The mere fact of being gay (whilst being otherwise well-behaved and in compliance with all social norms and standards, such that most people never even noticed) is not a major risk factor for child molestation, and is not evidence that Mr. So-and-So was actually a ticking time bomb all along and we simply never knew, thank God we got rid of him before he fiddled with somebody all of a sudden after never doing anything of the sort for thirty years.
I think… finding out (in the 1950s) that someone maintained many secret homosexual relationships for many years is actually a signal the person is fairly devious, and is both willing and capable of behaving in ways that society has strong norms about not doing.
It obviously isn’t true about homosexuals once the norm was lifted, but my guess is that it was at the time accurate to make a directional bayesian update that the person had behaved in actually bad and devious ways.
Edit: From looking through some of a YouTube documentary linked below, I updated that many of these people seemed pretty harmless and kindly. So I think there’s a good chance I’m wrong in this case.
but my guess is that it was at the time accurate to make a directional bayesian update that the person had behaved in actually bad and devious ways.
I think this is technically true, but the wrong framing, or rather is leaving out another possibility: that such a person is someone who is more likely to follow their heart and do what they think is right, even when society disagrees. This could include doing things that are bad, but it could also include things which are actually really good, since society has been wrong a lot of the time.
I agree it is also bayesian evidence for that! My current guess is it was more in the other direction, as in general I think there are more people breaking rules for bad reasons than for good reasons, but I’m not that confident, and would be interested in hearing from someone who disagreed about this (in specific or in general) and why.
I think that there isn’t just one bag of people breaking rules, and some number of the marbles in that bag are “for good reasons” and some number “for bad reasons.” I think there are clusters, and types, and certain kinds of rule-breaking are predictive of other kinds of rule-breaking.
I think that me not wearing shoes at university is evidence that I might also disdain sports, but not evidence that I might steal.
I think that trying to think in terms of “for bad reasons” and “for good reasons” as two flavors in one bucket is likely to lead one to make wrong updates. Like, the model is oversimplified and causes fearful swerves.
(In my usage, which may or may not be standard, if something feels like a Bayesian update for each of two different mutually exclusive directions, you sort of cancel out the overlap and then only refer to the net remainder as the thing for which you have Bayesian evidence. Like, if it independently seems like a 3 update to the west, and a 5 update to the east, when you consider each separately, you say “a Bayesian update of 2 to the east” or similar.)
Hmmmm, I see that Ben is getting some disagreement/pushback below, but I want to stand in defense of part of the thing I understand him to be saying.
(Or rather, I think Ben’s bucketing two things and the disagreement is pushing back on the whole bucket when it should be pushing back on the bucket error + one of the things.)
In my culture, we’re much better at noticing that X is bad in an absolute sense even if it’s overwhelmingly good in context, or net justified, or whatever. Like, in Duncan culture it’s straightforwardly obvious and commonplace to note that surgery is cutting into people with knives and lasers, and that kinda sucks, regardless of the fact that surgery can lead to miraculously positive outcomes.
I think that Ben is correct to point out something like “this is an update on deviousness,” and I think Ben is correct to point out something like “this is an update on being willing to cross social barriers.”
But I think it’s not correct to leap from that to “this is an update on a fundamental or intrinsic deviousness characteristic.” The deviousness of someone tying themselves in knots to avoid social sanction for behavior that’s actually harmless is not quiiiiiiiiiite the same as the deviousness of a con artist weaving a web of lies around a mark. It’s got a thorough and sufficient explanation in the combination of the internal pressures arising in the person, and the social pressures exerted upon them from the outside, and so we don’t have to (or have reason to) posit an additional drive-to-deviousness.
(You could perhaps productively replace the word “devious” with “furtive” and have a more empathetic and accurate sentence.)
Indeed, under the claims of the OP, there are a lot more people than you, Ben, presently think, being furtive in this and similar ways. Like, probably at least an order of magnitude more than you think (most people in at least one or two ways and some people in several big ways).
And that’s … kind of the key? Being like “ah, I have stumbled across this One Lone Rare-Seeming Instance of Furtiveness, I should make a large character update” is a mistake. The evidence “wow, this person is willing to deceive and buck social norms” feels extraordinary, and thus supportive of an extraordinary shift in your perceptions of their character.
But it is not, in fact, extraordinary. It’s much more typical-of-humans than your observations (if left unexamined) have led you to think.
I’m running out of time to finish this comment, so I’ll just say “there’s another bucket error around ‘bad behavior’” and hope you can connect the dots … it is not actually the case that violating one specific social norm for specific reason is a substantial update that someone is a Breaking Social Boundaries Type Pokemon in general. I think that discovering the fact that someone has a severe disagreement with a universal-seeming social boundary justifies forming the hypothesis that they’re actually bad, but one should split and commit and will much-more-often-than-not (I claim) subsequently realize that nah, the bulk of my previous experiences of this person are representative; I don’t need to throw out my whole model of them; this exception is in fact an exception.
(With the same caveat in the OP that some actions really are dealbreakers, and if you discover that someone is taking a dealbreaking action you previously thought they were incapable of, then sure, that’s a big update. But people in the 1950′s were wrong about the dealbreaking awfulness of putting a peepee in someone’s butt, and so one should be at least wary of one’s own confidence about how dealbreaky given behaviors are, if one hasn’t yet thought it through and is just regurgitating what society gave you. I paused and actually thought about rape and molestation and decided that they were really really bad, but not necessarily/absolutely/obviously/always worse than, say, getting your face punched multiple times until your nose breaks and your eyes swell up. This is near society’s conclusion, but importantly different, and the similarity is because society and I both saw (some amount of) the same true thing, not because I just accepted the party line.)
I think that me not wearing shoes at university is evidence that I might also disdain sports, but not evidence that I might steal.
it is not actually the case that violating one specific social norm for specific reason is a substantial update that someone is a Breaking Social Boundaries Type Pokemon in general.
If I can attempt to synthesize these two points into a single point: don’t assume weird people are evil.
If someone walks around barefoot in an urban environment, that’s a good clue they might also be weird in other ways. But weird ≠ evil.
Principled non-conformity is a thing. Human diversity is a thing. Eccentricity is a thing.
If weirdness indicated evil, then LessWrong would be a hive of scum and villainy.
Uncritically enforcing rules and conformity to an idea of normalcy is not good. It has done great harm.
Here’s two sentences that I think are both probably true.
In order to do what is right, at some point in a person’s life they will have to covertly break certain widespread social norms.
Most people who covertly break widespread social norms are untrustworthy people.
(As a note on my epistemic state: I assign a higher probability to the first claim being true than the second.)
One of the things I read the OP as saying is “lots of widespread social norms are very poorly justified by using extreme cases and silencing all the fine cases (and you should fix this faulty reasoning in your own mind)”. I can get behind this. I think it’s also saying “Most people are actually covertly violating widespread social norms in some way”. I am genuinely much more confused about this. Many of the examples in the OP are more about persistent facts about people’s builds (e.g. whether they have violent impulses or whether they are homosexual) than about their active choices (e.g. whether they carry out violence or whether they had homosexual sex).
For instance I find myself sympathetic to arguments where people say that many people would prefer to receive corporal punishment than be imprisoned for a decade, but if I were to find out that one particular prison was secretly beating the prisoners and then releasing them, I would be extremely freaked out by this. (This example doesn’t quite make sense because that just isn’t a state of affairs that you could keep quiet, but hopefully it conveys the gist of what I mean.)
Mm, perhaps rather than saying that most such people are untrustworthy, I just want to instead make an argument about risk and the availability of evidence.
Some people are very manipulative and untrustworthy and covertly break widespread social norms.
Some people covertly break widespread social norms for good reasons.
Even if you find out one time people are covertly breaking a norm, you do not know how much more often they are covertly breaking social norms, and it’s hard to understand the reasoning that went into the one you have learned about.
Suppose the amount of covert social norm breaking is heavy-tailed, where 90% of people break none, 8% of people break 1, 1% of people break 2-3, and 1% of people break 4+ (and are doing it all the time).
If you find out that someone breaks one, then you find out that they’re not in the first bucket, and this is a 10x multiplier toward them being the sort of person who breaks 10+. So this is pretty scary.
And what’s worse is regardless of which bucket they’re in, they’re not going to tell you which bucket they’re in. Because they’re not going to volunteer to you info about other norms they’re breaking.
So (if this model/distribution is accurate) when you find out that someone has covertly broken a widespread social norm, you need to suddenly have your guard up, and to be safe you should probably apply a high standard before feeling confident that the person is not also violating other norms that you care about and keeping that from you.
(I just want to acknowledge in my comments I’m doing a lot of essentialism about people’s long-standing personality traits, I’m not sure I’d endorse that if I reflected longer.)
2 seems both true and obvious to me (and we have a rich historical record of many of those people being vindicated as moral development proceeded apace).
3 seems true and correct to me as well.
Our divergence is after 3, in the rough model. I think that it is waaaaaaay unlikely that a 90% bucket is the right size. I think that 50+% of people covertly break at least 1 widespread norm, and even if someone talks me out of it I do not expect them to talk me even half of the distance down to 8%.
I think it depends a lot on the norm in question. Having been privileged (by virtue of being confidant to a lot of people from a lot of walks of life) to know about a LOT of harmless-in-my-estimation covert norm-breaking that the average person never gets a whiff of, I think that my money is on 2 being simply false.
I’m really surprised to hear you say this (ignoring update since I’m focusing on a different aspect). My sense was you didn’t think much of most social norms, and I would have predicted you’d see being gay in the 1950s as admirable independence from stupid social conventions.
I am a bit confused how to relate to covertly breaking social norms.
In general I think you can’t always tell whether a norm is dumb just by looking at the moral character of the people breaking it. I think sometimes silly norms are only violated by reckless and impulsive people with little ability to self-regulate and little care for ethics, and in some cases it isn’t worth the cost to general norm-following behavior.
a directional bayesian update that the person had behaved in actually bad and devious ways.
I dunno if I agree. Seems like many did it for self protection and it was probably “oh that old man lives with a friend and they keep to themselves”. Not sure what % of closeted gay people were lying to others, or lying more than was minimally necessary for self protection. Not sure I’d class that as “bad” and “devious”.
What on Earth? Why does it require being “devious” to be in the closet? If you were given a choice between lifelong celibacy and loneliness, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, seriously endangering yourself, risking being imprisoned or institutionalized, and ruining your life (economically and socially) by having relationships and disclosing them, would it make you “devious” to choose a third option and keep your relationships secret?
Were Jews who hid from the Nazis “devious”? Were people who helped them hide “devious”? Only in a sense that drains the word “devious” of its negative moral connotation.
The documentary “Before Stonewall” covers what gay life was like in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. I would recommend it.
Appreciate the link. I’m updating from some of the people and their stories toward it not generally correlating with a broader disregard for decency to strategically break certain strongly enforced norms. I think I’m also substantially updating about how much homosexual recognition/acceptance there was in the early 1900s — there was a very successful theater production called The Captive about a lesbian that had famous actors and ~160 showings (until it was cancelled due to its subject being scandalous).
Curious quote 8 mins into the documentary about Speakeasies. I’m not sure what to make of it directionally about rule-breakers at the time and how to update about their motives.
The main thought behind the thing was to break the law, and live as wildly as you could. And everybody did. Because the Speakeasies were all over the town. Even the old residences, some of them had Speakeasies in the basement. Now a lot of people write about prohibition, but they don’t bring out the fact that everybody was breaking the law because it was the thing to do.
I think… finding out (in the 1950s) that someone maintained many secret homosexual relationships for many years is actually a signal the person is fairly devious, and is both willing and capable of behaving in ways that society has strong norms about not doing.
It obviously isn’t true about homosexuals once the norm was lifted, but my guess is that it was at the time accurate to make a directional bayesian update that the person had behaved in actually bad and devious ways.
Edit: From looking through some of a YouTube documentary linked below, I updated that many of these people seemed pretty harmless and kindly. So I think there’s a good chance I’m wrong in this case.
I think this is technically true, but the wrong framing, or rather is leaving out another possibility: that such a person is someone who is more likely to follow their heart and do what they think is right, even when society disagrees. This could include doing things that are bad, but it could also include things which are actually really good, since society has been wrong a lot of the time.
I agree it is also bayesian evidence for that! My current guess is it was more in the other direction, as in general I think there are more people breaking rules for bad reasons than for good reasons, but I’m not that confident, and would be interested in hearing from someone who disagreed about this (in specific or in general) and why.
I think that there isn’t just one bag of people breaking rules, and some number of the marbles in that bag are “for good reasons” and some number “for bad reasons.” I think there are clusters, and types, and certain kinds of rule-breaking are predictive of other kinds of rule-breaking.
I think that me not wearing shoes at university is evidence that I might also disdain sports, but not evidence that I might steal.
I think that trying to think in terms of “for bad reasons” and “for good reasons” as two flavors in one bucket is likely to lead one to make wrong updates. Like, the model is oversimplified and causes fearful swerves.
(In my usage, which may or may not be standard, if something feels like a Bayesian update for each of two different mutually exclusive directions, you sort of cancel out the overlap and then only refer to the net remainder as the thing for which you have Bayesian evidence. Like, if it independently seems like a 3 update to the west, and a 5 update to the east, when you consider each separately, you say “a Bayesian update of 2 to the east” or similar.)
Hmmmm, I see that Ben is getting some disagreement/pushback below, but I want to stand in defense of part of the thing I understand him to be saying.
(Or rather, I think Ben’s bucketing two things and the disagreement is pushing back on the whole bucket when it should be pushing back on the bucket error + one of the things.)
In my culture, we’re much better at noticing that X is bad in an absolute sense even if it’s overwhelmingly good in context, or net justified, or whatever. Like, in Duncan culture it’s straightforwardly obvious and commonplace to note that surgery is cutting into people with knives and lasers, and that kinda sucks, regardless of the fact that surgery can lead to miraculously positive outcomes.
I think that Ben is correct to point out something like “this is an update on deviousness,” and I think Ben is correct to point out something like “this is an update on being willing to cross social barriers.”
But I think it’s not correct to leap from that to “this is an update on a fundamental or intrinsic deviousness characteristic.” The deviousness of someone tying themselves in knots to avoid social sanction for behavior that’s actually harmless is not quiiiiiiiiiite the same as the deviousness of a con artist weaving a web of lies around a mark. It’s got a thorough and sufficient explanation in the combination of the internal pressures arising in the person, and the social pressures exerted upon them from the outside, and so we don’t have to (or have reason to) posit an additional drive-to-deviousness.
(You could perhaps productively replace the word “devious” with “furtive” and have a more empathetic and accurate sentence.)
Indeed, under the claims of the OP, there are a lot more people than you, Ben, presently think, being furtive in this and similar ways. Like, probably at least an order of magnitude more than you think (most people in at least one or two ways and some people in several big ways).
And that’s … kind of the key? Being like “ah, I have stumbled across this One Lone Rare-Seeming Instance of Furtiveness, I should make a large character update” is a mistake. The evidence “wow, this person is willing to deceive and buck social norms” feels extraordinary, and thus supportive of an extraordinary shift in your perceptions of their character.
But it is not, in fact, extraordinary. It’s much more typical-of-humans than your observations (if left unexamined) have led you to think.
I’m running out of time to finish this comment, so I’ll just say “there’s another bucket error around ‘bad behavior’” and hope you can connect the dots … it is not actually the case that violating one specific social norm for specific reason is a substantial update that someone is a Breaking Social Boundaries Type Pokemon in general. I think that discovering the fact that someone has a severe disagreement with a universal-seeming social boundary justifies forming the hypothesis that they’re actually bad, but one should split and commit and will much-more-often-than-not (I claim) subsequently realize that nah, the bulk of my previous experiences of this person are representative; I don’t need to throw out my whole model of them; this exception is in fact an exception.
(With the same caveat in the OP that some actions really are dealbreakers, and if you discover that someone is taking a dealbreaking action you previously thought they were incapable of, then sure, that’s a big update. But people in the 1950′s were wrong about the dealbreaking awfulness of putting a peepee in someone’s butt, and so one should be at least wary of one’s own confidence about how dealbreaky given behaviors are, if one hasn’t yet thought it through and is just regurgitating what society gave you. I paused and actually thought about rape and molestation and decided that they were really really bad, but not necessarily/absolutely/obviously/always worse than, say, getting your face punched multiple times until your nose breaks and your eyes swell up. This is near society’s conclusion, but importantly different, and the similarity is because society and I both saw (some amount of) the same true thing, not because I just accepted the party line.)
If I can attempt to synthesize these two points into a single point: don’t assume weird people are evil.
If someone walks around barefoot in an urban environment, that’s a good clue they might also be weird in other ways. But weird ≠ evil.
Principled non-conformity is a thing. Human diversity is a thing. Eccentricity is a thing.
If weirdness indicated evil, then LessWrong would be a hive of scum and villainy.
Uncritically enforcing rules and conformity to an idea of normalcy is not good. It has done great harm.
Here’s two sentences that I think are both probably true.
In order to do what is right, at some point in a person’s life they will have to covertly break certain widespread social norms.
Most people who covertly break widespread social norms are untrustworthy people.
(As a note on my epistemic state: I assign a higher probability to the first claim being true than the second.)
One of the things I read the OP as saying is “lots of widespread social norms are very poorly justified by using extreme cases and silencing all the fine cases (and you should fix this faulty reasoning in your own mind)”. I can get behind this. I think it’s also saying “Most people are actually covertly violating widespread social norms in some way”. I am genuinely much more confused about this. Many of the examples in the OP are more about persistent facts about people’s builds (e.g. whether they have violent impulses or whether they are homosexual) than about their active choices (e.g. whether they carry out violence or whether they had homosexual sex).
For instance I find myself sympathetic to arguments where people say that many people would prefer to receive corporal punishment than be imprisoned for a decade, but if I were to find out that one particular prison was secretly beating the prisoners and then releasing them, I would be extremely freaked out by this. (This example doesn’t quite make sense because that just isn’t a state of affairs that you could keep quiet, but hopefully it conveys the gist of what I mean.)
Mm, perhaps rather than saying that most such people are untrustworthy, I just want to instead make an argument about risk and the availability of evidence.
Some people are very manipulative and untrustworthy and covertly break widespread social norms.
Some people covertly break widespread social norms for good reasons.
Even if you find out one time people are covertly breaking a norm, you do not know how much more often they are covertly breaking social norms, and it’s hard to understand the reasoning that went into the one you have learned about.
Suppose the amount of covert social norm breaking is heavy-tailed, where 90% of people break none, 8% of people break 1, 1% of people break 2-3, and 1% of people break 4+ (and are doing it all the time).
If you find out that someone breaks one, then you find out that they’re not in the first bucket, and this is a 10x multiplier toward them being the sort of person who breaks 10+. So this is pretty scary.
And what’s worse is regardless of which bucket they’re in, they’re not going to tell you which bucket they’re in. Because they’re not going to volunteer to you info about other norms they’re breaking.
So (if this model/distribution is accurate) when you find out that someone has covertly broken a widespread social norm, you need to suddenly have your guard up, and to be safe you should probably apply a high standard before feeling confident that the person is not also violating other norms that you care about and keeping that from you.
(I just want to acknowledge in my comments I’m doing a lot of essentialism about people’s long-standing personality traits, I’m not sure I’d endorse that if I reflected longer.)
1 seems both true and obvious to me.
2 seems both true and obvious to me (and we have a rich historical record of many of those people being vindicated as moral development proceeded apace).
3 seems true and correct to me as well.
Our divergence is after 3, in the rough model. I think that it is waaaaaaay unlikely that a 90% bucket is the right size. I think that 50+% of people covertly break at least 1 widespread norm, and even if someone talks me out of it I do not expect them to talk me even half of the distance down to 8%.
I think it depends a lot on the norm in question. Having been privileged (by virtue of being confidant to a lot of people from a lot of walks of life) to know about a LOT of harmless-in-my-estimation covert norm-breaking that the average person never gets a whiff of, I think that my money is on 2 being simply false.
This might be related to the circular reasoning that gay people shouldn’t be trusted with security clearances because they can be blackmailed.
I’m really surprised to hear you say this (ignoring update since I’m focusing on a different aspect). My sense was you didn’t think much of most social norms, and I would have predicted you’d see being gay in the 1950s as admirable independence from stupid social conventions.
I am a bit confused how to relate to covertly breaking social norms.
In general I think you can’t always tell whether a norm is dumb just by looking at the moral character of the people breaking it. I think sometimes silly norms are only violated by reckless and impulsive people with little ability to self-regulate and little care for ethics, and in some cases it isn’t worth the cost to general norm-following behavior.
But as I say, still confused about the issue.
I dunno if I agree. Seems like many did it for self protection and it was probably “oh that old man lives with a friend and they keep to themselves”. Not sure what % of closeted gay people were lying to others, or lying more than was minimally necessary for self protection. Not sure I’d class that as “bad” and “devious”.
What on Earth? Why does it require being “devious” to be in the closet? If you were given a choice between lifelong celibacy and loneliness, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, seriously endangering yourself, risking being imprisoned or institutionalized, and ruining your life (economically and socially) by having relationships and disclosing them, would it make you “devious” to choose a third option and keep your relationships secret?
Were Jews who hid from the Nazis “devious”? Were people who helped them hide “devious”? Only in a sense that drains the word “devious” of its negative moral connotation.
The documentary “Before Stonewall” covers what gay life was like in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. I would recommend it.
Appreciate the link. I’m updating from some of the people and their stories toward it not generally correlating with a broader disregard for decency to strategically break certain strongly enforced norms. I think I’m also substantially updating about how much homosexual recognition/acceptance there was in the early 1900s — there was a very successful theater production called The Captive about a lesbian that had famous actors and ~160 showings (until it was cancelled due to its subject being scandalous).
Curious quote 8 mins into the documentary about Speakeasies. I’m not sure what to make of it directionally about rule-breakers at the time and how to update about their motives.