[sorry if this is a repost; my original attempt to post this was blocked as comment spam because it had too many links to other OB posts]

I've always hated that Dante quote. The hottest place in Hell is reserved for brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and people who use flamethrowers on puppies - not for the Swiss.

I came to the exact opposite conclusion when pondering the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Most of the essays I've seen in newspapers and on bulletin boards are impassioned pleas to designate one side or the other as Evildoers and the other as the Brave Heroic Resistance by citing who stole whose land first, whose atrocities were slightly less provoked, which violations of which cease-fire were dastardly betrayals and which were necessary pre-emptive actions, et cetera.

Not only is this issue so open to bias that we have little hope of getting to the truth, but I doubt there's much truth to be attained at all. Since "policy debates should not appear one-sided" and "our enemies are not innately evil", it seems pretty likely that they're two groups of people who both are doing what they honestly think is right and who both have some good points.

This isn't an attempt to run away from the problem, it's the first step toward solving the real problem. The real problem isn't "who's the hero and who's the terrorist scumbag?" it's "search solution-space for the solution that leads to the least suffering and the most peace and prosperity in the Middle East" There is a degree to which finding out who's the evildoer is useful here so we can punish them as a deterrent, but it's a pretty small degree, and the amount of energy people spend trying to determine it is completely out of proportion to the minimal gains it might produce.

And "how do we minimize suffering in the Middle East?" may be an easier question than "who's to blame?" It's about distributing land and resources to avoid people being starved or killed or oppressed, more a matter for economists and political scientists then for heated Internet debate. I've met conservatives who loathe the Palestinians and liberals who hate all Israelis who when asked supported exactly the same version of the two-state solution, but who'd never realized they agreed because they'd never gotten so far as "solution" before.

My defense of neutrality, then, would be something like this: human beings have the unfortunate tendency not to think of an issue as "finding the best solution in solution-space" but as "let's make two opposing sides at the two extremes, who both loathe each other with the burning intensity of a thousand suns". The issue then becomes "Which of these two sides is the Good and True and Beautiful, and which is Evil and Hates Our Freedom?" Thus the Democrats versus the Republicans or the Communists versus the Objectivists. I'd be terrified if any of them got one hundred percent control over policy-making. Thus, the Wise try to stay outside of these two opposing sides in order to seek the best policy solution in solution-space without being biased or distracted by the heroic us vs. them drama - and to ensure that both sides will take their proposed solution seriously without denouncing them as an other-side stooge.

A "neutral" of this sort may not care who started it, may not call one side "right" or "wrong", may claim to be above the fray, may even come up with a solution that looks like a "compromise" to both sides, but isn't abdicating judgment or responsibility.

Not that taking a side is never worth it. The Axis may have had one or two good points about the WWI reparations being unfair and such, but on the whole the balance of righteousness in WWII was so clearly on the Allies' side that the most practical way to save the world was to give the Allies all the support you could. It's always a trade-off between how ideal a solution is and how likely it is to be implemented.

facepalm And I even read the Sundering series before I wrote that :(

Coming up with narratives that turn the Bad Guys into Good Guys could make good practice for rationalists, along the lines of Nick Bostrom's Apostasy post. Obviously I'm not very good at it.

GeorgeNYC, very good points.

Darnit TGGP, you're right. Right. From now on I use Lord of the Rings for all "sometimes things really are black and white" examples. Unless anyone has some clever reason why elves are worse than Sauron.

Paolo Freire said, "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

Consequences-wise, yes. But many people may not realize this fact, not realize its importance, or actually be working on something more important; and while pointing this out to them is good, doing so less than extremely carefully, I think, comes off as "you're with us or you're against us", and is alienating. (Especially if they think they do have something more important.)

Yvain, the most murderous dictator the world had ever seen and the biggest imperialist power of the day were on the side of the Allies and if our country had gone to war with his (and been as succesful) I am sure you would be talking about how lopsided the scales were in the other direction, having had it drummed into you through school and popular culture.

Hold on. Neutrality can also be, and often is, a meta-value judgment about the importance of the considerations that would lead to non-neutrality. The international relations case is a precise example of this.. Sometimes it really doesn't matter who started it. It's not just laziness to say that it doesn't matter who comitted the first Israel-Palestine atrocity: both have committed so many atrocities that the additional moral opprobrium that comes from having started it is just rounding error. And raising "they started it" as a defense of the next atrocity is just a distraction from the fact that the atrocities are indefensible. Same for the Hutus and the Tutsis, and the Hindus and Muslims in India, and so forth. The moral importance of assigning blame for generations and generations of back-and-forth atrocities when both sides have megagallons of blood on their hands pales in the face of the moral importance of stopping the killing.

On a smaller scale, this holds for the schoolchildren too. If two kids are fighting on the schoolyard, sometimes it matters who started it (one kid is a bully), but often it doesn't - if one kid insults then thr other pushes then the other punches and the other stabs, both are so guilty that "he started it" is nothing more than a distraction to get out of warranted punishment.

On political issues, neutrality too can be a principled position, either because one has very low confidence in one's evidence or simply because one thinks the question isn't one that is appropriate to be resolved by politics.

"The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral." -- Dante Alighieri, famous hell expert Wrong.

Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who.

There is some incredible insight hovering in the background here but I cannot put my finger on it.

I am am trained as a lawyer and therefore "disputes" are my livelihood. That being said, I have engaged in all sorts of "dispute" resolutions over the years from jury trials to bench trials to arbitrations to mediations to just simply getting people together and trying to work things out.

The schoolyard fight example is intriguing. We speak of many things when dealing with dispute resolution. I think, if asked, most people would claim that one of the prime goals would be justice or fairness. You are correct that the goal of the teacher is to end the fight. However, in that circumstance, he or she is merely playing "cop" as opposed to "judge." I think it is fair to say that if a fight is occurring we want our police to stop it and not really worry about blame. Likewise, if there is a genocide occurring I would think that the initial priority of our government is to stop it.

However, therein lies some of the insight. We would probably be outraged if the police suddenly started "judging" on the spot and were not trying to merely "stop" the fight but perhaps assist those in the "right" as it may be.

The issue of "judging" is therefore different from the initial policing of an event.

Interestingly enough, I think that we would not actually want the policeman to also be the judge. While we would insist on "neutrality" in responding to the fight, we would probably not be happy that the policeman also judged the "fault." You would think that this person would be in the best position. However, in fact, he or she may not be. This person may have come along at a time when the victim appeared to be the aggressor. This makes he/she now a partial witness and therefore comes to the dispute with a predisposed "bias."

This now poses the question of what kind of "judge" do we want.

What is interesting is the social status involvement. I had not really thought about it that way. While judges are (as you point out) willing to make decisions (within constraints as I will discuss in a bit), I have noticed that arbitrators (ostensibly private judges) are somewhat less willing to do that. They sometimes try to play the "wise neutral" and come down with decisions that are ambiguous. Mediators are arguably there to "mediate" and therefore should be neutral. Nevertheless, that "neutrality" seems to get in the way sometimes. The best mediators sometime resort to tricks to get agreements. They give the appearance of leaning your way in order to get you to agree.

What I can say is that getting to a decision in our system is a long and difficult task. Even in situations where both parties are eager to get a decision, any decision, at times judges may try to dodge the decision. There are, in fact, constraints on judges that are separate and distinct from those on layers or lay people. Judges are worried about being overturned by appellate courts. They have their own reputation for efficiency to consider. They also have judicial precedent to consider. These are al "other" outside factors that serve to limit their decisions or provide some other basis aside from just personal whim. (A "proxy" for neutrality?).

This is a bit of a meandering discussion. However, the insight that an individual does not want to appear to "lower" themselves to the level of the disputants is an interesting insight that bears further thought. The "false" neutrality based on consideration of social standing could be a bar to achieving optimal dispute resolution. Perhaps there are situations where attempts to achieve resolution have failed not because the involved individual were not "high" level enough but maybe they were, in fact too high up the social scale and that we can expect their reaction to be "neutral."

After all, the concept of a jury trial originates as a jury of our "peers" not our overlords or those less than us. I had always thought that this was concerned with "bias" or perhaps knowledge of similar circumstances. I thought it was a system designed to "protect" those being judged. However, maybe it is really more than a "fairness" issue. Maybe it intuitively recognizes the inefficiency of having those higher (or lower) than us make decisions? Those higher than us may be less inclined to really appreciate the importance of those decisions and thereby default to "neutrality." Those lower than us may be too eager to make decisions to establish their standing in society.

"Why does ancient Egypt, which had good records on many other matters, lack any records of Jews having ever been there?"

Of course the words "Jews" isn't used, but it is well-documented that West-Semites lived in Egypt. (They even ruled it for a while as the Hyksos dynasty.) There is also the Mernepthah Stele, with a small mention of "Israel."

Though we do have written records from ancient Egypt, they are nowhere near complete or consistent enough for the absence of evidence to be treated as useful evidence of absence.

Not that I'm claiming to be wise or anything.

Regarding Egyptians and Jews, why the Egyptians left no records of the Jews, I answer you with a question: Why you cannot find anything related to the Jews in the stettl I was born in, Jaszbereny, Hungary? No one in Jaszbereny has any idea that half of the population used to be Jewish, that there were three large synagogues, that it had been a center of Jews scholarship. It appears that neither the Egyptian wanted to remember the Jews.

Regarding courtroom judges:

I suspect that the big reason why they don't lose their reputation for impartiality simply by passing judgment is because in their situation, passing judgment ends the argument. Authoritatively.

A variation of this that I am very guilty of is only fighting my arguments on the other party's territory.

Instead of taking a position myself I just "try to understand" the other party's argument and in the process lead them down the garden path to a contradiction. When pressed on what I think, I usually reply "I don't know" or "I'm not sure."

Socrates seems to have fathered this tactic. He never claimed to be wise (but we call him wise).

Respectfully, I don't think he ended up all that wise, and neither am I when I argue this way. It does make me seem very wise, if only because it confounds my counterparties and I leave no target for counter-attack.

My main take-away message: There is a difference between: Passing neutral judgement, declining to invest marginal resources, pretending that either of these is a mark of deep wisdom. Sometimes being neutral is wise, sometimes just lazy. Not taking a side is taking the stronger side.

Let me stevenkaas this one for you:

"The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who [disagree with my politics]." -- John F. Kennedy, misquoter

I remember being guilty of this insidious neutrality, consciously aware that my stance was on very shaky ground, and yet was still prepared to stand my ground. It definitely didn't have the status elevating payoff I would have expected, which is good, because I've never said I was completely neutral about abortion since then. More importantly, it helped catalyze a slow revolution where I began to analyze my cached thoughts, resulting in some surprising reversals so far.

I'm not sure about the judges example. There have been certain judges who've taken sides on high-profile issues (like abortion or gay marriage) and consequently their reputation turned to mud amongst those on the other side of the issue.

[T]rying to signal wisdom by refusing to make guesses - refusing to sum up evidence - refusing to pass judgment...

Do you think this is involved in the general reluctance to assign probabilities in the absence of scientific frequency data (e.g., to assign probabilities to nuclear risks so that one can attempt expected value calculations)?

"propounding neutrality is just as attackable as propounding any particular side."

Indeed. (I hope Robin is reading.)

The last time the Great Powers got involved in taking sides on minor disputes WWI happened.

It is functional for leaders to be more reluctant than most to "take sides" in common disputes. Our leaders do this, and so one can in fact signal high status by being "above" common disputes. Our leaders are in fact wiser than the average person, and in addition we want to say they are even wiser, so it makes sense to call people who signal high status as "wise." Furthermore, on average across human disputes with near equal support on the two sides the middle position is in fact the more correct position. So in this sense it does in fact signal wisdom to take a middle position.

Paolo Freire said, "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

If the outcome of their conflict is not being affected by your existence, it can be said that you are neutral. If you disagree with me, I would be interested to hear what definition of "neutral" you are using.

With international affairs, isn't stopping the aggression the main priority? That is stopping the death and suffering of humans on both sides? Sure it would be good to punish the aggressors rather than the retaliators but if that doesn't stop the fighting it just means more people are dying.

Also there is a difference between the adult and the child, the adult relies on the law of the land for retaliation the child takes it upon himself when he continues the fight. That is the child is a vigilante, and he may punish disproportionately e.g. breaking a leg for a dead leg.

Neutrality can be an important strategy. Let's take international affairs. A neutral country that seldom takes a side in a dispute can end up being valuable as a go-between. It provides neutral grounds for peace talks can can broker deals between belligerents. A party trusted by both sides of a dispute can smooth the peace process.

Similarly with leaders. To be effective, a leader needs to be trusted by the tribe. The leader's job is to resolve disputes (note that kings used to have supreme judicial authority). Joining the fray should generally be avoided. There are obvious exceptions where the leader needs to take a stand, but for the most part he should focus on conflict resolution over partisanship.

Some people also just have a personal style wherein they sit back and watch the argument unfold while carefully weighing it in their minds. Like the Ents, they take a long time to decide anything, but when they do they have a well-reasoned position that they're not afraid to put forth and defend. They only appear to stay above the fray.

As the article points out, neutrality is often abused by people who don't have anything to say or are too timid to pass judgment. There are several good reasons for being neutral, but appearing wise isn't one of them.

Note: Dante had a special place outside of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven devoted to those who never took a stand.

This argument reminds me heavily of Ronald Dworkin's paper "Objectivity and truth" , although he constrains his argument to the domain of moral decisions.

"Trying to signal wisdom by refusing to make guesses - refusing to sum up evidence - refusing to pass judgment."

I use this non-committal stalling defense when I have not concluded which response will gain the most / cost the least, or when the question is one I don't want to answer for fear it will diminish my status, or for which I have not yet devised a rationalisation.

Is Robin Hanson "pretending to be wise" when he says:

"My core politics is "I don't know"; most people seem far too confident in their political opinions."?

How much does it matter today who started the first world war? Daniel Kahneman says something to the effect that it isn't particularly fruitful to look for which party to blame in a dispute as each party will be biased to believe that it is right, that it was injured,that the others are to blame. Taking sides would then just be the equivalent of entering into the fray, rather than trying to pull the combatants apart. In a second stage, which is the stage of trying to resolve the causes of the conflict, discussion of the merits of the situation may be relevant, but typically we just need to move on because its hard to get people to accept they have been wrong. Its much easier for them to accept they have been defeated.

Try the neutrality sex position? Even missionaries are known to recommend it.

@hvkhln

I said that just incase they had any empathetic qualms. I know they don't really need my permission.