Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market

It's hard to come up with a good counter-argument to "slavery is bad". Even women's suffrage and Prohibition didn't require lying.

That's bullshit. More precisely, it is quite possible that you don't consider any of the counter-arguments to be good. But you should not generalize it for everyone. A "good argument" is a 2-place word; it means that a given person accepts the premises of the argument and its style of reasoning. Also, there is a lot of hindsight bias and social pressure here: we already know which side has historically won and which is associated with losers; but before that happened, people probably evaluated the quality of the arguments differently.

I could start playing Devil's Advocate and give examples of specific arguments that would seem good to some people, but I am not sure the readers (and our stalkers at RationalWiki) would focus on the meta-argument of "it is possible to make good arguments for X" instead of taking the arguments as literally my true opinions (plus opinions of everyone who upvoted this comment, plus opinions of everyone who didn't throw a tantrum and publicly leave LW after seeing me publish this comment there).

"There are no good arguments for X" is simply how having a successful social taboo against X feels from inside.

For example, many debates with real-life feminists about women's suffrage assume that men had universal voting rights since ever, and women only got them recently. But the truth is that "men's suffrage" (a voting right of every adult man) also only came historically recently. In some countries, both men and women got the universal voting right at the same year. But you wouldn't guess that by listening to debates about women's suffrage in that country.

It's hard to come up with a good counter-argument to "slavery is bad".

I rather like Stefan Molyneux's (anarchist fellow on youtube) analysis of slavery across time, as an evolving institution to extract value from a subject population.

Under that analysis, we are tax cattle on the human ranch. We seem to go about free because the ranchers have found that "free range" tax cattle are more productive. Free range tax cattle work harder, more effectively, and produce more, than tax cattle physically yolked in a chain gang.

And a lot of people find this is a wonderful situation.

A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn't work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does. Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates), even though Republicans have much more faith in the free market.

This is an extremely terrible proxy for the question you're interested in.

1. We become increasingly poorly calibrated in the extreme tails
2. Model uncertainty increases a lot in the tails, justifying skepticism

"The argument that people need to be deceived into social reform assumes either that they're stupid"

I think the relevant point isn't what is needed, but what is possible. If lying wins, people will do it. Though stupidity is relevant.

I look at politics, and MoreWrong seems to win just fine. In fact, it wins better than LessWrong. When you fail to avail yourself of the Dark Side, you're failing to avail yourself of power. When the enemy doesn't, you lose.

When some people are much more intelligent than others, the Dark Side will work:

Poets priests and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no-one's jamming their transmission

'Cause when their eloquence escapes you
Their logic ties you up and rapes you

You can win by having the better argument, or win by being the better arguer.

With some people, there's a cultural value of honesty in disagreement. No lies. And such people make liars and their compatriots pay a price when caught, so that they are deterred from lying. That makes for a culture with great social capital in trust and cooperation.

But if that culture stops making people pay a price for lying, I don't see how that culture survives defectors. This is especially a problem when the champion arguers on both sides are simply much better at it than their audiences. They can lie to and manipulate their audiences, such that liar detection breaks down and the contest reverts to Us vs. Them.

Further, honesty simply isn't a universal value. Honest people arguing with liars and dissemblers is a contest in persuasion. The honest grant strikes, while the liars do not. The honest retreat, and the liars take ground.

A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn't work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does.

Another way of spinning the problem.

Is it likely that someone who feels they have the right to rule you by force would refrain from lying to you to achieve the same obedience?

Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates)

You're taking the New York Times and PolitiFact as unbiased estimators of the truth of Democrats and Republicans?

Literally, I laughed out loud.

"Even women's suffrage and Prohibition didn't require lying."

I'm pretty sure that Prohibition was often advanced by the argument that drinking alcohol is morally wicked, and I am very confident that this is false.

In any case, as Viliam has already pointed out, this is just a question of what you consider good arguments, and there were plenty of people who thought there were good arguments against any reform that you might support.

I'm not sure it's relevant to this post, but your description of your old post seems to be opposite to what it actually says. Here you say that practical directions come first and are deceitfully simplified to generate energy. There you said that naive energy creation comes first and later people harness and direct it. The difference seems important to me because in this post the person is trying to steer society, while in the previous post it seemed to me that the practical second person was just trying to harness the energy to personal benefit and maybe not even steering society at all where the naive first person wanted to go.

Added: Well, I guess the phrasing "Every Paul needs a Jesus" puts Paul logically first, matching this post. But the point about trying to steer society still seems an important difference.

This all depends on your goals and what you're optimizing for, as an agent. If your goals require lying, then from a rationalist perspective, you should lie. The requirement of lying is not evidence for or against the value of your goals. These are orthogonal issues.

A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn't work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does. Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates), even though Republicans have much more faith in the free market.

There a lot of wrong with that paragraph. The main problem is that's based on the lies. The lie that the political spectrum being well partitionated into left and right. After that none of the Democratic presidential candidates are Marxists the suggestion that they are is deeply flawed. In 2008 the Democrats outraised the Republicans. They got more money for corporate donors. In the election Obama had more economic professors as economic advisors than McCain who had a bunch of supply side advisors which happens to be a strain of thought not believed to represent the truth by mainstream economists.

In 2008 Berny Sanders isn't raising money from corporate donors. On the other hand he supports the status quo enough to pledge to support Hillary Clinton should she be elected, even when people like Ralph Nader think that giving away a lot of power to influence change.

On thing that most economists agree on is that free trade is great. The leading Republican presidential candidate doesn't believe in free trade. It was disgust in 1988 of how US politicians allow free access to US market to foreign actions and then talked that it the issue might motivate him to run for office in the future.

Lastly it was Marx who came up with the idea of seeing everything as a struggle of capitalism vs. marxism. It's worth noting that you are advocating for marxist ideas.

The argument that people need to be deceived into social reform assumes either that they're stupid or [clause which should be replaced with "selfish"].

What probability do you assign to the belief that 70% or more of current living humans are stupider, more short-sighted, and selfish than you are? I'm somewhat selfish in that I care far more about people I interact with than about distant (in time or space) strangers, but still likely in the top quartile on that dimension, and much higher on the first two.

I agree it's worth questioning your beliefs in what reforms are useful to what segments of the population, and what segments will suffer (temporary and non-righteous, we hope) losses. but I don't believe that the current population mix is capable of long-term self-governance without forceful guidance of elites.

If you're backing a cause which doesn't inspire the action you think it deserves, and you find yourself twisting the truth a bit for dramatic effect, how strong evidence is that that your cause is less worthy than you think it is? Can you give examples where you would go ahead and twist the truth anyway?

Ideally, I would estimate the negative effects: how many people would later learn I lied and abandon my cause, and how enemies of the cause might use the fact I lied against it, and the reputational harm to my other causes and to my allies.

To stop me from lying, a moral theory that says lying is wrong for me as a person would have to give this greater weight than some non-negligible factor in the success of a cause which could drastically affect millions of people for the better, e.g. Abolition.

Those movements didn't require wholesale lying and sleight-of-hand, because they could make valid and true one-sided arguments.

Yes they did, in particular the false claim that there are no significant diffrences between blacks and whites.

It's hard to come up with a good counter-argument to "slavery is bad".

Well, "slavery is bad" isn't even an argument it's either an asertion or at best a value judgement. The fact that this wasn't obvious to you is a sign you haven't thought much about the topic.

Even women's suffrage and Prohibition didn't require lying.

Well, consider how the latter turned out. Prohibition involved making false statements (they might not technichally have been lies only because some of the people making them believe them) about how much of the contry's crime was caused by alcohol. Some counties even sold off their jails after prohibition passed, figuring that without alcohol there'd be no crime so there would be no need for it.