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sunflowers comments on What truths are actually taboo? - Less Wrong
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Your suggested experiment wouldn't be very good. I do think that appearing to have become suddenly obsessed with holocaust revision would cost me. Talking about these things as one would actually talk about these things makes for a better experiment. Here's an interesting outcome: I've never been called an anti-Semite for discussing Holocaust revision - partly because it's made clear that I think anti-Semitism a form of mental illness and it's obvious I blame the Nazis for a genocide-that-yes-duh-happened. Now, I have been called an anti-Semite for supporting Palestinian human rights.
Of course I at times feel reluctance to bring up topics like this. I'm pretty sure I've admitted the existence of sensitive topics already. There are risks and costs to certain truths, but those risks and costs rarely if ever approach those associated with serious taboos like vulgar racism.
It's sound inference. It's updating on evidence.
Sometimes. I keep saying context context context, but do go on.
That'd be just awful. Has it happened? Are we really not allowed to do a reasonable, thoughtful cost-benefit analysis of immigration?
I agree that it's sound inference, given the hypotheses "racist" and "not racist."
What is more important is the importance given to those hypotheses. I think you're mistaken about what taboos are: they're signals of "not my tribe." Someone who supports Palestine over Israel is against the 'tribe of Israel,' in the way that a measured discussion of the Holocaust after professing love for the tribe isn't. It may be socially or instrumentally rational to yield to such politics, but never mistake it for epistemic rationality. (That is, the phrase "politically correct" is literally true.)
What do you mean by "we," "really," and "allowed"? No one will throw you in jail if you do such analysis and post it on your blog, but don't be surprised when the SPLC puts you on hatewatch. The more important question is, "are the people who actually decide immigration laws doing a reasonable, thoughtful cost-benefit analysis?"
Yes, given mutually exclusive and exhaustive - if fuzzy - categories that necessarily exist. Ok. Are you saying that it's an unsound inference?
My tribe here being correct and not completely morally reprehensible, which includes lots of people who aren't in what I consider my in-group.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with this debate. If you were, you would understand it to be a reflexive response against criticism of Israeli expansion and aggression. The Jewish critics of Israeli militarism are also called anti-Semitic. It has a lot more to do with power worship than tribal signalling, though the latter certainly plays a role in party discipline.
You'd probably think Bill is a racist. Bill is an extreme example, but for him or a more realistic case could you let me know why inferring this would be a failure of rationality?
I would be very surprised. I've followed Hatewatch before. Give me an example of this. If these exist, they must not be common.
More important? Sure. Related? No. Of course they aren't. The party that wants the xenophobe vote doesn't need to do that, and the party that wants the Hispanic vote doesn't need to do that.
You may be interested in this article.
I've read it. Still waiting for your examples.
Of Hatewatch targeting people who oppose immigration? You realize that's one of their tags, right?
I recommend reading it again. Consider what you wrote in the great-grandparent:
Don't it seem odd that the only dimension on which immigration is politically relevant is personal warmth towards Hispanics? As a policy decision, it has way more impacts than that. To pick just one dimension, where are the environmentalists comparing per capita carbon production in Mexico and America, and analyzing what impact Mexicans moving to America will have on global carbon production?
Yes, and I searched that tag before responding, and I didn't find people listed for doing careful cost-benefit analyses. Instead, I saw neo-Nazis and "minutemen."
Don't it seem odd that ain't what I said?
Duh, but your question was whether or not politicians are conducting cost-benefit analyses to arrive at their positions. They aren't. Republicans are busy trying to figure out how to get more of the hispanic vote without "alienating the base." Do you think the base will be alienated out of a concern for carbon emissions?
I'll ask once more for you to answer the question you keep refusing to answer: where is the failure of rationality in inferring that Bill is a racist? Why is it that true statements cannot serve as signals for the presence of false beliefs, or why is it that that rule, if sometimes sound, is not sound in this or similar cases?
Edit: Whoa I needed to fix some grammar.
Did you seriously expect the SPLC to say "this guy is an evil racist who hates immigrants, but he brings up sound, quantitative points that we ought to consider"? To the best of my knowledge, there is no American Thilo Sarrazin. Peter Brimelow might be close (and the SPLC excoriates him accordingly), but I haven't looked for or found anything carefully quantitative by Brimelow. Similarly, Steve Sailer is worth paying attention to, but calls for cost-benefit analyses rather than doing them himself (beyond back-of-the-envelope ones).
Thank you for repeating the question; that made it clearer what you were interested in.
In my opinion, strongly caring whether or not Bill is a racist is a mistake. There are reputational concerns about associating with racists, but I think it is poor epistemic hygiene to weight those concerns highly.
Even then, supposing it were important to care whether or not Bill was a racist, I think that most people overestimate the likelihood ratio of racism vs. non-racism upon hearing a politically incorrect comment.
I suspect most people do, in fact, weigh this too highly, but could you articulate why?
This is a good place to start. If you have more time, chapter IX of Mysterious Stranger is also relevant.
No. What I don't expect is for somebody who does decent work to end up on Hatewatch. Which is what you said I should expect. Which I don't. Because I shouldn't. Because the stuff about immigration which ends up on Hatewatch actually tends to be in the indefensible territory.
Good, so we'll be answering it!
No, we'll be saying it's not worth answering. Well shit.
This is an extreme claim that I would dismiss without strong evidence.
It seems that you only make it as an applause light. I doubt you have real evidence that anti-Semitism is a mental illness, rather than a normal mental state which is common in certain societies and is not harmful to those who possess it.
You have to profess this belief to allow you to discuss taboo claims that seem anti-Semitic without letting people think you're an actual anti-Semite. The fact you are forced to make this claim, which is probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand (e.g. what exactly happened in the Holocaust), is evidence that you are discussing a taboo subject.
A sensitive subject not in itself taboo so long as one includes provisos to prevent reasonable inferences leading to their concluding that I have views that actually are taboo.
I think that anti-Semitism is a qualitatively distinct form of racism which ought to be considered on the borderline of mental illness. I'll admit fault for calling it a mental illness without qualification. Here's one reason I consider anti-Semitism to be almost in a category of its own:
Racism is something segregated groups do more or less automatically, starting from early age and due to an evolutionarily sensible preference of the familiar to the unfamiliar. Anti-Semitism doesn't happen like this. Anti-Semitism is not only racial but also religious and nationalist, and it can happen anywhere. It's highly paranoid; the Jews frequently take an Illuminati-type role as the masters of everything. Any infinity of other racisms and poisons are naturally subsumed within it. Garden-variety racists are not typically racialists with a well-constructed theory to support their bigotry, but anti-Semites almost always are. Anti-Semitism is System 2. Conspiracies about Chinese and Japanese subterfuge wax and wane, but anti-Semitism stays. Jews are blamed simultaneously for the worst excesses of capitalism and socialism, for the kidnap and murder of children for ritual, food, and sport. They are out to undermine the true religion and dilute the blood of the best races, and turn the nations into beggars.
And it's been like this for centuries.
Let's be clear we're talking about the same thing here. The definitions for mental illness that I'm familiar with say that mental illness must be something that is not widespread in the person's culture, a beliefs or behavior that others consider weird or irrational. People imitate and conform to other's beliefs and actions so much, that anything that is common to a large segment of the population (e.g. religious belief) cannot be usefully called a mental illness. Anti-Semitism clearly fails this test.
Hating outgroups based on religious and nationalist lines, is just as normal and widespread as on racial lines. Almost every multi-religious society has or had in the past a large degree of segregation, distrust, and perhaps sectarian violence. The same goes for populations of "mixed nationalities".
Since the Jews historically lived among people where they were at once a religious, racial, and (in the last century) nationalist outgroup, it is not at all surprising that they were hated. Just like, since U.S. blacks are mostly a distinct social class from whites, and were previously a legally distinct class too, it's natural for this distinction to merge with the racial hatred and make it stronger.
We use a special term, anti-Semitism, because of the its historical importance, but it doesn't seem to me to be qualitatively different from other kinds of inter-group hatred.
This has only stood out since the 19th century in Europe. (Previously, other societies concerned themselves with racial purity and descendants of Jews, like Christian Spain; but they were the exception, not the rule.)
Yet Anti-Semitism has existed as long as mainstream Christianity. (And probably before - I just don't happen to know anything about the integration or otherwise of Jews in the Roman and Greek worlds.) Anti-Semitism changed a little in character when racial theories were added to the mix, but the so-called "modern" A-S could not have existed (in such a magnitude) with the millenia of "classic" A-S preceding it.
I would like to see a quantitative survey of the equivalent of blood libels in other famous sectarian hatreds. I would expect to find out that Christians have told (and tell) just as bad tales about Muslims, Protestants about Catholics, US whites about blacks, as anyone has told about Jews.
Also, A-S tales are famous in our culture. Mostly everyone has heard of the Blood Libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Maybe we just haven't heard enough non-A-S examples, and so A-S has become highly available to our thinking.
I still disagree, but kudos for a very reasonable response. May I plead time constraints in the hope that we may revisit this topic later?
Of course.