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Stuart_Armstrong comments on Blackmail, continued: communal blackmail, uncoordinated responses - Less Wrong
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Why? Are you arguing the example is wrong? Are you saying that you disagree with it personally? Because "don't talk about this general fact because someone else might think it has (weak) political implications" seems a heuristic to be avoided.
No. We do have research on how people get mindkilled. It's not about implications. Certain classes of claims for example lead to most people stop being able to use Bayes Rule when you ask them to analyse a problem. I'm claiming that the example is in that class.
A core question in this case is: "What do we gain from defining blackmail in a way that this example is covered? What do we gain from defining it in a way that this isn't covered?"
Given that most people here disapprove of the action of those persecutors politically they feel the desire to punish them by using a negative label. That makes it harder to have the discussion based on the merits.
That's not the heuristic brought forward in "Politics is the mindkiller". The heuristic is: You have a set A of examples (X_1, Y_1. X_2, Y_2, Y_3 ...). The X examples are political and fire up a bunch of mental biases in your reader. Most of your readers will suddenly start to flunk Bayesian calculation if you make one of those X_i examples. The Y_i examples on the other hand allow your readers to reason normally. If you want to choose an example for A, to speak about A don't choose one of the X_i but one of the Y_i.
We're trying to formalize our intuitions.
The way the opening post is written it doesn't ask the question: "Should we consider this behavior blackmail?" but takes it for granted that the answer to that question is "Yes".
Shutting off questions like that is quite typical for how politics mindkilling works. "Boo, evil prosecutors"
That's the point of formalizing intuitions. He has a preexisting category, and he's trying to find the rule which formally describes what goes in the category. In order to do that you have to take for granted that certain things are and aren't in the category. If you didn't have a preexisting caregory there would be no reason to do it.
Most people are unable to use Bayes' rule anyway, regardless of the class of claims.