[reposting screencap for context]
I think by this point I’ve established enough groundwork that some people will be able to complete what remains in their head. I have described the physical reality. And I have pointed to a category of events where society understands that people will often be profoundly disturbed by these events happening to them for reasons that have little to do with the immediate physical consequences. I could have given many more examples than the one I did, but hopefully people will get the idea.
I would hope that if people were with me so far, their attitude would go from “Infant circumcision is bad I suppose but it’s insane people care about it this much.” to “I can see how this is serious enough that people would sometimes get overwhelmed and develop maladaptive coping mechanisms. My intuitions for what my own response should be to these people’s failure to deal with this very bad thing are different now.”
Do I even need to criticize the “infohazard” part of this if I’ve already criticized the specifics that it depends on? If I don’t, will it seem like I’m criticizing the phrasing and tone rather than the argument itself? I think there are a few further points which might be worth making explicitly, so I guess I will.
Any negative fact about the world is, in some sense, an infohazard. The evidence against the existence of an afterlife, a horrible massacre that happened over 100 years ago, suffering in impoverished countries, suffering in dictatorships, beautiful and interesting species of animals going extinct, a horrible crime committed by a grandparent who died before you were born, brilliant artists who were cheated out of their royalties and died penniless, the fact that your zipper was down in front of people you were meeting for the first time, etcetera.
The obvious reading is that infohazard has a more specific implication in this context. The implication is that individuals and society in general should take more care not to look here. To deny this information to people who can’t handle it. Or that it would be good if this could be done somehow, even though there’s no way to do it. I don’t think that makes sense here, for a few reasons.
Most people in broader Western culture, in my experience, do not actually want painful things to be kept from them. It would be one thing if they said that but didn’t act like it, or vice versa, but in my experience this preference is found in both their words and actions. The details of a painful thing, perhaps they would want not to know. They would want to know if someone was spreading a monstrous photoshopped image of them because they would want to ensure that something was done about it, they might not want to see the image if there was no specific reason to.
There are many good reasons why people in our culture generally do not want to be protected from infohazards. One of them is that people don’t have full faith that society will fix a problem without their knowledge or involvement. It’s not that they’re undervaluing the peacefulness of their map, the thing that makes the map peaceful is the knowledge that it is basically accurate about things that would make them worry. Non-rationalists are not actually too crude to understand that, even if they might not put it in those words. They care more about the territory and don’t trust that some superhero will take care of everything without their knowledge or involvement. I would imagine that most rationalists would relate to that. For one thing, it was a theme in HPMOR.
Speaking of imagining things about rationalists, one might also imagine that rationalists would be even further in this direction than the average person, since The Litany of Gendlin is a core text, and “sunlight is the best disinfectant” is at least close to being a stock phrase in this community. Have we evolved beyond these ideas? Even if there are exceptions, is this one of them?
We can try to visualize a world where people don’t need to worry about anything, because they know that other people are taking care of it and there’s nothing that they could contribute which would possibly be worth it. We don’t actually have any way of knowing whether that would work out in practice, but we could still visualize it. We could even visualize a highly-traded, highly-subsidized prediction market, and have the prediction market predict to us that this would work out, and be reassured by that.
This is not that. This is not even close to that. This is “You’re wrong to care about this as much as you do. Sit back and let me and the rest of this cluster handle this matter by occasionally saying ‘I’m persuaded by the arguments against this in some abstract sense but also the people who care are weirdos/insane/broken in a way that I implicitly attribute to be solely to them and not the problem itself.’”
That may be a little unfair. It is true that there’s an ambiguity in Mason’s tweet, where it’s not obvious whether she’s talking about any strong negative feelings about this people might have or just people who fail to deal with those feelings in a productive way. It’s possible that there’s some reasonable level of emotional response, and some reasonable way of dealing with those emotions, which Mason would have empathy for, if only on an intellectual level. She didn’t actually write that, and I don’t normally hear people in this cluster say that (by definition, but hopefully you know what I mean), but she seems like a kind, reasonable person about other things, so one might say that it goes without saying, or that that side of things was just left out just by happenstance, without any reading-between-the-lines needed.
In this series I’ve mostly limited myself to making my arguments and not saying that the mind of anyone I’m disagreeing with has gone completely haywire. I’ve alluded to possible biases, and I’ve talked about things which I consider to be blindspots, but that’s as far as I’ve gone. In the course of my life, even if I feel that people are being deeply irrational, it’s usually more persuasive to just make my points as best I can rather than try to deconstruct the possible psychological reasons they have made the mistake they made, based on my semi-educated guesses.
Is there any valid reason I would go farther? Is there any reason I would make a similar argument to Mason’s, especially since it would be, ultimately, just a guess? I think so. People reading this might get something out of encountering a symmetrical argument; it might cause them to reflect. And the argument itself might have some small amount of merit, even if this sort of thing is never really a rigorous analysis. There is a pattern of irrational stubbornness on the part of society around this issue, and there might be some people who will get something out of me addressing it directly. Also hopefully it will be interesting or amusing to read in a general sense.
What follows is somewhat epistemically goofy and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Please feel free to just stop reading here, but if not, one accusation of deep-seated psychological dysfunction (“completely haywire”) I could make would be something like this, which is of course addressed to this cluster of thought and not Mason herself:
Rationalists talk about Societal Dysfunction a lot. We get angry at the people doing bad things, we get angry at the world, we take a step back, we remind ourselves that people don’t know any better, or their capacity for caring about others hasn’t been nurtured, that maybe it’s better to see whatever the particular bad thing might be as a societal mistake rather than a great evil with perpetrators, and we put things in perspective.
Societal Dysfunction can be put into perspective. Weak People cannot. To see Weak People being Weak is to feel contempt. Those feelings of contempt cannot be put into perspective, they will not, they must not. It would be too much to relinquish, it would leave you too defenseless, it would be like giving up too large a chunk of your soul.
Societal Dysfunction is one thing. But to show any recognition to Weak People is just too personal, the flinch is too intense, it can’t be borne. To be pressured into caring about them would be grotesquely unpleasant; to be forced to do so would be a deeply personal transgression against one’s boundaries.
People seem broadly compassionate and reasonable until they are exposed to the idea that infant circumcision is something people might feel strongly about, at which point a fairly large percentage go completely haywire. They have an instinctive gut response. They attribute this to the dysfunctional behavior of Intactivists. But that doesn’t make sense, because the actions that they are objecting to do not actually merit such a strong reaction. They have some inner set of rules about who is allowed to be upset about what, which are comprehensive enough that they are rarely wrong. But when they are wrong and other people point this out to them, even indirectly, they get angry. The discrepancy isn’t just something they can shrug off, they feel attacked, perhaps even violated, on a deeply personal level.
And this is true even for people who realize infant circumcision is bad. Even if they’re persuaded by the arguments, or partially persuaded as Mason is, that doesn’t change their instincts about who has a right to feel these things which are reserved for others. Those instincts are somewhere deep down in their pit of self-identity, and are completely unpersuadable by debate.
The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that there’s the same thing going on in their head as someone who is in denial about infant circumcision entirely. Mason’s position on the matter is less wrong, but in a strange way it is also less self-consistent. By walking down the road of admitting that circumcision is bad, people who are still unwilling to care must stretch farther, and contort more. They need to be cleverer to find some escape route, as they get closer to the thing they don’t want to recognize.
Would you believe me if I said that I’m not angry at people who act like this? The truth is, they really didn’t sign any social contract requiring them to actually care about anyone else’s suffering or grievances, just like I didn’t sign a social contract requiring me to have my foreskin cut off. At least they got their wish! I can find it in my heart to be happy for them, for that.
There is one time things are a little bit awkward for people who are persuaded by the arguments but don’t want to actually care in any way. That’s when a situation comes up where it seems like it would make sense to show some sign of caring or concern or recognition, even a somewhat intellectualized one, and they have to awkwardly contort their words and actions in order to avoid doing this as much as physically possible in order to maintain their personal boundary. Which probably does not feel very good.
Realistically, there’s a lot of possible explanations for this behavior that aren’t exactly about an instinctual mental category for Weak People. I just picked that because it was dramatic. For some people the instinctual category might be better described as “Not Victims”. It could also be that progressive-esque people instinctively don’t want any attention to go to any social movement they don’t consider to be one of them, and conservative-esque people instinctively feel there are too many people complaining about stuff in the world already. I’d say that both would be dismal thinking, in both senses of the word dismal.
There is sometimes, in the course of many peoples’ lives, an empty space. It is the empty space where compassion would be, if it existed. A space where it would make sense for some form of compassion to exist, even an intellectualized or sanitized form, but isn’t. Sometimes, not all the time. More often than one would probably want. I don’t know that it’s a totally ideal state of affairs, per se, but I can deal with it. The people who act this way may be facing trade-offs that I don’t fully appreciate. But it does make sense to me that, in the case of the people who create that empty space, the people who don’t actually care at all and don’t want to… Those people probably shouldn’t get to make decisions about what should be treated like an infohazard. Because they are very obviously prioritizing their own comfort over all other concerns around this issue.