I really disagree with your argument, Wrongbot. First of all, I think responding appropriately to “dangerous” information is an important task, and one which most LW folks can achieve.
In addition, I wonder if your personal observations about people who become bigots by reading “dangerous content” are actually accurate. People who are already bigots (or are predisposed to bigotry) are probably more likely to seek out data that “confirms” their assumptions. So your anecdotal observation may be produced by a selection effect.
At bare minimum, you should give us some information about the sample your observations are based on. For example you say:
One specific and relatively common version of this are people who believe that women have a lower standard deviation on measures of IQ than men. This belief is not incompatible with believing that any particular woman might be astonishingly intelligent, but these people all seem to have a great deal of trouble applying the latter to any particular woman. There may be exceptions, but I haven’t met them.
This could mean you’ve met a couple people like this, and never met anyone else who has encountered this data. In any case, you really don’t have enough data to draw the extreme conclusion that you should ignore data.
In any case, the most fundamental problem with your point is that any attempt to preemptively prevent yourself from acquiring dangerous information is predicated on you already knowing the “dangerous” part. You can spend the rest of your life avoiding data about IQ/SAT scores, but you already know that women’s scores vary somewhat less than men’s’ scores. (Anyway, I fail to see how expecting somewhat less variance in women would effect behavior in real life.)
I really disagree with your argument, Wrongbot. First of all, I think responding appropriately to “dangerous” information is an important task, and one which most LW folks can achieve.
In addition, I wonder if your personal observations about people who become bigots by reading “dangerous content” are actually accurate. People who are already bigots (or are predisposed to bigotry) are probably more likely to seek out data that “confirms” their assumptions. So your anecdotal observation may be produced by a selection effect.
At bare minimum, you should give us some information about the sample your observations are based on. For example you say:
This could mean you’ve met a couple people like this, and never met anyone else who has encountered this data. In any case, you really don’t have enough data to draw the extreme conclusion that you should ignore data.
In any case, the most fundamental problem with your point is that any attempt to preemptively prevent yourself from acquiring dangerous information is predicated on you already knowing the “dangerous” part. You can spend the rest of your life avoiding data about IQ/SAT scores, but you already know that women’s scores vary somewhat less than men’s’ scores. (Anyway, I fail to see how expecting somewhat less variance in women would effect behavior in real life.)