Airedale

Karma: 942

Airedale Aug 21, 2010, 6:32 PM
6 points
in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Transparency and Accountability
I agree it would be good if more info on finances was readily available. There are tax returns (although I think the most recent is 2008) available on Guidestar (with free registration). But as for leadership structure, is this link the sort of thing you had in mind or were you looking for an actual org chart or something?

Airedale Aug 21, 2010, 4:32 PM
39 points
on: Transparency and Accountability
Your posts on SIAI have had a veneer of evenhandedness and fairness, and that continues here. But given what you don’t say in your posts, I cannot avoid the impression that you started out with the belief that SIAI was not a credible charity and rather than investigating the evidence both for and against that belief, you have marshaled the strongest arguments against donating to SIAI and ignored any evidence in favor of donating to SIAI. I almost hesitate to link to EY lest you dismiss me as one of his acolytes, but see, for example, A Rational Argument.

In your top-level posts you have eschewed references to any of the publicly visible work that SIAI does such as the Summit and the presentation and publication of academic papers. Some of this work is described at this link to SIAI’s description of its 2009 achievements. The 2010 Summit is described here. As for Eliezer’s current project, at the 2009 achievements link, SIAI has publicized the fact that he is working on a book on rationality:

Yudkowsky is now converting his blog sequences into the planned rationality book, which he hopes will significantly assist in attracting and inspiring talented individuals to effectively work towards the aims of a beneficial Singularity and reduced existential risk.

You could have chosen to make part of your evaluation of SIAI an analysis of whether or not EY’s book will ultimately be successful in this goal or whether it’s the most valuable work that EY should be doing to reduce existential risk, but I’m not sure how his work on transforming the fully public LW sequences into a book is insufficiently transparent or not something for which he and SIAI can be held accountable when it is published.

Moreover, despite your professed interest in existential risk reduction and references in others’ comments to your posts about the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, you suggest donating to Givewell-endorsed charities as an alternative to SIAI donations without even a mention of FHI as a possible alternative in the field of existential risk reduction. Perhaps you find FHI equally non-credible/non-accountable as a charity, but whatever FHI’s failings, it’s hard to see how they are exactly the same ones which you have ascribed to SIAI. Perhaps you believe that if a charity has not been evaluated and endorsed by Givewell, it can’t possibly be worthwhile. I can’t avoid the thought that if you were really interested in existential risk reduction, you would spend at least some tiny percentage of the time you’ve spent writing up these posts against SIAI on investigating FHI as an alternative.

I would be happy to engage with you or others on the site in a fair and unbiased examination of the case for and against SIAI (and/or FHI, the Foresight Institute, the Lifeboat Foundation, etc.). Although I may come across as strongly biased in favor of SIAI in this comment, I have my own concerns about SIAI’s accountability and public relations, and have had numerous conversations with those within the organization about those concerns. But with limited time on my hands and faced with such a one-sided and at times even polemical presentation from you, I find myself almost forced into the role of SIAI defender, so that I can least provide some of the positive information about SIAI that you leave out.
What links here?
- Reflections on a Personal Public Relations Failure: A Lesson in Communication by multifoliaterose (Oct 1, 2010, 12:29 AM; 50 points)

Airedale Aug 20, 2010, 11:13 PM
34 points
0
in reply to: Jonathan_Graehl’s comment on: Competent Elites
From Eliezer’s post:

And by golly, Brooks sounded intelligent and original. He gave off a visible aura of competence. (Though not a thousand-year vampire aura of terrifying swift perfection like E.T. Jaynes’s carefully crafted book.)

The obvious explanation for the sparks is that Brooks and the other sparkly people must only be the lesser Twilight-type vampires.

Airedale Aug 20, 2010, 3:23 PM
3 points
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: The Importance of Self-Doubt
Agreed. I think that communication and coordination with many allies and supporters has historically been a weak point for SIAI, due to various reasons including overcommitment of some of those tasked with communications, failure to task anyone with developing or maintaining certain new and ongoing relationships, interpersonal skills being among the less developed skill sets among those at SIAI, and the general growing pains of the organization. My impression is that there has been some improvement in this area recently, but there’s still room for a lot more.

More collaborative posts on LW would be great to see. There have also been various discussions about workshops or review procedures for top-level posts that seem to have generated at least some interest. Maybe those discussions should just continue in the open thread or maybe it would be appropriate to have a top-level post where people could be invited to volunteer or could find others interested in collaboration, workshops, or the like.

Airedale Aug 20, 2010, 12:37 AM
27 points
on: The Importance of Self-Doubt

give the SIAI staff an opportunity to respond to the points which I raise in the present post as well as my two posts titled Existential Risk and Public Relations and Other Existential Risks.

Indeed, given how busy everyone at SIAI has been with the Summit and the academic workshop following it, it is not surprising that there has not been much response from SIAI. I was only involved as an attendee of the Summit, and even I am only now able to find time to sit down and write something in response. At any rate, as a donor and former visiting fellow, I am only loosely affiliated with SIAI, and my comments here are solely my own, although my thoughts are certainly influenced by observations of the organization and conversation with those at SIAI. I don’t have the time/knowledge to address everything in your posts, but I wanted to say a couple of things.

I don’t disagree with you that SIAI has certain public relations problems. (Frankly, I doubt anyone at SIAI would disagree with that.) There is a lot of attention and discussion at SIAI about how to best spread knowledge about existential risks and to avoid sounding like a fringe/doomsday organization in doing so. It’s true that SIAI does consider the development of a general artificial intelligence to be the most serious existential risk facing humanity. But at least from what I have seen, much of SIAI’s current approach is to seed awareness of various existential risks among audiences that are in a position to effectively join the work in decreasing that risk.

Unfortunately, gaining recognition of existential risk is a hugely difficult task. Recent books from leading intellectuals on these issues (Sir Martin Rees’s Our Final Hour and Judge Richard Posner’s Catastrophe) don’t seem to have had very much apparent impact, and their ability to influence the general public is much greater than SIAI’s. But through the Summit and various publications, awareness does seem to be gradually increasing, including among important academics like David Chalmers.

Finally, I wanted to address one particular public relations problem, or at least, public relations issue, that is evident from your criticism so far – that is, there is an (understandable) perception that many observers have that SIAI and Eliezer are essentially synonymous. In the past, this perception may have been largely accurate. I don’t think that it currently holds true, but it definitely continues to persist in many people’s minds.

Given this perception, your primary focus on Eliezer to the exclusion of the other work that SIAI does is understandable. Nor, of course, could anyone possibly deny that Eliezer is an important part of SIAI, as its founder, board member, and prominent researcher. But there other SIAI officers, board members, researchers, and volunteers, and there is other work that SIAI is trying to do. The Summit is probably the most notable example of this. SIAI-affiliated people are also working on spreading knowledge of existential risks and the need to face them in academia and more broadly. The evolution of SIAI into an organization not focused solely on EY and his research is still a work in progress; and the rebranding of the organization as such in the minds of the public has not necessarily kept pace with even that gradual progress.

As for EY having delusions of grandeur, I want to address that, although only briefly, because EY is obviously in a much better position to address any of that if he chooses to. My understanding of the video you linked to in your previous post is that EY is commenting on both 1) his ability to work on FAI research and 2) his desire to work on that research. No matter how high EY’s opinion of his ability, and it doubtless is very high, it seems to me that I have seen comments from him recognizing that there are others with equally high (or even higher) ability, e.g., The Level Above Mine. I have no doubt EY would agree that the pool of those with the requisite ability is very limited. But the even greater obstacle to someone carrying on EY’s work is the combination of that rare ability with the also rare desire to do that research and make it one’s life work. And I think that’s why EY answered the way he did. Indeed, the reference to Michael Vassar, it seems to me, primarily makes sense in terms of the desire axis, since Michael Vassar’s expertise is not in developing FAI himself, although he has other great qualities in terms of SIAI’s current mission of spreading existential risk awareness, etc.
What links here?

Airedale Aug 19, 2010, 10:00 PM
13 points
on: Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2
I’m not sure whether the satanic ritual abuse and similar prosecutions of the 80s/90s have ever been discussed on LW in any detail (I couldn’t find anything with a few google searches), but some of the failures of rationality in those cases seem to fit into the subject matter here.

For those unfamiliar with these cases, a sort of panic swept through many parts of the United States (and later other countries) resulting in a number of prosecutions of alleged satanic ritual abuse or other extensive conspiracies involving sexual abuse, despite, in almost all cases, virtually no physical evidence that such abuse occurred. Lack of physical evidence, of course, does not always mean that a crime has not occurred, but given the particular types of allegations made, it was not credible in most cases that no physical evidence would exist. It is hard to choose the most outrageous example, but this one is pretty remarkable:

Gerald [Amirault], it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury.

Moreover, there were all sorts of serious problems with the highly suggestive techniques used in questioning the children to elicit the accusations of abuse. If one is inclined to be charitable to the investigators, some of the problems with the interviews could be chalked up to lack of understanding at the time of how problematic these techniques were, but the stories are pretty damning. A short description of the sorts of techniques can be found in this Wiki entry on one of the most prominent prosecutions, that involving the McMartin preschool.

Many, although by no means all, of the defendants in these sorts of cases have since been exonerated. I am posting this comment because a defendant in one of the cases, Jesse Friedman (one of the subjects of the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans), is in the news because of a recent federal appellate court decision (pdf), which denied relief to Friedman, but noted:

While the law may require us to deny relief in this case, it does not compel us to do so without voicing some concern regarding the process by which the petitioner’s conviction was obtained.

For anyone who would like a brief overview of the problems with these sorts of prosecutions, the court’s opinion linked above has a relatively concise but informative discussion at pp. 18-23. For anyone interested in a book length treatment, I also recommend No Crueler Tyrannies by Dorothy Rabinowitz. Tons of info on the Internet as well, of course.

Airedale Aug 11, 2010, 4:48 PM
11 points
on: Rationality quotes: August 2010

I entered the Lager (Auschwitz) as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. . . . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation; I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it

-- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (quoted by Damon Linker at The New Republic ; h/t Andrew Sullivan)

Airedale Aug 11, 2010, 12:39 AM
19 points
on: Five-minute rationality techniques
Great idea for a post and an important topic. A somewhat similar topic came up at our recent Chicago meetup, when someone who saw our sign came up to us to ask us what Less Wrong referred to. We didn’t necessarily have a great answer at the ready besides relaying some of the basics (website/group blog about rationality and thinking better, etc.). We spent a few minutes afterward talking about what information a good LW elevator speech might include. We didn’t want it to sound too stilted/formal, e.g., “refining the art of human rationality” from the banner at the top doesn’t sound that inviting in casual conversation. Does anyone have approaches that have worked?

Airedale Aug 10, 2010, 2:45 PM
3 points
in reply to: Unknowns’s comment on: Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity
It rarely bothers me when insightful original comments are voted up more than their (more or less) equally insightful responses. In my view, the original comment often “deserves” more upvotes for raising an interesting issue in the first place and thereby expanding a fruitful discussion.

Airedale Aug 5, 2010, 9:18 PM
3 points
on: Coffee: When it helps, when it hurts
Here’s a recent Lifehacker article covering some of the same ground as well as some other stuff, including withdrawal: What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain

Airedale Jul 29, 2010, 11:21 PM
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Forager Anthropology
WrongBot wasn’t very clear in that particular comment, but he explained what he meant somewhat here

I was trying to point out that, regardless of whether Pinker has taken exaggerated positions, he has “deliberately misrepresented key evidence in support of a position.” Is doing that well-reasoned?

Demonstrating in painstaking detail that he has done so is the entire point of the first third of the post. Did you not find that convincing?

Airedale Jul 29, 2010, 8:08 PM
5 points
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Forager Anthropology

How much experience have you had watching the trajectory of online communities?

Have you for example informed yourself of the case of Reddit (the original one) which is particularly relevant to this community in that the software is so similar?

I have not studied this with any rigor, although I have seen communities that I previously enjoyed enter periods of decline (sometimes recovering at a later point, sometimes not). I don’t disagree that with online communities, there is often some tipping point when the bad reasoning/noise outweighs the good. That’s why I also made this part of my comment:

From my perspective, I don’t think we’ve reached the point where LW is so crowded with posts that good ideas and posts are being crowded out by bad ones.

Perhaps I’m wrong about this. At any rate, if LW is actually in a serious period of decline, the problem is more serious than just WrongBot, and I disagree with implementing a solution where individual posters take it upon themselves to ask other posters to leave. (If EY wants to create some sort of system like Paul Graham’s or make new moderators with these sorts powers, that would be different in my view than this sort of ad hoc approach, which doesn’t seem likely to work (due to both its ad hoc nature and unenforceability) and also presents greater risks of abuse, decisions based on personality conflict, etc.)

Airedale Jul 29, 2010, 6:56 PM
13 points
in reply to: MichaelVassar’s comment on: Forager Anthropology

The fact that you can be so wrong about what I have said, when it’s all there in writing, seems to me to be strong evidence that you just don’t know how to think carefully about arguments when they engage your emotions, which is what I was initially saying in my critical comments to your first post.

Whatever WrongBot’s failings as a poster may or may not be, I haven’t seen anything in his posts to suggest that the problem is arguments engaging his emotions. You’ve expressed the opinion that WrongBot can’t reason, and perhaps this comment is evidence for that (although I think I understand the point he is trying to make), but I don’t perceive the connection to emotions. It is, of course, possible that I’ve missed something demonstrating that his emotions are at the root of any failures he has exhibited.

At any rate, it seems to me that there are any number of posters on LW who’ve exhibited reasoning failures at one time or another, and I don’t understand why you’ve focused on WrongBot to the extent of asking him to stop posting on LW until he can reason better. If anything, as a more or less independent observer, I feel like it is your focus on WrongBot that could be interpreted as some sort of an emotional response, although from my knowledge of you, I don’t think that’s actually the case.

I don’t know how to surf and that doesn’t make me a bad person. It does mean, however, that I don’t really belong in a surfing club. It’s cool for me to watch surfing if that’s how I want to spend my time, and maybe to learn how to surf by doing so, but it’s not fair to the other surfers if I get out there in the ocean with them and start taking up space on the waves doing the sorts of stunts that the best surfers in the club are doing without making a serious attempt to overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect. If too many people start doing that, there will be a serious injury and the club will be shut down.

I disagree that posts from WrongBot, or others with similar failings in reasoning (although I think you and I also disagree about how serious WrongBot’s failings are), pose a serious risk to LessWrong as a community, although I also see how reasonable minds might differ on that. From my perspective, I don’t think we’ve reached the point where LW is so crowded with posts that good ideas and posts are being crowded out by bad ones. More fundamentally, I don’t see any real problem with posts like WrongBot’s, even if they exhibit imperfect reasoning. Even poorly reasoned posts can lead to interesting discussions, as I think WrongBot’s posts have.

Chicago Meetup: Sunday, August 1 at 2:00 pm

AiredaleJul 27, 2010, 3:10 PM

9 points

6 comments1 min readLW link

Airedale Jul 19, 2010, 10:20 PM
0 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks
But assuming there is more domestic violence, and that women are initially marrying more abusive and/or disrespectful men, if there’s also more divorce, this could mean that women are less tolerant of these abusive disrespectful men. So does it provide evidence for women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option or respectful men being almost entirely marginalized?

Airedale Jul 19, 2010, 9:49 PM
0 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks

Plus, the increasing frequency of divorce

I’m not sure why this is evidence that women increasingly believe that disrespectful men are their only option or that respectful men are almost entirely marginalized. Is the argument that the increased number of divorces largely affect respectful men, in that when divorces were more difficult to obtain, women could only obtain divorces when their spouses were demonstrably problematic (and therefore, more likely to be disrespectful), and that easier divorce procedures allow women to divorce respectful men more easily?

I’m not an expert on either current or historic divorce law, but it’s my understanding that under earlier regimes, in many instances, women could not obtain divorces easily even with abusive husbands, because of proof difficulties. Perhaps more easily obtainable divorces just allowed more women to divorce disrespectful men.

Airedale Jul 18, 2010, 4:05 PM
11 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Financial incentives don’t get rid of bias? Prize for best answer.

And like Nancy, you didn’t finish reading the comment! . . . .

Does it make sense now?

I did read your whole comment and I understand that you were making the point that men with wide feet face indirect prejudice because they can’t buy fashionable shoes and society judges people on their fashion choices. What I didn’t understand was how that point related to the issues of manufacturer bias and incentives originally being discussed in the thread.

Nancy’s original post was to the effect that the lack of clothing choices for fat women reflected a bias (among clothing manufacturers and more generally) against fat women, and that this bias resulted in the manufacturers ignoring what could be a lucrative market. (Several people who commented on the thread posted interesting ideas suggesting why such bias was probably not the whole story.)

When you made your first comment in the thread, I thought it was possible that you were making a related comment about the biases (or lack thereof) that influenced manufacturers of both women’s clothing and men’s shoes. I initially misunderstood your comment in that I thought that by highlighting this other failure to meet market demand (for wide fashionable men’s shoes), you were suggesting that there are all sorts of such failures, and ascribing these failures to some prejudice in society missed the mark.

When Nancy asked about bias against people with wide feet, and you described the indirect route by which such people experience bias, I realized that I may have misunderstood your point. I continued to not understand exactly what point you were making until you expanded on it in some of the other comments in this thread. I now understand that your comment was something to the effect that men with wide feet suffer indirect prejudice because they can’t have fashionable shoes but they aren’t throwing a “pity party” about this situation the way that fat women are.

I guess the reason it took me so long to understand this point was that it was sufficiently tangential to the main points being discussed in the post that I just didn’t leap there immediately. I was particularly confused because it seemed like you ignored the opportunity to make a post that discussed a failure to meet market demand that could not be ascribed to prejudice, which would therefore provide some evidence that at least part of the explanation for the failure in plus-size women’s clothing is also not due to prejudice.

(That being said, I don’t know if you can wear ordinary wide-size men’s shoes or if you need wider shoes than that, but for athletic shoes, I know New Balance carries wide sizes, and for other shoes, Cole Haan does. I’m not an expert on fashionable men’s shoes, but Cole Haan seems fashionable to me. You might also try Zappos, which gives you the option of searching by width.)

Moving on to the other question, the main reason I perceive you as “trolling” was that I am familiar with the longstanding issues between you and Alicorn. (I suspect that most regular Less Wrong readers who have been here for a sufficiently long time are similarly aware of those issues.) You engaged in behavior that I would deem “trolling” or perhaps “passive-aggressive” by making these comments:

And frankly, when the asymmetic bra issue came up, I got pretty scared. Some of the commenters—and I’m not going to single anyone out—sound like really angry people in general and I fear that being around them would make their rage spill on to me.

They have this entitlement mentality, where everyone has to make clothes that they like. I think it’s what motivates a lot of the crime against retailers.

I looked through the asymmetric bra sub-thread, and despite your reference to multiple commenters and assertion that you would not single anyone out, it is hard to come up with any other idea than that you were indirectly baiting Alicorn, the instigator and main proponent on the asymmetric bra issue.

Moreover, when HughRistik indicated that he didn’t perceive the anger on the issue that you described, you responded:

Good. It was satire to make a point. The people who are being mocked know who they are.

And again, the most reasonable interpretation is that you were baiting or mocking Alicorn here.

Which brings us to your question:

Would you consider it trolling for someone to say this (reworded to obscure origin; comes from an actual LW comment):

If someone makes a leap from, “Man, I wish you were better able to sell your product” to “someone should feel so bad for you that they buy your product”, that is a problem. It’s bad if someone is trying to make a living selling a product but can’t—yet I would never equate that with an obligation for people to buy! That mentality is downright scary, because it leads to all kinds of evil, like rape.

Because that logic is just as tenuous … and makes a more serious accusation. For those who have made such comments—and some are probably reading—I hope they get the message.

Given the rest of the thread, it will probably not surprise you to know that I was able to discern that the author of the original comment was most likely Alicorn. Alicorn’s actual comment was:

It’s the mental leap from “aw, I feel bad that you are having trouble selling your product” to “aw, someone should take pity on you to the point of buying your product” that presents the problem. I do feel bad for people who have trouble selling, but I categorically refuse to translate that into an obligation on the part of the target market! That kind of thinking scares the crap out of me, because that is the kind of thinking that leads to various evil behaviors up to and including rape. source

The context was that the “product” being sold was oneself as a sexual partner. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to address whether I consider the actual comment made by Alicorn to be trolling, rather than your translation of the comment presented without context. And whatever flaws that comment might have, I wouldn’t consider it trolling.

I don’t read the comment as directed at anyone personally (as I read your comment to be designed to bait/mock Alicorn), although perhaps you disagree on that point. I don’t think it’s designed to mock or bait more generally either. If you have evidence that the comment was directed more particularly at you or other LWers, or was intended to mock or bait, I would be interested in seeing that evidence.

On the other hand, I agree that the rhetoric might be somewhat over the top. The use of “scares the crap out of me” may be too much. I personally don’t read it to suggest that the sort of thinking described inevitably leads to evil behavior in every person who has such thoughts, although perhaps that reading is debatable. Softening the language to make that point more clear may have improved the comment’s palatability.

But my ultimate conclusion is that it’s an interesting point, worthy of debate, and indeed it resulted in a long, involved, and more or less productive discussion. So no, not trolling.

Airedale Jul 17, 2010, 8:07 PM
10 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Financial incentives don’t get rid of bias? Prize for best answer.
On a substantive level, I’m confused about what point you’re making. Are you suggesting that shoe manufacturers are biased against people with wide feet, in the same way that Nancy suggested that clothing manufacturers are biased against fat women? Or are you suggesting that neither situation represents that sort of bias or prejudice, and that alternate explanations should be sought?

Like Nancy, I’ve never heard of significant general societal prejudice against people with wide feet, so that’s part of why I don’t understand exactly what parallel you’re trying to draw.

Also, with respect to this quote:

And frankly, when the asymmetic bra issue came up, I got pretty scared. Some of the commenters—and I’m not going to single anyone out—sound like really angry people in general and I fear that being around them would make their rage spill on to me.

Like HughRistik, I don’t share your perception. And with respect to this quote:

They have this entitlement mentality, where everyone has to make clothes that they like. I think it’s what motivates a lot of the crime against retailers.

This struck me as pretty close to trolling, since I don’t think it’s a big inferential step to take that as suggesting that the unnamed “angry” commenters that left you “scared” might end up committing such crimes.

Airedale 13 Jul 2010 21:31 UTC
28 points
on: Room for rent in North Berkeley house

And before any of you pedants downvote me because “Less Wrong is not Craigslist”, this is kind of like a year long Less Wrong meetup.

Similarly, my marriage to steven0461 is kind of like a lifetime LW meetup. Current posts that I have in the works: 1) Pictures from our Less Wrong Wedding; 2) How to manage finances in a Less Wrong marriage; 3) Family vacations the Less Wrong way; and 4) Why every Less Wrong couple should get a puppy.

Airedale 13 Jul 2010 15:38 UTC
13 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think

I’ve also observed that people who come to believe that there are significant differences between the sexes/races/whatevers on average begin to discriminate against all individuals of the disadvantaged sex/race/whatever, even when they were only persuaded by scientific results they believed to be accurate and were reluctant to accept that conclusion. I have watched this happen to smart people more than once. Furthermore, I have never met (or read the writings of) any person who believed in fundamental differences between the whatevers and who was not also to some degree a bigot.

This is something I haven’t observed, but it’s seemed plausible to me anyway. Have there been any studies (even small, lightweight studies with hypothetical trait differences) showing that sort of overshoot? If there are, why don’t they get the sort of publicity that studies which show differences get?

I would also be interested in hearing if there are any studies on this subject. For me, much of WrongBot’s argument hangs on how accurate these observations are. I’m still not sure I’d agree with the overall point, but more evidence on this point would make me much more inclined to consider it.

Also, WrongBot, it seems possible that the observations you’ve made could have alternate explanations; e.g., the people that you have witnessed change their behavior based on scientific results may not have been as originally unbiased or reluctant to change their minds on these subjects as you had believed them to be.

In other words, there may be a chicken/egg problem here. Did these people that you observed really become more bigoted/discriminatory after accepting the truth of certain studies, or did (perhaps subconscious) bigotry actually lead them to accept (and even seek out) studies showing results that confirmed this bigotry and gave them “cover” to discriminate?

Airedale

Chicago Meetup: Sun­day, Au­gust 1 at 2:00 pm

Chicago Meetup: Sunday, August 1 at 2:00 pm