That’s true. I do avoid “biting off more than I can chew”. But then, I wouldn’t even challenge someone on religion if the context was wrong. I’m not sure the loss of status would come from arguing for “crackpot beliefs”. Rather, if I’m not talking to people who would want to go 10 levels deep with me on an abstract discussion, it’s impolite to put the conversation on that track.
I’m trying to think of arguments I’ve made that have left people a bit horrified. The sort of thing where people have brought it up later and said, “Yeah, but you believe X”.
Once I was talking to some friends about capital punishment, and I suggested that capital punishment would be much better applied to white collar crimes, because those crimes likely involve a more explicit cost/benefit analysis, and they tend to have worse social impacts than a single murder anyway. The inferential distance here is high because it relies on a consequentialist view of the purpose of criminal punishments. I was also being a bit contrarian here just for the sake of it. I’m not at all confident about whether this would be helpful or harmful.
In another similar context, I was explaining how I viewed punishments as strictly deterrents, and didn’t view “justice” as an intrinsic good. The thought experiment I put forward was, if it were all the same to everyone else in the world, and nobody ever knew about it, I would prefer that Hitler had escaped from the bunker and lived out his life happily in isolation somewhere. Or that he died and went to the best heaven imaginable. I guess this is the “Hitler doesn’t deserve so much as a stubbed toe” idea.
I’ve also horrified people with views on child pornography. Arguing that fictive images (cartoons etc) of children shouldn’t be illegal makes people uncomfortable, and questioning the role of child pornography in motivating offenders is also dangerous. I’ve had good and bad discussions about this. Sometimes I’ve also been contrarian about this, too.
These are all similar examples, because they’re the ones that started to come to mind. There may be other cases on different topics, I don’t remember.
Overall I don’t regret talking about these things at all, and I think mostly people find me more interesting for my willingness to “go there”. Hm, I should point out that I believed all these things before reading LessWrong. So maybe the inferential distance isn’t as high anyway.
I agree with everything you said (including the grandparent). Some of the examples you named are primarily difficult because of the ugh-field and not because of inferential distance, though.
One of the problems is that it’s strictly more difficult to explain something than to understand it. To understand something you can just go through the literature at your own pace, look up everything you’re not certain about, and so continue studying until all your questions are answered. When you want to explain something you have to understand it but you also have to be able to figure out the right words to bridge the inferential gap, you have to figure out where the other person’s model differs from yours and so on.
So there will always be a set of problems you understand well enough to be confident they’re true but not well enough to explain them to others.
Anthropomorphic global warming is a belief that falls into this category for most of us. It’s easy to follow the arguments and to look at the data and conclude that yes, it’s humans that are the cause of global warming. But to argue for it successfully? Nearly impossible (unless you have studied the subject for years).
Cryonics is also a topic that’s notoriously difficult to discuss. If you can argue for that effectively my hat’s off to you. (Argue for it effectively ⇒ they sign up)
That’s true. I do avoid “biting off more than I can chew”. But then, I wouldn’t even challenge someone on religion if the context was wrong. I’m not sure the loss of status would come from arguing for “crackpot beliefs”. Rather, if I’m not talking to people who would want to go 10 levels deep with me on an abstract discussion, it’s impolite to put the conversation on that track.
I’m trying to think of arguments I’ve made that have left people a bit horrified. The sort of thing where people have brought it up later and said, “Yeah, but you believe X”.
Once I was talking to some friends about capital punishment, and I suggested that capital punishment would be much better applied to white collar crimes, because those crimes likely involve a more explicit cost/benefit analysis, and they tend to have worse social impacts than a single murder anyway. The inferential distance here is high because it relies on a consequentialist view of the purpose of criminal punishments. I was also being a bit contrarian here just for the sake of it. I’m not at all confident about whether this would be helpful or harmful.
In another similar context, I was explaining how I viewed punishments as strictly deterrents, and didn’t view “justice” as an intrinsic good. The thought experiment I put forward was, if it were all the same to everyone else in the world, and nobody ever knew about it, I would prefer that Hitler had escaped from the bunker and lived out his life happily in isolation somewhere. Or that he died and went to the best heaven imaginable. I guess this is the “Hitler doesn’t deserve so much as a stubbed toe” idea.
I’ve also horrified people with views on child pornography. Arguing that fictive images (cartoons etc) of children shouldn’t be illegal makes people uncomfortable, and questioning the role of child pornography in motivating offenders is also dangerous. I’ve had good and bad discussions about this. Sometimes I’ve also been contrarian about this, too.
These are all similar examples, because they’re the ones that started to come to mind. There may be other cases on different topics, I don’t remember.
Overall I don’t regret talking about these things at all, and I think mostly people find me more interesting for my willingness to “go there”. Hm, I should point out that I believed all these things before reading LessWrong. So maybe the inferential distance isn’t as high anyway.
I agree with everything you said (including the grandparent). Some of the examples you named are primarily difficult because of the ugh-field and not because of inferential distance, though.
One of the problems is that it’s strictly more difficult to explain something than to understand it. To understand something you can just go through the literature at your own pace, look up everything you’re not certain about, and so continue studying until all your questions are answered. When you want to explain something you have to understand it but you also have to be able to figure out the right words to bridge the inferential gap, you have to figure out where the other person’s model differs from yours and so on.
So there will always be a set of problems you understand well enough to be confident they’re true but not well enough to explain them to others.
Anthropomorphic global warming is a belief that falls into this category for most of us. It’s easy to follow the arguments and to look at the data and conclude that yes, it’s humans that are the cause of global warming. But to argue for it successfully? Nearly impossible (unless you have studied the subject for years).
Cryonics is also a topic that’s notoriously difficult to discuss. If you can argue for that effectively my hat’s off to you. (Argue for it effectively ⇒ they sign up)