The really bad thing is if corrupt people get a motte-and-bailey, where they get to use the term “infohazard” unchallenged in describing why their corruption should be kept secret, and casual observers assume it means “a thing everyone agrees should be kept secret”. I’m recommending spreading the meme that the bare word “infohazard” carries a strong connotation of “a thing I want kept secret for nefarious reasons and I want to trick you all into going along with it”. I think, if the meme is widely spread, it should fix the issue.
Your earlier comment sounded to me like you were framing the problem as “the word has these connotations for typical people, and the problem is that serious people have a different definition and aren’t willing to call out bad actors who are relying on the connotations to carry their arguments.”
That framing naturally suggests a solution of “serious people need to either use different definitions or have different standard for when to call people out.”
Now it seems like you’re framing the problem as “the word’s going to be used by corrupt people, and the problem is that typical people assign connotations to the word that make the corrupt person’s argument more persuasive.”
I dislike the second framing for a couple reasons:
The first framing suggests we need to change the explicit understanding of serious people; the second that we need to change the implicit understanding of typical people. Of those two, changing the first thing seems massively more feasible to me.
You are evoking scenarios where the bad guy says a word that is understood to mean “spreading this is bad for me.” I think this is an unrealistic scenario, and you should instead be evoking a scenario where the bad guy switches to a word that is still widely understood to mean “spreading this is bad for the collective”, but where serious people no longer think that it technically could mean something else. (The bad guy will switch to whatever word is currently most favorable for them, not stick to a single word while we change the connotations out from under them.)
I don’t think the problem is motte-and-bailey per se; to me, that term implies a trick that relies upon a single audience member subconsciously applying different definitions to different parts of the argument. But it sounds to me like you’re describing a problem where one part of the audience is persuaded, because they apply the narrower definition and aren’t knowledgeable enough to object, while another part of the audience is NOT persuaded, but fails to object, because they apply the broader definition. (No single audience member is applying multiple definitions.)
If the second group actually did object, then hypothetically the speaker could turn this into a motte-and-bailey by defending their arguments under the broader definition. But I don’t think that’s much of a practical risk, in this case. To actually execute that motte-and-bailey, you’d need to at some point say something like “spreading this info is bad for me [and therefore it counts as an infohazard]”, and I think that sound bite would lose you so many rhetorical points among people-you-could-potentially-trick-with-it that it wouldn’t typically be worth it.
I do hope that “spreading the meme that “infohazard” probably means “info I selfishly want to suppress”″ will cause serious people to more readily notice and raise objections when someone is using it to gloss over corruption. I guess I didn’t specify that, but I believe that would be the primary means by which it would help in the short term. So I think we don’t actually disagree here? (In the longer term, I do suspect that either the meme would spread to ordinary people, or the term “infohazard” would fall into disuse.)
So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.
It does have an element of conditionally retreating depending on whether you’re challenged. Also, I think the original context is people making bold claims on the internet, which probably means the audience is many people, and there’s often a comments section where objections might be made or not made. The case of persuading a single person to accept a claim via one definition, then telling them the claim implies something else via a different definition—I would use different words for that, perhaps “equivocating” (Wiki agrees, although the article body references motte-and-bailey as one use case) or “Trojan horse argument”.
The ideal user of a motte-and-bailey hopes that, most of the time, they won’t be challenged; when they are challenged, it does become less convincing. The motte needs to be something they can at least “fight to a standstill” defending; if it is, then this discourages challengers. I expect we agree on this.
I would agree that “It’s an infohazard because revealing it hurts me” is generally not a good motte. However, there’s still a selection of other justifications to retreat to, some of which might be hard to disprove objectively, which suffices for the “argue to a standstill” purpose. If necessary, for someone who cares primarily about their social capital and doesn’t absolutely need to win the argument, it might even be a motte to say “I wasn’t claiming that the downsides of revealing the truth definitely outweigh the values of truth and justice; I just meant that there are significant downsides”.
Let’s take the example of “It’s an infohazard for churchgoers to learn that Priest Bob had molested some children 20 years ago.” The bailey would be “I’m claiming that many of our churchgoers would be heartbroken, would lose faith in God, etc., and since no one is challenging me on this you should update towards thinking the churchgoers are so fragile this is a worthwhile tradeoff.” One motte would be “Well, it would clearly cause emotional distress to lots of people, and we should think carefully before releasing it. (Definitely we should hesitate long enough for objectors like you to leave the room, so I can repeat my original argument to a more naive audience.)”
(Incidentally, I would admit that people didn’t need the word “infohazard” to make arguments like the above. But having the word would probably make their job easier, give them a layer of plausible deniability.)
I disagree that the word “infohazard” makes it easier to use arguments like the ones in your final example. If we had a word that was universally acknowledged to mean “information whose dissemination causes communal harm”, they could make precisely the same argument using that word, and I don’t see how the argument would be weakened.
And...I guess I’m confused about your strategy of spreading your proposed meme to serious people. If the goal is to provide the serious people a basis upon which to object, this strikes me as a terrible basis; “your word choice implies you are probably corrupt” is an unpersuasive counter-argument. If the goal is to make the serious people notice at all that the argument is objectionable, then that seems like a fragile and convoluted way of doing that—making people notice that an argument might be flawed, based on easily-changeable word choice, rather than an actual logical flaw. Maybe I’m still not understanding the proposed mechanism of action?
The really bad thing is if corrupt people get a motte-and-bailey, where they get to use the term “infohazard” unchallenged in describing why their corruption should be kept secret, and casual observers assume it means “a thing everyone agrees should be kept secret”. I’m recommending spreading the meme that the bare word “infohazard” carries a strong connotation of “a thing I want kept secret for nefarious reasons and I want to trick you all into going along with it”. I think, if the meme is widely spread, it should fix the issue.
Your earlier comment sounded to me like you were framing the problem as “the word has these connotations for typical people, and the problem is that serious people have a different definition and aren’t willing to call out bad actors who are relying on the connotations to carry their arguments.”
That framing naturally suggests a solution of “serious people need to either use different definitions or have different standard for when to call people out.”
Now it seems like you’re framing the problem as “the word’s going to be used by corrupt people, and the problem is that typical people assign connotations to the word that make the corrupt person’s argument more persuasive.”
I dislike the second framing for a couple reasons:
The first framing suggests we need to change the explicit understanding of serious people; the second that we need to change the implicit understanding of typical people. Of those two, changing the first thing seems massively more feasible to me.
You are evoking scenarios where the bad guy says a word that is understood to mean “spreading this is bad for me.” I think this is an unrealistic scenario, and you should instead be evoking a scenario where the bad guy switches to a word that is still widely understood to mean “spreading this is bad for the collective”, but where serious people no longer think that it technically could mean something else. (The bad guy will switch to whatever word is currently most favorable for them, not stick to a single word while we change the connotations out from under them.)
I don’t think the problem is motte-and-bailey per se; to me, that term implies a trick that relies upon a single audience member subconsciously applying different definitions to different parts of the argument. But it sounds to me like you’re describing a problem where one part of the audience is persuaded, because they apply the narrower definition and aren’t knowledgeable enough to object, while another part of the audience is NOT persuaded, but fails to object, because they apply the broader definition. (No single audience member is applying multiple definitions.)
If the second group actually did object, then hypothetically the speaker could turn this into a motte-and-bailey by defending their arguments under the broader definition. But I don’t think that’s much of a practical risk, in this case. To actually execute that motte-and-bailey, you’d need to at some point say something like “spreading this info is bad for me [and therefore it counts as an infohazard]”, and I think that sound bite would lose you so many rhetorical points among people-you-could-potentially-trick-with-it that it wouldn’t typically be worth it.
I do hope that “spreading the meme that “infohazard” probably means “info I selfishly want to suppress”″ will cause serious people to more readily notice and raise objections when someone is using it to gloss over corruption. I guess I didn’t specify that, but I believe that would be the primary means by which it would help in the short term. So I think we don’t actually disagree here? (In the longer term, I do suspect that either the meme would spread to ordinary people, or the term “infohazard” would fall into disuse.)
Regarding motte-and-bailey—I disagree about the definition. Quoting one of Scott’s essays on the subject:
It does have an element of conditionally retreating depending on whether you’re challenged. Also, I think the original context is people making bold claims on the internet, which probably means the audience is many people, and there’s often a comments section where objections might be made or not made. The case of persuading a single person to accept a claim via one definition, then telling them the claim implies something else via a different definition—I would use different words for that, perhaps “equivocating” (Wiki agrees, although the article body references motte-and-bailey as one use case) or “Trojan horse argument”.
The ideal user of a motte-and-bailey hopes that, most of the time, they won’t be challenged; when they are challenged, it does become less convincing. The motte needs to be something they can at least “fight to a standstill” defending; if it is, then this discourages challengers. I expect we agree on this.
I would agree that “It’s an infohazard because revealing it hurts me” is generally not a good motte. However, there’s still a selection of other justifications to retreat to, some of which might be hard to disprove objectively, which suffices for the “argue to a standstill” purpose. If necessary, for someone who cares primarily about their social capital and doesn’t absolutely need to win the argument, it might even be a motte to say “I wasn’t claiming that the downsides of revealing the truth definitely outweigh the values of truth and justice; I just meant that there are significant downsides”.
Let’s take the example of “It’s an infohazard for churchgoers to learn that Priest Bob had molested some children 20 years ago.” The bailey would be “I’m claiming that many of our churchgoers would be heartbroken, would lose faith in God, etc., and since no one is challenging me on this you should update towards thinking the churchgoers are so fragile this is a worthwhile tradeoff.” One motte would be “Well, it would clearly cause emotional distress to lots of people, and we should think carefully before releasing it. (Definitely we should hesitate long enough for objectors like you to leave the room, so I can repeat my original argument to a more naive audience.)”
(Incidentally, I would admit that people didn’t need the word “infohazard” to make arguments like the above. But having the word would probably make their job easier, give them a layer of plausible deniability.)
I disagree that the word “infohazard” makes it easier to use arguments like the ones in your final example. If we had a word that was universally acknowledged to mean “information whose dissemination causes communal harm”, they could make precisely the same argument using that word, and I don’t see how the argument would be weakened.
And...I guess I’m confused about your strategy of spreading your proposed meme to serious people. If the goal is to provide the serious people a basis upon which to object, this strikes me as a terrible basis; “your word choice implies you are probably corrupt” is an unpersuasive counter-argument. If the goal is to make the serious people notice at all that the argument is objectionable, then that seems like a fragile and convoluted way of doing that—making people notice that an argument might be flawed, based on easily-changeable word choice, rather than an actual logical flaw. Maybe I’m still not understanding the proposed mechanism of action?