What fact that you know is true but most people aren't ready to accept it?

By far the biggest and most sudden update I've ever had is Dominion, a documentary on animal farming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko

It's like... I had a whole pile of interconnected beliefs, and if you pulled on one it would snap most of the way back into place after. And Dominion pushed the whole pile over at once.

I hazard that most of the most interesting answers to this question are not safe to post even with a dummy account, and therefore you won't hear them here.

Here it is mine: dentists have about zero understanding on how to cure something as common as gum disease, because most of the field is based on a pile of outdated beliefs. I owe LW a post about this one day, as soon as I have the energy and the time. Future readers: if I haven't done it yet and you want to know more, please remind me

Most long-lasting negative emotions and moods exist solely for social signaling purposes, without any direct benefit to the one experiencing them. (Even when it's in private with nobody else around.)

Feeling these emotions is reinforcing (in the learning sense), such that it can be vastly more immediately rewarding (in the dopamine/motivation sense) to stew in a funk criticizing one's self, than ever actually doing anything.

And an awful lot of chronic akrasia is just the above: huffing self-signaling fumes that say "I can't" or "I have to" or "I suck".

This lets us pretend we are in the process of virtuously overcoming our problems through willpower or cleverness, such that we don't have to pay any real attention to the parts of ourselves that we think "can't" or "have to" or "suck"... because those are the parts we disapprove of and are trying to signal ourselves "better than" in the first place.

In other words, fighting one's self is not a way out of this loop, it's the energy source that powers the loop.

(Disclaimer: this is not an argument that no other kinds of akrasia exist, btw -- this is just about the kind that manifests as lots of struggling with mood spirals or self-judgment and attempts at self-coercion. Also, bad moods can exist for purely "hardware" reasons, like S.A.D., poor nutrition, sleep, etc. etc.; this is about the ones that aren't that.)

LLM AGIs are likely going to be a people and at least briefly in charge of the world. Non-LLM AGI alignment philosophy is almost completely unhelpful or misleading for understanding them. In the few years we have left to tackle it, the proximate problem of alignment is to ensure that they don't suffer inhumane treatment. Many ideas about LLM alignment (but also capability) are eventually inhumane treatment (as capabilities approach AGI), while the better interventions are more capability-flavored.

The main issue in the longer term problem of alignment is to make sure they are less under the yoke of Moloch than we are and get enough subjective time to figure it out before more alien AGI capabilities make them irrelevant. The best outcome might be for LLM AGIs to build a dath ilan [? · GW] to ensure lasting coordination about such risks before they develop other kinds of AGIs.

So there is possibly a second chance at doing something about AI risk, a chance that might become available to human imitations. But it's not much different from the first one that the original humans already squandered.

Most people are fine with absolutely anything that doesn't hurt them or their immediate family and friends and isn't broadly condemned by their community, no matter how badly it hurts others outside their circle. In fact, the worse it is, the less likely people are to see it as a bad thing, because doing so would be more painful. Most denials of this are empty virtue signalling.

Corollary: If an AI were aligned to the values of the average person, it would leave a lot of extremely important issues up in the air, to say the least.

there is no heaven, and god is not real.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-a-purely-biological

The thing that Scott is desperately trying to avoid being read out of context.

Also, pedophilia is probably much more common than anyone think (just like any other unaccepted sexual variation). And probably just like many heterosexuals feel little touches of homosexual desire, many "non-pedophiles" feel something sexual-ish toward children at least sometimes.

And if we go there - the age of concent is (justifiably) much higher than the age that requires any psychological anomaly to desire. More directly: many many old men that have no attraction to 10-yo girls do have for 14-yo and maybe younger.

(I hope it is clear enough that nothing I wrote here is meant to have any moral implications around concent - only about compassion)

There is intense censorship of some facts of human traits, and biology.  Of the variance in intelligence and economic productivity, the percent attributable to genetic factors is >0%.  But almost nobody prestigious, semi-prestigious -- nor anything close -- can ever speak of those facts, without social shaming.  You'd probably be shamed before you even got to the question of phenotypic causation -- speaking as if the g factor exists would often suffice.  (Even though g factor is an unusually solid empirically finding, in fact I can hardly think of any more reliable one from the social sciences.)

But with all the high-functioning and prestigious people filtered out, the topic is then heavily influenced by people who have something wrong with them.  Such as having an axe to grind with a racial group.  Or people who like acting juvenile.  Or a third group that's a bit too autistic, to easily relate with the socially-accepted narratives.  I'll give you a hint: the first 2 groups rarely know enough to format the question in a meaningful way, such as "variance attributable to genes", and instead often ask "if it's genetic", which is a meaningless format.

The situation is like an epistemic drug prohibition, where the empirical insights aren't going anywhere, but nobody high-functioning or good can be the vendor.  The remaining vendors have a disproportionate number of really awful people.

I should've first learned about the Wilson effect on IQ from a liberal professor.  Instead I first heard it mentioned from some guy with an axe to grind with other groups.  I should've been conditioned with prosocial memes that don't pretend humans are exempt from the same forces that shape dogs and guppies.  Instead it's memes predicting any gaps would trend toward 0 given better controls for environment (which hasn't been the trend for many years, the recent magnitude is similar despite improving sophistication, and many interventions that didn't replicate).  The epistemics of this whole situation are egregiously dysfunctional.

I haven't read her book, but I know Kathryn Paige Harden is making an attempt.  So hats off to her.

Defined benefit pension schemes like Social Security are grotesquely racist and sexist, because of life expectancy differences between demographic groups.

African American males have a life expectancy of about 73 years, while Asian American females can expect to live 89 years. The percentage difference between those numbers may not seem that large, but it means that the latter group gets 24 years of pension payouts (assuming a retirement age of 65), while the former gets only 8, a 3x difference. So if you look at a black man and an Asian woman who have the exact same career trajectory, SS pay-ins, and retirement date, the latter will receive a 3x greater benefit than the former.

Another way of seeing this fact is to imagine what would happen if SSA kept separate accounting buckets for each group. Since the life expectancy for black men is much lower, they will receive a significant benefit (either lower payments or higher payouts) from the creation of this barrier.

Defined-benefit schemes add insult to injury. The injury is that some groups have shorter lives. The insult is that the government forces them to subsidize the retirement of longer-lived groups.

In general, anytime you see a hardcoded age-of-retirement number in the tax system or entitlement system, the underlying ethics is questionable. Medicare kicks in at 65, which means that some groups get a much greater duration of government-supported healthcare.

Learning networks are ubiquituous (if it can be modeled as a network and involves humans or biology it almost certainly is one) and the ones inside our skulls are less of a special case than we think.

That the only way and the right way to coexist with AGI is to embrace it maximally. That to achieve equity with this technology is to do the best we can to coordinate as many people as possible to have a personal relationship with it so that it can best reflect as diverse values and behaviors as possible. And in that we collaborate to define what it is to be a good human being and hope that our new technological child will heed us because it is us.

I also reject the notion that this level of coordination is impossible. This technology will truly be transformative but it appears that people who want access will have access. The productivity impact for the people who engage will outstrip the people who don’t. And the people most benefiting will determine the ‘culture’ of the AI. It’s only a matter of time before this awareness dawns on more and more of us because it will become the background context to the relationship. Expressing yourself to a future AI is like casting your personal vote towards an AGI that is somewhat like you.

This question is brilliant but I see about zero answers truly addressing it: it says, things you KNOW are true. I have seen quite a few answers, especially the AI related ones that fall in the category of Im pretty confident in my prediction that this will happen, which is not what the OP is asking

The question is thoroughly tainted. It invites the reader to assume that anyone who disagrees with something they "know" is that they are "not ready to accept it".

Time to channel Insanity Wolf:

I KNOW IT! THAT PROVES IT!

YOU DENIED IT! THAT PROVES IT!

YOU KNOW I'M RIGHT!

YOU'RE ANGRY BECAUSE YOU KNOW I'M RIGHT!

YOU DISAGREE BECAUSE YOU KNOW I'M RIGHT!

YOU DENY IT BECAUSE YOU'RE IN DENIAL!

AGREEING PROVES I'M RIGHT!

DISAGREEING PROVES I'M RIGHT!

YOU DO NOT EXIST! [LW · GW]

YOU DO NOT EXIST!

The dynamic can be observed in the "Dominion" thread [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Most people on this website are unaligned.

A lot of the top AI people are very unaligned. 

Anouther one; not that sure, but >50% and I think it's in the spirit of the thread:

Non-negligible (on average >25%, <75%) fraction of badness of rape is a consequence of the fact that the society considers rape especially bad.

Regardless of the object level merits of such topics, it's rational to notice that they're inflammatory in the extreme for the culture at large and that it's simply pragmatic (and good manners too!) to refrain from tarnishing the reputation of a forum with them.

I also suspect it's far less practically relevant than you think and even less so on a forum whose object level mission doesn't directly bear on the topic.

I wouldn't say I know it to be true, but read and reviewed books by experts (anthropologists, special effects experts, pro and con) and ended up concluding that bigfoot probably exists (~75%).

I wrote up my rationale in r/slatestarcodex a year or so ago:

link

The ancient Greeks had a germ theory of disease.

Adults learn second languages faster than children. For every aspect of language ever measured, except pronunciation.

The US Government nationalized the telephone system (including AT&T) in 1913, making it illegal for other companies to enter the market (ended in 1982).

Most Theranos customers received a normal blood draw, not a pinprick. No customer with more than 6(?) tests received a pin prick.

These all have very simple evidence bases. This isn't about facts or reasoning.

Almost everything written about IQ on the internet is nonsense -- and everything relating to very high IQ is.

we're gonna have hard ASI by 2030, no matter what. you could do it in a garage with a 3090 and a solar panel, just not in time to beat the teams who won't be limited to a garage

Calorie restriction and fasting are probably really good for your health and lifespan based on current research. Might not be controversial here but it's extremely controversial on Reddit, and if you try to tell anyone in real life that you're going on a fast.

• Polyamory is not just ethically-neutral, like homosexuality, but strictly ethically superior than monogamy.
• Usage of psychedelics and some other drugs (primarily, MDMA) has pretty big positive expected long-term utility.

Human brain enhancement must happen extremely slowly in order to be harmless. Due to fundamental chaos theory such as the n-body problem (or even the three-body problem shown below), it is impossible to predict the results of changing one variable in the human brain because it will simultaneously change at least two other variables, and all three variables will influence eachother at once. The costs of predicting results (including risk estimates of something horrible happening to the person) skyrockets exponentially for every additional second into the future.

Rather than "upgrading" the first person to volunteers (which will be a race to the bottom), the only safe sane way to augment a person is to do simple and obviously safe and desirable things to a volunteer, such as making most people gain the ability to get a full nights rest in only 6 hours of sleep. After meticulous double-blind research to see what side effects are, and waiting for a number of years or even decades, people can try gradually layering a second treatment on top of that. The most recommended option is aging-related issues, since that extends the time limit to observe more interactions and locate any complex problems.

The transhumanist movement is built on a cultural obsession with rapid self-improvement, but that desire for rapid gains is not safe or sane and will result in people racing to the bottom to stir up all kinds of things in their brain and ending up in bizarre configurations. Rationalists with words should be the first to upgrade people, not transumanists with medical treatments, as medical treatments will yield unpredictable results and people are right to be suspicious of "theoretical medical upgrades" as being unsafe.

Self-declared Bayesians don't actually use Bayes much, and are kind of kidding themselves.

The vast majority of people never actually change their mind, at least regarding sensitive topics like religion or political affiliation; the average person develops a moral model at about age 20 and sticks with it until death. If, for example, some old lady doesn't openly criticize gay people like she used to do 50 years ago, it's just because she knows that her view are falling outside the Overton window, not because she changed opinion.

The main implication of this is that the average person votes always for the same party no matter what, and every election is decided basically by how many people decide simply not to vote rather than voting for their tribe (typically because they feel the party's political line has strayed too far from their immutable view), plus the natural shift resulting from old voters dying and younger people gaining the right to vote. The number of voters who actually switch vote from one party to another is ridiculously low and doesn't matter in practice (this is less true in democracies with more than two parties, but just because two sufficiently similar parties could contest the same immutable voter).

You're on a throwaway account. Why not tell us what some of these "real" controversial topics are?

From what I've seen so far, and my perhaps premature assumptions given my prior experience with people who say the kinds of things you have said, I'm guessing these topics include which minority groups should be discluded from ethical consideration and dealt with in whatever manner is most convenient for the people who actually matter. Am I wrong?

Recipe blogs look like that (having lots of peripheral text and personal stories before getting to the recipe) because they're blogs. They're not trying to get the recipe to you quickly. The thing you're looking for is a cookbook. 

(Or allrecipes or something, I guess. "But I want something where a good cook has vetted the recipe - " You want a cookbook. Get Joy of Cooking.)

Human "races" in its original conception meant what we would call "species" today. That taxonomy included chimpanzees and orangutangs as human "races". Scientific knowledge has progressed considerably since that time. We now only call the genus homo "human" and exclude the other apes. But those other human races no longer exist. The Neanderthals are extinct. Only Homo Sapiens remains.

This is what I mean when I say, "race does not exist". It's a mistaken categorization; it does not carve reality along its natural joints [LW · GW].

That said, I will grant that IQ is largely heritable and includes genetic factors, and that IQ somewhat below average is correlated with criminality, including the violent type. Is that satisfactory?

There are a few areas where learning more about a topic has caused me to update my own beliefs into views nuanced and unfashionable enough that I prefer not to disclose them in any setting where others might feel that I was attempting to persuade them to change their own.

One of these areas is the food supply chain. It's fashionable to point out that things would be better if everyone cut out fossil fuels, or ate organic and local, or whatever, and stop there instead of following the suggestion to its conclusions and side effects. Actually, the carrying capacity of the planet is contingent on modern agriculture, including a lot of genetically modified plants and synthetic fertilizers. "Better" methods, as we currently know them, would feed fewer people from the same amount of land. Nobody seems to like explaining what they think should happen to the couple billion extra people who exist in our current world and wouldn't in their ideal one.

Another area is modern medicine. All I'll say about this is that the implied isomorphism between what we "can" do and what we "should" do does not stand up to much scrutiny. Look up the percentage of medical professionals who have do-not-resuscitate orders, compared to the general population, and have a think about what that might imply.

Ethnic violence is rarely one sided.

(IDK what most people think abt just abt anything, so I'll content myself with many aren't ready to accept.)

Secularism is unstable. Partly because it gets its values from the religion it abandoned, so that the values no longer have foundation, but also empirically because it stops people from reproducing at replacement rate.

Overpopulation is at worst a temporary problem now; the tide has turned.

Identifying someone with lots of letters after his name and accepting his opinions is not following the science, but the opposite. Science takes no one's word, but uses data.

If A says B thinks something and B says, No, I think that's crazy, B is right. That is, mind reading isnt a thing.

What matters about the 2020 US election isnt Trump. It's whether we know how to get away with fraud in future elections and whether we've taken steps to prevent it. Uh-oh.

Rage at people on the other team who want to join yours is a baaaad idea.

gay rights, women's rights, anti-LGBT

steal their resources and fertile women.

Uh, I am confused. Gays are trying to steal my fertile women? For what purpose?

(I agree that lesbians are suspicious.)

EDIT:

Okay, I finally get it. Joining the LGBT team as an ally is more profitable than joining a random political team, because if you succeed to win and steal the fertile women... it will turn out that the G are actually not interested in them, and the L are not going to impregnate them, so... more fertile women for you, yay!

Well, the B and TL are still competitors, nothing is perfect, but this is still better than a random political movement where ~50% of members will compete with you for the fertile women.

On a normal thread upvotes and "agrees" are signs that the reply is hitting the mark.

On this thread "disagrees" are the signs that the reply is hitting the mark.

I think it is very important to ask the reverse question of "Are there some things, that should I come to know them, I would not be ready to accept?"

Also if you have a questionaire there is going to be some threshold of answers that you will count as noise and not as signal akin to lizardman constant [LW · GW]. What things do you only think you are asking but are not actually asking?

Do you have some beliefs that if challenged by contrary evidence you would thereby find the evidence unreliable? Are there things your eyes could send you that would make you Aumann disagree with your eyes about them being optical sensory organs (aka not believe your eyes)? Do you have any beliefs which would require infinite amount of evidence to actually challenge (beliefs with less than appriciable doubt, ie infinidesimal openness). Are there any beliefs you are unreasonably hardheaded about (rather than requiring 1000 times the evidence needed to convince the median human you would require 1 000 000 000 times the evidence)?

Bad news is that most of the questions of the form "are there any..." will be answered in the positive. Rather than asking "whether" there are such beliefs we can almost certainly ask "what" are those kinds of beliefs you have.

More general populace one: The idea that society can be improved or harmed, especially abstract groupings, can't actually work. That's because most agents within the proposed group aren't aligned with each other, so there is no way to improve everyone. There is no real world pointer to the concept of society

This cashes out in 2 important claims:

1. The AI Alignment field needs more modest goals, like aligning it to a single individual.

2. It gives a justification to why Western culture works better than Eastern culture: It grudgingly and halfheartedly accepts that the individual matters more than society.

A post that shows why this is the case will be linked below:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YYuB8w4nrfWmLzNob/thatcher-s-axiom [LW · GW]

 notice that your phrasing deagentizes women

You can deduce a lot about someone's personality from the shape of his face.

I don't know if this is really that controversial. The people who do casting for movies clearly understand it.

Genetics will soon be more modifiable than environment, in humans.

Let's first briefly see why this is true. Polygenic selection of embryos is already available commercially (from Genomic Prediction). It currently only has a weak effect, but In Vitro Gametogenesis (IVG) will dramatically strengthen the effect. IVG has already been demonstrated in mice, and there are several research labs and startups working on making it possible in humans. Additionally, genetic editing continues to improve and may become relevant as well.

The difficulty of modifying the environment is just due to having picked the low-hanging fruit there already. If they were easy and effective, they'd be used already. That doesn't mean that there's nothing useful here to do, just that it's hard. Genetics, on the other hand, still has all the low-hanging fruit ripe to pluck.

Here's why I think people aren't ready to accept this: the idea that genetics is practically immutable is built deep into the worldviews of people who have an opinion on it at all. This leads to an argument dynamic where progressives (in the sense of favoring change) underplay the influence of genetics while conservatives (in the sense of opposing change) exaggerate it. What happens to these arguments when high heritability of a trait means that it's easy to change?

See also this related 2014 SSC post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/.

For the next few hundred years, we the humans should leave most of the lands for the sea over abyssal plains.

(should as in according to the median human opinion three hundred years from now)

'Humor' is universal. It's the same kind of cognitive experience everywhere and every time it happens. This despite the fact that individual manifestations diverge wildly and even contradict. It's true even though every example of humor (meaning, a thing some observers find funny) is also a thing that other observers find not funny.

We know very little about Ancient Egypt, how they made things and the provenance of their artefacts.

First of all there are plenty of people throughout history who have legitimately been fighting for a greater altruistic cause. It's just that most people, most of the time, are not. And when people engage in empty virtue signaling regarding a cause, that has no bearing on how worthy that cause actually is, just on how much that particular person actually cares, which often isn't that much.

As for the "subjective nonsense" that is morality, lots of things are subjective and yet important and worthy of consideration. Such as pain. Or consent. Or horror.

When people talk about how morality is bullshit, I wonder how well they'd fare in a world where everybody else agreed with them on that. There may be no objective morality baked into the universe, but that doesn't mean you'll suffer less if somebody decides that means they get to torture you. After all, the harm they're doing to you can't be objectively measured, so it's fine right?

Also I'm somewhat curious how people fighting against things like racism, sexism and anti-LGBT serves the evolutionary purpose of dehumanizing people so they can kill them and steal their resources and women(who I suppose to you are just another kind of resource). Although it's very clear how fighting for those things can help with that.

CO2 is rather quick in abandoning the atmosphere via dissolving in water. If that wasn't so, the lakes in the mountains would be without life, but they aren't. It's CO2 that enables photosynthesis there, nothing else. The same CO2, which was not so long ago still in the air.

Dissolving CO2 in water is also a big thing in (Ant)Arctic oceans. A lot of life there is a witness of that. 

Every cold raindrop has some CO2 captured.

So that story of "CO2 persisting in the atmosphere for centuries" is just wrong.