Memorising the most common/intelligent/whatever refutations of yesterday’s Horrible Ideas is not very useful if you want to be on guard against the Horrible Ideas of tomorrow. Chances are they will not have enough superficial resemblance for a simple pattern-matching algorithm to detect them. Think of it this way: our culture already has strong antibodies against nazism, communism, etc. It doesn’t have nearly as many antibodies against whatever the Most Horrible Idea of the 21st century will be. But that amount is not zero. And they disproportionately come from the truth-seeking spaces, where people are allowed to do their outlandish thought experiments even if they lead to repugnant conclusions.
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- [note::I think this is valid, but I think there are certain people who are attracted to truth-seeking communities like EA that aren't sensitive to the ways in which their desire to "truth seek" might harm others who do not explicitly agree to the terms of the "truth seeking" dialogue.]

(Low fidelity of information transmission isn’t the only reason truth-seeking spaces are PR hazards for the movements in whose ecology they grow. Most outlandish ideas considered will be somewhere between neutral and awful through sheer statistics, and someone who hasn’t yet sufficiently trained their memetic antibodies might end up endorsing some of them or even acting on them. This means a PR hazard exists even if all information were transmitted with perfect fidelity.)
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- [note::"Most outlandish ideas are somewhere between neutral and awful" - is this true for all ideas?]

Memorising the most common/intelligent/whatever refutations of yesterday’s Horrible Ideas is not very useful if you want to be on guard against the Horrible Ideas of tomorrow. Chances are they will not have enough superficial resemblance for a simple pattern-matching algorithm to detect them. Think of it this way: our culture already has strong antibodies against nazism, communism, etc. It doesn’t have nearly as many antibodies against whatever the Most Horrible Idea of the 21st century will be. But that amount is not zero. And they disproportionately come from the truth-seeking spaces, where people are allowed to do their outlandish thought experiments even if they lead to repugnant conclusions.
- No location available
-
- [note::I think this is valid, but I think there are certain people who are attracted to truth-seeking communities like EA that aren't sensitive to the ways in which their desire to "truth seek" might harm others who do not explicitly agree to the terms of the "truth seeking" dialogue.]

(Low fidelity of information transmission isn’t the only reason truth-seeking spaces are PR hazards for the movements in whose ecology they grow. Most outlandish ideas considered will be somewhere between neutral and awful through sheer statistics, and someone who hasn’t yet sufficiently trained their memetic antibodies might end up endorsing some of them or even acting on them. This means a PR hazard exists even if all information were transmitted with perfect fidelity.)
- No location available
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- [note::"Most outlandish ideas are somewhere between neutral and awful" - is this true for all ideas?]