Jokes aside, I actually think it’s that kind of post that we should have a community norm against. Saying “Neo reactionaries are evil racists” or “Socialist regimes killed the most people!” is just as inflammatory as “black people are less intelligent than whites”. And what use does it serve?
A single comment is no cause for a ban of course, but if someone will look for any excuse to say that neoreactionaries are evil or blacks are inferior or socialists suck, and they post about it in every thread they can, then don’t you think they should be banned?
Let me explain my background. I grew up in a socialist country. Luckily, no one from my family or friends was a target of the regime, and it ended when I was 13. Only then I learned about what happened to other people. (You know, stuff like: secret police knocks on your door at midnight, they take your family member away, and you never seem them again. Later someone unofficially tells you they died during interrogation. They warn you that unless you shut up, you could be next. Also, you, your children, and your grandchildren will never be allowed to get to university or have a decent job, because you are relatives of a traitor, therefore politically unreliable. The regime hates you, but you are not allowed to leave the country, and will be killed if you try.) There was censorship to prevent me from learning sooner. I believed I was living in a happy paradise. Many people believe it today. (Many people also believe holocaust was a hoax, for similar psychological reasons.)
I remember a teacher at elementary school telling me: “Viliam, you think independently. You will have a lot of problems when you grow up.” I didn’t quite understand that, then. Now I do. So I guess I was lucky. Even my childhood experience with what you can and cannot say would be enough to predict that if someone in my country would write the Sequences, they would be inviting trouble. It’s difficult to explain why exactly; my neural network understands the rules, but they were never made explicit. It’s something like: merely saying “politics is the mind-killed” could be, under unlucky circumstances, be perceived as a criticism of the regime. You never say things that could be perceived as a criticism of the regime, because then you could have hard time explaining that you didn’t mean it that way.
The way I see it, the main difference between nazis and socialists is this: Nazis lost the war; their leaders were killed or put in prisons, their crimes publicly exposed and shamed. Socialists won the war, they were allowed to rule for decades, to eliminate free speech and spread their propaganda. After they killed and intimidated everyone who opposed them, and their rule was secured, they calmed down, and life under their rule became more peaceful during the following decades. Who knows; maybe in the parallel universe where nazis won the war, the nazis of 1980s were also less violent than the nazis of 1840s. (Maybe neoreactionaries are the moderate post-nazis from the parallel universe, where some later Führer hired Steve Jobs as the CEO.)
Anyway… the thing is, censorship “triggers” me. Censorship is the meta-evil that other evils can safely hide behind. Speaking about whether we need more or less censorship sounds like speaking about whether we need more or less secret police knocking on people’s doors at midnight. (Yeah, I can imagine a very exceptional situation, such as someone really constructing a nuclear bomb at their home… but that’s far from the typical scenario.) Censoring the bourgeois pseudoscience? Uhm, I’d rather have scientific questions answered by scientific means.
I generally try not to write off-topic comments. I consider exposing crimes of socialists highly relevant to the topic of censorship, because censorship was a critically important part of their regime; without censorship, it would fall apart. So the best way to keep me quiet about this topic is to stop proposing censorship on LW. Do we have a deal?
Thank you for taking the time to write all that, it helps me see where you are coming from. You clearly have a large framework which you are basing your views on, but the thing you have to keep in mind is that I do, too. I have several partially-written posts about this which I hope to post on Less Wrong one day, but I’m very worried they’ll be misconstrued because it’s such a difficult subject. The last thing I want to do is defend the practices of oppressive regimes, believe me. I’m worried that people just read my posts thinking “oh he is defending censorship, censorship is evil, downvote” without thinking about what I’m actually saying. “Censorship” is just a word. All of my arguments work just as well for “having a community norm against” something as opposed to “censoring” it.
The problem is a framing issue, I think. People keep seeing something like censorship as a bad thing period, because it is something that’s used by oppressive regimes. However, killing people is also used by oppressive regimes, and yet I still wouldn’t promote total pacifism. Your post reads to me like Ghandi saying that the Nazi’s should be opposed non-violently: I do believe that there is wisdom in what you say, but that’s going much too far. The thing you have to realize is that if all the nice and reasonable people in the world go around worrying that if they fight monsters they will themselves become monsters, the monsters always win because they’re the only ones willing to fight.
My view on killing is this: The crucial issue is who is being killed and why, and what principle you are using to determine who to kill. My view on censorship is this: The crucial issue is what view is being censored and why, and what principle you are using to determine what to censor. Censoring a view just because you disagree with it is just as wrong as killing someone just because they disagree with you. Getting everybody who disagrees with me to shut up wouldn’t actually make for the kind of world I want to live in. So what views do I think should be censored? Only those ones which seem to serve no purpose other than to destroy everything that’s good and right in this world.
Imagine you are the leader of Utopialand. Everything is going swimmingly: People are working hard, people are happy, and everyone is largely free to do and say as they please. Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful: You have to believe everything it says or you will be burned to death, you have to verbally abuse your children daily to raise them properly, you must reject anyone from society who holds ideas the religion disagree with, science and critical thinking are wicked, and so on and so forth. This religion goes against everything you value and what’s worse, it seems to be catching on. What is your reaction?
1) “Well if he wants to spread ideas that destroy everything I love and cherish that’s his right as a citizen. Who am I to tell him he can’t destroy the world? I mean it’s a free country. “ 2) “AAAAAAGHHH IT’S A VICTIM OF A MEMETIC PLAGUE! QUICK, ISOLATE HIM BEFORE HE INFECTS THE OTHERS.”
The way I see it, there is a war of ideas spanning across all of human history, with good and helpful ideas on the one side and horrible memetic plagues which destroy everything they touch on the other. The civilisations that have prospered so far are the ones which fought for the good ideas and won. I submit that if your reaction to the above is option 1) and not 2), you are essentially choosing to lose the war of ideas on purpose. There will be nothing left of your empire but fire and ash.
Your post reads to me like Ghandi saying that the Nazi’s should be opposed non-violently:
Uhm, no. I mean, this is exaggerating; we are not having any physical violence here. Worst case: poisoning of minds. (I believe Yvain handled the case of neo-reactionaries sufficiently, if that’s what we are talking about here.)
Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful:
What if there are two competing religions; each one of them evil in a different way. And one missionary approaches you with an offer that if you help him establish the holy inquisition, he will rid you of those evil heretics from the other side. Is it a good idea to give him the power?
Uhm, no. I mean, this is exaggerating; we are not having any physical violence here. Worst case: poisoning of minds.
Yes of course it’s an exaggeration, but it’s the same meta-type of error: Seeing X used for evil and therefore declaring that all X is evil and anyone who says X isn’t always evil is either evil or stupid themselves. It’s the same mistake as the one Neoreactionaries always complain about: “Perceived differences based on race or sex have been used to excuse evil, therefore anyone who says there are differences between races or sexes is evil!”
And poisoning of minds is very, very bad. People always seem to assume that physical violence is somehow worse than mental violence, but it’s just not true. Ideas can can be a lot more dangerous than guns.
(of course all of this is a bit moot since I’m not actually proposing banning democrats/republicans/race research/feminism or anything like that)
What if there are two competing religions; each one of them evil in a different way. And one missionary approaches you with an offer that if you help him establish the holy inquisition, he will rid you of those evil heretics from the other side. Is it a good idea to give him the power?
Of course not, why would I? Why are you asking this? Are you implying that in the real world, both sides to any conflict are always equally evil? Because that definitely isn’t the case in my experience.
Are you implying that in the real world, both sides to any conflict are always equally evil?
Didn’t say “equally”.
Seems to me that so far we had two significant attempts at suppressing opinions on LW.
1) Eugine’s one-person guerilla war of mass downvoting. Had some success for a few months, resulted in a ban.
2) Repeated suggestions that we should remove politically incorrect speech, because allegedly women don’t like it. Multiple proponents, no success yet.
I’m not sure which one of these is more dangerous; I could find arguments for either side. Eugine actually did censor the site for a while. However, he was finally banned, and if someone tries to do the same thing, they will probably get banned, too (hopefully much sooner). Also, his actions didn’t have popular support. On the other hand, censhorship of politically incorrect ideas is proposed repeatedly, by multiple people, openly in public. They demand that their norms become the official norms of the website, enforced by moderators.
Then I believe most people here want to have a debate without any political group dominating the website. About half of them don’t want to see here any politics at all, and I guess the other half would be okay with occassional, as rational as possible, polite debate about political topics.
Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful: You have to believe everything it says or you will be burned to death, you have to verbally abuse your children daily to raise them properly, you must reject anyone from society who holds ideas the religion disagree with, science and critical thinking are wicked, and so on and so forth. This religion goes against everything you value and what’s worse, it seems to be catching on.
If the religion is so obviously harmful why is it catching on? To paraphrase Kaj, why is it the place of individual people to decide that this religion needs censorship?
Saying “Neo reactionaries are evil racists” or “Socialist regimes killed the most people!” is just as inflammatory as “black people are less intelligent than whites”. And what use does it serve?
Well, two of those three statements are falsifiable statements that are useful for making predictions about the future.
Well. All three of them are falsifiable, barring quibbles over definition.
“Socialist regimes killed the most people!” may or may not be useful for making predictions—it’s not useful for making predictions about, say, the USSR—because it doesn’t exist now. But on the other hand, it created chains of cause and effect still in existence, and we would like to predict those.
“Neo reactionaries are evil racists” seems the most subjective, in that we are more confused about “evil” than “killing” or “intelligence”. But as long as we taboo “evil”, I don’t see how it could possibly be a useless-for-prediction, impossible-to-falsify statement.
“black people are less intelligent than whites” pretty clearly has the most confounders and controversy, but it’s certainly falsifiable in principle, and both sides would argue that it has already been tested, I think.
On the gripping hand, all three seem like prime candidates for political mind-killing.
“Neo reactionaries are evil racists” seems the most subjective, in that we are more confused about “evil” than “killing” or “intelligence”. But as long as we taboo “evil”, I don’t see how it could possibly be a useless-for-prediction, impossible-to-falsify statement.
You’d have to taboo “racists” too though.
(And tabooing “evil” is an almost FAI-complete problem, anyway.)
Jokes aside, I actually think it’s that kind of post that we should have a community norm against. Saying “Neo reactionaries are evil racists” or “Socialist regimes killed the most people!” is just as inflammatory as “black people are less intelligent than whites”. And what use does it serve?
A single comment is no cause for a ban of course, but if someone will look for any excuse to say that neoreactionaries are evil or blacks are inferior or socialists suck, and they post about it in every thread they can, then don’t you think they should be banned?
Let me explain my background. I grew up in a socialist country. Luckily, no one from my family or friends was a target of the regime, and it ended when I was 13. Only then I learned about what happened to other people. (You know, stuff like: secret police knocks on your door at midnight, they take your family member away, and you never seem them again. Later someone unofficially tells you they died during interrogation. They warn you that unless you shut up, you could be next. Also, you, your children, and your grandchildren will never be allowed to get to university or have a decent job, because you are relatives of a traitor, therefore politically unreliable. The regime hates you, but you are not allowed to leave the country, and will be killed if you try.) There was censorship to prevent me from learning sooner. I believed I was living in a happy paradise. Many people believe it today. (Many people also believe holocaust was a hoax, for similar psychological reasons.)
I remember a teacher at elementary school telling me: “Viliam, you think independently. You will have a lot of problems when you grow up.” I didn’t quite understand that, then. Now I do. So I guess I was lucky. Even my childhood experience with what you can and cannot say would be enough to predict that if someone in my country would write the Sequences, they would be inviting trouble. It’s difficult to explain why exactly; my neural network understands the rules, but they were never made explicit. It’s something like: merely saying “politics is the mind-killed” could be, under unlucky circumstances, be perceived as a criticism of the regime. You never say things that could be perceived as a criticism of the regime, because then you could have hard time explaining that you didn’t mean it that way.
The way I see it, the main difference between nazis and socialists is this: Nazis lost the war; their leaders were killed or put in prisons, their crimes publicly exposed and shamed. Socialists won the war, they were allowed to rule for decades, to eliminate free speech and spread their propaganda. After they killed and intimidated everyone who opposed them, and their rule was secured, they calmed down, and life under their rule became more peaceful during the following decades. Who knows; maybe in the parallel universe where nazis won the war, the nazis of 1980s were also less violent than the nazis of 1840s. (Maybe neoreactionaries are the moderate post-nazis from the parallel universe, where some later Führer hired Steve Jobs as the CEO.)
Anyway… the thing is, censorship “triggers” me. Censorship is the meta-evil that other evils can safely hide behind. Speaking about whether we need more or less censorship sounds like speaking about whether we need more or less secret police knocking on people’s doors at midnight. (Yeah, I can imagine a very exceptional situation, such as someone really constructing a nuclear bomb at their home… but that’s far from the typical scenario.) Censoring the bourgeois pseudoscience? Uhm, I’d rather have scientific questions answered by scientific means.
I generally try not to write off-topic comments. I consider exposing crimes of socialists highly relevant to the topic of censorship, because censorship was a critically important part of their regime; without censorship, it would fall apart. So the best way to keep me quiet about this topic is to stop proposing censorship on LW. Do we have a deal?
Thank you for taking the time to write all that, it helps me see where you are coming from. You clearly have a large framework which you are basing your views on, but the thing you have to keep in mind is that I do, too. I have several partially-written posts about this which I hope to post on Less Wrong one day, but I’m very worried they’ll be misconstrued because it’s such a difficult subject. The last thing I want to do is defend the practices of oppressive regimes, believe me. I’m worried that people just read my posts thinking “oh he is defending censorship, censorship is evil, downvote” without thinking about what I’m actually saying. “Censorship” is just a word. All of my arguments work just as well for “having a community norm against” something as opposed to “censoring” it.
The problem is a framing issue, I think. People keep seeing something like censorship as a bad thing period, because it is something that’s used by oppressive regimes. However, killing people is also used by oppressive regimes, and yet I still wouldn’t promote total pacifism. Your post reads to me like Ghandi saying that the Nazi’s should be opposed non-violently: I do believe that there is wisdom in what you say, but that’s going much too far. The thing you have to realize is that if all the nice and reasonable people in the world go around worrying that if they fight monsters they will themselves become monsters, the monsters always win because they’re the only ones willing to fight.
My view on killing is this: The crucial issue is who is being killed and why, and what principle you are using to determine who to kill. My view on censorship is this: The crucial issue is what view is being censored and why, and what principle you are using to determine what to censor. Censoring a view just because you disagree with it is just as wrong as killing someone just because they disagree with you. Getting everybody who disagrees with me to shut up wouldn’t actually make for the kind of world I want to live in. So what views do I think should be censored? Only those ones which seem to serve no purpose other than to destroy everything that’s good and right in this world.
Imagine you are the leader of Utopialand. Everything is going swimmingly: People are working hard, people are happy, and everyone is largely free to do and say as they please. Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful: You have to believe everything it says or you will be burned to death, you have to verbally abuse your children daily to raise them properly, you must reject anyone from society who holds ideas the religion disagree with, science and critical thinking are wicked, and so on and so forth. This religion goes against everything you value and what’s worse, it seems to be catching on. What is your reaction?
1) “Well if he wants to spread ideas that destroy everything I love and cherish that’s his right as a citizen. Who am I to tell him he can’t destroy the world? I mean it’s a free country. “
2) “AAAAAAGHHH IT’S A VICTIM OF A MEMETIC PLAGUE! QUICK, ISOLATE HIM BEFORE HE INFECTS THE OTHERS.”
The way I see it, there is a war of ideas spanning across all of human history, with good and helpful ideas on the one side and horrible memetic plagues which destroy everything they touch on the other. The civilisations that have prospered so far are the ones which fought for the good ideas and won. I submit that if your reaction to the above is option 1) and not 2), you are essentially choosing to lose the war of ideas on purpose. There will be nothing left of your empire but fire and ash.
Uhm, no. I mean, this is exaggerating; we are not having any physical violence here. Worst case: poisoning of minds. (I believe Yvain handled the case of neo-reactionaries sufficiently, if that’s what we are talking about here.)
What if there are two competing religions; each one of them evil in a different way. And one missionary approaches you with an offer that if you help him establish the holy inquisition, he will rid you of those evil heretics from the other side. Is it a good idea to give him the power?
Yes of course it’s an exaggeration, but it’s the same meta-type of error: Seeing X used for evil and therefore declaring that all X is evil and anyone who says X isn’t always evil is either evil or stupid themselves. It’s the same mistake as the one Neoreactionaries always complain about: “Perceived differences based on race or sex have been used to excuse evil, therefore anyone who says there are differences between races or sexes is evil!”
And poisoning of minds is very, very bad. People always seem to assume that physical violence is somehow worse than mental violence, but it’s just not true. Ideas can can be a lot more dangerous than guns.
(of course all of this is a bit moot since I’m not actually proposing banning democrats/republicans/race research/feminism or anything like that)
Of course not, why would I? Why are you asking this? Are you implying that in the real world, both sides to any conflict are always equally evil? Because that definitely isn’t the case in my experience.
Didn’t say “equally”.
Seems to me that so far we had two significant attempts at suppressing opinions on LW.
1) Eugine’s one-person guerilla war of mass downvoting. Had some success for a few months, resulted in a ban.
2) Repeated suggestions that we should remove politically incorrect speech, because allegedly women don’t like it. Multiple proponents, no success yet.
I’m not sure which one of these is more dangerous; I could find arguments for either side. Eugine actually did censor the site for a while. However, he was finally banned, and if someone tries to do the same thing, they will probably get banned, too (hopefully much sooner). Also, his actions didn’t have popular support. On the other hand, censhorship of politically incorrect ideas is proposed repeatedly, by multiple people, openly in public. They demand that their norms become the official norms of the website, enforced by moderators.
Then I believe most people here want to have a debate without any political group dominating the website. About half of them don’t want to see here any politics at all, and I guess the other half would be okay with occassional, as rational as possible, polite debate about political topics.
If the religion is so obviously harmful why is it catching on? To paraphrase Kaj, why is it the place of individual people to decide that this religion needs censorship?
Farmville must be an excellent game because so many people play it.
Well, two of those three statements are falsifiable statements that are useful for making predictions about the future.
Well. All three of them are falsifiable, barring quibbles over definition.
“Socialist regimes killed the most people!” may or may not be useful for making predictions—it’s not useful for making predictions about, say, the USSR—because it doesn’t exist now. But on the other hand, it created chains of cause and effect still in existence, and we would like to predict those.
“Neo reactionaries are evil racists” seems the most subjective, in that we are more confused about “evil” than “killing” or “intelligence”. But as long as we taboo “evil”, I don’t see how it could possibly be a useless-for-prediction, impossible-to-falsify statement.
“black people are less intelligent than whites” pretty clearly has the most confounders and controversy, but it’s certainly falsifiable in principle, and both sides would argue that it has already been tested, I think.
On the gripping hand, all three seem like prime candidates for political mind-killing.
You’d have to taboo “racists” too though.
(And tabooing “evil” is an almost FAI-complete problem, anyway.)