First, that’s not the metaphor we were discussing. Second, the metaphor you are using allows arguments to be soldiers of any ideology, not simply democracy.
I have read “Politics is the mindkiller” and am discussing the same metaphor. For that matter, I’m practically recapitulating the same metaphor, to make an even stronger point: not only can politics provoke irrational impulses to support poor arguments on your “side”, politics can create instrumentally rational incentives to (publicly, visibly, not internally) support poor arguments. Sometimes you support a morally dubious soldier because of jingoism, sometimes you support him because he’s the best defense in between you and an even worse soldier.
Would you be more specific about how you think my use of the metaphor is different and/or invalid?
I do think I’ve given a compelling counterexample to “bad ideas should always be [publicly] challenged”. (my apologies if the implicit [publicly] here was not your intended claim, but the context is that of a proposed public discussion) Have you changed your mind about that claim, or do you see a problem with my reasoning? For that matter, in my hypothetical political forum would you be arguing for atheism or for more compassionate augury yourself?
The preposition of your second sentence suggests a miscommunication of my initial claim. I didn’t intend to say “arguments are soldiers of democracy”, but rather “arguments are soldiers in a democracy”. You’re still right that this also applies to non-democracies: in any state where public opinion affects political policy, incentives exist to try and steer opinion towards instrumentally rational ends even if this is done via epistemically irrational means. Unlimited democracy is just an abstract maximum of this effect, not the only case where it applies.
In brief, I think my interpretation is right because it is consistent with the intended lesson, which is “Don’t talk about Politics on LessWrong.” In other words, I understood the point of the story to be that treating arguments as soldiers interferes with believing true things.
I agree that “bad ideas should be publicly challenged” is only true if what I’m trying to do is believe true theories and not believe false theories. If I’m trying to change society (i.e. do politics), I shouldn’t antagonize my allies. The risk is that I will go from disingenuously defending my allies’ wrong claims to sincerely believing my allies’ wrong claims, even in the face of the evidence. That’s being mindkilled. In short, engaging in the coalition-building necessary to do politics is claimed to cause belief in empirically false things. I.e. “Politics is the Mindkiller.”
My interpretation could be summarized in similar fashion as “really, really, don’t talk about politics on LessWrong”—whether this is “consistent” or not depends on your definition of that word.
I agree with your interpretation of the point of the story… and with pretty much everything else you wrote in this comment, which I guess leaves me with little else to say.
Although, that’s an example of another issue with political forums, isn’t it? In an academic setting, if a speaker elicits informed agreement from the audience about their subject, that means we’ve all got more shared foundational material with which to build the discussion of a closely related subsequent topic. Difficult questions without obvious unanimous answers do get reached eventually, but only after enough simpler related problems have been solved to make the hard questions tractable.
Politics instead turns into debates, where discussions shut down once agreement occurs, then derail onto the less tractable topics where disagreement is most heated. Where would we be if Newton had decided “Yeah, Kepler’s laws seem accurate; let me just write “me too” and then we’re on to weather prediction!”
In short, engaging in the coalition-building necessary to do politics is claimed to cause belief in empirically false things. I.e. “Politics is the Mindkiller.”
To me, this just shows that a ban on political argumentation is the very last thing that Lesswrong needs. The accusation of being “mind-killed” is levied by those whose minds are too emotionally dysfunctional for them to tell the difference between abolition and slave ownership (after all, one is blue and the other is green, and there couldn’t very well be an objective reason for either side holding their position, could there?).
The ability to stifle debate with an ad hominem and a karmic downgrade is the mark of a totalitarian (objectively unintelligent) forum, not a democratic (more intelligent than totalitarian) one. Now a libertarian and democratic forum with smart filters? That’s smarter still. In hindsight, everyone agrees so, but in present scenarios, many people are corrupted or uneducated, and lack comprehension.
This is one of the primary reason posts are labeled as mind-killed—because those posts are actually higher-level comprehension and what people don’t understand, they often attempt to destroy (especially where force is involved—people generally hate to be held accountable for possessing evil beliefs, and politics is the domain of force).
Every argument I make, no matter how seemingly mind-killed it is, is always able to be defended by direct appeal to the evidence. Many people don’t understand the evidence, though, or they deny it. Evidence that places sociopaths and their conformists on the wrong side of morality will always be fought, tooth and nail. To test this out, tell your entire family that they’re all thieves, no better than the Nazis who watched train cars of Jews go by in the distance, at your next Thanksgiving meal. (Don’t actually try this. LOL.)
Still, at some point, there was a family gathering prior to Nazi Germany, where all hope hadn’t been lost, and someone told their family that they should all buy rifles and join the resistance. That person was right. He was reported, sent to prison, and murdered by the prevailing “consensus view.” …So the Warsaw Jews had to figure it out later, and resist with a far smaller chance of success.
As John Ross wrote in “Unintended Consequences” if you wait to stand up for what’s right until you’re 98 pounds and being herded onto a cattle car with only the clothes on your back, it’s too late for you to have a chance at winning. You need to deploy soldiers when you’ll be hooted down for deploying soldiers. And, you need to be certain you’re in the right, while deploying soldiers.
The best thing possible is to make sure that your soldiers are defending something defensible at its core. The best way to do this is to quickly show that such soldiers are not in the wrong, and clearly aren’t in the wrong. If you’re defending Democrats, Republicans, most Libertarians, Greens, or Constitution Party candidates, you have a difficult row to hoe if this is your goal.
Far less difficult is an issue-based stance, and philosophical stance, on any given political subject. So yes, soldiers can be deployed, and here at LW, one would ideally wish to distance oneself from identification with bad arguments or poor defenses of an idea. …So just refrain from up-voting it. Not difficult.
Of course, once someone is tarred with “bad Karma” that’s a scarlet letter that prevents anything useful from that account from ever being considered—an ad hominem attack on all ideas from that account, no matter how valid they are.
If you cannot speak without insulting your audience, you probably aren’t going to convince anyone.
This comment would be much better, therefore, without the insults — the “emotional dysfunction”, the “totalitarian (objectively unintelligent)”, the “corrupted or uneducated”, the “sociopaths and their conformists”, and so on, and so on, ad nauseam.
Still, at some point, there was a family gathering prior to Nazi Germany, where all hope hadn’t been lost, and someone told their family that they should all buy rifles and join the resistance. That person was right.
No, he was wrong. The right thing to buy was tickets overseas.
You need to deploy soldiers when you’ll be hooted down for deploying soldiers. And, you need to be certain you’re in the right, while deploying soldiers.
I see a certain… tension between these two sentences.
Are some ideologies more objectively correct than others? (Abolitionists used ostracism and violence to prevail against those who would return fugitive slaves south. Up until the point of violence, many of their arguments were “soldiers.” One such “soldier” was Spooner’s “The Unconstitutionality of Slavery”—from the same man who later wrote “the Constitution of No Authority.” He personally believed that the Constitution had no authority, but since it was revered by many conformists, he used a reference to it to show them that they should alter their position to support of abolitionism. Good for him!)
If some ideologies are more correct than others, then those arguments which are actually soldiers for those ideologies have strategic utility, but only as strategic “talking points,” “soldiers,” or “sticky” memes. Then, everyone who agrees with using those soldiers can identify them as such (strategy), and decide whether it’s a good strategic or philosophical, argument, or both, or neither.
First, that’s not the metaphor we were discussing. Second, the metaphor you are using allows arguments to be soldiers of any ideology, not simply democracy.
I have read “Politics is the mindkiller” and am discussing the same metaphor. For that matter, I’m practically recapitulating the same metaphor, to make an even stronger point: not only can politics provoke irrational impulses to support poor arguments on your “side”, politics can create instrumentally rational incentives to (publicly, visibly, not internally) support poor arguments. Sometimes you support a morally dubious soldier because of jingoism, sometimes you support him because he’s the best defense in between you and an even worse soldier.
Would you be more specific about how you think my use of the metaphor is different and/or invalid?
I do think I’ve given a compelling counterexample to “bad ideas should always be [publicly] challenged”. (my apologies if the implicit [publicly] here was not your intended claim, but the context is that of a proposed public discussion) Have you changed your mind about that claim, or do you see a problem with my reasoning? For that matter, in my hypothetical political forum would you be arguing for atheism or for more compassionate augury yourself?
The preposition of your second sentence suggests a miscommunication of my initial claim. I didn’t intend to say “arguments are soldiers of democracy”, but rather “arguments are soldiers in a democracy”. You’re still right that this also applies to non-democracies: in any state where public opinion affects political policy, incentives exist to try and steer opinion towards instrumentally rational ends even if this is done via epistemically irrational means. Unlimited democracy is just an abstract maximum of this effect, not the only case where it applies.
In brief, I think my interpretation is right because it is consistent with the intended lesson, which is “Don’t talk about Politics on LessWrong.” In other words, I understood the point of the story to be that treating arguments as soldiers interferes with believing true things.
I agree that “bad ideas should be publicly challenged” is only true if what I’m trying to do is believe true theories and not believe false theories. If I’m trying to change society (i.e. do politics), I shouldn’t antagonize my allies. The risk is that I will go from disingenuously defending my allies’ wrong claims to sincerely believing my allies’ wrong claims, even in the face of the evidence. That’s being mindkilled. In short, engaging in the coalition-building necessary to do politics is claimed to cause belief in empirically false things. I.e. “Politics is the Mindkiller.”
My interpretation could be summarized in similar fashion as “really, really, don’t talk about politics on LessWrong”—whether this is “consistent” or not depends on your definition of that word.
I agree with your interpretation of the point of the story… and with pretty much everything else you wrote in this comment, which I guess leaves me with little else to say.
Although, that’s an example of another issue with political forums, isn’t it? In an academic setting, if a speaker elicits informed agreement from the audience about their subject, that means we’ve all got more shared foundational material with which to build the discussion of a closely related subsequent topic. Difficult questions without obvious unanimous answers do get reached eventually, but only after enough simpler related problems have been solved to make the hard questions tractable.
Politics instead turns into debates, where discussions shut down once agreement occurs, then derail onto the less tractable topics where disagreement is most heated. Where would we be if Newton had decided “Yeah, Kepler’s laws seem accurate; let me just write “me too” and then we’re on to weather prediction!”
To me, this just shows that a ban on political argumentation is the very last thing that Lesswrong needs. The accusation of being “mind-killed” is levied by those whose minds are too emotionally dysfunctional for them to tell the difference between abolition and slave ownership (after all, one is blue and the other is green, and there couldn’t very well be an objective reason for either side holding their position, could there?).
The ability to stifle debate with an ad hominem and a karmic downgrade is the mark of a totalitarian (objectively unintelligent) forum, not a democratic (more intelligent than totalitarian) one. Now a libertarian and democratic forum with smart filters? That’s smarter still. In hindsight, everyone agrees so, but in present scenarios, many people are corrupted or uneducated, and lack comprehension.
This is one of the primary reason posts are labeled as mind-killed—because those posts are actually higher-level comprehension and what people don’t understand, they often attempt to destroy (especially where force is involved—people generally hate to be held accountable for possessing evil beliefs, and politics is the domain of force).
Every argument I make, no matter how seemingly mind-killed it is, is always able to be defended by direct appeal to the evidence. Many people don’t understand the evidence, though, or they deny it. Evidence that places sociopaths and their conformists on the wrong side of morality will always be fought, tooth and nail. To test this out, tell your entire family that they’re all thieves, no better than the Nazis who watched train cars of Jews go by in the distance, at your next Thanksgiving meal. (Don’t actually try this. LOL.)
Still, at some point, there was a family gathering prior to Nazi Germany, where all hope hadn’t been lost, and someone told their family that they should all buy rifles and join the resistance. That person was right. He was reported, sent to prison, and murdered by the prevailing “consensus view.” …So the Warsaw Jews had to figure it out later, and resist with a far smaller chance of success.
As John Ross wrote in “Unintended Consequences” if you wait to stand up for what’s right until you’re 98 pounds and being herded onto a cattle car with only the clothes on your back, it’s too late for you to have a chance at winning. You need to deploy soldiers when you’ll be hooted down for deploying soldiers. And, you need to be certain you’re in the right, while deploying soldiers.
The best thing possible is to make sure that your soldiers are defending something defensible at its core. The best way to do this is to quickly show that such soldiers are not in the wrong, and clearly aren’t in the wrong. If you’re defending Democrats, Republicans, most Libertarians, Greens, or Constitution Party candidates, you have a difficult row to hoe if this is your goal.
Far less difficult is an issue-based stance, and philosophical stance, on any given political subject. So yes, soldiers can be deployed, and here at LW, one would ideally wish to distance oneself from identification with bad arguments or poor defenses of an idea. …So just refrain from up-voting it. Not difficult.
Of course, once someone is tarred with “bad Karma” that’s a scarlet letter that prevents anything useful from that account from ever being considered—an ad hominem attack on all ideas from that account, no matter how valid they are.
If you cannot speak without insulting your audience, you probably aren’t going to convince anyone.
This comment would be much better, therefore, without the insults — the “emotional dysfunction”, the “totalitarian (objectively unintelligent)”, the “corrupted or uneducated”, the “sociopaths and their conformists”, and so on, and so on, ad nauseam.
No, he was wrong. The right thing to buy was tickets overseas.
I see a certain… tension between these two sentences.
Are some ideologies more objectively correct than others? (Abolitionists used ostracism and violence to prevail against those who would return fugitive slaves south. Up until the point of violence, many of their arguments were “soldiers.” One such “soldier” was Spooner’s “The Unconstitutionality of Slavery”—from the same man who later wrote “the Constitution of No Authority.” He personally believed that the Constitution had no authority, but since it was revered by many conformists, he used a reference to it to show them that they should alter their position to support of abolitionism. Good for him!)
If some ideologies are more correct than others, then those arguments which are actually soldiers for those ideologies have strategic utility, but only as strategic “talking points,” “soldiers,” or “sticky” memes. Then, everyone who agrees with using those soldiers can identify them as such (strategy), and decide whether it’s a good strategic or philosophical, argument, or both, or neither.