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I’m not against the book and I don’t really want to be mean and I was entertained by all the exerpts I’ve seen of it, but I just think that there is ~complexity~ at play which pattern-matches to the kinds of things that have empirically been very harmful to people and ideas I care about and thus there is some cause for concern in how said ~complexity~ is addressed.
That’s fair enough, but I feel there is a certain hypersensitivity issue that comes up repeatedly around these topics.
And I realise that even by framing it in those terms I’m sort of playing into the narrative, eg. it sounds like I’m accusing people of caring too much and hence implicitly endorsing deaths and genocide, which is far from the truth. But there seems to be a greased waterslide where anything that smacks of mockery gets associated with every act of mockery ever, particularly the really nasty ones.
Ultimately it always boils down to whether the mockery is detected as coming from inside the tent or outside the tent, because mockery from outsiders cannot be tolerated or it will lead to gulags and terrible suffering.
But mockery is a common part of criticism, and forbidding criticism from outside the tent unless it can be expressed in more respectful and restrained terms even than those used by insiders basically shuts down all possible criticism.
I mean you give various examples of how mockery can have bad consequences, but they are not all very compelling. Many critics of cryopreservation mock it out of sheer frustration that people keep persisting with methods that cannot work, arguably a misallocation of resources that can lead to deaths from opportunity cost alone. (And of course proponents of cryopreservation can mock those who oppose it, when they are aren’t being outraged about Deathists).
While the dudes in dresses rhetoric often accompanies violence, I think it would be simplistic to say that it causes the violence. You could say that letting it pass unchallenged excuses the violence and sends a signal about what is acceptable.
But now the discussion has suddenly shifted from a mocking tone being used in philosophical discussions to actual violence and murder! I’ve seen plenty of jokes made at the expense of P-zombies, but as far as I know none of them have resulted in acts of aggression against people who lack qualia.
This isn’t intended as a defence of mocking people or being a jerk. But I think that some humour is justifiable in response to published texts pushing a political or philosophical worldview explicitly intended to convince others, and that forbidding any attempt at humour would make for a poorer world.
(And you know, someone would have to go searching through LessWrong and edit out any sarcastic remarks about talking snakes in the garden of Eden, and that sounds like way too much work).
My argument is basically that mocking the weird-sounding arguments that are low-status is significantly more harmful than mocking the weird-sounding arguments that are commonly accepted, and that I’d really appreciate it if people did less of the first type of mocking and if they are unable to tell the difference then doing less mocking whatsoever would be nice. (Heuristic for determining mocking: is it likely to feed into a pattern where people dismiss something out of hand based on the stereotype: “dudes in dresses lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why trans people should be taken seriously, and “human popsicles lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why attempts at cryonics (or alternative technologies pursuing the same goals) should be taken seriously, and “robot gods lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why AI should be taken seriously.)
If I could achieve such an equilibrium by reducing the amount of “talking snakes lol” in the world I’d take the deal. And I want to scorn the people who only focus on mocking (not really blaming the author so much, but rather the people who take it as an excuse to engage in “robot gods lol” and “rationalists are nazis lol”) without having adequately engaged the arguments; it’s one thing to have “here’s my thorough argument for why I don’t believe in cryonics working: (…) in summary, human popsicles lol” because at least it has some actual arguments to address (and Cthulhu knows I’m sometimes snarky in my own writing), while just “human popsicles lol” makes it way too easy to dismiss attempts at addressing it with simple repetition of “human popsicles lol”.
I don’t know if this makes any sense as written, but it does in my head, and the brainpattern-to-language translation is at fault if it doesn’t.
1 month ago · tagged #cissexism cw #basilisk bullshit #transmisogyny cw #death cw #status games cw · 122 notes · source: argumate · .permalink