Published on August 1, 2024 5:00 PM GMT
I'm agnostic on the existence of dragons. I don't usually talk aboutthis, because people might misinterpret me as actually being a covertdragon-believer, but I wanted to give some background for why Idisagree with calls for people to publicly assert the non-existence ofdragons.
Before I do that, though, it's clear that horrible acts have beencommitted in the name of dragons. Many dragon-believers publicly orprivately endorse this reprehensible history. Regardless of whetherdragons do in fact exist, repercussions continue to have serious andunfair downstream effects on our society.
Given that history, the easy thing to do would be to loudly andpublicly assert that dragons don't exist. But while a world in whichdragons don't exist would be preferable, that a claim has inconvenientor harmful consequences isn't evidence of its truth or falsehood.
Another option would be to look into whether dragons exist and make upmy mind; people on both sides are happy to show me evidence. If afterweighing the evidence I were convinced they didn't exist, that wouldbe excellent news about the world. It would also be something I couldproudly write about: I checked, you don't need to keep worrying aboutdragons.
But if I decided to look into it I might instead find myself convincedthat dragons do exist. In addition to this being bad news about theworld, I would be in an awkward position personally. If I wrote upwhat I found I would be in some highly unsavory company. Instead ofbeing known as someone who writes about a range of things of varyinglevels of seriousness and applicability, I would quickly becomeprimarily known as one of those dragon advocates. Given the taboosaround dragon-belief, I could face strong professional and socialconsequences.
One option would be to look into it, and only let people know what Ifound if I were convinced dragons didn't exist. Unfortunately, thiscombines very poorly with collaborative truth-seeking. Imagine ahundred well-intentioned people look into whether there aredragons. They look in different places and make different errors.There are a lot of things that could be confused for dragons, orthings dragons could be confused for, so this is a noisyprocess. Unless the evidence is overwhelming in one direction oranother, some will come to believe that there are dragons, whileothers will believe that there are not.
While humanity is not perfect at uncovering the truth in confusingsituations, our strategy that best approaches the truth is for peopleto report back what they've found, and have open discussion of theevidence. Perhaps some evidence Pat finds is very convincing to them,but then Sam shows how they've been misinterpreting it. But this allfalls apart when the thoughtful people who find one outcome generallystay quiet. I really don't want to contribute to this pattern thatmakes it hard to learn what's actually true, so in general I don'twant whether I share what I've learned to be downstream fromwhat I learn.
Overall, then, I've decided to remain agnostic on the existence ofdragons. I would reconsider if it seemed to be a sufficientlyimportant question, in which case I might be willing to run the riskof turning into a dragon-believer and letting the dragon question takeover my life: I'm still open to arguments that whether dragonsexist is actually highly consequential. But with my currentunderstanding of the costs and benefits on this question I willcontinue not engaging, publicly or privately, with evidence orarguments on whether there are dragons.
Note: This post is not actually about dragons, but instead abouthow I think about a wide range of taboo topics.
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