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ErikM 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: MixedNuts 26 January 2012 04:18:07PM 31 points [-]

Dear people who post things like "Incest is neat" and "Whites are smarter than blacks": those things are currently controversial. Therefore, they don't come close to being unthinkable or impossible to talk about.

Nitpick: men dominating women and fathers (not mothers) deciding infanticide are not features of the ancestral environment, they come from the invention of agriculture, moving out of the ancestral environment.

Now, "agriculture was a mistake, let's go back to hunting, gathering, and killing babies born during famines", that's more of a sacred cow^W wild aurochs.

Other not-easily-thinkable positions (I don't believe any of these, but believe they're not utterly ridiculous):

  • Radfems are righter than they know; it is unethical to do anything to anyone (such as looking at them or talking to them) without explicit consent.
  • Vertebrates are people. There should be systems to extract their preferences so they can vote and debate. Letting your goldfish die is murder.
  • The above also applies to the overwhelming majority of animals, and maybe some plants, fungi, and other living or not things (e.g. cancer is a person). Stepping on a anthill is mass slaughter. (I used to believe a version of this as a kid.)
  • It's impossible to predictably improve any complex system, let alone a whole country. Anyone pushing for a policy is flailing wildly in the dark. Successes like Atatürk were the product of blind luck and historians with a bad case of narrative fallacy.
  • Personal identity changing over time counts as death. It's better to kill people, so they die once, than allow them to live, so they die creating another doomed person.
  • "<foobar> is ruining our intelligence!" claims are all true. If we'd shunned writing, progress would have been slower and bad at trickling down but ultimately much greater.
Comment author: ErikM 26 January 2012 04:56:44PM *  16 points [-]

Dear people who post things like "Incest is neat" and "Whites are smarter than blacks": those things are currently controversial. Therefore, they don't come close to being unthinkable or impossible to talk about.

ADBOC and that's somewhat beside the point, because it seems to me that things are necessarily somewhat controversial to be taboo. As Paul Graham said:

No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. [...] If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.

Now, James Watson and Stephanie Grace might want a word with you. (Larry Summers could file an amicus brief.) Chanting "Racist, racist, cow porn, racist, racist, cow porn" seems to fairly closely match Multiheaded's description that "society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark" for at least some parts of society. This is moral panic and ridicule despite the speaker barely tiptoeing near controversy and hedging everywhere with statements such as:

This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic

I also don't think that there are no cultural differences

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility

I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables

I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 January 2012 05:32:19PM 9 points [-]

Whether I like it or not, people tend to overfit the curves associated with past trauma to available data.
If I want to avoid being pattern-matched to someone's trauma, I have to take extreme measures.
Hedge phrases pretty reliably don't cut it... they're like making incremental improvements to my bird-feeder to keep squirrels away: I just end up training the squirrels.

Comment author: MixedNuts 26 January 2012 04:58:52PM 3 points [-]

Yeah, but why bother Less Wrong for suggestions where YouTube comments would serve?