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Khoth comments on Donation tradeoffs in conscientious objection - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (52)
Well, one way to boost your chances of convincing people that you're a serious conscientious objector would be avoid leaving an internet trail that suggests your main reason for wanting to avoid conscription is concern for your personal safety.
How on earth are you getting that message from this thread? My whole intention with the thread is to say that I sincerely believe in opposing war, and wish to better understand the most effective ways to communicate that. I don't see anything in this thread to suggest that the reason I want to avoid conscription is concern for personal safety, other than mentioning Prob(death or serious injury | conscription) and I mention that here precisely because I would expect LWers to not view that as a retreat from separate ethical commitments to a position.
I find your reaction upsetting, either because you're only taking things at the surface level and disregarding what I'm actually saying, or else because I've written it up so poorly that I am not communicating my position at all. In any case, it's a shock to my prior that someone finds this post worthy of a downvote.
(I didn't downvote you)
In the post, you don't give any reason why you oppose war, but you do spend a few paragraphs on not wanting to be hurt. If it looks to me that your post is about how to most cheaply fake pacifism, how much more like that will it look to a draft board who are specifically looking for reasons to discount your pacifism?
I was not trying to write a post to defend conscientious objection as a philosophy. I was trying to ask the following: given that you already sincerely believe in conscientious objection to war what should you do to elevate that signal to a level that e.g. a draft board would find acceptable?
It's true that you did not see any reasons in my post regarding why I oppose war. That was intentional. I wanted to write a thread about tradeoffs and decision making conditional on being a sincere conscientious objector.
Not every post should start from a philosophical recapitulation of all the beliefs held as supporting foundations.
I just don't understand this. I'm not asking about faking pacifism. I'm asking about how to efficiently signal actual pacifism. How else am I supposed to ask about that?
I could certainly write better. But I also expect readers to think about it a little more. It's easy to say I'm trying to fake a signal and then just stop reading. But is that really a justified interpretation of what I'm asking? And even if it was, what's wrong with doing the thought experiment where you simulate being a sincere conscientious objector and ask yourself what the right tradeoffs would be?
If LW discussion isn't the right place for doing that, I don't know where else on earth is.
Replace "serious injury or death" with "causing serious injury or death".
No. It's absurd to act like "real" conscientious objectors don't do other things like care about the probability that they would be sent to jail or sent to military service. It's as if, in your model, conscientious objectors are never allowed to speak about self interest. Which is preposterous.
Yes?
If I understand correctly, the grandparent is a quote of the question to which the great-great-grandparent is a response.
In other words:
And the best way to do that is:
The elaborated version is that showing first and foremost that you care strongly about not causing serious injury or death will be much more efficient for signalling purposes.
This reminds me of the musician-programmer thing in social science and attraction; If you first show yourself as a guitar player, and then reveal that you also do programming, you're a cool and smart person. If you first reveal yourself as a programmer, and only then show that you play the guitar, you're a nerdy freak trying to show off.
This is the advice that is being given, as my first guess. Show that you care about not causing injury first, before showing that you also want to not be injured and also would like not to be conscripted / imprisoned.
Yes, but my question is conditional. Assume that you already sincerely believe in conscientious objection, in the sense of personal ideology such that you could describe it to a draft board. Now that we're conditioning on that, and we assume already that your primary goal is to avoid causing harm or death... then further ask what behaviors might be best to generate the kinds of signals that will work to convince a draft board. Merely having actual pacifist beliefs is not enough. Someone could have those beliefs but then do actions that poorly communicate them to a draft board. Someone else could have those beliefs and do behaviors that more successfully communicate them to draft boards. And to whatever extent there are behaviors outside of the scope of just giving an account of one's ideology I am asking to analyze the effectiveness.
I really think my question is pretty simple. Assume your goal is genuine pacifism but that you're worried this won't convince a draft board. What should you do? Is donation a good idea? Yes, these could be questions a faker would ask. So what? They could also be questions a sincere person would ask, and I don't see any reason for all the downvoting or questions about signal faking. Why not just do the thought experiment where you assume that you are first a sincere conscientious objector and second a person concerned about draft board odds?
Somewhere where there's no risk of the draft board googling it, that's where.
p(Draft Board is even AWARE of p4wnc6 really being John Smith) TIMES p(Draft Board even bothering with Google) TIMES p(LessWrong is a top result) TIMES p(An old thread is high on Google) AND/OR p(They spend time going through all their old threads)
So, um... seriously? You consider that compound possibility MORE LIKELY than LessWrong producing useful draft-dodging advice? I can't help but think that would be strong evidence that LessWrong is bloody useless at problem solving, if it were true.
I allude to this point and get -3 votes. I appreciate this point. There are many good criticisms of what I've written. But this idea that I should be worried about an "internet trail" about it is not one of them.
That's ridiculous. I have no problem if the draft board Googles this thread. Maybe I'm a poor writer, but I think even a cursory reading of this thread reveals that (a) I am arguing from a position of sincere belief in conscientious objection, and (b) there's a difference between making an argument for conscientious objection and asking questions about behavior that will be correlated to desired outcomes conditional upon sincere belief in conscientious objection. It seems you are unwilling to examine a distinction between the two, or at least you are unwilling to speak here as if there's a distinction between the two or perhaps you think that it is impossible for draft boards to believe there is such a distinction.
And you assign a far higher prior probability to the event that this thread would negatively reflect on me if seen by a draft board than I do.
Did it occur to you that the comments in this thread might be a practical implementation of your suggestion, i.e. an attempt to cover the internet trail in plausible deniability?
No, that didn't occur to me.
Do you think I should be adjusting towards that belief? It seems far too clever to work, bringing to mind the lessons from "The Tragedy of Light."
Corroboration of Khoth: I also assumed this was a how-to-fake-Pacifism ask.
Both pacifists and fake!pacifists are interested in efficient signalling to a draft board.
I don't see how this is relevant without additional information.
As Khoth said, the main harm you are worried about is being conscripted. Talking about P(injured | conscripted) distracts the reader's attention. I also got the same vibe - if you re-read my first post, you'll see a less direct bit of push-back.
But again, not every post on this topic has to be about conscription ideology. Among the things that an objector would be concerned about are (a) actually being conscripted despite genuine beliefs that war is ethically wrong; (b) not suffering personal harm or death; (c) opposing wars to succeed in achieving ethical goals.
It is as if you are trying to argue that a "real" conscientious objector could only ever be concerned with (c), regardless of how (a) and (b) turn out. But that's ridiculous. Given that you care primarily about (c) then what should you do to also solve (a) and (b)?
This is a piece of writing criticism, not ethical-theory criticism:
That's just false. An essay needs a point, and having too many weakens the essay. It's the difference between article Why it is unethical to eat meat and the essay Why it is unethical to eat meat - and by the way, pork tastes terrible.
In short, anything beyond the scope of "how do I show I'm a pacifist to the draft board" really distracts the reader.
As an aside, I think you over-estimate P( US institutes military conscription ). And you will never be forced into battle - prison for refusal to obey orders is always an option.
I disagree. Not every essay on the topic of conscientious objection needs to be centered on the foundational basis for the belief. It is possible to begin a discussion by saying, "assume X," and then asking what you would do about Y or Z conditional on X. The point of my post could be muddied due to poor writing, sure, but not due to missing details about my personal feelings on the reasons for conscientious objection. Those details would be totally superfluous to the questions that I'm trying to ask.
It sounds like you're saying that no one can ever broach this topic unless they conform to what you think are boundaries on acceptable conversations about conscientious objection. I don't agree with the limits you're setting on the scope of the conversation.
A CO doesn't need to worry too much about serving against their will. During Vietnam, it was possible to end up in jail if you just peacefully refused to carry out any order.
I am not sure that I agree, but this is at least a cogent point. You are saying that I should not have the preferences that I do have (e.g. you think I should assign less weight to the possibility of conscription against my will). I still think this is non-sequitur to the point of the post. Just because you don't see a lot of reason to place a large negative weight on that possibility doesn't mean that asking about how best to avoid it should count as evidence of faking rather than genuine tradeoff planning.
Even if you believe that Khoth (and other readers) misunderstood your article, it still is an evidence that the article can be (mis)understood this way... and thus you should avoid being associated with texts like this, whether honest or not.
Generally, speaking directly about "how to signal X" is usually treated as an evidence that you are non-X and you just want to fake X.
Why exactly? Let's just say that humans are not automatically strategic. Unless they are actively trying to fake something, in which case they have to apply some strategic thinking. Thus, being strategic implies being insincere, because the sincere people are expected to use reflection rarely. :-(