The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong LW - Dragon Agnosticism by jefftk
Aug 1, 2024
03:25
Link to original article
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Dragon Agnosticism, published by jefftk on August 1, 2024 on LessWrong.
I'm agnostic on the existence of dragons. I don't usually talk about this, because people might misinterpret me as actually being a covert dragon-believer, but I wanted to give some background for why I disagree with calls for people to publicly assert the non-existence of dragons.
Before I do that, though, it's clear that horrible acts have been committed in the name of dragons. Many dragon-believers publicly or privately endorse this reprehensible history. Regardless of whether dragons do in fact exist, repercussions continue to have serious and unfair downstream effects on our society.
Given that history, the easy thing to do would be to loudly and publicly assert that dragons don't exist. But while a world in which dragons don't exist would be preferable, that a claim has inconvenient or harmful consequences isn't evidence of its truth or falsehood.
Another option would be to look into whether dragons exist and make up my mind; people on both sides are happy to show me evidence. If after weighing the evidence I were convinced they didn't exist, that would be excellent news about the world. It would also be something I could proudly write about: I checked, you don't need to keep worrying about dragons.
But if I decided to look into it I might instead find myself convinced that dragons do exist. In addition to this being bad news about the world, I would be in an awkward position personally. If I wrote up what I found I would be in some highly unsavory company. Instead of being known as someone who writes about a range of things of varying levels of seriousness and applicability, I would quickly become primarily known as one of those dragon advocates.
Given the taboos around dragon-belief, I could face strong professional and social consequences.
One option would be to look into it, and only let people know what I found if I were convinced dragons didn't exist. Unfortunately, this combines very poorly with collaborative truth-seeking. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places and make different errors. There are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons, or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process.
Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our strategy that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they've found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence Pat finds is very convincing to them, but then Sam shows how they've been misinterpreting it. But this all falls apart when the thoughtful people who find one outcome generally stay quiet.
I really don't want to contribute to this pattern that makes it hard to learn what's actually true, so in general I don't want whether I share what I've learned to be downstream from what I learn.
Overall, then, I've decided to remain agnostic on the existence of dragons. I would reconsider if it seemed to be a sufficiently important question, in which case I might be willing to run the risk of turning into a dragon-believer and letting the dragon question take over my life: I'm still open to arguments that whether dragons exist is actually highly consequential.
But with my current understanding of the costs and benefits on this question I will continue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence or arguments on whether there are dragons.
Note: This post is not actually about dragons, but instead about how I think about a wide range of taboo topics.
Comment via: facebook, mastodon
Thanks for listening. To help us out wit...
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Dragon Agnosticism, published by jefftk on August 1, 2024 on LessWrong.
I'm agnostic on the existence of dragons. I don't usually talk about this, because people might misinterpret me as actually being a covert dragon-believer, but I wanted to give some background for why I disagree with calls for people to publicly assert the non-existence of dragons.
Before I do that, though, it's clear that horrible acts have been committed in the name of dragons. Many dragon-believers publicly or privately endorse this reprehensible history. Regardless of whether dragons do in fact exist, repercussions continue to have serious and unfair downstream effects on our society.
Given that history, the easy thing to do would be to loudly and publicly assert that dragons don't exist. But while a world in which dragons don't exist would be preferable, that a claim has inconvenient or harmful consequences isn't evidence of its truth or falsehood.
Another option would be to look into whether dragons exist and make up my mind; people on both sides are happy to show me evidence. If after weighing the evidence I were convinced they didn't exist, that would be excellent news about the world. It would also be something I could proudly write about: I checked, you don't need to keep worrying about dragons.
But if I decided to look into it I might instead find myself convinced that dragons do exist. In addition to this being bad news about the world, I would be in an awkward position personally. If I wrote up what I found I would be in some highly unsavory company. Instead of being known as someone who writes about a range of things of varying levels of seriousness and applicability, I would quickly become primarily known as one of those dragon advocates.
Given the taboos around dragon-belief, I could face strong professional and social consequences.
One option would be to look into it, and only let people know what I found if I were convinced dragons didn't exist. Unfortunately, this combines very poorly with collaborative truth-seeking. Imagine a hundred well-intentioned people look into whether there are dragons. They look in different places and make different errors. There are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons, or things dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisy process.
Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction or another, some will come to believe that there are dragons, while others will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusing situations, our strategy that best approaches the truth is for people to report back what they've found, and have open discussion of the evidence. Perhaps some evidence Pat finds is very convincing to them, but then Sam shows how they've been misinterpreting it. But this all falls apart when the thoughtful people who find one outcome generally stay quiet.
I really don't want to contribute to this pattern that makes it hard to learn what's actually true, so in general I don't want whether I share what I've learned to be downstream from what I learn.
Overall, then, I've decided to remain agnostic on the existence of dragons. I would reconsider if it seemed to be a sufficiently important question, in which case I might be willing to run the risk of turning into a dragon-believer and letting the dragon question take over my life: I'm still open to arguments that whether dragons exist is actually highly consequential.
But with my current understanding of the costs and benefits on this question I will continue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence or arguments on whether there are dragons.
Note: This post is not actually about dragons, but instead about how I think about a wide range of taboo topics.
Comment via: facebook, mastodon
Thanks for listening. To help us out wit...