I request that we stop using the Nazis as an example of a go-to fantasy adversary like vampires or zombies. The Gestapo was an actual institution that did real things for particular reasons. “Jews in the attic” shouldn’t be parsed as a weird hypothetical like Kant’s “murderer at the door”—it’s a historical event. You can go to the library and read a copy of Anne Frank’s diary.
On another post there was recently a demon thread in which I’m partially at fault, but an important contributing factor was that I was trying to point out specific resemblances between a proposed set of norms and historic examples of how anti-Semitism works, and it was difficult to do this (I failed) in a way that didn’t evoke the idea that the person proposing these protocols should be scapegoated like a fantasy adversary.
Upvoted, and I agree with this concern, though I also think I’d have had a harder time digesting and updating on Eliezer’s example if he’d picked something more fantastical. Using historical examples, even when a lot of the historical particulars are irrelevant, helps remind my brain that things in the discussed reference class actually occur in my environment.
I agree that historical examples can be helpful. I suspect these can be even more helpful if people vary the examples so they don’t wear down into tropes, and check whether the details plausibly match. My reply to Zvi here seems relevant:
It seems to me as though when people evaluate the “Jews in the attic” hypothetical, “Gestapo” isn’t being mapped onto the actual historical institution, but to a vague sense of who’s a sufficiently hated adversary that it’s widely considered legitimate to “slash their tires.” In Nazi Germany, this actually maps onto Jews, not the Gestapo. It maps onto the Gestapo for post-WWII Americans considering a weird hypothetical.
To do the work of causing this to reliably map onto the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, you have to talk about the situation in which almost everyone around you seems to agree that the Gestapo might be a little scary but the Jews are dangerous, deceptive fantasy villains and need to be rooted out. Otherwise you just get illusion of transparency.
I felt bad about using it as the example in my comment, feeling the OP should have picked a different example, but did it anyway because the OP did it. Agreed this was an error, we should use Nazis if and only if we actually mean Nazis, and find a better go-to example. Thoughts on what this should be? Kant’s literal ‘murderer at the door’ feels arbitrary and lame to me.
Something that would capture the feeling I think most people have in the Nazis example would be that a soldier from a foreign occupying army is looking for a peaceful dissident hiding in your attic. Genuinely not sure if that’s actually a great example for a thing like this.
To be clear, I’m not proposing a bright-line rule against this, just saying that I get the sense that it’s an example being selected because it’s a well-worn groove to pattern-match “enemy” to “Nazi”, not because it was particularly illuminating in this case.
I request that we stop using the Nazis as an example of a go-to fantasy adversary like vampires or zombies. The Gestapo was an actual institution that did real things for particular reasons. “Jews in the attic” shouldn’t be parsed as a weird hypothetical like Kant’s “murderer at the door”—it’s a historical event. You can go to the library and read a copy of Anne Frank’s diary.
On another post there was recently a demon thread in which I’m partially at fault, but an important contributing factor was that I was trying to point out specific resemblances between a proposed set of norms and historic examples of how anti-Semitism works, and it was difficult to do this (I failed) in a way that didn’t evoke the idea that the person proposing these protocols should be scapegoated like a fantasy adversary.
Upvoted, and I agree with this concern, though I also think I’d have had a harder time digesting and updating on Eliezer’s example if he’d picked something more fantastical. Using historical examples, even when a lot of the historical particulars are irrelevant, helps remind my brain that things in the discussed reference class actually occur in my environment.
I agree that historical examples can be helpful. I suspect these can be even more helpful if people vary the examples so they don’t wear down into tropes, and check whether the details plausibly match. My reply to Zvi here seems relevant:
It seems to me as though when people evaluate the “Jews in the attic” hypothetical, “Gestapo” isn’t being mapped onto the actual historical institution, but to a vague sense of who’s a sufficiently hated adversary that it’s widely considered legitimate to “slash their tires.” In Nazi Germany, this actually maps onto Jews, not the Gestapo. It maps onto the Gestapo for post-WWII Americans considering a weird hypothetical.
To do the work of causing this to reliably map onto the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, you have to talk about the situation in which almost everyone around you seems to agree that the Gestapo might be a little scary but the Jews are dangerous, deceptive fantasy villains and need to be rooted out. Otherwise you just get illusion of transparency.
I felt bad about using it as the example in my comment, feeling the OP should have picked a different example, but did it anyway because the OP did it. Agreed this was an error, we should use Nazis if and only if we actually mean Nazis, and find a better go-to example. Thoughts on what this should be? Kant’s literal ‘murderer at the door’ feels arbitrary and lame to me.
Something that would capture the feeling I think most people have in the Nazis example would be that a soldier from a foreign occupying army is looking for a peaceful dissident hiding in your attic. Genuinely not sure if that’s actually a great example for a thing like this.
To be clear, I’m not proposing a bright-line rule against this, just saying that I get the sense that it’s an example being selected because it’s a well-worn groove to pattern-match “enemy” to “Nazi”, not because it was particularly illuminating in this case.