= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
alienist comments on What does being x% on board with the program of a movement mean? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (15)
Also in certain circles it may be mandatory to show support for certain movements, e.g., if you were living in the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th century it was mandatory to show support for the ruler's religion, if you were a professor at a university in the Soviet Union it was mandatory to show support for communism.
Application of this to Scott Aaronson's statement is left as an exercise to the reader.
I find myself very put off by this comment, and I am not sure if I fully understand why it is bothering me. (or if it is good that it is bothering me) My immediate reaction is that it is rude for you to accuse someone of dishonesty about his own preferences. Instead I feel that you should assume honesty (about statements of personal preferences) and try to cultivate a society where honesty is the optimal strategy.
I am not sure if I am willing to take on all of the consequences of adopting this strategy, and am I not sure if is really well defined as there is a grey area between "preferences" and "beliefs" (Here I mean beliefs as falsifiable claims/probabilities)
Well, people are sometimes bad at introspection. And there are ideas that bring you social reward if you profess believing in them, and social punishment if you profess disbelief (unless you are trying to get points for being contrarian, which complicates things). So it would be reasonable to expect that our introspection is biased towards what is socially rewarded.
On the other hand, how strong can such bias be? (If someone reports "97%", should we expect the real value to be somewhere around 95%, 90%, 70%, 50%, 30%, or 10%?) Are there things that make this bias stronger or weaker? (Such as anonymity, age, profession, introversion, intelligence, etc.) Because then the accusations of bias could suggest a presence or absence of such traits.
I don't want this to develop into a fully general counterargument to anything people say about their preferences. But social pressure is real.
It depends on the strength of the social pressure.