From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Mar 21 2000 - 11:13:06 MST
"Peter C. McCluskey" wrote:
>
> The obvious hypothesis is that people who are unwilling to listen to
> Kaczynski's arguments will more reliably reject his dangerous ideas.
> I.e. people who are quick to point out that they disagree with him are
> either admitting they can't be trusted to distinguish between the reasonable
> arguments that Kaczynski makes and the unreasonable ones, or (more likely?)
> that they don't have enough of a reputation for reasonableness that others
> can know whether they can be so trusted.
I'd be more inclined to phrase it this way: Kaczynski is a bad guy.
You are only allowed to say bad things about bad guys. Everyone who
says bad things about a bad guy gets social bonus points. If you say
sufficiently bad things about a bad guy, you get extra status points for
leading the mob. Everything a bad guy says is bad. Bad guys are not
allowed to have any redeeming qualities (unless they're fictional bad
guys, of course, in which case they are required); if you point out a
redeeming quality, you're probably a bad guy yourself and a good target
for the aforesaid social mob.
Logic and reality have nothing to do with it. There are only behaviors;
the behavior of saying something bad about a bad guy, and the behavior
of saying something good about a bad guy. The words spoken are not
representational, semantic statements; they are behaviors. One behavior
is expected of group members, and the other is not. Insofar as these
behaviors denote anything, they denote group allegiances. The odd and
paradoxical 'behavior' of saying something bad about your own group, or
something good about an enemy group, is a modern innovation confined to
small groups of peculiar individuals; it is too infrequent to be
considered as a possible interpretation in social interactions.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
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