Tolerate Tolerance

I'm going to make a controversial suggestion: one useful target of tolerance might be religion.

I think we pretty much all understand that the supernatural is an open and shut case. Because of this, religion is a useful example of people getting things screamingly, disastrously wrong. And so we tend to use that as a pointer to more subtle ways of being wrong, which we can learn to avoid. This is good.

However, when we speak too frequently, and with too much naked disdain, of religion, these habits begin to have unintended negative effects.

It would be useful to have resources on general rationality to which to point our theist friends, in order to raise their overall level of sanity to the point where religion can fall away on its own. This is not going to work if these resources are blasting religion right from the get-go. Our friends are going to feel attacked, quickly close their browsers, and probably not be too well-disposed towards us the next time we speak (this may not be an entirely hypothetical example).

I'm not talking about respect. That would be far too much to ask. If we were to speak of religion as though it could genuinely be true, we would be spectacular liars. Still, not bringing up the topic when it's not necessary, using another example if there happens to be one available, would, I think, significantly increase the potential audience for our writing.

"of someone who I wrote off as hopeless within 30 seconds of being introduced to them."

Few college professors would do this because many students are unimpressive when you first talk with them but than do brilliantly on exams and papers.

I usually have something nice to say about most things, even the ideas of some pretty crazy people. Perhaps less so online, but more in person. In my case the reason is not tolerance, but rather a habit that I have when I analyse things: when I see something I really like I ask myself, "Ok, but what's wrong with this?" I mentally try to take an opposing position. Many self described "rationalists" do this, habitually. The more difficult one is the reverse: when I see something I really don't like, but where the person (or better, a whole group) is clearly serious about it and has spent some time on it, I force myself to again flip sides and try to argue for their ideas. Over the years I suspect I've learnt more from the latter than the former. Externally, I might just sound like I'm being very tolerant.

Note that tolerance is part of a general conversion strategy. Nitpicking everyone who disagrees with you in the slightest isn't likely to make friends, but it is likely to make your opponents think you are an arrogant jerk. Sometimes you just have to keep it too yourself.

Punishing for non-punishment is an essential dynamic for preserving some social hierarchies, at least in schoolyards and in Nazi Germany.

Abby was just telling me this afternoon that psychologists today believe that when kids are picked on in school, it's their own fault - either they are too shy, or they are bullies. (There is a belief that bullies are picked on in school, something I never saw evidence of in my school days except when it was me doing the picking-on.)

My theory is that the purpose of picking on kids in school is not to have effects on the kid picked on, but to warn everyone else that they will be picked on if they fail to conform. A kid is thus likely to be picked on if they don't respond to social pressures. Thus the advice that every parent gives their children, "Just ignore them if they pick on you," is the worst possible advice. Fight back, or conform; failing to respond requires them to make an example of you and does not impose any cost on them for doing so.

Wolves have a very strict social hierarchy, but I've never noticed evidence of punishment for a failure to punish. So this behavior isn't necessary.

We can and should reach whatever conclusions about people we wish. But we should be very slow to fail to observe and accept new evidence about them.

Excluding people from discussion may screen out their nonsense (or at least the things you thought were nonsense), but it also prevents you from discovering that you made a hasty decision. Once you've started ignoring someone, you can no longer observe what they say - and possibly find that they're smarter than you thought they were.

It's worth acquiring new data even from those you've discarded, at least once in a while.

M*nt*f*x! K*b*! Y*g-S*th*th!

I think there is an important distinction between cheap and expensive tolerance. If I am sitting on a plane and don't have a good book and am talking to my seatmate, and they seem stupid and irrational, being tolerant is likely to lead to an enjoyable conversation. I may even learn something.

But if I am deciding what authors to read, whose arguments to think about more seriously, etc., then it seems irrational to not judge and prioritize with my limited time.

And this relates to indirect tolerance - someone who doesn't judge and prioritize good arguments but instead listens to and talks to everyone is someone whose links and recommendations are less valuable because they have done less filtering. On the other hand, they are more likely to convert people, and when they do find good ideas they are more likely to be good ideas I wouldn't otherwise encounter. So it's tricky. Seems like the ideal is to read people who are intolerant but read tolerant people, so they have the broadest base of ideas, but still select the best.

Eliezer is correct, but this post should be followed up by one about the many places where failing to punish non-punishers, in other words, tolerating free-riders, has negative consequences.

The application of this principle to [outrage over the comments and commenters which a blogger declines to delete/ban] is left as an exercise for the reader.

My attitude toward Ben's tolerance depends on the context. When he does it as a person, I appreciate it. When he does it as chair of AGI, I don't. There were some very good presentations this year, but there were also some very bad time-wasters.

But probably I should blame the reviewers instead.

Damn M-nt-f-x! Damn every one that won't damn M-nt-f-x!! Damn every one that won't put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning M-nt-f-x!!!

Prescient.

Great post. I think I'd already sort of started trying to do this, although I couldn't have put it as well. Now what I want to know is how much to tolerate people who are less tolerant than me. I'm not quite sure what to do when I meet someone who is infuriated by patterns of thinking that I consider only trivially erroneous or understandable under certain circumstances.

I am going to disagree with the idea that 'being "intolerant of intolerance"' is inherently inconsistent. The problem is with the word tolerance, which contains multiple meanings. I think that it is morally wrong to discriminate against people for things that they can't change. Believing that someone of a different race can't possibly be intelligent is a moral wrong. Furthermore, it is so indicative of stupidity that I do not wish to associate with such a person, if they are in a culture where theirs is the minority view.To put it another way, to preserve my time and energy, I am going to avoid dealing with people who have some traits, and one of these traits is racism. This does technically mean that I am "intolerant of intolerance." However, given that you are Eliezer Yudkowsky and I am a random HS student, it is likely that you are correct. Could you explain to me why you believe that I am wrong, or how I misinterpreted that.

There's a question of whether there's an important difference in kind between sorts of tolerance. Here's an analogy which might or might not work: assume that, in general, a driver of a vehicle drives as fast as they think it is safe for cars to be driven in general. Only impatience would cause them to not tolerate people who drive slower than they; a safety concern could cause them to be upset by people who drive faster, since they consider that speed unsafe. Say you have two people who each drive at 50 mph. One of them tolerates only slower drivers but wants to ticket faster drivers and the other tolerates all drivers. The first driver could have a legitimate issue with the second one. They don't disagree about how fast it's safe to drive - they disagree about whether it is appropriate to expect that safety standard of others. Some kinds of statements are dangerous - perhaps not to the degree or in the way that cars are, but dangerous, like slanderous statements or ones that incite to riot or ones that are lies or ones that betray confidences or ones that mislead the gullible or ones that involve occupied inflammable theatrical venues. Refusing to castigate people who express those kinds of statements might - I'm not confident of this - itself be worthy of censure. Or perhaps I'm missing the point and those aren't the kinds of statements the tolerators of which should be tolerated?

I don't get it. You want us to work with those who refuse to 'punish' foolishness but who aren't fools themselves to, presumably, fight against foolishness. All right, I can see the sense in that.

Why does it follow that we should censor ourselves when dealing with these non-foolish foolishness enablers? Why can't we work with them and show our disapproval of their enabling?

a far more dangerous idiom that can lock an equilibrium in place even if it's harmful to everyone involved.

Could I get a reference for this? I wanted to refer someone else to it, and my Google searches failed me.

In a situation where someone who seems to be very like-minded is more tolerant to another person X than I would be, I would be very interested in why, if I don't already know. Perhaps my friend has reasons that I would agree with, if I only knew them. (Some pragmatic reasons come to mind.)

If I still disagree with my friend, even after knowing his reasons, I would then express the disagreement and see if I couldn't convert my friend on the basis of our common views. If I fail to convert him, it is because our views differ in some way. Is the view we disagree on minor or major? I would base my annoyance/intolerance/punishment on the view we disagree on, not his tolerance of person X.

There is the possibility that it is not possible or practical to find out my friend's reasons for the inappropriate tolerance. In that case, if my friend really does seem reasonable in all other ways, so that I am strongly convinced he really is like-minded, than I would have to give him the benefit of the doubt. There is the possibility that if I knew his reasons, I would agree.

(Later edit: This was my first comment on Less Wrong!)

... punishment of non-punishers, a far more dangerous idiom that can lock an equilibrium in place even if it's harmful to everyone involved.

Have you done the math? This would have important implications for the development of intolerant societies - it was clearly crucial to Nazism - but I've never heard of any studies on the subject. People are still working on first-order punishment.

A good reference on that; Simon Gächter, Elke Renner, and Martin Sefton, "The Long-Run Benefits of Punishment", Science 5 December 2008 322: 1510 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1164744] (in Brevia)

Abstract: Experiments have shown that punishment enhances socially beneficial cooperation but that the costs of punishment outweigh the gains from cooperation. This challenges evolutionary models of altruistic cooperation and punishment, which predict that punishment will be beneficial. We compared 10- and 50-period cooperation experiments. With the longer time horizon, punishment is unambiguously beneficial.

Whether someone agrees with us isn't as important as why.

If someone has sufficiently low standards of quality that they fail to disapprove of even the worst garbage, then they're of little use in distinguishing value from nonsense.

As a great deal of nonsense is not only passively but actively harmful (not just failing to be correct, but inclining people towards error), it is vitally important to tell the two apart. People who can't or won't do this are not only not-helpful, but make our tasks harder.

Strive to have good standards and apply them. Don't worry about being tolerant or intolerant -- the right mix of behaviors will naturally arise from the application of correct standards.

The communities that I've been a part of which I liked the best, which seemed to have the most interesting people, were also the nastiest and least tolerant.

If you can't call a retard a retard, you end up with a bunch of retards, and then the other people leave. When eventually someone nice came to power, this is invariably what happened.

In Hanson and Simler's 'The Elephant in the Brain', they mention Axelrod's (1986) "meta-norm" modelling which shows that cooperation is stable only when non-punishers are punished.

Just a small point-- tolerating tolerance seems to me to be a less powerful tool than the principle of charity, of which plenty has been said on this site. For me, the image:

One of the likely characteristics of someone who sets out to be a "rationalist" is a lower-than-usual tolerance for flaws in reasoning.

doesn't even start to feel right for me from a 'should' perspective (though it is quite familiar from an 'is' perspective). My image of a rationalist is someone exceptionally concerned with making sense of what others are saying, because arguments are not battles.

I have a massively huge problem with this. Every time a non-fiction author or scientist I respect gives credit to a non-rational I cringe inside. I have to will myself to remember that just because they have a lower rationality threshold, does not automatically discredit their work.

IAWY. However, regarding the practice of reminding yourself every time in order to prevent the behavior, why expend two units of mental force, opposing each other, when you could just remove both forces? It'd be more efficient just to get rid of whatever underlying belief or judgment makes you feel the need to be intolerant of the tolerant... and you'd suffer less.

I'm programmed to get angry when there's misbehavior and I don't know that I can just shut this off when the misbehavior consists of underpunishing. Maybe I should try channeling the anger toward the nonpunishee rather than the nonpunisher?

This post has motivated me to put my foot down aroudn one friend who is so bitchy about others.