The main reasons I didn’t use that title were that the piece I’m responding to doesn’t (Lack of social grace is also not always epistemic virtue! Sometimes it’s pure unforced error!)
IUUC, the “Epistemic” in the title of LoSGiaEV is intended as the qualifier—LoSG isn’t an unqualified virute. In the first 3 paragraphs LoSGiaEV lays out what it means by that qualifier. I feel like LoSGiaLoS would be improved if it engaged more with the nuances.
I assume you mean “having the potential to become disastrous; at a point of crisis”
Yes
“Hey moron there’s a car coming” is worse than “There’s a car coming” right?
Yes, but both are worse than just shouting “CAR”. Being shouted at feels bad, along with the implications that you weren’t being careful enough / are a bad driver / are stupid for not looking. When I was younger I was in a car with someone who I respected who was texting as they drove. I saw a car coming but was initially socially nervous and tried to politely get their attention. This didn’t work and in the end I had to shout at them. They felt pretty bad about it but it worked.
Or take expressing disapproving comments or judgements; I’ve often seen people give feedback that only points out one or two flaws with no further commentary. I later learned that the person giving feedback loved most of the piece.
I think this should mainly be orthogonal to social grace. In my initial comment I deliberately put in the bits I agreed with, not because I wanted to be socially gracious but because I wanted to accurately portray what I thought.
There’s a great scene where a scientist is in a room full of people congratulating themselves on the Chernobyl disaster being not that big a deal and being well in hand, and stands up to say things are not fine.
Unfortunately I can’t view the video because it’s copyright blocked. It sounds like a good example of when being socially gracious is useful.
My counterpoint would be to consider what culture led to the scientist having to waste his time on multiple explanations. Should a less socially adept scientist have been ignored?
In pushing the culture of LessWrong we should be wary of such problems. My personal feeling is that LessWrong at the moment is in about the right place on the “Gracious” vs “Honest” pareto front for a given social skill level.
Tying this in with the car example, my wife and I have an agreement when one of us driving. If the passenger sees something dangerous that they think the driver might not have seen, they’re allowed to shout this with no concern for social grace and the driver should not take this as a personal slight.
In this post John describes a method by which functioning democracies can attempt to prevent tyranny of the majority—giving each major faction a de-facto veto over new legislation.
Whilst this is a method used in some countries, it is by no means the only, or indeed the most common, method for achieving this. I am only properly familiar with the UK as a counter-example but Dumbledore’s army lists Frace, Germany, Italy and Canada as some others.
The method described in the post is likely more useful in situations where there are 2-3 major factions, whose values are incompatible with each other (slavery in pre civil-war US, religion/ethnic background in Iraq, religion/national identity in Northern Ireland—an example mentioned by Michael Roe). In Northern Ireland, for example, you cannot both want NI to be part of independant Ireland and want it to be part of the UK and you are very unlikely to change your position on the topic. Similarly slave vs non-slave states in pre civil-war america.
If such countries can maybe be thought of as bimodal (or trimodal) distributions of beliefs, other countries can be imagined as having a normal, or at least a relatively flat distribution.
In situations without a solid dichotomy, other methods for preventing tyranny of the majority are used. Some countries have regular coalition building (e.g. Germany), others are just kinda ok with regular opportunities to vote for a new leader. Possibly these solutions are less resilient if the country implementing them becomes more internally polarised and the de facto veto would be a useful backstop but I’m not sure.
Unfortunately this post doesn’t tackle these issues, instead focussing only on the single solution. To improve this post it would need to consider what different methods are used and the situations which make them more or less useful.
Footnote: Even the example of the US isn’t so obvious. Historically (before Nixon) the president and the 2 houses were united about 2/3rds of the time. More recently, power has been shared, but there is no tendency towards house or senate between Democrats & Republicans—each party has won each about 50% of the time since 1981. Before that Democrats controlled both for all but 4 of 48 years.