you be a bit more explicit?