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mwengler comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion

26 Post author: Multiheaded 25 January 2012 05:43PM

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Comment author: knb 26 January 2012 12:51:15AM *  55 points [-]

Let's do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.

  • Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren't actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of "rationality" as practiced by LessWrongers.
  • A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is "Evangelical Polyamory".
  • Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.
  • Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
  • Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society's expectations for normal behavior.

I would also like to endorse GLaDOS's excellent list.

Comment author: mwengler 26 January 2012 04:04:00PM 5 points [-]

It seems dictatorships work better (actually I can't think of an example off hand) AND wildly worse. Dictatorships compared to republic is like male compared to female: the main difference is just a much wider spread. So you wind up rolling a much bigger set of dice with dictatorships and then survivorship bias and human bias towards picking off the high spots makes the result look good.

Further, would a dicatatorship work well for long in the absence of republics from which it could steal ideas? I don't think there is a dicatatorship with a good record of innovation and technological development. (Hitler's Germany SPENT technical capital it had accumulated before, Hitler didn't last long enough to see if Germany would have been the exception).

North Korea, ceteris paribus, does not seem to have been helped by dictatorship.

Comment author: knb 04 February 2012 08:55:27AM 2 points [-]

On the other hand, South Korea was a dictatorship until 1987 and did extremely well during those years.

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