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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   27789 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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I take the utilitarian position, however I feel like lots of people who think they are taking the utilitarian position nevertheless produce wildly different real-world conclusions about what types of discrimination are or aren't justified.

It's a hugely complex issue once you start considering things like the just world fallacy and how people will take any 'approved' discrimination as justification to dehumanize entire populations, or the way discrimination creates self-fulfilling prophecies, or etc.

I almost feel like this is one of those cases where people can't actually think usefully about the truth of the matter, and the utilitarian optimal thing is to pretend that you 100% believe and insist on the liberal version, while secretly using the utilitarian version on practice, because a society that believes in the liberal version will come closer to the utilitarian-optimal outcome than one that tries to explicitly do utilitarian math.

I'm not sure that's stable though, because it may inevitably slippery slope its way into progressivism. That is, this optimal state depends on universal but not-common knowledge: the utilitarian version has to actually be a secret. Because if you are publicly insisting on ignoring group memberships and everyone knows that person A is discriminating against group X in a not-secret way, then the public persona is forced to denounce them as a X-ist in order to maintain consistency. But if everyone using the utilitarian version in practice, then it's hard to keep that a secret from everyone else (who is doing the same thing). And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.

Maybe it works if you restrict the secret utilitarian version to only cases where there's absolutely no conceivable way of being discovered.

And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.

Right, I think that's the world we're actually in, and that it's probably worth the trade-off.

Rationalists should get better about hiding it, no one's ever caught me so far.

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