Questions You Can't Answer Without Everybody Losing
Or, what privacy, censorship, and beauty ideals have in common with Milgram’s electric shocks.
Yesterday, Husbot shared a blog post with me that, had we been at a different point in our relationship, might have led to a divorce. Okay, probably not a divorce, but definitely a fight.
It was a frank, no-nonsense, and sometimes brutal assessment on the myths of feminine beauty, and specifically, what men really find attractive in women. Not what they say they find attractive about women to researchers and significant others, but what really turns them on. The author, J. Sanilac, is so convinced that they’re playing with fire here, that they give wary readers, especially women, ample warning:
A warning before you continue: I won't pander to boost your self-esteem. Writing the truth instead of repeating familiar lies will offend some readers. Most women will experience discomfort. If you're emotionally fragile or psychologically troubled, you should stop here. However, learning the truth will enable clear-sighted women to improve their appearance and succeed at the game of beauty. This is a prize that's worth the cost.
And Sanilac isn’t wrong, exactly, though the repeated ‘forbidden truths’ nature of the warnings started to give off a ‘pick-me’ vibe that cut against otherwise insightful analysis and deep scientific rigor. Still, their penetrating and exhaustive examination of the question is 100% worth reading, harsh truths and its novella length prose, notwithstanding.
I’m not going to dig into the details of the post though. This isn’t a beauty blog, and I don’t think I’d do the topic any justice anyway. But I do want to discuss one idea Sanilac mentioned early in the piece: milgram questions.
Answer Wrong, Answer Right: You're Still Losing
A milgram question (named of course, after the obedience to authority experiment guy) is the kind of trick question where any answer that’s against the consensus/dominant opinion carries a punishment that’s greater than the reward for being honest. Asking a man ‘What makes a woman attractive?” is a milgram question. I’ll let the author explain:
It’s a question where an unacceptable answer, regardless of whether it’s true or false, will be punished, and the punishment is greater than the reward for a true answer. I’m going to call these milgram questions, after the famous psychology experiment where electric shocks were administered for wrong answers.
Some milgram questions are intended as genuine questions. But often they only pretend to be a query on the semantic content of the words. The question “Do you love Big Brother” is actually asking “Do you submit to my power?” Or more generally, “Will you agree with me, or suffer the consequences?”
Of course no one actually asks questions about Big Brother. What they ask instead is “Do you believe taboo claim X is true?” or “Do you agree with mean-sounding claim Y, which will hurt your reputation among our audience?” or simply “Do you reject the ideology of the dominant regime?”
Now, this observation could easily lead into a digression on wokeness, but that’s not what I want to discuss here. The reason milgram questions intrigue me is because I started thinking about the kinds of questions that sometimes come up in privacy & free speech legal discourse.
Trick Questions That Shape the World
In the ongoing privacy v. security or speech v. dis/mis-information debate, for example, someone asking an encryption proponent “Do you have something to hide?” or “Why do you support predators and pedophiles?” is asking a milgram question. Similarly, a person who asks “Why do you support the Chinese government spying on teenagers and spreading disinformation?” in the context of pushing back against a TikTok ban, is attempting to elicit obedience by reputational warfare, not engage in a good-faith, honest debate.
People advocating for Signal or end-to-end encryption, or against backdoors or bans, don’t also believe that children should be abused. No one is asserting that the terrorists should win, or that the Chinese government should spread lies.
These questions, by their nature, are designed to shame opponents of the consensus view. They frame people advocating against ‘for the children/stop the terrorists/end disinformation’ narratives as choosing harm and lawlessness over societal good. But milgram questions go beyond your garden-variety false dichotomy/false dilemma fallacies: choosing the wrong side in the CSAM or security debate can have profound social and status consequences.
These types of questions are also frequently used to shift the goalposts of reasonableness, especially when they’re employed by the people in power against the powerless. Reasonable people might disagree on abstract concepts related to indiscriminate government surveillance (as the author notes, nobody loves Big Brother, after all), but surely everyone can agree that a well-defined backdoor is reasonable to prevent the bad things from happening. Surely we can trust that only the good guys will use that backdoor, or that the ban against X or Y will be measured and appropriate and not curtail other speech.
Eventually, Sanilac notes, that the punishment for non-majoritarian/dominant answers becomes so great, that “acceptable answers become untrustworthy, and indeed semantically meaningless.” The answers reinforce the dominant ideology by making any other position costly to hold.
I’m not sure we’re quite there yet re: privacy milgram questions, but I do worry that we’re coming dangerously close. The continuing push towards authoritarian, strongman governments and laws & policies that punish the press, limit bad think, and advocate for indiscriminate surveillance will only increase in 2025. We should all be on guard and call out milgram questions when we come across them.
I’d also love to hear about other milgram questions I surely missed. If you have any that bug you, feel free to drop them in the comments. (PS: Paid subscribers can discuss this on the Privacat Insights Slack channel, and it’s pretty rad).
… And now to get back to finishing Sanilac’s larger opus on female beauty.
Like a bot, I remain objective and scientific, as in the statement, “Rain is Wet.”