From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Apr 17 2002 - 15:47:14 MDT
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> What Harvey describes as "extremism" seems like obsessive-
> compulsive disorder. Certainly one can criticize that. But
> "extreme" just means "at the tails of the bell curve", and
> there are certainly cases where that's the right place to be.
>
> Moderation, too, should be practiced in moderation.
Moderation should be practiced with precision, as should extremism.
The pursuit of the truth is primary, and sometimes it leads to the middle of
the curve, and sometimes it leads to the tails. Someone who is "moderate in
all things" or "extreme in all things" is probably wrong in many specific
cases, and someone who chooses beliefs solely on the basis of whether they
are "moderate" or "extreme" is definitely not a normative reasoner.
However, it is worth noting that there are pure social pressures toward
"moderation" in some cases, and pure social pressures toward *particular*
extremes, or to choose one of two polar extremes, in other cases. We should
therefore expect a normative thinker, or one who is less non-normative than
average, to be called "extreme" in at least some of those cases where social
pressures demand "moderation"; a contemporary example is holding that
evolution is an absolutely solid fact, which it is, but this solidity is not
commonly realized and may be taken as extremism. A normative thinker should
also expect to sometimes occupy neither of two common extremes (neither
Democrat nor Republican) and to therefore have opinions which are not easily
explained; and a normative thinker should expect to be accused of "too much
moderation" in cases where social pressures tend toward a particular extreme
(i.e., failing to hold that the US is right on all issues whenever there is
a conflict of interest with another nation).
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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