I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions

High class people unknowingly wage class war against low class people by promoting liberal social norms that they can handle but induce dysfunction in the lower classes (drug abuse, high divorce rates, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, more violence, ... ).

Roissy recently quoted and linked to a disturbing parable on this:

The Parable Of The Smart Birds

Once there were 3 classes of birds of a feather: Dumb birds, Smart birds and Genius birds. There was also a genius bird of a different feather hanging around. All summer the genius bird of a different feather went around to the smart birds of a feather telling them how ridiculous it was to fly south for the winter — that these atavistic instincts were a terrible legacy from “the bad old days” and gave very sophisticated-sounding arguments that the smart birds of a feather couldn’t quite understand but understood quite well that they’d better pretend to understand lest they be accused of being dumb birds.

Fall cometh. The dumb birds fly south to the derision of the smart birds. The genius birds of a feather think, “I’ve heard the arguments about flying south for the winter being only for dumb birds, but where really do these feelings come from? Could they have survival value? Could the genius bird of a different feather have a conflict of interest?” Even before thinking the answers through, the mere doubts raised were sufficient to motivate flying south. The smart birds of a feather, hearing these doubts raised by the genius birds of a feather proceeded to attack them as “dumb birds”. They felt superior to the genius birds of a feather. Some genius birds of a feather were even injured enough to stop them from being able to fly south.

Winter hits. The smart birds of a feather die. The injured genius birds of a feather die. The genius birds of a different feather turn out to have an adaptation to cold weather. Spring comes. An evolutionary dynamic reveals itself…

Too much ethnic diversity kills liberal social democracy.

This one really doesn't belong on the list. The political science research showing a negative correlation between support for the welfare state and ethnic diversity is widely known and not-at-all secret.

[redacted]

There is no such thing as moral progress and if there is there is no reason to expect we have been experiencing it so far in recorded history, unless you count stuff like more adapted cultures displacing less adapted ones or mammals inheriting the planet from dinosaurs as moral progress.

Does this really belong or am I just lacking the requisite emotional abhorrence regarding its obvious truth?

Hey, people are taking you seriously even though you're not justifying your beliefs. That's not fair.

This was mostly a bunch of meta-contrarian crap, but this one:

High class people unknowingly wage class war against low class people by promoting liberal social norms that they can handle but induce dysfunction in the lower classes (drug abuse, high divorce rates, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, more violence, ... ).

is a novel thought to me. Thanks.

For those who don't know what this Roissy character is all about and what the scandal was, here's a third-party account:

http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2010/01/19/roissy-and-raine-make-a-right-noh/

(Just dug it up myself right now)

High class people unknowingly wage class war against low class people by promoting liberal social norms that they can handle but induce dysfunction in the lower classes (drug abuse, high divorce rates, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, more violence, ... ).

Reminds me of this.

Everyone's favorite effigy Moldbug calls this "defining the null hypothesis."

fair disclosure: I don't think Moldbug is good for much more than clever turns of phrase.

Behold, I come from the distant future year of 2013!

Should we allow same-sex marriage? vs. Should marriage have any legal relevance?

I don't know if this was true in early 2012, but I regularly see this point brought up during discussions of same-sex marriage, often by people who seem to think this is a revolutionary insight which no-one in the discussion has seen a thousand times before. So this may not be an example of this, at least not anymore.

The 'contrarian' answers to 1, 2, 3 and 5 are standard libertarian positions, while 4 is pretty common among some denominations of anarchism. They're hardly "suppressed" ideas.

The set of topics too inflammatory for LW to talk about sanely seems pretty small (though not empty), but there's a considerably larger set of topics too politically sensitive for us to safely discuss without the site taking a serious status hit

And it's not just the site in general, it's also the participants. Some of the stances that have been mentioned in this thread are considered so toxic within some circles that anyone even discussing them risks becoming very unpopular in such circles. At worst, everyone who's known to be an LW regular will be presumed to hold such opinions, regardless of whether or not they've actually even participated in such discussions.

I don't have a problem with such topics being sometimes touched upon, but if they were regularly and extensively discussed, I could imagine getting a little nervous about using my real name here.

Less Wrong will have a “limited-access forum” before 2013.

Specifically, I think this line has already been crossed with multiple polyamory discussions. When I started reading this site (while still being a religiously observant Jew) this is the sort of thing that might have quickly classified LW as a 'bunch of hippies who look for "rational" reasons to operate outside of social norms'.

I think there are good reasons to discuss this specific topic as a test case for rationality, but people need to be acutely aware of the tradeoffs.

More specifically if SI gains enough prominence to be noticed by news outlets I'd prefer more of this image

and less of this

This seems like a generally good idea. What would be your specific proposal? Members only forum? High karma only? invite only?

taking (say) anarcho-primitivism seriously

A while ago, I took x-risk very seriously, and the best solution I could come up with was anarcho-primitivism. FAI is a much better solution.

I'm finding it difficult to think of an admission criterion to the conspiracy that would not ultimately result in even larger damage than discussing matters openly in the first place.

To clarify: It's only a matter of time before the conspiracy leaks, and when it does, the public would take its secrecy as further damning evidence.

Perhaps the one thing you could do is keep the two completely separate on paper (and both public). Guilt by association would still be easy to invoke once the overlapping of forum participants is discovered, but that is much weaker than actually keeping a secret society discussing such issues.

-

• Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren't actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of "rationality" as practiced by LessWrongers.
• A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is "Evangelical Polyamory".

Agreed except for the part about Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard. I think it's actually doing better then most gatherings of smart people attempting to reorganize society. Keep in mind lesswrong's equivalent 50 years ago would have been advocating Marxism.

• Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.

Agreed.

• Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.

You've never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it's another good example of your first point.

• Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society's expectations for normal behavior.

True, however, the previous culture was hyper-conformist, since it was 'designed' to create people intelligent enough to operate machinery but conformist enough to work in an assembly line.

Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren't actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of "rationality" as practiced by LessWrongers.

Pff, this one is so normal it has an obligatory link :D

Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. [...]

While I agree, I disapprove because my impression is that this is not an opinion suppressed much in the outside culture. I can well imagine it being an unpopular one here at Less Wrong, but in the world at large I see widespread support for similar opinions, such as among "conservatives" (in a loose sense) complaining about how "intellectuals" (ditto) were and are overly supportive of Communism, and complaints against "technocrats" and "ivory towers" in general. I also see disagreement with this, but not tabooing of it.

My agreement is based on the opinion appearing to be congruent with the quip "Evolution is smarter than you are", or the similar principle of "Chesterton's Fence".

I also get the impression that this is often because smart people don't see the value of the institutions to smart people. (This may be because it doesn't have such value.) For instance:

A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is "Evangelical Polyamory".

I'm fairly confident LessWrongers could engage in polyamory this without significant social dysfunction or suffering, let alone death on a massive scale. (BTW: I couldn't find any articles here by that title. Are you referring to a general tendency, or did I fail at searching?)

As a former Evangelical Polyamorist, now a born-again Monogamist, I enthusiastically endorse items 1 & 2 in this comment.

It can be thought of as the cultural equivalent of Algernon's Law - any small cultural change is a net evolutionary disadvantage. I might add "previously accessible to our ancestors", since the same principle doesn't apply to newly accessible changes, which weren't previously available for cultural optimism. This applies to organizing via websites. It does not apply to polyamory (except inasmuch as birth control, std prevention, and paternity testings may have affected the relevant tradeoffs, though limited to the degree that our reactions are hardwired and relevant).

It seems dictatorships work better (actually I can't think of an example off hand) AND wildly worse. Dictatorships compared to republic is like male compared to female: the main difference is just a much wider spread. So you wind up rolling a much bigger set of dice with dictatorships and then survivorship bias and human bias towards picking off the high spots makes the result look good.

Further, would a dicatatorship work well for long in the absence of republics from which it could steal ideas? I don't think there is a dicatatorship with a good record of innovation and technological development. (Hitler's Germany SPENT technical capital it had accumulated before, Hitler didn't last long enough to see if Germany would have been the exception).

North Korea, ceteris paribus, does not seem to have been helped by dictatorship.

most of the deaths in the holocaust were caused by the allies bombing railroads that supplied food to the camps.

I think It would be technically illegal for me to participate or update away from my default position in such a hypothetical debate.

most of the deaths in the holocaust were caused by the allies bombing railroads that supplied food to the camps

And the shortage of food in Germany, and everything else that provided a disincentive to feed the people that the party line proclaimed to be innnately hostile and seditious.

When you're literally last on the priority list (well, maybe above Soviet POVs in 1941), every economic difficulty will "cause" you to starve while you could've easily endured it in a society that had a more balanced if utterly cynical opinion of you.

(I find the other things you mentioned to be broadly correct, but not without caveats; moreover, if one goes about it naively without minding such caveats, one would likely do much greater harm to most involved than the current self-deception does.)

Child sexual consent hits the same issues as child acting or any other thing that parents can allow

(Warning: Judging moral claims with System-1 is unreliable.) Thinking that as a kid I could have been allowed to have sex, have had people annoying me with undesired propositions (even after they knew my age), and have had people trying to manipulate me into sex, makes me at most kind of uneasy. Thinking that my parents could have had any kind of say over it gave me a panic attack.

. Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.

The "incest isn't wrong" position isn't novel. The "everyone would be better off if they did" is novel, and I confess I don't understand it at all. Not everyone is attracted to close family members.

. Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad. Child porn should not be suppressed (tho some of it is documentation of crime and should be investigated).

I agree with the first half, but would have phrased the second half as "the ban on computer-generated child pornography should be reversed and indeed subsidized to crowd out pornography using real children".

Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.

Really? What about for people who don't have access to emergency birth control? Or who were unlucky enough to be raped by someone with an STD? Or who live in a society that murders women who get raped as adulterers? Or just in a society that tends to divide women into "good girls" and "sluts"? (Maybe you meant society's self-fulfilling prophecy in the latter two examples, but it's not the woman's self-fulfilling prophecy.)

*Yes, I know men get raped too. That's pretty clearly not the context when people bring this argument up, however.

Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.

Judging them for what? Doesn't work for suitability as an underwear model, for example.

Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.

"Life After Rape" is a good (aside from "there is no sex in rape" being false in an important sense) elaboration on (one construal of) this.

An analogous idea, that other people on this thread have come close to but not exactly said, is 'spreading the meme of democracy to non-democratic societies causes needless suffering by making people feel oppressed, when their extrapolated volition if you hadn't done so wouldn't have come to care in the same way.'

Given functional birth control and non-fucked family structure, incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.

Birth-control isn't natural, so how can incest using it be?

I'd expect that it would generally be awkward, but it's fine beyond that.

Pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation, even if it expressing it IRL is bad.

I agree with the first half whole-heartedly. I'm not convinced that expressing it in real life is bad.

Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.

I never thought of that, but it doesn't seem that unlikely. The obvious way to check would be to find out how rape victims deal with it in cultures with different views on how they would deal with it.

Self identity is a problem.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean here by "self identity"? I originally parsed it as "membership in identity groups" per Keep Your Identity Small, but on rereading I notice that it might also make sense as something along the lines of "having ego boundaries".

Gender and partially sexual orientation is made up.

Please, that statement becomes more controversial if you negate it.

Hmmm, I begin to wonder if my assumptions about the typical person's attitude towards incest and pedophilia are based on some black magic a la: http://eugenicist.tumblr.com/post/11786816885/public-opinion-versus-public-opinion

Yes. Especially considering how often paedophilia is used as an excuse by various governments and organizations to commit their own arguably much worse atrocities.

Race, class and subculture are the most useful pieces of information when judging a person.

If you mean “the most useful pieces of information you could possibly have” that sounds obviously wrong (I mean, if I had to choose whether to hire someone for some job, and I could either know their race, class and subculture or how good they would be at that job, why shouldn't I choose the latter?), and if you mean “the most useful pieces of information when judging a person you know nothing else about” that's true but tautological, so what do you actually mean? I guess something like ‘among some set X of possible pieces of information you could know about someone, race, class and subculture are the most useful’, but it's not clear at all to me what set X would be.

Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.

One possibility to be considered while evaluating where the emotional impact of rape comes from is that women's emotional responses evolved in an environment where emergency birth control was not an available option. That would lead to traumatic responses even in first world countries where women are not ostracized for being 'damaged goods' on account of being raped.

...incest is fine and natural and probably a good experience to have.

Eww! This seems very subjective and, I suspect, rarely perceived to be desirable.

Source?

110% agreed. Hell, I often argue that in real life; there's no stigma attached to colonialism in Russia these days, probably in part because any serious attack on it sounds too much like a tired Soviet cliche.

Important disclaimer: "competently" means NOT the bull** the USA is doing.

I find it amusing that this was posted on India's Republic Day).

Dear people who post things like "Incest is neat" and "Whites are smarter than blacks": those things are currently controversial. Therefore, they don't come close to being unthinkable or impossible to talk about.

ADBOC and that's somewhat beside the point, because it seems to me that things are necessarily somewhat controversial to be taboo. As Paul Graham said:

No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. [...] If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.

Now, James Watson and Stephanie Grace might want a word with you. (Larry Summers could file an amicus brief.) Chanting "Racist, racist, cow porn, racist, racist, cow porn" seems to fairly closely match Multiheaded's description that "society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark" for at least some parts of society. This is moral panic and ridicule despite the speaker barely tiptoeing near controversy and hedging everywhere with statements such as:

This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic

I also don't think that there are no cultural differences

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility

I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables

I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Dear people who post things like "Incest is neat" and "Whites are smarter than blacks": those things are currently controversial. Therefore, they don't come close to being unthinkable or impossible to talk about.

Yuh. On LessWrong, scientific racism is a standard permitted scientific heresy for signaling nonconformity. It's the nonconformist in black, not the one in a clown suit. (And this is a stupidity that is extremely offputting.)

Other not-easily-thinkable positions (I don't believe any of these, but believe they're not utterly ridiculous):

Upvoted for showing a good alternative to my primitive heuristic of "Cruel as fuck". Unsettling and hard to propagate through one's belief net, but few would call those evil.

• Personal identity changing over time counts as death.

This is true but becomes a non-issue as soon as post-scarce computational resources and brain backups are available (while true; do sleep 1y; instantiate backup_01.mind &; done). The correct response is "go for cryonics as soon as possible".

Wireheading is necessary and sufficient for the fulfillment of true human CEV; people only claim to care about other values for signalling purposes.

Alternative which I view as being more frightening:

For any given human, its CEV involves that human winning at zero-sum, possibly even negative-sum, games (status would be one of these). As such, the best way to maximize the current collection of humanity's CEV would be to create new agents to which current humans defeat in zero-sum games.

That is, for every current human, create a host of new agents (all of whom are quite human for all intents and purposes) of whom the current human is emperor.

Note: if this is the case, I doubt pseudo-agents will suffice. Just as humans do not wish to love pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really love), humans do not wish to win zero-sum games against pseudo-humans (that is, humans who cannot really lose zero-sum games, with all that losing these games entails).

bad metaphysics may lead people to think there's a relevant difference between praying to God and attempting to summon demons

What's wrong with the metaphysics? I figured that one of the most powerful magicks developed by the Christians is a system for addressing only the demons who are actually God (using relatively rigid designators like the Word, the Form of the Good, &c.). The biggest reason I'm suspicious of the other Indo-European religions is that they don't advertise that they've developed any such system.

Most of the impact of rape is a made-up self fulfilling prophesy.

The same would apply to cuckoldry.

Upvoted for saying the only thing in this whole thread that makes my inner animal go "aaaaugh I must fight against people who say that". I didn't know I had it in me.

The same would apply to cuckoldry.

Men probably have systematic preferences for how to treat their children according to traits the children do or do not posses and a variety of cues that have evolved to ensure they invest in genetically related children.

But this may have little to do with conscious awareness of such information or emotional distress caused by it.

We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.

"Teenagers" doesn't really describe anything in the real world except perhaps a subculture.

Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways-- they've had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don't show up as superior results.

Well we already have data about the social status of people who propose such theories.

It's easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.

Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

... in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners ...

Clearly Jared Diamond is a shunned outcast and publicly apologized for his inappropriate speculation.

"Underdog is actually better but has just had bad luck" or "overdog is only winning because he is evil" is a narrative humans love and are significantly biased towards. Unless overdogs actually consider it plausible that they will be threatened even they derive status from claiming they where just lucky. Or that most (but clearly not them personally) overdogs are unethical.

Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.

Metternich would approve!

The same would apply to cuckoldry.

I agree. Why would there be a switch in the brain "in case genetic tests prove/shaman says child isn't yours go into depression!"? Other cues like smell or facial similarity are already factored into the fathers feelings before he consciously knows about the child's genetics.

We know almost nothing about the effects of sex for children and teenagers.

I don't think that's true for teenagers, their sexuality is heavily studied. I don't have very high confidence in academia but they must have produced something useful on the subject. Right? In any case I agree that children's sexuality is a pretty strong mind-killer and that our knowledge about it is woefully inadequate or just plain wrong.

Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.

Possible. But I don't see why this would be controversial.

Black people are actually genetically superior in important ways-- they've had such bad luck from geography and racism that their advantages don't show up as superior results.

Come now. White people would be all ecstatic that they now have proof they are to blame for all the problems they've been blaming themselves this entire time (and even more since the opportunity cost of squandered superiority is greater than squandered equality). Who dosen't like being proven right? This also fulfils their deeply ingrained pseudo-Christian guilt complex and desire for original sin. White people love feeling guilty and signalling moral superiority to other white people. I think that's partially genetic btw. Most other people on the planet are not such annoying moral poseurs. I don't have any real data to back me on this last claim but anecdotal evidence is pretty consistent on it.

East Asians and Arabs may react unfavourably though. Also the future would be very bright for mankind since Africa is likley to stay in population explosion mode for most of this century, while say Latin America and the Middle East are showing signs of incredibly rapid drops in birthrates (and the developed world is showing no real signs of recuperation).

Also its pretty obvious that black people are superior in certain aspects to most other races. Besides the obvious stuff like say West Africans being good sprinters and East Africans excelling at marathons, greater resistance to tropical diseases, greater diversity helping the evolve more rapidly to deal with new pathogens, lower rates of skin cancer, ect. humans in Sub-Saharan africa share some nearly continent wide adaptations to their environment that are very desirable. I'm pretty sure African males have an edge when it comes to attractiveness and no I'm not talking about the penis myth (which may not be a myth, it is hard to tell since measurements are ambiguous and conflicting). First off there is the purely physical advantage of darker skin since it is associated with masculinity, then there is the well documented "winning personality" when one controls for other factors. That last one is related to the fact that people of African descent generally have far fewer mental health problems (Europeans be they gentiles or Askenazi Jews and East Asians are really the neurotic freaks of the human race), better self-image, greater self-confidence and are much less prone to suicide than most.

ill effects of following socially supported advice are likely to be kept private and/or ignored for a very long time

Sharp. I've seen this especially in dieting/weightlifting communities.

I agree the majority of the damage caused by cuckolding/cheating is self created (though the pain is still real). However I do think there is a rational albeit selfish reason to be opposed to partner's cheating. If your partner cheats on you she/he may find out she/he prefers the other person to you. Or at the very least your inadaquaces may become clearer if your partner gets involved with somoene else.

The polyamory community suggests that these issues can be manged. But there is a plausible rational argument that outside relationships reduce stability, at least for some people.

Also I agree that black people are obviously superior in several ways. Black men seem clearly the most athletic overall. Subjectively they are also the hottest imo :)

how do you know this isnt happening in hard sciences?

Which soft sciences do you have in mind? (I'd say "name three" but that would come off as confrontational.)

Evidence: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/74794.html

We have tried to discuss topics like race and gender many times, and always failed.

The overall level of rationality of a community should be measured by their ability to have a sane and productive debate on those topics, and on politics in general.

An interesting thought, but as a practical idea it's a bad idea.

A lot of the problems with how people debate is that the underlying assumptions are different, but this goes unnoticed. So two people can argue on whether it's right or wrong to fight in Iraq when their actual disagreement is on whether Arabs count as people, and could actually argue for hours before realizing this disagreement exists (Note: This is not a hypothetical example). Failing to target the fundamental assumption differences leads to much of the miscommunication we so often see.

By having two (or more) debates branch off of different and incompatible assumptions, we're risking people solidifying in holding the wrong assumption, or even forgetting they're making it. The human mind is such that it seeks to integrate beliefs into a (more or less) coherent network without glaring contradictions, and by making people think long and hard off of a false assumption, we're poisoning their thinking process rather than enriching it. Even if, as you say, the signal-to-noise ratio is supposedly higher.

I would advise targeting the underlying disagreements first, proceeding only once those are dismantled.

Can we please try this? I think it's a really good idea.

The prevailing arguments against it are incoherent for non-vegans anyhow. Nonhuman animals can't consent? How can it possibly make sense to claim the relevance of consent for (non-painful) sexual activity for a class of animals which can be legally killed more or less on demand for its meat or skin, or if it becomes inconvenient to keep? The consent argument is bogus; the popular moral beliefs against zoophilia are actually not based on a legalistic rights framework, but on a purity/corruption/ickiness framework.

Multiparty electoral democracy has no real utility, confers no legitimacy and doesn't satisfy any primal urge for freedom laying dormant in non-Western peoples. "Democracy" as a concept is mainly used in international politics as a weapon to suppress other political systems through sanctions and military action. When a country becomes "democratic" by holding elections, it's really just signalling its compliance with the West. The current period of liberal democratic triumphalism has created an intellectual Dark Ages of political thought. There are many valid forms of governance that don't involved voting. Moreover, so-called "authoritarianism" has a proven track record for development.

Holy Moldbug I swear I get giddy at the very idea of a critical rationalist discussion about democracy on LessWrong! Please someone who has done some heavy lifting on the subject make a post about it!

Countries that are trying to self-determine their own political development necessarily have to suppress ideas that are backed up by the military and economic might of Western hegemony.

Who exactly, as in the class of persons doing it, is trying to self-determine what exactly?

They're really signalling their willingness to sell out their own culture for power.

What is "their own culture", who determines it and how does it figure in more or less reflection-heavy utility functions, especially given the heavy cost you approve of?

EDIT: I notice that you, as some of your comments would imply, you simply don't care about the lives and happiness of people who don't have long-term goals ("Life's Great Adventure"... bah). In this case we might just be having a genuine clash of values and can't convince each other about any moral judgment here.

If you truly believe in the right to self-determination

I don't, because I'm more or less imperialist, and neo-colonialist too. I still identify as a socialist and to a lesser extent as a liberal.

Moreover, so-called "authoritarianism" has a proven track record for development.

I think the most important feature of government is that it handle regime changes well and indefinitely. Authoritarianism would have to be awfully good at development to make up for increased intermittent revolutions and civil wars. I leave it to Steve Jobs and his ilk to handle development.

Yeah, I don't see anything problematic about discussing these here, except that they're about politics.

Moreover, so-called "authoritarianism" has a proven track record for development.

Be careful with that around political scientists. I get the impression that some of them define democracy as everything that is good in the world. If you find something else good, they'll just redefine democracy to include it.

It strikes me that searching the internet for this phrase, and meaningfully equivalent variants, would be a really interesting experience.

I came to this thread by way of someone discussing a specific comment in an outside forum.

Self-reported happiness data seems to not agree with this, unless Swedes are keeping some tortured children in the basement.

This all seems overtly contradicted by the decline of violence (including homicide, rape, torture, war deaths as a fraction of the population) and the increase in healthy lifespan over historical time.

But if this is innate, how do you recognize it as "bad"?

What is it in you that makes you feel sad at this? And can't we just plug that thing into the utility function?

Both imply that I should have no rightful reason to give a fuck about this.

There is a large class of violent people for whom no current treatment is available who simply need to be put down.

How large? Executing / permanently imprisoning serial killers e.g. is fairly mainstream, though certainly controversial.

Humans don't care about torture.

What makes you suspect something like that? Pretty much any tribe gets pissed off when starts torturing members of . Maybe you mean torture as established part of the justice system, as was common throughout much of history? Even then I'd suspect there are plenty of people who have no problem as long as it only affects or .

People can be tortured to create a lower set point on the hedonic treadmill. This allows for far more overall utility.

I wonder if this reasoning might be related to the longevity of the boarding school institution as implemented by early 20th century Britain, or of other similarly unpleasant forms of institutionalized child... I'm not sure I want to call it "abuse", but at least systematic deprivation.

Or of hazing or initiation ordeals in general, really.

Male/female sexual relationships are fundamentally adversarial due to the differences in dominant mating strategies.

AFAIK there's a sizable portion of feminists who believe this statement (or at least the first half of it) is true, and thus the statement is not as terribly controversial as your other ones.

People can be tortured to create a lower set point on the hedonic treadmill. This allows for far more overall utility.

Who said that this isn't being done to us right now, from the inside as well as the outside of our mind? (Consequently, I'm not scared but neither do I approve of this.)

Anyone with the ability to make the world better almost by definition has a vested stake in the current fucked up one. Very much believe this. Cure is a sense that more is possible.

People can be tortured to create a lower set point on the hedonic treadmill. This allows for far more overall utility.

I think this is a pretty common belief among religious people. You can explain evil people by free will being important, but there's a lot of bad stuff that's nobody's fault.

People can be tortured to create a lower set point on the hedonic treadmill. This allows for far more overall utility.

Why would this be bad? I mean, it's a pretty big IF, but if tortureworld is actually better, then just imagine a perfect world without torture, and that's a lower bound on how great tortureworld is.

Male/female sexual relationships are fundamentally adversarial due to the differences in dominant mating strategies.

I don't buy it! & not only based on personal experience - there's just too much variation in humanity, and we're getting pretty good at breaking out of supposed evolutionary imperatives.

Anyone with the ability to make the world better almost by definition has a vested stake in the current fucked up one.

I think I'd prefer to live now than in pretty much any prior era.

"How dare you question the coherence of thoughts that I refuse to express!"

Hilarious. I just watched Lovecraft's "From Beyond" again. It's free on hulu. ...A great reason to discuss orgies of sadists with pineal glands rupturing from their foreheads. Ach! I've already annoyed the floating blue radioactive nudist who wants us to clean up our image. Sorry doc!

I also noticed that someone here uses the avatar "Dagon" ...another Lovecraftian free movie on hulu. What's wrong with you people?! First, you downrank me into oblivion, and now I find a Lovecraftian obsession bubbling under the surface! LOL

What's next? I know. A Dr. Manhattan and Cthulhu spoof from South Park: http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/360445/i-am-mysterion

The post asked for opinions so repulsive people have a hard time generating them in the first place. This is a relatively common opinion.

Creating an X does not give the creator the right ...

Of course it doesn't. The question is if the world becomes a better place if they do it anyway.

A funny unrelated question that just occurred to me: how can one define property rights in a mathematical multiverse which isn't ultimately based on "matter"?

This seems to be a pretty mainstream position. Not one I agree with, but not that controversial.

there are better justified and less harmful ways to accomplish this than intellectual property law.

Such as?

Africans have (on average) low IQ scores and low conscientiousness. Therefore international aid is hopeless and we should stop it.

The low average IQ and the net harm done by the current model of international aid are more or less statements of fact. The rest of this line literally carries no message. What would be your preferred state for Africa?* What measures would you endorse to move towards that state?

- ("I truly don't care much because I don't consider Africans to be deserving of sympathy" is a legitimate answer, just a... boring one, and a one that can, in turn, mark your* utility function as worth much less consideration in the eyes of some people here - not necessarily being just me.)

Slavery, organ donations and sexual services for all ages should be legal if both parties give informed consent.

How would a 3-year-old give informed consent to be sold into slavery?

Even assuming the "for all ages" only applies to latter item, what would "informed consent' mean for a 3 year old?

Almost all of these are also topics which have been discussed as ideas on LW before. Some of them do seem to lead to close to flamewars (although the LW notion of a flamewar is more civil than most online discussions) but they pretty clearly don't fall into the claimed category of views that are so unacceptable that they can only be talked about indirectly.

I'm from Germany and here everybody gets money for having children. Don't know if that's true in the US.

Sort of. Children and other dependents give you tax breaks) in the US, but no direct financial aid unless you qualify for certain limited welfare programs. That's at the federal level; some states might expand on that, but I can't speak for all of them.

5. The male variance in IQ is greater than that for females which explains why most nobel prize winners, CEOs etc. are men. Therefore we should stop pointless countermeasures. (Men are also more ambitious, aggressive and psychopathic which seems also relevant)

Not necessarily:

The new study, by Mertz and Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, was published on Dec. 12, 2011 in Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The study looked at data from 86 countries, which the authors used to test the "greater male variability hypothesis" famously expounded in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, as the primary reason for the scarcity of outstanding women mathematicians.

That hypothesis holds that males diverge more from the mean at both ends of the spectrum and, hence, are more represented in the highest-performing sector. But, using the international data, the Wisconsin authors observed that greater male variation in math achievement is not present in some countries, and is mostly due to boys with low scores in some other countries, indicating that it relates much more to culture than to biology.

Downvoted because all of these are frequently thought.

We've already had one extended debate about this one. Reminds me of the Thought Police section of this recent post.

This is what I always assume that such comments are referring to, so I voted you up (which seems reasonable for survey-like questions where no criterion of correctness is likely).

(much) less morally significant

Very alarming. I'd say that the only good Schelling point here is to treat all people who fit the current definition of "capable of human thought" and aren't wilfully destructive towards others as EXACTLY equal in "moral significance". Then again, I've always been a staunch egalitarian on this point.

This doesn't make them (much) less morally significant than whites, but it should have public policy implications.

Too cliched for me. The null action could also be a "policy implication" under some worldviews in that case, as could affirmative action 2.0 on a massive scale or something else very much acceptable to mainstream ethics.

Here is the same old mistake of heartfelt but naive conservatism; assuming that the "common sense" and "old good values" of one's day, if they seem to bring such security and are so good at shooting down other naive and dangerous ideas, will be good forever. Yet Kipling's world with all its wisdom ended up impaled on barbed wire, choking on mustard gas and torn to pieces by its own Maxim gun.

And who led it to that hell? Socialists? Unscrupulous wheelers and dealers? Naive young men who wanted to throw out musty old books and change everything for the better? Why, none of the public Kipling used to deride had much to do with it; the gunpowder was lit by those wise old men who carried sacred traditions and led empires. I'm sure that it never even occured to Kipling that, say, Marshal Haig was far more debased, murderous and evil than any of those he railed against.

I may not necessarily agree with that particular video but Aurini's channel is pure contrarian & rationalist goodness. Its very depressing he only has a few hundred views per video. These two videos seems somewhat relevant:

• Intellectual Curiosity
• Nihilism and the Red Pill
• Atheistkult
• The Eternal Arrogance of Statism
• How to Read History

Edit: Added a few more sort of relevant videos.