It's hard to come up with a good counter-argument to "slavery is bad". Even women's suffrage and Prohibition didn't require lying.
That's bullshit. More precisely, it is quite possible that you don't consider any of the counter-arguments to be good. But you should not generalize it for everyone. A "good argument" is a 2-place word; it means that a given person accepts the premises of the argument and its style of reasoning. Also, there is a lot of hindsight bias and social pressure here: we already know which side has historically won and which is associated with losers; but before that happened, people probably evaluated the quality of the arguments differently.
I could start playing Devil's Advocate and give examples of specific arguments that would seem good to some people, but I am not sure the readers (and our stalkers at RationalWiki) would focus on the meta-argument of "it is possible to make good arguments for X" instead of taking the arguments as literally my true opinions (plus opinions of everyone who upvoted this comment, plus opinions of everyone who didn't throw a tantrum and publicly leave LW after seeing me publish this comment there)...
A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn't work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does. Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates), even though Republicans have much more faith in the free market.
This is an extremely terrible proxy for the question you're interested in.
It's hard to come up with a good counter-argument to "slavery is bad".
I rather like Stefan Molyneux's (anarchist fellow on youtube) analysis of slavery across time, as an evolving institution to extract value from a subject population.
Under that analysis, we are tax cattle on the human ranch. We seem to go about free because the ranchers have found that "free range" tax cattle are more productive. Free range tax cattle work harder, more effectively, and produce more, than tax cattle physically yolked in a chain gang.
And a lot of people find this is a wonderful situation.
It's hard to come up with a good counter-argument to "slavery is bad".
It's not that hard if you look at them from a contemporary perspective instead of a modern one.
Let's consider a tribal level of society which can barely survive using solely a subsistence economy, where previously the only thing you could do to prisoners after a fight with a neighboring tribe was to kill them all. You can't release them because the enemy will have higher numbers in the next battle, and you can't afford to just feed them because you can barely survive yourself.
Now enter a reform: they are allowed to live, but they have to work. (just a side remark: this is what slavery meant for the ancient tribes in the old testament, which often gets quoted outside context to claim that Christianity "advocates" slavery). Also, if I remember correctly, it only lasted at most seven years? Even in that case it is of course cruel by modern standards, but our current economic model allows for the upkeep of prisoners of war, and for a rehabilitative prison system supported by taxpayer money instead of penal labor. A stone age or early bronze age economy didn't.
Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates)
You're taking the New York Times and PolitiFact as unbiased estimators of the truth of Democrats and Republicans?
Literally, I laughed out loud.
"The argument that people need to be deceived into social reform assumes either that they're stupid"
I think the relevant point isn't what is needed, but what is possible. If lying wins, people will do it. Though stupidity is relevant.
I look at politics, and MoreWrong seems to win just fine. In fact, it wins better than LessWrong. When you fail to avail yourself of the Dark Side, you're failing to avail yourself of power. When the enemy doesn't, you lose.
When some people are much more intelligent than others, the Dark Side will work:
...Poets pries
A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn't work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does.
Another way of spinning the problem.
Is it likely that someone who feels they have the right to rule you by force would refrain from lying to you to achieve the same obedience?
"Even women's suffrage and Prohibition didn't require lying."
I'm pretty sure that Prohibition was often advanced by the argument that drinking alcohol is morally wicked, and I am very confident that this is false.
In any case, as Viliam has already pointed out, this is just a question of what you consider good arguments, and there were plenty of people who thought there were good arguments against any reform that you might support.
I'm not sure it's relevant to this post, but your description of your old post seems to be opposite to what it actually says. Here you say that practical directions come first and are deceitfully simplified to generate energy. There you said that naive energy creation comes first and later people harness and direct it. The difference seems important to me because in this post the person is trying to steer society, while in the previous post it seemed to me that the practical second person was just trying to harness the energy to personal benefit and maybe ...
This all depends on your goals and what you're optimizing for, as an agent. If your goals require lying, then from a rationalist perspective, you should lie. The requirement of lying is not evidence for or against the value of your goals. These are orthogonal issues.
A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn't work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does. Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates), even though Republicans have much more faith in the free market.
There a lot of wrong with that paragraph. The main problem is that's based on the lies. The lie that the political spectrum being well partitionated into left ...
The argument that people need to be deceived into social reform assumes either that they're stupid or [clause which should be replaced with "selfish"].
What probability do you assign to the belief that 70% or more of current living humans are stupider, more short-sighted, and selfish than you are? I'm somewhat selfish in that I care far more about people I interact with than about distant (in time or space) strangers, but still likely in the top quartile on that dimension, and much higher on the first two.
I agree it's worth questioning your b...
If you're backing a cause which doesn't inspire the action you think it deserves, and you find yourself twisting the truth a bit for dramatic effect, how strong evidence is that that your cause is less worthy than you think it is? Can you give examples where you would go ahead and twist the truth anyway?
Ideally, I would estimate the negative effects: how many people would later learn I lied and abandon my cause, and how enemies of the cause might use the fact I lied against it, and the reputational harm to my other causes and to my allies.
To stop me fr...
I've said before that social reform often seems to require lying. Only one-sided narratives offering simple solutions motivate humans to act, so reformers manufacture one-sided narratives such as we find in Marxism or radical feminism, which inspire action through indignation. Suppose you tell someone, "Here's an important problem, but it's difficult and complicated. If we do X and Y, then after five years, I think we'd have a 40% chance of causing a 15% reduction in symptoms." They'd probably think they had something better to do.
But the examples I used in that previous post were all arguably bad social reforms: Christianity, Russian communism, and Cuban communism.
The argument that people need to be deceived into social reform assumes either that they're stupid, or that there's some game-theoretic reason why social reform that's very worthwhile to society as a whole isn't worthwhile to any individual in society.
Is that true? Or are people correct and justified in not making sudden changes until there's a clear problem and a clear solution to it?
Examples, I think, of good social reform, were the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Those movements didn't require wholesale lying and sleight-of-hand, because they could make valid and true one-sided arguments. It's hard to come up with a good counter-argument to "plantation slavery is bad". Even women's suffrage and Prohibition didn't require lying.
If you're backing a cause which doesn't inspire the action you think it deserves, and you find yourself twisting the truth a bit for dramatic effect, how strong evidence is that that your cause is less worthy than you think it is? Can you give examples where you would go ahead and twist the truth anyway?
For example, if you want to build an asteroid defense system for Earth, and the numbers say that the odds of it being needed in any given human generation are 0.0001%, it might not ever be worth it to any "purely selfish" human to pay the taxes to build that system. I'm ruling that example out, because it is really about the questions of how to discount the future and how to value future human lives. That's a known problem which this angle provides no new insight into.
If you want people to cooperate to reduce risk from AI, or to cure aging, but hardly anyone seems to care, would that fact affect your judgement of the task's true value to most people?
Essentially I'm asking whether you believe in the free market of ideas, in which the effort people put into different tasks is the real measure of their value, or whether you think we need some good-old Marxist centralized planning of values. Answer carefully, because I don't think you can both support the manipulation of public opinion wrt social issues or existential threats (because the public is too stupid to know what it should value), and still believe the free market can solve economic problems (because people are smart enough to know what they value).
A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn't work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does. Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates), even though Republicans have much more faith in the free market.