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MugaSofer comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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I agree there's a common failure mode here - I'd be inclined to say it's simple overconfidence, and maybe overestimating your rationality relative to everyone else.
Still, if they're successful...
Even then, I'd most likely object to their attempts to try to dictate the actions of others; because of the common failure mode, my heuristic is to assign a very strong prior to the hypothesis that they are unsuccessful. Also, trying force has some fairly substantial negative effects; any positive effects of their proposed behaviour change would have to be significant to overcome that.
However, if they are willing to try to change the actions of others through simple persuasion without resorting to force, then I would not object. And if their proposed course of action is significantly better, then I would expect persuasion to work in at least some cases; and then these cases can be used as evidence for the proposed course of action working.
To be fair, we may have different interventions in mind here. I would also expect someone who genuinely found knowledge to use "soft force", but maybe that's just wishful thinking.
However, if forcing people to do things really helps, I'm all for intervention. Addicts, for example.
I was thinking armies, secret police, so on and so forth, forcing an entire country to one's will.
Hmmm. I hadn't thought of addicts. You make a good point.
I think I might need to re-evaluate my heuristics on this point.