I don’t want to be rude, but this appears to be just shoddy overuse of rationalist lingo in the name of shoehorning a myopic and empirically unsupported political agenda into the consequentialist framework.
What observed empirical effects? You link to a very strange post saying, concretely, that
This person has had a falling-out with their friends who believe HBD, apparently because they have come to harbor other right-wing ideas poorly compatible with aspects of this person’s identity and lifesyle.
Those friends had drifted to the right because they felt persecuted “by people on the left or center-left” due to them believing HBD.
This person had concluded that HBD is pseudoscientific, by virtue of right-wingers being nasty to trans people and vegans.
Pardon me, what? Is this your evidence base?
№1-2 might as well be considered arguments for lesser demonization of HBD. There is nothing inherently political about thinking one way or another about sources of cognitive differences; the political valence is imposed on such hypotheses by external forces. If smart people independently arrive at HBD as a morally neutral explanation for generally available observations, then it’s not very prudent on part of “the left or center-left” to baselessly label them racists, supporters of genocidal far-right ideologies, insane cranks and such and leave them no choice except break their own minds into an Orwellian mold, learn to live in falsehood, or go rightward. When they say, like Bostrom, that they are motivated by humanitarian impulses, they can be taken at their word.
You, however, seem to conclude that the only problem is insufficient intensity of vilification of HBD, now as a “cause area” unto itself; that these people can be intimidated into not believing what they see, through pure peer pressure and pushing the topic to the fringe instead of rational persuasion.
№3 is honestly horrifying in terms of epistemic integrity. You seem to be dismissive of truth as a terminal value, so let’s put it like this: a person who sees nothing wrong with such pseudoreasoning – and, given the score, that’s normal on EA forum –can delude oneself into excusing arbitrary atrocities; or less dangerously, draining resources into arbitrarily ineffective causes just to feel good about oneself.
I haven’t previously heard anyone in EA say that it’s vital for our epistemic integrity to freely discuss infohazards
Far-right ideas have created enormous suffering over the past few centuries. As far as I know, we don’t have a great theory for how this happened. But it seems fairly clear that it has something to do with memetics
We don’t have a good theory, in part, because there’s no meaningful way to lump together “far-right ideas” over “the past few centuries”, or indeed seriously analyze anything prior to the 20th century through these lens. Do you mean Jacobites or Bourbons by far-right? Why not address la Terreur as an archetypal case of the idea of egalitarianism causing mass death and suffering in the characteristic manner of an infohazard? Should this make us suspicious of egalitarian ideation in general?
Here’s a honest thought: the notion of “memetics” or “infohazards” is an infohazard in its own right. It’s bad philosophy, and it offers zero explanatory power over traditional terms like “undeservedly popular idea”, “misleading idea” or “dangerous idea” but it gives the false impression of such adjectives having been substantiated. It’s just a way of whitewashing a classical illiberal and, indeed, totalitarian belief that some ideas must be kept away from the plebeians because they are akin to a plague. In illiberal societies those are “democracy” and “independent thought”; we have a consensus that theories justifying restriction of access to those are vacuous and evil, but those theories at least had some substance, unlike equivocation here about suffering caused by “far right” and, by an entirely frivolous extension, HBD.
In sum, analogizing ideas and their bearers to infectious agents invading and spreading within the body politic is a staple of far-right sociology that exploits deep-seated reactions of disease-associated disgust, fear and distrust of outsiders, and that’s all there is to “memetics” in such colloquial use. Perhaps you could do without resorting to such tools for thought.
It would be much better if we had a robust, principled method to guard against harms from far-right ideas.
Perhaps there is, and it’s called “law” and “democracy”, and you need to argue in a principled way for your cost-benefit analysis that concludes that extant legal and political checks against far-right threats are insufficient, and concludes with embracing of some of the worst totalitarian legacies to ostracize an apparent scientific truth.
I don’t want to be rude, but this appears to be just shoddy overuse of rationalist lingo in the name of shoehorning a myopic and empirically unsupported political agenda into the consequentialist framework.
What observed empirical effects? You link to a very strange post saying, concretely, that
This person has had a falling-out with their friends who believe HBD, apparently because they have come to harbor other right-wing ideas poorly compatible with aspects of this person’s identity and lifesyle.
Those friends had drifted to the right because they felt persecuted “by people on the left or center-left” due to them believing HBD.
This person had concluded that HBD is pseudoscientific, by virtue of right-wingers being nasty to trans people and vegans.
Pardon me, what? Is this your evidence base?
№1-2 might as well be considered arguments for lesser demonization of HBD. There is nothing inherently political about thinking one way or another about sources of cognitive differences; the political valence is imposed on such hypotheses by external forces. If smart people independently arrive at HBD as a morally neutral explanation for generally available observations, then it’s not very prudent on part of “the left or center-left” to baselessly label them racists, supporters of genocidal far-right ideologies, insane cranks and such and leave them no choice except break their own minds into an Orwellian mold, learn to live in falsehood, or go rightward. When they say, like Bostrom, that they are motivated by humanitarian impulses, they can be taken at their word.
You, however, seem to conclude that the only problem is insufficient intensity of vilification of HBD, now as a “cause area” unto itself; that these people can be intimidated into not believing what they see, through pure peer pressure and pushing the topic to the fringe instead of rational persuasion.
№3 is honestly horrifying in terms of epistemic integrity. You seem to be dismissive of truth as a terminal value, so let’s put it like this: a person who sees nothing wrong with such pseudoreasoning – and, given the score, that’s normal on EA forum –can delude oneself into excusing arbitrary atrocities; or less dangerously, draining resources into arbitrarily ineffective causes just to feel good about oneself.
We don’t have a good theory, in part, because there’s no meaningful way to lump together “far-right ideas” over “the past few centuries”, or indeed seriously analyze anything prior to the 20th century through these lens. Do you mean Jacobites or Bourbons by far-right? Why not address la Terreur as an archetypal case of the idea of egalitarianism causing mass death and suffering in the characteristic manner of an infohazard? Should this make us suspicious of egalitarian ideation in general?
Here’s a honest thought: the notion of “memetics” or “infohazards” is an infohazard in its own right. It’s bad philosophy, and it offers zero explanatory power over traditional terms like “undeservedly popular idea”, “misleading idea” or “dangerous idea” but it gives the false impression of such adjectives having been substantiated. It’s just a way of whitewashing a classical illiberal and, indeed, totalitarian belief that some ideas must be kept away from the plebeians because they are akin to a plague. In illiberal societies those are “democracy” and “independent thought”; we have a consensus that theories justifying restriction of access to those are vacuous and evil, but those theories at least had some substance, unlike equivocation here about suffering caused by “far right” and, by an entirely frivolous extension, HBD.
In sum, analogizing ideas and their bearers to infectious agents invading and spreading within the body politic is a staple of far-right sociology that exploits deep-seated reactions of disease-associated disgust, fear and distrust of outsiders, and that’s all there is to “memetics” in such colloquial use. Perhaps you could do without resorting to such tools for thought.
Perhaps there is, and it’s called “law” and “democracy”, and you need to argue in a principled way for your cost-benefit analysis that concludes that extant legal and political checks against far-right threats are insufficient, and concludes with embracing of some of the worst totalitarian legacies to ostracize an apparent scientific truth.