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gjm comments on Suppose HBD is True - Less Wrong
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Comments (178)
There's no such thing as a good reason for deciding to delude oneself.
But if investigating something has little apparent upside (e.g., if OrphanWilde is right or nearly right that, conditional on HBD being right, knowing it to be right wouldn't actually be very useful) and a likely outcome is making it easier for unpleasant people to do unpleasant things, that might be quite a good reason for not investigating it.
and
Methinks these two things are very very similar. In almost all cases when one says "I will carefully avert my eyes and not look over there", one is deluding oneself.
But your comment was an... interesting one. I did not expect such a clear case of "Screw the truth if it will offer succor to the enemy".
That is neither what I said nor what I meant.
(LW is interestingly opposite to the rest of the world on this stuff. In both cases, not taking an uncompromising position gets you jumped on. It just happens that the uncompromising positions you're expected to take are opposite to one another.)
Of course, that was a patented snarky one-liner interpretation :-) Dialing it down a couple of notches, what you said was that you'd much prefer not to look into a particular corner because what you could find there might be helpful to people you dislike. And hey, there is that guy on teh internets who thinks the corner is empty, anyways!
The issue here, by the way, is not whether your position is uncompromising enough, the issue is whether it's coherent and consistent with other views you've expressed.
Nope, still neither what I said nor what I meant.
Sorry, don't believe you.