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This is: Philosophical Landmines, published by Philosophical Landmines on the LessWrong.
Related: Cached Thoughts
Last summer I was talking to my sister about something. I don't remember the details, but I invoked the concept of "truth", or "reality" or some such. She immediately spit out a cached reply along the lines of "But how can you really say what's true?".
Of course I'd learned some great replies to that sort of question right here on LW, so I did my best to sort her out, but everything I said invoked more confused slogans and cached thoughts. I realized the battle was lost. Worse, I realized she'd stopped thinking. Later, I realized I'd stopped thinking too.
I went away and formulated the concept of a "Philosophical Landmine".
I used to occasionally remark that if you care about what happens, you should think about what will happen as a result of possible actions. This is basically a slam dunk in everyday practical rationality, except that I would sometimes describe it as "consequentialism".
The predictable consequence of this sort of statement is that someone starts going off about hospitals and terrorists and organs and moral philosophy and consent and rights and so on. This may be controversial, but I would say that causing this tangent constitutes a failure to communicate the point. Instead of prompting someone to think, I invoked some irrelevant philosophical cruft. The discussion is now about Consequentialism, the Capitalized Moral Theory, instead of the simple idea of thinking through consequences as an everyday heuristic.
It's not even that my statement relied on a misused term or something; it's that an unimportant choice of terminology dragged the whole conversation in an irrelevant and useless direction.
That is, "consequentialism" was a Philosophical Landmine.
In the course of normal conversation, you passed through an ordinary spot that happened to conceal the dangerous leftovers of past memetic wars. As a result, an intelligent and reasonable human was reduced to a mindless zombie chanting prerecorded slogans. If you're lucky, that's all. If not, you start chanting counter-slogans and the whole thing goes supercritical.
It's usually not so bad, and no one is literally "chanting slogans". There may even be some original phrasings involved. But the conversation has been derailed.
So how do these "philosophical landmine" things work?
It looks like when a lot has been said on a confusing topic, usually something in philosophy, there is a large complex of slogans and counter-slogans installed as cached thoughts around it. Certain words or concepts will trigger these cached thoughts, and any attempt to mitigate the damage will trigger more of them. Of course they will also trigger cached thoughts in other people, which in turn... The result being that the conversation rapidly diverges from the original point to some useless yet heavily discussed attractor.
Notice that whether a particular concept will cause trouble depends on the person as well as the concept. Notice further that this implies that the probability of hitting a landmine scales with the number of people involved and the topic-breadth of the conversation.
Anyone who hangs out on 4chan can confirm that this is the approximate shape of most thread derailments.
Most concepts in philosophy and metaphysics are landmines for many people. The phenomenon also occurs in politics and other tribal/ideological disputes. The ones I'm particularly interested in are the ones in philosophy, but it might be useful to divorce the concept of "conceptual landmines" from philosophy in particular.
Here's some common ones in philosophy:
Morality
Consequentialism
Truth
Reality
Consciousness
Rationality
Quantum
Landmines in a topic make it really hard to discuss ideas or do work in these fields, because chances are, some...
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