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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)
"Instead of creating utility, which is hard, we should all train ourselves to find utility in what we already have."
This is my fairly gross simplification of a lot of Eastern philosophy, and it is antithetical to the "Western memeplex" of achievement and progress.
However, relatively few practitioners of Eastern religions really seem to carry through the logical implications of a totally passive philosophy.
I admit the above imperative doesn't seem as horrifying as the ones listed in the OP, but if you really think through to what the consequences would be, I suspect it would be a future we would never choose.
It's also a strange way to talk about utility - as if utility itself is what we want, rather than a measure of how much of what we want we've got.
It seems to be the case that happiness is actually not caused by getting what you want, but rather by wanting what you get. It's been challenging for me to square this psychological fact with the notion of utility maximization.
Although, I think your point might have been that I could have phrased that sentence more clearly without referring to utility.
Well, sure that may be true to the extent that you value happiness. What I was pointing out was that if you were completely miserable, saying "I should modify myself to prefer being miserable to being happy because then I'll get some of that sweet, sweet utility" is just wacky.
Sure. I wasn't defending the idea, or suggesting that we should do it. It is "wacky." Regardless, it is a meme that other human beings actually try to implement.
Nor did I think we disagreed.
Should? Should for what purpose? Generating utility? If so, utility by what function?
By a very confused utility function? By a utility function best described as Virtue Ethics with total passivity as the highest virtue?
I wasn't suggesting this was a good idea, I was just putting forward a meme which would be rejected by Less Wrong as "too dumb to talk about" which nonetheless would result in universal bliss if it were actually adopted.
Eastern philosophy has a lot of emphasis on things that don't needlessly grind against other things. For example, Taoism shares many themes in common with mechanism design and institutional microeconomics generally. In some ways a frictionless mind frictionlessly engaging its environment might be described as "passive", but though the Buddha might've been "passive" in that sense he sure ended up doing a lot of stuff and arguing with a lot of people. Contrast with Nietzsche's mirror men.
Do you mean this? I see some connection, but the emphasis and background assumptions seem extremely different from Taoism.
Perhaps I should have said "contrast with Nietzsche's mirror men".
That makes more sense.
Sorry. It's the result of my junior year AP History class. The teacher said "'compare and contrast' is redundant, as comparing implies contrasting". Which while true in a sense doesn't change the fact that 'compare' is often taken to mean 'find similarities'.
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.
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 hope you finish your weirdtopia story soon, I'd be very interested in reading it :)
I agree, freedom of thought is a must for me. But I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have to delete that many memes from my brain to make it acceptable.
Unless it ends with everyone dying horribly or something similar happening, it's not Warhammer 40k. ;)
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.
Seconded.
I don't really understand the purpose of your reply to my comment.
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?
So you can update slightly towards confidence in Vladimir_M's model?
For example.
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.
Thank you.
That may have been inspired by this blog post:
I know this is irrelevant, but I skimmed the article looking for context and couldn't work out which light entertainer they were referring to -- do you happen to know?
Jeremy Clarkson: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2011/dec/01/jeremy-clarkson-strikers-shot-video
Your and ciphergoth's links hardly inspire confidence that such thoughts would be met with calm and fair-minded criticism.
This title reminds me of something.
Don't forget that when arguing against these you don't have to assume simple terminal values.
For example, I would respond to "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)" with "Although this may lead to higher expected utility from other terminal values, it incurs a large negative/opportunity cost in utility in and of itself. Such a strict hierarchy would have to lead to huge benefits before I would consider it a acceptable option."
Also consider ethical injunctions. For example, "if my system of ethics determines it is a good idea to kill someone and not in direct defense of myself/others then I should ignore it."
derp
Oh you mean our very own escaped basilisk made by [he who must not be named]?
Edit: Removed name.
innocent comment
I didn't find the idea that scary or dangerous at least any more than Pascal's wager. But I also have this creepy meta-feeling that I really desperately want to believe that so I'm risking less than I would be if I did find it dangerous/plausible/scary.
irrelevent comment
I did find the idea scary, not because the basilisk itself was scary but because its existence suggests a significant class of equally scary or scarier ideas.
It's not like it's terribly difficult to find, even without the 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.
It's posts like this that make me wish for a limited-access forum for discussing these issues, something along the lines of an Iconoclastic Conspiracy.
The set of topics too inflammatory for LW to talk about sanely seems pretty small (though not empty), but there's a considerably larger set of topics too politically sensitive for us to safely discuss without the site taking a serious status hit. This basically has nothing to do with our intra-group rationality: no matter how careful we are in our approach, taking (say) anarcho-primitivism seriously is going to alienate some potential audiences, and the more taboo subjects we broach the more alienation we'll get. This is true even if the presentation is entirely apolitical: I've talked to people who were so squicked by Torture vs. Dust Specks as to be permanently turned off the site. On the other hand (and perhaps more relevantly to the OP), as best I can tell there's nothing uniquely horrible about any particular taboo subject, and most that I can think of aren't terribly dangerous in isolation: it's volume that causes problems.
Now, it's tempting to say "fuck 'em if they can't take it", but this really is a bad thing from the waterline perspective: the more cavalier we get about sensitive or squicky examples, the higher we're setting the sanity bar for membership in our community. Set it high enough and we effectively turn ourselves into something analogous to a high-IQ society, with all the signaling and executive problems that that implies.
We'll never look completely benign to the public: it's hard to imagine decoupling weak transhumanism from our methodology, for example. But minimizing the public-facing exposure of the more inflammatory concepts we deal in does seem like a good idea if we're really interested in outreach.
This seems like a generally good idea. What would be your specific proposal? Members only forum? High karma only? invite only?
A while ago, I took x-risk very seriously, and the best solution I could come up with was anarcho-primitivism. FAI is a much better solution.
I should probably mention that this has been discussed before. An invitation-only mailing list was the proposal being thrown around back then, but some fairly reasonable-sounding objections were also brought up. I'm not sure whether the signaling problems of organizing (as pedanterrific put it) secret-society stuff outweigh the signaling problems of discussing the same subjects publicly (though I suspect the former is preferable), or whether either one brings a net gain over not discussing them at all (less sure about this one), but in light of the OP I thought it was worth revisiting.
I am intrigued by the idea of a high karma only forum personally, with the karma bar set just below wherever I am currently, of course.
In particular, maybe we'd be allowed to discuss politics in the high karma forum. The "no politics" rule is a shame, I think, because I'm sure we'd get something out of it. I understand that PITMK, but a high karma forum could get around that.
And it's not just the site in general, it's also the participants. Some of the stances that have been mentioned in this thread are considered so toxic within some circles that anyone even discussing them risks becoming very unpopular in such circles. At worst, everyone who's known to be an LW regular will be presumed to hold such opinions, regardless of whether or not they've actually even participated in such discussions.
I don't have a problem with such topics being sometimes touched upon, but if they were regularly and extensively discussed, I could imagine getting a little nervous about using my real name here.
You meant "known to be an LW regular", right?
Yes. Edited.
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.
Yeah, I don't see anything problematic about discussing these here, except that they're about politics.
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!
From the contrary position, I totally agree that this would be an interesting discussion.
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.
I think the most important feature of government is that it handle regime changes well and indefinitely. Authoritarianism would have to be awfully good at development to make up for increased intermittent revolutions and civil wars. I leave it to Steve Jobs and his ilk to handle development.
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.
Who exactly, as in the class of persons doing it, is trying to self-determine what exactly?
What is "their own culture", who determines it and how does it figure in more or less reflection-heavy utility functions, especially given the heavy cost you approve of?
EDIT: I notice that you, as some of your comments would imply, you simply don't care about the lives and happiness of people who don't have long-term goals ("Life's Great Adventure"... bah). In this case we might just be having a genuine clash of values and can't convince each other about any moral judgment here.
I don't, because I'm more or less imperialist, and neo-colonialist too. I still identify as a socialist and to a lesser extent as a liberal.
"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?
We have tried to discuss topics like race and gender many times, and always failed. At some point I had this idea that maybe we could get better results if we sometimes enforced political conformity within comment threads :-) For example, if we had a thread of like-minded people discussing "how to make our country more vibrant and diverse" and a separate thread about "how to stop the corrupting influence of Negroes on the youth", I suspect that both threads would have a better signal-to-noise ratio and contain more interesting insights than a unified "let's all argue about racism" thread.
Of course this requires that people from thread A resist the temptation to drop in on thread B for target practice and vice versa. Some especially fervent people may feel threatened by the mere existence of thread A or thread B. (I have actually heard from some LWers that they'd consider it immoral to create such threads.)
Can we please try this? I think it's a really good idea.
The overall level of rationality of a community should be measured by their ability to have a sane and productive debate on those topics, and on politics in general.
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! ~_^
[redacted]
It has also directly saved millions upon millions of lives.
Is that true? It sounds plausible, but I'd like to see evidence.
Given that we haven't achieved immortality yet, we'd have to specify what it means to "save a life".
Yeah, I was thinking that. QALYs would be nice but tricky to deal with.
The first thing that comes to mind as establishing a lower bound are antibiotics but their effects are pretty complicated I think.
technology has indirectly caused millions of deaths by directly causing enough food to create millions of lives.
Technology has indirectly prevented millions of deaths by directly providing easy means of birth control.
However, now I am getting silly.
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?
A Google Scholar search for "ethnic diversity welfare state" will turn up a ton of links, but the specific evidence I had in mind is the graphs you can see here.
At a glance, "ethnic diversity" looks more like 'a history of one internal ethnic group imposing its will on another by force'.
The first Google result for your terms may cast doubt on this -- I can't tell right now -- but it definitely minimizes the effect, in Europe, of increasing diversity (whatever that means).
It probably should have been given as something like "Diversity is not strength." to make apparent its political implications as well as cover other cases.
Does this really belong or am I just lacking the requisite emotional abhorrence regarding its obvious truth?
Most people feel some abhorrence to the idea, although many conservatives will draw an arbitrary line at which moral progress ended. However, among the more philosophically inclined, it is hardly a shocking idea.
Yeah, it's a straightforward implication of moral non-realism which I've argued forcefully for here many times without feeling suppressed.
In practice LessWrongers invoke directly or implicitly moral progress all the time. Like this.
They also sometimes invoke "well people changed their opinions in the past on case A, B and C, surely we will change our minds on D too!". Taking the idea of moral progress seriously, its perfectly fine to say that no thank you but you'd prefer not to change your vales to pattern match arbitrary historical processes (and further more a potentially flawed pattern match of historical processes!), so you are not changing your opinion on D.
This is even true for people who happen to disagree with modern stances on A, B or C. Preserving one's values is most likley a prerequisite for maximising expected utility. In this sense all of human history has been a horrible tragedy with the vast majority of people (including people alive today), being born in a uncaring universe with a practical guarantee of an alien valueless future.
I agree, but (sheer projection follows) I don't think that our minds can handle that thought in sufficient detail at all without just deciding to give up and play a videogame instead. I.e. such statements might indeed be unproductive and self-destructive for anyone, in any context (although I'm not sure how unproductive or self-destructive).
The linked article has a negative karma, so this example did not convince me that LWers do this type of wrong reasoning all the time.
Reminds me of this.
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 :-)
Sort of. Children and other dependents give you tax breaks in the US, but no direct financial aid unless you qualify for certain limited welfare programs. That's at the federal level; some states might expand on that, but I can't speak for all of them.
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?
"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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
The interesting bit is that, the best heretic hunter is the man with doubts of his own.
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.
I haven't read any comments yet but why do I have a feeling this will be trigger a thread where lots of LWers come out of the closet? I feel left out, being pretty much flaming unPC I can't elicit any drama that way. :(
I'm very surprised at just how up voted the contrarian statements are in this thread, I must have significantly underestimated how popular certain opinions are among rationalists in private. I've read a few that have surprised and even disturbed me.
Yet I'm also just so excited about what I'll find here tomorrow morning. This thread might actually have been a good idea.
Bear in mind that some contrarian statements might have been upvoted for being valuable as examples and contributions to the thread, rather than for substantial agreement. Also there is a selection effect: a contrarian sharing an unpopular opinion is very likely to upvote it when seeing a kindred spirit, but a non-contrarian who doesn't share it is unlikely to downvote it (especially in a thread like this one where the point is to encourage contrarian opinions to come out).
Here is a post by Quirinus_Quirrell that is a decent summary. If you want to be more provocative replace "non-zero" with "significant" add sexual orientation/gender identity to the list of characteristics that provide significant information.
Those topics aren't even that shocking.
They become more shocking when one presents arguments for them, and/or discusses their implications. But you seem to have already noticed this.
that topic wasn't mentioned.
See my comment history.
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! :)
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.
Really, why?
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".
It doesn't have to be a flame war.
By "made up" In the context of gender, I mean it's a cultural norm that only has a very small basis in nature.
In the context of sexual orientation, I take the nature component to be larger, but still mostly cultural.
I'm open to new opinions on this, I'm mostly agnostic on these, but take them seriously.
"Many (and probably most) animals also have gender in the sense that individuals with penises behave in certain ways, and individuals with ovaries behave in other ways, despite not having memes." It would be surprising if H. sapiens were very different.
(The obviousness-in-retrospect of this argument, stated so straightforwardly, combined with the fact that I almost never hear it stated so straightforwardly and never thought of it myself, makes me update towards culture being able to non-obviously derange debates like this to a really high degree. Far mode isn't naturally about truth.)
Well that changes things.
And yes that is disturbing.
... though it's worth keeping in mind that "the details of how gender works are made up" is still true to a pretty large extent (≥ the extent to which cross-cultural variation in gender exists); it's just that, like all culture, they're made up in a way generated/constrained by primate behavior, which has a lot of sex-dependence.
It hurts me that I've never heard or thought of this point before, given the obviousness-in-retrospect. What other obvious mistakes am I making?
I think It would be technically illegal for me to participate or update away from my default position in such a hypothetical debate.
Hmmm, I begin to wonder if my assumptions about the typical person's attitude towards incest and pedophilia are based on some black magic a la: http://eugenicist.tumblr.com/post/11786816885/public-opinion-versus-public-opinion
I'm certain there is data about the differences in responses to a poll if it is conducted by a real person vs. by a robot.
Out of curiosity, what do you mean here by "self identity"? I originally parsed it as "membership in identity groups" per Keep Your Identity Small, but on rereading I notice that it might also make sense as something along the lines of "having ego boundaries".
I mean both, incidentally. Identity in the Paul Graham sense is the mindkiller.
In the ego sense, I mean that we should seek to cast off identification with our work, so that work becomes about the work not about signaling or growing your reputation. Also, this means not being constrained to try to defend your past actions. This is quite hard, but is made somewhat easier on the internet, especially in paces where anonymous posting is allowed. Being unattached like this also enables you to try new creative things with much lower social cost of failure. This is one of the big theories for why 4chan is so successful as a cultural center when compared with, say, facebook.
EDIT: I also hold that identity is probably a problem in the philosophical sense where you might be considering joining consciousness with someone (or many someones) else.
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.
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.
You underestimate the effects of an entire cultural narrative repeatedly telling them that it's something to be traumatized by.
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.
Manipulation. Children are prone to manipulation by figures they trust. So they have belief-in-consent, not actual consent.
From the abstract of this paper:
If sexual consent achieved by manipulation is equivalent to rape, does that imply that pick-up artists are rapists?
Spending time building up a relationship of trust and liking with a person that you want to have sex with is called "dating" and considered normal when it is in the context of two adults. The same activity is called "grooming" and considered horrendous manipulation when it is in the context of an adult and a child. Just because trust has been built up on purpose does not make consent founded on that trust false.
Then can (and are way too likely) to fail at being informed when consenting.
Also you're probably talking about hebephilia.
Some evidence suggests that this isn't true.
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.
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.
How is it different than saying "Sex is fine, and is probably a good experience to have" in response to puritanical notions about celibacy? Nowhere does it say it should be mandatory or that you absolutely have to have sex with anyone who asks.
"Sex (insert qualifiers of your choosing) is immoral" is a normative claim.
"Many people are not attracted to family members, and sex with an unattractive partner does not provide warm fuzzies" is an empirical claim.
"Sex is probably a good experience to have" is challenging the validity of the moral claim.
"Sex with people you aren't attracted to is probably a good experience to have"... do I really need to provide further refutation once it's stated like that?
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?
For some, the prevalent notion of "rape is something that doesn't happen to men" seems to make the feelings of shame after being raped even worse. Female rape is commonly considered horrific and something where the victim needs support; male rape isn't always even acknowledged as something that exists.
See e.g. The Rape of Men.
(Things are probably somewhat better in the Western world, but it's the Western organizations that are helping perpetuate the "men aren't raped" idea, so not necessarily that much better.)
And the shortage of food in Germany, and everything else that provided a disincentive to feed the people that the party line proclaimed to be innnately hostile and seditious.
When you're literally last on the priority list (well, maybe above Soviet POVs in 1941), every economic difficulty will "cause" you to starve while you could've easily endured it in a society that had a more balanced if utterly cynical opinion of you.
(I find the other things you mentioned to be broadly correct, but not without caveats; moreover, if one goes about it naively without minding such caveats, one would likely do much greater harm to most involved than the current self-deception does.)
I really hope no outside observers see this thread.
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.
Of course it doesn't. The question is if the world becomes a better place if they do it anyway.
The scientific process has been so corrupted by signaling and politics that outside the hard sciences, most of what is called "science" these days, especially mainstream opinion at universities, is less entangled with reality then most religions. At least the religions have been around long enough to be subject memetic selection.
Which soft sciences do you have in mind? (I'd say "name three" but that would come off as confrontational.)
For example: economics, psychology, sociology, possibly even medicine (see Hason's discussion of it).
how do you know this isnt happening in hard sciences?
I would vote for the God Emperor of Canada.
I would also like to endorse GLaDOS's excellent list.
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.
What makes you say that? Reading "lesswrong's equivalent 50 years ago" makes me think RAND Corporation.
AFAIK dictatorships are higher variance than democracies, but on average they aren't too differerent (in terms of GDP at least). Most intuitive explanation: a good dictator can do really good things and a bad dictator can do really bad things, but good and bad democracies aren't able to do as much good/bad because the political system moves like molasses.
Ideally doing good things shouldn't be dependent on the political system.
Edit: I just realized the most obvious reading of this comment isn't the one I intended. I meant that the political system's job should be to get out of the way of the people trying to create good things.
60's LessWrong would be Ayn Rand's Objectivism rather than some yet another interpretation of Marxism.
It might be the error where "X years ago" counts back from 2000 instead of the current year.
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.
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?)
LWers are largely too confident in the conclusiveness of the research they cite for some of their beliefs.
Source?
Zoophilia is perfectly fine.
The prevailing arguments against it are incoherent for non-vegans anyhow. Nonhuman animals can't consent? How can it possibly make sense to claim the relevance of consent for (non-painful) sexual activity for a class of animals which can be legally killed more or less on demand for its meat or skin, or if it becomes inconvenient to keep? The consent argument is bogus; the popular moral beliefs against zoophilia are actually not based on a legalistic rights framework, but on a purity/corruption/ickiness framework.
Note that there is a subtler mechanism than brute suppression that puts strict limits on our effective thoughtspace: the culture systematically distracts us from thinking about the deep, important questions by loudly and constantly debating superficial ones. Here are some examples:
Notice how the sequence of psychological subterfuge works. First, the culture throws in front of you a gaudy, morally charged question. Then various pundits present their views, using all the manipulative tactics they have developed in a career of professional opinion-swaying. You look around yourself and find all the other primates engaged in a heated debate about the question. Being a social animal, you are inclined to imitate them: you are likely to develop your own position, argue about it publicly, take various stands, etc. Since we reason to argue, you will spend a lot of time thinking about this question. Now you are committed, firstly to your stand on the explicit question, but also to your implicit position that the question itself is well-formulated.
Some possibilities on dorky LW topics (as opposed to the topics I assume Vladimir et al. are referring to):
Not only are anti-natalist arguments correct, they are correct in such a way that we should be attempting to maximize x-risks.
Wireheading is necessary and sufficient for the fulfillment of true human CEV; people only claim to care about other values for signalling purposes.
A very strong form of error theory is correct; what people actually care about is qualia, even though there is no such thing. It doesn't all add up to normality; just as bad metaphysics may lead people to think there's a relevant difference between praying to God and attempting to summon demons, bad metaphysics makes people think there's a relevant difference between donating a million dollars to Against Malaria Foundation and kidnapping and torturing a small child.
It would be very fun to have a thread where we attempted to come up with seductive, harmful ideas, and the chance of actually happening upon a very infectious and very harmful one would be very low.
Alternative which I view as being more frightening:
For any given human, its CEV involves that human winning at zero-sum, possibly even negative-sum, games (status would be one of these). As such, the best way to maximize the current collection of humanity's CEV would be to create new agents to which current humans defeat in zero-sum games.
That is, for every current human, create a host of new agents (all of whom are quite human for all intents and purposes) of whom the current human is emperor.
Note: if this is the case, I doubt pseudo-agents will suffice. Just as humans do not wish to love pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really love), humans do not wish to win zero-sum games against pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really lose zero-sum games, with all that losing these games entails).
I am willing to admit to having a desire to feel superior to other people.
As near as I can tell I'm -want/+like/-approve on both wireheading and emperor-like superiority.