LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation

Solvent

Scott, known on LessWrong as Yvain, recently wrote a post complaining about an inaccurate rape statistic.

Arthur Chu, who is notable for winning money on Jeopardy recently, argued against Scott's stance that we should be honest in arguments in a comment thread on Jeff Kaufman's Facebook profile, which can be read here.

Scott just responded here, with a number of points relevant to the topic of rationalist communities.

I am interested in what LW thinks of this.

Obviously, at some point being polite in our arguments is silly. I'd be interested in people's opinions of how dire the real world consequences have to be before it's worthwhile debating dishonestly.

Scott, known on LessWrong as Yvain, recently wrote a post complaining about an inaccurate rape statistic.

Scott just responded here, with a number of points relevant to the topic of rationalist communities.

I am interested in what LW thinks of this.

Obviously, at some point being polite in our arguments is silly. I'd be interested in people's opinions of how dire the real world consequences have to be before it's worthwhile debating dishonestly.

Of course.

The goal isn't to match the opponent, the goal is an effective strategy to further your own ends. Complete pacifism in the face of abuse is probably not it.

What do you mean by "complete pacifism"?

The way to fight someone how spreads lies about you is not to spread lies about them, it's to spread the truth about them.

7Protagoras12y

People seem to overestimate the effectiveness of playing dirty, though. Perhaps willingness to play dirty signals commitment, and I expect some of the time people are more interested in showing off their commitment than actually making progress toward the putative goal. But in any event, playing dirty has all sorts of costs (some discussed in this thread) which people seem to ignore or underestimate, and my only point is that it's a strategy to be employed only when it still seems like the best option even after all the costs and risks have been considered.

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