Summary: In response to catching a glimpse of the dark world, and especially of the extent of human hypocrisy with respect to the dark world, one might take a dim view of one's fellow humans. I describe an alternative, Hufflepuff cynicism, in which you lower your concept of what the standards were all along. I give arguments for and against this perspective.

This came out of conversations with Steve Rayhawk, Harmanas Chopra, Ziz, and Kurt Brown.

In See the Dark World, Nate describes a difficulty which people have in facing the worst of a situation. In one of his examples, in which Alice and Bob grapple with the idea that the market price of saving a life is $3000, Bob's response is to deny what this means about people -- to avoid concluding that humans aren't generally willing to pay more than 3k to save a life, Bob decides that money is not a relevant measure of how much people would sacrifice to save a life. This is a non-sequiter, but allows Bob to sleep at night.

Alice, on the other hand, decides that a life really is only worth about 3k. This, to me, is something like Hansonian cynicism -- when revealed preferences differ from stated preferences, assume that people are lying about what they value.

Nate calls both Alice and Bob's response "tolerification", and recommends undoing tolerification by entertaining the what-if question describing the dark world (following the leave-a-line-of-retreat method).

Ziz gives a somewhat similar analysis in social reality: when you recognize the distance between the social reality most people are willing to endorse and the real reality, you have three options:

Make a buckets error where your map of reality overwrites your map of social reality, and you have the “infuriating perspective”, typified by less-cunning activists and people new to their forbidden truths. “No, it is not ‘a personal choice’, which means people can’t hide from the truth. I can call people out and win arguments”.

Make a buckets error where your map of social reality overwrites your map of reality, and you have the “dehumanizing perspective” of someone who is a vegetarian for ethical reasons but believes truly feels it when they say “it’s a personal choice”, the atheist who respects religion-the-proposition, to some extent the trans person who feels the gender presentation they want would be truly out of line…

But it was all

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Hufflepuff Cynicism

Hufflepuff Cynicism