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I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions
You folks probably know how some posters around here, specifically Vladimir_M, often make statements to the effect of:
"There's an opinion on such-and-such topic that's so against the memeplex of Western culture, we can't even discuss it in open-minded, pseudonymous forums like Less Wrong as society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark.
Meanwhile the thought patterns instilled in us by our upbringing would lead us to quickly lose all interest in the censored opinion"
Going by their definition, us blissfully ignorant masses can't even know what exactly those opinions might be, as they would look like basic human decency, the underpinnings of our ethics or some other such sacred cow to us. I might have a few guesses, though, all of them as horrible and sickening as my imagination could produce without overshooting and landing in the realm of comic-book evil:
- Dictatorial rule involving active terror and brutal suppression of deviants having great utility for a society in the long term, by providing security against some great risk or whatever.
- A need for every society to "cull the weak" every once in a while, e.g. exterminating the ~0.5% of its members that rank as weakest against some scale.
- Strict hierarchy in everyday life based on facts from the ansectral environment (men dominating women, fathers having the right of life and death over their children, etc) - Mencius argued in favor of such ruthless practices, e.g. selling children into slavery, in his post on "Pronomianism" and "Antinomianism", stating that all contracts between humans should rather be strict than moral or fair, to make the system stable and predictable; he's quite obsessed with stability and conformity.
- Some public good being created when the higher classes wilfully oppress and humiliate the lower ones in a ceremonial manner
- The bloodshed and lawlessness of periodic large-scale war as a vital "pressure valve" for releasing pent-up unacceptable emotional states and instinctive drives
- Plain ol' unfair discrimination of some group in many cruel, life-ruining ways, likewise as a pressure valve
+: some Luddite crap about dropping to a near-subsistence level in every aspect of civilization and making life a daily struggle for survival
Of course my methodology for coming up with such guesses was flawed and primitive: I simply imagined some of the things that sound the ugliest to me yet have been practiced by unpleasant cultures before in some form. Now, of course, most of us take the absense of these to be utterly crucial to our terminal values. Nevertheless, I hope I have demonstrated to whoever might really have something along these lines (if not necessarily that shocking) on their minds that I'm open to meta-discussion, and very interested how we might engage each other on finding safe yet productive avenues of contact.
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.
P.S. Yeah, Will, I realize that I'm acting roughly in accordance with that one trick you mentioned way back.
P.P.S. Sup Bakkot. U mad? U jelly?
CONCLUSION:
Fuck this Earth, and fuck human biology. I'm not very distressed about anything I saw ITT, but there's still a lot of unpleasant potential things that can only be resolved in one way:
I hereby pledge to get a real goddamn plastic card, not this Visa Electron bullshit the university saddled us with, and donate at least $100 to SIAI until the end of the year. This action will reduce the probability of me and mine having to live with the consequences of most such hidden horrors. Dixi.
Sometimes it's so pleasant to be impulsive.
Amusing observation: even when the comments more or less match my wild suggestions above, I'm still unnerved by them. An awful idea feels harmless if you keep telling yourself that it's just a private delusion, but the moment you know that someone else shares it, matters begin to look much more grave.
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Comments (857)
Masturbating too often can be bad for you. (The writer of that article advocates stopping altogether, but in my experience --and in that of many of the commenters there-- going below one or two ejaculations per week can have drawbacks overweighing the benefits.)
That's not a very good article.
Anecdote & assertion.
Worse, the one link provided says the opposite of what the author claims! (Hint to whatever idiot wrote it: "beating off kills your testosterone levels" is not a correct description of a study in which testosterone levels did not change during abstinence except for a transient spike a week later. The second study does not support the claim either, and there are no other studies mentioned.)
The so-called "some posters" were right, but neglected to account for the self-fulfilling effect of drawing attention to the phenomenon. You all are tainting anything identified with this community and preventing good from being done.
Individuals who disregard negative social weight on concepts may privately explore those concepts for overlooked value and have an opportunity to bring that value to broader populations, doing good. But to do so they must persuade populations who still attach negative weight to those things associated with those social concepts to give their idea a try, AND overcome their personal reputation as one who associates with concepts that have negative social weight.
Small groups of individuals who disregard negative social weight on concepts may quietly explore those concepts and so forth. But they have the additional challenge of overcoming the general population's bias against their group, another layer of vilification.
Large groups of individuals who similarly dismiss negative social weight and loudly, indulgently explore such concepts move beyond the label of 'heretic' and under the label 'monster.' Anything associate with them is sullied with guilt-by-association.
This thread bites the hand that feeds it and should be put down with prejudice.
I'll ponder this, thanks.
See my comment history.
Individuals and society as a whole would be happier if everyone was drunk most of the time. However as alcoholism is low status we avoid it.
Let's go maximum ouroboros, shall we?
<redacted>
On a less depressingly metapolitical note, I'll at least indulge you with one of my slightly controversial opinions:
Ah-ha! You were inspired by That One Thing we have floating around, right?
In all seriousness, however, have you considered the psychological effect that getting a powerful shock while investigating all this crap might have on me? While it,s a bit of a stretch, I can see myself getting so bitter and disappointed in the memeplex of "Normal enjoyable life" and "Contributing to society" that I devote my life to supporting the push for FAI, on a "Kill or cure" logic.
I agree wholeheartedly (except that I think that the basic "Might makes right" principle is more ethical in practice than any kind of human international law, so a made-up and clearly bullshit casus belli is equal in my eyes to the most just and humanitarian one: it's the practical effects that matters). This is hardly a "forbidden" opinion in any way, though: e.g. the late Christopher Hitchens would've likely supported it.
In general, this thread seems to have a justification in digging mostly for policies we perceive as brutal, anti-liberal and anti-humanist: they're the ones that sound the most evil and appaling to us, therefore, exiling an idea to that cluster would be a viable form of censorship (even if we should find this censorship wise and proper).
"I must know" isn't a good enough reason. Sorry.
"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.
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."
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"?
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.
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.
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).
This is so true.
Oddly enough, this is probably correct.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Here's a critique of democracy that could be taken as either a loosely conservative-left one (mildly Stalinist, that is... Euro-Stalinist?), or a variation of the libertarian argument. Naive in places, but still an okay read.
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/democracy.html
Heh. Here's the modus tollens to the democratic alt-right's modus ponens.
derp
Oh you mean our very own escaped basilisk made by [he who must not be named]?
Edit: Removed name.
I personally did not find that scary at all. However, I understand that many intelligent people were discomforted.
And so. If anyone wants to know what this is about, PM me and I'll try to figure out if it will upset you, and then tell you what it is.
Not only is intellectual property law in its current form destructive, but the entire concept of intellectual property is fundamentally wrong. Creating an X does not give the creator the right to point a gun at everyone else in the universe who tries to arrange matter under their control into something similar to X. In programming terminology, property law should use reference semantics, not value semantics. Of course it is true that society needs to reward people who do intellectual work, just as much as people who do physical work, but there are better justified and less harmful ways to accomplish this than intellectual property law.
Total government surveillance would actually increase net happiness in developed countries significantly. (So cameras on every street, and if practical every bedroom. All emails, phone calls etc are kept on record to be examined by police when necessary)
We object to it out of a primal fear of being observed, internalised guilt about our actions and a cultural backlash against authoritarian governments.
Make that "centralized governments"; there is in fact no logical contradiction between democracy and total surveillance. Generally, in every case where people consider the Hobbesian Leviathan, they forget that Hobbes himself considered a democratically shaped Leviathan to be somewhat inferior but perfectly possible.
I didn't say there was, just that there is a general societal association between surveillance and bad things. (Surveillance -> Secret Police -> Scary governments doing bad stuff).
I imagine if the dominant cultural narrative of the last century was of centralised and authoritarian but benevolent states social attitudes would be a lot different. As it is all those features are lumped together into totalitarianism in the popular consciousness.
This perception makes people unwilling to support/vote/campaign for privacy reducing options even when there is an obvious net benefit (e.g. DNA and fingerprint databases would solve a lot of crimes at minimal cost in western liberal democracies).
Sometimes the only ethical course of action is to kill another human being.
Never would have predicted that this thread would be big. No, I never would have imagined it would have been posted at all. Pandora's box is now opened.
This is the first time I have ever seriously considered creating a sock puppet.
I would vote for the God Emperor of Canada.
The Self-Righteous Hive Mind
David Brin tells another story about tribalism and expanding horizons.
On the other hand, being in favor of independence for Quebec is liberal if you're in Quebec, and conservative if you're in France.
There is no way to coherently hold utilitarianism without it leading to "the repugnant conclusion" that we should maximise reproduction.
Everyone who thinks they're utilitarian is engaging in signalling behaviour by claiming to value the happiness of other agents, but always rationalizes a utility argument for the self serving position they had anyway.
this is stupid. Utilitarianism does not decide what you value, only what you should do once you know your values. If you don't care about the absolute total amount of utility, there's no reason to maximize reproduction.
For example.
Very alarming. I'd say that the only good Schelling point here is to treat all people who fit the current definition of "capable of human thought" and aren't wilfully destructive towards others as EXACTLY equal in "moral significance". Then again, I've always been a staunch egalitarian on this point.
We've already had one extended debate about this one. Reminds me of the Thought Police section of this recent post.
Do you have a link? What was said?
See here for instance.
That may have been inspired by this blog post:
Your and ciphergoth's links hardly inspire confidence that such thoughts would be met with calm and fair-minded criticism.
Anarcho-capitalists are right.
Most upper class and wealthy jobs are actually rent seeking activities as argued in this video by fellow LessWrong user Aurini.
Yep, Anarcho-capitalism is the best idea I can think of to fit that bill.
I may not necessarily agree with that particular video but Aurini's channel is pure contrarian & rationalist goodness. Its very depressing he only has a few hundred views per video. These two videos seems somewhat relevant:
Edit: Added a few more sort of relevant videos.
He's certainly smarter than the videos' previews are making him look, and sounds like an okay, responsible dude to be around in person... but eh. I get the picture, I'm just not too interested.
Also, what a cute website he's got contributions on... have a laugh, if you don't mind getting drool on your metaphorical clothes. - Note: I'm not saying Aurini isn't facepalming about this kind of shit, or doesn't recognize that being unjustly surrounded by complete dumbfucks is part of a contrarian's plight.
(make sure to check out the quite splendid comments if you're at it)
EDIT: I got fucktons of downvotes the last time I posted links to ugly stuff, and I'm getting them this time, so you're all welcome to also downvote me in advance for when I'll decide to do this next, nya!
[if you didn't know, a "Nya" at the end of every sentence is supposed to make one sound extra unserious and annoying, and is widely used on both English and Russian interwebs]
Help! Someone is making fun of nerds on the internet! And this guy you talked about occasionally writes on the same site!
In Mala Fide has all sorts of contrarian people. Some are silly, some are insightful. Sure many are mean but that's more or less the point of the site -- may as well complain that 4chan is mean.
Since we are on the subject of video blogs, I feel I should also put a link here for the measureofdoubt channel done by Julia Galef, who is just great at popularizing some basic rationalist material. I'm sure there has been a thread specifically about videoblogging and youtube channels with rationalist content so sorry if I'm duplicating stuff. Can someone please share a link to any additional recommendations?
These are pretty good introduction videos to perhaps share with non-rationalists, just so they know what the heck you are talking about. :)
Concerning what everyone on the right around here says the voluntary doublethink of the Left:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag
This is really quite complicated, though. Especially if one also asks which reader would've been better informed about the realities of capitalist democracy (neither would be well off in that regard, but still).
Isn't this an invalid comparison? If The Nation were writing for an audience of reader which only read The Nation, wouldn't it change what it prints? The point is these publications are fundamentally part of a discussion.
Imagine if I thought there were fewer insects on earth then you did, and we had a discussion. If you compare the naive person who reads only my lines vs the naive person who reads only your lines, your person ends up better off, because on the whole, there are indeed a very large number of insects on earth This will be the case regardless of who actually has the accurate estimate of number of insect species. The point is that my lines will all present evidence that insects are less numerous, in an attempt to get you to adjust your estimate downward, and your lines will be the exact opposite. However, that says nothing about who has a better model of the situation.
I never actually read anything by Kipling before reading a certain article by Orwell that a fellow LWer mentioned. I must admit I don't consume much poetry in English, yet I was bothered that I knew nothing of the man's work and did some reading after the reference.
I have stumbled upon this poem and thought it appropriate for some of the topics discussed.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Here is the same old mistake of heartfelt but naive conservatism; assuming that the "common sense" and "old good values" of one's day, if they seem to bring such security and are so good at shooting down other naive and dangerous ideas, will be good forever. Yet Kipling's world with all its wisdom ended up impaled on barbed wire, choking on mustard gas and torn to pieces by its own Maxim gun.
And who led it to that hell? Socialists? Unscrupulous wheelers and dealers? Naive young men who wanted to throw out musty old books and change everything for the better? Why, none of the public Kipling used to deride had much to do with it; the gunpowder was lit by those wise old men who carried sacred traditions and led empires. I'm sure that it never even occured to Kipling that, say, Marshal Haig was far more debased, murderous and evil than any of those he railed against.
Actually, technically yes.
Kipling's son died in the war. And he wrote a multi-volume history "The Irish Guards in The Great War". I think he had ample opportunity to reflect on Haig as a human being. My impression, from Kipling's postwar writing, is that he thought that the war was necessary to restrain the Germans.
And I wouldn't be quite so quick to talk about "Kipling's world...being torn to pieces." It's easy, in retrospect, to see the War as a sharp cataclysm. But it might not have looked quite so drastic at the time. The empire didn't start shedding territory for another twenty or thirty years -- and not until after another world war.
I think it's a mistake to cast Kipling as a stuffy Colonel Blimp. He was quite interested in technology and progress. He was aware that there were other societies, that disagreed with Victorian England about many things. He wasn't particularly a believer in the Church. He had enough detachment from his surroundings to make his perspective distinctive and interesting.
I was interpreting the poem sub specie aeternitatis rather than in the specific context it was made. To borrow from Robin Hanson, looking at history farmers embracing forager values tend to die out. The Gods of the Copybook Headings do seem to come back.
Now obviously modern technologically progressing industrial civilization seems a sui generis transition, and there are all sorts of good reasons why this time it will be different, but the outside view is Kipling's view in this case.
And don't think we can in principle rule out a farmer future. The often discussed Malthusian em scenario is a future where the Gods of the Market-Place finally abandon their folly and tightly embrace the teachings of the Gods of the Copybook Heading.
But this is a rather over-specific interpretation of the emotional and I would argue even rationalist core of the poem. Namely that being bored with "water will wet us" and "fire will burn" causes major problems since wishful thinking quickly works to disconnects us from viable strategies in reality.
Wait, wait, wait. You are wired as a forager; the farmer culture is a fluke amidst a roaring background of change - just as Lovecraft pointed out. Don't you want to fight? Don't your deepest instincts say that a stagnant, limited order - even a great and proud one - is much less appealing than a chance to end evil or perish, such as trying to build a FAI? Even if we had a recipe to make a stable and conservative society with "farmer" values, would the intellectual elites of our world want such a future? That's like leaving the Babyeaters alone to save your own colony in 3WC. Yes, mercy can kill. But I will embrace it anyway.
There is always a dialectic between "farmer" and "forager" values, but it leads in one direction only. Our common dream will either reign or destroy us.
And what about being bored with "burying the brain once the body is dead", eh? Maybe some fundamentals do brook change, eh? Maybe we should work against them? What does your morality say - not calculation, but intuition?
To clarify when I said abandon their folly, I mean abandon their in the long term (possibly) doomed endeavour. I did not say I would approve of the total victory of farmer values.
I will however say that I have no interest at all in shifting my own values more towards farmer or forager values. So if the current of history is towards one direction I will probably work towards the other.
I have just pointed out that historically this isn't true. Else there would have never been something to call "farmer values" in the first place. I have also given you a scenario that suggest in the future it might not be so.
And in very specific kinds of ways we have, even in modern times, been becoming more and more farmer rather than more and more forager. When it comes to violence we are still pretty clearly moving towards the domesticated farming human rather the violent wild forager (Check out this paper and Pinker's book Better angels of our nature ). To cite another example, when it comes to our workplace we are hyper-farmer in our behaviour compared to say people from the 18th century.
Also it stands to reason that natural selection has significantly and perhaps rapidly shifted humans towards farmer values compared to humans before farming in the last 10 000 years.
Perhaps LessWrong posters basically do. But Humans do not have a common dream. Values differ.
My moral intuitions are frustrated by the mere addition paradox. They are fundamentally broken. Robin Hanson is I think right that a Malthusian em world would be glorious. It is not the best of worlds by a long shot, yet neither is it the worst of worlds, it is a possible outcome and it is a better outcome than most uFAIs.
What if we just shut up and calculate?
EY and RH claim to have done this, but differ in their result. To RH this is a possible future we should be pretty much ok with, while EY thinks he should invest superhuman effort to avoid it. I think we would all be better off if more people on LW thought long and hard about this.
Thanks for the answer. You're certainly wiser than me. Damn, I have so many posts in the pipeline right now; the one with the Warhammer 40k communist eutopia; the one about how "democracy" as in "the rule of the People" is, while being quite real and attainable, a primarily economical and partly cultural matter and has nothing to do with surface ideology and political window-dressing; the one about how I'll likely end up choosing partial wireheading as an answer to whatever tomorrow throws at me... unfortunately, there are real life concerns in the way, but I promise I'll deliver someday.
"How dare you not engage in what you consider counter-productive debate!"
"How dare you question the coherence of thoughts that I refuse to express!"
What is this even supposed to be a paraphrase of?
The LW version:
Friendliness of AGI is impossible; this is because Coherent Extrapolated Volition is impossible; our volitions are in part determined by opposing others' so any extrapolation will produce a contradiction (a la once disease is gone, food is plentiful, hangovers don't exist, and you can have sex with anyone you like, the only thing that Palestinians and Israelis care about is denying the others' desires). Any optimisation process applied to human desires will necessarily make things subjectively and objectively worse. We are, in effect, falling down stairs at the speed of our optimising, and more optimisation of any kind will only make us fall faster and deadlier. There was no guarantee that the blind process of evolution would produce agents that form a consistent or positive-sum system, and indeed, it did not produce such agents. The future is unchangeably bleak and necessarily bad.
The Western memeplex version:
Humans are not essentially good-natured beings. The so-called moral progress of the recent era is no such thing - severe oppression of the minority has been swapped for a larger amount of minor oppression of the majority, abject slavery of some has been swapped for an equivalent amount of wage slavery for many, rape and physical coercion of sex has been reduced with a much larger increase in use of non-physical coercion with alcohol or money, and so on. We might alter the concentrations of suffering, spreading it out over many, but we can only increase the total levels of suffering because a large part of how we actually feel content or happy is based on relatives - that is, the pursuit of happiness ruins the world.
The seeds of our own hellish existences are planted within us from birth, they are irrevocable, and the only thing we can do about it is miserably fail to realise their deadly potential. Any kind of hopeful attitude, any kind of optimisation, any attempt to improve the world, is a guaranteed net negative because that is just how humans are.
Both imply that I should have no rightful reason to give a fuck about this.
This all seems overtly contradicted by the decline of violence (including homicide, rape, torture, war deaths as a fraction of the population) and the increase in healthy lifespan over historical time.
Surely some other bad thing has increased in proportion; I could make an attempt but I don't really feel like defending the idea.
You mean an an increase in the amount of time we spend living a net negative existence, necessitating the suffering of others? That sounds like a bad thing to me, not a good thing.
Self-reported happiness data seems to not agree with this, unless Swedes are keeping some tortured children in the basement.
Here are some policy recommendations which would not be very PC:
(Disclaimer: I endorse only a few of these views. See this comment )
Some of these examples seem rather mindkilling, but nonetheless interesting :-)
Not necessarily:
How would a 3-year-old give informed consent to be sold into slavery?
Even assuming the "for all ages" only applies to latter item, what would "informed consent' mean for a 3 year old?
You're right, my formulation was kinda self-contradictory. Let's change it to "at least 14 years" or "IQ above 100" or something like that. (Remember that I'm not necessarily endorsing any of these views )
We are never actually convinced by the logic of an argument, its pure presentation and rhetoric. We only think we respond to well reasoned arguments because the features we associate with 'well reasoned' are ones that we have been trained to consider authoritative and persuasive.
In short, we're just signalling rationality not being rational.
The same would apply to cuckoldry.
New topics:
We know so little about our minds that conscious efforts to improve them are likely to do damage. Actually, I consider that an exaggeration, but I do think that ill effects of following socially supported advice are likely to be kept private and/or ignored for a very long time.
We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.
Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways-- they've had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don't show up as superior results.
Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Following up on the "CEV is impossible" part of the discussion: The only thing an FAI can do is protect us from UFAI and possibly other gross existential threats.
I agree the majority of the damage caused by cuckolding/cheating is self created (though the pain is still real). However I do think there is a rational albeit selfish reason to be opposed to partner's cheating. If your partner cheats on you she/he may find out she/he prefers the other person to you. Or at the very least your inadaquaces may become clearer if your partner gets involved with somoene else.
The polyamory community suggests that these issues can be manged. But there is a plausible rational argument that outside relationships reduce stability, at least for some people.
Also I agree that black people are obviously superior in several ways. Black men seem clearly the most athletic overall. Subjectively they are also the hottest imo :)
Men probably have systematic preferences for how to treat their children according to traits the children do or do not posses and a variety of cues that have evolved to ensure they invest in genetically related children.
But this may have little to do with conscious awareness of such information or emotional distress caused by it.
"Teenagers" doesn't really describe anything in the real world except perhaps a subculture.
Well we already have data about the social status of people who propose such theories.
Clearly Jared Diamond is a shunned outcast and publicly apologized for his inappropriate speculation.
"Underdog is actually better but has just had bad luck" or "overdog is only winning because he is evil" is a narrative humans love and are significantly biased towards. Unless overdogs actually consider it plausible that they will be threatened even they derive status from claiming they where just lucky. Or that most (but clearly not them personally) overdogs are unethical.
Metternich would approve!
I agree. Why would there be a switch in the brain "in case genetic tests prove/shaman says child isn't yours go into depression!"? Other cues like smell or facial similarity are already factored into the fathers feelings before he consciously knows about the child's genetics.
I don't think that's true for teenagers, their sexuality is heavily studied. I don't have very high confidence in academia but they must have produced something useful on the subject. Right? In any case I agree that children's sexuality is a pretty strong mind-killer and that our knowledge about it is woefully inadequate or just plain wrong.
Possible. But I don't see why this would be controversial.
Come now. White people would be all ecstatic that they now have proof they are to blame for all the problems they've been blaming themselves this entire time (and even more since the opportunity cost of squandered superiority is greater than squandered equality). Who dosen't like being proven right? This also fulfils their deeply ingrained pseudo-Christian guilt complex and desire for original sin. White people love feeling guilty and signalling moral superiority to other white people. I think that's partially genetic btw. Most other people on the planet are not such annoying moral poseurs. I don't have any real data to back me on this last claim but anecdotal evidence is pretty consistent on it.
East Asians and Arabs may react unfavourably though. Also the future would be very bright for mankind since Africa is likley to stay in population explosion mode for most of this century, while say Latin America and the Middle East are showing signs of incredibly rapid drops in birthrates (and the developed world is showing no real signs of recuperation).
Also its pretty obvious that black people are superior in certain aspects to most other races. Besides the obvious stuff like say West Africans being good sprinters and East Africans excelling at marathons, greater resistance to tropical diseases, greater diversity helping the evolve more rapidly to deal with new pathogens, lower rates of skin cancer, ect. humans in Sub-Saharan africa share some nearly continent wide adaptations to their environment that are very desirable. I'm pretty sure African males have an edge when it comes to attractiveness and no I'm not talking about the penis myth (which may not be a myth, it is hard to tell since measurements are ambiguous and conflicting). First off there is the purely physical advantage of darker skin since it is associated with masculinity, then there is the well documented "winning personality" when one controls for other factors. That last one is related to the fact that people of African descent generally have far fewer mental health problems (Europeans be they gentiles or Askenazi Jews and East Asians are really the neurotic freaks of the human race), better self-image, greater self-confidence and are much less prone to suicide than most.
This almost reads like you are trying to hint at something but for the life of me I can't figure out what. Nope. No idea.
Didn't catch that implication before.
Edit: Just wanted to make clear that I'm not endorsing it.
Could someone make explicit what is being hinted at? I fear that I am missing the signal.
It's pre-controversial. I say it now and then, but people just ignore it.
There's a contingent of atheists who are seriously pissed off at people having religions, but I haven't seen anything comparable against nationalism, even though these days, wars are apt to be more about nationalism than religion.
Here's some nice controversial things for you:
Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.
Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad (which it is not). Child porn should not be suppressed (tho some of it is documentation of crime and should be investigated).
Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.
Child sexual consent hits the same issues as child acting or any other thing that parents can allow, and should not be treated differently from those issues.
Self identity is a problem.
EDIT: most of the deaths in the holocaust were caused by the allies bombing railroads that supplied food to the camps.
Less controversial in LW, but still bad to say outside:
I run out of ideas.
EDIT: in case it's not clear, I take all these ideas seriously. I would actually appreciate a discussion on these topics with LW.
EDIT: this was productive! I've seriously updated one way or the other on many of these ideas. Thanks for pointing out truths and holes everyone! :)
Birth-control isn't natural, so how can incest using it be?
I'd expect that it would generally be awkward, but it's fine beyond that.
I agree with the first half whole-heartedly. I'm not convinced that expressing it in real life is bad.
I never thought of that, but it doesn't seem that unlikely. The obvious way to check would be to find out how rape victims deal with it in cultures with different views on how they would deal with it.
Maybe natural isn't the right word. I mean it's not some immoral abomination, it's probably the same moral status as masturbation.
I can imagine an alternative moral history where it is normal, and not awkward at all. It doesn't seem like a moral disaster, so I can only conclude that it must be OK.
I'm not entirely either, but I forgot to dispute the whole "consent" thing, which would have to go away to make it ok IRL.
My reasoning here is that when people get brutally beaten or otherwise humiliated where there's social pressure to "man up and get over it", they don't turn into a bawwfest basket case the way some rape victims do, where there is social pressure to be a bawwfest basket case. I have not personally been raped, and have seen no studies, so there isn't much evidence, but this seems most plausible.
EDIT: Also, the fact that it's taboo to say this is evidence that it's true.
I'd say that natural things are vastly more likely to be immoral abominations on the basis that artificial things are created by people who have a moral compass and try to avoid immoral abominations, whereas natural things are created by Azathoth with the single goal of genetic fitness no matter how unspeakably cruel it is.
I find it odd that consent wouldn't be assumed. You never hear people say that extramarital sex is bad on the assumption that they're talking about rape.
Yes that's why natural isn't the right word. What I meant by natural was "morally natural", but it was the wrong word to use.
I was assuming consent in the sense that all parties are OK with it, but most people think sexual consent is impossible for children, so in that sense, consent can't be assumed.
I really should change it, tho. That version of consent is too full of holes and violations.
Have you personally met many people who were raped?
Come to that, have you met many people who were brutally beaten?
I haven't met many, but I've known emotionally traumatized people in both categories, and I've known people in both categories who seemed to shrug it off.
Incidentally, if I've mischaracterized what you meant by "bawwfest" by reframing it as emotional trauma, let me know. I don't really know what you mean by the term, over and above the intention to be dismissive of its referent.
Why?
The only way I can think of for it to be bad is for it to cause problems after the child has matured. I find this very unlikely. An experience can't become traumatic after-the-fact. At worst they'd feel a little squicky thinking about it later on.
I'm not entirely certain, but I've never had a very good reason to try and find out. Still, I would like it if someone could send a link to something where they actually asked people who had sex as kids how it affects them now.
Also, I would expect that, if anything, raping a kid wouldn't be as bad as raping an adult. If they're not sexually mature, I'd expect them to not be built to dislike it as much. Again, I would like to see something where they ask victims and find out if this is the case.
So the suffering of an immature person is not a problem?
What if it was a traumatic experience to begin with?
Children can get PTSD.
(I don't think I will be able to maintain an intelligent discussion on this topic, so I am unlikely to reply again.)
I meant consensual sex. Do I really need to specify?
Edit: Nvm, there's a reason we generally think these threads are a bad idea.
Short answer: if a child thinks they're consenting, they're likely enough to be wrong (with great enough consequences) that the expected value is negative. Much more importantly: if an adult thinks a child is consenting, the adult is likely to be wrong (they'll have a hard time between telling the difference between actual consent and consent that is feigned out of fear).
Is consent hypothetically possible? Yes. But you're running on corrupted hardware and the expected value will usually be negative.
How can they be wrong about consenting?
Do you mean changing their mind later? In that case, like I said, I find it hard to believe that they can be traumatized after-the-fact. It's not impossible, but I find it very unlikely.
If the other party can scare them into doing that, they can just scare them into saying they haven't had sex in the first place.
Then can (and are way too likely) to fail at being informed when consenting.
Also you're probably talking about hebephilia.
If they're not informed, that would be rape by deception. I would say that that should be illegal at any age, although I would imagine it wouldn't be nearly as bad as being forced.
What exactly do they need to be informed about? They can get diseases from it, I guess. I'm pretty sure putting someone in danger like that without warning them would be illegal without anything specific about pedophilia.
That too. There should be a term for pedophelia and hebephilia. Especially considering that pedophelia is commonly used to mean those two and ephebophilia.
Please, that statement becomes more controversial if you negate it.
Yeah but they have to be true.
And that's still quite controversial in the mainstream.
I don't want to start a flame war, but would like to mention that I find this highly unlikely, at least for reasonable definitions of "made up".
Yes. Especially considering how often paedophilia is used as an excuse by various governments and organizations to commit their own arguably much worse atrocities.
The "incest isn't wrong" position isn't novel. The "everyone would be better off if they did" is novel, and I confess I don't understand it at all. Not everyone is attracted to close family members.
I agree with the first half, but would have phrased the second half as "the ban on computer-generated child pornography should be reversed and indeed subsidized to crowd out pornography using real children".
Really? What about for people who don't have access to emergency birth control? Or who were unlucky enough to be raped by someone with an STD? Or who live in a society that murders women who get raped as adulterers?* Or just in a society that tends to divide women into "good girls" and "sluts"?* (Maybe you meant society's self-fulfilling prophecy in the latter two examples, but it's not the woman's self-fulfilling prophecy.)
*Yes, I know men get raped too. That's pretty clearly not the context when people bring this argument up, however.
Judging them for what? Doesn't work for suitability as an underwear model, for example.
And not everyone is attracted to everyone else, but I see no reason not to be close with your family in this way.
Why so conservative? How is child porn different from child acting? Assuming consent and all that.
Yes, in third world countries, butthurt is not the primary damage caused by rape. I mean in cases without lasting physical effects. Maybe I should have been more clear?
pretty much anything besides being an underwear model. Likelyhood to start a fight. Expected value as an employee in most jobs. Intellectual capacity.
Come to think of it, the correlates of race are mostly covered by class and subculture.
I still don't get it, and am genuinely trying to figure out what the inferential gap is. It sort of sounds like you're saying sex produces the warm fuzzies of closer social bonding regardless of whether the participants are attracted to each other.
If that is what you are saying, then that sounds like the typical mind fallacy at work. I, for one, would not get warm fuzzies from sex with someone unattractive whether they are related to me or not.
If that's not what you are saying, please clarify.
Nope. I just mean mean it's totally OK to be attracted and so on. It's less radical than you seem to think.
My original response didn't disagree with that. I wasn't objecting to the "incest is fine" part. I was specifically challenging '...and is probably a good experience to have" as being an overgeneralization that is untrue for many, and probably, most people.
Wait... what?
I may not be tracking, here. Are you suggesting that as a class, men who are raped aren't as emotionally affected as women who are raped? Or that if they are, it's for some reason other than social encouragement? Something else?
I was suggesting that men don't have the constant bombardment of "if you got raped, you should feel bad". There is some of that, but not as much and somewhat balanced by other parts of male culture like being looked down on for being emotionally affected by things: "man up and move on" and such.
On second thought, I don't know why I even wrote that, and it detracts form the rest, so I'll remove it.
Expressing a controversial opinion doesn't condone being immature or disrespectful.
Beyond that, I have two questions for you:
1) How much confidence do you place in your statement on the impact of female rape in first-world countries?
2) If the answer to (1) is greater than "very little", on what sort of direct or indirect knowledge of the phenomenon do you base this confidence?
U mad?
More seriously, you're right, I could have used a better word.
Which statement?
One possibility to be considered while evaluating where the emotional impact of rape comes from is that women's emotional responses evolved in an environment where emergency birth control was not an available option. That would lead to traumatic responses even in first world countries where women are not ostracized for being 'damaged goods' on account of being raped.
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):
Yuh. On LessWrong, scientific racism is a standard permitted scientific heresy for signaling nonconformity. It's the nonconformist in black, not the one in a clown suit. (And this is a stupidity that is extremely offputting.)
Easy for you to say.
HBD is firmly in clown suit territory in real life, people lose jobs over it, are physically assaulted or ostracised. If you want to see what LW's wearing black to school thing is check out the Moldbug references people love making.
It's not "racism" if you feel sympathetic and heartbroken for all the people and cultures clearly, unknowingly fucked over by mere biology, and would work hard on something in that direction - a global uplift project, donating to avenues which could eventually provide opportunity for massive genetic surgery (a class of charity currently consisting of SIAI, SIAI and SIAI), developing a political and cultural framework for something like "compassionate eugenics" (using as little coercion and stirring up as little drama as viable) - yes, I'd commit to any of that, if I wasn't confident that simply trying to cut all the Gordian knots in our vicinity with superhuman intelligence wasn't a better idea. (As it stands, I sort of desire to fight my akrasia to a standstill and find a good optimized way to help with the latter; however, it's not just akrasia, it's all sorts of problems I have with getting in productive work on anything.)
However, if I was, for some defensible reason, unwilling to relegate the entire mess to superintelligence, wouldn't trying what I described be noble instead of "racist"?
(Uh-huh, my signaling is about as subtle as a troll with a sledgehammer here. A troll of the fantasy non-network variety, that is. Well, whatever, I'm certain I've got a valid and coherent sentiment.)
You know, it is.
Plenty of racists historically wanted to "uplift" the savages, mostly through cultural assimilation, but occasionally through interbreeding. Neither of these could fully uplift them to our level, of course, but at least they would be better off than they would be on their own. "developing a political and cultural framework for something like "compassionate eugenics" (using as little coercion and stirring up as little drama as viable)" has also been a fairly obvious position for, y'know, actual racists, as opposed to the stereotyped klan member people are thinking of when they use that signal.
Not to argue about definitions, but this seems well within the original definition of 'racism' as I understand it ("...claim that some races are superior to other races"). And society has good historical reasons to look askance at it -- for example, the outside view says nobody should trust your motives. (In particular, you shouldn't trust yourself.) It also says we shouldn't trust your factual beliefs without extremely strong evidence.
People competent enough about intelligence enhancement tech to understand what you said are usually too incompetent about racism to start implementing anything like this without it blowing up in our faces. Remember that video where Razib Khan (?) asked Eliezer which groups were most interested in race-IQ research results, and it went like "I don't know, Ashkenazi Jews?" "White supremacists." "Oh."? That's how ridiculously ignorant we are. The common wisdom is here for a reason.
Yeah. Lots of people mention the finding that white people are smarter in average than black people, but few of them mention that East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are even smarter.
(And if I was asked about that, I'd answer “Yes, it has been found that white people have a higher average IQ than black people, but then again, Asians and Jews have an even higher one", so that I don't lie but still get to piss extreme-right-wingers off.)
The same. Hell, I remember reading the comments on such some alt-right blog - maybe UR, maybe some other one - and seeing a bunch of "white nationalists" who frequent those first imply that intelligence is the only measure of a person that matters, then trying to wriggle out of proclaiming the Jews to be the world's only rightful aristocracy and bowing down before them; that "argument" basically went like "We embrace Nature's truth if it makes us smarter than someone, but we aren't obliged to shit if someone ends up smarter than us." Equating "smarter" with "superior", of course.
Remember reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Aaaaaaaa. This is such a bad idea that I don't even know where to start.
Racism as it's presently conceptualized isn't a simple matter of fear or hatred of ethnic others, unfortunately. That would be comparatively easy to deal with. It's an enormously messy tangle of signaling and countersignaling and I really can't do it justice without reading a few books for background and then devoting a sequence to it (which I'm not going to do for reasons that should be obvious), but as an oversimplification you can probably sum up most of the Western world's high-status thinking regarding race as follows:
Everything even tangentially related to race is ineradicably tainted by ingroup/outgroup biases.
Because of this, attitudes and social prescriptions appearing to differentiate in any way by ethic background, or by any factor that can plausibly be linked to ethic background, are automatically suspect and should be compensated for as soon as discovered.
That includes these rules.
Now, that's a fairly cynical way of putting it (I'm optimizing for brevity), but to a first approximation I don't think it's even wrong.
So yes, conceptually your project should be seen as noble, if you accept all its prerequisites. But no one's going to try to evaluate those prerequisites on their merits. Instead you won't make it five steps before someone links to "The White Man's Burden" and things get nasty.
Also, I'm indeed feeling a significant pressure to agree wholeheartedly with this comment and retract everything, because you and the high-status mainstream thinkers would be for me retracting it, and people like the HBD Bi- sorry, HBD Chick would be derisive of such "self-censorship". Now I can feel for myself just how insidious the Blue vs Green pattern in your head can get when it's really trying to override you.
Of course not. That would subject accusations of racism to falsifiability.
Might be. Might be. Yet can't you envision e.g. transhumanism being tabooed like that if found to be "ineradicably tainted" by the human lust for power and an insidiously corrupting desire for a "legitimate" reason to feel superior to the people you currently associate yourself with?
If the so-called "HBD-sphere" or "Reactosphere" in general, for all its flaws (and I see some pretty fucking horrific flaws in it) can get away with a lot more, so can the LW Discussion section, or that semi-private enclosure being proposed around here.
That's a common argument against it, actually, although it's usually framed in class terms. Maybe the most common once you filter out all the various manifestations of "ew, that's gross".
Not one that I accept myself, but like I said I only buy an approximation of the thinking above. There's plenty of places it'll steer you wrong at the margins.
Upvoted for showing a good alternative to my primitive heuristic of "Cruel as fuck". Unsettling and hard to propagate through one's belief net, but few would call those evil.
I would also like to endorse GLaDOS's excellent list.
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.
On the other hand, South Korea was a dictatorship until 1987 and did extremely well during those years.
While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among "conservatives" (in a loose sense) complaining about how "intellectuals" (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, and complaints against "technocrats" and "ivory towers" in general. I also see disagreement with this, but not tabooing of it.
My agreement is based on the opinion appearing to be congruent with the quip "Evolution is smarter than you are", or the similar principle of "Chesterton's Fence".
I also get the impression that this is often because smart people don't see the value of the institutions to smart people. (This may be because it doesn't have such value.) For instance:
I'm fairly confident LessWrongers could engage in polyamory this without significant social dysfunction or suffering, let alone death on a massive scale. (BTW: I couldn't find any articles here by that title. Are you referring to a general tendency, or did I fail at searching?)
Using Chesterton's Fence here is a little misleading.
The whole rationale behind Chesterton's Fence is that clearly someone put the fence there, and it seems pretty likely that whoever that was was just as capable as I am of concluding (given what I know) that putting a fence here is absurd, and it seems pretty likely that they know everything I know, and therefore I can conclude with reasonable confidence that they knew relevant things I don't know that made them conclude that putting a fence here is worth doing, and therefore I should significantly reduce my confidence that putting a fence here is absurd.
Using the same rationale for natural phenomena doesn't really work... there's a reason it isn;t Chesterton's Fallen Tree.
You can, of course, put natural selection in the role of fence-builder, which seems to be what you're doing. But actually there's lots of areas where humans are smarter than evolution. At the very least, humans respond to novel situations a whole lot faster.
Gall's law:
Agreed except for the part about Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard. I think it's actually doing better then most gatherings of smart people attempting to reorganize society. Keep in mind lesswrong's equivalent 50 years ago would have been advocating Marxism.
Agreed.
You've never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it's another good example of your first point.
True, however, the previous culture was hyper-conformist, since it was 'designed' to create people intelligent enough to operate machinery but conformist enough to work in an assembly line.
The Ceteris Paribus is important. The fact that you can think of a lot of democracies that are nice places to live and dictatorships that are lousy isn't good evidence that democracy is beneficial in itself. I view democracy as an extremely expensive concession to primitive equality norms that primitive agriculturalists can't afford. But it isn't a luxury worth buying.
How many cetera can you require to be paria before you're creating an implicit No True Scotsman?
It's quite possible, and indeed I find the idea highly persuasive, that while dictatorships may not necessarily cause all sorts of unpleasant things (oppression, civil war, corruption, etc.), they do make those unpleasant things much more likely due to more hidden structural flaws (e.g. lack of an outlet for dissatisfaction).
That proposition sounds to me a bit like saying "ceteris paribus, driving at 230km/h will get you to your destination much faster".
60's LessWrong would be Ayn Rand's Objectivism rather than some yet another interpretation of Marxism.
A lot of us pro-market liberaltarian types would have been Marxists before the last 50 years of overwhelming evidence in favor of capitalism came in...
The only trustworthy, effective sort of chief executive - whether for a small business or a major government - is a sociopath who considers the whole enterprise his (or her, although it's a statistical inevitability that there will be more qualified men) personal property, including the lesser employees or citizens. Anyone capable of genuine compassion is proportionately incapable of unbiased strategic thought. Ideally the sadistic god-kings would also be biologically immortal, but for practical purposes a delusion supported by superstitious anagathic practices would be sufficient; the real societal cost of, say, ritually eating a young child's heart every three months would be trifling compared to the benefits of binding decisions being made by someone who genuinely and incorruptibly wants to maximize the long-term productivity of society as a whole, if only for his own amusement.
Orwell predicted that in such a situation the god-kings would be so corrupted by power that they'd stop caring about efficiency and personal wealth at all, and instead would turn to deriving pleasure from sadism alone. I don't know whether that's right, but history seems to suggest that power indeed drives men from mere cruelty to insanity.
Vladimir_M's statement sounds quite insightful but it's dangerously close to one of these "you can't prove that there aren't any dragons in the garage" type things (not being able to think up with examples doesn't imply they don't exist because their very nature is that they are elusive).
If I were to looking for examples myself - by analogy with the weird sort of thought patterns people addicted to smoking use, to convince themself to keep smoking - I'd try to think of ways to remove things I love from my life (e.g. being able to think whatever I like without monitoring or having my thoughts censorsed/deleted). Some of the Fun theory articles may be a good starting point.
I actually have a pretty high confidence in Vladimir_M's model of the world. I don't put a very high prior on the bits that are unknown to me to be very much less accurate or useful.
You're basically dismissing everything I said because he has a high reputation. Fine, but why tell me?
Stating that someone's reason for X is definitely Y, based on two sentences... are you a mind-reader?
I don't really understand the purpose of your reply to my comment.
Total, ubiquitous and universally available surveillance, including automated facial expression and body language analysis (every citizen being, given some work, able to check out every hour of someone else's life the way we check Facebook status, plus low-level AI monitoring) is part of a short Weirdtopia story I'm writing. I've decided to set it on a planet in the Warhammer 40k universe BTW.
Now that would be completely unacceptable indeed. Is, say, being on the business end of the mental health system in the worst way possible something like that? For myself, I don't consider a life with something like that to be worth living.
I don't think these are quite in the original spirit of the thread but seem related to several of the discussions that developed. I would like to have discussions about all of these points merely in the hope that I can be convinced to update away from them.
Things I REALLY hope aren't true and suspect might be. Honestly don't read this if you're already depressed right now.
Human beings WANT maximally brutal leaders up to the limit of being able to plausibly signal that they don't want maximally brutal leaders.
People can be tortured to create a lower set point on the hedonic treadmill. This allows for far more overall utility.
Male/female sexual relationships are fundamentally adversarial due to the differences in dominant mating strategies.
There is a large class of violent people for whom no current treatment is available who simply need to be put down.
Humans don't care about torture.
We could create a virtual utopia fairly trivially by investing in lucid dream research but nobody actually cares because:
Anyone with the ability to make the world better almost by definition has a vested stake in the current fucked up one.
P.S. throium reactors. God damn it humans.
Why would this be bad? I mean, it's a pretty big IF, but if tortureworld is actually better, then just imagine a perfect world without torture, and that's a lower bound on how great tortureworld is.
I don't buy it! & not only based on personal experience - there's just too much variation in humanity, and we're getting pretty good at breaking out of supposed evolutionary imperatives.
I think I'd prefer to live now than in pretty much any prior era.
Watson was right about Africa. Larry Summers was right about women in certain professions. Roissy is right about the state of the sexual marketplace.
Democracy isn't that great. A ghetto/barrio/alternative name for low-class-hell-hole isn't a physical location, its people. Richer people are on average smarter, nicer, prettier than poor people. The more you strive to equalize material opportunities the more meritocracy produces a caste system based on inborn ability. Ideologies actually are as crazy as religions on average. There is no such thing as moral progress and if there is there is no reason to expect we have been experiencing it so far in recorded history, unless you count stuff like more adapted cultures displacing less adapted ones or mammals inheriting the planet from dinosaurs as moral progress. You can't be anything you want, your potential is severely limited at birth. University education creates very little added value. High class people unknowingly wage class war against low class people by promoting liberal social norms that they can handle but induce dysfunction in the lower classes (drug abuse, high divorce rates, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, more violence, ... ). Too much ethnic diversity kills liberal social democracy. Improving the social status of the average woman vis a vis with the average man makes the average man less attractive. Inbreeding/Out-breeding norms (and obviously other social norms and practices too) have over the centuries differentiated not only IQs between Eurasian populations they have also affected the frequency and type of altruism genes present in different populations (visit hbd* chick for details ^_^ ).
Have a nice day! ~_^
For those who don't know what this Roissy character is all about and what the scandal was, here's a third-party account:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2010/01/19/roissy-and-raine-make-a-right-noh/
(Just dug it up myself right now)
Reminds me of this.
[redacted]
Hey, people are taking you seriously even though you're not justifying your beliefs. That's not fair.
This was mostly a bunch of meta-contrarian crap, but this one:
is a novel thought to me. Thanks.
Roissy recently quoted and linked to a disturbing parable on this:
This one really doesn't belong on the list. The political science research showing a negative correlation between support for the welfare state and ethnic diversity is widely known and not-at-all secret.
Actually, this one is new to me. Any links?
Colonialism was a good system with significant beneficial impact for colonized countries, which are now failing mostly due to native incompetence rather than colonial trauma. It would be a win-win position to reinstitute it competently.
Important disclaimer: "competently" means NOT the bull** the USA is doing.
110% agreed. Hell, I often argue that in real life; there's no stigma attached to colonialism in Russia these days, probably in part because any serious attack on it sounds too much like a tired Soviet cliche.
I must admit as much as I disagree with some components of the cultural and ideological influence of the British Empire, it is hard to argue with its results. The British Empire seems to have generally produced superior outcomes in terms of quality of life for inhabitants and general development than nearly any other government be it native or colonial. Considering the gains created by this I can't help but wonder if Cecile Rhodes had a point when he said:
Indeed if I found myself magically transported to 19th century Europe with considerable wealth and influence I may yet decide that there is no nobler and benevolent enterprise than to support the expansion and growth of the British Empire. In this light the success of the American revolution may actually plausibly be one of the great tragedies of human history.
Now that I've dumped all these warm fuzzies we may as well enjoy a happy death spiral around it.
Rule, Britannia!
While one can applaud the cultural influence of the British empire on its colonial holdings, allow me to disagree with "it is hard to argue with its results".
Timeline of major famines in India during British rule
Note that Britain was forcibly exporting Indian grain for its own benefit during some of these famines.
I fail to see why this is somehow horrible or surprising by historical standards. I can hardly think of an empire that would do otherwise. One might quickly argue that native government unlike an empire would have not done this, but seriously, does anyone expect economic growth and development of infrastructure to have grown at a comparable rate? Even rapid population growth that was sometimes the cause of such famines, is in itself an indicator that deaths from disease and violence have likley fallen.
Big sad events like famines grab more attention than say a faster than otherwise increases in GDP growth by 2% or 1% or 0.5%. But the latter sort amounts to far more over the years. Inclusion in the British Empire in itself lifted millions worldwide from the Malthusian margin.
I can think of a couple of possibilities that are difficult to discuss (although perhaps not here):
Multiparty electoral democracy has no real utility, confers no legitimacy and doesn't satisfy any primal urge for freedom laying dormant in non-Western peoples. "Democracy" as a concept is mainly used in international politics as a weapon to suppress other political systems through sanctions and military action. When a country becomes "democratic" by holding elections, it's really just signalling its compliance with the West. The current period of liberal democratic triumphalism has created an intellectual Dark Ages of political thought. There are many valid forms of governance that don't involved voting. Moreover, so-called "authoritarianism" has a proven track record for development.
"Free speech" is a luxury of hegemonic powers. Countries that are trying to self-determine their own political development necessarily have to suppress ideas that are backed up by the military and economic might of Western hegemony. Since multiparty elections don't express the innate yearning of every human for freedom but rather compliance with Western power, whenever you see somebody in another culture expressing a desire for elections and other Western political "rights", you should be extremely wary of their motives. They're really signalling their willingness to sell out their own culture for power. They're probably every bit as treacherous as the "authoritarian regime" in that country claims them to be. If you truly believe in the right to self-determination, you should support crackdowns on certain dissidents, since the marketplace for ideas has such a strong bias in favour of the current hegemonic power.
Be careful with that around political scientists. I get the impression that some of them define democracy as everything that is good in the world. If you find something else good, they'll just redefine democracy to include it.
Either my model is wrong, or this story is false.
I've heard of lots of academic research into what is driving economic growth in places like China. They don't tend to just label whatever they've found as "democracy."
This is why I said some. I'm aware that not all or even most political scientists do this. However, my impression is that there are some, and I've had my impressions confirmed talking with people more knowledgeable of the field than I.
(Also, looking into the factors driving growth in China is somewhere in the fuzzy gray area between economics and political science. Even if I were saying that most political scientists committed this error, I could easily attribute your counterexample to the influence to economics. But that's not what I'm saying. But it still seems plausible that economists had an influence there.)
Holy Moldbug I swear I get giddy at the very idea of a critical rationalist discussion about democracy on LessWrong! Please someone who has done some heavy lifting on the subject make a post about it!
I don't think this is likely to have good consequence if it happens in a public forum. However, if a private mailing list for this was being organized, I'd be interested in participating.
From the contrary position, I totally agree that this would be an interesting discussion.