Shun offensive things: always, never, sometimes?
Suppose that taking offense is something that you do in response to something that you think lowers the status of either you, your group, or something that you hold dear. Now there are two extremes as to how to respond to possibly offensive things, both of them wrong:
1. Shun anything that could cause offense to anyone. This is wrong because it would unreasonably restrict communication, because people can perceive something to lower their status when it doesn’t, and it would allow status grabs where groups decide what you’re allowed to say by arbitrarily defining things they don’t like as “offensive”.
2. Say that being offended is your own fault, and maintain that anyone should be free to say anything they like, regardless of whether it offends someone. This is wrong because some words or expressions, when used in certain contexts, do genuinely attack people or groups by lowering their perceived status. Social norms that were offense-blind would strenghten existing status differences.
The challenge is finding social norms that are balanced between these two. E.g. slurs against a genuinely high-status group are more acceptable than slurs against a low-status group, but the status of a social group is constantly changing and different people have different ideas of a social group’s status.
Suppose that person X says something that offends person Y, but X thinks what she said was fine. This could be because of two reasons:
A. X does think that her words might lower the status of Y’s group, but Y’s group does deserve to be taken down a notch.
B. X genuinely did not intend her words to lower the status of Y’s group, and thinks that most listeners wouldn’t think that she did.
In the case of e.g. offensive drawings of Mohammed, either or both reasons could be true. X might think that all religions should be mocked because religion is for idiots (A). Alternatively, X might think that all religions get mocked but that doesn’t make them less valuable and important (B). Or X might think that yes, this does take lower a religion’s status, but only because that religion’s adherents have given it such a high status to start with. If they didn’t (in X’s mind) unreasonably privilege their own beliefs, they’d have no reason to be offended by an assertion that their religion is of no higher status than any other belief (A&B).
Online, it often seems to be the case that people fall prey to the illusion of transparency. If you’re with a group of friends who know you well, then it can be safe to say potentially offensive things, since your friends either share your opinion of the other group’s status, or know that you don’t mean any harm. But if you speak online, where not everybody does know you or your friends, then they cannot know what your intentions were.
People who go with the general strategy of shunning anything offensive tend to presume that reason A is always (or most often) the only right one, while people who think everyone should be free to say anything tend to presume that reason B is always (or most often) the only right one. I don’t think either assumption is right.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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Kaj Sotala:
> The paper introduces AlphaGo Zero, the latest evolution of AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a world champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go. Zero is even more powerful and is arguably the strongest Go player in history.
> Previous versions of AlphaGo initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play Go. AlphaGo Zero skips this step and learns to play simply by playing games against itself, starting from completely random play. In doing so, it quickly surpassed human level of play and defeated the previously published champion-defeating version of AlphaGo by 100 games to 0. [...]
> AlphaGo Zero only uses the black and white stones from the Go board as its input, whereas previous versions of AlphaGo included a small number of hand-engineered features. [...]
> After just three days of self-play training, AlphaGo Zero emphatically defeated the previously published version of AlphaGo - which had itself defeated 18-time world champion Lee Sedol - by 100 games to 0. After 40 days of self training, AlphaGo Zero became even stronger, outperforming the version of AlphaGo known as “Master”, which has defeated the world's best players and world number one Ke Jie.
AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch | DeepMind
Kaj Sotala:
AI-powered, lethal bracelets sound really scary. And the specific application mentioned here wouldn't necessarily even need much beyond modern-day machine learning, especially not if the dictators are willing to be ruthless enough to accept the collateral damage resulting from incorrect analyses. You could also expand it to trigger if it heard its owner expressing criticism of the government...
> With superhuman technology, the step from the perfect surveillance state to the perfect police state would be minute. For example, with the excuse of fighting crime and terrorism and rescuing people suffering medical emergencies, everybody could be required to wear a “security bracelet” that combined the functionality of an Apple Watch with continuous uploading of position, health status and conversations overheard. Unauthorized attempts to remove or disable it would cause it to inject a lethal toxin into the forearm. Infractions deemed as less serious by the government would be punished via electric shocks or injection of chemicals causing paralysis or pain, thereby obviating much of the need for a police force. For example, if [the bracelet] detects that one human is assaulting another (by noting that they’re in the same location and one is heard crying for help while their bracelet accelerometers detect the telltale motions of combat), it could promptly disable the attacker with crippling pain, followed by unconsciousness until help arrived.
> Whereas a human police force may refuse to carry out certain draconian directives (for example, killing all members of a certain demographic group), such an automated system would have no qualms about implementing the whims of the human(s) in charge. Once such a totalitarian state forms, it would be virtually impossible for people to overthrow it.
-- Max Tegmark: Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Kaj Sotala:
"Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505 Thompson et al 2017: (media: http://www.nature.com/news/wikipedia-shapes-language-in-science-papers-1.22656 )
"“I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work.” - Charles Darwin, 1865. As the largest encyclopedia in the world, it is not surprising that Wikipedia reflects the state of scientific knowledge. However, Wikipedia is also one of the most accessed websites in the world, including by scientists, which suggests that it also has the potential to shape science. This paper shows that it does. Incorporating ideas into a Wikipedia article leads to those ideas being used more in the scientific literature. This paper documents this in two ways: correlationally across thousands of articles in Wikipedia and causally through a randomized control trial where we add new scientific content to Wikipedia. We find that the causal impact is strong, with Wikipedia influencing roughly one in every three hundred words in related scientific journal articles. Our findings speak not only to the influence of Wikipedia, but more broadly to the influence of repositories of scientific knowledge. The results suggest that increased provision of information in accessible repositories is a cost-effective way to advance science. We also find that such gains are equity-improving, disproportionately benefitting those without traditional access to scientific information."
Wikipedia shapes language in science papers
Kaj Sotala:
> You can learn a lot by comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold. [...] For many popular positions, the reasonable mood is virtually invisible. For your consideration...
> 1. The hawk. Modern warfare almost always leads to killing lots of innocents; if governments were held to the same standards as individuals, these killings would be manslaughter, if not murder. This doesn't mean that war is never justified. But the reasonable hawkish mood is sorrow - and constant yearning for a peaceful path. The kind of emotions that flow out of, "We are in a tragic situation. After painstaking research on all the available options, we regretfully conclude that we have to kill many thousands of innocent civilians in order to avoid even greater evils. This is true even after adjusting for the inaccuracy of our past predictions about foreign policy."
> I have never personally known a hawk who expresses such moods, and know of none in the public eye. Instead, the standard hawk moods are anger and machismo. Ted Cruz's recent quip, "I don't know if sand can glow in the dark, but we're going to find out" is typical. Indeed, the hawks I personally know don't just ignore civilian deaths. When I raise the issue, they cavalierly appeal to the collective guilt of their enemies. Sometimes they laugh. As a result, I put little weight on what hawks say. This doesn't mean their view is false, but it is a strong reason to think it's false.
> 2. The immigration restrictionist. Immigration from the Third World to the First World is almost a fool-proof way to work your way out of poverty. The mechanism: Labor is more productive in the First World than the Third, so migrants generally create the extra riches they consume. This doesn't mean that immigration restrictions are never justified. But the reasonable restrictionist mood is anguish that a tremendous opportunity to enrich mankind and end poverty must go to waste - and pity for the billions punished for the "crime" of choosing the wrong parents. The kind of emotions that flow out of, "The economic and humanitarian case for immigration is awesome. Unfortunately, there are even larger offsetting costs. These costs are hard to spot with the naked eye, but careful study confirms they are tragically real. Trapping innocents in poverty because of the long-run costs of immigration seems unfair, but after exhaustive study we've found no other remedy. Once you see this big picture, restriction is the lesser evil. This is true even after adjusting for the inaccuracy of our past predictions about the long-run dangers of immigration."
> I have met a couple of restrictionists who privately express this mood, and read a few who hold it publicly. But in percentage terms, they're almost invisible. Instead, the standard restrictionist moods are anger and xenophobia. Mainstream restrictionists hunt for horrific immigrant outliers, then use these outliers to justify harsh treatment of immigrants in general.
The Missing Moods | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
Kaj Sotala:
> I think that tribalism is one of the biggest problems with humanity today, and that even small reductions of it could cause a massive boost to well-being. [...] I basically mean the phenomenon where arguments and actions are primarily evaluated based on who makes them and which group they seem to support, not anything else. [...] as someone commented, "people are fine with randomized controlled trials in policy, as long as the trials are on things that nobody cares about" [...]
> Feelings of safety or threat seem to play a lot into feelings of tribalism: if you perceive (correctly or incorrectly) that a group Y is out to get you and that they are a real threat to you, then you will react much more aggressively to any claims that might be read as supporting Y. Conversely, if you feel safe and secure, then you are much less likely to feel the need to attack others.
> The last point is especially troublesome, since it can give rise to self-fulfilling predictions. Say that Alice says something to Bob, and Bob misperceives this as an insult; Bob feels threatened so snaps at Alice, and now Alice feels threatened as well so shouts back. The same kind of phenomenon seems to be going on a much larger scale: whenever someone perceives a threat, they are no longer willing to give someone the benefit of doubt, and would rather treat the other person as an enemy. (which isn't too surprising, since it makes evolutionary sense: if someone is out to get you, then the cost of misclassifying them as a friend is much bigger than the cost of misclassifying a would-be friend as an enemy. you can always find new friends, but it only takes one person to get near you and hurt you really bad)
> One implication might be that general mental health work, not only in the conventional sense of "healing disorders", but also the positive psychology-style mental health work that actively seeks to make people happy rather than just fine, could be even more valuable for society than we've previously thought. Curing depression etc. would be enormously valuable even by itself, but if we could figure out how to make people generally happier and resilient to negative events, then fewer things would threaten their well-being and they would perceive fewer things as being threats, reducing tribalism.
Anti-tribalism and positive mental health as high-value cause areas