How much is this our brain doing lazy reasoning, and how much is this strategically correct reasoning under cultural constraints.
E.g. if I admit that I believe allegations against A, then I the norms of our culture demand that I must stop associating with A. But if A has a lots of good qualities, then the cost of stopping associating with them is high, so I might want to take that into account.
I.e, the debate that is superficially about [are the allegations about A true] is actually about [should we kick out A], and most people know this on some level and act accordingly.
If this is what is going on, then the only way to stopp this "fallacy" is to change the incentive some how. This would include making it common knowledge that after we find out the truth of the allegations, there is a second step of waying the pros and cons of having this person around. But that can get into very taboo territory.
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1I agree that the situation you're describing is somewhat halo-defense-y rationally-defensible, in the spirit of ruling thinkers in, instead of out.
The examples I listed in the post are not about that. They are about cases where the claim X against A is being argued against by bringing up things that are irrelevant from the perspective of X against A. I didn't consider the other thing when writing the post.
Regarding how much of halo-defense-y stuff is something like what you're describing: IDK. At least on the spot, I'm finding it hard to come up with examples of "healthy halo defense" from my own experience and observation, but can easily generate more examples of the "unhealthy" type. The healthy kind[1] is coherent/plausible, but IDK to what extent it actually instantiates.
- ^
I'd rather coin a different term than "healthy halo defense", but I'm using this one provisionally.
I agree that the situation you're describing is somewhat halo-defense-y rationally-defensible, in the spirit of ruling thinkers in, instead of out.
I think you read something into my comment that I did not mean. I did not mean to say that less people should be kicked out. I'm making no comment on that either way. I'm just saying that if someone disagrees with the criteria for what is a unforgivable act, and it's taboo to argue over what should be forgivable, then they may (on the surface) argue over the facts instead, which may look like halo defense.
Specifically, there is a discussion about if person A has done [unforgivable thing]. Person B don't think [unforgivable thing] should be unforgivable, but just a normal bad thing, that can be forgiven if A has enough other good qualities. Person B thinks that probably a lot of people agree with them, but no-one can admit that they think [unforgivable thing] is not infinitely bad, without large social risk. So instead person B gestures at all the reason we would all like to keep person A around, and suggest we pretend that person A did not do [unforgivable thing].
Regarding how much of halo-defense-y stuff is something like what you're describing: IDK. At least on the spot, I'm finding it hard to come up with examples of "healthy halo defense" from my own experience and observation, but can easily generate more examples of the "unhealthy" type. The healthy kind[1] is coherent/plausible, but IDK to what extent it actually instantiates.
I'm not saying halo-defense is healthy. It's not. I'm saying it might be a symptom of a different problem, which means you'd have to solve that problem to get rid of halo-defense.
1I misunderstood you, at least connotationally. Thanks for the clarification. Regarding your main object-level point:
I'm saying it might be a symptom of a different problem, which means you'd have to solve that problem to get rid of halo-defense.
Interesting. To be honest, I don't know. Probably a representative dataset of halo defense-like dynamics spotted in the wild would be needed to answer this question.
I'm not actually sure people are miscalibrated here, at least for close friends? If someone accuses my best friend of murder, I really do think that they are much more likely to be lying than my friend is to have committed murder (barring exceptional circumstance like self-defense). This is entirely because of my judgement of their character, so that "when would I commit this crime?" really does tell me a lot about when they would.
People who are generally honest, law-abiding, and moral are in fact less likely to lie, break the law, and violate common morality.
It's seems likely that people are miscalibrated about weaker links, though, due to the reasons you've cited, the bonds of friendship, and the way that ill-doers will act differently (consciously or unconsciously) around people they think they can get away with harming.
People are often miscalibrated about long-heavy-tailed-ish things specifically, and this probably stems from an implicit assumption that people tend to be well-rounded.
The example of murder probably isn't great here, because that's, on priors, a fairly rare occurrence in modern developed-ish countries, and probably wherever you live.
To give an alternative example: you could observe someone express extreme emotional maturity in one context and expect that they are similarly emotionally mature in general, and yet this is not always true. I've met a lot of people whose level of (manifested?) emotional maturity is very context-dependent. I am, actually, one of those people.
Or, like:
People who are generally honest, law-abiding, and moral are in fact less likely to lie, break the law, and violate common morality.
I agree, but I think people overupdate on this, or at least make their update resistant to future evidence to the contrary.
I'll add to this: I think generally someone people kind and moral in one circumstance is Bayesian evidence of them being so in other circumstances, AND there are specific patterns of being sometimes kind and sometimes nasty that most people are under-aware of.
You have a good friend. They are always happy and cheerful. Once they hurt you by accident, but they sent you a cake the next day, and you forgave them before you could ask for an apology. They've had a couple people be mean to them in the past, and you feel sorry for them, but there's been nothing but cheer between you.
The previous paragraph includes three traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (constant happy exterior, niceties instead of apologies, believing a story in which they've always been the victim), and thus the previous paragraph is in fact Bayesian evidence that they may be horrible to other people.
Relatedly, if someone you know is accused of acting poorly toward another person, the observation that they never act that way toward you may provide nearly zero Bayesian evidence in their favor.
A very common example:
- Alice: "My boyfriend is controlling and abusive toward me, and disrespectful of other women."
- Bob: "I don't believe that. He never acted that way toward me!"
- Alice: "...Yeah. Duh. You're not a woman."
A related example from my own life:
- Bob: “You should be wary of Charlie.“
- Alice: “Why? He’s only ever been nice to me!”
- Bob: “Yes, and he’s also only ever been nice to me, but many of our friends report him being bad to them AND being horrible to people who he seems to consider ‘beneath him.’ I trust our friends, and so I’m worried about the possibility that Charlie is specifically kind when he’s around us.”
- Alice: “Charlie isn’t the type of person who would do that. I can tell.”
- Bob: “…”
I think in general people are vastly uncalibrated (in both directions) of the degree, and in some cases even the direction, of positive correlations/positive manifolds of different kinda-normal behavior with extreme behavior.
As an example of something with a superficially opposite moral of your post, I've seen multiple people confuse meta-honesty (of the form where someone will cheerfully tell you they're lying to you/lying to other people) with object-level honesty.
I think the implicit mental motion is that if somebody's telling you they're lying to you about X, they're less likely to lie to you about things other than X. Or if somebody tells you they're lying to other people, you're special and they won't ever lie to you, would they? Or something like "all politicians/CEOs lie, at least this dude's honest about it."
Whereas I much more have the view that any lie you see is the tip of the iceberg, and somebody cheerfully telling you how much they lie is probably positively correlated with the number of lies you don't know about.
Relatedly, "figuring out whether someone's a psychopath" is one of the situations where I trust empiricism and ordinary scientific reasoning over vibes, even for social questions.
1Great post. I'm curious about generalizations / other things in some class. Feels like there's a whole toolbox for "aggressively not answering the question". Another example besides the Halo Defense is agreeing on an abstracted claim (while not addressing the particular claim). E.g.:
A: "Do you agree that Charles generally does not carry his firearm, and that on the morning of the 9th he put his firearm into his backpack?" B: "I totally agree with you that murder is wrong. It's wrong when Republicans do it, and it's wrong when Democrats do it. And we can definitely discuss these things, and as I've said before, and I'll say it again, if someone commits murder then he should go to jail."
Part of how it works is simply distraction / filibustering. But also it kinda bends the Gricean implicature, where you're kinda compelling the discourse to have been about the abstracted claim. Sometimes it works on A; even if it doesn't, it might work on some of the audience; and even if it doesn't, it can give B plausible deniability, where an audience member might be like "well the conversation just didn't get clarified", as opposed to if B more directly said "uh no comment" or something.
I'm curious about generalizations / other things in some class
My first thought is the obvious "dual": the halo attack and its close cousin, guilt by association.
Regarding the direction in which you're going (a more interesting one): I had an experience of asking someone a question with the return type being requested as a binary yes/no with an elaboration, but then they proceeded to "answer" that the thing I'm asking about kinda isn't a thing. Only after leaving the conversation did I realize that they didn't answer my question and didn't meaningfully dissolve/unask it either. It felt shell-game-y.
Me: "Do you think X should be a part of the definition of Y or is it more like an important symptom of Y?"
Them: "I actually don't think X is a thing. It's more like Y involves kinda really trying to do X, but it never really does X."
Me: "Mmmm, kay?"
Me (after they left): "Wait, but so what? The question still mostly stands."
1Another example is focusing on some narrow and possibly utterly unimportant term mentioned by the interlocutor (implicitly communicating that this term's lack of clarity or something is load-bearing for the validity of the claim being made?). (For some reason, the two examples from my experience that come to mind are about climate change.)
Example 1: At some philosophically inclined conference, a speaker is giving a talk about the urgency of action for mitigation of the effects of climate change and starts saying something about "time" (lack of time? things taking a lot of time?). Someone from the first row of the audience asks her how she defines "time".
Example 2: At a different conference, someone raises the possibility that to spend fewer resources, energy, and money on aircon, maybe we should encourage people to move to regions where we can live with much less aircon, because "we get aircon from nature". He is accused of bringing up the old and bad dichotomy between "nature" and "nurture/culture".
You should probably disagree with me here, but that's exactly what I mean when I say "x person / group selects on vibes (or rather, someone else's testimony of someone's "vibes")" in the context of not having a clear and transparent selection policy.
I guess halo effect may be something that affects judgment and not necessary for "vibes based selection ". But I'd find it helpful to clarify my thoughts.
I mean, to the extent that people are selecting based on "vibes" but are not aware of it and actually think that they're selecting based on something else, this is totally a halo effect thing.
The common pattern underlying all of them is a spillover of evaluative judgments made on one axis (e.g., "helpful to people", "efficient") to all other axes
So it is basically a failure to decouple the values when they diverge?
IDK how broadly you tend and intend to use the term "value", but for me, applying it here is quite a stretch.
If you're measuring the performance of a program, and notice that it's very fast/time-efficient, and consequently conclude that it must therefore also be space-efficient (use as little memory as possible), and elegantly written, then you're definitely confusing various axes of evaluation — i.e., the thing I pointed at in the part of the post you're replying — but it seems like a big stretch to call time-efficiency, space-efficieny, and source code elegance three distinct values that are being confused here.
Oh, I didn't mean value as "measure of worth" but value as in the math definition of "amount denoted by reference".
1The "halo defence" is not, I think, an attempt to actually state that factually the outcome is less likely or has not happened.
It is, rather, that X is not important enough to warrant focus/punishment because of the positive effects of Y.
It is socially costly (basically, negative EV) to be publically seen to claim that X is somehow not a problem, hence the deflection.
To use an absurd example - imagine that my neighbour is a unique person in the world with some sort of superhuman ability to cure cancer or do incredible research that no-one else can do with really high expected value for society. He also may or may not have murdered a few people.
It is less costly socially to argue, even if everyone knows that this isn't really true, that he probably didn't do the murders, because he's such a good guy in other areas, as opposed to arguing the utilitarian "well yeah, he's a murderer, but he's saved 5000 people from cancer so like, whatever".
You can always come up with examples where halo defending someone is the Ethical move, and they surely instantiate sometimes, but I'm not sure I've ever encountered one, whereas I can think of lots of examples of people doing the halo defense when it was the Bad thing to do.
By ethical injunctions, I tend to distrust this sort of dishonest not-on-point argumentation, unless I have good reasons not to.
People could be useful pillars or functionaries in a community, and losing those pillars would come at great cost to the community or group. Isn’t it reasonable for the group to weigh the cost to remove vs the cost to look the other way/ privately censure/ or warn with more leniency than someone less important (Positive and negative costs of looking the other way/ private censure/ lenient warnings all considered)?
My guess is this kind of calculus is happening at a half-conscious level, but it comes with feelings like “we can’t lose <person x>.”
And I think groups really can schism or collapse over stuff like this, either via the argument about what to do, the visibly and costly holding to the same standards (and thus maybe losing a core leader), or the letting them get away with it. There may be no clean heuristic answer here.
As one tangential example, I still like MIT Opencourseware Physics by Dr Lewin, for example, and as of a few years ago still found his classes hard to replace. Yet he was found to have done online sexual harassment. What would we do if say Feynman was found guilty of that or worse? Could we really replace his lectures? Would we be able to recommend them to a niece in good conscience?
As I said, I doubt there are many easy answers down this road.
People could be useful pillars or functionaries in a community, and losing those pillars would come at great cost to the community or group. Isn’t it reasonable for the group to weigh the cost to remove vs the cost to look the other way/ privately censure/ or warn with more leniency than someone less important (Positive and negative costs of looking the other way/ private censure/ lenient warnings all considered)?
I mean, maybe, sometimes, sure. The law of equal and opposite applies. But how often is this the case? Is a sexual harasser a good material for a pillar of the local community? In most cases, I'd rather have this stubborn attachment painfully ripped apart, so that a new order can take shape.
(Also, I don't think I stated (explicitly?) in the post that halo defense is "bad", because that was not the point of the post. I do think it's generally mostly bad, because all the cases of it I can think of having seen were bad and unvirtuous. But, like, sure, in general whether it is the right response depends on something like "alignment of the local social judgment system to the people involved in defending or not defending the person being accused".)
As one tangential example, I still like MIT Opencourseware Physics by Dr Lewin, for example, and as of a few years ago still found his classes hard to replace. Yet he was found to have done online sexual harassment. What would we do if say Feynman was found guilty of that or worse? Could we really replace his lectures? Would we be able to recommend them to a niece in good conscience?
Agalloch is my favorite band ever, even though their frontman, John Haughm, used to tweet some idiotic anti-semitic stuff.
Similarly, I hold Nick Bostrom in very high regard, even though I think some of his most recent work would be better to have never been published, and his response to the racist email scandal was undignified.
Appropriately responding to people doing nasty stuff doesn't mean banishing them maximally from the community. Perhaps 2 out of the 3 examples I gave in the post are ones that involve sexual harassment, and proceeding with those things "to the end" often involves ruining the career and social standing, in which case mea culpa, because I didn't mean to anchor on this too heavily.[1]
Keep paying people for their good work, while punishing their bad behavior accordingly, or something like that?
- ^
But also, sometimes the right response is to banish someone fairly close to maximally.
Once upon a time, A Relatively Famous Guy On The Internet was accused of having been simultaneously dating multiple women, without those women's knowledge, those women (according to the accusation) having been convinced that they were his exclusive partners all along. Then, one of his friends, another Relatively Famous Guy On The Internet, defended him by claiming that he is "a great friend, a wonderful human being, and that his podcast was incredibly helpful to a lot of people".
This is a great example of what I came to call the "halo defense".
The halo defense involves "defending" someone from allegations by bringing up traits of X that are meant to be interpreted positively, without addressing the allegations on the basis of which X is being "attacked".
I'll give two more examples from my personal experience:
The halo defense seems to occur not too infrequently. For example, it is one of the main drivers of community disputes. I haven't seen it named yet, and the name "halo defense" fits perfectly.
It is a special case of the halo effect:
of the noncentral fallacy:
and of the affect heuristic:
The common pattern underlying all of them is a spillover of evaluative judgments made on one axis (e.g., "helpful to people", "efficient") to all other axes.
PS: A phenomenon related to the halo defense is that people seem to be insufficiently aware of the fact that many persons' distribution of behaviors is long- and heavy-tailed, and thus extrapolating the behavior observed in most circumstances to all circumstances may not work. Relatedly, the typical mind fallacy leads people to reasoning in terms of (something like) asking themselves a question "Under what circumstances and modifications of my own mind, could I imagine myself doing such a thing?". Upon this question returning a null result ("Never. Under no circumstance or modification of my own mind."), they come to conclude that this allegation cannot be true.