What if you aren’t sure if violence is the right thing to do? You obviously should want as many eyeballs to debug your thinking on that as possible no?
If you actually believe that violence might be the right thing to do, then you assign non-negligible probability to
the discussion will convince you that violence is indeed the right thing to do
you now have moral imperative to do violence, and you will act on this or convince others to act on it
you will want the discussion to never have occurred in the first place, because authorities can use it to track you down , and suppress your justified violence
If you want to discuss a coup or something do it in a less easily traceable fashion (not on a public forum. Use encryption. ).
You do realize this argument generalizes to discussing many things beyond violence right? So if this is your true rejection I hope you’ve spent some time decompartmentalizing on this.
The thing is discussing desirability of violence and carrying out violence are not necessarily done by the same person. Indeed historically they usually aren’t. This does not remove moral culpability but does provide some legal protection.
The thing is discussing desirability of violence and carrying out violence are not necessarily done by the same
person. Indeed historically they usually aren’t.
Certainly. I consider this to be evidence that the people discussing the desirability of violence do not actually believe what they are saying. They are merely attempting to raise their status in an in-group which hates the group against which violence is being discussed.
Due to hate speech laws, you may have less legal protection than you expect.
Certainly. I consider this to be evidence that the people discussing the desirability of violence do not actually believe what they are saying. They are merely attempting to raise their status in an in-group which hates the group against which violence is being discussed.
This fits with gwern’s model of terrorist groups as not being about political objectives but about dysfunctional support groups of people who bully each other into action because of all too human social games.
But you are making a mistake here. A similar one that people make after hearing about the evolutionary origins of altruism and then go on to behave as if altruism doesn’t really exist. Like thinking a mother was really doing fitness maximizing calculations when deciding to give the runt cub less food than the strong ones. She just feels less inclined to give it food because it isn’t as cute or something. The mechanism that produced that feeling certainly was optimized with fitness maximization as a goal in the past but that isn’t what is going on in her brain.
I’m pretty sure Ayatollah Khomeini, Thomas Paine or Lenin probably honestly believed in the desirability of the violence they where promoting. They weren’t faking it. But I think they probably did believed in it because of the social reasons you mention.
Like thinking a mother was really doing fitness maximizing calculations when deciding to give the runt cub less
food than the strong ones. She just feels less inclined to give it food because it isn’t as cute or something.
The fitness maximising calculations are encoded, by evolution, in the neural patterns relating to the cuteness response. The individuals whose cuteness response correlates with fitness are themselves more fit. Those who would give more food to their malformed three-legged offspring will go extinct. So of course the mother is doing fitness calculations. It doesn’t feel like that from the inside, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
And the religions people who merely believe that they believe in their god, they feel very religions from the inside.
There is a distinction to be made between the internal state of they who argue violence against a certain group is a good thing, but don’t lift a finger themselves (BELIEF1) , and, they who upon being convinced that violence against this group is a good thing, actually attack said group (BELIEF2). It is that distinction that I mean when I say they don’t really believe, even though both feel like honest belief from the inside. Neither is faking it, but there’s still a distinction.
The fitness maximising calculations are encoded, by evolution, in the neural patterns relating to the cuteness response. The individuals whose cuteness response correlates with fitness are themselves more fit. Those who would give more food to their malformed three-legged offspring will go extinct. So of course the mother is doing fitness calculations. It doesn’t feel like that from the inside, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
No she is not. Except in the sense that she is perhaps one small step in something that does fitness calculations, but looking at her brain you wouldn’t find fitness maximization calculations being done just execution of old adaptations.
And the religions people who merely believe that they believe in their god, they feel very religions from the inside.
Religious people believe they believe in God. And many of them are correct on this.
There is a distinction to be made between the internal state of they who argue violence against a certain group is a good thing, but don’t lift a finger themselves (BELIEF1) , and, they who upon being convinced that violence against this group is a good thing, actually attack said group (BELIEF2). It is that distinction that I mean when I say they don’t really believe, even though both feel like honest belief from the inside. Neither is faking it, but there’s still a distinction.
It can also be called division of labour. My comparative advantage may lie in bashing Wiggin heads or crafting arguments for why bashing Wiggin heads is good or organizing the logistics so our heads don’t get bashed by Wiggins so that we can bash more of theirs.
I don’t see from a consquentalist stand point what is so different between me pyhsically bashing a Wiggin head, pressing a button that activates a machine that bashes as Wiggin head and manipulating someone into bashing a Wiggin head. To call only one of these indication of “real” belief that bashing Wiggin heads is good (and I hope we all agree it is!) seems not very useful at all, especially since it is perfectly possible that the preferences are literally identical inside their brains but merely the means available to them are what varies.
The distinction seems useful only in very peculiar circumstances, like trying to discover my preferences with regards to personal physical confrontation or combat.
No she is not. Except in the sense that she is perhaps one small step in something that does fitness
calculations, but looking at her brain you wouldn’t find fitness maximization calculations being done just
execution of old adaptations.
These old adaptations encode rough heuristics of limited applicability which approximate fitness calculations (if the environment has been fairly constant for long enough). They are actually there inside the brain. What else do you think the cuteness response as you used here is?
Religious people believe they believe in God. And many of them are correct on this.
Are they? So very few of them actually take their beliefs seriously. So very few of them actually behave as if their expected utility calculations are dominated by treats of eternal damnation and promises of eternal salvation.
It can also be called division of labour. My comparative advantage may lie in bashing Wiggin heads or crafting
arguments for why bashing Wiggin heads is good or organizing the logistics so our heads don’t get bashed by
Wiggins so that we can bash more of theirs.
Yes. The problem is that this is exactly the rationalisation that someone would use if it weren’t true. Then again, it might be true.
We need to distinguish
(type A) Someone wants to rise in power within a certain group, advocates violence against a hated out-group, and remains largely protected from legal consequences himself because he doesn’t actually commit any violent acts. When asked, he claims his non-action is due to division-of-labour-reasoning.
(type B) Someone actually thinks violence against a certain out-group is a good thing (in the greater good sense), and doesn’t commit any violent acts himself based on division-of-labour-reasoning. When asked about his motivations, he is not (easily?) distinguishable from (A).
What’s the difference? The difference is that (type A) should be discouraged from encouraging violence. If a (type A) successfully encourages a group of followers to commit violence against a hated out-group , people get hurt. This was not the (type A)’s intention, it’s just an unfortunate side effect that he doesn’t really care about.
(type B)s, on the other hand, should be listened to, and their arguments weighed carefully. For the greater good, you know. In fact this seems like a good reason for (type B)s to signal that they themselves do not in any way profit from the violence.
What are your priors? More (type B)? More (type A)?
I don’t see from a consquentalist stand point what is so different between me pyhsically bashing a Wiggin
head, pressing a button that activates a machine that bashes as Wiggin head and manipulating someone
into bashing a Wiggin head.
You said it yourself : not being the one who actually commits the violent acts provides some legal protection. Your not ending up in jail is a consequence. (I don’t actually know what a Wiggin head is, I assume “bashing a Wiggin head” is some socially unaccepted form of violence).
Due to hate speech laws, you may have less legal protection than you expect.
lol. Hate speech laws are primarily about punishing ethnocentric white people, secondarily for protecting very specific minorities. Even when written so as to protect people of a certain profession or class or education level or political ideology as they are in my country they are never used that way.
An example: Do you think that saying you want to take stuff from or harm rich people without getting into specifics about a particular person will ever get you into legal trouble?
Do you think that saying you want to take stuff from or harm rich people without getting into specifics about a particular person will ever get you into legal trouble?
I imagine it depends a lot on the extent to which the legal jurisdiction I’m in at the time is influenced by rich people, and the extent to which those rich people take my having said that seriously. In most jurisdictions and for most audiences, very likely not, unless I’m a far more compelling speaker than I think I am.
I was talking in general, not about you specifically. In fact I much appreciate your out-of-the-box view on many subjects, and I can guess why you would argue against any form of censorship here, slippery slopes and all that.
Former Sharia4Belgium spokesman … convicted of charges relating to incitement to hatred and violence
and the discrimination of non-Muslims, receiving a 6-month prison sentence.
I think your example is rather atypical to be honest at least in the wider West. Emma West being the more typical one. Very much like with hate crime laws there is controversy whether hate speech against white people even is hate speech.
What would be considered unacceptable for one group is not unacceptable for another. The star of the recent popular movie Django Unchained, Jamie Fox joked for example:
“I get free. I save my wife and I kill all the white people in the movie,” Foxx said to thunderous applause. “How great is that?”
in light of his other comments this is interesting
“As a black person it’s always racial. … when I get home my other homies are like how was your day? Well, I only had to be white for at least eight hours today, [or] I only had to be white for four hours.”
Foxx went on to say that “black is the new white.”
Whether this combined is ominous, righteous or innocuous depends on your model of the world. That how such laws are applied depends heavily on what kind of model of the world judges or police officers are likely to use is hardly disputable however.
Oh, I agree fully that such laws are problematic and open to abuse, and that it might well be better for no such laws to exist at all. Nonetheless they exist and should occur as a (possibly very low) cost in the calculation of the expected utility of advocating violence.
Certainly. I consider this to be evidence that the people discussing the desirability of violence do not actually believe what they are saying.
Not necessarily. It could be division of labor since the people who are good at figuring out which violence to do are not necessarily the same people good at doing violence.
A friend and I once put together a shortcomictrying to analyze democracy from an unusual perspective, including presenting the idea that an underlying threat of violent popular uprising should the system be corrupted helps keep it running well. This was closely related to a shortercomic presenting some ideas on rationality. The project led to some interesting discussions with interesting people, which helped me figure out some ideas I hadn’t previously considered, and I consider it to have been worth the effort; but I’m unsure whether or not it would fall afoul of the new policy.
How ‘identifiable’ do the targets of proposed violence have to be for the proposed policy to apply, and how ‘hypothetical’ would they have to be for it not to? Some clarification there would be appreciated.
How ‘identifiable’ do the targets of proposed violence have to be for the proposed policy to apply, and how ‘hypothetical’ would they have to be for it not to? Some clarification there would be appreciated.
Then discussing it on the public Internet is the wrong thing to do.
Also, implying that violence is best discussed in private, versus not being discussed at all. It’s like saying in public “But let’s talk about our illegal activities in a more private venue.” There should be no perception of LW being associated with such, period (.)
Actually, I can think of at least one type of situation where this isn’t true, though it seems unwise to explain it in public and in any case it’s still not something you’d want associated with LW, or in fact happening at all in most cases.
Generally speaking, there’s a lot of options grownups in real life resort to before they resort to violence, and I would have no problem with a post describing the fully generic considerations and how far you’d actually have to go down the decision tree before you got to violence, without any identifiables being named. People who honestly don’t realize this would be welcome to read that post. I may be somewhat prejudiced by considering it completely obvious that jumping straight to violence as a cognitive answer and then blathering about your conspiracy on the Internet is merely stupid.
Someone lives in an area where there recently been a number of violent muggings. They are considering bringing a gun with them when they go out, in order to defend themself; they suspect they may be overestimating the danger based on news reports. So they decide to ask here if there are any relevant biases that may be coloring their judgement., and this leads into a general discussion of what chance there should be of encountering violent criminals before it becomes rational to arm yourself (and risk accidentally injuring or killing yourself or passersby.)
Discussion on lesswrong is not likely to give them an answer. Honestly, I can’t think of any public place on the internet that is likely to be all that helpful, unfortunately.
Then discussing it on the public Internet is the wrong thing to do. I can’t compare it to anything but juvenile male locker-room boasting.
What if you aren’t sure if violence is the right thing to do? You obviously should want as many eyeballs to debug your thinking on that as possible no?
If you actually believe that violence might be the right thing to do, then you assign non-negligible probability to
the discussion will convince you that violence is indeed the right thing to do
you now have moral imperative to do violence, and you will act on this or convince others to act on it
you will want the discussion to never have occurred in the first place, because authorities can use it to track you down , and suppress your justified violence
If you want to discuss a coup or something do it in a less easily traceable fashion (not on a public forum. Use encryption. ).
You do realize this argument generalizes to discussing many things beyond violence right? So if this is your true rejection I hope you’ve spent some time decompartmentalizing on this.
I don’t see how to decompartmentalize that, so I’m interested in what you are referring to.
The thing is discussing desirability of violence and carrying out violence are not necessarily done by the same person. Indeed historically they usually aren’t. This does not remove moral culpability but does provide some legal protection.
Certainly. I consider this to be evidence that the people discussing the desirability of violence do not actually believe what they are saying. They are merely attempting to raise their status in an in-group which hates the group against which violence is being discussed.
Due to hate speech laws, you may have less legal protection than you expect.
This fits with gwern’s model of terrorist groups as not being about political objectives but about dysfunctional support groups of people who bully each other into action because of all too human social games.
But you are making a mistake here. A similar one that people make after hearing about the evolutionary origins of altruism and then go on to behave as if altruism doesn’t really exist. Like thinking a mother was really doing fitness maximizing calculations when deciding to give the runt cub less food than the strong ones. She just feels less inclined to give it food because it isn’t as cute or something. The mechanism that produced that feeling certainly was optimized with fitness maximization as a goal in the past but that isn’t what is going on in her brain.
I’m pretty sure Ayatollah Khomeini, Thomas Paine or Lenin probably honestly believed in the desirability of the violence they where promoting. They weren’t faking it. But I think they probably did believed in it because of the social reasons you mention.
The fitness maximising calculations are encoded, by evolution, in the neural patterns relating to the cuteness response. The individuals whose cuteness response correlates with fitness are themselves more fit. Those who would give more food to their malformed three-legged offspring will go extinct. So of course the mother is doing fitness calculations. It doesn’t feel like that from the inside, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
And the religions people who merely believe that they believe in their god, they feel very religions from the inside.
There is a distinction to be made between the internal state of they who argue violence against a certain group is a good thing, but don’t lift a finger themselves (BELIEF1) , and, they who upon being convinced that violence against this group is a good thing, actually attack said group (BELIEF2). It is that distinction that I mean when I say they don’t really believe, even though both feel like honest belief from the inside. Neither is faking it, but there’s still a distinction.
No she is not. Except in the sense that she is perhaps one small step in something that does fitness calculations, but looking at her brain you wouldn’t find fitness maximization calculations being done just execution of old adaptations.
Religious people believe they believe in God. And many of them are correct on this.
It can also be called division of labour. My comparative advantage may lie in bashing Wiggin heads or crafting arguments for why bashing Wiggin heads is good or organizing the logistics so our heads don’t get bashed by Wiggins so that we can bash more of theirs.
I don’t see from a consquentalist stand point what is so different between me pyhsically bashing a Wiggin head, pressing a button that activates a machine that bashes as Wiggin head and manipulating someone into bashing a Wiggin head. To call only one of these indication of “real” belief that bashing Wiggin heads is good (and I hope we all agree it is!) seems not very useful at all, especially since it is perfectly possible that the preferences are literally identical inside their brains but merely the means available to them are what varies.
The distinction seems useful only in very peculiar circumstances, like trying to discover my preferences with regards to personal physical confrontation or combat.
These old adaptations encode rough heuristics of limited applicability which approximate fitness calculations (if the environment has been fairly constant for long enough). They are actually there inside the brain. What else do you think the cuteness response as you used here is?
Are they? So very few of them actually take their beliefs seriously. So very few of them actually behave as if their expected utility calculations are dominated by treats of eternal damnation and promises of eternal salvation.
Yes. The problem is that this is exactly the rationalisation that someone would use if it weren’t true. Then again, it might be true.
We need to distinguish
(type A) Someone wants to rise in power within a certain group, advocates violence against a hated out-group, and remains largely protected from legal consequences himself because he doesn’t actually commit any violent acts. When asked, he claims his non-action is due to division-of-labour-reasoning.
(type B) Someone actually thinks violence against a certain out-group is a good thing (in the greater good sense), and doesn’t commit any violent acts himself based on division-of-labour-reasoning. When asked about his motivations, he is not (easily?) distinguishable from (A).
What’s the difference? The difference is that (type A) should be discouraged from encouraging violence. If a (type A) successfully encourages a group of followers to commit violence against a hated out-group , people get hurt. This was not the (type A)’s intention, it’s just an unfortunate side effect that he doesn’t really care about.
(type B)s, on the other hand, should be listened to, and their arguments weighed carefully. For the greater good, you know. In fact this seems like a good reason for (type B)s to signal that they themselves do not in any way profit from the violence.
What are your priors? More (type B)? More (type A)?
You said it yourself : not being the one who actually commits the violent acts provides some legal protection. Your not ending up in jail is a consequence. (I don’t actually know what a Wiggin head is, I assume “bashing a Wiggin head” is some socially unaccepted form of violence).
See here: wiggin
lol. Hate speech laws are primarily about punishing ethnocentric white people, secondarily for protecting very specific minorities. Even when written so as to protect people of a certain profession or class or education level or political ideology as they are in my country they are never used that way.
An example: Do you think that saying you want to take stuff from or harm rich people without getting into specifics about a particular person will ever get you into legal trouble?
I imagine it depends a lot on the extent to which the legal jurisdiction I’m in at the time is influenced by rich people, and the extent to which those rich people take my having said that seriously. In most jurisdictions and for most audiences, very likely not, unless I’m a far more compelling speaker than I think I am.
I was talking in general, not about you specifically. In fact I much appreciate your out-of-the-box view on many subjects, and I can guess why you would argue against any form of censorship here, slippery slopes and all that.
Example of hate-speech laws being used
I think your example is rather atypical to be honest at least in the wider West. Emma West being the more typical one. Very much like with hate crime laws there is controversy whether hate speech against white people even is hate speech.
What would be considered unacceptable for one group is not unacceptable for another. The star of the recent popular movie Django Unchained, Jamie Fox joked for example:
in light of his other comments this is interesting
Whether this combined is ominous, righteous or innocuous depends on your model of the world. That how such laws are applied depends heavily on what kind of model of the world judges or police officers are likely to use is hardly disputable however.
Oh, I agree fully that such laws are problematic and open to abuse, and that it might well be better for no such laws to exist at all. Nonetheless they exist and should occur as a (possibly very low) cost in the calculation of the expected utility of advocating violence.
Not necessarily. It could be division of labor since the people who are good at figuring out which violence to do are not necessarily the same people good at doing violence.
A friend and I once put together a short comic trying to analyze democracy from an unusual perspective, including presenting the idea that an underlying threat of violent popular uprising should the system be corrupted helps keep it running well. This was closely related to a shorter comic presenting some ideas on rationality. The project led to some interesting discussions with interesting people, which helped me figure out some ideas I hadn’t previously considered, and I consider it to have been worth the effort; but I’m unsure whether or not it would fall afoul of the new policy.
How ‘identifiable’ do the targets of proposed violence have to be for the proposed policy to apply, and how ‘hypothetical’ would they have to be for it not to? Some clarification there would be appreciated.
It’s only applied if a mod feels like it.
Also, implying that violence is best discussed in private, versus not being discussed at all. It’s like saying in public “But let’s talk about our illegal activities in a more private venue.” There should be no perception of LW being associated with such, period (.)
Actually, I can think of at least one type of situation where this isn’t true, though it seems unwise to explain it in public and in any case it’s still not something you’d want associated with LW, or in fact happening at all in most cases.
What if someone is, y’know, unsure?
Generally speaking, there’s a lot of options grownups in real life resort to before they resort to violence, and I would have no problem with a post describing the fully generic considerations and how far you’d actually have to go down the decision tree before you got to violence, without any identifiables being named. People who honestly don’t realize this would be welcome to read that post. I may be somewhat prejudiced by considering it completely obvious that jumping straight to violence as a cognitive answer and then blathering about your conspiracy on the Internet is merely stupid.
That … doesn’t seem to answer my question.
Perhaps an example is in order.
Someone lives in an area where there recently been a number of violent muggings. They are considering bringing a gun with them when they go out, in order to defend themself; they suspect they may be overestimating the danger based on news reports. So they decide to ask here if there are any relevant biases that may be coloring their judgement., and this leads into a general discussion of what chance there should be of encountering violent criminals before it becomes rational to arm yourself (and risk accidentally injuring or killing yourself or passersby.)
Does this help clarify my problem?
Discussion on lesswrong is not likely to give them an answer. Honestly, I can’t think of any public place on the internet that is likely to be all that helpful, unfortunately.
Good point.