The asymmetry is not up/down, but political motivation/incompetence. Chomsky is derided because his underestimate of the Khmer Rouge atrocities was the result of his ideological sympathy *for the Khmer Rouge*.
The same holds for Holocaust denial, which is usually similarly politically motivated. There are autist/contrarian types who underestimate Holocaust deaths for reasons independent of anti-semitism/neo-Nazism, and to the extent they are not grouped in with the latter, they are not subject to the same derision.
In the climate change example, it's true that there's no motivational asymmtery because Greta and deniers are both politically motivated, but both are the objects of intense ridicule!
I would elaborate on this a little bit more and say that denying atrocities of those you sympathise with has the flavor of covering up their crimes.
Incorrectly thinking that a local criminal did not commit murder is one thing. Trying to help them get away with murder because you're a member of the same gang is another. It makes you a party to the crime, and any future ones perpetrated as a result of the killer's release.
And when it comes to political agendas, particularly those of groups like communists and Nazis, we have reason to believe they'll kill again if they ever "go free".
Yes, thank you! Arguably what Chomsky did is comparable to some right-wing authoritarian or Fascist sympathizer in the West in 1942 simply refusing to believe that a state that was close ideologically to himself could be so extraordinarily brutal and murderous and thus disbelieving reports of the Nazi Holocaust before the Allies ended up confirming them after liberating Poland and conquering Germany in 1945.
Any charity principle towards a professional activist is ridiculous. Beyond the inevitable bad faith of professional revolutionaries, he was in the wrong side of history:
Weird to write this and then carve out an exception for the Holocaust. The 6 million is *the* ur-example of a sacred atrocity that you aren't allowed to deny. Why is it so special? What's really the point of arguing against the idea of sacred atrocities if you're going to exempt the main one that most people care about?
I don’t think the controversy has to do with incorrect estimations, but downplaying atrocity because you happen to be ideologically aligned with the regime committing that atrocity.
It’s one thing to say “I analyzed the situation and I think there were less political deaths in the Khmer Rogue than reported.” It’s another to deny the existence of atrocity, while focusing and overestimating others based on your preexisting political beliefs.
Saying that someone who was murdered was not really murdered seems worse to people than saying someone who isn’t dead was murdered. Hence the asymmetry. We ought to condition our probability estimates based on the consequences of being wrong, no?
I guess what's really happening is that when someone underplays an atrocity or underestimates the number of the dead, people attribute an ulterior motive for it, as in "you are really downplaying the number of the Jews killed in a Holocaust because you also are an apologist for the Nazi regime." Or "you are downplaying the severity of global warming because you are employed by a coal company and your job depends on it"
There usually isn't an ulterior motive one can attribute for overestimating the casualties or the severity of an issue. Not that I can think of. Attention seeking maybe? But certainly there ought to be such cases too. A foundation for the homeless juicing the number of homeless to collect more donations?
So I guess the asymmetry may be justified in those cases where the person is underplaying due to some ulterior motive. In Chomsky's case, a lot of people suspected he downplayed the numbers because Khmer Rouge were communists.
Also tangentially relevant is the Faurisson affair, where Chomsky defended a Holocaust denier on freedom of speech grounds:
I like the main the main thrust of this piece, but ultimately, the price one pays, and with whom, still just comes down to people's shitty partisan politics.
Chomsky is ridiculed for underestimating by people to his right because he obviously has a bias when it comes to America, as he finds America uniquely bad. It colors his worldview.
Thunberg is mocked relentlessly by those to her right for being a chicken little.
You say that the difference between "X is a problem that can destroy the world" and "X is a problem that is on the scale of malaria" is larger than the difference "X is a problem on the scale of malaria" and "X is not a problem". Intuitively, your assertion seems wrong. The former two groups both agree that there is a problem but disagree on priorities. [What follows is elaborating on this intuition.]
[Elaboration: If someone agrees with you that something is a serious problem even if they massively overestimate the scope, they would be much more likely to take on minor inconveniences to solve the problem so are more likely to be allies (even if you are more of a reformist).
I am not a welfarist, but if I were I think I would prefer vegan abolitionists to factory farm apologists because the former are more likely to want to help me change farms to have higher welfare. While our beliefs are different (both welfarists and farm apologists probably believe in some form of animal agriculture), I would expect the radicals who agreed on the problem would be more useful to me than even moderates who do not.
If radicals overestimate the importance of specific problems that I am against (more moderately), they may even be willing to make sacrifices that I would not make. This can be a double-edged sword but may nevertheless be useful. The radicals can be abandoned and will lose the critical mass needed for action if they cannot convince enough moderates by the time the problem is sufficiently resolved. They are conditional allies. Moderates on the other side of the issue are enemies.]
As @Philip said, there might have very well been an ideological element in Chomsky downplaying the Khmer Rouge's atrocities. Specifically, as a leftist, he might not have believed that a leftist movement can be as horrible as the Khmer Rouge actually was.
This actually isn't different from someone who is sympathetic to Fascism or at least right-wing authoritarianism and who downplays reports of the Holocaust in 1942 because they simply can't imagine a Fascist or right-wing authoritarian regime engaging in such levels of brutality and atrociousness.
Good piece: thanks. Speaking only for me, and I appreciate your reminding me, I probably have greater dislike for Chomsky and Thunberg than their respective object-level positions justify (which would indeed justify plenty of dislike, especially in Thunberg's case) specifically because how they were/are valorized and turned into celebrities.
Hmm, mostly peaceful protests indeed. I'd probably suggest denying the somewhat better documented Taiping Rebellion myself, but since Hong Xiuquan (assigned Hong Huoxiu at birth) also thought he was more or less the son of God aka Shangdi, denying those atrocities probably gets you more mixed up in Church-state affairs, and perhaps the validation of theism, than you really want to approach.
AFAIK An Lushan did not claim to be in any way supernaturally connected; he was not of Han ethnicity but then neither was Hong Xiuquan; I'm not sure how the dueling claims to ethnic victimhood play out between Hakka and Sogdian/Gokturk. In the US at least it would start with which could be somehow construed as being more isomorphic to Black (Hakka, I would say).
The asymmetry is not up/down, but political motivation/incompetence. Chomsky is derided because his underestimate of the Khmer Rouge atrocities was the result of his ideological sympathy *for the Khmer Rouge*.
The same holds for Holocaust denial, which is usually similarly politically motivated. There are autist/contrarian types who underestimate Holocaust deaths for reasons independent of anti-semitism/neo-Nazism, and to the extent they are not grouped in with the latter, they are not subject to the same derision.
In the climate change example, it's true that there's no motivational asymmtery because Greta and deniers are both politically motivated, but both are the objects of intense ridicule!
I would elaborate on this a little bit more and say that denying atrocities of those you sympathise with has the flavor of covering up their crimes.
Incorrectly thinking that a local criminal did not commit murder is one thing. Trying to help them get away with murder because you're a member of the same gang is another. It makes you a party to the crime, and any future ones perpetrated as a result of the killer's release.
And when it comes to political agendas, particularly those of groups like communists and Nazis, we have reason to believe they'll kill again if they ever "go free".
Yes, thank you! Arguably what Chomsky did is comparable to some right-wing authoritarian or Fascist sympathizer in the West in 1942 simply refusing to believe that a state that was close ideologically to himself could be so extraordinarily brutal and murderous and thus disbelieving reports of the Nazi Holocaust before the Allies ended up confirming them after liberating Poland and conquering Germany in 1945.
Extremely dark final line. ;)
Any charity principle towards a professional activist is ridiculous. Beyond the inevitable bad faith of professional revolutionaries, he was in the wrong side of history:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vjQ5BhKnDyY35dXXf/chomsky-vs-pax-democratica
In answer to your final question, the Black Book of Communism's death toll stats are almost certainly wrong.
Weird to write this and then carve out an exception for the Holocaust. The 6 million is *the* ur-example of a sacred atrocity that you aren't allowed to deny. Why is it so special? What's really the point of arguing against the idea of sacred atrocities if you're going to exempt the main one that most people care about?
Fuck jews
I don’t think the controversy has to do with incorrect estimations, but downplaying atrocity because you happen to be ideologically aligned with the regime committing that atrocity.
It’s one thing to say “I analyzed the situation and I think there were less political deaths in the Khmer Rogue than reported.” It’s another to deny the existence of atrocity, while focusing and overestimating others based on your preexisting political beliefs.
Saying that someone who was murdered was not really murdered seems worse to people than saying someone who isn’t dead was murdered. Hence the asymmetry. We ought to condition our probability estimates based on the consequences of being wrong, no?
I guess what's really happening is that when someone underplays an atrocity or underestimates the number of the dead, people attribute an ulterior motive for it, as in "you are really downplaying the number of the Jews killed in a Holocaust because you also are an apologist for the Nazi regime." Or "you are downplaying the severity of global warming because you are employed by a coal company and your job depends on it"
There usually isn't an ulterior motive one can attribute for overestimating the casualties or the severity of an issue. Not that I can think of. Attention seeking maybe? But certainly there ought to be such cases too. A foundation for the homeless juicing the number of homeless to collect more donations?
So I guess the asymmetry may be justified in those cases where the person is underplaying due to some ulterior motive. In Chomsky's case, a lot of people suspected he downplayed the numbers because Khmer Rouge were communists.
Also tangentially relevant is the Faurisson affair, where Chomsky defended a Holocaust denier on freedom of speech grounds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair
Overestimating casualties can be (and often is) equally ideologically motivated. See the Victims of Communism foundation among many other cases.
Likewise, overestimating climate change may be a ploy to enforce socialism as the claimed only solution to the problem.
I believe in all of the numbers ever in the world especially the one that have to do with WWII.
We can read what Chomsky wrote: https://chomsky.info/19770625/
The criticism about Chomsky re: Cambodia is about more than under counting or overcounting. He blames the US.
Greta Thunberg is not subjected to ridicule?
I like the main the main thrust of this piece, but ultimately, the price one pays, and with whom, still just comes down to people's shitty partisan politics.
Chomsky is ridiculed for underestimating by people to his right because he obviously has a bias when it comes to America, as he finds America uniquely bad. It colors his worldview.
Thunberg is mocked relentlessly by those to her right for being a chicken little.
I don't believe that Gretw Thunberg has ever said that climate change will lead humanity to extinction. What is your source for this claim?
You say that the difference between "X is a problem that can destroy the world" and "X is a problem that is on the scale of malaria" is larger than the difference "X is a problem on the scale of malaria" and "X is not a problem". Intuitively, your assertion seems wrong. The former two groups both agree that there is a problem but disagree on priorities. [What follows is elaborating on this intuition.]
[Elaboration: If someone agrees with you that something is a serious problem even if they massively overestimate the scope, they would be much more likely to take on minor inconveniences to solve the problem so are more likely to be allies (even if you are more of a reformist).
I am not a welfarist, but if I were I think I would prefer vegan abolitionists to factory farm apologists because the former are more likely to want to help me change farms to have higher welfare. While our beliefs are different (both welfarists and farm apologists probably believe in some form of animal agriculture), I would expect the radicals who agreed on the problem would be more useful to me than even moderates who do not.
If radicals overestimate the importance of specific problems that I am against (more moderately), they may even be willing to make sacrifices that I would not make. This can be a double-edged sword but may nevertheless be useful. The radicals can be abandoned and will lose the critical mass needed for action if they cannot convince enough moderates by the time the problem is sufficiently resolved. They are conditional allies. Moderates on the other side of the issue are enemies.]
As @Philip said, there might have very well been an ideological element in Chomsky downplaying the Khmer Rouge's atrocities. Specifically, as a leftist, he might not have believed that a leftist movement can be as horrible as the Khmer Rouge actually was.
This actually isn't different from someone who is sympathetic to Fascism or at least right-wing authoritarianism and who downplays reports of the Holocaust in 1942 because they simply can't imagine a Fascist or right-wing authoritarian regime engaging in such levels of brutality and atrociousness.
Good piece: thanks. Speaking only for me, and I appreciate your reminding me, I probably have greater dislike for Chomsky and Thunberg than their respective object-level positions justify (which would indeed justify plenty of dislike, especially in Thunberg's case) specifically because how they were/are valorized and turned into celebrities.
Hmm, mostly peaceful protests indeed. I'd probably suggest denying the somewhat better documented Taiping Rebellion myself, but since Hong Xiuquan (assigned Hong Huoxiu at birth) also thought he was more or less the son of God aka Shangdi, denying those atrocities probably gets you more mixed up in Church-state affairs, and perhaps the validation of theism, than you really want to approach.
AFAIK An Lushan did not claim to be in any way supernaturally connected; he was not of Han ethnicity but then neither was Hong Xiuquan; I'm not sure how the dueling claims to ethnic victimhood play out between Hakka and Sogdian/Gokturk. In the US at least it would start with which could be somehow construed as being more isomorphic to Black (Hakka, I would say).