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A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. — Paul Graham, I. Staying on the subject of: what about all those scientists burned at the stake for their discoveries? Historical consensus declares this a myth invented by New Atheists. The Church was a great patron of science, no one believed in a flat earth, Galileo had it coming, et cetera.

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Presents some of these stories and explains why they’re less of a science-vs-religion slam dunk than generally supposed. Among my favorites: was a thirteenth century friar who made discoveries in mathematics, optics, and astronomy, and who was the first Westerner to research gunpowder. It seems (though records are unclear) that he was accused of heresy and died under house arrest. But this may have been because of his interest in weird prophecies, not because of his scientific researches. Was a sixteenth-century anatomist who made some early discoveries about the circulatory and nervous system. He was arrested by Catholic authorities in France and fled to Geneva, where he was arrested by Protestant authorities, and burnt at the stake “atop a pyre of his own books”. But this was because of his heretical opinions on the Trinity, and not for any of his anatomical discoveries.

Was a philosopher/scientist/hermeticist/early heliocentrism proponent who was most notable as the first person recorded to have claimed that humans evolved from apes – though his theories and arguments were kind of confused and he probably got it right mostly by chance. City authorities arrested him for blasphemy, cut out his tongue, strangled him, and burned his body at the stake. But nobody cared about his views on evolution at the time; the exact charges are unclear but he was known to make claims like “all religious things are false”.

Was a fourteenth century philosopher and doctor who helped introduce Arabic medicine to the West. He was arrested by the Inquisition and accused of consorting with the Devil.

He died before a verdict was reached, but the Inquisition finished the trial, found him guilty, and ordered his corpse burnt at the stake. But he wasn’t accused of consorting with the Devil because he was researching Arabic medicine. He was accused of consorting with the Devil because he was kind of consorting with the Devil – pretty much everyone including modern historians agree that he was super into occultism and wrote a bunch of grimoires and magical texts. Was a contemporary of Galileo’s.

He also believed in heliocentrism, and promoted (originated?) the idea that the stars were other suns that might have other planets and other life-forms. He was arrested, tortured, and burned at the stake. But although his “innumerable worlds” thing was probably a strike against him, the church’s main gripe was his denial of Christ’s divinity. I’m not a historian and I don’t want to debate any of these accounts. Let’s say they’re all true, let’s accept every excuse we’re given and accept the Church never burned anybody just for researching science.

Scientists got in trouble for controversial views on non-scientific subjects like prophecies or the Trinity, or for political missteps. Scott Aaronson writes about the (suggested alternate title: “Kolmogorov complicity”). Mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov lived in the Soviet Union at a time when true freedom of thought was impossible.

He reacted by saying whatever the Soviets wanted him to say about politics, while honorably pursuing truth in everything else. As a result, he not only made great discoveries, but gained enough status to protect other scientists, and to make occasional very careful forays into defending people who needed defending. He used his power to build an academic bubble where science could be done right and where minorities persecuted by the communist authorities (like Jews) could do their work in peace. It’s tempting to imagine a world where Servetus, Bacon, and Bruno followed Aaronson’s advice.

They pursued their work in optics, astronomy, anatomy, or whatever other subject, but were smart enough never to go near questions of religion. Maybe they would give beautiful speeches on how they had seen the grandeur of the heavens, but the true grandeur belonged to God and His faithful servant the Pope who was incidentally right about everything and extremely handsome. Maybe they would have ended up running great universities, funding other thinkers, and dying at a ripe old age. Armed with this picture, one might tell Servetus and Bruno to lay off the challenges. Catholicism doesn’t seem quite true, but it’s not doing too much harm, really, and it helps keep the peace, and lots of people like it. Just ignore this one good prosocial falsehood that’s not bothering anybody, and then you can do whatever it is you want.

But Kolmogorov represents an extreme: the politically savvy, emotionally mature scientist able to strategically manipulate tough situations. For the opposite extreme, consider Leonid Kantorovich. Kantorovich was another Russian mathematician. He was studying linear optmization problems when he realized one of his results had important implications for running planned economies. He wrote the government a nice letter telling them that they were doing the economy all wrong and he could show them how to do it better. The government at this point happened to be Stalin during his “kill anybody who disagrees with me in any way” phase.

Historians are completely flabbergasted that Kantorovich survived, and conjecture that maybe some mid-level bureaucrat felt sorry for him and erased all evidence the letter had ever existed. He was only in his 20s at the time, and it seems like later on he got more sophisticated and was able to weather Soviet politics about as well as anybody.

How could such a smart guy make such a stupid mistake? My guess: the Soviet government didn’t officially say “We will kill anyone who criticizes us”. They officially said “Comrade Stalin loves freedom and welcomes criticism from his fellow citizens”, and you had to have some basic level of cynicism and social competence to figure out that wasn’t true. Even if the Soviet government had been more honest and admitted they were paranoid psychopaths, the exact implications aren’t clear. Kantorovich was a professor, he was writing about a very abstract level of economics close to his area of expertise, and he expressed his concerns privately to the government.

Was that really the same as some random hooligan shouting “I hate Stalin!” on a street corner? Surely there were some highly-placed professors of unquestionable loyalty who had discussed economics with government officials before.

Even a savvier version of Kantorovich would have to consider complicated questions of social status, connections, privileges, et cetera. The real version of Kantorovich showed no signs of knowing any of those issues even existed. If you think it’s impossible to be that oblivious, you’re wrong.

Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time. The average person who grows up in a censored society may not even realize for a while that the censorship exists, let alone know its exact limits, let alone understand that the censors are not their friends and aren’t interested in proofs that the orthodoxy is wrong. Given enough time, such a person can become a savvy Kolmogorov who sees the censorship clearly, knows its limits, and understands how to skirt them. If they’re really lucky, they may even get something-like-common-knowledge that there are other Kolmogorovs out there who know this stuff, and that it’s not their job to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But they’re going to have a really cringeworthy edgelord period until they reach that level. All of this would be fine except that, as Graham says in the quote above, scientists go looking for trouble. The is curiosity.

I don’t know how the internal experience of curiosity works for other people, but to me it’s a sort of itch I get when the pieces don’t fit together and I need to pick at them until they do. I’ve talked to some actual scientists who have this way stronger than I do.

An intellectually curious person is a heat-seeking missile programmed to seek out failures in existing epistemic paradigms. God help them if they find one before they get enough political sophistication to determine which targets are safe.

Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy. So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on.

They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster.

But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario?

The problem is, nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”.

And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them. The more curiosity someone has about the world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much.

Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them. And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue.

The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval.

Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people.

It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly. Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics.

Everyone will agree that the intelligentsia are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power. But the biggest threat is to epistemology.

The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true.

And why should they even believe you if you tell them? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare? The Kolmogorov option is only costless when it’s common knowledge that the orthodoxies are lies, that everyone knows the orthodoxies are lies, that everyone knows everyone knows the orthodoxies are lies, etc. But this is never common knowledge – that’s what it means to say the orthodoxies are still orthodox. Kolmogorov’s curse is to watch slowly from his bubble as everyone less savvy than he is gets destroyed.

The smartest and most honest will be destroyed first. Then any institution that reliably produces intellect or honesty.

Then any philosophy that allows such institutions. It will all be totally pointless, done for the sake of something as stupid as lightning preceding thunder. But it will happen anyway. Then he and all the other savvy people can try to pick up the pieces as best they can, mourn their comrades, and watch the same thing happen all over again in the next generation. The Church didn’t lift a finger against science.

It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same. I’m not against the Kolmogorov Option.

It’s nothing more than a band-aid on the problems that even a harmless orthodoxy will cause – but if there’s no way to get rid of the orthodoxy, the band-aid is better than nothing. But politically-savvy Kolmogorov types can’t just build a bubble. They have to build a whisper network. They have to build a system that reliably communicates the state of society. “Stalin claims that he welcomes advice from everyone, but actually he will kill you if you try to give it.” Or “God probably doesn’t exist, but lots of us know this, and we all just go to Mass and mouth the right words anyway.” This is harder than it sounds. A medieval monk being told God doesn’t exist probably has a lot of questions.

He’s likely to go kind of crazy for a while, crave the worldview-shards that he needs to rebuild his fractured philosophy. “What about Heaven?

Does that exist? The thunder-and-lightning example seems like a bad comparison for this kind of situation, in that the false claim is (1) easily observable to be untrue, and (2) utterly useless to the society that propagates it. Neither of those statements applies to Stalinist communism or medieval Christian theology. (That doesn’t imply any particular judgment about whether those belief systems were true or good on balance, just that, Chesterton’s Fence-style, they existed for some reason better than serving as a strawman example.) I imagine you might respond that inane claims *do* serve a purpose. Forcing everyone in society to agree that “lightning comes before thunder” is a cheap and easy way to detect people who might also disagree with “the king rules by divine right”. This is true even if it’s not the overt motivation behind believing “lightning comes before thunder” (in fact, it almost certainly won’t be).

This kind of honeytrap may be socially beneficial (from the divine-right fans’ point of view), even if accidental. But that situation would still beg the question of whether the edgelord types are missing something. Is divine right really beneficial? (For whom?) Often the edgelord perspective glosses over the fact that something besides “truth” is at stake.

One might unwittingly take sides in a social or cultural power struggle, or destroy a useful institution, based on one’s perception of “truth”. (For the record, I don’t think that’s what’s going on with religion– or at least it isn’t the only thing going on. But the possibility is worth considering.). Well, there things are less obvious: actually, some people kept believing some of Lysenko’s claims after explicitly trying to verify them. There was a paper published in Soviet Union with reproduction of Mendel’s experiment on relatively small populations, which alleged to contradict the Mendel’s laws.

Actually, if analyzed with a good understanding of probability distributions, the experiment confirmed the Mendel’s laws. Kolmogorov immediately published a probability theory proof that this experiment had confirmed Mendel’s laws, which made Lysenko explicitly declare separate magisteria between mathematics and biology. Don’t both of those things apply to both Stalinism and Dark Age Christianity? The harm of Stalinism (central bureaucrats don’t have the knowledge to effectively implement central planning, are highly vulnerable to corruption and both of these things being true, no one has an incentive to do good work) isn’t necessarily obvious until you try to implement such a system, but it doesn’t take long before the flaws become apparent once you do.

As for the medieval church, these people were literally pushing faith as a virtue! It takes about five seconds before someone’s going to think, “wait a second, don’t I need evidence before I can have the trust needed for faith? And once I seek out evidence I’m no longer the guy who ‘believes though he has not seen’?” Neither of these things will necessarily lead to capitalism or atheism immediately. What’s going to seem more likely, especially to a scientifically-minded person who is probably more focused on questions of fact than on questions of politics-that the whole of society is wrong on something this obvious, or that the scientist has made a mistake? And so, anyone who cares about truth is going to be gaslit horribly as they wonder why nothing adds up.

But if the whole world claimed that lighting and thunder were reversed, wouldn’t the exact thing happen to anyone who bothered to actually look at a thunderstorm? “It sure looks like the thunder is following after.

Wow confirmation bias is strong, clearly I need to train my perceptions better!” As for being utterly useless, both Christianity and Stalinism would appear useless unless one bought in to the parts of the doctrines that explain why they’re actually super important (eternal salvation and/or a better economy). Epson Lq 570e Driver Win Xp there. It wouldn’t take long for any society that decided to make lighting a political issue to come up with a reason why this was a big deal. Consider how parts of modern social justice have decided that video gaming is a mark of misogyny, rather than just a hobby like any other, or that futurism article Scott reviewed recently that decided that there were more white males in the optimistic and singularitarian futurist camps, and therefore believing in a good and/or singularitarian future must mark one as a heretic Evil White Male. Sure, lightning vs. Thunder doesn’t obviously fit into an overarching narrative for us, because we haven’t seen it politicized.

But couldn’t one just as easily imagine Stalin welcoming help on implementing the Five Year Plan better, because isn’t the important thing to build a worker’s paradise, and if Kantorovich can help out, he’s a Hero of the Soviet Union? Couldn’t one imagine a Christianity where bloody wars weren’t fought over whether the Communion turning into flesh and blood was literal or symbolic because Jesus didn’t specify, He just said to practice Communion? Anything can be politicized, and with disturbing ease. The false claim is (1) easily observable to be untrue, and (2) utterly useless to the society that propagates it.

Don’t both of those things apply to both Stalinism and Dark Age Christianity? A) On the object level, no, they don’t. 1) Just off the top of my head: “Dark Age” refers to a different period than the one discussed here (see: the entire last week of posts) and the medieval church mostly didn’t use “faith” to mean what you’re assuming it means. As to Stalinism, I didn’t claim that it was economically efficient– just that it wasn’t *manifestly* untrue as a belief the same way thunder-before-lightning is. You can find people even today who make cogent arguments in support of medieval Christian theology or central-planning-style Communism. 2) In hindsight we might conclude we’re better off without them.

Or we might not. There are plenty of people who think that religion and/or authoritarianism, even if unjustified, are good for a society (other things being equal). In any event it’s undeniable that there was *some* social impetus for them to exist (Chesterton’s Fence implies that much) and that they had some significant impact on society (which thunder-before-lightning doesn’t). B) On the meta-level, this is still missing the point.

It’s a category error to reason from “the wrongness of Christianity and Stalinism seems obvious to me” (as it clearly does for you) to general conclusions about how to behave in the present. – First of all, we live in a very different kind of society and culture; *of course* Christian Europe and Stalinist Russia would seem manifestly unreasonable to us! So the apparent unreasonableness tells us much less than you might think about who’s actually right or wrong. (“Yeah, but can’t we see in hindsight that they were so much worse?” Nope, still missing the point. If they could see our modern-day society they’d likely be just as aghast.) – Second, we shouldn’t confuse outside view with inside view. We see these other worldviews from the outside, with the benefit of hindsight and massive selection bias toward history’s winners. We see our modern-day disputes from the inside.

Our model for reasoning about current events shouldn’t be our own confidence about Stalinist Russia; it should be Stalinist Russians’ constant disagreement and near-complete cluelessness about Stalinist Russia. – Third, and most important, we should practice epistemic humility (see point A above). From the inside, all strongly held beliefs feel much the same, regardless of how they’re supported or arrived. That is, it’s hard to internally distinguish between “I am highly confident in this belief based on examining all available evidence” and “I hold this belief for strong cultural, social, or personal reasons that have little to do with the evidence”. If you want proof of this, consider all the thinkers who were/are totally right in one area and horribly wrong in another, yet similarly forceful about both beliefs.

The big risk I see in promoting edgelord-like beliefs is that it correlates very well with strength of belief but much less well with accuracy of belief. That last point could use a bit more illustration/elaboration. So: Anyone remember where Stalinism came from? That’s right– it was more or less a direct consequence of Marxism, the favorite belief system of “freethinkers” (read: edgelord types) for the previous half-century or more. By and large, the same people promoting the cultural/social/religious ideas that we now celebrate as “progressive” were also fervent believers in an economic system that we mostly consider discredited.

It doesn’t look like their edginess did much to keep them from being wrong. Thanks for the response! Thoughts on your post: “Dark Age” refers to a different period than the one discussed here You are correct; my apologies. The medieval church mostly didn’t use “faith” to mean what you’re assuming it means Do you have sources? I was under the impression that the church has pushed a blind faith line for the entirety of its history, plus or minus a few apologists who try to pretend otherwise using motte and bailey tactics e.g. It wasn’t *manifestly* untrue as a belief the same way thunder-before-lightning is Maybe the failures aren’t quite as obvious, though for Holodomor victims one might argue they were more so.

On the other hand, Aristotelian motion (objects move in a straight line until they run out of impetus, then drop) was widely and dogmatically believed for centuries, even though anyone who bothered to throw a rock could have noticed the manifest untruth of the model. This seems like a fairly close historical parallel to lighting-heresy. You can find people even today who make cogent arguments in support of medieval Christian theology or central-planning-style Communism.

Cogent arguments? Certainly there are people who argue for such things, but I have not encountered coherent reasoning from Christian apologists, and I’ve read a fair amount of apologetics. On the meta-level, this is still missing the point. It’s a category error to reason from “the wrongness of Christianity and Stalinism seems obvious to me” (as it clearly does for you) to general conclusions about how to behave in the present.

This is absolutely correct. Just because we can see the error of Stalinism or blind faith doesn’t mean that spotting an analogous error from the inside is easy. The outside view suggests that we could be making similar mistakes today, while being mostly or completely blind to them. The point I was making wasn’t “these are easy mistakes to spot, therefore we can be confident in our ideas today.” Rather, it was that these are mistakes that persisted in spite of having easily observable flaws, moreover their perceived utility to society is dependent on a narrative without which they would seem potentially irrelevant. Therefore, the fact that lightning/thunder is obvious if one observes carefully wouldn’t necessarily prevent it from taking a similar role in orthodoxy, especially since any society that turned this into a dogma would almost certainly construct a narrative in which believing that thunder came first was absolutely not utterly useless, but essential. And in that situation the fact that the mistake is obvious to someone who didn’t grow up accepting it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to spot if you’re used to it. Scott’s point isn’t about falsehoods that everyone can easily see; it’s about falsehoods that are easy enough to notice that the intelligent and curious tend to notice that they’re confused about them, but are hard enough to pick up on (at least from the inside) that getting everyone to realize the problem is difficult, and creating common knowledge of the problem is harder still.

Thanks for the reply! Your request for sources on “faith” pushed me to do some actual research on the subject.

Lewis’s understanding of “faith” helpful in some ways, but I agree that it isn’t a typical one.) The premodern Christian document on the subject that I’d actually read most recently was Luther’s, which has this helpful passage: Faith is not that human illusion and dream that some people think it is. When they hear and talk a lot about faith and yet see that no moral improvement and no good works result from it, they fall into error and say, “Faith is not enough. You must do works if you want to be virtuous and get to heaven.” The result is that, when they hear the Gospel, they stumble and make for themselves with their own powers a concept in their hearts which says, “I believe.” This concept they hold to be true faith. But since it is a human fabrication and thought and not an experience of the heart, it accomplishes nothing, and there follows no improvement. Faith is a work of God in us, which changes us and brings us to birth anew from God (cf. It kills the old Adam, makes us completely different people in heart, mind, senses, and all our powers, and brings the Holy Spirit with it.

What a living, creative, active powerful thing is faith! It is impossible that faith ever stop doing good.

Faith doesn’t ask whether good works are to be done, but, before it is asked, it has done them. It is always active. Whoever doesn’t do such works is without faith; he gropes and searches about him for faith and good works but doesn’t know what faith or good works are. Even so, he chatters on with a great many words about faith and good works. Faith is a living, unshakeable confidence in God’s grace; it is so certain, that someone would die a thousand times for it.

This kind of trust in and knowledge of God’s grace makes a person joyful, confident, and happy with regard to God and all creatures. This is what the Holy Spirit does by faith. Through faith, a person will do good to everyone without coercion, willingly and happily; he will serve everyone, suffer everything for the love and praise of God, who has shown him such grace. It is as impossible to separate works from faith as burning and shining from fire.

Therefore be on guard against your own false ideas and against the chatterers who think they are clever enough to make judgements about faith and good works but who are in reality the biggest fools. Ask God to work faith in you; otherwise you will remain eternally without faith, no matter what you try to do or fabricate. So Luther contrasts “faith” with “unbelief”, but he also seems to deny that “faith” is equivalent to saying “I believe”. My interpretation is that, for Luther, the relevant meaning of “faith” was not about believing the historical/philosophical/scientific propositions in the Bible– because everyone in his time did that! Instead, it was about personally taking to heart certain spiritual promises in the Bible and gaining confidence as a result.

To summarize: “faith” for Luther meant “trusting in God”, not “believing God exists”. Needless to say, Luther is not a typical medieval theologian, so I also looked up.

He’s a little harder to parse, and being a philosopher he does seem to think of faith as something pertaining to propositions. But he characterizes faith as only applying to theological/spiritual knowledge (“First Truth” or “Divine Truth”), not propositions that are contingent or could be known through reasoning and observation.

So I’d guess that he more or less belongs in the “non-overlapping magisteria” camp re: faith and science. Finally, seems to have a decent summary of what Christians generally mean by “faith”. You’ll notice that there’s a lot of discussion of the trust/loyalty aspects and the theological implications of faith, with practically no mention of “faith” in the sense of “blindly believing things the Bible says”; in fact the Roman Catholic section explicitly denies this sense.

Hopefully this clears things up. Needless to say, Luther is not a typical medieval theologian, so I also looked up Aquinas on the subject. He’s a little harder to parse, and being a philosopher he does seem to think of faith as something pertaining to propositions.

But he characterizes faith as only applying to theological/spiritual knowledge (“First Truth” or “Divine Truth”), not propositions that are contingent or could be known through reasoning and observation. So I’d guess that he more or less belongs in the “non-overlapping magisteria” camp re: faith and science. Aquinas’ take on it is sure to be a bit more propositional than most, but Christianity in general was a pretty propositional faith, at least until the 20th century got hold of it. I’d recommend not reading “non-overlapping magisteria” into Aquinas’ position, though, for a number of reasons; chiefly, it’s anachronistic, and it’s not how he would have divided fields of knowledge (and arguably not how we should either). The medievals didn’t think any sort of conflict could occur between things we know from revelation vs things we know from reason vs things we know from natural philosophy, etc.

More importantly, though, they understood that it’s good to have reasons for one’s faith; it’s not for nothing that the Catholic Church teaches the existence of God can be known without the aid of revelation, and Aquinas and other medievals (and folks since) engaged in natural theology, reasoning about God in just that way. This was all a very long time ago, but Catholics have the benefit of continuity with a long tradition, so don’t discount its relevance. Thus my reply to David’s original question: I was under the impression that the church has pushed a blind faith line for the entirety of its history, plus or minus a few apologists who try to pretend otherwise Also, David, can you use italics or blockquote or something when you quote someone? It’s very confusing reading your posts otherwise.

Maybe the failures aren’t quite as obvious, though for Holodomor victims one might argue they were more so. On the other hand, Aristotelian motion (objects move in a straight line until they run out of impetus, then drop) was widely and dogmatically believed for centuries, even though anyone who bothered to throw a rock could have noticed the manifest untruth of the model.

This seems like a fairly close historical parallel to lighting-heresy. Aristotle did actually have an explanation for why projectiles keep moving after they’ve been thrown, although I can’t remember what it is at the moment. Maybe the failures aren’t quite as obvious, though for Holodomor victims one might argue they were more so. On the other hand, Aristotelian motion (objects move in a straight line until they run out of impetus, then drop) was widely and dogmatically believed for centuries, even though anyone who bothered to throw a rock could have noticed the manifest untruth of the model.

The blind reliance on Aristotelism of medieval scholars is a myth. Critiques and alternative theories of motions were developed already by John Philoponus in the VI Century, and later the quasi-inertial theory of impetus (a concept unknown to Aristotle) which responded to several objections to Earth’s possible motion was championed by figures like Buridanus and Nicholas d’Oresme. It seems to me that the lightning and thunder example was chosen specifically because it isn’t a real world example. If he used an example that is more complicated like Judaism or a Guaranteed National Income then everyone would get sidetracked with debating the example and miss the point.

I could mention here some obvious observable falsehoods regarding your examples, but that just falls into the trap. It is just easier in this case to stick to metaphors like lighting and the Emperor having no clothes in order to wrap our minds around the topic. A lot of things we hold as orthodox today will be proved wrong in the future, and debating the costs and benefits of a particular orthodoxy doesn’t really help people who find the flaws. The Deng and Zhao example is one possibility– you’ve got a group ready to come out of the woodwork when the lightning-and-thunder folks lose power.

Another possibility is that everything happens by degrees. If you can get a lot of people to test the lightning-and-thunder rules just a little bit, you can make it more socially acceptable and move the needle a little bit at a time without attracting too much attention from the authorities (and if they do try to crack down they’ll appear unreasonable). When the authorities make an example of an edgelord it often scares people away and moves the needle back in the other direction, so doing everything by whispers may be a better way to make progress.

I mean, under Stalin, it sure wouldn’t be. The fact that most Americans believe in the notion of free speech — by which here I mean the words “free speech”, though not necessarily much of the actual idea — may play a role; explicitly arguing against it, at least, may look bad. But I think the bigger explanations are: There’s no central authority doing this, just a popular movement, which relies on people’s enthusiasm; and the more levels of indirection, the less enthused people are going to be about going after it. And then on top of that, in many circles the core of this movement just isn’t large enough to accomplish what it’s doing alone, instead relying on popular support from people on its periphery, so it has to be able to convince them, too. (And then on top of that, in some circles it has to get not just people on its periphery, but people actually in the general population, limiting it even further.). I wasn’t being uncivil. Seems like a leap to call it cudgel wielding.

I was just pointing out he might be wrong about which side is the thunder side and which is the lightning side. This discussion does point out a secondary problem to dog whistles and whisper networks. Not only is the outgroup position not allowed to enter discourse on equal footing, the in group has a hard time legitimately attacking the outgroup position because the outgroup can always retreat with “no i wasnt really talking about that”.

So the true side has a hard time winning once and for all regardless of which side of the fence it is on. Like, OK, fine, you were just trying to talk about the object level things Scott might be implicitly discussing but such things isn’t the topic here. And attempting to argue such things in this topic is not really going to contribute to the cause of clear thinking, you know? Go discuss such things in another thread where it’s more relevant, or the open threads that aren’t culture-war-free. Talking about it here — and you’ve admitted, it’s not actually relevant to the point, so there’s no reason that here needs to be the place you talk about it — is just going to bring out tribalism in people and make the discussion worse.

(Also, if you’re confused about the response you’re getting here remember that people will generally read your comments in light of Grice’s maxims. If you say something clearly irrelevant, people won’t just assume you’re spouting irrelevancies for some reason; they’ll assume you believe it to be relevant. You’re only going to cause confusion if you go around saying things that aren’t relevant without explicitly marking them as such — especially if they’re things that other people honestly do believe to be relevant.). You said your reply to my earlier comment here that the correctness of what particular examples Scott might have in mind does not bear on the epistemological point being made. Given that, what do you possibly expect to be gained from trying to discuss such particular examples here?

Because there’s quite a bit to be lost — it’s going to make the whole discussion more mindkilling. Talking explicitly about examples is going to make people focus more on the examples than on the important point and tie the important point to the examples in their mind so that those who disagree with Scott will be more likely to dismiss the important epistemological point. There is a reason this post was written in the style that it was, and part of that is to keep people from dismissing the point out of hand based on (not actually relevant, but associated in their mind) examples. Don’t encourage such behavior! I’m not saying being more explicit.

(Well, I am saying be more explicit about what you consider relevant or irrelevant.) I’m saying this is a bad thread to talk about such things on, given that you have plenty of other options for talking about such things here on SSC. You said your reply to my earlier comment here that the correctness of what particular examples Scott might have in mind does not bear on the epistemological point being made.

Given that, what do you possibly expect to be gained from trying to discuss such particular examples here? When someone removes the details of some real life situation and tries to get the audience to agree to some abstract principle, that means that the audience has to trust that he is properly mapping the situation to the principle. And real human beings are usually terrible at mapping real-life situations to principles like these and not leaving anything out, assuming things they have no right to assume, or otherwise breaking the mapping in some undetectable (because it’s unsaid) way. There’s a reason why crackpots constantly compare themselves to Galileo. This whole blogpost is basically “look at all these Galileos. Galileos get persecuted. Implicature means I think that I or someone I support is like Galileo, but I won’t tell you who it is.

Trust me, they’re similar.” Scott could be referring to Damore or Horrible Banned Discourse, but the same thing that Scott is saying could equally well be said by a Holocaust denier, a homeopath, or someone designing a perpetual motion machine, and that person would sincerely think that it all applies to him. The details matter. There’s always epistemic learned helplessness. If someone creates a perfectly valid-sounding argument and successfully uses it to prove something that is sufficiently unbelievable such as homeopathy or flat-Earth, that’s Bayseian evidence that there’s something wrong with the argument and I just haven’t noticed it.

In some cases, such as Holocaust denial, it’s even Bayseian evidence for lying. Not to mention that I may not want to argue the Holocaust with a Holocaust denier in the first place. Also, whether the object-level claims are correct often directly affects whether the situations are analogous–they can’t be as easily separated as you suggest. The homeopath is not being rejected by the medical profession because they’re pulling a Galileo on him; he’s rejected because homeopathy is nonsense. But I can’t figure that out if he doesn’t reveal that he’s talking about homeopathy. @Sniffnoy The ability to write these things in such a way that people don’t immediately figure out what it is ‘really’ about and them immediately either dismiss it as heresy or preach it as the orthodoxy. I remember a while back there was a CGP Grey video along the lines of Scott’s Toxoplasma post, and at one point, he cuts the middle of the video and inserts something like “Stop.

Whatever issue you think this video is about, it isn’t about that. Put that away” and I remember realizing that he had caught me mid-thought-forming-in-my-head and I felt ashamed for a moment, then realized he was right. There’s very obviously, as you say, a reason why the post is structure in the way that it was. Anything enlightening on how? The in group has a hard time legitimately attacking the outgroup position because the outgroup can always retreat with “no i wasnt really talking about that”.

A second reason is that someone who suspects the outgroup position might be correct will reasonably reject even correct arguments for the ingroup position on the grounds that he hasn’t had the opportunity to see if there are rebuttals. And defenders of the ingroup position will be reluctant to offer responses to the strongest outgroup arguments, for fear that some may be persuaded by them. The only people who can give convincing arguments for the ingroup position are people identified as heretics who happen to agree with it. I’m thinking of a real example–the issue of innate racial differences and Thomas Sowell’s discussion of it in Ethnic America. A reasonable person observing the orthodox approach to the issue, which amounts to “we know there are no such differences and anyone who thinks there are should be shunned as a racist,” will reasonably suspect that the reason blacks earn less than whites is that they are less intelligent.

Sowell, being actually and obviously willing to offend orthodoxy, can present evidence–the success of West Indian immigrants–that is inconsistent with that view and be believed. It helps that he offers the same evidence in arguing against the other half of the orthodoxy–the claim that the real explanation is racism. Sorry that was I unclear. I was referring to this paragraph: If you think it’s impossible to be that oblivious, you’re wrong. Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time.

You might get fired, not hired or yelled at, sure. You’re not going to be shot or put in a gulag. We are not talking about atheist bloggers in Bangladesh here.

I like vvvvvv better:). How many people are in prison in “various Western countries” for saying the wrong thing?

I mean, I’m with you in liking the US version of free speech and opposing hate speech and blasphemy laws, but I can’t find any examples of people actually in prison by googling “people in prison for hate speech laws” and “people convicted of hate speech.” And by all means criticize Clanton (who should be convicted) or anti-free speech groups more broadly. Feel free to say something is going wrong, but when when people like the Scotts compare it to Stalin’s USSR when doing so, I am much less likely to take their claims about it seriously. Luke Edwards, thanks. Your link led me to this which was quite informative about the situation in the UK. There’s a lot of messiness here as threats, stalking (some of which would be illegal even in the US), ‘harassment’ and ‘offensive’ statements all seem to be covered in the same category. For example, I wouldn’t where a person sent a picture of a knife and the statment that she would ‘get it like Jo Cox” as going to prison for saying the wrong thing. I would characterize the people punished for burning poppies that way, but those cases resulted in a 50 pound fine in one instance and having to talk to veterans in another.

I’m against the arrests and punishment, but that’s not “going to prison”. Ultimately, as the report above shows, it looks like there is no comprehensive data on how many people are imprisoned for saying the wrong thing. If getting fired for your opinions is bad, not getting hired because of your race must be unimaginably terrible Not getting hired costs you the time invested in a cover letter and an interview, and a modest bit of aggravation tempered by the fact that you probably didn’t expect to get any one particular job and don’t know why you didn’t get that specific one. Getting fired adds in the opportunity cost of the job you quit/turned down in favor of the one you took, possibly the cost of moving to a new home, and likely some lost investment in non-transferable skills, knowledge, and social capital. Plus a much greater hit to your sense of self-worth, because the job you got fired from was almost by definition the best job you thought you could get, and you had thought you had earned recognition as being worthy of that job. Unless by “not being hired” you actually mean “blacklisted so cannot be hired anywhere“, getting fired is much, much worse.

And blacklisting doesn’t fit your context or analogy. Attempting to permanently discredit someone as one of the bad people you should never listen to, is not the same as honestly arguing with them.

Anyway, the important question isn’t, how badly are people hurt, but rather, to what extent is honest truth-seeking discouraged, and the resulting picture of the truth being distorted? Saying “oh but at least we didn’t kill anyone in the process” just isn’t much of a defense against the claim that you’ve given a lot of people a seriously bad epistemology. There was a sequence, at least in the Spanish Inquisition and Stalinist Russia. Declare a view (Judaism, pro-Tsarism) off limits and banish from Spain/to Siberia or kill anyone who expresses it 2. Realise that people occasionally lie about their beliefs, particularly if threatened by banishment or death. Require public affirmations of Christianity or loyalty to the new regime on the threat of banishment or death.

Realise that people can really lie about their beliefs. Start looking for subtle signs of a lack of belief in Christianity or Stalinism. On the threat, naturally, of banishment or death.

Realise that people might be communicating their beliefs in code. Accuse people based on your interpretation of their code, on the threat of banishment or death.

Say something that sounds vaguely like a code. Realise, possibly, that you probably should have stopped at step 1 as you are sent to the torturers or loaded on that truck heading East. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding here about how totalitarianism works. Totalitarian rulers really don’t care what people “really believe”–only that they demonstrate sufficient fear of saying what they really believe to convince the authorities that they’re no threat. In fact, one standard totalitarian technique is to force people to endorse absolutely ludicrous beliefs, thereby convincing everyone, not that the ludicrous belief is true, or even that everyone believes it, but rather that the authorities are so fearsome and all-powerful that everyone will say obviously ludicrous things to avoid challenging them. The result is that while there’s a lot of minor disinformation, nobody is so foolish as to trust the government just because nobody contradicts it.

On the contrary, the public tends to propagate all sorts of anti-government beliefs–mostly wild rumors and gossip–by communicating privately with family members and close, trusted friends. Everyone learns from a very early age how to toe the party line and spout the requisite approved drivel in public, and how to recognize with high precision exactly what level of frankness is safe in any particular private circumstance. (Since this is just about the most important survival skill of all in such a society, there’s naturally a great deal of energy devoted to teaching it.) The vast majority of the population has no difficulty absorbing and mastering these skills, and the few who don’t are similar to those who can’t master basic social skills in open societies: compulsive rebels, hopeless misfits (perhaps of the SSC variety), and a few noble martyr types.

As for scientists, I’ve got bad news–they’re pretty much like everybody else. The vast majority of them are perfectly capable of mastering the basic life skills required of a totalitarian state, and doing their science in that context. All this stuff about science requiring unstinting iconoclastic curiosity and so on is charmingly idealistic, but that’s not even how science works in the free world. Science is a method, and clever, creative, technically competent people who are also good at rigorously following a method can be very good at science–as well as at using their basic social/survival skills to direct their scientific research in harmless ways, whether the danger at hand is arrest by the secret police or just rejection by peer reviewers.

I don’t follow? I don’t recall ever reading anything of the kind. I got the impression that the true believers believed that once ordinary people had seen the wonders and virtues of the new system (be that French or Russian), they’d fall in line. Things only went downhill when such wonders didn’t quickly materialise and people started looking for whomever it was who was sabotaging the glorious new system.

And then it worked out that those in government – the true believers – were particularly subject to the terror. Have I got my history wrong? Do you have any sources supporting this view?

Usually happens regardless of what you say. Simply because if somebody gets the power to interpret codes, it’s the ultimate power of life and death. There can’t be too many people who wield that power.

In fact, there can be only one – Stalin. All the rest have expiration date. That’s why Ezhov followed Yagoda, and Beria followed Ezhov, and if Stalin didn’t die, somebody would have followed Beria, who would have been found to be a spy and a traitor (which he promptly was anyway when Stalin died). Well, but the people in Scott’s examples weren’t persecuted for “uncovering truths.” Unless consorting with the Devil is “true,” or Bruno’s books about magic and his belief the planets had souls are “true.” I think there’s a difference between saying “I don’t think the orthodoxy is true” and “here’s something completely out of left field I think is true.” Naturally I don’t think anyone should be persecuted for their beliefs, and I’m proud of the Church for learning from it’s mistakes, and wish the secular world could do a little better at this. Replying to you and Sniffnoy.

But it’s not the same type of criticism. Stalin killed or exiled everyone who could possibly be a threat to Stalin without caring about type I error.

Many other members of the revolution,famously including Trotsky, are murdered, executed or exiled. It essentially had nothing to do with orthodoxy or correct beliefs – the correct beliefs changed continuously and shamelessly as Orwell pointed out. I’m inferring that the Scotts are referring to beliefs about differences between individuals and groups which have attracted vociferous criticism, economic consequences and even physical assault in a few cases (and not beliefs that have a reasonable likelihood of you actually being murdered or imprisoned if you express them). It’s equally true for a number of other beliefs that attract extreme opposition, such as certain religious or political beliefs that are unacceptable in certain contexts.

But there are plenty of contexts where one can express those kinds of views without any fear whatsoever. Moreover, there are contexts where voicing opposition to those views results in the same sort of consequences. I’m not talking about situations about Kerensky writing from exile, I mean that there are people with a large public profile enjoying economic and social success while they loudly proclaim these allegedly “unacceptable beliefs.”.

Imagine a Martian observer of Earth who takes the democracy stuff at face value. The state is the people, so the people are the state, so there’s really no difference between what the people do and what the state does.

Everything that is done by the people is done by the state, which is the people; everything that is done by the state is done by the people, who are the state. In some places, people are tortured. In other places, people are blacklisted. Most cases of both don’t go viral.

They just happen, and you don’t hear about them. Now, if your Martian is interested in political speculation, he might wonder if there are any patterns to this. What determines whether people are tortured or blacklisted or both? Surely “both” is the worst of the options, but how about torture vs.

Torture is administrated by a central authority, and its target has the opportunity to recant. The Dark Lord Moldevort responded to his purge by asking if there was a creed he could assent to in order to be rehabilitated, but of course there isn’t and can’t be. Instead of torture followed by recantation and rehabilitation, we have blacklisting followed by more blacklisting. This is known as “progress”, and it sure sounds like a reasonable response to “progress” is an upward revision of one’s opinion of Catholic theocracy, and I say that as someone whose glorious ancient culture revolves mostly around conspiracy theories about the Pope. What’s the worst that could happen — you have to get your condoms from the same place you already get your acid? 600,000 people were killed in the Great Purge alone.

Out of a much smaller population. The guy you keep going back to as some great victim — Yarvin — is not destitute. You can’t name a single person that’s destitute because of this purge you claim is analogous to Stalin’s. When you go way over the top with your analogies, it doesn’t become more convincing, it becomes less convincing.

That’s the reason people try to avoid invoking Godwin’s law. And when you are called on going over the top, if you double down and say no really it *is* actually far worse, then you lose all credibility. Even if you think you don’t need to worry about credibility because you picked an unpronounceable handle. @rlms I’m glad to hear it, too- I kind of thought it was just me. I’m not a bigot, but I’m getting sick of having to preface support for civil liberties with “I’m not a bigot”.

And this is exactly the kind of thing I was sure would never come up when people were arguing against gay marriage in the first place. It’s left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, to be honest. I’m still pro-gay-marriage, but things like this and the pizza place make it a lot easier to see where conservatives are coming from on this issue. Jack Lecter says: I’m still pro-gay-marriage, but things like this and the pizza place make it a lot easier to see where conservatives are coming from on this issue. I hope it also makes it easier for you to understand why there’s pretty much going to be no “give” on the Right on the transgenderism issue. We remember how quickly “if you don’t want to have a gay marriage, don’t have one” became “bake the cake, bigot!” So the response is “if you have a penis, you’re male. And if you try to go into a girls’ / women’s restroom / locker room, we want you arrested.” All sympathy is dead, because we saw where sympathy got us.

I’m not sure how bigoted bakers fit into the discussion at hand. Isn’t the discussion about whisper networks and being punished for not holding the correct beliefs? I don’t see how businesses being punished for violating public accommodation laws, which go back decades, have anything to do with the subject at hand, regardless of one’s position on those laws. What’s ‘thunder comes before lightening’ in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case?

I understand some people have axes they are looking to grind, but you should probably look for at least a vaguely relevant context. I’m not sure whether you have me in mind, Brad, but I’d say my response to Jack’s post was relevant to it, and that Jack’s post, while at a tangent to rlms’, was entirely in line too. For that matter, Questioner’s post makes sense in response to rlms’: rlms was drawing a distinction between something he thinks is good (freedom of association) and something he thinks isn’t (government infringing on rights), and Questioner’s point, clearly, was to find a case of freedom of association that rlms would not accept, to show rlms either that freedom of association is not as uninfringeable as he thinks it is, or else that the cake shop should be fine too. No one mentioned “businesses violating public accommodation laws” except you—but that’s fine, because that’s presumably either a reasonable limitation of freedom of association or it’s not, and that’s relevant to rlms’ having a consistent position on freedom of association. I acknowledge 天可汗’s argument is difficult to parse, not least because he’s speaking in parables now, but no one here has been grinding any axes. All the individual responses make sense in context. It seems to me it’s only by trying to impose one single topic on all this that they look irrelevant.

@Nick Questioner’s line of argument was flawed, because it is perfectly possible to view freedom of association as generally good, and the categorical difference between negative effects from a government infringing on rights and negative effects from individuals freely associating as important, without viewing freedom of association as sacrosanct. But since they gave an example where I do favour the freedom of association side (and did so in an uncharitable way), I didn’t feel the need to explain this. I don’t think Questioner’s original interjection in this thread was at all reasonable. S/he clearly has some kind of ax to grind about bigoted bakers. That initial impression was confirmed by the follow up post, which again was generic right wing table pounding, this time about trans people. The discussion between quints, Sniffnoy, and Tracy W was about whether or not it is reasonable to compare peer to peer criticism about what people think and say to Stalinist purges. Unpronounceable decided to characterize this peer to peer criticism as “losing the ability to pay your bills and most of your social connections” although he’s been unable or unwilling to give any examples of that.

He then went on to further dig himself in the exaggeration hole by referencing Mussolini torturing people. That’s when rlms stepped in to point out that Mussolini was a dictator torturing people and not peers, in their private capacities, freely deciding whether or not to associate with someone based on their views. He did use the magic words “freedom of association” which is apparently what triggered Questioner to introduce his hobby horse, but Masterpiece Bakery has nothing at all to do with the distinction rlms was drawing between Mussolini as a state actor torturing people and peers dropping friends over perceived heresy (i.e. Losing social connections). As I said, just random ax grinding. Unpronounceable’s position is absurd, but at least it is regarding the topic of discussion.

Brad, rlms invoked freedom of association to defend his apparent (correct me if I’m getting this wrong, rlms!) contention that people losing their jobs for unacceptable views isn’t necessarily wrong. Questioner countered with a well-known case that invokes freedom of association, one in which folks who defend the firings typically argue it doesn’t apply for whatever reason, with his (uncharitably stated) implication that rlms either support the bakers too or consider freedom of association infringeable. I don’t think this means he has an ax to grind or to suppose that this is Questioner’s “hobby horse”, but even if it did, it’s not what makes his argument a poor one, and either way it hardly makes his post irrelevant. Rlms says: Questioner’s line of argument was flawed, because it is perfectly possible to view freedom of association as generally good, and the categorical difference between negative effects from a government infringing on rights and negative effects from individuals freely associating as important, without viewing freedom of association as sacrosanct. Well, both you and Brad are both wrong It’s not about “freedom of Association, and it’s not about public accommodation laws, sit’s about the right to disagree with orthodoxy. Phillips thinks that same sex marriage are not real marriages, and that therefore he doesn’t want anything to do with them.

Either he’s allowed to have that belief without having his business be destroyed, or he isn’t. Those who hold he isn’t are modern versions of the Inquisition, different targets (so what?) but same totalitarian demand that all must bow before them. The “public accommodation” argument is so stupid that I wonder at the total lack of “sense of shame” among the people who make it. If a gay individual walks into Phillips store, and he refuses to sell them items available for purchase, that would be a violation of a public accommodations law. Refusing to make a custom product for use in a ceremony Phillips doesn’t approve of is not a violation of any sort of legitimate public accommodation law. “Common carriers” don’t provide “custom goods”.

The answer is so completely obvious yet somehow Phillips never raised it before the Colorado Supreme Court. And instead conceded the public accommodation point. You never even bothered reading the key documents involved in the case you are demagoguing about, did you? Courts heard all these same claims made 50 years ago when your intellectual forebears were flipping out about miscegenation. And again this has zero to do with the subject at hand. There’s no “thunder comes before lightening” here. There’s just your unconvincing attempts to horn in on an argument whose entire logic was about leaving space for people to discover and share the truth.

Bigoted bakers refusing to serve customers has zero to do with any kind of truth about the world. @brad: There’s no “thunder comes before lightning here” Yes there is, there’s the claim that the union of two men 9or two women) is as valuable to society, and therefore as worthy of support, as a heterosexual marriage. We’ve got a ton of support for the idea that our society relies on heterosexual marriage for its well being. To take a simple case: insurance companies lowered rates for married males under the age of 25 because marriage made them more responsible, safer, individuals. There is no such evidence, that I know of, for same sex unions.

Care to provide some? Lacking such evidence, there is no valid reason to grant such unions the benefits that society grants heterosexual marriages As for “read the documents”, Phillips pointed out that they were willing to sell the couple everything in the store, they just weren’t willing to make a custom cake for their “ceremony”. Before you knock others for not reading, you might try it yourself. But there are plenty of contexts where one can express those kinds of views without any fear whatsoever. This gets us back to the bubble issue. There are contexts where one can argue that AGW doesn’t exist or that men are smarter than women or that Obama was really born in Kenya.

But there are groups where you can’t argue those things without serious penalties and where the members of those groups mostly limit their intellectual interaction to other members of them. If the result of saying X is that members of group Y no longer consider you someone worth taking seriously, then the logic of the situation within group Y is pretty much as Scott described. Again, I contend that you’re missing the point.

The point isn’t if people are being hurt for speaking their minds; that’s just one means of the problem, not the problem itself. The problem is bad community epistemics (well, OK, a particular form thereof, but focusing on “are they hurting people” is still the wrong thing to focus on). Not merely “doesn’t converge to truth” bad but “goes into a well-known positive feedback loop and goes to hell while getting more and more unhinged” bad.

So really as to the hurting people thing, whether you’re killing people or what that’s really just a matter of degree. Obviously harsher punishments are wronger in and of themselves but even pretty small punishments can be enough to send you towards the positive feedback loop of doom. So for the purposes I care about I’m just going to ignore questions of degree of punishment. I want to outline the factors that I think you’ve ignored or the parts where I think you’re substantially wrong (well, those beyond the ones just mentioned above). I’m going to repeat myself a bit from earlier comments here if you don’t mind. You keep using the word “criticism” as if all the talking that’s being complained about is, you know, argument. Actual argument about the actual issues under contention.

We’re talking about “criticism” largely of the form “This person is a bad person, and so you should disregard everything they say.” Or things essentially similar. Let’s be clear — this is not argument. This is a failure mode of argument. The genetic fallacy is a fallacy.

Ad hominem is not valid reasoning. Bulverism, psychologizing to act like these things are actual criticisms of the ideas being discussed, is a mistake. Where you seem to see argument, I see things that shut down actual argument and destroy a community’s ability to reason. Unless we’re to suddenly believe that the genetic fallacy is in fact a good way to get at the truth.

These sorts of demands for orthodoxy are often coupled with actual arguments, sure. You throw in things that destroy the epistemic environment, the fact that also people are producing arguments is irrelevant; they’re not going to lead to truth under such conditions. So I’m hoping now you’re beginning to get an idea why I consider your claim “But there are plenty of contexts where one can express those kinds of views without any fear whatsoever” (which I will agree is true) to be mostly irrelevant.

That’s not any sort of solution to bad community epistemics! Remember: Free speech is for the benefit of the listener, not the speaker! It’s not there so you can just feel the joy of saying things, it’s to make sure ideas actually get argued.

If everyone worth taking seriously refuses to consider what you say because it’s you that’s saying it, it’s not much comfort that maybe a bunch of people you don’t care about might happen to find it interesting. In some cases, sure, splitting off and forming your own community may indeed be sufficient to get you what you want. But often it’s not. Imagine the following. You’re, I don’t know, a chemist somewhere. You have some ideas you think are really neat about uh, I don’t know, I don’t know chemistry, about something chemical.

Then suddenly all of chemistry blacklists you for some reason and decides you’re a crank. You can’t get articles published in chemistry journals, companies won’t hire you, nobody will even listen to you or pay any attention to your comments on chemistry blogs (they know what ideas you’re advancing and can recognize it must be you).

It is then basically no comfort that, the community of chemists having kicked you out, the community of chemistry cranks will almost certainly gladly embrace you! Hell, it’s the opposite of a comfort — the last thing you want to do is further associate yourself with crankery! That’ll just demonstrate to everyone else that you really were a crank all along and it was all justified. (Not to mention that cranks are just awful company and even if it weren’t for the reputational effects you’d avoid them.) Thankfully I’m pretty sure chemistry doesn’t actually work like this. But map it onto whatever you want — “well you can go talk to cranks”, or the equivalent, is really no comfort.

And so with the current situation. If you’re a Blue Tribe liberal, the idea that “oh well the Red Tribe will listen to you” that’s not a comfort! That’s the threat, you know, if we’re talking about what are people actually being threatened with, they’re being threatened with being labeled as Red so that Blues will dissasociate from them, and their ideas will propagate only among people they fundamentally disagree with, not the people they think they’d be useful to as a supplement to their existing ideas. I mean there was a time when liberal online spaces (note: here as before that’s liberal in the American sense) seemed like a useful place to talk about things, you know? Maybe I’m wrong, because maybe the discussion was actually crap, but it certainly seemed like it at the time. Then things shifted. In this case, at least, I’m fairly OK with how things have split off.

But there’s enough overlap between the old and the new that it remains a problem; it’s not like people in the old groups have nothing of value to say, and it’s a problem that we often can’t seriously discuss it with them. But that doesn’t mean I can just disassociate everywhere! People say this stuff doesn’t come up in real life, bullshit it doesn’t, I lived in a housing co-op for over 5 years and you couldn’t escape it there. Let me tell you, living there you absolutely learn to judge what you say in public there and what you can’t.

But I’m sure I can always just find another living situation and place to hang around, right? Well, maybe I can. But the scariest thing to me is this stuff taking over the academy.

Academia’s entire specialty is supposed to be having good epistemology and getting things right. They’re supposed to be the leading edge of discovery. The place where human knowledge gets aggregated. They’re basically who acts as the arbiters of what’s known, in the literature, and what’s still unknown, not in the literature, in need of a solution. If the academy continues to fall to it where then will there be to flee to? Who will replace it? Because for academia, for “the literature”, to fracture, with nobody really being able to say what’s known or not anymore, isn’t a good outcome.

(I mean yes we are already having this problem not for political reasons but simply due to specialization and the overwhelming volume of literature but it is y’know a bad thing and this would be making it way worse.) And “well you can go talk to cranks” is definitely not going to cut it. I’m not saying “well you can go talk to cranks” or “disassociate everywhere” or ““oh well the Red Tribe will listen to you.” I am saying that there are many ‘Blue Tribe’ contexts where there is a lot of tolerance for heterodoxy on the kinds of issues I believe the Scotts are referring to. Go to a Democratic Party event or a public book club or a liberal group happy hour, you will hear a ton of “heterodox” views. Of course, the problem when people are completely dependent on their employer to survive and that employer imposes its beliefs on its employees, then the employee is censored. This is an ubiquitous experience, but it’s not tied to a societal wide orthodoxy. The solution is to reduce the power that employers have over employees. Qwints: I find your reply distinctly unsatisfactory, though I’m havin trouble pinning down just why.

Let me try to state a few reasons, though I can’t guarantee this will be the most coherent, and it’ll probably involve quite a bit of overlap between the points (as well as repeating my comment above, sorry, hope you don’t mind). #1: I notice none of the venues you mention occur in writing. Writing, I think, is important. Writing lasts. Writing can be copied and referenced.

Write an article, you can be cited. Write a comment, you can be linked to. That’s an important part of how an idea spreads.

Writing comments on blogs may be a bit like shouting into the wind, but discussing things in real life seems way more so, unless you’re, like, directly talking to people who can influence things. (I already put too little of what I have to say in writing, I think) #2: Another quality that seems to be lacking from what you suggest is any notion of being, you know, on the leading edge of truth. Like the bit above about a unified academia, a unified literature, where we can say what’s known and what’s not, is important. And various internet communities, such as LW or its diaspora, can function similarly. (I guess the whole unity thing goes together with the whole writing thing.) Why do I want to spend my time arguing with a book club, though? Is that where the best arguments on the subject are going to be found? Is that really where I’m going to encounter the best arguments against my position, so that we can really get to the heart of the matter?

Maybe I’d convince some people of my position, but without some stake in the matter — if I’m not talking to people who are actually going to influence what happens in places I care about — then that’s not so interesting. I don’t understand your advice regarding my living situation. I mean, I don’t live there anymore, though I still hang around there sometimes, but that’s not the point; we can imagine I am.

You’re not saying to disassociate myself from there? OK, so what do I do then? Continue to carefully gauge what opinions can and can’t be expressed openly?

What does one do about that problem? More generally there’s this idea of these are my friends you’re talking about, this is my home you’re talking about. Not necessarily literally my home (although also literally my home as mentioned) but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s, you know, a sad thing to see people and spaces I thought of as sane fall to this. OK, I can flee, sure. What’s going on is still bad and still has to be stopped somehow.

Maybe some of these spaces can just be abandoned — maybe discussion there was never good, they were never anywhere near the leading edge of truth, you were never going to learn anything by arguing there, and they certainly didn’t have any real influence over anything you might care about. Like I said, I’m fairly OK with how I’ve abandoned a number of my old internet haunts. But sometimes, as I’ve already said, they can’t just be abandoned without cost. If there’s someone there who’d actually be worth arguing with if only they and the environment were amenable to actual argument, or someone who’s got a real sharp mind but turns into a zombie on this particular topic, it’s a real problem. If you literally live there or work there, it’s a real problem. (And this isn’t just a matter of the employer imposing their views on the employees; it’s also a matter of gangs of employees imposing their views on each other. The mob is just as scary as the tyrant.) When it’s an academic department, somewhere that really truly is supposed to be on the leading edge of truth, that can’t be easily substituted for, it’s a real problem.

I was going to put some sort of conclusion here, but, eh, I’m tired. I hope I’ve made my point. Well, OK, here’s my one-sentence summary: It’s not so much about one’s personal situation, as it is rescuing the places where good, potentially leading-edge, potentially original discussion can both happen and be entered into whatever the local equivalent of “the literature” is. I’ll stop there.

I don’t really have anything organized to say about your other points. I’m enjoying our conversation, so here are some thoughts about the points you made I haven’t addressed: [Failure mode of argument] I agree that the fallacies you mention are common and fallacious.

I have not observed that “things shifted.” I do not have a good sense of the extent to which these have become more prevalent, and I do not think anyone can make claims about this in the abstract – you need a baseline and a particular space to say anything meaningful about whether fallacies are more common. [writing] I disagree that writing in the broad sense is more important than speech. Recorded video and audio is at least as permanent and referenceable as a blog comment.

[have to gauge what can be expressed openly] I think that human beings are social animals, and that it is literally impossible to communicate with someone without that impacting their view of you. My own responses: I agree that the fallacies you mention are common and fallacious.

I have not observed that “things shifted.” I do not have a good sense of the extent to which these have become more prevalent, and I do not think anyone can make claims about this in the abstract – you need a baseline and a particular space to say anything meaningful about whether fallacies are more common. OK, so, my claim isn’t just “these things are fallacies, and also they’ve become more common”. I mean, bad argument is everywhere, right? I think maybe I haven’t been clear enough as to just what my claim actually is. It’s this: This particular sort of bad argument — the declaring of large numbers of sources as somehow tainted and therefore useless (excpet of course when they’re not) — is part of the broader pattern of how groups, originally started to advance one cause, eventually become about advancing no cause but their own dominance. The key thing about this sort of argument isn’t just that it’s bad argument, but that, being fundamentally about people rather than arguments, it essentially does nothing but reflect ingroup/outgroup politics, or act as a medium for such. It’s not just bad argument, it’s politicking in the guise of argument.

All this didn’t happen for no reason — it happened because of SJers pushing warped norms of discourse, presenting them as if they were just natural extensions of liberalism, liberalism done better, rather than being fundamentally illiberal. And I, and a whole lot of others, fell for it. But once you accept a little of it well, it only goes in one direction, really. I disagree that writing in the broad sense is more important than speech. Recorded video and audio is at least as permanent and referenceable as a blog comment.

I don’t think recorded video and audio changes much, really, because very little of what’s said is in fact recorded. That said I’m not sure the writing point was one of my better ones. If I think about, just, say, discussing things with other people in the math department, that hardly seems so bad for not being written down. But I guess because that’s a smaller world, and one I care about; things I say there might actually be remembered and spread around if they’re good.

That point should probably just be discarded. But it is worth noting how much better writing lasts, and I think it does really become important when your community become sufficiently large; an oral “literature” just doesn’t work at that point. Like, I’ve totally dug up old comments — of mine, of other people’s — when I wanted to make a point that I or someone else has already made or find someone’s exact wording or whatever can’t really do that otherwise. (Imagine if I couldn’t link “garden” above) Really I should just start writing things down more often, in accessible places, in general! Often I have to do some real digging to find a point I’ve made before I think that human beings are social animals, and that it is literally impossible to communicate with someone without that impacting their view of you. I mean, sure, but there’s a real difference between “some people will decide they don’t like me” and “I’ll become marked to everyone as one of the bad people (whose ideas, let’s not forget, are tainted and should be disregarded).”. Can you think of some point of reference that’s clearly better?

Something where the members of the audience will all recognize it, understand that it’s a legitimate case of an inaccurate orthodoxy being enforced on people over correct knowledge, with consequences for the people who fail to at least pay lip service to the orthodoxy, which are not trivial, so people can understand that there’s real social force for the people involved, but the consequences aren’t so extreme as to offend anyone by comparison to consequences on modern issues? Examples which are too perfect for any criticism often do not exist. One thing you’re not really addressing is how to avoid those whisper networks from spiraling into their own epistemic traps.

The whole “and don’t go that far, because that’s silly” stuff seems rather glossed over and a major issue. Underground whisper network are particularly prone to compounding bad claims. See for example hundreds of years of esoteric nonsense that leads to smart people getting all into the occult and terrible terrible means of finding knowledge and then sharing them with each other. “Hey buddy, saying IQ is real will get you shunned badly by the other students and possibly sanctioned by the teachers. Also if you think that’s bad, wait till you hear about how global warming is fake, blacks are subhuman, and we should really be able to rape 6 year olds.” Whisper networks seem particularly prone to turning into singularities of tribal epistemic closure because trust piggybacks and people have bad instincts on the whole when it comes to rationality and vigilance, even when they have good instincts for curiosity. I suspect the idea that any network like this has been healthy is wrong, though retrospectively the correct portions just shine brighter.

The point of the post seems to be that they are, nonetheless, important enough to participate in and protect. In an optimistic view, the more correct portions slowly become mainstream while the dubious parts fall away under inspection. To put it another way, expecting that all of your beliefs will be correct is a level of confidence which is harmful. Since the people who wield power aren’t the same people who doubt their beliefs, any network which remembers to doubt itself is pretty harmless. There’s no need to be a true believer in facts, they’ll be true regardless.

+1 Suppose you live in a time and place where being a member of the local church is required to be a full participant in the community. And suppose you have some doubts about the rightness of the local church’s doctrines. If you just leave those doubts in place, even sometimes acknowledge them to close friends without making a big deal of them, etc., you can remain a member of the community. It won’t take a lot of mental effort to keep expressing acceptable opinions in public, because you’ll mostly have the ones you were raised with, just with a few inner doubts. On the other hand, suppose you spend a few years thinking deeply about your doubts, and come to the conclusion that there are neither gods nor devils, that all churches are scams including the local one, and that the whole subject is a bunch of nonsense. At this point, you will have a much harder time expressing acceptable opinions and fitting in. Instead of sharing most of the acceptable worldview but having a few qualms about what exactly happens to the bread and wine in the Eucharist, you’re constantly internally rolling your eyes when someone promises to pray for you, or when someone describes a tragic death as God’s will.

Your immediate reaction when you hear about a plan to build a new church or to offer more Sunday school classes for your kids is not the one your community would expect. There’s a lot more work and a lot less safety in being the second kind of dissenter.

Yes, I thorougly agree. And it doesn’t even have to be all that secret. I mean, I got into alternative medicine because I had noticed that ob/gyns do not always use evidence-based practices. And because there is no way to ensure you get a doctor who does use evidence-based practices (because they all claim to and then don’t), the only solution is to stop seeing doctors and googling for your information, and the next thing you know you think vaccines are poison and apricot pits cure cancer. I got out of that worldview (though I still agree establishment medicine has some really serious flaws) but I find it impossible to bring anyone with me. Trust piggybacks, like you say, and any study I can bring up which disproves the apricot-pit thing was always authored by a doctor or scientist who has some ties to Establishment Medicine, such as going to med school.

Basically as long as Establishment View can’t debate on an equal floor with Edgy View, then people are going to have a very hard time evaluating their different claims for truth or falsehood, and they’ll just grab Establishment Package or Edgy Package wholesale, because you can’t unpack them and compare contents very easily. Yes, institutions that want to be trustworthy have to work to retain that trust. A lot of institutions seem to have forgotten this. The apricot-pit thing can be interpreted game-theoretically. The institutions insist that thunder comes before lightning and that lightning is just the air reacting to the presence of the Thunder Devil after he makes thunder, and they’ve raised taxes on everyone over six feet tall under the assumption that they’re being stretched out by the Thunder Devil, and so on — so they’re catastrophically untrustworthy, they’re corrupt, and they aren’t acting in the best interest of the people. But they really don’t want people to believe that apricot pits cure cancer!

So we’ll go all in on that and try to draw in anyone who pays attention to thunderstorms and anyone who’s over six feet tall, and hopefully they’ll realize why this is happening and try to prevent it by moderating their position. In most cases, it’s an unconscious process, but the apricot-pit people would probably moderate if the institutions dropped the Thunder Devil stuff. In some cases, however, it’s an entirely conscious strategy. But these days I don’t think it would work. Ideally, yes. But, that depends on the good debaters showing up to the whisper networks instead of steering clear of them, on people being sincere there instead of keeping one eye out for spies, on people recognizing that their interlocutors are sincere instead of just unwoke, and on a lot of other things. And also, it depends on the whisper networks actually being able to produce good science.

If you wanted to make an argument about evolution in the Middle Ages – well, you couldn’t, because the evidence wasn’t there. Even if you somehow knew exactly where to dig for fossils, your whisper network didn’t have the money to send out an expedition to East Africa. It’s the same thing if your forest band of radicals can’t afford to send out an expedition looking for Jerusalem. @Tracy W, Selective breeding tends to show that evolution could produce species, but in order for it to actually be the explanation for the species we see, the Earth has to be extremely old, which was not generally believed to be the case in the middle ages. Also, just recognizing that it is a possible explanation doesn’t on its own rule out other explanations. So the Galapagos stuff is extremely important because the geographical distribution of species makes sense on Darwin’s account, but is quite mysterious otherwise. Looking only at animals from one region of the world it is much harder to see conclusive evidence for evolution.

If you look at medieval or even Renaissance paintings of Biblical stories, or Greek-Roman myths, or drawings of exotic locations, they all tend to resemble the artist’s local environment in many details: not only in anthropic elements such as architecture and clothing styles, but also in natural elements such as plants, animals and general landscapes. Before the Age of Sail, very few people traveled long distances, and therefore everybody imagined the world pretty much as their backyard. People with some education might have been vaguely aware that certain regions were warmer or colder, and might have heard of specific exotic animals, but nobody could really imagine the immense variety of lifeforms that existed on earth. In the 18th-19th centuries as more and more people traveled, some of them, the Naturalists, started to notice such variety, and compiled extensive collections of accurate drawings, descriptions and preserved specimens. And they noticed that this variety was not random, but followed patterns, and therefore set their minds to make sense of these patterns, to find the underlying rule. And finally one of such Naturalists, Charles Darwin, found the rule.

Could have people come up with good arguments for evolution centuries before Darwin? In theory yes, in practice probably not. Even if there was sufficient evidence available, it was not salient enough for people to notice that there were even patterns to be explained. @DavidFriedman I somewhat disagree, while you could construct experiments in the middle ages reasoning from first principles is prone to awful failure. Especially if you’ve got a few false first principles mixed in like a deity who wouldn’t let X happen.

You couldn’t provide nearly as good evidence for evolution as we can now. But the essential insight isn’t the evidence, it’s the logic. Once one sees that it is clear that the evolutionary explanation is at least possible, is one way in which the world we observe could be explained.

Which is enough to undercut one of the strongest arguments for religion. The problem with this sort of reasoning is that one could look at what actually happened in history and observe that even a certain nobody named St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning.

— Summa theologica, I.73.1 reply3 This example is specifically singled out as a possible objection to the idea that “the completion of the Divine works ought to be ascribed to the seventh day”. The Aquinate answers that even if new animals may develop, the powers (natural laws) by which they are created were there by the seventh day. Thus it was possible to study the rules according to which new species appeared, yet no Darwin in the Middle Ages. One thing I seriously worry about is generally in what you call “whisper network debates” the orthodoxy has a huge intellectual firepower advantage. This is perhaps not surprising, but what it means is correcting wrong orthodoxy is difficult because folks arguing against it are outnumbered and outgunned, even if we posit a “whisper network” setting where people can mostly speak freely.

— I have generally not been hugely impressed by heterodox thinkers on essentially any controversial issue. But maybe I can’t see enough sigmas out! Or maybe I need to learn their language better?

I don’t know. — The other thing is, the “heterodoxy ecosystem” is polluted by a lot of bad stuff, like conspiracy theorists (and other variety of poor epistemic hygiene), genuine assholes, foreign state actors, and so on. Come on Scott, don’t play coy, we all know what this post is about and i find your pathetic attempt to hide behind intellectual discussion disgusting. You think Lance Armstrong did nothing wrong and you want to take the Tour de France back to the bad old days. You probably even keep a copy of My Comeback on your dresser, and wear your wristband to bike rallies with your pathetic racer friends. You disgusting, fit piece of shit.

Do you ever even sit in front of your laptop in your bedroom like a well adjust person? Or do you spend your entire life outside getting exercise bemoaning the fact that every girl always found you hot? I can’t even. Tip your bike helmet and leave.

Your not welcome on the internet! Go back to polite society and wallow in your contentment with cyclist friends.

But you’ll always know deep down your a bad person! Oppressor of skateboards! Bike Supremacist!

How can you people read this guy he’s literally Lance Armstrong!!! Maybe the thunder does come first for some of these unspeakable issues. If so, then why is it heresy to say otherwise? Nobody is burned at stake, sent to the gulag or fired from a near-anagram of it for saying that the earth is flat, are they?

This does not mean that all heretic beliefs are correct, of course. Occult magic is really nonsense and Jerusalem does really exist, after all. But if the powers that be have to resort to censorship to defend their orthodoxy, then this is evidence that they probably don’t really have a good argument for it. No, I don’t see that at all. There are loads of reasons why orthodoxy might engage in censorship besides that. For instance, the proof for their view might be extremely complex and difficult, while the price for being wrong might be very high.

For instance, a doctor might lose his license for using some fringey treatment. The establishment does not want to argue him out of doing it, because he might not listen and in the meantime, he might be giving people bleach enemas and baking soda IV’s people who are in no position to evaluate the effectiveness of this treatment. The Catholic Church censored heresy, not because they didn’t think you could disprove it, but because they admitted that the proofs were difficult, and in the meantime ignorant people might come to believe it and the cost was an eternity in hellfire. They sincerely believed the risk of contaminating ignorant people’s beliefs was *that high,* and therefore they couldn’t rely on argument, which often fails even when proof is strong. Flat earthers still exist.) I’m sure you can easily come up with parallels about ignorant people being convinced by wrong arguments with dangerous results even today, and about whatever edgy views you’re thinking about right now.

The Catholic Church censored heresy, not because they didn’t think you could disprove it, but because they admitted that the proofs were difficult, and in the meantime ignorant people might come to believe it and the cost was an eternity in hellfire. I’m sure this was their rationalization, but in reality we know that the theological positions of the Pope and all his Cardinals were no better than those of any random raving mystic. And they must have known, at some level. Today we can observe many objectively false beliefs which can cause serious harm if acted on. Most of these beliefs are not illegal or even particularly socially unacceptable. Think of anti-vax, or denial of the negative effects of tobacco, or alcohol, or drugs, and so on.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, many factual beliefs that can get you “burned at stake” if publicly stated, are, in their steelmanned forms, at worst epistemically controversial and at best objectively true. Or at least, if slam dunk arguments that debunk them exist, I’ve never heard of them. And the defense that these argument exists but they are too complicated and difficult to state sounds like an excuse if these arguments are in fact never stated. If the censors can’t explain why they hold certain beliefs, how can they be sure that they are not wrong? How can they be so sure that they are willing to go such great lengths to enforce the orthodoxy and suppress dissent? My conclusion is that the censors don’t care about the truth, they care about power.

As far as they know the orthodoxy could be false, but they know that they stand to lose if this becomes common knowledge, therefore since they can’t argue for the orthodoxy using the tools of rational discourse, they enforce it using coercion. >Claims to the effect of “People who disagree with me know, deep down, that they don’t have any good arguments” aren’t generally very convincing, either. I’ll disagree with this. Consider alternate topics where factual support is a lot stronger – for example, global warming or evolution – they (or at least a very similar group) very vociferously argue those facts. The same is true on a variety of fairly questionable economic topics, where they at least perceive the facts to be on their side. Strangely, that willingness to engage with facts vanishes on certain other topics. “When the law’s on your side, pound the law.

When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. Otherwise, pound the table.”. Strangely, that willingness to engage with facts vanishes on certain other topics. You’re going to have to get more explicit, because on all the issues I can think of you trying to darkly hint at (race, gender, sexuality, religion, whatever) both “sides” are very eager to cite empirical claims that support their position. You can argue that these are fake alternate universe facts, like with creation science or the like, but you seem to be explicitly saying they’re very different from that, and my own experience (as someone who has spent far to much time online yelling at people) is utterly different from that. Maybe it’s a filter bubble thing.

Mathias, my claim is that on topics like race and gender, they do not in fact appeal to any facts. For example, no one that I read correctly stated a claim of James Damore and then showed why it was incorrect. Similarly for Charles Murray, or Bret Weinstein, or any of the others.

Or similarly, see the comments here: Lots of criticism, but no empirics. If you think I’m incorrect, can you actually link me to an article which a) correctly states a claim James Damore made and b) attempts to use data/theoretical argument/etc to refute *that argument* rather than attacking Damore or attempting to debunk a straw man? @qwints Most of these “scientific arguments” against Damore cited in the link you provided are vitriolic personal attacks. But to the extent that they make actual scientific arguments, all they can argue is that Damore’s case may not have been as strong as it is presented. In some cases there is conflicting evidence.

This is hardly a refutation. So the intellectually honest response would be to recognize that Damore rised some potentially valid points about our collective epistemic state that have important policy implications, and while not all of his arguments may be 100% correct, it is important to discuss these issues and evaluate the evidence, and if necessary do more research. Instead the response is that Damore is branded as heretic and all the arguments that he made are denounced as blasphemy not to be ever uttered again.

@qwints That’s a gish gallop, but I’ll address one of the criticisms from the site you linked: American businesses also have to face the fact that the demographic differences that make diversity useful will not lead to equality of outcome in every hire or promotion. Equality or diversity: choose one. In my opinion, given that sex differences are so well-established, and the sexes have such intricately complementary quirks, it may often be sensible, in purely practical business terms, to aim for more equal sex ratios in many corporate teams, projects, and divisions. First of all, this is primarily a moral argument, not a scientific argument.

Do you favor equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? Having a different preference than Damore is not actually an argument that he made a mistake in his reasoning. Secondly, the critique has the assumption that jobs will be done better if you have workers with disparate abilities. This is highly doubtful. You probably want all surgeons to have fine motor control. You probably want all front-line soldiers to not have emotional breakdowns on the battlefield.

You probably want all programmers to be highly systematizing. If one wants to argue that the upside of more diversity are greater than the downside, the first step is to acknowledge the possibility of both upsides & downsides. The second step is to compare them somehow. The critique does neither and instead assumes that no downsides exist. The critique doesn’t address the implications of Damore’s claim that the main cause of the disparity is that women are interested in programming far less often, rather than companies refusing to hire them. This means that those companies don’t actually have the ability to hire equally good female programmers. The critique seems to assume that companies have the ability to solve the issue, but it offers no good arguments why this assumption is true.

Finally, Damore actually did argue that we should look into possibly changing the job of programming to make it more attractive to women and/or playing to their strengths more. He merely doesn’t believe that discrimination in hiring is just. Again, Damore’s dislike of gender discrimination is a moral preference, not a scientific issue. Qwintz, I have read some of those critiques, though not this roundup. The roundup is actually quite odd – I’ve read some of the people included here and it’s quite strange how nymag fails to quote the parts where they completely support Damore’s factual claims. For example, here’s Geoffrey Miller. Nymag didn’t see fit to quote this part of Miller’s response: I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate.

Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and historyhis memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course. It is consistent with the scientific state of the art on sex differences. It merely quoted something Miller said tangentially which doesn’t even really disagree with Damore. Similarly, here’s what Schmidt says: sex differences exist in negative emotionality is not an “incorrect assumption about gender.” It is an empirically well-supported claim (at least, based on the best psychological science we have so far).Culturally universal sex differences in personal values and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size (see here), and sex differences in occupational interests are quite large2. Should we be able to openly discuss and be informed by some of the real psychological sex differences that account for variation in men’s and women’s workplace performance, and might lead to less than 50% of technology employees being women?

In the right context, I vote yes to that, too. Apparently at Google, internal discussion boards intended for open conversations about diversity and science-based thinking are not the right context for discussing evidence about psychological sex differences. Many of the others (e.g. Cynthia Lee, Rosalynd Barnett) do not dispute his science, but merely attack him and discuss their own negative emotional reactions. For example, Barnett critiques Damore’s claim that women’s biology makes them less able than men to work in technology jobsWe can say flatly that there is no evidence that women’s biology makes them incapable of performing at the highest levels in any STEM fields.”. They are very explicitly NOT arguing against anything he said.

The only one I haven’t had a chance to read carefully is the Quora post. Maybe later this week. Qwintz, the point you cite is her NOT disagreeing with Damore.

Damore said that higher developed societies result in a larger D = M – W. She’s simply saying “totally true, that’s because M changes, he’s so wrong.” I think she’s also glossing over other arguments Damore made regarding the correlation between gender equality and% women in tech. Specifically that Iran/Saudi Arabia/etc are great at getting women into tech, France/Sweden/etc not so much. That’s very explicitly a case where W changes rather than M.

But I’m not particularly sure that was in the memo – it’s possible I’m remembering Damore making this argument elsewhere (e.g. In one of his interviews).

@Aapje The critique doesn’t address the implications of Damore’s claim that the main cause of the disparity is that women are interested in programming far less often, rather than companies refusing to hire them. Did Damore actually claim this? It’s been quite a few weeks now since I read his memo in full, but I recall concluding that his claim was that the disparity was not evidence of companies refusing to hire women (or some other form of sexism), because given what we know based on the latest available social science research, men’s and women’s average preferences would tend to disproportionately lead more men toward positions that Google is looking to fill, which would cause such a disparity even sans sexism.

I don’t recall him actually claiming that this really was the main cause or a cause at all – merely that it was a sufficiently plausible that it was a cause, such that we can’t just dismiss it as not a cause in favor of “sexism” as the likely or only cause of the disparity. But you’re not attacking “white lies”; you’re attacking the idea that any claim, no matter how abhorrent and obviously false, should be unacceptable to publicly proclaim.

“Society should not have false beliefs” isn’t exactly controversial, since (as we all know) our society loves truth and welcomes honest criticism. “Society should not censure people with false beliefs, no matter how harmful they would be if implemented, no matter if people are actually implementing them” is super controversial even at the meta level. I know I’m late to the party, but this post has been haunting me all week. It’s been haunting because, well, even if Scott does have a few different things in mind, it is indeed a dog whistle for something(s). And, if Scott is a Kolmogorov, then we can never quite know for sure what it’s a dog whistle for.

I find this chilling, and makes me wish I could pick Scott’s brain in person. But of course, if he’s a Kolmogorov, he would be wary to reveal any more in person than he does now. Let’s say, e. Ac3d Keygen Software. g., that this post serves as a dog whistle for the one topic not to be mentioned on this site.

Maybe Scott thinks it’s important to have whisper network about it because (A) he’s really concerned that ignoring this topic will result in society missing the opportunity to save many from fatal disease that could have been prevented if we better studied human populations. Or maybe he wants a whisper network because (B) he believes that acknowledging this topic and research will allow society to forcibly modify populations in ways that (I think) everyone basically finds horrendous.

I like to think that Scott’s actual view is closer to the (A), and he’s said as much. But if he’s a Kolmogorov how would we ever know? This community attracts a nontrivial number of commenters that express sentiments being closer to (B), or at least close enough to (B) that they can’t viably be spoken publicly. And, while I do think that Scott’s commitment to free speech is consistent with holding (A) while allowing (B)-thinkers to participate, how are we supposed to know that this forum isn’t for the (B)-thinkers to get their ideas out there? If Scott announced that he agreed with the consensus that thunder comes before lightning, but that he would never ban a lightning-first-er from his site, it might be the only site where a lightning-first view can get expressed. And all the lightning-firsters would think to themselves and say to each other “Of course Scott says he’s a thunder-firster.

But he’s a smart guy. He knows lightning comes first. He just can’t say it straight out; he’s got a professional career and a hugely popular web site. Instead he tends a nice garden for us to get out and say so. He’s supporting us, but maintaining plausible deniability. Is that what (B)-thinkers are saying to each other? And are they right?

I really have no way of knowing. Ok, since you’re the one who’s bringing it up, what are some of the pet “unspeakable” topics in the ssc-sphere. It shouldn’t be a problem for you to list them since you’re saying they’re being discussed openly here. I have some ideas about what you might have in mind, or what scott might have in mind when writing this, and I understand why Scott doesn’t want to say what those were, because the general case is more important.

However, since you’re talking specifically about this aspect of it, it would be nice to know directly what you’re talking about. As someone who grew up in the Midwest and recently moved to Silicon Valley I found Scott’s post helpful. It feels like there are some subjects that are held very dogmatically and when SV gives statements about basing decisions off data it sends me looking for the data behind the dogma. Yet, I have received backlash for questioning the dogma in what I attempted to be a good faith discussion.

I read the whole post as Scott reflecting on this issue as a whole in a kind of meta level. Yes there are specific issues that have happened recently in SV that probably inspired this post. Yet this post is just as helpful to me in SV as it could be to someone who grew up in SV and moves to Small Town USA and is having to slowly (and awkwardly) figure out where the dogma is and what cannot be questioned.

Of course you can’t scream baby killer. But can you calmly and politely express dismay that someone’s kid is serving in the Marines because you think it is terribly immoral to join the Marines and go kill innocent people? Or will that get you just about the same reaction as going to a cocktail party in Silicon Valley and calmly and politely explaining that you think that all other things being equal a company should hire a white person over a black person because you should have a higher prior that they are more intelligent? I am under the impression that “serving” comes from the way military enlistment is structured, i.e.

As an irrevocable service contract. Historical apprenticeships worked the same way, where you sign up for a fixed term of years and from that point you’re stuck for the duration unless you run away (which is illegal) or the master craftsman decides to dismiss you for some reason, and “serving as [say] a tanner’s apprentice” makes linguistic sense to me. Contrast firefighting or EMT work, which carry the same public-service status but which are structured as conventional jobs. “Working for the fire department” sounds more natural than “serving in the fire department” to me, although I have occasionally heard people tell firefighters or EMTs “thank you for your service”. I was saying I don’t think the question is reasonable, because at the Small Town USA backyard BBQ, nobody’s going to suggest not hiring blacks over group racial differences either. So, I think you would get a better reaction to explaining to Small Town USA guy that joining the Marines is immoral, because the Small Town USA guy is already pretty much aware that’s how some of them city slickers think and he disagrees.

Worst he’d probably just tell you to shut up. Speaking poorly of blacks at the SV party is going to get you chucked out and excommunicated.

Doing that at the Small Town USA BBQ would probably cause some uncomfortable silence, or a response along the lines of the Soft Bigotry of Lowered Expectations. “Don’t think like that because my work just hired a black guy who’s really smart.” Basically I think you misunderstand the nature and overestimate the virulence of flyover country racism. I think the better answer for “absolutely do not do that” out in the country is flag burning. You will get your ass kicked for that. @CatCube Chris Rock also has a trait that results in him getting the benefit of the doubt for ‘racial humor’ much more than a person who doesn’t have that trait. In our society, on some topics the people who most clearly see a specific fault in the popular narrative due to the typical life experiences for their group, are also the people who get the least leeway in criticizing the narrative, directly or through humor.

Since people often judge prevalence by how many people speak out and often get offended and try to suppress claims that don’t fit the narrative, you can easily get self-reinforcing narrative + taboo combinations. So people can come to think something is false because they rarely hear about it.

Then the assumption is often that the people who do talk about are lying and have nefarious goals, so most people don’t talk about it as to not be accused of being nefarious. This then leads people to conclude that it’s not a real issue as they hear little about it and see only a few antisocial people speak out (because the pro-social people tend to care a lot about being accused of being nefarious). What also often happens is that society (self-)segregates into subgroups who each develop their own narrative + taboo combination, so then we get bubbles with their own realities. I don’t think that Michael Richards was actually riffing on the N-word. AFAIK he attacked loud audience members with racial slurs.

That’s not ‘a bit.’. Chris Rock also has a trait that results in him getting the benefit of the doubt for ‘racial humor’ much more than a person who doesn’t have that trait. Knowing that is part of the “social savvy” that I was referring to.

And I think that Richards was under the impression that his attacks were “jokes.” Comedians going after audience members that offend them (hecklers, interruptions, etc.) can be pretty vicious. However, he tried to freestyle racial slurs and it (rightly) bit him. Daniel Tosh ran into a similar wall when somebody objected to a set on rape, and he made an extremely poor extemporaneous “joke” about the heckler getting raped. @CatCube Knowing that is part of the “social savvy” that I was referring to. Yeah, but my point is that a white person who is just as socially savvy as Chris Rock still doesn’t have the same ability as him to get away with certain jokes.

If we would wave a magic wand and make everyone equally imperfectly socially savvy, you’d still have people who don’t realize that certain jokes can only be made if you have a certain immutable trait. So you will have persons who make that joke while being oblivious that it can only be made by some people. Then if that person happens to have the right trait, he will get lucky that his obliviousness is not punished by society, while a person who is identical except for having the wrong trait, will get unlucky to have his obliviousness is punished by society. Neither of these people is any wiser than the other or did anything different, yet one gets punished and the other doesn’t. So there is a fundamental imbalance here that is separate from a person’s social ability. — As for Richards, that: “Somebody interrupted my act,” he remembers, “and said some things that hurt me, and I lashed out in anger It was a selfish response. I took it too personally I should have been working selflessly.” That doesn’t sound like an attempt at humor, but rather extreme anger making someone use the most hurtful words he could come up with (which doesn’t necessitate believing that it’s right to refer to black people with the N-word, but merely the belief that it is going to be very hurtful to most of them, combined with ‘red mist’).

One thing that bothers me about this post is how the “at-risk thinkers” category blurs the line between “people who advance truth in a particular area” and “people who like to question received wisdom”. In my experience the two are largely orthogonal. Many of the greatest scientists of [whatever we’re calling this period] were utterly orthodox. Many other great scientists– including some of those you cite– were way into the occult, or alchemy, or spiritualism, or any number of other weird and not-strongly-correlated-with-truth belief systems. In any era we can find plenty of thinkers who are geniuses in one respect and crackpots in another.

Being prone to defy conventional wisdom may be statistically helpful for achieving Great Discoveries in certain contexts, just because those tend to require being at the edge of the ideological bell curve. And certainly it’s good for societies to keep that kind of person around and not burn them at the stake. But if you try to parlay that into a judgement of “this kind of person will have lower-than-average expected distance from the truth in any given area”, then you might be disappointed.

Selection bias is almost certainly at work here. I want to second this. I’m kind of confused about the whole “in favor of truth” thing being used to describe people who keep magic books. I think it’s more that some people just demand independent thought, and sometimes they’re very right, and sometimes their beliefs are simply bizarre and stupid, and sometimes both at once, but they’re so convinced of their own genius that nobody can gainsay them. Aside from Newton’s passion for alchemy–well after most other people were rolling their eyes at it–wasn’t it Linus Pauling who started the bizarre idea that gorging on vitamin C will make your immune system invincible? Jack Parsons: brilliant rocket scientist, dedicated practitioner of black magic, got snowed by L.

Ron Hubbard of all people. Scientists tend to get in trouble in proportion to how political they get. I like some politically active scientists (meaning scientists who talk to the media, basically) and dislike others.

I shudder at the way many good men are ruined. But the problem isn’t the ‘system.’ That’s like having an avalanche fall on you and saying the problem is gravity. I would argue that suppression of political opinions is the essence of politics. This is life – brutal competition, with any cooperation that lasts being cooperation TO COMPETE BETTER. To abstain from this sort of thing, which is considered ‘icky’ by many in this area, is in the end to abstain from life.

Politics is war by other means. The answer to political problems is to get better at war. Scientists are often naive children on a battlefield, acting like their enemies are family or friends. They do not understand the essence of politics – that the other side seeks their destruction just as surely as if they were lobbing shells, they are merely restricted by a powerful protection racket. Each side seeks dominion for themselves and ruin or subjugation for their enemy, all the same.

Conspiracies can have utility, but sooner or later the blade needs to be wetted, literally or metaphorically. If there’s no way for you to bring your enemy to ruin, sooner or later he will find you and bring you down.

This is not a question of truth against lies, but of people against other people with fundamentally different interests. The instant a person is saying something true, his statement is not just about truth but also about him. And the ‘about him’ part is the most salient part when someone is worried about being trampled into dust by this fellow and his compatriots. And everyone except his compatriots has that worry. Whether they recognize that or not, their instincts are not as idiotically naive as they are. The question of how to be good at politics needs to be approached methodically, systematically. Operational security is surely some part, but nothing like the whole.

‘Rationalists’ and those adjacent need to learn how to fight in this realm effectively. They need to understand that the ’emotional’ side of arguments is not noise but signal, that that signal is coming from fairly well tuned evolved heuristics, and that embracing a value-system that does not emphasize caring about this sort of thing, caring about their own proliferation, means winking out of existence pretty quickly. The truth is a tool in this game of proliferation and annihilation, a means and not an end. Elevating truth in this naive fashion actually just condemns it to relative darkness. If you use truth as a hammer to smash your foes’ skulls, you will have great riches and forge many hammers.

If you sit around worshiping the hammer, someone will come along and bash you with a rock, and in all likelihood the hammer will garner a great deal less respect. TL;DR don’t avoid politics, git gud. This objection comes up occasionally, and I think most here have heard it already. It doesn’t gain traction partly because to exhort people to be more dishonest in pursuing their interests when their interest is for everyone to be more honest is a bit paradoxical. How do you do that?

It’s a valid point but more cynical that you strictly need to be. Moloch can be kept at bay, but that needs work and everyone can’t be consuming social capital (defecting). It needs to be produced too. The modern world exists because people did. I tried to re-read Foundation recently, and this reminded me of this quote, brilliant in its simplicity: Q.

Can the overall history of the human race be changed? With great difficulty. Honesty and dishonesty really aren’t that important.

It’s how you say it, not what you say. And it’s what you look like and what you have as much as it is how you say it. Trump didn’t win by lying – his lies probably hurt him moderately. If he told the truth in the same manner he told lies, he would be ahead. It is how he said things, not what he said. And then, what he looked like and what he had, what he could marshal as social proof.

Look, deep down everyone is a preening arrogant bastard. There are varying degrees of this, but everyone has it. If you were told – you’re an ugly worthless nothing, would that offend you? Because some very significant part of you is not a truth-deducing and projecting machine, but wants to be a beautiful valuable important thing. Nerds don’t lack this essential human element, they are just often much worse at fulfilling it.

They’ve got other things to concern them, and I would agree that a lot of those things are important, and a lot of people completely devote themselves to beautiful-valuable-important and lose out on the outside world. But clearly, beautiful-valuable-important remains VERY CENTRAL to the value-system of even nerdling humans. Nerds will countersignal effort put towards beautiful-valuable-important, but while it is easy for people to say ‘Oh, it’s not that important to be beautiful.’ Essentially everyone feels something hurt inside them when they are called or considered ugly.

People might say ‘oh, I don’t need to be important‘ but something inside them still hurts when they hear or realize that they are irrelevant. I’m not saying that you should surrender to the value-structure of this society. I’m saying if you want to make something better, you sure as shit need to pay attention to the nature of value-structures and your own position in them, and you will need at least moderate success within this value-structure to move to create new and successful, lasting ones. This notion that you can ignore such childish and superficial things is actually just nonsensical. It implies not a defeat of the existing value-structure but a complete surrender to it. What is the aesthetic of the future? Recently, this battle has turned out not necessarily to our advantage.

The answer is not to retreat. There is nowhere to retreat. The answer is not to surrender, because in the long run success within this structure is not in our blood. The answer is to fight, and to build, within this value-structure because that is what now exists as the thing we can fight in, and then as success piles on success – fate willing – a value-structure that subtly and then not so subtly advantages us. You care about this fight – caring about the degree to which you win is highly variable, but caring about losing is universal.

Too much ground has been sacrificed by our forebears, who could not imagine losing and thought they were just raising their boot slightly off a poor helpless victim’s neck. The boot isn’t quite on the other neck yet, but we’re getting there. The first to feel it are those who are at the middle-bottom of the ruling coalition that now falters.

I don’t like the whole old, failing ruling coalition. I like some narrow parts of it very very very much. Those parts are the first to be sacrificed by its fall. I DESPISE those incipient coalitions that rise to take its place – they represent a bottomless downfall. The goal is not to reverse or restore the old ruling coalition.

It is to recognize that the outside forces that seek to tear it down are not rescuers of those who struggled within the old ruling coalition, but enemies who seek the defeat and subjugation of all within that old ruling coalition. Luckily they are weak, only threats to the heirs of glory when they sit befuddled and blinded. The old ruling coalition must have its leaders cast out, and proceed in a new direction. This can only be accomplished through politics. There is a feeling in the air, that those narrow parts of the old coalition that I mentioned earlier are waking up to the impending disaster. I want to push forward on this as hard as possible. This is where hope lies.

Look, deep down everyone is a preening arrogant bastard. There are varying degrees of this, but everyone has it. If you were told – you’re an ugly worthless nothing, would that offend you? Why Your premise is that if someone explicitly, clearly, attacks you (to a relatively extreme/blatant extent), that having some kind of emotional reaction makes you “arrogant”. If someone summons up bile and sickness in themselves to convey it over the empathic link you generously extend them, to hear what they have to say and think, you’re craaaaaaazy if you object. The foundation offered for your worldview is the idea that self defense is arrogant, that an attack isn’t an attack.

_ This is a good illustration of the importance of questioning. Heliocentrism is a side effect. The main thing is discoveries like ‘if someone attacks you for no reason, disliking it doesn’t prove them right’. Given humans’ slow starts, and their chance of landing in a bad starting zone, basic essential things like that aren’t self evident.

Grasping fearlessly after truth is not primarily a matter of reaching great heights, but of establishing basic integrity and sanity, from the depths of weakness and ignorance we all share as our starting condition. I find it curious that the essay didn’t say anything about the autism spectrum. I’m not someone that likes to armchair diagnose people, much less people that lived centuries ago, but when you see things like: If you think it’s impossible to be that oblivious, you’re wrong. Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time. And The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy it makes you think that the essay should be thinking about a neurodivergence angle and how it fits in.