A closet survey survey

One of the more novel posts on Less Wrong is  Closet Survey #1, asking participants to voice their craziest opinions – ones which almost nobody holds, including the LW readership. The twist is that the resopndendts are self-professed (aspiring) rationalists, so one would expect a great deal of thought in them, not random nonsense. I skimmed the responses, and I offer a list of the interesting ones. Not all of them are as marginal as the survey asks for, but still pretty controversial.

On abortion:

Infants are not people because they do not have significant mental capacities. They should be given the same moral status as, say, dogs. It’s acceptable to euthanize one’s pet dog for many reasons, so it should be okay to kill a newborn for similar reasons.

In other words, the right to an abortion shouldn’t end after the baby is born. Infants probably become more like people than like dogs some time around two years of age, so it should be acceptable to euthanize any infant less than two years old under any circumstances in which it would be acceptable to euthanize a dog.

On war:

Civilians should be considered legitimate targets in warfare, with the decision whether or not to attack them based entirely on expediency. If a cause isn’t worth killing civilians over, it’s not worth killing soldiers over, either.

And a corollary:

Killing enemy soldiers is not much better than killing enemy civilians.

On the sexes:

That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.

On life:

It is immoral not to put a dollar value on life.

On pedophilia (pretty disturbing, actually):

I don’t know if I actually believe this, but I’ve heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren’t necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:

“Child Sexual Abuse does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender.” Simplified, Rind et al. (1998) found that 3 out of every 100 individuals in a CSA population had clinically significant problems (compared to 2 out of every 100 in a general population).

Rind et al. contended that the degree of psychological damage was based on whether the child describes the encounter as consensual or not.

On race (this one is more popular than the others, but still very controversial):

That within human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations.

But:

I believe that people who try and sound all “edgy” and “serious” by intoning what they believe to be “blunt truths” about race/gender differences are incredibly annoying for the most part.

On the supernatural (this one is interesting because the author is an Overcoming Bias contributor, and a rationalist):

The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare.

On information availability:

As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.

Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished. The same applies to laws on libel, slander and exchange of child pornography.

Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.

On western medicine (this is very shocking to the layman and less so for the expert):

It’s generally not worth your time to ask a doctor questions about treatments; the responses you’ll get will be soothing but non-informative.

Doctors probably cause more harm than good, considered over all interventions.

My own contribution is minor. I guess my most unorthodox thought is that bearing children is immoral, although I don’t think the human species should go extinct (don’t ask me how I reconcile that contradiction, I don’t know yet). I intend to write on this more later.

Any others?