Hacker News Reader

Comment by 4bpp | Hacker News Reader

But consider the possibility that this might be perfectly rational behaviour for people who care about some side of the cause (even if it comes at the expense of HN as a forum): the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company. If you come into a HN thread believing X and then see that every post stating X got downvoted into oblivion, maybe you will think twice before mentioning that you believe X next time you are considering to do so in any setting, real-life or online, that you have a persistent identity of any value in. The next undecided person in that setting might never hear the case for X and come to believe not-X to be as uncontroversial as gravity, and before long it will actually come to be.

View on HN

> the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.

Well, to quote our host: No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

I don't think people talking about Bigfoot are usually subject to ostracization, unless they're really overbearing about it (keep changing the subject back to Bigfoot, start insulting or yelling at those who disagree, etc.). And I think not-Bigfoot is basically in the victory condition. I think the victory condition is "universally accepted" and it doesn't necessarily imply "negation cannot be expressed in polite company".

But you might be right that "its negation can not be expressed in polite company" is one of the steps along the way for some beliefs. I hope that's not true (because it might justify what I consider abhorrent behavior), but it might be.

That said, I recall seeing a study that said that extreme protest tactics were counterproductive in advancing an ideology. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314949726_Extreme_P... is probably the one I'm thinking of. I hope the principle extends, or can be extended, to "nasty behavior to suppress ideological opponents is counterproductive". It seems at least possible. Lots of argumentation consists of saying that one's opponents are nasty, which at least is evidence that many people have the potential to react strongly to (perceived) nasty behavior...

I'm not sure what to make of your Bigfoot example; it seems more driven by the circumstance that nobody really at all cares whether Bigfoot wins or loses outside maybe of some scientific fields. I could imagine that claiming that Bigfoot does exist at a zoology conference would land you in some professional trouble, though not nearly as much as something that people actually do care about such as whether vaccines cause autism. (Conversely, I don't think not-Bigfoot is in fact in the victory condition outside of science: 14% of people [1] profess to believe in it, and I figure that if tomorrow SciAm posted an article that Bigfoot had been discovered, most people would shrug and accept it. I suspect this should bother any people outside of science who actually have an interest in not-Bigfoot, and I do have a vague recollection of seeing some post on FSTDT back in the days where Christian fundamentalists were agitating hard against Bigfoot because they were afraid it would be used as "missing link" style evidence for evolution.)

Maybe a better rephrasing of the victory condition is something like "nobody who will ever be in a position to make a significant decision that depends on this belief can get away with disagreeing with it". By that definition, non-Bigfoot wins because approximately nobody except maybe for people controlling federal animal conservation budgets will ever make any significant decisions based on non-Bigfoot, and those probably are judged by scientists; on the other hand, the pro and contra on Stallman's cancellation materially influences decisions all of us will make every time we decide which conferences to sign up for, universities to accept jobs at or Twitter accounts to bolster the influencer status of.

Downvoting itself is not perceived as nasty behaviour. Seeing somebody else be nasty in defense of a belief X harms belief X; not seeing anyone ever defend or even bring up belief not-X because anyone who would do so is afraid of becoming a target of nasty behaviour, on the other hand, surely would help belief X.

[1] https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

> this might be perfectly rational behaviour for people who care about some side of the cause

I dispute this is rational. Creating echo chambers polarises and intensifies opposing viewpoints. The rational thing to do would be to engage in polite and meaningful discussion with people with whom you disagree. This would diffuse extreme opinions and allow people time to consider whether or not their position is justified. Rather than reacting in a knee-jerk defensive manner that serves to protect identity by strengthening belief, they are then given space to examine beliefs in order to strengthen identity.

Can you elaborate on why you dispute it is rational? I'm working with a definition of "rational" that is more or less "the optimal way to attain your goals", and assuming that the goals of Stallman's detractors imply that everyone agrees that Stallman/people like him should be cancelled. My argument, then, is that (1) upvote/downvote patterns on a forum like HN are a useful tools to reduce the frequency of the case against Stallman's cancellation being made in other settings than HN, (2) in the long run, the case against the cancellation being made less frequently would result in more people assuming the belief that the cancellation was good. (Of course, if this were at all realistically attainable at this point, many in the pro-Stallman camp would also want "cancel Stallman" to be downvoted so hard that people would be afraid to argue for it in public.)

I don't really see how the rest of your post argues against that, or what your argument for "the rational thing to do would be to engage in polite and meaningful discussion(...)" is. Maybe we are using different definitions of "rational" and/or different assumptions about people's goals, in which case it would help if you could state yours.

Let's start by assuming that a rational agent might choose as a goal the complete cessation of a particular belief. In that case I'd argue that downvoting patterns, as previously described, are not rational because, rather than having the intended consequence of reducing the likelihood of the expression of that belief, they would in fact simply cause that belief to strengthen and then be expressed elsewhere in alternative echo chambers. In order to establish which of our claims is correct we'd need to empirically observe the propagation of beliefs as a result of downvoting patterns. That would not be an easy thing to do.

However, I would also argue that choosing a goal like 'bring about the complete cessation of a particular belief' would be irrational. Although I accept that once I make that claim the conversation is directed towards very shaky territory. The question of how to choose rational goals is probably impossible to answer definitively.

But I will say that when I claimed that the rational thing to do would be to engage with a disliked belief in a meaningful and polite manner, my assumption was that a rational agent would choose to behave in a way that facilitates growth for both the agent and those with which they engage. Of course, once again, this choice of goal is by no means self-evidently rational.

I suppose it all depends on whether you think persuasion or group membership signalling is what primarily influences people's beliefs. I was under the impression there was a wealth of studies suggesting that people basically do not respond positively to logical argument but are easily swayed by what they think everyone around them believes, but I completely failed to find any of them (or studies to the contrary, on that matter), so barring someone producing links where I failed, I suppose we can only recognise that we have different beliefs about reality that we do not have easily serialisable/communicable evidence for.

One issue I take with what you said, though, is the notion of a "rational goal". I don't see how this would be defined in my understanding of the terms; goals are axiomatic, (ir)rationality is a property of candidate actions in pursuit of a particular goal. I still get the impression that we probably use different definitions, and yours is much closer to something like "rational"="conducive to intellectual growth". (So in my world a better paperclip maximiser would be more rational, and in yours a better paperclip maximiser would be less rational...?)

It's definitely an interesting question as to whether goal-choice itself can be a rational activity. Of course, it is necessary for a rational agent to begin with axioms and from there make choices. It seems perfectly coherent to me that we could, from those axioms, choose a further set of goals, each of which can be attained following a course of actions, and so on.

And so I would contend that the goal 'cause the cessation of a particular belief' is not axiomatic at all, but an instance of a goal that serves something more fundamentally axiomatic. Like 'make the world more comfortable'. Or 'make the world conform to my expectations'. Or something like that.

From this model we could absolutely talk about choosing goals in a rational manner that aids certain axioms. The question then would be: could the axioms themselves be chosen in a rational manner? Probably not but then it doesn't seem impossible to argue that some sets of axioms are better than others. It would be nice, say, if the axioms guiding the behaviour of a rational agent, didn't contradict each other.

Goal choice is adaptation activity. For humans two approaches to adaptation were identified: social and empiric. Monkeys use them too (fun fact: monkeys are more likely to resort to empiric adaptation than humans).

Doubtful. Racism is way down since it became completely socially unacceptable to support among most social groups.

This reminds me of The Racist Tree: https://lardcave.net/text/the_racist_tree.html

> By Alexander Blechman

> Once upon a time, there was a racist tree. Seriously, you are going to hate this tree. High on a hill overlooking the town, the racist tree grew where the grass was half clover. Children would visit during the sunlit hours and ask for apples, and the racist tree would shake its branches and drop the delicious red fruit that gleamed without being polished. The children ate many of the racist tree's apples and played games beneath the shade of its racist branches. One day the children brought Sam, a boy who had just moved to town, to play around the racist tree.

> "Let Sam have an apple," asked a little girl.

> "I don't think so. He's black," said the tree. This shocked the children and they spoke to the tree angrily, but it would not shake its branches to give Sam an apple, and it called him a n-[censored].

> "I can't believe the racist tree is such a racist," said one child. The children momentarily reflected that perhaps this kind of behavior was how the racist tree got its name.

> It was decided that if the tree was going to deny apples to Sam then nobody would take its apples. The children stopped visiting the racist tree.

> The racist tree grew quite lonely. After many solitary weeks it saw a child flying a kite across the clover field.

> "Can I offer you some apples?" asked the tree eagerly.

> "Fuck off, you goddamn Nazi," said the child.

> The racist tree was upset, because while it was very racist, it did not personally subscribe to Hitler's fascist ideology. The racist tree decided that it would have to give apples to black children, not because it was tolerant, but because otherwise it would face ostracism from white children.

> And so, social progress was made.

I think you've conflated online downvoting behaviours with real life social conformity pressures, each of which probably have quite different effects on the propogation/extinction of certain beliefs.

IRL ones are probably stronger, but they still look fairly similar to me.

I would expect the strength of the effect is only one of many differences between the two.

> the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.

This is a little bit terrifying to me. For me victory would be that the opposing view merely doesn't gain any traction when expressed, not that it can't be expressed - presumably due to social consequences. Any view that "wins" in this way doesn't deserve its victory - how do you know it's actually a good idea? Bad and good ideas alike can win in this way. Only good ideas are stable in the presence of the constant ability to question them.

> the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.

What about the belief that any belief should be expressable in polite company, including the negatiom of this belief?

This is a fascinating take on the purpose of discourse. I'm not sure if I agree but I'm upvoting it because it made me think.

> the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.

Kind of! That's been the measure of progress as a society; several beliefs that were once fringe have become almost mandatory in polite company.

But we're still not talking about the linked article which is about a distinction between freedom and openness.

Personally, I wouldn't identify an echo chamber as perfectly rational

> the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company

That's the victory condition for a mind virus. I hope that my beliefs (like the belief in free speech) aren't mind viruses and don't have that as a victory condition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com