But guess what, epistemic integrity on something like this (I believe something pretty reprehensible and am not cowing to people telling me so) isn’t going to help with shrimp welfare or AI risk prevention. Or even malaria net provision. Do not mistake “sticking with your beliefs” to be an overriding good, above believing what’s true, or acting kindly towards the world, or acting like serious members of a civilisation where we all need to work together.
There was recently a post on Less Wrong about the concept of information that is “infohazardous if true”.
I haven’t previously heard anyone in EA say that it’s vital for our epistemic integrity to freely discuss infohazards. I don’t see why this case should be different.
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—if far-right ideas remain on the fringe, they will do a limited amount of harm; if far-right ideas become politically dominant, there’s a chance they’ll do a great deal of harm.
So, it seems that the best way to prevent far-right ideas from doing a ton of harm is to keep them on the fringe. This is fundamentally a pretty scary thing, because memetics is poorly understood. It would be much better if we had a robust, principled method to guard against harms from far-right ideas. But I don’t think such a method exists. Until it does, we have to operate on a “best guess” basis.
Aptdell—You mention ‘Far-right ideas have created enormous suffering over the past few centuries.’ Often true.
But also true of far-left ideas (including the Blank Slate doctrine that all individuals must have exactly equal abilities, preferences, & values, and any empirical evidence challenging this doctrine must be instantly slandered). Examples include every ‘idealistic’ communist regime that degenerated into a totalitarian nightmare, internal genocide, & surveillance state.
IMHO, it’s is NOT useful to fall into the usual left/right partisan trap of trying to assess the empirical truth of claims about human nature by trying to tally up the relative historical harms that allegedly resulted, usually second- or third-hand, from holding certain views.
But also true of far-left ideas (including the Blank Slate doctrine that all individuals must have exactly equal abilities, preferences, & values, and any empirical evidence challenging this doctrine must be instantly slandered). Examples include every ‘idealistic’ communist regime that degenerated into a totalitarian nightmare, internal genocide, & surveillance state.
I’m not sure this is true.
I just finished reading a ~170 page history of the Russian Revolution (covering through the late 1930s, including forced collectivization and the Great Purges), and I didn’t get the impression Blank Slate doctrine was an important cause of Soviet horrors. (I don’t recall it being mentioned at all, and it doesn’t appear in the book’s index.)
While researching this comment, I read some of this pdf, and again, I don’t see any discussion of Blank Slate doctrine. (There are good sections on the psychology of socialism starting on PDF page 300 -- the “Intuitive anti-capitalism” and “Gary Lineker fallacy” chapters.)
I’m also not sure it is relevant.
Supposing communist horrors are due to Blank Slate doctrine, perhaps Blank Slate doctrine is also “infohazardous if true”. I don’t think that affects my original points.
IMHO, it’s is NOT useful to fall into the usual left/right partisan trap of trying to assess the empirical truth of claims about human nature by trying to tally up the relative historical harms that allegedly resulted, usually second- or third-hand, from holding certain views.
I’m not doing that. I don’t think historical harms tell us whether a claim is true, just whether it is an infohazard if true (or “infohazard if believed” really—a meme can be both false and harmful!)
It was confusing writing, and I’m surprised Miller didn’t bring this up in his reply, but my interpretation is that the two aren’t actually connected except by loose ideological affiliation.
Blank Slate is mentioned as the “far-left” counterpoint to Bostrom’s theory as the topic of discussion. It is, AFAIK, a considerably younger “theory” than communism and is not related to communism’s failures.
The example of communism is brought up because you only call out “far-right ideas” causing enormous suffering, while ignoring that “far-left” ideas have also caused enormous suffering. Communism is the last century’s far-left failure mode and horror show; funny that people so often forget about all that.
Had you left out the partisan phrasing, I don’t think Miller would’ve taken any issue with your post, and I would’ve found it a stronger post as well. EA doesn’t require promotion of infohazards, and there’s no reason to implicitly suggest that infohazards can only come from one side of the spectrum.
Aptdell—not every historian is tuned into the role of explicit or tacit Blank Slate thinking in political ideologies. Again, I’d recommend Pinker (2001) to get that attunement.
Once you see the harms caused by Blank Slate doctrine—like once you see the harms caused by factory farming—you can’t un-see them. But not everyone is willing to confront those horrors.
The problem with Blank Slate doctrine (and many doctrines) isn’t that it’s ‘infohazardous if true’, but as you say, it’s more like ‘infohazardous if believed’—since it can be both false and harmful.
What fraction of the harms from communism do you attribute to Blank Slate thinking?
I assume you consider Blank Slate doctrine false. Do you believe communism would’ve worked out in a world where it was true? (My view is that most or all of the problems with communism would remain.)
I assume you consider Blank Slate doctrine false. Do you believe communism would’ve worked out in a world where it was true? (My view is that most or all of the problems with communism would remain.)
Yeah, this. The real issues with communism ultimately come down to ignoring thermodynamics exists. Once you accept that idea, a lot of other false ideas from communism starts to make more sense.
“the Blank Slate doctrine that all individuals must have exactly equal abilities, preferences, & values, and any empirical evidence challenging this doctrine must be instantly slandered)”
But when I look up Blank Slate doctrine on Google—I find nothing remotely related to this claim. Instead I see a lot of something like this:
“According to blank slate theory, the mind is completely blank at birth. From there, education, environment, and experiences – which are external, as well as material and/or immaterial – shape the child’s process of development.”
Also it’s not clear to me what you mean by “far-left”—do you have more specific labels in mind? I consider myself fairly left-wing but have never heard of this doctrine, and highly doubt that my even more lefty friends would endorse anything like your claim above.
Examples include every ‘idealistic’ communist regime that degenerated into a totalitarian nightmare, internal genocide, & surveillance state.
In this, you’re only considering far-left regimes that are highly state-controlled, rather than both libertarian and left-wing societies (e.g. anarchistic). If you look for these examples, you might actually find things are going pretty well internally (e.g. Zapatistas or Rojava) and that these societies don’t seek to eradicate sub-groups of a population—which is pretty uniform for far-right ideologies.
trying to tally up the relative historical harms that allegedly resulted, usually second- or third-hand, from holding certain views [emphasis mine].
Can you clarify what you mean here? I’m trying to be charitable but seems like you’re trying to cast doubt on the fact that far-right ideologies have caused harm to people, or diminish the harm that has been caused. Would appreciate you specifying exactly what you meant as this could easily be interpreted as this pretty reprehensible view.
James—you’re giving a very uncharitable interpretation that sounds politically motivated.
I explicitly said that it’s ‘often true’ that ‘far-right ideas have created enormous suffering’. In what sense was that ‘trying to cast doubt’ or ‘diminish the harm’?
Then I argued that far-left ideas have also created enormous suffering.
We can dispute what % of far-left nations become highly state-controlled such that they have the centralized capacity for totalitarian oppression. My estimate might be considerably higher than your estimate. I don’t see many examples of truly libertarian or anarchistic societies that last more than 10 years, or that involve more than 10 million people. But such disputes would get us into precisely the kinds of pointless partisan squabbling that EA tries (rightly) to avoid.
If you’d like to learn more about the Blank Slate doctrine, and its many harmful effects over the last couple of centuries, I’d highly recommend the classic Steven Pinker book The Blank Slate (2001).
Could you clarify your last paragraph I quoted then? Im genuinely unsure why you used the word “allegedly”, if you do believe the far-right ideas have causes large amounts of harm?
I also wasn’t clear on what you meant by second or third-hand in this context, so clarifying that would also help me understand your position better.
James—I don’t get the sense that you’re arguing in good faith, but are looking for ‘gotcha’ quotes that you can share out of context. Sorry, I’m not interested in playing that game.
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.
There was recently a post on Less Wrong about the concept of information that is “infohazardous if true”.
Given the observed empirical effects of having certain beliefs about racial differences, it seems plausible to me that certain claims about racial differences fall into the “infohazardous if true” category.
I haven’t previously heard anyone in EA say that it’s vital for our epistemic integrity to freely discuss infohazards. I don’t see why this case should be different.
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—if far-right ideas remain on the fringe, they will do a limited amount of harm; if far-right ideas become politically dominant, there’s a chance they’ll do a great deal of harm.
So, it seems that the best way to prevent far-right ideas from doing a ton of harm is to keep them on the fringe. This is fundamentally a pretty scary thing, because memetics is poorly understood. It would be much better if we had a robust, principled method to guard against harms from far-right ideas. But I don’t think such a method exists. Until it does, we have to operate on a “best guess” basis.
Aptdell—You mention ‘Far-right ideas have created enormous suffering over the past few centuries.’ Often true.
But also true of far-left ideas (including the Blank Slate doctrine that all individuals must have exactly equal abilities, preferences, & values, and any empirical evidence challenging this doctrine must be instantly slandered). Examples include every ‘idealistic’ communist regime that degenerated into a totalitarian nightmare, internal genocide, & surveillance state.
IMHO, it’s is NOT useful to fall into the usual left/right partisan trap of trying to assess the empirical truth of claims about human nature by trying to tally up the relative historical harms that allegedly resulted, usually second- or third-hand, from holding certain views.
I’m not sure this is true.
I just finished reading a ~170 page history of the Russian Revolution (covering through the late 1930s, including forced collectivization and the Great Purges), and I didn’t get the impression Blank Slate doctrine was an important cause of Soviet horrors. (I don’t recall it being mentioned at all, and it doesn’t appear in the book’s index.)
While researching this comment, I read some of this pdf, and again, I don’t see any discussion of Blank Slate doctrine. (There are good sections on the psychology of socialism starting on PDF page 300 -- the “Intuitive anti-capitalism” and “Gary Lineker fallacy” chapters.)
I’m also not sure it is relevant.
Supposing communist horrors are due to Blank Slate doctrine, perhaps Blank Slate doctrine is also “infohazardous if true”. I don’t think that affects my original points.
I’m not doing that. I don’t think historical harms tell us whether a claim is true, just whether it is an infohazard if true (or “infohazard if believed” really—a meme can be both false and harmful!)
It was confusing writing, and I’m surprised Miller didn’t bring this up in his reply, but my interpretation is that the two aren’t actually connected except by loose ideological affiliation.
Blank Slate is mentioned as the “far-left” counterpoint to Bostrom’s theory as the topic of discussion. It is, AFAIK, a considerably younger “theory” than communism and is not related to communism’s failures.
The example of communism is brought up because you only call out “far-right ideas” causing enormous suffering, while ignoring that “far-left” ideas have also caused enormous suffering. Communism is the last century’s far-left failure mode and horror show; funny that people so often forget about all that.
Had you left out the partisan phrasing, I don’t think Miller would’ve taken any issue with your post, and I would’ve found it a stronger post as well. EA doesn’t require promotion of infohazards, and there’s no reason to implicitly suggest that infohazards can only come from one side of the spectrum.
Aptdell—not every historian is tuned into the role of explicit or tacit Blank Slate thinking in political ideologies. Again, I’d recommend Pinker (2001) to get that attunement.
Once you see the harms caused by Blank Slate doctrine—like once you see the harms caused by factory farming—you can’t un-see them. But not everyone is willing to confront those horrors.
The problem with Blank Slate doctrine (and many doctrines) isn’t that it’s ‘infohazardous if true’, but as you say, it’s more like ‘infohazardous if believed’—since it can be both false and harmful.
What fraction of the harms from communism do you attribute to Blank Slate thinking?
I assume you consider Blank Slate doctrine false. Do you believe communism would’ve worked out in a world where it was true? (My view is that most or all of the problems with communism would remain.)
Yeah, this. The real issues with communism ultimately come down to ignoring thermodynamics exists. Once you accept that idea, a lot of other false ideas from communism starts to make more sense.
I’m confused by this—you say:
But when I look up Blank Slate doctrine on Google—I find nothing remotely related to this claim. Instead I see a lot of something like this:
Also it’s not clear to me what you mean by “far-left”—do you have more specific labels in mind? I consider myself fairly left-wing but have never heard of this doctrine, and highly doubt that my even more lefty friends would endorse anything like your claim above.
In this, you’re only considering far-left regimes that are highly state-controlled, rather than both libertarian and left-wing societies (e.g. anarchistic). If you look for these examples, you might actually find things are going pretty well internally (e.g. Zapatistas or Rojava) and that these societies don’t seek to eradicate sub-groups of a population—which is pretty uniform for far-right ideologies.
Can you clarify what you mean here? I’m trying to be charitable but seems like you’re trying to cast doubt on the fact that far-right ideologies have caused harm to people, or diminish the harm that has been caused. Would appreciate you specifying exactly what you meant as this could easily be interpreted as this pretty reprehensible view.
James—you’re giving a very uncharitable interpretation that sounds politically motivated.
I explicitly said that it’s ‘often true’ that ‘far-right ideas have created enormous suffering’. In what sense was that ‘trying to cast doubt’ or ‘diminish the harm’?
Then I argued that far-left ideas have also created enormous suffering.
We can dispute what % of far-left nations become highly state-controlled such that they have the centralized capacity for totalitarian oppression. My estimate might be considerably higher than your estimate. I don’t see many examples of truly libertarian or anarchistic societies that last more than 10 years, or that involve more than 10 million people. But such disputes would get us into precisely the kinds of pointless partisan squabbling that EA tries (rightly) to avoid.
If you’d like to learn more about the Blank Slate doctrine, and its many harmful effects over the last couple of centuries, I’d highly recommend the classic Steven Pinker book The Blank Slate (2001).
Could you clarify your last paragraph I quoted then? Im genuinely unsure why you used the word “allegedly”, if you do believe the far-right ideas have causes large amounts of harm?
I also wasn’t clear on what you meant by second or third-hand in this context, so clarifying that would also help me understand your position better.
James—I don’t get the sense that you’re arguing in good faith, but are looking for ‘gotcha’ quotes that you can share out of context. Sorry, I’m not interested in playing that game.
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.