Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

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> If you allow Islamic terrorists to publish their indoctrination materials, conversions to their cause will increase

Or they'd decrease because people would actually be able to see the counterarguments to that propaganda. As it currently stands, very few people are able to produce the counter-propaganda because few have access to the actual propaganda.

This phenomena is how I've been mostly converted to racism (well, HBD), I could, with some difficulty, find the pro-racism view but finding an anti-racist view that actually addressed the HBD view was basically impossible (what little anti-racist stuff there was mostly attacking strawmen) because basically no one is exposed to the HBD argument (thanks to censorship including social censorship mostly), so no one produces counterarguments!

Also, there's a small chance that I've been completely mislead about what the supposed "Islamic terrorists" believe and actually their ideology is awesome and I should convert to wahabiism. I'd like the opportunity to make that decision myself.

>> very few people are able to produce

Why should we faithfully assume that people will produce that material if given the chance? There are plenty of "common misconceptions" in existance. (but i note that i think your argument here is the most convincing of the replies).

Also, will they do it in a timely manner?

>> I'd like the opportunity to make that decision myself

Is it possible you're not equipped to make that decision for yourself? In the way that a 12 year old child is not best placed to decide about drinking a bottle of vodka. Or in the way that if a doctor shared every detail about your ailment - you might still seek their guidance to help decide an appropriate treatment.

> Why should we faithfully assume that people will produce that material if given the chance?

Mostly the "someone is wrong on the internet" phenomena. There are a large number of people who like arguing things and debunking. They just need exposure.

> Is it possible you're not equipped to make that decision for yourself?

Well, yes.

It's also possible, qnd indeed just as likely, that we should not have allowed the common pleb to vote on the grounds that they don't have the free time or the long-term planning to make good decisions on how the country should be run.

I'd consider both hypotheses equally likely.

>> There are a large number of people who like arguing things and debunking. They just need exposure.

"It's cold outside, put a jacket on or you'll catch a cold!"

This isn't debunked yet but it's had plenty exposure over decades at this point.

Some things are just too boring to question so plenty of people continue to put on a jacket to avoid catching the cold, which does nothing, rather than washing their hands before touching their face, which could stop some spread.

Eric S Raymond's all bugs are shallow thing appealed to me but hasn't really worked that way. I think that's a similar story.

I think this premise of exposure always solving radical ideas is likely to be false but it's not without merit because exposure and illumination are such great tools in other cases that are very like this problem.

I think you need exposure and motivators. In the case of things like islamic extremism and think there will be far more people willing to do the debunking legwork than on the topic of catching a cold from the cold.

> This phenomena is how I've been mostly converted to racism

I'm sightly surprised that someone would just come out and happily admit that they've been radicalised by the internet and are comfortable being a racist.

I was mostly using the term for shock value to emphasize the point and to help drive home the fact that not being able to find the counter-arguments/deradicalization can be a very bad thing!

(Annoyingly, there's so many meanings of "racist" that it can apply to anywhere from 99% to 1% of the population, depending on which of the main definitions are used)

I had to google what on earth HBD was. For others (from less wrong)

>... HBD (Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations (I will be avoiding using the word "race" here insomuch as possible) of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population) is true, and that all its proponents are correct in accusing the politicization of science for burying this information.

I'd just note that noticing differences between races, eg black people are blacker is not racism really, it's more discriminating against races.

I'm reasonably sure that the vast majority of people would consider the statement "The average African American is less intelligent that the average "white" American, this is partially due to genes and cannot be entirely fixed without genetic engineering." to be textbook racism.

Ah, but it's not so much about "less intelligent" than about "lower IQ", which assumes that IQ is actually a good measure of intelligence!

Indeed it does. The question of how good a measure IQ is is an interesting one.

Scores on Raven's progressive matrices certainly correlate well with all sorts of things (working memory, income, ability to do computer programming, ability to write a popular story), so I guess it depends in how you are defining "intelligence".

According to Taleb, low IQ actually is... but not high IQ !

Do you have a source for this? I can find him saying it could be true (if it weren't for test scores influencing later worklife via people judging you for them) but not actually saying it is true.

You're right, I poorly formulated that sentence.

Yeah but at least partly because it's probably untrue.

So if it was true it wouldn't be considered racist?

It most likely would (considering all the things that are considered racist nowadays, which includes a set of all things and then some). But that's a descriptive statement, not normative. It really shouldn't be.

HBD is just how that particular crowd (less-wrong rationalists, a.k.a reactionaries who can spell) dog-whistles their racism.

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