But I can’t trust his math because he’s cut himself off from half the information necessary to do the calculations. How can he estimate the number of vegans harmed or lost due to nutritional issues if he doesn’t let people talk about them in public?
This paragraph seems like a fully general counterargument against ever refraining from an information-gathering action because the expected value of the information provided by the action is less than the expected harm coming from the action. Yet evidently there are examples in e.g. medicine where one ought to do so.
Disagree. The straightforward reading of this is that claims of harm that route through sharing of true information will nearly-always be very small compared to the harms that route through people being less informed. Framed this way, it’s easy to see that, for example, the argument doesnt apply to things like dangerous medical experiments, because those would have costs that aren’t based in talk.
I agree that “claims of harm that route through sharing of true information will nearly-always be very small compared to the harms that route through people being less informed”, I just don’t see it as a straightforward reading of the paragraph I was commenting on. But arguing over the exegesis of a blog post is probably a waste of time if we agree at the object level.
This paragraph seems like a fully general counterargument against ever refraining from an information-gathering action because the expected value of the information provided by the action is less than the expected harm coming from the action. Yet evidently there are examples in e.g. medicine where one ought to do so.
Disagree. The straightforward reading of this is that claims of harm that route through sharing of true information will nearly-always be very small compared to the harms that route through people being less informed. Framed this way, it’s easy to see that, for example, the argument doesnt apply to things like dangerous medical experiments, because those would have costs that aren’t based in talk.
I agree that “claims of harm that route through sharing of true information will nearly-always be very small compared to the harms that route through people being less informed”, I just don’t see it as a straightforward reading of the paragraph I was commenting on. But arguing over the exegesis of a blog post is probably a waste of time if we agree at the object level.