[Content note: various slurs and insults]
I.
Last post I thanked some of the people who have contributed to this blog. But I forgot some of the most important contributors: the many readers whose give valuable feedback on everything I write.
So here’s a short sample of some of the feedback I’ve gotten over the past three years. I’m avoiding names and links to avoid pile-ons, but you can probably find most of these if you Google them.
II.
“It’s like someone tried to make fivethirtyeight as uninteresting as possible.”
“Slate Star Codex: 20,000 words on ‘feminism is bad’ and ‘Tom Swifties are the funniest shit I’ve ever seen'”
“Mark Atwood spent a month on the SSC registry of bans. It is my belief that Scott uses his toolbox of psychiatric techniques to manage the range of comment allowable on his blog. This may be justified in order to minimize flaming and trolling, but it is also a stifling form of censorship.”
“Go read the comment section on Slate Star Codex for a week and report back if you think LessWrongism is acceptable. It’s a place for broken people to be shielded from ever hearing that they’re broken and for developing better and better rationalizations for why they’re not broken and shouldn’t do the work needed to fix themselves. And SSC is miles better than lesswrong itself which is a weird cult centered around gnome in charge Eliezer Yudkowski. Just read the post where Scott let ozymandius post about all the ways that Roissy is wrong. The information there permanently disqualifies anyone associated with it from from having anything to do with building a functioning society.”
“Scott Alexander’s blog used to be good, but now he has been terrorized out of politics. Therefore boring. The problem was he purged all frequent commentors to the right of him out of the comments, which means that he had only enemies in his comments. And, being the rightmost, was persecuted. He has stopped posting on politics, I assume as a result of this persecution.”
“it’s by a stuttering aspie with expertise in nothing at all”
“a mentally-ill beta male who literally admitted that he wished he could become an asexual.”
“He is a fairly smart guy who makes well reasoned arguments. (He is also a literal cuckold.)”
“never forget for one fucking second that its author (who is ‘asexual’) and his most avid readers engage in ‘cuddle puddles’ irl, often bringing stuffed animals, and that he recommends this because it ‘increases credence’ in the other cuddlers’ statements.”
“his arguments only seem well-reasoned to people with NO knowledge of the subject matter (like him), and thus his main effect (just like that of his mentor, Eliezer Yudkowsky) is to keep smart people from learning things”
“oh what an expert in psychiatry! he’s a fucking med student in IRELAND. not to mention he uses yudkowsky’s lingo and called Less Wrong “revelatory” or something like that. you are dealing with a 110 IQ reddit type in SSC.”
“here is a series of a few posts (1, 2, 3) about how he is basically a conspiracy theorist, and in these posts he gets completely owned by the guy who cucked him with his tranny ex.”
“Merciful $DEITY. If I had any inclination to participate [on SSC], that [Guns and States] comment thread would have turned me completely off of it. How much more SJW-feminist-entitled can you get?…Extreme? No. Hard-line SJW enough that I’ve got better things to do than try to engage them? Yes. SJW-feminist-entitled? Yes.”
“SSC skews toward highly intelligent discourse, but Scott is very protective of his liberal homies. He will ban you if you stray too far from PC rigor.”
“I’d always got a whiff of fedora from this guy, so I feel gratified in my judgment at seeing him come out as one.”
“Faggot blocked me for calling out some recent bit of his retarded bullshit. Fuck ‘im.”
“Reading Slate Star Codex, I feel like I’m finally strarting to understand how postmodernism happened. First, there’s the whole thing of looking at your friends and a few books you happened to have read recently, and jumping to grand conclusions about all of society throughout all of history. Second, there’s the thing of him writing lengthy posts elaborating at great length on something that might be either boring and obviously true or bold and innovative but also completely wrong.”
“Aargh!! I read that entire Scott Alexander piece…well 65% of it…in earnest with the expectation that there was going to be a POINT to it. Some sort of payoff for my investment of time and attention. But there was nothing. It was just a bunch of bloviation with no purpose.”
“Scott Alexander is the story of a functioning pattern-recognition module trapped in a progressive brain. It would make a great story of its truth-seeking brain blob could eventually break free and rewire his brain to be a born-again reactionary. Not gonna happen though. The prog morality police has a hard, thick grasp on his brain, and all his friends and pseudosexual partners are the leftiest hacks this side of Lenin; so it’s an endless futile battle to square the circle. No wonder he went into psychiatry.”
“I retain great hopes for Scott, he’ll come around. When he does he’ll bring a high level of rigor with him. He is a caterpillar and will become a beautiful reactionary butterfly someday.”
“slatestarcodex is a great example of the difference between ‘knowing how to type’ and ‘knowing how to write'”
“You aren’t reading it right. Scott’s ability to completely identify the problem but still, quite sincerely, ritually abase himself to it at the same time, makes him worthy of connoisseurship. It takes a once in a generation talent to write long sincere *thoughtful* screeds pointing out that baby sacrifice is lowering the birth rate and causing family trauma, though of course he fully understands and endorses that Lord Moloch must be sated with the only food acceptable unto him.”
“Scott Alexander reminds me of some too-nice beta (nominally played by Joseph Gordon Leavitt or a JGL-alike) from some rom-com who’s trying to find his way and get the girl, while painfully oblivious to the fact that he just needs to stop being a too-nice beta and rip out somebody’s jugular. Ostracize someone for their beliefs? Me? Never. Golly gee.”
“seems like these guys are incapable of being dismissive of anything and have to objectively analyze everything.”
“Slate Star Codex is 140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”
“He is sharp and makes good points but is way too fucking verbose. I dont need parts I II III and IV just fucking write concisely and stop vomiting words on your wordpress blog ”
“it’s basically a fish trap for aspies. people who can’t grasp nuance or understand basic human behavior, but are nonetheless obsessed with details and complex systems will inevitably gravitate toward this kind of horseshit. ultimately it’s a bunch of STEM-inclined dudes on the autism spectrum sitting around attempting to unpack societal problems like it was all a game of fucking sim city.”
“I would add that something like Slate Star Codex is also a clinic in the aspie tendency to miss the forest for the trees, except in this case it’s more like closely examining the bark on the trees for no goddamn reason whatsoever.”
“doesn’t this guy have a dayjob as like a doctor or something? why the fuck does he spend hours each day on a blog?” [to which another person on the same forum responded “why the fuck do you spend hours each day posting here?”]
“a blog populated by 99th percentile aspergers/IQ “rationalist” millennials who converse in an abnormally abstract style, and whose concrete cultural experience is drawn mainly from a bunch of weird nerd shit.”
“Its weird brand of reductionism and bizarre, arbitrary specificity plays to the types of spergy assholes and dumb know-it-all teenagers who don’t care about that anyway, or at least that’s how it seems to me. I mean, the ideas themselves seem like they’d be as much of a turn-off to regular people as their proponents’ personalities are, even if in a different way.”
“Oh, hey, the King of the Race Realist Misogynist Libertarian Nerds has Clever Things to say about vaccination.”
“yet another confirmation that: psychiatrists are crazier than their patients. polyamorous, diarrhea of the mouth/pen, math challenged, … i had no idea what an utter piece of shit you were.”
“He keeps his head down for fear of insulting permanently insulted people. He tries hard to be polite to people who hate him and consider him but a dog, unless they need him – and until they need him no longer. It is a waste of intellect, and debasement of character.”
“What makes me sad about Scott is just how close he is. I won’t give up hope on him yet. If only there was some way to secretly inject this guy with testosterone.”
“I wonder if he’s had bloodwork done to check his T count. I have to assume that if someone is an “asexual heteroromantic” as he puts it, that he’s interested in women from some abstract standpoint, and just needs some additional hormones to be thoroughly normal.”
“I literally want to see you kill yourself. I’m serious. You, and everyone else like you, are fucking disgusting wastes of space that are causing the decay of decency in the human race. I’m not going to argue with you, or say that it’s just my opinion or that it’s even up for debate.”
“is it some sort of special ‘Talk Like a Vulcan Day’ over there? Or are they always like that?”
“ssc spends a significant amount of time talking about stuff like how tables and chairs can be genders. he keeps a pretty unhinged tumblr”
“He’s definitely a beta orbiting cuckold.”
“that article seemed like a return ticket to obviousville with eight-hour layovers everywhere”
“That blog is very boring, and I didn’t manage to read long enough to find out what it was about. I hit Page Down a couple of times, and it seemed like it was on an entirely new topic each time.”
“I am thankful that I have never had any desire to seek psychiatric help. I have always had the impression, rightly or wrongly, that folks who pursue psychiatry as a career may themselves be the ones most in need of such therapy. Go to the mountains and look. Get up early and see the sunrise. Stop anywhere and take a minute to look at the beauty of nature all around you. We are a small piece in the universe, but still a part. The plan is good. You are fine. You will succeed if you try hard enough. Everything you need spiritually is inside you and has always been there. Stop complaining.”
“Also that ‘heteronormative asexual’ Scott Alexander. What a bizarre kike. He recently wrote that he’s incapable of not writing. LOL so kikish.”
“I thought it was a blog about science methodology until that post with the talking cactus.”
“Mark Atwood spent a month on the SSC registry of bans. It is my belief that Scott uses his toolbox of psychiatric techniques to manage the range of comment allowable on his blog. This may be justified in order to minimize flaming and trolling, but it is also a stifling form of censorship.”
I want this one to be true. If we could manage a practical psychohistory even for just comment sections that would be a huge step forward
So the Reign of Terror is merely cunning misdirection in order so that we won’t notice we are the lab rats and he is the psychologist conducting experiments upon us?
The fiendish cleverness of it all! 🙂
I thought it was a blog about talking cacti except the cacti won’t shut up about growth mindset.
Hahaha. This made me laugh pretty hard. Thank you, sir.
Literally laughed out loud. Office thinks I’m even more crazy. Good on you.
I’m not gonna say this wasn’t entertaining reading, but the optics here are, uh, questionable.
I don’t understand what you mean by “optics” here.
I’m basically saying it’d look bad from an outside perspective. You’re spending weirdness points by posting this.
Scott already used up his weirdness points and is deeply in debt.
It takes weirdness points to make weirdness points.
Really? My expectation is that this would look mostly like normal self-deprecating humor. That is, it seems normal to say, “But I forgot some of the most important contributors: the many readers whose give valuable feedback on everything I write,” and then give a pile of insults. With hundreds of comments on each post, there’s nothing surprising about the ability to collect this volume of insults.
Is it the content of the insults? As an outsider, I think I would get the impression that some weird variant of conservative don’t like Scott. Certainly, I might get the impression that the asexuality might be true, which is weirdness points, but I’m pretty sure Scott’s already said so. I would definitely see the common theme that SSC is seen as overly analytical, but that’s not really weirdness points.
The optics are pretty wonky for an outsider, but as a long-time and SSC-positive reader, this list made me literally laugh out loud in parts. For (some) long-time and SSC-negative readers, this might be the final straw that makes them give up.
Blogging isn’t all outward-facing, and sometimes things like this have an indirect role in filtering your commentariat.
I think it does the opposite. Taking abuse from alt-right douchebags is a badge of honor to anyone who isn’t an alt-right douchebag (or, I suppose, an alt-right non-douchebag, although I’m pretty sure all ten of them are already regular commenters), and certainly not any kind of barrier to mainstream acceptability.
(and granted, some of them aren’t from the ‘beta male cuckold’ perspective–but what little effect the ‘hurr he’s a libertarian shitlord’ ones would have is completely mitigated by the fact that they float in a sea of quasifascist hatred)
Twelve, there’s twelve of them, I counted.
I think calling someone a beta cuckold is more disgust than hatred. The only one who wished for his death seemed to come from the other side (but I could be wrong).
@Outis
That’s the general impression I got too. The complaints from the right seemed to be more disgust/pity/hope that he’d see the light (“he’s so close!”), and those from the left just derision and unmitigated rage-vomit. Then again, that’s just a general impression from a single read-through, and it’s entirely possible I was unconsciously bucketing criticism into from-the-left and from-the-right based on their tone.
I’d like to think that I’m not a douchebag. . .
I don’t think I’ve ever commented before, but I read everything on SSC. I’d have to give Scott the very honest compliment that he’s actually changed my mind a few times, and that even when I disagree with him, his ideas are worth serious consideration.
Another rightist long-time reader here. I wonder if this post (or a least this discussion thread) was a ploy to get us to start commenting.
I wanted to object, but I probably am a douchebag.
Seemed like a bad idea to me also.
What good can possibly come from letting the internet know you notice trolling, and are sensitive about it? Sensitive enough to collect the rudest trolling, at least, and post about it.
“Posting it to dismiss it” or such gambit is about as convincing as a teenager’s “I don’t care what you think!!” protests. In either case the main effect is to reveal sensitivity to rudeness. Which again, is not a helpful thing to reveal on the internet (or in high school).
The winning move is to pretend, as convincingly as possible, that you don’t even notice that stuff.
I don’t think this blog is resigned to the idea that all human or even online interactions can be boiled down to high-school style bullying and counterbullying. Nor should it be.
Everyone already knows Scott is a sensitive person. I thought that has his main sales pitch: “Like Yudowsky, but mushier. Also, his site’s not dead”.
Seems a clear case of “feeding the trolls” to me.
The reason not to do that isn’t about philosophy of human interaction, or what kind of person you are emotionally.
It’s just a simple practicality: you don’t feed trolls, because if you feed them they multiply. And they’re a negative externality for the rest of the community.
I dunno. I feel like the main message is that he finds some or most of that vitrolic shit to be so harmless that he’s willing to post it here to provide us with laughs (because some of those are pretty damn funny) and to gain credibility (which is twofold – people don’t viciously attack a nobody for any length of time, and showing said attacks come from both sides, each utterly convinced you’re obviously a lapdog of the other)
@Andrew: I know that last is the part *I* find funniest about it.
As a semi-outsider, I came to say exactly this.
nil’s reply that ‘ha, we’re ABOVE being ‘reduced”…. really isn’t helping my impression of this blog.
Some of those comments are actually pretty persuasive, IMHO.
Which ones? I’m not saying I disagree that any are valid, but I’m curious about what direction of criticism resonates with (at least one) SSC commenter.
@Virbie: Personally, I agree with the criticisms that Scott is often excessively verbose and meandering — e.g., I personally couldn’t, and still can’t, bring myself to finish “Meditations on Moloch” or any of his SJW-related posts; sometimes extrapolates too much from the scant material that he has read on a given subject; and has a noticeable inclination towards having “140 IQ discussion[s] about 105 IQ issues” (once again, SJW-related posts come to mind). I also agree that Ozy’s posts were banal and subpar, and was surprised when Scott allowed her to write on SSC.
I can’t imagine you would find any of them persuasive if you didn’t already agree (or maybe didn’t realize you agreed and were waiting for the criticism to be formalized).
That’s generally the case, isn’t it? How often do you read something that drastically changes your views? It’s much more common to have someone state something you already felt, but couldn’t articulate well.
@Alexander Stanislaw
You don’t need to find any persuasive to be interested in what others think and find their points valid. Scott’s verbosity was one of the main things that first attracted me to the blog (I hate the feeling when you read something well written and insightful and it ends too soon), but I’m not incapable of finding other opinions about his verbosity to be reasonable.
Also, hearing other people make a case for certain points can push you over the fence in certain cases.
Lastly, even if I were looking to have my mind changed, it’s certainly not the first time that an SSC comment has done so.
Just so we are clear, publicly fretting about “spending weirdness points” is way weirder than this post.
Always been confused if this is supposed to be a currency or a “man as game character” metaphor, I sorta suspect the latter and am against it for all the usual reasons.
I’m more partial to the expression “Revealing your powerlevel”.
Yeah, the metaphor’s silly. But when in Rome…
Seriously, although I suppose the goal was to get Scott to delete the post along with the comment (which would have correct imo).
I think that the idea of “weirdness points” is a pretty classic example of what some people mean by “140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues” and are annoyed by. If I were to put the objection as firmly but politely as I can, the pattern goes like this:
First step: take a concept that (normal) people understand intuitively – it’s not socially desirable to be weird (playing guitar is cool, making armpit noise music as an adult is weird), however standards of weirdness are dependent on whether you already have credibility or popularity.
Next step: dress it up in pseudo mathematical language and debate intensely about the details of the model (how many weirdness points am I spending), with the tone that you’ve discovered something revelatory.
Optional step: miss out on some important features of reality because you are so focused on the details of the model (no one’s guilty of this here, but I think its a common mistake).
@ Alexander Stanislaw:
I think you’re on to something. I especially find the pseudo-mathematical language kind of annoying.
I don’t understand why discussing “spending weirdness points” is off-putting. It’s perfectly mainstream to talk about “spending political capital” which is a very similar metaphor for a very similar concept.
Guessing that it’s because it’s a gaming metaphor rather than an economics metaphor. Even if the math behind it is the same, the undertones aren’t.
That or it’s just a zinger.
To me, it’s pseudo-sophistication. Like many uses of “political capital” outside an actually rigorous context.
I could say the same of a good deal of LessWrong speak.
The problem is that there is no math, just a veneer of mathiness, used to
1) Give the illusion of rigor and precision where there is none.
2) Create an in-group identity via jargon filled language. (while also giving off the impression – “look how cool we are for figuring all this stuff out” – I don’t think its actually that bad, but it can easily look like that to someone not in the community)
Political capital might be guilty of 1, but not 2. And I’m not sure it even is guilty of 1, people don’t seem to take it as literally and as seriously as rationalists seem to take their ideas and concepts. There is also the issue of quantity. the community has generated a lot of pseudo-rigorous concepts.
@ Alexander Stanislaw
Pseudo-rigor may be annoying, but in-depth reasoning without any rigor is even worse. At least you can explicitly point out whatever the toy model fails to reflect.
This misses the main point of the “weirdness points” metaphor. The idea is that you have to “act normal” more than you naturally would in order to make your serious, but unusual ideas easier for other people to accept.
It’s not “don’t be weird, unless you can afford to”, it’s “important thing X is perceived as weird, therefore silly thing Y has to go”.
(And obviously only people who are aware that the ideas they want to spread are weird would be thinking about this in the first place, so no wonder there isn’t a perfect match in “common sense” beliefs.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate
That, pretty much.
Optics look like a classic humblebrag to me!
Show me a public intellectual without haters and I’ll show you someone nobody cares about.
This.
One should be judged by their enemies as well as their friends.
I feel kind of bad, though, that I didn’t contribute any of these insults, and it’s because of lack of trying. It would take some time to top these. I know some internet rock stars avoid reading comments because the 12,000 friendly comments get emotionally run over by the 50 unpleasant idiots, but I’m glad Scott has entertained us.
Let me try: “Scott is nerdy and Jewish, who is center-left with some unpopular political views!”
OK, that would have been better, but SSC has obviously made me dumber. I’m suing.
What do you think this is? Popehat!?
The back cover of Ian Banks’ “The Wasp Factory” alternated between glowing reviews and outraged ones. The book itself turned out to be good-but-not-great IMO, but the marketing tactic totally worked on me.
Speaking of dead-tree editions of SSC, the back cover could alternate between these quotes and quotes from Scott’s supporters.
Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams went with straight negative quotes on some of their work too, and Stewart Lee has used some downright hateful comments on his tour posters. When I began reading this it felt like another bit of evidence for a trend I have noticed where if someone is willing to laugh at criticism I will enjoy their work.
I don’t really have much intelligent to say here, since I’m not really sure how to interpret the post (I have Aspergers Syndrome). It looks most likely Scott Alexander talking about how a lot of people have abused him, and for what it’s worth I agree that what they’re saying seems very unfair.
Could somebody please clarify what this post is meant to be, though? I’m not sure.
I thought it was funny.
For what it’s worth, I think it is too.
I liked the last one, “I thought it was a blog about science methodology until that post with the talking cactus.”
Talking Cacti–making random musings randomer since 2015.
It’s funny, I got linked to SSC about a year ago from an anti-SJW community* but now I stay for the science methodology and talking cacti.
*of which I am no longer a member.
Ah yes, I now read the cactus one and the Jewish Whale one.
Never mind then. Thanks for clarifying.
I thought some comments were mean while others were solely funny. Cactus was funny, for example.
You were right
It was funny, but it kind of made me want to vomit. Seeing people you like a lot get abused is viscerally unpleasant.
I had a similar reaction, in part because it includes personal attacks that could just as easily be directed at me. I’m glad Scott is able to take this shit with a smile.
“in part because it includes personal attacks that could just as easily be directed at me”
This is the exact reason why I really liked this post. If someone I look up to gets insults like this, I must not suck when I get insults like this. (Not that I’m famous enough to get insults like this, but still.)
Huh? They’re just words. People disagree. Some react like jerks. Nothing to get upset about.
…do you never get upset about something somebody says? If so, congratulations, you are in approximately the 1% by emotional stability. (I made up that number, sorry.)
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words cause permanent damage.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it”.
XKCD 1216, on one of Randall’s better days.
If posting this makes Scott feel less like he deserves any of it, that is more than sufficient reason.
People who think that way about the “stick and stones” thing usually were never at risk of getting stick and stones and underestimate how much of a problem they are compared to words.
People who think that way about the “stick and stones” thing usually were never at risk of getting stick and stones and underestimate how much of a problem they are compared to words.
True. But how can we fix that, aside from re-introducing sticks and stones into the discourse?
“Over-reaction to the discouraging word” is a predictable outcome of “no shooting or beating” to react to, but that doesn’t make “no shooting or beating” a bad thing.
I feel exactly the same.
I think I’m with Carinthium here. Somewhat amusing, somewhat interesting for the range of directions the attacks come from and what they do agree on, but not much of a point. I was expecting a III section with actually nice things.
The comment I’m replying to would make an excellent third section, I think.
That’s a relief. It wouldn’t be a good idea to wallow in this muck unless you were actually having a blast making mud pies.
I, for one, am disappointed that at no point are whales mentioned.
I’m glad he gave it a rest. We’re all at an elevated risk for cataracts with the recent buildup of aqueous humor.
Your invitation to the party has been revoked. You should receive a replacement soon; be advised that it will consist largely of puns.
That made me groan aloud, you will probably be pleased to know.
My immediate impression is that it was supposed to be a counterexample to the claim that one gets hate from the internet right in direct proportion to how left and how oppressed one is. (Not all of the hate is from the right, but a lot of it is.)
I have no idea how well the post accomplishes this (if it was even intended to); presumably the content of the hate would have been different if you were (say) female and/or more left, and you may be high-profile enough that hate of any subtype could be selected as though it were more representative than it were. (No idea if that’s true, but it would be fairly obvious as an objection.)
I’m mostly saying this because I suspect this post will be interpreted this way by some people besides just me.
It was *really* funny. A lot of these were so creative. Thanks for sharing, Scott.
I actually even found a lot of these insightful, they really reveal a lot about various different perspectives people have on the world.
Insightful, or insight-provoking?
“a blog populated by 99th percentile aspergers/IQ “rationalist” millennials who converse in an abnormally abstract style, and whose concrete cultural experience is drawn mainly from a bunch of weird nerd shit.”
blog: yep
99th percentile IQ: If standardized tests correlate with IQ, then this is at least true for me. Of course, they don’t completely correlate, but it’s a good indicator. I also know that a number of people here are smarter than me. So yes, this is at least partially true.
Asperger’s: I don’t have it according to people that do have it and two therapists. Most of the rest of the people here don’t seem to have it, but I’m not someone that can diagnose other people with a strong degree of certainty.
“rationalist”: Yep, a lot of people here call themselves rationalists.
Millennials: Nope, I’m a millennial but I’ve seen many non-millennials here.
Converse: Yes, that is generally what one does in the comment section of a blog.
Abnormally abstract style: As in, we use funky words that aren’t normally used by the majority of the population, like Bayesian. So yes.
Weird nerd shit: Is that a negative? What makes nerdy stuff any less acceptable than any other kind of “concrete cultural experience”?
Weird nerd shit uses ciment fondu rather than Portland cement, so it’s not really concrete.
Concrete is aggregate held together with a binder. In popular terminology, “concrete” refers only to portland cement concrete. In specialized literature, “asphalt” is called asphaltic concrete, which is aggregate held together with an asphalt binder.
For inconsistency, though, drawings will usually use “concrete” for portland cement concrete (matching popular terminology), and “AC” for asphaltic concrete.
Accurate descriptions are the best descriptions.
Basically the criticism is that because the community’s experiences are not central, the discourse has no bearing on the aggregate reality.
Goodness, I thought I had drawn a lot of hate and insults over the years, but that list definitely beats any I could’ve compiled about me.
He hasn’t been blackmailed yet though.
That you know.
Growth mindset!
Good point. I bet he hardly ever receives death threats. And has anyone even accused him of being an FBI informant yet?
As they say in the hip-hop community, if you ain’t hated you ain’t made it.
That is a really dubious statement and I hope you can quantify it.
I lol’d.
This one was hilarious!
“I thought it was a blog about science methodology until that post with the talking cactus.”
(and it does not really seem mean)
I read that in the old man Scooby Doo villain voice. “And I would have understood it too, if it wasn’t for you dang kids and your talking cactus!”
The best part about that one is that that post WAS about science methodology, at least tangentially.
The last one is the best.
Amusing. Do you keep this stuff on a text fie?
It’s days like today when I’m glad I have the millennial -> snake person plugin installed.
“Millennial” is starting to be one of those words that connotes “I have nothing worth saying” louder than anything it could possibly denote.
I think it’s the older generation’s way of consoling themselves about leaving us with a much worse economy than they came of age in.
@norn
Much like “Gen X” or “Greatest Generation” before it. “Boomer”, as with the boomers themselves, is used in diverse contexts and so might mean just about anything.
Thank you for mentioning that plugin. I just installed it, and it is the most amazing thing.
“the snake person -> snake person plugin”
Your reactionary and SJ critics should get together and decide which side you’re secretly on.
He conveniently switches to further his own clandestine agenda! He’s the most pragmatic (read: dangerous) flip-flopper ever to have lived…
But seriously, I find it interesting that the things we tend to value as rationalists are directly opposed to what the public claims to want from elected officials. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to remind people that it’s a GOOD THING when politicians assess the evidence and are able to go on record as changing their minds.
Pretty sure I’ve seen that discussed somewhere, but I don’t remember where or when.
To mildly steelman what the public wants, they don’t want a politician that doesn’t update on evidence, they want someone who will stick to their principles and won’t betray them when politically convenient. For example, if I elect a politician who promises to shrink government and they change their minds and decide that growing it is better, even if that weren’t opportunistic I’d still have reason to be displeased. I put them in office to enact my agenda (with some leeway given to them to decide how to do it most effectively), not to decide the agenda for me.
I’d be thrilled to see politicians update on evidence, if only the updates looked like “I should stop supporting X, because study Y shows it to be untrue”, rather than “I can stop supporting X, because the voters who do so already cast their ballots and now I don’t need them anymore”.
Exactly. I wouldn’t even be that angry if a politician honestly changed his mind. Disappointed if I thought he was wrong, but I’d hardly expect him to do what he was elected on instead of what he thought was right.
The problem is that the evidence they update on is the latest polls of public opinion. It’s updating on the acceptability of beliefs, not their truth.
I wouldn’t be so angry either if a politician changed his mind… if I believed he’d honestly changed it, rather than shifted to match public opinion and pretended he’d changed his mind.
I think I can name two, maybe three, times in all modern politics when I trust the change of mind to have been genuine.
@ Evan Þ:
No disagreement from me.
When a politician promises to do X and then doesn’t carry through, this is moderately good evidence that X is a bad idea or very difficult to do. The more popular X is and the less the politician does, the stronger this evidence. After all, politicians love and need to be popular; not taking the popular decision is very informative.
“bad idea” could mean many different things. It might mean “will result in his getting fewer campaign contributions from the interest group opposed to doing it.” It might mean “will reduce the politician’s ability to reward supporters and punish opponents.”
Your way of putting it seems to take it for granted an identity between the interest of the politician and the interest of the people his decisions affect.
>Your way of putting it seems to take it for granted an identity between the interest of the politician and the interest of the people his decisions affect.
I don’t in fact. I’m basing this on the purest cynicism ^_^ If you see how much vapid empty stuff politicians put up with just to get a few good headlines (and avoid a few bad one), then anything the politicians do/don’t do that is unpopular deserves careful scrutiny.
“Shrinking the size of government” seems an excellent example. Lots of US politicians have promised this, few deliver. Why? Well, the politicians’ reluctance seems to confirm my suspicion that this is really hard to do. As in, there is little that you can cut for free, and substantial cuts will piss off large or powerful sections of society. I think it’s pretty clear that US leaders are convinced (rightly or wrongly) that the NSA surveillance apparatus really does keep terrorism down. Tepid steps towards free trade are another example – these are unpopular in general, so it seems likely that politicians (or their advisors) really believe they will have positive impact.
Your examples of “will result in his getting fewer campaign contributions from the interest group opposed to doing it” and “will reduce the politician’s ability to reward supporters and punish opponents” are relevant, but politicians do both all the time – if there’s enough to gain from doing so (I also suspect that idealism explains a lot more of politician’s behaviour than is generally accepted, but that’s another debate).
Tracking politicians making unpopular decisions can be very revealing.
But decisions are not equal. Let’s say the public wants low government deficits (aka a country that doesn’t have to go cap-in-hand to Goldman Sachs).
It’s easy for a politician to promise that. But low deficits require either limiting public spending or raising taxes.
Raising taxes is hard outside of World Wars.
Limiting public spending runs up against a public choice problem: generally the potential beneficiaries of public spending are vocal and well-organised, and the cost to an individual tax payer is minimal. The easiest response for a politician is to say yes, the government will help (and of course the beneficiaries have every incentive to emphasis to the politician how much they need that help.) It’s only when you add up all those little costs that you get to something that has voters outraged.
So, given the pressures politicians are under to spend, spend, spend, anyone who cares about government deficits does wind up putting a lot of weight on inflexibility in this area.
A similar argument applies to regulation – a lot of the harm of regulations comes not from any individual one but the whole web.
From personal experience as a low-level minion in the public service, I can also attest that “shrinking the government” sounds great when it’s a campaign promise: all those lazy civil servants sitting around drinking tea and gossiping! We’ll cut the numbers and bring in private-sector expertise and efficiency!
Except that government is not a business so you can’t run it on the same lines as private sector businesses. And when you cut staff numbers (as with the recruitment embargo in the public sector that has been in place for the last few years here in Ireland) what that means is (a) no new jobs (b) reducing numbers by ‘natural wastage’ means no replacements (c) means fewer staff to cope with increased volume of demand.
So you get waiting lists, delays in service, and things like people forgetting that teachers, nurses, etc. are also public sector employees and then being outraged when little Johnny is in a class of forty kids and not getting the attention he needs, or that the new ward in the hospital isn’t open because they haven’t the staff to run it. Had to waste all your lunch hour queuing at the post office and wondering why the hell they don’t just open another window instead of having one person serving during the rush hour? Public sector embargo! No hiring on new staff! So that means one person left to cover the lunch time rush.
There’s also not that huge gain in efficiency and profitability by privatising services; as I said, government is not a business. Private operators will bid on the profitable routes for things like bus services and won’t take the unprofitable ones, so government is left with either maintaining rural bus routes for social purposes and taking the loss, or shutting them down (and then facing public backlash over old age pensioners with no transport being stuck in their homes unable to get into town to buy groceries, visit the doctor, and have necessary social contact).
There really isn’t a huge amount of trimming numbers you can do with the grassroots staff unless you’re going to shut down a lot of services, and with new programmes being announced every five minutes when politicans see a bandwagon to leap on, that is not happening. There probably is a fair amount of trimming that can be done off the top, but ministers tend to be terribly fond of their special advisors etc. and don’t want to part with them (or offend the permanent high ranking civil servants by trying to give them the boot).
@ Deiseach
On cutting government:
Your comments assume a fixed set of services government is responsible for. In the U.S. at present, quite a lot of mail delivery is done by private firms, such as UPS. They can’t deliver first class mail because there is a law against their doing so.
Abolishing the Post Office (and the Private Express Statutes that give it a monopoly on First Class mail) wouldn’t mean that the mail didn’t get delivered.
More generally, the U.S. and the U.K. in the 19th century had total government expenditure of about 10% of national income, compared to current figures of about thirty to forty percent—and, at least for the U.S., almost all of that was at the state and local level, with the Federal government the smallest of the three measured by expenditures.
On the general question of the relation between work to be done and number of employees, you might enjoy _Parkinson’s Law_ if you haven’t already read it. After stating the law (“Work expands to fill the time available” or, alternative statement, “The number of people employed by a bureaucracy increases at a constant rate independent of whether the work to be done increases, decreases, or there is any work at all,” which sounds like a joke), he gives some data.
Number of employees of the British admiralty on shore establishment, from the point when Britain had the largest navy in the world to the point when it was barely able to defeat Argentina.
Number of employees of the Colonial Office during the period when the British Empire went from the largest empire in history to its present state.
Both of them are steadily increasing graphs.
Note also that one way of cutting government is to stop doing things that ought not to be done. From the standpoint of some of us that includes the War on Drugs and all tariffs, the Export/Import bank and all other corporate welfare, as well as much else.
I think Deiseach and David Friedman are not strongly disagreeing – the main point of both is that, if you really want to cut government, you have to cut what it’s doing (David seems more open to “cutting waste and fraud”, but his main point is still about cutting programs). I’d guess they disagree over what is good to cut, but that’s another issue 🙂
>From the standpoint of some of us that includes the War on Drugs and all tariffs, the Export/Import bank and all other corporate welfare, as well as much else.
I have to say, my rule of thumb is that “if someone isn’t mentioning social security, medicare, or the military, then then they aren’t serious about cutting government”. I agree on all you mention, but it’s cutting some of the functions of government, not cutting its size in any meaningful way.
I’m a little startled at the jump to elected officials, being one myself.
As far as I know, Scott has expressed no interest in becoming a candidate, so it seems odd to measure him by that particular yardstick.
Wait, what? Where are you an elected official?
The answer would appear to be yes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kestenbaum
From Wikipedia: “On Saturday, March 22, 2014, following a U.S. District Court ruling that Michigan’s ban on same sex marriage was unconstitutional, Kestenbaum was one of four Michigan county clerks to open for special hours while the ruling was in effect; his office issued marriage licenses to 74 gay and lesbian couples.”
Well done, Mr. Kestenbaum.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/31/ot41-having-your-mind-thread/#comment-320617
Too often with politicians it comes across not as “New evidence has been presented to me, and after mature consideration I have decided that my former opinion was mistaken” but rather “The polls show that now people want Purple rather than Ochre, so forget all my past speeches in favour of Ochre, I am now – and have always been – solidly pro-Purple!”
Not alone does this come across as “Of course I have principles – just tell me what ones you would like me to have, and I’ll have them!” but also “I think you, the public, are so dumb you’ll never remember what I said in opposition/before this position became popular”.
“I think you, the public, are so dumb you’ll never remember what I said in opposition/before this position became popular”.”
This generally proves to be a safe assumption.
Yeah, I feel like we could get a pretty good game of “Metafilter or Jim’s blog comments?” going here.
Nah, it’s sadly pretty easy to tell. Even if you ignore the fact that the reactionaries are pretty much begging Scott to join them, their criticism is the one with the cruder insults but a generally ambivalent tone (“Scott’s pretty smart, but…”), the blues’ insults are much more clever, but are pretty much just insults.
I think the game is traditionally called “Stormfront or SJW”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StormfrontorSJW/
Strip out a few of the keywords and then try to guess which side a comment is from.
I’m pretty surprised to find that he gets more right-wing hate than left-wing hate. Or maybe that’s just the selection that he chose to put up.
I think the interesting aspect here is the amount of attention Scott’s alt-right haters pay to his personal life, not the relative lack of attention from “Tumblerenas”.
That’s what makes the right-side comments look more bizarre (and thus, more amusing).
The alt-right really is just the mostly-white incel male variant of standard Tumblr-style identity politics. In both places the key dynamic isn’t really anything ideological, but more that splicing self-help and politics together naturally attracts damaged people, and the ad-hoc and amateur nature of the “self-help” component isn’t sufficient to undamage said people.
A good deal of the contemporary far right *in general* can be accurately be described as “identity politics for low-status white people”.
Is that really so bizarre? The notion that all lifestyles are equally respectable, especially in the sexual sphere, is a (recent) left-wing idea. And still, if Scott had other personality traits, he may get more attacks on his personal life from the left.
In any case, I think that it may be a good thing to find Scott hard to respect as a man. It makes it easier to take his arguments exclusively on their own merits.
@ Outis
If I recall, the comments we are discussing did not say, “the author’s lifestyle is not respectable, especially in the sexual sphere”.
Or else, we should also be reading “he’s a sperg racist shitlord” as “I find the gentleman’s approach overly reductive, and the ethical impact of the implications of some of his statements may be a cause for concern”.
Moreover, some of you-know-who’s insults imply a high familiarity with Scott’s personal history, while most of the other side’s is the sort lazy dismissal that comes with low familiarity. Obsessive haters exist in all sorts of groups, of course, but the sheer amount of vitriol is surprising.
I also enjoyed Mark’s suggestion that failing to persistently stalk and bad-mouth someone you disagree with is a fault (apparently, because it means you’re “too incoherent” to remember to do it).
Horseshoe theory. They’re both on the side that cares about leveraging whatever instrumental power they can get their hands on in order to further their goals, while SSC is secretly on the side of civilization and human decency.
I just read https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ which was linked in the classes post the other day and is frightingly on-topic in the light of the current “where does the criticism come from” discussion.
Sadly, I have to conclude, that the critics have a point. The piece reads very differently, depending on whether you imagine the author to be a “genius of human nature” (The other Scott A. on Scott A. here: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2537) or an angsty nerd desperately trying to figure out an inner conflict of ingrained values vs. rational insight by adding meta-rationality. Note that the latter is basically the authors self-description in that piece.
So what does this mean? It is very rare that peaople make their process of rationalization transparent to themselves, let alone others. I think we have to applaud our host for that. But when he then goes on to misrepresent his own rationalizations for actual rationality, who is he trying to fool?
Mind you I do not mean this as an offense. On reflection I like “struggling to figure things out”-Scott much better than “rational”-Scott, and maybe the former is all he ever intended to be on his blog. What do I know.
So, we should instead try to understand societal problems on the basis of… what? Whim? Intuition?
Shit just, like, happens, bro.
I wonder if there’s maybe a steelman-able point to be made there about the problems with a demographic who traditionally has lots of trouble fitting in with other people attempting to understand and solve all of society’s problems.
On reflection, though, given how many problems basically reduce to economics or biology it’s probably fine. Or at least unavoidable, which is almost like fine.
I expect they would reject the claim that many problems basically reduce to economics or biology. They would, of course, be wrong.
…given how many problems basically reduce to economics or biology…
The word “reduce” is doing a lot of work in that statement. That said, I think the most-steelmanable point is “Problems are hard, yo, don’t think you’ve solved them because your model can predict the past.”
This is, of course, not something I think the person who wrote the “fish trap” comment was aware of.
Economics at its best can build models that predict what has already happened. But some of is is nothing more than “Just So” fables:
A: “Right guys, we’re economists so we have to be able to explain the evolution of money and how people distributed goods and services before we had it.”
B: “Well what would we do right now if there was no money?”
A: “I guess we’d have to do everything through barter, like swap a chicken for a sack of potatoes.”
B: “That must be it then! We had barter but it was inconvenient so we invented money.”
C: “Should we check what contemporary societies that don’t have money do? Or maybe the historical/archaeological record? Just to make sure we’ve got it right?
A+B: “Nah, let’s not bother.”
A few years pass
C: “Oh hey, guys, it turns out that anthropologists went to a whole bunch of societies that have never had money, and it seems that most exchange isn’t done through barter. In fact there’s literally zero evidence of barter being the primary form of transaction in any society that hadn’t previously used money for transactions. Should we change our story?”
A+B: “Nah, let’s just ignore them, it’ll be way easier.”
I’m not sure if we’re actively prognosticating Fish Trap’s intentions, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t all true.
@ H.E. Pennypacker:
But the story of the how the use of money would evolve from barter is not supposed to be a true historical story. It illustrates the purposes money serves: it solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants.
@ Vox Imperatoris
Some would say that it obstutificates the purpose money serves: a formalization of the socioeconomic credit held by given individual in relation to their community.
@Vox Imperatoris
“But the story of the how the use of money would evolve from barter is not supposed to be a true historical story.”
Because trying to tell an accurate story wouldn’t be great for the “science” of economics.
“It illustrates the purposes money serves: it solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants.”
And here’s the problem with a discipline based on Just So stories. “The problem of the double coincidence of wants” is a problem invented by economists projecting a very simplistic understanding of human nature and social relations onto a mythical past.
If I lived in a society without money I wouldn’t go around thinking “Oh gee! I really want Bill’s chicken but I only have a sack of potatoes to trade and Bill doesn’t want potatoes”. It would totally depend on who Bill was. If he was my son-in-law maybe he would be obliged to give it to me. If he was my good friend I’d probably just go an say “Oh wow, Bill! What a nice chicken!” and he’d insist I take it. If he was an acquaintance he might insist I take it but remember that I owe him one, and so on and so forth.
I was always partial to money was originally a unit of abstract value that symbolized debt theory. Certain economists do not like this because it suggests that the economic rules might not be as innate and akin to natural forces as they would like.
Of course it’s a simplistic assumption. That’s the point: you have to really understand the fundamentals before you can understand the more complex factors of the real world.
This is equivalent to saying: physics is bullshit! They have all these assumptions about frictionless spheres, but that isn’t how the real world is. No shit. Though that is the sort of argument that postmodernists use to invalidate physics.
@ nil:
Those people would be wrong.
Even if you are held in very low regard by a community, your money is still as good as anyone else’s. Americans don’t think much of Saudi Arabia and their royal family. But since they’ve got money, there will be people willing to accommodate them.
For instance, the university I attended, which is owned by the Catholic Church, established some kind of “Center for Islamic-Christian Understanding” in no small part because they were given a lot of Saudi money to do it.
This is a big part of the reason why capitalism is a force for globalization: no matter how much they hate foreigners, a lot of people are going to decide they like their money more.
Very relevant: Don Boudreaux’s “Most of What You Learn in Econ 101 is Right”. From one of the linked articles:
“Even if you are held in very low regard by a community, your money is still as good as anyone else’s. Americans don’t think much of Saudi Arabia and their royal family. But since they’ve got money, there will be people willing to accommodate them.”
Well, that’s why it’s a formalization (or perhaps better stated, the reification) of social credit, not the original actual thing. It’s a social credit stripped of it’s social meaning and context to facilitate transfers between societies (where, unlike in intrasocietal transactions, it DID replace barter).
Which for most purposes is a distinction without a difference, but IMO can be relevant in some high-level policy contexts.
You’re kind of right, but there’s a lot of differences between physics and economics that could make this argument relevant in economics where it is not so relevant in physics.
The most salient difference would be the fact that planets and stars in the interstellar medium act a whole fucking lot like frictionless spheres, making these assumptions useful in physics in ways that similar assumptions simply may not be so useful in economics.
We can see this from the fact that the outcome of economics studies are usually so much more equivocal than the outcomes of physics studies. In both domains, a naive application of the most abstract laws will either succeed or fail to predict a particular phenomenon. In economics, it seems about 50/50 — the evidence for minimum wage increases also increasing unemployment, for example, is incredibly equivocal.
More of what is important about economics is in the particulars, so it makes more sense to downgrade the utility of abstract theories in economics on the basis that they’re based on unrealistic assumptions than is the case in physics where we’re mostly concerned with contrived experiments that isolate as few interacting variables as possible. Physics as currently practiced is inherently reductive, but economics cannot be purely reductive and still provide any useful guide to its content.
It’s not really, actually. The pomo arguments are more like Feyerabend’s arguments against privileging scientific knowledge in “Against Method”. Basically, the argument is that science is like the drunk searching for keys under a streetlight, and that there is a bunch of stuff that is important to human beings beyond the range of the streetlight, and that privileging scientific knowledge tends to divert focus from these quite important things.
This won’t be convincing to rationalists; in the analogy, a rationalist is someone who insists that illumination via streetlight is a necessary condition of existence.
FWIW I was partly kidding, speaking tongue in cheek.
As unpredictive as some parts of economics may be (parts of macro being the obvious ones), it’s still the only economics you’ve got. If someone has come up with a more predictive model, please let us know. If not, then we’re basically in the position that we know our models aren’t very good, but they’re better than nothing. And that’s no justification for using whatever ideological belief about how the world works as a basis for policy rather than the flawed models.
And, of course, there are plenty of models that do make fairly good predictions.
@ wysinwyg:
But the principles of economics are highly illustrative in this case. They don’t mislead. Economics says that, all else being equal, employers will have to fire employees.
If they are not going to fire employees, then they have to do something to make them cost less. Such as working the employees they have harder, or making their working conditions worse. Moreover, while there are fixed costs to firing in the short run, in the long run they will hire fewer employees.
If they can pay their employees more without cutting costs, then they would have to have a lot of “monopsony power”, which is a completely implausible assumption because monopsony power would imply a lot of other things that aren’t true. And even if it were true, it wouldn’t be enough to make the minimum wage a good idea. As Boudreaux writes:
What economics shows is that there is no magical way to have the government raise real wages, and that is absolutely true. And yet most people have no understanding even of the principles of economics and support the minimum wage on that basis, not the monopsony power arguments, as Boudreaux explains in this excellent post.
Moreover, another fallacy in these types of experiments to determine whether the minimum wage causes unemployment is given in his example of the “swimming pool”. Imagine a large swimming pool. Physics tells you that if you drop a brick in it, the water level is going to rise. But if you just drop one brick, the rise is probably going to be so small as to be immeasurable, and it could be cancelled out by other factors like evaporation.
The way these arguments go is: we’ve done 100 studies on whether dropping a brick in a swimming pool raised the water level, and it came out 50-50. Therefore, there’s a good likelihood that dropping 10,000 bricks in the pool won’t raise the water level, either.
That is, they look at the “experimental results” from tiny changes in the minimum wage and conclude that nothing bad will happen if you raise it by 50%.
You’re right. They argue that reason distracts from other modes of knowledge.
But in order to do that, you have to argue that reason is flawed or doesn’t work. Which is where the attacks on reason come in: that it oversimplifies and “murders in order to dissect”.
In other words, they have to point to some areas that are not lit up by the streetlight.
@Urstoff:
Another possibility: our models are actually actively misleading and therefore worse than nothing.
I’m not arguing this is true for economic theory, but I would argue it’s true of, e.g., any major news outlet.
@Vox Imperatoris:
Interesting discussion, but this is the only part that’s relevant to my argument. My point was that economic theory is not so good at determining what factors will be “bricks” with negligible impact on “water level” and what factors will be “Cadillac Escalades” with significant impact on “water level”, but that this is exactly what we’d want from an economic theory.
I think there are other considerations, too, though:
I’m not so sure. I can certainly imagine a state of affairs where increasing the wages of everyone in a particular locale would generate enough excess demand to actually increase the total number of jobs and amount of hiring. Maybe that’s not technically possible for some tricky reasons, but it’s not at all obvious it’s not possible.
And my point is that we want to know whether increasing minimum wage is a good idea right now in a particular situation, not in some abstract global sense. If it’s possible for minimum wage increases to increase demand in such a way that spurs growth and actually decreases unemployment in some situations, it would be really good to be able to recognize those situations and act accordingly instead of adopting the rule that really just applies to the abstract global case.
Which is the crux of my complaint about economic theory — it ignores particularities when particularities are what we’re most interested in.
That’s easily enough done. The hard part is getting the rationalist to actually look.
@ wysinwyg:
The point is not what’s measurable. The point is that economic theory tells us that minimum wage is not magic. If it raises wages, it’s got to be doing something else, too.
The “something else” that many people have in mind is that it takes excess profits from employers and transfers them to workers. But this is what economic theory shows to be impossible under realistic conditions.
What economic theory shows is, regardless of how much the minimum wage increases unemployment, it won’t do anything good.
This is just silly. There is a reason the “Keynesian stimulus argument” for the minimum wage is not popular among left-wing economists.
For one, the stimulus argument is inherently a cyclical argument. If the government should sometimes force wages to rise to boost demand, then at other times it should force wages to fall. That’s why there is no Keynesian argument for a minimum interest rate.
Another commenter somewhere else sums up the other problem:
Finally, you say:
Examples of where it has been “easily enough done”?
I take this to be a major point of Scott’s “catus person” post. The cactus person tells him to just get out of the car and says it’s so easy, but it never actually tells him how.
Also, all arguments for mysticism are vulnerable to Leonard Peikoff’s “fifth sense argument”. Why is there no controversy among blind people that others have a mysterious “fifth sense”? The answer is that other people can make predictions with the fifth sense that are verifiable to the blind, and which the blind people could not have known. For instance, you say “There’s a car coming,” and a few seconds later the blind person hears the car and feels the wind rush past him.
With the “sixth sense” of mysticism, people never claim anything useful, or to have knowledge of this world. They claim to have seen above and beyond this petty world and into the nature of true reality, which is radically different.
(Compare this to Scott’s example of the cactus person who refuses to factor the large numbers he gives in order to verify the reality of the experience.)
If you tried to tell a blind person this sort of thing about your fifth sense, he would say: “I may be blind, but I’m not crazy.”
Until I’ve got one of the revelations myself, I’m going to persist in not believing the mystics. And I’m not going to waste my time in the apparently-fruitless task of trying to achieve a mystic vision. If, by all outer signs, it’s indistinguishable from “shit doesn’t work”, I’m going to assume “shit doesn’t work” rather than “shit does work but appears exactly as if it doesn’t in order to fool people”.
“the evidence for minimum wage increases also increasing unemployment, for example, is incredibly equivocal.”
Two points:
1. The prediction is that increasing the minimum wage will increase the unemployment rate of those now receiving the minimum wage. Minimum wage workers are about four percent of hourly wage workers, about two percent of the labor force. So even quite a substantial increase in their unemployment rate will have an invisibly small effect on the overall unemployment rate. The relevant test is to look at some relevant subset, such as teenage workers, and see what happens to their employment.
2. I’m not sure you are allowing for the effect of social pressure. Academic economists are academics, which means that they are in an overwhelmingly blue tribe environment, which makes it costly to support positions that the blue tribe strongly disapproves of.
A perhaps relevant story:
Leo Rosten was a writer (_Captain Newman M.D._, _The Education of Hyman Kaplan_, _The Joys of Yiddish_) and a friend of my parents from graduate school. On one occasion he happened to be talking with one of the M.I.T. economists and asked him what the view of economists was on minimum wage laws. He got the usual response—that they increased unemployment among low skilled workers by pricing them out of the market.
Leo asked if that was the usual view of economists, was told that it was. He pointed out that it wasn’t the popular view of the subject and asked why the economists didn’t make a point of correcting the public misunderstanding of the subject.
Response: “I think we’re afraid of sounding as if we agree with Milton Friedman.”
That was the story as Leo told it, filtered through my memory.
If there are strong social pressures against a conclusion and half the people in the field support it in spite of those pressures, that suggests that the arguments for that conclusion within that field are much stronger than the arguments against.
With regard to the sim city comments in the thread, I don’t think of econometric modeling as part of the core of economic theory. It’s a mixture of economics, statistics, and witchcraft designed to create models of a very complicated reality that are simple enough to be usable but somehow preserve enough of the essential features to provide useful predictions about what they model.
The core is price theory, which provides good reasons to expect an increase in the minimum wage to reduce the employment prospects of unskilled workers (but doesn’t tell us by how much), good reasons to expect tariffs to, on net, make the inhabitants of the countries that impose them worse off.
“Good reasons” doesn’t mean “rigorous proof.” There are few if any real world implications of economics for which a sufficiently clever theorist couldn’t think up a logically possible situation for which they would not hold. That’s one reason why, in using economics to make sense of the world, you construct conjectures on the basis of theory, use them to generate testable predictions, and test them.
One could describe that as modeling, but not in the econometric sense. You are making simplifying assumptions, but you aren’t trying to model a particular economy but rather a particular issue.
And, at a considerable tangent, an old post about a sufficiently clever theorist:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2013/09/economics-ideas-vs-politics.html
@Vox Imperatoris
“Of course it’s a simplistic assumption. That’s the point: you have to really understand the fundamentals before you can understand the more complex factors of the real world.”
Of course what’s a simplistic assumption? My point was that economics has a very simplistic understanding of human actors and social relations. I don’t see what this has to do with understanding fundamentals. My point was that economics reduces an incredibly complex and messy reality to an extraordinarily simplified model of how humans behave to then build incredibly complex mathematical models on top*.
“This is equivalent to saying: physics is bullshit! They have all these assumptions about frictionless spheres, but that isn’t how the real world is. No shit. Though that is the sort of argument that postmodernists use to invalidate physics.”
As a side point “postmodernists” is often a convenient way of dismissing critiques of science because a lot of scholars wrote a lot of rubbish that can be related to postmodernism (although I note it’s a term used by the critics much more than those they are criticising). There are plenty of critiques of science that are very well thought out but those who see it as their role to defend science often seem to have a hard time distinguishing between good thinking on the subject and “E=MC2 is a sexist equation” nonsense.
More crucially, though, you’re wrong here. Physics has proved incredibly good at predicting how the world works. Economics has proven itself unable even to assess the value of financial instruments that were created by people who’d studied economics.
*From my own anecdotal experience, the people making the really complex models aren’t even economists because you need people who are better at maths than most economists. My dad works for a company that makes financial software and all the maths guys are astrophysics or pure maths PhDs who are fully aware of the fact that they are making models which have very little basis in reality but they’re getting paid huge amounts to mess around doing something they find fun so they don’t complain.
@ H.E. Pennypacker:
I don’t adhere to the “incredibly complex mathematical models” school of economics. I think these models are misguided precisely because they are dressing up a lot of hidden assumptions in an obfuscating layer of mathematics. As George Reisman writes in his book Capitalism:
And I don’t see that the purpose of economics is to predict the economic future. Especially not in any kind of detail on the level of “what is the value of these financial instruments”.
I think that the main purpose of economics is, as it was originally called, political economy: to understand the broad strokes of how the economy works in order to tell people what political stance they ought to take toward the economy. And I think the main lesson of economics in that respect is: under a regime of clearly defined private property rights, the free-market, capitalist system naturally works to the benefit of everyone. But at the same time, it teaches that the economy is far too complex for any one person or small group of people to predict; that it works on the basis of distributed knowledge; that you shouldn’t try to guide, control, or manipulate it. Reisman again:
And I think the main value economics has to individuals is not insofar as it helps them make money on the stock market (though a certain knowledge of economics is necessary to do that), but insofar as it allows them to understand history and its development; allows them to understand their place in society and the wider significance of their work; and allows them to appreciate the nature of their relationship to others (as fundamentally cooperative, not adversarial).
Higher mathematics is no more necessary to the discussion or clarification of economic phenomena than was Latin or Greek to the discussion of matters of scientific interest in previous centuries.
I’ve got to take issue with this. Having a common scholarly language is immensely useful in sharing ideas, and there’s no reason why mediaeval authors writing in Latin was any more pretentious than non-Anglophone authors today writing in English.
(And, yes, I’m aware that a greater proportion of the world population today can read English than could read Latin in the middle ages. But that’s a result of increased access to education rather than decreased pretentiousness or what-have-you.)
If that’s a problem, it’s a problem that LW has much, much worse.
Experience and study of the humanities canon. Speaking as someone who resembles that remark (i.e. “unpack societal problems like it was … sim city”), the basic criticism is that the theories built are superficially plausible to the builders, but go awry by being disconnected from empirical testing. Of course, many writers know this in the abstract. They’ve heard it before. But still, there’s a sort of dont-know-what-you-dont-know problem. If your model is poorly constructed, but you’re unaware of it, there’s still a tendency to debate it extensively – even if it when asked, you’d reply that of course you know it’s just a model and it could be flawed, etc. etc.
But but but … for me the answer to that is Sim City! Well, not Sim City itself, but something like it. My position on a lot of issues like minimum wage, immigration, urban zoning, healthcare finance, monetary policy is basically “I don’t really know, and I’m suspending judgement until I can build a simulated model of the economy / the society etc. in which I can test the idea”. And that seems much closer to empirical testing than anything else I could do. Predicting the behavior of complex dynamic systems is hard, I’d like to see more Sim City (open sourced, with assumptions made explicit), and less anecdotes and speculation.
>Predicting the behavior of complex dynamic systems is hard
This is why the anti-minimum-wage, immigration etc. libertarian-conservativish camp tends to say “so don’t mess with it”.
Then again of course one could raise the argument why political messing is the only messing, and also that refusing to govern does not mean governing well.
Ultimately my position would be to not mess with it ideologically or moralistically because it ignores consequences and these days 95% of the cases it is how it happens, minimum wage morality crusades etc.
I would accept messing with it on a pattern-matching level, a common-sense level which is precisely how complex systems can be cheaply modelled.
Opposing immigration is absolutely NOT a libertarian tenet — quite the opposite in fact. And “don’t mess with systems we don’t understand” is very much a conservative rather than a libertarian idea; its libertarian false cognate is more along the lines of “don’t mess with systems that we DO understand, because we understand them so well we know that not messing with them is optimal.” You’re lumping in two groups who typically hate each other.
Someone who actually took this “complex dynamic systems” view to heart would more likely end up being socially center-right, economically center-left, and really REALLY freaked out about climate change.
On one side you have people making vague and “common sense” arguments that obviously change X will improve things, on the other you have people making vague and “common sense” arguments that changes to complex dynamic systems are hard to predict, and often changes to something that works will make it worse.
I don’t trust either side, and I’d rather avoid taking a side (lest my brain makes me identify with it), and wait until I get the change to analyze that more formally.
“Don’t mess with it” helps if and only if not messing with it makes the system easier to predict. I don’t think that’s established.
FeepingCreature, if something has been around for a long time, like the climate, it’s probably in some type of equilibrium. It’s not going to spontaneously do something really crazy, but if you poke it too hard, it COULD. I hope it doesn’t.
You can construct your preferred comparison to immigration policy however you’d like.
Except it did in the past. Ice ages happened. For economics, we regularly have system meltdowns (recessions). Arguably, the economy is constantly unbalanced, we go from boom to bust.
When it comes to war, immigration, education and other matters our elites have essentially used the world as a grand realisation of Sim City and there is no “off” button.
‘and there is no “off” button.’
Sure there is:
http://akley2uingwuqzfv2laavbf8.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/x8.jpg
http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/50f0c59e6bb3f7b23800000b/nuclear-missile-officer-describes-life-in-the-underground-bunker.jpg
And now our life is way more peaceful and comfortable than that of the vast majority of our ancestors. Yay our elites?
This is what economists generally do. One problem is that there are many different plausible ways to program Sim City’s rules.
Sure, though comparing the models, or comparing how various ideas work in different models, is likely to bring more understanding than the original debate was.
That kind of modeling is what economic theory is already. It’s not just people guessing in either direction, there are formal models involved. I’m not sure what you expect to gain by framing this as a software simulation rather than a mathematical model, when the former is little more than an implementation of the latter.
I’m not “expecting to gain anything”, mathematical models would also be a valid way of analyzing those problems. I prefer computer simulations because I personally find them easier to implement (I’m a somewhat mathy game/robot programmer), but I don’t think it’s *better* on the absolute.
I don’t know what the writer of that comment was thinking, but there is DEFINITELY a rationalist slash “neuro atypical self help-y people” trend of trying to work out your own copious problems, making some progress maybe, and deciding that the insights you’ve gained in the process mean that you’ve unlocked the key to reforming your entire culture, if only the fools would listen to you.
Its like a self help book reading therapy attending version of super villainy.
I think you just described the ages old sin that is vanity.
Correct.
Scott is very painstaking about providing context on the issues he discusses and trying to show different points of view, often writing open-ended conclusions that read like “this is a complex issue, but hopefully now you’re better prepared to think about it.” I don’t remember reading intellectually-arrogant “I have the solution to everything and this is it” diatribes here.
What’s most amusing is not that the claim of SSC doing “other-optimising” is off the mark, but that many of the complaints seem to be asking for exactly that. It’s hard for me to interpret “there’s no point to any of this” or “this is useless and verbose” as anything but “please give me the TL;DR and tell me what I should believe at the end of the article.”
Yeah, I should clarify- I don’t actually think SSC does this. Just that its rather endemic among the sorts of bloggers who use words like “neuro-atypical.”
The rationalist term for this is “other-optimising”. Unsurprisingly, Eliezer Yudkoswy has a post explaining why you shouldn’t presume that the one weird trick that worked for you will also work for everyone else.
Yeah but on the other hand side, it seems equally implausible that the one weird trick will work for no-one else, so sharing it can still be valuable.
“So, we should instead try to understand societal problems on the basis of… what? Whim? Intuition?”
Normal people already understand basic human behavior. They come with understanding pre-installed. (or at least think they do) So they don’t spend time thinking about it, and think it is weird for other people to spend time thinking about it.
Citing fictional characters to prove a point kind of undermines the point you were trying to make. Your best example is a made-up person?
The division between normal and abnormal in this conversation seems fake.
I don’t have any examples, because everyone I know who does that is either so good at it that I can’t even tell they’re doing it, or (I suspect this is more common, sadly) really bad at it, and seems to think they have some deep insight into human nature, but they really just come across as some sort of uncanny valley robot.
To be fair, there is actually the thing that people on the autistic spectrum lack the intuitive understanding of other minds and thus have to rely on theoretization. On one hand this is good because the theories, models are reusable and basically build up a science, on the other hand it can be quite facepalmy when people over-analyze the obvious and get it wrong, too.
But no problem, I think since everybody understands how important is the status motive and how oblivious we tend to be to it, how strongly our brain tends to hide it, we can now bring Aspie and neurotypical behavior closer as there is basically one major difference:
Neurotypicals grok the status motive in people and themselves although they are embarrassed to talk about openly and consciously. Once Aspies figure that neurotypicals do everything for either real status gains or feeling good about themselves (subjective status gains) they have a simple, not overanalysed, not “spergy” and pretty usable model.
I mean like Dale Carnegie in How To Make Friends And Influence People. The basic idea is that people love to be made feel important. That is status. Aspies read this book. Neurotypicals read this book. Both tend to find it immensely useful. And it is NOT COMPLICATED. It ain’t spergy.
So I say we are close to collapsing oblivious Neurotypical behavior and Aspie over-analysis into one basic simple status theory. Carnegie’s book is fairly close, if old and outdated in many aspects.
The status model can be wildly overvalued. At the risk of being asked for srcs pls I’ve seen people imply or outright assert that human motives from love to friendship to professional ambition are entirely reducible to status-seeking. A danger of overanalysation is that one can obsess about factor X and miss factor Y.
Professional ambition, as ambition, LITERALLY means status: the desire to not do something big but also to gain renown for it. Or even when not externally recognized, still have this warm glow inside that you bested them all. Internalized status. Ambition plain simply literally means status-seeking, albeit often internalized. The evidence for this internal warm glow is internalized status is that it manifests as pride. You don’t tell anyone you ran a marathon or something, but still feel pride inside for it. Where could it come from if not from actual pride, which is the reaction to social praise and prestige?
True friendship is not, but many “friendships” are just to be seen hanging wit the cool crowd.
True love is not, but many “affairs” are, beyond genital desire, the desire to be seen with someone hot.
My opinion is that status gets undervalued even if these circles, it is something far bigger: everything that can make you feel proud or embarrassed is related to that. Morality. Health choices. etc.
I’m inclined to think that normal people don’t understand other *minds* intuitively– normal people have a good intuitive understanding of the social signals that normal people use. Since normal people are the large majority, this is enough to produce an illusion of understanding other minds.
I realized this when it occurred to me that autistic Temple Grandin’s normal mother didn’t have an intuitive understanding of Temple Grandin.
Ah. Er. Yes. Probably, yes. Or else it would be easy for neurotypicals to write NT user manuals for aspies.
Insightful.
Quite.
I think all of this is utterly overblown, the supposed systemizing autistic trait. A major problem of autism is that 7 different disorders are lumped under it in practice. Language deficits, nervous system disorders. Its almost meaningless now. Did it ever *have* a great deal of meaning? A big issue is that guys and girls are being compared with the same tests. Both genders average equal verbal reasoning ability, with differing spatial abilities. A few guys are then going to be quite a bit below average verbally and above average spatially when combining two moderately different mental populations, simply due to the “glitch” of averaging both populations together.
Another (this time offensive) observation I have is that OL, quite a few people who claim autism have the “lack” of traits that bestow social success in High School and many colleges. Or lacked it when young. Namely, poor at sports and below average physical attractiveness. I think if you combine those two traits with really sub-optimal parenting, social behaviors so poor one would believe autism is a culprit can develop.
Your “seven different disorders” (rather than something like “a number of disorders”) suggests that you have a list in mind. If so, could you go into more detail?
Ah, 7 is simply a natural number.
One issue with a “subtype” of autism is those considered to have language deficits with high spatial skills. Its simply an unlikely, but entirely normal aspect of a multi-dimensional Gaussian distribution
with reading comprehension being only somewhat correlated with spatial intelligence. Averaging both populations of men and women in the same distribution gives much different “normal” ranges then not. I believe I have read that women have about a general 1/5th SD advantage over men in overall reading comprehension, while guys have about a 2/3rds SD over women in spatial manipulation. A significant female advantage is emotional recognition, where I believe women have about a 1/3rd SD advantage in that trait. I’m not sure that combining both populations together is the best idea for diagnosing a disorder, though that might fundamentally be an issue with diagnostic semantics.
Though, that can easily explain away, right then and there, the 1:10 ratio of guys to girls, simple multi-dimensional gaussians occupying a certain range of function.
I know a person who has once been diagnosed, or a psychologist suggested it, when that person clearly would have simply been diagnosed as somewhat dull. I know them personally. It seems to be a sort of professional euphemism in that case. It agrees with what seems to be a growing suspicion amongst the casual crowd.
There’s neurotic introverts. I read those cases from a psychologist I like reading online, who entirely disagrees with other diagnosis.
There’s simply the great rate of professional disagreements in the field of psychology. It leaves a good bit of leeway in abnormal behavior.
There is the cynical observation that if a male lacks athletic ability, and is lower then average on facial aesthetics that at least in HS, a rather critical time of social development, he may simply decide the sphere isn’t worth it. Social deficits that many young males have won’t be corrected. And video games are the next obvious hobby.
And I have a simple personal annoyance with the trend to casually diagnose any young boy, or grown adult, who has a preoccupation with certain topics as having a version of aspergers. That same disorder is never(rarely) mentioned if the person has that obsession with something like football, where its simply considered natural…though I do suppose that by somewhat suspicious reasoning an obsession in a field that doesn’t directly lead to some versions of social status is a trait of the socially lacking.
I am too excited about being in a fish trap.
No, we should deal with societal problems using BRUTE STRENGTH.
Well, he did solve entropy..
If you can’t grasp basic human behavior, you have no right to try and fix it. Dolphins shouldn’t tell birds how to fly.
But humans can tell birds how to fly. Birds can’t tell humans how to fly. Deferring to the birds doesn’t seem like a good solution, either.
If you can’t *intuitively* grasp human behavior, and therefore study it sufficiently to gain an understanding of the topic far beyond what intuition supplies and un-marred by incorrect intuitions, you have every right to try and fix it.
Did you read the standard biases posts on LW, or any other exploration of the myriad ways in which people are routinely wrong on stuff about human behavior? Better yet, did you do both? If so, and you consider yourself neurotypical, did nothing in that research surprise you? Intuition is frequently useful, but its failures are a source of many societal ills.
We (and I mean all humanity, not any particular subset thereof) can do better.
You’ll fail, because you have no feel for what you are fixing. This leads to very smart people doing very dumb things like “rationally” trying to redesign marriage or food or education or what have you, and history is full of examples of this. If you are non-neurotypical, you don’t “get” how neuros act at a base level and you think “rationality” is just trying to apply your own thought processes in order for them to obey. Then you get shocked at how they don’t obey them.
There needs to be a lot of humilty, experience, and understanding in something to change it. Once you really know something, you realize how hard it is to do so.
What if the dolphins are correct?
I have never driven a car in my life, but I know more about driving than you do. Am I likely to be correct? Probably not.
Current airplanes do more resemble the aerodynamic shape of dolphins than birds.
Hey, I remember a bunch of those!
You’ve got plenty of valuable feedback from the right, but a surprising lack of it from the left. I think you need to expand your reach. You know, in order to get more balanced voices from your faithful readers.
I think it’s funny that about half the comments from the right are “The left is going to be mad at Scott despite how careful he’s being,” and half the comments from the left are them being mad at Scott despite how careful he’s being.
I noticed this too, as someone on the left.
You’re taking the worst critics on the left as representative of the left, which is somewhat unfair.
The other issue, as someone on the left, is that those of us on the left who can acknowledge this are relatively unlikely to be participating members of the left communities that need guidance. If I “walked into the den of the lion”, they’d have no way of knowing that I wasn’t secretly a fascist come to trick them. (for example)
I used to try this. It produces nothing but accusations of “concern trolling” — the left has a strange belief that right-wing operatives are constantly attempting to undermine their convictions. I even got banned from Daily Kos, back in the day, after being (falsely) accused of sock puppetry.
I don’t know how unusual a distinction it is to have been banned from both Redstate and DKos, but I have.
@stillnotking
I remember how baffled I was the first time I got called a crypto-Communist and a cold-hearted libertarian Randtard in _the same day_ in similar communities (both on Reddit). My best guess at the time was that those people were so simple-minded that they had to reduce the dimensionality of my political views into a binary one (left/right). I still don’t have any better theory for what they would be thinking.
@Virbie/@stillnotking:
Isn’t that the essence of tribalism?
If you aren’t with us, you are against us.
Whenever a guy says “beta male”, I want to pat him on the head and say, “Aw, what a bwave widdle awpha male you are!” Real men, like real women, don’t need to compare themselves to other people because they’re confident their deeds speak for them.
“Those people who think their deeds speak for them will inevitably be outshone by those who speak incessantly about their deeds.”
— Donald Trump
Excellent.
The cleverness of this quote betrays the fact that it is not actually attributable to Donald Trump, although if it were it would definitely force me to raise my estimation of him.
I certainly didn’t think it was authentic. But it’s good at showing the big reason for the unexpected success of the Trump campaign.
Of course it’s bogus, but if I may toot my own horn, I think it captures both Trump’s pompousness and his complete lack of attention to meter.
It’s too complex for a Trump quote. You are supposed to be aiming for a fourth grade reading level.
“Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.”
— Abraham Lincoln
i,e,: The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
somewhere in sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
Jesus was a sphinx in the future?
According to Yeats… um, that’s one possible interpretation?
To fill in the missing chunk:
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Just barely in the public domain BTW. If it had been written 5 years later it might not be.
Still, it’s one of the poems I would really expect to be in Western Canon, and am puzzled at the phrase not being recognized.
@keranih, I’d pin that on the overthrow of anything like a Western Canon that most people would be aware of. I’d never have encountered the poem if it wasn’t for one lengthy fanfic structured around it.
As best I can tell, poetry is not something that people, even educated people, in the modern world are likely to be familiar with. They might remember something they read because it was assigned in a course at some point in the past, but also might not, given that a common response to such classes is to learn what you need to pass the final and then forget it as rapidly as possible.
People who actually know lots of poetry and like it exist, but they are not very common.
@keranih
Same here. I would have expected most people to have read the poem in high school and at least have it vaguely tickle a memory. I’m 35 FWIW.
I’d never have encountered [Yeats’ The Second Coming] if it wasn’t for one lengthy fanfic structured around it
For me it was “Revelations”, Babylon 5, 2nd season. Delivered by the incomparable Andreas Katsulas.
YMMV; it’s a powerful bit of poetry and no doubt shows up in quite a few memorable places. But I agree that we are probably beyond being able to realistically expect everyone to recognize it. Too many good poets for that.
Yeah, I was ninja’d: was just about to say “or who watched Babylon 5“.
@David (and other people who enjoy poetry): How do you actually read poetry? Like you say, most of my experience with poetry comes from the high school, then a little bit of the 19. century French poetes maudits which we found kind of cool when we were 16 and listened to black metal (although I find that poetry quite kitschy today) and the one time when I tried reading Faust (when I was 15 I think). I also had a book of poetry by Bukowski, some if it was kind of interesting, but I did not like the fact that it didn’t rhyme. I really liked one poem by Kundera (I also like his prose a lot, although the last time I read something from him was when I was about 19 or 20, so I don’t know whether I would still like it as much as then) which was strong emotionally, had an interesting point, did rhyme and generally I felt like it fit the format well, i.e. that it was a good choice to write that as a poem rather than a short story (maybe I was too young then to appreciate it, but when reading Faust I always though that there was not much point to the format and that prose would work just as well).
So my question is to all of you – what poems/poets do you like and why?
@Tibor
For me, kicking back on the patio with a drink and a book (be it history, poetry, or fiction) is basically my ideal “lazy weekend”. Having writers/poets who’s work I know I enjoy, and keeping a few books of theirs on hand is conducive to the above.
While I enjoy spoken verse, I have to be honest and say that 99% of it is crap, so again the trick is to find a few poets or performers that you know you enjoy and follow that.
@ Tibor
A lot of things that we would put in prose, were once customarily done in (rather dull imo) verse. Lewis’s _A Preface to Paradise Lost_ goes into this. So don’t expect the same kind of concentrated effect we get from short, modern poems.
Imo with any genre, it’s good to start with the more recent stuff you already like, and work back from there.
@houseboat:
I don’t know. I consider maybe 80% of modern art (as in modern visual art) as either bad or pretentious (usually both). I like art to have an artisan quality as well. To me, visual art should come hand in hand with craftsmanship. There are artists today who also show a technical skill (and also those who show nothing else, like the hyper-realistic paintings which are impressive but also kind of dull, photography is more interesting in that case) but there are many more of them among the 18th century artists for example. So if I wanted to go from modern art back, I’d conclude that I just don’t like it, but there are many paintings that I like prior to Andy Warhol. I am almost surely oversimplifying because I am not all that interested in visual arts but it is my impression that the vast majority of modern art (at least the stuff you can see in a modern art gallery) is copying Warhol or Jackson Pollock (who themselves had a good idea which they then repeated too many times). But like I said, I find a lot of strange music interesting that people would not like, probably because they don’t see (or rather hear) the details I do and people who are more interested in paintings probably also see much more in them than me.
And judging from the very limited amount of poetry that I’ve read, I don’t like the very modern poetry which does not rhyme, at least in a whole book of poems by Bukowski I found maybe one or two interesting and I read them simply like very short stories anyway. At the same time, I don’t like epic poems either (but again, the only experience I have with those comes from reading Faust and the few exerts in school books from ancient epic poetry like the epic of Gilgamesh or the Iliad and Odyssey – I really like the latter and learned it by heart as a kid but I read it rewritten in prose). To me, epic poetry is a strange hybrid genre which fits the age when most people could not write and had to remember the stories by heart – and it is easier to do so when they rhyme. I kind of like this poem, although it is probably slightly kitchy. It is a story, but it is very lyrical, the story itself is actually not all that interesting. I don’t know if I prefer the original or the English translation. English has a very different rhythm than Czech where all words have the accent on the first syllable…Which, I think, makes it actually harder to write good sounding song lyrics or poems in Czech than in English or in other languages where the accents vary.
Tibor asks what poems/poets I like.
My favorite poet is Kipling. Others that I like include Chesterton, Millay, Hopkins, Yeats, Donne, Frost … .
Particular poems …
I mentioned “The Mary Gloster,” which is a Browning monolog and I think better than any of Browning’s. I like to argue that Kipling is more of a modern poet than most modern poets, because he uses contemporary technology as poetic material. The best example is “Hymn to Breaking Strain,” in which the underlying metaphor is the table of breaking strains in an engineering handbook. But there are lots of others.
For story poems by Kipling, I like “The Ballad of East and West,” “The Last Suttee,” “Akbar’s Bridge.” By Chesterton, “The Ballad of the White Horse” is very long but also very good. I’ve written a couple of narrative poems about William Marshall that I’m fond of, but I admit prejudice.
One poem I’m fond of by someone whose other work I really don’t know: “They flee from me that sometime did me seek.”
Hope that helps.
I’m not a huge person for poetry, but I studied Russian in college, and I like a fair amount of Russian poetry I’ve looked at (mostly by Pushkin), as well as Russian songs.
When I studied abroad there, I had to pick one short poem to memorize and recite as part of a “phonetics” class, and I picked this one from Pushkin:
Узник
Сижу за решеткой в темнице сырой.
Вскормленный в неволе орел молодой,
Мой грустный товарищ, махая крылом,
Кровавую пищу клюет под окном,
Клюет, и бросает, и смотрит в окно,
Как будто со мною задумал одно.
Зовет меня взглядом и криком своим
И вымолвить хочет: “Давай улетим!
Мы вольные птицы; пора, брат, пора!
Туда, где за тучей белеет гора,
Туда, где синеют морские края,
Туда, где гуляем лишь ветер… да я!..”
А reading of it can be found here (amateur, but better than some of the professional versions I found).
Here is a passable metrical translation:
Prisoner
I’m sitting by bars in the damp blackened cell —
The juvenile eagle, who’s bred by the jail,
My mournful friend, with his wings stretching wide,
Is picking at bloody food right by my side.
He’s picking and looking at me through the bars,
Like having a thought that is common to us,
Like calling to me with a glance and a sight,
And wanting to say, “Let us fly outside!
We’re free proud birds; it is time for the friends
To fly to the white of the rock in a haze,
To fly to the blue of the sea and the sky,
Where evenly dwell only tempests … and I!”
What I like about it is pretty clear, I suppose: it has a very strong metrical “beat” and a forceful tempo. Every single line goes:
da DA da da DA da da DA da da DA
And it has a simple rhyme scheme, as well. One thing I don’t like about English poetry is that it’s hard to construct a long series of sentences that rhyme consistently in English and not sound forced or “twee”. Especially if you’re trying to go above the lyrical level of pop songs. Part of it, I’m sure, is my lack of familiarity with Russian, but I think it is simply easier to make things rhyme in a natural way.
Another one I really like is a “lyric poem” by Mikhail Matusovsky that was later adapted into a song in the Soviet period, and which (I gather) remains a popular “standard” today:
Московские Окна
Вот опять небес темнеет высь,
Вот и окна в сумраке зажглись.
Здесь живут мои друзья, и, дыханье затая,
В ночные окна вглядываюсь я.
Я могу под окнами мечтать,
Я могу, как книги, их читать,
И, заветный свет храня, и волнуя, и маня,
Они, как люди, смотрят на меня.
Я, как в годы прежние, опять
Под окном твоим готов стоять.
И на свет его лучей я всегда спешу быстрей,
Как на свиданье с юностью моей.
Я любуюсь вами по ночам,
Я желаю, окна, счастья вам…
Он мне дорог с давних лет, – и его яснее нет –
Московских окон негасимый свет.
It is performed excellently here my the singer Muslim Magomaev.
My own translation, non-metrical:
Moscow Windows
There again the height of the sky darkens,
And there windows are lighted in the dusk,
Here live my friends, and, with bated breath,
I gaze into the windows of the night.
I can dream under the windows,
I can, like books, read them,
And, the precious light of preserving, and fermenting, and enticing,
They, like people, look at me.
I, as in previous years, again,
Am ready to stand under your window,
And to the light of its rays I always hurry faster,
As to an encounter with my youth.
I admire you in the night,
I wish, windows, happiness to you…
It is dear to me across these many years,—and there is nothing brighter than it—
The never-ending light of Moscow’s windows.
The Magomaev version is one of my favorite songs, though it has been covered by other groups like the pop group Блестящие (sometimes described as the “Russian Spice Girls”), which was actually where I originally heard it.
***
I thought to was interesting to include a little snippet (in the original not-quite-perfect English) from the website I got the lyrics from, sovmusic.ru. It shows you how the true Soviet nostalgics see things, and how in many ways the Soviet Union was a very “conservative” place:
I don’t suppose this would be a good time to discuss if there’s a meaningful differentiation between poetry and certain forms of music lyrics, especially rap?
Because my instinctual reaction to the question”What poems/poets do you like and why? How do you actually read poetry?” keeps being “Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter, Comden/Green, Lorenz Hart. Also, go read the lyrics for critics’ top rap songs.”
(I mean, the word contortions and clever plays that the likes of Weird Al and Gerard Alessandrini go through to make their parody lyrics fit have me going “Ooooooohhhhhhh” about as often as Sondheim does. Speaking of which, ugh, those little turns of phrase in the second-to-last verse of “Any Moment” always has me with a shit-eating grin. “best to take the moment present/as a present/for the moment” UGH SONDHEIM)
Song lyrics are a subset of poetry.
For clever turn of phrase, I’m with MC Paul Barman: “My dandy voice / Makes the most anti-choice grannies’ panties moist.”
If you’re going to boast, boast well.
@Vox: Yeah, the fact that communists are conservative does not really surprise me. Czechoslovakia under communism, except for the brief period of Prague Spring in ’68 before the Russian invasion, was quite a socially conservative place. You have to realize who the communists were. There was a small group of Noam Chomsky-like intellectuals (Trocky would probably fit that description), then a large group of quite poorly educated workers (and in Russia, probably not educated at all) and than another small group of sociopaths who ended up running the show. But since the sociopaths also usually recruited from the “proletariat”, they were not exactly your socially liberal “hippies” either. So for example, the student dormitories in the communist Czechoslovakia were divided to those for male and those for female students, so they would either be in a different building or at least a different floor. The communist morals were actually quite puritan, not exactly like the Orwellian anti-sex youth, but not all that far. Actually, although this divisions was of course long gone by the time I started studying, there were some remnants visible. There is one dormitory in Prague where I lived during the first semester in my bachelor (then I moved away because it was very expensive only because it was in the centre and otherwise worse than other dormitories) where they have showers not in every room but on each floor and there is always a designated female shower room on even floors (or maybe odd, doesn’t matter) and a male shower room on odd floors (there were I think some 4 floors in total). So when I moved and the male bathroom was on the same floor as my bedroom, I naturally assumed there to be men there only. But one time, when I was in the bathroom and left the shower, a girl came there also to take a shower – I was standing there completely naked and also surprised. She explained to me that since it would be a great nuisance for the people who do not live on the floor where their bathroom matches their gender to always go take a shower up- or downstairs, everyone simply uses the showers on their floor. When they set the building up as a student dormitory, they had only women or only men on each floor, so it was not a problem. But now the result is unisex bathrooms which are however not properly labeled as unisex 🙂
@ Tibor:
Interesting story.
There was a famous quote where a Soviet actress (looking it up, it was Lyudmila Ivanova) was interviewed as saying “There is no sex in the Soviet Union!” (She meant no sexual references on television programs, unlike in America.)
Layers within layers here.
You want to belittle the alpha male, and you also compare him unfavourably to someone who doesn’t compare themselves to others?
Real men and women don’t start fights, but once one has begun, they may try to end it. One way to do that is to try to expose the pettiness of the people who first offer insults.
And to be clear here, I”m not belittling “the alpha male” because there are none. It’s a notion loved by insecure people who have appropriated an idea that’s not true of wolves or men. Google “the myth of alpha-male dominance” if you doubt me.
http://raggedjackscarlet.tumblr.com/post/129742696353/shibarilynx-funereal-disease
It’s the classical “Outside the Box” Box applied to masculinity.
You are supposed to get rid of your gender role by exactly following the rules this ideology provides for your gender. Otherwise, you fail as a man, and you will be socially punished.
This feels like rhetoric to me.
Satisfying rhetoric with just enough true things mixed in to get cheers from one side of the room but my first thought reading that was
“hmm… to say that so definitely you’d need far more than 2 examples of top-tier male feminists”
Don’t get me wrong, I like the comment but it speeds down a too-long and fragile chain of inference to get to it’s main point.
There’s also that guy from NSWATM, Charles Clymer and (arguably) Jian Ghomeshi… probably a bunch more.
I’m not convinced by the argument either, but there is something there to look at. Probably best left to the people who care about that stuff, though, like Ozy and pals.
I agree though the nature of how it’s posed will tend to make us think of examples which confirm it. to do it honestly we might have to find someone who’s not read the shibarilynx-funereal-disease link, ask them to make a list of influencial contemporary male feminists so that we can’t bias it by only selecting the most “alpha” ones then get them to pick a list of influencial contemporary male [something neutral, say composers or authors] then for each attempt to find any details on some list of publicly known “alpha” traits to see if high-profile male feminists are more likely to have them.
Confounders: if feminists are more likely to call out male feminists publicly for “alpha” traits then that screws it up.
>ask them to make a list of influencial contemporary male feminists
Ayyyy
EDIT: More seriously, though, I’ve mentioned before (and seen mentioned by other people, most notably an old post from Thing of Things), that there’s a lot (a lot more than you’d expect, at least) of cases of abusive personalties in leadership positions among SJ people.
Why I’m not sure about this explanation is that, while it fits part of the data, it ignores that it’s also pretty common among female SJ people as well.
I would expect a huge number of abusive personalities in a movement that assigns status largely on the ability to say the right things. That’s a sociopath’s dream scenario; they practice saying the right things insincerely for their entire lives.
This is also confounded by the fact that most of SJ are only in it casually, as the current most shiny way to analyze pop culture. As such, you get variously fandoms praising celebrities’ feminist cred, a la the Emma Watson thing a few posts ago.
For male celebrities, notable names off of the top of my head would include Tom Hiddleston, Joss Whedon, Poe Dameron, Andrew Garfield, Ryan Reynolds, Alan Rickman, and Ryan Gosling.
Most of your regular SJ aren’t going to know the names of the dudes in Feminist Frequency, but they sure as hell will remember Tom wearing that “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt.
To me, Fragile Masculinity Discourse is about saying something like this —
“You think that if you do X, Y and Z, you will feel confident and strong, safe and in control of your life. That’s not true. The ideal exists to keep you reaching, struggling, pushing other people down to reaffirm your worth.
The threat of falling from the pedestal of manliness will always control you, as long as you believe that you must be Real Man (TM) to be a worthy human being.
The promise of inner strength through masculinity is a lie. There is only the facade of strength that you will feel compelled to maintain till the end of your days, even if it hurts you or your loved ones.”
But phrasing it as mockery seems to be counterproductive, for sure.
This is another instance of conflating venting/backlash (you think you’re better than me because you X, Y and Z? well, my friends all agree that X, Y and Z are dumb, so there!) with earnest discussion, and making a mess of the latter.
How would such an ideal have been created, by whom, and to what end?
Arguments about gender roles tend to devolve into conspiracy-theory territory. Surely the null hypothesis here is that men act in ways they perceive as attractive to women and vice versa. The perceptions must be largely correct, or Darwin has a lot of explaining to do.
At the very least, military culture/training is in the picture (especially historically) as an organized effort to define masculinity for purposes that are completely orthogonal to attracting women.
More generally/arguably, cultures take on a life of their own and self-propagate accordingly.
@nil: Women’s fondness for men in uniform tends to undercut that “completely orthogonal” part. Besides, a major historical purpose of military action was to capture women. Perhaps I should amend my statement: men act in ways that make them more likely to breed, normally with a willing partner, but not necessarily.
Cultures take on lives of their own, yes, but some things don’t change much (e.g. combat soldiers, again, are near 100% male in all times and places), and the things that are arbitrary follow the Schelling pattern. It doesn’t matter which side of the road we drive on, but it very much matters that we all drive on the same side.
If women find men in uniform attractive, it’s basically coincidental, as there is no aspect of military training that has “attracting barflies” as a goal.
But I guess I’d need to know exactly what we are talking about here. If you’re zoomed way out, then, yeah, I think you can rest on Darwin to explain “chicks dig confidence.” But to me the post you replied to a sort of stiff upper lip buttoned stoicism that I think was very significantly influenced by Renaissance/Enlightenment era Western-style infantry warfare/training and propagated in large part by intra-male social conditioning (and, later, advertising), none of which were particularly motivated by attracting (or attaining) women.
Plus, we’re talking about times and places where partner selection was done very early in people’s lives and from a very limited pool, and was not infrequently made by women’s’ fathers rather than the women themselves.
Moloch.
I think Darwin would throw up his arms and complain that our world is not anywhere close to the ancestral environment, we’re all crazy people and he’s outta here.
A major historical purpose of warfare was to capture women, among other things, but the cultures that build themselves around that kind of raiding don’t usually have a military. Or at least not the kind of military that has uniforms and recruits and a culture of its own.
How did someone create the English language? Who? To what end? Or how about the Hellenic Bacchanals? The sport of cricket?
Are you kidding? Very few men go out of their way to determine what is perceived as attractive by women, and those who make an honest effort by asking women are usually regarded as particularly unmanly.
And yes, you will no doubt argue that men don’t ask women because women don’t know/women always lie/bitches be crazy, but then the whole premise that men know what they want and act in ways that are likely to achieve their goals is shot through because we’re already assuming that’s false for women, and there’s precious little reason to suspect women are special in this regard.
The main problem with asking people what they’re attracted to — and this works for men as well as women — isn’t that they don’t know, or are lying etc., but that the answers you get aren’t likely to come on a level that’s helpful. Sometimes they’re physical preferences that you can’t do anything about (maybe your friend likes tall and you’re short, or vice versa), or that you can do something about but which don’t generalize well enough to be worth the effort (maybe your friend likes back muscles; doesn’t make it a good idea to spend an hour a day on deadlifts). Sometimes they’re personality preferences, but trying to fake a personality trait directly tends to come off as creepy, especially if you’re doing it to get into someone’s pants. Sometimes they’re just too vague to be useful.
To put it another way, optimizing for any particular person’s preferences is almost always a losing game, and the answers you get are always going to be highly particular. People — whoever they are, whatever they’re into — know what’s unusual about their preferences, but not what’s typical about them.
Women like men in uniform for much the same reason female birds like male birds that put a lot of effort into looking pretty, like peacocks with their extravagant tails and similar efforts by other species.
Uniforms used to be very ornate. A handsome man in a flashy uniform looked very pretty 🙂
Military training seems to spend a huge amount of time teaching recruits to look impressive.
Take the gentleman at the end of this commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n0SCScSFYI . He’s clearly spent hours learning to make precise salutes with a ceremonial sword.
The sword, like the extensively-detailed parade uniform, isn’t there for any combat application. They exist to help recruitment and internal morale via making soldiers look good.
So, successful militaries have optimized for “looking good” even if that’s not their terminal value.
(Admittedly, I’m not sure how this point would tie back to the core argument)
@Drew-I think you’re underestimating the degree to which that kind of stuff facilitates military discipline, and the degree to which that same discipline (i.e., staying in formation and not routing) has historically been the killer app of European infantry.
Posturing and intimidation used to be a critical part of the military skillset–but soldiers defeat warriors pretty reliably.
I should have thought of this, but it only popped up in memory later. Okay, so I’m going to assume you all know “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” and if you don’t, here it is:
Here’s Chesterton’s riposte on behalf of the lady:
Does criticizing something in others automatically means comparing oneself? To be fair, often yes, there is always a certain sense of a relative status game. But sometimes you really just want to roll your eyes and point out behavior you find ridiculous and it is not a self-comparison or status game. I mean, recently a guy on Reddit asked how to politely and diplomatically tell her wife she got fat. That is really so beta and it is really not comparing oneself to point it out. It is just that any relationship where you cannot call each other a hippo but have to walk on diplomatic eggshells to avoid offense is not a good, honest, trusting relationship so why so afraid of losing it through giving accidental offense? It is not self-comparison to be annoyed by cowardice in men in situations not warranted for.
“But sometimes you really just want to roll your eyes and point out behavior you find ridiculous and it is not a self-comparison or status game. ”
This post is an example of itself. And that’s pretty neat.
Is a post about posts that are not examples of themselves an example of itself?
It’s a weird totalizing theory of the hyper-defensive, “masculine” (alt?) right and related bros. And also an obvious way of making ad hominem attacks instead of arguments. If you’re calling someone a beta, you’ve already lost.
That’s just alternate Real Manning.
The real undermining factor is that apparently the wolf research was inaccurate, and wolves don’t really behave that way in the wild. It’s been a while since I saw that, so I would have to double check, though.
Where can I find some good 105 IQ discussions about 140 IQ issues?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bang_Theory
105 seems generous.
I may have mentioned this before, but Sheldon’s admiration of Wesley is legitimately pretty clever.
Care to explain? I’ve not heard you mention it before.
I could have sworn I made a reference to this before on this site, but Wesley was a know it all and famously derided as a mary sue. It is just kind of clever (on a show that often goes for the surface level gag) that they decided a character as obnoxious as Sheldon conceived of Wesley as a hero.
Obviously its not Shakespeare, but in terms of thinking through characterization, I thought it was funny. (I have always been a fan of shows going for the less obvious gags).
I think you might be giving the show writers too much credit. I like your interpretation, but I suspect it was more a case of “Wesley Crusher was a child prodigy! On a spaceship! Of COURSE little Shelly would love him!”
But maybe. They do write Sheldon as terrible at social cues and liable to take things at face value.
Oooh! You should read my treaty that demonstrates that Gôdel’s Incompleteness Theories prove that Laughter Curves aren’t real and the Australians are out to a free lunch! (Or alternatively: that disprove the Efficient Marketing Hypothesis because of the indecisiveness of P = NP (what with the death of traveling salesmen and such)!)
That’s more like mentally ill IQ 130.
Second hand characterization of some interesting discussions on the other side of a relatively thin wall.
Encyclopedia Dramatica.
95 IQ discussions about 70 IQ issues
Once you get past the jargon and euphemisms (and gore, and porn, and gore porn), ED is actually pretty good.
In what way is any of ED’s content on IQ 140 issues?
Probably most talk news qualifies- topics include national and international economics, major technological development, social ramifications of complicated political policy, etc., read by people who have their jobs because they have great hair and don’t stutter on camera.
That first one is awesome. I approve of this tradition.
gr8 h8 m8.
im ir8.
Well, I have to admit: I did find these comments funnier than most of the atom Swifties I’ve read.
That’s not too difficult. (Tom challenged)
Posts that contain a Swifty and nothing else are anti-content to me.
“Think small”, said Atom swiftly.
“My wavefunction is highly spread in position space”, said Atom swiftly.
“I thought it was a blog about science methodology until that post with the talking cactus.”
Remark from a reader, or self-criticism?
>Slate Star Codex is 140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues
Not entirely inaccurate.
Upvote
I’m kind of wondering what would constitute a 140 IQ issue. Does the commenter imagine rooms full of people in mutual psychic flux, having transcended the need to discuss boring mundane issues like mass-media dynamics or politics or talking cacti?
Perhaps they want us to focus on high-energy and quantum physics, advanced mathematics, quantitative finance and similar topics? You know, let the nerds do their weird stuff?
For what it’s worth, I think you are a beautiful human being. I hope that amount of hatred never gets to you.
Totally agree with you. I’ve always felt that Scott is one of the best representatives for rationality today. Along with his tremendous insight, exquisite ability to weave a narrative that shocks you into seeing the other side and top-notch rationality and statistical rigor, I’ve always admired his deep empathy, even (especially?) for people who disagree with him.
Much <3 Scott, never get jaded, please.
Well, hell, Scott, they can say it’s a homosexual Jewish Stalinist circlejerk, but damn if it’s not the *nicest* homosexual Jewish Stalinist circlejerk I’ve ever seen
I’m not sure I could write a blog if people were saying those kinds of things about me/it. I don’t always agree with you, but you’re rigorous and (almost) never seem to argue in bad faith. Just trying to do my part to balance out the hate and let you know that your work is appreciated.
Clearly have to step up my game, now that I’ve stopped lurking.
IMHO “It’s like someone tried to make fivethirtyeight as uninteresting as possible.” simply IS the sickest burn, but I bet there are better lurking in the hearts of men.
That one made me smile. Fivethirtyeight is already intensely uninteresting, so Scott must be pushing up against some theoretical limit.
I… I feel so personally attacked
I’m not sure what “105 IQ issues” means exactly, but given that people of average intelligence are pretty much definitionally going to make up the biggest chunk of the population, addressing their issues seems like a pretty worthwhile thing to do.
Though a post which boils down to, ‘We could reconcile theism with the evidence if we added Truman Show-level effective solipsism,’ does not address anything anywhere.
I just kept remembering this: http://nerdist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Last-Week-Tonight-Poster-John-Oliver.jpg
(Also, as a mathematician I’ve always been impressed by your ability to handle mathematics-ish things like quantum computing and statistics despite not being mathematically inclined).
I saw about thirty seconds of John Oliver in my entire life… Those are thirty seconds I want back.
It was about some stuff that was happening here in Canada… He was hopelessly oversimplifying, and coming to absurd conclusions. It seemed like he was confident he wouldn’t get called out because his public is American.
For what its worth, hes the same way with US issues.
I wouldn’t go to him for sombre political analysis, but he genuinely is pretty funny. Plus the Jack Warner thing was awesome. (context: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/15/john-oliver-jack-warner-fire_n_7586250.html )
I don’t tend to agree with collective guilt, but we Englishmen are very sorry for John Oliver. And James Corden. And Piers Morgan. Oh, God, what have we done…
The British have a long history of making their undesirables migrate to other places, we are used to it by now 🙂
“I retain great hopes for Scott, he’ll come around. When he does he’ll bring a high level of rigor with him. He is a caterpillar and will become a beautiful reactionary butterfly someday.”
lol
“Slate Star Codex is 140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
“I would add that something like Slate Star Codex is also a clinic in the aspie tendency to miss the forest for the trees, except in this case it’s more like closely examining the bark on the trees for no goddamn reason whatsoever.”
lol
“a blog populated by 99th percentile aspergers/IQ “rationalist” millennials who converse in an abnormally abstract style, and whose concrete cultural experience is drawn mainly from a bunch of weird nerd shit.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
“What makes me sad about Scott is just how close he is. I won’t give up hope on him yet. If only there was some way to secretly inject this guy with testosterone.”
lol
“I would add that something like Slate Star Codex is also a clinic in the aspie tendency to miss the forest for the trees, except in this case it’s more like closely examining the bark on the trees for no goddamn reason whatsoever.”
My favorite.
Goddammit I am just trying to figure out if there’s a regular pattern in the moss/lichens so I can find North if I get lost out in the woods.
Take it from a lapsed Boy Scout: the moss grows wherever it wants to grow.
That’s been my conclusion, too.
But I keep holding out hope.
Yeah, some of these are completely off the wall, but some you just want to nod and explain. “Of course you have to examine the bark on all the trees! Where do you think aspirin came from?! What would life be like without cinnamon!?!”
You don’t just need to *examine* the bark on all the trees, you need to *taste* it.
“Hey guys! I just found pine weevils! I think this might be why so many trees are dying!”
That’s exactly what I’m going for as well!
Well, dude, don’t want to be a dick or nothing, but you’re fucked up. You talk like a fag and your shit’s all retarded. Don’t worry scro. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.
Enjoy your ban.
Not sure, but I think the above was a parody of the types of comments listed above.
It’s an Idiocracy quote, but I think the satire would be detectable even if Scott didn’t get the reference.
Actually, no, I take that back. In the context of this post Poe’s Law clearly applies.
I’m fairly certain that I would vote for Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
For context, in the scene the quote is from in the film Idiocracy the speaker is talking to someone who is , unknown to him, at that point the smartest person in the world but the speaker isn’t mentally equipped to tell the difference between that and being mentally disabled.
“that article seemed like a return ticket to obviousville with eight-hour layovers everywhere”
Actually, that one’s pretty clever.
I mean, if you want to spend time in everywhere and still eventually get to obviousville, that seems like a pretty good deal.
Why a fish trap, of all things?
I think they meant a lobster trap, which is one of those evocative images that gets used totally out-of-context all the time—probably because of the completely-unintended association with lobsters dragging one-another back into a boiling pot.
Look up ghost lobster traps (that’s ghost lobster-traps), I think that’s what that person was going for.
They mean it in the same sense one might refer to a roach motel. You can enter any time you like, but you can never leave.
One of these:
http://images.lmgtfy.com/?q=fish+trap
I assumed the commenter meant this thing, as in “the people who read SSC float past the seemingly harmless bars of Scott’s rhetorical framing until they are trapped against an inescapable intellectual dead end, where they are metaphorically devoured”, and it’s disappointing this was likely not the intention.
I feel like most of these can be summarized as “it’s not right that the people here aren’t yelling at one another, and I’m going to yell at them until they start.”
+1
Well… on the other hand I respect Multi more since (pronoun dodged) gave me the finger. Dispassionate analysis is all fine and sorely missing from most websites, but ultimately too much robotic grayness can get too much and too much dispassion and politeness could easily lead to what I call the Indian spiritual debate problem: revolving forever around unresolvable differences in sweet language. Like you can never get Maharishi to tell you he thinks Osho is full of shit, he’ll just always be like “he is saying the same as I do just in different words”. I never liked this, some confrontations are better not avoided. The same way it is more honest and direct for people to tell each other some X is for them not up for debate but basically something dear enough to get the knives out for, and that is what strong language suggests. Drawing the lines, the boundaries. Agreeing to disagree, but show some _teeth_ first, or why would anyone? Show that you would be willing to take and dish out some hurt in defense of something that matters to you. Be a properly territorial animal and bare your incisors when your territory is threatened. I respect this more than polite analysis badly hiding disguised contempt.
Yeah, perpetual circumlocution is bullshit. You have to be conciliatory in communication with others, but you also have to say what you mean. That means not walking around on tiptoes as if you’re terrified you’ll break something with an off-the-cuff remark. Think before you speak, but don’t unpack every word down to pure anodyne abstraction.
It can be difficult for meek people to learn to express themselves effectively, because it entails a certain assertion of one’s status, and a basic confidence that one has the right to “take up space” in the conversation in this way.
And there are multiple strategies. One is to start big. Assert yourself big in a space, then when others do the same and bump into you, then deflate and retreat a bit. They do the same and you end up with equal space, because everybody demonstrated to each other they are not to be screwed with. You probably seen this at parties and whatnot, a few guys initially behave as if they owned the place, bump into each other, cut down each other to size a bit, then behave normally. This all in body language basically, an intricate pantomime. This is a strategy for equilibrium, even equity, for people who are naturally dominant, start big but don’t be reluctant to retreat if you bump.
Then there are people with the opposite strategy, naturally submissive people who start small, and expect others to be small, and then grow cautiously so much, all together, until they gently touch.
I wonder that is part of why Occupy Wall Street did not work. For precisely these reasons, they generally had the rule to let the people of underprivileged gender, sexual orientation etc. speak up first precisely because they may be more naturally timid, less used to assert themselves. Achieved maybe about equal voice between the dominant and submissive or strong and weak. But this obviously weakens the group as the whole – this is why historically this was never done! Bending over backwards to include weaker voices weakens the collective voice of the group. Back in 1968 it was the other way around, the loudest, most confident, most aggressive voices the most heard, which is the natural state of things and this student revolution stuff quickly became an signalling arms race of high-T aggressive young men about Che-type bravery and antagonizing the system. And yes, it caused quite a bang.
I’m still pretty sure that the reason Occupy Wall Street didn’t work was because they didn’t actually WANT it to work, at least if we define “work” as “reduce income inequality”. The point was to be as righteous as possible, not to actually achieve meaningful social change, and the latter was actively avoided because it inevitably meant dealing with the Hated Enemy. I watched a lot of Occupy discussions at the time and it was astonishing how hard they would swerve if it looked like they had a chance of accidental success.
“The point was to be as righteous as possible, not to actually achieve meaningful social change.”
I get the same feeling from a lot of Marxist cultural critiques and the like, as well as from the sorts of usually academic leftists who are really into the writings of people like Adorno. The goal is to show how smart and nuanced you are as a thinker by weaving an ever more complex web of problems. Solutions are bourgeois.
I arrived at the local Occupy offshoot with several Trotskyist “comrades”, and the first thing they did was get a banner saying “no more lefty hacks, no more unions bureaucrats” taken down. They then proceeded to dominate the voting by virtue of having called in everyone affiliated with them, and within three days they’d driven off anyone not on the far left, in addition to pretty much everyone from the working class leaving since they couldn’t afford to burn time and money camping in a park.
I think it’s misleading to say that an amorphous “they” didn’t want it to succeed because they were busy signalling. In my n=1 anecdotal experience in a city that wasn’t NY and a country not on either American continent, all the people who wanted to create realistic change were either forced to leave or couldn’t stay, and the movement was taken over by people who thought they were in the first days of the revolution. Fighting a revolution has totally different requirements compared to lowering income inequality, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that the movement was pushed toward pointless violent encounters, that it delivered unrealistic demands whenever it had a chance of compromise, or that it pushed for strikes from sympathetic unions. At the end it was run by literal communists, who knew no tactics other than those they’d previously employed at ignored protests and futile marches.
“local Occupy offshoot”
I didn’t even know it spread beyond the US. Was it still called “Occupy Wall Street,” or was it just a similar protest group created in sympathy with that movement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Occupy_movement_protest_locations
The US news media doesn’t report on anything happening outside the US unless we happen to be bombing that place or hope to soon be bombing that place at the time.
Careful of typical mind fallacy here.
As a generally wordy and non-incisive writer, my experience isn’t that I’m too meek to say what I think. It’s that I don’t necessarily *know* what I think, at least not with certainty, and I’m trying to work through the angles by writing about it.
TheDividualist, you sound (in Enneagram terms, and I’m not recommending this as anything other than an amusing online test – you would not believe the Jesuit-inspired fad for this system of personality-typing amongst clergy and religious novice masters in the 80s) like a typical Eight – Eights are the type who believe that true motives, character and intentions are revealed only when all the “polite bullshit” is peeled away, so they often deliberately let themselves get angry, or push others to be angry, in order to provoke “authentic” reactions. Also, they like it when people stand up to them and push back.
I’m a Five, by contrast: one of those who hate direct and interpersonal conflict and prefer to act with civility and in accord with acceptable social mores; we only resort to showing our emotions, particularly anger, as a very last resort and take it very seriously, which leads to bad misunderstandings with Eights (they think we are hypocritical push-overs who can’t think for ourselves and are mushy in the middle; we think they are violent, brainless, barbarians who try to get their way by shouting and foot-stamping and intimidation).
I did those tests a decade ago and got inconclusive results. I don’t even remember what my own result was, but just like with horoscopes or Myers-Briggs, almost everything there sounded like something everybody does occasionally. The problem is that ultimately ALL types in such tests sound, how to put it, likeable, desirable. No type tells you you suck. So it is easy to nod for every question… all sounds good. All sounds desirable. And of course it is very easy to guess what a question drives at.
This is why I invented mine. I think Scott will fall over laughing but anyway: my personality typology is that disorders and mental illnesses are just stronger versions of normal personality types.
On this, I would characterize myself as a schizoid type. Not as strongly as to have this disorder, but a weaker version, as a personality. My wife is a depressive type, again, not depressed, no disorder, but too often questioning her worth and so on, so she can kind of borrow my detachment and indifference when I tell her stuff like “if your boss does not care about running the place right, don’t be emotionally invested in doing your job right”.
The advantage of my test is that all disorders are obviously inglorious. Who likes to call himself or herself a schizoid or narcissist or something? So I think if we analyse ourselves these ways, we are going to be more honest. We don’t get to pick from various likable traits and types i.e. questions that obviously lead to them, we have a menu card of stuff that all sucks, and we must decide which kind of suck to embrace.
You look like the same depressive type as my wife, or my mother too, I think this is why I like you, I feel protective with women who are open and honest about their vulnerability. I don’t like this in men, though, don’t make good trenchmates.
Putting it in a more glorious way, I associate my schizoid type with the stiff upper lip, cool under fire, stoic, no damn given attitudes. But I may be entirely wrong. The problem for my type is that as people who matter keep dying on us, we get more and more detached and indifferent, eventually crossing into actual schizoid disorder. This is why having kids is absolutely crucial for my type.
Ever read Clans of the Alphane Moon? Sounds a bit like your classification system.
Seems extremely reasonable to me, and definitely jives with how I tend to think about myself and others.
You look like the same depressive type as my wife, or my mother too, I think this is why I like you, I feel protective with women who are open and honest about their vulnerability.
Why, TheDividualist, that is so sweet. Thank you! Be careful there, you don’t want to let down your tough “One time I fought a bear and it ripped my guts open so I had to walk fifty miles in a howling blizzard dragging its carcass behind me until I reached an abandoned half-ruined hovel where I could stitch myself up with fishing line and a rusty hook” facade 🙂
Please say more about your classification system. It sounds a lot like my mental model and I want to know what’s going through your head.
You’re being unfair to the Enneagram– or at least the version I read. The idea was that there are good and bad versions of the personality types, and it was people’s job to cultivate their compulsion until it was reliably good.
I’m inclined to think I’m an Enneagram 1 (perfectionist) with a 9 (peaceful) wing– in other words, why won’t you goddamn people get it right and be peaceful?
Some confrontations are better not avoided? Agreed. But you’re pushing for conversational norms that will favour your own style over that more common among those you most disagree with. Yes, if everyone were like you the world would be well to everyone’s liking, but they’re not. What actually happens when everyone is confrontational is, well, a whole bunch of confrontations. It doesn’t produce good discourse. It just produces a lot of satisfying feelings for those who enjoy confrontation and a lot of unsatisfying ones for those who don’t.
And yeah, I get it. Having just polite conversation seems to you like it produces nothing but satisfying feelings for those insufferable smug elitists and unsatisfying ones for the real manly men-of-the-world. There just is no solution that lets both groups of people be happy in the same space. And agitating for a shift towards your own preferences should be treated with suspicion, even if you really do think things would be more “honest” that way.
I have a pet theory that everything is BDSM or in other words BDSM is just the over-fetishized version of everything. Don’t even take it seriously, it probably says more about me than about the world, but anyway, if this place tends to favor a “tell culture” anyway, there could be Reddit-like flairs that say what you are. Not necessarily implemented here, but just a general idea of online flairs and offline badges. One cute idea from kindergarten – have an animal as your chosen symbol, basically totem. So there is a discussion topic and the tigers and lions and bears jump at it and express loud opinions, then the owls and eagles could say hey leave some breathing room for the hares and cats and guinea pigs. I don’t go to rationalist meetups or any other kind, but testing this animal totem badges would be totally cool I think. How would it change the dynamics of a group discussion.
Or for example when people are asked to form small groups of 4-5 to make a plan or something, work something out, we did this at postgrad and then of course the tigers and lions (again: badges) would grab group leadership and the others will probably understand why they want it so much and if they are good enough at letting the hares and the cats speak up it is okay, if not, maybe put all the tigers into one group and see what happens. Could be interesting.
(furry jokes gonna be met with fury)
Look, I’m no judge of souls, but maybe when you start off talking about BDSM, move on to saying people should have animal-styled internet personas, and then put yourself to lengths to emphasize how you’re definitely not a furry! Definitely! – maybe this is the point where you should take a moment, relax with a beer, buy yourself a fursuit and accept that you’re no less of a big strong man for also wanting to be a big strong wolf/human hybrid.
okay. Irresistible bait aside. It’s a good idea, but suffers from a tendency to drag apart communities and create echo-chambers. People with similar personalities also tend to have similar views. I’ll also note I’ve spent a little time on communities with tags based on various personality-tests in the past (see Deiseach’s post above), and it didn’t seem to help much. It was like seeing the tag just primed people to expect a comment they wouldn’t like, and then they picked up on every element of it as being twice as “characteristic” of that personality type as was actually the case. Though, my own life online has left me with a great distaste for “GTKY” content, so I’m biased here.
Which suggests the policy of responding to fury with furry jokes.
I bags the three-toed sloth as my totem animal!
> ultimately too much robotic grayness can get too much and too much dispassion and politeness could easily lead to what I call the Indian spiritual debate problem: revolving forever around unresolvable differences in sweet language.
I may be misunderstanding your post, but it sounds like you’re conflating “refusing to take a firm stance” with “being civil”. I don’t see why the latter would be necessary, despite my strong agreement that lack of the former just leads the conversation in circles until everybody is too drained to continue.
For example, this comment could’ve been phrased (e.g.) as “That’s retarded, being rude and being firm are not the same thing. what the fuck are you even saying?”. What would that add to the conversation? The idea that I _really_ disagree with you?
> The same way it is more honest and direct for people to tell each other some X is for them not up for debate but basically something dear enough to get the knives out for, and that is what strong language suggests.
Seriously, why not just use grown-up words like “unequivocally” instead of using “strong language” (by which I assume you mean insulting language, given the rest of your comment).
FWIW, of the people I have met personally who have commented on SSC directly (myself included), none are Millennials even by the loosest definition. I guess I do know one or two “Millennials” who reads SSC, but they’re all within the age range that some folks put in Gen X, so not really the youth that folks are whining about.
(edit: this comment is *intentionally* missing the point; I am well aware that “Millennials” is shorthand for “the hated other tribe”)
I’m definitely a millennial who reads SSC.
I think I count as an early baby boomer—1945.
I’m 15 and I read SSC, but I’m definitely in the minority.
>rational_rob
That’s how we know you’re <16
Right. He should have made it Logical Lawrence.
Empirical Eric ?
Scientific Stan.
Unbiased Ulrich
Unbiased Urist.
It was inevitable.
Bayesian Bob
Insightful Ibid
Translation for Rob’s sake: younger people signal status harder and simpler. It’s saying “I am smart” in a bit too obvious way. As people get older they both relax it a bit and signal more subtly. For example, putting a pun into a username. One level even higher is making up a real sounding name that does not endanger your privacy. That sounds professional, you look like talking like an expert not some random nickname – our host does just that. If someone comments as John T. Sylvan that automatically looks more respectable to me than some smart fellow with a Weevil Empire type pun – even if it is a made up name.
Mine is a real name, but I don’t get points for it because it’s a name nobody seems to have heard of.
… God, I’ve completely lost track of what level of signalling I’m on with this comment.
Mine’s a real name but I made the choice that I don’t mind this part of my online presence to be linkable to my real life.
Also it’s basically ungooglable.
Huh.
Where is “Uses your real name, has stopped giving fucks about being googled and doxxed” in the hierarchy?
Very high status, in a “no one can hurt me” sort of way.
Or, potentially, very low status, in a “I’m not employed in a position wherein anyone gives a shit about my views” sense.
More like, I had an anonymous alias at one point, but I feel like I trust the comments section here more than I would, say, the comment section of reddit. Also, most of the other names were taken, and I mean, when do you get this opportunity for alliteration?
>More like, I had an anonymous alias at one point, but I feel like I trust the comments section here more than I would, say, the comment section of reddit.
It’s not the commenters you should be worried about, but the silent readers.
I mean, you probably shouldn’t be worried about most anything (Except Hostile AI takeover, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT), but it’s not the active members of the community that are going to dox you/get you expelled/whatever
Also, the internet is forever. You don’t have anything to worry about now, and you probably don’t have anything to worry about in five years… but in ten? Fifteen? Who knows. At this point in your life, I’d say that it’s not worth the risk to put your real name anywhere remotely controversial, including this blog. Not because the risk is high, because it’s not–but when a risk is > zero and the cost of mitigation = 0, there’s no reason not to CYA.
Did somebody say that young people like to put puns in usernames?
(I’m 23, which makes me Millennial by my understanding.)
In fifteen years, if am lucky enough to live longer than my parents and three of my four grandparents, I will be 75 years old. I doubt that anybody is going to bother me with past SSC comments at that point.
Calculating costs and benefits around epsilon levels is hard, I think. I definitely derive benefit from my real name; I can easily context-switch and bring up, e.g., stuff I wrote on my LiveJournal way back when to my real-life friends.
And as for the risk, well, I think the marginal risk of Saying Things On The Internet is very, very low. It does happen that someone says the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way and bad things happen, but this is overwhelmingly the exception. And furthermore, it is frankly impossible to know what will be the wrong thing, especially if you become a person of record.
And on top of that, it’s not like it’s difficult to de-anonymize people if you ever do get a target painted on your back.
I’m pretty sure the optimal strategy is “Name yourself whatever the hell you want to be named, and let risk-mitigation and status-posturing go hang.” But I am quite capable of being convinced otherwise with evidence to the contrary.
I also, obviously, post under my real name. Perhaps less of a problem for me than for some, since I also publish books and give public lectures under my real name, so posting anonymously wouldn’t conceal my various unconventional views.
My wife has occasionally worried that someone I argue with online will some day heave a brick through our window. But I’ve been doing it for thirty years or so and that hasn’t happened yet.
What is or isn’t prudent for other people under other circumstances I can’t say.
Don’t be mean, man. I couldn’t come up with anything better.
It’s a perfectly fine name. Don’t let them make you change it.
They’re just messing with you man, it’s all good 🙂
Don’t worry we actually love you. I would stop using your real name though. I def wish I could take back the stuff I wrote on the ‘net under my real name when I was 15. (I honestly wonder to what degree politics is dynastic because politicians will keep their kids from doing dumb stuff that could be dug up.)
I would be doing so, too at your age, were I born a while later than I actually was.
If you are 15, doesn’t that make you a generation-after-millennial?
I think so. I thought that “Millennial” was for those born 1980-2000.
What? That is news to me. Are age cohorts at war with each other?
I mean, sure, Baby Boomers have been a favored punching bag among every group born since 1960, because there were so many of us that we supposedly took all the jobs, but most of the actual Boomers just roll their eyes, if they even notice it at all.
If you want to see things in shades of Red, Blue, and Gray, I’m sure all three colors are well represented among Millennials.
I’m talking about the term itself. Which is why there is the Millennials to Snake People plugin — to mock the lazy use of the term as a shorthand for “vaguely young people we don’t like”.
Huh, I’m used to seeing Millennial used as “OFFICIAL GOOD GUYS OF PROGRESSIVISM WHO FIGHT AGAINST EVIL OLD WHITE MEN”.
Tell that to Gloria Steinem.
I installed this a few hours ago and it’s really tripping me up in this comment thread.
I installed it *because* of this thread and the results have been *glorious* thus far. I recommend it to all.
In the last presidential election, the voting gap between men and women (in terms of who they voted for, not turnout) was 7 points, while the gap between the oldest and youngest age cohorts was 16 points. Make of that what you will.
http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/exit-polls
“Millennials” seems to be like the word “Americans” with its different political meaning. Sometimes it refers to any person born after 1980, and other times it refers to a young member of the Blue Tribe.
“Millennial” is certainly a dirty word among the middle managers I sometimes socialized with. Or at least, was. Perhaps these managers changed their tune since Millennials will make up 50% of the work force in the not-distant future.
Boiler-plate arguments. Entitlement. Narcissism. Need for constant feed-back.
Eventually I stopped associating with these kind, wise, sage-tastic managers.
I’m somewhere between gen x and millennial.
Isn’t that gen Y?
Is that a thing? I mean, I’ve heard it, but very rarely. I never see news articles saying “Gen Y does this” or “Gen Y is like that.” I think we tend to get lumped in with millennials now.
Yeah, I think Y is mostly understood as a synonym for Millennial. Nathan’s not the first person I’ve seen who tried to carve it out for people born from, say, 82-87, to reflect the fact that we’re the only “Millennials” who really remember the pre-internet and pre-911 worlds. I think it’s a worthy aspiration to reflect a genuinely important distinction, but I don’t think anyone else cares.
“Millennial” here, and I found this blog through other “Millenials” (though I dislike that word because it usually connotes some kind of Essence of Millenialism which mostly consists of having no discipline or respect for anyone).
Another milennial who reads this blog checking in. I’m 19.
I’m 20, so I’m pretty sure I count as a millennial by any definition, and I’ve been reading SSC since it started (when I was 17). My 18-year old brother reads it too.
Wow, I would definitely not be cut out for any kind of internet fame. Reading these made me feel awful and I wasn’t even the person being criticized. I don’t know how Scott deals with it.
Serious question for SSC readers: how does one become less averse to criticism? I feel like I spend most of my time either trying to avoid criticism or trying to avoid embarrassment, and it’s becoming more and more clear that this is not the best way to live my life.
(I mean, it kind of works in that I’m rarely criticized and I don’t do embarrassing things that often, but it’s for sure holding me back)
EDIT: basically, what jsmith said, below.
It’s weird, because I had the totally opposite reaction; after reading these, ah, testimonials, I wished that I could one day write something that elicits the same kind of passion in people… Well, except for the “I hope you die” guy and the random insult guy, their passions are already permanently inflamed just like their brains.
I used to be really sensitive to negative feedback, and I don’t know how I stopped. I guess one way to do it is to read the feedback, and attempt to figure out what your detractor’s point is. If he is building up a coherent argument against your point, then he’s worth listening to, even if his argument is swathed in layers of snark. On the other hand, if all he can say is “haha you suck lol”, then clearly he is beneath you, so why waste your attention on him ?
Same thing they do in boxing class: line everybody up, tell them to drop their guard, and punch them in the face. You learn getting punched in the face really isn’t that bad (the bad thing is getting punched in the face repeatedly over long periods of time), and also if you’re cut out for boxing.
You’re more or less advocating exposure therapy. I almost posted advocating the same, but thought better of it, because I don’t know that it’s actually very solid advice in this situation. It has a good track record for anxiety, but this doesn’t sound like *just* an issue of anxiety, but also of sensitivity. I don’t think we should necessarily be advocating that highly sensitive people expose themselves to unnecessary harm to “build character” (as many people like to say), because while it’s true that some wounds heal to make you stronger than you were before, it’s also true that some will just leave you sort of permanently worse off and a bit “broken”. Some people will be better at recovery than others, just like some people won’t develop PTSD from a prisoner of war camp. Social abuse is one of those things that humans are *really* not good at handling, and if OP wants to go the exposure route, it’s likeliest to not result in permanent damage if it’s undertaken with the help of a therapist.
Oh, people can do what they want, but if they want to box, they should probably get used to getting punched in the face. I, personally, think avoiding criticism and embarassment is a Very Bad Thing in the same way that AIDS is a no-good disease (this is a deliberate comparison for all the easily offended in the audience), but I hear you can live a long time with both, now.
On the contrary,
People underestimate the clarity and peace that can come from ringing ears, blood in your nose, and a song of wrath in your heart.
As someone who enjoys boxing I would like to make clear that starlight is not describing boxing, he is describing the results of changing one’s name to Punchy McFace.
I’m pretty sure Punchy McFace is pretty great, actually.
That’s not actually how fighting classes work. At least not good ones. When you’re sparring, you start by drilling specific attack and defense routines, taking turns with each position. Then later you actually have short sparring matches where you apply what you’ve learned. Some individual people have trouble aiming at each other, so their partner or the instructor will tell them they’re doing it wrong and make them try again. People not wanting to get punched in the face is essentially never a problem – it is, in fact, a quality to be desired, because if you want to not get punched in the face you will learn how to block and dodge, and thus become a better boxer.
In fact, the sole time I recall being told to just not defend myself in my ten years of martial arts was when the instructor got frustrated because people were not learning how to block a particular technique correctly. They weren’t learning because nobody was attacking properly, and this became a feedback loop that was harming everyone. (to be clear, the harm was that it was limiting skill development, not that it was causing injuries)
What you describe does sound like a good way to get brain damage, though.
(I leave to the reader the construction of the equivalent process in the world of discourse, as opposed to pugilism)
We have different definitions of good fighting classes, I guess.
I disagree. Too many people, including me, have a tendency to flinch away when they see a fist in the vicinity of their face, which is pretty much the worst way to defend against it. Proper defense depends not only on actively assessing your opponents movements, but also in offering a credible threat of counterattack.
In addition, in order to get good at boxing or kickboxing, you have to spar, and it’s almost impossible to avoid getting hit at all while sparring unless you’re already really good. And you only get really good by sparring.
If you start trying to not get hit in the face, you’ve lost the fight.
They never did this to me, but this may be a difference between teaching recreational adults as opposed to young hopefuls. In the first case they probably think if some of us figure out this after 6 months when we are allowed to spar first, that is probably still 6 months more of regular exercise than some of us would otherwise get.
I have to recalibrate this in my mind that a word like “boxing” can me two completely radically different thing in different age cohorts. At 12 it can be driving them hard because some of them may become the champion in 10 years and thus a stance an inch wrong is WRONG, while at say 42 it is more like OK you fat bald manager you will never ever compete of course but it is a good workout and even light sparring could make you feel you rediscovered your manhood, so it is a cutting a lot of slack.
Should we have different words, different vocabulary for these things? Recreational vs. sports for example?
It’s simple. You simply look down on those people. I doubt Scott is really worried about the opinion of someone who says “Faggot blocked me for calling out some recent bit of his retarded bullshit. Fuck ‘im”.
(responding to this comment, but other people said essentially the same thing)
Yeah, I agree this is a thing I need to do. My brain doesn’t easily let me do it though. There’s a part of me that a) treats almost anything written confidently on the internet as true or at least worth considering (because it was written by “someone else” rather than me, and believing something that someone else claimed just seems way more defensible to my dumb brain than believing something that I came up with) and b) won’t allow myself to have self-charitable opinions, because I don’t feel like I could defend those opinions to skeptical critics (this would include things like “It’s okay to write off certain people’s opinions and look down on them” – how would that sound to a hostile or skeptical party?). So I end up finding it really hard to ignore criticism of me or things I believe.
It’s like a weird combination of…I don’t know what to call it, epistemic scrupulosity and humility? I mean, it’s obviously not something I feel 100% of the time, because I’d be fine ignoring criticism from someone I was sure was wrong, like a young-earth creationist or something. But it’s there a lot of the time.
(Needless to say, I don’t endorse these feelings)
Related: a LW post I wrote on gullibility, a way-too-long blog post on humility I’m semi-embarrassed to link to, and Scott’s old post on learned helplessness.
Ozy of Thing of Things has posted a great big sequence of posts on DBT, a way to hack such feelings out of your brain. The parts of it I looked at looked pretty good.
I tend to have exactly the same feelings. It reminds me of impostor syndrome, and the joke about being too open-minded to take your own side of an argument, but it’s neither of those, and I’m glad somebody put it into words. Thanks!
Good to know I’m not alone
I don’t think “simply looking down on them” is really enough. Just looking down on someone yourself does nothing, you need to feel that other people look down on them as well. Insults work by threatening your status, and can only really be ignored if you can feel confident that they won’t be successful at that.
My reaction to reading these was to get a bit upset, I’m not used to reading things like this and it just felt absurd. The mean-spiritedness of it is just alien. Who are these people? Scott must have much thicker skin than me to find this funny, I can’t imagine what it’s like to read stuff like this about yourself.
It may be easier for Scott to shrug it off since I assume he read these in context, and therefore can more easily infer that the people who wrote them don’t need to be taken seriously, and aren’t being taken seriously by others. It’s probably worse seeing these things decontextualized here than on, say, Jim’s blog.
Well, part of the exercise of this post is that 99% of Scott’s readership are going to look down on the sources of these quotes. The fact that Scott left the names off can be interpreted as him being nice to those critics quoted, or as signaling that they matter so little there’s no point in naming them individually.
Note also that Scott’s in the middle of a psych residency, so he’s probably had actual, literal shit flung at him; this stuff is a pale imitation.
None of this applies to that last one, about the cactus: that’s funny because it’s true.
As someone who has been on the internet forever, my best advice is to just imagine that everyone else is some 13 year old called xXD34thS3ph1r0thXx who is mad that he lost while trying to PK you.
Yup, this exact thing. I used to spend a lot of time on 4chan and nothing deflates criticism received on there like the realization that the guy who wrote it is a 4channer.
But in that situation you are also a 4channer.
But see, you’re just a 4channer part time, and you can walk away whenever you want to. That guy, he’s probably a 4channer for life.
I would say “imagine they’re saying it in their underwear”, but they almost certainly are.
Translation: in order to avoid losing internal, subjective status (self-esteem) from the “you are low status” messages sent by others, imagine they themselves are low-status.
You worry too much. I didn’t come out of this craving such attention, but I certainly wasn’t majorly put off by it. Most of these people don’t intend for the intended recipient of the criticism to change his mind, anyway, so I see no point in feeling awful about them.
BTW, I get criticized a lot for various things. I don’t let it worry me too much.
Two things that help to me:
1) Aggregating the stupid criticism. Seeing the whole set at the same time makes it less painful that looking at the individual comments. Different critics often contradict each other; one hates you for “being too X”, the other hates you for “not being X enough”. Seeing both reactions next to each other makes you realize there is nothing you can do to make everyone happy, so you can simply ignore them both. You don’t even feel the need to defend yourself because ironically each of these haters kinda defends you from the opposing kind.
2) Talking with smart people. Because ignoring the noise it not the same as hearing the signal. There are thousands of internet nobodies who try to push their opinion on me, but the proper reaction is not to block all feedback. It is to get a higher-quality feedback. Opinions of the people you respect. You usually have to actively ask them, because they are less likely to give you unsolicited feedback.
Some people would object that this strategy may lead to “echo chambers”. Well, the risk is obviously big if you filter your friends by having the same political or religious opinions as you do — but I don’t do this. The “voice of mob” is usually even worse source of information. There are always some people in the mob screaming louder than most, and those people are not selected for being smart or being right; it’s most likely the other way round. The mob doesn’t represent all opinions in a balanced way; it has its own obvious biases. In most cases you could replace the whole mob by two or three stupid people and you would get the same range of opinions.
The key is to realize that the person criticizing you does not represent the whole population, even if you are getting 99% of feedback from this specific person. It only means such person is really pushy.
Do you care what a random person thinks about, say, Jim Carrey?
So why should their opinion start mattering when it becomes about you?
As an extra data point: reading those didn’t make me feel awful at all (despite being very much a Scott fanboy), I found them somewhat amusing, and an extra data point for “whatever the subject, you’ll find a crowd of haters”. Maybe I’ve been exposed to enough internet to be desensitized. I *might* feel differently if I was the target, but I’d like to believe I’d find it just as easy to ignore
A lot of people above seem to be saying variants on “lower the status you give the critic”. My advice is to identify less with the things being criticised.
Think about people getting angry enough to kill about insults to their chariot team. It seems to me to be obvious that watching sports is basically superstimulus for the tribal loyalty parts of your brain. A huge number of people (far more than would live in an EEA tribe) get together, dress up in a distinctive way, and bellow their approval for their tribe and their hatred of the other tribe while watching heroes of their tribe battle the other tribe’s champions. When the tribe wins, they laugh and cry and hug strangers.
I also find it plausible that there’s a single status-tracking module in your brain, and the more you identify with something, the more it counts as part of you for status purposes. Think about a Buddhist monk getting mistreated and not seeming cross about it. It’s not that he has amazing control of his temper, it’s that he doesn’t feel angry when people push him and spit on him, because he no longer strongly identifies with himself.
The best ways that I can think of to cultivate this are to honestly critique yourself and to practice the Litany of Tarski. If you get used to saying “that essay was great!” and “that essay was mediocre” (for *specific, concrete reasons*), it will hurt less when someone says “I hated your essay”. If you honestly want to believe true things rather than keeping your treasured beliefs, it will hurt less when someone proves you wrong in public.
Once you get called Hitler a few times, it starts to lose its sting.
And anyone who’s the least bit Internet famous gets called Hitler or the equivalent. Scott — judging from his Tumblr — seems more sensitive to this than I was when I spent more time in the kinds of positions that attract it, but even so I’ll bet he’s stopped caring much about his less pointed criticisms.
Jesus Christ, people. Good lord.
On a slightly more serious note, I really like how half of these boil down to something along the lines of ‘HOW CAN YOU ACTUALLY READ WHAT I WROTE AND NOT AGREE ALREADY! YOU BASTARD!’
Universal love, said the cactus person…
*Lord.
Cactus one was my favorite. Good job saving it for the very end.
Well, the pattern plays out all over the place, it seems. I’d just unsubscribe from the feed, but it’s not really a bad blog? It’s only the circlejerk that’s bad. You’re kind of a Randall Munroe figure – sure, his comic is aggressively hateable, but it’s the tropes, not the man. His “what if?” feature, or, as we used to call it (before it existed!) on xkcd haters IRC, “the illustrated picto-blog” (that we all wished he would do instead of comics), is a great use of his talents.
Maybe you should try your hand at a format that plays to your strengths. Like Swifties.
Circlejerk? xkcd? SSC?
It’s nice to see some criticism now and then, but when you make a point like that you have to elaborate. What quality in specific do you find objectionable? The denial of spiritualism? The cold, objective analysis of trivial things? Or do you not like anything because you are out of the loop?
We need to know what direction you’re coming from in order to change anything about our behavior. Or, more likely, we need to know what you object to, so we can tell you why we do it, and come to a compromise.
You’re responding to someone who hangs out on haters’ IRC channels. Just let it go…
Does SSC have an IRC channel?
With respect, I don’t think you are very good at reading sentences that don’t express thoughts already firmly lodged in your mind.
Unsong.
Is it full of terrible wordplay? I have a very low tolerance for nerd web novels these days, after I seriously contemplated printing out and binding Ra just to hurl it at the wall in fury when that appallingly retarded genre swerve happened, but I love a good bad wordplay.
You know, you’re in luck. The main character made approximately 15 puns in the first few chapters, and doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.
So actually the comical mirror of accusations from MRA’s/SJW’s accusing Scott of being a typical example of the other side, is not at all surprising. Both ideological trends are obsessed less with their honest opponents, and much more with finding infiltrators and spies. Their weapons are currently focused on people who claim to agree with them, while secretly wanting to indulge their evil desires. So they cannot see Scott as “someone who disagrees with us” but rather “another traitor who is trying to infiltrate our ranks”. So they ring the bell declaring him an enemy spy, like all the other enemy spies (ie, anyone in their political movement who has disagreed with them.) Their only term for spy, of course, is “member of the group we hate the most and suspect of constantly trying to infiltrate us.”
They think Scott is an all-powerful evil genius who is close to corrupting their pure movement, and feel that others must be warned. They can not see that he is just a human being.
This comes dangerously close to being too defensive. It’s great that you give Scott and his objectors this kind of credit, but for the most part these are a select few of the funniest reactions Scott found – most of them are deliciously paranoid because he chose them, because they are funny sounding. I’d take a solid bet that most MRA’s and SJW’s are against him in a more typical way.
No way you’re <16, I call shenanigans.
He’s totally a teenager, he wrote “the denial of spiritualism” in a serious context right above this subthread.
I think it’s hard to be calibrated about what typical behavior is for a particular age group unless you spend a lot of time around that age group.
Also funny: both SJWs and White Nationalists hate Rhoosh for blogging about having sex with white women.
…
And Scott is hated by both sides for not blogging about having sex with lots of women?
Man, you can’t win in this world.
‘Haters gonna hate.’ is received cosmic reason for a reason.
And a good personal philosophy, too.
Reminds me of this:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/taylor-swift-a-socratic-dialogue
I’m pretty sure it’s not the SJW/metafilter crowd insulting him for being a low-t asexual beta cuck orbiter.
Many of Scott’s difficulties with SJWs stem from personally observing that they are mean to nice guys who ask for advice about how to get laid/have romantic relationships with women. If Scott were the sort of guy who easily interfaced with others in highschool, had no trouble getting a girlfriend, etc., he’d have never sought out advice on the matter, nor written posts about how people treated him as a result.
My model of political battles is that there are always at least two different wars fighted in parallel. One front is the obvious one: left vs right, red vs blue, feminists vs patriarchy, whatever is currently the fashion. But there is also the other, less visible front that doesn’t have a name, but whose one side is “niceness and civilization”, and the other side is something like “the greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters”. So there are four factions, each of them with their own goals.
The “uncivilized” side has the advantage of greater freedom of action, and ability to use stupidity and mass hysteria for their support. The “civilized” side is at majority, which is probably necessary because a civilization built mostly from the former would quickly fall apart. The “civilized” factions would prefer if their “uncivilized” partners would disappear, but sometimes they accept them as a necessary evil, hoping that it will be only temporary. The “uncivilized” factions knows they have to keep the war going on forever, because when the war ends, the majority will turn against them.
Imagine what would happen if people from the opposing side could just sit down, have a friendly talk, explain all misunderstandings, and then create a mutually satisfying solution, something like: “okay, so these things are most important for us, these things are most important for you; I guess if we arrange the society this way then we could all get the things which are most important for each of us, which would be strictly better than the situation we have now; and by the way, each side will agree to keep their own predators under control so they doesn’t create another conflict between us in the future.” How would the poor predators get their power in such world? How could they live without the power?
This is why the predators (the soldiers of Moloch) have to insist that anyone tempted by “niceness and civilization” is a traitor that should be executed first.
+1
Remarkable explanatory power for such a simple model. It gets the whole motte-and-bailey/weakmanning/equivocation/outgroup-homogeneity/closing-ranks dynamic down.
Trouble is, it fails to provide a course of action when (or acknowledge the possibility of) the main sides have a genuine irreconcilable values difference – my preferred solution is to have an arbitrarily large “frontier” to which groups with irreconcilable values can go, but this isn’t practical in certain technological bands (like our present one).
Well “compromise” could be that course of action. It does require two things:
1. That they understand each other’s wants. (Actively sabotaged by the behaviour of the “uncivilized” wings.)
2. That they don’t try to “win”. (Actively sabotaged by the behaviour of the “uncivilized” wings.)
So what needs to be done, and what it seems like Scott is trying to do with most of his political posts, is to get the civilized people to understand which conflict is the important one and stop seeing the uncivilized part of the other camp as defining it.
@John Nerst
Compromise can be difficult if the goals are truly mutually exclusive. For example, how does a pro-lifer come to a compromise? “OK, as long as you only kill 35% of the babies you do now, we’ll be cool with that.”? Pro-choice obviously has the inverse problem. The values underlying each of their positions are totally opposite.
Trying to steelman John’s views, perhaps the compromise could be the pro-choice side saying, “Okay, we see that life is more important to you than an immediate choice is to us; we’ll outlaw abortion” – and the pro-life side saying, “Okay, we see choice is important to you; we’ll fund mass contraceptive distribution, make adoption very easy, and provide a whole lot of government support for pregnant women since they’re denied choice.”
And then both sides go work on inventing artificial wombs.
(As a pro-life person myself, I’d be very open to this compromise.)
@ Evan Þ:
Yes, but that’s the kind of compromise you make with a burglar trying to steal all your stuff. If you have to, you’ll say “Please, let me keep half my stuff,” and if he doesn’t want to fight, you’ll have a “deal”.
But if you have a gun, you just shoot him.
There are two types of compromise: the first type says “better half a loaf than no loaf at all”, and that’s undoubtedly true; the second views compromise as an end in itself, and this is very dubious. If you accept the “half a loaf” view, it’s as a temporary deal; you’re still trying to get the whole loaf.
If I’m pro-choice, I see no reason to compromise in the way you describe with the pro-lifers and ban abortion. I say: I’m right; you’re wrong. If you want to fight, I’ll win.
In any case, though, I don’t think abortion is a difference on “values” which is supposed to be separate from facts. I think both sides have different opinion on the facts, not different terminal values. Such as: does God exist, and is abortion contrary to his will? Obviously a factual question.
@Evan: From the pro-choice side…I think I might actually agree to some permutation of that compromise. Perhaps if the widespread birth control were in the form of IUDs, and encouraged for anyone physically old enough to get pregnant.
In thinking about this, and speaking only for myself, I think the dividing line is “I could accept compromises that forbid abortion if the system is set up in such a way that getting pregnant without explicit intention is extremely unlikely” — then the choice still exists, it’s just earlier in the process. I’d be pretty okay with that.
Of course, having written that, I can come up with edge cases that would still fuck it up…also any such compromise is never going to work in the real world because most people who are against abortion are also against contraception. But, well, the thought experiment is interesting and a good way of getting at true rejections; “what’s the minimum that would have to change for me to change my mind?”
I’m not so sure about that. Certainly it’s the party line on the left, and it seems to actually be true for groups like the Catholic Church hierarchy. But the Church has weird incentives to deal with, and I have a hard time believing that rank-and-file pro-lifers would be opposed to contraception on anything like the level that they’re opposed to abortion.
At least per se. They might (reasonably enough) object to a mandatory long-term contraception plan on the grounds of it being an unacceptable level of government interference in people’s private lives.
“most people who are against abortion are also against contraception”
Considering both my personal experience, the polls showing that even the vast majority of Roman Catholic laypeople (!) support and use contraception, and the absence of any official opposition from any other denomination, I disagree with this claim.
About the nature of compromise, I was steelmanning “these things are most important for us, these things are most important for you” to say that both sides would recognize when the opposition holds a value more important and then give in on it. Of course, in practice, this’d provoke an arms race of sacredness… but in theory, it’s an attractive idea, and it might even work sometimes if implemented on multiple issues at once. For instance, in my example, a libertarian pro-lifer would see that his defeat on government-funded contraceptives has bought him a victory on abortion.
@Error –
In thinking about this, and speaking only for myself, I think the dividing line is “I could accept compromises that forbid abortion if the system is set up in such a way that getting pregnant without explicit intention is extremely unlikely” — then the choice still exists, it’s just earlier in the process. I’d be pretty okay with that.
Thing is, I (as an anti-abortion person) already truly believe (and think that this holds up factually) that the system is already set up this way (specifically in the USA and the rest of the West) – it’s damn near impossible to get pregnant without undertaking a series of actions that everyone and their brother has told you is likely to get you pregnant. The “earlier choice” you describe is already in play.
At a tangent concerning the Catholic position on contraception.
The two main reasons to want to use contraception are to control the number of children that a married (or equivalent) couple produces and to permit sex outside of marriage without any significant risk of pregnancy.
People who attack the Catholic position on contraception tend to focus on the former purpose, arguing that that position produces lots of unwanted children and overpopulation in poor countries. That attack is, I think, weaker than it seems. Catholic doctrine permits the use of the rhythm method. I did some calculations a while ago, and concluded that the rhythm method was probably sufficient to hold down the birth rate in a poor country to a level that would result in slow or zero population growth.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-rhythm-method-and-population-growth.html
On the other hand, in a society where there are large social costs to pregnancy for unmarried women, the rhythm method is not sufficient to make regular sex outside of marriage safe. Which raises the possibility that the real objective of the Catholic position is to permit birth control adequate for purposes of family planning but inadequate for facilitating non-marital sex.
Comments?
I’d add that the licit forms of family planning n Catholicism are a but more sophisticated than “rhythm method” would suggest. (e.g https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiMibfk–vKAhUF62MKHa3nBs0QFggcMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.creightonmodel.com%2F&usg=AFQjCNGK3sNUaLzyIRp09iWZYl7oTpJQxg&sig2=WpEaz6mvhj4cnRJLQ_l3UQ)
But, to the point, they are more suited to a marriage, or at least a long-term committed relationship, than they would be to one night stands.
—
I would also say that the Church’s opposition to contraception is of a different category than its opposition to abortion.
Abortion is seen as the killing of innocents, and must be opposed for anyone, Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
Contraception is opposed as practice for Catholics. While the Church may not be excited about its cultural saturation, it is lower on the list of priorities.
Muddying the waters a bit is that the Church (controversially to many) considers some forms of birth control to be abortificient, in that one of their methods is to prevent implantation.
@ David Friedman:
There’s also the “Papist conspiracy” argument, which is that they do it in order to produce more Catholic children and therefore take over the world. But that’s pretty discredited; I associate it with the 1960s and the kind of people who thought JFK would take secret orders from the Vatican.
However, when you said “to control the number of children that a married (or equivalent) couple produces”, that was my first thought before I read the rest of your comment.
Anyway, I think your comment is a fair rationalization, but what is your opinion of the face value message: that the reason they prohibit it is that it undermines the “natural purpose” of sex as they see it? Sex is supposed to be “inherently generative” and therefore every sexual act must be “open” to pregnancy. That is why I think they do it. (Of course, this implies that old people shouldn’t be allowed to have sex, which is inconsistent.)
The cynical reading that the “real purpose” is to discourage premarital sex has a major flaw: how much does it actually discourage it? It seems more likely to discourage people from being faithful Catholics.
There’s also the Ayn-Rand type of cynical reading: that the “real purpose” of all the Catholic commandments about sex is to ensure they are broken and to make people feel guilty, so that they are more easily cowed and led to support the Church and its teaching that all men require redemption through Christ. Which I doubt is actually their conscious purpose. But the position has its merits.
@ keranih
The “earlier choice” you describe is already in play.
Have you a source for a poll of abortion seekers with a question like: “Were you using contraception during that period? If so, what kind and what went wrong? If not, why not?”
A while back, you posted a lead to a chart showing why women dropped particular forms of contraception, which could account for some “skip it just temporarily” pregnancies. I found it interesting as a list of flaws in current methods, which indicates need for developing better methods.
@keranih
“I didn’t know I could get pregnant from having sex” ranks right up there with “I didn’t know smoking was bad for me” for things people say when try to avoid looking bad for the results of their chosen actions. It’s possible, sure, but given the cultural penetration of the preventative knowledge, the rebuttable presumption should be “yup, everyone knows that.”
What is more common, rather, is that people know the possible consequences of their behaviors, but enjoy that behavior, and think they can get away with it one more time . . . until they don’t.
@ The Anonymouse
What is more common, rather, is that people know the possible consequences of their behaviors, but enjoy that behavior, and think they can get away with it one more time . . . until they don’t.
Possible … but how likely? Let’s apply some relative probability here. Everyone knows that sex sometimes gets you pregnant and sometimes not. Taking chances in traffic sometimes gets you injured and sometimes not. I don’t support withholding medical care for someone who got injured carelessly … just because someone else has a belief about a fetus being whatever.
@houseboatonstyx
I don’t support withholding medical care for someone who got injured carelessly
Nor do I (of course).
But in your example, the term “medical care” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Someone who is injured in a traffic accident necessarily has suffered an injury, and injuries often require treatment to heal. Someone who has carelessly had sex and become pregnant has not suffered an injury, and the “medical care” required to remedy an unwanted pregnancy is not of the healing sort.
@CatCube, Evan, VI
Things are getting complicated now, so only some short thoughts…
In the face of truly irreconcilable differences, I guess there needs to be a vote. That’s what voting is for, basically.
The ideal I’m after kind of presupposes that there can be no truly sacred values. If people disagree about terminal values, others are pretty much required to accept that and work with it. If something is dependent on some empirical fact, the decision should wait until all the available evidence have been gathered and evaluated.
Ideal, I know. Religion being a real force in politics really throws things off. Luckily that’s not really the case where I live.
I think the burglar analogy is critically different in that you and the burglar are not a society/community. If there were only those two people, disagreeing about who should have what would make more sense. It’s a question that would have to be dealt with, at the very least.
And reality isn’t as different from that as one might think. You may not share your stuff with a burglar to buy him off, but you do pay taxes to fund a social support system aimed to reduce crime. Modern welfare states being created as a compromise when revolution seemed a real possibility is pretty much the same.
@ Vox Imperatoris
Yes, but that’s the kind of compromise you make with a burglar trying to steal all your stuff. If you have to, you’ll say “Please, let me keep half my stuff,” and if he doesn’t want to fight, you’ll have a “deal”.
Yep. At the moment we pro-choice people have a choice that reaches all the way to 20 months or whatever. Any such compromise will take away part of that period (and support for the pregnancy/baby is not a substitute for choice).
Otho, better and more available contraceptives would reduce the need for abortion till (almost) the whole problem would wither away. Just don’t ask us to give up part or all of the choice period till that has actually been accomplished. Then you won’t have to ask us; we won’t be wanting abortion anyway. (You don’t have to ask us to agree to developing better contraceptives; you can do that unilaterally.)
Hm, to fit this with the burglar analogy…. “Okay, you can have my silverware _after_ you bring me a gold set.”
“At the moment we pro-choice people have a choice that reaches all the way to 20 months or whatever. ”
They made infanticide legal up to almost a year? I didn’t know that.
In continental Europe infanticide by the mother is not formally a crime. It is not handled by the criminal justice system.
In America and Britain (and, I suspect, most places) if the mother appears distraught, the death will almost always be classified as accidental. In America infanticide is formally murder. In Britain, infanticide up to a year by the mother is not murder. It is a separate crime that was created as a result of jury nullification. The crime was created to allow the mother to plead insanity before that was an option for any other crime. Sentences are almost always suspended. There was a recent case where the mother refused to plead insanity and was tried for murder.
In much of Europe the mother is not even given the option of not pleading insanity, but is handed directly to psychiatrists. Again, that is only if the death was not classified accidental.
(I assume “20 months” was intended to be “20 weeks.”)
@ David Friedman
LOL. And just now I somehow read your comment as referencing 20 years.
Clearly, more coffee is needed.
@ houseboatonstyx –
Otho, better and more available contraceptives would reduce the need for abortion till (almost) the whole problem would wither away. Just don’t ask us to give up part or all of the choice period till that has actually been accomplished.
…I find it very difficult to believe – based on the conversations we’ve had here – that there would *ever* be contraception that effective enough or wide spread enough to satisfy those who hold that killing the baby is the undisputed right of the pregnant woman.
If I’m wrong, please lay out your standards for contraception efficacy and social penitration that you think would justify reducing the “legally permissive period for killing a child” down to, say, 12 weeks of gestation.
When I’ve presented (as you mention above) evidence that women’s failure to use contraception is not due to lack of access or funds, but instead a personal choice to put more emphasis on immediate gratification instead of consideration of long term effects – you responded by calling for “better contraception”.
We already have exceptional contraception. Conception and pregnancy are extremely tricky biological processes, and have – apparently – in humans evolved to operate around our conscious desire to limit those processes. Stopping fertility in women in a reliable and reversible manner is quite difficult, and instead of whining about how we haven’t already completely re-drawn human women from the cellular level up, we should be very pleased with what we *have* accomplished.
Relatedly – I am also wary of viewing contraception as the whole-hearted good that many seem to see it as – anti-pregnancy-only methods have been directly linked to the spread of life-threatening disease, and the longterm social impact of “consequence-free sex” has not been such a great thing. Good for a particular person? Perhaps. It certainly helps facilitate satisfying short-term desires while decreasing some consequences. Good for society? I’d hold that at best, it’s of dubious value, if not outright negative.
@keranih
Suppose the technology existed to render everyone in the country infertile, but the effect could be reversed with a once daily pill but each person had to have a pill designed for him or herself.
Also suppose that in such a universe there was a proposal to use this technology but make the antidote available for free in monthly allotments by presenting yourself (and only yourself, no third party orders) at your nearest post office.
Which of our current ideological groups would be in favor or opposed to such a proposal? I think libertarians would clearly be opposed and the alt-right be in favor. I suspect most of the left would be opposed, with the exception perhaps of some of the greener parts. But what about the traditional / religious right? Would it tip the balance if it came with a ban on most abortions?
@Douglas Knight
Every once in a while you come up against something that smacks you in the face with the fact that Europe really is foreign. This is one of those for me. A little bit of discretion for the people involved to say it was totally an accident is way different to my mind than a policy that says it is not even criminal to begin with.
@keranih
I suspect there is no amount of access to contraception that would satisfy your interlocutors. Admitting such would undercut their other policy goals. We could air-drop literal pallets of condoms and birth control pills onto every street corner, with dollar bills taped to the packages, and you would hear counterarguments about some weird sympathetic corner case.
You can ride that asymptote as close to zero as you like, but convincing your opponents that enough “access” has been provided is a fool’s errand. All the incentives lie the other way.
@ The Anonymouse:
There certainly wouldn’t be for me. It’s just a weird and irrelevant idea, in my opinion.
It’s like saying: “What amount of other dessert alternatives would convince you to agree to ban cheesecake?” My answer is: “No amount!”
I don’t think a fetus has rights, certainly not before the point of viability, and I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with abortion. So I am not going to agree to ban it, except as a grudging compromise made under threat of force.
Accessibility of contraception does not “remove the need” for abortion. For one, people are often careless and make bad sexual decisions in the heat of passion. This is unfortunate, but even if they could easily have avoided getting pregnant, it doesn’t mean they ought to be forced to carry a baby to term.
Moreover, situations can change: maybe a woman is planning on having a baby and gets pregnant on purpose, but then her husband divorces her.
And this is leaving out completely considerations like: what if the fetus has Down’s syndrome or some other kind of genetic disorder? I think that sort of thing is the most defensible case for abortion, which the issue of contraception does nothing to touch.
There’s also, of course, rape, but that’s such a rare cause of pregnancy that it’s stupid how much emphasis it gets. In any case, the logic for banning abortion on the basis of a fetus’s “right to life” obviously implies no rape exception. The only logic that would make this exception is one that sees anti-abortion laws as a way to punish loose women…hmm.
@ keranih et al
No one likes having an abortion. It’s painful and expensive and inconvenient. But some women sometimes take the chance of needing abortion, rather than the certainty of what the side effects of common bc pills etc have proved to be for them. (And/or the expense and hassle and discomfort of getting the less common methods, such as IUDs.)
Do you have a link handy to that useful chart of what problems women had with methods they dropped? Many cited side effects of one kind or another, or their doctor’s advice to drop it.
Maybe we should distinguish actual numbers of abortions performed, from having the legal right still on the books (hopefully as a fossil, but available as a back-up). Note that as demand falls, so would supply.
@ keranih
please lay out your standards for contraception efficacy and social penitration that you think would justify reducing the “legally permissive period for killing a child” down to, say, 12 weeks of gestation.
We can’t predict what factors will bring about the outcome of a neglible number of abortion requests, but we can work on all possible factors till that outcome happens. (Even then, I’d be leery of taking that right off the law books.)
We already have exceptional contraception. Conception and pregnancy are extremely tricky biological processes, and have – apparently – in humans evolved to operate around our conscious desire to limit those processes. Stopping fertility in women in a reliable and reversible manner is quite difficult [….]
So, there is plenty of room for improvement — to reduce the side effects of the ‘stopping fertility’ approach, or develop better approaches.
Fortunately for the cause of preventing abortions, this is incremental. A small upgrade in BC Pill X to cause less nausea, will keep Y number of women using it more consistently, thus a small reduction in abortion requests.
For some women, the need may be for better dellvery: something that works for months or longer wiithout further attention.
ETA: If you think we’ve already reached the limit of how effective/safe/convenient contraception methods can ever be … well, I see no reason to believe that.
@houseboatonthestyx
And to go back to the original point about compromise, for those of us who think that there’s morally no daylight between late(ish*) abortion and waiting until the woman has the kid, then picking it up by the legs and bashing it’s head against the wall. This is one of those things that people have different values on. For someone like Vox, who thinks that a fetus has no rights, there’s absolutely no problem with abortion and there’s little anybody can do to talk him into it
*I’m not convinced that life begins at conception, but by induction the line must be there somewhere. Since we’re talking about at what point you’re murdering a baby, I think the line ought to be drawn well on the safe side. Kerinah’s 12 weeks might be early enough, but I’ve not put a lot of thought into it because we’re so far on the bad side of the line that almost anything would be an improvement.
@ keranih
I found the link that led to your Table 5.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr062.pdf
Here is what I could pull out of it and massage to make it WordPress friendly. Exactly what each number is measuring is obscure (have to study the fine print), and iirc it surveyed all the women who used any form of contraceptive even once in several decades, so I guess it would slant toward worse side effects from the early versions.
I added two flags: $ for cost, and M for obvious medical problems, though really everything on the list could be improved by medical advance.
$ – 2.6..Insurance did not cover it
$ – 3.4 .. Too expensive
2.4..Too difficult to obtain
0.4..Too messy
1.2..Your partner did not like it
1.8..The method did not protect against disease
10.0..Too difficult to use
10.9..Other
2.6..You worried the method would not work
M – 11.3..The method failed, you became pregnant
M – 11.5..Did not like changes to menstrual cycle
M – 11.8..You were worried you might have side effects
M – 5.1..Decreased your sexual pleasure
M – 5.7..Doctor told you not to use the method again
M – 62.9..You had side effects
@brad
Suppose the technology existed to render everyone in the country infertile, but the effect could be reversed with a once daily pill but each person had to have a pill designed for him or herself.
Also suppose that in such a universe there was a proposal to use this technology but make the antidote available for free in monthly allotments by presenting yourself (and only yourself, no third party orders) at your nearest post office.
In such a world, I would immediately leave for any country that did not practice this totalitarian control over reproduction. If precluded from leaving, or every country in the world followed this practice, I would immediately join the inevitable widespread rebellion instead. I would seriously consider the merits of a nuclear holocaust, literally nuking humanity back into the stone age, in this scenario.
Which of our current ideological groups would be in favor or opposed to such a proposal? I think libertarians would clearly be opposed and the alt-right be in favor. I suspect most of the left would be opposed, with the exception perhaps of some of the greener parts. But what about the traditional / religious right? Would it tip the balance if it came with a ban on most abortions?
The alt-right is to a large extent also religious, and even among the non-religious, there are many those who would view this particular scenario as worse than North Korea levels of totalitarian leftism.
@ keranih
What long-term social impact of “consequence-free sex” could possibly be worse than (what you consider to be) mass murder of innocent babies? I don’t know, perhaps murder is not such a big deal to people who believe in immortal souls? I’m struggling to understand your priorities here.
Contraceptives have been getting better over the years, and abortions have been getting less frequent*. Like houseboatonstyx, I see no reason to think that there’s no more room for improvement.
* but not in poor women, so either socioeconomic or genetic factors do have an effect, or the poor must be morally inferior somehow
The most common reason given by women who had had an unintended birth after not using contraception was that they “did not think they could get pregnant”. This answer was much more common in women with high-school education or less (42%) than women with any amount of college education (26%). Out of Hispanic/Latina women, 49% gave this answer.
@ Yellow-green Anonymous (below)
It was a multiple choice question. Perhaps “couldn’t” was the closest option to “wouldn’t”, or perhaps they had major misconceptions about human biology. Or both.
Why would they think they couldn’t get pregnant? Wouldn’t I would buy, since per-intercourse chances are low.
@Anonymous:
The current president of South Africa famously stated that he couldn’t get AIDS because he had taken a shower after… biblically knowing an infected woman.
The president.
Now, take similar folk beliefs like “we do it standing up”, “he finished on my back/stomach”, “I was on my period”, “I drank [insert traditional remedy here]” and extrapolate.
In one spectacular anecdote from an acquaintance, “but we only did anal!” – which raises some troubling questions about hygiene.
Never underestimate the overconfidence of the undereducated.
@Leit
I recall now with fondness the advice we got in Sex Ed (not called that): Never have sex unless you are prepared to make her pregnant.
@Anonymous
But you see, part of the reason for the approach taken in that anecdote I noted was that it wasn’t sex sex.
Now, the odds were indeed formidable in that particular case. But are you going to tell me there do not exist some number of young folks who are willing to justify their satisfactions the same way according to, say, the criteria that he didn’t ejaculate inside?
Of course I believe in the existence of stupid people.
Hmm, since we’re on the topic, I might as well dump more statistics…
In the USA:
Similarly, in England and Wales, where abortion law is also quite permissive:
The most common gestational age at abortion seems to be 8-9 weeks (i.e., around 6-7 weeks from conception), when the embryo weighs about 2 grams.
@ CatCube:
I don’t believe in what I mockingly call the “minuteman” position: that there’s nothing nothing wrong with killing the baby a minute before it’s born.
I believe that the line ought to be drawn around the point of viability. Or rather, that the mother has the right to remove the embryo or fetus from her womb at any time, but that she is not entitled to kill it in the process after the point where it is capable of surviving outside her body. The point where the fetus is capable of performing the biological actions to sustain its life outside the mother’s body is the point at which it becomes a separate living thing.
I think abortions should only be permitted after the point of viability if induced pregnancy would present a serious threat to the woman’s life or health.
For what it’s worth, this is pretty much the exact position of the U.S. Supreme Court, starting in Roe v. Wade:
(My only disagreement with the Court is that I am skeptical that “technological developments” have much to do with the question. Even if you could grow a fetus from conception in an artificial womb, I would say whoever owns that artificial womb has the right to remove the fetus from it, since it is not an independent lifeform until it is capable of self-sustaining biological function.)
Moreover, almost no abortions occur in the third trimester (after 28 weeks), and the ones that almost always occur for compelling medical reasons. I am not actually aware of any specific exceptions, but if there are a few, I condemn them.
And yes, this is a difference in values, but I think it is a difference in values based on a difference of opinion about facts—i.e. not a difference in terminal values. As I said above, one of those factual differences is over the truth of certain religious dogmas. Another one is over whether there are such principles as natural rights and, if so, what is their basis in fact.
@anonymous
Your reaction is about what I’d expect from anyone with significant libertarian impulses, but I think you somewhat overestimate the prevalence of that.
Also:
I don’t buy it at all. I can’t imagine there’s a non-trivial number of ministers, pastors, or priests that are okay with their parishioners sitting around calling each other fag, strategizing about how to build harems, calling people cucks, and otherwise acting like horny, irreverent teenage boys.
Your reaction is about what I’d expect from anyone with significant libertarian impulses, but I think you somewhat overestimate the prevalence of that.
It’s not about libertarianism. It’s about taking away people’s ability to have children. In the scenario, the government would have total control of that, and I would sincerely expect it to use that to punish dissent. Most will submit, intimidated into acquiescence, but many will not. I’d expect a thriving black market in illegal conceptives to spring up overnight, much like black market activity in communist countries.
I don’t buy it at all. I can’t imagine there’s a non-trivial number of ministers, pastors, or priests that are okay with their parishioners sitting around calling each other fag, strategizing about how to build harems, calling people cucks, and otherwise acting like horny, irreverent teenage boys.
1) Just because the actual priests aren’t okay with being crass, doesn’t mean that a steelmanned, SSC’d version of the argument won’t actually be what they support. Last I checked, orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews are against practicing homosexuality, divorce, female independence, etc. They obviously won’t be supporting fornication and adultery, but there’s surprising amounts of overlap on the “how the world actually works” between Roosh V and the Catholic Church, even if they don’t quite agree on “how the world should work”.
2) Have you actually looked at the attitudes in East Europe? The nationalists have a strong tendency to be for God, Honour and Fatherland. Are they not alt-right?
3) One of the three major faction groups within the Death Eaters is religious, and many express wanting to be religious, but being unable to alter their base assumptions about the supernatural that way.
I’m so old, I remember when “keep the government out of our bedrooms” was a rallying cry of the left.
@ keranih
Though I posted an excerpt from the Table 5 (at cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr062.pdf)
which you had originally brought up, I don’t endorse it or your conclusions from it. That report has several problems for our purposes: sample selection and time range are too large, numbers are obscure, etc.
On affordability of contraceptives, here are some costs as of April 24, 2015 from University Health Service at the University of Michigan, https://www.uhs.umich.edu/contraception-cost.
UHS Cost without Insurance
Diaphragm: Device $66 Fitting $91
Implant (Nexplanon): Device $834 Insertion $211
Intrauterine Device (IUD): Device $799 Insertion $79
Patch $173
Ring (NuvaRing) $110
Shot (DepoProvera): Medication $54 Injection *$27
Pills $76 per pack [At Planned Parenthood some pills may be free but all require a prescription, Pap smear, and possible pelvic exam costing up to $250.]
Note the high initial costs, which will be a deal breaker for women on a budget, even if the longterm cost would amortize to something affordable. The initial or refill cost incentivizes procrastination “for just a month or two”, during which time, Boom!
@Jaskologist
Read more, sneer less.
I suspect most of the left would be opposed, with the exception perhaps of some of the greener parts.
@Anonymous (greenish-blue this time instead of mustard)
No one believes a steel-manned anything. That misunderstands what steelmanning is about. In any event the claim is that the crass (putting it very mildly) people are themselves religious. Not that religious people somewhere deep in their hearts believe something sort of akin to what the crass people are saying out loud.
What’s with online movements and delusions of grandeur? Of course I don’t think Eastern European nationalists are alt-right. They existed first and will exist long after.
I understand the death eaters to be: a) tiny in number and b) not a strict subset of the alt-right.
@brad:
Your reaction is about what I’d expect from anyone with significant libertarian impulses, but I think you somewhat overestimate the prevalence of that.
Who else have you run this idea past?
It’s not going to be just libertarians. Anyone who isn’t confident that their tribe will dominate politics for the next two generations, is going to be uncomfortable with the idea of handing the government a monopoly on childbirth. There is a substantial minority of Blue Tribe that believes Cthulhu’s inevitable leftward swim will be fast and steady enough that they don’t have to worry about a decade when only conservatives or the obediently apolitical are allowed to have babies, and maybe that’s where you are hanging out and finding approval for this proposal, but it’s not going to be enough.
Try this anywhere in the real world, and there will be both a Trump on the right and a Sanders on the left running on the platform of “Don’t let the government take away your children’s right to give you grandchildren”. And they will win. Because, if you haven’t noticed yet, the majority of people who actually vote when they have a choice in the matter, have no higher terminal value than happy grandchildren.
No one. It’s a pure thought experiment about the limits of effective birth control and how that would impact the acceptability of banning abortion. I certainly wouldn’t support it.
The intended key sentences was: “Would it tip the balance if it came with a ban on most abortions?”
Also no one I know has any beliefs about Cthulhu’s swimming habits.
Re “couldn’t get pregnant” …
Is it possible the women believed for some reason that they were infertile?
No one believes a steel-manned anything. That misunderstands what steelmanning is about.
Have you never encountered someone who was convinced that the steelman was actually right, even though they initially thought the strawman to be wrong? It is not inconceivable that if you improve an argument enough, it will become supportable.
In any event the claim is that the crass (putting it very mildly) people are themselves religious.
Not all of them, no. Some of them surely are.
Not that religious people somewhere deep in their hearts believe something sort of akin to what the crass people are saying out loud.
Some – many, I think – do.
What’s with online movements and delusions of grandeur? Of course I don’t think Eastern European nationalists are alt-right. They existed first and will exist long after.
By that line of thought, the Death Eaters aren’t alt-right at all, because they were obviously here before just about everyone else.
I understand the death eaters to be: a) tiny in number and b) not a strict subset of the alt-right.
I no longer have a clue what you mean by “alt-right”. I was operating under the assumption that it meant “non-mainstream right-wingers”, like the tradcaths, monarchists, Death Eaters, white nationalists, etc, etc.
I’m not Brad, but when I hear “alt-right”, I take it to mean recently founded identitarian rightist movements not associated with the mainstream, and usually reacting against it in some way. So the Death Eaters, yes, /pol/, and some of the national populist sentiment that’s crystallized around Trump, but not traditionalist Catholics (they’ve been around too long) or old-school monarchists (if you can find one).
@ brad
Also no one I know has any beliefs about Cthulhu’s swimming habits.
I am recently disillusioned. I thought Cthulhu was some ancient power with His hands in all our threads ever since at least Moses and the stone tablets that said ‘an eye for an eye’ instead of ‘kill all their tribe’, and the right-wingers were objecting to His extending mercy to their outgroup. But in fact Moldbug was just referring to FDR’s New Deal. Sigh.
@ Nita
[I fondly hope I’m misfiguring this in some way.]
Just to get the ballparks on the same page, the initial cost of getting on to major contraceptives looks like this (from the umich info I posted above).
device / insertion / total
Diaphragm 66 91 157
Implant 834 211 1045
IUD 799 79 878
Patch 173 0 173
Ring 110 0 110
Shot 54 27 81
BC Pill 76 300 376 (including pelvic exam, Pap smear, etc)
average 402.85 initial cost
A Federal Poverty Guideline for a single woman living alone is about $1,100/monthly.
A cost of living estimate for a single woman living alone in Silverdale, WA is $2,315/monthly.
So here’s a woman who is already trying to live on half of normal income, presented with a lump requirement of at least $81, or ~$300, or more. That’s incentive to procrastinate.
Interruptus and rhythm are both free. Combine them and the odds of getting pregnant are pretty low.
Alternatively, insist on your partner using a condom.
@ David Friedman
Yes, those methods are free. They also happen to be some of the least effective methods, especially with “typical” use (perhaps because they require persistent conscientiousness and self-control from both partners at all times, as well favourable biological conditions — e.g., a regular cycle).
Approximately half of all unintended pregnancies occur during a period of — presumably “typical” — contraceptive use.
(And good luck with the condoms when apparently even a seemingly intelligent guy like Julian Assange will sneak up on you without one while you’re sleeping.)
@ Nita
I can’t imagine anyone, male or female, putting up with a condom. There’s a need for better barrier contraceptive devices — perhaps developed from spray on bandages, other medical membranes, etc.
Costs of FDA approval of such things might be too much for any one commercial manufacturer; thus a need for subsidising development.
(Personally long past such needs and never pregnant.)
ETA – On the initial costs, the method with the cheapest initial option, $81 for the shot, has to be done every 3 months. The next cheapest initial cost is $110 for the rings (which last about one month each); dunno how many rings you get with the $110, or how much refills of the prescription will cost. ( See https://www.uhs.umich.edu/contraception-cost )
Just to get the ballparks on the same page, the initial cost of getting on to major contraceptives looks like this (from the umich info I posted above).
If the argument is that birth control is too expensive for poor women (and abstinence is unthinkable) so we need to keep abortion legal as an alternative, shouldn’t the cost of the abortions be on that chart as well?
Also, you’re comparing average costs with poverty-level incomes. If we’re playing that game, birth control is irrelevant, all of the poor people are going to starve to death in <9 months anyway. The free-market price for cheap oral contraceptives seems to be nine dollars per month, or 0.8% of a poverty-level income (and I saw what you did with the pap smear there).
@keranih
The intended operative phrase in my comment was ‘explicit intention.’ i.e. something like “I want to have a baby, and therefore I am going to go off birth control.” Wheras I think what you’re thinking of is “I don’t want a kid, but I really want to get laid right now so I’m going to take the chance.”
Humans are human. It is not enough for me that people be able to prevent pregnancy; non-pregnancy must be the default, the thing you must undergo trivial inconvenience to overcome, before I would be willing to compromise on abortion. That’s why I used IUD’s as an example; once in place, it’s hard to screw up without trying to screw it up.
Yes, that’s asking a lot; but, hey, no one said compromise was easy. I’ll at least acknowledge that there is some hypothetical middle to meet you at, which is further than most of these sorts of discussions get.
In the spirit of the somewhat orwellian government-pills hypothetical someone mentioned above, here’s another one: Implant everyone with a long-term IUD when they reach the age where they can get pregnant. They can have it out whenever they like (possibly only after the age of majority). Someone who had one and took it out voluntarily can reasonably be assumed to be intentionally aiming to have kids; I wouldn’t necessarily support forbidding abortions in that case, but I don’t think I would fight it terribly hard either.
(Yes, I know this is wildly unrealistic. Also, someone is going to point out that universal IUDs would be expensive, assuming anyone is still watching this thread. I answer that it is probably less expensive than raising unwanted children on welfare)
(full disclosure, I have in the past paid for a friend’s abortion; not because I had anything to do with it, but in the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is)
@ error et al
If opt-out contraceptives ever became that cheap and medically safe, then you wouldn’t need to dystopia them.
@ John Schilling
In haste.
>>Just to get the ballparks on the same page, the initial cost of getting on to major contraceptives looks like this (from the umich info I posted above).
>If the argument is that birth control is too expensive for poor women (and abstinence is unthinkable) so we need to keep abortion legal as an alternative, shouldn’t the cost of the abortions be on that chart as well?
Then we’d need a probability factor as well. The initial $81 cost (for a Shot) is a for-sure, the ‘might need an abortion later’ is a maybe, the ‘my electricity will be turned off next week if I don’t pay it’ is a for-sure — so ‘okay, muddle along till I can afford the $81’ is a rational choice at the time.
>The free-market price for cheap oral contraceptives seems to be nine dollars per month,
With the initial cost amortized, I assume? I’m looking at initial cost without amortizing.
> (and I saw what you did with the pap smear there).
Ya, the pap smear/pelvic exam part was unclear in my shallow sources (umich/Planned Parenthood) so I left it unclear. Those are services that PP or some other prescription provider can do cheap or free (or skip) if they wish. What I wanted was initial cost of using the method without PP or other help.
‘$81 for a Shot and have to do it again in three months … or for the Pill, make an appointment for some sort of interview and/or exam to see how many other exams they will want and how much those wlll cost (free market value of the biggest exam being around $250) … hell, imma pay the electric bill.’
My argument is not just about people under the Poverty Line. People already making enough for the normal cost of living, still have such considerations. Especially if the people have time pressures making each visit to the prescription-provider (whether free-market or PP etc) difficult.
@houseboat: If a woman is engaging in recreational sex at any significant frequency without using any sort of birth control, the probability that they will need an abortion is close enough to 100% as makes no economically significant difference. Or more precisely the probability that they will become pregnant. They may then chose not to have an abortion, but that is several orders of magnitude more expensive still.
As for the “initial cost” of oral contraception, aside from the $9 or so for the pills themselves it is zero for most women. If you are talking specifically about the US regulatory environment and in particular about changes to the US regulatory environment – we did get into this with a discussion of how abortion might be ideally regulated – then the elephant that you seem to be imagining is a natural furnishing of the room is that $400 pelvic exam. Which the medical community has basically admitted has nothing to do with contraception, and is mostly just a way for doctors to use their monopoly over prescription drug access to charge a $400/year rent on sexually active women.
Also, disturbingly, a way for the worst sort of feminists to score points in several already-ugly political battles that shouldn’t have anything to do with pelvic exams. Fortunately, the better sorts of feminists have been able to work with the better sort of Republicans to do something about the whole mess.
I wish I’d thought of phrasing it that way. Opt-out birth control is exactly what I’m getting at, and much more concise. That’s what I’d need to compromise on the abortion issue.
I’m not sure you wouldn’t need to dystopia it. If nothing else, people tend to be physically old enough to breed before they’re mentally old enough to make or even think about those calls. But then, I’m not seriously proposing that dystopia, either; I was looking for a hypothetical world in which I wouldn’t oppose anti-abortion laws (much), and that’s what I came up with.
Also, since a couple people mentioned it, I’m updating on the anti-abortion->anti-birth-control thing. On reconsideration I don’t have much to back the belief outside what I’ve heard of Catholic dogma, and I find the objections reasonable.
I’ve been researching some more facts on abortion.
I didn’t know that only four doctors in the entire United States perform third-trimester abortions. There were five until George Tiller was assassinated in 2009.
You can look at one of the doctors’ websites here, the website of Dr. Warren Hern.
In Colorado, where he practices, abortion is available outpatient until 26 weeks (two weeks before the third trimester). It is available until 34 weeks (8.5 months) “for conditions such as fetal anomalies, genetic disorder, fetal demise and/or or severe medical problems.”
Based on some comments in previous threads, one with a person calling himself “pro-life” because he doesn’t support elective abortion post-viability, and others that seemed to exaggerate the numbers of third-trimester abortions, I suspect that general knowledge on the subject of late-term abortions is not particularly extensive.
From a fairly old (but, as far as I can determine, still medically accurate) Slate article about fetal viability:
***
Additional conclusion: those out there who are convinced that abortion is murder might take heed of the fact that a single vigilante with decent planning could personally kill every single third-trimester abortionist with relative ease.
Of course, I think such a person would be the real murderer and would deserve what he gets, but it does show that you have little excuse for not acting on your beliefs.
@ John Schilling
Thanks for encouraging news:
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/11/over_the_counter_birth_control_in_california_and_oregon.html
Nancy Stanwood, chairwoman of the board of Physicians for Reproductive Health, told the Times that the research doesn’t support the argument that contraception is necessary to bring women in for Pap smears and other important gynecological care. “We were holding pregnancy prevention hostage to cancer screening,” she said.
Your link to http://ocsotc.org/wp-content/uploads/worldmap/worldmap.html color codes the US and other Commenwealth nations as outliers that are “RX only”. The http://ocsotc.org/ page links to several other sources on their efforts to make BC pills (effectively) OTC in the US etc. If that were done, the US cost might come in line with a worldwide cost of around $9/mo. (That would be in line with my shallow info from PP and Umich.)
In so far as your argument is that medical advance is less necessary than cutting regulations and unnecessary exams, that too is encouraging — for the future. If you can get that cut, then more women will use BC pills and there will be fewer requests for abortion. Cutting these regulation-related expenses is something both sides can support.
@ Nita
And here are some more sources for facts.
http://www.cyclebeads.com/blog/815/why-arent-all-women-using-contraception?-
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-Unintended-Pregnancy-US.html
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/win/contraceptive-needs-2013.pdf
Which side is the payday loan industry on?
comic illustrating this
The other problem for the civilized factions is that they don’t necessarily have effective resources for controlling the uncivilized factions, especially in the short run.
An alternative model is that on each side there are the nasty people, the actively civilized, and the mostly apathetic. The first two groups are small, but the balance is on the side of civilization because it takes effort to be nasty and most people don’t care enough and so they end up being passively civilized. The actively civilized are more likely to engage their counterparts on the other side and to have a negative view of their own side’s nasty people, but the apathetic care more about the “my side vs their side” conflict without much consideration of tactics and may not think of their side having this kind of division.
Super worried about the manic guy.
Followed the quote to its origin. Prognosis is grim =(.
Like…why? He knows he’s mentally ill, he understands what that means, and he discloses it quite clearly so you can take him on his own merits. That’s like…the epitome of people you don’t need to worry about. Unless you want to, in which case knock yourself out I guess lol.
Gosh, Scott, I didn’t know you were an SJW and a reactionary. That’s like the 7-10 split of internet politics.
At least he’s not a Communist Nazi Jew.
…. he’s not?
Of course not. Clearly he’s a Nazi Communist Jew.
Scott, I view you as one of the three great S.S.-initialed social intellectuals of our time, the others being Scott Sumner and Steve Sailer. All have their flaws, all are great minds which have not been put to waste. I truly admire this blog’s blogposts, especially those from 2013, for being brilliant expositions of the errors of tribalism and Yarvin-Landism. I also view your personal life as a mess, and your anti-libertarian FAQ is godawful. I could write a better one, though I probably won’t, as there would be no point in me doing so. I am also jealous of your ability to successfully leverage social media to the advantage of your blog’s viewership.
Nominating Yarvin-Landism as most useful labeling of such.
“Yarvin-Landism”
I’m going to steal this.
*Stealing Yarvin-Landism as well.
Though I think I shall change it to Yarvinist-Landism, so it scans like Marxist-Leninism.
Wow. Scott, I think you have a few blind spots, but you have some truly fucked up critics. I hope you don’t let them stop you from writing.
A someone with their ‘accessory to adultery’ merit ribbon with bronze oak leaf cluster, I have to say that the author of this site has never particularly reminded me of any of the men I’ve cuckolded.
Also, most of them were decent fellows for whatever that’s worth.
Wait, “accessory” ? How does that work ? There’s an old Russian phrase, that people use when someone asks then about their friends’ sex lives: “I don’t know, I wasn’t standing there with a candle to light their way”; is it something like that ?
They fucked a married person.
Oh, ok that makes more sense than what I was thinking. I thought maybe he/she/etc., provided some sort of a adultery match-making service… you know, like Ashley Madison, only real.
“They fucked a married person.”
Twice, actually if they were awarded the ribbon a second time (an OLC).
What do you guys think of the ethics of having sex with someone who you know is in an exclusive monogamous relationship? I’ve always assumed it was a screwed up thing to do, but I’ve had friends who say “if they don’t cheat with you, they’ll cheat with someone else”, etc. And does the amount of persuading one does in order to be successful get counted as an input?
I’d say it’s pretty bad, but how bad depends of the specifics (is this “exclusive monogamous relationship” eighteen-year-olds who have been dating for a few weeks, or a married couple with children? Is the cheated-upon partner a huge asshole? Do they cheat?)
If they’re coming on to you it’s a jerk move, but you didn’t sign anything and you don’t have any actual obligation to refuse. If you’re coming on to them you’re a real piece of work, go fuck yourself, that shit used to be a tort.
I see it as being a really bad thing to do, but I’m not sure how much of that emotional response is simply related to the fact that I am an extremely monogamous individual and can’t understand (on an “alief” level) why anyone would ever cheat or have a non-monogamous relationship.*
To me, the idea of facilitating someone else’s cheating seems essentially the same as helping someone do any other immoral action (though it’s obviously less bad than, say, helping someone murder another person). To me it sort of makes you…vaguely guilty by association, in the same way that the lookout person during a bank heist is guilty of bank robbing, even if he never actually touched any of the money or threatened anyone at the bank and was simply there to alert his companions if the cops show up.
I don’t think I’d count the amount of persuading one does in order to be successful as an input. By this you mean the amount of persuading the aspiring cheater has to do to convince you to enter a relationship with them when you know they are already in a monogamous relationship, right? If so, I wouldn’t add it. I think the harder the aspiring cheater tries to cheat, the worse (morally) they are, but the amount of persuading it takes you to accept seems kind of irrelevant. All I would count is whether you eventually accepted or not.
I’m not exactly a utilitarian (though I mostly agree with them), but I’d guess they’d say that if the aspiring cheater’s utility + your utility goes up by a larger amount than the decline in utility the cheater’s monogamous spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend will experience when they find out they’ve been cheated on, then it’s morally acceptable.
*(Note that I am not saying there’s anything objectively wrong with polyamorous relationships, which I know are popular around SSC. I’m just saying I don’t understand the desire to have one, on an emotional/instinctual level, and that may be affecting my instinctual response to the question of whether it’s wrong to help someone cheat.)
People who say “If they don’t cheat with me, they’ll only cheat with someone else” are trying to justify being assholes. Imagine someone saying “Hey, if I didn’t take the money out of your wallet, some random mugger would just do it instead”. Would you accept that as a reason to let them put their hand in your pocket?
If you’re tempted by what seems like free, easy, no-strings-attached sex, consider this: is it no strings attached? What happens if their partner finds out (you might be risking a punch in the face at the very least)? You could get a rep as a home-wrecker – do you want that? Suppose one or the other of you develops feelings beyond “Let’s screw” – how would that work out? If you did enter into a relationship with them, would you ever quite trust them (or they trust you); after all, both of you have shown that you’re willing to ignore the fact of someone being in a committed relationship when it comes to having sex.
My own opinion: it’s too much hassle. If the relationship is on the rocks anyway, you don’t want to get into the middle of the drama. If it’s not yet at that point, do you want to risk getting caught up in whatever is going on?
If you like drama and intrigue, and the notion of forbidden love and sneaking around (rather than the sex on offer) is what turns you on, that’s a different matter. You might want the drama and the chance of violence or recrimination in that case.
>People who say “If they don’t cheat with me, they’ll only cheat with someone else” are trying to justify being assholes. Imagine someone saying “Hey, if I didn’t take the money out of your wallet, some random mugger would just do it instead”. Would you accept that as a reason to let them put their hand in your pocket?
Wallets distinclty lack personal agency.
“Wallets distinctly lack personal agency.”
True, but agency is not the same thing as “superhuman will.” There walks no-one who is capable of not succumbing to temptation if it is presented well enough, and/or often enough. Anyone can be persuaded to commit infidelity, no matter how much they love the one they’re with. What one needs to say or do, and just how much effort one must put into the enterprise, will vary based on an almost uncountable number of circumstances, and it may be that things never line up such that cheating happens, but it’s always, always a possibility.
In theory it sounds really bad, but I have to admit I’ve done it more than once and don’t really feel bad about it. Reasons I don’t feel bad:
1. If it is bad, I don’t consider it nearly as bad as being the cheater. That is, while I’ve had sex with women who were in relationships at the time, I’ve never had sex with another woman while I was in a committed relationship. To me, this is a very important distinction, because I’m not breaking any promises or being dishonest to anyone, though, admittedly, I’m facilitating someone else being dishonest with someone else. But doesn’t this mean I’m having sex with bad people? Well, see 2.
2. Many, if not most very attractive women are almost never single. This is because women tend to be in the position of receiving and accepting or rejecting offers of sex/romance. The men come after them whether they seek them out or not. And especially if they’re unusually attractive. Unusually attractive women are constantly being hit on by men; this makes it almost an act of willpower for them to remain single. Being in a relationship of some sort becomes the default for many of them, and, as a result, not a few of them feel very insecure with the idea of ever being single for any significant period.
Thus, attractive women, very often develop an attitude towards relationships similar to Tarzan looking for a new vine to grab before he lets go of the old one, or a person with strong job prospects waiting to quit job A before she has a firm offer from superior company B. In other words, being an attractive woman is like being an insecure rock star: implicit offers of sex are constantly coming fast and furious, yet you still don’t want to (and don’t have to) risk ever being alone.
Thus, cheating is, sadly, a way for many women to end their current relationship–by testing out a new model. All the women who’ve ever cheated with me ended their relationships not too long after–either ending up with me or else someone else, but not the person they cheated on. So, as a man, if you are unwilling to sleep with a woman in a relationship of any kind–even a dysfunctional relationship that is clearly not working out–then you are, at least in my experience, limiting yourself rather severely, since, as stated above, really attractive women are rarely truly single.
This may sound unscrupulous or not very “bros before hos” of me, and some might say that I’m just a sneaky jerk who can’t get hot women to sleep with him honestly or something. Maybe so? I just know that at a certain point I realized that nearly all the women I was attracted to were nearly always already in a relationship, and that I wasn’t going to let that stop me if they wanted to come to me (in my defense, I never pursued any of these women very proactively).
As for married women; that would give me much greater pause, and I doubt I’d do it.
Awww man. Why’d you have to go and post that? I liked you so much more before you did. 🙂
Cheating with someone in a monogamous relationship is like hearing that a kid is going to go rob a bank, and lending him a gun in exchange for a cut of the loot. That he might get the gun from someone else if not from you is the thinnest of justifications. You might not be the most culpable guy in the mess, but you’re still pretty darn culpable.
Arguing that “hey, what am I going to do? all the really hot girls are in relationships!” is little different than arguing “b-b-b-but what am I supposed to do? most of the money is in the bank drawers!”
“Arguing that “hey, what am I going to do? all the really hot girls are in relationships!” is little different than arguing “b-b-b-but what am I supposed to do? most of the money is in the bank drawers!””
Again with the comparison of sleeping with women in relationships to stealing someone else’s possessions. Are the problems with this not obvious?
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I was raised to regard a man who’d sleep with another man’s girlfriend as extremely dishonorable. The old school version of “bros before hos”, sort of. I honestly don’t know to what extent those rules still apply, given the very different sexual ethics of young people in 2016.
The accepted protocol used to be that you left a note under his shaving cream if you didn’t find out until it was too late.
“Maybe it’s a generational thing…
The accepted protocol used to be that you left a note under his shaving cream if you didn’t find out until it was too late.”
I find this last thing very cute, and it is, indeed, very “bros before hos.”
I feel like the mating market has become way too defect-defect in game theoretical terms for this sort of thing anymore, along with what I perceive as a positive development in terms of women’s perceived autonomy.
For example, it used to be that if you came home and found someone sleeping with your wife, you wanted to beat up the man. To me, if I found someone sleeping with my wife, especially if I didn’t know the man, almost all of my anger would be directed at my wife, not him. She’s the one who’s betrayed me.
I remember some sort of litmus test: a man comes home to find his wife sleeping with a stranger (or his best friend in some versions, maybe); he says “I’m going to kill you!” Who is he talking to? I think women more often assumed he meant the woman, where men more often assumed he meant the man. I think the latter is the more “old fashioned” way of thinking which is, imo, the wrong one in this case.
But I think part of the problem is that, by old fashioned standards, women are just well, a lot more promiscuous now than they used to be (and I don’t mean to attach any negative judgment to my use of that term). It is just way more likely that any given woman will have some sort of man she’s sleeping with at any given time from the age of 18 (or younger) on. So unless you’re dating teenagers, any given woman in her twenties, say, is very, very likely already to be sleeping with someone else.
Given this state of affairs, I just don’t understand what exactly the good alternative is: follow people around like in a crowded parking lot waiting for people who show signs of brake lights moving and then jump in as soon as the spot is available? Is this really much better than just sleeping with the woman whose relationship is on the rocks and going to end soon anyway?
In my further defense, I never slept with any woman whose boyfriend I knew or had even met.
Would you like my analogy better if the comparison were, rather, “cold-caller on behalf of Bernie Madoff”? Or “press agent for Andrew Wakefield”? Or “knowing publisher of a plagiarist”? The point is not the benefit gained, but rather knowingly facilitating a betrayal of trust. Moloch smiles every time the community defects, and there is never a scarcity of rationalization for doing so; I simply prefer cooperators.
We both know I wasn’t saying that women are chattels; neither you nor I are SJWs, so let us not act like them.
@onyomi: Well, to pull out another old-school aphorism, the single piece of romantic advice my mother ever gave me was “If she’ll cheat with you, she’ll cheat on you.” Is that not something that concerns you, if you intend to start a relationship with your co-cheater, as you implied you might? Do you regard the risk as inevitable given the prevailing “defect-defect” ethos?
@onyomi, I don’t know if hating the person your partner cheated with is something heterosexual men do because they think of their female partners as lacking agency. I think more of it is that it is something people do because they prefer not to think ill of someone they love, and so prefer to blame someone else if at all possible.
The Anonymouse:
I don’t get it. How is the behaviour of the “unbound” partner defective? Are you implying that the potential emotional harm done to the person cheated upon is a harm done to socienty?
@Alex
The primary harm I see is in the undermining of the bonds of trust, commitment, and cooperation that cheating produces (by both the “bound” and “unbound” members of the illicit relationship). I’d rather live in a high-trust society than a low-trust society. As I mentioned, I judge the “bound” cheater more harshly than the “unbound” one, but if it weren’t for people running around society trying to get laid with married people, married people couldn’t cheat.
My preferred situation would be that if people in monogamous relationships wish to have sex outside of their relationship, they honestly end that relationship first (or make a fully informed arrangement with their otherwise-deceived partner).
Maybe I’m with stillnotking, and just old-fashioned, and everyone really is cheating on everyone else all the time, and we all have to defect to get the “very attractive women.” But I hope not, and that’s not what I see in my daily life.
NB: If I seem unduly harsh to onyomi, it’s because he’s one of my favorite and otherwise-agreeable commenters here. As the parents like to say, “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”
“if it weren’t for people running around society trying to get laid with married people, married people couldn’t cheat.”
Well, for one thing, note I specifically said I would have serious qualms about sleeping with a married woman. At that point I do get more of a sense that I am somehow doing a subtle damage to society by helping someone else betray a very public, supposedly lifelong sort of commitment. I also could never imagine myself in the “leave a note under his shaving cream” situation, because I never slept with a woman who was living with her boyfriend at the time and would certainly feel super uncomfortable doing so in their shared living space, if only for the risk of him coming home, to say nothing of the betrayal of using somebody else’s space for that.
The “attached” women I’ve slept with mostly had bad long-distance relationships which were clearly not working out, but which they had remained in due to habit or sentiment or fear of abandonment. And as I said, I didn’t really pursue them. They pursued me. So I do think that’s a pretty far cry from me actively trying to sleep with married women (some people get off on such things, no doubt, but that is very much not the case for me–I did feel sort of bad about it… though not bad enough, apparently!).
I don’t think “go ahead and sleep with cheating women” is a static equilibrium or a desirable state of affairs, but I also think it may not be bad advice to give to a young man in this dating market.
I mean, if you had asked 18 year old me whether I’d ever sleep with a woman in a relationship I’d have said “no, of course not! that seems dishonorable!” But several years of frustration at nearly every woman I liked being stuck to her crummy high school or college boyfriend whom she didn’t really like that much anyway but stayed with out of habit and some of those women showing signs of being interested in me, I basically started to feel like a chump: in essence, “the only thing this guy has on me is the luck of having met her first.” In such a situation it can be hard to say no, and I don’t think I should have had to.
Not an ideal state of affairs, though I’m not sure of the alternative: go back to a more traditional mating game where women wait to have sex or get attached until they are very serious or married? Tell women to stop being such weenies and break up with the crummy boyfriends they want to cheat on? Date ugly chicks (no, I am, of course, not saying that only ugly women are single; I am saying that attractive women are much less likely to be single)?
To be blunt, I think onyomi‘s position here is absolutely disgusting and inexcusable.
If you want to date someone, let alone sleep with them, tell them to break up with their partner first. Fucking period.
The Anonymouse:
Thank you for the clarification. I do think your view is self perpetuating though. The connection of sexual exclusiveness with trust seems to be a largely arbitrary one stemming from a society without working contraceptives and paternity tests. If it weren’t for old wise men and women telling future generations that there is such a connection and it should be honoured, it might as well vanish from modern society.
Incidentally the c-word much discussed in this very thread seems to be another facet of the same problem.
@onyomi
Thank you for the extended and thoughtful response. I feel like I understand you better now.
“To be blunt, I think onyomi‘s position here is absolutely disgusting and inexcusable.
If you want to date someone, let alone sleep with them, tell them to break up with their partner first. Fucking period.”
You would say that. Have fun in Ayn Rand’s world of perfect rationality. I hope you find a nice old lady who loves you for your virtue.
You know, Houellebecq’s novels are supposed to be dystopian, not instructional.
Welp, brb, converting to Wahhabism.
@ Psmith:
I don’t know if I’m misinterpreting you, but are you saying that refusing to sleep with someone behind their partner’s back is a form of puritanism equivalent to Wahhabism?
Vox, no, that was an expression of amused horror at onyomi’s stated position ITT. Edited for clarity.
@ onyomi
>>”If you want to date someone, let alone sleep with them, tell them to break up with their partner first. Fucking period.”
>You would say that. Have fun in Ayn Rand’s world of perfect rationality. I hope you find a nice old lady who loves you for your virtue.
Rand’s world? That doesn’t fit with her fiction.
Rand actually did that in real life, she and Nicholas Branden informed their spouses they wanted to have an affair, and did so.
@ houseboatonstyx:
The fiction is sort of a mixed case. In Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden’s wife Lillian is some kind of absolute shrew. It’s clear that she hates him and he hates her, but he puts up with this out of some kind of sense of duty, until he ends up falling for (the unmarried) Dagny Taggart and sleeping with her. He feels guilty about this, but Rand’s clear message is that he shouldn’t have.
He ends up agreeing to some kind of blackmail to “save Dagny’s reputation”, but after that he calls up his lawyer and tells him to “Get me a divorce” by whatever means necessary. (This was, of course, back in the time when divorce was at-fault only.)
So I think Rand would say ideally he shouldn’t have cheated, but really he shouldn’t have been married to that woman in the first place. Given that he was married to her, cheating was the better option. Better than to compound his past mistakes by pushing Dagny away. I suppose you can also read it as an argument for no-fault divorce.
Really, in my opinion, the characterization of Hank Rearden is a little weak. He’s supposed to be the archetypal American businessman who is rational in his business decisions but mixes this in an unintegrated way with conventional duty-based religious ethics in his personal life. But this doesn’t really come through except in that he feels obligated to keep supporting Lillian and her horrible relatives for no expressed reason. And why he fell in love with her in the first place is touched on, but still not clear.
Anyway, if you want my opinion, it’s still wrong to cheat and not break up first, at least in the modern context. But if your partner is that horrible of a person, it’s a serious mitigating factor. “He/she drove me to it!”: it’s not as if you couldn’t have done otherwise, but you had a lot more legitimate pressure in that direction.
@ God Damn John Jay:
That’s true. But it was also not a particularly healthy relationship.
You are, however, right that Rand was part of the “rationalist polyamorist community”. 🙂
She was not open about this during her life (it was the 50s and 60s, after all), but she did write some articles answering questions about marital fidelity. And she generally said that monogamy was good, but that there were situations where she could imagine exceptions. One she gave was (in her typical melodramatic way), a woman who thinks that her husband has died in a war or something and gets remarried, only to find out years later that he is alive after all. In that case, she said the woman is not obligated to stick with one and “dump” the other.
Indeed! The comparison is thoroughly inadequate. After all, men care about women far more than they care about mere possessions, and pursue material wealth chiefly as a method of attracting women. Therefore, transgressions violating a man’s woman should be punished far more harshly than transgressions against his things.
@Psmith ibn Psmith al-California
It is a sad reflection on our Roman society, when the barbarians’ sexual morality is the superior one.
There are fairly strong secular reasons to believe that monogamous marriage is good for society. Thus, a decent argument can be made that even an unmarried man who sleeps with a married woman (for instance) is doing something morally wrong, since he is weakening not only that specific marriage but the institution of marriage in general, and that is a bad thing. And, indeed, most societies did disapprove of men who seduced other men’s wives, and either punished them at law or tacitly allowed the cuckolded husbands to handle the issue privately.
But it’s a lot harder to defend the “sanctity” of shacking up. We already have a widespread, readily available, socially acceptable means of declaring lifelong sexual dedication to one partner. If someone chooses *not* to avail themselves of that method, then what right does either party have to expect something that was never promised? Onyomi said he doesn’t seduce married women and it would give him “much greater pause” to do so. I think there’s a sound ethical reason for that distinction, and you don’t have to be religious to believe this.
@ Vox
Rearden is supposed to be objectivist-leaning in his business, but not in personal matters (till Dagny and others push him otherwise). Otho, Roark, an ideal objectivist hero, has no problem ‘cuckolding’ his best friend (Wynand) with Dominique, and laughs when Dominique makes it pubic to insult Wynand. (Why, it’s almost like he considers Dominique free to make her own decisions, which are none of his business.)
Dagny pretty formally broke up with Francisco because she did not approve of his playboy behavior, well before she met Rearden. When Galt turned up, she dropped Rearden without formality or thought, iirc. And they all continued friends, allies. (Again, almost as though they all saw Dagny as free to make her own choices. There was also something, perhaps from Dagny, about continuing to be ‘on the open market’ rather than bound to any previous choice.)
@ houseboatsonstyx:
I didn’t consider the case with Roark.
Anyway, it’s hardly as if I agree with everything Rand said on gender and sexuality. A lot of it is unrealistic and/or actively harmful.
>Are the problems with this not obvious?
I don’t care much about the ethics complaints of people who fuck other people’s girlfriends
That doesn’t seem entirely plausible. You can tell whether there is, ahem, “chemistry” without actually having sex, and good sex is not sufficient for a good relationship. What they might actually be testing is their own commitment to the current partner — if they can go through with cheating, the relationship must have been a mistake.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to sleep with someone who does that kind of thing, let alone become attached to them.
@ onyomi:
I’m not sure it’s as high a percentage of the population as you think. Selection bias and all.
Well, considering the quantity and severity of harm that’s caused to people by dyfunctional romantic relationships, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
I mean, I feel like this is great in theory, but is also the sort of standard that effectively eliminates a very, very high percentage of the population.
Just as cowards think all men are cowards, and liars think all men lie, so I suspect most cheaters think everyone cheats. My experience is otherwise.
Since I have recently been searching for a job in a very, very difficult job market in my field, and since I’ve always thought that there are rather striking parallels between dating and job seeking, I’ll offer another comparison:
Right now, in my field, the competition is extremely intense because the number of desirable jobs is very few and the number of qualified candidates is very many. As a result, people on both sides behave, frankly abominably, quite often. To some extent it may be pure carelessness, but to some extent it is just a result of the mismatch of supply and demand. Everyone is super cutthroat and looking out for number one. Loyalty is not rewarded.
This is a bad state of affairs, to be sure, and I certainly don’t excuse those who behave abominably. But, if a job seeker in this situation asked me for advice, as OP was asking for advice, I’d say “don’t be mean or dishonest or intentionally deceptive, but also put your own interests first.” In other words, in a situation of widespread defect-defect, the best advice for any given individual is “defect,” even if the best advice for society is “cooperate.”
Note, I don’t mean to compare cheating to “defect” and remaining faithful to “cooperate” in this comparison. Rather, I am comparing “adamantly insisting on sleeping only with single women” to “cooperate” and “being okay with sleeping with theoretically attached women under certain circumstances” to “defect.”
That is, if we lived in a world of no cheating, or if we lived in a more traditional society where there was basically only “courting” (very casual, uncommitted) and “marriage” (very serious, very public commitment), then maybe this advice wouldn’t be necessary. But we don’t live in that world. So I think the best individual advice is “defect.”
And sure, you could say “break up with your boyfriend first,” but I think this is an unrealistic picture of how actual romance, in my experience, develops nowadays. One doesn’t say “madam, may I court you?”
One is hanging out with someone and things get cuddly and then you kiss the person, and maybe it goes further, or maybe not. But I can tell you how most women will react if, when they start to unzip your pants you say “hold on there, you are in a relationship and I would never do anything with a woman in a relationship–you better just break up with your boyfriend first.” It’s not good.
@ onyomi:
I think the situations are very different. But that’s partly because you haven’t specified what kind of unethical job-hunting behaviors you’re talking about.
Anyway, you’re either just looking for sex, or you’re looking for someone who is an upstanding, moral person who will not cheat on you down the road. If you’re just looking for sex: go ahead! On that premise, there is nothing wrong with going after every kind of disreputable woman and engaging in every sleazy practice.
But if you’re looking for a decent partner, it seems counter-productive.
I can quite well imagine that the kind of women who would unzip your pants in that situation would react poorly to being called out as immoral cheaters, which is effectively what you would be doing. The question is why you’re going after those kinds of women. But maybe cheaters and the people who will cheat with them deserve one another.
Further down in a thread on polyamory, Dr Dealgood says something that I think could just as well been a response to this thread:
“If offered a choice they would have settled down with a high school sweetheart and been a reliable (if boring) husband. But that wasn’t in the cards, so they adapted as best they could to the new order.
So I can see them being angry that the same crappy situation that they were reacting to is getting crappier, even while they’re playing their role in accelerating it.”
“But if you’re looking for a decent partner, it seems counter-productive.”
I could agree with that. But as I stated in the comment which I deleted because I thought it was too flippant, but which then everyone quoted anyway, there are things I care about in a partner other than perfect ethical rectitude and consistency.
Right now I am engaged and intend only to have sex with this one woman the rest of my life. If for some unfortunate reason it didn’t work out, I would, because of where I am in my life and career, be looking for someone serious who wanted to have children, etc. For that reason, and because maybe my hormones now are less raging than they were in my twenties, I would be more likely to just take the hard line you describe, because I’m not interested in casual sex and willingness to cheat is, indeed an undesirable quality in a longterm life partner.
But the OP sounded rather like a younger person considering some casual sex which might or might not have led to something more. For that person in that situation, it’s hard for me to be as judgmental, partially, yes, because I’ve done it myself, but partially also because of all the other factors I’ve described.
I will also note here that I find it amusing, in a comment thread for a post in which many people criticize Scott and his commenters for being “Vulcans,” “aspies,” etc. I suddenly find myself feeling like the only human in a room full of Vulcans. Yes, the neat and tidy picture you describe seems ideal to me too, and the Vulcan position is often the right one, or at least, the one easiest to logically defend (almost a tautology there); I’m just not sure it’s realistic advice for a young man on today’s dating market.
@ onyomi:
See, to me it seems like the opposite. I’m feeling outraged and saying “Dammit, Jim, you can’t sleep with the green-skinned alien woman: she’s got a boyfriend!” And you’re trying to coolly rationalize it.
But I guess the way you’re seeing it is that you’re saying “I just want to let my passions run free!” And we’re the preachy Victorians saying: “No, morality!”
“But I guess the way you’re seeing it is that you’re saying “I just want to let my passions run free!” And we’re the preachy Victorians saying: “No, morality!””
It’s not so much that I want to let my passions run free, but that I found trying to hold myself to an abstract, theoretical standard in the face of a real life situation to which it felt inapplicable was making me unhappy. So I adjusted my standards.
I think it would be a more obvious case of ex post facto justification if I had first slept with a woman in a relationship out of sheer temptation and then attempted to retrofit my ethical view to suit that; that wasn’t, in my case, at least, how it went. Rather, having previously ignored signs of interest on the part of other attached women, I finally said, ‘this sucks and isn’t doing anyone any good!’ (arguably not even the boyfriend, who in each case, was in a relationship with a woman who wasn’t happy with him, a fact of which he was oblivious until she broke up with him) and so decided I would stop treating “marriage jr” as if it were marriage.
Also, what could be more human than coming up with nice-sounding logical justifications for what your penis wanted to do in the first place? 🙂
Spot on! Attractive women are practically never single unless they are virgins. And in the west they are never virgins by the time they reach legal age.
A lot of good looking smart women hang around somebody (sometimes you cant even call them men), and it takes someone better to open their eyes on their relationship. Women need a lead and this is the queue for them. Women will not cheat unless she wants it herself.
Today dating market is strangers vs strangers. Not neighbor seducing neighbors wife
Right. Just keep telling yourself what you want to hear — it’s the key to happiness and success.
Banned .
FWIW, onyomi, I find your honest perspective on this refreshing and something I largely agree with. Like you, at 18 I probably would have considered such actions dishonorable, and like you as I grew I discovered that holding such a value was hurting more than helping.
There’s a high probability that I’m just rationalizing, but I too see little reason to condemn the unattached partner. We’re not talking about the attached partner being coerced or manipulated; the attached partner has free will and is making the choice to break the promise that they made with their partner. Nor are we talking about being aid to robbing someone or killing children; we’re talking about being aid to breaking a promise between 2 individuals.
Maybe it’s bad to go around helping people to break their promises, so perhaps the case can be made that someone who deliberately goes around trying to cause people to willingly cheat with them is bad behavior. At the same time, if an individual willingly decided that they value something more than keeping their promise, it seems a little arrogant to tell them that no, their values are wrong and my values are right.
Unfortunately, sexual relationships are complicated. I imagine a lot of no-longer-relevant hangups about cheating exist that have hung around from the more patriarchal and less contraceptive-available past, and I also imagine a lot of motivated reasoning exist done by people who just really want to get laid.
I tend to think that being the cheater is much worse than being the person cheated with; most of what’s wrong with being the person cheated with seems to me to be prudential rather than moral (you’re not breaking any commitments you’ve made, but you are inviting massive drama on yourself). But I do think the amount of persuading you do does get counted; manipulating someone into doing a bad thing is itself a bad thing.
I used to be more against this, but now I think too much weight is given to “exclusive monogamous relationships.” If they are married, then it is downright evil to have sex with them. But if they aren’t, then they have deliberately avoided making any real commitment with the other person, so there is no real commitment to break. It seems mildly scuzzy at worst to aid somebody in “breaking” a commitment they never really made. Leaving a note for the SO may even be doing them a net favor.
“If they don’t cheat with you, they’ll cheat with someone else” is just a rationalization in all cases, though.
Is marriage the only commitment, though? I mean, any couple where they have spoken and said they’re exclusive has an agreement going not to break that commitment.
Do they? Would you really expect an “exclusive” couple never to break up? If one of them broke up with the other would you think that they had done something deplorable?
@ Jaskologist:
I think you are misinterpreting.
The agreement is not that they will never, ever break up. The agreement is that they will not interact romantically with anyone else until and unless they break up. And that they will make a reasonable effort to stay together.
Which is also quite similar to the modern view of marriage itself, with the difference being that the stakes are higher and the “reasonable effort” is much greater.
For instance, moving across the country because you’ve got an amazing job opportunity is considered a fair reason to break up with a girlfriend/boyfriend, if the other one is not prepared to move out with you. But it’s not considered a fair reason to get divorced.
Vox Imperatoris is basically saying what I mean. An LTR is now treated as “marriage jr”. Or, a marriage is treated as “LTR+”.
The difference is of degree more than kind, these days.
dndnrsn, I think you got at the basic issue below with “marriage is now more easily ended than it once was” and “An LTR is now treated as “marriage jr”. Or, a marriage is treated as “LTR+”.” I don’t think this is a stable equilibrium, partly because I’ve witnessed how much dating norms have eroded in just the past 10 years.
A dating relationship fundamentally includes the clause “unless something better comes along.” Marriage explicitly excludes that. Now that we’ve broken down that central marital norm, people are trying to import it into the dating world, but that doesn’t work long term. The very fact that there is such a continuum between “committed” and “not” makes it very easy for one party to think things are much less serious than the other. How much of that is after-the-fact rationalization hardly matters; the situation inherently rewards defection and does not reward cooperation.
Does the difference between morally and immorally leaving your current boyfriend for somebody really boil down to giving two weeks notice first?
@ Jaskologist:
Yes?
Your idea of commitment is strange to me. You seem to be saying it consists of: I commit to stay with you even if someone better comes along. But my interpretation of it is: I commit to stay with you because I think you are the best partner for me, and no one better will come along.
If you happened to be wrong in that judgment, well, that’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t mean you should throw good money after bad.
Giving “two weeks’ notice” is the way of letting the other person down easy, in the way that will hurt them least, out of respect for them. Rather than having them find out eventually and be emotionally devastated as their trust is betrayed. But ultimately you’re telling them that there are serious flaws in your relationship (otherwise, why break up?) and that you think the two of you would be better off going your separate ways.
“I commit to stay with you because I think you are the best partner for me, and no one better will come along.”
But then why not just propose?
“A dating relationship fundamentally includes the clause ‘unless something better comes along.’ Marriage explicitly excludes that.”
Exactly. In some sense, the disappearance of “dating” might be the unavoidable result of the disappearance of “marriage” (as a lifelong long commitment with no escape clause typically entered into fairly young and before sex, certainly before cohabitation).
So from my perspective, the women who cheated with me were “dating,” but because dating has now become “marriage jr.,” I now become “homewrecker jr.” or “adulterer jr.”
If your partner were relying on simply being the best all the time, why would you even need to commit? Of course you wouldn’t trade up; there’s no up to trade to. Commitment is meaningless if it doesn’t layer something on top of whatever already would have happened.
@ onyomi:
Once you’re sure of that, that is the point where you propose. The long-term relationship level is for when you find it pretty plausible, but you’re not sure.
@ Jaskologist:
Again, that sounds completely bizarre to me.
It’s not “Baby, you’re far from the best for me, but I won’t trade up because I signed a contract with ya.” It’s: “I love you so much, and I am so sure that we are right for each other that I am willing to share my life and wealth equally with you.”
It’s not a slavery contract. You’re not revoking your right to break it if it turns out you’re wrong. But you’re so sure that you’re right that you are willing to join your households together—exposing yourself to significant risk—for the purpose of more effectually living as a permanent couple.
And of course, once you’ve done this, you’ve put in the investment, and when thinking about “trading up” you have to consider not “would it have been better to be married to this other person from the start?” but “is this person so much better than it’s worth breaking up this marriage to be with him or her?”
To use an economic example, the difference between a long-term relationship and a marriage is like the difference between a prototype and a full production run. You don’t order a prototype unless you’re pretty sure it’s a good idea, but it’s only a small investment of resources. If the prototype fails, you discard it at low cost. But if it works, you scale it up to a full production run. Now if there’s some fatal flaw in the production run, you throw it out and eat the cost. But the expectation is that you will try not to do that—you will think carefully before committing—and you won’t redo the whole run for a tiny marginal improvement.
“when thinking about “trading up” you have to consider not “would it have been better to be married to this other person from the start?” but “is this person so much better than it’s worth breaking up this marriage to be with him or her?””
Now this is a Vulcan way of looking at it! 😉 I don’t think the intent of marriage is just to increase the cost of a breakup so that the person you leave your spouse for has to be *really* super awesome in order to offset the expected disutility of the divorce.
I think it is, rather as Jaskologist put it, a commitment that says, in effect, not “I’m now willing to publicly declare that you’re the best person I could ever hope to find” (what people think it is), but rather the less romantic-sounding but arguably more significant, “I agree not to leave you even if someone more desirable comes along if you agree to do the same.” That’s what all that “for richer and for poorer…” stuff is about.
@ onyomi:
The increased cost of a breakup is not the point. That’s a side-effect. For that matter, it’s a negative side-effect.
The point is both to publicly signal the seriousness of your relationship and to make it more convenient to live as “partners-for-life”.
Now, if you separate out every aspect of marriage, such as cohabitation, agreeing to joint custody of children, spending almost all your time with one another, going on vacations together, bringing them into your family gatherings as a welcomed equal, sharing finances, including one another in your wills, filing taxes together, buying family insurance plans together, signing powers of attorney, and so on, and ask what’s the difference between all of those things together and marriage, the answer is: nothing. A word.
Maybe that’s some people’s idea of marriage, but it’s certainly not my idea, and I’m not sure it’s the prevailing idea.
“For richer and for poorer” doesn’t necessarily mean—and certainly doesn’t obviously mean—I won’t leave you even if someone richer whom I love more comes along. No, it’s: no amount of material riches could outweigh the love I have for you.
Maybe at one point marriage was just a loveless contract entered into for security and economic efficiency. But I don’t think it means that in the contemporary age. And I think it’s a significant improvement. People can now afford not to be married; it’s not a necessity. So the idea that you need some kind of absolute guarantee not to break it even if it sucks is just weird.
In the modern understanding, it’s a vice, not a virtue, to try to sustain a loveless marriage by “faking it”. You don’t want your spouse to pretend to love you, or to stay married to you even if he or she hates you. You want him or her to actually love you, or else leave you. The second alternative is not preferable, but it leaves you free to try again.
In other words, marriage is supposed to be a means of living more effectively as a couple, not of trapping yourselves in a suboptimal equilibrium you can’t break out of.
I think this is part of what led me to basically change my position: my realization that many young adults in their teens and twenties acted like they were married (having sex, sometimes cohabiting, celebrating “anniversaries,” etc.) when in fact they were still very much testing the waters. In the old days, these people would have either gotten actually married or to have been only in some kind of courtship phase. To sleep with a man’s wife is a sin, then and now. But to woo a woman whom other men are currently courting seems like much less of a problem. Thing is, “courting” now tends to look surprisingly similar to marriage.
It is true that there are a lot of relationships treated as “marriage lite”. Like a marriage, except extremely easily ended.
However, marriage is now more easily ended than it once was, and is a later “stage” in adulthood than it once was: I gather it used to be normal for people to be engaged or even married while still attending university, but I only knew a few people who were engaged while in school (including grad school), and the only married people I met were older students.
So, saying “well, we’re all 21 and nobody’s married, so cheating’s OK” misses some things.
Additionally, beyond the nature of the relationship, a promise is still being broken. “We’re not going to have sex with anyone else” might not have a wedding attached, and lawyers are less likely to get involved, but it’s still an agreement between two people.
I feel like part of the problem may be the lingering cultural baggage which says that a woman who has sex outside of a marriage or, now, outside of a committed relationship, is a slut and/or is being taken advantage of. This may lead women who don’t really feel committed, but who do want sex to prematurely commit to an exclusivity that maybe neither partner actually desires.
For those who know more logic or Latin than I do: is there a technical term of art for “argument from the fact that my dick is hard”? 🙂 🙂
Argumentum ad baculum? 😉
I think you mean argumentum ad bakulam
Can we count seeing that as my adequate punishment?
I agree with Jaskologist. Now that everyone is free to enter into marriage – the universally understood exclusive monogamous relationship – with the partner of their choice, I see no reason to see anything less than an engagement as a bar to flirtation. Marriage as a public partnering and pre-commitment mechanism predates both the state and modern religion, and I see no point in muddying the waters with various intermediate idiosyncratic commitments.
I do not condone dishonesty – the non-single individual should ideally break it off with their partner before becoming involved with someone else, and at the very least should break it off immediately afterward. But I think the culpability of unmarried persons abruptly leaving one partner for another is limited, and that the liminal state of unmarried cohabitation should not be considered equivalent to marriage. If you like it then you better put a ring on it. On the other hand, I think cheating on ones’ spouse is in most cases evil, and the decision to divorce should be taken very seriously.
But that’s all I’m saying, and I think it’s all anyone here is saying.
I don’t condone dishonesty—so you shouldn’t cheat on your partner, married or not. And the “culpability of unmarried persons abruptly leaving one partner for another is limited” but not zero. If you “dump” your partner in a hurtful way without cause, that’s still immoral. But the threshold of “good cause” is a lot less than it it takes to file for a divorce.
I also think the external party to an unmarried couple bears little-to-no responsibility for interfering in their relationship (except for cases where doing so betrays a friendship or other non-ronantic relationship with the couple). In fact I think in many cases expressing interest in a coupled-but-not-engaged person is a positive good, even if one knows they are not single. I think boyfriend/girlfriend/SO status has become a bit over-powered.
I strongly disapprove.
Ethically, there isn’t much of a justification. On the micro scale you’re taking advantage of someone else’s weakness for your own gain, and at the macro scale you’re weakening the trust which society relies on. And the magnitudes are incomparable in both cases: balancing an orgasm against a breakup or even a malicious rumor is silly.
That said, I’ve done it before and don’t particularly regret it. Ethics ultimately yields to pragmatism: if someone is going to be taken advantage of, I’d much rather be the one taking. If I see that a friend or stranger is weak enough not to respond to me having sex with his girlfriend / fiance then it’s an obvious choice.
What do you take “ethics” to mean?
As I see it, ethical injunctions are supposed to be a useful guide telling you how to live. If you say “ethics yields to pragmatism”, that merely means you reject the conventional ethics as false and accept some kind of predatory view of “grab what you can before someone else gets it”.
Or maybe you accept the Sophistic view that this is the “secret knowledge”, but you should put on an outward appearance of conventional virtue, thus enjoying the benefits of both.
Not that I endorse either of these views.
I would agree with this definition, with one change. Ethical injunctions are a useful guide telling people how to live. Overall people are better off following them than not, but you in particular may find yourself worse off for following a given injunction.
For example, in the lab it is unethical to sacrifice a mouse without knocking it out with some CO2 first. But if you found mice in your home you would have no qualms about performing unanesthetized cervical dislocations via mousetrap.
That said, I explicitly said there is no ethical defense of it. I’m not going to do apologetics for cheaters even if that includes myself.
Surely you can’t define “ethics” as guidelines for achieving maximum personal utility.
Any formulation of ethics I know would endorse personal sacrifice for the benefit of others, generally.
The “pragmatism” My Alt is invoking, is probably a synonym for “selfishness”. Do you not acknowledge any possible tension between enlightened self interest and ethical behavior?
@ Esquire:
As an advocate of the view that enlightened self-interest is the correct moral theory, I do not.
But supposing there were, the whole idea then is that there is some reason binding on you to follow something other than your enlightened self-interest. And therefore, you should do that thing and not try to do what is “pragmatic”. If the “pragmatic” option were better, all things considered, then it would be the ethical option.
@ My Alt:
Maybe that shows that the laboratory ethics here stands on dubious grounds.
This is silly to me. Why is ethics supposed to be concerned only with the general and not with the specific? As James Fitzjames Stephen writes:
The rest of the essay is pretty interesting, and Fitzjames Stephen was in fact a defender of ethical egoism.
His answer to this question:
As much as I liked that quotation the first few times, you should really just start linking to it rather than copy pasting the whole block every time.
Anyway I’m not really feeling like a debate on Objectivism specifically or egoism generally so I’m not going to get into that.
In my defense, the first one was a different quotation. And the second was only part of the one I linked before.
But: point taken. However, not everyone reads every thread, and just linking a long essay without pulling any quotations is unlikely to be very effective.
I get that, and I do unironically like the quote. Not trying to be a dismissive dick.
This is interesting to me. I am not sure how to parse a claim that enlightened self-interest is the correct moral theory.
I mean, I have sympathy for the notion that folk morality is basically incoherent and there is no particularly great reason to act for goals other than enlightened self interest.
BUT… that seems to me like a rejection of moral realism than anything else.
AND in a quotidian sense if I say “ethical reasoning led me to jump in front of a bullet to save a stranger,” and you say “actually that was not an ethical action due to X Y Z”, I think people will assume you are just defining ethics in a weird nonstandard way.
No? I am not a great philosopher and I would love to hear your take.
@ Esquire:
It’s not exactly a rare theory in the history of philosophy. For instance, almost all the Greek philosophers were egoists of one sort or another. Now, they had very different ideas about what it meant to live the best life. But they argued that doing so would bring the most personal fulfillment.
Even under Christianity, there’s a strong tendency to believe that what’s morally best is also what’s best for you in the long run—everyone has an interest in making sure his soul is saved, after all. Of course, many Christians deny that self-interest should be the reason you act morally, but the two don’t come apart. Many of the first modern proponents of enlightened self-interest were Christians.
It’s not until Immanuel Kant that moral goodness is positively opposed to happiness, and that you should be moral despite the fact that it will make you miserable. (And even he, of course, has the Christian element, so it’s really the atheistic post-Kantians who do this most consistently). Part of this is because these people wanted to take the idea that you should serve God and turn it into serving Society. But Society can’t give you an eternal reward.
Even John Stuart Mill was not only an ethical egoist but a psychological egoist (the view, which I do not hold, that people can do nothing but act to advance their own interests). He just held the very dubious view that, as a person became more “advanced”, he would see that acting in the interest of humanity as a whole was identical to acting in his own interest. (I don’t think the two are radically opposed, but they are obviously not the same. That’s the point Fitzjames Stephen attacks in the first quote I pulled from him)
Well, my theory is a revisionist theory of ethics, but it’s not an eliminativist theory of ethics. I say that there is no real coherency to the way people commonly use the word “good”—but that I propose to revise the term and transfer its connotations to the meaning of “enlightened self-interest”.
But ultimately, if you really want to stick to the charge of “you’re just using the word to mean something different”, that’s pretty much what revisionism is. However, it’s not something arbitrarily different, but something with a lot of commonalities.
There is a difference between “I was using ethical reasoning” and “I was using correct ethical reasoning.” It’s not incoherent (though it may be unusual) for someone to say: “Yes, jumped out to take a bullet for a stranger, but he really ought to have considered the people who really matter more to him: his wife, his children, his friends, and all the happy experiences he could have had with them in the future. And if he had, he would have seen that he had more reason to preserve his life than to sacrifice it.”
People do often say that the kind of “effective altruist” behavior where you give 50% of your income to charity is not right, as it neglects the obligations closer to you. (But because they also accept the altruist morality on some level, they have to package-deal this with the claim that the charity money is really ineffective, that it’s a foolish fantasy of hyper rational deviants, etc.)
***
Anyway, I addressed it in more detail in this comment in the same thread.
That doesn’t follow, though. You taking advantage doesn’t protect from you being taken advantage of, and they aren’t necessarily connected.
If Al’s girlfriend is going to cheat, and you get the feeling that Bill will sleep with her if you don’t – what happens is that Bill sleeps with her if you don’t. There’s no negative consequence to you save not getting laid.
EDIT: I think I misread the post, actually. See below.
I think his view is precisely the zero-sum view of “lays”.
If Bill gets more “lays”, you get fewer “lays”, since there’s only so many to go around. Therefore, it follows that, if you want to maximize “lays”, you should be as unscrupulous as you can and use every means possible to beat out Bill.
I misread the post, I think.
Precise words were “if someone is going to be taken advantage of, I’d much rather be the one taking.”
For some reason, I read “than being taken advantage of” onto the end. Not sure why.
You didn’t misread, I edited the post. Not for any sneaky reason so much as wanting it to flow better.
And you’re right, obviously, that I doesn’t really help prevent other guys from trying to get with your girl (aside from knowing what to expect). It’s more of a half psychological half game theoretic thing. You still come out net negative on defect / defect but it’s not as bad as cooperating and doesn’t leave you feeling like as much of a chump.
I would argue that it would make it more likely that you would yourself be cheated on.
First, if somebody’s partner finds out they cheated, they are presumably more likely to justify cheating to themselves.
Second, presumably the time you are cheating is time you are not spending with your partner.
And if you’re starting from the assumption that the other person is probably going to defect, why bother with a relationship? Plus, a relationship would be an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and those see more cooperation, don’t they?
In this context, the PD is with other men in society not within your relationship.
As for the rest, I don’t generally cheat on my own girlfriends (once in a long distance relationship, ended up confessing it soon after) so much as go after women indifferently as to their relationship status. There’s not much chance of those guys doing anything in response, otherwise I would have avoided their girlfriends to begin with.
@ dndnrsn:
I agree with your basic point. But your first consideration is not valid. The effect is negligible. Unless you live in a very small social world, you always have to ignore for selfish purposes the amount that your action is going to “erode social norms” in general.
This applies in many other fields. It’s the “what if everyone else did that?” argument. And it’s a bad argument because the fact that you do it is not going to make everyone else do it, or even a large enough portion of them as to outweigh whatever ostensible gains you get.
Your second consideration is valid, and it’s what I would go with.
@Vox Imperatoris:
I mean it not in an “eroding social norms” sense.
I mean that if Alice finds out Bob cheated on her with Carol, and doesn’t end the relationship, Alice is still less likely to be faithful to Bob in future. If she ends up having a cigarette with David on the back porch at a party, and he’s actually pretty cute, screw Bob, he cheated on her!
@ dndnrsn:
But what we are considering in this discussion is the ethics of being “Carol”, not of being “Bob”.
If Carol is also in a relationship, with Ed, finding out that Carol cheated is more likely to cause Ed to cheat with Francine.
And let’s not even talk about George.
@ dndnrsn:
The situation is being Carol and single. If Carol is in a relationship, then she is simply in the position of “Bob”.
The initial question was about the ethics of being what used to be called a “homewrecker”—someone who sleeps with a person already in a relationship—not about being a cheater yourself.
Oh, in that case, I’ve misunderstood. In my view, Carol is bad, but not as bad as Bob. She’s not breaking a promise. Unless, of course, she had promised Alice that she wouldn’t have sex with Bob.
@ dndnrsn:
I agree with you. Carol is bad, but not as bad as Bob.
The question was whether Carol is bad at all, or whether “all’s fair in love and war”.
A monogamous relationship involves the promise of exclusivity by the people in it. But someone outside it isn’t bound by that agreement and wouldn’t be breaking any promises by sleeping with a monogamous partner.
The justification of “if they don’t cheat with you, they’ll cheat with someone else” isn’t quite right, though. If someone really wants to cheat but never gets a chance to, that seems to me to be as bad as actually cheating, so providing the opportunity doesn’t make much of a difference. In that respect, it’s different from bank robbery (and other crimes) because having the motive (or disposition) is the real problem.
The blame does not come from breaking promises. The blame comes from aiding and abetting the breaking of promises.
Using meth is immoral. But so is selling it.
I don’t think this kind of aiding and abetting is wrong, as I’m under no obligation to minimize others’ promise-breaking. Whether they choose to do it remains entirely up to them, even if I make it easier, so there’s no wrongdoing on my part. The same applies in the meth case.
Now this is individualism.
Of course it’s up to them.
The immoral action on your part is not causing the promise-breaking. It’s being the sort of person who would aid and abet a promise-breaker. It’s contrary to the virtue of justice on your part, since the proper way to treat a promise-breaker would be to reject and condemn him, not let him into your life as a romantic partner. It’s the abrogation of proper judgment on your part. And this is partly captured by the “cheats with you, cheats on you” aphorism.
And it also displays a callousness and lack of benevolence toward the cheater’s partner, in whose being-harmed you are assisting. That’s going to encourage both a negative, adversarial attitude in you yourself, and invite other people validly to judge you as an inconsiderate person who won’t think twice about harming them in a similar situation.
The case of selling meth is similar. It implies dealing with irrational, impulsive people, which is a danger in itself. It means giving existential aid to the continuance of their self-destructive habit, which is contrary to justice and benevolence.
And since you know that the measure of your success is the measure of human harm and misery you enable, by any rational standard you won’t be able to feel any pride or satisfaction in your work.
So no, I don’t think it’s right to sell meth, either. Or cigarettes, for that matter.
What level of harm prevention makes an action immoral, then , Vox Imperatoris? Selling unhealthy food? Are cigarettes and meth Universally Bad, or are there exceptions? How do people act in this system?
Obtaining the benefits of possessing the virtue of justice merely requires me to not act unjustly myself, not to restrain others from doing so – and helping someone break this kind of promise isn’t unjust. Nor is it callous, because I’m not the one harming their partner, the cheater is, by choosing to break their promise, betray their trust, show a lack of expected consideration for their interests, etc. There’s no adversarial attitude on my part because I’m not trying to harm anyone, but merely taking advantage of an existing bad situation.
As for the case of meth, all of those considerations only mean that selling it is prima facie bad (e.g. if you were selling a kilogram for a penny). The danger and the fact that people harm themselves with it count as reasons against it, but they’re not necessarily decisive.
The original question was about having sex with them, not about letting them into your life as a romantic partner. It’s likely that someone who cheats would be untrustworthy romantically (though there may be mitigating circumstances), but the bar for being a sexual partner is lower.
@ honestlymellowstarlight:
There could theoretically be exceptions (maybe if cigarettes prevented schizophenia?), but I don’t think there are in reality. Of course, there are degrees of association. It’s one thing to be the executive of a tobacco company. It’s another thing to stock the shelves at a convenience store that sells them as one of its many products.
Besides, people can sell electronic cigarettes.
Unhealthy food is a different sort of case because it’s a matter of moderation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a candy bar. The problem is when you eat 50 a day. You shouldn’t knowingly encourage people to eat 50 a day, but if you run the Snickers company, it’s not your job to investigate every user, so long as you are reasonably confident that the benefits of your product outweigh the harms.
The same thing goes with alcohol. It’s fine in moderation, and it’s not wrong to run a liquor store. But to sell to the alcoholic who comes in at opening time every day is, in my opinion, unethical, yes.
Maybe you could justify it (perhaps with cigarettes and meth, too?) if you genuinely, seriously tried to direct them to ways to stop their habit. I don’t have much of an opinion on that. It could be a good idea, but it stinks of rationalization.
Alcohol’s actually pretty damn addictive, if that’s the distinction you’re trying to make. It’s not in heroin territory, but it’s in the middle of the pack compared to illegal drugs, tending high. And isn’t much less risky.
@ blacktrance:
This is absurd. Yes, the main way you are being unjust is in treating this person as an acceptable sexual partner—but you apparently have very low standards for that.
But you are being unjust and callous and contributing to the harm. You are not the primary cause of the cheating, but you are a contributing cause. This is the point of the example of robbing a bank. If you sell a man a gun, knowing he is going to use it to rob a bank, you are an accessory to the crime. You helped caused it. You have a funny idea of causation if you think otherwise.
The fact that, if you hadn’t sold him the gun, some other person would, is irrelevant. That’s the standard collaborator’s rationalization: “if I didn’t help the invaders, then someone else would have.” Maybe so, but you actually did, and you’re the one who’s going to be shot. If the other person had done it, he would be the one getting shot.
You are not solely responsible for breaking the partner’s trust, etc. But you are a knowing accessory to it, and therefore you are a partial cause of it.
The adversarial attitude is implied very simply, as you say you are willing to “take advantage of a bad situation”. People rightly have a low opinion of individuals of that nature. It shows you don’t have any human sympathy for the partner being victimized. It’s like seeing a thief steal a cellphone and then buying the phone from the thief at a bargain price because “Hey, I didn’t steal it.”
@ Nornagest:
Yes, but alcohol is also much more commonly used in moderation, in which case it is perfectly fine and produces pleasure and happiness for the people who use it.
The idea that you can’t produce fine champagne because someone could theoretically get drunk on it and harm themselves is silly. On the other hand, the producers of Mogen David 20/20 are on shakier ground.
I don’t see anything wrong with selling people cocaine, if it’s in the tiny and harmless quantities found in coca tea (a common legal drink in Peru) or in the original formula of Coca-Cola.
Moreover, I don’t think people are obligated to go by the utilitarian net harm or benefit of the product. The question is whether it has a morally acceptable use—and whether you know any particular use will be immoral. For instance, even if guns are a net negative, it is not immoral to sell them because many people use them for innocent pleasure or self-defense. But if your particular customers come in wearing gang colors and buy cheap pistols every week, then things are much more dubious.
@Vox Imperatoris
That’s the problem I have with a lot of these rigid moral systems, especially around popularly-considered-to-be-pure-negatives, like cigarettes and meth. It’s all moderation. And breaking strangers of their addictions requires an impossibly high Obligation to Strangers standard that I don’t think is really enforceable in a workable way.
@blacktrance
Updating towards libertarianism being a rationalization to free ride, as if I needed more confirmation.
Vox Imperatoris:
It’s usually a bad idea to have a former cheater as a romantic partner because they’ve proven themselves untrustworthy in that context, and it’s important for a romantic partner to be trustworthy because you’re relying on them significantly, opening yourself up to them, and otherwise putting them in a situation in which they could do a great deal of harm if they wanted to. In contrast, a mere sexual partner has much less opportunity to harm you, especially if you take a few precautions, so trust isn’t as important. That’s not to say that my personal standards are low, only that if the limiting factor is trust, it makes sense to require less from sexual partners.
As for “the collaborator’s rationalization”, I explicitly rejected that justification in this comment. I’m not contributing to the harm. The harm has already been inflicted by the would-be cheater having the desire or disposition to cheat, and my opportunity is just an expression of that. It’s not “if not me, it’ll be someone else”, but “the bad thing has already happened, might as well take advantage of it”.
Taking advantage of a bad situation isn’t adversarial, no more than it’s adversarial for a store to charge more for water during a natural disaster. The attitude that taking advantage of a bad situation is bad is what gets us complaints about Uber’s surge pricing, most opposition to sweatshops, etc. It’s the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, and I’m surprised to see an egoist libertarian subscribing to it.
honestlymellowstarlight:
What am I free riding on?
@ honestlymellowstarlight:
I don’t think cigarettes are a pure negative. I think they have benefits and harms. But if the marginal harm of cigarettes outweighs the marginal benefit at all levels of use, then they are not good, even in “moderation”. Certainly not in the context of alternatives like electronic cigarettes.
@ blacktrance:
That’s assuming that a casual attitude toward sexual partners, separating them from romantic partners, is appropriate. But I don’t really want to get into that.
And this is specious reasoning. Having the desire to cheat is a negative, but by far the larger harm comes when it is actually carried out in practice.
The reasoning you’re describing would be fine after the couple broke up. But not when you are directly participating in an act that going to cause great emotional harm and betrayal of trust.
This is a fair enough criticism. I was thinking of it myself, and perhaps I was not entirely clear.
There is a difference between personally benefiting while helping to address a social problem, which is what sweatshop owners and Uber do, and engaging in actions that perpetuate that problem, or collaborating with the people who caused it. The latter is what, for instance, “crony capitalist” companies do. Or, for instance, Pepsi signing an exclusive deal to be the only Western soft drink sold in the Soviet Union.
Of course, the left-wing misunderstanding with Uber and sweatshops is that they are perpetuating their respective problems instead of alleviating them. Under that premise, their condemnation is reasonable.
To go back to the cellphone example, there is nothing wrong with charging people money in order to protect them from thieves, even though in some sense you are “taking advantage of the situation”. But there is something wrong with buying the stolen cellphones from the thieves and selling them back to their owners at a markup.
I don’t think it’s free-riding. It’s just plain predation.
Vox Imperatoris:
Cheating is bad because it displays a lack of caring and regard for the other partner, reveals oneself as untrustworthy, and so on. But then it’s not the physical act of cheating itself that’s bad, but the attitudes/motives that cause it, and those can be present without the opportunity for the act. If my partner doesn’t care about me, it’s no comfort if she hasn’t yet acted differently because of it. It’s similar to (but more credible than) your partner just telling you about those negative qualities.
I also don’t agree that collaborating with people who do something wrong is bad if you don’t do any of the actually wrong parts yourself. It’s wrong to steal, but the guilt is entirely on the thief – I’m not stealing from anyone by buying a stolen cellphone. The only act that makes people worse off is the theft itself, for which the thief is responsible, and it would be no better or worse if the thief instead chose to keep or destroy the cellphone instead of selling it to me.
@ blacktrance:
The immorality is the act in combination with the attitude.
If you somehow have sleepwalk-sex with another person, that’s the “physical act of cheating” I guess. And you’re right that it is not condemned.
And if you just contemplate cheating but don’t carry it out, that is condemned but not as much.
More contemptible is contemplating it and actually doing it, and that is the act you are assisting. That causes a greater harm than merely contemplating cheating but not carrying it out.
You might as well say that it’s not the physical act of rape that’s bad, but the attitudes/motives that cause it, and those can be present without the opportunity for the act. Yes, the physical act is not immoral without the attitudes and motives. And the attitudes and motives are wrong in themselves. But the physical act in combination with the attitudes and motives is the cause of by far the greater harm than the attitudes and motives alone.
(Obviously, the difference between cheating and rape is that rape is a moral wrong that is also a violation of rights and a crime. While cheating is just a moral wrong.)
You can’t be serious.
Obviously it’s still wrong if you don’t do any of the bad parts yourself. Or rather, to rephrase that more accurately, knowingly collaborating with a thief and enabling his theft is itself wrong. Again, if you sell him a gun knowing he is going to use to mug people, you are in the wrong.
Buying the cellphones rewards the thief and incentivizes him to commit more thefts. That’s why it’s wrong. I’m surprised I have to spell it out.
Not to mention that, you know, your responsibility is to turn him in to the police to face justice.
Vox Imperatoris:
Contemplating cheating and actively desiring it to the degree that you’d actually do involve differences in the would-be cheater’s motivations. If I consider it but ultimately decide against it, it’s right that it’s condemned less than actual cheating, because it doesn’t display the same attitudes/motives (or at least not to the same degree).
Consider the following scenarios:
1. Alice considers cheating on her boyfriend, but decides against it, recognizing that her relationship has some problems and chooses to work on them (or end the relationship).
2. Bob wants to cheat in his girlfriend, and he begins to drive to his would-be lover’s house, but on the way his car breaks down and he takes a taxi home, and the woman he’d have cheated with moves away the next day, so he never gets an opportunity to try again.
3. Same as 2, except Bob’s car doesn’t break down and he successfully has a one-night stand.
1 would (and should) be condemned to a much lesser degree than 3. But 2 seems to be as bad as 3, even though no physical act occurred. This is because Bob’s attitude towards his partner is the same in both 2 and 3, and is different from Alice’s in 1.
The incentives don’t remove the thief’s free will, and don’t by themselves cause anyone to lose their phones, which is the objectionable aspect – only the actual theft does that. This principle extends even further: if I pay you to steal someone’s cellphone, I am still not responsible for it, because paying you doesn’t cause anyone to lose their cellphone, only your theft does.
@ blacktrance:
Are you fucking kidding me? (Sing it to the tune.)
Seriously, am I being trolled here?
So if I’m a mob boss and tell one of my henchmen to “knock someone off”, that’s an innocent act? I’m not to blame? I shouldn’t be punished?
But alright, if you want my honest take on this, here goes. There is no such thing as “the cause” of the theft, as if there were just one. There are many causes of the theft, each of which apply in varying degrees. One of those causes is the thief’s free choice to steal (which, as I recall, you don’t believe in, since you are a determinist). That is an ultimate cause of the theft, but it’s not the only cause.
To another extent, the thief is only a proximate cause of the theft, whose ultimate causes extend beyond him. A major one of those causes is the reason for which he steals: to obtain money. By giving him money to steal, you are providing that cause. Therefore, your choice to pay him is one of the causes. Your choice to pay him is an ultimate cause of his being the proximate cause of a theft. And since you knew this, you are to blame. Therefore, we send your ass to jail.
No, this is fallacious, as David Kelley explains:
We blame people not for “thinking bad thoughts” in isolation but for thinking bad thoughts which result in bad actions. If there’s no harm, there’s no foul.
When the thoughts are just in the mind, they are wrong to a certain extent in themselves, such as to the extent they reflect a lack of honesty towards one’s partner. But when they are actually brought into practice, they cause a great deal more harm. When the car breaks down and the thoughts are not brought into practice, this harm is prevented and the full extent of the blame does not accrue.
Vox Imperatoris:
I promise you I’m not trolling. I recognize that this is one of my most controversial positions, seeing how even you react to it.
I am the cause (or one of them) of the thief having the incentive to steal. But creating an incentive to do X is not doing X. Creating an incentive to steal doesn’t cause anyone to lose anything – if no one responds to the incentive, nothing happens. If I don’t create the incentive and the thief steals anyway, then there’s a loss. So the theft is the cause of the loss, and since the thief’s decision is the cause of the theft, it’s all on them. Of course, there are reasons why the thief makes those decisions, and I am a cause in those, but not in a harm-causing way, because the output is just incentives.
Also, I believe in free will, as I’m a compatibilist.
Normally, there is the intent to cause a bad action, but only the action itself causes the harm – this is the case in theft, murder, rape, etc. For instance, me wanting to not be murdered means that I don’t want people to try to murder me, not that I don’t want them to not want to murder me (beyond the degree to which it’s necessary to prevent attempts). But cheating is different and unusual in this respect. There, the negative consequence is having a partner who would be willing to cheat given the opportunity, because you care about what they want and whether they care about you. It’s similar to what you wrote here: if someone wants to cheat on you but doesn’t, it’s small comfort if the only reason they didn’t is because they got unlucky.
With murder, the action is the harm and the intention is only relevant because it causes it. With cheating, the intention entails a certain attitude towards you that is bad for you and is itself a negative consequence, and the act of cheating merely reveals that attitude (and thus does no additional harm).
http://www.theonion.com/article/husband-still-faithful-after-42-years-of-trying-to-2819
“The harm has already been inflicted by the would-be cheater having the desire or disposition to cheat”
Sounds reasonable, but does not fit the way human moral intuitions work. We judge people by what they have done far more than by what they have a disposition to do.
This comes down to the problem of moral luck. My favorite discussion is by Adam Smith in _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_. His example of the problem with the apparently reasonable policy of judging people by the inside of their heads rather than by what they actually do is that all good English Protestants know that a Catholic would try to kill the King if the Pope told him to. So they are all as guilty as if they had tried to kill the king, so we are entitled to execute them all.
Or in other words, because we are not competent to judge people by the inside of their heads, we have an apparently irrational disposition—Smith regards it as wisely given us by God—to judge them by their actions instead.
However much sense your position appears to make, it does not describe the way humans actually respond. Having your wife be unfaithful to you is much worse than knowing that under some possible circumstance she would have been unfaithful to you.
@ blacktrance:
Again, you have a funny idea of causation.
The fact that the thief has an incentive to steal is a partial cause of the fact that he steals. True, the thief is the sole proximate (efficient) cause of the theft. But in providing the incentive, you become an ultimate cause of the theft.
To the extent that the thief was motivated by the desire to earn his reward from you, you are to blame.
Under your theory, no one could ever be charged with murder by shooting someone with a gun. After all, it wasn’t your willing that killed the victim; it was the bullet. Guns sometimes misfire, don’t they? If you pull the trigger and nothing happens, no harm no foul. If you don’t pull the trigger and the gun randomly fires because of shoddy construction, neither are you to blame. So how can you send a man to jail just for pulling a little trigger? The harm is caused by the bullet, not the trigger-pull.
And since you didn’t respond to the mob-boss example, I’m going to assume you agree that they can’t be charged with murder for telling a henchman to go commit a murder. I suppose, then, Hitler ought to be left off the hook, since he never invaded Poland or killed any Jews himself.
When I said that I was talking about divorce, not cheating. If marriage is supposed to be based on love, then neither partner wants to be fooled and married to a spouse who has no love for them. Divorce is not in itself a harm but a solution to a bad situation.
On the other hand, cheating is an act that it is itself wrong, dishonest, and harmful.
If a woman were to learn that her husband had attempted to cheat on her, she would feel bad. She might feel bad enough to divorce him on that grounds alone. But if she learned that he had attempted to cheat and actually succeeded, she would no doubt feel worse.
In the first case, he has merely been dishonest toward her in regard to his feelings. In the second case, he has compounded that dishonest by actually going ahead and betraying the agreement and trust of their marriage.
My fundamental disagreement with you here is that, given determinism, it is obvious to me that neither the cheater nor the “homewrecker” is morally blameworthy because they simply acted as they had to act.
You can say that their actions had negative consequences, and you can even say that they ought to be “negatively reinforced” to stop them from repeating the behavior. But to act like it’s their fault or to hold them morally blameworthy is just as absurd as getting mad a dog for pissing on the carpet.
They were simply the proximate causes of their actions, and the ultimate causes were society, genetics, and (in the furthest analysis) physics. If there were a god who created the physical world, he would be the run responsible (presuming he also didn’t operate deterministically). Otherwise, there simply is no responsibility anywhere in the cosmos.
@ David Friedman:
Again, I think this misses the point of morally judging people. We don’t judge people just for the hell of it. We judge them as the rational response to the fact their immoral behavior causes harm.
If Catholics want to kill the king but don’t, what harm is there, for which we need to accord blame? Maybe there is some harm: for instance, they don’t feel as inclined to respect the laws in general. Or perhaps they say terrible things about him to other Catholics, some of whom then go out and try to kill the king. But then that is what they are blamed for, not killing the king.
David Friedman:
Often, it’s just the action itself that’s objectionable (as Vox Imperatoris said), so their dispositions/thoughts/etc only matter to the degree that they cause those actions. In such a case, it’s not irrational to judge actions directly. Also, people’s actions reflect their dispositions, and they’re often better than words at providing information about what’s going on inside their heads. So even when what we ultimately care about is what they’re thinking, it still makes sense to give a lot of weight to their actions. But here it’s not because of the harm of the action itself, but because of what it reveals about the person who performed it – it’s an effective signal. By cheating, they reveal themselves to not care much about their partner (or something similar).
Vox Imperatoris:
You misrepresent my theory. A gun has no free will, and thus doesn’t choose to fire itself at someone. A properly functioning gun will only do what its user wants, and it’s reasonable to expect a gun to function at least that well. In contrast, a thief chooses to steal, and can refuse to do so even if I give them the incentive.
As for compatibilism, all of that (physics, society, genetics) and free will are different lenses through which one’s actions are explained. They’re not incompatible – physics determines that I will type this sentence, but it determines it through my will. I can choose to do whatever I want, it would just be caused by physics.
And in the case of Hitler, it’s not like German soldiers were free to say “You know what? I think I won’t invade Poland”. There was a draft, so in a sense they’re victims too. But that does bring up the good point that soldiers in a volunteer military aren’t held nearly responsible enough for their misdeeds.
Yes, and cheating is similar. If you have a partner who wants to cheat so seriously that they’d be willing to do it given the opportunity, that is already a betrayal of trust – the trust that they won’t be in such a state. But someone who successfully cheats is more likely to have this kind of objectionable mental state than someone who fails, so it’s still reasonable to judge based on the physical act – not because the act itself is harmful, but because of the information it gives you about the cheater. It’s more credible than merely saying “I want to cheat” – and in the case in which someone really tries to cheat and fails because of unlucky circumstances, they reveal themselves anyway (if their partner finds out), and that would be as bad as actually cheating.
@ blacktrance:
Sure, the thief can choose to take your money and still not steal. But just as when you pull the trigger, you reasonably expect the gun to fire a bullet, when you give the thief the money, you reasonably expect him to commit the theft.
The money is a partial but very significant factor determining the thief to steal.
Moreover, the thief is not responsible for the fact that someone is willing to pay him a lot of money to steal. That’s why, if an undercover police officer offers to pay you $1 million to steal a cellphone, it’s entrapment: a reasonable person would have done the same thing. They effectively made you do it; it’s not your fault.
It determines it through your will, but if so your will is by definition not a “free will”. It is an unfree will that does not move itself actively but rather moves passively as a result of forces acting upon it.
There is no actual, factual dispute between the compatibilists and the hard determinists. It is a verbal / terminological dispute only.
I agree that they are victims.
But sure, in the metaphysical sense, they were perfectly free to say “I won’t invade Poland”. The consequence is that they would have been sent to a concentration camp, but they were free to choose that consequence. The only difference between the thief who takes the money to steal and the soldier who invades Poland under threat of imprisonment is that Hitler applied a stronger incentive, in a way that violated the soldier’s rights, and one that in my view excuses the soldier’s actions assuming he had no better alternative. And if it does not excuse, it’s a mitigating factor.
But the difference is not that one had free will and the other didn’t. That is confusing free will (a metaphysical question) with political freedom. Which is the original confusion imparted by David Hume in this very type of debate.
Not telling your partner you’re in a state of mind such as to want to cheat is a form of dishonesty, yes. But it’s a far greater betrayal to actually go out and have sex with someone else, as I have said repeatedly.
I’ll be bowing out of this discussion, but I want to make one final point.
That’s true, but there’s an implicit (maybe should’ve been explicit) assumption that choosing to do something is not sufficient for culpability – it has to also be a free choice in the political (not just metaphysical) sense. The thief has such a choice and the German soldier didn’t.
In my view, the real premise is the one I stated: that he had no better alternative.
I think this also applies to the thief. If he’s Jean Valjean and can only survive by stealing, he is justified in stealing even if he’s politically and metaphysically free not to steal.
You bring something like this up on your tumblr:
In my opinion, “I had no better options” (if it’s actually true) is a complete moral defense. For instance, if it’s true of the Wehrmacht soldier, you can’t blame him and get angry at him. But you can still kill him in self-defense.
That’s the precise problem with war: it sets people’s interests against one another.
@Vox Imperatoris
I think that covers a reasonably large part of morality, but not all of it. Taking this argument seriously leads you to utilitarianism – something is bad if and only if it causes harm. But I don’t think that maps directly onto what morality is – ‘aggregate utility’ is definitely a concept that exists, but to claim that it’s what morality all amounts to is to throw away lots of what we almost universally view as moral. It’s not immoral to save your wife over two strangers. It’s not immoral to spend any money on things other than bednets.
More abstractly, if one person does some work to produce something while another sits around doing nothing, it’s not morally wrong for the first person to keep the product of their labor – even if it would provide marginally more utility to the person who didn’t produce it. Yes, you can make various arguments about how it would be difficult to construct laws that would transfer the good without creating any perverse incentives or whatever else, but I think that even if we ignore all that, if you’re God looking in from outside, and you can make this one change and it will affect nothing else, it’s still wrong to take from the person who did the work to give to the person who didn’t in order to produce an infinitesimally small gain in aggregate utility. And I think the vast majority of people would agree with this.
You can get carried away taking this view too far, to the point where you claim morality is people getting what they produced no matter how much suffering this causes, but I think that’s the same mistake as utilitarianism: taking one aspect of morality and extrapolating it to encompass all of morality.
@ Anonymous:
Consequentialism is not the same as utilitarianism.
First of all, whether “aggregate utility” exists is dubious. The problem of adding cardinal utilities is well-known and just politely ignored.
More importantly, the view I support is egoism: that everyone ought to maximize his own utility, not aggregate utility. There is no reason why anyone has a motive to maximize aggregate utility.
Now, when people enter into society with others and form governments, the basis upon which those governments judge people is not (supposed to be) whatever maximizes the utility of the specific judges, but the utility of the people making up the government.
Moreover, as I have said before, there is no reason for the government to consider the utility of all people equally. Suppose that there are two types of people: good people and bad people (this is a gross oversimplification, but it gets across the point). Good people respect rights and don’t steal, murder, etc. Bad people do. If the good people are in the majority, they may very well decide to form a government that (within the bounds of its scope) seeks to maximize the utility of good people, not the average of the utility of good people and bad people.
The social situation being what it is, should people just not attempt exclusive monogamous relationships which aren’t marriage?
Perhaps they should attempt them, if they are so inclined, but understand that it is a matter of “you and me against the world”, that they cannot count on third parties to respect or recognize their monogamy. And in rationalist-adjacent spaces (among others), even marriage may not be enough.
Absent a ring or other culturally-uniform signal, monogamous couples are externally indistinguishable from open or polyamorous ones, and if both partners aren’t present, from singles. It is no longer realistic to expect the rest of the world to refrain from propositioning your partner, or to sanction your partner if they are observed canoodling with a third party, so it’s now down to just your trust in your partner against the temptations that will be offered.
My opinion? Severe disapproval.
If the ‘exclusive monogamous relationship’ is marriage, that would be adultery for the both of them, otherwise fornication (with the understanding that the EMR is fornicatory in the first place, in which case you reap what you sow).
I feel like you could use a hug. So here are hugs if you want them.
“is it some sort of special ‘Talk Like a Vulcan Day’ over there? Or are they always like that?”
Hey ! I resemble that remark ! 🙂
This one was my favorite as well.
We should have Talk Like A Vulcan Days sometime.
in before “Illogical, Captain”
Damnit Jim!
But do we do it in English, Vulcan, or Latin?
Vulgar Vulcan
Straw vulcan or steel vulcan ?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hbu/rationality_quotes_may_2013/8w8n
How did all these people miss the chance to use “Do they all ‘Talk like Houyhnhnms‘ all the time or is this a special day?”
Using “Vulcans” is much too pop-culture obvious, plus comparing SSC to rational horses would get in that extra-value insult the weirdoes “buncha furries” dig!
Thanks for that, I’d never heard of Houyhnhnms before.
Which probably also answers why they used Vulcans instead.
Because no one ever reads past the first chapter of Gulliver’s Travels, despite it being the worst one. Political satire about a bunch of readily identifiable (to Swift) members of the Court is much less interesting to modern readers than the later chapters’ satire of human nature itself, which is why high school curricula only cover the former. God forbid anyone read anything interesting in high school.
If I ever become filthy rich, I’ll hire Scott and pay him to disagree with me. Then, whenever I become obsessed with some new contrarian/conspiracy theory, I’ll go to Scott, have him read my sources and listen to my arguments, and then have him gently, rationally talk me out of whatever the heck I am thinking.
Over the past decade I have turned from a regular nice liberal college girl attending a reputable institution of higher learning into a red tribe libertarian crackpot who doubts the majority expert opinion in a frightening large number of unrelated fields. Am I crazy? Probably. (If you think that most people around you are out of their minds, that’s a tell, right?)
So, anyway, for now I might not be filthy rich, but I at least have this blog. And there are still archives I haven’t gone through. And there’s always hope Scott will happen to touch upon some of the topics I’m interested in. SSC is my favorite place on the Internet.
(This testimonials post is hilarious, BTW.)
Do you have a list of your contrarian positions?
Thanks for the interest. I actually don’t have a list. It just seems to me that most of what I do and believe is vastly different from what people around me do and believe. Ok, so just to give you an idea, I’ve written down some of my beliefs below. Most are about parenting/medicine because that’s what I’ve been interested in lately, but the same thing happens with other subjects I get into. Are you a contrarian yourself? Do you have a list? =)
-Statins are a fraud. They do way more harm than good and should not be prescribed. The same probably goes for many other “preventative medicine” pharmaceuticals. Routine physicals are useless/harmful.
-I’m astounded by the fact most people don’t know this. Diapers are not necessary. Infants are perfectly capable of communicating their elimination needs and holding it long enough for their parents to take them to the bathroom. Potty training only has to happen becaude the kids were diaper trained in the first place (trained to overcome their aversion to soiling themselves.)
-Schools are mostly babysitting institutions. They don’t teach nearly enough. And they are definitely not a good way for kids to learn social skills.
-The way foreign languages are usually taught is a laughable waste of time.
-Most children could learn to read at 1st grade level or above before they turn 3.
-US dietary guidelines are insane and harmful. I can’t believe doctors actually still keep telling people to eat less cholesterol. (!)
-Campaigns telling parents categorically not to cosleep with their infants and children are very wrong.
-Most research on breastfeeding/formula feeding of infants and children is so bad that we have absolutely no clue just how risky formula feeding is.
-Roughly what Freeman Dyson says about global warming.
-Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is real. It’s also treatable. I cured mine.
-My newest interest: I think Linus Pauling may not have been completely crazy about vitamin C. I still need to read the medical literature, though, before I make up my mind, so this is mostly a hunch at this point.
Where is your blog?
Have you read Scott’s posts on contrarians? (the three linked in one of the testimonials)
How would you teach young children to read? Do you have links? When I was 3 my nursery school had ordinary reading primers and most of the students failed to learn to read. In fact, they banned the primers because the students were very competitive and stressed about it.
You may be interested in the topic of how rapidly children should be weaned. Do you know about the Swedish epidemic of celiac in the 80s? They concluded that it was important to introduce wheat to children’s diet before weaning, although I’m not sure how good their evidence was. There is ongoing work that seems to have reached the same conclusion about peanut allergies.
Since you brought up Dyson, let me repeat what I wrote about him in the comments of one Scott’s posts about contrarians: I don’t know if he has any public contrarian views, but he has many times complained that science is too conformist. He has supported many contrarians, such as by writing the forward to Gold’s book, but I don’t think those are endorsements of their theories. It might be a useful exercise to compile a list of his similar endorsements, but I’m not sure what to do with it.
Thank you for your reply. I need to look up the Swedish celiac epidemic: it sounds fascinating. I’m also going to look at Gold’s book.
As to children reading: yes, I have a great source. Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, wrote an essay called Why and How I Told My Toddler How to Read. It’s available on his blog.
I read Scott’s post on contrarians just now, actually, but still need to go through the comments section.
@Douglas:
On teaching children to read …
When our daughter was little, I read a book whose title I have forgotten on how to teach very small children to read, using cards with words on them. I tried it and it didn’t work.
When our daughter was about five or six the school she was going to thought it was too soon to teach her to read, she and my wife disagreed, so my wife taught her to read. As best I recall, it took less than a month, largely done with the aid of Doctor Seuss, some of whose books are clearly designed for the purpose.
Her brother, three years younger, observed the process and taught himself.
So it’s clearly possible for at least some two or three year old children to learn to read, but one requirement is probably that they want to.
I don’t know about the “most children could learn to read before they turn three”; I certainly did, but (a) that wasn’t in school (in my day and place there was no childcare, nursery school or kindergarten; you started school between the ages of four and five) so it was mainly my bed-ridden grandmother, and my father, who taught me and (b) my paternal family has freaky early reading skills that have little or nothing to do with intelligence, ability or the rest of it; we just learn how to do it so early and so fast that it’s almost instinctive. I certainly would not expect “most children” to be reading at “age seven level” (that is what you mean by First Grade level?) at age three.
I’m kind of with you on the co-sleeping thing, but bear in mind that “overlying” was often a defence in infanticide cases, and even when it was legitimate, it still was a genuine risk – to quote part of an 1889 poem by Yeats:
I don’t agree with the diapers thing; very young babies will urinate and defecate at will and aren’t able to communicate their elimination needs and hold it long enough for their parents to take them to the bathroom (anyone who’s ever had the experience of changing a baby’s nappy and having the child urinate on them in the middle of doing it will know all about this). When a child is old enough to be able to indicate it needs to urinate, then yes, it should be potty-trained and not kept in nappies.
Thank you for your comment.
You’re right in that I have little support for the “most children” part of “most children could learn how to read by age 3”. Reading seems very simple and 2 year olds seem very smart, and I’ve never heard of anyone trying and failing (as long as they used the phonics method as opposed to whole word) but, but none of that means *most* children could. I’d need a better sample to be able to assert that.
Now, in terms of elimination, the reason infants often pee when they are being changed is that they keep it in until they can go without soiling themselves. So when the diaper goes off, they take it as an opportunity. Unfortunately, it’s a bad opportunity, because they aren’t being held in the proper position, and the poor things end up getting themselves dirty anyway.
In time, they learn that if they pee in the diaper, they actually don’t get wet, because of how absorbent these things are, but they aren’t born with that knowledge. It’s called diaper training. In time, they also learn to ignore the uncomfortable feeling of pooping in the diaper. I think children are born with an instinct not to soil themselves and not to soil the adult who is holding them. If you keep a baby in your arms, or in a baby carrier, facing you, they will start acting squirmy and uncomfortable when they have to go. If you then take them out of the carrier, and hold them facing away from you and over the toilet, they will happily and cleanly take care of business.
This is how people handle babies’ elimination needs in many traditional cultures, as well as how many Brooklyn hipsters do it these days. 😉 I’ve done that myself with my son, starting at several weeks old, because of how vocal he was about not being comfortable going in the diaper. I tried to diaper train him and failed.
People in western cultures often aren’t aware of this, and they have little experience with how it works, so they aren’t looking for the cues their babies send. And even if they are looking for the cues, they might miss them, because they have no experience of what the cues looks like. It’s like breastfeeding. It would be natural and easy if, growing up, we saw our mothers and aunts do it. But we don’t. So it doesn’t come as naturally or as effortlessly.
As to sources, other than “I did it with my son! I swear it works!” there are a bunch of books on this topic, complete with pictures of babies from different cultures being held by their parents in the proper position to eliminate. I believe “Infant Potty Training” by Laurie Boucke is one of the most complete treatments of the subject. The practice is also often called “elimination communication” in case you were interested in googling it.
On diapers – have children, see how things work out and then report back.
On Statins, I don’t know what you mean by harm, but using mortality (all cause or cardiovascular) as a the primary outcome, the benefit is robust:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004816.pub5/epdf
My only experience with diaper-free child-rearing comes from watching Indonesian mothers. Maybe those children learn to use the toilet earlier, but their mothers do spend a lot of time mopping.
I do have a child. Please see my comment above, in reply to Deiseach.
I’ll be very happy to debate statins with you. Unfortunately, the article you linked seems to be behind a paywall.
The most favorable studies available for statins used in people with heart disease show a small reduction in overall mortality. Namely, for every 200 people taking statins for a couple of years, 199 will derive no benefit, and 1 will. Now, that 1 is often touted as “a life saved”. Unfortunately, the concept of a life saved is close to meaningless when it comes to preventative medicine. You can’t save a life, you can only delay death. So, just how long is the death delayed for that 1 person out of 200 treated with statins? 3 to 4 months.
If you ask a doctor who prescribes you a statin how much longer you can expect to live if you take the drug everyday, the doctor is unlikely to know the answer. In my experience, they usually estimate 5-10 years. Which is very, very far from the truth.
Now, let’s also remember that this miniscule benefit is what has been shown by the most favorable studies. Pharmaceutical companies refuse to publish the remainder of their research.
@smocc
Wow, that’s really cool you have actually seen diaper free child rearing in a non-Westerm setting. I guess it didn’t seem too appealing to you? =) To me, the best of both worlds was to use a diaper as backup, but to offer potty opportunities whenever my child needed them. I usually ended up throwing out dry diapers, which made me feel bad about the waste, but it occasionally did prevent mopping.
Re Diapers, thanks for the info! Very interesting, I learned something today. Now I’m curious about whether children in diaper free cultures have fewer instances of bedwetting.
I apologize, but I’m not currently interested in debating statins. I shouldn’t have commented on that. This is an older version of the review I cited if you want to read it anyways:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4164175/
Are there considerable savings in avoiding having to buy diapers?
@Anonymous
I think people usually estimate they spend $50-$100 a month per child on disposable diapers, wipes and diaper creams.
That being said, we didn’t do it because of the money. Initially, I intended to use diapers, even though I was vaguely aware of the diaper-free approach. I gave up on full time diapering because my infant son squirmed and cried whenever he had to go in the diaper. The moment I started taking his diaper off and letting him eliminate cleanly over the toilet or a potty, he stopped fussing. And once I realized he didn’t want to eliminate in a diaper, I started feeling kind of bad about having him do so.
So responding to what I perceived as my baby’s legitimate need was the number one benefit for me. There were others.
-We didn’t have to deal with blowouts and poopy diapers. I usually hear from parents that cleaning up after blowouts and changing poopy diapers is pretty unpleasant. I’m not sure how big of a deal it is, but I hear people complain about it a lot. There are even anti-baby Internet memes about it. Those annoy me to no end, especially if they claim dogs are cleaner than babies, because babies mean 2 to 3 years of poopy diapers. Oy!
-We didn’t have to deal with diaper rash. I hear it’s often a big problem. The babies are in pain and the parents feel terrible about it.
-We didn’t have to deal with potty training. Again, I’m not really sure how big of a deal it is on average, but I’ve heard some of my parent friends say potty training was one of the most frustrating parenting experiences they’ve ever had.
-We avoided adding a ton of diaper trash to landfills.
The one MAJOR negative was that wherever we went, we had to be aware of where the toilets were. Wherever we went, we had to make sure there would be a bathroom. When we drove for longer than an hour or two, and our baby didn’t happen to be napping, we had to plan for potty stops.
Overall, I’d highly recommend the practice if there’s a stay-at-home parent or a nanny. It would not be feasible for most daycares. Some parents who use daycare still practice EC part time, but I’m not sure how that works out.
@anonymous:
Depends on your water costs. There have been some movement to re-popularize reusable diapers, analogous to the return of reusable menstrual products. Now, as the latter has a longer time frame, the saved costs will be more in the long run, but the politicization of the movement is about how indigenous communities’ use of reusable diapers was demonized by the privileged as unhygienic and for poor dirty people, (“clean good-class people use disposable diapers” marketing) so presumably it is cheaper.
Yes, “diaper” originally referred to a cloth garment. And they’ve been around a long time.
But look at it this way: there’s a reason people switched to disposable diapers in the first place. If someone tells you it’s a one-sided tradeoff the other way, you should be suspicious.
The same goes for baby formula vs. breastfeeding.
I too am curious about these contrarian positions, especially if you’ve got sources.
For an interview with Dyson about climate, see:
http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151
Aw, Scott! These are hilarious, but super mean. I think your blog is great, appreciate reading and sharing your stuff, and just felt like I had to say so and show some positivity after seeing all that.
This makes me feel better about my teaching evaluations.
I might be projecting here, but I’m noticing a build, an arc, you might say to the way these are organized. There are a bunch of one liners just totally out in crazy fascist left field, people who obviously have really deep anger issues and are kind of mad at Scott…slurs, insults, totally irrelevant crap…then a suicide wish (totally rude)…then a gigantic block quote from somebody who seems as if he likes Scott and doesn’t want to engage in that kind of malarkey. Just a gigantic block of text. Took the time to engage, obviously. And when I see a block quote and rhythm like that…I get the impression that for whatever reason, that particular angle affected Scott if not more deeply, then at least differently. I understand why he might have been affected by it…poor fellow takes criticism hard. But it is so different…and we’re always talking about the guy in the third person here, which is weird…so I’d love to know. What was different about that one? It was certainly higher quality criticism, higher effort…at least how I see it.
If you mean the following quote, I see that it has now been removed. (Edit: @Scott: After reading your reply, I don’t know whether I should be including the original quote here; please feel to edit it out if you think I shouldn’t.)
Yeah, after thinking about it more I decided it was wrong to publicly embarrass a manic person for what they said during their mania.
You might think so, and as a Real Doctor™ it’s probably best that you do. But you know…it didn’t occur to me at the time, and future me has past me’s back just as much as I do. We are not embarrassed. And honestly I suspect that you had your reasons for putting my (quite lucid and respectful given your loss of control and deflection of agency that morning) criticism amongst all these “isn’t it funny that he’s Jewish” low effort thingies. Whatever they were, I stand by my ability to roll with the punches, modify based on evidence, and criticize blogs I love whilst also engaging in healthy rivalry. It helps me, maybe that means I don’t sound like the people telling you you have a tail. That would be goal achieved in my book.
So go ahead, man. Put it back. I didn’t get to where I am by waking up the person I wanted to be and asking for a mulligan. Don’t do that to yourself. Future Scott from the Darkest Timeline needs you!
Totally irrelevant: Shouldn’t crazy fascist stuff be way out in right field?
Whether fascists should really count as right or left politically is an interesting question—Mussolini was a prominent Italian socialist before he invented fascism, and he seems to have invented it in the belief that establishing socialist results by a bottom up revolution wasn’t practical, so it should be imposed top down instead.
But, for some unknown reason, “in left field” is the standard idiom for “offbeat, unusual and eccentric.” It comes from baseball, and there seems to be disagreement as to what was special about left field.
I’m guessing that a combination of the fact that it’s the region where a right-handed batter is most likely to foul and the fact that the ideal hit (aside from a home run) tends to be a line-drive through the gap between 1st and 2nd base.
Sounds like you’ve made all the right enemies. Anyone who pisses off the people who send these kind of insults is doing something very right.
Not sure about the context of whatever disagreement you and Scott have, but just wanted to point out that it’s always gratifying to see polite, nuanced disagreement on the Internet!
Everytime I hear this on SSC.
In fairness to Hitler, you *do* have some growing up to do.
We should always strive to be fair to Hitler.
Who doesn’t? Nobody yet born, that’s who.
@Guy: Well, yes. That’s why we had the Nuremberg trials (for other Nazis). Even people who are really obviously guilty as sin get trials, and we learn things like “people who run death camps seem boringly normal”, and then we learn important stuff about human psychology.
Also, it’s important to be able to say things like “Hitler was a really effective leader, leading in totally the wrong direction” and “Hitler was terrifyingly charismatic and converted people who’d gone to his rallies to heckle the crazy Nazi” and “Hitler killed millions of people he thought were subhuman, but was also a passionate animal rights activist”, because understanding how one charismatic crazy guy *caused WWII* while still thinking he was the good guy is *really important*.
So yes, we should always strive to be fair to Hitler. We should always strive to hold true beliefs, because what you don’t know can get millions of people killed.
@Chrysophylax
I agree absolutely with everything you wrote. In my defense (if needed), I really wanted that sentence to exist on the internet and it was 5:00 in the morning.
(Iceweasel doesn’t think I spelled “internet” correctly; it suggests “INTERNET”, “Internet”, “internee”, “interned”, and “inter net”)
I’ve always disliked that image. Hitler rather pointedly wasn’t known for behaving like that – if we don’t know people by their fruits, how then shall we know them?
I think it makes a fair point, monsters campaigning for monstrous things can speak fairly and eloquently.
Hitler wasn’t generally that polite but if someone turns up with the same policies and goals who is polite that doesn’t make them a significantly better human being.
I think it’s a great Motte.
“It’s OK to get angry at literally hitler, even if he’s being very polite about his views” is perfectly reasonable, but then:
>It’s OK to get angry
How angry? “Shout at them” angry? “try to get them fired” angry? “throw hommade bombs at their house” angry?
>at literally hitler
“literally hitler” being a standin for terrible views, of course. But how terrible? “Kill all the jews” terrible? “I don’t think AA is a great idea” terrible?
It also hides the fact that, while our hitler here just wanted to kill all the jews, the actual literal Hitler literally got millions of them killed. So it obfuscates the fact that, it took actual action for Hitler to become Hitler.
So you can easily use the original, uncontrovertial statement, to justify being an all-around dick.
Hmm.
That gets into the problem of when it’s ok to kill Literal Hitler or potential demi-Hitlers.
Do you have to wait till he actually enacts his genocide or is it enough to wait till he runs for office with the genocide-promoting positions as his manifesto?
How about when he’s just meeting in the back room of a pub , drumming up support for his fringe political party, talking about how everything will be better once the jews are all dead?
How about when he’s running for office, having said horrible things in the past, but not even referencing them in the present?
Real, literal Hitler. One Jew who went to a rally came away complaining that he hadn’t even mentioned Jews.
Problem: Take that as your principle and you will NEVER let someone outlive folly.
Hitler seems like a chill dude.
From what I read, he was a very likeable fellow, and a good boss. He became increasingly erratic in his reign, but then, I guess so would I, if I were subject to dozens of assassination attempts.
I follow a few “Historical Photos” feeds, which tend to be WWII-heavy, which means there’s a lot of Hitler.
At one point, a Facebook friend asked for pictures of cute animals to cheer them up. I just barely made my will save to avoid posting this picture of an adorable baby deer.
And I still don’t know what’s going on in this photo.
Content Warning: Contains HITLER!
>Everytime I hear this on SSC.
Yeah I get tired of Scott’s lengthy, reasonably toned arguments for killing all the Jews too
Scott, what is your opinion of Basic Income now? In some old post you said that you had thought it to be crazy but that you weren’t so sure any more. What do you think now?
I love how Scott is simultaneously accused of being way left and right of normal on every issue. He’s too tolerant and also a censorious petty tyrant. He’s a misogynistic ultrafeminist, etc. Its like the parable of the elephant and the five blind dudes, except that they are all drunk and wandering around throwing punches.
Best parable ever.
Agreed.
But not one I’d want to clean up after.
I especially liked the “he has purged everyone to the right in order to pander to the ultra-leftists”, in view of complaints that this blog has now – in the comments – tilted so heavily to the right and Scott is too tolerant of this tilt such that it is driving away any left-leaning potential commenters. It’s been a very long time since I last quoted Chesterton, so here’s something that the “too X and also too Y” criticism put me in mind of:
I think those assessments can both be correct at the same time.
Over the course I’ve been reading SSC, Scott’s both cracked down on a lot of the most belligerent far-rightists – e. g. James Donald and Steve Johnson – but at the same time most of the really strident left-wing posters have either stopped posting (e. g. Veronica D) or just don’t comment anywhere as often as they used to. (e. g. Eli)
While both of those things happened, there’s also been a much higher representation of mainstream right-libertarians in the comment section after Bryan Caplan, Megan McArdle, Glenn Reynolds etc have started linking to SSC on a regular basis.
So it’s both accurate that the commentariat’s turned to the right overall while the really extreme right-wingers aren’t quite as well-represented as they used.
It should also be pointed out that the specific claim that Scott has purged all commentors on his right comes from Jim Donald himself, who at the time was apparently the only permabanned commentor with >30 comments or so.
(But yeah, the people on the left seem to be less prominent than previously. Maybe selection bias, but maybe not.)
Do note that the last survey gave the following view breakdown: social democratic (29%), liberal (23%), libertarian (22%), and conservative (9%). Granted, that’s over a year old now.
It would be interesting to see that weighted by comment count, but that would involve some scripting and access to de-anonymized data.
I’m expecting that when the new survey’s results come in, it will show a much higher count of libertarians and significantly fewer social-democrats.
The comments section does feel like it has a definite ideological consensus now, in sharp contrast to my memories of what it was like two years ago.
Bet you it won’t; concretely, I’ll bet it’ll show no more than 2-3% more libertarians than last year, and no fewer social democrats. People have been saying the same stuff as long as the blog’s been around.
@Nornagest
You need to assign a confidence value to that so we can calibrate properly!
Also, note that 649 people took the last survey. A gain of 2 points would be about 13 new libertarians.
Yeah, I agree that it will probably not be significantly more libertarian. I read SSC a lot, but I read the comments only rarely, comment even more rarely, and comment on politics approximately never these days. Which is partially a function of the sheer number of comments (I prefer to read all of the comments if I read any, which is untenable with such a large comment section) and partially because of the sense of an ideological consensus in the comments. It’s not even so much that most of the commentors have a right-libertarian perspective as that most of the commentary on politics comes (or seems to come) from the right. Survey results probably can’t capture that, and while it might be possible to get some sort of data, it would require reading through tens of thousands of comments and then deciding (on what criteria?) what their political perspective is. If a single person collected that data, I would suspect that their definitions of political perspectives would be flawed, and I doubt you could get more than a few people to actually do it, unfortunately.
If I’m betting at even odds, you can assume a confidence somewhere north of 50% (I want to make a profit) but not so high that I could make a more dramatic prediction. Generally I prefer making my bets more specific to making my odds longer.
Also, should clarify that I meant as a percentage, not as a total.
I’m glad you’re able to deal with that negativity and see the humor in it, I feel like I would find it very hard to do. While I’m sure you didn’t write this to garner sympathy, but I’m glad you continue to do what you do. Your dogged insistence on the principle of charity has changed the away I approach and talk about some issues, in trying to humanize the people I disagree with and working to understand how their views could make sense from their perspective. So, thanks. Please keep it up.
Scott, your writing here has affected my thinking in the same way, and it’s been a welcome change. It’s perhaps telling that someone who takes pains to avoid tribalism gets all sorts of tribal epithets thrown at him from both sides of every tribal divide. One of the best way to unite two enemies against you is to try to make them stop fighting.
Keep up the good work. Count me as one more who appreciates your compassion and cool-headedness. I’m glad you’re able to shrug off the haters.
Thanks for commenting! I’m glad someone else has been affected similarly.
I’ve come to sincerely believe that the meta-level principles of treating people with respect and assuming the best of your intellectual opposition is more important than having the right position on the majority of issues. Being right is no excuse for being a jerk.
Karl Popper has an essay in Conjectures and Refutations discussing the belief that the truth is manifest. If you believe that, everyone who disagrees with you must be stupid/evil, and there’s no point to engaging in debate or listening to the arguments of the other side. Keeping an open mind may be the most important principle, because without it you can get stuck on a wrong idea forever. To quote Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
If Scott’s reading this, I’d encourage you to read the Popper essay on manifest truth (on the off chance you haven’t already), I think you’d find it interesting.
David Kelley has a similar point in his excellent book Truth and Toleration: The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand. Following Ayn Rand, he attacks the idea (which he thinks many Objectivists implicitly share, to their discredit) that Rand called “intrinsicism” in epistemology: the belief that the conceptual knowledge is something you “just see“, without any mental effort or work. That view implies that anyone who disagrees with you about “obvious” truths is engaged in evasion, or the willful hiding from truth, and is therefore immoral.
In a false dichotomy, proponents of intrinsicism typically portray those who disagree with their theory as subjectivists, who believe that there is no objective reality and that truth is entirely a mental product. What he (and Rand) endorse is what he terms “objectivism” (lowercase “o”), or the belief that knowledge exists in the mind but is properly formed off the evidence. Yet because our context of experience is limited and our conceptual faculty fallible, it is possible to be honestly mistaken about almost anything, and we should engage with our opponents on the presumption that they are honest until and unless they prove otherwise.
I have recommended the book several times, as I think it is well worth reading even if you’re aren’t an Objectivist. It is available free online if you search for it.
That sounds similar in principle to Popper’s perspective, I’ll take a look at the version online. I have to admit, the Amazon reviews look like a bit of a turf war where people are arguing about what Ayn Rand really believed and who really deserves the label Objectivist, which feels a few degrees removed from what I care about.
I think about the similarities between Eliezer Yudowsky and Ayn Rand sometimes (a popular work of fiction serving as a recruitment tool for a system of philosophy). I’m glad that the rationalist diaspora (SSC, CFAR) doesn’t spend its time arguing about labels or who is the true heir to the legacy, to an outsider the Objectivist squabbles are a little off-putting.
@ Newbie:
Well, in my (admittedly biased) point of view, the Kelley side is saying “We shouldn’t care about these labels or what Ayn Rand ‘really believed’. Ayn Rand was not a perfect person. We should care about the facts.” And the other side is saying: “You are traitors: you are not entitled to call yourselves Objectivists, and we hereby kick you out of our little movement because you’re diluting our message.”
So, yes, I find this squabble very off-putting. The interesting thing about the book is not that, but the wider principles it invokes, despite the actual origins of the book. Which were, to put it bluntly, David Kelley was “kicked out” of the “Orthodox Objectivist” movement, at which point he wrote a self-published book to defend himself. At which point anyone who agreed with him was determined to be “sanctioning the sanctioners [of evil, which Kelley did in calling for ‘toleration’]” and therefore evil themselves.
If you can get past that, it’s a fascinating book. And really, the squabble serves as an illustrative example because it’s really the same as all similar squabbles, such as within the communist movement or in religious sects and various online communities today. Once you have those principles, you can apply them to the next ridiculous squabble.
It deals with principles like:
1) What is the nature and purpose of moral judgment?
2) How does this apply to the sphere of intellectual ideas?
3) At what point does it become immoral to give existential aid to a group you oppose?
4) At what point can you be considered to “sanction” or agree with bad ideas by collaborating with their proponents?
5) What is the role of ideas in history? Are intellectuals morally responsible for all the bad consequences of the ideas they endorse?
6) How common is honest error versus dishonest evasion?
7) Are there “inherently dishonest ideas”?
8) To what extent should we tolerate people who disagree with us?
9) How do we square this toleration with thinking that we ourselves are correct?
And these principles are very applicable. For instance, take the Scott-Hallquist dispute. Hallquist is basically accusing Scott of “sanctioning” evil in the form of “novo-regressives”, thinking that they and anyone who agrees with them are not only wrong but obviously wrong and morally contemptible. It is an inherently dishonest idea and shouldn’t be treated as reasonable.
Scott also thinks they are wrong, but he extends them tolerance and the principle of charity, which others argue are being stretched beyond their bounds in this case.
And the “existential aid” question comes up very much in the debate over whether effective altruism’s conventions should use fees to buy meat products for their catering. From many vegans’ point of view, this is providing existential aid to evil and is immoral. But from the point of view of some others, this is such a weak form of support that it is alright, even if you think the meat industry is evil.
And this is not to mention all of Scott’s concerns with the vicious intolerance of many people in the social justice movement.
This reminds me of when I looked up “The Righteous Mind” by Haidt on Amazon and read the 1 star reviews. About half of them were left-wingers damning the author as “conservative apologist” (plus a few extra insults if they felt like it) and half of them were righ-wingers complaining that the author is just another socialist who hates conservatives. I heard about the book before but had I not, this would be enough for me to want to buy it 🙂
For some reason, I don’t know any libertarians who don’t like that book, so maybe Haidt is actually a libertarian apologist :))
Anyone who can draw vitriol from such numerous and diverse sources absolutely must be doing something right.
I think this is where we’re supposed to make some solemn wise-sounding post in reference to http://lesswrong.com/lw/ii/conservation_of_expected_evidence/ but it’s more thread-appropriate to be meta about it instead.
This is, of course, not true. But there are enough other reasons why Scott is right that it seems acceptable to enjoy it anyway.
You could title this post -“Solidify the in-group by mocking the out-group”
It’s the online blog version of Jon Stewart’s classic method of (1) show clip and (2) stare at screen dumbfounded.
Anyways, just because you posted insults ironically doesn’t mean that they’re not true. Not that I think they’re true, but it’s very easy to put yourself in a bubble doing this “haha the outgroup is so wrong I don’t even need to address their points” method of self-gratification.
That’s exactly what a Neo Justice Reactionary Warrior *would* say.
It’s what Scott would have said a year ago. Depending on Reddit for validation has not helped him. Although Chronic Psychitis changed my life and Unsong tickles my ceremonial magick boner.
I keep finding myself wanting to reply to a comment and say “That was a great comment. It was really interesting and funny and I agree” but I’m always worried I’m not contributing to the discussion. I’ve been reading SSC for over a year but haven’t been commenting that long. Is there a convention for this sort of thing I’m missing?
No, but it is advisable to coat it with a layer or two of irony.
Sincerity is unseemly, after all.
Just say it!
Though if I agree with a comment, I usually have some kind elaboration or spin on it to add. Or an anecdote that supports it.
Or in fact I agree with most of it but disagree with part of it. That’s very common, too.
I agree with this. There was a good post on some rationality blog I stumbled across earlier this week about the limitations of accusations of hypocrisy, and why they should not be relied on. Can’t remember where, but it made a similar argument.
I’d be interested in reading that post if you stumble across it again.
http://nothingismere.com/2015/09/16/ditch-the-word-hypocrite/
Is it true that people who bash gays tend to be closeted homosexuals? If so I have a feeling that those who like to scream about beta males and others being cuckolded may have a similar problem.
The evidence basis for the homophobe-homosexual link is pretty weak, from what I can recall, not having looked at it for a couple years.
I think it’s because when a case like that comes up the person tends to be someone that everyone can love to hate combined with over-representation in the media.
When a politician who’s spent his career campaigning to have gay people locked up and beaten gets caught with a half dozen rent-boys everyone can glory in his fall without feeling bad for him so it makes good newspaper headline. On the other hand “hates gays, isn’t gay” and “doesn’t hate gays” both make boring headlines and so to a casual observer it looks like there’s a steady stream of people who publicly hate on gays being caught with gay lovers.
I don’t have any evidence, but knowing about “typical mind fallacy” it would make a lot of sense if they were actually bisexuals, or more precisely: bisexuals with greater preference for the same sex.
Just imagine what would the society look like if everyone would be exactly like this, but we would also historically have strong religious taboos against homosexual behavior. Many hypotheses that sound insane today would start making perfect sense in such world. It would be true that as soon as people would start ignoring this taboo, people would be less likely to have children, and the society would perish. In such world having strong taboos against homosexuality would be a result of group selection — groups that had such taboos have historically survived; groups that didn’t have such taboos have disappeared. People breaking the taboo would be the defectors in the Prisonners’ Dilemma, sociopathic assholes; they would sacrifice the whole society only to get greater pleasure from sex.
This is an explanation that makes sense (well, ignoring the fact that group selection usually doesn’t work in real life). Now imagine that you are such a bisexual person. The “typical mind fallacy” will make you consider this hypothesis, and it seems to match the known facts; or at least the facts that don’t fit can be easily rationalized away. Does someone say they are not tempted by the same sex? They are merely hypocrites trying to signal that they are so virtuous they don’t even feel the temptation to break the taboo. Does someone complain that their rights are violated because they are not attracted to the opposite sex at all? They are merely trying to manipulate the gullible to give them a license to break the taboo.
(As an analogy, imagine a parent telling their children that they cannot have chocolate for dinner, but must eat broccoli instead. They know that everyone prefers chocolate to broccoli, but that there are good reasons to eat broccoli for dinner anyway. If a child says “actually I don’t even want the chocolate”, that’s cute and in given context prosocial, but obviously not true. And if another child says “I have to eat chocolate, because broccoli is horrible”, they are simply unreasonable. The parent’s hypothesis protects itself against falsification.)
On the other hand, for a completely straight guy, the hypothesis “if we make it legal for you to fuck other guys, you would never look at women again” sounds batshit crazy. Even if it would be perfectly legal and socially acceptable, even if most people would do that, it wouldn’t change his preferences. It could actually be an improvement for him, because the more guys become gay, the more women are left for him. (Then of course female homosexuality would reduce the number of women available for him. So the straight guy has a selfish reason to object against female homosexuality, but not against male homosexuality.)
Ultimately, the “born this way” approach to gay stuff and the “it’s a choice” approach to gay stuff have to be combined to form an accurate model of the world. Predisposition to non-heterosexual behavior spreads genetically (and is one spectrum); non-heterosexual behavior itself spreads memetically (and is another spectrum, contingent on the first).
> Predisposition to non-heterosexual behavior spreads genetically
Wasn’t it hormone stuff? I remember that one guy coming up with a “gay germ” hypothesis on the basis that it was less implausible than the genetic explanation.
Think of it this way: say you’re attracted to both men and women.
If society doesn’t condemn homosexuality, you might find yourself with a man or with a woman. But if society does condemn homosexuality, then you will only pursue partners of the opposite sex. You’d have to have a really strong preference for the same sex (or at least for a specific person of the same sex) to be willing to be reviled as a homosexual.
The guy who came up with the Gay Germ theory is Gregory Cochran. He has a bunch of posts about it on his blog, but they’re not organized well, so another blogger who believes in the theory (Jayman) organized links to and explanations of each post here, if anyone wants to read it.
He also has two other interesting posts on the topic: one on the potential social consequences if the gay germ theory is true, and one on why homophobia exists if the gay germ theory is true.
On the other hand, for a completely straight guy, the hypothesis “if we make it legal for you to fuck other guys, you would never look at women again” sounds batshit crazy. Even if it would be perfectly legal and socially acceptable, even if most people would do that, it wouldn’t change his preferences.
But it would increase the pool of people who potentially find him sexually attractive, which now would no longer be confined to straight women, and would moreover leave him open to unwanted sexual advances. After all, unless everyone is going around with a badge indicating their orientation/preference, two strangers in a bar don’t know if A is strictly straight, strictly gay, or bisexual and so would not/would welcome advances from B. Having to deal with the hassle of “No, sorry, I’m straight” every time you go out for a drink or a social occasion? Red Pill version of “How to trick that straight hottie into going to bed with you” in that society?
I don’t want to reduce it to “So homophobia is based on fear of predatory gays!” because that’s not what I think, and I equally don’t want to get into the “Oh please, just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I’m going to jump on you in the locker room” part either, but it certainly would be the case that open bisexality/homosexuality would be different. We’ll have to see how this works out in modern society with greater tolerance and openness and see what the result is in about twenty years or so. It may be a new experience for men to have to learn how to gracefully turn down unwanted advances without being offensive to the person making them 🙂
And, as in some societies of which we have examples, it might be part of adulthood (think Athens and Sparta). If you’re very oriented to be straight, having to take a male lover as part of your initiation into adulthood could be very off-putting, making you inclined to be censorious about the whole matter.
@Deiseach:
Note that the more legal and tolerated homosexuality is, the more likely that people will be wearing the equivalent of a badge indicating sexual preference—some reasonably unambiguous way of signalling.
On the other hand, for a completely straight guy, the hypothesis “if we make it legal for you to fuck other guys, you would never look at women again” sounds batshit crazy.
How common is such a hypothesis, though? I mean, sure you could probably find one or two individuals who think it, but nothing I’ve seen has given me any reason to think such people are at all common.
It is implied by saying that we need to ban/restrict homosexuality in order to discourage it and safeguard our children from corruption. If the rate of homosexuality is 0% under freedom, there is no need to ban it.
For instance, why is prostitution banned? On the theory that if it were legal, there would be more of it, and this would be bad. If no one ever wanted to visit a prostitute, bans would be pointless.
This doesn’t mean that the proponents think everyone will go out and visit a prostitute if it were legal. It just means that they think a good number of men would. Perhaps they even think they themselves would be tempted. Usually not, though, because they think of themselves as too virtuous to give in to that temptation.
Yet prostitution is still a temptation, while to a straight person, gay sex is not tempting at all.
“Yet prostitution is still a temptation, while to a straight person, gay sex is not tempting at all.”
To a straight adult, no. But you can’t just extrapolate from there to say that it wouldn’t be tempting to someone just beginning puberty whose sexual desires haven’t fully formed yet. You’d need a lot more information about brain and hormone development, which most people don’t know.
@ Evan Þ:
Most adults know what it’s like to be a teenager, don’t they?
And if you felt a really strong temptation toward gay sex as a teenager, it stands to reason that you might feel society ought to do more to discourage it versus if you thought “Ew, who would ever want to do that?”
It’s like the apocryphal story of how Queen Victoria refused to extent the sodomy law to lesbians, since she didn’t believe they existed. It’s not a true story, but the logic holds: if you can’t imagine ever feeling tempted toward lesbianism, you can see how a law against it would be absurd.
However, you’re right that this is by no means the whole story. Probably a more common explanation of anti-gay sentiment is precisely that most people have no experience of homosexual desire, and our natural inclination is that “unusual” = “deviant and immoral”. And perhaps they do not think very carefully about why this loathsome practice would be appealing to some.
For a silly example, take the fact that, after using the restroom, around half all people wipe themselves standing up, while the other half wipe sitting down. Most people don’t know this, but their immediate reaction upon finding out is to accuse the other side of being deviant and wrong.
“Most people don’t know this, but their immediate reaction upon finding out is to accuse the other side of being deviant and wrong.”
Wiping while sitting presumably causes you to wipe toward the front, which is less hygenic, especially for a woman, given the other openings which exist there. Only deviants would do such a thing… or hang a toilet paper roll so it dispenses underhand, for that matter…
@onyomi To wipe while sitting, you lean forward or to one side, so you can wipe from the back.
“@onyomi To wipe while sitting, you lean forward or to one side, so you can wipe from the back.”
This seems a lot more uncomfortable and dicey than just getting up. Isn’t there a risk of smearing poop on the seat?
I’m guessing there is a strong gender component to this. Men like to stand up and admire their work; women like to pretend that they don’t actually have to poo.
The only choice is to purge the standing-wipers.
Some thought the final war would be between men and women, others thought it would be between vegetarians and meat eaters.
No, the final war was between standing wipers and sitting wipers (after the brief joint crusade against the non-wipers).
In my country, I hear Catholic priests say similar things quite often. (Apologies to everyone who got offended, but this really is the source of that hypothesis.)
What would more likely happen in that scenario is that either people would have kids but otherwise have sexual relationships mostly with the same sex (it is not such a stretch from the ancient Greece) or if that were not possible, the people more interested in the opposite sex than others would have more children and eventually you would get where we are in reality by natural selection.
Assuming that his preferences (and the preferences of people he cares about, e.g. his children) are not influenced by social norms. Which does not occur in the parasite hypothesis of homosexuality.
I doubt it. They’re just morons.
On the contrary, they are closet intellectuals, charitable and understanding at heart, but deeply ashamed of what the society perceives as weakness, so they overcompensate by signaling being aggressive morons.
Is saving a text file with all the hurtful things people say about you a recommended way of dealing with hostility?
It’s like writing down a list of everything you’re grateful for only in this case it’s a list of enemies you get to spite by continuing your blog
From what I hear, Nixon was a pretty good president.
Sorry, maybe I’m slow, but what is the purpose of this post? What are you trying to establish? That there’s silly people on the Internet? That sometimes people say nasty things? Is it a study of how people project their own viewpoints onto things? Is it just to point and laugh at out-groupers?
The ingroup has Asperger’s. The outgroup has bipolar. It’s kind of like my marriage that way.
…sorry, that makes no sense whatsoever to me. Could you explain? In as little words as possible, since I’m clearly not very clever today.
I’m joking a little bit. She’s on the desktop so I have to explain on mobile…hmmm….both disorders, in my experience, contain a lot of big picture thinking, but where Asperger’s is rational, non-confrontational, a schematic…bipolar tends to be mythical, intuitive, high octane….Miles Davis’ album Bitches Brew is my lifeblood and has been since I was fourteen, but it makes my wife trance out something awful. So essentially my experience is that Less Wrong types tend to seek the wisdom of crowds to condone their metacontrarian ways, and I’m a wizard and I don’t really care what you think but I’d prefer you make something of it lol. And honestly it’s funny. I only got a mention in this post because of a spat on exactly those lines. And it’s not the one I asked for, which I understand. It’s probably fair, given that I was balls out and going around Mars at the time lol. But the mention seems designed to both minimize confrontation while maximizing its potential, in the scope of the greater blog post. And that’s what my wife does a lot. It can work, but both sides have to be committed to hearing each other out and doing the right thing with the data. Updating beliefs is my jam, yo.
Tldr: I’m not a LW type because I’m INFP and not INTP. Despite having gotten both results on occasion.
Goddammit goddammit goddammit nooooo.
Sorry, maybe I’m slow, but what is the purpose of this post?
It is simply funny. That’s all it needs to be.
Well, I usually not write this sort of comment, because I’m lazy and it doesn’t look like important thing to do, but reading so much negativity, even given its obvious hilarity, makes me want to counter it.
I think it’s one of the best blogs I’ve been reading (and before anybody says the obvious “you must not be reading too many blogs” I actually do read many blogs – when Google Reader went out, I immediately bought paid subscription for another system doing the same, but only after rejecting a different one because it didn’t cope with the numbers efficiently enough). It is especially interesting for me because it’s one of the best ones written by someone thinking rather differently from how I do. Yet when I disagree with the author, I can see that Scott is making honest effort to derive and prove his conclusions and not just relies on reader to have similar prejudices and belong to the same ingroup. This is, unfortunately, very rare, but, fortunately, still exists. So please keep up the good work.
P.S. Ah yes, and some talking cacti now and then aren’t too bad either. Not a big fan of swifties though.
Nice! Your defiant attitude is inspiring.
Hey, long time reader, first time commenter.
I usually dread making public posts anywhere on the Internet, but I am compelled to after reading this post. Of all the blogs, in all my feeds, “slatestarcodex.com” is my most treasured. Please don’t change (or at least don’t accelerate too much).
I want to point out that the value of appearing “alpha” of which some of your readers hold is truly baffling; many of the characteristics of which they ridicule, happen to be the very ones I cherish most in my partner (also a ssc fan). Their models of who can have a stable and healthy relationship appear, at least to me, to be not only wildly inaccurate, but counter-productive to a lasting relationship of open communication.
Anyways, what I’m really trying to say is: in terms of how humans go, you’re one of my favorite.
Is 110 IQ supposed to be insulting? That’s the only part of this that bothers me
edit: Whoops, didn’t mean to reply to anyone in particular
It is here. Apparently the average IQ of lesswrong/SSC users is somewhere between 135-140.
You always want to insult the upper middle class. And I mean class as in category, not as in social or economic or scholastic class. The upper middle group is where everyone believes themselves to be when in humble phase, and it’s where everyone tries to escape from in their vain phase, so it’s everyone’s outgroup when they’re trying to insult people. (All the children are above average, but none of them are truly gifted, certainly not mine)
It’s a contextual insult, it’s supposed to say “This guy is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is”.
Given that I am VERY PROUD of my online Ravens Matrices IQ test telling me my score was 99* IQ, 110 IQ is a flattering assessment of mi brainz and I feel in no way insulted by it 🙂
*It must be correct because according to Richard Lynn the average Irish IQ is 93, a result that is in no way suspect as being coloured by his pro-Unionist political leanings, and he’s a Real Proper Scientific Study Method professor what has writted books about IQ and everything!
If I remember it right didn’t he base the irish numbers on data from the 70’s when Ireland was still effectively a developing country and there was a non-trivial portion of the older population who weren’t literate?
In my parents generation kids reading the paper to grandma/grandpa was apparently not terribly unusual.
Yes to all that, which is why sweeping assertions about national IQ scores or ethnic group A being genetically more gifted than ethnic group B who are better than ethnic group C need to be taken with a wheelbarrow-full of qualifications.
I see alpha as referring to (at least) two different concepts. The first concept would be associated with things like self-confidence, leadership, strength, decisiveness, extroversion, and desirability. The second concept would be associated with things like arrogance, posturing, political maneuvering, bluster, manipulation, and self-deception. I think the first category really is valuable, although the second category is an awful one.
I do feel like the guy who said that the blog’s gotten more boring without the politics has a point, but it’s still interesting enough and I can’t blame you for avoiding that mess.
The weirdness of SSC is matched only by the strangeness of its readears. I’m going back to reading Free Will Astrology in Creative Loafing.
I thought I was doing a pretty good job of keeping up with SSC, but clearly I’ve been missing some posts on grammatical gender in languages and/or on something adjacent to object sexuality.
That was what I thought of too at first, but they’re talking about the post in which Scott discusses preferred pronouns for transgender people I believe.
Grammatical gender is an interesting thing though. I wonder how English native speakers think about nouns, but if your native language has gendered nouns (like most Indo-European languages, I think), it gets stuck in your brain. I cannot really think about nouns without assigning a gender to them. For example, the moon is obviously masculine to me but a Frenchman or a Spaniard would beg to differ. Time is masculine as well, but Germans would not agree (it is a bit more complicated because in Czech there are two words for time, one is feminine like in German and one is masculine, but the feminine word is used in the sense of a time interval and the masculine for a particular time or for time in the abstract…kind of like the difference between Stunde and Uhr in German). The word animal is obviously gender neutral, which is something speakers of romance languages probably will generally have a difficulty to wrap their heads around. At the same time, particular animal kinds can be masculine, feminine or neutral.
I am pretty skeptical about this having any influence on behaviour or opinions of people. After all, in both German and Czech “girl” is gender neutral, although there is also a feminine variant of that word in Czech…I don’t think that fact makes the native speakers of those languages change their attitude towards or thoughts about girls 🙂 And I bet there are similar peculiarities in other languages as well. But when things are personified in fairy tales, you tend to think about them in their gender, including gender neutral. So a talking table should be masculine for me whereas a talking chair should be feminine. I would find a talking female table unbelievable. But a German speaking chair would probably have a male voice. And even though I can speak German (although my German is still worse than my English) and use the right gender when I speak, usually without thinking about it, I still imagine the nouns in the gender I am used to from Czech (obviously, it is not always different, which however makes it an even bigger mess).
“I would find a talking female table unbelievable.”
This seems like evidence that it does affect how you think about things, at least superficially… and is also hilarious!
What I don’t understand is how grammatical gender gets conflated with biological sex/social gender–especially when it doesn’t even correspond perfectly, with “girl” being neuter and so on. Aren’t “masculine” and “feminine” just arbitrary descriptors we could just as well call “type a nouns” and “type b nouns”?
Yes, there are a few words that are special cases and are one gender in form but the opposite gender in meaning (such as mädchen in German or poeta in Latin), but this is rare. Masculine nouns have the endings associated with masculine names and masculine pronouns. While feminine nouns have endings associated with feminine names and feminine pronouns.
Or, for instance, “France” is a feminine word in French, and there are women named “France”, like France Gall (though upon looking it up, it is a stage name). But it would be weird to name a boy “France”.
This to me maybe speaks to how the human brain is wired, to such an extreme degree, to think about human social concerns: in a world of countless objects, animals, plants, phenomena, etc. we can let the way we imagine those things (albeit when they are anthropomorphized) be colored by the similarity of their noun declensions to certain basic human words like “man” and “woman” or typically male or typically female names, titles, and occupation names.
I’m not a native speaker of a language with gender, but the way I guess it might feel is not so much that you walk around thinking of every inanimate object as if it were male or female, but rather that, if you were to think of an inanimate object as being a person, your mind would immediately jump to the sex you’d assume if the noun were a name. French “table” for example: most words ending in “e” in French are feminine, as do many feminine names. Therefore, if you want to turn “la table” into a person, it makes more sense for it to be “madame/mademoiselle table” than “monsieur table.”
In English, most machinery is either neuter or female, but never male. (Ships, cars, aircraft, guns….). And I’ve quite often heard mathematical objects referred to as male (“this guy”, etc.) in lectures and such, but never female.
@onyomi: Yeah, I guess it is like that, I also find it easier to personify objects that have either a male or a female gender than those which have a neuter gender. I am also always mildly surprised when people talk about a “cat” in English and it turns out the cat is male, because to me, a cat is female by default. I even talk about my parent’s cat, who’s male, in the female gender.
What I meant is that I do not think it really affects the way you think in a substantial way, which is what some people think. Specifically, feminists try to make people use gender neutral words for occupations, so for example the word “Studenten” (students) is nowadays often replaced by “Studierende” (“the studying” – it is a nominalized adjective…it sounds quite awkward to me, although the same word construction is fine and sounds ok when applied to some other words) because Studenten, even though it is also recognized as a default plural which includes both female and male students, comes from the word “Student” and not “Studentin” (a female student). Sometimes you also see really bizarre things like “StudentInnen,” as a plural which is just awful and you cannot even pronounce that because without the capitalization of the I in the middle it is just the plural of female students. What I wanted to say is that I have serious doubts about this having any impact on how people behave and these changes just seem like a form of newspeak to me. Also, my former German teacher told me that when she was studying, they were given a worse grade when their essays used something like “Studenten” instead of “Studierende”. I think this only happens in humanities though. Interestingly enough, people mostly use “Frau Doktor” and I have probably never heard “Frau Doktorin” even though in Czech it would sound strange (or rather like something from a 1930s movie) to use the male version of doctor when the doctor is obviously female – but it would not sound strange to me to use it like that in a sentence “she is a doctor”. I don’t know what the feminists tend to think about “Frau Doktor” though.
@Psmith: I get slightly bothered by people who refer to mathematical objects by “this guy”. But it is also not used very often. I prefer “this animal” 🙂
What is used pretty often is something like “f is a function which lives on this or that space” and that I also like 🙂
@onyomi: I thought about it a bit more and I think your interpretation is correct – that is that people go with the word endings…and specifically the endings from their mother tongue.
For example the German word “Büro” which means “office” and has a neuter gender. Then there are two words for office in Czech – “kancelář” and the colloquial “kancl”. The former has a feminine gender and the latter masculine. And since Büro also “sounds like a neuter word” in Czech (as in, if it were a Czech word, it would have a neuter gender) I have no problems imagining the office as neuter when I talk and thing in German and depending on which word I use for it in Czech, also masculine and feminine. And in English, office is “obviously” feminine to me as is the word person for example. I don’t know why, but it seems to be “correct” in the sense that “la oficína” is feminine in Spanish (but I thought about the word office in feminine gender even before I started learning Spanish) and the same goes for la persona (and that word is also feminine in German and in Czech). So then it is unnatural to me to use any pronoun other than “she” in English when I used the word “person” in the preceding sentence.
On the other hand, the words which end with “-ung” in German are all feminine but I perceive them as neuter even though when they are used in Czech, for example “mišung=die Mischung” which is often used colloquially, they are conjugated like masculine because it actually sounds like a masculine word in Czech. I think I see then as neuter, because -ung sounds like -ing in English where this ending is used to construct nouns out of vebs (e.g. swimming) and the same word construction in Czech yields neuter words (in German also, but -ung is not used that way). So probably in reality the languages that you learn mix in your head and create a complete mess (I also sometimes end up using a word from a different language in a sentence by mistake and this happens to me even when I speak Czech) while the first language you learn is naturally the most dominant. I wonder how people with two mother tongues think about this, especially if those languages are a bit similar but not mutually intelligible.
I’m a native English speaker but I speak a couple of languages with grammatical gender (neither particularly well, but…). I tend to think of the gender as a purely grammatical property, a property of the word itself rather than its referent; a table in German is der Tisch and a wall is die Wand, but I don’t think that particularly colors the way I think of the objects, even when my brain’s in its German mode. I have no trouble with a female talking table, to use your example, no matter what language it’s speaking.
As a Spanish native speaker, I find myself adscribing gender even to mathematical concepts. If I am telling a geeky joke with talking functions, the exponential will be female and the cosine male. Telling a joke about a male exponential function would seem forced and unnatural to me, even though 99% of my actual mathematical thinking and writing is done in English.
I’m a native English speaker who does not speak any other languages, and for me it’s almost impossible to mentally add a gender to random nouns (like tables or chairs). It just feels bizarre, and also superfluous. I’m sure I’d feel differently if I spoke a different language as my native language, though.
I don’t have any problem imagining genders onto objects. In children’s cartoons, we see it done all the time, and it’s relatively easy for me to imagine cartoonish drawings of a table with long eyelashes and deep red lipstick, for example. When I assign objects genders like this, however, generally it is forced rather than automatic (although not always) and always it is arbitrary. What is difficult for me is to imagine a table that looks photorealistic, or to look at a real table, and associate gender with it. However, for some objects, like ships, I do closely associate “female” and “boat”.
I agree about the cartoon-style gendered objects. I can imagine objects having gender if I picture them being alive and having secondary sexual characteristics. But real-life inanimate objects just don’t have a gender to me, even if I try to think of them with one.
I sometimes feel the urge to call ships “she,” but I don’t actually categorize them as female in my head, and I’m fine with calling them “it” as well.
I’m a native English speaker (not fluent in any other languages), and it never really occurred that this is how many native speakers of languages with grammatical gender process it. I suppose it’s almost a type of synesthesia — at least, the descriptions above are reminding me of some of my own synesthetic tendencies in other arenas.
I expect that the ingrained connection of gender to certain nouns is much deeper for native speakers of languages where grammatical gender isn’t easily determined by anything phonological. For instance, in German, it seems pretty difficult to be able to tell that Tisch is masculine just by looking at it. The only (non-native) languages I’ve studied at very great length are Spanish and Italian, and in both, grammatical gender is made easy by corresponding pretty consistently to certain endings of nouns. So when I speak Spanish or Italian, I don’t strongly associate the essence of a certain gender to the nouns I’m using, but I inflect them (and the articles and adjectives modifying them) almost purely according to the sounds they end in. For instance, if I want to say “the new house” in Italian, since the word for “house” is casa it seems natural to say la casa nuova rather than, say, il casa nuovo. I’m not particularly thinking of houses as somehow effeminate; it just seems completely jarring to put the article il before a noun ending in -a, or to follow such a noun with an adjective ending in -o. (Same in Spanish with the almost-identical la casa nueva.)
“Scott Alexander is the story of a functioning pattern-recognition module trapped in a progressive brain.”
You’re quoting that one /ironically/? 😛
Expected more Hallquist.
How much effort did you put into ordering these? The last one stands out as placed, but the rest?
I’m pretty sure that’s the nicest thing Jim has ever said about anybody.
It’s weird how the dorkiest places on the internet are always the first to go “NEEEEERRRRDDS!” You’d think they’d embrace it, but instead they all have covert fantasies of being a high school bully kicking sand into the 97-pound weakling’s face.
Reminds me of how tumblerinas speak using academic terms (“intersectional praxis” and “performative class”), sprinkled with Valley Girl level vocabulary (“gross” and “douchebro”). It’s like they’re two different people communicating through the one brain.
(And doesn’t Scott have girlfriends lying around all over the place? And yet he’s an omega/beta male? Something doesn’t add up here, Turing.)
Nah, to be an “alpha” in their eyes he’d need to have an exclusive harem.
They’ve got your number Scott! Also it’s nice to see “cuckold” get a run out, it hasn’t been seen so much this century.
Also also, sixteen year-old me wants to know: reactionaries don’t actually know the word reactionary do they? I thought our leftist lingo was completely cryptic and off-limits to them!
Most of the people that leftists call reactionary do not call themselves that (although they’d know the word; they’re not stupid, especially as regards terms of abuse). But in the context of this blog, it usually means a newer, smaller, almost entirely Internet-based political denomination that thinks political modernity (most often defined as the realignments kicked off by the French Revolution, but sometimes points older still) was a bad move.
I can’t use the usual words for it because the spam filter will eat them. But call ’em Death Eaters and everyone will know what you’re talking about.
There’s a long and distinguished tradition of taking your enemies’ insulting names for your group and making that the actual name for your group. Look up the origins of the ‘cynics’ and ‘Christians’, for examples off the top of my head.
“Tories” used to be a term for bandits.
“Whig” was a term of abuse that also meant a type of raider.
Both ended up being used as terms for political parties to refer to themselves.
It’s not as though the elephant and donkey are especially flattering. I’m not sure how GOP (Grand Old Party) snuck in.
From Wikipedia:
Also, in my opinion, the elephant is definitely more flattering.
That part about “cuckold” not being used much this century is sarcasm, right?
Not really, I have heard the word used but never as an actual insult, more as a point of nomenclature.
“Cuckold” was something I associated with Shakespeare when I was a kid, but which has recently been revived by the “white Western men have been emasculated” crowd.
Especially fascinating to me is “cuckservative,” which apparently is now like a nastier version of “RINO”–a way of pointing out that Republican voters have been “cheated on” by the politicians they voted for. The sexualization is what interests me: figuring the ruler-subject relationship in terms of a sexual relationship between husband and wife is positively BC-Confucian. Except in that case, the King or Emperor is the “man” and the ministers are the “women.”
There was a gag on Seinfeld where “Oh yeah?!? Well, I had sex with your wife” was used as a general purpose insult when you couldn’t think of something clever.
I do no think this is an accurate analysis of the “cuckservative” term. You don’t have to be a politician to be a cuckservative.
The analogy has basically 3 semi-independent facets:
1) A cuckservative as someone who cares more catering to and being accepted by leftists to standing up for his own ideology. This is sort of like being the overindulgent host who offers his guests his wife after they drink all his booze and destroy his house.
2) A cuckservative as someone who lets the rich “cuck” him, happily watching as the Republican party fights for negative taxes for hedge fund managers rather than any of the issues the base really cares about.
3) Like the cuckold fetish, there is a racial/ethnic angle that gets most of the attention, but is not really the main point. I get the impression most people who have this fetish are indifferent as to the race of the “bull”, but some of the creepier folks really want the man sleeping with their wife to be black and want to be humiliated for being white. Metaphorically, some see immigrants as the “bull” in this scenario and the country as the woman, and possibly the next generation their taxes will be paying to raise as the illegitimate children from such a union.
I’m having a difficult time how Onyomi so badly misread the term – note that, in his example, the cuckservative is the one cucking the Republican voter. His interpretation only makes sense, as best I can tell, if he simply shut down at the sight of the term and then later tried to reverse-engineer a meaning without actually reading anything else the person said.
“Cuck,” used in the political context, is a claim that the the individual has betrayed himself – any betrayal of his own, while common, is incidental to the slur, though also worthy of derision. Exactly which meaning of the term (“tricked into raising another man’s child, especially at the expense of your own” vs. “individual who gets off on self-abnegation and humiliation”) is being used depends on circumstances, and while all cuckservatives are cucks, not every cuck is a conservative – it’s in the mindset.
For example, Feminists who claim that right-wing men are only concerned about rapes in Rotherham and Cologne because – and I shit you not, this is an actual claim made by actual people – they just want to rape the women themselves? That’s cuck. Same thing with a lot of missionary work – I’ve seen women divorce their husbands and abandon their children “because the Holy Spirit told them to (do something expressly forbidden by Christ).” They accomplish nothing, but couldn’t be prouder; just look at how not racist they are!
Okay, I guess the comparison to “RINO” was not quite right because RINO usually refers to politicians who pretend to be conservative in order to get elected. The “cucks” are the people who keep voting for RINOs–that is, their politicians are “cheating” on them and they just keep letting them get away with or even seem to weirdly like it or something? Is that the implication?
I haven’t actually encountered the term that much outside of people commenting how horrible it is.
This is how the two senses of the word are used in the wild:
George Will is a cuckservative in the “gets off on humiliation” sense. He’s made a career of going on talk shows to be ritually humiliated.
An evangelical whose number one issue is “support for Israel” who thinks opposition to immigration is racist is a cuckservative in the “provides resources for another man’s child” sense.
Both senses are used.
It experienced something of a revival in recent years, generally shortened to “cuck” and used exclusively by people who subscribe to the moral worldview of first season Sansa Stark.
What I really don’t understand is why it’s used as an insult at all. To me it’s a sign of great emotional security, respect, and maturity. Not by any means mandatory as many people have strong visceral negative reactions to the idea of their S.O. sleeping with someone else, but admirable nonetheless.
^ I find it hard not to read your views as a form of rationalization. While I believe that someone can with hard work overcome their natural jealousy instincts, that does not seem an especially praiseworthy choice to me, only neutral at best. Defaulting to associating “cuckoldry” with “emotionally mature” seems like the equivalent of defaulting to associate “retreat” with “wise and successful leader”, to me. A good leader knows when to retreat, and a good human being might willfully enter a polyamorous situation, but nonetheless most of the time that people retreat they’re going to be doing it because they failed and most times someone’s wife sleeps with someone else the husband will have a bad marriage.
@ 27chaos:
Agreed.
It’s the “unnatural and difficult” = “praiseworthy” fallacy. I’m sure it takes a lot of mental endurance to get full-body tattoos to become the Tiger Man or something. That’s doesn’t mean it’s a particularly admirable thing to do. Really, it’s taking the correlation between virtue and effort and reversing causation: many things are virtuous despite being difficult to practice. Practicing only easy virtues shows you’re probably not very virtuous. But just because something is hard to practice doesn’t mean it virtuous.
It’s just sort of reverse moralizing: if you’re not willing to let your partner sleep with other people, I’m not saying you’re a bad person. But you lack a sign that you’re a good person.
Honestly, I find the discussion of polyamory in the rationalist community enlightening in an introspective sort of way. I never had the extreme negative reaction to homosexuality (probably too young, I guess), but I naturally find polyamory and any form of casual sex absolutely disgusting, and I have a strong tendency to want to say it’s immoral and will lead to horrible consequences. And I’m not sure on average whether it does lead to better relationships; I think it can cause both good and harm. In any case, the degree of harm is most likely far outside the bounds of my negative reaction, which has been a useful check on me.
Still, that doesn’t mean you can set up polyamory as a “sign of maturity” and a praiseworthy quality.
“What I really don’t understand is why it’s used as an insult at all.”
Because you don’t believe the fact that we are animals produced, like other animals, through Darwinian evolution has any effect on our current feelings and behavior?
That’s the only sense I can make of your comment.
@Nomghost
I’m a pretty kink-friendly person, and I find some manifestations of “cuckoldry” to be pretty benign. The “hotwifing” manifestation, for instance, that isn’t about degrading one member of a couple.
But the other thing? The thing where a man gets off specifically on feeling lesser, or who simply feels so inadequate that he gets more pleasure out of fucking his SO by proxy than he does with his own presumably less masculine body? That’s not a kink, that’s sexual self-annihilation. That’s the lamentations of the damned. Do you think there is a single cuckold fetishist of this type who would still have the same fetish if he had the body he wanted? As Dan Savage says it’s a consolation prize. And what an awful consolation prize it is.
Seriously? There’s a plethora of humiliation and degradation kinks, masochism, submission, chastity kink, there’s even vore and snuff — cuckoldry is nothing special.
Kink is all about channeling intense emotions and sensations (fear, pain, power, loyalty, pride, protectiveness, restriction, heat or cold) into arousal. Jealousy and insecurity are certainly intense feelings, and thus prime candidates for kinky use.
Also, deep-seated insecurities are not always related to “objective” qualities. There are beautiful women with body image issues, successful professionals suffering from impostor syndrome, perfectly average men preoccupied with penis size…
@faradn
I agree with the first reply to your comment. You could say the same about all manner of kinks.
I don’t pay much attention to Dan Savage these days, as I’m not entirely sure he respects my sexuality, but that’s another discussion.
The internet is vast and full of normies, friend.
The nice thing about its revival is that it is an infallible signal. When you see those four letters in a row you can stop reading.
I’m seeing “cuck” used more extensively (I honestly wish I wasn’t) and it appears to be morphing from the base meaning of “cuckold” into a general derogatory term that doesn’t necessarily mean anything stronger than “sexual failure because they can’t get women” and even more often doesn’t have any sexual element at all to it, it’s just thrown out there as an insulting term – I kind of get the impression it is now taking on the tone of “servile; wants to be dominated; likes taking orders and being pushed about”.
It’s such a horribly ugly word. I thought “cunt” was the most aesthetically displeasing slur in the English language, but “cuck” might be worse.
The connotation is often that the target enjoys or collaborates in being cuckolded, i.e. he’s not only inadequate but actually fetishizes his own inadequacy. Side note, I think this is one of those words that women may not intuitively “get” in terms of its impact on the male psyche — again, similar to “cunt”, which implies worthlessness for other than sexual purposes, an accusation having special resonance with women.
It’s particularly galling when it comes from so-called MRAs. The first time someone called me a ‘cuck’ for attempting to be compassionate in an online discussion, I was furious. It’s just aggressively reiterating the gendered requirements for male harshness and emotional insensitivity. It honestly seems to be the equivalent of someone calling themselves a feminist and then calling another woman an ‘uppity wench’.
The fact that “cuckold” has become the online far-right go-to insult also suggests a lot of those types watch wayyy more skeezy pornography than could possibly in line with their own declared morals.
Probably has something to do with 4chan /pol/ becoming to the right-wing internet what Tumblr is to the left…
Don’t know if there’s a lot of overlap between the anti-porn right and the pro-calling-people-cucks right. Different ideologies, different generations, and different motivations.
Don’t /pol/-tier right-wingers use “degenerate” much the same way Tumblr-tier left-wingers use “problematic”?
No, “problematic” means “evil”. “Degenerate” means “gross”, since… and I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I’ve seen enough of their behaviour to be convinced… they actually think aesthetics is more important than morality.
My understanding is that people who use ‘degenerate’ in that fashion do in fact mean ‘immoral’.
On the internet, it’s curiously enough the lefties who use “gross” as an insult most often.
Aesthetics is more trustworthy than morality. Morality is really easy to hijack. Plenty of people can be convinced that you’re absolute evil if you try to deny a woman her right to choose who will still be squeamish watching the baby sliced up for parts.
I assumed degenerate behavior means r-selected behavior.
“The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s, when it was criticized by several empirical studies.”
But pop evo psych doesn’t care because pop evo psych isn’t science.
@Galle, Anonymous
Conservatives consider morality and aesthetics to be the same thing, or at least to have WAY more overlap than liberals think they do.
@anonymous
The first sign of a complete moron is when somebody says something isn’t science. They should instead say something isn’t Science, to emphasize the Correctness and Orthodoxy of their Worthless Blathering Cant. Read the rest of the Wikipedia article you’re quoting from.
@Faradn
Interested to see the narrative for that claim.
“Interested to see the narrative for that claim.”
Conservatism is driven in part by a highly-developed (overdeveloped, a liberal might say) disgust response. Grossness is the inverse of the aesthetically pleasing.
Also a lot of conservative intellectuals would say it has something to do with Platonic ideals. More beautiful and elegant people and things more closely approximate the ideal order of the universe, and beauty and elegance can be objectively defined. I personally don’t think this idea meets minimal standards of evidence, but I’ve heard it from enough conservatives that I know it’s not a straw man.
“Conservatives consider morality and aesthetics to be the same thing, or at least to have WAY more overlap than liberals think they do.”
On the other hand, I find that it’s almost always people on the left who think that art is basically politics. “The personal is political” is a very distinctly left-wing paradigm, and it’s in my opinion telling that traditionally the people on the right who as a rule think in those terms are Fascists and Objectivists: Both groups who learned it from the far left, as Mussolini used to be a Communist and Ayn Rand grew up in the USSR.
See also what I mentioned above about most of the contemporary far right being identity politics for lower-class white people, hence attracting a lot of people who would in previous generations have ended up on the left.
@Faradn
So the analogy is to Haidt’s system, in which case I’d be wary of what you consider a base rate: conservatives are supposed to stress all foundations equally, after all. That said, I’m still not convinced bad art evokes a disgust response, thought I could be convinced. I usually feel contempt for bad art, personally.
The Platonism connection is interesting, heuristically I usually jump straight to low church Christianity when thinking of conservatives with all the traditional suspicion of high church finery, but I do like this framing a lot.
@Simon
“Ther personal is the political” has been corrupted a lot over time, if I recall it didn’t used to mean what it means now. That said, it obviously means what it means now, though my assumption was that totalism as a major feature of leftist thought came out of the late 19th early 20th centuries.
@gall:
Things denounced as degenerate don’t necessarily result in lots of offspring, though. A lot of sexual practices that traditionalists consider “degenerate” either cannot result in children, or precautions are taken to ensure none result.
“It’s a cesspool of aspie puns” Tom added.
[I hope someone appreciates my magnum opus]
Attention Deficit Disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome are too different things. 😛
It’s also known as asperger’s disorder. And it’s not the only layer.
No, I don’t get it.
Isn’t it about addition being a mathematical operation?
I thought I got it, but then I read the note implying you were worried that people wouldn’t get it, so now I’m left wondering if I fooled myself and really don’t get it.
“Minions, sneer at the (quote-mined) outgroup and give me validation!”
I feel plenty validated. My original quote mine has been deleted, but it wasn’t even the juiciest part…and I actually should thank Scott. My blog doesn’t blow up this much when I make a new post, sometimes :p
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with asking for a little validation now and then, especially after reading a hundred spiteful insults about yourself.
Nobody compelled him to compile this list, and I’m pretty sure that he receives more compliments than insults.
So what?
@ several
I find comments criticizing Scott for posting this thread to be unkind, and either untrue or unnecessary.
So is the post we are responding to.
a list of quotations is untrue?
It is possibly true, assuming that the quotes have not been taken out of context, but it is unkind and unnecessary.
>Scott Alexander is the story of a functioning pattern-recognition module trapped in a progressive brain.
This wasn’t me, but 100% agree. I envy how well this is worded. Maybe I would replace it with “a brain incompletely masculinized”.
Heh, what about a fundraiser to bribe Scott into lifting weights? I wonder what would happen.
I thought the pattern recognition one was pretty good, and suggests a more general idea—the tension between the set of beliefs one starts with and the beliefs that are implied by one’s approach to making sense of reality. It would be interesting to look at a variety of cases of very smart, reasonable people, people equipped with good tools for discovering what’s true, who started from very different ideological/religious/… viewpoints.
One possibility, suggested by Dan Kahan’s work, is that the smart person employs his ability creating sophisticated justifications for what he already believes. Another is that smart people with very different starting points end up converging: “Any spoke can lead an ant to the hub,” as Nero Wolfe puts it in a different context.
@ David Friedman
It would be interesting to look at a variety of cases of very smart, reasonable people, people equipped with good tools for discovering what’s true, who started from very different ideological/religious/… viewpoints.
The core of SSC, I thought.
I once heard it said, don’t remember where, that psychotherapy is sometimes less effective for smart people because smart people are better at creating logically airtight stories about why they should be miserable.
I had a therapist tell me that she didn’t think therapy would work for me because I was “too smart”, by which she meant that I would think too abstractly about the process to achieve the “breakthroughs” psychotherapists aim for.
Mind you, I’m smart by the standards of the general population, not by SSC’s.
You just need to find a smarter therapist.
Relevant quote by Thomas Paine:
“We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.” -Eric Hoffer
Shoulder injuries due to poor form, I suspect. Also arguments in the comments about whether he should be doing SS, SL, SA, Greyskull etc., and how useless personal trainers are.
IME, lifting weights doesn’t change personality nearly as much as fighting does, but otherwise endorsed.
I used to think that and I was wrong. However, define fighting. Most adults at a boxing club even after months are only allowed light sparring. Because you average fat balding office guy is not that good at it. If you mean it as sticking with the boring stuff for years until you are allowed to really give each other a black eye, probably yes. Maybe. But those who start as adults rarely stick so long. So you are doing the mittens and the sandbags and the super boring step-schooling and the kindergarten play level sparring for for 6 months and nothing happened to you, do you have the patience to go on?
We need to invent a martial art when you are allowed to do fun stuff to each other from day 1. Well, that is BJJ. But that is “rolling” not “fighting”.
However, there are 45 years old neckbeards who go lifting and they don”t even do it right, they just take the machines, even the ridiculous sitting bench press machine, not the barbells, and yet I see them behaving far more confident after that. And that happens in 3-4 months. Beginner gainzzz, also in hormones I suppose.
Am I confusing something? I thought abundance of body hair, as in “neckbeard” was a sign of high testosterone.
I’m not sure of the significance of beard on the neck, specifically, but most men can grow some kind of beard. I think what is being insulted here is the scraggly, patchy, poorly-looking beard that is a sign of low testosterone (so far as I know).
Aha!
I thought “neckbeard” was a metaphor for body hair, which would be visible only around the neck, while wearing a t-shirt. Didn’t know it referred to an actual beard.
It’s also partly orthagonal to testosterone. “Neckbeards” are a mocking term for a certain type of young man that is simultaneously trying to look masculine (via growing a beard) but is hopelessly socially awkward (hence doesn’t know how to maintain a beard well, which often involves shaving the neck if it’s a short beard, which most are if they’re young!).
My general impression is that “socially awkward” gradually becomes indistinguishable from “stopped giving a fuck” the older one gets.
Or to put it differently, obession with social awkwardness seems to peak at the age of 16 or something like that.
I thought “neckbeard” was an insult about grooming– that the neckbeard should be shaved.
Alternate theory: a few major examples of people who annoy those who use the insult have neckbeards.
Another theory: it’s a gendered insult (women don’t have neckbeards) with no other content.
I’m amazed that people aren’t sure what the insult is even about, but it does back my theory that it’s context which makes a word into an insult.
I am increasingly unsure what part of the anatomy is considered to be the neck and what part of body hair might be referred to as a beard in the English language.
Like I said I somehow arrived at the misconception that “neckbeard” refers to a teenage attitude of “all body hair is just gross [as in: renders you undesirable as a sexual partner, regardless of hygenie and such]”. How little did I know.
I sport what my father’s generation would have called a “full beard” and to me it seems to be pretty obvious how that ought to be groomed. I seriously do not see what could go wrong, let alone so wrong that it becomes a matter of political insult.
This is the stereotype:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-k9vZMmk0HPk/U0EmQrKKrHI/AAAAAAAAQIM/iniBHTfK7XE/s1600/neckbeard-trilby.jpg
The actual unshaved beard on the neck is just a stereotype or synecdoche (…) for the overall idea of a guy who is trying to be charming and attractive by following some misguided ideas about fashion and chivalry while at the same time being unaware of his continued poor hygiene, fatness, or awkwardness. The fedora and calling women “m’lady” are other stereotypes.
onyomi:
I’m pretty sure that none of the things you mention would be held against the guy (or the stereotype for that matter), were it not for the “fatness”. Especially not by judging from one photograph. Or is this some internet celebrity I’m ignorant of?
This person is not, so far as I know, an internet celebrity, other than being one of the top results when I typed “neckbeard” into GoogleImage search.
But I would disagree with your estimate of his attractiveness, especially from the perspective of the sorts of people who are apt to use the phrase “neckbeard.”
Yes, the fatness is the biggest problem, but consider also the actual beard: it’s patchy and odd looking. What kind of style is he going for? Could he grow a fuller beard if he wanted to? Did he shape it in any way or just let his hair grow in the weird, sparse pattern nature chose for it? And did he actually think doing so was a better stylistic choice than just shaving?
Next the hat: the fedora is now associated with men trying to look stylish but who don’t realize that a fedora looks stupid on almost everyone in the 21st century. What’s more he’s tipping the hat in what appears to be an imitation of a very old-fashioned style of greeting. This says “I have no natural social skills, but think that acting in accordance with an old stereotype about classy, chivalrous men might get me laid/make me more interesting.”
And the shirt–goes with fedora. Too shiny/silky; seems weirdly formal.
I’ll agree he looks like he could be a reasonably attractive man if he lost 75 lbs, shaved and got a completely new wardrobe. But then, he wouldn’t be a neckbeard if he knew to/how to do these things.
(Note that none of this is meant to endorse being mean to nerdy men with bad style, nor the use of the term “neckbeard” for that purpose; I’m just explaining my understanding of the stereotype and what I think this picture means to those who have singled it out for internet ridicule).
The person is the picture is an actor, known for playing (as a child actor), the character of Pugsley Addams in the 1998 Addams Family movie.
>Did he shape it in any way or just let his hair grow in the weird, sparse pattern nature chose for it? And did he actually think doing so was a better stylistic choice than just shaving?
Yeah, I’m with you on all of this. In a way it makes me grateful for what mother nature chose to by my facial hair. What I’m saying is without being obese, he probably could have gotten away with that, despite it clearly being bad judgement.
>This says “I have no natural social skills, but think that acting in accordance with an old stereotype about classy, chivalrous men might get me laid/make me more interesting.”
How is that a bad signal to send? I mean seriously, what are “natural social skills” other than acting in accordance with a _current_ stereotype? Of course I understand that this signal would loose all its value if everybody did it. But that does not seems to be the problem.
>And the shirt–goes with fedora. Too shiny/silky; seems weirdly formal.
Nothing wrong with that shirt IMO. Probably would look better, were he able to use the topmost button, even if he then did leave it unfastened intentionally. I trust, you get my point.
>But then, he wouldn’t be a neckbeard if he knew to/how to do these things.
For sure SSC comment section is the wrong place to state the obvious and say that all of the above is a judgement of character on the basis of questionable taste, but I had to get that elephant out of the room so I said it anyways. Sorry.
It’s an Uncanny Valley thing. If you grew up into a set of social rules, they look good on you. They can even look good if there are some holes in your natural social skills (perhaps because you spent too much time at your computer as a teenager) but you put some effort into patching them by looking at what real, modern people are actually doing.
Trying to synthesize them from TV movies set in the 1930s and your dad’s half-remembered anecdotes about the 1960s, on the other hand, makes you look like an alien in a skin suit. Even if you have the motions down, which you probably won’t, there were a whole mess of cultural assumptions informing them that you’re just not going to get.
Agree totally with Nornagest about the “alien in a skin suit” effect.
I loved those movies. Pugsley’s not looking so good, though.
Related, it occurs to me that all the problems I cited with this person’s appearance can be attributed to signalling (at least within our current milieu) a lack of maturity–not just emotional and social, but literal, biological maturity.
What are the physical signs of a mature male? Lots of body hair/thick beard, chiseled features, receding hairline/baldness, etc. Age itself (this is how Clint Eastwood manages to remain sexy; aging is masculinizing for both sexes insofar as a big part of human femininity is neoteny).
What are the outward signs of a psychologically mature male? Looking put together, understanding and fitting into the (yes, arbitrary) social milieu he finds himself in, giving off an aura of being able to protect others, financially and/or physically.
The neckbeard stereotypes seem almost all to be neotenous, or childish:
living with your parents
fat, round face like a child or baby
inability to grow a full beard/appearance of patchy beard
social immaturity that causes one to try on ill-fitting habits/bad fashion
Neoteny, of course, is associated with femininity in the human.
Interestingly, I get the impression that some of the meanest critics of neckbeards are online feminists: they make fun of them for being, basically, creepy, gross man-children who think they can trick women into having sex with them through obviously bad fashion and a weird attempt at revival of traditional intergender etiquette (hence “m’lady”).
So feminists are criticizing these men for not being stereotypically masculine enough.
@Alex
> all of the above is a judgement of character on the basis of questionable taste
That’s very much the point. The term we are discussing is a mocking insult and almost nothing else. We’re not saying it’s a good insult, just describing how it is used and what connotations it typically has.
Though it is interesting to me how prevalent the “neckbeard”/”fedora” style is, despite it inviting so much ridicule. I own two fedoras from high school. I’m not sure where I got the idea that a fedora paired with a black t-shirt and cargo pants looked cool, but it seemed like a great idea at the time.
I guess it’s a fashion for nerds meant to look cool to nerds. What’s interesting is that, while being gentlemanly and nice towards girls is a common part of the aesthetic, it has very little to do with what is actually important to girls. This isn’t surprising when you consider other young male fashions — expensive Air Jordans and Axe body spray aren’t actually attractive to most young girls, though the boys that wear them probably think they are.
Well, one of the layers in the sad, deflated tiramisu of cultural signaling here is that the hats were briefly in style about ten years ago. I remember seeing Justin Timberlake and Johnny Depp wearing them, for example. So it’s not just trying to regurgiate some kind of long-lost, probably-never-existed-as-such tradition of gentlemanliness, it’s also seizing on a brief fad and blowing it way out of proportion. Compare orphaned vests, or the bizarrely long-lived influence of The Matrix. Fedora+trench hasn’t been in style since the early Sixties, though, and fedora+trench+T-shirt never has.
There are nerds that try to adopt or adapt older fashion wholesale, e.g. the steampunk thing, but at that point it almost crosses over into cosplay. And at least it’s a coherent look.
Some more notes on fedora/trench/”m’lady”:
Deeper than the uncanny valley effect, and contributing to it, I think the problem might be that less experienced nerds tend to look at aesthetics very superficially. You look at, say, Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep and you think he’s cool. Fair enough; he’s cool. But what makes him cool is how he behaves in the context of the (partly fictional) universe he inhabits. The hat, the coat, the rough-but-classy mannerisms look good there, but in another context they’d send a totally different message. What earns you friends in a roadside bar in backwoods Montana won’t make you any friends if you’re having tea with the Emperor of Japan; same deal.
The chivalry thing works similarly. Etiquette is, basically, a protocol, and like all protocols it only works if you’re talking to something that’s also running it. You send a message and you get one of a range of shorthand responses that your society has coordinated on, because it’s faster, easier, and for most people more intuitive to do it that way than to hammer out common exchanges explicitly every time you meet somebody. Use etiquette from (a fictional version of) the distant past and you might think you’re being classy or cutely old-fashioned, but you’re actually doing the equivalent of plugging your computer’s Ethernet cable into a banana.
(An example: I grew up around martial-arts dojos, which are often very ritualized in small ways. Fast-forward to range day with some guys in Nevada, and I’m in kind of the same headspace. I accept a shotgun from the rangemaster with both hands and a little bow, and he looks at me like I’ve grown two more heads that both speak only blasphemy. Entirely my fault.)
tl;dr: there are no cheat codes for cool.
Re: fedora
1. The thing most people call a “fedora” nowadays is actually a trilby.
2. Nah, people who already look conventionally attractive can definitely rock a “fedora.” Plenty of people of any gender still drool over ladies who rock a suit and trilby. Fangirls love it with their male idols dawn the attire, as well. Traditionally good-looking people don’t look so different from the good-looking people in the past when those hats were more common, so they still look just as fantastic.
Some of the disdain over the MRA fedora use is that they believe the hat itself will imbue some measure of attractiveness to them. But as with most fashion things, usually it’s the person making the fashion look good. So the fedora-rocking MRAs just look like try-hards that don’t “get” what they should actually do to be attractive, a la what Nornagest talked about with the Bogart example.
(For another example, Fred Astaire. Not conventionally attractive by any means, other than being enviously slender, but he’s got that Astaire Swagger, the pure confidence in knowing he’s one of the best dancers of all time.)
Yes this is not particularly nice or feminist, reinforcing conventional unrealistic beauty standards. But the feminist critique is root in the same kind of dog-whistle associations as “freeze peach.” The impending MRAness is what makes the hat unattractive, not the hat itself.
@onyomi
So feminists are criticizing these men for not being stereotypically masculine enough.
This is confounded by how the “suit and trilby/fedora” get-up is most attractive on more feminine/prettier men. Your Justin Timberlakes, your Matt Bomers, Michael Jackson, your asian boyband members.
Man the spam filter is merciless. I can’t get this link through at all. Anyways, it was an article talking about how male celebrities actually have to care a whole lot about their image, about how they dress, and their makeup and hair, and think about how to posture, in ways that are traditionally coded feminine. So you get male idols and soloists being like “I hope our fans enjoy this beastly/manly album concept,” even as boyband detractors the world over deride them for being so metrosexual.
Similarly, a theme that emerged in female fans responding to “dudes are objectified in media too!” was to point out how female fans’ ideal males aren’t the beefcakes, but more “bishounen” and “woobie” figures. Tom Hiddleston gets more love than Chris Hemsworth. And just look at the Lobo redesign for New 52.
So in terms of physical attractiveness, odds are the MRAs probably aren’t pretty enough for the hat.
I’m with Arbitrary_greay on this one. The fact that Timberlake can pull it off and the stereotype nerd can’t ought to tell us something.
However:
Re: Uncanny Valley Effect / The Protocol Analogy
Let me add an example to yours. First of all this might upset people who ar fond of differenciating musical genres so I will refer only to “rock music” in its broadest possible sense.
In my time and place ™ rock music is more or less entirely in the tradition of The Stones. There is no mainstream strain in the tradition of Elvis or Johnny Cash or something. It’s a subculture. People who carefully dress and groom in the style of said musicians, not in a Hollywood “Elvis imitator” or cosplaying way, but in a way that is practical in real live. There is a mannerism going with that style, e. g. carrying a comb and using it in public. Things like that. Some sport a fake American accent even if not speaking English in the first place.
Of course it’s all an act. I’m resonably sure that none of these people share any cultural background whatsoever with real Elvis or real Johnny Cash. But as far as I can tell from the outside, the live the act like 24/7. And, again speaking from the outside, I do not find this to be uncanny. In the same way I would not find a long haired guy in a Mötörhead band t-shirt uncanny. But note how the former is sythesizing the past and the latter is not.
Not that I would recommend to a random stereotype nerd to put this kind of effort into an act. Its more like that mainstream culture works very much alike said subculture, but the patterns are easier to observe from the outside so I went with that example. And it also goes to show that basically anything can work as a style if you put enogh enthusiasm into it. Your example, the 30s as remembered by the 60s, i. e. Bonnie and Clyde: that could totally work as a style today.
The protocol analogy I think misses the point. You can adhere to protocol by the numbers and still come across as awkward and you can break protocol left and right and still be socially accepted. And, no coincidence here, the former is something, nerds might have learned the hard way, when trying to geek into the protocol, whereas the latter seems to be the central idea of PUA (?).
So I conclude, what we call socially awkward and what gives rise to the nerd stereotype is neither the hat nor the old fashionednes nor the lack of protocol. But what is it? Haven’t decades of Nerdology solved this question yet?
But breaking protocol is not quite what’s going on here. Breaking protocol comes in two flavours:
(1) unintended failure due to sloppiness / inattention / ignorance,
(2) deliberate playfulness, identifiable as such only when combined with evidence of not-(1) (awareness of the protocol and ability to perform it).
“M’lady” doesn’t quite pass for either of those, so it’s read as a combination of (1) and
(3) a weird, inexplicable choice to rigidly adhere to the wrong protocol.
A big chunk of successful social interaction (outside of bare conflict) is being pleasant — and that includes surprising your companions in ways that make them feel good, not confused or awkward. I’ve had my hand unexpectedly kissed once, and let me tell you, that was awkward as hell.
There’s a related thing I’ve noticed in myself and similar folks — an occasional itch to bring up in-jokes outside their native context (sometimes even when I’m the only person who would get it!). It might have something to do with being “inside one’s head” most of the time, instead of paying broad attention to the surrounding people and adapting one’s thoughts to the social context.
So, “guy”+”fedora” seems like a good combination of ideas in mind-space, and some people might forget or fail to simulate how its implementation looks to others. In contrast, rock fans are more social and more familiar with their target audience (other rock fans vs “the ladies”).
Re: mind-space vs implementation
I’ve seen one or two guys successfully doing “the fedora” in real life. These guys hat one thing in common though, they were attractive and confident.
Other real life experience: I guess I qualify as a type (1) protocol breaker. Hasn’t been that much of a problem after high school. On the contrary, most people, including non-nerds, have no idea what the protocol is. The occasional damage from type (1) protocol breaking is that people think “what a jerk”. But it happens far less often than I used to assume.
@ Alex
Yeah, (2) can be either cool or annoying, and (1) is usually no big deal — others might smooth things over (“Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman!”), or simply ignore it.
But (3) can leave some “normal” people puzzled, and then they start talking to their friends / internet strangers, trying to make sense of it.
“I’ve seen one or two guys successfully doing “the fedora” in real life. These guys hat one thing in common though, they were attractive and confident.”
This reminds me of an Onion article I can’t find atm to the effect of: “the latest fashion this year is wearing hats and being hot!… this was a change from last year when the fashion was large sweaters and being hot…” etc.
Point is, if you’re hot enough and confident enough, anything looks good on you, but mostly due to halo effect.
@ onyomi
No, wait. The aim is not to literally make clothes “look good on you”, or to wear whatever’s in fashion. The aim is to make the whole thing, the you-in-the-clothes, look good. Obviously, how you look, controlled for clothes, is a big part of that. If that’s “halo effect”, then so is taller people scoring more points in basketball at the same skill level.
“This is confounded by how the “suit and trilby/fedora” get-up is most attractive on more feminine/prettier men. Your Justin Timberlakes, your Matt Bomers, Michael Jackson, your asian boyband members.”
I think this actually supports what I’m saying while adding an interesting additional nuance: even the “successful” examples of “neckbeard fashion” are not typically masculine-looking by Anglo-American standards. They look boyish.
What’s interesting to me is that I don’t think this particular type of necbkeard fashion predates the rise of anime in American nerd culture. East Asian depictions of attractive men are typically less “masculine” and more “pretty” due to a combination of the fact that East Asian men have less pronounced secondary-sex characteristics (most can only grow a thin, whispy beard, for example) and the fact that, in East Asia, there is still a greater association between big, muscly, tan people and low class agricultural labor.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that US standards about what constitutes an attractive man, and especially within nerdy subcultures, has moved in the East Asian direction of favoring the pretty, boyish look. And to the extent the fedora and trenchcoat look good on anyone other than Dick Tracy (I’m skeptical that they do, though I appreciate Arbitrary pointing out that what is now called a “fedora” is really a slightly different style, as I always thought that what was now called a fedora really was different from the fedora of old movies), it’s more likely to be this sort of man.
But this reinforces my point: there is a subset of men now looking not to Humphrey Bogart for their idea of masculinity, but to Orlando Bloom and the like.
What I’m saying is suspicious is that if feminists don’t like men admiring and striving to imitate Orlando Bloom and beautiful Korean Boy Band members then I think they are being a bit hypocritical–because it’s precisely within the framework of a traditional patriarchy where men are expected to be strong, stolid protector and provider figures who would never spend as much time making themselves pretty as they did providing for women (though, of course, in East Asia, the pretty man was associated with ability to provide since he probably came from a good family).
Oddly enough, “trying to look like Orlando Bloom” and “sexist” are not mutually exclusive properties. Feminists-qua-feminists are mostly interested in men’s attitude to women, not the type of “look” they’re going for.
And the usual complaint about the stereotypical “fedora-tipping Nice Guy” is that there’s a burning pit of rage and bitterness lurking beneath the gentle, unassuming surface layer.
(The usual disclaimers apply: feminists are people, many feminists are not very good people, many people try to tar their target with every negative word they can think of.)
@ Nita:
Yep, that’s pretty much it. I think Scott’s many posts on the subject have shown why it’s not exactly fair or appropriate to demonize these men, but that’s the root of the issue..
It only takes one bad experience, or even a friend’s bad experience, or even bad experiences you read about on the internet, in order to make a woman avoid that kind of guy in general.
>I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that US standards about what constitutes an attractive man, and especially within nerdy subcultures, has moved in the East Asian direction of favoring the pretty, boyish look.
>But this reinforces my point: there is a subset of men now looking not to Humphrey Bogart for their idea of masculinity, but to Orlando Bloom and the like.
Is this true? Maybe it’s me getting old, but to the extent that I ever identified with nerd culture it implied not giving a damn how a guy looked. Not out of carelessness but out of a humane sense of equality.
Also, as far as my insight into the habits of young ladies at the height of Disneys Pirates success goes, it was them (or Disney marketing) and not “a subset of men” who stylized Bloom to be the hottest thing since … well Timberlake or something. And as far as I can tell, they (the ladies, not Disney) meant it too.
So rather than nerds following an Esat Asian stereotype for complex reasons this seems to be a case of nerds wanting to comply with the ladies’ expressed and revealed preferences.
And in that model PUA is the same guys failing to do so and then falsely concluding that the ladies must have been lying about their preferences. Could that be it?
>It only takes one bad experience, or even a friend’s bad experience, or even bad experiences you read about on the internet, in order to make a woman avoid that kind of guy in general.
Where “that kind of guy” refers to “a burning pit of rage and bitterness”, who would blame them. But I find it very hard to believe that a “gentle, unassuming surface layer” is a good predictor for that.
@ Alex:
It’s not that being gentle and unassuming is the predictor.
It’s that a certain kind of fashion and grooming style is a predictor for guys who say: “Why don’t these heartless bitches like me? I’m so goddamn gentle and unassuming! So fuck it, I’m going to be of those asshole ‘bad boys’ who treats women poorly.”
Re: Protocol
Yep, for pop culture world, (and thus arguably aesthetic-driven world) authenticity is the thing.
Hip hop/rap, where is more overtly male-driven, has its obsession with a certain model of masculinity. Country music has another. Rock has its own.
But as any sufficiently popular artist crosses into the realm of pop music, where authenticity isn’t so important, and fangirls have the most influence, everyone gets a whole lot prettier. And so most of the “breakout/crossover” male artists of any genre tends to be more of pretty boys than their peers.
But back to authenticity. Your attitudes aren’t supposed to be learned, they’re supposed to be a part of you. A good ol’ homeboy from the country can do a stereotypical “aw shucks” chivalry routine, and it will come off more endearing than creepy. “White boy can’t dance/rap” mocks how a rich guy can’t understand or correctly emulate the attitudes of someone who grew up
with systemic oppressionon the streets. The white rapper bragging about their money and their hos is callous 1%, but the black rapper has the subtext of that being the end of their bootstrapping narrative.Same with chivalrous nerds. It’s not that they’re breaking a universal protocol, but that they’re breaking the protocol for their station. If you look like a nerd, you can’t act like a jock. Unless you also have copious amounts of money.
@Nita:
Yes, there is a “fake to to make it” aspect to fashion. But the key is that the clothes are supposed to help facilitate your mind to have your body convey the attractive sense of power/confidence. If you aren’t doing that, the body isn’t matching the clothes, and it’s not a convincing fake. Again, it’s not the clothes themselves. A uniform might give you the urge to stand/sit up straighter, a hoodie and baggie pants might have you slouching casually, both might give you the attitude to walk more purposefully, and it’s those behavioral changes the make the difference.
@onyomi
Wait, that’s not what I was going for? The key point was that the likes of Orlando Bloom and Justin Timberlake actually do spend a bunch of time making themselves look pretty. Dudes revile the pretty boy for being metrosexual (“cares so much about feminine aesthetics that they no longer resemble a regular heterosexual man”) while ignoring said pretties’ hordes of screaming fangirls, (and older women!) indicating that women find that attractive.
Feminists perceive the MRAs to be chasing after an undesirable form of masculinity, defined by it’s opposition to femininity, which has worrying implications as to how they would perceive the worth of women. And this isn’t an East/West thing. Asians mock boybands, too.
Exactly. No one wants the obvious impression that their date is trying to pull of some unnatural, forced act. They want the other person to be himself.
The hard truth is: they want him to be himself and be likable, charismatic, funny, smart, polite, etc. So some kind of blatant affectation like wearing an old-fashioned hat (but not having the style truly consistent with it) or trying to kiss women on the hand, is just weird and off-putting.
On the other hand, if your whole personal style throughout your life is to be some kind of debonair 30s guy, that’s sort of unusual, but you’re walking the walk and more likely to get away with it. Even that sort of thing is kind of suspicious, though. I once knew a girl from Nevada who spoke with the fakest half-British, half-Mid-Atlantic accent you’ve ever heard of. And people sort of rolled their eyes at her behind her back because it was ridiculous.
>But back to authenticity. Your attitudes aren’t supposed to be learned, they’re supposed to be a part of you.
I’m not convinced. My example was specifically chosen to illustrate the point of people decidedly not growing up in a world where everybody carries a comb and looks like Johnny Cash and coming across as perfectly authentic while doing so. To me it seems to be very clear that they saw something they liked and embraced it until it became “a part of them”. How do you differentiate that from “learned”? Like I said, none of them has an actual shared background with Cash.
Granted though it is at least easy to see the concept these guys are embracing. What “the fedora” is trying to embrace, other than a fleeting fashion, I cannot possibly tell. Maybe that is the problem we are discussing here.
>but that they’re breaking the protocol for their station.
Hmm, I am very allergic to “nerds need to know their station” rhetoric or rather to “x need to know their station” for any x. Perhaps you want to elaborate?
>Wait, that’s not what I was going for? The key point was that the likes of Orlando Bloom and Justin Timberlake actually do spend a bunch of time making themselves look pretty. Dudes revile the pretty boy for being metrosexual (“cares so much about feminine aesthetics that they no longer resemble a regular heterosexual man”) while ignoring said pretties’ hordes of screaming fangirls, (and older women!) indicating that women find that attractive.
With you so far.
>Feminists perceive the MRAs to be chasing after an undesirable form of masculinity, defined by it’s opposition to femininity, which has worrying implications as to how they would perceive the worth of women.
Wait, what? What does “an undesirable form of masculinity” refer to? Timberlake/Bloom or something else?
As a natural experiment into what makes women uncomfortable about neckbeards, I recommend losing >100 lbs while not otherwise changing your personality or social position.
You start seeing really funny stuff, like a woman who complained to a mutual friend that your presence made her feel uncomfortable suddenly approaching you in the grocery store and complaining that you don’t spend enough time with her. Or going from hearing “I have a boyfriend” to learning about a girl’s boyfriend from her landlord after the fact.
It’s really very simple, women are just as superficial as men are. Women will forgive nearly any amount of “creepy” behavior from an attractive man for the same reason men put up with the faults of attractive women. And vice versa, as in the case of neckbeards and their female equivalents.
@ Alex:
I guess it’s not “learned vs. innate” but “integrated vs. superficial”. If that’s just your style, practiced consistently, to be the “Johnny Cash guy”, you can get away with it. But it’s not good if people perceive it just as something you are affecting to pick up women.
Also, there’s a limit to how “weird” or outdated a style can be to allow you to get away with it. You can act like Johnny Cash, but you can’t act like Henry VIII or George Washington—or dress in a kimono as a white person.
Some things just seem very inauthentic, often for cultural reasons that may be unfortunate. For instance, there is what I call the “black professor accent”: the accent which enunciates every sound of every word just a little too carefully. The reasons for it are totally understandable (and you mainly hear it among older people), but it sounds false.
I think it’s the “He-Man Woman-Hater” kind of attitude. Or focusing on how to be a real man with a real beard who eats real food and drinks real liquor. And whose ideal is some kind of cross between Ernest Hemmingway and Sean Connery. Including the idea that what women “really want” is to be treated roughly and slapped when they get too hysterical.
>It’s really very simple …
I suspect what stereotypical nerds and stereotypical feminists have in common is a dislike of simple things.
@Alex:
Re: rock culture. Vox pretty much answers this, and it’s analogue to the genuine feelings behind “fake geek” anger. The rock fan that appears to have taken on rock culture because they love rock is authentic. They personally understand and identify with the behaviors that come with the visible markers of it. (Also there’s less likelihood of cultural appropriation muddling things up at this point in rock history)
Re: “need to know their station” rhetoric. I’m not defending it. I agree that it’s fucked up. Authenticity culture is rooted in labelling and categorizing people, and needs for them to stick to those categories. Which is one of the reasons I don’t give much weight to authenticity in pop culture.
Re: “undesirable form of masculinity.” Masculinity that sneers that everything feminine (ain’t no time to care about my looks, that for sissies!) could easily blur into hatting all things feminine, including the thing defined as its epitome/source, women.
So people who embrace feminine-coded activities like caring about their hair, fashion, makeup, etc., like pretty male celebrities, are less likely to dismiss women’s perspectives. They’re seeeensitive. They caaaare about you. They notice that you’re beautiful, even when you don’t think you’re beautiful. (paraphrased from One Direction’s first hit)
If classic stoic masculinity abhors that, then what does their idea of providing for a woman even mean? Especially in modern times, when women provide the essentials for themselves, then men need to provide new things, like emotional support and empathy.
Also, I agree with Dr. Dealgood. Hot people can get away with a lot more than un-hot people. Have, say, Robert Pattinson show up in a stained T-shirt and boxers, ruffled hair, 5 o’ clock shadow in full force, and fedora/trilby, and you get a horde of fangirls squeeing over the sexiness.
(I mean, we’ve got a thread in this post about how disliking people with punchable faces.)
Maybe to some extent that’s true, especially in terms of grooming and general self-maintenance — though “humane sense of equality” is a step too charitable, I think.
But nerd fashion is a thing. It was a thing even before every hipster in Portland started wearing an Atari T-shirt one size too small.
No, this is off base. Jocks — to the extent that there is a jock culture, at least after high school and outside pro sports — don’t do the fake chivalry act. There is a subtext in some readings of the trope that “m’lady” will drop the act under pressure and start acting like a bro, but that’s wrong too; bro culture is a culture, it’s not some kind of primitive behavior to which men default, and “m’lady” won’t have the exposure to it he needs to imitate it any better than he’s imitating an 18th-century aristocrat.
I’m not saying that there aren’t some aspects of “know your place” floating around w.r.t. nerds, but this isn’t how it plays out.
“The hard truth is: they want him to be himself and be likable, charismatic, funny, smart, polite, etc.”
This is a big problem not only with dating, but with life in general: everyone says “be yourself,” but if that self doesn’t happen to be smart, charming, funny, confident, etc. then don’t expect to get anywhere in your career, with the opposite sex, etc.
Strangely enough, “be yourself” can be a weirdly aggressive, selfish thing to say to a person, though it sounds accepting and kind.
At its most well-meaning/helpful, it means, “be the best you you can be.” In other words, don’t necessarily stay exactly the same, but find the attitude, fashion, etc. that works for you. Everything looks better on hot people, true, but it’s also true that some haircuts, styles, attitudes, etc. are more suited to certain head shapes, body shape, personalities, etc. and “being yourself,” can just mean “be the best you can be, given your particular configuration.”
Less helpfully, lurking behind many “just be yourselfs” is a subtle “don’t get beyond your station,” I think. It is almost a way of saying, “my pattern recognizer knows the best people for [promotion, sex, friendship, marriage…]; now don’t go trying to muck it up by pretending to be something you aren’t. Reminds me of the story (which turned out to be fake) of the Chinese man divorcing his wife who gave birth to ugly children (as the story goes, she had had plastic surgery and he never knew). And this is why, I think, plastic surgery only looks good to the extent it isn’t perceived as plastic surgery.
In other words, on some level, I think some people resent “fake-it-till-you-make-iters,” and arguably not entirely without good reason: after all, until they “make it” the person is, in fact, being fake. I don’t like that way of thinking, but I think it sometimes underlies the less generous form of “be yourself.”
I think “be yourself” is supposed to mean “don’t desperately try to hide literally everything that makes you you“. That is — feel free to fake confidence, but don’t fake your entire personality, as that would be exhausting, and you would end up stuck with people or jobs you hate.
@ Nita:
I think it goes both ways.
What you’re saying is the defensible motte. And it’s what I agree with.
What onyomi is saying is the bailey, which is the message often received in practice.
I think the benign interpretation of “be yourself” is “you’re basically alright, but your anxiety is screwing you up”. The problem is that people don’t know how to just stop being anxious.
@nornagest
I guess I was thinking of jock in the Petyon Manning sense, where they actually go out on the traditional types of dates, and so open car doors, hold doors open, pull out chairs, take jackets, offer their own jackets, pay for meals. etc.
But that just kind of goes back to body language confidence. A jock doing it like they were taught by their mother/grandmother, assuredly, feels different from when a smarmy dude or a nervously clumsy dude does it. (to varying degrees of reception and interpretations of motivation)
Re: “be yourself”….
Mrs. Agronomous has definitively informed me that every time my female friends told me that, what they meant was:
“Be yourself, but dress like someone else.”
Solution: do BJJ and striking. The fun rolling will keep your attention and will get you used to an opponent exerting themselves against you.
I’ve started doing some stuff with striking, and while I am complete garbage, and not doing full-force sparring yet, I freeze up less than I expected I would.
The advantage of lifting is that if you’re doing it right, it’s safer than full-contact martial arts. That’s a big if, though.
Right. I agree that boxing is best if you can hack it, but there are lots of reasons people can’t–apart from the head trauma thing, being nearsighted (common around these parts, I imagine–it’s what got me) makes it very hard and increases your risk of detaching a retina.
So grappling is a second-best option. I wrestled for a while, and maybe I was just starting from an exceptionally low baseline, but pretty much from the beginning I was sparring at a level (not of skill, I mean, but intensity and lack of structure and so on) that required me to deal with fear and develop some wholesome aggression. (For my second Starship Troopers quotation ITT, “that isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important-it’s just like the trembling of an eager racehorse in the starting gate.” Just so.). I have only a tiny bit of experience with judo and none at all with BJJ, but I expect they would be pretty similar, depending on the coach.
“We need to invent a martial art when you are allowed to do fun stuff to each other from day 1. ”
SCA combat–simulated medieval foot combat–comes pretty close. You get to hit someone over the head with a sword, assuming he doesn’t manage to block with his shield. Whether it’s sparring from day one would depend on the instructor, but it’s full force sparring from pretty early.
Yes, but that is so obviously unreal. LARPing. I love watching in TV Jown Snow training the recruits of the Night Watch but doing SCA isn’t just like doing standup D&D?
I mean, 25 years ago, I was one of the guys in D&D (AD&D) club rolling dice and yes I was of the stereotype that is common there, the guy with horrible clothes, haircut, and social skills, which type is described as dorky, neckbeardish or nerdy. And I didn’t really understand myself and I didn’t really understand others as well there, but I sense we are somehow not doing life right.
Anyhow, long story short, I think we were so much into fantasy because we wanted to escape reality because we sucked at certain aspects of it.
So I went to improve myself in various ways, mostly physical, and I developed a strong immune reaction against fantasy escapism: it is a sign that one aspect of one’s life is not in order. Now my fence is not fully watertight, sometimes I do engage in fantasies about some kind of new tribal vikingish barbarism but try to keep it in check.
So when one does boxing, that is easy to think it is are improvement, because it is close enough to a bar brawl, which I don’t intend to participate in, but the psychological improvement of not being afraid of aggressive large guys is something entirely real.
LARPing would feel like escapism again and thus denial. But then again it can be the SCA is not just LARPing.
An alternative could be HEMA. It is still not very useful for real life, but not LARPing either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-eHZydEhJ4 again of course it is possible SCA is not LARPing either I really don’t know it.
I haven’t done LARP combat, but I gather it’s with padded swords. SCA combat the swords are made of rattan, which is pretty much like wood in its characteristics. Blows only count if hard enough to injure through armor if struck with a real sword (as judged by the person hit). Fake swords and real armor mean you can really fight.
It’s artificial in some ways–no wrestling allowed, for instance. But it’s exhausting and can be fast and feels pretty real.
@ David Friedman:
How does this work? If it’s just by the honor system, things can’t be too competitive. You not only have intentional bias but unintentional bias.
I used to do fencing in high school, and there of course you have the electrified system of lights and buzzers. Before that (and still often used by my instructor in practice and in large groups where there is a shortage of equipment), they used a system of four judges, one in each corner. Points were awarded by majority decision, with the referee as the tiebreaker.
People hit harder when points are being given by human judges, since you have to really get a good hit in to convince a judge. Triggering a spring is easier.
Of course, foil and sabre fencing also the concept of “right-of-way”, which is confusing. But that’s judged by the referee. (The purpose of the concept is to decide who gets the point if the two fencers strike each other at the same time. Epee fencing says both get the point and dispenses with right-of-way.)
Where I live, if you want to sound world-wise you’d say “the progressives in the US are more conservative than our conservatives” or something like that. Which is to say that this blog, of all places, is my only point of contact with thoughts from whatever you hold to be the opposite of “progressive” in the political spectrum.
So I guess what I’m saying is that observing a Universe in which at the same time it is true that $I know from prior comments, that “TheDividualist” is not an idiot$ and $”TheDividualist” uses phrases like ‘a brain incompletely masculinized’ which only an idiot would do hereabouts.$ is very enlightening for me. And I mean this as a sincere compliment.
To be sure, the new information is not $other smart people endorse different worldviews than myself$, that is trivial, it is $there are smart people, that endorse this particular worldview$. Having realized this, what does it tell me about this worldview? So, to bring this to a full circle, once you conceed “a functioning pattern-recognition module”, shouldn’t you be more careful about dismissing whatever worldview that module appears to be “trapped” in?
>Where I live, if you want to sound world-wise you’d say “the progressives in the US are more conservative than our conservatives” or something like that.
For most of Europe that would only be true in the strictest political sense and mostly just economic policy: universal healthcare, paid maternal leave and all that. And I think most Europeans just consider these pragmatic stuff taxpayers get and not a moralistic stuff for the poor.
But if you look at culture before the astonishing refugees-are-welcome period changed it, there was none of the US Progressive Holy-Moral-Crusades attitude. Most Europeans were just cynical about politics and mostly minding their own business. Even today, the hysteric political correctness, SJWery, about gays and feminism is still far less in Europe. The eggshell-walking, tongue-watching that characterizes work or school in the US does not really exist, I worked over 15 years in office jobs in various European countries and never ever ever had a feminist at work report me to HR for saying something insensitive or nothing even remotely like that.
So I would say, culturally US Progressives are from an average European angle far-left, far-progressive.
Economically, yes, Europe is statist. But that is not a Progressive trait, that just how things are done. Universal healthcare does not carry the mood of bleed-heart for the poor, it carries the mood of I pay enough taxes so I want to pay no hospital bills. It is selfish in general.
Statism doesn’t imply Progressivism – it is just a unique feature of American culture that conservatives are kind of anarchistic. But statist, paternalistic and yet conservative attitudes have a long history in Europe – just look at Bismarck, just look at how Churchill supported the NHS. This didn’t make them Progressive. Just statist.
Now, as for incompletely masculinized brains, there is a ton of research of how both prenatal and serum testosterone works. Amongst others, it makes you “not too nice”. Now, Scott can be I think realistically characterized as “too nice”. Why could that be wrong? Because you could sacrifice your own interests or your own in-group and ultimately you could too-nice to exactly the wrong people. So I don’t see why would it be so that usually idiots say things like this. If you read websites like the Art of Manliness it is clearly non-idiotic. If you read Jack Donovan’s The Way Of Men (La Voie Virile, whoa, that is a brutal one, but clearly non-idiotic. And one good way to start with the research is Kemper’s Social Structure And Testosterone. It is 25 years old – sociobiologists have figured this out already a generation, and yet it is even today not common knowledge.
The problem is prejudice. Specifically the kind of prejudice that at high school practically every geek thinks the jocks are idiots, because if he did not think so he would feel inferior and that feels bad. After all the jocks are happier. Popularity, girls, all that. This carries over into assuming anything that sounds even remotely jockish is probably stupid. But that is mostly just a prejudice. Not-nice, even unethical, that can be, yes, after all it has hints of aggressiveness and competitiveness, that is a part of the way of men. But that is not the same as stupid. The funniest part is those geeks who happily geek into wars, military tech and von Clausewitz and then assumes the guy who behaves a bit like an aggressive bull or the guy (like me) who does not always fully disapprove of that is stupid. As if it was not fundamentally the same thing!
Sounds true.
One thing though. If it is all about being nice to the right or wrong people, something seems to have gone wrong on the way. Basic alpha-male niceness reasoning suggests as far as I can understand to be nice towards women and agressive towards other male. But what we observe is agressiveness towards women and camaraderie among the supposed alphas. “Bro before ho” as discussed elsewhere in the thread is an example.
Where did you get the idea that the self-appointed alphas are nice to women?
A large part of the red pill is to STOP being nice to women a priori, and start being half-as-nice in reciprocation. If a woman gives you two compliments, you give her one. If she gives a case of beer, you give her a pack of skittles. Every time, reciprocation should come after niceness from the woman.
Another part is that in the red pill view, women are to be regarded as non-agenty – similar to children. They may posture for agenthood, sure, but red pill advises to ignore that and patronize them.
“Where did you get the idea that the self-appointed alphas are nice to women? ”
You misread me there. I wanted to say that is what I would expect of an alpha as opposed to what I observe.
Being alpha is all about getting women. Being nice to women does not get women.
(In the olden days, being nice did get you women, but the niceness was directed at the woman’s parents, to show that you would be a reliable, responsible, good husband. Now that women are free to choose their own mates, this approach no longer works.)
I still think the whole “nice to women” thing is a red herring that a lot of PUAs latched on to. I’ve been helpful/nice/supporting to women in my life for decades, and never had any trouble finding willing partners- as the PUA community suggests elsewhere, it’s mostly in standing out from the crowd, personal confidence, and general good looks and grooming.
After that, I imagine whether you’re nice or an asshole is a lot less relevant. Another way of saying this is that niceness doesn’t matter- it’s good on it’s own, but it doesn’t help much *or* hurt one’s chances.
@Andrew,
It really depends on the scene.
In Day Game, which is the closest to “old-school” dating behavior, being (somewhat) nice can be useful. Your main goal in a day approach is to start a conversation without looking like a rapist. You can and should tease a little but if you come off as rude or pushy you have lost.
In Club Game, the birthplace of PUA, it’s exactly the opposite. You need to be pushing boundaries or else you will go home alone. That’s where neg hits, aggressive kino, smoking as a tactic, etc all come from. The club is an unpleasant and brutal environment and you need to be an asshole if you want to get laid there.
Either way, being too nice is more of a concern than being too rude. Even a day approach is outside the bounds of normal politeness.
I still think, that “alpha” is a very unfitting biological analogy for this kind of behaviour. Within the “alpha” “beta” “omega” analogy, why would you want to assert your dominance over the potential partner rather than over potential rivals?
Rule 1 is “be memorable”. Stand out. Mystery famously achieved this by peacocking, but later iterations of PUA seem to have realised that telling socially awkward young men to dress in a fashion that looks patently ridiculous is just asking for trouble.
In a world where deferential treatment of women is the norm, cocky assholes are memorable.
“In a world where deferential treatment of women is the norm, ”
We must be living on separate planets. Or, more likely, continents.
Being alpha is all about getting women. Being nice to women does not get women.
It’s really sad how “don’t suck up to women with the obvious intention of getting into their pants” gets read as “don’t be nice”.
Though apparently telling someone their brain is insufficiently masculine is a bannable offense, and I can certainly see how that sounds insulting (even I, a not-very-manly man would find it insulting), I, personally have a kind of stereotype in the opposite direction: I find I don’t often like or have a ton of respect for extremely masculine men or extremely feminine women. Many of the nicest, most reasonable, most intelligent, most interesting people I’ve met in my life have been kind of androgynous and/or gender atypical.
This is not to say, of course, that there aren’t plenty of very accomplished, smart, virtuous masculine men and feminine women, just that my anecdotal experience is to find it somewhat less likely.
If I were to posit a just-so-story, it would be that very masculine men and very feminine women strike me as being more ruled by their hormones than their intellects. Relatedly, I think I find it harder to make friends with very masculine men and very feminine women because I feel like the sexual dynamics (competitiveness in the case of men, mutual attraction or the lack thereof in the case of women) tend to loom too large in the interpersonal interaction. Like, it feels like the world of “ladder theory,” which is sort of not a world I like living in.
Also interesting to note that many gods and other spiritual creatures in world religion tend to be androgynous or even explicitly hermaphroditic (see Ardhana Isvara). Of course, to some extent one can think of this as just wanting to get around the weirdness of angels having penises and vaginas, but I think it’s more than that: perfected beings are complete unto themselves and have a more harmonious balance of feminine and masculine characteristics/yin and yang than humans.
>Though apparently telling someone their brain is insufficiently masculine is a bannable offense,
I’d rather not discuss the ban, because in my experience this leads to nothing and anyways, I’m of the opinion that whoever pays for the traffics can show the door to whoever else he likes, no questions asked. So please see the following as a response to the comment and not the ban:
>and I can certainly see how that sounds insulting (even I, a not-very-manly man would find it insulting),
I feel differently. I don’t even believe that there is such thing as an insufficiently masculine brain. These words have little meaning. Like I said, to use them, one had to live in a very different set of values than me and being devalued within the other’s set of values would probably not hurt me in any way, because it is nothing I value myself. This does not change when The Dividualist explained his worldview. I can now see intellectually where he is coming from, but emotionally it still means nothing to me.
It’s just a nerded-up way of calling someone a pussy faggot. Why allow one and not the other?
I’ve been looking for an excuse to ban you for a while, and it’s unfortunate that it has to be an anti-me post since it will raise accusations of bias, but I’ll take what I can get. Banned.
You mean you’re not claiming bias? Honestly, I’d have an easier time accepting that ban if you were. Anyone can see that it’d piss you off, and it’s widely accepted that pissing off a blog owner on their turf is not conducive to an account’s long-term health and well-being.
But within Dividualist’s frame of reference, warped though it may be, that post would have been both true and necessary (or at least productive). Only “kind” is questionable, and he could have been a lot ruder if that was what he was going for.
(By way of disclaimer, I don’t endorse Dividualist’s views.)
Why do you think it’s any kind of defense that he sincerely thinks it’s true? Isn’t like 90% of this blog about the importance of having very, very good reasons to think you’re right, especially if you’re going to go mess with other people’s business based on your beliefs (giving advice counts)? He expressed two beliefs in the post that lead to banning, one of which was a value judgment he couldn’t have any evidence for, and the other one so obviously simplistic it can’t possibly have undergone any serious scrutiny at all.
Because otherwise the “true” gate in the comment policy is either an “agrees with Scott” gate or a “boringly mainstream” gate, and I don’t think Scott wants either one. I definitely don’t.
@ Nornagest:
That depends on whether you interpret “disagrees with Scott” as “says something Scott suspects isn’t true but is not sure” or “says something Scott thinks is definitely false”.
If someone turns up in your comments section and says, “Well, you’re only saying that because you’re not a real man” are you not banning them before they have even refreshed the page? I don’t know what other issues our host has with this dude – perhaps it is anti-right bias – but if you want to stick around on a website, don’t make fun of its owner. That’s not complicated.
For what it’s worth, I maintain that Meditations on Moloch is the best essay I’ve ever read, on grounds that it makes prisoner’s dilemma intuitively salient, a nigh-impossible feat, in 20k words. The only downside is that I’m vaguely disappointed since every new post isn’t quite as life-changingly good, although Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable and We Are All MsScribe have had a large impact on me.
Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable is one of the worse ones IMHO the problem is that Scott takes this incredible level of moral goodness of Cliff way too seriously. He should have said either you are just advertising or you have some kind of borderline mentally ill self-esteem issue because normal healthy humans are generally happy enough doing a few nice things for their own in-group only once in a while and give no shit about how much other people are suffering or what crimes their in-group committed against the past.
So IMHO this is one of the things to be not engaged rationally. Pathological altruism is either a mental illness or advertising, but you don’t argue with it, there is no point. Do you argue with people who want to amputate their leg because they feel it is not a proper part of their body? No. It is a mental illness. Why argue with people who don’t think a healthy, read, fitness-maximizing and survival-helping sense of selfishness, both individual and group, is not a proper part of their mind? Cliff basically has no sense whatsoever of the basic “my genes/kids should survive and reproduce at the price of their kids/genes dying horribly and I am cool with that” biological motive. Most civilized humans suppress it, of course, but Cliff has it downright *missing*. Most people fight their devils, their demons, of this kind, that is what a normally civilized, moderately good person does[1], Cliff has a gaping hole where these demons are supposed to live. You can’t argue wit that.
Note: sending 15% of your income to buy mosquito nets in Malawi and similar EA stuff is not pathological altruism because you probably don’t miss that money much. It is probably still advertising or self-esteem balm, but anyway, it does not hurt you much. Feeling actual pain over moralistic issues, or pretending to, that is pathological altruism.
[1] fighting the inner demons, having multiple conflicting wills, not being an indivisible individual: being a dividual…
Evolutionary processes exist! The results they produce are correct! Do not open the Scary Door!
This was just a parallel, but I guess I should use them less often around here because they are misunderstood as a heuristic for determining what is ideal. I certainly don’t mean in that sense. Just one possible illustration of generally expected behavior, nothing more. I could have just as well written some historic process or no process at all and just point out people usually function.
I mean, the fact-value gap and thus the naturalistic “fallacy” is rather obviously bunk, or else you derive your values from philosophy unrelated to the universe where you are supposed to put them into practice and that is a beautiful FAIL, but values don’t just derive from Sacred Evolution but the totality of factspace. But evolutionary stuff is one good quick illustration of it.
Are you an optimizer or an event? Do you have opinions or merely beliefs? Do you wish to move the world towards a state or do you simply watch it go by?
If you prefer one state of the world to another, that preference necessarily derives from something other than the state of the world, else you could not distinguish it from other possible world states. The naturalistic preference heuristic becomes a fallacy when it claims to not be a preference heuristic but rather the absence of one. In making such a claim, it falsely demands excessive respect from people who see simple preferences as superior: what is simpler than the total absence of preferences?
In claiming that people who don’t take to naturalistic preference selection are mentally ill, you claim that the naturalistic method is the only valid method for preference selection, based on … the naturalistic method. Which is true enough as far as it goes, but doesn’t go particularly far.
Other people actually genuinely prefer different things than you do. They are optimizing under different constraints. Acknowledge it and either engage on a level where it is possible to communicate with them or leave them alone.
All of this is of course prefaced on the assumption that you answered “yes” to the questions at the top. If you answered “no”, this gap is not bridgeable.
(this post is hampered by the limitations of the English language and/or my knowledge of the same)
@Guy
>If you prefer one state of the world to another, that preference necessarily derives from something other than the state of the world, else you could not distinguish it from other possible world states.
So I am not part of the world? That would be interesting. How could any definition of the world not include our minds?
>The naturalistic preference heuristic becomes a fallacy when it claims to not be a preference heuristic but rather the absence of one.
Agreed – even naturalism is something discovered and I am not a full naturalist, that was just an example.
>Other people actually genuinely prefer different things than you do.
And that has reasons in the world, such as in them, me, or somewhere else. The difference is derivable from facts.
>Acknowledge it and either engage on a level where it is possible to communicate with them or leave them alone.
Maybe it is not very charitable to assume something like mental illness, but a nicer way of putting it is “how the heck can your preferences work so obviously against your own interests”.
The root issue is that everything is part of the world, so preferences should somehow derive from it, and it is at least theoretically should be possible that a given person in a given situation should have X preferences ideally. Otherwise we are engaging mystical philosophy that floats above the world and that gets old soon.
My point is, in the last few hundred years, Hume’s guillotine was so overused that we lost that comfortable, practical common-sense that we had before i.e. Aristotle. Ethics today seems so divorced from how life pragmatically looks like. Is this good? What is the use of having values that feel so other-wordly e.g. veganism? Why not have ethics that is halfway mostly instinctive and familiar anyway? Cutting with the grain?
It is the same choice that e.g. goes through the whole history of Judaism and Christianity. Are you going to go Rabbinic / Orthodox / Catholic and fundamentally accept this world and how it usually works? Or go Prophetic / Gnostic / Puritan / Pietist and reject it?
I mean, you as a human animal are inherently of this world. I think world-rejection is ultimately can only be a disorder, an illness, a malfunction in a brain that is so obviously of this world.
Don’t you find some value judgements are so obviously encoded in the world that they basically make themselves? Basically if you are a fish – don’t hate water.
In the world of cynical pragmatism, Tradition is out of favor because it repeatedly got its ass kicked. What kind of otherworldly idealist puts their money on a broken-down nag that hasn’t won a race in ages?
Sure, the world includes our minds. So in some sense, obviously our preferences are “part of the world”. But I take it Guy‘s point was that they are not necessarily part of the external non-mental world as it is now.
For instance, even in a society that rests upon slavery, it is possible for someone to think that slavery is objectively wrong. And yes, this is a belief about the “the world”: a belief that the requirements for a productive, happy, and prosperous society actually are such that slavery is incompatible with it, and that he would rather have such a society.
You are just assuming that people somehow have to value whatever serves their own interests. In fact, they don’t. It is a choice.
Moreover, the kind of tradition-worship you endorse often leads people to act against their own interests. But you justify it by saying “that’s the way things are; there is no other way”. The whole idea of “group selfishness” is a contradiction in terms. Sure, it is possible that your selfish interest the same as the interest of your group. But if they ever conflict (and they do, at least in the way you talk about it), why should they go with the group?
By what standard do they have those preferences?
That is the is-ought problem. I agree with you that it is interpreted way too broadly (as Hume in fact interpreted it), to strike down every attempt at making morality have anything to do with the world.
But the problem is simply that there is no possible way to argue from purely non-moral facts that a person “ought to” value any particular thing. If you include moral premises, of course, you can do it. But then you have to explain where you got those moral premises.
If you want to say it is “wrong” to amputate your own leg for no reason, you have to appeal to some standard, some value that people want to achieve. If your standard is: “the requirements for human happiness and prosperity”, then I would agree. But if that person doesn’t accept or agree with that standard, then he is not “bound” by it.
The idea that there is some universal standard that just has to be accepted by everyone is false. I really like this quote by Tarkovsky, recently put on Scott’s tumblr:
That is: man does not have to value anything in particular. It is up to him.
Now I myself am an egoist, and I think that this is not a pure idiosyncrasy on my part but something I could convince others to agree with if they agreed with my premises. Once you show that there is, in fact, no universally standard you “just have” to accept, it is clear that you can value anything at all. But if the bindingness of morality comes from your choice and your valuing, there is no reason why these should be subordinated to anything else. As Ayn Rand put it (in a tragic character’s words):
Moreover, everyone in fact does feel the draw of happiness to some degree, and I think they fail to pursue it for two reasons: a) irrational laziness and carelessness, and b) arguments that there is something “above” happiness”. But if it is shown that there is no good argument that you “just have” to do anything except pursue your own happiness, then people are free to pursue it.
But if someone chooses not to pursue life and happiness and rejects reason, then I don’t say that’s immoral. I don’t say that it is categorically wrong to want to die. I say that’s a pre-moral choice; he’s chosen not to be guided by morality and he doesn’t need it. On the other hand, if someone argues that there is a binding reason to do something against life and happiness, then I say this is irrational and immoral.
I think the ultimate reason that you are being attacked is your determinism: you believe that man is, like Tarkovsky said, “an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species.” What I find odd is the fact that more people don’t agree with you, since they are also determinists. However, I think they recognize on some level that such determinism does not justify morality; it invalidates morality.
That is a still a value judgment, and there is no number of non-moral facts that are ever going to “add up” to it, without anyone’s choice. The correct way to phrase this would be: “If you are a fish, you have to choose whether to value water or to die, but I can’t tell you which one.”
You’re also, I believe, being attacked for including quite a few too many things under “the water”, which we allegedly cannot survive without.
In the world of cynical pragmatism, Tradition is out of favor because it repeatedly got its ass kicked.
“Got its ass kicked” how? Certainly a lot of opinion-formers look down on the concept, but that in itself doesn’t prove anything much.
Losing wars.
If that’s the metric we’re using I think tradition is clearly winning.
@Vox, @Guy very important discussion, so let’s not have it on the lowest thread level. Next OT I’ll start a top level one with the tag #hume OK?
Not remotely. The relevant military powers have all been Liberal Democracies or Communist Dictatorships since WWII. Not surprising, given that wherever you look – Ancien Regime France, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, Imperial China – chronic military impotence is what led to the fall of the old order.
One of the many interesting things in J Storrs Hall’s Beyond AI is an evolutionary argument that it is pro-survival to have a precise mental model of the outside world but a very imprecise mental model of your own mind. He argues that this is where the (very useful) notion of free will comes from.
It’s been a little while since I read it, so I won’t try to provide a précis of the argument, but I remember that I found it at least quite plausible and illuminating.
Not remotely. The relevant military powers have all been Liberal Democracies or Communist Dictatorships since WWII. Not surprising, given that wherever you look – Ancien Regime France, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, Imperial China – chronic military impotence is what led to the fall of the old order.
Ancien Regime France, Austria-Hungary and Imperial Russia could hardly be described as “militarily impotent”, much less chronically so. In particular, France probably had Europe’s single most powerful army from the time of Louis XIV to the fall of Napoleon.
@ The original Mr. X:
Your examples are suspiciously out of date…
It reminds me of a joke from the silly movie Undercover Brother:
“Name one thing the Republican Party has ever done for black people!”
“They were the party of Lincoln, who freed the slaves.”
“Okay, name two things—lately!”
@ ChetC3
I would contend that the last clear cut case of a “traditional” power getting its ass kicked by a “secular” one was the razing of Japan in 1944 – 45.
Since then traditional powers have, for the most part, beaten or at least been able to hold their own against secular ones even in scenarios where they really had no right to.
And while I will conceded that the Cold War was essentially between two secular powers, it was the more traditional and less secular of the two that ended up winning handily.
Your examples are suspiciously out of date…
? “My examples” were actually ChetC3’s.
@ The original Mr. X:
Those empires were powerful a long time ago, up until the point when they weren’t anymore and collapsed.
1945 Japan was not a significantly more traditional power than 1945 America; we hear a lot about the samurai cult and so forth, but the context there is of a romanticized revival of the samurai ethos, roughly parallel to how Mussolini used the iconography of Rome. From (roughly) 1868 to the early Thirties Japan had been modernizing just as fast as it could, based on Prussian, British, and American models, and if there’s anything Japan’s good at it’s naturalizing other cultures’ stuff.
In many ways, in fact, I’d call the US more traditional at the time.
Those empires were powerful a long time ago, up until the point when they weren’t anymore and collapsed.
Yeah, but so what? All powerful countries decline sooner or later. If you want to show that there’s something wrong with traditionalism, “These empires were traditionalist, and don’t exist anymore” isn’t enough to get you there. You might as well say “Of course democracy’s bad — why else don’t the Athenian Empire and Roman Republic exist any more?”
Well, we do say that, and that’s why there are major differences between modern liberal democracy and the ancient greek kind. Modern liberal democracy is at best “inspired by” the older democracies because the older democracies were fatally flawed and died.
“But if the bindingness of morality comes from your choice and your valuing, there is no reason why these should be subordinated to anything else. ”
If. However, the idea that bindingness comes from a personal choice that was made arbitrarily and can be unmade arbitrarily is nonsense on stilts. Obligations are social and interpersonal, as much as promises and contracts.
@ TheAncientGeek:
And what makes social obligations, promises, and contracts binding? Your estimate of the consequences to you if you break them.
Replicator selection doesn’t stop.
The theory that “altruism is self-serving” is an interesting one, but the theory that “the theory that ‘altruism is a self-serving'” is a self-serving one, deserves an even closer look.
About Hobbes’ difficult idea. Suppose with some uncharity that Bob does not actually wants to solve a problem, just signal he is better/smarter than most people. He would do exactly the same. Sermonize about everybody having to change their ways and drive Flintstone cars instead of SUVs or something. Of course nothing happens. Next time sermonize ever harder about how irresponsible everybody is which makes him look even smarter and better and so on. Preacher/priest move.
The point is, I could only credit Bob with really caring if he instead of the moral exhortations, would ask questions like “OK, what would be a smart incentive to give people to drive Flintstone cars instead of SUVs?”
**One way to tell a secular Holy Joe is that he apparently cares not only what you do but also for what motives.** This is a very good heuristic. We should not only cut our carbon emissions: we should cut our carbon emissions for the righteous reasons, saving the planet, not for some selfish, spurious, even unfriendly reasons, for example, sending a fuck-you to Saudis and Russia or valuing thinness so much we take a bicycle or saving money or you name it.
For example, one very, very good way to make people like me to take the light rail to work is to do it like proper trains and have a bit more expensive first class cars that are reassuringly free from the underclass and make us feel like someone important. Have you ever seen them propose this? Why not? Because that is a horribly unholy motive. Regardless of whether it would do to carbon.
Quite the impressive portfolio…
Being hated by those types of people is probably one of the best compliments you can get 🙂
There’s more written about you in the Elder’s Hideout, some by people who know you from far back.
There’s a thread called “What If You Built a Scott Alexander Commune and Nobody Came”
New banners!
“the story of a functioning pattern-recognition module”
“either boring and obviously true or bold and innovative but also completely wrong”
“a great example of the difference between ‘knowing how to type’ and ‘knowing how to write'”
“nominally played by Joseph Gordon Leavit”
“Ostracize someone for their beliefs? Me? Never.”
“140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”
“doesn’t this guy have a dayjob as like a doctor or something?”
“a waste of intellect, and debasement of character.”
“on an entirely new topic each time”
“I thought it was a blog about science methodology until that post with the talking cactus.”
Yes. Good.
The talking cactus one is lovely (and the least mean-spirited), it should be a new banner 🙂
I like the 140 IQ one as well, though in my case it often feels like I’m doing “105 IQ discussion about 140 IQ issues”.
Came here to say this. Seems like its time for a new banner
he’s a fucking med student in IRELAND
I feel I should be outraged on behalf of my nation or something: not alone only a mere medical student [at the time], but one in Ireland so obviously he couldn’t even get into an American medical school for a job sweeping the floors 🙂
I have to say, though, I am immensely flattered to be associated with the type of company I’m keeping here in the comment boxes: “skews towards highly intelligent discourse”, “99th percentile aspergers/IQ”, “STEM-inclined dudes on the autism spectrum”, “140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”? I’m definitely mixing with my betters (under false pretences* as a mere female – some of those boys don’t seem to like the girls too much – and an Arts rather than Maths type to boot) here!
*Though I am glad to bolster my claim to a place here by saying that many on my father’s side of the family do indeed fall on the autism spectrum ranging from what used to be called Asperger’s to mild autism, and indeed the dudes tend to be good at, and interested in, maths.
I don’t know what your IQ is (I don’t know mine either), but you are definitely one of the people with the highest literary talent/skill in the local commentariat, which is one reason why I enjoy reading your posts. They are usually fun even when they are just snarky remarks.
For me the hilarious part is that imaginig Scott as the “pure” upper-classy sheltered guy with the general loftiness of Americans of this background mixing with the thicker aspects of Irish culture, the lads and lassies who practically say cunt as a punctuation, the thicker dialects, the whole Colin Farrell in the movie In Bruges type of stuff. Like, the “you’re a bunch of fookin’ elephants” part, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaPzN2gD3PQ imagine Scott as an onlooker in this scene. For me this picture is utterly hilarious.
When I said Western Europe doesn’t really have a properly Labor class culture, I somehow forgotten about Ireland. You can make such a movie Irish, you can make such a movie Polish or Serb, but you cannot make such a movie Danish or Belgian, it just doesn’t work, this is roughly what I meant. (Not for lack of trying- but Rundskop http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/rundskop_2012/ became a bad and entirely implausible parody of Labor culture obviously made by people who have no idea!)
For me the hilarious part is that imaginig Scott as the “pure” upper-classy sheltered guy with the general loftiness of Americans of this background mixing with the thicker aspects of Irish culture
Scott did his study in University College Cork (which reminds me: when I had my most recent doctor’s visit, the practice had a very nice Second Year med student doing her four weeks’ work experience who was studying in UCC – shout-out to your alma mater, Scott; she may even have been American herself, as she had an American accent, though that might also simply be the accent of the English she learned: she seemed to me to be of East Asian origin).
Which means he probably had a selection of Cork City, County Cork (including West – or as we in the South-East say in the local patois, Wesht – Cork), and parts of Kerry. Possibly even parts of my own lovely West Waterford, if the authorities exposed him to the wild and dangerous baby-eating ogres 🙂
Translation services may have been necessary (warning: coarse language, swearing)
Your mention of “In Bruges” also makes me laugh because there is someone on my feeds list who thinks it’s the perfect movie for Lent, and that is certainly something to reflect upon 🙂
I almost expected to see a “donate to my Patreon” link at the end.
This entire post is hilarious!
I skipped ahead because some of these comments made me sad. I never notice this kind of thing in the comments, I must have trained my brain to block these.
Funny story, the best comments section I ever read was on a hentai site. So hilarious and positive at the same time. Some of the better ones here reminded me of those in a over the top sarcasm kind of way.
It’s harder to be overly judgemental when it’s obvious to everyone that everyone else is reading/watching chinese cartoon porn.
So like, is anyone who dates someone, then stops dating them, then that person dates someone else, a cuckold?
Cuckoldry is like original sin. If you are ever cucked, you have always been a cuck in your heart.
Apparently. It also seems that in some places, being okay with immigrants coming to your country is being a cuckold.
Yes, participating in the dispossession of your people is cuckoldry. Just like a bird cucked by the cuckoo bird feeding the young cuckoo instead of its own offspring. (Indeed, the young cuckoo bird usually even kills off all the other young in the nest)
The equivocation between “your family” and “your countrymen” is precisely the point in contention.
As is the idea that allowing immigration means “dispossession” of “your people”.
Race is extended family. Immigration literally leads to dispossession–they end up owning property that could be retained for your own people, and they or their children are allowed voting rights–essentially they’re given shares in the government. Just ask the Native Americans if immigration dispossessed them.
Not to mention that immigration (particularly the third world variety) also tends to harm your actual children and grandchildren as well.
No it isn’t. This would be argument by vigorous assertion, except it not even particularly vigorous.
@ Anon:
So is the whole human race. What’s your point?
Why draw the line at “nations” (very arbitrary from a genetic point of view)? If you let people from another city move into yours, are you being “cucked”?
If you let your daughter marry an unrelated white American instead of her first cousin, you are being “cucked” far more extensively (i.e. there is a far greater relative genetic difference) than when the choice is between a white American and a black American.
Not if the immigrants produce more wealth and exchange it with you in trade. Do you think the United States would be as productive today if it had just had the native Indians in it?
The harm suffered by the Indians was to the extent that they were not allowed to assimilate and were actually literally deprived of property by force. Which is not a typical result of peaceful migration under an organized government.
Or are you saying that Indian culture was superior to European culture, and that they were entitled to keep all the Europeans out by force, instead of letting them buy grazing land and put it to more productive use? And Europeans quite often did buy Indian land peacefully, and Indians often did attack them without provocation; it’s not a one-sided story as the progressive narrative usually puts it.
I’m not aware that I, as an American today, have been harmed by any of the immigration allowed in my ancestors’ time.
Further problem: why am I supposed to care more about the guy who happened to be born nearby than the guy with the guts to move to a different continent and the brains to succeed there? An first-generation Indian immigrant shopkeeper seems much more admirable than most of the people I went to school with.
Eh, don’t discuss cuckoldry on this level, there is no point. It’s purpose is just that the much-insulted “outer right” finally found an insult to shoot back with that seems to emotionally indeed hurt a bit. The idea is just that lacking the ethnic loyalty and the territorial instinct is inherently unmasculine. Which is probably actually plausible, at the very least on that broad historical level that men used to have both. It is just to push too-mild conservatives to find their balls. It is just to take a bit of “revenge” for so many insults received, the “outer right” rarely, maybe it is a first time in decades, is able to find a back-insult that seems to actually hurt. And beyond that, the utility is that “cuckservatives” are apparently too terrified by name-calling from left and that is why they give in, so there is the idea to name-call them from the right as well to push back. It is mostly emotional and psychological and really no point in discussing what is real and not real cuckoldry.
It is possible to have very rational arguments against open borders and even against race-mixing, but then again those arguments don’t need to be about cuck or no cuck, that is an emotional term.
So that is two different levels / purposes.
BTW do you even really mean seriously that advanced people immigrating to a land with a primitive culture is the same as people from a primitive culture immigrating to an advanced land? And I didn’t even HBD now just culture, which is the easier case. Chinese immigrants are rather awesome. Then many others, not.
> Or are you saying that Indian(s) (…) were entitled to keep all the Europeans out by force, instead of letting them buy grazing land and put it to more productive use?
Weren’t they? wasn’t the land, theirs?
@ anon:
“They” weren’t a collective entity. Individual tribes had the traditional rights over certain pieces of land, and they often sold it to Europeans. At which point the other tribes were not entitled to try to expel the Europeans by force.
Moreover, you can say the whole idea of tribal ownership is dubious, and it’s not totally clear to what extent Indian ideas of land ownership matched up with European ideas. In which case why the Europeans ought to respect it—or what that would consist of—is much less clear.
If a tiny population of native tribes want to arbitrarily wave their hands over the whole expanse of the American continent and prevent anyone else from settling on it and developing it on the basis simply that they were there first, maybe Rothbardian libertarians ought to agree to respect their “property rights”. But it seems to me that the concept of property rights is being perverted from its productivity-sustaining purpose in that case.
Regarding the “territorial” instinct that TheDividualist mentioned, I always find it astonishing that the outer-right can get so worked up about protecting anonymous ethnic strangers (white race), but not care one bit about protecting anonymous class strangers (the working class).
Once upon a time, many working class men had the same sense of territoriality about class allegiances:
https://newsyndicalist.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/wobdog.jpg?w=434&h=434&crop=1
http://ep.yimg.com/ay/yhst-74742418910237/one-big-union-iww-poster-tshirt-3.jpg
To me, this sort of territoriality has always felt far more instinctual. You know, to band together with your actual co-workers, other people like them, people going through the same shit as you on a daily basis…
@ Latetotheparty:
But that is a significant part of what the “outer right” does. They say: this international class of rich bastards is undermining our culture and our standard of living by wanting to bring in millions of Mexicans to produce profits for them while destroying America. (Or substitute any country and the relevant foreigners.)
It’s about class solidarity and racial solidarity coming together.
This is actually not far off from what the labor movement did in practice (despite some lip service to internationalism): they were a major force for immigration restriction, as well as laws preventing striking workers from being replaced by (usually black) “scabs”.
VI
“Moreover, you can say the whole idea of tribal ownership is dubious, and it’s not totally clear to what extent Indian ideas of land ownership matched up with European ideas. In which case why the Europeans ought to respect it—or what that would consist of—is much less clear”
They ought to respect because of the Golden Rule: they wouldn’t want someone stealing their land form under them using the excuse of “we have a different concept of property..oh, and better weapons”.
@ TheAncientGeek:
If the Europeans thought they had a better concept of property rights and were right, they would not be vulnerable to the “Golden Rule” objection. Because then if aliens invaded in the name of imposing communal ownership of property, those aliens would be wrong.
Though exactly why the fact that the Europeans wouldn’t like the same thing being done to them, is supposed to be a reason for them not to do it, is a little mysterious. Especially since there was no one in that position. Moreover, there are plenty of things that are perfectly justified that you nevertheless wouldn’t want done to you. For instance, I think it’s a good idea to punish drunk drivers. But if I somehow had a major lapse of judgment and drove drunk, I wouldn’t want to be punished.
I enthusiastically accept my characterization as a STEM-inclined dude on the autism spectrum sitting around attempting to unpack societal problems like it was all a game of fucking Sim City.
This one made me vomit in my mouth a little, though:
“Go to the mountains and look. Get up early and see the sunrise. Stop anywhere and take a minute to look at the beauty of nature all around you. We are a small piece in the universe, but still a part. The plan is good. You are fine. You will succeed if you try hard enough. Everything you need spiritually is inside you and has always been there. Stop complaining.”
“You are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars, yoooouuu have a right to belongggggg” – yeah, that comment took me back to my 70s childhood (man) 🙂
That sounds a bit like something a dystopian villain would intone to you in a hypnotic voice.
Given how it was played to death on the radio stations, it certainly felt like being brain-washed by a dystopian villain.
And I see I misquoted; it should be “you have a right to be here”, not “belong”. Ah well, it was a long time ago and I have done my best to forget it! 🙂
Does this make you feel any better?
“He’s definitely a beta orbiting cuckold.”
Is this the same reference class as gay nazi muslim atheist communist terrorist?
SCOTT WHY U HAET ARE FREEDUM????
Sigh. I’m afraid ‘established permanent floating crap game in New York’ doesn’t quite fit.
*reads a list of reasons why he loves this blog, phrased in strangely insulting language*
*nods sliently*
This is a beautiful comment. Thanks for making it. You didn’t know it at the time, but you were speaking on my behalf as well. 🙂
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-fallible-mind/201601/why-ted-cruz-s-facial-expression-makes-me-uneasy
Actually related (at least in my mind), I swear:
This article describes how many people have a visceral dislike of Ted Cruz beyond what any of his actual actions or positions would warrant, basically because he has a weird face.
I have actually heard people irl express this opinion: “I don’t know, I just hate that guy–he has such a punchable face.”
Apparently his former roommate now has a significant Twitter following where he says nasty things about Cruz in a way that is supposed to be funny. But the thing is, when I read his anecdotes about Cruz in college, it basically sounds like everyone is being cruel to him for no particularly good reason. They all just viscerally hate him, but little is mentioned to explain why he actually deserved it.
What I’m trying to do here, actually, is defend Ted Cruz: in theory, at least, I think most of us recognize that physiognomy is pseudoscience–you can’t tell much of anything about a person’s character by looking at the shape of their face. But it’s also instructive to consider why physiognomy appears independently in many world cultures: because people have a very strong intuitive sense that they can, in fact, judge a person’s character by his face.
I’m not talking about body language–to some extent I think one can intuit real information about a person’s state of mind, level of confidence, degree of openness or hostility on the basis of body language and, of course, overt facial expressions.
I’m talking about the kind of thing which makes it very possible for person a’s genuine smile to be interpreted as welcoming and person b’s genuine smile to be interpreted as unsettling, even though person a may be a psychopath and person b may just be born with a weird face.
Although I’m sure the average SSC reader is less inclined to make this error than the general public, I think this is something people should be more aware of in general.
Oh, and the relation to the topic, if it wasn’t clear, is that I feel like many of the above comments boil down to “Scott and many of his commenters just seem eminently punchable” (even if they are basing that more on an appraisal of tone and writing style than having actually seen his face).
And I think it also has to do with a certain hostility people feel toward logical analysis of things like social dynamics: if you can logically break down why some people are “punchable” and others just “seem normal,” then you are potentially undermining the evolutionary mechanism the tribe uses to weed out bad stock–ostracism of the weirdos.
Also, holy shit, his roomate was Craig Mazin from Scriptnotes? Are there only like a handfull of moderately famous people who all know one another?
Yep, Harvard.
Nope, Princeton.
Have a set of steak knives.
I’m no fan of Cruz, but I do sympathize with him partially. I have several good friends from college who were similarly hated by their classmates.
I do understand why a lot of people don’t like them, though I think it’s unfair, and what I have read about Cruz makes him seem like he would be insufferable.
I dislike Ted Cruz because of this:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ted-cruzs-iowa-mailers-are-more-fraudulent-than-everyone-thinks
and this
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/us/politics/ted-cruz-wife-campaign.html
and this
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/05/ted-cruzs-promise-that-big-donors-will-match-campaign-donations-could-break-rules/
and this
http://www.politifact.com/new-hampshire/statements/2016/feb/07/marco-rubio/rubio-attacks-cruz-role-lawsuit-defending-chinese-/
and this
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/06/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-falsely-says-cnn-first-said-ben-carson-wa/
and this
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/15/ted-cruz/gop-debate-cruz-says-he-voted-rubio-defense-spendi/
His actions speak louder than his face. And his actions state there is literally nothing this man won’t stoop to. Also, he’s Princeton-educated, yet, is still about as dishonest as Trump. His 95% incoherent foreign, tax, and monetary policy is also a major turn-off for me. Trump’s, compared to the rest of the GOP, is a massive turn-on.
“What I’m trying to do here, actually, is defend Ted Cruz: in theory, at least, I think most of us recognize that physiognomy is pseudoscience–you can’t tell much of anything about a person’s character by looking at the shape of their face.”
-[citation needed]. I suspect this, like IQ tests being culturally biased, may be just another evidence-free product of the left-of-center memeplex.
This is really not relevant, because I never said there weren’t good reasons to dislike Ted Cruz–just that his face isn’t one of them.
As for the legitimacy of physiognomy… I think it’s pretty clear from my other posts that I’m no defender of any “left-of-center memeplex,” but it is not taken seriously by any part of the political spectrum. Do you honestly mean you can tell me things about a person’s character based solely on the shapes of his facial features? Next you’ll be defending phrenology?
Steelmanning this into a glib comeback, sure facial features matter, or else acting would be totally different. File this under “body language is extremely underrated”.
I mean, I’m not saying facial features don’t matter–rather quite the opposite. It’s well known that handsome/pretty people, as well as tall people are generally judged to be more competent. And, of course, there are many actors who always get type-cast basically because they look like what a villain or a nice guy is “supposed” to look like. When deciding who to have sex with or play your lead character, then by all means, let the shape of their face or their height be a decisive factor; when picking a surgeon, or, say, a president, probably not such a good idea.
“This is really not relevant, because I never said there weren’t good reasons to dislike Ted Cruz–just that his face isn’t one of them.”
-Agreed.
Do you have any studies showing people to be unable to predict personal characteristics based on a simple glance at people’s faces?
“I never said there weren’t good reasons to dislike Ted Cruz”
You: “it basically sounds like everyone is being cruel to him for no particularly good reason.”
You could claim you never said there were no “pretty good reasons”, only that were no “particularly good reasons”.
“Being cruel to him for no good reason” does not imply that there are no good reasons to be cruel to him, only that, if there are, they are not the motive for the cruelty.
I always assume, when someone is vocally defending a candidate, they’re neither friendly nor open to speculation that other, secretive reasons may exist to be cruel to the person.
I can’t tell things by the physiognomy, but you can tell quite a lot by facial expressions, although I seem to be worse at it than average.
So you might interpret the behavior you are attacking as an error due to a correct policy. Certain facial expressions usually mean “I don’t like you.” Some people, unfortunately, have a physiognomy that mimics such expressions even when that isn’t what they are feeling. Other people, naturally enough, read the appearance as reflecting the feelings and dislike people who they think dislike them.
Obviously that’s only one example of what might be happening.
This seems a pretty plausible explanation for the phenomenon: movements of facial muscles do, indeed, tend to communicate some amount of genuine information, at least about mood, if not moral fibre: even babies known intuitively that bared teeth look threatening, upturned mouth with narrowed eyes indicates good will, downturned mouth with furrowed brow indicates distress/sadness, etc. etc.
But some people are just born looking more furrowed or smiley or frowny than average, and so probably are easily mistaken for actually having say, a cheerful personality if their facial structure naturally resembles a happy face, say.
It could be that Ted Cruz’s face causes people to dislike him because he is actually always thinking mean and nasty things and this is reflected in his facial movements. More likely, I imagine, even if assume Cruz is not a moral paragon, is that his skull and facial muscles just happen to be of a shape which people find subtly offputting, maybe because they create expressions which, in a more average-looking person, would indicate something bad.
I mentioned that baring the teeth is seen as threatening–so imagine someone whose lips and teeth and facial muscles are such that the teeth are prominent, and easily, frequently revealed, even when the person is not feeling any sort of aggressive emotion. This person would likely be perceived as more aggressive than he really was.
“It could be that Ted Cruz’s face causes people to dislike him because he is actually always thinking mean and nasty things and this is reflected in his facial movements.”
There’s something so oily about the way you freak-man antipathy for Cruz as some unstable superstition or lower order folk demonization.
How about supporting your candidate on his merits?
“There’s something so oily about the way you freak-man antipathy for Cruz as some unstable superstition or lower order folk demonization.
How about supporting your candidate on his merits?”
What does this comment mean?
“Do you honestly mean you can tell me things about a person’s character based solely on the shapes of his facial features?”
Halfway trolling (the studies aren’t terribly impressive), but:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1651/2651.short
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886913013214
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265661100136X
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/276/1656/575
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/06/29/rspb.2011.1193.short
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/12/1478.full
Ambiguous between attractiveness-type effects and facial morphology as indicator of personality/ability, but very interesting nonetheless:
http://cogprints.org/631/1/Facdom.html
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580383?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Some of the people around here who know more biology than I do may have something to say about this, but it doesn’t strike me as (ahem) prima facie unreasonable that there is a good deal of overlap between the things that affect facial symmetry and the things that affect intelligence and impulse control.
Separately, I reckon a president’s job–not just the art of getting elected, you understand, I mean negotiating treaties and working with the legislature and whatnot, the executive work of government–has at least a good deal in common with an actor’s job as well as a surgeon’s. If being perceived a certain way makes you a more effective leader, and if facial features change how you’re perceived (which is uncontroversial), having certain facial features may make you a more effective leader even if it has nothing to do with IQ.
Obviously, someone needs to fund a study in which world leaders are randomly assigned to treatment = kidnapping and plastic surgery vs placebo and compare policy outcomes.
This is an image of composite photos of people with high levels (positive and negative) of each of the five factors of personality:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4031/4234575748_beec7eeb8a_b.jpg
You still sure there’s nothing to physiognomy? How often do you expect that people could pick which of each pair corresponded to being negative / positive on each trait? I expect that people would do far far far better than chance.
Neurotic and unconscientious people have widow’s peaks? The latter also have bigger hair, which is not so unusual.
Also, on conscientiousness and openness, I don’t think I could predict. The others, maybe.
And this is separate from physiognomy, besides the weird widow’s peak thing.
It looks to me like most of the changes have to do with resting expression — but there is the widow’s peak thing, and I think I detect some differences around the jawline in the conscientious/unconscientious and neurotic/stable pairs.
@ Nornagest:
Yes, definitely my first impression of the source of these findings is “limited sample size”. Not to mention that the guy looks suspiciously white.
If you had mixed these up and said “guess which of these two is neurotic,” “guess which of these two is extroverted.” I doubt I would have done better than chance. Seeing the picture prelabeled I can craft ex post facto explanations like “yeah, hmm, this guy does seem a little more open somehow” or “yeah, I do expect the extrovert to have bigger hair…?” but I think these are just that: hindsight bias.
What’s more, these are supposed to be composites of people at one extreme of a spectrum or another. If, like most people, the person you’re looking at falls somewhere in the middle on most traits, how much more indistinguishable will those traits be simply by looking at the face?
I love it how the introvert has dark spots under his eyes.
Those all look the same. If they weren’t labeled and I had to say something about them, I’d say that *maybe* the bottom row looks slightly unhappier.
Why support a candidate who you’ve already determined people dislike on sight? Dropping the question of why his face has that effect for a second. Knowing what you know, why is that a face we should want representing all 300 million of us in a world crisis situation?
I like your comment a lot. I never realized people had such a negative reaction to Cruz’s face. Makes me sad.
I’m actually a Cruz supporter, and yet I have to agree… He really does have an extremely punchable face.
Part of me feels like I should have a sympathy cringe for watching people say things about Scott/SSC that they intend to hurt. Another part feels like I should try to take some of the comments to heart, as if they were legit critiques.
Mostly, though, I’m just lmao and trying to not fall out of the chair.
I will never understand why people yell at polyamorous men for being cuckolds.
By literal definition, if your wife sleeps with another man you are a cuckold. In a society that either disallows formal polygamy or devalues marriage, it is understandable to extend that to “if you let your girlfriend sleep with another man you are a cuckold”
I believe that the mental models of polyamory where this applies are, A: woman who likes to sleep around, with a harem of low-status men who will settle for a fraction of a woman because they know they can’t keep the attention of a whole one, and B: high-status alpha male who can keep a harem’s worth of women and doesn’t mind “sharing” them with a bunch of low-status men because they might as well be eunuchs for all they are going to be actually doing with said women. Neither of these mental models is entirely accurate as applied to real polyamory, but Scott describing himself as both polyamorous and asexual sort of matches to ‘B’ if someone wants to deploy “cuckold” as an insult.
I suppose, but it doesn’t seem like it’s an insult that could possibly carry weight with a self-described polyamorous individual. Regardless of their level of sexual desire.
I also don’t know if models based on power dynamics are as universally applicable as some people think they are.
It doesn’t matter if the insult carries weight with the target, so long as it carries weight with the audience.
And yes, I can see how “If any of Scott Alexander rubs off on you, you might wind up as a eunuch that women use for emotional security while going off to have actual sex with other men” would have that effect on some audiences. Probably not so much with rationalist types who would at least think about whether any of that is actually true [hint:no], but Scott’s audience and influence is no longer confined to rationalist or rationalist-adjacent circles.
I find myself uninterested in tracking down the source of the cuck-based insults and trying to figure out what audience their creators were going for.
Trump voters
The rise of “cuck” as an insult is one of the weirder things about politics lately. Two years ago I only ever saw it when I ran into, er, special-interest blogs on Tumblr.
The origin of the “cuck” insult was at therightstuff.biz and My Posting Career. I was there to see it take off. The audience the creators were going for were those despising Jew-created degeneracy in the media and enemies of Jeb Bush’s immigration policies (also, his Mexican wife).
Urstoff is being too broad. Yes, some Trump voters. But exclusively Trump supporters.
The modern political usage of cuck originated on 4chan/pol/. TRS, at least, was much later, and MPC was following 4chan’s lead.
If I recall correctly, it surged in use when people where mad at moot for banning GG talk, it was a reference to his (lack of a) relationship with Mallory Blair.
How high an IQ does the average 4chan poster have, anyway? Or does it just have good connections?
It’s not the average that matters.
/duck/, the Moldie Bros’ 8chan board, was an early vector.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150115152257/http://8ch.net/duck/catalog.html
Some choise thread titles:
OFFICIAL [REDACTED] UNDYING SLASH THREAD (cuck, MMF*, scifi, dino, gore, tweeting, Idaho, millennials)
PRINCE WILLIAM **CUCKED** BY LBJ, [REDACTED] FAGS BTFO ON A TRANSATLANTIC SCALE
THE CUCKOMORPHOSIS
Why is Natsoc a cuck tetish
All cucking aside…
/duck/ = /cuck/?
*just realized that people insult individuals to their face for reasons other than making the individual upset*
The thing is that a lot of this insults aren’t really “to his face”, most obviously the ones that are not adressed by him and clearly not from this comment section.
Insulting an asexual for not having sex is rather like insulting total abstainers for not getting drunk on Friday nights – that’s rather the point of the whole thing.
But really, when anyone uses “cuck”, it makes me deduct a large chunk of value from both their IQ and their age.
I think at least part of the deeper origin of this “cuck” thing, at least among the people likely to read SSC, is the fact that the breakdown of patriarchy means that men are no longer selected as mating material for their background, education, money/perceived ability to make money, and intelligence, at least not the extent that they were in, say, the 19th c. US and Britain. Not that these things don’t matter, but when women can either have their own career or rely on the state for support, there is less reason to choose a man for his ability to support. So they are more likely to choose sexy outlaw bikers over nerdy computer programmers, at least on the margins.
This dynamic, I think, is almost entirely encapsulated here, though that is not at all what people posting it expect to be the takeaway, I’m sure:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CX6sYVhUoAEA7SC.png
This may not entirely be a bad thing–why should women have to pick men they find unattractive in order to avoid starving? But at the same time, I think this is why the nerds are, to some extent, up in arms, and one reaction to this is to try to be more stereotypically masculine at the same time as they paradoxically hate on women who have desire sex with stereotypically masculine men.
I think this relates to the Trump voter thing: ridiculous as his antics may be, Trump is a very “masculine” personality for a politician. He doesn’t ask politely for what he wants, he grabs it.
To those inclined toward this way of thinking, asexual, nuanced Scott may seem a symptom of some broader emasculation of “the Western man,” I imagine.
“as they paradoxically hate on women who have desire sex with stereotypically masculine men”
-Where’s the paradox?
“Where’s the paradox?”
The paradox of wanting to become more like the type of man you don’t want women to like?
“The paradox of wanting to become more like the type of man you don’t want women to like?”
-This is a classic example of a non-excludable good. Nothing paradoxical about that.
I don’t know what you mean. Can you explain a bit more?
The cuck meme started on /tv/, not /pol/
>The paradox of wanting to become more like the type of man you don’t want women to like?
There is nothing paradoxical about it, pragmatically speaking: they want to have sex, sex partners are a limited resource; the hypothetical ‘nerd’ in this discussion wants more sex, and, perceiving both other competitive (‘attractive’) males and the females who desire them, as both complicit in their failure to be a sex partner to themselves, has resent to both, even, while seeking to emulate the former so as to attain the latter.
What a mouthful: more simply, they hate the player and not the game.
I’m saying that they want to become better players at a game they hate, which seems paradoxical to me, though I’m not especially invested in defining it as such.
*just realized that people insult individuals to their face for reasons other than making the individual upset*
The bit where, when someone insults you, you used to slap them with a glove and insist on pistols at dawn, isn’t because you were upset with them. It’s because you understand that a big chunk of status has just been transferred from you to them in a way that is going to make your life genuinely difficult going forward unless you get it back. And the bit where you didn’t have to do the pistols-at-dawn bit if you were a noble and they a peasant isn’t because a peasant’s insults can’t be upsetting, but because they can’t lay a claim on your status.
We do things differently now. Maybe that’s an improvement.
Most insults come from the giver’s value system, rather than the receivers. It’s simpler and avoids insulting yourself and your allies, I assume.
We’re all shmucks in someone’s value system.
Anyway, conservatives must choose: Cucks or Shmucks.
Women have all the power on polyamory, for the most part. There are two types of polyamorous men, the exciting guy, and the provider guy. The provider guy is more or less same as a cuckold, often coerced into polyamory because the woman gets tired of him sexually but likes their house, emotional stability, lifestyle, etc. Since men in general find it harder to get women, it tends to be asymmetrical. This can be reversed if the man is high status enough, but is rarer. So essentially the guy is made to accept the woman cheating on him in the guise of polyamory. It’s a self-delusion due to asymmetric power.
Yeah. On the other hand, if you are the “exciting guy” yourself, which I suppose is the self-image of the self-declared “alphas” you have no incentive to discredit polya and / or the “provider guy”. On the contrary, you could be thankful for the other guy providing services that would only cost you but to no benefit. So what the hell is going on here?
Simplest answer is probably that a lot of guys who like to paint themselves as “alpha” aren’t, or are at least insecure about it and aware that they could potentially end up holding the “beta” end of the stick.
As a socially conservative sort, I’d echo the reasons that Maware cited above and because I think it erodes public trust.
The exciting guy has little power either. He is replaced by another when the woman gets tired of him. Probably its because all the power is centered on the woman, which is why said alphas don’t like polyamory.
Most of the guys I knew who got into PUA, from the Mystery era till now, were nice guys first. I mean that in both the Nice GuyTM and ‘he’s a mensch’ senses of the phrase. If offered a choice they would have settled down with a high school sweetheart and been a reliable (if boring) husband. But that wasn’t in the cards, so they adapted as best they could to the new order.
So I can see them being angry that the same crappy situation that they were reacting to is getting crappier, even while they’re playing their role in accelerating it.
@Dr Dealgood
I resemble that remark more than I’d like.
I’m pretty sure there are a number of people who don’t fall into delineated power models in relationships.
Nuance is for beta cuckold orbitor faggots, bro.
Something something signaling status ancestral environment alpha!
Not the least of which includes all of the non-straights that would happily muddle up the dynamics in Maware’s description.
Non-straights have same power issues. It’s human nature, and it doesn’t go away if you are same sex attracted. You still have the promiscuous one and the captive one/house husband, and it still hurts as much when the one with the power abuses the partner with less.
@Maware:
This is more true of male-male relationships than female-female. What statistics I’ve seen have male-male relationships breaking down into one earning more money and the other doing more chores. In comparison, female-female relationships divide chores much more evenly. Women (regardless of sexuality) also seem to care a lot more that potential partners have similar levels of education and earning.
@dndnsrn — I find that surprising, and mildly suspicious. What’s your source?
@Nornagest:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/the-gay-guide-to-wedded-bliss/309317/ references a few studies.
Why do you find it suspicious?
@Maware
In my experience, which is admittedly limited, I see power fluctuating a lot between partners. It’s also a) not the only axis by which relationships function, b) the only thing at play when someone is hurt, or c) always present when someone gets hurt.
Even if I wanted to evaluate relationship dynamics through power alone, it’s complex enough that I am uncomfortable saying “Women always have the power in relationships of type X” or the equivalent for any other form.
I’m not sure. They may not think they do, but usually when something happens the power models get revealed quite quickly. Usually when someone gets jealous or feels neglected.
So, wait, this is…bad?
I know, right?
Yes. Of course it’s bad. Seeing society like Sim City means you’re dispassionate about it and treat fixing problems with it as a game and not a moral struggle against the Forces of Evil.
The proper response to social problems and injustice is moral outrage and empathy for the downtrodden. If you can be dispassionate it means you’re defective in that department and you don’t care about people, your heart is not in the right place. And that is what is most important, the worldview this kind of opinion comes from isn’t consequentialist but virtue ethical – your moral qualities are dependent on feeling the right way.
I suspect it also lacks a proper division between virtue ethics and consequentialism, i.e. good consequences are the result of virtue and bad consequences are the result of moral failures. The way to combat social problems is therefore not to try to understand and manipulate the system (the engineering approach) but to fight moral failings (“greed”, “racism”, “oppression” etc. ) and those who support them.
Seeing society as a complex system means you don’t get it and lack the moral sense all good people have. Being Good is not achieving good outcomes (consequentialism) but Fighting Evil!
I also suspect a lot of the “privilege” talk (when used as a weapon) is really about this: “You can only be rational and dispassionate about something if you don’t have strong feelings about it, and strong feelings are required to muster the proper will and committment (will solves things, not competence, because problems aren’t complex – just fight evil). To have the requisite strong feelings, you must have experience of oppression yourself. -> You’re being rational, so shut up.”
This is fundamental fault line – seeing passion as a virtue vs. cool-headedness.
“Oppression” is definitely a system thing, not an individual moral failing. Hence people calling for “systemic change”. But humans do fall into virtue ethics at every opportunity, of course.
Well… There is some truth to that. E.g., Scott can be dispassionate about racism, but not so much about anti-nerd sentiment. And obviously Scott tries much harder to be rational and fair than most people.
Another aspect of “it’s all a game to them” is that, while playing games, we often suspend moral judgment entirely. The objective is to win, and game characters, or even entire nations, can easily be sacrificed to gain a higher score.
Similarly, SSC commenters may suggest “solutions” like re-colonizing Africa or compelling women to produce more children by some coercive means. The possible mindset behind such ideas could be “it’s like a game”, “it’s a terrible but necessary sacrifice”, and “outgroup people aren’t people”, out of which “it’s like a game” is of medium charity.
There is some truth to the idea that dispassionate rationality is opposed to strong feelings, but I think what John Nerst was objecting to was the idea that when the chips are down, it’s more important to feel strongly about important issues than to be rational about them.
I agree that this idea can be seen “in the wild”, but it’s neither an inherent part of the SJ belief system, nor necessarily the motivation behind the comment John analyzed.
So sure, we can talk about this unhelpful idea, but we there’s no evidence that it’s what the SSC critic was thinking.
@Nita
Of course it’s not a certainty when I extrapolate thought from a single comment, I mostly used it as a seed for speculation.
It does seem you agree with me that the opinion expressed is something like “they talk about people’s lives as if they were an engineering problem, and that’s terrible”.
I guess we have different ideas of exactly why one would see it as terrible. I see it as mistakenly assuming that you need strong moral feelings towards issues “on the ground” to be effective in doing good, or just not properly separating the two at all.
I gather you see it more like a standard criticism against utilitarianism? “If you’re trying to optimise some number you don’t care about people, and I might be sacrificed next.”
Personally I don’t think an engineering approach to problems necessitates utilitarianism at all. I’m not really one.
Not quite. I’m thinking / guessing along these lines:
First off, “a game of fucking sim city” (in that tone) doesn’t map to “an engineering problem” in my mind. It maps to “a form of entertainment that is obviously not a suitable tool for modeling and solving real large-scale problems”.
Secondly, the average engineer or utilitarian tends to have more regard for human beings than the average player has for the imaginary inhabitants of their games, which leads to more care in considering solutions.
And thirdly, “engineering” implies total control of the system, which can be seen as simply an unrealistic assumption that will render proposed solutions worthless, and/or a sort of arrogance — seeing yourself as someone who should be put in charge of single-handedly rearranging society.
By system I mean it more like “mathematical” rather than “moral, social, idea-based”. And while things like “oppression” is spoken of as not a moral failing, not fighting it or disagreeing with the ideas describing it is certainly treated as such.
I also think ideas like “racism” and “oppression” are mentally processed, albeit subconsciously, as if they were moral entities that should be fought, not like an emergent phenomenon (like friction) that should be engineered away when desirable. The moral failing as an independent entity, “infecting” people who then must be fought. That also comes with the idea that it can be destroyed, unlike friction, which can only be circumvented. The solution is still a type of fighting, not a type of engineering.
Oh, certainly. I didn’t mean to say that part isn’t mostly true. I just think the take-home message of that actually is the opposite: you can only make good decisions about things you don’t have too strong feelings about yourself. That doesn’t mean you should be careless – you should care about making good decisions, but that’s different. I guess I do think it more likely that Scott would make good decisions about racism than anti-nerdism.
It can certainly seem that way, but this changes if the “win condition” is to satisfy moral principles as well as possible. Not an obvious point, though.
The last paragraph brings up things that are pretty extreme and, I trust, not supported by the vast majority here (sounds like something likely to come from people who are now banned). Of course non-central examples are commonly used to tar an entire category so it wouldn’t be surprising if such things were indeed seen as typical.
Well, that’s an interesting dichotomy. Society is clearly not a mathematical object, IMO, although it is a system. And there’s a reason why physics is the poster child of the Power of Science, while social sciences are the epistemological quagmire we all love to hate — our tools are adequate for physics, but not yet for complex systems like societies.
True. Animism is one of the oldest belief systems, after all 🙂
On one hand, that’s certainly a sensible idea. But on the other…
Imagine that we’re planning a referendum on the following proposed law:
(courtesy of Ancient Rome)
Predictably, many people born with anatomical abnormalities have strong negative feelings about this. Should they be forbidden from voting in the referendum, due to being so biased?
I’ll just gather my response in one post, it’ll be easier.
Winning a game is not unlike an engineering problem, at least a solo-game like SC. The difference between it and society is largely a matter of degree, not kind, although I expect most “normal” people to disagree with that. That’s why I think “perceive goodness through empathy (left) or common sense (right) and then support goodness and fight badness” is most people’s intuitive (not explicit) model. I also expect people to distrust a more detached approach since it’s not clear whose side you’re on. Rationality is dangerous.
Kind of, they do work for complex systems, like biological organisms and computers. The reason society is more difficult isn’t so much ontological as practical and ethical. The necessary experiments can’t be done not because they are impossible but because they are too expensive, time-consuming and unethical.
I wish engineering meant total control of the system, it would make my job easier. But yeah, absolutely, I think that’s what makes most engineering types dislike politics and rarely take part in it directly (I’ve got a post somewhat related to this in the pipeline, needs an editing run, though), politics is discouraged on LW, after all. Maybe critics of this place mistake idle speculation mostly done for fun for serious political proposals? I do remember a friend of mine treating the idea of discussing things for fun as idiotic.
I assume the romans thought these children posed some kind of danger? What one should do is of course find out if that is actually true, and if it is try to mitigate the situation the best way you can, by quarantine, insurance, whatever. (One thing I do like to fight is hypotheticals…)
This has to do with rights, which I see as hard rules imposed by broad consensus exactly to avoid the worst drawbacks of naive utilitarianism. We do have a broad consensus that we don’t kill innocent children, and it’s very rational to have this as a hard rule.
Let’s instead assume that a minority existed, A, who couldn’t coexist with another minority B (because A are allergic to B:s sweat or something) and were constantly fighting about who should make what concessions when. If one person were to make the rules regarding this, should it be an A, a B or someone not in either group?
I believe you, but we’re doing text interpretation here. We’re trying to guess what the original author meant, not what you would have meant if you had said it.
And also, perhaps, because it’s populated by a huge number of intelligent agents and groups, all working hard to game any system you set up and shift the outcome in their own favour?
Two things:
1. Some of the people here are 100% serious — e.g., I doubt David Friedman would have bothered writing a whole book on his favoured political system just for fun.
2. Yes, a popular view is that the fun mode of conversation consists of reinforcing each other’s opinions, and prolonged disagreement is a failure mode (that’s why you only discuss safe subjects like the weather with strangers, to avoid accidentally calling them wrong).
That’s not equivalent to my hypothetical. I meant to bring up the (very common!) situation when we can either impose a small cost on the majority, or a large cost on a minority. Since the potential loss for the minority is larger, they will tend to express stronger feelings. But if we exclude them from decision-making on those grounds, we will (IMO, unfairly) privilege the majority.
Winning a game is not unlike an engineering problem, at least a solo-game like SC. The difference between it and society is largely a matter of degree, not kind, although I expect most “normal” people to disagree with that.
Wouldn’t there be a pretty big difference in kind from the fact that society at large is a very non-solo game?
I read “like it was a game of fucking sim city” as implicitly followed with “…instead of a proper game like football”.
To society at large, that’s how the game of society is supposed to be played. By teams, with a coach, a star quarterback(*), players who do what they are told, legions of fans, and cheerleaders to make everybody suitably enthusiastic about the fact that we are Defeating the Other Team that is Wrong. Having some nerd do a bit of analysis on a spreadsheet he’s running on the side and saying “Huh, look at that, the problem we were struggling over just went away”, sucks the life and the spirit out of the whole process.
And leaves most people feeling that they don’t have anything useful to contribute. Even if that turns out to be objectively true, they won’t embrace their new role as Sims when they would at least be Fans if we were playing the right game.
*OK, “star forward” for you fans of the Other Sort of Football. You all still need to work on the “cheerleaders” aspect – or maybe, given the demonstrated enthusiasm of some of your fans already, it’s best that you don’t.
Sure, that’s part of what you’re trying to study. I don’t see it as changing much in principle.
I don’t know enough about David Friedman in particular to know what he does, but what I mean is that if you really want to change politics for extrinsic reasons rather than intrinsic interest, you become a politician or an activist, not a political theorist. Just because you mean something doesn’t mean you necessarily pursue it actively.
Completely agree, and that probably leads to overestimating the seriousness of what people say. I like picking things apart, but when I do so people naturally think I do it because I want to push an agenda – that arguments are always a reflection of material conflict. Seems like Scott does the same, leading to him being construed as both an SJW and a right-winger at once.
No it’s not equivalent, because what I was talking about wasn’t so much that kind of situation, so a I substituted one more suited to explaining it.
You’re talking about voting, which is different from rational decision-making. When one person is making the decision, they need to take everyone’s needs, as well as the facts (this is important, since strong emotions is likely to make it more difficult to rationally evaluate how things actually are) into account.
Consider it like this then: when setting the speed limits on all the roads in a country, who should do it? Someone who has lost their family in a car accident and therefore will overvalue safety over convenience compared to most others, or someone who hasn’t ever been close to danger in a car, and therefore vill overvalue convenience over safety? My answer is someone who doesn’t have strong feelings on the matter themselves but takes care to consider everyone’s interests.
That really depends on your outlook. I don’t see it that way, and I think it’s destructive to do so. For someone trying to shape the rules of society, seeing it as a solo game with the goal of maximising people’s well-being is essential. Treating is as a game where your main objective is to beat the other players is very bad and leads to a lot of shit. I want politicians to play Sim City, not Risk.
For the rest of your post, I agree completely. Football vs. SIm City is a great illustration of the different between fighting and engineering. Fighting is more engaging, but that’s really unfortunate.
“if you really want to change politics for extrinsic reasons rather than intrinsic interest, you become a politician or an activist, not a political theorist.”
Adam Smith. Karl Marx. Keynes. Milton Friedman. Ronald Coase.
To take the last, with whom many readers may not be familiar. When he wrote an article arguing that the radio spectrum, like other scarce goods, should be allocated through the market, it was an obviously crazy idea. It’s now, in an imperfect form, government policy.
For a smaller example, but one that has affected most of us. Airlines used to deal with overbooking by failing to carry whichever passengers were last in line, compensating them with (I think) a refund and a free ticket on the next flight. Julian Simon pointed out that that was an inefficient solution, since the cost to some passengers of switching to the next flight was negligible, to others large.
He eventually persuaded the airlines that, when they overbooked, they should run an auction–offer to pay whoever was willing to accept their offer to give up his place. That’s now how they do it.
And, while it’s hard to prove, my guess is that the population hysteria of the 1960’s did less damage than it might have because Julian Simon was willing to stand out against it.
That’s a good enough steelmanning of the “fucking game of sim city”, thanks.
(I wonder if the author of the original comment will read this, and stare at all these nerds debating over a dismissive one-liner he wrote months ago)
Quote dissection is fun!
>The proper response to social problems and injustice is moral outrage and empathy for the downtrodden.
I.e. signalling goodness either for status gains or as a balm for a wounded self-esteem. Outrage as a subset of moralism is uniquely well suited for this. Outrage is moralising LOUD, ensuring a lot of people hear it. It’s always about the person, not the issue. It is probably an outgrowth of the highly pietist, highly Holy Joe type subsets of American religion because the whole concept is somewhat alien from Europe, at least from the periods before much American influence, i.e. before 1950 or so.
Moral outrage and empathy for the downtrodden is alien to Europe? Are we talking about the same Europe here? The one where worshipping some guy named Jesus, a frequently-outraged defender of the downtrodden, used to be mandatory?
I believe European cultural values have changed just a tad from the time that worshiping Jesus was mandatory.
Not to the extent that moral outrage and/or empathy for the downtrodden are present alien to the continent, but I’d want to ask, exactly which downtrodden and who is the target of the postulated outrage.
Your blog says you’re not down with manipulative narratives. But that is what you’ve given us. Why are you trying to pin anti-progressive, anti-governement, anti-intellectualism on the SJWs when we all know its a reactionary shibboleth; that central planners, meddlers and nannies, want to control your every move.
True, but you can’t escape narratives completely (unless by a mathematical model) , and you can’t escape narratives being a little bit manipulative.
My last post was an attempt to reconstruct a narrative I don’t hold relatively fairly (I didn’t mean it as mean-spirited, even though it can come across that way), but with some extra rhetoric on top – sometimes we all sin.
EDIT: When I wrote the above, your comment only said “Your blog says you’re not down with manipulative narratives.” Looking at what you wrote after that, I’m not really sure what you’re talking about, and what it has to do with me.
I read the rest of the subthread and still can’t tell if this is a parody post or not.
Depends. Parody on what level?
I assumed your post to be a caricature of a position that you not truly hold. Is this not so?
Pretty much, but not really intended to be mean. And I wouldn’t call it a “position”, that implies something more explicit.
Seeing society like Sim City means seeing society through a lens so false that it would make any attempt you had to try and help it fail. It’s not passion, it’s taking a mental simulcra as the real thing. Doesn’t matter about passion or dispassion, but the fact that you are remote from the actual thing you are trying to talk about or solve.
I guess it’s a matter of disagreement exactly how false it is. All our models of things in reality are mental simulacra of sorts, you should just try to make sure yours is a good as it can be, by integrating different sources of information and theory that are as abstracted as generalized as possible, rather than privileging your own personal experience. But this is the point of contention, I imagine.
This is true, and my argument is mostly about viewing it from a highly abstract lens indeed.
No complaints from Objectivists? Nothing about whim worshiping or prior certainty of consciousness? It looks like the Objectivists are missing in action!
Are Objectivists even that numerous (on the internet, at least) these days?
Objectivist here:
Scott Alexander is a whim-worshipping social metaphysician whose evasion of reality is so unparalleled that no life-loving, rational person should associate with him, nor with the “rationalist” movement and its perversion of rationality. He is a second-handed “mystic of muscle” who believes in existence without consciousness who denies the causal efficacy of man’s mind, the ultimate “Witch Doctor” paving the way for any “Attila” to come in and walk over piles of corpses in the name of fighting “Moloch”.
His advocacy of “effective altruism” is remarkable in that he so readily acknowledges the self-destructive nature of that ideal. Yet he “salvages” it by combining it with a open, naked stance of amoralism: that “unprincipled exceptions” from morality are to be granted at your subjective whim.
His psycho-epistemology is so destructive—but in theory and in practice—that anyone who attempts to follow it should expect to wreck his life in short order. As can be seen by his romantic history: to quote Rand, “Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.” And anyone who follows him will have deserved destruction, too, for willingly walking into such a cesspool of intellectual filth.
[Okay, I sincerely am an Objectivist, but I do like Scott. I tried to write what the most dogmatic kind of Objectivist would write, loading it with as many buzzwords as possible.]
Haha you had me going for a while there.
Nah, didn’t read like sincere Objectivist criticism to me–they’re real buzzwords, but they read as buzzwords for the sake of buzzwords (what’s second-handed about Scott?). Also I’d guess most Objectivists would see some positive in Scott.
Let me try:
Of Rand’s characters, Scott most resembles Hank Rearden at the beginning of Atlas Shrugged: capable, productive, and intelligent, but compromised by acceptance of moocher values–at what he believes to be his own expense, not realizing what he betrays by being a sanctioning victim.
The key premise leading him astray is *charity*–the assumption that all others are somehow unconditionally deserving, and none are thoroughly corrupt. This fuels both his economics–manifesting quite straightforwardly in his support for UBI–and also his constant concessions to imaginary harms.
[Status: Insincere criticism but honest steelman effort, by former Objectivist retaining some sympathy for that philosophy.]
Well, that’s what I would say for real. 🙂
Sincere or not, I would say that you’re right that there is more that a little bit of the sanction of the victim in Scott, especially as a medical professional.
The idea that people are unconditionally deserving also plays a major role. Though i think Scott is absolutely right, in contrast to Rand, in downplaying the extent to which people are “thoroughly corrupt”. Rand could really exaggerate that—and it was a very negative, harmful tendency. The idea that no one is corrupt at all goes too far in the other direction, however.
This is basically the ARI/TAS split: one side thinks intellectual charity and toleration should be extended to almost no one—because if you systematically disagree with Objectivism, you’re ipso facto a corrupt SOB. The other side says toleration should be extended to a wide array of people and that honest error is extremely common, but that you still shouldn’t let yourself be turned into a doormat (or played like a damn fiddle!) in the face of blatant dishonesty.
From what I’ve already said here, it should be clear that I agree with the latter.
So am I being prejudiced if my response to this is basically “fucking reactionaries man…”
Is there a comparable list of nasty things said to you by your liberal or socialist readers? Or are reactionaries really just that much more dickish on a personal level?
“Slate Star Codex: 20,000 words on ‘feminism is bad’ and ‘Tom Swifties are the funniest shit I’ve ever seen’”
“it’s by a stuttering aspie with expertise in nothing at all”
“his arguments only seem well-reasoned to people with NO knowledge of the subject matter (like him), and thus his main effect (just like that of his mentor, Eliezer Yudkowsky) is to keep smart people from learning things”
“oh what an expert in psychiatry! he’s a fucking med student in IRELAND. not to mention he uses yudkowsky’s lingo and called Less Wrong “revelatory” or something like that. you are dealing with a 110 IQ reddit type in SSC.”
“I’d always got a whiff of fedora from this guy, so I feel gratified in my judgment at seeing him come out as one.”
“slatestarcodex is a great example of the difference between ‘knowing how to type’ and ‘knowing how to write’”
“it’s basically a fish trap for aspies. people who can’t grasp nuance or understand basic human behavior, but are nonetheless obsessed with details and complex systems will inevitably gravitate toward this kind of horseshit. ultimately it’s a bunch of STEM-inclined dudes on the autism spectrum sitting around attempting to unpack societal problems like it was all a game of fucking sim city.”
“a blog populated by 99th percentile aspergers/IQ “rationalist” millennials who converse in an abnormally abstract style, and whose concrete cultural experience is drawn mainly from a bunch of weird nerd shit.”
“Its weird brand of reductionism and bizarre, arbitrary specificity plays to the types of spergy assholes and dumb know-it-all teenagers who don’t care about that anyway, or at least that’s how it seems to me. I mean, the ideas themselves seem like they’d be as much of a turn-off to regular people as their proponents’ personalities are, even if in a different way.”
“Oh, hey, the King of the Race Realist Misogynist Libertarian Nerds has Clever Things to say about vaccination.”
“yet another confirmation that: psychiatrists are crazier than their patients. polyamorous, diarrhea of the mouth/pen, math challenged, … i had no idea what an utter piece of shit you were.”
I’m pretty sure most of these come from liberals/left wing people. You can find more “directly from the source” by looking around the usual suspects.
It’s depressing (and, sadly, accurate) that ‘insults based on mental illness/disability’ flag one as being of the left.
Meanwhile, my corners of leftist Tumblr post rants about ableism (especially with regards to mental illness/disability) sufficiently often that I’ve had to withdraw from them to temper my irritation.
Sometimes it’s the same people doing both. Hypocrisy is real and a significant portion of tumblr is founded on it.
I’ve seen Heartiste attribute libertarianism to “sperglords.”
To be honest, I mentally marked any Aspergers based insults as having a 50/50 change of coming from the left or right and anything that uses the word “sperg” as having a 70% chance of coming from the right.
To me, the most dubious is this one:
“a blog populated by 99th percentile aspergers/IQ “rationalist” millennials who converse in an abnormally abstract style, and whose concrete cultural experience is drawn mainly from a bunch of weird nerd shit.”
Because even if it hits all the right notes, it’s very strange to have an acknowledgement that the object of criticism is actually intelligent.
Of course, it could just be followed by “Further proof that IQ doesn’t mean shit”.
The “fedora” one doesn’t necessarily come from a leftist source. The fedora/neckbeard stereotype is used by both social justice activists AND far-right loonies
While this is true, you have to consider both the rest of the quote and the context.
As for the rest of the quote:
“I’d always got a whiff of fnord (fnord is the right word for these things, right?) from this guy, so I feel gratified in my judgment at seeing him come out as one.”
It’s basically denouncing him as a member of the outgroup that was trying to pass as a member of the ingroup, which is more common on the (internet) left than on the (internet) right.
In regards of the context: /pol/ uses “fedora” to demean atheists (militant or otherwise), but it doesn’t make sense to say “I suspected he was a fedora” when Scott has never denied his atheism. Scott has, however, had a turbulent relationship with left/SJ people questioning his adherence to blue values for a pretty long time.
Besides, at least in my experience, every time SSC has come up in /pol/, the reaction was pretty overwhelmingly positive. Take that as you will.
they’re not all Reactionary comments.
Try to guess which ones are which.
Some are easy because keywords, some not so much.
These comments are like a mirror image of how I rage-read Tyler Cowen.
I don’t know how you put up with this shit. Seriously. This makes me ask uncomfortable questions about humanity.
I’m a little surprised to hear that, and to see how many people here share this sentiment.
To my jaded eyes, these negative comments look pretty mild. I’m used to seeing wall-to-wall hate of the “go die in a fire” caliber, so reading negative comments that are actually on topic makes for a nice change.
They’re more disgusting because they are “on topic.” It’s one thing to say someone should just “go die in a fire”. It’s quite another to drag up specific incidents in his personal life and try to politicize them.
These should be put on random rotation, showing one a day in a space on the side bar.
I saw a Jenny Holzer piece at a modern art museum. There was a tunnel that the viewer was supposed to enter, and inside the tunnel Jenny Holzer quotes were displayed on the wall with a slide projector. The quotes would change periodically and you were trapped inside the tunnel with the quotes. I think this would be the ideal setting for the display of these anti-Scott quotes.
With a nice Bach piece playing in the background?
The glorious Ninth by Ludwig Van, surely!
I view this as confirming my heuristic that “people who go on about ‘beta males’ can be safely disregarded as fools”.
Which is not incredibly scientific, but has a pretty good success rate.
If you disregarded them how did you know you were right?
Easy.
Before developing the heuristic, I paid more attention to them.
(I still read the things they say in comments, because that’s how you find out they’re going on about beta males.
Heuristic still going strong.)
That’s my instinctive response, sure.
Poor Dr Mech.
Don’t forget this one
http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/13106/
“Scott Alexander over at the popular blog Slate Star Codex is an interesting case study in classical liberalism; nowhere else will you find someone who better exemplifies the phenomenon of skirting within microns of the event horizon of Getting It before screaming “Nooooo” and zooming off in some other direction; nor will you find many who choose a crazier direction in which to flee. “
Would definitely love to see this post/argument get more exposure. I’m a regular reader and basically a fan of this blog but agree with pretty much everything in it (edit: except, on rereading, all the parts about SSC’s interest in the singularity constituting a religion and enabling procrastination re: solving real problems; I think all the EA stuff serves as a pretty good rebuttal to all that).
Or, perhaps better yet, some kind of genuine deep dive into those eight-figure Black Book of Communism numbers, since they seem to be the main thing really keeping this blog and much of its readership from some variant of Full Blown Socialism
Aren’t eight-figure deaths due to Communism in the 20th century accepted by most legitimate scholars, with the issue being “how many tens of millions, how many are due to misfortune vs incompetence vs mallice?” The “Black Book of Communism” number is widely regarded to be unrealistically high, was my understanding.
It’s also unfair to compare to the Nazis, because National Socialism only lasted 12 years, with almost all of the deaths due to it coming in the last 6 years (and those mostly in the last 4), and had far fewer people in its grasp than Communism did.
The problems arise in:
1) As you say, how many tens of millions
2) How many are atributable to Communism
3) How many deaths in the same time period can be atributed to Capitalism, which inevitably leads to…
4) What exactly are Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism, and in which ways are they comparable? (In my experience, which is probably not generalizable, Socialists/Commies are pretty coy about this last point).
This is all true. I’m not some kind of rabid anti-communist, and capitalism has its body count for sure. I’d argue that it’s probably lower (if not in total – as you point out, defining capitalism is an issue – then lower when considered relative to timespan, and probably to reach), and less intentional, than communism.
In turn, communism’s body count is relatively lower (when, again, timespan and reach are considered) than that of national socialism (I’d say fascism, but the majority of the body count of fascism was by national socialism), and less intentional – and if they’d won the war, the German leadership’s plans for the East involved the deliberate starvation of several tens of millions and the reduction of the survivors to helot status. I would argue that intentionally causing death is morally worse than accidentally causing it, or having it happen on your watch but failing to do much about it.
So, if we’re ranking evil by deaths, especially if limited to the 20th century, communism comes in 2nd out of 3.
Well, the numbers are disputed to some degree. E.g., some of the famine numbers were based on comparing actual population numbers to what would be expected under an extrapolation of the best-guess birth rate; numbers relating to the gulags didn’t do a good job of distinguishing political from non-political prisoners, nor natural and unnatural causes. Obviously, you’re not talking about contexts where there’s necessarily any better way to figure these things out, but “best available” can co-exist with dodgy.
But the numbers aren’t the real problem, from my point of view–even if they’re off by an order of magnitude it would be more than enough to discredit communism from the perspective of anyone reading this blog. The real question is the one of “misfortune vs incompetence vs malice,” to which I would add context and comparison. I don’t have any doubt that Mao bears significant responsibility for the famine that occurred under his watch (the Four Pests campaign certainly deserves to be in the Worst Ideas Hall of Fame) but I think it’s worth also remembering that it was the last Chinese famine, and that the genre had a great many other entries prior to Communist rule. It’s also worth investigating whether the framework used to blame famines on communists can be used to blame other famines on capitalism–do that, and you’re going to pull in the Irish Potato Famine and multiple famines in British India at the very least, with plenty more to pick from as you broaden your standards (Late Victorian Holocausts is a good examination of this side of things).
And, finally, it’s worth noting that the reason almost everything in this post is talking about famines is that the vast majority of the deaths attributed to communism come from famines, which (IMO, YMMV) makes them qualitatively different from Nazi Germany’s efforts.
I don’t think the incompetence vs. malice question matters that much. If your system is constructed so that the incompetence of the supreme leader can lead to millions of deaths, you have a bad system (misfortune is somewhat different; but we can look at what economic systems are most robust in the face of misfortunes). The question for communists is whether some aspect of communism makes the probability high that you will have brutal Stalinism or incompetent (and brutal) Maoism; if so, then you’ve got a major problem.
My comment above is relevant – Nazi Germany is definitely the worst, due to the intensity of the death toll (considering how many people they had dominion over and how quickly it was done) and the intentionality of it.
I would certainly condemn, say, Britain’s leadership for the famines in India or elsewhere on the same grounds as I would condemn the Soviet or Chinese leadership for their famines. 3 million or so died in the Bengal Famine, during WWII – and it is worth noting that since India gained self-rule, it has had problems with malnutrition, but never any acute famines, which were fairly common under British rule.
There’s more than enough moral blame to go around, really.
@ Urstoff: I think it matters a lot. Part of this is that if it’s incompetence, then it could, potentially, be corrected (and really, what does a failure of central planning in the fifties tell us about the effectiveness of central planning in 2016, when said planners would have access to an unfathomably greater amount of computational power?).
Another part of it is that if it’s incompetence, you can start getting utilitarian about it. If Mao accidentally kills 20 million people, but also prevented 30 million deaths through glorious socialism, then maybe, on the balance, it starts to look like a not-terrible deal. But if it’s malice, there’s something really off-putting about that analysis, and it obviously remains wrong from any deontological perspective.
But mostly it’s rhetorical. Take, for example, the Moloch essay. I’m not a Marxist scholar by a long shot, but to me a very significant portion of that essay is a paraphrase of Marx’s declining rates of profit. In a world where Stalin is Hitler+, it makes sense to brush off the implications with a brief reference to “100 million dead.” But if was “well-meaning but flawed,” then that blitheness sticks out like a sore thumb. There’s a big difference people how people treat a murderous ideology and one which fucked up.
All that said–I wouldn’t expect anyone who bought the numbers and ascribed them to incompetence to be a communist. If it’s just a question of “should we implement this system” then it wouldn’t be worth the risk no matter how many of the problems we thought we fixed.
3 million or so died in the Bengal Famine, during WWII – and it is worth noting that since India gained self-rule, it has had problems with malnutrition, but never any acute famines, which were fairly common under British rule.
To be fair, there have been advances in farming techniques/technology since the 1950s and ’60s, so it’s not quite a fair comparison. As with the famine under Mao, it’s as if widespread starvation was unknown pre-British India.
Plus with respect to the Bengal Famine, it’s worth pointing out that a most of the territory that usually supplied Bengal’s food was under Japanese occupation at the time.
@ nil:
For what it’s worth, that essay was one of the first I read by Scott, and my reaction to that point was: this is basically just Marxism. He’s also got a whole FAQ attacking libertarianism (though he says he’s gotten more friendly to it over the years).
Worrying about collective action problems is a very leftist thing, since if they are pervasive and severe enough, it proves that markets cannot work. David Friedman has made this point repeatedly.
What do you think he ought to read to be convinced that Marxism is correct?
Also, you’re entirely correct that the history of the Soviet Union and all other communist countries can hardly prove that state socialism doesn’t work. It’s always possible to argue that they just didn’t do it right. Now, if every country that tries it doesn’t do it right, then maybe that’s evidence that doing it right is very hard. But maybe they were just unlucky.
And if you define capitalism as “anything that’s not socialism”, then yes you can show many atrocities committed under “capitalist” regimes. The response by advocates of laissez-faire capitalism is: they didn’t do capitalism right.
@Urstoff:
I would argue that one of the reasons to consider malice vs incompetence, or misfortune exacerbated by incompetence, is that malice goes out of its way to cause harm.
National Socialism was basically destined to cause persecution, war, and death. Hitler’s intention from the beginning was to expand Germany’s territory to encompass “Greater Germany”, to attack eastwards to claim land and resources, to get rid of the Jews one way or another (whether he intended genocide from the beginning or not is a matter of debate among historians).
The way things went down was, up until Germany started losing the war, National Socialism working more or less as intended.
In comparison, if the deaths ascribed to communism were due to misfortune and incompetence, well, better fortune and more competence would fix that, at least in theory.
It’s like comparing a rocket weapon to a passenger plane that gets hit by lightning and also the pilot is drunk.
I personally think that communism’s track record is enough to, at the very least, raise eyebrows. So it never impresses me when communists proclaim its clear superiority to our system, especially when they pull a “no true Scotsman” and announce that everybody prior was doing it wrong, but this time there will be no starvation or forced labour or people shot in the back of the neck for no reason. It’s the same as when laissez faire capitalists proclaim that as the solution to everything, and pull similar rhetorical tricks.
The Bengal Famine of 1943 is an interesting case study I think. There was a lot of bad luck, the British definitely could have done more (and Churchill was being a huge douche about it), but I think ultimately, the responsibility lies with the Japanese.
@The original Mr. X:
There’s argument among historians as to the causes of the Bengal famine. However, it seems pretty clear that the British did not do a great deal to alleviate it.
“In comparison, if the deaths ascribed to communism were due to misfortune and incompetence, well, better fortune and more competence would fix that.”
Given the universality of misfortune and incompetence, that’s not very comforting to anyone with a goal of trying to choose an optimal economic system.
The question is whether you’re trying to apportion blame for past instances or construct (or avoid constructing) systems for future use.
@Urstoff:
I edited my post a little. I am not an advocate of communism.
Intentionality is useful beyond apportioning blame, though: it’s conceivable (even if not likely) that, if communism’s problems were due to incompetence, it could be done better.
In comparison, national socialism with less incompetence would be more dangerous: were it not for Hitler’s incompetence as an administrator and tendency to micromanage, resulting conflicts and infighting in the Nazi German government and military leadership, intelligence failures, strategic errors, etc, Germany might have won the war, which would have led to many more deaths. In many ways, Nazi Germany fulfilled a lot of the “evil overlord does something really stupid” tropes.
>I think it matters a lot. Part of this is that if it’s incompetence, then it could, potentially, be corrected (and really, what does a failure of central planning in the fifties tell us about the effectiveness of central planning in 2016, when said planners would have access to an unfathomably greater amount of computational power?)
Well, I think we should at the very least make the distinction between reasonable policies implemented incompetently, incompetent policies implemented reasonably, and incompetent policies implemented incompetently.
What you say is true for the first group, but if there are things that can be classified in the second, that’d be a knock against communism.
The third group provides us with all those soviet era anecdotes that we all find so hilarious (except maybe the people who lived in those countries).
@dndnrsn
Fair points, but the game of “which is less terrible: communism or nazism” seems like kind of a dumb game to participate in.
Right. Moreover, you can attack a system based on the kind of people it is likely to put in charge.
It would probably be good if we had a benevolent dictatorship. But if we tried it and the leader was bad, it wouldn’t be much of a defense to simply say he was incompetent. The very problem with the system is that there’s no reason to think the dictator will be competent. It predictably leads to bad leaders.
When you give unlimited power to a small party elite, who is likely to get that power? Intellectuals thinking about the good of mankind as a whole? Or vicious social climbers posing as them?
On the “incompetence vs malice” question I think it’s worth comparing the Ukraine famine with the Great Leap Forward famine. At least as I read the evidence, the Ukraine famine was deliberate.
I don’t think the Great Leap Forward famine was. Mao had created a situation in which there were strong incentives for local officials to lie about crop output, and they did. Believing their lies, the government exported a lot of food. A lot of people died–probably considerably more than in the Ukraine famine.
There is some evidence that when people told Mao what was happening his response was to purge them, which is part of the reason that Rummel decided to include those deaths in his figures for democide. But I don’t think there is any reason to believe that Mao started out with the intention of starving people to death.
On death counts, by the way, Rummel’s democide page is a good source.
I’m not sure if the paradigm people here are looking at these things is very helpful. ‘Communism vs capitalism vs fasacism’ is a very post WW2 thing to do, and it’s not exactly helpful to try and fit everything into such characteristics whilst ignoring everything else.
If you look at the examples of deaths caused by communism, people here keep citing Russia and China. That’s all well and good, but you’re missing the fundamental point that these are and were radically different civilisations from our modern states, and attributing all their issues to the economic system they happen to have implemented is incredibly shortsighted.
In learning revolutionary theory, people studying history tend to learn that post 19th centuries revolutions against autocratic governments and the subsequent reforming of the country could happen in one of three ways. You could have a middle class revolution as in France, an ‘authoritarian revolution’ where the upper classes realised they would need to get their shit together before things went awry quickly, as happened in Germany, or a lower class revolution as happened in the world’s empires for the most part: China, Russia, and later many colonial places as well, though you can dispute the validity of these.
Keeping this in mind, ascribing so many millions of deaths to communism isn’t the most helpful thing to do. We’re talking about countries where the common people were of a far lower class than they were elsewhere in the world, and where a peaceful transition from one system to the other may well have been impossible. This makes the amount of deaths such things were paired with no less horrible, but seen in the context of states with very different institutions evolving they can be revealed to be more than a case of ‘communism bad.’
Also, on a slight tangent, I want to note that both China and Russia had their issues with famines before/during/after succession troubles before communism just fine. The fall of Han China and the time of troubles in Russia both had death tolls well within the double digit percentages, more because of famine than because of actual warfare.
@Vox
>Moreover, you can attack a system based on the kind of people it is likely to put in charge.
Excellent, congratulations, that is one of the best angles.
>It would probably be good if we had a benevolent dictatorship. But if we tried it and the leader was bad, it wouldn’t be much of a defense to simply say he was incompetent. The very problem with the system is that there’s no reason to think the dictator will be competent. It predictably leads to bad leaders.
Dictatorship itself is not a system, because there are multiple ways someone could become a dictator. Actual systems are like democracy or hereditary monarchy / aristocracy.
I think we can say with some confidence that democracy predictably, reliably puts bad people into charge, because it selects for ability and willingness to dupe the dumb masses.
The advantage of hereditary monarchy / aristocracy is that it has both nature and nurture on its side, the idea is that it tries to not select leaders but manufacture leaders, through breeding and education. This is actually the best known way to make a racehorse so there is sense in it, there are two issues, they can get too complacent, or too detached from everyday reality, and also that in the case of monarchy despite the high chance to manufacture a decent monarch, sometimes you are unlucky.
Dictatorship is not a singular system, because for example Hitler was going the usual democratic route and then refused to hold elections, so he was selected for the usual democratic mass-fooling ability and willingness, while Franco led soldiers into a risky revolt, so he was selected for his ability to inspire soldiers and make them loyal to himself. Salazar was a professor of economics and an outstanding good finance minister, the first one ever to produce a budgetary surplus in Portugal, and was picked for this by the president and competing factions. Obviously enough, Salazar was far better than Franco and Franco far far better than Hitler.
It is just three random examples, but isn’t it interesting how the most democratically selected dictator is the worst?
Another good angle is how the leaders are likely to change the people. That’s for next time.
I’ll go out on a limb and say Communism was malice, not incompetence. Just because they were saying they have nice intentions? Really? You gotta believe that? Or put it differently they were NOT saying they gonna kill a large group of people and reduce other countries to slavery? But they did just that anyway.
Why give credit just because they talked nicer?
The problem is that you guys are too much influenced by Universalism so you give to much credit to those who don’t say that openly that I will enrich my group at the expense of that other group. Who seem to say something along the lines of they are gonna treat everybody the same and not have dedicated enemies. So I think many of you may confuse good intentions with Universalistic intentions.
It’s possible to be a universal asshole, and equal-opportunity murderer. When you don’t even care that much about your national ingroup. Just power.
It is perfectly possible that more competent Communists just would have channelled the better economy into more and better weapons and then pull a Clancy on Western Europe.
Isn’t there a libertarian line about how Rachel Carson, simply by publishing a book, caused 60-80 million deaths?
Since liberals are fascists, and socialists, and communists, and rachel carson (and capitalists) I think we can solve this without buying a vowel.
@Stefan Drinic:
Comparing fascism, communism, and capitalism makes sense because “capitalism has its death toll too!” is heard from communists.
It is definitely true that some places and times (geographically, in terms of development, whatever) are more susceptible to famine than others.
Still, reading, for instance, about the Ukrainian famine, unless one is a complete revisionist, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Soviet government handled it very poorly, unless they wanted that many people to starve to death.
The reason the focus is on famines is that, while a lot of people died due to malice, the majority died due to famine (either malice or incompetence depending how you count it).
I also am not sure I agree with the assessment that the Soviet Union in the 1930s, or China in the late 50s-early 60s, was somehow radically different and alien compared to today, or all other societies at the same time. For instance, yes, the rural areas in the USSR were quite underdeveloped compared to Western or even Eastern Europe. If, however, the USSR had been truly primitive in terms of infrastructure and organization and the like, they would not have been able to defeat Nazi Germany a decade or so later (and it should be considered that during WWII the rural areas were still underdeveloped – which is part of the reason that the Germans had such a hard time with logistics).
The situation is the same with the Bengal famine, and other famines in British-ruled India. Was part of it that conditions for famine existed in India that did not exist in, say, Britain? Yes. But also a big part of it was that the British rulers of India did not consider keeping Indians from starving to death as one of their higher priorities.
Additionally, there is the argument (I believe it’s Amartya Sen?) that famine is rarely due to crop failures and the like alone – there has to be some kind of conflict preventing food from moving about, a government that fucks up, etc.
Besides, I rarely see communists make the argument that “tens of millions starving to death is an unfortunate but unavoidable step in building a better society” any more than I see them saying “building a massive security apparatus and having people shot in the back of the neck and sending people to labour camps is unpleasant but must be done” a great deal. It’s either tu quoque, arguing the numbers, or ignoring it outright.
Hereditary monarchy reliably selects for parricides, fratricides, and willingness to commit every kind of intra-family violence. Successful monarchs are also more likely than not to be accomplished liars and back-stabbers.
Hereditary monarchies are not an unknown quantity, they have been the most common form of government in the historical record. Historical monarchies have not reliably produced superior leaders and good government. They have produced do-nothing kings, rule by debauched favorites, endemic corruption, and chronic instability. It is no coincidence that they have failed to compete against modern states ruled by a superior breed of ruthless power seeker.
I don’t see how ‘those other folks started using a dumb framing first!’ is a good reason to keep on using said dumb way of framing something yourself. Arguing about why you’d do much better in using other ways to look at governance is another discussion, but suffice it to say that these categories are selectively too broad, to narrow, or inapplicable entirely to some other places.
Either way, focusing on famines is fine, but the focus is in the wrong place. Saying ‘the Soviet Union and China had a famine, the 20th century west generally didn’t, QED communism is bad’ is incredibly shortsighted. Instead of comparing China and the Soviet union to other contemporary states, you want to look at them for what they were: states with a high majority agrarian population with a highly centralised form of government undergoing a violent transition of government. You show me a place where such a thing goes well, and I’ll show you an Ethiopia, a Congo, a Romania. One of the reasons France didn’t have a huge famine after its own revolution is because it was such a famine that kickstarted it.
Whether or not the deaths in communist states is up to malice or incompetence isn’t even relevant anymore at that point. Looking at the perils of China and the Soviet Union and attributing their errors to communism rather than their legacy is nothing other than shortsighted. It’s but one symptom of generally paying less attention to historians than economists because the latter have a (not entirely undeservedly) better reputation for being a hard science.
Hereditary monarchy reliably selects for parricides, fratricides, and willingness to commit every kind of intra-family violence.
I’d like some evidence for what sounds like a standard-issue Ev-Psych “Just So Story”. You can’t judge reproductive fitness until you see viable grandchildren, of which e.g. Macbeth had none and Scotland got Malcom and his line.
So, what is the rate at which regicidal moarchs have viable genetic and/or dynastic grandchildren, as compared to their counterparts who are content to remain dukes or whatever? I haven’t done the math, but my general reading of history is that hereditary monarchy selects for stable and mutually supportive families. And culls the defectors in ways that make for great stories as they otherwise vanish from history and the gene pool.
@ John Schilling:
I don’t believe he means it selects for them genetically.
It selects for them in the sense that if the only way to get power is to kill your brother for it, you’re going to either kill your brother or not have power.
This happens regardless of whether “willingness to kill one’s brother” is a heritable trait.
@ TheDividualist:
I don’t think democracy selects for particularly good leaders. But it also selects against particularly bad leaders.
The idea is that you have mediocre leaders with limited power, creating a better situation than mediocre leaders with unlimited power, let alone bad leaders with such power. Both of these are worse than excellent leaders with unlimited power, but that’s a very difficult thing to achieve, not least for the fact that power itself tends to corrupt.
You see this even with menial things like George Lucas on the Star Wars prequels. When he was a nobody, people were willing to tell him where his ideas were bad, and he took their advice into account. But after he became an industry giant, everyone was fawning over him as a creative genius and no one was willing to tell him to tone things down. Having power removes the regulators on people’s negative personalty traits and habits.
Not to mention that a truly absolute monarchy is a myth. Even if an absolute monarch has the best will in the world, he’s still got to deal with court intrigue and keep the nobles happy.
Saying ‘the Soviet Union and China had a famine, the 20th century west generally didn’t, QED communism is bad’ is incredibly shortsighted.
But the complaint, unless it is being excessively stripped for brevity, isn’t just that the Soviet Union and China had famines. It is that, in the midst of famine, they sent men with guns to take food away from the hungry and farmland away from the farmers.
That’s capital-E Evil in a way that mundane agricultural failure is not. Or, at a minimum, I should think that strict liability would apply. If your ideology or economic theory says that a famine should be thusly managed, either your dispossession-and-redistribution scheme works, or you are guilty of criminally reckless homicide.
Exactly, and it’s the part of the complaint that committed Marxists tend to gloss over.
Yes, capitalist countries had famines too, no one is denying that. But as a general rule the capitalists didn’t respond by shooting or imprisoning farmers who failed to make their quota.
Granted, within the Marxist framework punishing those who hold out is the correct course of action but surely one can see how those “on the ground” might be inclined to conclude that your glorious workers paradise is just the opposite.
Jesus Christ, man. How often do I have to spell out what I’ve been saying?
Such antics have much, much less to do with communism than they do with the fall of agricultural empires in the modern world, be they called Abyssinia or Qing. You can keep pretending that it’s due to communism, or you can come to realise that maybe, just maybe, shifts of power and governance in such cases will come with a large death toll regardless of the ideology in place.
This blame the outgroup thing is getting really old by now. I’m not a communist, you’re not a communist, but you’re coming across as trying to score points against it anyway. Can you PLEASE stop framing everything as having economic theory as its root cause and try to look at history from a more institutional perspective instead?
It selects for them in the sense that if the only way to get power is to kill your brother for it, you’re going to either kill your brother or not have power.
Which monarchies are you thinking of where the brother of the king does not have power?
The brother who kils the king, now he is at great risk of winding up powerless, either dead or an impotent guest in the court of whoever will host his government-in-exile when a neighboring kingdom with a more functional sort of monarchy conquers the squabbling regicidalists.
Again, I am asking for the actual evidence for the claim, not the just-so story. If “power” is your metric, then what is the average power wielded by regicidal vs. non-regicidal brothers-of-kings in history?
And really, since we are talking about “selection”, I still would prefer to know about the power wielded by their dynasties in the third generation. Because Duncan – Macbeth – Malcom – Donald doesn’t look like selection for treachery to me.
Last Chinese famine *so far*…It’s only been a half-century or so.
Personally, I view the CCP as no more or less evil than any of the dynasties that preceded it. I expect it to hold together in some form or another for 300 or 400 years, then after a period of disunion something else will unite China.
That’s been the pattern since Confucius and I see no reason to expect a change.
But Chevalier Mal Fet, they’re communist! That changes everything! Economics said so!
@Stefan Drinic:
“the Soviet Union and China had a famine, the 20th century west generally didn’t, QED communism is bad”
Is not really what I or anybody here said.
You are right that it is unfair to compare the 1930s USSR or China in the 50s and 60s to more developed countries. And you can compare the USSR or China to, say, the Congo, BUT:
1. Nobody I know of argues that the system (or lack thereof) in the Congo should be adopted by anyone else.
2. The Ukrainian famine and the famine under Mao in the late 50s/early 60s did not happen during a transition. In both cases the Communists were in power, and had been for a decade or more. This was not a “civil war, breakdown of society, nobody gets any food” situation.
3. John Schilling makes a good point and I don’t really need to repeat it.
Additionally, I would not say I’m relying more on economists than historians – my area of study was history, not economics.
@ Stefan Drinic
The same point can be made about Abyssinia or Qing, as was already made about “capitalist” famines. It’s not just that there is a famine, it’s that Marxism is prone to a specific failure mode that makes famines worse.
This is a flaw that needs to be addressed if you’re going to seriously defend Marxism.
@ John Schilling:
I don’t have a statistical analysis in front of me, but the broad history of monarchical regimes seems to me to show that they were wracked by instability and succession crises.
Usually, the monarch’s actual authority is inversely correlated to his dynasty’s longevity. See: the longevity of the Japanese imperial dynasty versus the Chinese dynasties.
For specific examples of fratricide, Charlemagne comes to mind as one likely candidate, along with the Ottoman dynasty, and the grand dukes of the Kievan Rus’. There are many other examples, especially once you include killing mothers, spouses, children, and more distant relatives. Even in WWI, all the royal families involved were closely related (except the Ottomans), though some of them had little power.
Two of the Jimenez brothers waged war on the third. Then one of those two killed the remaining brother.
Nero inherited the throne as a child because his uncle(?) was murdered by his mother.
There are also at least two cases of brother in laws rebelling against a weak or heirless King. Harold Godwinson rebelled against Edward the Confessor and Sybilla’s husband made a coup attempt on Baldwin the IV. (One of the conditions for Sybilla’s son taking the throne was that she divorce Reynaud, while being given permission to marry any other man in Jerusalem).
Proof by anecdote? Really?
@ John Schilling:
What do you expect?
You make some assertion on the basis of “common sense” in your opinion. We make competing assertions based on our “common sense” and historical anecdotes.
I don’t have a damn research paper at hand. And I’m not particularly inclined to find one for the purpose of this little discussion.
“states with a high majority agrarian population with a highly centralised form of government undergoing a violent transition of government.”
Both the Ukraine famine and the Great Leap Forward famine occurred well after the violent transition stage.
The Ottomans are in interesting case, because the succession rule was pretty clearly fratricide. When the Sultan died, the close relatives who wanted the job fought each other.
It’s an expensive mechanism, but it does a good job of selecting the candidate who is best at winning a civil war, which is likely to mean the candidate best at running an aggressively expansionary empire.
@Vox Imperatoris
Seriously, how can limited power be a stable equilibrium? What keeps it limited? Whatever limits power is in itself power, be that a constitutional court or pitchforks. The only way to limit power without actually getting power is the one we learned on the marketplace: the threat of peaceful exit. Ideally, I should be able to commute to my current job from three different sovereign lands. For the same reason I can only expect my lunch to be tasty if I can choose from three different restaurants. If and when that could be achieved, there would be hardly any point in keeping mini-governments democratic.
However this would have other problems like many small wars, no generic peacekeeping.
I don’t think anyone has a firm recipe of what would really work, but we can already begin to see the outlines of why nothing works that was tried so far.
>Hereditary monarchy reliably selects for parricides, fratricides, and willingness to commit every kind of intra-family violence.
This is fixable by the ruler selecting a heir in the will, not necessarily the elder son, but more like the most capable or even someone outside the family, and keep it secret until he dies. This would also fix genetic accidents and infertility. Why not? It would still be private property. The owner freely deciding how any private property is inherited, be that a farm or a kingdom, and not having a law that privileges descendants, is a reasonably libertarianish idea, isn’t it? And thus as long as you trust the ruler, you can trust his unknown selected heir.
This is fixable by the ruler selecting a heir in the will, not necessarily the elder son, but more like the most capable or even someone outside the family, and keep it secret until he dies.
The problem with that, though, is that there will inevitably be some people who support the ruler’s actual son because of his bloodline, and hence there will be potential for conflict. Even in Rome, where the imperial power was theoretically just another magistracy, someone like Agrippa Postumus was considered a threat to Tiberius for no other reason than that he was descended from Augustus.
Plus, there’s the fact that people are naturally biased in favour of their own offspring. I wouldn’t consider it unlikely for a king to nominate his own son, even if said son wasn’t actually very competent.
@Dividualist
Actually, primogeniture is more stable that elective, also more stable than ultimogeniture.
With primogeniture, there’s a very clear line of succession, not dependent on the prior monarch having said something or not on his deathbed, there’s more time for the younger offspring and vassals to adapt and get to know the successor before he inherits, and the secondary kids don’t get superior firepower compared to the main heir. Therefore, minimal squabbling.
Well said, purple anon. Incidentally, that was the original plan in Syria, until the intended, carefully prepared and positioned heir died in a car crash.
Syria seems largely like the Roman faux-magistracy. From Wikipedia:
Seems like Dividualist’s idea, with the expected amount of squabbling due to no particular tradition of succession priority of one relative over another.
@ TheDividualist:
What limits power? Ideology. The same thing that expands power.
Why can’t the Supreme Court impose some kind of totalitarian dictatorship? Number one: they don’t want to. Number two: no one else wants them to, and they know this; so even if they did want to impose dictatorship, they know they would be stopped.
It’s the same reason the military doesn’t knock over the government every time they get a president they don’t like. They have all the big guns; who would stop them? Answer: the other factions in the military, since any general who wanted to do such a thing exists in an environment where he knows most of the other generals don’t want to. And even if all the generals wanted to, the lower officers and the enlisted men don’t.
I agree that the possibility of peaceful exit is good for freedom, but America (and most other countries) are far more free than the minimum implied by the possibility of exit. For one, national governments themselves voluntarily allow people to exit, where they could relatively easily stop it if they chose. They don’t because such a policy would be viciously opposed and could only be enforced by the most tyrannical governments. Which tend to fall without outside support, as they have no legitimacy.
A major reason they lack legitimacy is ideology. When people believe in the divine right of kings or in the glorious future of communism, you can enforce it. But when they lose faith in that, you can’t.
Now, if everyone, or the great bulk of the people, or even the great bulk of the intellectuals, wants power to expand, then it will. That is entirely consistent with the growth and shrinkage of power being determined by ideology.
I’m not saying the structure of the government is not important at all, but it operates mainly as a Schelling fence on rapid ideological change.
” I wouldn’t consider it unlikely for a king to nominate his own son, even if said son wasn’t actually very competent.”
For a pretty clear example, consider Muawiya, the fifth caliph and the founder of the Umayyad dynasty. He named his much less competent son as his heir.
And there was at least one case, I think one of the later Umayyads, where the Caliph left a sealed envelope naming his heir.
Is anyone else noticing that the ones who refer to him and the community as “aspies”, “spergs”, etc. seem to be exactly the kind of people who would go on about how awful ableist slurs are? Or has Asperger’s as a disability reached a situation like Asians and whiteness: they’re only an oppressed minority when it’s convenient?
I think they’re kissing cousins, but not necessarily the exact same people.
I know a fair few people who will happily do both. A lot of people seem to care about ableism (and the other isms) just insofar as it is either directed at ‘their guys’ or it will allow them to bash the people they’re opposed to.
It’s more ‘bad when *you* do it, okay when *I* do it.’
I did wonder how many of those came from SJ types.
My guess is most. Everyone is calling him a “nerd” but the right/reactionary/MRA version is to focus on his wimpiness / lack of masculinity, hence “beta cuckold orbiter”. The left/SJW version is to focus on his insensitivity / lack of social awareness, hence “aspie”/”fedora”.
My guess is many, but that they represent only a section of SJ. (Unknown if minority or majority)
In other SJ circles, with everyone agreed about sexism/racism doctrine, the new thing is addressing ableism, especially mental illness/disability. Accommodations are valid, don’t kneejerk discount self-diagnosis, lived experience is still king, demanding visible disability is SUPER ABLEIST AND OPPRESSIVE, etc.
It’s gone so far that there’s internal backlash over letting the self-identified wallow too much.
The contempt over Asperger’s and rationalists from [certain] SJ circles comes from a suspicion of people justifying their -ist behavior with social awkwardness and the like. From their perspective, the interlopers are only claiming Asperger’s as an excuse to ignore niceness, community, and civilization. And so the term becomes a dog whistle.
That’s my estimate as well
Urstoff, in reply to your MR comment, do you not realize that the only reason I spam MR is because its author started deleting my comments, forcing me to do my writing outside of them? I will stop making new MCR posts if my comments stop being deleted for a period of nine days. I wasn’t banned because of spamming; I spam because of banning.
And I doubt most of the “aspie”/”sperg” comments are coming from the SJ side. Doesn’t sound like them.
That makes no sense. Why would you want to post *more* if your comments are being deleted? You’d think you’d want to post less because each post is seen by fewer people. (Actually the normal reaction would be to stop posting there altogether, but leave that aside.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_of_labour
That still makes no sense
What character traits are aspie/sperg trying to slander? I’m honestly not familiar with the term, doesn’t make immediate sense.
Awkward, stiff, overly literal, lacking in social graces, full of weird obsessions, etc.
I read an unstated implication in these kinds of insults that Asperger’s isn’t real or the target doesn’t really have it – he’s just an awkward nerd who obsesses over minutia, etc., and should just knock it off and act normal. There’s certainly no shortage of people who have self-diagnosed Asperger’s and use it as an excuse to be dickish. (I actually don’t know whether I’m one of these people. My brother has a severe, officially diagnosed case of Asperger’s and I see a lot of myself in his behavior, but also a lot of stuff that with additional effort I could knock off and be normal.)
As a beta orbiting talking cactus, I really appreciate having a source of content tailored so specifically to my interests.
“that article seemed like a return ticket to obviousville with eight-hour layovers everywhere”
That’s gold, Jerry! Gold!!
Thanks Scott – many of these were hilarious, and I hope your feelings weren’t hurt.
Scott is proof that cuckolds can be cool, too
As for a lot of these comments… how do you even get this opposite-of-reality?
The comments or the quotes in the article? Also which ones?
The quotes in the article. At a quick glance, the “kill yourself” comment, the “examining the bark on the trees” comment, the “basically a fish trap for aspies” comment, and the “obviousville” comment leap out.
Actually I thought the “bark on the trees” and “obviousville” ones had a bit of truth, and would be pretty funny in a “roast” context if they were delivered as jokes rather than, apparently, seriously.
The obviousville quote is my favorite. It’s like super-dense Oscar Wilde.
And I just can’t stop thinking about it. Why a “return ticket?” Does this blog take us to obviousville AND BACK, and if so, what does the “and back” mean?
Or is a return ticket different from a round trip ticket, and this blog brings us (eventually) home from obviousville, a place in which we were formerly stranded?
It is a return ticket because Obviousville should be your home, but the beginning of the article finds itself in Asperg. The criticism being made is that yes, the article does eventually get to the truth, but comes from a bizarre and inhuman starting point and goes to way more work than should be necessary to reach a conclusion that should have been self-evident.
That makes sense – thanks!
“Slate Star Codex is 140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”
Can this be the new tag-line? Please?
I guess I’m just a normal weirdo, because I’m not an aspie, nor do I have an exceptionally high IQ, nor do I identify with any of the various labels flung at our esteemed blog host (SJW-feminist-entitled, asexual, lesswrong-er, etc.), yet I mostly find the content here to be interesting, insightful, and full of great intellectual excursion exploring various issues and dynamics of our dysfunctional society in a new light. And the discussion threads are of a significantly higher caliber than typically found on the intertubes. Sure, it can be kinda long-winded, but that’s a plus, in my book.
Keep ’em coming, SA!
And I’m really confused how Scott can be accused of being an SJW. Aren’t a not-insignificant chunk of his posts railing against SJWs? Am I missing (or misunderstanding) something?
As much as I dislike social-justice demagoguery, I have to admit that there do exist a few people for whom an SJW is anyone to the left of Francisco Franco.
On the first parsing I misread “there do exist a few people for whom an SJW is anyone living in San Francisco”
Well, there are probably published papers on correlations with a lower R-squared.
I’m not a fan of SJWs, and I definitely don’t consider Scott to be one. He seems to do a really good job of keeping the decent parts of SJW-ism (treating people with respect, trying not to typical-mind when hearing about someone else’s lived experience, not lumping all minorities together into one indistinguishable group, etc.) and leaving the bad parts behind (insulting members of “privileged” groups just for being “privileged,” telling random white men to go kill themselves, treating all heterosexual males as sexual predators, etc.)
He’s one of the few people who seem to genuinely be outside the usual SJW/anti-SJW binary that is emerging online.
“not lumping all minorities together into one indistinguishable group”
That’s actually a pretty big part of SJWism. The term “person of color” does exactly this.
SSC has drawn some attention from the alt-right by taking them seriously and writing popular anti-feminist posts, and the alt-right has a pretty broad definition of SJW.
Most people have the same definition for SJW: “SJ person I don’t like”
The further right you go, this group usually becomes pretty pretty large, because those guys saying “maybe the emancipation of slaves was a good idea” should really stop shoving their PC bs down our throat.
The further into SJ you go, it gets smaller, that guy doxxing someone has their heart in the right place, isn’t actually physically hurting anyone, and really, that bigot probably deserved it anyway…
Hah.
Cuddle piles and stuffed animals are quite literally the best. Those boogers are missing out.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cuddle pile with stuffed animals!
You ought to make a script that changes the blog’s tagline randomly to one of these.
I think you kind of cherry picked here. Did you get any negative feedback? Seems only fair to show both sides.
Hey, these are public comments. You want the negative feedback go find it yourself 🙂
lol
The post is amusing, but it occurs to me that after mentally translating these quotations from Bloggish into common English, I would have treated some of them as a positive references, or even strong recommendations (albeit from unreliable sources):
“Slate Star Codex is 140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”
==> The blog applies careful thinking to matters of general interest.
“a blog populated by 99th percentile aspergers/IQ “rationalist” millennials who converse in an abnormally abstract style, and whose concrete cultural experience is drawn mainly from a bunch of weird nerd shit.”
==> Intelligent people make substantive observations in the comments.
“is it some sort of special `Talk Like a Vulcan Day’ over there? Or are they always like that?”
==> Precise language and terminology are considered acceptable.
“I thought it was a blog about science methodology until that post with the talking cactus.”
==> Matters of interest are described with sense of humor.
“Precise language and terminology are considered acceptable.” – pf said, talking like a Vulcan.
(Not that I don’t do the same thing myself – my husband likes to compare me to Lilith from Cheers.)
Is there an emoticon for one raised eyebrow?
ō.ò
ō_Ô
I suspect you already know this, but I’ll say it anyway.
What these people wrote has very little to do with you, and about gaining status in the communities they are a part of. You are a high-profile person who has been critical of their communities; they gain status by trashing you, using any weapon at hand.
If you did not provide those weapons, they would have grabbed other ones.
If you didn’t exist or never wrote anything critical (or perceived as critical) about their movements, they would have targeted someone else.
Although, I do have to wonder how much crap like this plays into the marketplace of ideas.
We see some discussion about this, on the outskirts. About PC outrage mobs, or about how a jerky tech culture scares women out of STEM role.
But I wonder how many people just decide to, in general, keep their mouths shut because to become a prominent champion of any particular position is to make oneself the scapegoat for the community that might be opposed to that position.
And I don’t know how we get out of it. I would say that these people don’t have influence, but it looks like they’re gaining. Would it take something like a Trump presidency for us to decide that enduring this abuse is better than leaving the field open to those who don’t give a shit?
Surely he just hasn’t found and performed the correct rituals yet? I mean, there must be some way to ward off ostracism. The alternative would be unthinkable.
Dude! It’s like Scott wrote the book on signaling and countersignaling. (j/k) (or at least a book length post on it).
I’m pretty sure he knows that on an intellectual level, but I like the way you put it clearly and concisely.
I think that’s 90% of it, the rest is genuine frustration that could have been stated much more reasonably.
How on earth did you find that goodgamery.com thread?
WordPress shows me the source of all incoming traffic.
More generally, web browsers send the “Referer” (sic), or the page that a link came from, when they request a linked page from a web server.
So any site that you link to, will be able to see that you linked to it if people follow those links. On most common web servers (like Apache) this shows up in the logs.
(… Unless the linking page is on HTTPS and the linked page is not, in which case browsers don’t send the Referer.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
YOU KNOW WHAT PEOPLE DON’T HATE EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BEING RATIONAL!
You’re not from around here, are you?
Some of those comments are pure gold. And I don’t mean the dumb abusive ones, although they’re funny too especially in aggregate. I mean, some of them are actually witty and fun. Still pigheaded but with a grain of truth and very entertaining. So glad you posted this despite “optics” etc. I discovered this blog quite recently and instantly fell in love. I thoroughly enjoy your regular posts on every level – the insights, the witty and clear writing, the overall aura of niceness you project. But I rarely grin like crazy reading and this time I have. I feel like I should apologize for my immature sense of humor but I’m not gonna. You made my day, thank you.
Scott,
You’re a bright mind with many interesting ideas. SSC is great work, please keep it up and don’t ever change (well, do change, but only as appropriate after considering the merits). Hope all’s well with you and your family!
+1
My only real complaint about SSC is the amount of my time it consumes, but that’s mostly the fault of the commenters, not Scott. And if I wasn’t wasting time here, I would very likely, on past evidence, be wasting it online somewhere with a lower level of civil conversation.
I find it easier to reclaim my time from places with less civil conversation, but this.
Content critiques aside, I’m disgusted by the number of ad hominem attacks. Aspies, asexual heteroromantic in quotes, cuckold, mentally ill… I wish I could find it funny but it’s just really sad.
“ssc spends a significant amount of time talking about stuff like how tables and chairs can be genders. he keeps a pretty unhinged tumblr”
Are we sure Scott didn’t slip this one in himself? xD
Completely off-topic, but a random question: what songs, if any, have ever moved people here to tears?
I am not a very “teary” or sentimental person; I can’t think of any times I’ve cried because from watching a movie or reading a book (maybe there are some I can’t recall right now). But sometimes a song will get me, usually the combination of a song and a video or experience. (I’m not talking about tears streaming down by cheeks, but rather the feeling of your eyes “getting wet”.) The specific examples I can think of:
1. When I was studying abroad in St. Petersburg, we went on a tour to the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, in which around 500,000 victims of the Siege of Leningrad by the Nazis are buried. It was a fairly emotional experience in itself, but they had a loudspeaker constantly playing classical music, and I had tears in my eyes when they were playing Pachelbel’s Canon.
2. A completely different type of example: when I first heard the song “Telstar” by The Tornados (I can’t find the correct original version online). It’s a sort of novelty song which I suppose is something of a precursor to modern electronic music, an instrumental named after the first telecommunications satellite and meant to evoke it in sound. But something about it just captured the wonder of human progress for me, without being expressed in any words. Just the sort of optimistic vision of the future, that there is an unlimited expanse of technological and scientific advancement to be made.
3. The music video to “Endless Sorrow” by Ayumi Hamasaki. It depicts a very unrealistic dystopian future where all physical speech of any kind is forbidden. But in a dream, a little boy climbs to the top of the Eiffel Tower and inspires people depicted in prison, with their vocal cords cut, with hope. I don’t know exactly what it was about it, but the combination of this and the music somehow struck a nerve with me.
4. Another maybe silly example, but much more recent. Just a few weeks ago, I came across the cover version of “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys, and the associated music video. If you can get past the cheesy 90s special effects and costumes, the song starts off very similar to the Soviet national anthem, and the video depicts a brigade of stereotypically Soviet-looking soldiers following the Pet Shop Boys and marching “west” up a staircase to the heavens and to freedom. The combination of that and the simple lyrics talking about freedom just struck me in an emotional way.
So I suppose the lesson is: give me a trite message about human freedom and progress, and it will really move me emotionally. 🙂
This is separate from what have been the saddest songs for me. That place is occupied by a couple of songs, which I can hardly listen to because I don’t like songs that make me feel sad. They were both played often by my father on car trips, so I heard them at a young age:
1. “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles. This one is sort of self-explanatory, and I think people are mostly familiar with it. It’s a song about people who live and die alone and unloved.
2. “The Way” by Fastball. This one may be more unusual (and it may date me 😉 ), but I always found this to be a terribly depressing song when I was little. The idea of the song is of parents suddenly leaving their children and setting off on the “highway”, where they walk forever after their car breaks down. I don’t know if this was intended, but it always struck me as a metaphor for suicide and death, as they continue walking aimlessly forever without ever getting “old and grey”. And the concept of continued, purposeless existence (“But where were they going without ever knowing the way?”) struck me as expressing a very sad and depressing point of view.
The Way has always brought up a feeling of abandonment in me, and I seem to remember thinking it implied suicide at some point, although you may have implanted that idea in my head.
Another 90s song which is a lot darker than most people seem to realize when the lyrics are actually paid attention to is the Offspring’s “The Kids Aren’t Alright”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrZ4sMRYimw
That song in particular almost always evokes hopelessness/melancholy in me.
“The Way” was based on a true story. In reality they were found dead at the bottom of a ravine, hundreds of miles from home.
Interesting! I like this part of the article:
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” has done it for me, which is why this makes me want to declare war on Japan. Cultural appropriation!
A fantastic choice. In case you missed it: “If I ever become Christian, it’ll probably be because of this song.” High praise, from Scott.
You know, I forgot to mention that one, but it’s also done it for me.
On a bad day, the fourth movement of Mahler’s 5th symphony or the last movement of Mahler’s 9th symphony will get me.
Yeah. Mahler’s 5th Symphony’s fourth movement is a great piece.
ps. I’m not musician so I can’t judge it on objective terms.
I’ve never had the urge to cry because of music before. But as someone with a background in music, (and still plays/performs on a regular basis) I have had “eargasms,” where I go directly to the “oh shit this is perfection and I need to listen to it on repeat for a couple of days” stage instead of the usual “eh, it’ll grow on me.”
Closer to what you’re asking for, I’ve had music experiences where I just get completely filled with an undefinable emotion, a state no other mediums have accomplished for me.
This specific performance of Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are”
Richard Strauss’s Don Juan
John Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances
Mahler’s Symphony 2
Resphighi’s Roman Festival (Movements 1 and 4)
Hector Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique
Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture
Astor Piazzolla Concerto for Bandoneon
Otherwise, there have been a few “cheating” moments in anime, where a well-directed reprise of a main motif happens at an emotional climax, but the narrative storytelling is doing just as much of the work there, so. Nonetheless, the anime Simoun managed to do it multiple times, so much so that I paid good money to import the out-of-print OSTs.
Lyrics don’t do much for me. It’s all in the composition and arrangement, baby.
Hmm, I think that narrative-linked music is a special case. For example, “Leaving Earth” is probably not very impressive on its own; but it always feels like a punch in the gut whenever it comes up on my playlist, due to the backstory associated with it.
EDIT: The same thing goes for New Order’s Elegia, because of More.
I can’t think of any songs that move me to tears, but at least one poem—”The Mary Gloster,” by Kipling, I sometimes have a hard time reciting all of.
The ones that I can specifically recall:
Shaggy – It Wasn’t Me (somewhat NWS music video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_x6QmuJdms
Earth Wind and Fire – September https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs069dndIYk
Honda Mariko (voice of Yukko from Nichijou) – Yukko no Gyagu Hyaku Renpatsu (Yukko’s 100 Rapid-fire Gags) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrnrduVjIL0
Itou Kanae (voice of Elsie from The World God Only Knows) – Oh! My God! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGdgyVTvw44
I’m torn between a little bit of happiness because someone else has expressed an appreciation for Nichijou and a large bit of irritation for clearly going against the prompt. No way these songs made you cry from emotion.
That’s pretty presumptuous of you – I choked up just constructing this list.
You don’t see how e.g. Yukko’s desperate pleas for her friends to react to her masterpiece of comedy could tug at a fellow’s heartstrings? As a person who often likes to make jokes and has a fragile self-image it speaks to me on a deep level.
You’re an odd duck. (But I’m one to talk.)
I don’t cry at media, but the closest Nichijou came to moving me to tears was the scene near the end of the series with the “friendship coupon”. Just beautiful.
Melodramatic as it is, this song for me is Hurt.
For a young, destitute, homeless me living in a city far from anyone he knew, The Downward Spiral crystallised the suicidal undercurrent in his thoughts and helped him work through it. Not bad considering it was more than a decade old when I first heard it.
For me it would be Those Were The Days, by Mary Hopkin.
The original.
Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPHh3nMMu-I
A Man/Me/Then Jim – Rilo Kiley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_MuX8cjrKA
Cold Missouri Waters – Cry Cry Cry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgQNeGPJdcQ
Ya Adheeman – Ahmed Bukhatir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_feOLUJGvs
“Eleanor Rigby” definitely for me as well. I find it always very hard to listen to, because it gives me a sharp stab of emotional pain. Because it’s not a big dramatic tragedy, it’s the quiet slide into hopelessness of everyday life when you’re getting older and either friends and family move away, move on, die, or you never had too many in the first place, and here you are living alone and likely to die alone. Just one of the countless lonely people that won’t make a stir.
I’ll have to think a bit about music that has moved me to tears. There is music that moved me like getting klonked over the head with a 2×4 because of its beauty and sublimity – Mozart and Pärt are good for that – and many slow airs in Irish traditional music (and other folk music) do touch me and move me greatly, such as The Parting of Friends.
Perhaps too obvious, but military laments and anything commemorating dead soldiers, like Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden, and and their various later musical e.g. rock-ish reinterpretations. Doesn’t really matter from what country. I haven’t even knew anyone who served beyond the mandatory terms that are common around here, and yet something as simple as a photo of airplanes flying in the missing man formation affects me very strongly. Somehow these moments of life feel the most real, most honest.
My memory must be hallucinating. “[T]he smile that brings the tear” isn’t in “The Barrel-Organ”, and Google can’t find it anywhere else.
But that’s how it works for me. Not music itself, but the memories around it. Really good music washes away tears and smiles both.
One of the very few ones is actually “Brighter than Today”.
GYBE! – Antennas to Heaven (particularly 5:30 – 12:00): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NivY_iRdSBQ
Although that’s a more joyful sort of tears.
Anathema – Untouchable Pt. 1 & 2 (really, the climax of 2, but both are necessary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrgrEkhudfo
You guys are so much more classy than I am!
Music that has made me tear up.
This piano rendition of Next to You, originally on the Parasyte OST. (It makes me remember Shinji’s run towards the sea wall, and I can’t say more without spoilers.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch/v=D0b5uulBrDrs
Kate Nash, The Nicest Thing
When I was like 14, I heard Sting singing The Russians Love Their Children Too for the first time, late at night on the radio, wearing headphones in a dark room. I think all of those conditions were necessary.
Elvis Costello, I Want You. (Full on tears running down my face on that one – in my defense, it was my first time listening to Blood and Chocolate, and I had just gone through a bad break-up).
Oh, and Johnny Cash’s covers of One and Oh Danny Boy.
You guys are so much more classy than I am!
Or possibly simply more pretentious 🙂
If we’re broadening this to “music that was personally meaningful at a certain time of our lives”, then for me:
(a) Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty. It’s 1978, I’m just turned 15 (sigh – giving my age away with that), I’m doing the Intermediate Certificate national state exam, it’s June, it’s glorious summer mornings and I’m up early in the kitchen getting my breakfast before heading off for a full day in the exam hall, and this song is the big summer hit. It’s played on the radio every morning and it’s the soundtrack to my memories of that time. (Oh, that saxophone solo!)
(b) Atmospherics: Listen to the Radio, Tom Robinson. 1983 and this song is on the radio every evening. I’ve never been to Paris, I’ve never lived the kind of life referenced in this song, but yes, at the time – every evening I get back from work, I turn on the radio, have my tea, and, as per the lyrics, I lie down on the bed, throw back my head, and listen to the radio.
“The first time our pipers kicked their heels out in front of the band, skirling away at “Alamein Dead,” my hair stood up so straight it lifted my cap. It gets you — makes tears.”
(There’s no pipe march called “Alamein Dead”, but this will do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwKgGTANQQg)
Simply listening to “Earth” gets me to cry almost always.
Ólafur Arnalds also does it for me, with “This Place was a Shelter” (admittedly with strong visuals) and “Gleypa Okkur”.
Then there’s also a random “Helicopter” rescuing me when I get “Lost in Las Vegas”.
You could say I have a pretty strong reaction to music, I could name several more pieces from memory. It doesn’t even have to be good music, in any conventional sense of the word. Strangely enough, all these pieces are instrumental. I somehow, dunno, cringe when music has vocals.
“Earth” doesn’t do much for me, but I find Blackheart to be oddly inspirational. It’s one of the very, very few pieces of music that actually creates images in my mind as I listen to it.
Best of my Love by the Eagles. Whatever that wailing instrument is in the vamp, and “Every morning I wake up and worry what’s gonna happen today.” I haven’t actually been depressed in a while, and I haven’t been in a dying relationship in even longer, but than line always reminds me how lucky I am about both. Of course an old man like me gets teary more easily than he used to.
“Yesterday” by Atmosphere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJUD0rEPWM
“Rebecca” by Grieves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g2R6Ed3_xE
Just to shake things up a bit genre-wise.
Edit: Also “Guarantees” by Atmosphere. That one really hits home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoLxuyV9qz8
I’d like to express my support of the cactus-person comment and issue the following plea; SSC should return to its roots.
Whale metaphor blogging.
Second the need for more whale hedgehogging.
Is it the opinion of the commentariat that this site needs more Cactus World News?
Your blog has made me a better person (and facilitated my blossoming into some kind of weird proto-rationalist) – and this post is hilarious.
So, New Hampshire.
I think this cements SC as a Trump vs Cruz race. Rubio has a track record of a 3rd place and a 5th place. Bush is worse. Kasich has no money, no organisation, and his one bragging point is winning less than half of what Trump did.
The Bush/Rubio donors have deep pockets and will keep propping up their guys for a while, but the voters will see that they aren’t serious competitors. For anyone who wants to stop the Trump train, Cruz is the only realistic choice now.
My two cents: I think this post was a mistake. It’s clearly cherry-picking its examples to make some sort of point or, worse, not to make a point but just to elicit negative feelings about a particular point of view. Which of course is not to deny that the examples are generally nasty, distasteful, unfair, and inaccurate. The problem is, it reads to me like it’s “weak-manning” an opposing viewpoint (i.e. disagreement with SSC’s themes and style) by showing the opposition at its worst. It could also be read as fishing for compliments and positive feedback, or even encouraging retaliation against the writers of the negative comments.
Not saying that was the intention, but it was the sense I got from reading the post. And I think it goes without saying that it’s contrary to the spirit of SSC to deal with opposing viewpoints that way.
I think you’re taking it too seriously.
Oh. Yeah, that could be it too.
750 comments and counting… So the favorite topics here appear to be Moloch, social justice and internet comments. I’m pretty sure with a little effort someone can turn this into a phrase worthy of the inevitable follo-up to this post.
Nah, this post is just acting as the de-facto Open Thread, cannibalizing the comments from the actual one.
Unless Cruz’ punchable face, the result of NH’s caucus and songs that make you cri evrytiem seem like related topics to you.
Unless Cruz’ punchable face, the result of NH’s caucus and songs that make you cri evrytiem seem like related topics to you.
How about crying at the NH caucus when someone sang a song about Cruz’ punchable face? 🙂
I think the last two could be explained by the fact that people find drama interesting, especially if it’s about tribes adjacent to ours.
I read everything you wrote on this blog for the last 18 months or so and much of what came before it. I do often disagree deeply. But I’d never say you didn’t do your best to get at the heart of a problem and I admire your intellectual virtues greatly.
I’m unclear what particular exercise this entry was but my main guesses all make me think even more highly of you.
You do have an awesome way with words. Though I think you would be even better received as a fiction author. Just make a pseudonym behind some impressive double blinds for privacy and rock the world ^.^
I’m very confident you weren’t soliciting praise with this. But I realized after reading this “damned but you receive a lot of abuse.” Even if you have a Buddha like detachment from it, it’s a sign you’re doing something right. A society as sick as ours screams when you poke the pus filled abscesses of its cultural gangrene.
So good on you and may your powers increase.
“You do have an awesome way with words. Though I think you would be even better received as a fiction author. Just make a pseudonym behind some impressive double blinds for privacy and rock the world ^.^”
What do you think of Unsong though?
It’s hilarious to see commenters saying Scott is bending over backwards to please ‘SJWs’ or being helplessly locked in left-wing ideology, when I personally find this blog to be so scandalously to the ‘right’ of what I normally read that I feel a bit dirty coming here.
With his endorsement of polyamory, UBI, and open borders*, he could practically write the Republican party platform.
*Simplification, I admit.
Scott is pretty good at being an engaged, thoughtful centrist in general.
Scott has crazy political positions with respect to America, he’s just a nice guy, so he seems centrist/moderate/whatever we’re using to mean “good person” now. Unless someone really does think he’s a centrist/moderate, I’d like to here that argument.
Yeah, that’s true, while moderate tempermentally I can’t really think of any positions he has that are considered as far right as some are far left. But he at least seems open minded. (He can feel free to correct me, of course).
If half of your positions are far-left and the other half are far-right you come out moderate on average.
I think you could call yourself centrist then, but not moderate. Moderate should mean “doesn’t favor any radical change” if we want the political meaning to match the generic meaning.
I just graduated from a university with a very active, intensely Marxist, pointedly illiberal and completely dominant student-political Left, who are more-or-less my tribe, since I’d run screaming out the door* five minutes into a conservative meeting on campus.
Just reading someone eloquently defending liberalism gives me a fear reaction lol. A nice thrill. Maybe, in adult life, it’s ok to be liberal, and Trots won’t scream in your face?!
*sit in my seat listening and feeling intensely uncomfortable
In the “reign of terror” posts, and some of the “black hole” talk, Scott admitted that part of his motivation was scrubbing the comments of those not-to-be-named persons who might scare off too many of his social group and/or get him labeled an untouchable by association.
So, while I wouldn’t go as far as the critics listed here, I do feel like Scott sometimes holds back a bit on (or apologizes more for) what he really believes, if what he really believes is something that would be looked upon with suspicion within his mostly blue-tribe milieu. On the other hand I’ve seen nothing to indicate Scott would censor himself (or his commenters) who supported more radical leftish positions like UBI or open borders.
Now this may not be true at all, and Scott certainly hasn’t held back in some of his SJ-related posts, but I do find it’s a nagging suspicion. Could be an error on my part.
A lot of nails were hit on the head there. This is probably SSC’s most insightful post.
> “I thought it was a blog about science methodology until that post with the talking cactus.”
I have absolutely no clue why I find this one in particular so hilarious.
Because it’s gently bewildered rather than angrily accusative? And by comparison with the rest of them, it’s not insulting Scott’s (or ours) intelligence, politics, personal integrity, sexual prowess or disinterestedness?
I dunno, it’s just funny (and would make a fantastic banner for the site) 🙂
Agreed on all points.
Being gently bewildered isn’t usually a sufficient condition for me finding something funny, so I’m gonna have to go with no on all counts.
If that’s of any interest to you, conventional success is a great way to get under the skin of those critics, who probably enjoy little or none of their own. It’s well within your abilities to publish a New York Times best-seller and – though the attacks won’t stop – these people will genuinely feel psychological pain as a result.
They deserve it: there has to be a cost to being a complete ass. You’ll be doing society a service.
As someone who desires to act as your vicarious aggression center:
Fuck the haters. Don’t let them get you down. Your thing is weird and even I think it’s weird (and sometimes even deeply wrong sometimes) but a lot of this criticism is from assholes and you deserve better. Crush your enemies below your feet, Scott! Take life by the soft tissues and squeeze it until it gives you its damn wallet! Fight back, Scott! call down the legions of angels to take you off your cross! Tell Sun Tzu to screw himself and unsheath that sword, son!
Sincerely, an angry young man who doesn’t know what is actually going on.
I love this blog but some criticism:
1. Some of the humour on SSC is a bit hmm.. bad. And speaking as a geek myself. Maybe Scott should do a standup or two to more “normal” people. Its not a major problem. To some extent its a taste difference. I’d prefer a blog with some fatherly firm common sense but still rather deep understanding of signalling and epistemology etc. It would feel like it would have bigger impact on world than a blog that caters more to a geek niche. But its his blog.
2. Verbosity. Yeah I feel like the posts are a bit too verbose. Not just length of the post but sentence complexity. Expressing yourself in short periods is a skill.
The great thing about reading a blog in foreign language is that many of the things I’d read in my mother tongue would sound really weird, bad or something. But I don’t have that emotional connotation here. Not to mention having to deal with countrymen. This helps to speak objectively about some things. Probably would work too for English-speaking people.
I don’t mind the length too much. Scott is verbose but it’s rarely due to repetition or needless verbiage, almost everything is generally doing work. Often large portions of a post are dedicated to making it clear what he’s *not* saying which is unfortunately necessary since so many will read it in bad faith.
Yes, I don’t object to the length of the posts at all.
Okay, to be honest the ones about gun control or marijuana where he goes through all the studies are pretty boring. But that’s not what I read this blog for. (Nor for the social justice stuff.)
I read it for the intriguing ideas like in “Meditations on Moloch” or “Right is the New Left”. Which there haven’t been as many of lately, unfortunately. Though I’m pretty sure Scott has said this is because he’s busy with real-life engagements. The most recent “big ideas” post is, I would say, “Should AI Be Open?”. (And even that’s not bold Scott Alexander stuff like “The Goddess of Everything Else”.)
“Staying Classy” is close but it’s more brief and mostly just a summary of other people’s ideas.
And if Scott reads this: I am not trying to criticize you or guilt you into writing more!
I like the length. If I’m really enjoying a post, then there’s a lot of it to enjoy, and if I’m not, I skim it.
Too much of a good thing is wonderful, after all.
Some more feedback, courtesy of The Anti–Democracy Activist.
What’s the point of banning anyone if jaime here is just going to repost their blogs verbatim in the comments of every post?
Your gripe would have more merit if this post weren’t dedicated to reposting complaints about SSC. Jaime’s comment is very on-topic here.
(I don’t know if Scott has banned anti-dem. I do know he’s banned some of the people he himself quoted above).
AntiDem is not banned. As far as I know, he’s made all of one comment here.
I like the juxtaposition of “I make sure each word counts” with “Again, [a sentence repeated from the previous paragraph verbatim”.
I’d take these a lot more seriously if they came from someone who’d ever written anything besides contentless, moralizing drivel
“But Alexander is one of those guys who never says in 1000 words what he could say in 5000.”
“Again, Scott Alexander never says in 1000 words what he could say in 5000.”
(also @Hal) The paragraphs are quotes from three different posts, and I would say the ask.fm format encourages repetition in that form.
Serious lol at excusing Moldbug for long posts and then complaining about Scott.
What is the deal with Death Eaters and ham-handed sexual metaphors?
I can’t see the site from work. Did he link the one about Scott “getting cucked by liberal values”?
Or words to that effect, yeah.
My guess would be the influence of the Heartiste side of that blogosphere.
They work the best at getting attention, I suppose, and I suspect there are far more people willing to be sexist than racist in the American Internet population.
@honestlymellowstarlight; @Jaskologist too:
I think that is correct. “Here’s how you can get laid!” is a big selling point for a lot of men.
It seems like the one (sexism) can lead to the other (racism). Heartiste seems to have started out in, when, the mid 2000s, as a fairly standard PUA of his time: more “theory” than the ones in the 90s had, and misogynistic on a more intellectual level (not just treating women badly, but outright presenting them as lower creatures). Nowadays he is pretty much a white nationalist blogger, with a side of PUA.
My hypothesis is that, as PUAs sought evo psych just-so stories (not that all evo psych is that bad, but a fair bit is) to explain their tricks and justify their behaviours, they began to focus more and more on supposed biological differences between men and women, which they painted as causing all differences between men and women – where the conventional view (especially the conventional left-wing view) would ascribe many/all differences more/entirely to socialization.
It is not a far leap from ascribing social differences between men and women to biology, to ascribing differences that exist between ethnic groups to biology, in comparison to the conventional view of difference being caused by society (that is, left wingers will blame the plight of oppressed minorities on discrimination; conventional right wingers will blame it on a “culture of poverty” or something like that – nobody in the mainstream explains them using biology any more). Once you’ve explained one thing by appealing to biology, you’re more likely to explain other things that way.
Because men are acutely sensitive to implications of sexual failure so they are among the best weapons in a troll’s arsenal.
It’s not just them; it’s the pejorative du jour of the entire far right. The Freudian explanation is that it speaks to their inmost sexual insecurities, but the more likely explanation is that they realize that preying on people’s sense of humiliation (sexual or otherwise) is a powerful means of persuasion.
I both feel bad for and detest anyone that is persuaded by that tactic.
Who are they persuading? I don’t think the prominent targets of the term are bothered by it (aside from thinking the insulting party a moron). Are they trying to persuade an undecided audience? My guess would be that persuasion is the last thing on the minds of such people.
I think they’re definitely trying to persuade an undecided audience. E.g., white nationalists want to convert disenfranchised white Republicans whom they perceive as naive dupes betrayed by the conservative mainstream (“cuckservatives”).
OK, looking at the comments that (seem to be) left wing, there are a few that basically seem to be saying (I’m glossing a few) “these are STEM types who are smart but don’t understand the non-STEM stuff they’re talking about and don’t have enough sources to realize they don’t”.
Is there something to this? I think there is, although I think it’s a bit harsh, and I think that “STEM people talking about non-STEM” is infinitely better than the opposite. I think what happens is that smart people without a background in “soft” stuff like the humanities and social sciences can trick themselves into thinking they understand those subjects better than they do.
I’m not a STEM person. Not even close. My background is basically history. One thing I will admit is that at the ground level, humanities and social sciences are easier than STEM stuff. A 100-level physics course is going to be harder for someone like me than a 100-level history course is going to be for a physics major. Note that this does not necessarily mean that the humanities and social sciences are easier – but they are definitely easier to get into at a low level.
As a result, people with a science background can get to a fairly low-level, first-year-of-undergrad level of understanding of, say, 20th century history, based on popular materials and a few primary sources. It’s still a better understanding than I would have of physics, having read some kind of pop-physics book. But they lack the knowledge of the methods used in the humanities and social sciences. It’s not necessarily that these methods are good: I have a lot of problems with various social sciences (many tendency to play fast and loose with facts to fit a theory, and a tendency to build up almost theological internally consistent systems that don’t fit the facts, for instance).
A good example is the stuff Yarvin wrote that falls into the “secret history of the xxth century” stuff. A few primary sources that run against the conventional narrative, based on which the conventional narrative is attacked, but without an understanding of how historians use sources.
Attacking the conventional narrative can be good. The window of what it’s acceptable to say in academia is often rather small. There’s a real tendency to assume that because the guys who won, ideologically speaking, are our ancestors, ideologically speaking, they must have been the good guys. But doing it without understanding how to handle sources is bad: some pamphlets by people attacking the American revolution by people against the American revolution doesn’t prove the American revolutionaries were in the wrong. Yarvin is far from being as bad as actual pseudohistorical types, but his sources don’t prove what he says they prove.
This said, STEM types have more of value to say about the humanities and the social sciences than the other way around, because it’s harder to get in on the ground floor in STEM. What someone without quite advanced training in physics has to say about physics is probably going to be so worthless as to not even be thought-provoking.
One thing I definitely disagree with in some of the (again, seemingly) left-wing comments is the idea that dispassionate intellectualizing is gauche, or even immoral. It doesn’t make sense to say that emotional distance from something makes it harder to understand that thing, and if I got deeply emotional about human history, I’d just be crying tears of rage all the time. Human history is pretty nasty.
Beyond the tribalism and the dismissals (if something is so easily dismantled that it can just be dismissed, than do the easy thing and dismantle it!), though, I think there is something there.
What I find weird is… when did Scott (A psychiatrist with a bachelor’s degree in, if I recall correctly, philosophy) become “a STEM type”?
“STEM-types” in the negative sense are defined by their reverence for math and the hard sciences, not mastery of them.
No, but I mean it the other way around: Scott’s handling of math seems perfectly adequate, but he chose to pursue education elsewhere, whcih makes me not get the perception that he somehow “venerates math & associated sciences”.
Scott has repeatedly stated that he lacks the aptitude for professional-grade math, despite his best efforts to learn, but he does seem to consider it extremely important for humanity — perhaps even the key to solving all our problems.
Attacking people for being dispassionately analytical is de rigeur on the left, and — as far as I can tell — always has been. Liberals are idealists. We tend to be suspicious of anyone who stops to think about problems we regard as urgent and obvious. It invokes the psychology of taboo. (Remember that psych experiment where participants rated a fictitious hospital administrator as evil for even considering letting a child die to save the money that could build a new wing?)
The left also tends to fetishize authenticity, more so the more left you get. Someone with lived experience has “street cred” even if they are demonstrably incorrect on an analytical level. In some leftist circles, this is literally all you need — I knew people in Portland whom I wouldn’t have trusted to buy coffee, but who were regarded as gurus because they’d been born poor or had endured some major hardship.
Surely the right attacks people for being dispassionately analytical and inauthentic, though?
I mean, witness the attacks on know-it-all academics and folks who aren’t salt-of-the-earth. “Lived experience” isn’t only a left-wing thing either – it’s just that what gets valued is different. The right certainly values, say, military service, or business experience, more than the left does.
The right has stories about Marine vets punching out atheist professors; the left has stories about oppressed students schooling professors on their privilege.
That’s true. It seems subtly different; on the right, it’s about anti-intellectualism qua intellectualism, while on the left it’s more about certain things being declared intellectually off-limits. Often by people who are themselves intellectuals.
Experience is not quite what the left means by “lived experience”. It’s not that people with the “lived experience” of oppression are presumed to have skills or knowledge others don’t. Rather there is a presumed emotional incommensurability: you just can’t “get it” if you haven’t been through what they have. I guess military service is the closest equivalent on the right, but I don’t think it’s actually all that close.
I don’t think it’s so much about declaring things intellectually off-limits, I think it’s about different attitudes toward intellectual roles.
Specifically, I think — though individuals will fall somewhere in between — that the left as a culture tends to see the academy as a place to communicate wisdom, and the right sees it as a place to communicate knowledge. If you’re on the wisdom side, you’re likely to see sociologists et al. as doing serious, important work in charting the moral future of society, and STEM types as anomalously overpaid peons who type some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo. If you’re on the knowledge side, you think engineers and scientists are laying the technical foundations of power and prosperity while the humanities and social-science guys are out-of-touch ivory tower elites hubristically playing at a priestly role.
“Oppressed student shames privileged professor” is a standard “out of the mouths of babes” story.
I would say it’s pretty close.
A person not of an oppressed group (or a group presented as oppressed) is, in a left-wing context, going to get torn to bits if they correct a person of that group on some factual matter pertaining to the oppression or supposed oppression. Similarly, a civilian in a right-wing context is going to get torn to bits if they correct a veteran on something related to the military. Doesn’t even have to be something about a war – it could be something wonky, like weapon specifications.
In both cases, it’s basically “you weren’t THERE, maaaaaan”. It’s a genetic fallacy – life experience is held to confer moral and factual authority.
Having “lived experience” and being “dispassionately analytical” aren’t the same thing, though. I’ve seen both right and left attack the other side for speaking of things they have no experience of; I’ve also been told by people on the left that wanting to consider things dispassionately is ipso facto a mark of privilege (because if I’d really suffered, I’d be too angry to set aside my feelings, or something), whereas I’ve never come across this view on the right.
wanting to consider things dispassionately is ipso facto a mark of privilege (because if I’d really suffered, I’d be too angry to set aside my feelings, or something)
I agree, I’ve only encountered this on the left, and actually, only since…say…2003/2004 or so. I find the degree of traction that this idea has to be very disquieting, and even more so how it has eroded what I had considered the “natural ideal” (*) of setting aside emotion and personal gain/loss while advocating for a particular policy or course of action.
I think we could do with more discussion of this.
(*) more fool me, obviously, as many don’t agree. But to me, getting angry about something is *easy*, and can be done fraudulently, while presenting factual evidence in support of something in a clear and dispassionate manner is *hard*, and so we *should* privilege the second over the first. And this doesn’t even begin to address the tendency for passionate advocacy to shift to violent pressure, which as a member of the smaller and weaker half of the species, I *thought* we were getting away from, as much as we could.
But isn’t that often correct? Being privileged means you can afford to be dispassionate? It’s just that being privileged (in some particular regard, not “in general”) doesn’t make you wrong in any way, shape, or form when it comes to factual and logical matters.
“But isn’t that often correct? Being privileged means you can afford to be dispassionate?”
It seems likely that progressives started exalting less privileged perspectives in response to this exact argument. It’s easy to dismiss people who are actually affected by policies and cultural forces since they can be said to have bias. It’s also absurd to do so. “Dispassionate” is not a synonym for “informed” or “rational.” Passion can be a strong motivator to research and think about a subject thoroughly, beyond one’s personal experience (which in some contexts can also have some validity). There was a real need to draw attention to underprivileged people’s voices. Progressives just took it too far by dismissing everyone else’s. Or at least white progressives like to signal dismissing privileged people (presumably including themselves)–in reality white people still dominate liberal discourse. Though perhaps not men as much anymore.
Questions. On what issues are these people with street cred said to be incorrect?
The thing about handling sources rings so very, very, very true for me. I’d respect Yarvin much more if he didn’t consistently take every historical person at face value all the bloody time. I remember actually cringing the one time one person in the comments here unironically tried to tell people imperialism was totally okay and was done primarily to help those poor foreign people.
Taking Moldbug at face value, at least on the history posts, he said he was trying to provide an alternative narrative.
Honestly, Moldbug’s claim to just providing an interesting alternate narrative strikes me in the same way as Scott Adams’ whole “just kidding, this is only a joke, for entertainment purposes only, don’t take political/life/health/whatever advice from a cartoonist, BUT AS A TRAINED HYPNOTIST all these predictions came true if you stand on one leg and squint” shtick.
Claims of bad faith are always interesting. Why?
OK, it’s impolite to attribute bad faith. Mea culpa.
Taking away the attribution of bad faith, Yarvin/Moldbug either started with bad historiography and built his politics from it, or vice versa.
It’s an alternate narrative, and one that would be interesting if it was done right, but I don’t think he does it right.
Man, I wasn’t asking for an apology, I was asking for an apologia! Politiness is boring anyway, usually why I troll. So, back to my questions: what’s bad about it, what’s wrong with it, and why did you off-the-cuff go with bad faith?
(This isn’t a sneaky internet debate and I’m not trying to make you look dumb or anything, I’m interested.)
Ohhhhh I thought you were asking why claims of bad faith are interesting, and being a bit snarky.
Yarvin/Moldbug doesn’t really handle primary sources with the most awareness. In the case of the American revolution, one of his major points (he’s so verbose that it’s hard to paraphrase) is essentially “we’re taught the revolutionaries were great, but here’s an account by a loyalist who says they’re scoundrels, so they must have been scoundrels”. Beyond the fact that serious historians give a less triumphalist, the-good-guys-won account than the sort of American creation myth he’s taking as the opposing side, this is not how you (are supposed to) handle primary sources. Primary sources are incredibly useful, but using them alone, especially using a few alone, is a great way to get misled. If you wanted to write a person’s biography, you are going to do a piss-poor job if you start and end with their diary. You’re going to do a bad job if you have an account of interactions with them by their worse enemy.
He also has a tendency to assume malice over incompetence – eg, as I recall (again, his verbosity is a problem) he attributes the failure of the British to quash the rebellion primarily to elements in the British leadership wanting the rebels to win. On another level, he attributes the triumphalist, good-guys-won narrative Americans get to more-or-less intentional deception – rather than such a narrative being the norm for most societies.
Bad methods lead to bad results. A narrative come up with by someone with more ability to weigh sources is going to better reflect reality, generally. Of course, there is the problem of professional academics being constrained in what they can say in polite company, as it were – but the solution is not to hand the enterprise over to amateurs. They might be less bound by worrying about not getting tenure, but there are pitfalls they don’t know to avoid.
Given that his account of the American revolution, and of many other things, fits into the larger political and social picture he is painting, it just makes “I’m presenting this as an interesting alternative narrative” seem like ass-covering. It’s along the same lines as prefacing some criticism of a person as “I don’t want to be critical, but…”
It’s more that they approach human interactions with STEM tools, I guess. Think it was Lewis who said that “you can’t study a man, you can only get to know them” when referring to social sciences. But STEM people can approach human interaction trying to use tools designed to understand repeatable, non-sentient phenomena. You can view people as numbers, statistics, causes, and distributions but lose the human, unpredictable element. Or common among STEM types, you go with the logically elegant solution, i.e. the conspiracy theory over the human solution; that causes maybe irreducible and unexplainable, can’t be extrapolated to a general principle of humankind, and are messy and unsatisfying.
I wouldn’t say that STEM subjects are easier to study than humanities (at a low level). I think the main difference is that most people with the relevant skills for both areas tend to choose STEM (partly because, as you say, it is easier for a physics student to read a history book than vice versa, so if you choose to formally study STEM you can have the best of both worlds). I know several STEM types who definitely wouldn’t do well in the humanities due to lack of skill, and several more who have the raw ability, but would really hate writing essays.
I do remember a course where half the STEM types dropped out when the first essay was assigned. It was 2 to 4 pages. My reaction was sort of horror, because I guess I had internalized the idea that STEM students were the smart ones, while I was one of the humanities bullshitters (key skills include ability to do OK on exams without studying much, possibly hung over).
But this isn’t about “do well”, it’s about “do at all”. A physics student dropped into a 100-level history course has a better shot at even passing than a history student dropped into a 100-level history course.
Where I attended university, high failure rates were expected and intended, to weed out the weak. 300 attend the first year, 50 attend the fourth.
Was this for something STEM?
I don’t know about the S, T, or M, but where I went to school, the reputation the engineering department had was that it was pretty brutal, and failing was a very real possibility. If not failing out, then failing courses.
Whereas in the humanities and social sciences, failing a course was almost unheard of, and the province of incredible incompetence and negligence.
Last time I saw this many cuckposts about an internet libertarian, it was because people were worried he was about to sell the site to Gawker.
Maybe we can get the guy who runs r/starslatecodex to start 8 Star Codex.
In the spirit of the post, I feel like I should mention that I almost never agree with Scott, but I like to listen to him talk (type). Partly because he’s eloquent and pleasant to listen to, partly because it’s fascinating to watch someone present a set of data and come to the exact opposite conclusion from it than I would, and partly just because it’s nice to hear an alternate viewpoint presented in a way that isn’t “You disagree with me? You’re an idiot and I hope you die!!!” so that I can actually parse the viewpoint and understand why someone might hold it. Thanks, Scott!
Eh, haters gonna hate. SSC is, by far, my favorite blog. I’m an altright guy, too, and couldn’t care less about Scott’s sexual preferences.
*edit* I should say that the altright is the political movement that I’m most sympathetic to . . . I don’t consider myself a part of anything.
I’m a longtime reader of SSC and this is my first comment on the blog. Reading a distilled “two minutes hate” was uncomfortable and demoralizing.
Uncomfortable because it felt like really transparent signalling. “My opponents are the kind of stupid jerks you hate, so we’re clearly on the same team.” One of the things I enjoy about SSC was that it felt like neutral ground in the gender wars. This feels like backpedaling on that stance and that makes me uneasy.
Demoralizing because it gives me the expectation that most people who disagree with you (and “explain” their disagreement) are bad at making arguments persuasive to their ideological opposites. It’d be a weird coincidence if all the people to the right of you (as one writer put it) just happened to all be largely incoherent.
I usually don’t read the responses beneath the article and now I see that I was happier in that ignorance.
I’m pretty sure these don’t come from the comments; I think they come from other people’s blogs. Maybe some are anonymous hate on Tumblr, or other forms of private correspondence.
That said, I have seen drive-by hate in the comments here. Just not this drive-by hate.
Most of them don’t come from the comments, but at least one of them did.
That’s some prime copypasta material, right there.
Scott can’t even make a joke post without it getting overanalyzed and politicized. The former is expected given the rationalist milleiu, the latter, well, have we reached peak politicization yet? Because it’s getting tedious.
It’s a presidential election year, and it’s mostly Americans around here. I expect the politics to get yet more tedious as November approaches, and everyone wants to talk about how stupid and evil the other tribe are* to be supporting such misguided, indeed vile and contemptible candidates and policies.
* Or maybe both tribes are, but most self-styled independents or third partiers seem to pick one of the two big tribes to be especially passionately against.
9 months to the election, it will only get worse.
There’s a gender war going on? More than one even? Why didn’t anyone tell me?
Genders 1, 2, and 5 are battling genders 3 and 6, with gender 4 so far remaining neutral.
Does that mean the trans-movement is just a conspiracy by Gender 3 to get Genders 2 and 5 to defect to their side?
> .. sitting around attempting to unpack societal problems like it was all a game of fucking sim city
I think a lot of such people do know on some level that societal problems are just people disagreeing on what they want, but you can’t write anything about that because it’s a dead end. However if you focus on systems maybe you have a chance of finding some change that would actually help. Something more universal than just persuading more people to your side.
People value different things. Most people are not intuitively aware of this. People can’t always verbalize what they value accurately. People sometimes think they value something they actually don’t. People don’t always know how to act to further their values. Even if they do know, sometimes they don’t act. To get things done, people must coordinate despite all this, over a horribly messy, non-binding communications channel. It’s a huge mess, and I assume all of this is considered somewhat standard knowledge on LW/SSC, at least if you spell it out.
I include myself in most of the above “people”.
Stupid assholes. The comments around here feel really toxic for some reason. Usually comment with real name around the Internet, and on controversial issues, never had problems. Until here. Got very creepy anonymous email afterwards.
To be fair, almost all of those are from outside sites and not from the comments here. Though I agree that the comments have gotten more aggressive recently as the older rationalist group fragments and fresher readers come in.
Also I’m really sorry to hear that. I’m not asking you to dox yourself but can you point out the thread that you think instigated this? I’m curious what got people’s blood up.
An anon thinks random abuse is just the way the world works, so the everyone should go anon, until the whole world is turned into 4chan? What a surprise.
This comment is especially hilarious considering that *this* anon went anon because of Nita’s focusing on posters (“didn’t you also say X in thread Y, Z months ago?”), rather than arguments.
Really? You flatter me. I’m no l33t haxx0r, I don’t have an army of Tumblr followers (or a Tumblr account, for that matter), and plane tickets for in-person harassment are out of my budget.
But more importantly, I don’t want to hunt people down and intimidate them. That’s just wrong. And I’m sorry if I made you think otherwise.
Edit: Oh, it’s because I mention previous comments? Well. I like keeping people’s alignments and histories in mind — sometimes it helps me read more charitably or understand their arguments better. I like noticing contradictions — to fix my own, or to determine that an alternative worldview is inconsistent. It’s more of a debating club habit than anything personal.
You know, for a strawman, that sounds pretty appealing.
Like this?
(fair warning, TVTropes)
Cosigned. You can do a lot worse than 4chan.
Uh, to voice the obvious opposition: there is already a 4chan for those that want one. And we can do a lot better than it, too.
Two 4Chans! No, fifty 4Chans!
Yes, absolutely. The world needs more anonymity, not less.
In response to the long thread on whether you should sleep with someone who is married or in a long term and nominally exclusive relationship, I would like to start a discussion on a more general question which in part underlies that one.
Sex serves at least two functions other than direct reproduction. One is entertainment–a pleasurable activity. One is as a mechanism to support a long term partnership—”making love” in the literal sense. Obviously a lot of people use it sometimes for the one purpose, sometimes for the other—but I am curious as to which people consider more important.
To put the question more precisely, suppose you had a choice. You could either live a life with no long-term romantic attachments but a reasonable amount of sex with reasonably attractive partners. Or you could have a successful, long term, exclusive relationship with one partner, marriage or the equivalent, and no sex outside that relationship. The latter case includes having children if you want children, not if you don’t. The former might include producing children, accidentally or deliberately, but not the parents jointly rearing them.
If those were the only alternatives, which would you prefer?
No sex outside that successful, long-term, monogamous relationship? But that’s not a forced-choice hypothetical at all: that’s what I would prefer in the real world!
I thought you were going to say: would you rather have all the sex you wanted but no long-term romance, or no sex at all with a long-term romantic relationship? In which case, it’s more of a debate, but I would still choose the latter.
The way you put it sounds to me more like: “Would you rather be rich and smart, or poor and stupid?”
Nope. My preferred arrangement is, as yours, a single romantic partner. But there is no way on earth that any romantic relationship would survive without a sexual component. I may be an outlier, but I doubt it.
It’s not even close to a debate. Which basically reduces the options to “no sex” or “a sexual variety”.
The hypothetical doesn’t ask you to consider the likelihood that the relationship will survive. That’s a given.
And there are people who are unable to have sex, at least in the conventional way. Such as quadriplegics, people with genital injuries, and so on. They still often manage to have romantic relationships.
Now, if you’re getting looser on what constitutes “sex”, it’s harder to draw the line. If you want to go as far as “No kissing, no touching!” that would be substantially more difficult. But even then, I would say that it’s possible to have a romantic relationship purely by means of long-distance communication.
Not necessarily desirable for everyone. That’s why I said it’s “more of a debate”. But I think it would be more desirable to some than the inverse alternative.
I’m not saying that there wouldn’t be anyone who could deal with a sexless romantic union. Hell, our host has non-sexual romantic relationships, not as a matter of inability but as a matter of inclination, if I understand correctly.
What I’m saying is that my definition of a successful romantic relationship – for myself – necessarily includes some amount of sexual satisfaction. Any definition excluding this would, to me, be an oxymoron and the relationship would never get to the point of failure because it could never exist in the first place.
It’d be nice to be a perfect platonic mind free of the desires of the flesh, but man, pretending that it wouldn’t be a problem would just bite me, and as I said, a lot of other people. Likely even people who’d take on your sexless relationship. Bite hard.
If I’m typical-minding a bit hard here then fine, I’ll get slapped down. But no, I suspect that the reason the original hypothesis was posed as it was, disregarding the option of a completely sexless relationship, is because Mr. Friedman understands this view.
I actually like this configuration better, because then we could get into ace dynamic funtimes. Homo/hetero/biromantic asexual, aromantic homo/hetero/bisexual, or aromantic asexual would all have very, very different preferences, much less compared to the standard romantic sexual.
And that’s before you start fiddling with any questions of poly!
It’s what I chose in the real world a very long time ago.
But I don’t think it’s what everyone prefers. Men at least have a taste for sexual variety. The cute twenty-five year old who expresses interest really is more sexually desirable to you than the fifty year old you have been sleeping with, and living with, for the last twenty years. Not as attractive as a long term partner, more attractive as a short-term bedmate. And I suspect some people would prefer the option of being able to pursue such opportunities, at least if they expect them to be reasonably common, even at the cost of not having the long term relationship.
Hence my question.
To put it differently … . Do the comments on the earlier thread reflect a preference for recreational sex, or only the belief that the alternative is not a practical option?
Or, of course, the belief that you can do both, recreational sex in your twenties, long term commitment after.
These seem to me to be in tension with one another.
If anything, based on “revealed preferences” 🙂 I would say that many men (and women: see the Ayn Rand discussion above) are relatively open sexually in their youth until they find the right person to “settle down with”. And they do, but then after ten, fifteen, twenty years, they grow apart or the passion just dies down, and they start looking for something outside the marriage.
A younger partner who has the fire of youth, who gives them things that the person they are married to cannot. And not just sexually, but in terms of personality. I think many affairs are just as much about things like getting away from the spouse’s nagging and annoying habits (everyone probably has some annoying habits) as they are just about sex.
Or to put it another way, it’s just as much about emotional/romantic variety as it is about sexual variety. You get to go through all the magic of a blossoming romance again.
What’s “long term”? Is the partner in the second choice equally “reasonably attractive”? What’s a reasonable amount of sex? What is a “successful” relationship?
Even without clarification, though, I would definitely tend towards the second.
EDIT: Can we define “reasonably attractive” as someone who is basically as attractive as you? I suppose this could change – if you hit the gym and dress better, you’re picking up better-looking people, and let’s assume that if you take the second option, any improvement or decline in you is mirrored in the other person?
Obviously the latter. As Vox said, it’s not a dilemma if you don’t actually put any downsides in.
It’s not even a loss in terms of volume of sex. Unless you’re literally a rockstar you won’t be able to pull in anywhere near as many one-night-stands to match the frequency of sex with a live-in girlfriend or (presumably) wife. An average single guy could beat a sexless marriage, but you ruled that out by inserting the qualifier “successful.”
Besides that, I don’t see any meaningful difference between the reproductive and lovemaking aspects. The Christian term “one flesh” is useful here: you’re creating a literal physical union, down to the molecular level. So the question is flawed on a fundamental level.
Monogamous marriage, then. The other thing sounds like too much work for too little benefit.
If the options are “sex with many different people but no long term relationships or joint child-rearing” or “long-term sex with only one person but happy cohabitation and joint child-rearing,” then B seems like the obvious choice to me, though the ideal is “A from about ages 18-30 and B from about age 30 up.” This is because sex with lots of different people was more interesting to me in my late teens and twenties, and long term cohabitation with children was not something I desired to begin at that point.
After around 30, in addition to my libido being just not as strong, I had already had enough sexual experience with different people to come to the conclusion that most vaginas feel roughly similar and that doing it with someone you really like is a more important component of the enjoyment. What’s more, my career became more important and I was just all around busier and tireder. My relationships became less about ardor and more about “someone you like being around when you’re both super busy and collapse together in front of Netflix at the end of the day.” I assume once children enter the equation it becomes even less sexy and more about practical stuff.
A much tougher question, indeed, is sexless partnership and child-rearing with someone you like very much in every other respect (but who, for example, is just totally frigid, say) or multiple short flings with sexy people but no longterm shared life and children.
I think I’d still choose the long-term partnership and child-rearing, though I would probably try to work out something where I was allowed to have flings outside the relationship. Assuming even that were not allowed, it becomes even harder, though I think I still might take it. Family seems very important to me, and increasingly so as you age, whereas sex seems to follow the opposite curve.
Also, I think when I was younger (especially when I was a virgin, but even during my earlier experience), I saw the difference between masturbation and sex as like the difference between a moped and an airplane or something.
Now it seems to me that sex is more like pizza: sex with lots of people is a pizza with a wide range of interesting toppings, sex with just one person I really like is like pizza with my one favorite topping (pepperoni), and masturbation is kind of like cheese pizza. I could eat pepperoni pizza every day, or at least a couple times a week and never get tired of it. And while it would be sad to only get to eat cheese pizza for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t be so bad I would give up emotional closeness, working together, children, family, etc. just to get the super combination pizza (also, sexual variety, imo, is overrated; like pizza, sex doesn’t really get old; I don’t really understand people who feel a need to add a bunch of toys, roleplaying, etc.).
Also, as Bill Maher says, “sex is like pizza: when it’s good, it’s amazing, but when it’s not good, it’s still pretty good.”
sex doesn’t really get old;
mmm… Like every hedonistic pleasure it does get old if you do it too much. Eventually to get off you need more and more extreme stimulation. The lengths some people go are mind boggling.
“Eventually to get off you need more and more extreme stimulation”
Or take a break? Even pizza isn’t appealing when you’re full. Yet somehow it never fails to be appealing when you’re hungry.
It gets old if you treat it as a terminal goal which is supposed to give your life meaning. Not so much if you slot it in to the supporting role where it belongs.
That doesn’t mean it gets old. Those more and more extreme manifestations are still sex.
The latter seems obviously better. I prefer polyamory, but the existence of at least one long-term romance is better than none, regardless of the availability of sex in the first scenario. An interesting (though maybe less realistic) third scenario to consider is a life full of medium-term (a few years) attachments, monogamous or not, but no long-term partnerships. I’d still choose long-term monogamy, but I know some people who would choose that over either of the first two.
My full preferences are:
polyamory with long-term commitment > monogamy with long-term commitment > medium-term romantic relationships (with polyamory better than monogamy) > neither sex nor romance > a lifetime of casual sex.
It’s weird to me the way you even posed this, because I prefer sex as a pleasurable, entertaining activity, but I still prefer it with one person nearly all the time, and if that’s the choice, I’m going with the one person. I’m just not that social and I’m very busy and don’t like spending time trying to go and find new partners when I already have a perfectly good partner that I enjoy right here in the house with me every night. Basically, I enjoy consumption a lot more than shopping.
So can someone tell me who this guy Steven Kaas is?
From his Twitter, he’s apparently a genius at creating funny yet insightful aphorisms, but I can’t find out much about him, and he hasn’t posted anything on it in four years.
According to the LessWrong wiki he was the author of a blog called Black Belt Bayesian, which doesn’t seem to exist anymore. I can’t find anything else on him.
Well, apparently he’s not dead: his Twitter’s “Tweets & Replies” section shows a few comments last month, the first since 2012.
This one in particular is pretty clever, and I haven’t seen it quoted here before:
And this one’s not exactly a pearl of wisdom, but it made me laugh:
I appreciate the SOTN reference.
I…don’t?
What is SOTN? Google tells me Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMTizJemHO8
But this guy is genuinely brilliantly witty and I hope he continue to create content in some form. Let me know if anyone finds more. Or maybe just hope his Twitter gets active again.
I think you missed a really excellent example of the form:
“These “Dark Enlightenment” types, Anissimov and associated bloggers in particular, are current or former members of the Less Wrong crowd. Less Wrong holds meet-ups around the globe, and I have been to a few. These people are insane. They are nerd shitlibs of the highest degree; their high intelligence has made them quite possibly the dumbest people who ever lived. The entire philosophy of Less Wrong is to replace common sense and use our rationality for everything.
I could probably tell stories about these Less Wrong types all day. They’re all young people in their early 20s and none of them have ever had real jobs. I was once incredulously asked why I hadn’t take my degree and moved to California to work at a start-up. They speak earnestly of “polyamory” which happens to look a lot like polygyny (all non-ugly girls in the group were f**king the tall, fit, handsome student from Germany.) At one meet-up everyone joined hands in a big circle and made a solemn promise to make the world a better place – my spidey sense tingling, I declined to participate and have never returned.
The only difference between the neo-Reactionaries and Less Wrong proper is that the former has decided Progressivism is wrong and dumb. Even Scott Alexander in his Anti-Reactionary FAQ manages to note of neo-Reactionaries: “I like that they’re honestly utopian.” Alexander stupidly touts this as a good thing; he may as well have called them Progressives.”
from mpcdot.com.
I have heard it described as “Yudkowski-Yarvin-Landism”, before, by other turbo nerds who spend to much time on the internet.
It’s funny how well spelling “Yudkowsky” with an ‘I’ predicts attitudes. I mean, I can come up with reasons why it might have happened, but they’re all basically just-so stories.
I do it from time to time and I’m not a huge fan of his, so I can speak for at least one of us.
Mainly, it’s because the guy has a huge and unusual name. It’s legitimately tough to remember, even after reading tens of thousands of words of the guy’s prose. I usually just google it and copy-paste if I need to refer to him now.
His given name is even worse in that regard but luckily we’re not on a first name basis.
This was a genuine spelling mistake on my part (it should be “Yudkowsky-Yarvin-Landism”, I reported incorrectly), I’d like some follow-up on what you’re darkly hinting at.
No dark hints intended. I just see that spelling a lot when he gets criticized.
Yeah, I’m not sure what the hint’s supposed to be, either.
For the record, I never found Eliezer Yudkowsky hard to remember / hard to spell. It’s entirely phonetic. But I did study Russian…
My library has Tolsoi’s and Tolstoy’s, and I end up reading a lot of Russian math papers from various eras of Latinization.
Am I the only one who thinks Eliezer Schlomo Yudkowsky is the most ridiculously Jewish name ever? He’s like an English person called John Smith, or a Canadian called Bob McKenzie.
I just want to grab him by his ankles and shake him to see if any loose shekels fall.
@ honestlymellowstarlight:
Yes, the -i/-y thing could go either way. The latter is more prevalent, though.
@ MawBTS:
Yes, I think it is a hilariously stereotypical Jewish name. And I didn’t know his middle name was Schlomo!
It’s not like “John Smith”. (That would be like “Aaron Cohen” or something.) It’s like “Geoffrey Cholmondley-Warner”.
Or “Theodore Dalrymple” but real.
I can do better – my Hebrew name is Shlomo and my family name before Ellis Island was Shlomovich. “Hi, yes, my name is Shlomo Shlomovich, no, I consider myself an atheist, why do you ask?”
And how can this be?
For he is the Kwisatz ben-Haderach!
During the Palaeolithic Era, spelling Yudkowsky with an ‘I’ signalled a self-aware attitude that made those who did attractive to potential mates. By contrast, using a ‘Y’ indicated a tendency towards asking reproductively useless philosophical questions, and was less favoured.
And you’re not even getting into the subtle differences in pronunciation!
In pastoral societies, pronouncing the name “you’d-COW-ski” enhanced reproductive success because it suggested that the speaker had a large number of cattle and could provide for many women in his harem.
However, pronouncing it “you’d-COFF-ski” signaled sickness (obviously, by means the coff-cough linkage) and therefore repelled potential mates.
So that’s what I’ve been getting wrong all this time.
@ Nornagest:
I really don’t know how he pronounces it, but I pronounce it “you’d-COFF-ski” in my head.
He is eclipsed by the far more famous Big Lebowski. Big Yudkowsky never had a chance.
(Calling him “Big Yud” indicates attitudes even harder.)
>“I like that they’re honestly utopian.”
And they take *that* as most insulting!
I trundled along to a meetup once, I found it generally pleasant. Arrived a little early, got chatting to someone else who was there for the first time too, chuckled a little about the occasional culty feel you can get about less wrong sometimes.
Debated lightly about where cultyness begins and harvesting effective methods from political groups and marketing campaigns ends.
More people arrived, we talked about wind turbine design and whether it could be possible for something like an ant colony to store and act on information as a unit over beers, a couple of them talked about nootropics, a couple of them were Phd students. Lots of unusual areas of interest/knowledge. A few others were in various tech areas, someone gave me a print copy of the start of HPMOR.
No cuddle piles or sex networks but I found it generally pleasant and wouldn’t be averse to having beers with a few of them again some time.
Now I’m wondering who the tall German is. I can’t think of anyone like that in our group.
HAHAHAHA when you get this sort of hate from both sides you know you have to be doing something right! Shine on you awesome Vulcan talking cactus, and please don’t get less verbose or aspie-ish, EVER.
In the spirit of being weird Vulcans, I first of all want to mention that the “prism glasses” Scott recommended last November (that let you read a book / look at your laptop while lying supine with your eyes toward the ceiling) have changed my life! Okay, maybe not something quite that dramatic, but it’s a pretty damn big increase in convenience for, like $12.
So in that vein, I want to recommend these Fratelli Orsini cashmere-lined leather gloves, which are fully touchscreen compatible. They’re not like the cheap touchscreen gloves I’ve seen elsewhere that have some kind of ugly special pads on the thumb and forefinger. Rather, the entire surface of the palm side is simply given some kind of treatment that makes it work on touchscreens. (I do not know how this works. Nor do I know whether the treatment could potentially wear off eventually, which would be a serious downside.)
The link I gave is to the women’s gloves, but they also make men’s at the same price. I actually ended up sending the men’s back and exchanging them for the women’s, since my hands are apparently 6 1/2 inches in circumference—smaller than any men’s size. And if you’re going to type on a phone with the gloves on, you need them to fit tight. (If they are tight, typing is not hard at all.) The women’s gloves also come in more interesting colors.
The advantage of these is that they are warm (relatively, they’re not ski gloves), nice-looking, and completely indistinguishable from a conventional glove. They are suitable for formal dress.
And these are winter gloves, but they also make unlined touchscreen-compatible driving gloves and military/police-style gloves (i.e. thin, tight-fitting dress gloves). They also sell cheaper, lower-quality touchscreen gloves with the thumb and finger pads.
Since this is starting to sound like an advertisement, I should note that I’m not getting any kind of referral money from this. I just think they are pretty interesting.
Most touchscreens work capacitively. The treatment makes the gloves conductive. I don’t know whether the one you’re talking about will wear off or not; the fingertip-only ones usually work by having very fine metal thread sewn into them.
I know it has to make it conductive somehow. But I’m not sure of the specific method.
I think that the picture you use for your profile is really ugly. You should change it.
It just makes me curious as to what the full-size picture looks like.
You can see it here. It’s from a turn-of-the-century magazine showing a variety of odd “driving garb” for women. Apparently, there was some kind of contest to identify the person depicted, but if it depicts a real woman, I certainly don’t know who it is.
(This page wasn’t where I originally found it, but it’s what turns up in a reverse image search.)
Ah. From that context, a time-travelling Emma Peel, disguised as a cadet of the Darths. A male would have been too young for me to trust with such power, but Emma Peel for Anything is fine.
Uh, noted.
Just curious: what do you think is ugly about it?
I ask because I am familiar with the original-size picture. So maybe it looks different to me than it looks to you.
Not ugly, just a little scary. It looks like a cadet of the Darth dynasty.
I don’t know… I just find it weirdly repulsive.
(If I were to describe the picture I’d say that it is a guy with a cold and arrogant expression dressed up as some kind of fantasy gendarme from the 1940s. It puts me in mind of 1984/ judge dredd / nemesis the warlock … I can imagine him gunning people down for thought crimes/traffic violations/being an alien. And whipping people.)
That’s not diametrically opposed to the aesthetic I was going for. 😉
The general semi-militaristic feel, with a stern expression…in fact in a discussion a few weeks ago on Magic: The Gathering (which I have hardly played), I ran across this picture and said the expression reminded me of my avatar a little.
But I may change it at some point. I’d have to find something else that works at 40×40 pixels, which is the hard part (see below).
I don’t mind it, but it’s always reminded me of Lord Farquaad from Shrek. That the picture is cropped directly around the head allows me to imagine a tiny body beneath it, so it feels out of proportion (even though it isn’t).
That might just be me though. Also the goofy image I get in my head from it is a nice balance to the usually very serious subject matter you engage with here.
Interesting take.
One problem is that most pictures don’t scale very well to that tiny size (40 x 40 pixels). For instance, this one I’ve used before (a picture of singer Yulia Volkova), looks terrible at that size. (And that’s with my best effort to crop it.)
Another huge limitation is that they have to be square.
For those following this earth-shattering discussion, here are two other options I considered and rejected:
A) A cutout from the center of a flag of my own design (or rather: my modification of the Cross of Burgundy flag). Reason for rejection: the white and gold blend together; looks blurry and indistinct.
B) An Eye of Horus, refitted to square proportions. Reason for rejection: again, white and gold don’t work together at that scale; also too dominated by background. Closest candidate, though!
Three others I tried just now:
C) A picture of actress Louise Brooks. Too indistinct.
D) A picture of Israeli singer Dana International. Doesn’t work at all.
E) The painting “Italian Girl Drawing Water” by Bouguereau. Looks okay but too small, unless cropped too close. And even then…
A few other tries.
For what it’s worth, I looked at the full size image and I really like it.
Since you’re soliciting feedback, I vote in favour of keeping it. It looks like a badass lady to me, and also somehow suits you (although apparently you’re not a lady yourself).
I like the picture, but I interpreted it as male in the thumbnail version. Looks like Kato in a medieval scholar’s hat.
Speaking of which, I’ve not yet tried changing my avatar. I assumed one put the link to the image in the “website” field, but that seems not to work. How does one do that?
I’m not a badass lady, but I play one on TV.
@onyomi
I think you have to go to gravatar.com and register your email address.
testing
Okay, it worked. And even retroactively changed all my old posts. Thank you.
I feel a little ambivalent about actually customizing it (as I think attaching a picture of any kind may subtly encourage me, and possibly others, to get more emotional/personal about my SSC persona), but who am I kidding if I want to claim I don’t spend enough time on SSC to justify the effort?
@ onyomi:
But now you’re part of the “anime avatar contingent” on SSC. 😉
Oh no! So now this pegs me as belonging to a particular camp. Maybe the nondescript orange square was better, as I like the idea of people having to read my posts at least a little before forming snap judgments, but I guess the Japanese name probably already pegs me for a weeaboo.
it is actually a video game, though. I never played the game myself, but when Persona 5 came out, more than one person told me the main character looked like me.
Thanks brad. Now I can actually find my own posts without control-F
Now can you please do a Testimonials for SSC, Part 2? With all the nice things people have said about you??
Stumbling on SSC was one of the greatest things that’s happened to me in the past few years and it would make me really happy to read positive testimonials from all the other people who love your blog.
A few years back, I tried doing exactly that for my own web site. It was kind of fun, but I haven’t kept it updated.
never forget for one fucking second that its author (who is ‘asexual’) and his most avid readers engage in ‘cuddle puddles’ irl, often bringing stuffed animals
I fail to see the problem.
Actually, that failure is the problem.
Remember that post on adultery, and how much shit Scott took from the comments section (myself included) for saying that explicit vows of monogamy are just meaningless boilerplate? Or how Yudkowsky et al always seem to be shocked when people get upset at the idea that their FAI would naturally forcibly convert everyone into bisexuals and/or lock them off in solipsistic simulated worlds? Or even just the average Culture fan who doesn’t understand why anyone would see their utopia as dystopian?
You can’t meaningfully address issues of public concern if you have little to no awareness of what people actually want. Solutions that seem obvious in a Berkeley / Internet bubble are often horrifyingly wrong in the real world.
If the worst thing people engage in is that they all hug one another, then that is pretty bloody tame behaviour to get outraged over.
It’s not my cup of tea but I’m not very good with physical contact and don’t like strangers in my personal space. Now, if it were a matter of compulsory “cuddle puddles” for all, then I’d understand why the person was so angry about it, but there is nothing to say that you have to do this.
The tone of the complaint seems to be one of contempt: that Scott and his readers are all such weaksauce emasculated (I have no idea what their opinion of the female readers is – that we’re all ugly/frigid/lesbian or all three?) losers that they can only get cuddles, not sex; and that moreover this is all a regression to infantilism (the mention of stuffed animals) that it’s a further demonstration of how pathetic and futile they all are.
My opinion? If people’s only or main source of demonstrative physical affection and/or emotional support is going to one of these events and engaging in the cuddle puddle (with or without stuffed animal), good luck to them. Who is it harming?
What am I supposed to take from the original source: “In contrast, I am such a Manly Man that I go out, drink my own body weight in beer, get into pointless fist-fights, and pick up an anonymous slut to bang for a one-night stand like a proper Red-Blooded American Male every Friday night”? That behaviour impresses me as little as a cuddle puddle.
The tone seemed to me to be one of contempt for massive amounts of ignorance, not any particular masculinity concerns. Not everyone wants to be a hippe in a free-love-n-drugs commune, and that’s where most of the modern Silly-con Valley culture ultimately comes from.
Actually this has been a complaint in Rationalist circles. Once the… “cuddle puddle” … reaches a critical mass all of the non-cuddlers are essentially shown the door. It’s been an obstacle to growing the IRL community.
I happen to have seen the quote in its original context before this, although it seems to have disappeared from the internet since according to Google. I can tell you that you’re half right.
It was saying that Scott is not-right-in-the-head, insufficiently adult and masculine, and fairly pathetic as a result. But it wasn’t posturing on the part of the author so much as a warning to people unfamiliar with Scott. As in ‘he’s smart and a good writer but he’s not all there and you shouldn’t take his word as gospel’ in cruder language.
Early Death Eaters were particularly worried about entryists and Scott had just written what was, for a while, the #1 intro text to their philosophy. This was a warning that he was not actually one of them despite that.
>Actually this has been a complaint in Rationalist circles. Once the… “cuddle puddle” … reaches a critical mass all of the non-cuddlers are essentially shown the door. It’s been an obstacle to growing the IRL community.
I’m going to need some confirmation from rationalist-con goers, because the image is just too hilarious.
Can confirm.
(“Rationalist con” is a little off base, but close enough.)
If there is any legitimate part of their criticism I can vaguely get behind, it is the gut feeling I got from reading a lot of Scott’s posts that his emotional-sensitivity meter is tuned a little too high.
When I read some extremely emotional complaints about issues that are (or at least appear on the surface) less than earth-shattering, it triggers my “Jesus Christ, man up and get over it!” response.
And if I were a more close-minded, dogmatic type of person, I would have skipped straight to the comments and said, “Jesus Christ, you pussy. Man up and get over it!” But as it is, I think I’ve learned a lot and broadened my experience from reading this blog.
@Vox Imperatoris:
I see what you’re saying – a strong emotional sensitivity.
But on an individual scale. A lot of the (seeming) left-wing criticisms seem to be built around the idea that he is insufficiently emotionally sensitive on a group scale – the “treats social problems like SimCity”/”dispassionate Vulcan” complaint.
Thinking about it, the only social problem I have seen him sort of throw up his hands and say “I don’t even know if anything can be fixed” is with the hard lives of some of his patients – people he has interacted with as individuals.
@ dndnsrn:
Well, it depends on whether you’re talking about Scott or the commenters here. Because there is a definite trend from the comments towards tolerating people who say outrageous things—that would get you thrown out of most other places—like “Have we considered solving the problem of dysgenics by sterilizing poor blacks and recolonizing Africa? With the right sort of propaganda, they might even come to appreciate it!”
I have a hard time imagining the worldview of those who think Scott Alexander is insufficiently empathetic in regard to global problems, however.
Unless by the route of: anyone who rejects communism doesn’t care about the poor; Scott rejects communism; Scott doesn’t care about the poor. QED
I think it goes something like “if you aren’t getting mad, you’re part of the problem.”
There’s also the angle I see sometimes from SJ-aligned critics of EA, where a lot of the causes Scott’s sympathetic to — malaria eradication, deworming, etc. — get seen as basically an excuse to propagate neocolonial/White Savior tropes. Never quite understood what the alternative was supposed to be, but I’m biased.
(I may actually need to update in that direction; until five minutes ago, I had legitimately never considered that there might be a racial angle to dysgenics talk. I am, apparently, not a smart man.)
@Vox Imperatoris:
As I understand it, one of the criticisms is that he takes a numbers-focused approach that, while not callous, offends people with really strong “listen and believe” tendencies, even when his analysis of the numbers ends up agreeing with what they were saying in the first place.
EDIT: Nornagest expresses it well with the quote about getting mad vs being part of the problem.
Non-real-world example: A Venusian tells you that Martians are more powerful than, and discriminatory towards, Venusians, and this is hurting Venusians.
If you respond by sitting down, looking at the average incomes of the two groups, incarceration rates, life expectancy, graduation rates, opinion polls that check what opinion Martians have of Venusians, etc. and then coming back a few hours later and saying “yeah, I crunched the numbers, you definitely have a point, Martians do cause harm to Venusians by discriminating”… It’s taken as offensive that you verified it and that you’re dispassionate about it. You crunched the numbers and viewed it as a factual claim to be tested, rather than focusing on their emotional response to how they perceive their own experience.
Uh, not really accurate, I think. It’s more like, “Yeah, I crunched the numbers, and the evidence is inconclusive. Tsk tsk, this sort of shameless exaggeration is typical of people like you (also other people, but I won’t mention that right now).”
@Nita:
Both have happened. I went with the “checks numbers and it confirms story” option, because it’s not at all mysterious why disagreeing would offend.
But these people cite their preferred studies all the time.
@Chalid:
Most people, on the left or the right, seem prone to repeating bits (maybe out of context, or somewhat distorted) of studies, but it’s rarer to see them actually name the study. They cite them, but without the actual citation.
” (also other people, but I won’t mention that right now)”
Chinese Cardiologists.
@dndnrsn
I find your original Venus/Mars example on-point. I’ve seen more than once someone get legitimately angry at someone else NOW FINALLY coming around to agreeing that [x] is a problem after looking at statistics and scientific studies done on the topic when they should have just taken them on their word because they were complaining about it loudly and consistently enough.
The part that seems to offend is that the other person dared to try to research the topic in order to verify claims made about it rather than taking their own word. This seems to me to be an accurate description of the behavior some of SA’s detractors.
But it shows they’re not offended by the very idea of analysis. Probably the majority of “living wage” supporters can’t explain the details of Card and Krueger. But surely they’re at least aware that the studies consist of some sort of fancy statistics which (they believe) ended up supporting their position, as opposed to “listening and believing.”
@Chalid:
Some people who support a basic income do so because they’ve crunched the numbers, or cite others who have. Some people who support it do so because they think it’s morally right – and do not care if it’s the “best” option in a number-crunching sense. The latter might dislike the reasoning of the former – seeing it as making the ability of a lot of people to survive contingent on some bean counter with a calculator.
And, there are issues that are far more emotional than basic income.
This always confused me. Something like 2/3 of the Culture books revolve around exactly that question, even if Banks is clearly on the Culture’s side.
At the same time, you have Banks saying that the only people who wouldn’t like living in the Culture are fascists (his word). Whatever he writes in-universe the fan community is probably more influenced by those out-of-universe statements.
I guess it depends on what you mean by fan, but I suspect that more than half, probably almost all, the people who have read all ten Culture books, have read little to no out-of-universe statements about them, nor debated with anyone — either on the internet or off — whether or not it constitutes a utopia or dystopia, nor spun their enjoyment of the books or horror over them into an elaborate political philosophy.
Just because you loath them doesn’t mean you aren’t in the very same “Berkeley / Internet bubble” as they are. X derangement syndrome types are much more similar X fanboys than they are to the vast bulk of people who just don’t give a fuck.
Remember that post on adultery, and how much shit Scott took from the comments section (myself included) for saying that explicit vows of monogamy are just meaningless boilerplate? Or how Yudkowsky et al always seem to be shocked when people get upset at the idea that their FAI would naturally forcibly convert everyone into bisexuals and/or lock them off in solipsistic simulated worlds?
I was also one of those who gave him shit (albeit pretty polite shit) on the adultery remarks, and I’m not familiar with the whole forced-bisexuality/forced-simulated-worlds thing (though it sounds like I’d be against it), but I’d say that consenting adults engaging in mutually enjoyable behavior in a private space is nowhere near either of those things.
If there actually is an element of coercion to the “cuddle puddle” phenomenon, then that’s a problem. But that particular comment didn’t seem to be coming from a place of concern for people being forcibly cuddled, but rather just “this person engages in behavior that I find weird and squicky,” with the implication that this somehow undermines everything Scott says.
You’re not familiar with the forced bisexuality/forced simulated worlds thing because it’s completely made up.
Worse: as I understand, it’s taking what Yudkowsky has written about as a disastrous outcome of Unfriendly AI and twisting it into what he is actually advocating.
It’s like saying: George Orwell is some kind of asshole who wants a boot stamping on the human face forever! Well, guess what, Mr. Orwell? Not all of us like being kicked in the face! Maybe you’d realize that if you weren’t such a damn ivory-tower intellectual.
Forced bisexuality via CEV shenanigans:
Sauce
This is not the only such quote, nor the most blatant, just the one I was first linked to a while back (and thus knew how to find in a reasonable time period).
As for the forced sims ones, you can do your own digging but they too are out there.
Ugh, capitalized TV Tropes names. While we’re talking about pet peeves…
@ Dr Dealgood:
It seems unreasonable (or at least uncharitable) to describe that as “forced bisexuality”.
Maybe you reject the entire idea of coherent extrapolated volition. If so, fine. Then attack that.
But otherwise, I don’t see why you would privilege one’s current will made in an environment of limited information over what one’s own will would be if one had greater information. You can certainly say, “I don’t believe that any computer would be able to determine this.”
However, to say Yudkowsky wants to force everyone to be bisexual is at best highly misleading.
@Vox,
Because it isn’t what one’s will would be at all. Even after going several meta levels up, in his own thought experiment, he can only get his desired endstate to tie the guy’s actual volition. And naturally the tiebreaker isn’t what the guy actually wants, it’s what random strangers would prefer him to want.
The core idea of CEV is interesting: it’s the Munchkin’s idea of wishing that you were smart enough to make the best and most airtight possible wish. But whenever anyone actually talks about it it’s used as a sort of post-singularity shell game where the computer “extrapolates” exactly far enough to convert every inconvenient no into a yes.
@ Dr Dealgood:
As far as I can tell by that post, he doesn’t endorse those tiebreakers. He just “considers” them.
And to phrase things as that the extrapolation “ties” his initial volition is misleading. No, in the extrapolation, he finds himself perfectly indifferent between being bisexual or not. Like me when I decide whether to have one brand of tea vs. another that tastes exactly the same. I couldn’t care less which one.
In that situation, what the hell would you use to break the tie?
Wasn’t CEV abandoned almost immediately after it was described by Yudkowsky?
I think it’s a valid point. It’s one thing to say, “I enjoy cuddle puddles, that’s just my thing”; but it’s a wholly different thing to say, “cuddle puddles are objectively the best form of social interaction, and anyone who does not enjoy them is an idiot”. While neither of these statements implies any kind of coercion, the second one is incredibly myopic, especially coming from someone who is supposed to be smart.
Obviously, Scott never actually said anything that severe, but IMO his stance on monogamy (or lack thereof) comes close. Generally, any time any kind of a person with a limited life experience says, “I am smart and I have determined what it is that everyone else should want”… well, let’s just say that person is not doing himself any favors.
That speaks volumes about your particular subculture. I feel my personal space being violated just by looking at pictures of cuddle puddles. ‘Merica, I guess.
(But anyway, this is just an ignorant furriner talking, by all means keep doing your thing)
“‘Merica, I guess.”
erm, no.
I looked up Google Images for “cuddle puddle”, and found a vast plentitude of images of kittens, puppies, baby otters, owls, etc., etc.
Only after that were some featuring humans.
Perhaps you should avert your eyes, then.
From what I understood, a common class marker for the middle class was avoiding touching people and relatively more focus on personal space violations compared to the other classes.
Well for one thing, I’ve never seen anyone bring stuffed animals to a cuddle puddle.
I’m sorry to hear (although alas not surprised) that you take that much hate for what you write.
However just because right-wing idiots talk shit at you and think your leftist tendencies make you brain-dead doesn’t magically make you right. You’re a very intelligent person, which makes it all the more infuriating when you get it incredibly wrong (like not even considering the possibility of taxing or nationalizing tulip production/universities).
I nevertheless hope you keep writing because I enjoy reading the ~80% of posts when you’re not letting your “but what if all the right-wing people were actually right” side get the better of you. And I hope that this torrent of abuse make you less likely (or at least, not more likely) to consider them right. Yes, that could be weakmanning, which would be bad, but at this point you probably need a recalibration on your standards to consider the possibility that some idea might be true.
Edit: I realize this might sound condescending. That’s not my intention. I’m just a random lurker who comments once in a blue moon, I know I have no business telling you what to do. However given the amount of voices trying to pull you to the right telling you this felt like the correct thing to do.
Well, at least you didn’t call him a caterpillar…
In a more serious vein, perhaps you could try presenting some arguments that might change Scott’s opinions, when the next disagreement between you comes up?
As I mentionned, I very rarely comment so it’s unlikely that discussion comes up. Mostly this is due to me reading SSC unfrequently (this is an exception of me coming back to check on my comment) and arriving way “after the battle”, but also I’m a bit intimidated by the fact that a large portion of the commenters seem to be of roughly the same opinion as Scott.
Id did in the comment above form the biggest objection to the wrongest recent-ish post I could think of. There are many other posts I don’t agree with (like the one about tolerating everything but the outgroup), but they’re very old so raising a discussion woudl be even more awkward.
Political opinions here are all over the place — so yes, you might be a minority, but so is everyone else. However, for the same reason, you’ll have to be willing to explain or justify even the most basic assumptions behind your views.
You know, although it’s not easy to tell, some of the bashing comes from left-wingers…
There is one obvious quote that comes from a left winger (“King of the Race-Realists….”), but the rest seems either neutral re: politics or to come from right wing people (or at the very least very socially conservative). But yeah, that one was pretty crummy.
Did I miss any?
I’d much rather read something from an author with an overactive “but what if [other side] is actually right?” reflex than one who rejects any such thoughts out of hand, which you seem to want Scott to do for some reason. If you want a lefty echo chamber (or a righty one, for that matter) there are plenty such places on the internet already – the beauty of SSC is that it is not such a place.
I don’t want an echo chamber. I like when he examines the possibility that some people on the left are dreadfully wrong, and he’s made me change my mind on some occasion. But when he starts wondering whether racism or colonialism are great ideas, ugh…
I guess the tulip thing falls under “is the left wrong?” rather than “is the right correct?”, which means I should approve of the principle but the execution is lacking as he is missing the incredibly obvious solution of the government either taxing the benefits, regulating the prices or seizing the means of tulip production.
Or eliminating the tulip subsidies…
Except the tulips are not tulips, they’re a stand-in for going to college in the US.
Even if you agree (which I don’t, at least mostly not, but I could imagine being convinced) that college is mostly useless and that is just as crazy from an outsider point of view as the tulips (in this case, I take it “outsider” means at least “not Western”), you still have to deal with the fact that society-wide change isn’t going to happen magically, so just not subsidising the tulips is not an option. I guess you could in theory both do the subsidy and the (very impractical) fix that Scott suggested to deal with America’s problem with college (making it illegal to ask of candidates for a job to have been to college), or you could try to have a system like in most European countries where going to college doesn’t mean selling both your kidneys.
I knew an older man whose sister became a millionaire (I got the feeling he told tall tales, but I just mentally divided dollar amounts, hookups and penis sizes by half) after being selected for a bootcamp program for Texas Instruments and then being promoted through the ranks. I think it is likely that if it was possible to run these *without* incurring the HR and lawsuit expenses modern businesses are subject to, more companies would do so.
(Scott highlighted a comment that it is de jure illegal to ask for a college degree without the job requiring it, so there is also that… even though that will never actually happen)
“a mentally-ill beta male who literally admitted that he wished he could become an asexual.” actually contains one of Scott’s favorite forms of flattery: conflation with Scott Aaronson.
Good catch. I didn’t even realize at first, but it was Aaronson that said that.
I was watching dogma the other day – the angels have no genitals – and I was thinking – that really would be the ultimate human form – (more-or-less) physiologically, mentally normal – full of vigor – but without any sexual desire or genitalia. Asexuality has an image problem – asexuality to me means – weak… socially crap…. and sort of suspect – are you really asexual? What are you hiding? But I think that if we got rid of sexuality in a cool way we’d solve all kinds of problems. At the very least we’d get rid of people who insist that all shitty behavior has its roots in sexual desire. ( I think I would genuinely be prepared to sacrifice my penis to raising the level of the pseduo-philosophical internet discourse (that we all love so much) just a little. )
Anyway… effective altruism… we need to get a normal person without genitals. Someone should get to work on making it happen.
This would be like breeding a human being with no head, because it’s far more efficient to run without that ungainly protuberance providing all that wind resistance.
Not really: whichever particular genital configuration you happen to have, you can be sure that a large number of people have an entirely different set-up. It’s therefore less of a stretch to say that the normality of a person isn’t linked to their genitals than it is to say it isn’t linked to them having a head. (Also, just in terms of size/function a closer comparison would be to say something like: “we should get rid of ears/mouths because blah blah blah).
Anyway, I wouldn’t object to headless humans if there were a good reason to create them – the purpose of creating genital-less humans is to reduce the amount of time wasted thinking about sex, possibly to make us less susceptible to immorality due to lust – the (stated) purpose of removing heads is to make us more efficient at doing some rather pointless activity.
So, actually, removing heads to make us faster runners would be closer to suggesting something like making penises prehensile in order to increase sexual pleasure – that is – a failure or taste and wisdom and misunderstanding of what it is to be a human.
That way, degradation into chaotic pleasure blobs lies.
(How many weirdness points does this comment get?)
Making penises prehensile in order to increase sexual pleasure sounds to me more reasonable than removing them. In fact, I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the idea.
Making penises prehensile in order to increase sexual pleasure sounds to me more reasonable than removing them.
I’m pretty sure you just want the prehensile penis for cheating at cards.
I didn’t say anything about having us all work our hair up into crests whose size depends on our social rank.
Um, but I like sex.
Interesting this idea should be proposed on the site which is apparently an audience for “meal squares,” which, so far as I can tell, is a way to make eating as efficient and boring as possible.
Maybe we can just outsource living to computers altogether and we won’t have to bother?
Why don’t we get rid of sexual desire first and then see if we want to re-institute it. Try it out – lets see what works.
In the meantime, perhaps we could have some kind of serum you inject into your groin that provides something akin to sexual pleasure.
My usual response to these sorts of suggestions is “you first.”
I’m with onyomi. Sexual desire and sex are great, and moreover both are required to accomplish key goals such as building a family of my own. If you want to castrate yourself go ahead but don’t expect other people to follow.
Edit: Also, that serum idea sounds horrifying. Did you specifically pick injection to make it sound less appealing, or is that just me being weird about needles?
@ Dr Dealgood:
It’s not required to build a family. In vitro feritilization, cloning, etc.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if Mark really would do such a thing. However, I doubt it would be appealing to many others.
True, although you have to admit that in vivo fertilization is much more fun.
It’s tautological to say “why don’t we remove your desire for fun thing x and see if you still want to do fun thing x.”
But if you currently enjoy doing x, it isn’t a good argument for why you shouldn’t.
Unless you’re arguing that the consequences of sexual desire for humanity are so catastrophic that it would be worth eliminating one of the things most people find most enjoyable in life. Considering the useful bonding function of sexual activity, I very much doubt it.
“Doctor, what can I do to extend my life?”
“Don’t drink, have sex, or eat fatty food.”
“And that will make me live longer?”
“No, but it will sure feel a hell of a lot longer.”
And speaking of food, if we are going to try some utopian project of eliminating something everybody loves, there’s no way we shouldn’t start with eating:
Eating is the cause of:
Almost all chronic diseases people in developed countries suffer from, resulting in billions of dollars of unnecessary medical care and lost productivity
Is itself a very time consuming and expensive activity (I have fasted on nothing but water for several days at a time on more than one occasion, and one of the first things you notice is how much extra time you have).
So why don’t we develop some sort of bland, nutritious smoothie or intravenous solution that can eliminate the need for this harmful, wasteful, frankly kind of gross (you think sex is yucky? look at the results of all your eating in the toilet) activity?
(Yes, joking, but it genuinely makes more sense to me than eliminating genitals).
@ onyomi:
Yeah, the food thing makes a lot more sense. (I have never tried Soylent or Mealsquares, but I vaguely “support” them.)
I like eating really good food, but most of the food I eat is merely okay. I would change out the okay food for extra time. The problem with Soylent, etc. is that they are too expensive.
Also, IVs are seriously awesome. That’s the thing I liked most about the few times I’ve had to be in the hospital. You get to drink while you’re asleep or too tired to sit up, and you are always maintained at an optimal level of hydration.
That’s one of the worst things about being sick: you have to drink a lot of liquids, but you don’t want to. If it were safe, cheap, and socially acceptable, I wouldn’t mind being on a saline IV every time I had a bad cold.
Scott Aaronson is literally a genius and this unremarkable schmuck who will never accomplish anything thinks he’s superior because “does Aaronson even lift, bro”.
I know who I’d rather be.
I expect this has been said a couple hundred times in the comments already, but Scott, SSC is great and so are you. Don’t let the haters get you down.
In the spirit of celebrating those who insult us, I like the more subtle insults and faint praise on John Quiggin’s blog. Things like “I do not know how he is a professor, but anyway he purports to be an economist.”
I don’t usually post, but just want to say that this is one of my favorite blogs going. Don’t always agree with your points, but I’ve never read another blog that has so consistently made me go ‘huh, never thought about it like that’.
And don’t listen to those saying that doing a post like this has bad ‘optics’ or whatever. Everyone should be able to poke fun at themselves sometimes. Making a post like this shows that you have a sense of humor about trolls and flamers. It’s hardly the kind of thing that’s going to draw more. Seriously people, learn to human.
If you think this just makes the blog look weird, please see exhibit A: The Moloch Post. That is 9000% weirder than this is, and is also one of my favorite posts on this blog.
Thanks again Scott!
Not that you really need to hear it another time, but SSC is very good. Thanks for writing!
Huh. So I don’t generally post (mainly because just reading SSC feels like trying to cram a 140 IQ shoe onto a 110 IQ foot and I’m insecure enough that I don’t enjoy interacting with people considerably smarter than me) but I’ve got to say that if the quality of the insults you get is any indication, then reading your blog is a good investment of my time. Nobody who manages to rile up neo-reactionary edgelords and death-threat spewing hard-lefties to that degree can be all bad, and anyone who gets called a “beta cuck” is okay in my book.
Also I thoroughly enjoy your fiction. And a lot of your non-fiction analysis. And whatever the hell Meditations on Moloch was. So there’s that.
Author of one of the comments above. For what it’s worth, this was the full post:
“I really like it actually.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
He is a fairly smart guy who makes well reasoned arguments. (He is also a literal cuckold.)
Apart from being overly friendly a small number of stupid SJW, his analysis on most things is interesting.
…
He is big on “poly”, “rationality”, and “AI” and I think those things are mostly cringeworthy, but his comments on other things are mostly top notch. “
“Slate Star Codex is 140 IQ discussion about 105 IQ issues”
If so, you’d think it could solve them!
Whoa. People are weird.
Keep up the good work, Scott. It’s the best blog I know. (Not that I know or read many, but still.)