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steven0461 comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion
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"I must know" isn't a good enough reason. Sorry.
"I must know" could be a good enough reason for me if the person gave some evidence that they're more open-minded than average. Anyone can feel open-minded.
Over the years, I updated away from the position I once strongly held that anyone who makes "racist" remarks should be given "a taste of their own medicine", i.e. squashed like a righteous paladin squashes a goblin.
Example, although a tainted one: I've been looking at the HBD Chick's blog and the only distasteful thing for me was her (honestly expressed) indifference for the Babyeater children, even if those Babyeaters diverged from her own descendants less than a million years away.
Ironically, she's also signaling proud, righteous, oh-so-contrarian resignation to the ugly results of Azatoth's blind meddling instead of even dreaming about fixing them in a real way (uplifting). http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/pew-pew-pew/#comment-1300
All her scientific stuff - picked for its determinist bent, of course - is fine and very curious to me, it's just the totally defeatist, barren (not "selfish" - selfishness can be so much more beautiful and constructive) attitude that I dislike so much.
Conclusion: I'm quite open-minded about statements of fact, but very narrow-minded about values I perceive as hostile. I support more or less polite agrument on them, but realize what such core disagreement implies: in the physical universe, one system must give way for the other to prosper. Not because of the words, statements and tactics they use, but because their CEVs end up shaping the universe in ways abhorrent to the other.
I guess most people could say that they're more open-minded than they were before, but that doesn't make them more open-minded than average...
The average for the mainstream? But one of the key points often either stated or implied by contrarians in threads like this is that when it comes to taboo topics such-and-such, our society is narrow-minded indeed and behaves depressingly like a bunch of religious fundamentalists in its handling of dissent, except that it shuns physical violence. If that assertion were true, clearly I've shown that I'm more open-minded than that! (Which is not a great compliment by itself, of course)
We already know that most political discussions on LW fail, so maybe the relevant metric is "more open-minded than average for LW".
Would you like to see Multiheaded's Big Five scores? Other than that, I fail to see how we could test for openness.
I took a quick test of those, here are the results.
(88% openness sounds pretty high to me, and in general I would appear to have quite an outlying personality compared to a guy from the street; probably perfectly ordinary for LW though. Also, I might be motivated in picking answers here, of course.)
"You can't handle the truth" is practically always a semantic stop sign. If you can't explain why a concept can't be discussed and convince others of the truth of that fact, then there's no reason to take the position seriously.
Do you think previous failed discussions of the topic in question, and the lack of previous successful discussions, shouldn't count as evidence?
Do you mean Pick-Up Artistry? If so, I agree that there is strong evidence that this community can't talk productively about it. But then, you can just say, "I have an idiosyncratic position on PUA that experience has shown me is not worth talking about." Note how much less clear that sentence would be if it omitted the highlighted portion.
Sorry to bother you, but I'd like a sanity check: is there any justifiable reason you can think of that this post should be heavily downvoted?
(ETA: I guess maybe you should take it as a compliment that you're the first person I thought to ask.)
Can't tell because I guess you removed the post while I was asleep :-(
How about "there is no such thing as anonymity on-line and I don't want to loose my job/go to prison/have my wife leave me"?
If your beliefs cause you to risk losing your job, being imprisoned, or having your spouse leave you, then you have bigger problems. Not posting your thoughts here is unlikely to help.
And posting, "I have an interesting idea, but social pressure prevents me from stating it" is worse. People who might be sympathetic have no reason to take that assertion seriously, while people who would punish you for your thoughts now have reason to be suspicious and catch your inevitable slip-up (or they might confabulate a case against you that has nothing to do with what you've actually do wrong).
In short, if the rule is "Don't talk about Fight Club," then hinting about your neat evening activity is not helpful in communicating or in avoiding trouble.
In practice the exact opposite tends to happen. People who are sympathetic tend to pick up on subtle cues, whereas mainstream people are so used to actively avoiding thinking against their orthodoxy that like the OP they can't even imagine what you're hinting at. For example Paul Graham's essay is perfectly respectable, going into details about what specifically you can't say wouldn't be.
The interesting bit is that, the best heretic hunter is the man with doubts of his own.
I think I see what you are saying, in that you see the choice as between being explicit & punished or subtle & ignored-by-orthodox. That may be, but if your position is "I'm trying not to talk to the orthodox" then the intelligent orthodox are totally justified in saying "I have no reason to respect the quality of your ideas if you refuse to communicate them to me."
I totally agree with this point by Graham, and I think it counsels in favor of speaking about taboo-ed subjects. How else is the taboo going to change? And if you reasonably fear punishment, that's an unfortunate fact about your situation, not a proof that to the orthodox that your ideas have quality.
The goal isn't to convince the orthodox to change his position, it's merely to show that the orthodox opinion isn't unanimous.
I don't know why people are downvoting this. You hit the nail on the head with this and your post abou PUA.
EDIT: what the fuck, man?
One hypothesis I have is that there is a sizable population on LW that REALLY doesn't want to talk about the social norms. In meatspace, stuff like how often to talk, how close to stand, and such.
There's a little discussion of the equivalent for online discussion, but mostly phrased in terms of "status," which is not a deep enough concept to capture everything that's going on. I get the feeling that others think something like "My methods of interacting with others are effective, and I'm not interested in other people telling me that my methods makes them uncomfortable." Certainly I've felt that way in the past.
(That said, I'm not sure if that phenomena is why this downvoting is occurring here).
can you elaborate?
I've asserted occasionally that post-modern moral theories (like the worthwhile parts of feminism) are consistent with empiricism. That is, they look at what as happened before and make predictions about will happen in the future.
That is often down-voted. I suspect that this is because taking feminism seriously would require people to re-think their methods of interacting with others, in a way that would be extremely challenging to their personal identities. That way leads to mindkilling (By the transitive property: The personal is political + Politics is the Mindkiller => The personal is the mindkiller).
I would love to see a rational discussion about feminism.
I guess there are many ideas where I should update, but also a lot of BS... and I have trouble separating these two parts, mostly because saying that "there is a lot of BS" means that I am an evil person not worth discussing with. Asking for evidence is a proof that I don't believe everything, which of course means that I am an ignorant evil male. So I would like to participate in a discussion where my comment "I don't think this is enough evidence for X" or "I think there is an alternative explanation" is countered by more evidence, instead of just pointing out that I don't get it, because I am privileged (because somehow the non-privileged person could never be wrong).
Here is a start at what I'd call empirical feminist. I'm not sure what you mean by rational, if you don't mean empirical.
More generally, I rely on feminist thought to say:
From there, I move on to say:
For arguments-are-soldiers reasons, many feminists are particularly provocative in their redefinition of worlds. Also for arguments-are-soldiers reasons, other feminists are reluctant to call them on being provocative. That's a bug, not a rationalist feature.
But notice that redefinition can be quite powerful, like how "queer" has been reclaimed from being a slur to being a positive label. If you weren't a feminist, would you have predicted this was possible? Keep in mind hindsight bias.
My experience is the exact opposite.
Let me put it this way: If Marxist history were true, that would falsify Foucault. As I understand it, one of the purposes of Foucault's philosophical project was to explain why Marxist history could sometimes say insightful things even if it was wrong.
And I'll say again the post-modern thought is often co-opted by more mainstream thought. What's left behind is not representative of the insight-fulness of post-modern thought.
This is so true.
Oddly enough, this is probably correct.
False. Perfect anonymity is not very difficult; all you need is a clean computer, some standard tools that you can easily download, and a little time with no one looking over your shoulder.
Modify that to "good enough" and I would agree. If someone was really determined to track you down anonymity is hard.
In any case some of us would have to resort to sock puppets because we've already disclosed the connection between our user names and our IRL names.
I hereby promise that I'll find some way to pay Steven $20 or so if, say, he and I contact each other with fake accounts in a messenger program, using Tor or some other anonymizer, and he finally gives me his vaunted red pill.
It has been explained why the concepts can't be discussed. If every correct line of reasoning were convincing to everyone, we wouldn't be living in the world that we do.
Do you see have much clearer you would be if you had described what concept you meant instead of just saying "the concept."
Compare "I decline to discuss Pick-Up Artistry" against "I decline to discuss the forbidden concept."