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What truths are actually taboo?
LessWrong has been having fun lately with posts about sexism, racism, and academic openness. And here just like everywhere else, somebody inevitably claims taboo status for any number of entirely obvious truths, e.g. "top level mathematicians and physicists are almost invariably male," "black people have lower IQ scores than white people," and "black people are statistically more criminal than whites." In my experience, these are not actually taboo, and I think my experience is generalizable. I'll illustrate.
You're at a bar and you meet a fellow named Bill. Bill's a nice guy, but somehow the conversation strayed Hitler-game style to World War II. Bill thinks the war was avoidable. Bill thinks the Holocaust would not have happened were it not for the war, and that some of the Holocaust was a reaction to actual Jewish subterfuge and abuse. Bill thinks that the Holocaust was not an essential, early plan of the Nazis, because it only happened after the war began. Bill thinks that the number of casualties has been overestimated. Bill claims that Allied abuses, e.g. the bombing of Dresden, have been glossed over and ignored, while fantastic lies about Jews being systematically turned into soap have propagated. Bill thinks that the Holocaust has become a sort of national religion, abused by self-interested Jews and defenders of Zionist foreign policy, and that the freedom of those who doubt it is under serious attack. Bill starts listing other things he's not allowed to say. Bill doesn't think that the end of slavery was all that good for "the blacks," and that the negatives of busing and forced integration have often outweighed the positives. Bill has personally been the victim of black-on-white crimes and racism. Bill is a hereditarian. Bill doesn't think that dropping an n-bomb should ruin a public career.
Here's the problem: everything Bill has said is either true, a matter of serious debate, or otherwise a matter of high likelihood and reasonableness. Yet you feel nervous. Perhaps you're upset. That's the power of taboo, right? Society is punishing truth-telling! First they came for the realists... Rationalists, to arms!
Or.
We can recognize that statements like these correlate with certain false beliefs and nasty sentiments of the sort that actually are taboo. It's just like when somebody says, "well science doesn't know everything." To this, I think, "duh, and you're probably a creationist or medical quack or something similarly credible." Or when somebody says, "the government lies to us." To this, I think, "obviously, and you're likely a Truther or something." Bill is probably an anti-Semite, but Bill doesn't just say, "I'm an anti-Semite," because that really is taboo. He might even believe that he shouldn't be considered something awful like an anti-Semite. Bill probably doesn't think Bill so unpleasant.
That's the paradox: "taboo" statements like black crime statistics are to some extent "taboo" for sound, rationalist reasons. But "taboo" is not taboo: it's about context. People who think that such statements are taboo are probably bad at communicating, and people often think they're racists and misogynists because they probably are on good rationalist grounds. If you want to talk about statistical representatives on the topic of race, be ready to understand that those who are listening will have background knowledge about the other views you might hold.
All this is the leadup to my question: what highly probable or effectively certain truths are genuinely taboo? I'm trying to avoid answers like "there are fewer women in mathematics" or "the size of my penis," since these are context sensitive, but not really taboo within a reasonable range of circumstances. I'm also not particularly interested in value commitments or ideologies. Yes, employers will punish labor organizers and radical political views can get you filtered. But these aren't clear matters of fact. I also don't mean sensitive topics like abortion or religion, nor do I mean "taboo within a political party."
Is there really anything true that we simply cannot say? I have the US in mind especially, but I'm interested in other countries as well. I'm sure there are things that deserve the label, but I've found that the most frequently given examples don't hold water. I think hereditarianism is a close contender, but it's not an "obvious truth." Rather, my understanding is that it is a serious position. It's also only contextually taboo. If it were a definitive finding, it could perhaps become taboo, though I think it more likely that it would be somewhat reluctantly accepted.
Any suggestions? If we find some really serious examples, we might figure out a way to talk about them.
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Comments (293)
Then I think your experience is atypical. If you can say things like this in front of your peer group without being ostracized, you have an atypical peer group. I have an atypical peer group and I still think I would lose friends for saying some of these things.
My peer groups have ranged from good ol' boys to academics to leftwing activists. I don't think my experience is atypical for somebody who knows how to carefully introduce taboo topics. If my experience is atypical, it's due to the thought I've put into communicating such topics.
Edit: Changed "good topics" to "taboo topics."
Do you think that the position that Larry Summers was in is atypical, or do you think that he was bad at carefully introducing good topics?
Again, the emphasis of the post is "obvious truths." But yes, I think the reaction to Summers' talk was atypical. Gender differences and IQ and women in mathematics are standard topics in introductory psych textbooks. I think the reaction to his talk was deplorable, but I think that a big part of the explanation here has to do with "former administration official" and "university president." People with these titles are subject to stricter rules.
It is no longer clear to me what you mean by "taboo." Can you, erm, taboo this?
Any particular reason why you write "erm" even though (I assume) you don't have a British accent?
I had been reading this (and its more common cousin "er") for years before I saw someone point out that they're just different spellings of "um" and "uh". Edit: Not different pronunciations (modulo the difference in accent), for anyone who doesn't know what amacfie and I are on about.
...but people (around me, at least, in the DC area) do say "Er..." literally, sometimes. It appears to be pronounced that way when the speaker wants to emphasize the pause, as far as I can tell.
I hear "er", literally (rhotically), quite infrequently and I always assumed that people said it that way because of seeing "er" in written English and not knowing that it was intended to be pronounced "uh"; similarly, I've heard "arg" spoken by people who thought "argh" from written English was pronounced that way.
In my previous commented I restrained myself from linking to Ant Phillips's Um & Aargh but now you've given me sufficient excuse. (The chorus sounds to my American ears like "um and ah".)
Edit: Grumble grumble Markdown parser bug grumble grumble.
...but "argh" is pronounced that way... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOlKRMXvTiA :) Since the late 90s, at least.
'My reading of the use of "erm" here is as a replacement for "my repetition of the word taboo seems awkward in this context (since the point is we don't share a mutual understanding of the word) but I don't know a better word of phrasing this".
Do the British commonly use "erm"? I didn't know that.
I think you may have missed the point. "Erm" is just a British spelling of what Americans would spell "um." The pronunciations are quote close. (Similarly, British writers use "er" where Americans would write "uh.")
Really? I've always considered those distinct sounds, but then I read a lot from both sides of the Atlantic as a kid.
Here's some evidence.
Er: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/er#Etymology_1
Uh: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh#Pronunciation
Erm: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/erm
Um: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/um#Etymology_1
I think the recordings at those pages are misleading, because they're all from a US speaker. The phonetic markings are what to look at.
Exactly. As an American, I obviously prefer "er" instead.
It's more fun? I dunno.
What Bill said is criminal in Germany, and so is your account of what Bill said. Criticism of Islam is criminal in some Muslim countries. Without exaggeration, to convert from Islam to Christianity carries the death penalty in some Muslim nations. In the USA it is sometimes illegal to not sell your goods and services to whoever asks (ie you must sell flowers to a gay couple's wedding even if that is against your morals). People in prison have profound restrictions on their free speech .
Holocaust denial is criminal in Germany, but I was not aware that correct revisions of the Holocaust-as-popularly-understood were. I obviously wouldn't have trouble thinking of tabooed truths in Muslim countries. And restrictions on trade and discrimination in business are not about tabooing factual statements.
Almost the entirety of my post concentrated on what I wasn't looking for.
At some point the law must decide what is a correct revision and what is an "incorrect" revision attempt that would amount to denying the (legally enshrined) conception of the Holocaust. Regardless of the net value of the law against Holocaust denial, it is a law restricting speech.
Right, I disagree with the law, in case you were wondering. I don't think it contributes any significant value. I support marginalizing bigotry, not criminalizing it.
Law can criminalize things, but it can't marginalize them. It may be that the politicians who make the laws agree with you that a society whose people voluntarily marginalize Holocaust denial would be better than one where the government suppresses Holocaust denial by law. But to them, it's not a directly available option, so they prefer to play it safe.
This is an aside, but yes it can.
I'll explain my view. Here are two entirely consistent statements:
On this view, the United States does mostly well. Klansmen have a hard time getting newspaper columns, TV shows, and contracts with major publishers. Association with the Klan is a serious cost in polite society. But we provide police to protect their marches.
How?
So, if you pass a law that doesn't make it illegal to X, but does mandate that I can no longer do X in public buildings, and mandates that I have to pay substantial annual license fees in order to do X, and that the licenses must be applied for in person at City Hall during business hours... how is marginalizing X different from what that law does to X?
Do a before and after of the American labor movement with the central event being the Red Scare. Do a before and after of Christianity in Russia with the central event being the Bolshevik Revolution. Legal crackdowns can ultimately affect thought.
I'm not really familiar with US history, so let's talk about Christianity in Communist Russia. It wasn't merely marginalized, it was almost entirely outlawed after the Revolution.
The church organization was dismantled, its property and funds were confiscated, including most actual churches, and new ones were not allowed to be built. People could legally practice religion in private, but anyone who publicly declared their religion was forbidden from being a Party member, from holding any senior post, and generally was persecuted and oppressed. Many people (and in particular many priests) were persecuted much more harshly, being murdered, tortured, deported, etc. by the regime.
And after the Communist regime fell, in only a few years Russia has become about as publicly religious as the US. Which goes to show the Communist attempts at atheist education failed, in part because people were attracted to anything the Communists were against.
I don't see, in this example, either how the legal crackdown was marginalizing but not outlawing religion, or how it succeeded in affecting thought.
Yes, and that outlawing worked. Orthodoxy fell from holding near-universal adherence and being a pillar of state power to a fragmented, hated patchwork, which was re-allowed to exist during World War II as a submissive state organ.
While the state lasted, Russians really did become atheists and Marxists, though as Bertrand Russell footnotes his History of Western Philosophy, this practically meant replacing Tsar-worship with Stalin-worship. Criminalization led to marginalization. Similar things happened to "infantile leftist" communists and "factionalists," and with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, militant anti-fascism.
These are just particularly dramatic examples. Unfortunately, not all censorship and oppression has the Streisand Effect. I think regimes would act at least a little differently if it did.
... which is significantly lower than before it was outlawed.
Before you asked what may not be said, not what may not be thought.
I think I thought of one: "Most children enjoy genital stimulation." I'm not 100% sure that is true, but I think it is true. At least, I know I did and I believe that many children engage in a fair amount of self-stimulation. I can't think of any situation where I would be comfortable discussing the positives of giving sexual pleasure to children.
Most Western people don't want to allow sexuality even to post-puberty teenagers, at least before the ages of 15-16. Some people are even opposed to any sort of sexual education.
The issue is more socially complex than the (true) fact it's taboo. Most people are not guided by "what would be best / most enjoyable for the children", but rather "what would be proper" or "what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up".
There's also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.
I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because "what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up" seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what's going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what's proper, what's presentable or impressive, what doesn't discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn't a modern development.
Rather, questions of propriety and morality refer to memes that were presumably selected by memetic evolution for some combination of the children's individual and collective benefit.
<strike> It's not? Damn, that 12-year-old girl in feudal England must be so happy that there's a social taboo against children having sex. That way she doesn't have to worry about being done stuff she doesn't even understand when she gets married next moon to some 19-year-old page boy she's only ever met twice.
Oh wait. </strike>
(TL;DR: [citation needed]) Edit: (gwern wins some more internets - by actually providing citations! I stand corrected.)
I'm not an expert on developmental sexuality in preindustrial Europe, but for most of the feudal era child marriage was a lot rarer than pop culture would have us believe and almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon. It also didn't necessarily imply immediate consummation; most of the feudal women we know about that did marry at thirteen or fourteen didn't bear children until a few years later. Women from the peasant and mercantile classes (the vast majority of the population) often wouldn't marry until their early twenties, for a variety of basically economic reasons.
Upper-class feudal women did marry young by our standards, but usually that would have meant sixteen to eighteen, not twelve.
From Farewell to Alms; Asia:
Egypt:
Europe:
To put these averages in perspective; from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
I've seen claims that ancient Greece & Rome may have been very different from the later medieval patterns; from http://community.feministing.com/2010/02/14/misogyny-and-relationship-inequality/comment-page-1/
(Quotes extracted from searching my Evernotes: http://www.evernote.com/pub/gwern/gwern )
Thanks! This makes a strong enough case to upturn the history book I read (in high school, and of typical epistemic quality for high school history books).
I'd say it's more that 'it's complicated and dependent on region'. After all, there is a specific claim there that in Grecoroman society the stereotype that girls got married the moment they started bleeding was true. And no doubt anthropologists could list societies fitting every marriage age bracket from before conception to 'never'. (But it does mean that we can't pride ourselves on how civilized we are compared to our barbaric ancestors as of, say, 5 centuries ago.)
Or feel ashamed at how much more sexually repressed we are as savageorange was doing above.
More materials: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/GUS/HISTORYCHHS.HTM http://womenofhistory.blogspot.com/2007/08/medieval-marriage-childbirth.html
What do you mean by parents treating their children like pets?
I realize not everyone is familiar with or has witnessed or has even heard of the kind of interactions that are described when children are compared to pets, but it still baffles and surprises me on a gut level whenever someone asks about it.
Here's a few contrasting examples as a (weak) attempt to McGuyver an intuition pump:
To Roommate: "Your music's bothering me, I need to concentrate / have calm for XYZ reasons, could you please turn it down a bit?" (justification usually given or implicit)
To Pet: "Your meowing's loud, shut the fuck up." (optional addition: *gives a cookie to shut it up*)
To Child: "Turn down your music! It's loud!" (No justification given, usually even upon request)
To Roommate: "Could you wash the dishes? I'm really tired and I still have to do XYZ. (or insert X'Y'Z' reason)"
To Pet: ... (pet eats in dirty dishes, or at best rinsed with flowing tapwater)
To Child: "Do the dishes before 5 PM." "Come do the dishes NOW or I'm unplugging your computer / gaming console / (insert other arbitrary unrelated top-down punishment)"
To Roommate: "I'll take care of cleaning my room/space, I don't care about yours as long as it doesn't stink or infest the whole place, although you should help me clean bathroom/kitchen/living room/etc for XYZ reasons"
To Pet: (trains to not be messy, yell at whenever it makes a mess of its personal space)
To Child: "Clean your room by the end of the day or you can't go out this weekend."
In other words / to generalize, what is meant with "treating children like pets" is that the interactions, decisions and their properties are, in the case of children, more accurately modeled by a decision tree / graph like that for Pet interactions than one for Roommate / Significant Other / Actual Other Human Being Living With You interactions.
For many families, though I don't know how many, the interactions for children is extremely close to the counterfactual "pets if my pet could talk", and completely incompatible with the "Roommate" examples (my .5 is 70-80%, .95 for 40-95%).
In a large number of situations I've seen personally, replacing the child with a roommate for a similar situation being treated similar to the child would have resulted in a civil or perhaps even criminal lawsuit, even if the roommate was otherwise similar (say, a cousin living there and going back to university that for some family circumstances you're stuck living with, but who still doesn't / can't pay rent and food and amenities, e.g. because 100% of money goes for studying).
But their child? "People can educate their children however they want, they have a right to their children's education" (read: They have a "right" to decide what the child does, how they do it, which rights the child is entitled to or not, etc.)
Also compare the rights of parents and what parents are allowed to do with their children legally to what they have towards pets, versus what they have with other-people-just-living-with-or-near-them.
Basically, this is similar to what rationalist!Harry sometimes complains about in the early parts of HPMoR. Children are Not People.
Yes, this is exactly what I mean. In my case I was also thinking of the way some parents train their children to make their parents look good -- as objects to show off, just like dogs or cats at a show, not individuals whose accomplishments are largely their own.
It's a good thing I asked-- my guess was that you meant that children were coddled but not trained.
In some ways the child in your examples is actually treated worse than the pet (particularly along the scale of invasive coercion).
I know right?
Guess the best part. Go on.
(spoiler: All of them are true examples of things that have happened dozens or hundreds of times to myself or other humans in my circles during their childhoods, and they're only select examples that are easy to compare out of dozens more similarly-bad cases I could list.)
Fair disclaimer: This subject engages me a lot and it's on my long laundry list of Subtopics Of Things To Protect.
I don't think this is so much "treating children as pets" as it is "treating children like not your peers". When your boss asks you to do something, does she say "Hey, would you mind helping me out with X? I'd really like to get it done this week."? More than likely, she says "I need you to finish X by Friday."
You only need to give justifications to peers. A person in a higher position of authority can make a request of a subordinate without justification. So it is with officers/privates in the military, managers/employees, and parents/children.
To adress your second point: The point isn't in justification. The difference I'm pointing at is the attitude and mental model of the world of the Commander, i.e. the parent. And this causes some crucial differences in behavior that aren't accounted for by the lack of need to justify oneself or even the consideration of not being a peer.
Sure, we could say some (or perhaps even most, YMMV) workplace managers behave a certain way that is similar to those parents and children. We could say the same for militaries. I care little for what one could say about the similarities or the words that can or "should" be used.
Key point: Children are often treated by their parents in a manner completely dissimilar to every other case of family member or person with whom they live.
Key point 2: This behavior of parents towards children has sufficient differences from typical cases of social-class or not-peer behaviors for me to not label it as a standard case of such. I believe it would be very misleading. Parents often carefully control the "private life" of their children; what they eat, what they do at any given time, who they interact with, what they say, and even what they think to some extent.
Even in military settings, moreso in workplaces, these examples are not at all carefully monitored and controlled with punishments and threats of various kinds, and even those that are generally end the moment your shift ends and you walk out the door, with some exceptions regarding PR and such (e.g. politicians and people with similar occupations).
Key Point 3: Behaviors, social norms and laws differ between all those cases, and I would argue that laws and social norms, at least, are more similar between pets and children than they are between children and employees/nonofficers. If an employee doesn't behave as a manager wishes, they are limited in their options, and the interactions and roles are socially clear. A manager cannot threaten to confiscate an employee's phone for not properly cleaning up after themselves in the bathroom, nor are they legally and socially allowed to dole out corporal punishment for an employee that talks back to them or asks the wrong questions.
Yes, this is a touchy issue for me, so I apologize if I come across as less polite than I think.
That's.... a really good one, actually. Perhaps disguise the idea in a critical discussion of Brave New World?
Really the only acceptable conversation I can think of goes something like:
If memory serves, it was something about not hitting 6-month-olds for touching themselves in Marriage and Morals that prevented Russell from teaching at City College years later...
With the another evident exception being this conversation and those like it that employ sufficient indirection. The ancestor is currently at +4, 100%.
Hrm? I'm not sure why you think I disagree with your comment. Taking a step meta is generally acceptable. People claim the Holocaust never happened is not taboo, even if The Holocaust never happened is taboo in many contexts.
I think the ancestor is a +12 because it is a great example of what the OP requested - a true, probably taboo sentence.
See this excellectly written blog post on should we allow sex play in Kindergarden? (SFW, seriously)
This hasn't been a taboo since Freud's time. (For one data point, I never masturbated until I was about 15, as far as I can remember, but... teenagers talking about when they masturbated as children weren't terribly uncommon.)
Prepubescent children? Babies touch themselves while being changed - most of the parenting books I read said not to worry or make a big deal about it.
Such a warning seems unnecessary if most people normally followed the advice.
I guess that “taboo” in the OP means ‘what you can't say’, not ‘what you can say but still lots of people are wrong about’. Otherwise it'd be faaaar easier to find taboos.
Yeah, I debated a separate post on that point. To me, it is pretty clear that the OP is using taboo in Graham's sense. Then I decided too much time had passed to make that post worthwhile.
Perhaps it should be? I'm not sure how we can rely on ourselves to give sexual pleasure without any sort of self-gratification, and using children for sexual gratification is a big no no in my book. Lots of moral hazard in this form of pleasure that is quite avoidable by finding one of the billion other things kids like doing.
That seems like an astoundingly arbitrary position. Good thing + good thing somehow equals bad thing?
Mind you, I'd say any argument that even tangentially endorses pedophilia - including all those arguments that are trivially wrong but filled with applause lights - is massively taboo.
Edolo sat ignore quidnis memere qui vertorum fugit.
A caret tibusdam sit altus docet: nonamus quor ultus exeati nec mensus essit biscripta.
In hero me digno neque abuntum et cupitersum obos caris femina vitabique? Prae? Tetimeo Dausa iam aud longistio ventis!
Hic volunt quod absenere linera dat revertas.
Or to put that another way, if there were, then by definition we could not say it.
Well, if they're given, in public, they wouldn't be taboo. What are you really asking here?
We're only allowed to talk about the fact that we are almost universally demonstrably evil by the standards of our own professed moral systems in a joking context.
Or the context of religion.
But the religion pretends to have a solution -- you do a ritual, and now you are magically less evil.
It depends on which religion -- apparently, Orthodox Judaism doesn't.
Could you expand on this? It's not clear to me how this is the case.
Rational charity and utilitarianism make it extremely hard to justify how much most of us spend on ourselves or on feel-good charities rather than high impact results like giving money to high impact charities.
This is actually one of my favorite conversational topics. People find it uncomfortable, but not in a "you're sinister" sort of way.
But yeah, not a great way to make friends.
I'd like to hear your reasoning for that. It's not obvious at all to me - unless you're talking about eating meat, in which case.. well, I'm still unsure how the equation works out.
It is taboo to talk about your personal monetary benefits of the recent death of an (innocent) person even if you really benefited and are just stating it and it is taboo especially around the close friends and family of the deceased.
Not in my experience.
I suspect the timing is critical here. And tone moreso.
I wouldn't classify the above statements as either true or likely/reasonable. As to the statements being seriously debated, please provide a link or something.
There were abuses by bankers and capitalists, many of whom were Jewish. There were "Jewish Bolsheviks." And there was resistance and terrorism. As for the war being a prerequisite for the Holocaust, see the intentionalist vs. functionalist debate.
The avoidability of the war is a more subtle question. Along with Orwell, I think war was inevitable and obvious by 1936, at least if we consider the conquest by Germany of continental Europe possibly excepting France, Switzerland, Belgium, and other fascist powers unacceptable. Even then, the war might have been confined. I see little historical necessity for e.g. the alliance of Japan and Germany or the attack on Pearl Harbor. At what date would you agree the war was avoidable? 1918? 1930? If you'd like me to find particular historians - I'm not including Pat Buchanan - I will do that. But there's a pretty wide range of opinion here. (Aside: I'd like to find resources that framed the question primarily in terms of German-Soviet relations instead of Anglo-Polish ones.)
I'm also having trouble connecting the dots between the functionalist position that the Holocaust was caused by mid-level Nazi bureaucrats and the assertion that the Holocaust would not have happened were it not for the war.
It's not just a "mid-level vs. top-level" split, but a question of when something like the Holocaust was formulated or became likely to happen. "Hitler planned it all along" sets a much earlier date than "mid-level bureaucrats were competing for Nazi brownies during the War."
I'm wondering how you get from the premises "some Jews were bankers" and "some bankers did bad things" to Bill's conclusion about the Jews. The logic strongly reminds of this: http://xkcd.com/385/ , and I would not characterize it as reasonable.
Regarding "Jewish Bolsheviks", while a number of prominent Bolsehviks were Jewish, most politically active Jews in Russia had not been Bolsheviks (the Bund dwarfed any of the other socialist parties for a long time), and in fact the main distinction between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the time of the split, rather than ideology, was ethnicity; about 86% of the Bolsheviks were ethnic Russian and only about 37% of the Mensheviks; Jews and Georgians who had been SDs were much more likely to be Mensheviks. Furthermore, by the time period that is relevant to this discussion, Stalin had largely purged the prominent Jewish Bolsheviks from the Soviet leadership.
FYI, Did you know that most Jews in the 1920s Germany self-identified as Germans first and Jews second, if at all? That they were just as patriotic as the "true" Germans? Same applies to Jews in, ehm, Soviet Russia and other places which did not have institutionalized anti-semitism or had a break from it for a few decades at least? Same applies to many other ethnicities, by the way.
And German and Austrian Jews had a distinctive culture and identity, to the point that you could find bigotries amongst them against other Jews.
What history of Russia have you been reading?
I'm not sure what reasonable position is being gestured towards by Bill's statement. Are you willing to cash it out a little? (Other than the quoted statement and the "Holocaust as reaction to Jews," I agree that Bill's positions are arguable - although I don't agree with many of them).
On a totally separate topic, I think the International Relation Realists have the better of the argument. WWII was inevitable in the same way that the wars of Louis XIV, Napoleon, and WWI were inevitable. It just seems to be a property of multi-power regions that a power with a plausible chance of dominating the region will try to dominate the region by military force - in the absence of outside intervention (like the US military presence in Germany since essentially the beginning of the Cold War to today).
For serious (though hardly undisputed) evidence that slavery wasn't, in certain respects, "not all that bad" see Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross. Note also that Fogel and Engerman were allowed to say this and that they both remain highly respected academics, despite Engerman existing in just the sort of field that the Sheeple Can't Handle My Thoughtcrime crowd would predict to be most witchhunty.
In case it wasn't clear, I think people who think "Slavery wasn't so bad" are widely under-weighing the suffering caused by the violent enforcement of the status quo. Slaves tried to escape all the time, and fugitive slave enforcement was incredibly violent - and the violence was state-sanctioned.
I was asking to try to understand how the statement imputed to Bill addressed that issue - because without addressing the violence of fugitive slave enforcement, the statement did not even seem plausible to me.
The central premise of Time on the Cross - that slavery was economically profitable and unlikely "wither away", and this had some positive effect on the treatment of the slaves, seems quite plausible to me. (That said, I believe this is only true after the invention of the cotton gin).
But I find it implausible that this benefit outweighed the negatives of the fugitive slave enforcement in the US.
The first half of the thesis is most assuredly true. It could be that if not for the invention of the cotton gin, slavery would not have been profitable in the cotton-growing regions of the US South, but slavery was extremely profitable and economically dynamic elsewhere, so I wouldn't be inclined to lay too much emphasis on the gin (except as a matter, possibly, of where slavery came to be located, as it did die out "naturally" in the areas where it was unprofitable.) However, it is also true that northern and/or metropolitan political leaders generally believed (however incorrectly) that free labor would generally be more efficient than slave, which to be fair it was in the industrial production processes that the abolishing regions had a comparative advantage in.
I am extremely skeptical of the second part of the thesis, because most everything I've seen indicates that slaves were worse off than black sharecroppers were worse off than southern whites were worse off than northern whites. But I haven't actually read Time on the Cross too closely.
I'd have to do some reading before responding to the second half of your comment, but to the first, that's relatively easy.
During slavery: black people are somebody's valuable property.
After Reconstruction: black people are a hated but cheap source of labor you can do pretty much anything to.
Granting that I haven't done a detailed study of the literature on this, but I think you're taking an exceptionally narrow view of what was bad about slavery in the antebellum US. After reconstruction, for example, black sharecroppers could not have their spouses and children arbitrarily seized and sent elsewhere.
How sure are you of that? Sharecroppers were often kept indebted as a method of control, and the US had debtors' prison just like England did.
As I said, this is not within my area of expertise. However, given that the family-destroying aspect of slavery is much commented upon, and various other evils of Jim Crow are much commented-upon, the fact that I have never encountered complaints about the family-destroying aspect of Jim Crow is sufficient for me to feel moderately confident that the situation was not equivalent on this dimension.
"Jim Crow" is a pretty small part of the story here. "Criminalization of black life" is a better description.
It wasn't designed to be a erudite summation of what slavery was like, but rather a succinct illustration of how slavery was not at that time an obviously worse outcome than the consequences of abolition. It's obvious to me at least that the abolition of slavery has proved a Good Thing, but it would not have been obvious in 1890.
Interesting argument, although I think it overestimates the protection offered by slavery and underestimates the downsides. Maybe change it from "either true or arguable" to simply "arguable"? You're losing status by implicitly endorsing these positions.
This has been discussed before.
Thanks for the link; I had not seen it before. But I think the topic here is somewhat different. Were there solicitations for taboo truths in the comments I didn't read? Was there an explanation similar to mine about context?
Well, that OP asked an almost identical question to yours (he wanted taboo opinions while you want taboo "true" opinions) and got over 800 responses. From what I remember when I read it months ago, and given the nature of this forum, most of the discussions seemed to revolve around different statistics and facts painting "uncomfortable" truths.
I haven't seen particular comments doing what I'm doing here. Of course some opinions are taboo! I think my question somewhat less trivial.
Hi, I've been considering and investigating various uncomfortable/unpleasant/dark matters more thoroughly since making that thread, drawing on sources from radical feminists (e.g. Susan Bronwmiller) to "conspiracy nuts" (e.g. Jeff Wells) to far-right (e.g. Moldbug) and far-left (e.g. Maoist) extremists to unorthodox psychologists (e.g. Alice Miller) to anti-natalists/VHEMT (e.g. Sister Y).
Fortunately, my Weltanschauung has proven flexible enough to handle depressing stuff without me going stark raving mad, turning into a fascist/totalitarian, etc (although a few times I did want to break with this dark obsession). As an added effect, my politics did grow more radical (and harder to summarize), although I consider myself less mind-killed then when I started out.
Feel free to contact me through PM if you want to exchange any opinions!
Also, while we're on to all this, check out The Hoover Hog's "thoughtcrime" blog - remarkably erudite and charitable with lots of links to such stuff. Much of it is boring, nasty reactionary crap (sorry, people - "keeping blacks and women in their place and letting the White Man reign in glory" is not a novel, surprising or insightful idea, especially to someone aware of the last 200 years of ideological history in the West - and "let the weak slave away for us or perish" is sadly timeless)... but some is rather fascinating.
I agree that much of it is "nasty reactionary crap", but also that "some is rather fascinating." For instance, check out the early interview with Brian Tomasik, at a time when he was still publishing under the pseudonym "Alan Dawrst".
When the server asks if the meal was good, it usually wasn't good. Most meals are satisfactory or poor.
"Good" is calibrated to the implicit mapping between "actual merit" and "what the patron would say now" in that context.
It's just like when you ask someone how they're doing. It's not a lie (I claim) to say, "I'm doing fine", even if lots of things in your life suck and are stressing you out, because such a response is interpreted differently than a serious "life analysis" inquiry, and the person asking the question knows this and therefore is not deceived.
I wouldn't say it's "taboo", but rather, a case of using slightly different language in some situations that (knowingly, knowably) conceals a lot of information.
Then why don't you change restaurant?
Who are the twenty people you interact with most often? Make a list.
Meet with each of those people in person. Work each of those three observations that you think are obvious and not taboo into the conversation. Notice whether or not you feel any reluctance to bring up the topic. Pay close attention to their reaction, and where they try to steer the conversation.
I strongly suspect your experience will be that these topics are actually costly to discuss (i.e. there actually is a taboo).
Notice here that I sought to counteract selection effects. Yes, there are lots of people I can talk to who think those things are reasonable beliefs. But there are also lots of people who, if I mention the quantitative implications of the black-white IQ gap, will not see it as a good idea to be friends with me anymore. Correspondingly, I don't discuss that topic with them.
This is, of course, a very destructive self-fulfilling prophecy. If pointing out the negative side effects of immigration from Latin American countries is publicly acceptable evidence that someone is a racist, then anyone who cares more about their reputation as a non-racist than their impact on the immigration debate will be silent. There's a positive feedback loop here- as each non-racist concerned about immigration decides not to talk about it, talking about it becomes better evidence that the person is racist, and that tips the scales for more people, who decide to stay silent about immigration.
Your suggested experiment wouldn't be very good. I do think that appearing to have become suddenly obsessed with holocaust revision would cost me. Talking about these things as one would actually talk about these things makes for a better experiment. Here's an interesting outcome: I've never been called an anti-Semite for discussing Holocaust revision - partly because it's made clear that I think anti-Semitism a form of mental illness and it's obvious I blame the Nazis for a genocide-that-yes-duh-happened. Now, I have been called an anti-Semite for supporting Palestinian human rights.
Of course I at times feel reluctance to bring up topics like this. I'm pretty sure I've admitted the existence of sensitive topics already. There are risks and costs to certain truths, but those risks and costs rarely if ever approach those associated with serious taboos like vulgar racism.
It's sound inference. It's updating on evidence.
Sometimes. I keep saying context context context, but do go on.
That'd be just awful. Has it happened? Are we really not allowed to do a reasonable, thoughtful cost-benefit analysis of immigration?
I agree that it's sound inference, given the hypotheses "racist" and "not racist."
What is more important is the importance given to those hypotheses. I think you're mistaken about what taboos are: they're signals of "not my tribe." Someone who supports Palestine over Israel is against the 'tribe of Israel,' in the way that a measured discussion of the Holocaust after professing love for the tribe isn't. It may be socially or instrumentally rational to yield to such politics, but never mistake it for epistemic rationality. (That is, the phrase "politically correct" is literally true.)
What do you mean by "we," "really," and "allowed"? No one will throw you in jail if you do such analysis and post it on your blog, but don't be surprised when the SPLC puts you on hatewatch. The more important question is, "are the people who actually decide immigration laws doing a reasonable, thoughtful cost-benefit analysis?"
Yes, given mutually exclusive and exhaustive - if fuzzy - categories that necessarily exist. Ok. Are you saying that it's an unsound inference?
My tribe here being correct and not completely morally reprehensible, which includes lots of people who aren't in what I consider my in-group.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with this debate. If you were, you would understand it to be a reflexive response against criticism of Israeli expansion and aggression. The Jewish critics of Israeli militarism are also called anti-Semitic. It has a lot more to do with power worship than tribal signalling, though the latter certainly plays a role in party discipline.
You'd probably think Bill is a racist. Bill is an extreme example, but for him or a more realistic case could you let me know why inferring this would be a failure of rationality?
I would be very surprised. I've followed Hatewatch before. Give me an example of this. If these exist, they must not be common.
More important? Sure. Related? No. Of course they aren't. The party that wants the xenophobe vote doesn't need to do that, and the party that wants the Hispanic vote doesn't need to do that.
You may be interested in this article.
This is an extreme claim that I would dismiss without strong evidence.
It seems that you only make it as an applause light. I doubt you have real evidence that anti-Semitism is a mental illness, rather than a normal mental state which is common in certain societies and is not harmful to those who possess it.
You have to profess this belief to allow you to discuss taboo claims that seem anti-Semitic without letting people think you're an actual anti-Semite. The fact you are forced to make this claim, which is probably irrelevant to the discussion at hand (e.g. what exactly happened in the Holocaust), is evidence that you are discussing a taboo subject.
A sensitive subject not in itself taboo so long as one includes provisos to prevent reasonable inferences leading to their concluding that I have views that actually are taboo.
I think that anti-Semitism is a qualitatively distinct form of racism which ought to be considered on the borderline of mental illness. I'll admit fault for calling it a mental illness without qualification. Here's one reason I consider anti-Semitism to be almost in a category of its own:
Racism is something segregated groups do more or less automatically, starting from early age and due to an evolutionarily sensible preference of the familiar to the unfamiliar. Anti-Semitism doesn't happen like this. Anti-Semitism is not only racial but also religious and nationalist, and it can happen anywhere. It's highly paranoid; the Jews frequently take an Illuminati-type role as the masters of everything. Any infinity of other racisms and poisons are naturally subsumed within it. Garden-variety racists are not typically racialists with a well-constructed theory to support their bigotry, but anti-Semites almost always are. Anti-Semitism is System 2. Conspiracies about Chinese and Japanese subterfuge wax and wane, but anti-Semitism stays. Jews are blamed simultaneously for the worst excesses of capitalism and socialism, for the kidnap and murder of children for ritual, food, and sport. They are out to undermine the true religion and dilute the blood of the best races, and turn the nations into beggars.
And it's been like this for centuries.
Let's be clear we're talking about the same thing here. The definitions for mental illness that I'm familiar with say that mental illness must be something that is not widespread in the person's culture, a beliefs or behavior that others consider weird or irrational. People imitate and conform to other's beliefs and actions so much, that anything that is common to a large segment of the population (e.g. religious belief) cannot be usefully called a mental illness. Anti-Semitism clearly fails this test.
Hating outgroups based on religious and nationalist lines, is just as normal and widespread as on racial lines. Almost every multi-religious society has or had in the past a large degree of segregation, distrust, and perhaps sectarian violence. The same goes for populations of "mixed nationalities".
Since the Jews historically lived among people where they were at once a religious, racial, and (in the last century) nationalist outgroup, it is not at all surprising that they were hated. Just like, since U.S. blacks are mostly a distinct social class from whites, and were previously a legally distinct class too, it's natural for this distinction to merge with the racial hatred and make it stronger.
We use a special term, anti-Semitism, because of the its historical importance, but it doesn't seem to me to be qualitatively different from other kinds of inter-group hatred.
This has only stood out since the 19th century in Europe. (Previously, other societies concerned themselves with racial purity and descendants of Jews, like Christian Spain; but they were the exception, not the rule.)
Yet Anti-Semitism has existed as long as mainstream Christianity. (And probably before - I just don't happen to know anything about the integration or otherwise of Jews in the Roman and Greek worlds.) Anti-Semitism changed a little in character when racial theories were added to the mix, but the so-called "modern" A-S could not have existed (in such a magnitude) with the millenia of "classic" A-S preceding it.
I would like to see a quantitative survey of the equivalent of blood libels in other famous sectarian hatreds. I would expect to find out that Christians have told (and tell) just as bad tales about Muslims, Protestants about Catholics, US whites about blacks, as anyone has told about Jews.
Also, A-S tales are famous in our culture. Mostly everyone has heard of the Blood Libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Maybe we just haven't heard enough non-A-S examples, and so A-S has become highly available to our thinking.
I still disagree, but kudos for a very reasonable response. May I plead time constraints in the hope that we may revisit this topic later?
Of course.
Most sexual relationships are between people who are settling for what they can get.
Cynicism about love is taboo? Where have I been?
It's fine until you change a vague statement about "most" relationships (which obviously means outgroup-people's relationships) into a specific one about people in the conversation, or friends of people in the conversation, or other ingroup members. At which point, I'd say it's just offensive, not taboo. Offensive, hard to justify, based on the outside view when people with inside view information are around... yeah, probably instrumentally unwise to say most of the time, too.
You mean optimizing.
Wouldn't satisficing be more correct?
Agreed. Although if you include the cost of searching, satisficing is the optimal solution.
As opposed to what?
True Love.
Yeah, that was pretty much the only thing I could think of. But given that people do not in fact have randomly assigned soulmates who are a much better match than anyone else, holding out for your soulmate is not a possible policy.
Another thing that would qualify is meeting everyone in the world (in reasonable age brackets and filtering by gender if appropriate, and maybe some amount of filtering on culture and interests still counts as not settling) to determine the best possible match, not because you can only be happy with them but because you refuse to settle for the infinitesimally inferior second-best match. But it's very unlikely that you'll be your first choice's first choice, forcing at least one of you to settle for an inferior match or remain single.
Gratuitous bragging: my calculations suggest that there are about ten thousand people in the world I'd be more or less as happy with as with my boyfriend. (It's not that lucky, I meet an incredibly skewed sample.) I have on average two more chances of finding another good match if we break up, and I'm not unhappy about this prospect, which makes "settling" a strange descriptor.
But this is only an issue at all because we're weirdos here.
Claiming that people did not have their mate selected by their subconscious and pheromones or whatever is not the same as saying they did not have them selected by random draw by ***ing cupid.
Reading this post and the comments to it, I think that "Fake Bold Iconoclasm" may actually be a more important category than taboo truths.
As to taboo truths, I think that most would be along the lines of futility of discourse, and maybe some as to failures of ethics/meta-ethics, such as possibly 'a huge amount of what we consider absolutely bad and universally traumatizing is actually socially constructed'.
Ooh, that's a good one.
Being able to delicately bring up certain topics with close friends after a few drinks is different from being able to bring them in your public life. But I would also suspect that Less Wrong posters, contrarians in general and the less neurotypical among us are likely to have difficulty approaching taboo topics with tact. I would subsequently expect those with better social skills (perhaps like yourself) to feel like such topics aren't as taboo as other's think they are.
I agree that social skills would help a lot in stating taboo opinions safely. On the other hand, social skills consist in some measure of not stating taboo opinions, and in general, opinions your listeners won't like.
I'm hardly a social genius. I haven't kept any childhood friends, and I alternate between making large numbers of friends and months of self-imposed isolation. I read math textbooks at bars for entertainment.
I think most people could do better than me.
At the same time, I'm a socialist atheist living in Tennessee, and I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to sensitive topics. I'll admit the possibility that my disposition could help to make my experiences atypical. But I've seen people have the "typical" experience, and I can usually instantly tell when they've failed and how they could have done better.
It's less about being able to make a lot of friends or forcing oneself to be social and much more about being able to calibrate how you're coming off to others and head misperceptions off at the pass.
Quoting from this wikipedia article on autism spectrum disorders.
Edit: Btw, you aren't in eastern Tennessee by chance are you?
I am, near Knoxville.
Neat, I'm likely moving to Asheville in the next few months.
It's a beautiful, beautiful place. I used to drive through it fairly often in a big, ungainly truck, and it always seemed to be storming. Probably my stare-offs with imminent destruction made it even prettier.
There's one I can think of but I'm not sure I want to post it publicly (so it must be real :P).
Also, there are things (which can be rephrased as what I think are high-probability factual statements) which have explicitly been made taboo on Less Wrong itself.
That may hold for the bar conversation you describe, but it doesn't once media distortions are introduced.
And when you consider the things that public figures can talk about, then which ones are "taboo" is pretty clear: it's the things that can be stripped of context and used as ammo for accusations, or just for a nice and attention-grabbing headline story.
This kind of distortion is what people (like me) who are annoyed by "taboos" are most concerned with. Yes, your Bill's statements may be valid evidence of some questionable characteristics, but such a statement by Bob stripped of it's context and pushed in the media is much weaker evidence: maybe there were plenty of caveats attached, but the journalist preferred to get rid of them, so Bob gets judged as if he was Bill.
The Stephanie Grace case is a pretty clear example where all the context was stripped for maximum outrage. Or here is Chomsky talking about how he was taken out of context (I believe he's a frequent victim of that).
Honestly I think that one of the main factors is what you imply from your statements. If talking about statistical truths, there's a tendency, even among rationalists, to implicitly speak as though correlation implies causation. Or rather, there is rarely an explicit statement to the contrary and since humans are naturally biased, we parse the sentence as implying direct causation.
For example: yes, crime rates are higher among certain genetic subgroups of people. That statement is true. If you stop there, it implies that you believe that to be an innate property of their genes, rather than due to other intermediate factors: mainly demographics and social factors such as how those people are treated and what cultural norms/scripts they're given.
And I believe there's a taboo regarding genetic supremacism. I believe that given phenomena like stereotype threat and self-fulfilling prophecies, that's a valuable taboo to have. See another comment of mine on the subject.
As long as you talk about the statistics as being manifest through external factors, though (which they largely are) I think most people are mostly fine about this.
I believe that genes that have a strong influence on the prevalence of violent criminality exist, and are likely distributed differently in different populations. Given that intelligence, self-control, personality, and so on all feed into propensity for violent crime, and all of those are known to be at least partly heritable, it seems odd to believe otherwise.
Emphasis mine. I don't know of a single hereditarian who disavows the influence of other intermediate factors. The debate is always over how much they explain- is heredity 40% of IQ, or 80%, or somewhere in the middle? But there are many people who want heredity to explain 0% of IQ, or criminality, or so on, which seems like an odd hypothesis to privilege.
So I agree with you on the points of intelligence, etc. I would guess that most people do... although I guess I'm not certain of that. At the very least I would suspect that there is known causal evidence about these sorts of things.
By contrast, here's an article that explores how certain racial groups appear to be more violent, until you control for class and demographic, when they suddenly aren't. And yet a lot of conversation ignores the second half, which is actually the key to finding a solution.
As a man, I will note that one of the strongest correlates with violence is being a man. Given what we know about things like testosterone, there's probably a substantial degree to which this is genetically/biologically caused. I just find most people emphasize the genetic aspects more than they can reasonably be confident about. For example, regarding heredity of IQ:
30 million fewer appears to be about 12 million vs 42 million.
Note also:
So even within families, this can be an issue.
You said:
I've recognized a tendency in myself to attempt to go to 0%. Consciously I realize it can't possibly be that low, but I can't be confident it's more than 2%. Or rather, I think that genetics possibly plays a large role now, but that if we raised people better than we could essentially eliminate these issues without focusing on genes.
If, 300 years ago, you were to describe a society in which large portions of the population can do algebra, or several centuries earlier, you were to describe a society in which basically everyone can read, the people you spoke to would probably assume this was a society of high-intelligence people. Rather, it's just today's genetically-basically-identical people, who are learning more effectively, and more, period than people used to.
Sure, genes play a role. But I'm not sure what the value is in focusing on genes.
Well, to partially refute that: Bayesianly-speaking, if you meet someone who has X trait, you might want to update to whatever odds of them having Y correlated trait, sure. That would be generally valuable to have better predictive models. But the brain has trouble separating "I know that X and Y are likely to go together" and "I think that X is a root cause of Y". Especially the brains of people who don't train this stuff, meaning even if you can keep these thoughts separate in your head, they can be dangerous memes to spread, because self-fulfilling prophecies, etc.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/14/6/623.short
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67168735/heritability%20of%20iq.pdf
"Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of IQ in young children".
To make a long story short, this analysis of a large cohort of children assigned a 'socioeconomic status indicator' to each family they were following from 0 to 100 based on a large number of factors. They found that the heritability of IQ was a VERY strong positive function of socioenomic status. At the bottom, they think less than 5% of IQ variation is moderated by genetics. At the top of the scale, over 80%.
Obvious interpretation: low socioeconomic status masks genetic predisposition.
That is to say, violence and class have common causes. Intelligence, self-control, personality, etc., all immediately come to mind as relevant, but let's call this cluster of common causes of violence "harmness". Even though the presence of harmness may screen off the ability of race to contribute to predictions of violence and class, one still observes more harmness in the population of blacks than the population of whites.
I'm sorry, but this test in no way differentiates between the hypotheses of biological heredity of IQ and verbal transference of IQ. As is, this just shows that there's an attribute which is positively correlated with being talked to by your parents and academic success, and negatively correlated with welfare. To quote the newspaper article:
Even among links which are strongly supported- like breastfeeding raising IQ- there are selection effects that are hard to estimate, because almost all of our evidence is observational. (Breastfeeding is still a good idea for most parents, even if we're not quite sure how good it is.) If cleverer parents are more likely to breastfeed because of the purported IQ-boosting link, then in order to start separating out the effects of breastfeeding and the effects of heritability we would need to measure the IQs of the parents of both groups, moving from a simple observational study to a massive project (that would still have possible unmeasured selection effects, like the amount they care about health and cleanliness).
Emphasis mine. The probability of this conclusion being made by correct reasoning from the evidence supplied is epsilon, and if you didn't realize that when reading that quote, I beseech you to give that lapse of rationality solemn contemplation.
The probability of an unbiased survey of the literature returning this conclusion is epsilon. I suggest updating.
I think it is worth considering the mirror of this concern. "Anyone who says X must mean Y" is its own self-fulfilling prophecy, which can only be counteracted by saying X and not meaning Y.
If parents talk more to girls but men are the stereotypically intelligent ones, how could talking more to kids be the difference?
...by some stereotypes. There's also the "men are stupid" stereotype. So I'm not sure about your premises.
However, I don't think your argument is valid, either. Its structure is something like:
Just because lots of people think that !B is the case doesn't make it the case.
And if we're talking about success in school (which the article emphasizes) then note that more women go to (and succeed at) post-secondary education than men. Fewer in STEM fields, but that appears to be largely due to stereotypes anyway, not aptitude.
I would also guess that the male-female discrepancy is much smaller than the poor-rich discrepancy.
What model of hereditary intelligence predicts significant hereditary differences in the current environment and negligible differences in an environment where people are raised better?
(this is talking out of my ass but:)
Variation in genetic robustness/fragility. A known example of this is Iron deficiency in women. If iron in the food is plentiful, no one will notice iron deficiencies, and if it's non existent then everyone will suffer. But if there's an almost sufficient amount of Iron, women will be far more likely to be deficient than men. Women are less robust to lack of environmental iron than men. You can imagine brain development such that everyone has the ability to develop a great brain in a great environment but certain genetics will deal better or worse with certain deficiencies.
I was not saying that everyone would have the same level of intelligence, but merely that the baseline might be high enough that violence becomes less of an issue. That was the original subject.
Similar to drethelin's comment.
This: For very good reasons, most things we say explicitly carry a large boatload of implications, whether or not we actually mean them. This effect is exacerbated when people who say the same thing with the express purpose of conveying the implications - it becomes a widely-recognized signal.
It's still usually possible to approach the taboo in question, but it has to be done very, very, very carefully, like approaching a police officer who thinks you may be a violent criminal.
...in certain societies
Yes, yes it does.
The point made by the OP is that is a true implication. If crime rates are higher in certain genetic subgroups, that is valid (if perhaps weak) evidence for a purely genetic correlation with crime, all else being equal. So it's reasonable to conclude someone believing the first fact, also believes the second one to a degree. And this would not be a problem if the issue were not taboo.
The word "implies" in the phrase "correlation implies causation" typically uses the technical meaning of imply in logic which is quite different from it's common usage as a synonym for "hint" or "suggest".
Good point. I wonder if people (other than me) normally understand this sentence that way?
Most people do not know logic, so it's unlikely to be that widespread.
In contemporay America, it is generally forbidden to publically criticize or defame Muhammad or Islam, particularly on public media. Compare/contrast treatment of Christianity/Catholicism/Jesus on comedy shows, particuarlly on Comedy Central. The debacle with South Park is the most notable.
The South Park debacle is a great example of media cowardice, but it's not hard to criticize Islam on public television. Hitchens had no trouble, and I don't think anybody in the right wing press has trouble. The left-wing press is semi-censorious about it.
You might find this post interesting.
Life would be better if God existed.
Which god?
Charitable interpretation: an ontologically fundamental Friendly AI
How can something be fundamental and artificial?
Maybe drop its being artificial? The post makes more sense that way.
Depending on who you're talking to, it may also be taboo to suggest God doesn't already exist. Or even that life could be better.
If only there was a Celestial Pyschopath to torture me eternally.
If the Celestial Psychopath is also a Utility Monster and gets a lot of utility from your torture, why not?
EDIT: This is more or less the official theological explanation. God's utility function is infinitely bigger than human's, therefore torturing a human eternally even for the smallest offense against God is fair. Of course there are some applause lights on the top of that.
This is to some extent a rephrase of some specific Christian apologetic justifications. Note that not all religions which have such a deity which tortures people for eternity. For example most forms of Judaism and some forms of Christianity and Islam believe in at most finite punishment in the afterlife.
You should read smart theists for a different perspective (e.g. C. S. Lewis).
Full disclosure: I don't like C. S. Lewis, but you are laughing at a man of straw, it's like mocking science based on crackpots.
Yes, the man of straw made of a thousand years and more of the dogma of hell, and the majority of monotheists still. That's the reality of monotheism.
Smart, compared to a lot of his brethren, who also are one chromosome away from a chimpanzee. Do you plan on spending your life reading the smart astrologers? Me neither.
The majority of monotheists are stupid. How good would their opinion be on an easily verifiable topic?
If you ask stupid monotheists about evolution, they would tell you garbage. If you ask them about God, they would tell you garbage too. You shouldn't update much in either case, even if they believe one but not the other. If you want to be an atheist, you steelman theism first.
The original statement was about God, not Thor. I can't think of anything I particularly have against Thor, besides being a tiresome, pompous ass in Marvel comics. In an honest reading of the bible, God is a sadistic psychopath.
There are more or less horrific gods. I wasn't responding to a statement about a god who grants wishes and poops happiness gum drops, and I see no point in engaging in wishful thinking about what the bestest and shiniest god could be.
he did say life, not afterlife.
Is afterlife the "life after", like the after party? Your eternal life, as opposed to your mortal life?
No matter how you slice it, I don't see improvement in this life from the existence of God as portrayed in the Bible (or Allah in the Koran).
I don't think that's taboo in any sense, but I think life would be better with a superpowerful, ultra-benevolent God.
I do feel a little upset, but it's not the power of taboo. It's the prospect of dealing with a crazy person.
Most (but not all) of the individual examples of your Bill are things that could be "either true, a matter of serious debate, or otherwise a matter of high likelihood and reasonableness." But pack them all into one paragraph, with the loaded language and I become very doubtful that Bill is interested in a reasonable discussion. I'm heading for the door. Maybe it's a bad example?
I do have conversations about some of these issues, but only with close friends who have a shared trust and understanding. I don't think I have enough credibility here on LW nor do I know the landscape well enough to have an informative conversation about these issues.
Science really doesn't know everything.
Scientists rarely perform actual science.
What do you have in mind for actual science?
Aiming to falsify ideas rather than confirm them would be a nice start; that seems to be the most common rut.
How is this a forbidden discussion topic? Most of the public agree with this sentiment, and so do the scientists. Do LWers think otherwise?
From the OP:
I thought it was amusing that someone could wreck their credibility so quickly by saying something so obviously true.
There might be some markers which would indicate whether someone is heading off into nonsense with a claim that scientists don't have a complete understanding of the universe. Personifying science might be one of the markers.
Right, that's the OP's point.
I can count on one hand the number of times that I've heard someone worth listening to say "well, science doesn't know everything" in response to anything I've said or heard someone else say.
If the conversation goes:
A: I believe X.
B: X is contradicted by (citation to some study).
A: Well, science doesn't know everything.
then there is essentially no chance A has anything interesting to say about empirical topics - at least those unrelated to that person's job.
Tone matters here. Whoever says it as if any scientist were under the opposite impression has some serious problems.
Sometimes, saying something true is excellent evidence for believing falsehoods. Sometimes, giving knowledge is excellent evidence of ignorance. See Rand Paul's recent performance at Howard.
Yes, but they agree in different ways. As Dara O Briain says, "Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop." But the phrase "science doesn't know everything" in common usage has more to do with filling the gap with whatever fairy tale the speaker is fond of.
"Taboo" also has a different meaning in local jargon. It appears at first that you are referencing the local use "taboo [phrase]", meaning "instead of using [phrase], explain what you mean by [phrase]". (Example: Taboo "True Scotsman")
Then you go into the common language understand of taboo: Violation of local customs.
I don't think sunfowers is using taboo this way at all.
If I misunderstand, correct me, but are you saying that I am confusing common usage with rationalist taboo? I didn't think this was ambiguous here.
One of the bonuses of a first amendment it that people are free to say what they think is true, and other people are free to hear them. Under those circumstances, it will be hard to find something that is universally taboo.
This comment is missing the point of either the first amendment or taboo topics.
The first amendment deals with what powers the government has with respect to free speech. Taboo topics are ones that other people will punish you for bringing up. Your peers are not the US government.
You're free to say anything, and your peers are free to shun you for saying anything.
So controversial that no credible people will go on record (in non-insane states)? Not indisputably true.
Facts (and predictions) that are hard to obtain or verify, that are essentially answering "is controversial public policy X a good idea?" may earn you scorn or reprisal, so you keep quiet if you're not looking for a career in political gang-warfare. Anyway there's so much noise in that department that it's hard to justify searching for or disseminating such truths.
If I'm wrong, though, feel free to PM / irc / email me any awesome truths. I keep confidences.
I think that some of the paragraphs in this post are true but if you stated them (in isolation as something you believe, rather than along with the other two in the same triad as an example of the pattern) publicly with a straight face, you would be frowned upon (to say the least).