Widely-agreed-on HBD would provide a lot of cover for horrible racists, by which I mean people who (whatever fine-sounding reasons they might give) want to discriminate against various outgroups just because they don’t like them.
Therefore manipulate those loathsome peasants with lies and suppress the truth to keep the peasants in line. The Noble Lie.
Unfortunately:
Widely-agreed-on social control through Noble Lies would provide a lot of cover for horrible totalitarians, by which I mean people who (whatever fine-sounding reasons they might give) want to subjugate others.
If the baseline level of noble lies is zero, then it would make sense to keep it there, as a Schelling fence. However, I doubt that any society has a baseline of zero.
Or is the whole trick of Noble Lies that you’d never admit that they are lies?
When people say crazy, obviously false things, I more and more wonder how much of what they are saying are things they don’t believe themselves, but are just saying to go along with what others say, or manipulate others in Noble Lie fashion.
Noble lies we approve of seem to us to be truths. Noble lies we dont approve approve seem to plain old lies...”crazy, obviously false things”. So almost everybody thinks they are living ina Noble Lie free world.
Noble lies of the right include “my tribe is objectively better than everyone else’s” and “his majesty was placed on the theone, by God”. Obsessing about four point differences in IQ is a version of the former.
Doesn’t seem that way to me. If I tell a Noble Lie, I don’t believe it (in the epistemic sense), but intend others to do so. If I spread a claim I think is true and it is in fact false, I’m just spreading a falsehood that I’m unaware of.
If what I say is correct, you would not be able to tell, solipsistically, if you believed in any lies that seemed true to you. You need to start with other people’s lies, in particular by thinking about how persistent crazy ideas could fulfil an instrumentaal purpose.
So what did you mean? I thought the clear implication was that you favored suppressing the truth about HBD because you felt it would give bad people breathing room to do bad things. Or you just think that other people favored suppressing the truth about HBD on those grounds?
First: Not “suppressing the truth” but “not expending effort looking into something whose widespread belief would have bad consequences”. Second: I said nothing about my own preferences, but about “why there is not much appetite (in most circles) for discussing (etc.)”. Third: I do not advocate, neither do I think those opposed to “HBD” generally advocate, telling lies. Fourth: so far as I know, I don’t regard anyone as “loathsome peasants”; in my idiolect “peasant” is not an insult, and the racists I know are mostly not peasants either literally or metaphorically.
What you’re doing here is taking what I wrote, finding the worst kinda-sorta-semi-defensible interpretation of it you can, and expressing it in ways clearly intended to make me look as bad as possible. Apparently you think that’s a reasonable way to treat someone else; to my mind it’s an act of hostility as overt as breaking my windows or my nose, though of course much less actually harmful.
And my point is that in this discussion I am being misrepresented and attacked unusually much.
(I also happen to have an unusually strong dislike of the style of debate that proceeds mostly by insinuations, unstated implications and sideswipes, and have had for many years.)
When I see what I consider to be intellectually dishonest passive aggressive innuendo, I will often respond with a little hostility (closer to annoyance than the hostility I’d associate with breaking someone’s nose) and convert the passive aggressive stance to an overtly aggressive interpretation to hopefully get past the bullshit and see if we can openly discuss the innuendo. It seems not.
That’s very curious, because “intellectually dishonest passive aggressive innuendo” is pretty much exactly how I would describe your response to me, and I honestly can’t see that I’ve engaged in anything of the kind. So clearly we have a failure of communication.
I’m not sure what open discussion you want to have that you think I’m avoiding, but let me try making a few things more explicit.
I do not know whether any HBD-ish thesis is true. I think it entirely possible that some might be. My impression is that what evidence there is almost all points that way, but that much of the evidence in question is really questionable in various ways, and the whole field is severely enough politicized (and difficult enough on account of a zillion confounding factors, not to mention weirdnesses like the Flynn effect) that I wouldn’t be surprised to find a large fraction of the work in the field total crap.
I have not put a lot of effort into investigating HBD-ish claims, not because I fear that my doing so would somehow give cover to horrible racists[1] (I don’t see how it would) but because I have only so much time and energy, and investigating HBD doesn’t seem to score very well in terms either of fun or of utility.
I think some HBD advocates are horrible racists[1]. I think some HBD advocates are very much not horrible racists. So far as I can tell from introspection, my working assumption is that people who gleefully bring up HBD theses at every opportunity are more likely to be horrible racists, whereas people who merely say “yeah, probably” when asked about it are likely not to be.
So far as I can recall, nothing I have said on LW has been intended to insinuate that any other LWer is a horrible racist, with the possible exception of Eugine.
When I said that one reason why a lot of people are not keen on investigating HBD theses is that the most likely “interesting” outcome of doing so is giving cover to horrible racists, I meant what I said, and I did not mean either (1) that I personally avoid such investigation for fear of helping horrible racists—again, how would that work? -- or (2) that anyone advocates lying about these issues (I bet some people do, but I wouldn’t think that’s common) or (3) that I endorse lying about them.
Does any of that help?
[1] I have used this phrase a few times and it occurs to me that it could readily be misconstrued. I refer specifically to “horrible racists” rather than just to “racists” because there are some definitions according to which anyone who accepts any sort of HBD thesis is ipso facto racist, no matter what their motives or attitudes or policies. By “horrible racists” I mean something like: people who denigrate[2] and/or work against the interests of some racial group(s) because they hate or fear them, or because they see the success of that group and the success of their own racial group as opposed to one another, and choose to harm the other guys for their own benefit.
[2] I swear I chose that word before it occurred to me what its etymology is.
By “horrible racists” I mean something like: people who denigrate[2] and/or work against the interests of some racial group(s) because they hate or fear them, or because they see the success of that group and the success of their own racial group as opposed to one another, and choose to harm the other guys for their own benefit.
You mean like all the Al Sharpton-style black demagogues? There are certainly a lot more of those people than there are white people satisfying your definition of “horrible racist”.
Therefore manipulate those loathsome peasants with lies and suppress the truth to keep the peasants in line. The Noble Lie.
Unfortunately:
If the baseline level of noble lies is zero, then it would make sense to keep it there, as a Schelling fence. However, I doubt that any society has a baseline of zero.
Do you have Noble Lies that you approve of?
Or is the whole trick of Noble Lies that you’d never admit that they are lies?
When people say crazy, obviously false things, I more and more wonder how much of what they are saying are things they don’t believe themselves, but are just saying to go along with what others say, or manipulate others in Noble Lie fashion.
Noble lies we approve of seem to us to be truths. Noble lies we dont approve approve seem to plain old lies...”crazy, obviously false things”. So almost everybody thinks they are living ina Noble Lie free world.
Noble lies of the right include “my tribe is objectively better than everyone else’s” and “his majesty was placed on the theone, by God”. Obsessing about four point differences in IQ is a version of the former.
Doesn’t seem that way to me. If I tell a Noble Lie, I don’t believe it (in the epistemic sense), but intend others to do so. If I spread a claim I think is true and it is in fact false, I’m just spreading a falsehood that I’m unaware of.
If what I say is correct, you would not be able to tell, solipsistically, if you believed in any lies that seemed true to you. You need to start with other people’s lies, in particular by thinking about how persistent crazy ideas could fulfil an instrumentaal purpose.
That is neither what I said nor what I meant.
Yes, I agree, it could do that and that would be bad.
So what did you mean? I thought the clear implication was that you favored suppressing the truth about HBD because you felt it would give bad people breathing room to do bad things. Or you just think that other people favored suppressing the truth about HBD on those grounds?
First: Not “suppressing the truth” but “not expending effort looking into something whose widespread belief would have bad consequences”. Second: I said nothing about my own preferences, but about “why there is not much appetite (in most circles) for discussing (etc.)”. Third: I do not advocate, neither do I think those opposed to “HBD” generally advocate, telling lies. Fourth: so far as I know, I don’t regard anyone as “loathsome peasants”; in my idiolect “peasant” is not an insult, and the racists I know are mostly not peasants either literally or metaphorically.
What you’re doing here is taking what I wrote, finding the worst kinda-sorta-semi-defensible interpretation of it you can, and expressing it in ways clearly intended to make me look as bad as possible. Apparently you think that’s a reasonable way to treat someone else; to my mind it’s an act of hostility as overt as breaking my windows or my nose, though of course much less actually harmful.
I notice you’re unusually curt and tetchy.
“Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l’attaque, il se défend.”
The key word was “unusually”.
And my point is that in this discussion I am being misrepresented and attacked unusually much.
(I also happen to have an unusually strong dislike of the style of debate that proceeds mostly by insinuations, unstated implications and sideswipes, and have had for many years.)
When I see what I consider to be intellectually dishonest passive aggressive innuendo, I will often respond with a little hostility (closer to annoyance than the hostility I’d associate with breaking someone’s nose) and convert the passive aggressive stance to an overtly aggressive interpretation to hopefully get past the bullshit and see if we can openly discuss the innuendo. It seems not.
That’s very curious, because “intellectually dishonest passive aggressive innuendo” is pretty much exactly how I would describe your response to me, and I honestly can’t see that I’ve engaged in anything of the kind. So clearly we have a failure of communication.
I’m not sure what open discussion you want to have that you think I’m avoiding, but let me try making a few things more explicit.
I do not know whether any HBD-ish thesis is true. I think it entirely possible that some might be. My impression is that what evidence there is almost all points that way, but that much of the evidence in question is really questionable in various ways, and the whole field is severely enough politicized (and difficult enough on account of a zillion confounding factors, not to mention weirdnesses like the Flynn effect) that I wouldn’t be surprised to find a large fraction of the work in the field total crap.
I have not put a lot of effort into investigating HBD-ish claims, not because I fear that my doing so would somehow give cover to horrible racists[1] (I don’t see how it would) but because I have only so much time and energy, and investigating HBD doesn’t seem to score very well in terms either of fun or of utility.
I think some HBD advocates are horrible racists[1]. I think some HBD advocates are very much not horrible racists. So far as I can tell from introspection, my working assumption is that people who gleefully bring up HBD theses at every opportunity are more likely to be horrible racists, whereas people who merely say “yeah, probably” when asked about it are likely not to be.
So far as I can recall, nothing I have said on LW has been intended to insinuate that any other LWer is a horrible racist, with the possible exception of Eugine.
When I said that one reason why a lot of people are not keen on investigating HBD theses is that the most likely “interesting” outcome of doing so is giving cover to horrible racists, I meant what I said, and I did not mean either (1) that I personally avoid such investigation for fear of helping horrible racists—again, how would that work? -- or (2) that anyone advocates lying about these issues (I bet some people do, but I wouldn’t think that’s common) or (3) that I endorse lying about them.
Does any of that help?
[1] I have used this phrase a few times and it occurs to me that it could readily be misconstrued. I refer specifically to “horrible racists” rather than just to “racists” because there are some definitions according to which anyone who accepts any sort of HBD thesis is ipso facto racist, no matter what their motives or attitudes or policies. By “horrible racists” I mean something like: people who denigrate[2] and/or work against the interests of some racial group(s) because they hate or fear them, or because they see the success of that group and the success of their own racial group as opposed to one another, and choose to harm the other guys for their own benefit.
[2] I swear I chose that word before it occurred to me what its etymology is.
You mean like all the Al Sharpton-style black demagogues? There are certainly a lot more of those people than there are white people satisfying your definition of “horrible racist”.