It’s hard to come up with a good counter-argument to “slavery is bad”. Even women’s suffrage and Prohibition didn’t require lying.
That’s bullshit. More precisely, it is quite possible that you don’t consider any of the counter-arguments to be good. But you should not generalize it for everyone. A “good argument” is a 2-place word; it means that a given person accepts the premises of the argument and its style of reasoning. Also, there is a lot of hindsight bias and social pressure here: we already know which side has historically won and which is associated with losers; but before that happened, people probably evaluated the quality of the arguments differently.
I could start playing Devil’s Advocate and give examples of specific arguments that would seem good to some people, but I am not sure the readers (and our stalkers at RationalWiki) would focus on the meta-argument of “it is possible to make good arguments for X” instead of taking the arguments as literally my true opinions (plus opinions of everyone who upvoted this comment, plus opinions of everyone who didn’t throw a tantrum and publicly leave LW after seeing me publish this comment there).
“There are no good arguments for X” is simply how having a successful social taboo against X feels from inside.
For example, many debates with real-life feminists about women’s suffrage assume that men had universal voting rights since ever, and women only got them recently. But the truth is that “men’s suffrage” (a voting right of every adult man) also only came historically recently. In some countries, both men and women got the universal voting right at the same year. But you wouldn’t guess that by listening to debates about women’s suffrage in that country.
I think addressing PhilGoetz’s example about slavery as unsuitable doesn’t invalidate his main point at all as it is only intended to provide an example. It may not be a good example but I think we can imagine good ones instead.
The central point is whether lying (at the very least intentional selection on information provided) to groups of people is required to achieve some common goods. And this is not even posited as true but asked as question (and I see no answer to that only comparably minor nitpicking).
I fail to see how men having only recently gotten the vote is a good argument against women getting the vote.
You neglected to include a good argument in favor of slavery.
If you look at my earlier post, and my examples in this post, you’ll see that “altruistic deception” is when you present something that is false and unworkable in order to motivate people to do work that you hope will contribute to a real solution. Your objection amounts to saying that we can’t say that anything is false, or even that one X is more false than another X.
Let’s test your idea that “There are no good arguments for X” is simply how having a successful social taboo against X feels from inside:
“There are no good arguments for the phlogiston theory of chemistry” is simply how having a successful social taboo against the phlogiston theory of chemistry feels from inside.
“There are no good arguments for Ptolemaic astronomy” is simply how having a successful social taboo against Ptolemaic astronomy feels from inside.
“There are no good arguments for Aristotelian physics” is simply how having a successful social taboo against Aristotelian physics feels from inside.
Marxism is less able to make correct predictions, and more thoroughly empirically refuted, than any of those theories. It is a false theory. It is a not-even-wrong theory. If you ask a Marxist to predict whether a corn blight will make the price of corn go up or down, he can only say, “Markets are a tool of the bourgeois, and their prices are commodity fetishization.” Marx deliberately removed the concept of market price from the Marxist ontology, so Marxists can’t be tempted to make quantitative predictions and be proven wrong.
Christianity, my other example, is also bad at making predictions. I object to your implication that we cannot say that the theory of Christianity is less probable than the theory of evolution.
I think you’re misunderstanding Viliam’s point. Your examples, other than Marxism, aren’t proposing empirically testable theories: they’re moral revolutions, or social ones that demand valuing some people differently from before. Slavery, suffrage, Christianity or Prohibition aren’t right or wrong in some objective non-moral sense. Arguments for or against such things are inevitably about convincing people, not about some objective truth.
Slavery, suffrage, Christianity or Prohibition aren’t right or wrong in some objective non-moral sense. Arguments for or against such things are inevitably about convincing people, not about some objective truth.
Well three of those four things are essentially government/societal policies, and one can argue about what the consequnces of adopting or not adopting those policies are.
It’s possible to make predictions and arguments about how letting women vote would affect society, or men in particular. But the people who fought for women’s suffrage did so on moral grounds of equal rights; even if they had believed suffrage would in fact harm society in some way they wouldn’t have changed their minds. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Christianity is even more clearly about moral precepts and not about “worldly” benefit. Anti-slavery is too, although the US civil war mixed that up with a lot of other causes. About Prohibition I don’t know enough to say.
I fail to see how men having only recently gotten the vote is a good argument against women getting the vote.
It wasn’t meant as an argument against women getting the vote, but rather as an example against the argument that good causes don’t require lying. Well, strictly speaking, maybe the lying wasn’t necessary, but such is the human nature that even when a good cause becomes a political topic, people immediately start lying and spreading lies that make their cause seem even better.
For example, women’s suffrage was not only believed to fix a specific legal inequality, but also to end all wars, etc. The idea of “no difference between men and women other than a few anatomical details” is probably recent; the original argument for women in politics was that women were better than men. To see how serious were historically feminists about the idea of “equality of sexes”, note that some famous feminists supported the white feather campaign, and influential feminist organizations opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. So there was and still is a lot of lying involved.
Debates about slavery are often framed as “evil white men enslaved peaceful black people”, ignoring the historical fact that slave trade was popular in Africa before white men started participating in it. If we are going to condemn slavery as a principle (as I believe we should) then it is a lie by omission to speak about American white masters, and ignore the whole culture of slavery in Africa… plus another huge elephant in the room, the traditional Islamic slavery, which is even supported in their holy book, specifically encourages sexual slavery, and existed since the very beginning of their religion, and still exists today. Also, current debates about slavery completely erase all the white slaves / indentured servants, and their descendants are ironically told to “check their privilege” and feel ashamed for having benefited from slavery.
And Prohibition? Uhm, what is your opinion on the current “War on Drugs” and how exactly it differs?
Yes, but please note I made my comment about slavery while using the abolition of American black slavery as an example of a good cause which did not require lying. Substituting “conscription” for “slavery” makes it no longer relevant to my statements.
Do you think the early Marxists were lying? I’m inclined to think they were telling the truth as they saw it. Later Marxists—after it was clear that Marxism was leading to poverty rather than prosperity—are a different story.
It doesn’t matter to me whether they were lying deliberately or not. The abstract question I’m trying to ask is whether a need to tell untruths is strong evidence against the worthiness of a cause. Whether the person telling the untruths knows they’re untrue is irrelevant.
If you’ll check the original post, you’ll see I phrased it in terms of the separate valuations of the individuals deciding whether to mislead people, and the individuals deciding whether to follow such people. It does not posit an objective “worthiness”. That was shorthand to try to avoid spending my life writing paragraphs like this re-writing the details of my post every time I reply to a comment about it.
This is not a central example of slavery but still. Some people claim that military conscription is a form of slavery. And enough people think that there are enough good arguments in favor of military conscription that many countries practice it.
Let’s test your idea that “There are no good arguments for X” is simply how having a successful social taboo against X feels from inside:
“There are no good arguments for the phlogiston theory of chemistry” is simply how having a successful social taboo against the phlogiston theory of chemistry feels from inside.
“There are no good arguments for Ptolemaic astronomy” is simply how having a successful social taboo against Ptolemaic astronomy feels from inside.
“There are no good arguments for Aristotelian physics” is simply how having a successful social taboo against Aristotelian physics feels from inside.
There are in fact good arguments for all three of those theories, and better arguments against. I’m guessing you don’t know either arguments, and base your belief in all three based on argument from authority.
Edit: Also the situation isn’t exactly analogous due to the difference between debates about physical facts, and debates about policy.
There were good arguments for all of those things when they were still in use. There are no good Arguments today for favoring Aristotelian physics over Newtonian physics, Ptolemaic over Copernican, or the phlogiston theory over the oxygen theory, where an Argument means a complete consideration of the evidence and the individual arguments.
Viliam’s comment, which I’m sad to see has 10 points on LessWrong, uses the impreciseness of what I meant when I said “no good arguments” to crowbar in a claim that we just can’t say some theories are wrong. We can.
It should be obvious to anybody reading my original post that digressions into what is a “good argument” are irrelevant; the point is that many activists motivate people by advocating ideas that are false, or deceptively one-sided to the point that they are lies of omission. My question is what the distribution of the degree of necessary lying is as a function of a cause’s social utility.
Stop hyper-focusing on individual words to try to score debating points when the intent behind their use is clear from the context, everybody on LessWrong.
There were good arguments for all of those things when they were still in use. There are no good Arguments today for favoring Aristotelian physics over Newtonian physics, Ptolemaic over Copernican, or the phlogiston theory over the oxygen theory, where an Argument means a complete consideration of the evidence and the individual arguments.
I’m not trying to score debating points. I have a serious point, namely that chances are you don’t actually know most of the arguments involved, either here or in the political debate. Instead you rely on appeals to authority. This raises the question of how reliable are the authorities. Probably reasonable reliable in the case of physics, rather less so in the case of political issues.
I did not appeal to any authorities. I relied on the readers here being well-educated. I am and was familiar with the history of these ideas, and with the specific arguments that at one time made Ptolemaic astronomy seem more reasonable, such as the apparent diameter of stars caused by atmospheric refraction, and that made phlogiston (which was just “negative oxygen”) seem reasonable, which are recounted in detail in Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I’m not familiar with any arguments giving Aristotelian physics advantages over Newtonian physics. It probably wasn’t immediately obvious to some people why things floated in water, or why hot air balloons rose; I suppose that could count.
I don’t think questions of appealing to authorities are relevant here. There are theories that are wrong. There seems to be a positive correlation between theories of action that require lies to inspire action, and theories that are wrong. My post asks about the strength of that correlation. Not knowing which theories are correct makes it harder to answer the question, but neither ignorance, nor knowledge, of the correctness of theories makes that question itself go away.
You neglected to include a good argument in favor of slavery.
Some people aren’t intelligent enough/don’t have high enough time preferences to function in modern society. Thus you either need to have them under the control of a master, or you wind up having to put them on the public dole and institutionalize the many of them anyway.
Some people aren’t intelligent enough/don’t have high enough time preferences to function in modern society.
Why should we have a moral expectation that people have to “function in modern society” or else be enslaved/institutionalized? Our adaptive environment is small forager tribes, not “modern society”.
Our adaptive environment is small forager tribes, not “modern society”.
Well, in case you haven’t noticed aren’t in small forager tribes right now.
Why should we have a moral expectation that people have to “function in modern society” or else be enslaved/institutionalized?
You’re right, I left out a few alternatives. We could also deport them to a haunter-gatherer society, let them go around engaging in tribal-style raids (although that tends to interfere with the functioning of modern society for those who can function in it), or let them starve to death.
That’s bullshit. More precisely, it is quite possible that you don’t consider any of the counter-arguments to be good. But you should not generalize it for everyone. A “good argument” is a 2-place word; it means that a given person accepts the premises of the argument and its style of reasoning. Also, there is a lot of hindsight bias and social pressure here: we already know which side has historically won and which is associated with losers; but before that happened, people probably evaluated the quality of the arguments differently.
I could start playing Devil’s Advocate and give examples of specific arguments that would seem good to some people, but I am not sure the readers (and our stalkers at RationalWiki) would focus on the meta-argument of “it is possible to make good arguments for X” instead of taking the arguments as literally my true opinions (plus opinions of everyone who upvoted this comment, plus opinions of everyone who didn’t throw a tantrum and publicly leave LW after seeing me publish this comment there).
“There are no good arguments for X” is simply how having a successful social taboo against X feels from inside.
For example, many debates with real-life feminists about women’s suffrage assume that men had universal voting rights since ever, and women only got them recently. But the truth is that “men’s suffrage” (a voting right of every adult man) also only came historically recently. In some countries, both men and women got the universal voting right at the same year. But you wouldn’t guess that by listening to debates about women’s suffrage in that country.
I think addressing PhilGoetz’s example about slavery as unsuitable doesn’t invalidate his main point at all as it is only intended to provide an example. It may not be a good example but I think we can imagine good ones instead.
The central point is whether lying (at the very least intentional selection on information provided) to groups of people is required to achieve some common goods. And this is not even posited as true but asked as question (and I see no answer to that only comparably minor nitpicking).
That’s a nitpicking which is barely related to the main point of the post.
I fail to see how men having only recently gotten the vote is a good argument against women getting the vote.
You neglected to include a good argument in favor of slavery.
If you look at my earlier post, and my examples in this post, you’ll see that “altruistic deception” is when you present something that is false and unworkable in order to motivate people to do work that you hope will contribute to a real solution. Your objection amounts to saying that we can’t say that anything is false, or even that one X is more false than another X.
Let’s test your idea that “There are no good arguments for X” is simply how having a successful social taboo against X feels from inside:
“There are no good arguments for the phlogiston theory of chemistry” is simply how having a successful social taboo against the phlogiston theory of chemistry feels from inside.
“There are no good arguments for Ptolemaic astronomy” is simply how having a successful social taboo against Ptolemaic astronomy feels from inside.
“There are no good arguments for Aristotelian physics” is simply how having a successful social taboo against Aristotelian physics feels from inside.
Marxism is less able to make correct predictions, and more thoroughly empirically refuted, than any of those theories. It is a false theory. It is a not-even-wrong theory. If you ask a Marxist to predict whether a corn blight will make the price of corn go up or down, he can only say, “Markets are a tool of the bourgeois, and their prices are commodity fetishization.” Marx deliberately removed the concept of market price from the Marxist ontology, so Marxists can’t be tempted to make quantitative predictions and be proven wrong.
Christianity, my other example, is also bad at making predictions. I object to your implication that we cannot say that the theory of Christianity is less probable than the theory of evolution.
I think you’re misunderstanding Viliam’s point. Your examples, other than Marxism, aren’t proposing empirically testable theories: they’re moral revolutions, or social ones that demand valuing some people differently from before. Slavery, suffrage, Christianity or Prohibition aren’t right or wrong in some objective non-moral sense. Arguments for or against such things are inevitably about convincing people, not about some objective truth.
Well three of those four things are essentially government/societal policies, and one can argue about what the consequnces of adopting or not adopting those policies are.
It’s possible to make predictions and arguments about how letting women vote would affect society, or men in particular. But the people who fought for women’s suffrage did so on moral grounds of equal rights; even if they had believed suffrage would in fact harm society in some way they wouldn’t have changed their minds. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Christianity is even more clearly about moral precepts and not about “worldly” benefit. Anti-slavery is too, although the US civil war mixed that up with a lot of other causes. About Prohibition I don’t know enough to say.
It wasn’t meant as an argument against women getting the vote, but rather as an example against the argument that good causes don’t require lying. Well, strictly speaking, maybe the lying wasn’t necessary, but such is the human nature that even when a good cause becomes a political topic, people immediately start lying and spreading lies that make their cause seem even better.
For example, women’s suffrage was not only believed to fix a specific legal inequality, but also to end all wars, etc. The idea of “no difference between men and women other than a few anatomical details” is probably recent; the original argument for women in politics was that women were better than men. To see how serious were historically feminists about the idea of “equality of sexes”, note that some famous feminists supported the white feather campaign, and influential feminist organizations opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. So there was and still is a lot of lying involved.
Debates about slavery are often framed as “evil white men enslaved peaceful black people”, ignoring the historical fact that slave trade was popular in Africa before white men started participating in it. If we are going to condemn slavery as a principle (as I believe we should) then it is a lie by omission to speak about American white masters, and ignore the whole culture of slavery in Africa… plus another huge elephant in the room, the traditional Islamic slavery, which is even supported in their holy book, specifically encourages sexual slavery, and existed since the very beginning of their religion, and still exists today. Also, current debates about slavery completely erase all the white slaves / indentured servants, and their descendants are ironically told to “check their privilege” and feel ashamed for having benefited from slavery.
And Prohibition? Uhm, what is your opinion on the current “War on Drugs” and how exactly it differs?
Is conscription slavery? Are there good arguments in favor of conscription?
Yes, but please note I made my comment about slavery while using the abolition of American black slavery as an example of a good cause which did not require lying. Substituting “conscription” for “slavery” makes it no longer relevant to my statements.
Do you think the early Marxists were lying? I’m inclined to think they were telling the truth as they saw it. Later Marxists—after it was clear that Marxism was leading to poverty rather than prosperity—are a different story.
It doesn’t matter to me whether they were lying deliberately or not. The abstract question I’m trying to ask is whether a need to tell untruths is strong evidence against the worthiness of a cause. Whether the person telling the untruths knows they’re untrue is irrelevant.
Define “worthiness”.
If you’ll check the original post, you’ll see I phrased it in terms of the separate valuations of the individuals deciding whether to mislead people, and the individuals deciding whether to follow such people. It does not posit an objective “worthiness”. That was shorthand to try to avoid spending my life writing paragraphs like this re-writing the details of my post every time I reply to a comment about it.
This is not a central example of slavery but still. Some people claim that military conscription is a form of slavery. And enough people think that there are enough good arguments in favor of military conscription that many countries practice it.
There are in fact good arguments for all three of those theories, and better arguments against. I’m guessing you don’t know either arguments, and base your belief in all three based on argument from authority.
Edit: Also the situation isn’t exactly analogous due to the difference between debates about physical facts, and debates about policy.
There were good arguments for all of those things when they were still in use. There are no good Arguments today for favoring Aristotelian physics over Newtonian physics, Ptolemaic over Copernican, or the phlogiston theory over the oxygen theory, where an Argument means a complete consideration of the evidence and the individual arguments.
Viliam’s comment, which I’m sad to see has 10 points on LessWrong, uses the impreciseness of what I meant when I said “no good arguments” to crowbar in a claim that we just can’t say some theories are wrong. We can.
It should be obvious to anybody reading my original post that digressions into what is a “good argument” are irrelevant; the point is that many activists motivate people by advocating ideas that are false, or deceptively one-sided to the point that they are lies of omission. My question is what the distribution of the degree of necessary lying is as a function of a cause’s social utility.
I’m not trying to score debating points. I have a serious point, namely that chances are you don’t actually know most of the arguments involved, either here or in the political debate. Instead you rely on appeals to authority. This raises the question of how reliable are the authorities. Probably reasonable reliable in the case of physics, rather less so in the case of political issues.
I did not appeal to any authorities. I relied on the readers here being well-educated. I am and was familiar with the history of these ideas, and with the specific arguments that at one time made Ptolemaic astronomy seem more reasonable, such as the apparent diameter of stars caused by atmospheric refraction, and that made phlogiston (which was just “negative oxygen”) seem reasonable, which are recounted in detail in Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I’m not familiar with any arguments giving Aristotelian physics advantages over Newtonian physics. It probably wasn’t immediately obvious to some people why things floated in water, or why hot air balloons rose; I suppose that could count.
I don’t think questions of appealing to authorities are relevant here. There are theories that are wrong. There seems to be a positive correlation between theories of action that require lies to inspire action, and theories that are wrong. My post asks about the strength of that correlation. Not knowing which theories are correct makes it harder to answer the question, but neither ignorance, nor knowledge, of the correctness of theories makes that question itself go away.
Some people aren’t intelligent enough/don’t have high enough time preferences to function in modern society. Thus you either need to have them under the control of a master, or you wind up having to put them on the public dole and institutionalize the many of them anyway.
Why should we have a moral expectation that people have to “function in modern society” or else be enslaved/institutionalized? Our adaptive environment is small forager tribes, not “modern society”.
Well, in case you haven’t noticed aren’t in small forager tribes right now.
You’re right, I left out a few alternatives. We could also deport them to a haunter-gatherer society, let them go around engaging in tribal-style raids (although that tends to interfere with the functioning of modern society for those who can function in it), or let them starve to death.