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Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

I do some work with HIV prevention. Sometimes I give talks where I'm very blunt about the realities of HIV among men who have sex with men. I've watched people immediately shift from mild hostility and discomfort to wholehearted acceptance of what I am saying, when I tell them I'm gay myself.

In that circumstance, I think it is clear that my sexual orientation is the basis by which they are judging the authoritativeness I have to speak on the topic. Never mind the formal qualifications, or the logic or veracity of what I am actually saying. Like, I know we all have little unconscious checklists like that for judging whether someone is credible, but it is uncomfortable to see the effect live.

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-messe...

The Messenger Is the Message: Science Talk podcast, June 2020.

You see this on Reddit all the time, every day.

Someone wants to disagree with whatever nonsense the hivemind is raving about in the moment, but in order to do so they have to prostrate themselves and make it clear whose side they're on before they make their (often very valid) point.

e.g. "I hate Trump just has much as the rest of you but..." or "Look we need to be super supportive of X group and my dad is actually X but..."

That definitely happens, but sometimes the motivation is a bit more nuanced than just crawling to the mob. With everything so tribalised, and most people unwilling to stick their neck out and call their ingroup on its bullshit, we end up in situations where anyone expressing a dissenting opinion is quite likely to be an extremist of some kind -- or at least solidly on the 'other side' -- because they are the ones most likely to be motivated to speak up.

So if I preface an opinion with 'X, but', it may not be all about begging for the right to dissent; I may have good reason to think that, without the preface, what I say will signal some beliefs or values that I don't hold. If those things are genuinely hurtful to a vulnerable group, or simply reprehensible to me, then I have good reason to disavow them, regardless of whether I need to do so in order to be heard.

Yeah, but isn't that the same thing, said in a different way?

If I'm hyper-paranoid about my statement signaling beliefs I don't hold, isn't that just an indication that people are trying to assume too much based on that "signaling"?

> Yeah, but isn't that the same thing, said in a different way?

Sort of, and it's definitely part of the same dynamic. The differences, or at least the points I wanted to emphasise, are:

- I thought you were focusing on people's need to signal their in-group membership and general conformity (sometimes sincerely, sometimes not) so that they might be listened to and not shunned. I was pointing out that the motivation for the caveats can have a less cynical/craven strand: the simple desire to clearly communicate one's true values and beliefs.

- We might be collectively reinforcing this state of affairs without individually doing anything irrational. You say 'people are trying to assume too much based on that "signaling"' -- but given the equilibrium we're currently in, if someone expresses unpopular opinion X on hot-button topic Y in context Z without any caveats, I may be quite right to suspect that their real views are even more extreme, and/or that they come as part of a broader ideological package. If that's not the case, and the person wants to express their actual unpopular opinions without appearing to hint at the other ones, they may be right to add the tortuous preface. If they do so, the strength of the implicit signal sent by those who don't add the caveats increases, and the cycle continues; none of us can unilaterally break it without (on the receiving end) wilfully ignoring implicit meaning, or (on the sending end) risking being completely misunderstood.

edit: also, I don't know if you were implying this is a notably modern/progressive thing, but I think the basic dynamic is pretty universal. Definitely right now in the circles I live in, I'd mostly be afraid of signalling right-wing stuff. And the whole thing does seem to have increased in intensity over the last decade or so. But I see people in the various right-wing tribes being just as conformist, and I don't think it's really anything new. I'm confident that people arguing for less conservative interpretations of the Bible 20/50/100/1000 years ago were very careful to signal that they were genuine pious Christians.

(I don't like this dynamic, by the way. I'm a bit of a literalist, I like to make clean logical distinctions and evaluate each idea on its own merits, and I'm not very comfortable with the world of social signalling and game-playing we all seem to be trapped in. But it's completely pervasive (not only in political contexts) and I don't think people are wrong to read and react to the signals, even though they sometimes do it badly.)

I guess my perspective on this is slightly more permissive, in that I don't actually care what your underlying beliefs are as long as the point you are making is a coherent / valid one.

It shouldn't matter if you are pro-Trump if a bunch of people are being anti-Trump in a wildly over-the-top way and you want to point that out. Or vice versa – if you're surrounded by Trump loyalists and want to point out that something he did you disagree with, you shouldn't have to say "I love Trump but...", you should just be able to say "This is dumb, he shouldn't have done this".

The problem is that we've polarized everything to the point where this isn't very feasible.

> I don't actually care what your underlying beliefs are as long as the point you are making is a coherent / valid one

I half agree, but for me it depends on the situation. If the point is purely logical or empirical, and a fully detailed argument is made or watertight evidence presented, then the speaker's other beliefs and values are irrelevant. But often things are a bit fuzzier, and it makes sense to take the speaker's identity and character into account when making a snap judgment on how seriously to take them. And there are social reasons to care as well; conversation usually isn't just about truth-seeking. Even if people would take my arguments equally seriously regardless, I would prefer not to imply alignment with a set of values I don't actually hold.

> But often things are a bit fuzzier, and it makes sense to take the speaker's identity and character into account when making a snap judgment on how seriously to take them.

In all honesty I think this mindset is precisely why we've ended up in this massively polarized situation. When you "take the speaker's identity and character into account", you're obviously ("you" here being people in general not you in particular) to lend more credence to someone who's priors match your own. In other words, you give the benefit of the doubt to people like you, and interpret more uncharitably the words of someone who you think isn't like you. This creates a destructive cycle where everything eventually devolves into an echo chamber, increasing polarization and creating more echo chambers.

That's why I like how one of the principles behind Hacker News is to employ the "principle of charity" – try to interpret people's words in the best possible light, regardless of their priors or your own.

It absolutely can (and often does) lead to a cycle of reinforcing one's own biases. But I'm not convinced it would be either possible or desirable to completely avoid it. You simply can't thoroughly evaluate every claim you hear, or independently fill every gap in every apparently cogent but not absolutely watertight argument, or determine exactly how cherry-picked the evidence being presented to you is. You can't even pay full attention to more than a fraction of the ideas you encounter. At some point you've got to make judgments about the credibility of the speaker, the biases and incentives that might cause them to make mistakes or mislead you, the fundamental moral disagreements that might render your opinions on certain issues mutually irrelevant. If you're not doing it consciously I strongly suspect you are doing it unconsciously.

I agree wholeheartedly that the problem is information overload, but I disagree on the solution.

If you don't have the bandwidth to process all the arguments you're receiving... receive fewer arguments. Get involved in fewer shitposting threads on the internet. Have fewer arguments about politics at work. The solution is not to assume / reduce / summarize until the arguments become tidy little things you can stick in boxes, it is to just reduce your workload so that you can give the arguments you care most about the attention they deserve.

You must be filtering by speaker at some level and in some contexts, though, right? I assume you have opinions on e.g. scientific topics that you don't understand in depth. The only way I know to form those opinions is by doing my best to work out who to (provisionally, partially) trust.

Likewise, you talk about devoting your attention to the most important arguments -- but how do you decide which arguments deserve that attention? You can't be doing that 100% independently, you must at some point be allowing other people to raise issues to your attention, and to shift your priors a bit by virtue of the credibility they have earned via their track record (of being right, of being honest, of caring about things you care about).

That happens all the time here too, which is an interesting note.

Doesn't this happen in pretty much any group ? The more what you say goes against the consensus, the more the group will reject it.

No, I don't think so. It certainly wasn't a thing that I was aware of prior to roughly two years ago. Maybe it's "normal" now but that's probably because certain people made you show your identity card in order to dissent.

I've noticed this trend where people started to accuse each other of psychological trickery a lot. I think it descends as a "defense" from that. I was never really sure of how many psychological games were really being played and how much people just reached for the terms to use as dismissal from criticism.

Yeah, if you believe the internet, "gaslighting" is something that people are trying to do to you all the time.

As a bisexual male, I think a good part of disdain about connecting HIV and gay goes to the older naming of the disease: GRID. gay-related immune deficiency

It also dates me, but I had a blood transfusion in 1982. At that time, it was a Russian Roulette if I ended up with HIV blood or not. I didn't. Had I been innfected, I would have ended up like Ryan White.

Even knowing the term GRID dates you. :) Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS#1981%E2%80... , the "GRID" moniker was only used for under two years, forty years ago. I think it's unlikely that the name is to blame.

I was born in 1982 and I knew about it.

I don't think it's unlikely. It was early in the chain of events, so even if it was six months it could have had a big impact.

Quite illustrative. People have referential groups, that’s human nature. One could work with the framework to achieve desired result and hopefully minimize externalities, or one can lament biases and lambast the biased people for extra whatever points.

This is not a dig at you, btw, it seems clear that you’re making the best of the situation.

This suggests that a possible answer to TFA could be to find a trusted female peer to carry the message.

You'd think so, but I have seen this specific idea play out and in one case the "trusted female peer" accused the person doing the asking of expecting her to do his emotional labor.

Interesting, can you give an example of a fact that is initially resisted but is then accepted when you provide additional personal experience.

It's the most obvious one. According to Public Health Canada, men who have sex with men are 71x more likely to become HIV+ during their lives than men who have sex with women. Based on the infection rate modelling of the early 2010s for which we have data, a young gay man in Toronto has about 30% odds of becoming HIV+ in his lifetime.

Wide eyes. Disbelief. That can't possibly be right. With all the people I have watched become HIV+ over the years, it is of course very believable to me. But the data from PHAC is reliable enough, and it speaks for itself. I shouldn't need to make it believable. But of course people are not emotionless abstract rational machines, and that's why I'm doing these sort of talks rather than emailing out memos with charts.

(The good news at least is those numbers are almost certainly coming down with new medical interventions like PrEP, earlier treatment and routine testing, which are my main points these days. I might actually get to be happy with the numbers in the national HIV tracking data when it's compiled for 2021.)

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