The first time I heard a rationalist talk about the Principle of Charity in debate, I thought it was a great idea - obviously we could all stand to treat our opponents’ views with more respect. A big problem in nerd culture generally is a belief that we’re better than everyone else and what they have to say isn’t as important as what we have to say. A community rule to try to engage charitably with the arguments of others seems like it should be good for everyone, so why is the Culture War thread (the place where it’s most enforced) such a cesspool?
The problem with it is that it privileges contemptible positions, because they’re harder for an opponent to criticize without sounding uncharitable. This is most obvious with HBD (“oh, you called my views racist just because I said some races were better than others? That’s uncharitable of you, therefore I get to ignore the rest of your argument and whine about how mean you are! Mods, ban them for violating the Principle of Charity!”) but any position that’s particularly vile or ridiculous benefits from it, as it’s harder for an opponent to criticize it without seeming uncharitable. So we end up with a community filled with neo-reactionaries and eugenicists and misogynists and AI cultists.
There’s something poetic about it - the consequence of a community over-valuing charity is to be filled with people who don’t deserve it.
(edit)
A lot of the comments are variations on “charity is fine, the problem is how SSC applies it differently to different groups” and certainly that’s also a problem, one I don’t wanna minimize; the HBDers will claim we shouldn’t trust the opinions of IQ researchers because they might be biased by PC culture one day, then get angry and rant about “Principle of Charity!!!” the next because someone suggested that Charles Murray might be biased on racial issues given his history of literally burning crosses. And of course if Scott sees a paper with a pro-feminist conclusion he’ll dissect it under a microscope looking for bias, but if a paper has a pro-libertarian conclusion (like the one he linked about how great payday loans are, which was funded by a payday loan company), we have to embrace it or we’re uncharitable.
But I still feel that even if applied 100% fairly, there’s an inherent problem with the principle itself, simply because it’s more difficult to show charity to more repugnant views, which makes them benefit in a subculture that forces everyone to show them charity. Even absent SSC’s other problems, that alone is going to slowly warp the subculture towards them.
It’s a good idea when talking to say, your random Trump supporter in Indiana or Nebraska who simply doesn’t know any better.
It’s a bad idea when talking to people with political goals that use said principle of charity to put forth terrible ideas.
It’s doesn’t just privilege contemptible ideas; it also privileges people with nothing at stake. It privileges the privileged. I’m sure someone could, without being Uncharitable, write a boringly rational and logorrheic counterargument to e.g. a claim that racism doesn’t exist in America anymore. White Americans probably do that sometimes. But it’s a lot harder to take that idea seriously enough to be Charitable if you get followed around in stores, or you’re afraid of staying in remote smaller towns after sundown, or you’ve had to give your kids The Talk, or you’ve had slurs yelled at you. It’s like trying to explain the concept of left and right directionality - it’s too hard to even imagine what it’s like to not understand that - except your audience also has an unconscious (at best) bias against understanding it. The only people who are willing to waste their patience relitigating this on the internet are the people for whom it is an abstraction and a novelty, not something they live with every day. Thus you end up with a group of white American men trying to solve race relations, gender equity, European politics, etc. all among themselves.
I’m not sure the issues with SSC can really be explained by the principle of charity, because SSC is not run according to it. In a previous thread here, I found a couple of entertaining posts from over there including a self-described uncharitable post arguing that a large number of researchers were anti-science leftists (currently floating around +50), and a response showing that that poster was racist (previously downvoted, now on +2 or so). A direct demonstration that someone has bad intentions on a topic is dismissed by the community as ad hominem when it’s an SSCer being called out for racism, but dismissing academics who don’t agree with you as leftists afraid of science is A-OK.
The “principle of charity” is consistently applied to defend people who fit in with the general consensus on matters, and questions about their motives or intentions are dismissed as ad hominem. Left wing positions are not approached charitably, and Alexander’s own “Conflict versus Mistake” post is a beautiful demonstration of the lack of willingness to actually engage with left wing positions, even when that is his stated intention.
As explained by other responders here, the root of these issues is more the limited demographics, obsession with IQ, and also the tendency to moderate based on tone rather than content. These have created a community with a consensus view that allows scientific racism to run rife.
It works well enough in one on one conversations, but it can be a disastrous principle to follow when you’re trying to judge an argument between two other people. Whoever is making the worse case, whoever seems more illogical, uninformed, and dishonest, is more in need of your charity, and therefore you can get more Virtue Points by supporting them. The person who seems more reasonable doesn’t need your charity, because they’re just a boring ingroup member.
It can turn into a strange form of doublethink, where you’re constantly trying to signal agreement and tolerance for opinions which seem wrong to you, while disregarding reasonable opinions because they’re passé and about to go out of fashion. I stopped posting once I figured out that Scott was less interested in having fair truth seeking in his comment section than he was in getting Neo-Nazis to think he was cool.
It only stands a chance of being good if you recognise that being charitable is sometimes hard. Not emotionally hard, necessarily, but that you genuinely may not know what the other person’s argument “should have been”, and that the first priority when trying to be charitable this way should be ensuring that you do. Freely substituting the closest thing to their argument that you feel is suitable is ultimately a form of arguing with yourself and can’t be based on any knowledge you don’t actually have, which is enough of a disadvantage to make the whole thing useless.
As with many of the rationalist community’s attempted principles, I think most of what’s lacking is the execution. If it’s an idea they like, then “charity” means “pretend they gave a vastly better argument than they actually gave, and assume all of their assertions are true”. If it’s an idea they don’t, then it’s “assume this person believes this misguided nonsense out of the genuine goodness of their heart and a patronisingly understandable form of ignorance”, shifting the concept of ‘charity’ to a place where it’s irrelevant.
I mean, “charity” in the context of the principle of charity doesn’t mean “nice” or “polite”, it just means that you’re interpreting the person’s argument as the strongest argument they might plausibly be making, based on what they said. It’s essentially the opposite of straw-manning. But it’s generally consistent with the principle of charity to call someone a racist fuckhead or what have you, so long as it’s intended as either a general statement about their character or it’s consistent with the strongest plausible reading of what they said. The point is mostly that you stop and think a minute about whether the person might be making a non-terrible argument that you initially mistook for a terrible argument, since otherwise you might get a bunch of false positives on your bullshit detector. But a lot of things are still going to be bullshit after you do that, and that’s fine.
If someone says you’re violating the principle of charity, it’s incumbent upon them to present the more charitable case they think you missed, and you’re within your rights to push back if their reading seems implausibly charitable. Of course, it’s gonna be a popularity contest and people will downvote you for saying stuff they don’t like regardless, but the principle of charity isn’t really germane to that.
There is the issue of racists who use bait-and-switch tactics to try to advance uncontroversial positions while implying controversial ones, to try to smuggle credibility toward the latter. I think you can generally deal with this just by being explicit about the fact that the “buried” positions are bogus and don’t follow from the uncontroversial ones.
The principle of charity long predates international “rationalism.” There’s a difference between the principle if charity used correctly and incorrectly. The point is to refute the strongest conceivable argument of a position, not to give the strongest argument a new platform. The principle of charity without refutation is just making the argument.
Rationalists have no sense of social context and want to treat everything like a hyper-idealized Habermas-ian public sphere. There’s obviously a spectrum of charitability from high (e.g., academic peer-reviewed paper) to low (random person on reddit with 5,000 posts on /r/the_donald).
Edit: Good Terry Eagleton on this.
Not really. The principle of charity alone is not a bad idea. It’s basic kindness and human decency. The problem is elsewhere.
I will say it again. When you have a community comprised mostly of libertarian (and adjacent) high IQ white people with more or less similar backgrounds, you will eventually result in a cesspool like that. I was skimming some replies to the race-iq links earlier and I saw a comment which said that there are no differences in the quality of education between blacks and whites in america. The comment was upvoted, with no reply at all. This is a fundamental denial of reality. If you had a black person in the community that has faced the issues and is well-read on that, they would have replied. But no one in the community has the background to even care about this besides asserting that there are no differences to support their white superiority.
There is a point where you have to decide that you need to change the community. You can do that by trying to attract more diverse people, something that would be considered a heresy within rationalists.
Or you have to decide that there are some views that are not worth discussing anymore, like white nationalism for instance and discriminating people based on their race maybe as a starting point.
I think it’s a good idea to assume good faith at first. That’s a defeasible proposition, though, and it doesn’t mean you have to approve of them, just to read the strongest version of what they might have meant into their words. When someone is clearly not in good faith, charity is no longer very useful.
The most important thing about charity/steelmanning/etc is that it only actually works for its intended purpose if you really do it across the board, not just when convenient. I think that’s more what the Rationalists do wrong.
Yeah. A big part of it is that once people have had a chance to associate with others who care about something political more than they care about how things work, they’ll reach whatever conclusions they want to. Once you’re surrounded by people like that, all the rationality techniques and literature on heuristics and biases in the world won’t be enough to save you. The bottleneck on figuring things out, then, is that you end up steering your exploration of the world in the wrong way, by having the wrong intentions.
If we grant that the actual problem is that people don’t have the right intentions, then the principle of charity becomes an obstacle. The ultimate insult in rationality and EA seems to be to criticize someone’s intentions–which is no coincidence, since the belief that everyone’s intentions are honorable is the one belief that rationality needs to protect more than any other.
It’s a good principle, but any good idea can be turned into a bad one if you do it hard enough.
The other problem is a rationalist habit they’ve had for years - when justifying themselves, they’ll bend over backwards to find a context in which a reprehensible statement isn’t reprehensible. Up to inventing one. This is commonly invoked to defend Scott’s awful posts, for example, and treat them as not being in the context of all his other awful posts or his awful blog roll when it was full of literal white nationalists and scientific racists and so on.
The Principle of Charity is a great idea.
The problem is it’s been weaponized on SSC. Charity is something demanded from the left towards right wing views, no matter how odious, yet conveniently never given back towards even the most basic, mainstream liberal views.
It’s only a bad idea because they apply it asymmetrically. You’ll never see them being “charitable” to crazy far-left ideas.
In debate, the principle of charity is a suggestion that one be prosocial in one particular way. Like every way of being prosocial, it leaves you open to exploitation if applied indiscriminately.
The principle I think is prior to all these nice ideas is reciprocity. If your opponent isn’t demonstrating charity, then you do not owe it to them.
Sometimes it’s still be a good idea to offer unreciprocated charity, when the debate is primarily for the benefit of an audience who might be swayed by one side appearing clearly more prosocial.
The defense lawyer doesn’t need to do the prosecution’s job for him; debate is, at the very bones, an adversarial system where advocates of a position should be able to defend it readily and easily, if it holds merit.
Saying we need to be kind to otherwise misunderstood or scandalized positions is sort of the point; they are muddled in reasoning and have hideous implications. You’d have to be a secret admirer to hear out diabolical and hateful rhetoric.