Would your views on speaking truth to power change if the truth were 2x less expensive as you currently think it is? 10x? 100x?
Maybe not; probably; yes.
Followup question: have you considered performing an experiment to test whether the consequences of speech are as dire as you currently think? I think I have more data than you! (We probably mostly read the same blogs, but I’ve done field work.)
Most of the consequences I’m worried about are bad effects on the discourse. I don’t know what experiment I’d to to figure those out. I agree you have more data than me, but you probably have 2x the personal data instead of 10x the personal data, and most relevant data is about other people because there are more of them. Personal consequences are more amenable to experiment than discourse consequences, but I already have lots of low-risk data here, and high-risk data would carry high risk and not be qualitatively more informative. (Doing an Experiment here doesn’t teach you qualitatively different things here than watching the experiments that the world constantly does.)
Can you be a little more specific? “Discredited” is a two-place function (discredited to whom).
Discredited to intellectual elites, who are not only imperfectly rational, but get their information via people who are imperfectly rational, who in turn etc.
It almost sounds like you’re saying we should tell people they should always speak the truth even though it is not the case that people should always speak the truth, because telling people they should always speak the truth has good consequences. Hm!
I don’t like the “speak the truth even if your voice trembles” formulation. It doesn’t make it clear that the alternative to speaking the truth, instead of lying, is not speaking. It also suggests an ad hominem theory of why people aren’t speaking (fear, presumably of personal consequences) that isn’t always true. To me, this whole thing is about picking battles versus not picking battles rather than about truth versus falsehood. Even though if you pick your battles it means a non-random set of falsehoods remains uncorrected, picking battles is still pro-truth.
If we should judge the Platonic math by how it would be interpreted in practice, then we should also judge “speak the truth even if your voice trembles” by how it would be interpreted in practice. I’m worried the outcome would be people saying “since we talk rationally about the Emperor here, let’s admit that he’s missing one shoe”, regardless of whether the emperor is missing one shoe, is fully dressed, or has no clothes at all. All things equal, being less wrong is good, but sometimes being less wrong means being more confident that you’re not wrong at all, even though you are wrong at all.
(By the way, I think of my position here as having a lower burden of proof than yours, because the underlying issue is not just who is making the right tradeoffs, but whether making different tradeoffs than you is a good reason to give up on a community altogether.)
Maybe not; probably; yes.
Most of the consequences I’m worried about are bad effects on the discourse. I don’t know what experiment I’d to to figure those out. I agree you have more data than me, but you probably have 2x the personal data instead of 10x the personal data, and most relevant data is about other people because there are more of them. Personal consequences are more amenable to experiment than discourse consequences, but I already have lots of low-risk data here, and high-risk data would carry high risk and not be qualitatively more informative. (Doing an Experiment here doesn’t teach you qualitatively different things here than watching the experiments that the world constantly does.)
Discredited to intellectual elites, who are not only imperfectly rational, but get their information via people who are imperfectly rational, who in turn etc.
It almost sounds like you’re saying we should tell people they should always speak the truth even though it is not the case that people should always speak the truth, because telling people they should always speak the truth has good consequences. Hm!
I don’t like the “speak the truth even if your voice trembles” formulation. It doesn’t make it clear that the alternative to speaking the truth, instead of lying, is not speaking. It also suggests an ad hominem theory of why people aren’t speaking (fear, presumably of personal consequences) that isn’t always true. To me, this whole thing is about picking battles versus not picking battles rather than about truth versus falsehood. Even though if you pick your battles it means a non-random set of falsehoods remains uncorrected, picking battles is still pro-truth.
If we should judge the Platonic math by how it would be interpreted in practice, then we should also judge “speak the truth even if your voice trembles” by how it would be interpreted in practice. I’m worried the outcome would be people saying “since we talk rationally about the Emperor here, let’s admit that he’s missing one shoe”, regardless of whether the emperor is missing one shoe, is fully dressed, or has no clothes at all. All things equal, being less wrong is good, but sometimes being less wrong means being more confident that you’re not wrong at all, even though you are wrong at all.
(By the way, I think of my position here as having a lower burden of proof than yours, because the underlying issue is not just who is making the right tradeoffs, but whether making different tradeoffs than you is a good reason to give up on a community altogether.)