From Emil Kirkegaard’s “Sometimes you should speak up with an unpopular view”
“Sometimes you should speak up with an unpopular view”
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It was therefore a pleasure when I remembered that I should read Hrishikesh Joshi’s 2021 book Why It’s OK to Speak Your Mind, because it is one of those short (196 pages) and to-the-point books that remind me why books are still the best for some topics. While one could write a 200 page blogpost, or split it up, a book can package everything you need to know into a single coherent whole.
The topic of the book appeals to me given the current situation with the Guardian/Spiegel/Hate not Hope spy that infiltrated my research institute. The Guardian has been triumphantly posting articles about this, as has their German counterparts (though the institute has nothing to do with Germany). The main lesson from this is that we were not sufficiently cautious against such evil people. Mainly, I think, because our small time operation was hardly of interest to many people. The lackluster attention that the Guardian’s articles have gathered so far seems to confirm this take. While the journalists thought this was super exciting, thinking of themselves as running a modern James Bond, the readers saw this as kinda meh. After all, the entire revelation was that: 10-15 nerds regularly meet to talk about science in private. Not much different from weekly lab meetings at a university.
However, on a personal level, this experience made it very clear to me that there are costs to speaking your mind on some topics. Yet, that is precisely what Joshi tries to convince the reader to do. Helpfully, he provides a synopsis in the introduction, but which is still too long, so I fed it into GPT4o, which gave me this:
The “epistemic commons” refers to the shared pool of knowledge and ideas within a community, which is vital for collective understanding. Social pressure, however, can distort this commons by suppressing certain evidence or perspectives, as seen in events like the Chernobyl disaster. In democracies as well, social pressure can create blind spots, leading to skewed perceptions. Individuals have a duty to resist such pressure and contribute to the epistemic commons by speaking their minds, especially when withholding evidence can harm collective understanding.
Speaking out also serves personal development, as reasoning is fundamentally social. Following thinkers like Aristotle and Socrates, the text argues that living a good life involves actively exercising reason and integrity by expressing one’s views. Philosophers like Mill and Nietzsche, who valued independence and nonconformity, remind us that such expression is crucial to resisting cultural pressures and fostering both individual and societal growth. Ultimately, contributing to the epistemic commons is not only about benefiting society but also about living a meaningful and independent life.
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From this perspective, the way a society figures out what is true and what is false is by having many different actors play each other in a kind of epistemic game. Loosely speaking, you get points when you say things that are true and get vindicated. You lose points for the opposite. The efficiency of this truth-finding system depends upon certain features of it, including its members. One such property is whether people with uncommon or unpopular views will speak up or stay quiet. Sometimes an idea that is currently unpopular is actually true. Anyone who reads history will eventually learn that people in the past thought things that we now consider false and even crazy (e.g. bloodletting). Why then should anyone think our current collective worldview — the current most popular belief on each question — is entirely right? That’s the historical argument for epistemic humility. Are all of our currently common behaviors morally optimal? No one could believe this after reading a bit of history. The only way to figure out what things currently believed are in fact false is to tentatively challenge the popular opinion. That is to say, to speak up. So someone must speak up for the benefit of all of us. Joshi thinks we should do more of this.
However, speaking up has personal costs, so the situation is a kind of tragedy of the (epistemic) commons. By voicing an unpopular opinion, you might be merely considered eccentric, but other times you might be considered evil, or even punished by the state (UK and Germany are infamous for illiberally arresting and jailing people for saying trivial things on Facebook). Most free speech debates concern the state’s ability to punish people (“hate speech” laws, first amendment in USA), but Joshi points out that this is usually a minor part of the cost for a given person. The costs are mostly social. You might not get invited to the next family dinner, or your uncle will ask your mom questions about your beliefs.
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When people justify censorship laws or practices, they almost always do this in terms of the social costs of people believing such things. The exact terms used fluctuate over time, but the idea is always the same: some speech is either directly harmful or leads to harms and should therefore be limited or prevented with fines or other harassment for those who dare say it. It’s a utilitarian argument for censorship. The main issue with these kinds of arguments is that the promoters almost never try to actually justify their claims of harm …
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The arguments for censorship come up frequently regarding research into into genetics, intelligence, race, and especially their combination. What good can come out of this work? Eric Turkheimer famously wrote:
If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history.
But what evidence did Turkheimer supply for this claim? Nothing. Presumably, it was obvious to him. What evidence did people who said similar things about Arthur Jensen’s 1969 article present? Nothing. Steelmanning the position, the best evidence one can present is that occasionally, some crazy person with very racist views who referred to such research goes out shooting members of the race they don’t like (e.g. Breivik, Christchurch). By extrapolation, then, it is presumed that if such research was more popular or more widely disseminated, many more such shootings would occur. Maybe there would be another ethnic cleansing or genocide, holocaust being the go-to example of course (many of the censorship advocates are Jews who often have some ancestor who was killed by the Nazis). I don’t think the historical record bears this out. People have been killing each other for all sorts of reasons since before history began. Genocides and population replacement is common in history and clearly did not need scientific justification. The contribution of a few lone wolf shooters is tiny compared to ordinary citizens killing each other for mundane reasons (money, love/jealousy, offense etc.). But even if one accepts some increased deaths due to lunatics, there may be other outcomes that are even worse if one tries to build a society based on lies. Jensen himself wrote presciently on this in the 1970s, and I won’t go into detail again here. …
Here is an edited extract from The Guardian Weekly [UK] on October 25, 2024, pp.30-32: “An international network of ‘race science’ activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding…the Human Diversity Foundation [which] seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime [and] deployed to ‘argue for more restrictive immigration policies’…
“Erik Ahrens [attending a Thames club-house meeting said] ‘The organisation which I am working with is taking more concrete steps towards the establishment [of a west European higher education] elite…. A researcher for Hope Not Hate spent more than a year posing as a would-be donor, covertly filming a wide circle of activists and academics with an interest in race science and eugenics [including] Matthew Frost…recently editor of the online magazine and podcast Aporia…. Frost and Ahrens were filmed pitching plans….
“Mainstream writers had been commissioned by Aporia for ‘legitimacy via association’…some of the ideas it publishes are gaining ground. Trump, who has promised mass deportations…told an interviewer last month: ‘We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.’…
“Frost claimed the group controlled output from a YouTuber called Edward Dutton [who] said he did not support eugenics and had never signed any contract with HDF…. Frost told the Guardian he did not hold far-right views [and later disconnected from Aporia, HDF and Ahrens].
“HDF’s owner, Emil Kirkegaard, has made similar comments about ‘remigration’… Kirkegaard is an author of more than 40 papers published by the Mankind Quarterly, a British race science journal….he heads what Frost described as ‘underground research wing’ for HDF consisting of about 10 hobby researchers and academics.
“HDF projects…led by Kirkegaard included studies into ‘international dysgenics’, whether dating apps alter human breeding and whether people with progressive opinions are mentally ill.”