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Using that subtitle as the title would make it work worse for me because:
- that title would be too long. many of the interfaces that show me titles would simply cut it off and I would not see the back half of it
- that sentence is semantically dense and grammatically complicated. I have to put in some work to break it down into noun phrases and such and figure out how it fits together. requiring cognitive work of potential readers before they've even decided if they want to read your thing is extremely anti-memetic
- the tone of it sounds like a dry academic paper. those are typically not very fun to read. it signals that this will also not be fun to read
Whereas the actual title has none of those problems. It's short, it's easy to parse, it's conversational with a clear and compelling valence. It's true it does not already explain why the author is worried about Chicago, but I think that's fine - when the explanation is complex enough you should need click on the article to find it out. Clickbait is when the answer could easily fit into the title and the author chose not to do that. Here I don't think it can.
I mean "radioactive" in a descriptive political sense. I agree that truth claims ought not be radioactive in this sense and it is a bad thing about the political landscape than they are.
(What, does discrimination against mentally ill people suddenly not exist? Or do you think that no trans person has ever been discriminated against for being mentally ill?)
Yes, trans people can be discriminated against for being mentally ill. What I meant was that if someone says "trans people are often discriminated against and that's bad" you should not respond with "well, trans people are mentally ill, what do you expect" as though (a) that's universally true of trans people (b) that means the discrimination is justified.
(Additionally, I claim you could have understood that this was what I meant, by applying a modicum of interpretive labor and using mental motions like "I am confused about why someone would say this, can I try to build a model where it makes sense / pass their ITT internally". My impression is that you are going around spamming attempted gotchas and refusing to engage even the slightest flexibility towards attempting to understand the views of people you think you disagree with; this is pretty annoying and bad for your truthseeking.)
The first three claims you list are either politically anodyne or else have the valence of the dominant political faction. And one basically never sees anyone condemned and targeted for shunning on the basis of having such beliefs.
Okay first of all, I have spent a fair bit of time in discourse contexts where they're not really anodyne. But more importantly, ...and??? I answered the question you asked (in a tone of confident assumption I would not be able to produce an answer)! I thought maybe you wanted existence proofs of me actually believing that saying a true thing can be bad rather than using that as a smokescreen for some reason, and I provided that even though it was a deeply obnoxious ask?
(Actually that would be a weird smokescreen. The type of person who I think you're gesturing at would never want to admit that a radioactive claim might possibly be true and if anything might end up using smokescreens to try to avoid admitting that.)
First, I don't think rationalists should shun Cremieux. The only cases I'm aware of where there was a push to get someone actually banned from rationalist stuff and truly "cancelled" are cases of, like, abuse, theft, murder, and I think this is good. I don't think Cremieux should be banned from rationalist events, I don't think people should refuse to read his blog or anything. He has good Twitter threads sometimes. (though after the Dynomight thing I'm a little suspicious of how much of that is his work)
What I do think is that his character as a person (which includes the blowup in response to the plagiarism accusation, and also the posts we're talking about here) should inform to what extent we hold him up as an exemplar of how to be. I wish we wouldn't. I am not myself lodging any kind of big protest about this, I am going to LessOnline myself (though not as any sort of featured guest), but it does make me a little less happy about how my community works.
Anyway, if someone is, say, a diehard communist who likes to post "kill all landlords" and argue that we need to immediately have a communist revolution and put a lot of people in gulags, that would
- (a) be a very different valence from Cremieux's takes
- (b) not warrant banning them from rationalist meetups (assuming they're not constantly going on about this at the meetups - if they are, ask them to cut it out and ban them if they won't)
- (c) cause me to not want to be friends with them or respect their opinions
- (d) cause me to think that if e.g. LessOnline organizers are holding them up as an example of how one should be, they are wrong and have worse judgment than I thought
Many of the truly radioactive claims I have not really investigated the truth of so cannot give as examples, but this does not mean I claim they are necessarily false either.
That said, of things I am pretty confident are true -
- "Men are stronger than women." -- very true on a population level; typically not relevant to bring up in e.g. a discussion of voting rights; not appropriate to bring up to imply men are better than women
- "Men are more physically aggressive than women." -- also true on a pouplation level, also not relevant to bring up in e.g. a discussion of voting rights; not appropriate to bring up to imply women are better than men
- "Being fat is generally bad for your health." -- true, not relevant to bring up e.g. in response to an objection to fat people being bullied or discriminated against, not appropriate to bring up to imply fat people are contemptible
- "Trans people are likelier to be mentally ill than cis people." -- true, not relevant to bring up e.g. in a discussion of discrimination against trans people, not appropriate to bring up to imply trans people are all delusional/contemptible
(Whether the question is rhetorical or not—I wonder if this is a case where, if you have a negative prior about someone, you'll take an ambiguous signal and decide it's bad, and use that to justify further lowering your opinion of them, whereas someone with a positive prior will do the opposite.)
This does seem likely true. As TheSkeward noted, he has a lot of previous experience with Cremieux that he's drawing from and is informing his view here (which is harder to cite since it was on Discord rather than the public Internet, integrated into conversational contexts, and in many cases now deleted). You could say this is a bias causing him to be uncharitable, but on the other hand it's also a prior with a lot of information integrated into it already which people without that experience don't have. Personally I think you are being so charitable that it slides into outright ignoring evidence just because any given bit of it isn't ironclad proof - which is a really important decoupling skill in situations of disagreement but also will lead you astray if you don't also step back and evaluate the less certain evidence too.
(maybe the "court of public opinion" should stick only to ironclad-proof kinds of evidence like literal courts do? idk, I think that's a good idea for some kinds of actions and not others)
(disclosure, TheSkeward is a close friend of mine and I've talked to him about this a fair bit)
The question "How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population...?"—if you take it as a rhetorical question, then that sounds pretty bad. [...] and I don't see strong evidence that he's operating in bad faith (although the plagiarism thing seems somewhat bad) or that he's in favor of forcibly sterilizing the aboriginals.
From elsewhere on Reddit, we have also this list of some of his preferred policies. It does not have precisely "ethnic groups that are on average less intelligent should not vote" or "forcible sterilization of such groups", but it does have some other things that are kind of relevant and to me kind of horrifying, such as:
- Jus Sanguinis (with removal of citizenship for people who marry/procreate with foreigners - but otherwise, they're free to stay, work, w.e - obviously subject to local government whims, but allow this to be an option that exists for, e.g., an ethnonationalist state, city, or patchwork bracket).
- [...]
- Mandatory abortions of the congenitally ill.
(bonus things that are not relevant but also kind of horrifying:)
- Complete removal of the prison, replacement with corporal and capital punishment including slavery (with conscription as an option) and medical experimentation depending on the severity of the crime (and in the case of slavery, usually not permanent unless it's a life sentence). Exile as a first option.
- [...]
- Having to have kids as a requirement for voting/being a politician.
- Having to be married to vote/be a politician.
- [...]
- Mental illness/having mental health medication prescribed disqualifying voting.
(note this is selected for being particularly horrifying to me; list also has some reasonable stuff and some stuff that's more baffling than horrifying)
This is again more like "bayesian evidence of what kinds of things this guy likes" than "look he said this exact thing" but like. it does not to me paint a picture of a guy who's reasoning from a careful or compassionate place or going to be careful about e.g. policies he pushes for not ruining a lot of people's lives willy-nilly!
He does make word choices like "dullards" and say some things that one could call unnecessarily insulting. [...] There's more than zero inflammatory rhetoric.
yeah I think this is pretty bad and causes me to not respect someone or think others should respect them? It's not just that he makes factual claims about an ethnic group and those factual claims are unflattering; his rhetoric oozes contempt for them. I think it's... bad to ooze contempt for an ethnic group? There's a thing that "racist" means and I don't think it necessarily ought to include beliefs about IQ but it very clearly includes "oozes contempt for some ethnic groups"! (For that matter I think it's also bad to ooze contempt at intellectually disabled people per se too.)
And I think this in fact muddies his epistemics, or at least his rhetoric! I admit that when I first read the comment I thought it was more factually bullshit than it in fact is, and I agree this matters. But also here are some more questions whose answers matter -
- how many cases of this "sleeping on the road" thing have actually occurred?
- what happened in those cases?
- how representative are those cases of the relevant groups as a whole?
- should you model this set of people as "basically like people you know with some adjustments" or "basically incomprehensible aliens"?
Another friend of mine looked into this a bit and basically found that there were a handful of cases like this (which is indeed more than I expected! but not, like, ubiquitous) but also they mostly seemed to be either explicitly drugs/alcohol-related (sometimes better described as "person was walking on the road while drunk or high and fell asleep") or just very likely so (see e.g. this graph for some info re: base rates of being drunk in pedestrian fatalities in this population, though caveat it's from 2006). (sorry this is not better cited, source is a small Discord conversation) This is... a different situation than if sober people just routinely decided to take a nap in the road like shown in that PSA video! It also much more matches my model of the world where, yknow, people are people, they can be not very smart but they are mostly not THAT dumb unless they're way out of distribution or there's drugs involved. (I mean, like, animals learn not to sleep on the road.)
I agree that the object-level non-rhetorical question is an interesting one, and an important one if the premises are true (which I am not convinced they meaningfully are as stated, I think?). I... don't really want the people exploring it to be so obviously devoid of compassion for the people in question!
--
Caveats -
- I do kind of hate the idea of, like, having something that smells like a political test for whether someone gets to be a respected rationalist. I don't really know how to get around the fact that there are ways people can be odious that have a political valence. I will just note that there are many political beliefs I think are terrible and which I might personally judge someone for but would not feel that there's something particularly distasteful about my community respecting (e.g. opposition to same-sex marriage; opposition to immigration; opposition to building housing; standard communism).
- Similarly I kind of hate the exercise of dissecting someone's words to determine whether they Really Suck and Should Be Shunned. Again I'm not really sure how to get around the situation where sometimes people suck and this is mostly visible in how they talk and while I don't think this means they should be ostracized I do think it bears on how much respect they ought to be afforded. (Not purely a political thing; see also the recent conflict around the plagiarism allegations & his response to them.)
- The Reddit comment we're arguing about here is 6 years old; he's not active on that account anymore; maybe this no longer reflects how he thinks about things, idk. (My understanding is that his allegedly similar Discord activity is more recent than that but I haven't personally seen it so can't really comment with good knowledge.)
- I can feel the "taking a side and feeling the need to defend it as hard as I can, including internally defending against changing my mind" machinery whir into action in my head. I'm trying not to let it control what I think/say too much, but also I kind of think even a possibly biased case is worth making here because it frustrates me that a lot of good arguments and evidence on this "side" are going unreported in this thread because sensible people with good arguments and evidence look at it and say "nope, no thank you" so I guess as a less sensible person I am wading in in their stead. If the discourse were slanted the other way I would be advancing a different set of considerations.
1“Jews are more greedy than Gentiles; this is established by the following studies” can be blameworthily antisemitic even if the studies do show that this is true on average. Some ways this can be true -
- bringing it up where not relevant, e.g. to criticize a Jewish politician
- saying it in a way where you're clearly oozing contempt about Jews
- making it sound like this is an essential trait of all Jews vs. all non-Jews
- bringing it up weirdly often
In all these cases it can be appropriate to object to that regardless of the validity of the studies.
Why would Cremieux be viewed as a “community representative”…?
On less.online, the list of invited guests is titled "SOME WRITINGS WE LOVE" and subtitled "The sites below embody the virtues we are celebrating. Each author below has been offered a free ticket to LessOnline." [emphasis mine]
I guess technically that says his site embodies these virtues, not that he as a person does, but I think that's a pretty hairsplitty distinction.
A possible reason to treat "this guy is racist in ways that both the broader culture and I agree is bad" more harshly than "this guy works on AI capabilities" is something like Be Nice Until You Can Coordinate Meanness - it makes sense to act differently when you're enforcing an existing norm vs. trying to create a new one or just judging someone without engaging with norms.
A possible issue with that is that at least some broader-society norms about racism are bad actually and shouldn't be enforced. I think a possible crux here is whether any norms against racism are just and worth enforcing, or whether the whole complex of such norms is unjust.
(For myself I take a meta-level stance approximately like yours but I also don't really object to people taking stances more like eukaryote's.)
What? I am telling you it is. Not in the sense that I can't parse it, but in the sense that I notice the cognitive effort involved, and preferentially read things that take less cognitive effort (all else equal, of course). If I'm skimming a bunch of titles and trying to pick which thing to read, the difference between titles that lodge their meaning into my brain as soon as my eyes fall on them vs. titles that take an extra couple seconds to parse is going to matter. (Similarly, I prefer Cooking For Engineers recipe layouts to recipe blogs that require me to extract the instructions from longer-form text - not that I can't do that, but I don't prefer to.)
Maybe this means you don't want me to read your post! But I don't think that's right. Titles are usually the most optimized-for-memeticness part of a post; I typically assume that the rest of it will be denser, and that's fine - if I'm reading your post I am probably sold on being interested in what you're saying. (Still better all things equal to make stuff easier to parse, when that doesn't trade off against other desiderata.)