I upvoted this post because it's a fascinating topic. But I think a trip down memory lane might be in order. This 'dangerous knowledge' idea isn't new, and examples of what was once considered dangerous knowledge should leap into the minds of anybody familiar with the Coles Notes of the history of science and philosophy (Galileo anyone?). Most dangerous knowledge seems to turn out not to be (kids know about contraception, and lo, the sky has not fallen).
I share your distrust of the compromised hardware we run on, and blindly collecting facts is a bad idea. But I'm not so sure introducing a big intentional meta-bias is a great idea. If I get myopia, my vision is not improved by tearing my eyes out.
On reflection, I think I have an obligation to stick my neck out and address some issue of potential dangerous knowledge that really matters, rather than the triviality (to us anyway) of heliocentrism.
Suppose (worst case) that race IQ differences are real, and not explained by the Flynn effect or anything like that. I think it's beyond dispute that that would be a big boost for the racists (at least short-term), but would it be an insuperable obstacle for those of us who think ontological differences don't translate smoothly into differences in ethical worth?
The question of sex makes me fairly optimistic. Men and women are definitely distinct psychologically. And yet, as this fact has become more and more clear, I do not think sexual equality has declined. Probably the opposite - a softening of attitudes on all sides. So maybe people would actually come to grips with race IQ differences, assuming they exist.
More importantly, withholding that knowledge could be much more disastrous.
(1) If the knowledge does come out, the racists get to yell "I told you so," "Conspiracy of silence" etc. Then the IQ difference gets magnified 1000x in the public imagination.
(2) If t...
I flat-out disagree that power corrupts as the phrase is usually understood, but that's a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that's simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word 'benevolent' and for meanings of 'dictator' which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?
I'm seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won't, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim. How many people would have jumped in against the claim that without belief in god there can be no morality or public order, that the moral behavior of secular people is just a habit or hold-over from Christian times, and that thus that all secular societies are doomed? To me it's about equally credible.
BTW, just from the 20th century there are people from Ataturk to FDR to Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Chou Ping. More generally, more or less The Entire History of the World especially East Asia are counter-examples.
that's a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).
If this is a plea to be let alone on the topic, then, feel free to ignore my comment below -- I'm posting in case third parties want to respond.
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that's simply a religious assertion,
Perhaps it's phrased poorly. There have certainly been plenty of dictators who often meant well and who often, on balance, did more good than harm for their country -- but such dictators are rare exceptions, and even these well-meaning, useful dictators may not have been "truly" benevolent in the sense that they presided over hideous atrocities. Obviously a certain amount of illiberal behavior is implicit in what it means to be a dictator -- to argue that FDR was non-benevolent because he served four terms or managed the economy with a heavy hand would indeed involve a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. But a well-intentioned, useful, illiberal ruler may nevertheless be surprisingly bloody, and this is a warning that should be widely and frequently promulgated, because it is true and important and people tend to forget it.
...BTW, just from the 20
I simply deny the assertion that dictators who wanted good results and got them were rare exceptions. Citation needed.
Admittedly, dictators have frequently presided over atrocities, unlike democratic rulers who have never presided over atrocities such as slavery, genocide, or more recently, say the Iraq war, Vietnam, or in an ongoing sense, the drug war or factory farming.
Human life is bloody. Power pushes the perceived responsibility for that brute fact onto the powerful. People are often scum, but avoiding power doesn't actually remove their responsibility. Practically every American can save lives for amounts of money which are fairly minor to them. What are the relevant differences between them and French aristocrats who could have done the same? I see one difference. The French aristocrats lived in a Malthusian world where tehy couldn't really have impacted total global suffering with the local efforts available?
How is G.W. Bush more corrupt than the people who elected him. He seems to care more for the third world poor than they do, and not obviously less for rule of law or the welfare of the US.
Playing fast and loose with geopolitical realities, (Iraq is only slightly about oil, for instance) I'd like to conclude with the observation that even when you yourself, as a middle class American, don't get your hands bloody as cheap oil etc corrupt you, it is possible that you are saved from bloody hands by an elected representative who you hired to do the job.
I simply deny the assertion that dictators who wanted good results and got them were rare exceptions. Citation needed.
The standards of evaluation of goodness should be specified in greater detail first. Else it is quite difficult to tell whether e.g. Atatürk was really benevolent or not, even if we agree on goodness of his individual actions. Some of the questions
Unless we first specify the criteria, the risk of widespread rationalisation in this discussion is high.
MichaelVassar:
I'm seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won't, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim.
I was tempted to challenge it, but I decided that it's not worth to open such an emotionally charged can of worms.
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that's simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word 'benevolent' and for meanings of 'dictator' which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?
These are some good remarks and questions, but I'd say you're committing a fallacy when you contrast dictators with democratically elected leaders as if it were some sort of dichotomy, or even a typically occurring contrast. There have been many non-democratic political arrangements in human history other than dictatorships. Moreover, it's not at all clear that dictatorships and democracies should be viewed as disjoint phenomena. Unless we insist on a No-True-Scotsman definition of democracy, many dictatorships, including quite nasty ones, have been fundamentally democratic in the sense of basing their power on majority popular support.
rhollerith_dot_com:
IMHO probably the worst effect of Western civilization's current overoptimism about democracy will be to inhibit experiments in forms of non-democratic government that would not have been possible before information technology (including the internet) became broadly disseminated.
I beg to differ. The worst effect is that throughout recent history, democratic ideas have regularly been foisted upon peoples and places where the introduction of democratic politics was a perfect recipe for utter disaster. I won't even try to quantify the total amount of carnage, destruction, and misery caused this way, but it's certainly well above the scale of those political mass crimes and atrocities that serve as the usual benchmarks of awfulness nowadays. Of course, all this normally gets explained away with frantic no-true-Scotsman responses whenever unpleasant questions are raised along these lines.
For full disclosure, I should add that I care particularly strongly about this because I was personally affected by one historical disaster that was brought about this way, namely the events in former Yugoslavia. Regardless of what one thinks about who bears what part of the blame for what happened there, one thing that's absolutely impossible to deny is that all the key players enjoyed democratic support confirmed by free elections.
Seconded. I live in Russia, and if you compare the well-being of citizens in Putin's epoch against Yeltsin's, Putin wins so thoroughly that it's not even funny.
Voted up for precision.
I see decentralization of power as less relevant than regime stability as an enabler of non-violence. Kings in long-standing monarchies, philosophical or not, need use little violence. New dictators (classically called tyrants) need use much violence. In addition, they have the advantage of having been selected for ability and the disadvantage of having been poorly educated for their position.
Of course, power ALWAYS scales up the impact of your actions. Lets say that I'm significantly more careful than average. In that case, my worst actions include doing things that have a .1% chance of killing someone every decade. Scale that up by ten million and its roughly equivalent to killing ten thousand people once during a decade long reign over a mid-sized country. I'd call that much better than Lincoln (who declared marshal law and was an elected dictator if Hitler was one) or FDR but MUCH worse than Deng. OTOH, Lincoln and FDR lived in an anarchy, the international community, and I don't. I couldn't be as careful/scrupulous as I am if I lived in an anarchy.
If knowing the truth makes me a bigot, then I want to be a bigot. If my values are based on not knowing certain facts, or getting certain facts incorrect, then I want my values to change.
It may help to taboo "bigot" for a minute. You seem to be lumping a number of things under a label and calling them bad.
There's the question of how we treat people who are less intelligent (regardless of group membership). I'm fine with discriminating in some ways based on intelligence of the individual, and if it does turn out that Group X is statistically less intelligent, then maybe Group X should be underrepresented in important positions. This has consequences for policy decisions. Of course, there may be a way of increasing the intelligence of Group X:
Based on all the evidence I have, I’ve made a conscious decision to avoid seeking out information on sex differences in intelligence and other, similar kinds of research.
How are you going to help a disadvantaged group if you're blinding yourself to the details of how they're disadvantaged?
WrongBot:
But I should not make decisions about individual members of Group X based on the statistical trend associated with Group X [...]
Really? I don't think it's possible to function in any realistic human society without constantly making decisions about individuals based on the statistical trends associated with various groups to which they happen to belong (a.k.a. "statistical discrimination"). Acquiring perfectly detailed information about every individual you ever interact with is simply not possible given the basic constraints faced by humans.
Of course, certain forms of statistical discrimination are viewed as an immensely important moral issue nowadays, while others are seen simply as normal common sense. It's a fascinating question how and why exactly various forms of it happen (or fail) to acquire a deep moral dimension. But in any case, a blanket condemnation of all forms of statistical discrimination is an attitude incompatible with any realistic human way of life.
The well documented discrimination against short men and ugly people and the (more debatable) discrimination against the socially inept and those whose behaviour and learning style does not conform to the compliant workers that schools are largely structured to produce are examples of discrimination that appears to receive less attention and concern.
I’ve also observed that people who come to believe that there are significant differences between the sexes/races/whatevers on average begin to discriminate against all individuals of the disadvantaged sex/race/whatever, even when they were only persuaded by scientific results they believed to be accurate and were reluctant to accept that conclusion. I have watched this happen to smart people more than once. Furthermore, I have never met (or read the writings of) any person who believed in fundamental differences between the whatevers and who was not also to some degree a bigot.
One specific and relatively common version of this are people who believe that women have a lower standard deviation on measures of IQ than men. This belief is not incompatible with believing that any particular woman might be astonishingly intelligent, but these people all seem to have a great deal of trouble applying the latter to any particular woman. There may be exceptions, but I haven’t met them.
The rest of the post was good, but these claims seem far too anecdotal and availability heuristicky to justify blocking yourself out of an entire area of inquiry.
When well-meaning, intelligent people like yo...
In the comments here we see how LW is segmenting into "pro-truth" and "pro-equality" camps, just as it happened before with pro-PUA and anti-PUA, pro-status and anti-status, etc. I believe all these divisions are correlated and indicate a deeper underlying division within our community. Also I observe that discussions about topics that lie on the "dividing line" generate much more heat than light, and that people who participate in them tend to write their bottom lines in advance.
I'm generally reluctant to shut people up, but here's a suggestion: if you find yourself touching the "dividing line" topics in a post or comment, think twice whether it's really necessary. We may wish ourselves to be rational, but it seems we still lack the abstract machinery required to actually update our opinions when talking about these topics. Nothing is to be gained from discussing them until we have the more abstract stuff firmly in place.
My hypothesis is that this is a "realist"/"idealist" divide. Or, to put it another way, one camp is more concerned with being right and the other is more concerned with doing the right thing. ("Right" means two totally different things, here.)
Quality of my post aside (and it really wasn't very good), I think that's where the dividing line has been in the comments.
Similarly, I think most people who value PUA here value it because it works, and most people who oppose it do so on ethical or idealistic grounds. Ditto discussions of status.
The reason the arguments between these camps are so unfruitful, then, is that we're sorting of arguing past each other. We're using different heuristics to evaluate desirability, and then we're surprised when we get different results; I'm as guilty of this as anyone.
Here is another example of the way that pragmatism and idealism interact for me, from the world of pickup:
I was brought up with up with the value of gender equality, and with a proscription against dominating women or being a "jerk."
When I got into pickup and seduction, I encountered the theory that certain masculine behaviors, including social dominance, are a factor in female attraction to men. This theory matched my observation of many women's behavior.
While I was uncomfortable with the notion of displaying stereotypically masculine behavior (e.g. "hegemonic masculinity" from feminist theory) and acting in a dominant manner towards women, I decided to give it a try. I found that it worked. Yet I still didn't like certain types of masculine and dominance displays, and the type of interactions they created with women (even while "working" in terms of attraction and not being obviously unethical), so I started experimenting and practicing styles less reliant on dominance.
I found that there were ways of attracting women that worked quite well, and didn't depend on dominance and a narrow version of masculinity. It just took a bit of practice and creativ...
I strongly agree with this. Count me in the camp of believing true things in literally all situations, as I think that the human brain is too biased for any other approach to result, in expectation, in doing the right thing, but also as in the camp of not necessarily sharing truths that might be expected to be harmful.
Anti-PC? Good name, I will use it.
I know my rationality isn't that fragile and I doubt yours is either.
What troubles me is this: your position on the divisive issues is not exactly identical to mine, but I very much doubt that I could sway your position or you could sway mine. Therefore, I'm pretty confident that at least one of us fails at rationality when thinking about these issues. On the other hand, if we were talking about math or computing, I'd be pretty confident that a correct argument would actually be recognized as correct and there would be no room for different "positions". There is only one truth.
We have had some big successes already. (For example, most people here know better than be confused by talk of "free will".) I don't think the anti-PC issue can be resolved by the drawn-out positional war we're waging, because it isn't actually making anyone change their opinions. It's just a barrage of rationalizations from all sides. We need more insight. We need a breakthrough, or maybe several, that would point out the obviously correct way to think about anti-PC issues.
Anti-PC? Good name
I don't think using this name is a good idea. It has strong political connotations. And while I'm sure many here aren't aware of them or are willing to ignore them, I fear this may not be true:
There's no social coprocessor, we evolved a giant cerebral cortex to do social processing, but some people refuse to use it for that because they can't use it in its native mode while they are also emulating a general intelligence on the same hardware.
If you're an altruist (on the 'idealist' side of WrongBot's distinction), you'd probably consider making women you know happier to be the biggest advantage.
A thousand times no. Really, this is a bad idea.
Yeah, some people don't value truth at any cost. And there's some sense to that. When you take a little bit of knowledge and it makes you a bad person, or an unhappy person, I can understand the argument that you'd have been better off without that knowledge.
But most of the time, I believe, if you keep thinking and learning, you'll come round right. (I.e.: when a teenager reads Ayn Rand and thinks that gives him license to be an asshole, his problem is not that he reads too much philosophy.)
You seem to be particularly worried about accidentally becoming a bigot. (I don't think most of us are in any danger of accidentally becoming supreme dictators.) I think you are safe. Think of it this way: you don't want to be a bigot. You don't want your future self to be a bigot either. So don't behave like one. No matter what you read. Commit your future self to not being an asshole.
I think fear of brainwashing is generally silly.* You will not become a Mormon from reading the Book of Mormon. You will not become a Nazi from reading Mein Kampf, or a Communist from reading Das Kapital. You will not become a racist from reading Steve S...
But most of the time, I believe, if you keep thinking and learning, you'll come round right. (I.e.: when a teenager reads Ayn Rand and thinks that gives him license to be an asshole, his problem is not that he reads too much philosophy.)
"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."
-- Pope
(Poetry still sucks, though. I'm not yet changing my mind about that.)
... must ... resist ... impulse ... to ... downvote ... different ... tastes ...
You will not become a Nazi from reading Mein Kampf, or a Communist from reading Das Kapital.
I became a Trotskyite (once upon a time) partly based on reading Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution. Yes, I was primed for it, but... words aren't mere.
A few examples (in approximately increasing order of controversy):
If you proceed anyway...