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Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes Thread July 2015 - Less Wrong
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Comments (86)
-- Ozy Frantz (source)
1) This strikes me as careful cherrypicking of "absurd" results to pick only the non-absurd "absurd" ones. You're supposed to say "well, giving women rights isn't so absurd after all, people who thought it is absurd were mistaken", but not all absurd conclusions from the past turned out to be okay in hindsight. Some were pretty horrible.
2) People who say "it is okay if my moral reasoning produces absurd results" generally don't personally think "that sounds absurd, but I'll accept it anyway". Typically, the result is something they are strongly motivated to believe, but which is thought absurd by others. They welcome the moral reasoning because it provides a way to reject their critics.
(In the LW-sphere, there are people who actually do accept results that seem personally absurd, but the LW-sphere is a minority. Most people don't act that way. Go tell a vegetarian that he should support exterminating all wildlife to end wild animal suffering, and see what response you get.)
3) Rejecting reasoning that produces absurd results even if we can't find a flaw in the reasoning is an important way we avoid errors.
And an addendum:
4) Sometimes people accept results that are absurd as a way of signalling commitment to an idea. If you're so dedicated to your religion that you're willing to stand up and publicly say it's wrong to lie even if telling the truth leads to someone's death, or so dedicated to your ethical system that you're willing to say that helping a stranger's child is as good as helping your own, you must be really committed.
I don't think Ozy is claiming that all absurd conclusions are correct. Rather, Ozy claims that some absurd conclusions are correct. When you just need an existence proof, there's no cherry-picking - you just pick your example/s and you're done.
Maybe they should! My impression is that Ozy does.
Ozy's a vegetarian, and their position on wild animal suffering is:
Seems pretty open to absurdity to me.
I'd prefer the framing of applying an absurdity penalty to one's estimated probability, rather than "rejecting" it in a binary way, but yes: absurdity could be a useful thing to weight in one's estimated probability of a conclusion being correct.
Ozy is in the LW-sphere. As I pointed out, people in the LW-sphere may actually say "it sounds absurd, but I'll still believe it despite that" and mean it. But people in the LW-sphere are exceptions. Most people, when they say that, don't really mean it, and instead mean that their opponents think the conclusion is absurd, but they personally think it's only slightly unusual.