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ArisKatsaris comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong
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I, for one, have the impression me that the more dire the consequences, the more important honesty in arguments becomes. So, I don't really get your dilemma.
What if you are Jewish and are trying to stop a Hitler from coming to power and the best means would be to spread a deliberate lie about him. Are you saying that the worse the outcome would be, the less likely you would be to lie?
Nobody in this discussion is confronting a present or potential totalitarian state bent on murder so this feels like a tangent. In fact, this is a hypothetical that very few people are ever confronted with and therefore it isn't relevant to a question of practical ethics. Very few people are skilled enough at predicting the future to know when the situation is dire or whether dishonesty will work; very few people are skilled enough manipulators to pull it off.
For the range of social issues the participants in this conversation are likely to confront, I think it's a good policy to be more careful and honest the higher the stakes. Among other things, the higher the stakes, the likelier a lie or mistake is to be caught. And being caught lying doesn't generally achieve any goal of the liar.
Obamacare only became law because Obama lied by saying that under the law "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." PolitiFact made this their lie of the year.
I suspect that many on the left knew at the time Obama was lying about this but kept quiet because they really wanted the law to pass. They won.
[upvoted for giving a crisp recent, and plausible example of people getting away, at least in the short term, with dishonesty. I was a little squeamish about the politicization of the topic but I think it's hard to avoid giving a real political example in a conversation about political dishonesty]
I take the point that there's a complicated collective-action problem here where if enough people repeat something they wish were true, it can become relatively accepted, at least for a while.
The catch is that, as happened here, people often get caught having been dishonest. And we will see how painful the consequences are for those people personally and politically.
Obama doesn't use truth as a strategy but that doesn't change the fact that Cato was a very successful politician when it comes to people respecting his positions.
The didn't lose but they also didn't get the single payer health care they wanted.
I think US politics is ready for someone like Cato to come up and take it over. You don't win in politics by telling a bit less lies than your opponents. On the other hand actually being honest has it's advantages.
If I lie about him, then the most likely consequence is that Hitler will have verified proof that "Jews are lying about me". So the consequence is that I would end up helping cause the holocaust, not stopping it.
More generally what's the point of using a hypothetical scenario where the assumption is that the best means would be to spread a lie, when that's exactly what I'm contesting (that lying is the best means)? That's begging the question. Tell me in what exact way I'd be in an epistemic position to know that lying is the best means?
The set of things you could say is vastly larger than the set of true things you could say so unless lying is observed and punished you should assume that you are probably better off at least occasionally lying.
I'm a game theorist and think that wearing makeup or acting more confident than you really are, are forms of lying that frequently benefit individuals.
I think I spent to much attention at optimizing things like the clothing I'm wearing and the way the background is arranged at my first TV interview.
Being busy with tactics takes mental resources and builds anxiety. I would have probably done better if I would have spoken from a more relaxed state of mind that doesn't worry that much about the background of the image.
Do you in fact wear makeup on a regular basis?
No makeup, but I do fake confidence.
Why no makeup? It's possible to use makeup as a man in a way that accentuates manly features.
I'm open to the idea, I do dye my hair.
I think that if you really look at the makeup question you will find that's not cost effective.
A quick googling gives me the number that woman spent on average 91 hours per year applying makeup ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2175077/Women-spend-43-weeks-life-applying-make-perfecting-face-night-out.html ).
I think that a woman who rather spends the same amount of time in daily meditation sessions will get a higher return on her time investment.
In a world full of superficial people there's not much comparative advantage at trying to be better at being more superficial than everyone else. I think it's a better strategy to compete based on personal depth.
If you are open about who you are, that will make you more confident than if you walk around all the time with a mask.
Comparative advantage doesn't mean you can neglect something entirely. Personal attractiveness has large consequences on how people evaluate & treat you, and equally so for men and women, it looks like (Langlois et al 2000 (excerpts) claim gender is not a large moderator of beauty effects). Even if Miller goes beyond just dying his hair, he could still be well below optimal.
I'm not so sure. Women who don't wear makeup are much less attractive, which significantly reduces their social status and their dating market value. These are things people greatly value.
I think confidence depends mostly on practice and genetics and situational factors. If anything, I think the superficiality-confidence connection is the other way round - being confident makes people see you as more genuine, because of the halo effect, i.e. because everybody loves to hate low-status people. People without masks are weirdos, because what people call "being normal" is a learned behavior, a mask.
The best means to stop a Hitler would be to show the actual, ugly truth of where he'll lead us. Very few lies about Hitler could match the real horror.
To credibly show the truth. Claims of Hitler-equivalent societal doom are a dime a dozen. Almost all of them are false.
Almost all isn't that reassuring given the scope of the potential harm. Hitler democratically acquired power in an advanced civilized Western Christian nation while being fairly open about his terminal values. Fear of this pattern repeating is worth continually emphasizing.
The analogy isn't effective (outside the ingroup where it originates) unless it's credible; throwing it around in situations where it isn't in no way guards against the possibility of a recurrence of Nazism, or one of its less famous but often equally nasty companions in 20th-century totalitarianism. In fact, I'd say it's probably actively detrimental, as it makes the accusation less punchy when and if we do start seeing a totalizing popular movement that openly preaches extreme prejudice against an unpopular group of scapegoats.
That's not to say that these kinds of mass movements aren't worth studying or analogies to modern movements can't be made; they absolutely are and can. But crying Nazi without commensurately serious justification can only cheapen the term once everyone catches on. Who cares about having one more political slur?
I think it's somewhere in Sun Tzu's Art of War. Often things are well hidden in plain sight.
Hitler's biggest advantage was that nobody took him seriously.
And yet the German military didn't overthrow Hitler when he started messing up military strategy in Russia.
By that time Hitler did put people he trusted into central positions of military power. Everybody who Hitler considered to be untrustworthy was already removed from power.
Nobody succeeded in running a coup against him but people did try at such dates as the 20 of July. The military didn't follow Hitlers orders when it comes to subjects such as burning brides in Germany.
A few tried, even specifically operating under the theory that the failures in Russia would make a post-assassination coup politically possible, in Operation Spark.
I don't think this much affects your point, though; by the time a sufficiently evil person and/or group is in power, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of political and psychological mechanisms they can use to entrench there.
In a world with rational voters, yes. In our world you might want to start a false rumor such as Hitler's Jew hating is just a false cover for his true desire to reduce social welfare payments
That rumor wouldn't spread. It's to complicated to be a good story that's believable to the average person in that time period. I think Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction is quite brilliant at illustrating how such principles work.
I was making an analogy to Bill Clinton's false claim that Bob Dole wanted to cut medical benefits to senior citizens. When confronted with his lie by Dole, Clinton reportedly said "You gotta do what you gotta do."
It's confusing to talk about history of the 1930's with examples that come from the 1990's and which aren't marked that way.
It prevents you from learning the historic lessons that the 1930's do provide.
In Tea-Party constituencies, that'd be an argument in his favor.
No, smarter voters would see the purpose of the lie and vote against Hitler. (As a tea party person I'm disassociating with Hitler.)
The Tea Party would probably support a candidate who they had reason to think wants to cut down welfare programs, even if there are some unnerving rumors about him.
I think the relevant axis may be short-term/specific vs. long-term/broader consequences rather than unimportant vs. important. I think defecting is usually a long-term bad strategy but a short-term good one. If you're pretty sure there's not going to be a long-term unless you fix your short-term problems immediately, defecting might be a good idea for you or your chosen cause - not sure about for the world at large.