The Ideology Is Not The Movement

I.

Why is there such a strong Sunni/Shia divide?

I know the Comparative Religion 101 answer. The early Muslims were debating who was the rightful caliph. Some of them said Abu Bakr, others said Ali, and the dispute has been going on ever since. On the other hand, that was fourteen hundred years ago, both candidates are long dead, and there’s no more caliphate. You’d think maybe they’d let the matter rest.

Sure, the two groups have slightly different hadith and schools of jurisprudence, but how many Muslims even know which school of jurisprudence they’re supposed to be following? It seems like a pretty minor thing to have centuries of animus over.

And so we return again to Robbers’ Cave:

The experimental subjects — excuse me, “campers” — were 22 boys between 5th and 6th grade, selected from 22 different schools in Oklahoma City, of stable middle-class Protestant families, doing well in school, median IQ 112. They were as well-adjusted and as similar to each other as the researchers could manage.

The experiment, conducted in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, was meant to investigate the causes—and possible remedies—of intergroup conflict. How would they spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the 22 boys were divided into two groups of 11 campers, and —

— and that turned out to be quite sufficient.

The researchers’ original plans called for the experiment to be conducted in three stages. In Stage 1, each group of campers would settle in, unaware of the other group’s existence. Toward the end of Stage 1, the groups would gradually be made aware of each other. In Stage 2, a set of contests and prize competitions would set the two groups at odds.

They needn’t have bothered with Stage 2. There was hostility almost from the moment each group became aware of the other group’s existence: They were using our campground, our baseball diamond. On their first meeting, the two groups began hurling insults. They named themselves the Rattlers and the Eagles (they hadn’t needed names when they were the only group on the campground).

When the contests and prizes were announced, in accordance with pre-established experimental procedure, the intergroup rivalry rose to a fever pitch. Good sportsmanship in the contests was evident for the first two days but rapidly disintegrated.

The Eagles stole the Rattlers’ flag and burned it. Rattlers raided the Eagles’ cabin and stole the blue jeans of the group leader, which they painted orange and carried as a flag the next day, inscribed with the legend “The Last of the Eagles”. The Eagles launched a retaliatory raid on the Rattlers, turning over beds, scattering dirt. Then they returned to their cabin where they entrenched and prepared weapons (socks filled with rocks) in case of a return raid. After the Eagles won the last contest planned for Stage 2, the Rattlers raided their cabin and stole the prizes. This developed into a fistfight that the staff had to shut down for fear of injury. The Eagles, retelling the tale among themselves, turned the whole affair into a magnificent victory—they’d chased the Rattlers “over halfway back to their cabin” (they hadn’t).

Each group developed a negative stereotype of Them and a contrasting positive stereotype of Us. The Rattlers swore heavily. The Eagles, after winning one game, concluded that the Eagles had won because of their prayers and the Rattlers had lost because they used cuss-words all the time. The Eagles decided to stop using cuss-words themselves. They also concluded that since the Rattlers swore all the time, it would be wiser not to talk to them. The Eagles developed an image of themselves as proper-and-moral; the Rattlers developed an image of themselves as rough-and-tough.

If the researchers had decided that the real difference between the two groups was that the Eagles were adherents of Eagleism, which held cussing as absolutely taboo, and the Rattlers adherents of Rattlerism, which held it a holy duty to cuss five times a day – well, that strikes me as the best equivalent to saying that Sunni and Shia differ over the rightful caliph.

II.

Nations, religions, cults, gangs, subcultures, fraternal societies, internet communities, political parties, social movements – these are all really different, but they also have some deep similarities. They’re all groups of people. They all combine comradery within the group with a tendency to dislike other groups of the same type. They all tend to have a stated purpose, like electing a candidate or worshipping a deity, but also serve a very important role as impromptu social clubs whose members mostly interact with one another instead of outsiders. They all develop an internal culture such that members of the groups often like the same foods, wear the same clothing, play the same sports, and have the same philosophical beliefs as other members of the group – even when there are only tenuous links or no links at all to the stated purpose. They all tend to develop sort of legendary histories, where they celebrate and exaggerate the deeds of the groups’ founders and past champions. And they all tend to inspire something like patriotism, where people are proud of their group membership and express that pride through conspicuous use of group symbols, group songs, et cetera. For better or worse, the standard way to refer to this category of thing is “tribe”.

Tribalism is potentially present in all groups, but levels differ a lot even in groups of nominally the same type. Modern Belgium seems like an unusually non-tribal nation; Imperial Japan in World War II seems like an unusually tribal one. Neoliberalism and market socialism seem like unusually non-tribal political philosophies; communism and libertarianism seem like unusually tribal ones. Corporations with names like Amalgamated Products Co probably aren’t very tribal; charismatic corporations like Apple that become identities for their employees and customers are more so. Cults are maybe the most tribal groups that exist in the modern world, and those Cult Screening Tools make good measures for tribalism as well.

The dangers of tribalism are obvious; for example, fascism is based around dialing a country’s tribalism up to eleven, and it ends poorly. If I had written this essay five years ago, it would be be titled “Why Tribalism Is Stupid And Needs To Be Destroyed”. Since then, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve found that I enjoy being in tribes as much as anyone else.

Part of this was resolving a major social fallacy I’d had throughout high school and college, which was that the correct way to make friends was to pick the five most interesting people I knew and try to befriend them. This almost never worked and I thought it meant I had terrible social skills. Then I looked at what everyone else was doing, and I found that instead of isolated surgical strikes of friendship, they were forming groups. The band people. The mock trial people. The football team people. The Three Popular Girls Who Went Everywhere Together. Once I tried “falling in with” a group, friendship became much easier and self-sustaining precisely because of all of the tribal development that happens when a group of similar people all know each other and have a shared interest. Since then I’ve had good luck finding tribes I like and that accept me – the rationalists being the most obvious example, but even interacting with my coworkers on the same hospital unit at work is better than trying to find and cultivate random people.

Some benefits of tribalism are easy to explain. Tribalism intensifies all positive and prosocial feelings within the tribe. It increases trust within the tribe and allows otherwise-impossible forms of cooperation – remember Haidt on the Jewish diamond merchants outcompeting their rivals because their mutual Judaism gave them a series of high-trust connections that saved them costly verification procedures? It gives people a support network they can rely on when their luck is bad and they need help. It lets you “be yourself” without worrying that this will be incomprehensible or offensive to somebody who thinks totally differently from you. It creates an instant densely-connected social network of people who mostly get along with one another. It makes people feel like part of something larger than themselves, which makes them happy and can (provably) improves their physical and mental health.

Others are more complicated. I can just make motions at a feeling that “what I do matters”, in the sense that I will probably never be a Beethoven or a Napoleon who is very important to the history of the world as a whole, but I can do things that are important within the context of a certain group of people. All of this is really good for my happiness and mental health. When people talk about how modern society is “atomized” or “lacks community” or “doesn’t have meaning”, I think they’re talking about a lack of tribalism, which leaves people all alone in the face of a society much too big to understand or affect. The evolutionary psychology angle here is too obvious to even be worth stating.

And others are entirely philosophical. I think some people would say that wanting to have a tribe is like wanting to have a family – part of what it means to be human – and demands to justify either are equally wrong-headed.

Eliezer thinks every cause wants to be a cult. I would phrase this more neutrally as “every cause wants to be a tribe”. I’ve seen a lot of activities go through the following cycle:

1. Let’s get together to do X
2. Let’s get together to do X, and have drinks afterwards
3. Let’s get together to discuss things from an X-informed perspective
4. Let’s get together to discuss the sorts of things that interest people who do X
5. Let’s get together to discuss how the sort of people who do X are much better than the sort of people who do Y.
6. Dating site for the sort of people who do X
7. Oh god, it was so annoying, she spent the whole date talking about X.
8. X? What X?

This can happen over anything or nothing at all. Despite the artificial nature of the Robbers’ Cove experiment, its groups are easily recognized as tribes. Indeed, the reason this experiment is so interesting is that it shows tribes in their purest form; no veneer of really being about pushing a social change or supporting a caliph, just tribes for tribalism’s sake.

III.

Scholars call the process of creating a new tribe “ethnogenesis” – Robbers’ Cave was artificially inducing ethnogenesis to see what would happen. My model of ethnogenesis involves four stages: pre-existing differences, a rallying flag, development, and dissolution.

Pre-existing differences are the raw materials out of which tribes are made. A good tribe combines people who have similar interests and styles of interaction even before the ethnogenesis event. Any description of these differences will necessarily involve stereotypes, but a lot of them should be hard to argue. For example, atheists are often pretty similar to one another even before they deconvert from their religion and officially become atheists. They’re usually nerdy, skeptical, rational, not very big on community or togetherness, sarcastic, well-educated. At the risk of going into touchier territory, they’re pretty often white and male. You take a sample of a hundred equally religious churchgoers and pick out the ones who are most like the sort of people who are atheists even if all of them are 100% believers. But there’s also something more than that. There are subtle habits of thought, not yet described by any word or sentence, which atheists are more likely to have than other people. It’s part of the reason why atheists need atheism as a rallying flag instead of just starting the Skeptical Nerdy Male Club.

The rallying flag is the explicit purpose of the tribe. It’s usually a belief, event, or activity that get people with that specific pre-existing difference together and excited. Often it brings previously latent differences into sharp relief. People meet around the rallying flag, encounter each other, and say “You seem like a kindred soul!” or “I thought I was the only one!” Usually it suggests some course of action, which provides the tribe with a purpose. For atheists, the rallying flag is not believing in God. Somebody says “Hey, I don’t believe in God, if you also don’t believe in God come over here and we’ll hang out together and talk about how much religious people suck.” All the atheists go over by the rallying flag and get very excited about meeting each other. It starts with “Wow, you hate church too?”, moves on to “Really, you also like science fiction?”, and ends up at “Wow, you have the same undefinable habits of thought that I do!”

Development is all of the processes by which the fledgling tribe gains its own culture and history. It’s a turning-inward and strengthening-of-walls, which transforms it from ‘A Group Of People Who Do Not Believe In God And Happen To Be In The Same Place’ to ‘The Atheist Tribe’. For example, atheists have symbols like that ‘A’ inside an atom. They have jokes and mascots like Russell’s Teapot and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. They have their own set of heroes, both mythologized past heroes like Galileo and controversial-but-undeniably-important modern heroes like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. They have celebrities like P.Z. Myers and Hemant Mehta. They have universally-agreed-upon villains to be booed and hated, like televangelists or the Westboro Baptist Church. They have grievances, like all the times that atheists have been fired or picked on by religious people, and all the laws about pledging allegiance to one nation under God and so on. They have stereotypes about themselves – intelligent, helpful, passionate – and stereotypes about their outgroups – deluded, ignorant, bigoted.

Dissolution is optional. The point of the previous three steps is to build a “wall” between the tribe and the outside, a series of systematic differences that let everybody know which side they’re on. If a tribe was never really that different from the surrounding population, stops caring that much about its rallying flag, and doesn’t develop enough culture, then the wall fails and the members disperse into the surrounding population. The classic example is the assimilation of immigrant groups like Irish-Americans, but history is littered with failed communes, cults, and political movements. Atheism hasn’t quite dissolved yet, but occasionally you see hints of the process. A lot of the comments around “Atheism Plus” centered around this idea of “Okay, talking about how there’s no God all the time has gotten boring, plus nobody interesting believes in God anymore anyway, so let’s become about social justice instead”. The parts of atheism who went along with that message mostly dissolved into the broader social justice community – there are a host of nominally atheist blogs that haven’t talked about anything except social justice in months. Other fragments of the atheist community dissolved into transhumanism, or libertarianism, or any of a number of other things. Although there’s still an atheist community, it no longer seems quite as vibrant and cohesive as it used to be.

We can check this four-stage model by applying it to the Sunni and Shia and seeing if it sticks.

I know very little about early Islam and am relying on sources that might be biased, so don’t declare a fatwa against me if I turn out to be wrong, but it looks like from the beginning there were big pre-existing differences between proto-Shia and proto-Sunni. A lot of Ali’s earliest supporters were original Muslims who had known Mohammed personally, and a lot of Abu Bakr’s earliest supporters were later Muslims high up in the Meccan/Medinan political establishment who’d converted only after it became convenient to do so. It’s really easy to imagine cultural, social, and personality differences between these two groups. Probably members in each group already knew one another pretty well, and already had ill feelings towards members of the other, without necessarily being able to draw the group borders clearly or put their exact differences into words. Maybe it was “those goody-goodies who are always going on about how close to Mohammed they were but have no practical governing ability” versus “those sellouts who don’t really believe in Islam and just want to keep playing their political games”.

Then came the rallying flag: a political disagreement over the succession. One group called themselves “the party of Ali”, whose Arabic translation “Shiatu Ali” eventually ended up as just “Shia”. The other group won and called itself “the traditional orthodox group”, in Arabic “Sunni”. Instead of a vague sense of “I wonder whether that guy there is one of those goody-goodies always talking about Mohammed, or whether he’s a practical type interested in good governance”, people could just ask “Are you for Abu Bakr or Ali?” and later “Are you Sunni or Shia?” Also at some point, I’m not exactly sure how, most of the Sunni ended up in Arabia and most of the Shia ended up in Iraq and Iran, after which I think some pre-existing Iraqi/Iranian vs. Arab cultural differences got absorbed into the Sunni/Shia mix too.

Then came development. Both groups developed elaborate mythologies lionizing their founders. The Sunni got the history of the “rightly-guided caliphs”, the Shia exaggerated the first few imams to legendary proportions. They developed grievances against each other; according to Shia history, the Sunnis killed eleven of their twelve leaders, with the twelfth escaping only when God directly plucked him out of the world to serve as a future Messiah. They developed different schools of hadith interpretation and jurisprudence and debated the differences ad nauseum with each other for hundreds of years. A lot of Shia theology is in Farsi; Sunni theology is entirely in Arabic. Sunni clergy usually dress in white; Shia clergy usually dress in black and green. Not all of these were deliberately done in opposition to one another; most were just a consequence of the two camps being walled off from one another and so allowed to develop cultures independently.

Obviously the split hasn’t dissolved yet, but it’s worth looking at similar splits that have. Catholicism vs. Protestantism is still a going concern in a few places like Ireland, but it’s nowhere near the total wars of the 17th century or even the Know-Nothing-Parties of the 19th. Consider that Marco Rubio is Catholic, but nobody except Salon particularly worries about that or says that it will make him unsuitable to lead a party representing the interests of very evangelical Protestants. Heck, the same party was happy to nominate Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and praise him for his “Christian faith”. Part of it is the subsumption of those differences into a larger conflict – most Christians acknowledge Christianity vs. atheism to be a bigger deal than interdenominational disputes these days – and part of it is that everyone of every religion is so influenced by secular American culture that the religions have been reduced to their rallying flags alone rather than being fully developed tribes at this point. American Sunni and Shia seem to be well on their way to dissolving into each other too.

IV.

I want to discuss a couple of issues that I think make more sense once you understand the concept of tribes and rallying flags:

1. Disability: I used to be very confused by disabled people who insist on not wanting a “cure” for their condition. Deaf people and autistic people are the two classic examples, and sure enough we find articles like Not All Deaf People Want To Be Cured and They Don’t Want An Autism Cure. Autistic people can at least argue their minds work differently rather than worse, but being deaf seems to be a straight-out disadvantage: the hearing can do anything the deaf can, and can hear also. A hearing person can become deaf at any time just by wearing earplugs, but a deaf person can’t become hearing, at least not without very complicated high-tech surgeries.

When I asked some deaf friends about this, they explained that they had a really close-knit and supportive deaf culture, and that most of their friends, social events, and ways of relating to other people and the world were through this culture. This made sense, but I always wondered: if you were able to hear, couldn’t you form some other culture? If worst came to worst and nobody else wanted to talk to you, couldn’t you at least have the Ex-Deaf People’s Club?

I don’t think so. Deafness acts as a rallying flag that connects people, gives them a shared foundation to build culture off of, and walls the group off from other people. If all deaf people magically became able to hear, their culture would eventually drift apart, and they’d be stuck without an ingroup to call their own.

Part of this is reasonable cost-benefit calculation – our society is so vast and atomized, and forming real cohesive tribes is so hard, that they might reasonably expect it would be a lot of trouble to find another group they liked as much as the deaf community. But another part of this seems to be about an urge to cultural self-preservation.

2. Genocide: This term is kind of overused these days. I always thought of it as meaning literally killing every member of a certain group – the Holocaust, for example – but the new usage includes “cultural genocide”. For example, autism rights advocates sometimes say that anybody who cured autism would be committing genocide – this is of course soundly mocked, but it makes sense if you think of autistic people as a tribe that would be dissolved absent its rallying flag. The tribe would be eliminated – thus “cultural genocide” is a reasonable albeit polemical description.

It seems to me that people have an urge toward cultural self-preservation which is as strong or stronger as the urge to individual self-preservation. Part of this is rational cost-benefit calculation – if someone loses their only tribe and ends up alone in the vast and atomized sea of modern society, it might take years before they can find another tribe and really be at home there. But a lot of it seems to be beyond that, an emotional certainty that losing one’s culture and having it replaced with another is not okay, any more than being killed at the same time someone else has a baby is okay. Nor do I think this is necessarily irrational; locating the thing whose survival you care about in the self rather than the community is an assumption, and people can make different assumptions without being obviously wrong.

3. Rationalists: The rationalist community is a group of people (of which I’m a part) who met reading the site Less Wrong and who tend to hang out together online, sometimes hang out together in real life, and tend to befriend each other, work with each other, date each other, and generally move in the same social circles. Some people call it a cult, but that’s more a sign of some people having lost vocabulary for anything between “totally atomized individuals” and “outright cult” than any particular cultishness.

But people keep asking me what exactly the rationalist community is. Like, what is the thing they believe that makes them rationalists? It can’t just be about being rational, because loads of people are interested in that and most of them aren’t part of the community. And it can’t just be about transhumanism because there are a lot of transhumanists who aren’t rationalists, and lots of rationalists who aren’t transhumanists. And it can’t just be about Bayesianism, because pretty much everyone, rationalist or otherwise, agrees that is a kind of statistics that is useful for some things but not others. So what, exactly, is it?

This question has always bothered me, but now after thinking about it a lot I finally have a clear answer: rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph.

No! Sorry! I think “the rationalist community” is a tribe much like the Sunni or Shia that started off with some pre-existing differences, found a rallying flag, and then developed a culture.

The pre-existing differences range from the obvious to the subtle. A lot of rationalists are mathematicians, programmers, or computer scientists. The average IQ is in the 130s. White men are overrepresented, but so are LGBT and especially transgender people. But there’s more. Nobody likes the Myers-Briggs test, but I continue to find it really interesting that rationalists have some Myers-Briggs types (INTJ/INTP) at ten times the ordinary rate, and other types (ISFJ/ESFP) at only one one-hundredth the ordinary rate. Myers-Briggs doesn’t cleave reality at its joints, but if it measures anything at all about otherwise hard-to-explain differences in thinking styles, the rationalist community heavily selects for those same differences. Sure enough, I am constantly running into people who say “This is the only place where I’ve ever found people who think like me” or “I finally feel understood”.

The rallying flag was the Less Wrong Sequences. Eliezer Yudkowsky started a blog (actually, borrowed Robin Hanson’s) about cognitive biases and how to think through them. Whether or not you agreed with him or found him enlightening loaded heavily on those pre-existing differences, so the people who showed up in the comment section got along and started meeting up with each other. “Do you like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog?” became a useful proxy for all sorts of things, eventually somebody coined the word “rationalist” to refer to people who did, and then you had a group with nice clear boundaries.

The development is everything else. Obviously a lot of jargon sprung up in the form of terms from the blog itself. The community got heroes like Gwern and Anna Salamon who were notable for being able to approach difficult questions insightfully. It doesn’t have much of an outgroup yet – maybe just bioethicists and evil robots. It has its own foods – MealSquares, that one kind of chocolate everyone in Berkeley started eating around the same time – and its own games. It definitely has its own inside jokes. I think its most important aspect, though, is a set of shared mores – everything from “understand the difference between ask and guess culture and don’t get caught up in it” to “cuddling is okay” to “don’t misgender trans people” – and a set of shared philosophical assumptions like utilitarianism and reductionism.

I’m stressing this because I keep hearing people ask “What is the rationalist community?” or “It’s really weird that I seem to be involved in the rationalist community even though I don’t share belief X” as if there’s some sort of necessary-and-sufficient featherless-biped-style ideological criterion for membership. This is why people are saying “Lots of you aren’t even singularitarians, and everyone agrees Bayesian methods are useful in some places and not so useful in others, so what is your community even about?” But once again, it’s about Eliezer Yudkowsky being the rightful caliph it’s not necessarily about anything.

If you take only one thing from this essay, it’s that communities are best understood not logically but historically. If you want to understand the Shia, don’t reflect upon the true meaning of Ali being the rightful caliph, understand that a dispute involving Ali initiated ethnogenesis, the resulting culture picked up a bunch of features and became useful to various people, and now here we are. If you want to understand the rationalist community, don’t ask exactly how near you have to think the singularity has to be before you qualify for membership, focus on the fact that some stuff Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote led to certain people identifying themselves as “rationalists” and for various reasons I enjoy dinner parties with those people about 10000% more interesting than dinner parties with randomly selected individuals.

nostalgebraist actually summed this up really well: “Maybe the real rationalism was the friends we made along the way.” Maybe that’s the real Shia Islam too, and the real Democratic Party, and so on.

4. Evangelical And Progressive Religion: There seems to be a generational process, sort of like Harold Lee’s theory of immigrant assimilation, by which religions dissolve. The first generation believes everything literally. The second generation believes that the religion might not be literally true, but it’s an important expression of universal values and they still want to follow the old ways and participate in the church/temple/mosque/mandir community. The third generation is completely secularized.

This was certainly my family’s relationship with Judaism. My great-great-grandfather was so Jewish that he left America and returned to Eastern Europe because he was upset at American Jews for not being religious enough. My great-grandfather stayed behind in America but remained a very religious Jew. My grandparents attend synagogue when they can remember, speak a little Yiddish, and identify with the traditions. My parents went to a really liberal synagogue where the rabbi didn’t believe in God and everyone just agreed they were going through the motions. I got Bar Mitzvahed when I was a kid but haven’t been to synagogue in years. My children probably won’t even have that much.

So imagine you’re an evangelical Christian. All the people you like are also evangelical Christians. Most of your social life happens at church. Most of your good memories involve things like Sunday school and Easter celebrations, and even your bittersweet memories are things like your pastor speaking at your parents’ funeral. Most of your hopes and dreams involve marrying someone and having kids and then sharing similarly good times with them. When you try to hang out with people who aren’t evangelical Christians, they seem to think really differently than you do, and not at all in a good way. A lot of your happiest intellectual experiences involve geeking out over different Bible verses and the minutiae of different Christian denominations.

Then somebody points out to you that God probably doesn’t exist. And even if He does, it’s probably in some vague and complicated way, and not the way that means that the Thrice-Reformed Meta-Baptist Church and only the Thrice-Reformed Meta-Baptist Church has the correct interpretation of the Bible and everyone else is wrong.

On the one hand, their argument might be convincing. On the other, you are pretty sure that if everyone agreed on this, your culture would be destroyed. Sure, your kids could be Christmas-and-Easter-Christians who still enjoy the cultural aspects and derive personal meaning from the Bible. But you’re pretty sure that within a couple of generations your descendents would be exactly as secular as anyone else. Absent the belief that serves as your culture’s wall against the outside world, it would dissolve without a trace into the greater homogeneity of Western liberal society. So, do you keep believing a false thing? Or do you give up on everything you love and enjoy and dissolve into a culture that mostly hates and mocks people like you? There’s no good choice. This is why it sucks that things like religion and politics are both rallying flags for tribes, and actual things that there may be a correct position on.

5. Religious Literalism: One comment complaint I heard during the height of the Atheist-Theist Online Wars was that atheists were a lot like fundamentalists. Both wanted to interpret the religious texts in the most literal possible way.

Being on the atheist side of these wars, I always wanted to know: well, why wouldn’t you? Given that the New Testament clearly says you have to give all your money to the poor, and the Old Testament doesn’t say anything about mixing meat and milk, maybe religious Christians should start giving everything to the poor and religious Jews should stop worrying so much about which dishes to use when?

But I think this is the same mistake as treating the Sunni as an organization dedicated to promoting an Abu Bakr caliphate. The holy book is the rallying flag for a religion, but the religion is not itself about the holy book. The rallying flag created a walled-off space where people could undergo the development process and create an independent culture. That independent culture may diverge significantly from the holy book.

I think that very neurotypical people naturally think in terms of tribes, and the idea that they have to retool their perfectly functional tribe to conform to the exact written text of its holy book or constitution or stated political ideology or something seems silly to them. I think that less neurotypical people – a group including many atheists – think less naturally in terms of tribes and so tend to take claims like “Christianity is about following the Bible” at face value. But Christianity is about being part of the Christian tribe, and although that tribe started around the Bible, maintains its coherence because of the Bible, and is of course naturally influenced by it, if it happens to contradict the Bible in some cases that’s not necessarily surprising or catastrophic.

This is also why I’m not really a fan of debates over whether Islam is really “a religion of peace” or “a religion of violence”, especially if those debates involve mining the Quran for passages that support one’s preferred viewpoint. It’s not just because the Quran is a mess of contradictions with enough interpretive degrees of freedom to prove anything at all. It’s not even because Islam is a host of separate cultures as different from one another as Unitarianism is from the Knights Templar. It’s because the Quran just created the space in which the Islamic culture could evolve, but had only limited impact on that evolution. As well try to predict the warlike or peaceful nature of the United Kingdom by looking at a topographical map of Great Britain.

6. Cultural Appropriation: Thanks to some people who finally explained this to me in a way that made sense. When an item or artform becomes the rallying flag for a tribe, it can threaten the tribe if other people just want to use it as a normal item or artform.

Suppose that rappers start with pre-existing differences from everyone else. Poor, male, non-white minority, lots of experience living in violent places, maybe a certain philosophical outlook towards their condition. Then they get a rallying flag: rap music. They meet one another, like one another. The culture undergoes further development: the lionization of famous rappers, the development of a vocabulary of shared references. They get all of the benefits of being in a tribe like increased trust, social networking, and a sense of pride and identity.

Now suppose some rich white people get into rap. Maybe they get into rap for innocuous reasons: rap is cool, they like the sound of it. Fine. But they don’t share the pre-existing differences, and they can’t be easily assimilated into the tribe. Maybe they develop different conventions, and start saying that instead of being about the struggles of living in severe poverty, rap should be about Founding Fathers. Maybe they start saying the original rappers are bad, and they should stop talking about violence and bitches because that ruins rap’s reputation. Since rich white people tend to be be good at gaining power and influence, maybe their opinions are overrepresented at the Annual Rap Awards, and all of a sudden you can’t win a rap award unless your rap is about the Founding Fathers and doesn’t mention violence (except Founding-Father-related duels). All of a sudden if you try to start some kind of impromptu street rap-off, you’re no longer going to find a lot of people like you whom you instantly get along with and can form a high-trust community. You’re going to find half people like that, and half rich white people who strike you as annoying and are always complaining that your raps don’t feature any Founding Fathers at all. The rallying flag fails and the tribe is lost as a cohesive entity.

7. Fake Gamer Girls: A more controversial example of the same. Video gaming isn’t just a fun way to pass the time. It also brings together a group of people with some pre-existing common characteristics: male, nerdy, often abrasive, not very successful, interested in speculation, high-systematizing. It gives them a rallying flag and creates a culture which then develops its own norms, shared reference points, internet memes, webcomics, heroes, shared gripes, even some unique literature. Then other people with very different characteristics and no particular knowledge of the culture start enjoying video games just because video games are fun. Since the Gamer Tribe has no designated cultural spaces except video games forums and magazines, they view this as an incursion into their cultural spaces and a threat to their existence as a tribe.

Stereotypically this is expressed as them getting angry when girls start playing video games. One can argue that it’s unfair to infer tribe membership based on superficial characteristics like gender – in the same way it might be unfair for the Native Americans to assume someone with blonde hair and blue eyes probably doesn’t follow the Old Ways – but from the tribe’s perspective it’s a reasonable first guess.

I’ve found gamers to get along pretty well with women who share their culture, and poorly with men who don’t – but admit that the one often starts from an assumption of foreignness and the other from an assumption of membership. More important, I’ve found the idea of the rejection of the ‘fake gamer girl’, real or not, raised more as a libel by people who genuinely do want to destroy gamer culture, in the sense of cleansing video-game-related spaces of a certain type of person/culture and making them entirely controlled by a different type of person/culture, in much the same way that a rich white person who says any rapper who uses violent lyrics needs to be blacklisted from the rap world has a clear culture-change project going on.

These cultural change projects tend to be framed in terms of which culture has the better values, which I think is a limited perspective. I think America has better values than Pakistan does, but that doesn’t mean I want us invading them, let alone razing their culture to the ground and replacing it with our own.

8. Subcultures And Posers: Obligatory David Chapman link. A poser is somebody who uses the rallying flag but doesn’t have the pre-existing differences that create tribal membership and so never really fits into the tribe.

9. Nationalism, Patriotism, and Racism: Nationalism and patriotism use national identity as the rallying flag for a strong tribe. In many cases, nationalism becomes ethno-nationalism, which builds tribal identity off of a combination of heritage, language, religion, and culture. It has to be admitted that this can make for some incredibly strong tribes. The rallying flag is built into ancestry, and so the walls are near impossible to obliterate. The symbolism and jargon and cultural identity can be instilled from birth onward. Probably the best example of this is the Jews, who combine ethnicity, religion, and language into a bundle deal and have resisted assimilation for millennia.

Sometimes this can devolve into racism. I’m not sure exactly what the difference between ethno-nationalism and racism is, or whether there even is a difference, except that “race” is a much more complicated concept than ethnicity and it’s probably not a coincidence that it has become most popular in a country like America whose ethnicities are hopelessly confused. The Nazis certainly needed a lot of work to transform concern about the German nation into concern about the Aryan race. But it’s fair to say all of this is somewhat related or at least potentially related.

On the other hand, in countries that have non-ethnic notions of heritage, patriotism has an opportunity to substite for racism. Think about the power of the civil rights message that, whether black or white, we are all Americans.

This is maybe most obvious in sub-national groups. Despite people paying a lot of attention to the supposed racism of Republicans, the rare black Republicans do shockingly well within their party. Both Ben Carson and Herman Cain briefly topped the Republican presidential primary polls during their respective election seasons, and their failures seem to have had much more to do with their own personal qualities than with some sort of generic Republican racism. I see the same with Thomas Sowell, with Hispanic Republicans like Ted Cruz, and Asian Republicans like Bobby Jindal.

Maybe an even stronger example is the human biodiversity movement, which many people understandably accuse of being entirely about racism. Nevertheless, some of its most leading figures are black – JayMan and Chanda Chisala (who is adjacent to the movement but gets lots of respect within it) – and they seem to get equal treatment and respect to their white counterparts. Their membership in a strong and close-knit tribe screens off everything else about them.

I worry that attempts to undermine nationalism/patriotism in order to fight racism risk backfiring. The weaker the “American” tribe becomes, the more people emphasize their other tribes – which can be either overtly racial or else heavily divided along racial lines (eg political parties). It continues to worry me that people who would never display an American flag on their lawn because “nations are just a club for hating foreigners” now have a campaign sign on their lawn, five bumper stickers on their car, and are identifying more and more strongly with political positions – ie clubs for hating their fellow citizens.

Is there such a thing as conservation of tribalism? Get rid of one tribal identity and people just end up seizing on another? I’m not sure. And anyway, nobody can agree on exactly what the American identity or American tribe is anyway, so any conceivable such identity would probably risk alienating a bunch of people. I guess that makes it a moot point. But I still think that deliberately trying to eradicate patriotism is not as good an idea as is generally believed.

V.

I think tribes are interesting and underdiscussed. And in a lot of cases when they are discussed, it’s within preexisting frameworks that tilt the playing field towards recognizing some tribes as fundamentally good, others as fundamentally bad, and ignoring the commonalities between all of them.

But in order to talk about tribes coherently, we need to talk about rallying flags. And that involves admitting that a lot of rallying flags are based on ideologies (which are sometimes wrong), holy books (which are always wrong), nationality (which we can’t define), race (which is racist), and works of art (which some people inconveniently want to enjoy just as normal art without any connotations).

My title for this post is also my preferred summary: the ideology is not the movement. Or, more jargonishly – the rallying flag is not the tribe. People are just trying to find a tribe for themselves and keep it intact. This often involves defending an ideology they might not be tempted to defend for any other reason. This doesn’t make them bad, and it may not even necessarily mean their tribe deserves to go extinct. I’m reluctant to say for sure whether I think it’s okay to maintain a tribe based on a faulty ideology, but I think it’s at least important to understand that these people are in a crappy situation with no good choices, and they deserve some pity.

Some vital aspects of modern society – freedom of speech, freedom of criticism, access to multiple viewpoints, the existence of entryist tribes with explicit goals of invading and destroying competing tribes as problematic, and the overwhelming pressure to dissolve into the Generic Identity Of Modern Secular Consumerism – make maintaining tribal identities really hard these days. I think some of the most interesting sociological questions revolve around whether there are any ways around the practical and moral difficulties with tribalism, what social phenomena are explicable as the struggle of tribes to maintain themselves in the face of pressure, and whether tribalism continues to be a worthwhile or even a possible project at all.

EDIT: Commenters point out a very similar Melting Asphalt post, Religion Is Not About Beliefs.

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1,687 Responses to The Ideology Is Not The Movement

  1. Sniffnoy says:

    Razib Khan links relevant to the religion example: Against the seriousness of theology; Gods made in the image of man; God is an effect, not the first cause; Though shalt love thy neighbor as thyself

    (OK, a lot of these boil down to “You should read Slone’s Theological Incorrectness“, but myself I haven’t read that book, so I’m linking to Razib Khan blog posts I have read instead.)

  2. anonymous says:

    “Part of this was resolving a major social fallacy I’d had throughout high school and college, which was that the correct way to make friends was to pick the five most interesting people I knew and try to befriend them. This almost never worked and I thought it meant I had terrible social skills.”

    Strange, I always used exactly that method and it always worked great.

    The people I befriend are always part of a tribe as well, but that doesn’t seem to be much of a hindrance. Usually I end up being a half-member of many different tribes, by being a personal friend of individual full members.

    • anonymous says:

      That’s pretty much the only way I’ve made friends after the age of 10 — make a ton of acquaintances by chatting to people in classes, at the gym, in my apartment building, at work, at the laundromat, in clubs, at restaurants and dining halls and grocery stores, etc. and invite the ones I like out to do stuff with me (e.g. go hiking or climbing, grab a coffee/drink, play some video games, attend a festival, whatever). Hang out with them, meet their other friends, make acquaintances of their other friends, rinse and repeat.

    • Kyle Strand says:

      My experience has been very similar. One issue I’ve found with this approach is that my core friend group has changed on an almost yearly basis. This is perhaps due to other factors, though.

    • LPSP says:

      I think the key thing is that you proceed to hang out with said full friends ingroup and get along perfectly well while you’re there.

      Whereas young Scott was trying to make his attempted friends *HIS* friends, like a new bestie you hang out with alone.

      Part of this is Scott’s intense character – he feels the need to have deeply personal friendships – but I see the commonality.

    • JuanPeron says:

      Not only have I used this method, I’ve explicitly used it.

      I’ve made most of my friends unconsciously, associating with people when it happens easily and ending up friends eventually. A number of my closest, longest-term friendships, though, have come from realizing “this person is super interesting, I will go out of my way to befriend them!” I’m something like 3/3 on ending up with really close friends this way, so it seems like there’s some variation where it works.

      Of course, I’m also a half-member of tons of groups, so it may be that we’re doing something a bit uncommon with this.

  3. Jaearess says:

    Is “the late Thomas Sowell” a joke I don’t get? As far as I know (and I just Googled to be sure,) Thomas Sowell is still alive.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Weird, I distinctly remember his death.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        I’m trying to guess who you could possibly be thinking of. I can’t think of any major conservatives (black or not) who have died recently except Scalia.

        • I know Scott made the same mistake with Thomas Schelling (also still alive) a while back. Maybe he just has trouble remembering whether economists named Thomas are alive or not?

          Scott, if you reading this: Piketty = Alive; Malthus = Dead.

          • JuanPeron says:

            No, it’s exclusively “Thomas S*”. So he’s fine with Piketty, but Thomas Szasz still gives him trouble.

        • Anonymous says:

          Oh yes, I’m so glad there’s an actual term for this thing.

        • Nornagest says:

          The only thing on that list that I have clear alternate memories of is Jiffy peanut butter. Which is weird, but we all know memory is unreliable.

        • 27chaos says:

          None of those bother me except the Lindbergh baby, which bothers me a lot.

        • stillnotking says:

          That Henry VIII turkey leg portrait is seriously creeping me out. I have a very clear visual memory of such a portrait in the Holbein style, and no explanation for how that’s possible given the apparent fact that Holbein never painted one.

        • Eric Rall says:

          I have a distinct memory of a television commercial which featured an animation based closely on the Holbein portrait, but with Henry eating a succession of turkey legs while the Herman’s Hermits song “I’m Henry the 8th I am” played in the background. I think it would have aired some time in the late 80s or early 90s. I have no idea what the commercial was for.

          Someone in the comments of the Major Memories page linked to a Pepto-Bismal commercial from 1980, but that’s definitely not the one I’m thinking of.

        • jes5199 says:

          The thing that I find striking about that list is that while the false memories that I have myself are weird and striking, the ones that I don’t have mostly look like obvious mistakes of simplification – quirks removed, spellings simplified, conditions made more usual-seeming, consequences more direct.

          I can’t explain the Henry VIII thing, though.

        • JDG1980 says:

          The explanation for Berenst[e/a]in Bears seems pretty straightforward: there are a lot of people in the U.S. with Germanic last names ending in “-stein”, not so much with “-stain”. Thus, people just sort of assume that Stan and Jan’s surname followed the usual rules, which for whatever reason (Ellis Island clerical error?) it didn’t.

          Regarding Henry VIII and the turkey leg: There used to be a tourist attraction in Orlando called King Henry’s Feast. They served chicken (on drumsticks?) and ribs buffet-style while a dinner show was performed. Maybe some of the advertising materials featured “King Henry” eating a drumstick? It would then be easy for someone to mix that advertising up in their mind with the famous Holbein portrait. I know they used to run TV commercials all the time down here, but don’t recall the specific content of these commercials.

          Oh, and the explanation for remembering deleted movie scenes is probably pretty simple: it’s from the novelizations. Often, the novelization of a film is based on an earlier variant of the script, and thus contains scenes that the final theatrical release of the film doesn’t. I know that was the case with both Terminator 2 and Back to the Future.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Theres a well known portrait of Henry, and a well known movie, The Private Life of Henry VIII, featuring Charles Laughton, as the monarch, in a chicken-guzzlng scene. Presumably, people are simply combining the two.

        • Deiseach says:

          I am pretty sure I saw a brand of peanut butter called “Jiffy” which is odd since this says it never existed.

          And the Lindbergh baby was found? I was sure they never did find it!

          I’ve also had the experience of discovering “So and so is alive” when I’ve been positive I’ve heard their death reported on the news years previously. (This is different from hearing “So and so is alive” and going “Still? I was sure they must have died ages ago!”)

        • The Nybbler says:

          The problem with the movie thing is references to Henry VIII and the turkey leg don’t appear until the mid 1980s, and the movie was from 1933. I suspect there was a parody of some sort, based on the movie scene and/or the portrait, that just hasn’t been found.

          “Jiffy” peanut butter is probably just mental conflation of “Jif” and “Skippy”.

          The one which bothers me is “Mirror, mirror”. I am certain I remember an animated treatment of Snow White where she asks “Mirror, mirror”.

          I though it might be a Looney Tunes but all I can find there is “Coal Black” and a parody where the witch asks “Who is the ugliest of them all”?

        • onyomi says:

          Though I don’t think I have any false memories of celebrity death news, I do often hear of the death of a celebrity only to think “so-and-so was still alive?!” That is, though I never remember explicitly hearing of their death, I just assume they had been dead for a long time.

          Shirley Temple is one such example. Probably because she was so young when she achieved fame but my brain assumes anyone in movies of that era is long dead. Also, she certainly didn’t maintain a high profile later on.

        • onyomi says:

          Actually, what’s most disturbing about this to me is the number of people on Youtube and, presumably, elsewhere, who seem genuinely *adamant* that the best explanation for this phenomenon is actual distortions in reality rather than their own fallible brains remembering things the way they seemed they should be, rather than as they were.

        • John Salvatier says:

          Have you been to the Seattle EA or Rationality meetups?

        • I used to to see bright green areas between the clouds during sunset. Not emerald green– something like Crayola sea green, but more saturated. The clouds in that area would look like islands in water.

          This would have been in northern Delaware at least into the 60s, maybe the 70s.

          I saw a little bit of the color in a sunset in Philadelphia recently.

          The most plausible explanation is pollution– there also used to be a faint light green band on the horizon back then. The other part of a boring explanation is that I’m more interested in sunsets and colors than most people.

          I posted about this on facebook. A school friend remembered the green in the sunsets. My sister (two years younger) didn’t remember it.

        • Julie K says:

          > Ellis Island clerical error?

          Nope.
          Why Your Family Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island (and One That Was)

          (Well, unless all those family stories actually slipped in from a parallel universe…)

        • Anonymous says:

          Sweet cheese on crackers, Tiananmen Square. I thought the whole reason China’s government was being painted as evil was precisely because they didn’t care about the guy who stepped in front of the tanks. I remember that. Incorrectly, apparently. Ditto for King Henry’s turkey leg, chartreuse, and “mirror, mirror”, but for some reason none of those bother me.

        • AlphaGamma says:

          @JDG1980:

          Thus, people just sort of assume that Stan and Jan’s surname followed the usual rules, which for whatever reason (Ellis Island clerical error?) it didn’t.

          I think that the -stain ending might well be because the name went via Cyrillic -штайн at some point.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Not many living people have seen the 1933 movie, but it was very popular in its day, and the drumstick-noshing scene was reproduced in comedy sketches and cartoons,

        • Jeffrey Soreff says:

          Isn’t that slightly too far north for that? 🙂
          http://www.obooksbooks.com/2015/3977_2.html

        • Jesse M. says:

          @The Nybbler: ‘The one which bothers me is “Mirror, mirror”. I am certain I remember an animated treatment of Snow White where she asks “Mirror, mirror”.’

          I don’t know about animated versions, but there are plenty of written versions that say “mirror, mirror”, like the English translation of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. So it’s possible those of us who remember “mirror, mirror” either read it somewhere or heard people in real life repeating this version of the phrase which originated in a written version, and just transposed the memory onto whatever animated version we’ve seen.

        • Jesse M. says:

          @27chaos: ‘None of those bother me except the Lindbergh baby, which bothers me a lot.’

          Maybe you just had a sort of general memory that “it didn’t end well”, and so if your memory of the details was fuzzy you assumed this meant the baby was never found, as opposed to them finding a dead body.

        • youzicha says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz, I guess the sky isn’t green during sunset, but it’s very common that it turns Crayola sea green in the evening afterwards, when the sun is just below the horizon. (I guess it depends on your lattitude and season as well). Maybe you’re just remembering that?

        • onyomi says:

          “Maybe you just had a sort of general memory that “it didn’t end well”

          I think there is also a general preference for open-ended mystery over grim finality. “Missing person never found” is a juicier story than “missing person found dead in a ditch.” Presumably the search was also reported on more breathlessly and over a longer period of time than the discovery of the body. Even not having been born at the time, it also came down to me that the missing part was the salient point. I don’t actually recall hearing that the baby had never been found, but I think I sort of assumed it, because that is, in some ways, a more interesting story.

          I also remember mistakenly believing for a while, for example, the one about Agatha Christie, probably because “old mystery writer disappears without a trace and is never hear from again,” is a better story than “young mystery writer goes off somewhere for a few weeks and returns to wonder what all the fuss is about.”

          In a pre-Google world we are also all vulnerable to what some random friend tells you; and mysteries make better stories.

        • youzicha, as far as I can remember, the sun would be above the horizon but obscured by clouds. The clouds would be more orange than pink.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Nancy Lebovitz
          https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29090/29090-h/29090-h.htm#stcvol1_Page_362
          All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
          Have I been gazing on the western sky,
          And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
          And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye! 30
          And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
          That give away their motion to the stars;
          Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
          Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
          Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew 35
          In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
          I see them all so excellently fair,
          I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
          [365]
          III
          My genial spirits fail;
          And what can these avail 40
          To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
          It were a vain endeavour,
          Though I should gaze for ever
          On that green light that lingers in the west:
          I may not hope from outward forms to win
          The passion and the Life, whose fountains are within.

        • JuanPeron says:

          @27Chaos and @stillnotking

          Those are the only two that seriously struck me.

          The Lindbergh baby I could have told you was never found with some confidence, but I’ll chalk that up to mis-remembering “never fully solved” as “never found”.

          The portrait of Henry VIII? Shit. Not only do I remember it, I remembered the turkey leg in his left hand. I remembered the opulent goblet before I saw it in the description. I remembered the Holbein colors and style, though I didn’t know the painter’s name. I haven’t seen any of the things people are claiming as sources, and I buy the “those are references to the painting” claim.

          How the hell does that happen? It’s not an inaccurate memory of a real thing, its a detailed memory of a work that has apparently never existed.

        • houseboatonstyx, thank you, but that sounds like something completely different from what I remember.

          I’m not talking about a green light lingering in the west, I’m talking about bright green areas as part of the gaudiest sequence of a sunset.

          Imagine green lakes with orange-pink clouds as shores and islands.

        • keranih says:

          @ Nancy –

          I am assuming that this green flash is not what you’re thinking of – is that right?

        • Thanks for checking– the green flash is absolutely not what I’m thinking of. I’ve very rarely been any place flat enough to have a chance of seeing it.

          Planets can green flash, too. description of dramatic color sequence from Venus

        • @Nancy et al, one possible explanation for any apparent discrepancy might be the “dress color illusion”, i.e., two normally-sighted people can look at the same thing and see different colours. And I’m told normal human vision is remarkably sensitive to what are (objectively speaking) very small variations in colour, which can be very difficult to pick up with a camera.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Nancy
          I’m talking about bright green areas as part of the gaudiest sequence of a sunset.
          Imagine green lakes with orange-pink clouds as shores and islands.

          Pink clouds as shores and islands in very soft green ‘water’ I’ve seen — but it was never a bright gaudy green. Offhand I wonder if there could be an after-image effect: the bright orange-pink making a gentle green look brighter.

        • houseboatonstyx, it’s possible that I’ve got more sensitivity than most to that shade of green, or that it actually was brighter when I saw it.

          If it won’t compromise your anonymity, when/where did you see it?

    • CatCube says:

      The instant I saw that I tabbed away, worried I had missed the news.

  4. Vox Imperatoris says:

    Also at some point, I’m not exactly sure how, most of the Sunni ended up in Arabia and most of the Shia ended up in Iraq, after which I think some pre-existing Iraqi vs. Arab cultural differences got absorbed into the Sunni/Shia mix too.

    There are a lot of Shiites in Iraq, but I think you meant to say “Iran” here. At least when you’re talking about “Iraqi vs. Arab” differences (Iraqis are Arabs—mostly, anyway).

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I think in the beginning it was more of an Iraqi thing – that’s why all of their holy sites are in Iraq. And at the time, Iraq had a very complicated and different non-Arab culture.

      I’ve changed it to “Iraq and Iran” to clarify.

      • jeorgun says:

        ‘At the time’ was back in the 6-700s, though. If anything I’d argue that Iraqi culture contributed more to Sunni culture, through the Abbasids, than to Shia— for instance, IIRC they were the ones who introduced the burqa into Islam.

        In any case, the Sunni/Shia divide was much less intense before the astonishingly bloody, centuries-long conflict between the Ottomans and Safavids, and Shia culture today is definitely dominated by Iran.

        • Fatimids vs Abbasids was earlier and substantial. And, earlier still, the Abbasids defeated the Umayyads in part by appealing to the Shia, although they never delivered.

          • jeorgun says:

            Sure— I don’t mean the conflict started with the Safavids— but during the centuries between the Fatimids and Ismail I, the conflict had become substantially muted. It wasn’t until his mass conversions (and resulting massacres and wars) that the conflict reached anything like its current level of belligerence.

          • jeorgun says:

            Aside: what the heck? I managed to use “the conflict” three times in two sentences. Why do my comments always have these egregious grammar mistakes that I completely miss when writing them, despite being totally obvious after the fact?

          • Anonymous says:

            @jeorgun

            Is clumsy wording a grammar mistake?

            Is mistakenly calling clumsy wording a grammar mistake a grammar mistake?

          • jeorgun says:

            For once it was actually intentional! The clumsy wording isn’t actually ungrammatical, but my general grievance is more with the actual stupid grammatical errors that I always seem to come up with.

      • Richard Gadsden says:

        It’s a lot more complicated and weirder than that. Indeed, it’s almost fractally complicated; every time you think you understand it, you find a new layer of complication.

        After the death of Ali in 661, most of the Shia outside Arabia were in the east (ie Iraq) rather than the west (ie Syria). Arabia was (and is) much more mixed than the rest of the Islamic world.

        This is why the second Fitna (Sunni-Shia war) of 680-692 had the shape it did of Alids (the future Shia) in the east and Ummayads (the Sunni Caliphal dynasty) in the West.

        After this the Shia dispersed, and their next successful state was Idrisid Morocco in 788, then Fatimid Egypt in 909 – which eventually conquered all of Muslim Africa.

        The association of Shia with Iran rather than Africa came after the Mongol invasions, which had shattered all the states of the Middle East and resulted in complete reconstruction of the Muslim state-system.

        It was only after that that the Safavid state in Iran really set about pulling in Shia – and the association of Shia with Safavids, and reciprocally of Sunni with their rival Ottomans really drove the division within the regions of their power.

        In Southern Arabia (modern Yemen and Oman), in much of India, and in the Mahgreb, mixed Sunni and Shia populations survived to the modern era, and those are also the main areas where non-Twelver Shia survive – and Ismaili and Zaidiyya are very different from Twelvers, and really don’t fit into Iran well when they flee there from Sunni persecution.

        Iraq was much more geographically split between Shia and Sunni before Saddam, and that has been coming back over the last decade since he fell. If it weren’t that both claim Baghdad, then two states might have evolved at some point … or might still.

    • Alexp says:

      Iirc, Egypt was predominantly Shia until Saladin almost single handely changed that.

      Not sure how it changes the analysis, but it’s interesting.

      • Egypt was under a Shia dynasty (Fatamid) which was falling apart, and Saladin picked up the pieces. But I’m not sure how much of the population was Shia.

        And they were Seveners. My impression is that the Twelvers, who currently dominate Iran, are in many ways closer to the Sunni than to the Seveners, even though both count as Shia.

  5. Tom Scharf says:

    The main part of tribalism seems to be as much about who you consider the out group as who is the in group. Anti-tribalism seems to rule the day in American culture lately. Sport rivalries revolve around * hating * your arch-rival, even though you literally know not one person from the other school.

    I love college football, follow my favorite team religiously, and absolutely hate our arch rivals. It ruins my day when they get upset and makes my day when they over perform. It is totally irrational, I recognize it as irrational, but I love it anyway and I don’t care what anyone thinks, especially if you are from my most hated school, you loser. Sometimes you just need to turn your rational brain off for a while and enjoy ridiculous frivolous emotional attachment.

    • brad says:

      I had a different experience. Our biggest rivals were down the road 10 miles or so. During basketball games we’d come up with nasty cheers. We’d cheer for other teams playing them, and so on. But when I actually met people in my current city from that school, after some good natured ribbing, having spent four years in that city was something we had in common. They aren’t a real out-group; it’s make believe and all in good fun. At least for me.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Right.

        These kind of loyalties tend to be concentric.

        I noticed this when I was 6 and watching the major league baseball All Star game at my cousins’ house in Minnesota in 1965. I was a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers and hated the San Francisco Giants’ Juan Marichal and feared their Willie McCovey (granted, Willie Mays was on a different level and had to be admired even by somebody as tribal as myself).

        But the Twin Cities are an American League city and the MLB All-Star Game is played between the American League and the National League. So, I naturally rooted for the National League team, including Marichal and McCovey.

        Similarly, in 1965 when I was 6 I became a UCLA fan and rooted for them to beat their Los Angeles crosstown rivals USC. But when I went off to college to Rice U. in Houston, I immediately had no problem rooting for USC in years when UCLA wasn’t very good.

        • onyomi says:

          This reminds me of the “rivalry” which exists between Yale and Harvard. They make fun of one another mercilessly, but actually like/respect each other, especially with respect to other schools. It does feel like a concentric circle effect: if you are in a group of only Yale and Harvard students then you must love your fellow Yalie/Harvardian and scoff at the other. But introduce some people from Cornell and it may become Yale/Harvard v. Cornell. Introduce some non-Ivy league school and it becomes Ivy League v. Non-Ivy League, etc.

        • The traditional legal system of Somaliland does this in an organized fashion, complete with contracts specifying intragroup obligations. A system of nested groups increasing in size and decreasing in closeness as you go up. Membership defined in part by agnatic kinship, in part by contract.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Immigrant neighborhoods in the U.S. tend to attract mortal enemies from back home — Ethiopians and Eritreans, Armenians and Azeris, etc., — because they all want to shop at the same ethnic grocery store.

          I first noticed this in the 1970s when Beverly Hills started filling up with rich Muslims.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            Also the case in other countries- I am aware of shops in London run by Greek and Turkish Cypriots working in partnership.

          • LPSP says:

            The most striking observation I made of the copious Lithuanian student body in York was the near-unanimous contempt for Poles.

            Weirdly, it wasn’t mutual.

        • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

          Same. I’m a fan of my hometown Kansas City Royals, an American League team. I hate the Yankees and everything they stand for (due to some intense playoff contests through the late 70’s), also an American League team. But naturally in the All-Star Game I root for the Yankee All-Star players against Those Bastards in the National League, every time.

      • Anatoly says:

        >But when I actually met people in my current city from that school, after some good natured ribbing, having spent four years in that city was something we had in common.

        The extreme version of this is Squaring the Circle.

      • Civilis says:

        On thinking about it I wonder, to what degree do we owe our relatively calm (by historical standards) heterogeneous society to sports, specifically professional or televised?

        Pro team sports give people an obvious visible cultural signal they can and are encouraged to display to signify group membership, yet it’s one that at the end of the day that people (Americans, at least; see the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras) recognize is ultimately not worth getting violent over? If you see someone wearing the team colors on game day, you know he’s in your group, and you have one major interest in common.

        • Nicholas says:

          Americans do sometimes riot or engage in racist mimicry that they wouldn’t ordinarily, on the basis of it being about their sports team(s).

    • Vamair says:

      I’ve got a similar experience when I deliberately went to some anti-evolutionist forums to find someone to hate. I don’t know if this “that’s my favorite enemy, it’s really fun to hate them, I hope they’ll be okay” emotion has a name. Kismesissitude?

      • LPSP says:

        Only if you plan to mate with them, while mating a seperate, friendly conjugal romance.

    • LPSP says:

      I’d say as much.

      First comes the negative definition of the outgroup – “Cussers, Idolaters, Degenerates, Weaklings” – and THEN comes the contrasting – “well WE’RE well-mannered, pious, pure, strong”.

      People build the walls around an ingroup to protect themselves from the Dreaded Outgroup. Nothing unites people like a common foe. (That’s why Fnargl works out.)

  6. I thought you had misspelled camaraderie, but then I found this: http://grammarist.com/spelling/camaraderie-vs-comradery/

  7. Pku says:

    It seems like we’re also getting a “protestant rationalist” tribe that’s based around the belief that Scott Alexander is the rightful caliph, in the sense that whenever I meet people who read this blog IRL I get a really strong shared-tribal-bond feeling (which is somewhat discomfiting, since I’m not used to strong feelings of tribal bonds).

    I don’t get that as much online though (and I wonder if it’s just me) – there are a bunch of standard potential reasons, like maybe it’s harder to trust people in a blog-commenting interaction format, or maybe it’s my bad experiences in internet communities subtly influencing me. But I suspect a lot of it is that when Scott explicitly tries to steelman opposition opinions and the like, it’s working directly against his tribalistic instincts, which extends to suppressing tribalism among the readers.

    • LCL says:

      I think it’s an effect of the commenting interface: lack of upvoting limits the sense of shared norms and thinking styles.

      Because I do get a much stronger sense of tribal bonds reading comments on the old Less Wrong threads. I think it’s because the interface there:
      1) Shows upvote counts, which correlate well with my own judgment about the comments. Thereby demonstrating to me that other community members share my opinion about what constitutes a good comment, and
      2) Hides all but the best/most relevant comments, creating the illusion of greater uniformity in norms and styles than really exists.

      This interface does neither, which probably hinders both the discovery of tribal commonality and the expression of it once discovered. I got the impression that was an intentional decision by Scott, related to preserving diversity of thought and audience. I wonder if this post reflects a potential change of opinion.

      ETA: I actually said, out loud, a couple hours after discovering the (by then already outdated) LW forums – “Oh – my people! I didn’t even realize I *had* a people.”

      • I’m wondering whether the difficulty of finding old comments and the way the commentariat keeps re-forming around new posts makes it harder to have continuity.

        On the other hand, most communities are face-to-face and only have memories and no other records.

        • Viliam says:

          On the other hand, most communities are face-to-face and only have memories and no other records.

          But in those communities the old members often know each other, and sometimes sit apart at their own table.

          The analogy on LW would be having a special sub available only to the elite, where the elite would be defined recursively as “the LW members hand-picked by the existing elite” starting from Eliezer.

          • Reformed Vox Hater says:

            The analogy on LW would be having a special sub available only to the elite, where the elite would be defined recursively as “the LW members hand-picked by the existing elite” starting from Eliezer.

            Question: if someone created an online forum that actually let you do that, and thus fight back against the “atomized nature of modern society” etc., would that be a good or bad thing?

          • suntzuanime says:

            There have been forums created along similar lines. They tend to blow up due to drama but are wistfully recalled afterwards.

      • Quixote says:

        I would have upvoted this.

      • Tom Scharf says:

        Upvoting might be OK, but when you add downvotes the shout down police form death squads and feel it is their obligation to enforce the imaginary consensus. I prefer the neither form, having to make your own mind up about a comments quality.

        But I also don’t have time to parse 100’s of comments either, so we live in an imperfect world. I would prefer the ability to collapse tree nodes and to whitelist certain people for highlighting.

        • Bakkot says:

          The ability to collapse subthreads has been present a good while now – that’s what the ‘hide’ button does. Or do you mean something else?

          • Tom Scharf says:

            Wow. I never saw that. Duh. I think everything but the text just kind of got visually filtered out. Thanks for pointing out the blatantly obvious to a blind man.

          • Anonymous says:

            For a long time, I had never noticed that button. I noticed it first because of a helpful comment similar to the one you made here. I remember how glad I was to discover the hide button for collapsing subthreads, and I want to give you imaginary internet points for helping someone else the same way. Kudos!

    • samedi says:

      I agree. I am a Shi’i believer who is of the Party of Scott Alexander, but not Eliezer Y. (whose work leaves me cold and apathetic).

      • Anonymous says:

        I haven’t to admit the non-transitivity is a little puzzling. I really admire Scott’s writing, and Scott really admires Yudkowsky’s writing, but … yeah.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          I have heard this before, in the comments of SSC. I have never heard the opposite, but there is an obvious sampling bias (SSC did not exist during the golden age o f LW, and now that LW is kill there is no place I would ever hear about someone who liked LW but dislikes SSC, because someone who dislikes SSC isn’t going to comment here).

          Has anybody heard about people who like Eliezer’s work but dislike Scott’s?

          • Alex says:

            Yes, but mostly (as far as I can tell) by virtue of an (incorrect) interpretation of Scott’s position on SJ.

          • Stezinech says:

            Remember “Testimonials for SSC”. As Alex pointed out, it’s probably the SJ-leaning crowd that is more likely to dislike SSC at the same time as liking Eliezer (in theory).

            There could be overlap with people that Scott just wrote about: those in the Atheism community advocating for SJ, particularly given the proximity of the Atheism and rationality “tribes”.

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            My perception is that due to Eliezer’s more cult-y image, he’s more associated with rightist movements (by virtue of humoring their ideals), while Scott’s more public hedgings, caveats, epistemic statuses, etc., make him less caricatured.

            So my guess would be people who might call Scott a cuck would prefer Eliezer’s more rhetorically-confident writings more. (as “less beta” or something like that)

        • Ilya Shpitser says:

          I agree — Scott is smart but has bad taste :).

      • Anonymous says:

        Me too.

        My impression of Less Wrong and the rationalist community is that it has more ideological conformity than here, and is less tolerant of disagreement. Perhaps you get to disagree on questions that are viewed as still open, but not on matters that the community has all agreed there is a definite obvious answer to.

        An example: veganism. My own view is that, from a utilitarian perspective, there is literally nothing wrong with killing and eating animals, for roughly the reasons Robin Hanson gives. If you think the lives of battery hens / dairy cows / etc are especially bad then perhaps you could treat them as an exception, but the basic argument seems to me to be fairly convincing, far more so than anything I’ve read in favor of veganism.

        As far as I can tell, the rationalist community consider “is it ethically correct to be vegan?” to be a solved question, with the answer being ‘yes’, no further debate on this basic point being necessary. The SSC community is divided on the matter, like on most matters. Even those with strong views in favor of one side or the other consider this issue to be something people might reasonably disagree on, and are open to hearing new arguments against their own perspective. Arguments for unpopular ideas are met by consideration and counterarguments rather than downvotes and instructions to Read The Sequences.

        That’s not to say that people here don’t view people they disagree with as being wrong, but that the community is about lively debate with one another, rather than collective agreement on a steadily-expanding set of views.

        I’d be keen to attend a SSC meetup if it were actually a SSC meetup and not a SSC/LW/EA meetup. I know Scott says not to worry about not fitting in, but I know I wouldn’t. I’d say the wrong thing and get snarled at. (Even identifying myself as the poster of this comment would probably result in a snarling.)

        • Nornagest says:

          As far as I can tell, the rationalist community consider “is it ethically correct to be vegan?” to be a solved question, with the answer being ‘yes’, no further debate on this basic point being necessary.

          I know enough rationalists who’re into paleo or other heavily carnivorous diets to call this into question.

          • Urstoff says:

            Maybe they think it’s ethically correct, but not important.

          • Nornagest says:

            Maybe, but absent evidence to that effect I’m not gonna assume it.

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m also under the impression that the rationalist community views “it is ethically correct to donate all of your income to charity – specifically, bednets – beyond that which you need to survive” as being quite conclusively true. But nobody actually does this, not even Singer. The defense normally given is moral weakness. Presumably this applies to meat-eating too.

        • suntzuanime says:

          I went to a SSC/EA meetup and while I didn’t get snarled at, it did seem pretty pointless. They were perfectly polite about thinking veganism or whatever was a settled question but there was just too much of a mindset gap to make it a worthwhile use of an evening.

        • Deiseach says:

          As far as I can tell, the rationalist community consider “is it ethically correct to be vegan?” to be a solved question, with the answer being ‘yes’, no further debate on this basic point being necessary.

          Oh indeed, yes. That irritates me about some bloggers whom I otherwise like: meat-eating is explicitly called out as immoral (not just “a poor choice” or “industrialised factory farming has a lot wrong with it in how it operates” but wrong, bad, sinful if they believed in the notion of sin, pretty much murder as far as they’re concerned and never under any circumstances excusable. You eat meat, you are immoral, unethical and frankly evil).

          This is especially grating when they generally operate elsewise on a platform of “nobody gets to tell you what you do is wrong, you have the right to make up your own mind and your own choices, ignore any guilt tripping on the part of those who think they have The Truth” and would never, ever use that kind of thinking about something like abortion (yes, sorry for raising that vexed question): you think a foetus has moral weight, well that’s your opinion but those who don’t share it can legitimately differ on whether this procedure ends a life. Have a roast chicken for dinner and you are a murderer, no ifs ands or buts.

          • ii says:

            @Deiseach

            Your average anti-abortion activist is familiar with the facts of what it is they’re protesting. Your average meat eater has no argument for why it’s excusable to kill a farm animal but not a dog.

          • John Schilling says:

            Apples and oranges – being familiar with the facts of a dispute and having a [good] argument for one side of that dispute are two different things.

          • ii says:

            @John Schilling
            but not unrelated, the average person doesn’t believe that animals suffer from emotions like grief or have personalities or otherwise lack basic features of cognition all evidence to the contrary

          • Anonymous says:

            @ii

            I think the average meat eater thinks it’s morally fine to raise animals for meat, but is subjectively upset at the thought of eating animals that are fluffy and cute. I don’t think most believe there is a fundamental moral justification for why eating dogs is wrong, they just don’t like the idea of it.

            Note though that the claim that people consider killing dogs as immoral is not entirely true. We are fine with ‘putting to sleep’ a dog that is old or ill.

            Also, in my experience, pet owners tend to exaggerate the intelligence of their pet, so I’m not sure your second post is correct either.

        • Anon says:

          The most animal-rights affiliated group of rationalists I know, an EA group, is only about 50% vegetarian. Where are you getting this impression?

          This is kind of beside the point, but re: the Hanson article, I know of no rationalists who make the argument that meat is immoral a priori, only that the lives of factory-farmed animals are net negative and you ought not incentivize the creation of more of them.

          • Anonymous says:

            You don’t need to bring incentives into it. I don’t know whether the effect of eating the marginal animal is to incentivize meat production or to consume part of a fixed quantity of meat and so reduce the amount of meat available to everyone else. In the absence of this information, the default assumption seems to be neither: that my meat consumption will have no effect on everyone else’s in one direction or the other. But even then, if factory farm animals live net negative lives then I’m still increasing the number of factory farm animals above what it would otherwise be.

            Regarding the more general point… It seems very likely that some farm animals have net negative lives. It also seems very likely that some have net positive lives. I recall someone on SSC cite some EA-affiliated material that claimed that factory farmed chickens are an example of the former, but factory farmed beef cattle an example of the latter. There are many farms you can source meat from which are not factory farms, which target their products specially at those concerned about animal welfare. Beyond that, some meat comes from animals that simply aren’t raised in cramped factory conditions – lamb, for example.

            So given this, it seems very bizarre that the utilitarian perspective on meat-eating should be that it’s ethically correct to go vegan. Why vegan? What’s the chance that, with all this variability, the utility maximising approach is to eat zero animal products at all, rather than, say, to eat beef and lamb, don’t drink milk, buy chicken from small high-welfare farms only?

          • Anon says:

            @Anonymous:

            People are more likely to do a thing if they know other people doing it; the default assumption of you doing anything is that other people will do more of that thing.

            Re: rest of your post: it’s surprisingly hard to accurately source meat which probably did not involve a great deal of suffering to create; I know people who’ve tried. Anyway, the EAs I know acknowledge the complexity of the situation; for example, several consume dairy, since it’s probably lower suffering per unit than meat is (a dairy cow produces vastly more milk in its lifetime than a farmed cow does beef), and at least a few encourage vegetarians to consider giving up eggs in exchange for introducing chicken meat, which probably causes less suffering. Others are “bivalvegans”.

            But these complexities are, we think, much less memetically fit than mere vegetarianism or veganism. Since the goal is not to avoid doing harm but rather reduce suffering, if your actions influence others’ eating habits this is where most of the effect will come from. So it’s probably correct to optimize for memetic fitness as a first line. Hence the choice of messaging, with complexities only gotten into for people like you.

        • I’d say the wrong thing and get snarled at.

          I speak as someone who has been on LW since the OB days, has over 1000 karma, knows employees at CFAR/MIRI, has gone to dozen+ LW meetups: I don’t predict snarling, at least based on what you wrote here.

          Maybe people who read only LW get bad intuitions about what the community is actually like? Because in person, LWers seem way too nice (or, uncharitably, spineless) to snarl at anyone… well, except maybe a few (including Eliezer unfortunately?)

        • Scott Alexander says:

          This seems completely wrong to me. I eat meat. So does Eliezer. So do most people in the community I know. A look at the last LW survey confirms that fewer than 10% of LWers are vegetarian. EA is maybe a little more vegetarian, but I still don’t think anywhere near 50%.

          • Anonymous says:

            As I said somewhere above, I’m not talking about actually being vegan so much as holding the view that it is quite clearly ethically correct to be vegan. That a majority of EA folks are not vegan is not surprising to me – they don’t fulfill what they view as their obligations re: donating all excess income to bednets either.

            In your own post defending meat-eating, you argued that doing so can be morally neutral if it’s offset with extra charity donations, but didn’t question the fundamental claim that veganism is the most ethical choice.

        • Jeff says:

          It’s a weighty subject. I’m a strict vegan and have been since I was born (parents “indoctrinated” me into it I suppose), so I probably have a biased opinion on the matter, but I don’t think Hanson’s points are that convincing in total.

          I think Hanson’s point about an individual’s choice to become vegan, by itself, not resulting in increased utility for animals is probably a valid one. That is, the animal is already dead, your choice to be vegan won’t make that animal less dead, and probably won’t make any other animals less dead. So, you may as well take advantage of the situation, since not taking advantage of it isn’t by itself “righting a wrong”.

          That is probably the only argument for non-vegetarianism/non-veganism I’ve ever found somewhat convincing.

          However, his grander point about utility isn’t so simple. The subject of more existence = more utility is hotly debated and not nearly as black and white as he portrays. Especially when you consider life quality.

          Not to directly compare animals to humans, but Hanson’s point is purely that day of life * all lives = more utility. So, if you plug humans into this equation, what are the ethics surrounding, say, a small (1/8 of a square mile perhaps) isolated island where new humans are born through in vitro fertilization of women living on the island, observed experimentally for 22 years, then silently and painlessly killed on their 22nd birthday? Let’s also say the island has ample but nearly tasteless food, and no entertainment options other than the humans playing with one another. No medical services.

          It’s a matter of average vs. total utiliarianism. If you are a blanket total utiliarian, then both of these scenarios add more total utility, and so are good. Even without an additional condition like “the experimental data gathered from this carries some utility to humanity as a whole”, the creation of new human life is sufficient enough for the total utilitarian. You could expand this and create an entire constellation of new humans with poor life quality, yet since they number in the trillions, the total utility is much higher than it is on Earth.

          If you’re not a blanket total utilitarian, then you can’t accept that “more” [X] is always the better choice. Especially when life quality is particularly bad (as is the case for most meat production), but even when it’s not particularly bad. I’d also argue prematurely ending a life carries its own negative utility separate from quality of life and general non-existence, if you place any utility in longevity, aspiration, or growth (e.g. why people seem to care more when a teenager is murdered vs. when a 95-year-old is murdered).

          This is also somewhat related to the “repugnant conclusion” issue. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox)

          (Also, I obviously wouldn’t “snarl at you”, nor would other vegetarian or vegan rationalists. You might just experience some healthy debating.)

    • konshtok says:

      It more culturally appropriate to say that Yud is the incarnation of the prophet Elijah in his role as the herald of the end days while SA is the messiah of the House of Joseph who will gather the tribes to conquer the earth and free the land
      The messiah of the House of David who will bring justice and peace has not yet been revealed

      • samedi says:

        Or like, how Malcolm X spent a lot of time talking about how the Hon. Elijah Muhammad taught us this and that, but everyone was there to hear what Malcolm had to say. I know I’m not on Youtube today, decades later, to watch Elijah Muhammad videos.
        Scott Alexander is an unwilling emperor. His reticence and lack of power-seeking is a further virtue, and confirms more heavily that the Mandate of Heaven smiles upon him. He should have enough Sinology to know that like Zhao Kuangyin, the yellow (imperial) robe must and will be forced upon him, three times in the night before the cock crows.

        • Franz_Panzer says:

          Great, now you’ve brought the King in Yellow into this. Madness must surely follow.

      • Ilya Shpitser says:

        God, just start a church already, you clearly want to.

        • Exa says:

          Well, maybe we will!
          (Personally, I’ve been self-labeling as a member of the “cult of Elua” since I heard the phrase)
          (I feel like the only-half-joking semi-spiritual abstraction/personified entity conflation is a large part of the fun. Talking about things in a serious tone and invoking adages and proverbs and Gods (sacred mysteries/pretending to Deep Wisdom/deliberate obfuscation to magnify perceived interestingness aside, things like “The twelfth virtue, which is nameless” just really resonate for some reason) makes everything /feel/ like it has import, rather than just knowing intellectually that it does.)

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            They really resonate because of the God-shaped hole. I think rationalists should renounce God and prophets and religion, not just theism, for good.

          • Brad (the other one) says:

            >They really resonate because of the God-shaped hole. I think rationalists should renounce God and prophets and religion, not just theism, for good.

            This assumes they can.

    • LPSP says:

      I have never met someone who reads Less Wrong or SSC in real life. But if we did, I’d imagine we’d have a lot to talk about, SSC related or not. I can sense its bonding-potential.

  8. K says:

    Excellent insight. One thing I would quarrel with is that this knowledge about tribes makes you more hesitant to want to destroy a tribe you don’t agree with. It’s okay to be partial to a tribe, as you correctly point out, but then why is not also okay to enact tribal warfare? Obviously for smaller arguments you don’t literally go to war, you just try to out argue your opponents, or mock them into submission. But for bigger problems on the scale of the Nazis or ISIS, then it seems perfectly reasonable to want to raze their culture and replace it with our own, and in fact we did that exact thing with the Nazis.

    My point is just that for me what your insight has made me think is that you should be more careful that your tribal warfare is actually more than just about problems on the tribe level (Them vs Us etc), and should rather be about actual consequences or actual bad ideas.

    • Sastan says:

      A good reason to have a healthy but not heretical norm of self criticism as a founding value (or a rallying flag, or sacred value, as Scott and Haidt might put it).

      We call it Freedom of Speech in legal terms. But that’s just one example, and it is useless without the cultural norm of using it (“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism!”).

  9. Vox Imperatoris says:

    I also just wanted to say I really enjoyed this one. I’d say it’s “Scott Alexander Hits” material.

    You might just be the rightly-guided caliph.

    • rictic says:

      Seconded. This gave me a fresh bag of tools to use when thinking about a variety of things I’ve been puzzling over.

    • Walter says:

      +1. This is some vintage slate star codex.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        The secret ingredient is length!

        • MasteringTheClassics says:

          You joke, but I’ve previously observed that around here length is a reasonable proxy for how much I’ll enjoy reading a post…

          • Randy M says:

            Guess I’m the odd one out, but this was the first one I thought could have used an editor. It seemed like there was a lot of background already known by everyone here if it was aimed at his in-group, but a lot of in-group details if it was aimed at a wider audience; and didn’t really get to anything new until near the end.

            But it should make a good post for restarting the discussion that bounces around the comments here often of late.

        • Simon says:

          It’s not a secret.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      Nth-ed. I hope that in another four years or when Scott stops blogging (whichever happens first), RobbBB will compile a second volume (or expand his current list into a version 2.0) of The Library of Scott Alexandria, and that this post will be included in it (and that Nino will make another ebook).

      • John Schilling says:

        or when Scott stops blogging (whichever happens first)

        Possibly because God takes him out of the world to preserve him as a future Messiah? Scott being an atheist, this is going to confuse him mightily, but I say roll with it 🙂

    • Anatoly says:

      -1 here. To me, this post is Scott’s fine rhetoric without Scott’s fine explanatory power.

      1. This post likens almost all human social structures to tribes. Culture, subculture, nation, ethnicity, club, community, class, party, company, volunteer organization – all are tribes. Since everything around us involves some social structures, whenever any action or decision or attitude is aligned with a social structure, it can now be explained by “tribalism”. Since the concept ends up being so broad, it explains nearly nothing; worse, since it *feels* narrow and specific, it gives an impression of an insightful point of view.

      2. Because so many different things are called tribes, we can expect the 4-stage process (preexisting differences, rallying flag, development, dissolution) to not really work. The idea of “preexisting differences” becomes vacuous when the “tribe” assembles itself from a wide population by selection (e.g. online rationalists). Development and dissolution are just “things work until they don’t”. And a rallying flag is something that can always be found in any sort of nonrandom social structure – so again, what is its explanatory power? Notice how in the examples in the post rallying flags are such wildly different kinds of things. One “rallying flag” is who ought to have been caliph >1000 years ago, something no more than an abstruse symbol to the majority of people in the “tribes”. Another is deafness, the condition that shapes everyday life in the community and informs all its customs. And if the rallying flag changes every few decades (what’s the rallying flag of the Democratic party?), then how is it different from “current ideology”?

      3. Why use the word “tribe” and not e.g. “community”? Tribes stand in our imagination for strong ties, cohesive power. So talking about everything as a tribe encourages us to emphasize the power and the strength of the connections. But actually, the degree of commitment and the degree of loyalty everybody has to each of their “tribes” varies wildly (in particular because everyone is a member of many different ‘tribes’, another reason why the word is unhelpful). If we think of social structures in terms of tribes and tribalism, our default examples will be those where tribalism is really strong. But how strong and coercive a particular social structure is is almost the whole issue. Take Judaism. One of the surprising developments of the recent decades is how, in the US, Orthodox Judaism has been growing stronger while the more permissive Conservative and Reform movements are diminished; something which reverses previous trends. There’s a very typical situation which is the complete opposite of what Scott describes with his family – when mildly religious parents send their kids to Modern Orthodox schools and they come out much more zealous. There’s an obsession with khumra that leads to ludicrous results – e.g. portraits of very famous rabbis and their wives in early 20th century are retouched when published in religious books today because they’re not dressed modestly enough by today’s standards. Can we explain all this by tribalism? Sure we can. Can we explain the preceding trend of Judaism moving towards its milk-toast varieties like Reform? Sure we can. There’s a “generational process… by which religions dissolve”, until they don’t. It’s all about tribalism when they do, and it’s all about tribalism when they don’t.

      • Nornagest says:

        Culture, subculture, nation, ethnicity, club, community, class, party, company, volunteer organization – all are tribes. Since everything around us involves some social structures, whenever any action or decision or attitude is aligned with a social structure, it can now be explained by “tribalism”. Since the concept ends up being so broad, it explains nearly nothing; worse, since it *feels* narrow and specific, it gives an impression of an insightful point of view.

        Sure, there are tribal aspects to most if not all aspects of human endeavor. But that doesn’t mean they’re all just tribal. Tribalism explains why you keep going to your old gym instead of the one across town when you move closer to it; it does not explain why you went to the gym in the first place.

        (Unless you’re Robin Hanson.)

      • I liked the post, but this bugged me somewhat.

        Popper’s criticism of Freud came to mind–this can explain everything. It would be good to hear what would qualify as evidence against this way of thinking about things.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        The tribe vs. community distinction to my mind rests upon the idea that tribes have some kind of family tree connection, either in the past or potentially in the future through intermarriage. The term “community” more implies randomness: community college. Or perhap temporary mutual self-interest: the community doesn’t want the proposed low rent apartment complex because it would lower property values.

        But then I always think in terms of family trees, which is alien to most contemporary people.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          I think of tribalism as oppsitional, as needing an outgroup. Which is a failure mode if opposing isn’t what a group is supposed to be doing, like rivalry between government departments, or branches of the military.

        • samedi says:

          It’s not alien to the contemporary Middle East! Nor to most premodern societies.

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        If we have separate concepts for tribal and notnribal groups, you can explain how tribal*ism* trips up the aims of a group

      • RG says:

        I agree. I think the tribal idea and the whole spectrum of groups has been developed much more extensibly by anthropologists already. For example a “normal” tribe or community has members of all ages and their “flag” is survival, while the tribe of video game players is a tribe within a bigger one that provides all their basic needs so survival becomes secondary. But in a bigger tribe, like a state, humans use different cognitive strategies to deal with others and are not the same cognitive strategies used in smaller tribes. Anyways, there are many differences that have been studied and developed in other fields of knowledge about this topic.

    • liquid8 says:

      absolutely! this is some pukkha gear right here!

  10. Anonymous says:

    On first read this seems very insightful and will enter my favourites list. Just when I was thinking that you’re dialing down the production of long essays introducing new concepts.

    EDIT: woops, vox beat me to it

  11. I think that your analysis misses one crucial history angle to think about tribes – for nearly all of human history, women weren’t allowed in them. No workplaces allowed women, no debating societies allowed women, no political bodies allowed women, women could hold no special roles in most religious organizations, etc. This ended (in America, at least), only about 40-50 years ago.

    If “conservation of tribalism” is a thing, then did the breakdown of male-only tribes by the feminist revolution lead to an uptick in tribalism elsewhere?

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      Not defending sexism, etc., but this is not really true.

      Women weren’t allowed in men’s “tribes” (of certain kinds). But there were plenty of social clubs, religious groups, and even political groups for women. The really intensive political activity mostly started in the 19th century—such as temperance activism. Still, women have virtually never been completely socially alienated.

      For instance, children today aren’t allowed to do any of those things. Does that mean children don’t form “tribes”? Clearly not.

      • Anon says:

        Ah, a mention of children and tribes? This is an opportunity to post one of my favorite short essays, on the disappearance of children’s culture! : The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth.

        • CAE_Jones says:

          And now I have a new candidate for favorite short essay, too!

        • LPSP says:

          Captures the mood of my youth very accurately. I used to relish the rare walks my family took as a small child. When my parents split up at age 7, my mother didn’t have time for that, and I grew despondant and dependent on video games (heavily in fact, to the point it hurt my grades without intervention), and later the internet, no matter how crassly I engaged with it. Rediscovering walking around my late teens was something like . . . reattaching a limb from deep-freeze, and flexing it and bolstering it. It felt great.

          Traditions like Halloween and Bonfire Night exist for very good reason, as do fantastical adventure stories like Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Burning effigies of that terrorist still goes on. Not sure if I agree that today’s world is more dangerous for children (other than in a few specific areas), but interesting nevertheless.

          • LPSP says:

            It always amazes me when Americans aren’t aware of Bonfire Night. It’s such a big deal when you’re a kid in England.

      • Koldos the Shepherd says:

        This may be an artifact of patriarchy writing the history books, but I get the impression that women were still significantly less divided and more tied into a “tribe of all women”, which night have served as a mechanism to defuse tribal conflicts (you can bond with other members of gender X over “at least we are not gender Y”, and the echo chamber is disrupted by having most households contain members of different tribes).

        • Anonymous says:

          It seems to me that all muslims are one group, but saying they’re a “tribe of all muslims” wouldn’t be very accurate. Seems to be the same case there, especially since I’m more likely to know about subtypes of muslim than differences in political opinion of women in the 15th century.

          If the tribe flag becomes too weak, either the tribe gets absorbed into a bigger one or it dissolves into multiple smaller ones with stronger flags. Either way, everyone finds themselves a new tribe. In modern society we complain about atomization which seems to be a lack of (strong) tribes. Scott seems to be describing a fundamental need among all humans, although he avoids going so far as to make that claim. If this is indeed the case, patriarchy cannot affect women’s desire for forming and belonging in their own tribes any more than it can affect their desire for food and sleep.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          No, women tended to at least as tribal as men.

          • Lambert says:

            I would guess that men, looking from outside the supertribe of women, could not see all the subtribes.

      • Julie K says:

        “Fred Arnold was at the manse and walked home with me. He is the new Methodist minister’s son and very nice and clever, and would be quite handsome if it were not for his nose. He wants to enlist, but can’t because he is only seventeen. Mrs. Elliott met us as we were walking through the village and could not have looked more horrified if she caught me walking with the Kaiser himself. Mrs. Elliott detests the Methodists and all their works. Father says it is an obsession with her.”

        -L. M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside (1921)

    • NN says:

      Considering how many women have traveled great distances to join the extremely patriarchal “people who believe that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the rightful caliph” tribe, I’m extremely skeptical that women were excluded from tribes in pre-modern periods. I think it’s more likely that tribes in sexist/patriarchal societies simply had different roles for men and women. For example, in the aforementioned “followers of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” tribe, men go out to fight and get blown up by airstrikes while women keep house, raise children, and police the behavior of other women in the tribe’s territory.

      Looking much further back in history, women in Ancient Athens were kept cloistered to a degree not too dissimilar to women in modern Saudi Arabia. But if Athens got in a war with Sparta, do you have any doubt that the women of Athens would do as much as they could to support the war effort – for example, by running their husbands’ households while they went off to war and even encouraging men to go out and fight?

      • DavidS says:

        Aristophanes’ Lysistrata suggests precisely the opposite – women from Athens and women from Sparta league together to try to stop their husbands waging war (by refusing to sleep with them until peace is reached).

        No idea if that was based on a perception of women as being less pro-war at the time, though.

        • Protagoras says:

          It was a comedy. Likely part of the implication was that the war was so amazingly stupid and destructive that even the women could see that it shouldn’t go on. Plus the setup allowed for a lot of dirty jokes. Very little realism was intended.

        • Jaskologist says:

          The thing to remember about Lysistrata is that it is fiction. And a comedy, at that.

    • This is complete and utter nonsense. Have you never heard of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, much less a knitting circle?

      No workplaces admitted women? Who did the washing? The typing? I have a copy of a German woodcut showing a blacksmith hard at work with women in the background, pumping the bellows to feed the fire.

      Did famous women not host the French Salons of the 18th century? And how did the Aztecs function without any women in their tribe? I don’t know how the Jews got here, what with Judaism reckoned through the mother, but no women allowed in the tribe…

    • Steve Sailer says:

      Women traditionally played a huge role in European social life. Courts and salons were heavily female. The French Enlightenment, for example, played out at salons run by ladies of a certain age.

      A glance at the Old Masters paintings in any museum will show how coed was European socializing.

    • It’s a weirdly incomplete view of culture and tribe to say that only explicit political and economic activity counts as “belonging to the tribe”.

      You’re missing out on the way that most pre-modern “tribes” were actually tribes in the literal sense: groups of people who lived in the same area and reproduced together. Reproduction is a thing that requires females. Females are central to tribal survival as far as that goes; in many pre-modern tribes women were the primary transmitters of the tribe’s values and mythology as the ones who did most of the child-rearing. Heck, that’s still true today.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Right.

        One thing I’ve noticed in recent years is how unrealistic about the past SJWs are becoming. Ideological assumptions about how evil and oppressive the past _must_ have been override simple reality checks such as, say, paying attention to one of the countless filmed versions of “Pride and Prejudice.”

        • Julie K says:

          I’ve noticed that discussions of Jane Austen often mention how important it was in that society for a woman to find a rich husband, while overlooking that Austen has a *lot* of male characters who, not being wealthy, need to either find a rich wife or remain single.

          • Nita says:

            In “Pride and Prejudice”, the five sisters can’t inherit their family estate because they’re women. That’s what makes their mother so anxious to marry them off. Sure, it’s a matter of social class, not life and death — but so is dropping out of high school, for example.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I may be confusing Pride and Prejudice with one of Austen’s other books but I thought that the issue was that the estate was in debt.

          • anonymous says:

            hlynkacg-

            The estate was entailed – it couldn’t be split and had to go to a male heir.

    • Caddyshadrach says:

      I would mark this as wildly inaccurate. I might even counter that there has never been a self-sustaining tribe that did not engage women. After all, men can make a settlement, but it’s not a colony until you bring in women.

      Plus, what do you think all the women were doing while the men were out tribe-ing it up? Just sitting at home feeling atomized? Even the most gender-segregated societies have intense social subgroups among men and women. And gender roles meant that women frequently worked together at common tasks delegated mostly or exclusively to women.

      Historically, women spent huge amounts of time together not only on household chores, but in economically important industries involving textiles, brewing and food preservation, both inside and outside of the home. Women also had hobbies, including crafts, card games and hunting, in which they participated together. And this is not even considering religious and cultural functions in various societies across time.

      • Women *might* be less likely to form named tribes.

      • Zip says:

        “I might even counter that there has never been a self-sustaining tribe that did not engage women.”

        This seems way too strong. How about fraternities and fraternal orders?

        Personally, I’m disappointed that forming new, explicitly male-only tribes gets you labelled a “sexist” so quickly. I’d prefer a tribe of only men to the common situation of a tribe that’s 90% male, 10% female–as a heterosexual man, I find such imbalanced gender ratios very depressing. I’d rather be part of a 100% male tribe, get a break from having to think about women, and engage in frictionless male bonding.

        • onyomi says:

          This is an interesting thought. And the difference, in my experience, between a 90-10 gender ratio and a 100-0 gender ratio is night and day. Because in the 90-10 scenario, coupling and romance actually tends to play an outsize role, because the 90 competes fiercely to sleep with the 10, usually inspiring a lot of drama. In 100-0, of course, there is no sexual drama outside possible homosexual drama.

          So, really, 100-0 and 50-50 are both quite preferable, in many ways, to 90-10. Though there are certain obvious advantages (though not only advantages) to being in the 10.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            In 100-0, of course, there is no sexual drama outside possible homosexual drama.

            So long as you are making an explicitly male-only space, you an make it explicitly heterosexual-only as well. In fact, the military integrated females decades before it let in homosexuals. The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was integrated into the United States Army in 1978, while “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was instituted in 1993 and suspended in 2011.

          • dndnrsn says:

            The US military, and every military, tried to keep out homosexuals, but it did not succeed in that to anywhere close to the degree to which they succeeded in keeping women out of the military or out of certain positions or units, and minorities out of the military or out of certain positions or units.

            The choice is not between gays or no gays, but rather between out and closeted, which means that the issue of guys worrying that other guys are lusting after them can’t be eliminated.

            This creates more drama than not banning them: there will be homosexual drama, and it will be more dramatic because it’s secret, and also there will be drama involved in worrying about secret gays, drama involved in persecution of real or imagined gays, etc.

            Take, for instance, the Cleveland Street scandal, Oscar Wilde’s trial and punishment, etc. The illegality and social unacceptability of homosexuality in Victorian England didn’t keep drama from happening – quite the opposite.

          • onyomi says:

            Yeah, there seems to be no practical way to keep closeted gays from being part of anything. I know gay men who “seem” more straight than me–and I am straight!

          • Jaskologist says:

            There are, however, ways of keeping them from hitting on you.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Plus, a certain sort of gay man is going to be positively attracted to a “we’re-all-men’s-men-here-no-pansies-allowed!” environment. So if you try to preserve that environment by keeping gay men out/keep gay men out to preserve such an environment, uh…

          • Nornagest says:

            I dunno. Working in tech, 90-10 is about the gender ratio I see, and there’s been very little in the way of office romance around me, either attempted or perpetrated. And I don’t think it’s because everyone’s afraid of HR, either; I think it’s because, faced with those numbers, it’s generally understood that the office is a bad place to get laid. There may also be some demographic issues involved.

            On the other hand, a friend in a different company reports almost the opposite, so maybe this is one of those things where culture can collapse into either state.

        • Wency says:

          I’m with you there.

          Though in practice, the only tribe I belong to in the real world is tabletop gamers, where the larger community has, at best, this 90-10 ratio. As much as possible, I lobby to exclude female participation, and I think the groups are enriched for it. This is a position I did not adopt in the beginning and only came to after much experience.

          Of course, with tabletop gaming, the seemingly most common form of female participant is the girlfriend who is roped into joining, or is curious about what her boyfriend does. And she invariably becomes bored and is not engaged and either drops out or brings the entire game down with her.

          But in one instance, I was in a group where there was a single, unattached, reasonably attractive woman who was extremely interested in the game. And virtually all of the men were interested in her. And she was interested in me, but I had a girlfriend. And it ended, naturally, with group disintegration.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            “As much as possible, I lobby to exclude female participation, and I think the groups are enriched for it.”

            Is there a name for the situation where you think a position is a ludicrous straw man, and then you find someone who actually holds it? It’s not quite Poe’s law, because that requires it to be funny.

          • Protagoras says:

            When I was an undergrad, I played tabletops a lot with a group that was mostly but not entirely male. There was drama, to be sure, but things did not disintegrate; I only left that group because I left the state. More recently, I’ve been playing with a group which does a lot of LARPing in addition to doing tabletops. Perhaps because of that, it’s much less male dominated (perhaps not equal, but maybe 60-40 male female), and I think the additional women make things more interesting.

          • Tibor says:

            I guess this is a problem when you’re 16, not so much afterwards. Even if there are some sexual tensions or whatnot, adults should be able to deal with that. If you can’t do that, you can have a rule “no relationships within the game group”. Also notice that if there was no way around this, gay men or lesbian women could not ever form a stable group of this sort.

          • Nornagest says:

            Funny, I’d have described tabletop as maybe the second most female-friendly geeky hobby I’ve participated in (after the MUD scene, which is closely related). Haven’t played for a few years, but every group I’ve played with has had at least a couple of women, and the ratio was often near unity.

            Admittedly, there was usually a couple or two at the table, but I haven’t seen the bored and disengaged girlfriend much.

          • Zorgon says:

            I’m in a group with three women and two men. I’m involved with one of the women and one of the other women is involved with the GM and every single person has been involved in tabletop gaming since long before we even met each other. And the group has so far lasted for nearly 2 years, surviving the loss of 3 players to natural churn and the recruitment of replacements.

            And this description is not unusual in the gamer circles I travel in.

            I therefore posit that |your| |ongoing| issues with |disruptive| |social phenomena| associated with |women| in |your games| has nothing specifically to do with women, and therefore that the cause of said issues is likely to be one of the other marked elements, or something else specific to your situation.

          • NN says:

            It probably depends on which sector of tabletop you’re talking about. War games (including sci-fi/fantasy ones like Warhammer 40k) are probably the most male-dominated sector, White Wolf games probably have the most female participants of any sector outside of “normal” board games (or least they did back in their heyday), and I imagine that DnD is somewhere in between.

          • Wency says:

            For the record, I’m mostly talking D&D and various other more obscure RPGs. I do agree women are more common in White Wolf, especially LARP, and it might be that the more balanced gender ratios have fewer problems. LARP isn’t my thing though.

            I also play wargames and other strategy games. I’ve never heard a woman express genuine interest in playing a wargame once she knows what it is. Sometimes women will join for other board games, and I think that’s OK, as it’s always more of an ad hoc group coming together than a regular group.

            I find the lack of bored girlfriends in other people’s experiences especially surprising, as it’s something I’ve run into in probably 4-5 groups in three different cities in three different regions of the US, in high school, college, and post-college life. Bored girlfriends probably filter out a bit as they get older, but I’ve still run into them in their 30s. They probably constitute 2/3 of the women I’ve ever played an RPG with. They’re an iconic archetype — there’s even one in one of the Dead Alewives D&D skits. I think for many women, RP sounds to them like something they might like, but they don’t enjoy the practice of it. Maybe many of them the women in that category later filter into White Wolf LARP once they learn about it, as that aligns more with what they’re looking for.

            So in practice, much of the “exclusion” I’m talking about is a consensus to not try to rope in a wife or girlfriend to replace a player if one moves away, but to instead go through the harder work of posting online if we don’t have anyone in our immediate network who is able to join. When I’ve posted online to recruit a player, I’ve never had a woman respond.

            And whether or not we can handle the drama is irrelevant — the purpose of the group is to have a space for men where we don’t have to deal with drama at all. There’s also a side benefit to wives and girlfriends that they know we’re a bunch of guys hanging together into all hours of the night, with no nubile young women present. In that one group with the attractive young woman, my girlfriend knew about her and was constantly wondering about her, and it didn’t help that this woman would reach out to me in texts/e-mails to discuss the game between sessions.

            For my current group, there are women at home for some and women at work for others, and for most of us, this is the only male-exclusive outlet we have. And I think that has made this group very stable and allowed deep friendships to form.

          • Nornagest says:

            D&D (2E through 4E, plus Pathfinder), Exalted, nWoD base, one oWoD Vampire game in high school, Paranoia, Eclipse Phase, various one-shots. So maybe a bit artsier and more RP-heavy on average, but we’re not talking LARP. There weren’t any girls in my group when I was playing D&D in junior high, but, you know, junior high.

            I hadn’t been thinking of wargaming, though, and sure enough that’s heavily male — I was never much into it, but I don’t know any women that are. I do have one female friend with a bunch of Warhammer 40K miniatures, but I’m pretty sure she just likes painting them.

            Also, it occurs to me that the ratio’s been steeper for the pickup games I’ve played at events.

          • Tibor says:

            @Nornagest I thought that all wargame fans generally were into it mostly for the painting and building your model battlefield. I’ve always seen it as a hobby similar to model airplanes or railroards.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I painted miniatures a lot when I was a kid, and I have probably played fewer than 10 games of W40K, which is an awful game: terribly balanced, far too complex, and I’ve heard it’s just gone downhill in recent years.

          • Protagoras says:

            @Tibor, that may be true for miniatures wargamers, but there are other kinds of wargames. Though I believe the boardgame type wargames have declined in this era of computer wargames. I’ve only been playing the computer wargames myself in recent years.

        • John Schilling says:

          People of both genders need an asexual social space from time to time, but they don’t need it all the time nor does it need to be their primary tribal identity. And it is still permissible to organize this sort of thing informally, e.g. a weekly “Girl’s Night Out”, or a “Man Cave” where the guys can retreat for beer and poker.

          It is often convenient to integrate this with one’s work environment, and this has often been done in traditionally all-male and all-female fields. It may arguably be necessary to do this in places where one is forced to socialize with one’s coworkers and only one’s coworkers for months at a time (e.g. ship crews, deployed military units, offshore oil rigs). And it can certainly cause temporary problems when a culture set up this way starts mixing genders. Or including non-traditional sexualities, for that matter.

          It probably isn’t necessary that these problems be permanent, but we are still in our first generation of really putting that to the test. E.g, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a clumsy way of dealing with the fact that deployed military units were going to now have people who theoretically to have sex with their mates but That’s Not What Our Tribal Culture Is About Shut Up. It sort of worked but wasn’t sustainable. Now we’re trying something new, and we’re adding women as well as gay men to the mix. I think it will work, but get back to me in a decade.

          For workplaces on dry land in civilized environs, deal with the disruption and set up your asexual, maybe explicitly single-gendered social environments outside of the workplace. And don’t go whining about sexism just because someone posted a “No girls allowed” sign on their social club, please, because while men and women can arrange this sort of thing informally it would be more flexible if we could in some cases institutionalize it.

          • Tibor says:

            I remember a BBC article about Spanish culinary societies which are basically “men only clubs” (it is also just “men invited by the club members and accepted by all of the members or sons of the deceased club members”). In fact, some of them sometimes tolerate women, but they are absolutely forbidden in the kitchen :))

    • TrivialGravitas says:

      This is really quite wrong. In specific times and places historically those things became male only, but this comes and goes historically. When the university system got started in Europe it was co-ed, women were kicked out much later. At the same time in Europe the workplace as much as it existed, was usually mixed gender, in fact the primary way in which the guild system discriminated against women was making women subservient to their husbands if they married a man in the same guild, which required them to be part of the same group to begin with (and a woman who married outside her guild or stayed single was getting all sorts of equal pay protections, guilds were all about equal pay). It was factorization and industrialization that caused such major gender disparities.

      I don’t think there are any religions, certainly no western religions, where women couldn’t hold special roles (you’ve heard of nuns right?), though the roles were often very segregated the same up/down trends apply. Very early Christianity had women in pastoral clerical roles (that is, a priests a monk/nun) and while I’m not sure exactly when that came back certainly it was present in the 19th century.

    • RG says:

      Human history is 200.000 years old, not 3000. There has been many tribes with women involved.

      • LHN says:

        While it goes further than three thousand years (more like five, at least in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt), once you get much past written records you’re into the realm of archeology (or paleontology), rather than history. (Whence “prehistoric”.) That said, I can’t tell if The Wackademic’s claim encompasses prehistory or not.

    • LPSP says:

      There have always been plenty of female-only groups, within and without the great institutions of their day. Nunneries are the tip of an iceberg.

      One of my grandmothers made her life moving in such circles, usually charitable and/or medicinal.

  12. Nicholas Weininger says:

    I think “cultural appropriation” is used to mean a lot of different things and one should avoid weakmanning it. Much of it is clearly what you’re talking about, but there is also a concrete and sometimes legit material complaint about people who are borrowed from never getting credit or compensation. Think of Elvis getting rich and famous while the black bluesmen who influenced him remained obscure and poor.

    • Charley says:

      I actually thought Scott’s articulation of it was pretty robust. The cultural appropriators (the rich white constitutionalists) seemed to be doing something legitimately harmful to the original participants in the culture (the rappers from the ghetto). I often scoff at the idea of cultural appropriation because Halloween costumes and dreadlocks can’t be THAT sacred, and reading that section made me a lot more sympathetic to the harm cultural appropriation might do.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        I think the power-dynamic does actual matter.

        So, imagine being a Jew in 1939 and seeing a bunch of “funny” Halloween costumes built around Jewish stereotypes. Or a Catholic or Jew in 1839. Or a Christian in Saudi Arabia today.

    • kaninchen says:

      There’s a difference there, in that in the case of the bluesmen we can point to individuals who are personally responsible for musical innovations which were vital to Elvis’ success. Call this “proto-plagiarism”. “Cultural appropriation” is typically about the usage of – well, a culture. It exists when there is a cultural phenomenon which no-one still active can claim to have invented but which is heavily associated with a particular tribe (e.g. Native American headdresses, rap).

      The difference between proto-plagiarism and cultural appropriation is important because it’s easy to see what’s wrong with the first: there are living people who have put in work and creativity and are not receiving due credit or recompense while other people profit from them. With cultural appropriation there’s no individual who is in this position – which is why I’m grateful to Scott for pointing out that it may nevertheless cause problems.

      Incidentally, some people are saying that the objectionability of cultural appropriation is about power dynamics. I disagree: there are ways for powerful groups to complain about outsiders taking up their tribal markers. Instead of talking about “cultural appropriation”, however, they dismiss the fakers as “nouveau riche” and “gauche”. It’s the same social dynamic, merely expressed in a different way.

    • nyccine says:

      Think of Elvis getting rich and famous while the black bluesmen who influenced him remained obscure and poor.

      Except that never happened. For one, Rock n’ Roll was already an established, popular genre by the time Elvis even started his first recordings; two, white pioneers in the rock movement predated him; and three, the influences were a two-way street, with white and black performers drawing off of country, boogie woogie, R&B, and the blues (and more) to create new sounds.

      • It seems to me that there would be more truth in saying that the black musicians of Elvis’ era didn’t get the money and respect they deserved. Elvis could have done something to promote them. However, this doesn’t mean it was especially Elvis’ fault.

      • Vorkon says:

        You might have a point here if you were talking about Rock & Roll in general, but the OP was talking specifically about Elvis. Some of Elvis’ biggest hits were covers of black artists’ work, (most notably Hound Dog, but I’m pretty sure there’s others) and he has gone on record in interviews about how he was influenced by specific black artists, and black gospel music. Saying that Elvis was not directly influenced by black musicians is a little silly; he was basically the Eminem of his day.

        That said, I think the OP is using a particularly bad example of a case where cultural appropriation caused a concrete and material loss. I mean, do you really think Big Mama Thornton would be any more famous or wealthy if Elvis had never covered Hound Dog? Of course not, and an argument could definitely be made that it only helped her. The same holds true for any of the other black musicians that influenced Elvis less directly: Elvis’ success did not make them any less successful than they would have been if Elvis had never existed.

        • nyccine says:

          Saying that Elvis was not directly influenced by black musicians is a little silly

          Nobody said that. The issue is the idea that his style of music is exclusively owed to black musicians, that “he was the Eminem of his day.” That’s one of those “everyone knows” things that’s completely wrong; it’s driven by a mistaken belief that there was a clear line between country, gospel, R&B, blues, etc. that in reality didn’t exist. Everyone was playing everyone else’s music – note that Hound Dog, which you mentioned as “black music,” was in fact written and arranged by two white guys.

          The situation then is totally incomparable to Eminem, who walked into a pre-existing genre that was exclusively the domain of blacks (so much so that with few exceptions, white performers were objects of ridicule, even undeservedly so, such as Vanilla Ice)

    • Sastan says:

      Cultural appropriation is a good and positive force, and should be lauded, not denigrated.

      Plagiarism is not. But you can’t plagiarize a culture. If Elvis stole some piece of music from some poor black dude, get yourself a law degree and a descendant, and sue his estate. If you think it is illegitimate for a white person to dare to use elements of black music in developing his own stuff, then simply know that your tribes are racial, and you believe in artistic segregation.

      • Winter Shaker says:

        Sadly I think it may be a bit more complicated than that. As far as I can tell, there are people who, on seing the memes of their culture adopted by members of another culture, especially one that has a history of cruelty towards people of the first culture (or at least are using those memes with far less reverence than the first culture affords them) will experience genuine psychological anguish, whether for the reasons our host describes above or for other reasons (see here for a non-central example, with gaming culture feeling the sting of appropriation by makers of crappy movies), – that seems to be just one of the unfortunate but understandable products of the way brains work.

        But it is also true that attempting to police the mixing of memes between cultures also hurts people – both the people from outside the culture who would have enjoyed using those memes, and the people from the originating culture who might have enjoyed a bit more mainstream success if those memes had been popularised by more people from mainstream culture … and of course all the other people who would have got to enjoy the artistic and intellectual fruits of letting the memes mingle.

        Seems to me that there’s no ideal situation here, and my preferred policy is simply to say leave people alone unless they are using someone else’s memes in an obviously mocking or belittling manner. That is to say, I think I agree with your policy proposal, but I can understand where the opposition is coming from, and there is a kernel of reasonableness to it.

        • Robert Bork wrote an old law review article, part of whose argument was that the cost to someone who disapproved of pornography of someone else reading pornography (I don’t swear that was the example but I think it was) was an externality just like the cost of breathing pollution, hence that it was just as legitimate for the law to restrict pornography as to restrict pollution. That’s basically the same issue—psychic costs.

          I like to describe that as Bork writing an article explaining why he was not a libertarian–and see what happened to him.

          My response to the argument is that psychic costs are sufficiently hard to measure and easy to counterfeit that a legal system run by humans not omniscient gods should probably ignore them.

      • Nita says:

        In some cultural systems (type A), plagiarism is not a thing. Everyone is free to “borrow” from everyone else, and no one keeps track of authorship. In others (type B), plagiarism is a big transgression. Authorship is very important, and “borrowing” is allowed only with detailed acknowledgement, or even only with permission and compensation.

        This can create a one-way relationship on the boundary between type A and type B systems. Type B creators can use content from a type A community without giving back to it in either of the two ways. Disney has done a lot of this, for example — it takes from the public domain, but it doesn’t give anything back.

        • “Disney has done a lot of this, for example — it takes from the public domain, but it doesn’t give anything back.”

          I don’t think that is true. Copyright law only covers a subset of the content of art. Disney cartoons have influenced our culture and art in a variety of ways outside its coverage.

      • It’s more complicated than that– how you respond to art is shaped by its context.

        If your mind is going “kill the wabbit”, this affects your experience of Wagner.

        Is a swastika a symbol of atrocity or of a happy holiday? The Nazi use of the swastika is a clear case of cultural appropriation, and the emotional reactions are strong enough that there’s no point in telling people to just ignore them.

  13. Edward Scizorhands says:

    I was thinking a lot about tribes after the recent post which had the call for a fundraiser for a member of the tribe, and the resulting heated comment thread, and I realized that the social norms being discussed were completely alien to me.

    I thought of commenting but remembered to be two-of-three of {nice, true, necessary} (I think I’ve got the triad wrong) and just hit cancel. Which is good because my comment might have gotten me the boot.

    When I first read the post and saw that our host was inviting people to support a member of our tribe, but that this person had violated community norms, I was upset. Because that’s what a tribe does: it supports members but also enforces community norms. Those norms tend to be whatever is necessary for that particular tribe to survive.

    But when I suddenly realized that I was observing a foreign culture, like reading about a tribe in National Geographic, it all became clear. The reason I didn’t understand what was going on was because I wasn’t part of that tribe. And that’s okay. It doesn’t put a ding against either me or the person needing help that we aren’t in the same tribe. And so there was no reason to be upset: it wasn’t any violation of my tribal norms. I could regard the whole thing coolly.

    • Too Late says:

      I thought of commenting but remembered to be two-of-three of {nice, true, necessary} (I think I’ve got the triad wrong) and just hit cancel. Which is good because my comment might have gotten me the boot.

      I refrained from posting for exactly the same reason. This is called self-censorship. I have mixed feelings about it.

      • moridinamael says:

        Ironically, a well-tuned self-censorship faculty is very important to tribal membership in general.

  14. Great post.

    One thing that you seem to ignore, though, is that tribes sometimes (often?) harm their members pretty directly, going far beyond just expecting members to defend stupid beliefs, and they even force people to stay in them against their wishes.

    The most obvious example to me is the treatment of women in a fundamentalist Islamic tribe like, say, Saudi society. In this tribe, women aren’t allowed to drive or go anywhere unaccompanied. They’re more-or-less the property of men for their entire lives. Leaving this tribe, or even questioning its norms, can be punishable by death.

    It is of course the case that Saudis (both men and women) identify strongly with the norms of this tribe. Like other tribes, many of them are convinced that other norms are stupid, or even barbaric or disgusting. (Take the famous example of the Saudi argument that Western women drive because they don’t care if they’re raped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQEeXmcWOxI.) And, many of the customs of this tribe have developed independently of their rallying cries as a collection of behaviors that allow Saudis to feel like they are part of a larger community. I.e., the ideology is not the movement.

    So, this is very much a tribe as you define it, and it serves many of the debatably worthwhile, necessary purposes of tribes, as you describe. E.g., if Saudi culture changed overnight, many Saudis would understandably feel quite upset. But, I just think so much of your post, which is reasonable and interesting when applied to gamers or rationalists or Republicans or whatever, just sounds completely absurd in the context of tribes that viciously oppress half of their members and will kill people for trying to leave.

    This makes it particularly weird that your global example tribes are Sunnis and Shias…

    And, of course, many other tribes have similarly horrible norms. One could argue that involuntary tribes are more common than voluntary tribes. Some recent other examples of extremely depressing stories from tribe members who clearly needed to be saved from their tribes: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/my-childhood-was-stolen-from-me-pupil-of-illegal-jewish-faith-school-reveals-physical-physical-abuse-a6965536.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/world/asia/indian-women-labor-work-force.html?ref=world.

    This doesn’t even consider the fact that so many tribes make it their business to kill members of other tribes because, frankly, I think most tribes are far worse for members than for non-members. Nor does it get into the thorny issue of tribal parenting–i.e., bringing children into a tribe before they’re old enough to know what it means to be a member.

  15. Sam says:

    Do tribes really need to have a specific outgroup to hate and define themselves against? I know this is the case for many of your examples, but I also see plenty of examples of groups that either stand primarily for themselves and their ideology or fight battles on multiple fronts.

    Personally, I see this as the case for some of the nuanced tribes I consider myself part of, like Christian intellectuals (found in organizations like BioLogos and the Veritas Forum), political moderates/centrists (like supporters of Kasich and Clinton), and, well, SSC readers.

    I guess my major question is whether you see such groups as less likely to succeed or last as tribes than more polarized groups.

    • Timothy Johnson says:

      I don’t think a tribe needs to have a specific outgroup, just a general narrative of what’s wrong with the world, and some sense of how to fix it.

      Intellectual groups tend to have more abstract enemies. The primary enemy for SSC readers is definitely Moloch.

    • HeelBearCub says:

      Tribes only need to have something that binds them and separates them from others. It could be something as simple as geographical isolation.

      But, I think that, generally, as soon as a tribe is put into competition for limited resources, then they will start having an oppositional outgroup.

    • IMO, SSC readers definitely have an outgroup, and while they might not hate the outgroup particularly much they definitely define themselves against them.

      (The outgroup isn’t a readily-identifiable group with an agreed-upon name, I’ll give you that, but it includes, for example, Arthur Chu, and the Tumblr communists who occasionally clash with the Tumblr rationalists. Basically people who disagree with Scott’s In Favour of Niceness, Community and Civilization post.)

      • JBeshir says:

        Specifically, the left-aligned people who disagree; the right-aligned people who disagree are interesting conversation partners, offering fascinating conversations about whether murder-genocide is a good idea and acceptable response to sociocide.

        I think this is probably a “tribal alliance” thing, in that both can pick up on how the other offers support against things which are a more credible threat to them personally.

        • Nornagest says:

          Seems to me that almost the opposite is true, at least w.r.t. SSC and adjacent parts of Tumblr. (Other facets of the rationalist diaspora have other norms.) Annoying left-leaning commentators attract heated debate, both here and on Tumblr. Here, annoying right-leaning commentators get banned, because Reign of Terror. On Tumblr they get ignored.

          The asymmetrical treatment is interesting, especially offsite, but for these purposes the important part is the consequence: if you’re counting heated debates, it looks like the left is getting more flak, but if you’re counting bans, the opposite is true. This is probably how people in both wings manage to convince themselves that Scott’s secretly allied with their enemies.

          • jeorgun says:

            The original version is definitely true of the subreddit.

          • Urstoff says:

            Alternately, annoying commenters get banned, and more of those happen to be right-leaning.

          • Nornagest says:

            Nah, I feel pretty safe saying that Scott’s quicker to ban the right — he’s said as much on a number of occasions.

            Absent a ban, though, annoying rightists do seem to have a tendency to stick around longer. I’m tempted to put this down to /pol/ and the trollish character it’s inspired in the modern far right, but that might be a just-so story.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I would submit that there are still more annoying right-wing commenters than annoying left-wing commenters, despite the bans. And the latter tend to be much less persistent.

          • Frog Do says:

            I agree with Vox I. and Nornagest

          • JBeshir says:

            I’m thinking less about bans, and ignores, and more about who, when they express some wildly illiberal idea, draws a polite argument about why that’s a valid position but they disagree, and who draws an angry response about how they’re traitors to the liberal ideals of society.

            The former is perhaps not ingroup, but they’re also probably not outgroup, while the latter is probably the outgroup.

            I think this is not because anyone is a crypto-anything but probably more a matter of who is perceived as threatening and who isn’t, as well as an impulse to stand up for anyone else threatened by the same people. But it does mean that they can’t credibly claim to be merely disliking those who disagree with niceness and tolerance, or assume the kind of mantle of neutrality that that implies.

            Bans might be kinda informative but are fairly inconclusive, because of numbers and filtering and all kinds of other things going on. Ignoring someone is probably neither treating them as the Evil Outgroup nor the Ingroup, but instead just treating them as irrelevant.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I think JBeshir is right about it being about threat, in large part. Average poster here is probably more scared of campus protester types than of the far-right types who show up here.

            However, the far-right types who show up here are of a particular kind – the “grim cyberpunk future where the US is a corporation and 99% of the population has sold their vote in exchange for nutritious gruel” variety, rather than the “tattoos that are illegal in Germany” variety, for instance.

            It is definitely true that some fringe ideas are better represented and better responded to than others, which is a pity.

          • Zorgon says:

            As always, which side gets more flak for being illiberal depends very much on what you consider “illiberal”. That concept is not even slightly constant between left-rationalist and right-rationalist tribes.

          • TD says:

            Some ideas will always come across worse than others. It’s more disturbing (to a humanist) to kill people for who they are (Nazism), then to kill people for what they do (Communism). Even if you are not directly calling to eliminate people, who you identify as the problem class matters; is it a class of rank that could be opted out of at any moment, or is it a class of innate identity that cannot be discarded?

      • That reminds me– I’m generally pretty civil. What doesn’t come through, I think, because it can’t be expressed civilly is that I hate lack of civility, and I generally hate people who are habitually uncivil.

      • Berna says:

        The outgroup on SSC is people who operate in what Siderea calls ‘moral mode 2’ in this series of articles: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1272731.html

        • Frog Do says:

          The biggest lie everyone tells themselves is that their mode 1 and everyone else is mode 2, going by the terminology of that blogpost. No one is universalist, not completely, not enough.

        • Theo Jones says:

          Interesting article. The same “moral mode 2” stuff probably applies as much to SJ types as Trumpers. I would generalize it to more than morality.

          Worldview 1: Knowledge (including normative knowledge) comes from a parsimonious set of universal logical principles,buffered by empiricism. These are not particular to individual subgroups of society.

          Worldview 2: Knowledge (particularly normative knowledge) is particular to group understandings. The same logical rules do not nesarrily apply to all groups. Some groups can have lesser value or different ways of knowing.

          The rationalist movement is pretty much worldview 1, and worldview 2 is its mirror image.

          • Frog Do says:

            The Christians believe in two kinds of people, the Body of Christ and the sinful World.

            The Muslims believe in the Ummah and the unblievers, the world at peace and the world at war.

            The Jews believe in Jews and Gentiles, making this sentence much shorter.

            The Rationalists believe they have achieved Universal Knowledge and Morality, and everyone else is simply Uneffective.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            The Rationalists believe they have achieved Universal Knowledge and Morality, and everyone else is simply Uneffective.

            No, they don’t.

            Certainly Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky have never endorsed such a viewpoint. That’s the whole mindset of “less wrong”.

          • Frog Do says:

            They say one thing and do another, just like everyone else. The better elements of the Sequences do contradict the lesser elements.

            Just of the top of my head: utiliatarianism, consequentialism, libertarianism, bisexuality, polyamory, queerness, New Atheism, and Effective Altruism are all Correct Answers. Correct answers that they conveniently no longer mention include cryonics, Yudkowsky’s particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Singularity, Roko’s Basilik, various AI bits, and Strong Bayesianism; again off the top of my head.

            Again, this is not to criticize rationalists for being evil or anything, the point is they are like everyone else. Pretending otherwise is pointless. Obviously I like rationalists, else I wouldn’t be here, and wouldn’t have lurked Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias back in the day, and wouldn’t have lurked SSC threes years ago and rationalist tumblr today.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            Again, this is not to criticize rationalists for being evil or anything, the point is they are like everyone else. Pretending otherwise is pointless.

            This is the “everyone’s grey” fallacy.

            To say the rationalist community is not completely free of these behaviors is not to say that they are no different from anyone else. They exhibit them to lesser degrees.

          • Frog Do says:

            Like everyone else != exactly precisely the same as everyone else. I’m not saying every group is exactly alike in their tribalism, good grief, you lack reading comprehension as usual.

            “They exhibit them to lesser degrees.”

            Yes, yes, this tribe is the best, all other tribes are lesser, haven’t heard this a million times before, no sir. Back up that claim with some work shown.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            Like everyone else != exactly precisely the same as everyone else. I’m not saying every group is exactly alike in their tribalism, good grief, you lack reading comprehension as usual.

            And you’re extremely rude, as usual.

            Don’t accuse me of some kind of systematic lack of reading comprehension when you continually write things that are both hostile and unclear. I’m a text-reader, not a mind-reader.

            It certainly seemed to me that you were saying the rationalist community is flawed to roughly the same degree as everyone else. “Exactly precisely the same” is neither here nor there.

            And indeed, that seems to be the clear takeaway from your very next paragraph:

            Yes, yes, this tribe is the best, all other tribes are lesser, haven’t heard this a million times before, no sir. Back up that claim with some work shown.

            What do you want, a scientific study?

            Obviously, I’m going on anecdotal evidence, contrasting this to my experiences with other online communities.

            I don’t know any “rationalists” in real life. I only heard of Scott Alexander and Yudkowsky around a year and half ago. I don’t really consider myself a part of the community. But the “core” rationalist community does seem to be better about those things than most.

            I do not include everyone in the comment section of this website under that description.

          • Frog Do says:

            I’m being as nice as possible to someone who is repeatedly maximally uncharitable. You continuely misread my posts so as to say I’m making the most idiotic claim possible given the ambiguity of the English language. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt by claiming you are being stupid, not malicious.

            My point is you have absolutely no measurement for “this tribe is better at nontribalism than this other tribe”. You’re answer should be “I don’t know”, or else it’s just tribal cheering. At least add a “in my opinion”, so we know it’s an anecdote. Cheer away, I guess, if you really want to cheer.

          • Jews believe that Gentiles should obey the Seven Laws of Noah, a fairly sensible rule set.

            Do not deny God.
            Do not blaspheme God.
            Do not murder.
            Do not engage in illicit sexual relations.
            Do not steal.
            Do not eat of a live animal.
            Establish courts/legal system to ensure obedience to the law.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            @ Frog Do
            EY’s goal is to solve morality and thinking. Given he hasn’t announced success, I have no idea why you think that rationalist believe they have the answer to that; after all, the Less Wrong crowd believes if you do have the answer to that making a Friendly AI is trivial. Unlike other groups there is an inbuilt condition to check success.

          • Frog Do says:

            The Kingdom of Heaven still isn’t at hand, either; nor has the world been renewed; nor has everyone on the planet submitted to Allah. The rationalists definitely believe there are Correct Answers, which coinciently match up with several other obvious ancestral memeplexes. They also pick and choose which Correct Answers to emphasize and which ones to wiggle out of.

            “Unlike other groups there is an inbuilt condition to check success.”
            That’s it? We’re back to cheering again?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “The rationalists definitely believe there are Correct Answers,”

            The fact I believe the sky is blue does not mean I believe in Correct Answers. Rationalists do not agree on morality or what people should do with their lives.

            “They also pick and choose which Correct Answers to emphasize and which ones to wiggle out of.”

            If you make claims vague enough no one can answer them.

            “That’s it? We’re back to cheering again?”

            How is “Less Wrong’s goal is to build a friendly AI so once they do that they’ve succeed” cheering? That is EY’s goal and shared by most of the movement. It has a clear end condition and we can measure progress to it.

          • Frog Do says:

            Vox, I completely apologize for accusing you of being maximally uncharitable. I should not have made that claim before Samuel Skinner showed up in this thread to reply to every one of my posts calling me a liar while somehow managing to misread my posts even further than they are normally misread.

            (This is even mostly sincere.)

          • “EY’s goal is to solve morality and thinking. Given he hasn’t announced success, I have no idea why you think that rationalist believe they have the answer to that; after all, the Less Wrong crowd believes if you do have the answer to that making a Friendly AI is trivial.”

            The Less Wrong crowd may be less unanimous than you think.

            Solving morality and thinking would make a Friendly AI trivial, except for the AI part.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            That is the thinking part, unless you are referring to the fact I forgot to mention you needed computing power to run everything. While that isn’t trivial, I think it is taken for granted the computer industry has that in the bag.

          • I don’t think it’s just takes thinking in the ordinary sense for an AI to improve its intelligence without breaking itself.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            I apologize; I don’t mean in the ordinary sense. I mean in the sense that it is solved like how chess or checkers is solved. That it is understood to the extent it can be made explicit and programmable.

          • rockroy mountdefort says:

            @frog do:

            writing about christianity/judaism/islam’s explicit beliefs, comparing it to a slur of rationalism you just came up with, and defending it on the basis of “They say one thing and do another, just like everyone else” is pretty obtuse

          • Viliam says:

            Just of the top of my head: utiliatarianism, consequentialism, libertarianism, bisexuality, polyamory, queerness, New Atheism, and Effective Altruism are all Correct Answers. Correct answers that they conveniently no longer mention include cryonics, Yudkowsky’s particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Singularity, Roko’s Basilik, various AI bits, and Strong Bayesianism; again off the top of my head.

            Politics is mostly taboo at LW, and according to the survey most LW members don’t identify as libertarians.

            Most LW members are monogamous.

            Most LW members are heterosexual.

            I wonder what is your opinion on what the “Correct Answer” on Roko’s Basilisk really is. (People who dislike LW usually say that Eliezer believes that Basilisk is real; Eliezer denies it; his opponents say “but that’s why he deleted it, right?”; Eliezer says he deleted it because some members were triggered by the concept and he didn’t want to encourage inventing memetic hazards; and then his opponents say “okay, now you are just lying because we totally know that you believe in Basilisk; that’s what RationalWiki said”.) So it the “Correct Answer” what Eliezer says, or what RW says that Eliezer says, or…?

            Time to change your mind about something?

          • Frog Do says:

            @rockroy mountdefort
            If you think what I said is a slur, surely Scott’s post is a slur. We’re saying the same thing. If you think this is a slur, you’re being weak.

            @Viliam
            LW politics are obviously libertarian influenced, this isn’t really debateable to anyone who pays attention to politics.

            One of the major behavioral discussion at LW was the idea of polyhacking, because poly is the superior relationship mode.

            One of the major posts is how if there was a pill that makes you bisexual with no other consequences, you should take it to double the number of potential sexual partners, because optimization.

            My opinion on Roko’s Basilisk is that even in the LW survey, the framing is set up in a particularly awkward way. You can look at the relavent comment sections of SSC to see where this is discussed.
            No, you haven’t changed my mind. It’s time for you to Read The Sequences again.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            ” LW politics are obviously libertarian influenced, this isn’t really debateable to anyone who pays attention to politics.”

            http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj0/2013_survey_results/

            POLITICAL:
            Communist: 11, .7%
            Conservative: 64, 3.9%
            Liberal: 580, 35.5%
            Libertarian: 437, 26.7%
            Socialist: 502, 30.7%
            Did not answer: 42, 2.6%

            “One of the major behavioral discussion at LW was the idea of polyhacking, because poly is the superior relationship mode.”

            RELATIONSHIP STYLE:
            Prefer monogamous: 829, 50.7%
            Prefer polyamorous: 234, 14.3%
            Other: 32, 2.0%
            Uncertain/no preference: 520, 31.8%
            Did not answer: 21, 1.3%

            “One of the major posts is how if there was a pill that makes you bisexual with no other consequences, you should take it to double the number of potential sexual partners, because optimization.”

            That is covered under utilitarian consequentialism

          • Frog Do says:

            “The Ideology Is Not The Movement”

          • Jiro says:

            Eliezer says he deleted it because some members were triggered by the concept and he didn’t want to encourage inventing memetic hazards; and then his opponents say “okay, now you are just lying because we totally know that you believe in Basilisk; that’s what RationalWiki said”.

            Eliezer said that he didn’t think the Basilisk exactly as described would work–but he seems to believe that ideas similar to it would work, and that discussing the basilisk should be banned because of that.

            That’s not RationalWiki, that’s from his mouth (or keyboard), and to a non-LWer, is pretty much the same shade of crazy as saying that the Basilisk itself would work.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            @Frog
            At this point you are claiming EY’s personal beliefs define the movement. So of course EY’s personal beliefs all match EY’s personal beliefs. You’ve defined a set up where it is impossible for it to be false.

            However if you define ‘less wrong’ as just “The Sequences”, guess what?

            http://lesswrong.com/lw/1d9/doing_your_good_deed_for_the_day/

            Yes, the sequences aren’t all written by EY. That is Yvain, or you know, the writer of this blog. Notably, not a libertarian.

          • Frog Do says:

            “At this point you are claiming EY’s personal beliefs define the movement.”
            You can’t just tell lies, Sam, no matter how much you wish they were true.

            With respect to Scott, again, “the ideology is not the movement”.

          • Viliam says:

            @ Frog Do:

            You are moving the goalpost from “libertarianism, (…) are all Correct Answers” to “LW politics are obviously libertarian influenced”. I agree with the latter. Yet, as you see, the influence is unconvincing for the majority of the readers.

          • Frog Do says:

            @Viliam

            I am obviously using “libertarianism” in the ideological sense, not the tribal sense that you are using. The purpose of this artcle shows that conflating ideology with tribe is probably the wrong way to go about things. The fact that you continue to miss this point in the comment section of an article about this point is surprising to me.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            Villiam not making a distinction between the “ideology” and the “movement”. He saying that you are moving the goalposts concerning the ideology.

            The first time, you said that rationalists consider libertarianism a “Correct Answer”. The most natural interpretation of that statement is that you were saying they overwhelmingly believe the claims made by libertarianism are correct.

            The second time, you said that rationalists are “libertarian influenced”. That is a very different claim about their ideological beliefs.

            And—not to go too deeply into your other insults—consider the possibility that it’s not everyone else who’s stupid and uncharitable and willfully misinterpreting you. Samuel Skinner is not the most charitable person on this site, but he’s more so than you.

          • Frog Do says:

            @Vox
            “Yet, as you see, the influence is unconvincing for the majority of the readers.”
            This is clearly still referring to the poll, which is still the tribal definition. You’re putting words in Viliam’s mouth, which really isn’t surprising at this point.

            “The most natural interpretation of that statement is that you were saying they overwhelmingly believe the claims made by libertarianism are correct.”
            No, it isn’t. Libertarians have made an enourmous number of claims about everything in every possible direction. To assume that I’ve claimed LW agrees with all of them is very, very dumb; and I repeat myself, but you’re interpreting my words in the dumbest possible fashion. I will repeat again, this is obviously not the most natural interpretation. Words are not precise code with one and only one definition that exectues according to the rules of grammar. Especially with politics.

            As for the second claim, I’ll retract the word influence, under the duress of insufferable nitpicking.

            And finally, you personally put words in my mouth, put words in other commenters mouths, are currently attacking me via identity politics because you think I am an Evil Christian for talking about the bible in repsonse to another commenter talking about the bible, previously dismissed me because you think I’m insufficently “capitalist”. Sam Skinner shows up in these comment threads to deliberately lie about what I’ve said in the past (you can see examples in this very comment section!), and demands my religious affiliation like he wants to see my damn papers.

            Plenty of other people on this site have had productive conversations with me, again, there are examples in this comment section. So no, I don’t think “everyone else” is wrong. Really, it’s just you and Samuel Skinner.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            This is like the second story of The Foundation and the ambassador.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            No, it isn’t. Libertarians have made an enourmous number of claims about everything in every possible direction. To assume that I’ve claimed LW agrees with all of them is very, very dumb; and I repeat myself, but you’re interpreting my words in the dumbest possible fashion. I will repeat again, this is obviously not the most natural interpretation. Words are not precise code with one and only one definition that exectues according to the rules of grammar. Especially with politics.

            I just don’t know what the hell to make of you. How am I supposed to read your goddamn mind and figure out that when you say “rationalists” believe “libertarianism” is a “Correct Answer”, you don’t mean to say they think it is correct ideologically but rather that they affiliate with it tribally?

            Again, you’re moving the goalposts. I never said the natural interpretation was that “rationalists” agree with the One True Libertarian Theory in every particular. I said the natural interpretation was that they believe in libertarianism—which is no doubt a broad category but does not include social democracy or what is called “liberalism” in America.

            And finally, you personally put words in my mouth, put words in other commenters mouths, are currently attacking me via identity politics because you think I am an Evil Christian for talking about the bible in repsonse to another commenter talking about the bible, previously dismissed me because you think I’m insufficently “capitalist”. Sam Skinner shows up in these comment threads to deliberately lie about what I’ve said in the past (you can see examples in this very comment section!), and demands my religious affiliation like he wants to see my damn papers.

            Well, I don’t know what to say.

            I swear that I have never intentionally put words in your mouth or any other commenter’s mouth. And I don’t think that I am exceptionally stupid or lacking in reading comprehension skills.

            I don’t know why you think I am attacking you on the basis of “identity politics”. That’s certainly out of the left field. I do not think that Christians are, in general, evil people, nor have I said that you were evil because I (mistakenly?) thought you were one.

            I did say something to the effect that you seemed to have an unspecified problem with capitalism—because you were repeatedly making objections to what I was saying that didn’t seem to me to be going in any coherent direction. And you refused to clarify, claiming that I was being too obtuse to deal with.

            I don’t think that I have initiated any kind of particular hostility toward you. If I have, I apologize. I am certainly prepared to put all this aside and have civil discussions with you, if you will please try to be more clear about what you mean and not jump to accusing people of maliciously twisting your words out of context.

          • Frog Do says:

            @Vox
            I believe you that that there has been some kind of gross misunderstanding. No apology needed, truce is called, tit for tat officially restarted. Maybe we can have fruitful discussions in the future.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            In the future? You mean you are officially admitting you were wrong?

          • Frog Do says:

            @Samuel Skinner
            No, of course not, obviously. If Vox and I are talking to each other and not understanding each other, saying either of us are right or wrong is a meaningless statement, we have no idea what the other is saying. This seems to be a particular problem with me and Vox, and I do genuinely believe there is some sort of misunderstanding.

            My opinion on you hasn’t changed in the slightest. I think you are deliberately lying about my statements in some misguided attempt to launch a holy war I have repeatedly said I do not want any part of. In fact, your particular reply here hardened it even further.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “If Vox and I are talking to each other and not understanding each other, saying either of us are right or wrong is a meaningless statement, we have no idea what the other is saying.”

            Oh no, it is quite simple- you made a claim.
            “The Rationalists believe they have achieved Universal Knowledge and Morality, and everyone else is simply Uneffective.”

            Vox disagreed. I’m not seeing where you can possibly claim there is a misunderstanding. Are you retracting the original claim? Because it is blatantly clear Vox totally and unequivocally understood what you said.

            “I think you are deliberately lying about my statements in some misguided attempt to launch a holy war I have repeatedly said I do not want any part of. In fact, your particular reply here hardened it even further.”

            Yes, all your opponents are evil. In fact telling them how evil they are is totally not insanely passive aggressive, but rather a perfectly normal way to communicate.

          • Frog Do says:

            I will refrain from making any comments about what Vox thinks, given our past history.

            All my opponents are not evil. I recall opposing David Friedman and Nancy Lebovitz (to take two regular posters as examples), and I clearly don’t think they’re evil.

            You are confusing my active-aggression with passive-aggression, which continues your pattern of not really knowing what certain words mean, see sophism and solipsism in this very comment section! This is not insane, and is entirely normal human behavior; though I suspect you’re going to use the word “insane” repeatedly in the future when refering to me, in an actual instance of passive-aggression, given our past conversations.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “I will refrain from making any comments about what Vox thinks, given our past history.”

            So you never are going to defend what you claimed. Because Vox disagrees with it. Okay, I disagree with it to.

            “All my opponents are not evil.”

            Disagree=/ opponent.

            “which continues your pattern of not really knowing what certain words mean, see sophism and solipsism in this very comment section! ”

            Watch as he attempts to deflect any attention to his argument by attacking completely unrelated arguments in different comment sections.

            He could of course explain how

            “The Rationalists believe they have achieved Universal Knowledge and Morality, and everyone else is simply Uneffective.”

            was somehow misunderstood. He won’t. You’ll notice that all this could have been simplified is instead of ranting Frog described how he came to said conclusion. Unfortunately he did
            “Just of the top of my head: utiliatarianism, consequentialism, libertarianism, bisexuality, polyamory, queerness, New Atheism, and Effective Altruism are all Correct Answers. ”
            “LW politics are obviously libertarian influenced, this isn’t really debateable to anyone who pays attention to politics.”

            Got it? I charitably assumed he meant something like “EY is a libertarian” or “the sequences were written by libertarians”, but no, I got called a liar. It isn’t clear what the difference between this and claiming that SSC believes Libertarianism is the Correct Answer because we have David Friedman commenting on this blog (so we are obviously libertarian inspired; he wrote the bloody book). To check, we need to see the cut off criteria- fortunately we can see the methodology in action.
            “Just of the top of my head: utiliatarianism, consequentialism, libertarianism, bisexuality, polyamory, queerness, New Atheism, and Effective Altruism are all Correct Answers. ”
            —Most LW members are monogamous.

            Most LW members are heterosexual.—
            “One of the major behavioral discussion at LW was the idea of polyhacking, because poly is the superior relationship mode.

            One of the major posts is how if there was a pill that makes you bisexual with no other consequences, you should take it to double the number of potential sexual partners, because optimization.”

            So yes, letting people of group x speak on your forum and other people with similar interests talking about it means that you think it is the Correct Answer. We should inform Scott he is now an Anarcho-libertarian as well as David Friedman that he has the ability to turn people libertarian just by being in their presence. Presumably he will only use these powers for good.

          • Nita says:

            I seem to have done more lurking than Frog Do, so here’s my authoritative opinion.

            These are indeed canonical:
            – utilitarianism
            – consequentialism
            – New Atheism
            – Effective Altruism
            – cryonics
            – quantum mechanics
            – Singularity
            – various AI bits
            – Strong Bayesianism

            These are “lifehacks” (i.e., potentially beneficial for some, not “correct” for everyone):
            – bisexuality
            – polyamory

            These are just confused:
            – queerness (what?)
            – Roko’s Basilisk (perhaps you mean “timeless decision theory”?)

            And libertarianism is N/A because the Correct Answer is “politics is the mind killer”.

            However, Nancy is right: there are a lot of rationalist “heretics” who disagree with the canon (especially cryonics, QM, Singularity and AI), and no one seems interested in kicking them out.

            Canonically, universal morality is solved only on a very high level of abstraction, which is too vague to be of practical use. But solving morality would not make a Friendly AI trivial — there’s still the problem of making the AI stick to the correct morality.

            There, questions answered, confusions cleared. Can we bury the hatchets now?

          • @ Samuel:

            Are you implying that I haven’t converted Scott yet? I’ll just have to keep working on it.

          • Frog Do says:

            @Samuel Skinner
            I will also not defend my positions against you, since you have shown that you have a very shaky grasp on the English language and confuse “I endorse [x]” and ” ‘I endorse [x]’ can be understood as a reasonable statement”, talking to you about anything serious seem relatively pointless.

            I am calling you a liar because you deliberately lied about what I’ve said multiple times in multiple other comment threads, not neccessarily this one. Do try to keep your lies straight, if you are going to be complusively dishonest.

            Out of jokes, truth! Scott is probably is significantly more anarcho-libertarian than you’d think, though I doubt he’d want to be a part of that tribe. And David Friedman as a “vampire-of-libertarians” is a great idea.

            @Nita
            Queerness is shorthand for a particular theory about gender and sexuality that is still relatively niche but popular in LW circles, to the extent that disagreeing with it publically is generally forbidden. Since certain people will take the oppurtunity to assume that I am an Evil Fascist or and Evil Christian or whatever, I will perform my ritual public “not that there’s anything wrong with that” (and I will even mean it sincerely).

            I choose Roko’s Basilisk because of the recent discussion around the LW survey. Timeless decision theory is important, but it’s not as meme-able as the Basilisk, so I assume more people are aware of the latter.

            As for politics being the mind-killer, my response is there is no neutral point of view. Every political system will claim to be common sense and not especially political when it suits them, and LW is no different. I can elaborate on this in the next Open Thread, if you’d remind me.

            I would definitely agree with there being many rationality heretics, obviously I am one of them! Though you claim to have lurked longer than me, I suspect we lurked different places for different periods of time, diluting that claim to authority somewhat. We should convene a Council of Nicea.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “These are indeed canonical:”

            Depends on the meaning of the word canonical. Also you left out the most important (which can be summed up “that which can be destroyed by Truth should be”).

            “– cryonics”

            Didn’t they give the percentage chance they think it would work? I think it was 8%.

            “– quantum mechanics”

            If you mean EY’s interpretation, no. The thread itself was filled with people who disagree.

            “– Singularity”

            Singularity is pretty undefined. As far as I’m aware the definition people use is “once we make an AI, it can design computer chips which lets it run faster, which lets it design faster, etc”. While some people invest a lot of meaning into it, others don’t.

            DF
            “Are you implying that I haven’t converted Scott yet? I’ll just have to keep working on it.”

            No, I’m saying we need to send you into North Korea to optimize the use of your powers. Libertarianism is Magic.

            Frog
            ” I will also not defend my positions against you,”

            This site is about dealing with other people’s arguments. Not them personally. We are willing to listen to far right and far left individuals as long as they are willing to make coherent arguments.

            “Queerness is shorthand for a particular theory about gender and sexuality that is still relatively niche but popular in LW circles, to the extent that disagreeing with it publically is generally forbidden”

            Does this theory have a name? Distinguishing characteristics? Any details so we can work out what the heck you mean? It is perfectly fine to be homosexual? Non straight individuals have the same amount of mental and social stability in the absence of discrimination (except for bisexuals)? Transexuals should get transhumanism?

            “As for politics being the mind-killer, my response is there is no neutral point of view.”

            Yes there is. It is called not talking about politics. Or is the chemical make up of stars a political subject? Optical illusions? The sunk cost fallacy?

          • Frog Do says:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory

            Can you distinguish statements from statements about statements yet?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory

            That doesn’t make things any clearer. At all. It looks about as broad a category as feminism.

          • Nita says:

            @ Frog Do

            I don’t claim to have lurked longer. Only, uh, “moar” 😉

            @ Samuel Skinner

            you left out the most important

            Sure — I didn’t try to compile my own exhaustive list, I just classified Frog’s.

            “Cryonics” is shorthand for beliefs in the range between “cryonics is more worthy of consideration than most people think” and “signing up for cryonics is a good idea”:

            If you can afford kids at all, you can afford to sign up your kids for cryonics, and if you don’t, you are a lousy parent. I’m just back from an event where the normal parents signed their normal kids up for cryonics, and that is the way things are supposed to be and should be, and whatever excuses you’re using or thinking of right now, I don’t believe in them any more, you’re just a lousy parent.

            These beliefs are not incompatible with an 8% probability estimate. An 8% chance of immortality may be well worth the cost.

            The thread itself was filled with people who disagree.

            Like I said, there are lots of “heretics” (in quotes because they aren’t treated the way religious groups tend to treat them).

            While some people invest a lot of meaning into it, others don’t.

            When Scott talks about human values being “lifted to heaven“, what do you think he’s talking about? Who published the “FOOM debate” as an e-book, and why?

            The ideology is not the movement, but that is the ideology. The Friendly AI project is what motivated Eliezer to write all those persuasive essays about Truth, Virtues et cetera — he needed allies to save the world, so he decided to create some.

            And you can’t fully understand the LW rationality movement if you try to ignore this, just like you couldn’t understand a community inspired by Carl Sagan if you ignored things like this:
            ‘We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.’
            ‘The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.’

          • Frog Do says:

            @Nita
            Lurking moar is always, always good.

            @Samuel Skinner
            Well, since you clearly didn’t know what it is, maybe take a while and educate yourself. It’s tradition is a lot more restrcitive than “feminism” and a lot more recent. Or not, whichever.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Nita
            ““Cryonics” is shorthand for beliefs in the range between “cryonics is more worthy of consideration than most people think” and “signing up for cryonics is a good idea””

            The first is reproducible to Baysianism because most people assign probability of zero to thing they think are unlikely. The actual dogma is “nanomachines are awesome”

            “When Scott talks about human values being “lifted to heaven“, what do you think he’s talking about? Who published the “FOOM debate” as an e-book, and why?”

            I consider hard take off and singularity independent. They share a lot of threads in common, but they are independent; you can have a hard take off even if your AI can’t build more powerful machines (like if quantum computers are impossible). You can have a singularity (where an AI speeds up the time to build new and better chips) without a hard take off. They also seem to have different subtexts- singularity is for optimism and nanomachines, hard take off is for gamekeeper testing. Less Wrong may conflate the two, but I don’t. I’m aware they consider a hard take off their number one concern.

            Frog
            “Well, since you clearly didn’t know what it is, maybe take a while and educate yourself.”

            Are you claiming LW holds all of queer theory as immutable doctrine? Because if it only holds certain things as dogma, learning about everything else is pointless.

          • Frog Do says:

            I am not claiming that, for one, everything in queer theory is not completely coherant. In fact, rationalists generally have some pretty heterodox interpretations even given this. However, since you clearly knew literally nothing about it, it might help to have some basic knowledge of the theory so you can understand the rationalist position, where it differs, etc.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            If they don’t even agree with the theory, why bother? Just tell me what the LW dogma is.

            Also are you ever going to reply on libertarianism?

        • Julie K says:

          I stopped reading where she said that Trump’s base wants to murder whole populations.

          • Zorgon says:

            Ah, so there are other people who use “time to first lie” as a quality metric, then?

          • Agronomous says:

            @Julie K:

            I got a little farther than you; it was when she associated Stalin’s favorite aphorism (eggs and omelets) with Trump/Nazis that I had to give up and admit it wasn’t going to get any better.

            @Zorgon: time to first lie should follow a Poisson distribution, right?

            At the time of the 2008 financial crisis, I kind of wanted to let the investment banks go under, just to show that it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Lately, I find myself wanting Trump to win the Presidency, just to show how overblown everybody’s fears about American Fascism are.

        • Tom Scharf says:

          Yes, Trump supporters are all evil racist Nazi loving fascist morons. What a great article. What incredibly compelling prose that is bound to give insights to everyone who believes….Trump supporters are all evil racist Nazi loving fascist morons….who are so incredibly inept to not even understand they are thus. I mean they don’t even know what xenophobia means, snicker, snicker.

          We all know that there is one identity group we are allowed to stereotype and broad brush, white people who live in trailer parks. Open season. They are all on meth and if they had their way slavery would be legalized again. And man are they incredibly stupid, they wouldn’t know a legitimate grievance if it bit them in the butt. They aren’t real people, they don’t love their kids, they never worked a day in their life, and they absolutely positively should not ever get to vote. If there is a fatal flaw to democracy, one only needs to visit a trailer park to find it.

          It’s incredible that this is the only identifiable group that has immoral thinking, and it’s a good thing we don’t actually have to talk to them to verify this. Let’s not get our hands filthy dirty.

          And the really funny part is how unbelievable bad they are at being the racist oppressors everyone knows they are. They are so incredibly bad at it they live.in.a.trailer.park. Any self respecting oppressor can at least find their way to exploiting a few disadvantaged minorities to get out of a trailer park, right? At least 90% of systemic and institutional racism is derived straight out of trailer parks, and I have a peer reviewed model to prove it, p = 0.0000001.

          It is perplexing that they don’t respect their betters. It is quite obvious that if one can write sentences at graduate school level that these people cannot possibly comprehend that they should overlook the sneering condescension and understand that we are only trying to help them and we understand their needs better than they do.

          I mean, of all the 0 Trump voters I know, every single one of them is a knuckle dragging racist, and I know lots of people who can say exactly the same thing, you probably know many yourself.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            Does that generalize in to an argument against grassroots fascism?

          • Anthony says:

            So the thing I noticed about the Mode 1 vs Mode 2 thinking is that (s)he completely ignores the way the SJ left tries to make Mode 2 intellectually respectable. All the appeals to the unique experiences of the oppressed, all the stuff about being bad “allies”, and the entire argument that the morality of an action depends on who is doing the actiing (“blacks can’t be racist”), is explicitly justifying Mode 2 thinking.

            And I think it’s not surprising that as this toxic thinking escapes the academy into the culture, that lots of whites are figuring that if the intellectuals are saying that some people are more equal than others, then it’s ok for whites to act on that belief. And that leads, *at best*, to President Trump.

        • I put a comment on the Siderea blog suggesting that people who agree with her politics also engage in her moral mode 2, although with a different out group, and offering the commentary on the Facebook climate discussions as evidence.

          It hasn’t appeared yet. I’ll be interested to see if it does.

          • I don’t think I’ve seen your comment– I don’t think siderea does a lot of moderation, so it’s possible there was a technical glitch.

            If it’s convenient for you, could you post your comment here?

          • I don’t have comment to repost.

            It was to the effect that I thought she was mistaken in believing that people on her side of political issues were all morality 1 rather than morality 2, rather than in part having a different outgroup.

            The evidence I offered was my observation of climate arguments on facebook. Attacks on “denialists” take it for granted that they are ignorant, stupid, evil, or being paid by evil people to hold their position. Similarly in the other direction for attacks on “alarmists,” although I don’t think I have seen the suggestion that posters on that side are in the pay of forces of evil. Each side treats the other as people who are not entitled to ordinary courtesy, respect, etc., to be insulted, not taken seriously and argued with.

        • Deiseach says:

          I struggled on through the retina-searing yellow-on-purple plus blue background (yikes!) but this is the part where I stopped reading:

          In the other, Mode 2, one’s moral standard of conduct for interacting with other people by default doesn’t include all human beings – and that is considered a feature, not a bug. There is some, somewhat flexible, mental category of people to whom one owes moral conduct – but then there’s everybody else. In Mode 2, morality only applies to interactions with people in a certain set, and in dealing with people outside that set, morality doesn’t apply.

          I don’t think Mode 2 is very familiar to most of my readers, because the forces that filter who comes here mostly only admit people of the professional classes, and in that class, the second mode is deeply socially unacceptable. Mode 2 remains more acceptable in other classes, but those who function in that mode know that the professional classes feel very strongly about it, and consequently they’re mostly pretty scrupulous about not letting on, lest Mode 1 professionals ostracize them in outrage. Well, until recently.

          Well indeed, madam, sir or other. Speaking as a person not of the professional class(es), you start off with “We Americans” but that wears off fairly fast, when it turns out you mean “Those others over there, those bad Americans, not my readers, not the Good Guys who don’t think of others as “those belonging in the set of those to whom one does not owe moral conduct”, no we’re not like those not-quite-fully-human knuckledraggers who are omni-phobic over a whole range of things, the fascists!”

          Mote and beam?

          • There’s an option to read siderea’s blog in black and white, but you probably didn’t see it in all that yellow and purple. It’s at the top of the posts.

          • I noticed the option, read it in black and white.

            The fact that she posts in that sort of startling and hard to read color scheme lowers my opinion of her even before I read what she has to say. But at least she offers an option.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            The fact that she posts in that sort of startling and hard to read color scheme lowers my opinion of her even before I read what she has to say.

            I had that reaction, switched to the b/w … found it hard to read … swiched back to the colors. On my screen, the colors had better contrast, were really easier than most b/w sites.

          • Tom Scharf says:

            Ah yes,

            Being in the professional class inoculates you from being an a-hole. I’m just going to go ahead and point out her own post as evidence that this isn’t true. That post is so full of contradictions and hypocrisy that it ought to be posted on The Onion.

            I’ve spent >30 years in the “professional class” and I haven’t noticed the a-hole ratio to be any different than any other class I have connected with.

            Granted that a-holes in the professional class are more sophisticated in their methods, but they tend to be just as petty per capita as any other group.

        • Anonymous says:

          I was expecting some sort of third act twist, but it never came. Now I want my money back.

          More seriously though, this piece has all the problems of the models of American society “by the way of primary color tribes” (and or the recently adopted “by the way of a two dimentional approach of one letter and one number”) while also having the additional problem of “and one of these groups (the other guys, obv) is Evil, capital E Evil, baby-munchingly evil”.

        • Some Troll's Legitimate Discussion Alt says:

          It’s interesting that this article about it being good and right and just that social norms of decency and good conduct be extended to everyone opens with a prolonged screed about how the people voting in a way the author doesn’t like are literally nazis refraining from voting for a literally Hitler only because a LARP Hitler is the best available.

      • Anonymous says:

        IMO, SSC readers definitely have an outgroup, and while they might not hate the outgroup particularly much they definitely define themselves against them.

        (The outgroup isn’t a readily-identifiable group with an agreed-upon name, I’ll give you that,

        The outgroup for SSC commenters is the perhaps semi-imaginary group known as “social justice warriors”. Not necessarily for Scott, but it’s definitely the dominant hated enemy down here.

        • Frog Do says:

          You are allowed to say the hated enemies name, which should tell you something. Scott’s ban on certain words for certain groups definitely limits their signalling (their metaphorical burqas are banned). Not that it’s a bad thing, avoiding those groups of commenters should be a priority, but as far as general statements go.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            They aren’t a hated enemy. Scott just doesn’t want them linked to his blog through google hits; they are the people he doesn’t want outsiders all assuming he is a member of.

          • Frog Do says:

            Not letting groups signal means you are against them coordinating. Opposing their coordination is the same as weakening the group. “Hated enemy” is my preferred translation for outgroup, since it is more directly understandable by non-rationalists.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            He’s not “opposing coordination”.

            The issue is this: Scott Alexander is not far-right racist and sexist in favor of monarchy.

            But he often interacts with that community and writes things engaging with at least some of their ideas. As a result, he will be linked to by them in approval at least sometimes. That will likely result in some of those people hanging out in the comments section of this website.

            If the comments section is turned into an echo chamber for far-right racism and sexism, he is likely to be confused for one of them by casual observers. That kind of environment would also drive away everyone else, amplifying the effect.

            Such a thing would be very bad for him, since he does not want to be attacked for views he does not actually hold. While he has been explicitly against firing people for having far-right racist and sexist views and has been in favor of extending intellectual charitability to them, not everyone shares his opinion. He would not like to be fired or “no-platformed” for appearing to endorse views he does not actually endorse.

            Communists and “SJWs”, for whatever reason, tend to be much less tempted to come and troll the comments section here. When they cause trouble, they get banned as well. But Scott is in no danger of being confused for a communist or other variety of left-wing radical. So they are less of a priority for him.

            If this were the 1950s, Scott might legitimately be more worried about being blacklisted as a godless communist. Yet despite the fact that he has consistently opposed blacklisting of right-wing radicals, that doesn’t mean that he is eager to be taken for one.

          • Frog Do says:

            He is opposing coordination.

            This is a good thing, far-right racist and sexist comment sections are trash and deserve to be disrupted.

            I am aware of the extent Scott goes to spend his weirdness points judiciously.

          • Zorgon says:

            I agree with you in general, Vox, but…

            Communists and “SJWs”, for whatever reason, tend to be much less tempted to come and troll the comments section here.

            This is because SJWs are currently dominant and relatively numerous (certainly in comparison to rationalists), so there is little to be gained by coming and trolling the comments section here except warm virtue fuzzies.

            In contrast, there are very few Taboo Monsters here, so there is significantly more incentive to come and splurge all over the page.

            It’s extremely noticeable, however, that while the Taboo Monsters come here in fully combative enemy-territory mode, the SJWs come here acting affronted that anyone could possibly consider disagreeing with them about anything.

          • The Nybbler says:

            > the SJWs come here acting affronted that anyone could possibly consider disagreeing with them about anything.

            That doesn’t say anything about here; that’s a general SJW characteristic.

          • Zorgon says:

            In the spirit of charity, that’s not an “SJW” characteristic so much as a “dominant cultural paradigm” characteristic.

          • BBA says:

            SJ isn’t the dominant cultural paradigm, but it thinks it is.

          • Zorgon says:

            No, it definitely is, at least at the moment.

            I’m of the school of thought that dominant paradigms are revealed by who is or is not untouchable. You can criticise SJ’s enemies in the mainstream press, but you cannot criticise SJ itself.

            Yet. Pendulums swing, after all.

          • BBA says:

            I think we mean two different things by SJ. Jon Chait criticizes SJ-by-my-definition in New York Magazine all the time, and he hasn’t been fired for it yet (though he’s gotten some nasty pushback on Gawker).

          • Zorgon says:

            Jon Chait is protected and even he tiptoes around the subject.

            Meanwhile, and I realise this is shifting the goalposts somewhat, if I try to get an article or interview into any mainstream publication as being against the SJ response to GG, I will get no traction whatsoever, even though I’m a game developer.

            They have the dominant position right now because the establishment have found a way to make them useful. I recognise that as soon as the establishment no longer considers them useful they will be discarded like everyone else, but that is short shrift for those of us running in fear of losing our jobs if we catch the wrong eye on Twitter.

          • BBA says:

            Yeah, that’s shifting the goalposts plenty.

            Erik Kain is arguably a counterexample.

        • Anonymous says:

          From page 3:

          “Under these circumstances, there’s a motivation for those in the in-group to shove fellow in-group members back out over the membership boundary: if they’re rendered an outsider, you are permitted to subjugate them. This is true on the scale of an individual, where discrediting someone’s claim to in-group membership might effectively authorize you to kill them and take their stuff, as well as on the scale of whole groups, where the re-designation of a demographic as out-group could mean you get to kill any of them and take their stuff.

          In a society in which Mode 2 is the predominant way morality works, identity and membership and the status of groups can become – or perhaps often are – highly contested. How safe a person is in that society from fellow members turning on them has a lot to do with how secure their identity claims are. And people who have the power to determine other people’s identities have a lot of power.”

          Interestingly, I feel like a lot of commenters here would agree that, if you replace “kill and take their stuff” with “harass and shame”, that’s a pretty good description of the semi-imaginary menace (and much of the objection isn’t to the ideals of social equality, but to this “who’s in-group enough?” bickering).

      • Anon. says:

        Well, according to Scott himself his arch-enemy is Nick Land, not Chu. Not sure if that necessarily makes Landians the SSC out-group though.

        • Anonymous says:

          As I understand it, Land argues that we should create a paperclipping AI (or similar) and submit to it, on the basis that an intelligent being that is a great many times more intelligent than us is a great many times more morally worthy than us.

          If I’m right then that sounds remarkably similar to an argument I’ve heard someone else make

          (Skip to 7.6)

          • hypnosifl says:

            Land doesn’t believe AI can be programmed with basically arbitrary goals, hence he disagrees that “paperclipping AI” is a genuine danger, see his post against orthogonality”. I don’t agree with Land on much but my intuition is that he’s correct about this, see my comment on the slatestarcodex reddit here. However, even though Land does seem to think there will be some natural “attractors” in AI goalspace, my impression is he does agree with the paperclipper argument about the basic premise that the goals of AI are probably not going to be very “friendly” ones from a human point of view.

    • Sastan says:

      I believe they do. If a group is successful, and large, over time it will cycle through a great number of outgroups, often with many at the same time. Outgroups become ingroup sometimes, alliances change, but all tribes have outgroups.

  16. I know someone who left sf fandom and got involved with origami culture (they have conventions and a lot of online activity) because he preferred the way origami attracted a wider range of personalities.

    I’m an agnostic of the militant I-don’t-know-and-you-don’t-either variety. However, I don’t try much to convince other people to be agnostics, and so far as I know there’s no agnostic tribe. On the other hand, I was very annoyed when someone at LW tried to convince me that I’m really an atheist. I’m quietly pleased that the best countries to live in seem to be agnostic in effect (religious freedom) rather than hewing to a religion or to atheism.

    I’m still angry that Social Justice has made sf fandom into a place where I’m not at home the way I was– and while the rationalist community is pretty comfortable for me, it’s just not home in the same sense. At this point, I’m resigned, and I feel as though people should count their blessings if they’re in a tribe. It won’t necessarily last.

    I think race is actually a sort of pseudo-ethnicity, while much smaller groups with shared culture are how people really organize themselves.

    Vonnegut suggested artificial tribes, but I think actual social connections are needed.

    • FeepingCreature says:

      > I’m still angry that Social Justice has made sf fandom into a place where I’m not at home the way I was– and while the rationalist community is pretty comfortable for me, it’s just not home in the same sense. At this point, I’m resigned, and I feel as though people should count their blessings if they’re in a tribe. It won’t necessarily last.

      That sounds scary. Can you explain what happened there? I was never in the “SF fandom”, so I don’t have context. (Or do you refer to the Hugo drama?)

      • Nothing happened exactly, but I read a lot of racefail (it started in 2009), and it interlocked badly with my emotional habits. Obviously, I’m willing to write about it now (but this may be taking a stupid risk), but at the time, I was terrified at the idea that people thought it was moral to dump their anger on me, and I was morally obligated to not care whether they were hurting me.

        I kept my head down. Fandom used to be the place where I didn’t have to keep my head down.

        I’ve been recovering. When I have fits of self-hatred (“If I weren’t such a piece of shit, I’d kill myself”), I can pull out relatively quickly.

        Social Justice people will say that isn’t what they mean– that is, they think their intentions are magic. That might be jargon– SJWs don’t want to hear people justifying themselves by saying they meant well, but SJWs always justify what they do by their good intentions.

        Actually, in the early stages of racefail (racefail was when Social Justice (it was called anti-racism then) started taking hold in sf fandom), people would say “but that can’t work” and anti-racists would say “we don’t dare whether it works”.

        If I could either completely deny Social Justice or completely accept it, my life would be simpler. Unfortunately, I see it as pointing at some real problems, while using cruel, divisive, and sometime counterproductive method to try to solve the problems.

        • In retrospect, my degree of fear was disproportionate, not just because of the stakes, but because authors were the primary targets. There was a non-author who was something of a target, but that person had to work very hard to get the anti-racists’ attention.

          • For what it’s worth, I’m a very tangential part of fandom–occasional panel member at conventions, author of two not very successful novels. I make no secret of my views, which are very far from SJ orthodoxy, and have not as yet been targeted by anyone, continue to be invited to be on panels.

            It may be more of a problem for people for whom fandom is more “their tribe”—the nearest equivalent for me would probably be SCA—and are more prominent in fandom.

          • I have no idea how targets were chosen– some of it might have been bad luck. Also, most of the targets were women writers. I have no idea what, if anything, was going on with that.

            When I was panicking, it seemed as though the anti-racists had infinite energy and infinite malice. I expect that anyone reading this who was an anti-racist during racefail thinks that’s pretty funny. The truth is that trying to get the attention of people who don’t want to believe they’re hurting you is exhausting.

            However, I was feeling very badly outnumbered by people who were smarter than I was. I eventually concluded that they weren’t especially smarter than I am (some of them may well be), but they’d been thinking about the subject for a long time.

          • Deiseach says:

            I have really badly fallen behind in reading modern SF/Fantasy authors, but I ignore a lot of the kerfuffle on the basis of (a) I’m not American so not my circus, not my monkeys and (b) sod you, I was a fan when you lot were in nappies, you don’t get to decide if I belong or not 🙂

          • Viliam says:

            The truth is that trying to get the attention of people who don’t want to believe they’re hurting you is exhausting.

            Thanks, you have summed up my feelings about the whole ‘social justice’ stuff.

            (Except, I am not completely sure whether their belief is actually that they don’t hurt me, or that it doesn’t morally matter when they hurt me because my life doesn’t have any intrinsic value.)

          • BBA says:

            Fearful symmetry: “trying to get the attention of people who don’t want to believe they’re hurting you” reads like how anti-racists see themselves when they go after Nice White Liberals.

            I’m mostly SJ sympathetic but I don’t have the stomach for Racefail and its ilk.

          • Viliam: Groups are large, and contain multitudes. Surely the answer is “Some are actively malicious and do things because it will hurt people like you, some are indifferent and do things for reasons of their own whether or not it hurts you, and some don’t want to hurt you but want in-group bennies more.”?

            Ascribing one motive to a large group is always wrong. Heck, ascribing one motive to a single person is usually wrong.

          • Nita says:

            Oh, that. I remember seeing distant waves of it in the LJ-sphere back then.

            According to the other side’s summaries, they saw a bunch of professional writers and editors (i.e., the “cool kids”) ganging up on a black fan for daring to express her frustration at one of their ingroup members.

            And then it went tribe vs tribe, with one side getting accused of being willfully ignorant whitesplainers, and the other getting called “draggletailed loudmouths” and “nithings”.

            The two sides also got into some substantial debates along the way — “is classism way more important than racism” and such.

        • Frog Do says:

          Hey, fellow ex-sf fandom by way of Racefail, you are not the only one!

        • EyeballFrog says:

          I feel like I would understand this post better if I understood what “racefail” means in more detail.

          Also, is this in any way connected to that thing with Larry Correia and friends?

          • Evan Þ says:

            No, the Larry Correia thing is only peripherally connected. Racefail’s an example of what Correia says he’s reacting against.

          • Thanks for the link. A minor point– Verb Noire was a proposed publishing company for sf by people of color and, as I recall, homosexuals (trans people weren’t on the horizon then). It failed. I was expecting something better– some actual publishing, though with little chance of significant success unless they got very lucky with their early authors.

            Con or Bust is a successful and continuing fundraiser to help fans of color to get to sf conventions.

          • Jiro says:

            How is “fans of color” defined for that? The website doesn’t seem to have a definition and I can’t help but wonder if Asian-Americans are included.

          • I don’t have the foggiest how they define fans of color.

            I don’t know how they adjudicate it if a fan might or might not be viewed as being of color.

            Mercifully, it is on the list of things which are not my problem.

          • Deiseach says:

            How is “fans of color” defined for that?

            Looking in from the outside (and rapidly retreating), that seems to be a large part of the problem, Jiro: any definition anyone proposes has a good chance of getting shouted down by someone else as being racist, appropriative, culturally insensitive, non-inclusive enough, colonialist and White Saviour Coming In To Help Us All.

          • Jiro says:

            The problem of Asian-Americans not getting the benefits of minority status doesn’t usually bother the people who would call something racist, culturally insensitive, colonialist, etc.

          • We haven’t yet established whether Asian Americans are included in Con or Bust, so it seems a little early to be complaining that they aren’t.

          • suntzuanime says:

            But either they are or they aren’t, and either is a reason to complain. Law of the excluded middle.

          • Wikipedia includes Asian-Americans among writers of color.

            Zen Cho (Sorcerer to the Crown) is from Malaysia and it living in Great Britain. Her book has made something of a splash.

            Aliette de Bodard isn’t on the list, but it isn’t surprising if the list is incomplete.

            In any case, we have some evidence that Asians and Asian-Americans are counted among writers of color.

          • Jiro says:

            Writers of color and fans of color aren’t the same thing. Given the concentration of Asian-Americans in STEM and the correlation between STEM and fandom, I wouldn’t be surprised if Asian-Americans are not underrepresented among fans.

            That being said, if I was a starving student and couldn’t afford to go to a con, I’d certainly try using it. (Yes, I am AA, though my name isn’t really Jiro.)

          • keranih says:

            My issue with Con or Bust is not its racist exclusionary grants, but rather its non-need-based awards. Multiple awards have gone to Ivy/near-Ivy graduates.

            In this, the Con or Bust fund raisers appear to be yet another way for fans to channel money of the gullible to the pockets of their fannish friends.

      • John Schilling says:

        I was in an overlapping section of fandom with Nancy, and left a little bit before she did. My take:

        Generally, science fiction fandom has had an ethic of tolerance that made it a comfortable place for non-militant social justice. And it had in its early history a number of bad experiences with groups thinking that fandom was a ready-made tool for its social agenda (as with atheism vs atheism plus), which made it somewhat resistant to militant social justice. This combination made for a tribe I felt very comfortable with.

        In the early oughts, the balance of power shifted as social justice became more prevalent and more militant in the rest of the world. Minor offenses and arguments that in the past would have faded in short order, instead started provoking the sort of response that earned “Social Justice Warriors” their full name. The voices of moderation and intellectual tolerance were less likely to speak out, or in some cases spoke with the SJW. And while there were some who came from outside to promote an agenda of militant social justice, too many were long-time members of the community now violating traditional community norms, against which the traditional defenses were ineffective.

        I was the target of what was, objectively, a fairly minor flareup of this in 2008, but the unilateral and asymmetric nature of the attacks and the conspicuous shortage of any defense left me feeling quite alone. It isn’t my nature to fight for acceptance in a place where I am not valued, or to value the opinions of people who mark themselves as my enemies, so I left.

        About a year later, the environment achieved criticality. The initiating event was a blog post by a white female author offering advice on how to write convincing nonwhite characters, which some people took to be inappropriate or offensive either because of the content or the author’s whiteness. Any hope that the flareup would be minor or even bounded, was proven false. Racefail ’09.

        I watched from a modest distance as a community I had called home was torn apart, and replaced by something smaller and uglier. I do still attend a few local cons where I know I can expect to find old friends lurking in the corners, and look for signs of a community that I might want to rejoin, but meh, it’s not home, it’s not warm and comfortable, it’s an exercise in reconnoitering an interesting but unfriendly territory.

        There are still good books to read, and I do that even if there isn’t a community of people to talk about them with.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          Particularly dismaying (although, in retrospect, hardly surprising) is how some of the most social justicey big names in SF nowadays were primary targets of Racefail for perceived insensitivities: the Nielsen Haydens, John Scalzi, to a lesser extent Charles Stross. It didn’t take much sustained assault, even though it was by nobodies, to flip them.

        • FacelessCraven says:

          …This is pretty much a perfect description of the Gamer community, 2000-1015.

        • “I was in an overlapping section of fandom with Nancy, and left a little bit before she did.”

          I didn’t leave fandom. I’m just less happy with it.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Nancy: Sorry about the misunderstanding on my part. One of the side effects of leaving fandom is that I lose track of who is still in it; I’m glad you can still find something of value there. Are there any parts that you are particularly happy with and can recommend?

          • John Schilling, I’m still in fandom because I have long connections there and I haven’t found anything that’s enough better than what’s currently in my life. I should probably be looking.

            I still go to east coast conventions. I have a lot of friends there.

            It probably isn’t obvious from my level of rage and bitterness, but I’m still a lot more compatible with moderate Social Justice than I am with conservatism. My tentative theory about why I’m a libertarian who tends to like progressives is that I did something very peculiar in a past life. This theory isn’t rationalist,but I don’t know what a sensible theory would look like.

            Evidence of where my preconceptions are is that I had no idea that siderea link would go over so badly.

            I like quite a bit at Making Light, a very fannish site which has talk about a wide range of things. However, it tends pretty left, and I’m not sure what your range of tolerance is.

            I’d only been following links to Book View Cafe, but I find that the top page has a lot I’m going to read. Like Making Light, it swings left.

            I’ll think about this– I’m not sure what else I’ve got.

          • Viliam says:

            I’m still a lot more compatible with moderate Social Justice than I am with conservatism.

            I wouldn’t be surprised if most people attacked by Social Justice are like this.

            It kinda makes sense. If your goal is to bully people online, what are your going to do with your ideological opponents? You will scream at them, they will scream at you, both sides have fun, no one wins. (You can try screaming at their employers, though. Unless they also happen to be your ideological opponents.)

            But when you scream at people with similar values, you can make them feel guilty. Even an obviously unfair accusation will hurt them. That gives you power. They may even try to apologize, in which case you just double the pressure and watch them squirm. Sweet victory! Then you can rationalize it to yourself that you only did it to make the world a better place.

          • Theo Jones says:

            Post emergence of the social justice stuff, I feel a stronger affinity with libertarians/conservatives even though my actually beliefs may be further from them.

      • J Mann says:

        I don’t know if there’s a good cataloging, but SF fandom (along with librarian conventions and who knows what else) seems to be one of the fronts where social justice is fighting hardest for systematic change. (I’m shooting for neutrality.) From what I can tell, this usually involves calling out someone for insensitivity, harassment, or creepiness, followed by a drawn out flame war. I’m specifically thinking of “WisCon: Burn it all down”, but could try to dredge up some others.

        • keranih says:

          Will Shetterly’s “How to Make a Social Justice Warrior” is a pretty acurate review of the whole decades-long mess – but definately is anti-SJW in presentation.

          (The part where I finally stopped being angry about SF & SJWs (despite occasional descents into madness and cranky bitterness) was when the WISCON leadership actually investigated and censored someone for allegedly snarking at someone else during a poetry open mike. At that point it was beyond offense and into self-parody, and laughter is the only reaction I could muster.)

          • J Mann says:

            Good grief – I just googled and read the poem from the “harassment by poetry” issue at WisCon, and I’m actually shocked. If the poem’s insensitive to anyone, it’s insensitive to the class of men who hope for mail order brides to change their lives, not to Russians.

            Is WisCon unusual in it’s level of SJW-iness?

          • keranih says:

            Is WisCon unusual in it’s level of SJW-iness?

            Have never been. By the sorts of people who attend, the sorts of panels and groups they have, and the sorts of things they promote (compared to cons I have attended), yes. They are the forward edge of what the SJW front would like SFF (and the world) to be.

          • John Schilling says:

            WisCon was organized as an explicitly feminist science fiction convention. “Feminist” even now isn’t quite the same thing as “SJW”, and certainly not in 1977, but if I were going to go looking for the highest concentration of SJWs in meatspace fandom that’s probably where I would start looking.

    • Ryan says:

      Vonnegut suggested artificial tribes, but I think actual social connections are needed.

      Wow, didn’t even think of it at first, but this essay is basically Bokononism in prose form.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      “On the other hand, I was very annoyed when someone at LW tried to convince me that I’m really an atheist.”

      Because you fit the definition. You can say it is a bad definition, but you’ll need to show differences between what an atheist expects to see in the world and what an agnostic does to justify a separate category.

      “I’m quietly pleased that the best countries to live in seem to be agnostic in effect (religious freedom) rather than hewing to a religion or to atheism.”

      Religious freedom isn’t agnosticism. It sounds like you are just claiming all the good things for your grand idea.

      • Nornagest says:

        you’ll need to show differences between what an atheist expects to see in the world and what an agnostic does to justify a separate category.

        This seems to rule out separate categories for most philosophical positions.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Turns out we really all do believe in p-zombies, given that we don’t expect to see anything in the world the p-zombist doesn’t.

          Well, except for the fact that as p-zombies, we don’t actually have beliefs…

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          Yes it doesn’t rule out “solphism but the world looks exactly the same”. Of course those beliefs are in fact impossible to rule out since the world is supposed to look exactly the same so I’m not sure why one would ever bother dealing with them.

          • Alliteration says:

            The moral implications matter. For example, if everyone else is a p-zombie, then it doesn’t matter if I hurt other people because they aren’t really feeling pain.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m not just talking about solipsism or the P-zombie thing, although those are the most obvious ones. I’m talking about the rest of epistemology and philosophy of mind, metaphysics, most positions in ethics.

            Sure, there’s a school of thought that says all these questions have no sensory consequences and so why bother with them, but just by accepting that school you are making a claim about the nature of truth.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “The moral implications matter”

            You mean exactly the same as sophism? Since you can’t disprove sophism does that mean you don’t consider others real humans?

            “I’m talking about the rest of epistemology and philosophy of mind, logic, most positions in ethics.”

            I’m not sure about the first two, but logic is a system of reasoning, not a belief. Ethics are not beliefs about the nature of the world, but ‘what people should do’.

          • Nornagest says:

            Why carve out exceptions for those but not for atheism vs. agnosticism?

            (Tangentially: I hate to be that guy, but I’m pretty sure you mean solipsism, not sophism. Sophism is, roughly, superficiality or intellectual bluster.)

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Being that guy is fine. I often mix up words. No guarantee the improvement won’t go down the memory hole.

            As for exceptions, something’s existence is a factual question about reality. It is separate from logic and ethics; they are built upon factual questions (things don’t contradict themselves, human desires), but the fields themselves aren’t.

      • Anonymous says:

        Because you fit the definition. You can say it is a bad definition, but you’ll need to show differences between what an atheist expects to see in the world and what an agnostic does to justify a separate category.

        Language is socially constructed. One definition of agnostic is roughly “a non-believer but not an asshole about it”. If you don’t think that definition “justifies a separate category” maybe you should try Esperanto.

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          You could just say “I’m a non asshole atheist”. Oh wait, the problem with that is you are calling everyone who identifies as atheists assholes.

          I’m not going to jump to the assumption that is what the personal I’m questioning is doing.

          • Anonymous says:

            You could use that long phase, or you take the much shorter word speakers of the English language have decided to give the same meaning (among others).

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            But “not being an asshole about it” is not the meaning in English of the word “agnostic”.

            An atheist thinks there’s actually no reason to believe in God. An agnostic claims not to know. This may represent sincere confusion, or it may represent an aversion to denying the rational legitimacy of religious beliefs.

            Now, you can argue that denying the rational legitimacy of religious beliefs makes you an asshole by definition. But in fact it’s possible to deny the legitimacy of them in a kind and considerate way, and it’s possible to be rude and nasty about it.

            The connotation of agnosticism is that you think the question of whether God exists is about 50-50, or at least a reasonable possibility. If you think that God almost certainly does not exist, it is misleading to describe yourself as an agnostic.

          • Anonymous says:

            Asshole was unduly nasty. But I agree with the other anon that in practice atheist vs agnostic can be a lot more about whether you want to debate it or are in a particular tribe than some strict epistemological distinction.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous (the blue one):

            Yes, I think that does have a lot to do with it.

            Saying you’re an atheist has the connotation that you think religious belief is wrong. It doesn’t mean you think it’s probability 0, but that it’s wrong in the same sense it’s wrong to say that witchcraft exists. The evidence against is much greater than the evidence in favor.

            Saying you’re an agnostic is much more non-threatening. It doesn’t come across as a challenge. You’re just saying you don’t know. Maybe because you haven’t investigated it. Whatever it may be, you’re leaving the question open.

            It’s obvious why the latter view would emerge in a society where religious belief is considered the norm.

            It’s similar someone being asked, in a very left-wing environment, what you think about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. “I don’t know if it will have negative effects; who can be certain about political questions?” is a much safer answer than “No, I think it’s most likely very destructive.” As long as you don’t think it’s probability 1 that a $15 minimum wage is harmful, you’re not outright lying if you say you’re not certain.

            If you say you think it’s a terrible idea, you’re likely to get into an argument. If you say you don’t know, it will probably be dropped. So people who are more argumentative will probably favor the first option.

      • Honest to whatever, I do think there’s a difference between “it is impossible to know whether there is a God” and “I am absolutely certain there is no God” even if the only difference in behavior is what one chooses to argue.

        I don’t think it’s possible to know the roots of the universe, though I that it’s unlikely that a triple omni creator is lurking there.

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          The first google hit for atheism
          “Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods. Older dictionaries define atheism as “a belief that there is no God.””

          Guess what I and the person you were talking to are referring to?

          • Guy says:

            You, Nancy, and anyone else reading the thread all know what she means by agnostic. Let her have the word; it is in no way a big deal. (Are you going to tell me there are important, fundamental differences between nerds and geeks?)

            edited: I incorrectly assigned blame to Samuel Skinner re: negative affect on the word atheist.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Well it comes with her claiming it is better than atheism, so what do you think?

          • I don’t know what it is, but I want to double down.

            I think my (non)-belief is more accurate than atheism. I don’t think it’s the same as atheism, based on my observation of most people who publicly say they’are atheists.

            I’m dubious about arguing from dictionaries. They may be out of date or based on a demographic that’s not the one taking part in the discussion. Nonetheless, I’ll still use dictionaries for conventional English, and the urban dictionary for unconventional English.

            Let me tell you about “articulate”. It’s a word which isn’t worth using as a compliment any more because it’s acquired a connotation of “better spoken than I expected from a person like you”.

            And before you get all “PC is so awful” on my ass, the person I know who hates “articulate” the most is a white Southerner whose accent was treated as a speech defect in school. He can still do his home accent, what I think of as a radio announcer voice, and an accent which is probably intermediate.

            When I was in an argument about articulate, I got hold of the OED definition and it was mostly about bones. I contacted the OED, and it turned out their definition hasn’t been updated for a century. I guess it was ossified.

            I don’t generally argue for agnosticism vs. atheism because I can’t see the point. I suspect there’s a difference of temperament involved, possibly P vs. J, using the distinction of whether a person wants things settled or open.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “I think my (non)-belief is more accurate than atheism.”

            Why?

            “I don’t think it’s the same as atheism, based on my observation of most people who publicly say they’are atheists.”

            You do realize the enormous sample bias you are having here? Because “atheist but not outspoken” is simply not going to be on your radar.

            “I’m dubious about arguing from dictionaries.”

            I’m not claiming the dictionary is correct. I’m saying that is the definition atheists are using.

          • lvlln says:

            But this isn’t about invoking the dictionary definitions of “atheism” and “agnosticism” and claiming that by those definitions, you fall under the former rather than the latter, is it? AFAICT, the claim is that, by definitions of those terms as understood by the population in general, the way you describe yourself makes you fit under the “atheist” definition. This seems true to me; based on my observations, “atheist” in general everyday usage doesn’t refer to someone who claims to know or even claims to be somewhat confident that there is no god. That’s a subset, but not the set. It refers to someone who claims not to believe in a god.

            I think an important point is that this doesn’t at all imply that you aren’t also an agnostic. “Agnostic” is generally used to refer to someone who doesn’t know whether there is a god or someone who believes there is no way to know whether there is a god. This is entirely consistent with not believing in a god (or with believing in a god, for that matter).

            Indeed, in my mind, I would categorize you as an agnostic atheist, the same general group to which I belong. Even if I wouldn’t call you that to your face since you’ve expressed a distaste for being labeled that, based on what you’ve expressed about your beliefs and what I understand to be the everyday accepted definitions of “agnostic” and “atheist,” I can’t not classify you as that while remaining honest.

          • Samuel Skinner:

            “I think my (non)-belief is more accurate than atheism.”

            Why?”

            We’re still scrambling to understand the workings of the visible universe. It’s going to be really hard to find out what (if anything) is behind it, and I don’t think philosophy has enough information to do the trick.

            The odds aren’t terribly good of us understanding what’s going on if we’re in a simulation. Imagine how much harder it would be if there are several layers of simulation.

            Or if, as you examine the universe on the very micro level, it keeps getting weirder and less intuitive.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “We’re still scrambling to understand the workings of the visible universe. It’s going to be really hard to find out what (if anything) is behind it, and I don’t think philosophy has enough information to do the trick.”

            I’m not following. Why should we treat this claim about the universe different than any other claim? If someone asks if I believe in philosogen, the answer is no; why is this different?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Samuel Skinner:

            I agree. Maybe phlogiston exists; I’m not omniscient. I just don’t have any particular reason to believe it exists. That doesn’t make me agnostic on the issue.

            Anyway, I don’t know whether Nancy Lebovitz is an agnostic or not. I’m not a mind reader; I can’t speak for her. If she thinks there is some peculiar about the issue of God that makes it fall in a different category of unknowability, then perhaps she’s right to call herself that. If she simply denies absolute knowledge of the nonexistence of God, then she’s probably better classified as an atheist.

            I’m just an observer, though: I don’t know which one it is.

        • There is a difference, but I was long ago convinced by a friend who had written a book in defense of atheism that atheism meant not believing in God, did not mean believing with certainty that God does not exist. At which point I stopped calling myself an agnostic and began calling myself an atheist.

          I am not agnostic as to whether a hurricane will hit San Jose tomorrow. I can’t be certain it won’t, but I believe it won’t. I see no reason to apply a more severe standard to religious beliefs.

          • Exactly. I called myself an agnostic once upon a time. This is why I stopped.

            Although I did used to have some quiet fun with the concept that, since religion was belief in the existence of God (and disbelief in the non-existence of God) and atheism was belief in the non-existence of God (and disbelief in the existence of God) and agnosticism was disbelief in the existence of God and disbelief in the non-existence of God, that obviously there was a missing category there: people who believed in the existence of God and the non-existence of God.

            I dubbed that category “irrational dualism”, not knowing at the time that “dualism” was already a thing. Oh well. I can’t say I developed the philosophy very far, though I think I had some ideas about an omnipotent deity being by definition able to affect the real world without having to actually exist in order to do so. Also that God obviously existed but equally obviously wanted us to think He didn’t, and we’d better do as He said and not believe in him or there’d be some Smiting.

            I don’t think I was drunk at the time.

          • There are people (not sure whether all of them are mystics) who say that God is too utterly other (I’m tempted to write “God is too awesome”) for a mundane quality like “exists” to apply to Him. (God should probably have a unique pronoun. I have a vague impression there’s a language where this is true.) God neither exists nor doesn’t exist.

          • Urstoff says:

            God persists, much like Meinong’s unicorn

        • John Schilling says:

          There are four broad positions on the matter, to wit: “God exists”, “God does not exist”, “I don’t presently know whether God exists”, “Nobody can ever know whether God exists”. Our language has traditionally allowed only three words to cover these four possibilities: “theist”, “atheist”, and “agnostic”.

          Somebody is going to be left out, and they are going to be upset about that. And, human nature being what it is, lots of other people are going to try to rope them into their belief system or support network on account of overlapping nomenclature, which is going to further upset the people who are trying to make it clear what they think and how it differs from what other people think.

          Ideally, we’d invent a fourth term and convince everybody to use it. That’s probably not going to happen any time soon. Until it does, I tend to favor including both “I don’t presently know…” and “Nobody can ever know…” under the “Agnostic” banner on the grounds that A: there is less cognitive distance between those two than any other possible grouping, and B: there are fewer of the classic “Nobody can ever know…” agnostics around to be upset, and C: this is the actual common usage of the term in the 21st century.

          And whatever you believe or do not believe, please don’t be an asshole about other people using their own terminology to describe what they believe or don’t believe.

          • Guy says:

            Well said.

          • Jiro says:

            There is another problem: It is possible that technically, someone doesn’t know there is no God (because he doesn’t know things to 100% certainty), but the level of certainty that he does have would be described as “know” when applied to anything else.

            It makes no sense to call this position “agnostic”; not having 100% knowledge is not a useful distinction to anyone except pedants. In order to communicate that you know there is no God in the same sense that you know that Washington, DC is the capital of the USA, you have to say “atheist”. Unfortunately, there are a lot of pedants on the Internet. There are also a lot of people who are not normally pedants, but who are willing to become pedants for a moment in order to score points against unbelievers.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            Exactly.

          • FrogOfWar says:

            @Jiro

            The problem is that the concept of knowledge doesn’t match with that of extremely high justified degree of belief.

            You don’t know that your lottery ticket will lose, even it has a 1-in-a-100,000,000 chance. Or at least, it’s not acceptable to assert that you know this.

            On the other hand, you can know things that are much less justified than this, such as that your friend is currently at a given bar.

            This isn’t an issue of knowledge pedantically requiring certainty; it’s an issue of knowledge just being a weird category to begin with.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “There are four broad positions on the matter, to wit: “God exists”, “God does not exist”, “I don’t presently know whether God exists”, “Nobody can ever know whether God exists”.”

            There are religions other than Christianity that exist. My criteria for a guy claiming to be Apollo is a lot different than that of the OTG and the idea you can’t know simply breaks down.

          • Jaskologist says:

            How did this get laid at believers’ feet? They’re not the ones telling Nancy she’s not really agnostic, regardless of her claims.

          • I think a useful way of looking at the atheist/agnostic question is to consider what level of uncertainty would make you describe yourself as agnostic on some other question.

            I would not, for instance, say that I am agnostic on whether Obama was born in the U.S., although I can’t reject the claim that he wasn’t with absolute certainty.

            I am agnostic on whether what Hillary Clinton did with her email server was seriously illegal.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Nancy Lebovitz

          +

          I do think there’s a difference between “it is impossible to know whether there is a God” and “I am absolutely certain there is no God” [….] I don’t think it’s possible to know the roots of the universe [….]

          I’d say “I don’t think it’s possible for me to know the roots of the universe … and probably not for anyone else either.”

          I do think that jumping to conclusions (whether admittedly or emotionally) is a very, er, irrational act.

  17. Grant says:

    As probably one of the few evangelical Christians that read this blog, I find the discussing of pre-athiests in church amusing. There were a few people I grew up with that regularly attended church and did the motions, but later on left the church when given the chance. Looking back, I am not surprised at all.

    In talking about changes in tribes, do you think declining religiosity is any different than increase in religiosity? Or a change from one religion to another. For example, the Christian tribe in America was once a lot larger, if only because many people were culturally Christians. But I see a lot of the changes you mention from the first generation being very religious to not very religious, not as a change in consciousnesses change in tribes like switching from going to church to atheism, but as a rise in distraction.

    People today I would say are largely much less religious because they distract themselves from larger questions. (I would exclude everyone reading this blog from this group). With the rise in media consumption from video games, television, movies, music books, etc these seem to be the future rallying flags that people fight over.

    Also, is it better or worse that we are fighting over trivial things? If it means less violence, that is good. But if we become a society where the discussions we have are about whether a person is part of the country versus rap music tribes, it makes me wonder if arguing over religious tenants where there is some philosophy and higher thinking involved might be better. But then again, maybe I am just imposing my high culture views upon others.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      it makes me wonder if arguing over religious tenants where there is some philosophy and higher thinking involved might be better. But then again, maybe I am just imposing my high culture views upon others.

      I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this, but it seems to me that most religious disputes aren’t about “higher thinking”; they’re about fine points of doctrine that seem really important to insiders but are completely trivial differences from the perspective of anyone outside.

      Was the Thirty Years’ War really about religious doctrine, for instance?

      Not that there aren’t similarly acrimonious but trivial debates in nonreligious movements like Marxism, Objectivism, libertarianism, and so on. These debates usually relate in some general way to “higher” issues, but the war in the trenches is the same old kind of tribal stuff.

      Sometimes good things come out of them (I continue to think that David Kelley’s Truth and Toleration is a great book, despite coming out of the Ayn Rand Institute – The Atlas Society schism), but it’s usually the same debates with the labels for the subject matter switched around.

      • Sniffnoy says:

        Regarding religion in particular — well, I’m just going to pull some quotes from the Razib Khan posts I linked above:

        Theology and texts have far less power over shaping a religion’s lived experience than intellectuals would like to credit. This is a difficult issue to approach, because even believers who are vague on peculiarities of the details of theology (i.e., nearly all of them!) nevertheless espouse that theology as true. Very few Christians that I have spoken to actually understand the substance of the elements of the Athanasian Creed, though they accept it on faith. Similarly, very few Sunni Muslims could explain with any level of coherency why al-Ghazali‘s refutation of the Hellenistic tendency within early Islam shaped their own theology (if they are Sunni it by definition does!). Conversely, very few Shia could explain why their own tradition retains within its intellectual toolkit the esoteric Hellenistic philosophy which the Sunni have rejected. That’s because almost no believers actually make recourse to their own religion’s intellectual toolkit.

        This is the hard part for many intellectuals, religious or irreligious, to understand. For intellectuals ideas have consequences, and they shape their lives. Their religious world view is naturally inflected by this. And most importantly they confuse their own comprehension of religious life, the profession of creeds rationally understand and mystical reflection viscerally experienced, with modal religiosity. This has important consequences, because intellectuals write, and writing is permanent. It echoes down through the ages. Therefore our understanding of the broad scope of religious history is naturally shaped by how intellectuals view religion. In a superficial sense the history of religion is the history of theology, because theology is so amenable to preservation.

        […]

        The key insight of cognitive scientists is that for the vast majority of human beings religion is about psychological intuition and social identification, and not theology. A deductive theory of religion derived from axioms of creed fails in large part because there is no evidence that the vast majority of religious believers have internalized the sophisticated aspects of their theologies and scriptures in any deep and substantive sense. To give a concrete example, Sri Lankan Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims can give explicit explanations to at least a rudimentary level as to the differences of their respective religious beliefs. But when prompted to explain their understanding of the supernatural in a manner which was unscripted, and which was not amenable to a fall back upon indoctrinated verbal formulas, their conceptions of god(s) were fundamentally the same! (see: Theological Incorrectness).

        […]

        Not only do I believe that the theologies of all religion are false, but I believe that they’re predominantly just intellectual foam generated from the churning of broader social and historical forces. Some segments of the priestly class will always find institutional politics exhausting, mystical experience out of their character, and legal commentaries excessively mundane. These will be drawn to philosophical dimension of religious phenomena. Which is fine as far as it goes, but too often there is an unfortunate tendency toward reducing religion to just this narrow dimension.

        Books like these are very useful for overly intellectual types (religious and irreligious) who naturally reduce religion to explicit propositions, often relating to theology. Cognitive anthropology suggests that in fact the basic fundamentals of the religious impulse have very little to do the explicit cultural trappings which are so well known in the organized religions which arose after the Axial Age. Often these complex systems of belief and practice are centered around philosophical or revealed truths, and statements of confession which exhibit logical structures, at least superficially. Though it is probably a misleading analogy, many think of DNA as the blueprint for the form and function of organisms. In a similar fashion it is common to see religious texts and the opinions of seminal thinkers as the blueprint for a given religion. The empirical reality is that this view is upside down. Traits which we think of as seminal to religion, such as profession of specific elements of faith, are relatively recent cultural innovations on top of a far more robust and deep primal layering of religion as a psychological and cultural phenomena.

        But, all the accoutrements of organized “higher” religions, which crystallized in the period between 600 BC and 600 AD (from Buddhism to Islam), are not necessary to understand religion. In fact, as outlined in books such as Theological Incorrectness, taking the claims of organized world religions at face value can mislead in terms of the beliefs and behaviors of the mass of the rank and file, whose spiritual world is still strongly shaped by the same cognitive parameters one finds in primal “animistic” faiths. Summa Theologica is not only impenetrable to the vast number of believers, but it is totally irrelevant. And yet the concerns of intellectuals loom large in any attempt to understand the nature of higher religions, because they tend to occupy positions of power, prestige, and prominence. And importantly, they are the ones writing down the history of their faith.

        It is useful then to differentiate between religion in the generality, which likely has deep evolutionary roots in our species. This is characterized by modal intuitions about the supernatural nature of the world. A universe of spirits, gods, and unseen forces. Then there are the complex processed cultural units of production and consumption which are the “world religions” of the past few thousand years, which have achieved a sort of stable oligopoly power over the loyalties of the vast majority of the world’s population. They are not inchoate and organic, bottom up reifications of the foam of cognitive process, perhaps co-opted toward functional or aesthetic purposes. Rather, world religions are clearly products of complex post-Neolithic agricultural societies which exhibit niche specialization and social stratification. They are the end, not the beginning.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          Reminds me of “A Dust Over India”:

          Perhaps it was my own arrogance, but it saddened me. My belief has always been that spirituality is something that is experienced personally, not measured, compared, or quantified. Meditating on a loud bus in Chicago can be just as profound as meditating under the Bodhi Tree itself. In a religion whose whole belief system revolves around impermanence, unattachment to the material world, and equanimity, making a 4,000 mile pilgrimage to a tree in the middle of Nowhere, India, for bragging rights seems, well… counterproductive. I can see the interest historically, and perhaps emotionally, but spiritually, there’s not a whole lot of difference. And so as I passed the flyers, and the hippies with their braids and skullcaps, it became harder and harder not to be a little bitter. I understand that pilgrimages and capitalizing on your most holy site are pretty standard for all of the world’s religions. But I guess in my mind I held out hope that Buddhism was different. And actually, Buddhism is different. It’s the followers who aren’t.

          Eliezer Yudkowsky comments:

          Reading this made me realize that many religions genuinely are different from each other. Christianity is genuinely different from Judaism, Islam is genuinely different from Christianity, Hinduism is genuinely different from all three. It’s religious people who are the same everywhere; not the same as each other, obviously, but drawn from the same distribution.

          • Mary says:

            “It’s religious people who are the same everywhere; not the same as each other, obviously, but drawn from the same distribution.”

            It’s surprising that people are people?

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            “Humans gonna human” is an incredibly hard concept for less neurotypical people to understand.

          • Walter says:

            It’s like “But they said that they wouldn’t!”

        • LCL says:

          I read that and thought it also explains a lot about politics, especially in context of the current political moment (which has baffled the intellectual class). I mean, just change “religion/theology” to “politics/ideology”:

          The key insight of cognitive scientists is that for the vast majority of human beings politics is about psychological intuition and social identification, and not ideology.

        • oh thank god somebody gets it.

        • Mary says:

          Not only do I believe that the theologies of all religion are false, but I believe that they’re predominantly just intellectual foam generated from the churning of broader social and historical forces.

          Argumentum ad hominem. He should be ashamed of himself. There is no system of thought that can not be “explained” in such a manner by a sufficiently determined person — particularly including his own explanation here, which raises the question of how seriously we can possibly take it.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            It’s not an argumentum ad hominem because it’s not an argument. He’s just asserting them in conjunction, he’s not claiming that the first is due to the second.

          • Nero tol Scaeva says:

            Argumentum ad hominem. He should be ashamed of himself. There is no system of thought that can not be “explained” in such a manner by a sufficiently determined person — particularly including his own explanation here, which raises the question of how seriously we can possibly take it.

            Expecto Patronum. Unfortunately, there is no ad hominem in the part of Scott’s post that you quoted. So it makes about as much sense as starting a reply with a random Harry Potter spell.

          • Jiro says:

            “It’s not argument ad hominem because it’s not an argument” is a technicality. The point about calling it one is still valid: you can apply the conclusion to anything.

          • Tracy W says:

            Argumentum ad hominem is the argument that someone is stupid or evil or whatever. So their argument is wrong.

            But the argument you are calling ad hominem uses actual evidence: that most religious people don’t understand the theological underpinnings of their faith, that books about theology are more likely to be preserved than others, etc. One can point to other evidence, eg how does one get from the Jesus of the Bible to praying to Mother Mary and the saints?

            This evidence might be wrong. There might be other evidence that points the other way. But it’s not an ad hominem.

          • Sniffnoy says:

            No, it’s really not an argument at all. It’s not an incorrect argument and it’s not a correct argument. Take it in context. This is from a blog post by Razib Khan. He’s an atheist, that’s well known. He’s not arguing here that religions are false, he’s just asserting it as a background fact. Why would he interrupt a post about a different subject to argue that religion is false? In fact, if you read the posts I linked to, there’s very little argument for any of what he says; he’s basically just asserting these things. He’s mostly referring to outside sources for the actual arguments. All he’s doing here is restating the assertion, “Not only are theological claims incorrect, they’re not even important to most believers.” It’s true that “not only X but also Y” often means that Y is a stronger claim than X, but that isn’t always the case and it clearly isn’t the case here. (Trivially, X and Y is always a stronger claim than X.)

            The “foam on the froth” comment here doesn’t mean “they’re the result of social forces, so they’re false” because that is exactly as terrible an argument as Mary points it out to be and, y’know, Razib isn’t stupid. I mean it could mean that, but that would require us to believe not only that he made such a terrible argument, but, again, that he’s going off-topic from the rest of the post to argue that religions are false, which makes no sense. The sensible conclusion is that it doesn’t mean that and this isn’t an argument. I’m pretty sure the “foam on the froth” metaphor is just supposed to indicate a lack of feedback — that they do not significantly feed back into the social forces that generate them, because they’re only actually taken seriously by a small class of theologians.

        • Mary says:

          The key insight of cognitive scientists is that for the vast majority of human beings religion is about psychological intuition and social identification, and not theology.

          Which is nothing more than a Christian would expect.

        • I’ve been playing with the idea that that there are two large camps (not tribes): “people should be kinder” and “people should be stronger”, and that neither one is likely to get much change in their preferred direction, at least in any reasonable amount of time.

          Both camps share the idea that that people just *should* be different, and don’t do much in the way of offering methods.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Do they really conflict so much?

            I sympathize with both sides: people shouldn’t be so thin-skinned, but other people shouldn’t be needlessly mean to them, either.

            I agree that there’s a lack of methods.

          • You’re being sensible. I tend more towards the “people should be kinder” side, even though it can paradoxically turn vicious. (See also the idea from Ordinary Vices that hating cruelty can lead to hating people in general.)

            However, at least what I see online is typically in one camp or the other.

          • Frog Do says:

            I think about it in terms of public strength or public weakness, which probably tells you which side I’m on. Of course what you do in private is your own business, but what happens in public matters more.

        • Deiseach says:

          But when prompted to explain their understanding of the supernatural in a manner which was unscripted, and which was not amenable to a fall back upon indoctrinated verbal formulas, their conceptions of god(s) were fundamentally the same!

          Well, what the dickens else do you expect when you want a broad definition of a concept but don’t allow people to use particular distinctions? If you ask me, a Hindu, and an Australian Aborigine about our notions of the divine but we can’t use any specific terms of our own faiths, just broad concepts, we’re all going to say pretty much the same thing.

          It’s like asking someone to describe cats and dogs but not letting them use the words “cats and dogs”, then coming back and saying “They said cats and dogs were four-legged animals with tails, obviously they see no difference between a cat and a dog!”

          • Jaskologist says:

            Yes, this sounds like a case of asking the wrong question, or asking it in a way designed to get a certain answer.

            Ask them “Does God love you?” and you’ll see a stark divide, at least between the Christians and the rest. I’d bet there are similar questions the other religions could ask which are easily understood by the man on the street, matter a great deal to his understanding of the world, and highlight real differences.

      • John Schilling says:

        Was the Thirty Years’ War really about religious doctrine, for instance?

        It was mostly about nationalism. Not the superiority of one specific nation over another, but of the entire concept of nations. The core doctrinal dispute was between “Sovereignty is vested in Kings, who happen to own lots of land populated by their loyal subjects”, and “Sovereignty is vested in Nations, which are composed of people living on a chunk of land and most of which happen to have kings to handle executive functions”.

        That one faction aligned with the religion headed by a personal monarch and the other with the religious movement that said religious executive function could be decentralized and performed by anyone locally competent, is perhaps not a coincidence.

        Both versions can become intensely tribal.

        • nimim. k.m. says:

          I’m sorry, but I thought I had some understanding of the 30 years’ war, and I have serious trouble recognizing it from your description. I have no idea on the which side Gustaphus Adolphus, Louis XIII and Ferdinand II would fit, looking at their kingdoms, or which one is closer to the so-called Westphalian nationstate…

          The original religious dispute could have been about anything, the reason war dragged on for so long time was about the usual: geopolitical power and money. In the end, Sweden found herself with an “empire” and lucrative, taxable areas in Northern Germany, and Richelieu and Mazarin established France as the geopolitical power du jour?

  18. BBA says:

    Wondering how the fervor of the newly converted fits into this scheme.

    The loudest atheists tend to be the ones who were raised religious and deconverted, as opposed to those who were raised atheist or atheist-adjacent (Reform Judaism, UU, “nones”) and naturally settled there.

    More controversially: although what we now consider internet social justice was certainly a thing at least as far back as Peggy McIntosh in 1988 – I distinctly remember hearing most of the stuff tossed around today from my early-’00s college experience – it only started dominating the discourse when nerdy white dudes turned against their misogynistic pasts to loudly support it. (Maybe I’m getting the narrative wrong here, but the conversion of Something Awful feels like a turning point – but then I was never a Goon and only heard of it secondhand.)

    • Thursday says:

      There are a lot of atheists who are totally non-tribal. They just aren’t religious. A good number of these presumably were raised in at least somewhat religious environments.

      What makes the tribal atheists tribal?

      • Randy M says:

        Not having another tribe, perhaps?

        • Thursday says:

          Yeah, maybe the people who don’t build any identity around their atheism already have some other identity that takes up that space in their life.

          Or they could just not care that much about any identity.

          • Randy M says:

            Tribe, as I understand the usage, is more than identity, it is also community. Also, similar to what Scott mentions, there are basically tribes coalescing around being anti-tribal, so there’s something for everyone.

          • Thursday says:

            Fair enough criticism. I was using identity as short hand for collective identity, which has to include some sort of community.

      • I suspect there are two main factors that make atheists tribal:
        1. Transitioning from theism to atheism can cause anxiety or at least be something people want to talk about out loud with sympathetic people, which makes new atheists gravitate toward atheist communities, and
        2. If the religious people in one’s area are annoying, (which can be anything from “keeps assuming you’re Christian and trying to engage you in theological discussions” to “fired you for being an atheist,”) then you may want/need other people who’ve encountered the same thing to talk to/get advice from.

        Whereas, atheists who are comfortably atheist and haven’t anything to particularly “work out” on the subject, and whose religious neighbors are perfectly polite and pleasant, don’t have as much to bond with other atheists over.

        • [I think this may be ending up in the wrong place. It’s a response to the claim that women are not a part of tribes]

          Women played a substantial role in Islam, including intra-Islamic fights. Consider the Battle of the Camel.

          Apropos of which, I think a more important tension in early Islam than Sunni vs Shia may have been true believers vs practical opportunists. The divide comes with Othman, who was an early convert and pretty clearly a believer, but saw the position of Caliph as an opportunity to benefit his kin. He ends up assassinated, I think although I’m not sure by the son of the previous Caliph, and on alternate days I think he deserved it.

          His successor is Ali, and the split goes back to open warfare when Muawaya, Othman’s nephew and a much abler practical politician, refuses to recognize Ali as Caliph.

          And ultimately founds the first Muslim dynasty.

          And the conflict between that and Ali’s sons is, I think, the point at which you begin getting a real Sunni/Shia division.

          • Apropos of comments ending up in the wrong place … .

            What appears to happen is that I write a comment but forget the final step of posting it. Later I try to write another comment on something else. The first comment ends up where the second should have gone.

        • “Whereas, atheists who are comfortably atheist …”

          My case, at least. I first discussed religion with parents when, about age ten, I told my father that I had concluded that God probably did not exist. He responded that that was his opinion as well.

        • Yrro says:

          I know my personal development has been strongly influenced by “who has annoyed me most recently.”

          When I was a lonely atheist teenager in a Bible belt town, obviously the religious folk with no sense of global perspective were the problem.

          When went to college, the problem switched almost immediately to the secular liberal who looked down on all rural religious people as bigoted idiots.

          I guess what I’m saying is that I totally buy how immediate converts from Christian culture are going to have “disproving theists” much higher on their priorities list. Long-time atheists no longer consider it a relevant question to debate, nor are they constantly re-exposed to it.

          • I’ve read about a project about identity (sorry no cite) where people were asked about their identities, and it turned out that the strongest sense of identity was mostly related to what people had been attacked for.

          • Ryan says:

            @Nancy

            One of the most interesting hypotheses I’ve read for Donald Trump’s success is that he goads the media into attacking his character in ways that resonate with people who have had their character attacked in a similar way. There aren’t really that many narrow minded bigots left in the United States, but there are millions upon millions of people who’ve been called a narrow minded bigot by some smug lefty for no good reason. Trump is the last guy on Earth who would ever qualify as actually being a redneck or white trash, but as long as he’s insulted and looked down upon the same way as people who do qualify are, he’ll have their tribal loyalty.

            Or use another example. Cops do a thankless and often shitty/dangerous job. Sure it’s not really that hard and the pay is pretty good, but I’m certain they in no way appreciate being called a bunch of racists who oppress the black community. So long as the major media goes around calling cops racist oppressors while also calling Trump a racist oppressor, cops will identify with him and probably vote for him.

          • Anonymous says:

            What about the millions and millions of people who have been called a smug lefty for no good reason?

          • For what it’s worth, siderea was rather sharp about it when I proposed that theory. She thinks that the main issue is that life has been getting objectively worse for lower class whites, and the insults aren’t a significant factor.

            http://religiondispatches.org/sympathy-for-the-devils-i-was-a-pastor-to-trump-supporters/?

          • Protagoras says:

            I can certainly imagine that people being called smug lefties for no good reason is increasing some people’s tendency to identify as left. Thinking about it, I was attacked a lot in my youth for being intellectual (well, for being a nerd). I haven’t really been attacked much about that (or very many things) for a long time, but I would say that “intellectual” is probably the category I most strongly identify with, and I guess I don’t find it that implausible that being attacked for it in my youth is partly responsible for that.

          • “What about the millions and millions of people who have been called a smug lefty for no good reason?”

            They identify with the candidate who actually has the guts to describe himself as a socialist.

          • Ryan says:

            @Annonymous

            Yeah I imagine the road goes both ways.

            @Protagoras

            I kind of wonder if the intellectual/political elite in their 40’s/50’s are so indifferent to the problems in working class communities because fuck those guys, they used to make fun of me in school and got to take a hot chick to prom.

          • Protagoras says:

            @Ryan, I suppose that could be true in some cases. Not really mine; I grew up in a disturbingly homogenous suburb, so the people who bullied me were generally the same class as me (because almost everyone I went to school with was). But I don’t feel qualified to generalize about other intellectuals in their 40s or 50s.

          • Tibor says:

            This is true. I come from an atheist majority country and people simply almost never treat religion as an issue at all and they almost never think about it (or know much about it).

        • Tibor says:

          I find this quite outlandish and in a way interesting. My domestic experience is that if you are religious, you are going to be seen by a mix of surprise and curiosity (and a bit of prejudice, especially if you are a member of an organized religion). The majority of the Czech population is atheist but I think it is a different kind of atheism than in the US (or generally countries where the majority of the population is theist). Average Czechs know almost nothing about religion at all. They know that there’s Christmas and Easter (and celebrate that but usually without ever going to the church…although I do go to the midnight mass sometimes even though I’m an atheist) and that’s about that. They know who the pope is (of those who are religious, the vast majority is catholic, protestants are about 10 times less common, there may be more Buddhists – mostly Vietnamese – in the country nowadays than Protestants) and that is about that. I think my knowledge of religion is above the Czech average but I first learned about the existence of Pentecost (which is one of the most important Christian holidays) in Germany (because it is a national holiday). The Czechs even messed up Christmas in the parliament in the sense that December 24th is a national holiday (since most of the MPs thought it was actually a part of Christmas back when they were deciding this issue since the baby Jesus brings Christmas presents on the 24th in the evening :)) ).

          At the same time, American atheists seem to know the Bible and religion in general quite well, perhaps better than the theists. At the same time I would expect the Czech Christians to understand their religion better than the American ones – like the American atheists, they are surrounded by a majority which does not understand them and they are the ones who need to provide the explanations when confronted with the majority.

          What is also interesting is how fast this can change. Bohemia was about 95% catholic in 1910 and about 10% (declared) catholic in 2011.

          • “The Czechs even messed up Christmas in the parliament in the sense that December 24th is a national holiday (since most of the MPs thought it was actually a part of Christmas back when they were deciding this issue since the baby Jesus brings Christmas presents on the 24th in the evening :)) )”

            Not clear it is a mistake. Until town clocks became common during the Renaissance, the day was generally considered to end at sunset. Christmas Eve is the evening of Christmas day.

            Jewish holidays still work that way.

          • Tibor says:

            @David:

            Interesting. I heard the mistake as an explanation for why the 24th is a holiday (along with the 25th and 26th) in the country. But come to think of it, it is not so likely that none of the MPs would know about this and point it out. The Christian democratic union has had a more or less stable support of some 5-10% since the end of communism and I would imagine that most of their members are actually Christian and know the holidays 🙂

      • Peter says:

        I’m from the UK, and movement atheism (despite the presence of Dawkins etc.) seems to be something of an American thing. I’ve always thought there are two main differences:

        a) It’s just easier to be an atheist in the UK – it’s not really anything you’re in danger of being ostracised for. There’s no real incentive to band together for safety.
        b) If I want to meet some atheists, I can go to the pub for a pint with my friends. If at any time I feel the need to yammer on about the subject, there are lots of people there with views similar to mine, I don’t need to specifically seek them out.

        Thinking about it, there’s a third component. I think that atheism was more a part of my identity before university – I went to a C of E school, and was a closeted atheist early on and out later on. So I go to university and discover clubs and societies and Usenet… so what Thursday says.

        So, in summary, for me, there’s a) less need for community with atheists, b) needs can be met outside of formal “atheism community”, c) other, stronger, needs can take precedence. But these factors vary from person to person and from place to place.

    • Taradino C. says:

      Theory: the newly converted are fervent because it helps them catch up on social connections. They don’t have a shared history with the other members, so they have to double down on the things they do have in common in order to bond.

      • Pku says:

        Alternative theories:

        1) Only people who are really into the ideals join a tribe without having already been socialized into it.

        2) New recruits need to work hard to signal loyalty in order to fit in.

      • multiheaded says:

        ^ was true for me, in part.

      • HeelBearCub says:

        The newly de-converted have their separateness emphasized for them on a daily basis. In Scott’s terms, it is a “pre-existing difference” that is shared between them.

        It’s no accident that one of the very active de-conversion reddits is r/exmormon. Those people both have their differences from active Mormons and their differences from everyone else (the shared Mormonism). Your average ex-Lutheran, Catholic or Episcopalian won’t have those kind of differences from America broadly.

        Whereas atheists from birth don’t feel different from everyone else, because they likely live in a community where that was acceptable. Only if they lived in a very religious community would they, finding out that their are other atheists in the world, have that sudden feeling of kinship.

      • Ghatanathoah says:

        From personal experience I can attest that convert zeal, for me, from the inside, simply feels like wanting to share something cool with somebody else. It’s the same emotion people get when they want to share a cool Youtube video with someone else, only bigger.

        I may be atypical, however.

      • BBA says:

        It seems that at times it’s the new converts who define the tribal culture, rather than the longstanding lifetime members at the “core” of the tribe.

    • moridinamael says:

      Catholicism has the Sacrament of Confirmation, which is a sort of second Baptism, a ceremony in which the young adult publicly confirms their faith after going through 1-2 years of intensive tribal education/group-bonding with a small cohort.

      To me this seems like an attempt to synthesize a “conversion experience” for people who were born into the tribe.

  19. Thursday says:

    It’s because the Quran just created the space in which the Islamic culture could evolve, but had only limited impact on that evolution.

    The Quran may be just a symbol. It’s particular content may be somewhat arbitrary. The fact that a certain community has adopted it may have been historically contingent. That a person is part of that community may be completely unchosen.

    And yet, because the symbol is what the community is rallying around . . . you can’t disrespect the symbol in too obvious a way. Like, for example, by ignoring its teachings too much.

    This has practical results. For example, there may be somewhat contradictory verses on violence in the Quran, but, if believe or claim to believe in the Quran as the literal word of God, you have to give the violent verses some weight. Furthermore, having those verses makes it way harder to throw a person who adheres to a more violent interpretation out of the community.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      People totally can! Look what secular Christians do the Bible! Look what Americans do to the Constitution!

      • Sniffnoy says:

        I think violent Buddhism is the canonical example here…

      • Thursday says:

        Group identity can bear some disrespect to the central symbol, but if you disrespect it too much the whole thing starts falling apart. Show me a Christian group with a lot of secular Christians and I’ll show you a group that won’t be Christian for long. The increasing disrespect for the Constitution does not bode well for America’s future.

        • Anonymous says:

          The central symbol of Christianity, Jesus’ teachings, were marginalized within the first 50 years as Paul reformed the religion to make it more attractive to the gentles he was trying to win to his side in order to show up his rivals — the Disciples.

          And look how long it lasted.

          • Thursday says:

            Your characterization of those events is highly questionable. Moderns like to grossly exaggerate the differences between Jesus and Paul for political effect. A prime example of moderns’ tendency to cherry pick Jesus’ teaching is how they ignore all his hell fire sermons. He wasn’t a lovey dovey hippy.

            On a more substantive note, Jesus in the synoptics claims, at the very least, some sort of special sonship relationship with God. One could accuse Paul and others of really running with that in a certain direction, but its not some blatant contradiction of Jesus original message.

          • Mary says:

            How do you know that?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Thursday
            I didn’t say discard or contradict, I said marginalize and reformed. It’s pretty clear both from Jesus’ words themselves and the subsequent actions of those that actually met Jesus (or if you prefer the living Jesus) that what he envisioned was a kind of reformed Judaism with more emphasis on the spirit of the law and less on the letter of it. And that’s what the Jewish Christians were doing in Jerusalem while Paul was off building his universal Church.

            By the same reasoning that you call this taking an aspect and running with it, you could say the same thing about the Warren Court and the Constitution. They weren’t making things up out of whole cloth (at least not generally) but they were extrapolating wildly.

            @Mary
            I studied the New Testament which was written by Pauline Christians and so is presumably as charitable as possible to his position. Nonetheless he still comes across a usurper. Think about how unsympathetic a character you have to be for the the victor written history to still make you look like a villain.

          • Thursday says:

            Let’s take this message to the whole world, instead of just keeping it to the Jews doesn’t seem like even a marginalization of Jesus’ teaching.

          • Anonymous says:

            Except Paul wasn’t bringing Jesus’ message to the whole world. He was bringing a different message.

            I’m not even sure his message could be brought to the whole world, even if Paul wanted to, since the message was primarily about how to be a better, more authentic Jew in order to prepare oneself for the then imminent world-to-come.

          • John Schilling says:

            Let’s take this message to the whole world, instead of just keeping it to the Jews doesn’t seem like even a marginalization of Jesus’ teaching

            Unless perhaps “Jesus’s teaching” is that the world is going to end ca. 100 AD, clearly not enough time to take the message global but maybe enough for a focused effort to bring God’s Chosen People back to the fold so they are worthy of Heaven.

            It’s not clear that this was the core of Jesus’s actual teaching, but it is at least consistent with my reading. Since the world didn’t actually end ~1900 years ago, Paul comes off looking pretty good in that version. He also, obviously, comes off looking pretty good in the version where God actually tells him that, yes, no matter what those Disciples are saying, this is what He wants. YMMV

          • Mary says:

            “It’s pretty clear both from Jesus’ words themselves and the subsequent actions of those that actually met Jesus (or if you prefer the living Jesus) that what he envisioned was a kind of reformed Judaism with more emphasis on the spirit of the law and less on the letter of it”

            Except that there are plenty of references to his dealings with Gentiles in a manner incompatible with that. You yourself admit that it’s his words in the Gospels.

            “Nonetheless he still comes across a usurper. ”

            Nonsense. I do not see that at all.

          • Mary says:

            “since the message was primarily about how to be a better, more authentic Jew in order to prepare oneself for the then imminent world-to-come.”

            That presumes what you are trying to prove.

          • Jaskologist says:

            A plausible case can be made that Jesus expected the world to end in short order, and Paul later tweaked his message to make it more palatable to a wider audience. You could, for instance, plausibly discard Acts 1:7-8 as a Paulite putting words into Jesus’ mouth (and I guess do the same for the Great Commission). But this is a case of fitting the data into your reading rather than vice-versa; there’s no actual textual or archaeological evidence to mark these as later interpolations. It’s a defensible reading, but no more defensible than saying that Paul really was carrying on Jesus’ message pretty accurately.

            (This brings us back to the impossibility of reading a text in the absence of an interpretive tradition. Trying to do so is like abandoning ideology in favor of pragmatism; it just means you’re using an unexamined interpretive tradition/ideology instead.)

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Have you read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle?” If so, do you remember the traditional Bokonon incantation before a suicide? Why not assume Jesus was a pretty sharp guy and talking about something subtle?

            Actually, that book is good reading for folks with a strong religious impulse (which I think includes a lot of LW folks).

        • Alliteration says:

          Britain is doing just fine in spite of not having a constitution at all, just a collection of traditions and varied documents.

          • Thursday says:

            Missing the point. The constitution was a central symbol of what it was to be American. That people are disrespecting it is a sign that people don’t really care about being American anymore.

          • Zip says:

            That may have more to do with the fact that they’re British than anything. If people in your society have sufficiently strong respect for notions of “fair play”, you can cooperate on a large scale and do all sorts of cool stuff like invent capitalism while neighboring countries are still kleptocracies, conquer a significant fraction of the known world, etc. Britain has been doing fine for a long, long time.

          • Zorgon says:

            Unfortunately, it also means that an aristocracy – whether open or somewhat obfuscated – can make out like bandits by manipulating people’s ideas of what “fair play” means.

            This, in case anyone was wondering, is why we have such a prodigious number of newspapers.

      • NN says:

        Or for that matter, look at how American Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians ignore the Bible verses that clearly seem to imply that God has no problem with abortion

        • 75th says:

          People always link that Exodus passage with this argument and I just do not get it. It specifically says serious injury is to be punished by the same standard as injury to an adult. And the context clearly implies it’s the fetus/premature baby whose “injury” is being spoken of.

          • Basium says:

            > And the context clearly implies it’s the fetus/premature baby whose “injury” is being spoken of.

            It does now, but it didn’t used to; that’s the point. Up until sometime in the 80s IIRC, everyone translated that line as “if she has a miscarriage, but there is no serious injury…” or similar, which makes it clearly about the mother. For example, here’s the King James version: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow…”

            The doctrine changed, and the translation was altered to suit.

          • Mary says:

            The very links cited predate the 1980s.

        • Exodus 21:22–23 proves that abortion isn’t capital murder, at least in the legal context of “intending to injure A (the other man in the fight) and injuring B (the fetus or the woman)”. That’s a far cry from “God has no problem with abortion,” though it is a valid argument against the maximalist anti-abortion “even to save the mother’s life” position.

          Numbers 5:21–22 is completely irrelevant.

          • NN says:

            How, exactly, is a Bible passage that commands pregnant women who are suspected of being unfaithful to drink a magic potion that will induce a miscarriage if they truly have been unfaithful irrelevant to the question of abortion?

          • Jiro says:

            Because it’s magic, the one doing the killing is God. God is permitted to kill fetuses even if fetuses are people, for the same reason that God is permitted to kill adults.

          • Jaskologist says:

            @NN

            Try thinking of it instead as a “magic” potion that doesn’t actually kill the fetus, but does make the mother go through an embarrassing and uncomfortable ritual which may well guilt her into confessing, and will put an end one way or the other to the jealous husband’s accusations.

          • NN says:

            @Jaskologist: I don’t know exactly how accurate the translation that I linked to is, but “If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse.” seems pretty clear to me.

          • Brad (the other one) says:

            @NN

            The bible *also* says God commanded the flood – were there no infants on earth then? No pregnant women? It says God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and the same question arises. When the Israelites, on God’s orders (c.f. Deuteronomy 20:16-17) put entire cities to the sword at God’s discretion, do you think there just happened to be no babies there?

            In fact, we can go further: God controls reality moment by moment. When someone dies, is God unaware of it? Does he not know? Is he powerless to prevent this?

            God has the right to command us, the right to kill and to make alive. In one circumstance he commanded certain person to be put to death; to us we have (generally speaking) marching orders to not put to death. Quoting the passage is therefore a canard (if the intent to justify a pro-choice position or infer there is some contradiction in the text.)

          • Julie K says:

            @NN: “I don’t know exactly how accurate the translation that I linked to is”

            It’s not at all how Judaism understands the text, certainly. However, your question is reasonable when directed at whichever group considers this a valid translation.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            @ Brad

            What exactly are you trying to argue?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            It seems to me like he’s arguing that God’s commanding the killing of fetuses doesn’t show that the Bible endorses abortion because God has the right to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime. A right which he exercises frequently, ordering the Israelites to massacre people left and right.

            Therefore, just because God has the right to perform an abortion doesn’t mean you do.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            Or, to steel man the straw man, omega can calculate consequences better than you, and therefore will do things, and do them rightly, that you would not.

        • Deiseach says:

          Those verses do not refer to deliberately induced abortion; it’s the difference between manslaughter and homicide. Both cases end up with someone dead, but it’s the intention that makes the difference.

          Two guys get in a fight, a woman gets in the way, she is punched or kicked in the stomach and miscarries versus guy deliberately kicks his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach in order to make her miscarry.

      • anonymous says:

        The q’thran has built in error checking though.

        Once in your life you’re supposed to travel from wherever you live and go to Mecca. Presumably when you travel you might be accompanied by a few people at most from the mini-tribe of your home community so the natural human reaction will be to conform to whatever is practiced in Mecca.

        Then when haji returns his status is enhanced – but only to the extent that he has seen and experienced something at least slightly different from home – so he’s incentivized to relate the practices of Mecca to his congregants back home.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Right.

          Razib points out that jet airliners made the Haj a lot more affordable, thus spreading the influence of Mecca worldwide.

          A lot of what we think of as the bizarre growth of Islamic fundamentalism globally, such as Muslim women wearing stupid black tents instead of their lovely native dress, is just people coming back to their village from their pilgrimage and saying to their slightly poorer neighbors, “Well, when I was in Mecca we did it this way …”

          • chaosmage says:

            Obviously! I feel stupid for not thinking of this sooner. Thank you!

          • NN says:

            Mecca’s current owners are also relevant. Mecca was a very different place before the Saudis got their hands on it. People who travelled there in the 18th century before the rise of the Wahhabi movement reported seeing alcohol vendors and prostitutes on the street literally right outside the Grand Mosque, among other things.

      • Emily H. says:

        Many liberal/progressive Christians are eager to claim Jesus, rather than the Bible, as their rallying flag. This isn’t JUST liberal/progressive Christians — in my experience Catholics and Orthodox Christians also tend to de-emphasize the text of the Bible and emphasize instead the life/death/resurrection of Jesus as their rallying flag — but I suspect that liberal Protestants picked it up because at some point the tension between the rallying flag and what you actually believe turns into an issue you want to deal with, in the name of intellectual honesty.

        • Thursday says:

          And the problem with the “just Jesus” rallying flag is that that can mean any damn thing at all, so it ends up being not much of a central symbol.

          More conservative Catholics and Orthodox are different from liberal Protestants though. They may focus more on Jesus, but that is because their authoritative teachings actually go beyond the Bible. More authoritative texts, not less.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Even without “authoritative” texts there is a deep rabbit hole shared philosophical and artistic history to explore and “geek out” on.

          • Thursday says:

            Even without “authoritative” texts there is a deep rabbit hole shared philosophical and artistic history to explore and “geek out” on.

            But it becomes just another hobby, and hobbies don’t create nearly as strong an identity as religions. Most people (or their kids) find other, new hobbies that they are just as interested in, so they leave the church. Perhaps a tiny few remain.

            In fact, one might describe liberal churches as hobby churches.

      • Patrick says:

        Secular mid westerner here.

        One of the most regular, recurring experiences of the secular religious parent is realizing that you accidentally taught your child to be a fundamentalist.

        It happens because one of the communal norms that you should publicly affirm the conservative aspects of your religious tradition, but that your acknowledgment of the caveats you hold ought to be private. So “the Bible is the word of God” is communicated explicitly, but “ok, it’s either not really or mostly not really, who really knows, let’s not get too crazy here” has to be communicated implicitly.

        And sometimes kids get the explicit parts, but not the implicit ones. And the next thing you know your kid is trying to shame you for not being fundamentalist enough, using the levers of social norms you raised them to belueve, and your community publicly affirms.

        This is probably the same reason a certain percentage of Muslim kids of secular parents radicalize. I’m not in that community, but every aspect of it visible to me is analogous.

        TLDR, you CAN ignore your holy texts teachings… up to a point, and conditional on how you structure your community, and with the caveat that not everyone in your community may be able to do it.

        • Thursday says:

          Good description.

          The other problem though is that too many “secular religious” people mean that the group is in danger of falling apart. Which is what is happening in mainline Protestantism.

          • Ryan says:

            The long lasting religions I think are going to be the ones with infinite depth. That way they have something for everyone. My friend’s wife was raised in India and the version of Hinduism she was taught was be a good person and god will take care of the rest, which was good enough for her. But if she had a million questions Hinduism would be ready with 2 million answers. If a Jewish kid is just way more into it than mom and dad, they get to drop him off with the Rabbi and say bother him now. A Catholic or Orthodox Christian has a wealth of ancient philosophical texts to keep them interested, a Muslim can read all 10,000 or whatever Hadiths.

            But with mainline Protestantism in the US a lot of the churches are built around a pastor who’s mostly a great speaker, good at making people feel good and put money in the plate on Sundays. This will be fine for the “secular religious” who can live perfectly well with be a good person and God will take care of the rest. But someone who’s really interested in learning more will have little to go off of other than just reading the Bible and taking everything literally. And what is the Pastor supposed to do about it? He probably has some vague notion of who Thomas Aquinas was, but no real idea what he ever said. There’s no philosophy and depth to acculturate them to, and so they become in-out machines for Bible verses.

          • http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/01/09/running-toward-the-gunshots-a-few-words-about-joan-of-ar/

            I’m including this partly because it’s an example of the Catholic Church having saints for everything– Joan of Arc is, among other things, the saint for disaffected Catholics, and partly because it’s one of the best rants I’ve ever read.

          • Thursday says:

            I’m not sure “having something for everyone” is a major factor in what makes a long lasting religion, but it is pretty much a prerequisite for any religion that appeals to lots of people. Hinduism and Catholicism would be good examples.

      • onyomi says:

        I agree you can. And this relates to my initial reaction to the post, which was to think about how Precedent is Everything.

        I have mixed feelings about using written documents like the Constitution as guide or supposed authority for real life behavior. The story comes to mind of the American who says to the Brit: “how awful to have an unwritten law based on precedent which Parliament can change at will,” and the Brit says, “how awful to have a written law which nine unelected judges appointed for life can change at will.”

        I’m a strong believer that what people actually do is what matters, not what they write down. And I also believe in flexibility and discretion in enforcement. People often note that the result of having too many laws on the books is, paradoxically, a kind of lawlessness, because everyone is a criminal all the time and now it’s up to the enforcer’s discretion. I don’t like that solution, but I do like the idea of written law, like a dictionary, as merely encoding practice, rather than trying to make it.

        That said, writing stuff down in unambiguous language can give a lot of power to one side or another: I genuinely think we’d have more restrictions on gun ownership by now in the US if not for the Second Amendment as rallying flag/practical obstacle, for example. But yeah, don’t confuse the rallying flag for the movement. If a huge majority of Americans really wanted guns banned then they would be banned by now, Second Amendment or no.

        Perhaps words on a page act sort of like that check box for organ donation or not: sets the default.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          That’s exactly what the Constitution does, in my opinion.

          Of course it doesn’t enforce itself or absolutely demand a particular theory of interpreting it. But it’s harder to interpret it in some ways than other ways, and this influences the debate.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          The story comes to mind of the American who says to the Brit: “how awful to have an unwritten law based on precedent which Parliament can change at will,” and the Brit says, “how awful to have a written law which nine unelected judges appointed for life can change at will.”

          The Brit seems to be saying this as though it’s a bad thing…? The USian is saying the Parliament system is too flexible. The Brit is describing the much less flexible US system (a written law, judges appointed for life) … as though it also is too flexible?

          • sweeneyrod says:

            I think the implied disadvantages of the American system are that the judges are unelected, and that it goes against the original aim of having a written law that can’t be changed “at will”.

          • onyomi says:

            Yes, it’s not about which system is more flexible overall, but about who gets to exercise the flexibility which all systems unavoidably include. Stated more explicitly:

            American: I’m glad we have an explicit, written Constitution by which our legislators must abide, unlike that amorphous set of precedents called “English Common Law,” which the Parliament can interpret any old way it likes.

            Brit: At least our elected legislators do the necessary and unavoidable work of precedent interpreting, whereas you leave that up to a much smaller, unelected group, who, in the end, must rely on precedent to tell them how to interpret the written Constitution.*

            *Though one could and, imo, should, set a precedent for literalism if one is going to have a written Constitution at all; otherwise, it defeats the purpose of achieving the rule of law as opposed to the “rule of men.”

          • Until quite recently, the “Supreme Court” of England was the House of Lords, specifically the law lords–appointed, not elected. Under the current system, there is a supreme court with appointed judges.

            It is true, however, that Parliament has much greater authority in legal interpretation than the U.S. Congress, because of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

          • BBA says:

            Aside from the British Supreme Court, there are the pan-European courts empowered under various treaties to strike down British law as incompatible with the treaties. The processes through which these courts make and enforce their decisions are opaque and confusing, which I understand is intentionally how the European system was set up so people wouldn’t second-guess it. (Note that I’m not just referring to the EU. The European Court of Human Rights reports to the Council of Europe, which is totally separate from the EU. The Council of Europe is also separate from the European Council and the Council of the European Union. And now my head hurts.)

      • Wrong Species says:

        To some extent that’s true but people take these issues more seriously than you’re suggesting. Evangelicals aren’t against evolution just because. They are against it because it seemingly contradicts the Bible. If there was no Book of Genesis, then Christian creationism wouldn’t exist.

        Now why do they take a stand on some issues and not others? It’s hard to say.

        • Frog Do says:

          Evangelicals are against evolution, because evolutionists are against evangelicals. How much could have been solved if H L Mencken wasn’t around deliberately mocking anyone who disagreed with his opinion of the Scopes Monkey Trial?

          Why they take stands on some issues and not others obviously follows form this.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “How much could have been solved if H L Mencken wasn’t around deliberately mocking anyone who disagreed with his opinion of the Scopes Monkey Trial?”

            Nothing? The Creation Science Research Center was founded in 1970.

          • Frog Do says:

            What are you saying, here?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Note the 50 year time gap?

          • Frog Do says:

            I am capable of subtracting numbers, yes.

          • Silva says:

            Let me be explicit then: after Mencken, creationism was on the way down, and stayed that way until relatively recently. What resurrected it is that the Republican base (NARALT, etc. …) needed a new overt rallying flag because the one they had was defeated so badly it became taboo: racial segregation. That said, coincidentally right now Trump helps move the Overton window in that direction, *therefore* religious beliefs have been mattering less in this election cycle (the “undercover” racists haven’t been needing to take cover of late). Also, on misogyny, the fundamentalists hadn’t been non-misogynist at any point of the past few decades, but right now, one can go straight to despising women, without needing religion as an acceptable intermediary.

          • Frog Do says:

            See, now that’s claim, I do like that. I’m slightly suspicious because it casts one side as pretty much Pure Evil, when the side that is Pure Evil is also the Officially Hated tribe, but that’s standard for these sorts of conspiracy narratives. My question is still, then, “why creationism”? The Red Tribe in general and Christianity in particular have a lot of things that disagree with the Official Consensus. Why would they pick creationism, how is it unique compared to anything else that could have been picked? Especially because creationism vs evolution doesn’t really seem to affect anyone’s behavior at all, possibly because of that?

            My claim with Mencken is that it was picked because there was a stable history of The Righteously Civilized laughing at the Booboisie, so the narrative was already smouldering.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “I am capable of subtracting numbers, yes.”

            Then how is he responsible for what happened 50 years latter?

            “My claim with Mencken is that it was picked because there was a stable history of The Righteously Civilized laughing at the Booboisie, so the narrative was already smouldering.”

            That doesn’t explain the time gap.

          • Frog Do says:

            The answer to the question: “why this particular issue instead of anything other issue?” is: this thing that happened in the past.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            I serious doubt conservative Christians in the 1960s were reading H L Mencken in large enough numbers to found a political movement.

          • Frog Do says:

            They didn’t have to, of course, that’s why this all works. There was a history of The Superior hating The Inferior, championed by H L Mencken chiefly in a certain time period with one crucial meme of American history that all children are publically educated in called the Scopes Monkey Trial. This issue is generally taught in terms of Evolutionism vs Creationism, it is understood of course that it is about The Superior vs The Inferior. Mencken himself would have approved of these terms, I’m sure, given that he became famous for using similar terms.

            So, if you’re looking to rally a movement of the Inferiors later on in history, which issue(s) do you choose? Well, there are a lot of possible issues, people can find ways to disagree on nearly everything, especially since they’ve already been broken up into teams? Well, you can appeal to a meme everyone’s been taught, where the sides are obvious, because you don’t need to know the history really well to rally to a cause. So there you go, that’s why evolution vs creationism is A Thing.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “They didn’t have to, of course, that’s why this all works.”

            I’m sensing a grand theory and a total lack of evidence to support said theory.

            “There was a history of The Superior hating The Inferior, championed by H L Mencken chiefly in a certain time period with one crucial meme of American history that all children are publically educated in called the Scopes Monkey Trial.”

            Yeah. You are going to need to show “all children are publically educated in”. Schools didn’t discuss evolution; why would schools in the areas the most hostile to evolution talk about the Scopes Trial?

            A better explanation is here
            http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/9/790.full
            “After testing its ideas with 1,000 teachers and 165,000 students in 47 states, the BSCS in 1963 produced three versions of a high school biology textbook, each identified by the color that dominated its cover—blue (a molecular approach), green (an environmental/ecological approach), and yellow (a cellular/developmental approach) (Engleman 2001). ”

            Or in short the creationist backlash occurred just after evolution re-entered the classroom. I see no reason not to take creationist reasons at face value; they oppose evolution for the reasons they say they do. It is entirely consistent with their efforts.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I’m sensing a grand theory and a total lack of evidence to support said theory.

            Did you read the OP, or any of Scotts other posts on tribalism?

          • Frog Do says:

            Well, you can look up the history curricula in public schools across the US and learn more about social impact of the Scopes Monkey Trial in general, if you want. Trying to prove a narrative is a waste of time, I’ve presented it, you’ve dismissed it without cause, that’s that, really.

            There are two types of people, I think: people who think people are mostly telling the truth, and people who think people are mostly not telling the truth. I suppose you’re in the former, I’m definitely in the later.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “Well, you can look up the history curricula in public schools across the US and learn more about social impact of the Scopes Monkey Trial in general, if you want.”

            “social impact”
            “all children are publically educated in”
            Those are not equivalent statements.

            “Trying to prove a narrative is a waste of time, I’ve presented it, you’ve dismissed it without cause, that’s that, really.”

            If only there was some sort of link in my reply…
            maybe something covering the history of teaching evolution in the united states…
            something that would imply states didn’t teach it and so would be unlikely to talk about the Scopes Trial…

          • Frog Do says:

            If only I was talking about biology classes.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            So your claim is they censored talking about evolution in biology classes, but talked about it in history class. If something is controversial enough that biology texts don’t talk about it, why would history texts bother? Heck why would they talk about social movements- didn’t that trend start in the 1960s?

          • Frog Do says:

            Yes! And when they did start talking about them in the sixties, there was this event that happened in the past, that happened to map very well onto a current tribal dispute, amplifying the process of that dispute becoming a flag to rally around, for both sides, giving it a mythological history, giving it a staying power. Inherit the Wind came out as a play then a movie around this time as well, and this probably isn’t a coincidence.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Except people still cared between 1925-1970. It did not emerge as an issue in the 1960s; all that happened is the people pushing for evolution had the federal government on their side because of fears of Soviet technological supremacy. The situation can be seen in the changes in biology textbooks over time; if people didn’t care we shouldn’t see selective pressure but…

            ///Some biology textbooks also began to include religious quotations; groups such as the California State Board of Education argued that these quotations made biology textbooks worthy of adoption because the quotations showed that the books were “tactfully written” and presented evolution as a “theory and not as an established fact” (see Grabiner and Miller 1974). However, the best-selling textbooks continued to downplay or ignore evolution; for example, the best-selling biology textbook in the 1930s (Baker and Mills’ Dynamic Biology, published in 1933) did not include the word evolution, nor did it include any information about the evolution or fossil record of humans. Indeed, Dynamic Biology included an attack on evolution, likening Darwin’s ideas to Lamarck’s and claiming that Darwin’s theory was no longer generally accepted. That attack on Darwin was followed by a tribute to God.///

            ///About two decades after Scopes’ trial, authors of some biology textbooks again made a few bold statements about the validity of evolution. For example, E. T. Smith (1949) wrote in Exploring Biology that “modern biologists accept evolution as proved,” and other authors attacked views that opposed evolution. However, these pro-evolution textbooks were rarely popular. The best-selling books presented a much more conservative treatment of evolution (Skoog 1979). By 1942 fewer than half of the science teachers in the United States taught evolution (Futuyma 1983). ///

            ///In the late 1940s, many authors reduced their treatments of human evolution. For example, the nearly 1,000 words that Hunter devoted to evolution in Life Sciences: A Social Biology (1941) were reduced to about 235 words in the next edition (Skoog 1979). Some authors even tried to reconcile evolution and Genesis. For example, Hunter (1941) stated in Life Sciences: A Social Biology that “later one-celled green plants must have come into existence and then one-celled animals, which feed on the green plants and bacteria.” In 1949 a similar statement was extended with the addition of the line, “As you see, if you turn to the first chapter of Genesis, this is the order of Creation.” ///

            ///In the late 1950s, many textbooks continued to avoid mentioning the word evolution. If mentioned, evolution was usually described timidly with abstractions and euphemisms (e.g., “change” and “development”) and, as in earlier textbooks, was usually in the final chapters of the book. For example, the 1956 version of Moon’s book devoted only one page to evolution, which it referred to as “racial development,” and said nothing about human origins. The evidence supporting evolution received even less coverage in books published in the 1950s than it had in those published in the 1940s (Skoog 1979). As the 1950s came to a close, there was no evidence in textbooks that evolution was regarded as a major concept in biology. On the contrary, biology textbooks and biology teaching in public schools—according to one prominent biologist—were dominated by “antiquated religious traditions” (Muller 1959). ///

          • FacelessCraven says:

            “General H.H. Wotherspoon, president of the Army War College, has a pet rib-nosed baboon, an animal of uncommon intelligence but imperfectly beautiful. Returning to his apartment one evening, the General was surprised and pained to find Adam (for so the creature is named, the general being a Darwinian) sitting up for him and wearing his master’s best uniform coat, epaulettes and all. “You confounded remote ancestor!” thundered the great strategist, “what do you mean by being out of bed after naps? — and with my coat on!”
            Adam rose and with a reproachful look got down on all fours in the manner of his kind and, scuffling across the room to a table, returned with a visiting card: General Barry had called and, judging by an empty champagne bottle and several cigar-stumps, had been hospitably entertained while waiting. The general apologized to his faithful progenitor and retired. The next day he met General Barry, who said: “Spoon, old man, when leaving you last evening I forgot to ask you about those excellent cigars. Where did you get them?” General Wotherspoon did not deign to reply, but walked away. “Pardon me, please,” said Barry, moving after him; “I was joking of course. Why, I knew it was not you before I had been in the room fifteen minutes.”

            -Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

          • Frog Do says:

            Of course people cared in the first half of the twentieth century, otherwise they couldn’t reference it as history! And to repeat myself, I am not talking about biology textbooks.

            Also, I have no idea what FacelessCraven is talking about.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “Of course people cared in the first half of the twentieth century, otherwise they couldn’t reference it as history!”

            No, you are claiming the Scopes Trial and HL. Everything after that and before the federal backs the teaching of evolution is an entirely different trend; namely it shows the majority or a plurality of Americans were opposed to the teaching of evolution. Creationists are perfectly willing to explain their opposition and the fact you seem to think they are lying (despite the fact their actions are entirely consistent with their stated reasons) is odd.

            “And to repeat myself, I am not talking about biology textbooks.”

            You know what would be great? If you actually say what you are talking about.

            Additionally the reaction to biology textbooks show how people felt about evolution- namely they were opposed to it. A majority of people being opposed to something means that continued opposition is not something mysterious

          • Frog Do says:

            I don’t think the creationists are lying! At least, unless they are claiming to be entirely and solely responsible for broad social trends in this tribal conflict, which would be very, very weird. Social science is really, really hard; I would be especially wary of saying “this huge tribal conflict is entirely caused by This Particular Tribe Which Is Clearly An Outgroup To Me”. Not everything is solely the result of the machinations of the Evil Enemy Tribe, and the fact you set up conflicts like this is why I am constantly accusing you of playing identity politics, because, well, you are.

            I am talking about tribal conflict, not biology textbooks, obviously. But I suppose this is also a single step of meta beyond the object level, which (since you also don’t understand the difference between statements and statements about statements), you seem to have difficulty understanding. See, you can talk about something, and you can also talk about the conversation around that thing. You can only seem to do the first, while I am only interested in doing the second. You can’t do social science without going meta like this, otherwise you are doing some kind of weird Radical Behaviorism.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            ” At least, unless they are claiming to be entirely and solely responsible for broad social trends in this tribal conflict, which would be very, very weird. ”

            Why? Some social conflicts are entirely caused by one side.

            ” I would be especially wary of saying “this huge tribal conflict is entirely caused by This Particular Tribe Which Is Clearly An Outgroup To Me”.”

            Teaching creationism in school is in fact entirely the result of creationists wanting it taught in school.

            “Not everything is solely the result of the machinations of the Evil Enemy Tribe”

            Pushing creationism is entirely due to the actions of creationists. I’m not sure who else could be pushing for it.

            “I am talking about tribal conflict, not biology textbooks, obviously.”

            The textbooks show people were against evolution even when ‘evolution’ (aka the evil secularist) wasn’t against them (because they were utterly irrelevant/crushed). You can’t blame continued opposition to tribal conflict. The opposition to evolution came first.

            “See, you can talk about something, and you can also talk about the conversation around that thing. ”

            And your claim is the conversations are
            “Evangelicals are against evolution, because evolutionists are against evangelicals. How much could have been solved if H L Mencken wasn’t around deliberately mocking anyone who disagreed with his opinion of the Scopes Monkey Trial?”

            Which immediately falls down when we see the trend of how creationism was popular in the country.

          • Frog Do says:

            “Why? Some social conflicts are entirely caused by one side.”

            p r o t o c o l s
            o f
            t h e
            e l d e r s
            o f
            z i o n

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            I have no idea what your point with that is. Both sides agree that the creationists are the ones pushing for creationism; the creationists do not disagree with the statement ‘the majority of biologists disagree with them’. Unless your position is that biologists constitute a faction for trying to get biology classes to teach biology, this is one sided.

          • Frog Do says:

            The goal is to win the war. Turning it into a semi-permenant tribal conflict is probably not the best way to do this. Going with The Hated Other Who Cause All The Problems as your narrative is very historically understandable but very stupid way to try and win this, even when you are right.

            And if you think evolution vs creationism is entirely about the accuracy of different scientific theories, you should go and reread all of Scott’s posts about tribalism.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “The goal is to win the war. ”

            So you reject the concept of factual descriptions of the past unless they suit your personal needs? So basically my mistake is to take what you say as true? I should assume everything you write is false unless proven otherwise?

            “And if you think evolution vs creationism is entirely about the accuracy of different scientific theories,”

            It isn’t me who thinks that. It is the people who President Eisenhower appointed to reform the American educational institution in order to be more competitive with the USSR in the Cold War. Unless you are claiming all the biologists were in some sort of group think or conspiracy, they did in fact reject creationism because evolution was a much better theory.

            “you should go and reread all of Scott’s posts about tribalism.”

            http://www.icr.org/how-we-do-research
            Creationists do believe their beliefs are true and they fight against evolution because they believe that it has harmful moral effects aside from being false. They are pretty clear about this and their behavior is consistent with this.

          • Frog Do says:

            You’re stuck in True Believer mode again, fighting that Holy War, calm down. There is a difference between fact and narrative when interacting with people, you don’t just spew facts at people, you arrange them in a logical sequence to tell a story. Your story implies the history of this conflict really starts in the 1970s (although at least now we’ve moved it back to President Eisenhower, progress), mine is that it really starts earlier in the twentieth century and is part of a larger tribal conflict.

            Firstly, well, if it’s about winning the Cold War, then it’s not entirely about scientific theories, isn’t it, or did Lysenkoism not exist in your history of science? Secondly, of course biologists are acting as a conspiracy, this is going to be obviously true of all scientific disciplines, just look at how science advances one death at a time. Scientists don’t get to be perfectly pure thinkers, they’re human, too. Thirdly, I’d be really surprised if creationists are the first group of humans in history to sincerely execute their beliefs consistant with their behavior, because humans don’t actually do that, of course, Read The Sequences.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “You’re stuck in True Believer mode again,”

            I am stating things that both creationists and their opponents agree upon. How is this a true Believer?

            “Your story implies the history of this conflict really starts in the 1970s (although at least now we’ve moved it back to President Eisenhower, progress), ”

            That is such a massive misreading of what I said I have no idea how you got there.

            Creationists have opposed the teaching of evolution the entire time. It became a major issue because…
            ===
            In response to these concerns, President Dwight Eisenhower requested (and Congress passed) the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which encouraged the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund and develop state-of-the-art science textbooks.
            ===
            After testing its ideas with 1,000 teachers and 165,000 students in 47 states, the BSCS in 1963 produced three versions of a high school biology textbook,
            ===
            By 1970 BSCS books had been adopted in almost half of American high schools.
            ===

            Got it? Eisenhower pushed for change, they finished the work by 1963 and the rollout covered half the country by 1970.

            “Firstly, well, if it’s about winning the Cold War, then it’s not entirely about scientific theories, isn’t it, or did Lysenkoism not exist in your history of science?”

            Yes, it is about which scientific theory is better. The federal government’s would have pushed for creationism if it was the better theory.

            “Scientists don’t get to be perfectly pure thinkers, they’re human, too. ”

            So? What does that have to do with which position is better supported by the evidence? You appear to be attacking the very idea that some theories provide better predictions than others.

            “Thirdly, I’d be really surprised if creationists are the first group of humans in history to sincerely execute their beliefs consistant with their behavior, because humans don’t actually do that, of course, Read The Sequences.”

            Feel free to show how the statement is wrong. Regurgitating jargon doesn’t actually illuminate anything.

          • Frog Do says:

            You’re in True Believer mode because you are focusing on the object level conflict, not how these types of conflicts are sustained. This is not about who is right and who is wrong, unless you seriously think I am defending creationism. Given your past reading comphrension, this is unsurprising.

            The federal government does not subsize the truth, it subsidizes based on what it is incentivized to subsidize, trivially. We are lucky we got the proper evolutionary synthesis, but around the same time the Soviet Union got Lysenkoism, which serves as a counterexample to the idea that government science departments fund truth even in near-wartime situations.

            Your final statement is wrong because humans are not perfect belief executors. They are not computers. Surely you are aware of the hypocrisies of creationists, unless you’re claiming otherwise?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “not how these types of conflicts are sustained.”

            It is being sustained by the creationists. Again, no one disputes that.

            “The federal government does not subsize the truth, it subsidizes based on what it is incentivized to subsidize, trivially.”

            ///
            President Dwight Eisenhower requested (and Congress passed) the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which encouraged the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund and develop state-of-the-art science textbooks.
            ///

            Unless you are declaring scientists have no incentive to work towards truth your statement is irrelevant.

            “Your final statement is wrong because humans are not perfect belief executors. ”

            So? There just needs to be a relation between human beliefs and their actions.

          • Frog Do says:

            There is more to life than Our Good Guys and Their Bad Guys.

            Scientists have multiple incentives, some of which are for the truth, some of which are not. The scientific method is structured to encourage the former and discourage the later, but is not always perfect. Public choice economics might be a good subject to introduce to you here, as well as history and philosophy of science.

            There is a relationship between humans and their actions. There are decisions between those exectued by deterministic algorthim and random number generator.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “Scientists have multiple incentives, some of which are for the truth, some of which are not.”

            Are you declaring biologists support for natural selection is not based on evidentiary grounds? If you aren’t, how is this remotely relevant?

        • Thursday says:

          If there was no Book of Genesis, then Christian creationism wouldn’t exist.

          Actually, you can find creationism everywhere among religious people, even when there is no official holy book, like among some Native Americans, or where the authorities have come out in favour of evolution, like with the Catholics.

          People who are religious tend to prefer explanations where things, especially important things, like human beings, are caused by a personal agent. This has to do with religious psychology, not what the holy book says. Though, of course, a holy book does provide additional authority.

          —–

          Anyway, one should read up on Native American creationism. It’s amusing.

          • Nathan says:

            Many (most?) Muslims are also Creationist. We just hear about the white American Creationists because those are the ones the American left doesn’t feel awkward about mocking for their beliefs and culture.

          • NN says:

            I believe that the only major religion that doesn’t have a significant Creationist movement is Buddhism, because their scriptures record that the Buddha refused to answer questions about how the world began, or whether the world even had a beginning, and specifically rejected the idea of a creator god.

            Though considering how Buddhist practice has tended to mix with the local religious practices of the places where it has been established, it wouldn’t surprise me if there are some Buddhist creationists out there.

            Many (most?) Muslims are also Creationist. We just hear about the white American Creationists because those are the ones the American left doesn’t feel awkward about mocking for their beliefs and culture.

            Also because Christian Creationists are the only one who have attempted to get American public schools to teach their Creationist ideas as science.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            People who are religious tend to prefer explanations where things, especially important things, like human beings, are caused by a personal agent.

            Or more broadly, the idea of evolution by natural selection is deeply counterintuitive to a human brain sculpted to be hypersensitive to agenty things, so it is no surprise that in most of the religions that predate the discovery of natural selection, agenty creation was the leading hypothesis for those religions to incorporate into their story.

          • Wrong Species says:

            Imagine that the Bible had a verse saying that all material forces were made up solely of three elements. Everyone believed this for a while until chemists started learning that there are more fundamental elements such as hydrogen, helium, etc. This is resisted because it goes against the Bible. Eventually, the evidence becomes so overwhelming that some Christians convert to atheism and some theologians manage to make the statements compatible by saying that the three elements actually refers to protons, electrons and neutrons. But there would still be a “three-only” movement of Christians who can’t square the circle and believe the theologians are heretics. Meanwhile, someone like yourself would say that people don’t believe in the three-only theory because of anything to do with the Bible. You insist that there is an inherent psychological appeal to the rule of threes so that these religious people would believe in only three elements regardless of what the Bible says.

            The point is that I tend to distrust someone who tells me that people have an inherent psychological belief in X, regardless of culture.

          • Randy M says:

            It is a common observation that people tend to pattern match random events to narratives with agents responsible.
            In fact, it is a common argument against theism.

          • Thursday says:

            That you need a specific scripture or even any scripture to get to creationism is falsified by religious groups with no scripture, like Native Americans, being creationists.

          • NN says:

            That you need a specific scripture or even any scripture to get to creationism is falsified by religious groups with no scripture, like Native Americans, being creationists.

            They may or may not have scriptures, but they do have traditions passed down orally that include creation myths.

            Considering that virtually all religious scriptures started out as oral traditions that were later written down (even the Koran, which wasn’t written down in full until about 20 years after Muhammad’s death), and that at least some Native American tribes must have committed their oral traditions to writing by now, I don’t see any practical difference between the two.

          • Thursday says:

            There is no definitive set of myths. There are tons of variations, and each storyteller is free to tell things his or her own way. Paganism has always been pretty pick and choose like that. Written texts are mostly read by anthropologists and aren’t much used by Native people themselves in their religion. It’s not an ossified thing, like the Bible or Koran.

          • Wrong Species says:

            I’m not trying to make a difference between written scripture and oral traditions. What I’m saying is that Creationism isn’t just some inherent psychological belief that latches on to religion to justify it. It’s an ideologically influenced belief. Saying that Native Americans also have an ideologically influenced belief doesn’t falsify my original point.

            Here’s a good way to see who’s right. Evangelical Protestants and Catholics are both Christians but one explicitly believes in evolution and the other doesn’t. If you’re right, then Catholics shouldn’t be any less likely to be Creationists because people don’t get their psychology from church leaders. But if I’m right, there should be a significant difference because church leaders do matter when it comes to ideology. Now that’s not absolute, which is why some Catholics may still be Creationist but it’s important.

          • @Wrong Species, seems to me it is an ideologically influenced belief today, but it is also one that any pre-scientific society is likely to hold regardless of ideology, presumably because the idea of evolution is too counter-intuitive for anyone to guess at without evidence.

            In short, the ideology is in the rejection of the scientific evidence against creationism, not in creationism itself.

    • NN says:

      Furthermore, having those verses makes it way harder to throw a person who adheres to a more violent interpretation out of the community.

      Muslims throw people who adhere to a more violent interpretation of Islam out of the community all the time. If you read biographies of Muslim terrorists, variations of “he was thrown out of the local mosque for preaching violence” show up with astonishing regularity.

      The modern Salafi-Jihadist tribe* split off from the Salafi Muslim tribe several decades ago. The Salafi Muslim tribe itself split off from the Orthodox Sunni Muslim tribe some 200-300 years ago. At this point, they’re about as far removed from mainstream Sunni Islam as the Branch Davidians were from mainstream Protestant Christianity.

      * Which has itself split into at least two tribes in the past few years, but let’s leave that aside for now.

      • Jiro says:

        Muslims throw people who adhere to a more violent interpretation of Islam out of the community all the time.

        Acceptance of violence isn’t an all or nothing thing. I would expect that violent Koran verses are an influence in the direction towards greater acceptance of violence even if acceptance of violence is not unlimited. It pushes the Overton window.

        Even the Muslim terrorists you describe are only a subset of Muslim terrorists. I’m pretty sure that not a lot of terrorists have been thrown out of ISIS or Al Qaeda for preaching violence.

        • NN says:

          Even the Muslim terrorists you describe are only a subset of Muslim terrorists. I’m pretty sure that not a lot of terrorists have been thrown out of ISIS or Al Qaeda for preaching violence.

          One of the reasons that ISIS was thrown out of Al Qaeda was because Al Qaeda’s leadership felt that ISIS was getting too indiscriminately and counterproductively violent, so…

          • Jiro says:

            Yes, but that isn’t “violence against heretics is immoral, so we have to throw you out of Al Qaeda”.

        • Thursday says:

          It pushes the Overton window.

          Great way of putting it.

      • Patrick says:

        I’m not the guy you’re answering, but from my perspective the regularity is the point. John Doe goes to mosque, they tell him that the Quran is the perfect word of god and that he should read and follow it of he wants to be a good person. So he does. And he finds a bunch of passages about violent action. He tries to being this to mosque abd no one appreciates it. He goes back to the Quran. And he finds a bunch of stuff about fake believers who don’t really follow the Quran.

        And eventually he leaves or gets kicked out, and the cycle repeats.

        It’s not substantially different from a dynamic that happens all over the place bid you read deconversion stories, there’s a trope that goes like this: my church taught me to question authority and think for myself. They wanted me to use that to reject evolution. But when I actually went to examine evolution and question it and compare it to the bible, the bible lost. I don’t go to church anymore.

        It’s a process that bedevils religious groups. They have values. They have holy texts. They have subtle norms of not interrogating the texts too deeply using those values because the texts can’t withstand it. They have norms of not publicly admitting that. And they have a steady tricke of people who internalize the values, don’t get the message about not taking them to their logical conclusion, interrogate the text, and head off in predictable directions given the texts and values at issue.

        • NN says:

          That isn’t how it works. The exact cause of turning to violence varies from person to person (the most common cause seems to be going off to fight in Afghanistan/Chechnya/Syria/Iraq and getting absorbed into the Jihadist culture there, another common cause is coming across Jihadist propaganda websites), but I yet to come across a single case where it happened because somebody just sat down, cracked open the Quran, and came across some violent verses that all of the Fake Muslims ignore.

          Indeed, studies of Muslim terrorists have found that significant numbers of them have high levels of religious illiteracy. See, for example, the ISIS fighters from the UK who bought Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies on Amazon before they traveled to Syria.

        • Ryan says:

          Mainline American Protestants are just lazy and unsophisticated when it comes to evolution.

          “Of course the forms of life today evolved from the forms of life in the past, we see this happen with our very eyes. Or do you think it was not from the wolf that came the dog? But we’re speaking here of forms. Remember all that time we spent not speaking in tongues and passing the plate around and how we used part of it to teach you about Plato and the allegory of the cave? And how if you leave a succession of caves you arrive in the realm of forms, where there are not individual wolves, but the wolf, not unique dogs, but the dog?

          Well Billy, since you seem to think you’re so smart, where did the forms come from, what designed them, what created them? Randomness you say? Now that’s just terrible science. When you flip a coin, what causes it to land heads or tails? The laws of physics. Where the coin was on your thumb, how hard you threw it, minute misshaping of the surface which interact with air resistance, where your hand was when you caught it etc. etc. But of course no predictive model can take all that into account, so you shortcut with some statistics, you say heads and tails are equally likely and the outcome of individual flips is random.

          So what is randomness Billy? It is nothing but a kind of error in a predictive model. It is an intellectual sin of the highest order to reify this error and claim it is a force of nature. Since the first moment of creation the laws of physics have caused everything, model error has caused nothing.

          So who are you going to throw your lot in with Billy, you little ingrate? The millenniums old traditions, beliefs and faith of your forefathers, or a bunch of bozos who reified a parameter in a statistical model and imbued it with the power of God? Yeah, I thought so. Now finish reading Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, there’s going to be a sermon on it this Sunday.”

          You know, or something like that. But if all they muster is “you have to reject evolution or your going to hell” they better not be surprised when it doesn’t work.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            St. Thomas Aquinas is nodding in approval.

          • Cauê says:

            The argument is in quotes, it’s hard to know how it was meant. In any case, I’m not seeing natural selection there, which is kind of a big deal.

          • Ryan says:

            @Caue

            Maybe look at it this way. The laws of physics and nature of matter are such that liquid water facilitates the SN1 and SN2 reactions that underlay all biochemistry.

            Why do the laws of physics and the nature of matter cause liquid water to facilitate the biochemical reactions?

          • Cauê says:

            I haven’t danced this dance in a long time, but I’m seeing my brain rehearsing the same old steps, anticipating the next moves, and I don’t really want to go there. Sorry for poking.

        • JDG1980 says:

          It’s a process that bedevils religious groups. They have values. They have holy texts. They have subtle norms of not interrogating the texts too deeply using those values because the texts can’t withstand it. They have norms of not publicly admitting that. And they have a steady tricke of people who internalize the values, don’t get the message about not taking them to their logical conclusion, interrogate the text, and head off in predictable directions given the texts and values at issue.

          This is mostly an issue with religions that believe in some variant of sola scriptura. Protestant Christianity and some forms of Islam, primarily. Many other faiths (e.g. Catholicism, most forms of Judaism) require that the original scripture be interpreted in light of cultural traditions.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            Catholicism (both Orthodox and Roman) has a strong precedent of making and explicitly discussing the distinction between “Map” and “Territory”.

            See Ryan’s reply above.

          • Patrick says:

            Catholicism is darn near Exhibit A of this problem. Its just usually not the text of the Bible itself at issue, but rather the official teachings of the Catholic Church. Catholics who don’t follow Catholic teachings but who still teach their kids to venerate Catholic teachings are like… 95% of the Catholics in my state.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.

          • Patrick says:

            Hokay. Catholic parents who don’t follow their churches teachings on things like homosexuality and birth control, but who do raise their children in the church and teach them to look to the church for moral guidance, and then have a certain percentage of those children disagree with them about things like homosexuality and birth control, that’s totally not a thing. Hokay. I wasn’t paying attention, and actually I just saw, like, a squirrel or something, and thought it was that.

          • Cauê says:

            Catholicism (both Orthodox and Roman) has a strong precedent of making and explicitly discussing the distinction between “Map” and “Territory”.

            I’ve been thinking of the idea of “substance” (as in “transubstantiation”) as the most egregious example of mixing up map and territory that I know of.

            I once tried asking here if I was strawmanning, but didn’t have much of a response. Am I?

    • I haven’t seen Christians or Jews stoning adulteresses lately, and I think anyone who did would go to jail.

      • Guy says:

        Well, I don’t know about the Christians, but for the Jews, you’ve only got like half an hour where you can actually do the stoning, so it’s a pretty hard command to follow.*

        * I don’t actually know/recall Jewish law re: stoning of adulterers, but the teachings regarding disobedient children are quite amusing and, I believe, at least somewhat well known. They are approximately as follows:

        It is a part of the law that the parents of a disobedient child must stone him to death. However, Jews are not (despite what the Nazis might tell you) known for their cruelty; most parents would rather not have to follow this particular law. So they go to their rabbis, way back when the Talmud was being written. Or possibly one of the many layers of commentary? I’m uncertain. In any case, they go to their rabbis and explain their problem and the rabbis say, well, for one thing, the law clearly says parents, not father or mother. So obviously it only applies to a child who disobeys *both* parents; if he was obedient to one of them, he need not be stoned. Further, we know that children cannot be held accountable the way an adult might be; we have these other teachings that say as much. Therefore the law must only apply to those children who are adults. But it cannot apply to an adult man, who as an adult is not instructed but advised by his parents…

        The end result of all this legal wrangling is that there is a period of about twelve hours where a boy might conceivably “disobey his parents” in a way that would cause the law to apply. I assume a similar thing applies to adultery, though it may involve reasoning to the effect that it is impossible to be an adulteress (I think there was some structure by which she was automatically actually divorced at the time? I might be wrong).

        • According to Maimonides, it is three months.

          But there is a long list of other conditions supposedly deduced from the detailed phraseology of the text which imply that it can never happen. Such as the requirement that the father and mother bringing the accusation must have identical voices.

          (Maimonides XIV, Treatise 3 chapter 7)

          • Jiro says:

            What bothers me about that is the special pleading and different standards. Nobody ever says “Well, because of the way it is worded, you are only prohibited from eating meat with milk when the milk actually comes from the mother of the animal” even though that’s a far lesser stretch.

          • Loquat says:

            But not being allowed to eat meat and dairy together is also a far lesser problem than the issues that get all the special pleading, like being required to stone your disobedient son to death or being officially a bastard and therefore not allowed to marry any non-bastard. Nobody’s life is ruined just because they couldn’t eat a cheeseburger, so what’s the incentive to come up with excuses for it?

          • Not “bastard.”

            A mamzer is a child whose parents not only were not married but could not be married, such as the child of an incestuous union or of his mother’s adultery. A child whose parents could have been married but were not has the same status in Rabbinic law as a legitimate child.

  20. Thursday says:

    It’s interesting that there seem to be only three things that create really strong, larger scale identities: ancestry (real or perceived), religion, language. Nothing else comes close.

    You can create strong smaller identities around something as simple as survival (military units) or even pure material interest (gangs). But those things tend not to scale up to far, and they tend to dissolve as soon as the immediate reason for their existence goes away. Think of a rock band on the way up, versus when they are at the top.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I disagree. Ideology seems to do just fine, unless you want to define the problem away by counting ideology as religion, which I think is unfair.

      Also, be careful that you’re not confusing contingent with necessary truths. I think the reason ancestry and language are good things to make nations out of is that people with the same ancestry and language tend to start out in the same place, so you can draw a nice border around them and call them a nation. If all gamers or football players were on the same patch of land, they might found their own nations too.

      • Thursday says:

        Some political ideologies have sometimes created very strong communities, but those differences tend to fade over time. Anybody care about the Guelfs and Ghibellines anymore? Yet, people cling to religious identities for centuries.

        I’m dubious about place being much of a factor. There are too many cohesive yet mobile minorities for that to be true, and too many places with closely mixed geographically but still otherwise separate groups.

        And, let me state the obvious, gamers and football players don’t form anything like as strong of identities as something like religion.

        • Nathan says:

          I hear there are parts of Scotland where wearing the wrong football Guernsey in the wrong place will get you hospitalised.

          • Eoin says:

            Wrong Channel Island 😀

          • Thursday says:

            The really violent and intense football rivalries tend to have an ethnic or religious component. Celtic vs. Rangers is Catholic vs. Protestant, for example.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            I remember being on holiday in Barra (one of the Scottish islands, and one of the few majority-Catholic parts of the country) and getting into a conversation with someone who asked me what football team I supported. When I said I wasn’t into football, his immediate next question was what religion I follow.

            When I told him I wasn’t into religion either, he seemed a little surprised but willing to take that as an answer.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          “football players don’t form anything like as strong of identities as something like religion”

          If you’re talking about football as in soccer, that certainly wasn’t true in the UK. A classic example of religion, nationalism, politics and football all combining to form strong identities is Celtic vs Rangers.

        • NN says:

          And, let me state the obvious, gamers and football players don’t form anything like as strong of identities as something like religion.

          That may be true of gamers, but I’m not so sure about sports fans.

          • Thursday says:

            While ancestry/religion/language tend to form the strongest, largest, and most persistent group identities, its not like other things never create enough cohesion to enact significant real world effects.

            But let’s put things in perspective: sports riots are rare, if spectacular. Most cities with major professional sports teams have never had one, despite hundreds of games played.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Sports seem the healthiest way to express tribalism. And I say this as someone not interested in sports as an adult.

            1. No real desire to destroy members of the other tribe or get them fired from their job.
            2. Even if you try to destroy the member of another tribe, all other tribes are big enough to defend themselves.
            3. Switching tribes is easy.
            4. Sports riots, as a rule, happen in their hometown, not against enemies. I’d rather be in 2 sports riots than 1 race riot.

        • Adam Casey says:

          A datapoint on sports:

          Fans of Liverpool FC were blamed by the Sun newspaper after a stadium crush killed 96 people. That was 1989, the Sun utterly retracted and apologised numerous times.

          Today fans of Liverpool wear badges saying “remember the 96” and “don’t buy the sun”. I’m not a fan of LFC or any other football club, but some of my friends growing up were. The idea of buying the Sun makes me feel quite uneasy in a way buying the Star or the Express doesn’t.

      • Esquire says:

        Maybe the organizing principle is that tribalism your sense needs to overlap with literal kinship-based tribalism to become extremely strong.

        There can be co-evolution… if gamers all start hanging out IRL and dating each other, they can create a genetic kin-group, but…

        Proposal: if you want to predict how strong a tribe is, you can pretty much just ask how genetically “loaded” it is:

        Clan > Ethnicity > Language > Religion > Hobby

        • Thursday says:

          Right. People in ev psych talk about kin selection very easily helps cohesive groups form. Ethnic identity seems to be built on this.

          —–

          Language is obviously a hard in-out boundary, because you literally can’t communicate with a group that doesn’t speak your language. You can obviously learn a language, but it takes time, and even then you have to get up to speed on all the other things in the culture that are walled off by the language barrier.

          But it does also make a fairly good proxy for ancestry.

          —–

          Religion is a bit more of a puzzler, but it is much more powerful than hobbies and such.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Religion often has a big influence over whom you will marry. People of the same religion may have different ancestors, but their descendants are allowed to converge.

          • Thursday says:

            That’s true Steve, but its not clear why it had to be religion that would form such groups in the first place. Why not form soon-to-be-inbred groups around hobbies, for example?

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Hindus form soon-to-be-inbred groups around occupations, but Europeans tend to find that weird.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            High IQ English secular progressives — the Darwins, Wedgwoods, Galtons, Keyneses, Huxleys, Arnolds, etc. — formed a loosely inbreeding informal caste beginning around the time of the French Revolution and continuing to this day.

            For example, the child movie star Skandar Keynes, who played Edmund in the “Narnia” trilogy, is some kind of grand-nephew of John Maynard Keynes and a direct great-great-great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin.

            I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar fate awaits American “rationalists.”

          • One reason people prefer to marry folks from their own religion is so they can guarantee that their children will be raised in the religion. If you believe that the only way to go to Heaven instead of Hell is to worship the Right Way, then why would you marry a Sinful Unbeliever who will teach their unbeliefs to your children and doom them to Hell?

            Whereas, the average person probably doesn’t care as much if their kids turn out to like hiking or gardening or video games or whatever.

          • Creutzer says:

            You can obviously learn a language, but it takes time, and even then you have to get up to speed on all the other things in the culture that are walled off by the language barrier.

            There is also the fact that it is basically impossible for most people to learn a language to the point that they’re indistinguishable from non-native speakers. There are very few people who ever acquire a completely native-like accent in any second language. In some way, this makes language reinforce ancestry.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            A really helpful way to think about tribalism is by imagining family trees, both those of your ancestors and your descendants. You are likely to feel kinship toward relatives via ancestry and toward future in-laws via descent.

            For example, the famous Lunar Society of Birmingham, England in the late 18th Century consisted of a number of secular intellectuals — e.g., Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Samuel Galton, Jr., James Keir, Joseph Priestley, William Small, Jonathan Stokes, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, John Whitehurst and William Withering — whose descendants tended to intermarry.

          • I’ve seen fans (of sf) delighted that that their kids are also fannish.

          • Thursday says:

            People who are fans of X may be delighted that their kids are into X, but would they really choose their mates on that basis? I’ll put this as the hotness test. Would you choose someone who was into X over a very attractive person for a mate? Highly religious people will absolutely reject otherwise highly attractive potential mates who are outside their religion. I really doubt even the most fanatical of sci fi fans would reject a very pretty girl just so their kids could be into sci fi.

            (As an aside, the whole premise of The Big Bang Theory is that the science geek still really wants the hot girl who knows nothing about science. )

          • It seems to me that the sf fans I know aren’t especially selecting for conventional beauty, but this may be due to limited opportunities, or it might be that someone who selects for looks and not fannishness drops out of fandom– and I’m more likely to know how people look if they go to conventions.

            I would expect fans to select for fannishness to get subcultural compatibility with their partner rather than because they especially want to have fannish children.

          • Thursday says:

            The distinction between choosing someone based on common interest vs. hope that offspring will share that interest is a valid one (thanks for correcting me), though I’m not sure that it makes much difference practically.

            Sharing a particular interest is only one among many attractive traits that one would look for in a mate. Very few people would make it an absolute requirement, while sharing a religion is quite often an absolute requirement among more religious people.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Or the families spend a lot of time socializing together and the children are thus more likely to marry within a social network. I use the example that the descendants of the friends of Erasmus Darwin in the late 1700s were still marrying each other at a well above random rate in the late 1900s.

            Similarly, the Obamas vacation each summer at The Oaks on Martha’s Vineyard, where the most socially elite African-Americans in the U.S. have summered for a century or more. I would hardly be surprised if one of the White House daughters eventually marries a good blood, good bone young black man of wealth and breeding whom she met on that romantic beach. That’s the plan.

          • Thursday says:

            Maybe that mattered in class conscious groups in the 19th and early 20th century, but it’s all pretty loose these days. Obama himself was originally a nobody from Hawaii. There’s also the upward movement of originally nobody Jews to take note of. Ralph Lauren’s son married into the Bushes. So, while I don’t doubt there is assortive mating by certain traits, I don’t see this as any sort of self-conscious exclusion. It’s just people with valuable traits marrying other people with valuable traits.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Actually, David Maraniss’s 2012 biography of Obama makes clear that he grew up around wealthy, accomplished families and understands class and caste quite well. For example, his stepfather Lolo was the son of the leading Indonesian petroleum geologist and was part of an extremely well-connected clan in Indonesia oil. His girlfriend in New York, Genevieve Cook, was the daughter of the Australian ambassador to the U.S. and stepdaughter of the famous American lawyer (son of an even more famous Washington lawyer) who ran the biggest mining operation in Indonesia. Obama’s Pakistani roommate in NYC sounds like a loser, except one day a Bhutto, daughter of one Pakistani prime minister and sister of another, shows up at their apartment to visit her old friend. His mother’s Ph.D. adviser Alice Greeley Dewey was a descendant of Horace Greeley and John Dewey. Etc etc

            Obama downplays his connections to this rather exotic world, making his white grandparents sound like totally average people from the middle of nowhere, but both white grandparents had siblings with doctorates. Janny Scott’s biography of his mother has long interviews with several of his elderly American relatives and I was impressed by them: they were smart, cultured, educated people.

            In short, Obama comes from the stratum of the WASP upper middle class that, generation after generation, provides America with its career diplomats and intelligence agents.

            The Obamas have spent a lot of money over the years to keep their daughters in private schools. Their choice of repeatedly summering at the most distinguished African-American summer colony is a conscious one in part to introduce their daughters to the rarefied society of America’s most wealthy and refined blacks.

          • Thursday says:

            You’re really having to stretch your evidence there. Obama’s maternal grandparents were from Kansas. The family was smart and started to move on up during the 20th century, like a lot of other Americans, starting with his grandparents generation. But they didn’t start out there by any stretch. His grandfather had some distinguished ancestry, but managed a furniture store after WWII. His grandmother worked in a factory during WWII, for goodness sake.

            Obama himself doubtless learned a lot from moving among Indonesian government circles, but his mother was a newcomer who didn’t make it into that milieu because of her family connections. And needless to say there isn’t much connection between the Indonesian upper class and the American upper class.

            America is a big country and there are a lot of people from the higher end of the middle class. Many of them are smart, cultured and educated. Characterizing this as a endogamous caste though is fairly ridiculous.

      • Aegeus says:

        Speaking of football, a local sports team can be an incredibly strong tribe. Listen to a Bengals fan talk about the “Shittsburgh Squealers” and the Baltimore “Ratbirds.” People take it seriously. As seriously as religion, I’d say.

        It probably benefits from the same geographic benefits as a nation, since everyone from Cincinnati grew up cheering for the Bengals, and the common activity of watching the games together also adds cohesion (and means that people keep being Bengals fans when they leave Cincinnati).

  21. roystgnr says:

    I see the same with the late Thomas Sowell

    I know conservatives aren’t the most lively bunch, but at least check the guy’s pulse before you pronounce a time of death.

    (on edit – sorry, should have reloaded the page before posting a likely-to-be-duplicate comment)

  22. deskglass says:

    Belgium as a whole may not be a very good tribe, but that’s because it is sharply divided into the Flemish and Walloon tribes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Belgium

  23. Tom Passin says:

    I read once – and haven’t verified it – that the old Romans once divided all citizens into “green” and “blue” factions, mostly I gather for supporting sporting events. Eventually there were widespread fights and riots between the factions. Of course, the designations were completely arbitrary, but people got as serious about them as of they really meant something. This sounds a lot like those teen age campers.

    • Redland Jack says:

      The Blues and the Greens play a major role in Guy Gavriel Kay’s ‘The Sarantine Mosaic’. Of course, that is a work of historical fantasy, but I believe it is based on the Roman Empire …

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I expect that most rationalists were first exposed to this historical tidbit by Eliezer Yudkwosky’s “A Fable of Science and Politics”:

      In the time of the Roman Empire, civic life was divided between the Blue and Green factions. The Blues and the Greens murdered each other in single combats, in ambushes, in group battles, in riots. Procopius said of the warring factions: “So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colors be brothers or any other kin.” Edward Gibbon wrote: “The support of a faction became necessary to every candidate for civil or ecclesiastical honors.”

      Who were the Blues and the Greens? They were sports fans—the partisans of the blue and green chariot-racing teams.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      I believe (and wikipedia confirms) there were also red and white factions (it was chariot races). They don’t sound too different from UK football hooligans.

      • Richard Gadsden says:

        In actual Rome, the four factions were very much like UK football hooligans.

        In New Rome (Constantinople), there were only the two (blue and green) and they developed gang-like structures and social-service arms known as demes (and if that reminds you of Hamas or Hezbollah, then it should).

        After the Nika revolt, the demes were dismantled, and the tribes faded – within a generation, the tribal split was between monophysites and diaphysites.

        • Evan Þ says:

          And then, several generations later, between iconophiles and iconoclasts.

          • AlexanderRM says:

            This seems to be a perfect example for one of the ideas Scott was going at here (and in previous things on the subject), that dismantling tribes might not actually be a good way to stop tribal conflict.

            I’m wondering if an effective method might be to do the opposite, get deliberately set-up, explicit tribes, ideally a large number (as in more than 2-3 and try to avoid natural coalitions dominating the thing), and have them all recognize the tribal boundaries and agree to respect members of other tribes, backed up by the majority of tribes coming down on any given tribe for starting inter-tribal conflict.
            This is sort of like what the nation-state system is going for, although not a perfect success thus far.

            OTOH, I wouldn’t be surprised if having recognized tribes that agree to respect each other actually causes those to be de-emphasized (even assuming they’re drawn up by tribal boundaries initially, something “nation”-state boundaries in large parts of the world today fail miserably at), in favor of some other axis not recognized as such.
            It’s possible the best solution- and certainly the one that works thus far- is to have tribes that often strongly dislike one another and identify around being not-other-tribe, but get them to not *kill* each other over it.

          • Schmendrick says:

            AlexanderRM, you’ve (possibly inadvertently) recreated the Ottoman “millet” system for the regulation of religious minorities almost perfectly. It worked really well for the Ottomans…until the Russians and French decided that having explicitly organized coreligionist minorities in a rival power was too sweet a lever not to pull…

  24. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    First, a couple of nipticks; “can (provably) improves” should be “can (provably) improve” and “Harold Lee’s Harold Lee’s” should be “Harold Lee’s”. Also, I’m surprised this doesn’t have the “long post is long” tag.

    I’m stressing this because I keep hearing people ask “What is the rationalist community?” or “It’s really weird that I seem to be involved in the rationalist community even though I don’t share belief X” as if there’s some sort of necessary-and-sufficient featherless-biped-style ideological criterion for membership…

    If you take only one thing from this essay, it’s that communities are best understood not logically but historically. If you want to understand the Shia, don’t reflect upon the true meaning of Ali being the rightful caliph, understand that a dispute involving Ali initiated ethnogenesis, the resulting culture picked up a bunch of features and became useful to various people, and now here we are. If you want to understand the rationalist community, don’t ask exactly how near you have to think the singularity has to be before you qualify for membership, focus on the fact that some stuff Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote led to certain people identifying themselves as “rationalists” and for various reasons I enjoy dinner parties with those people about 10000% more interesting than dinner parties with randomly selected individuals.

    This reminds me of something I keep noticing whenever people discuss the literary merits of fanfiction. Someone always argues that the Aeneid can be considered Illiad fanfiction or that Paradise Lost is basically fanfiction of the Bible, and that therefore fanfiction is already part of the Western canon. But this is only true if you are using a featherless biped definition of fanfiction. Cladistically, the literary tradition of the modern fanfiction community is descended from the Star Trek fanzines of the 60s and has nothing to do with the work of Virgil or Milton. And it always annoys me when I see someone trying to imply that it does, because I am part of the fanfiction community, and I am proud of what we do, and I don’t think we need to steal the status of the great books by association.

    Incidentally, one of the benefits of reading Death Eater blogs is that it teaches you to think cladistically.

    There seems to be a generational process, sort of like Harold Lee’s theory of immigrant assimilation, by which religions dissolve. The first generation believes everything literally. The second generation believes that the religion might not be literally true, but it’s an important expression of universal values and they still want to follow the old ways and participate in the church/temple/mosque/mandir community. The third generation is completely secularized.

    This was certainly my family’s relationship with Judaism. My great-great-grandfather was so Jewish that he left America and returned to Eastern Europe because he was upset at American Jews for not being religious enough. My great-grandfather stayed behind in America but remained a very religious Jew. My grandparents attend synagogue when they can remember, speak a little Yiddish, and identify with the traditions. My parents went to a really liberal synagogue where the rabbi didn’t believe in God and everyone just agreed they were going through the motions. I got Bar Mitzvahed when I was a kid but haven’t been to synagogue in years. My children probably won’t even have that much.

    This only happens when all of the incentives push towards dissolution (as you note, modern America is an environment where there is an “overwhelming pressure to dissolve into the Generic Identity Of Modern Secular Consumerism”). When the pressure and incentives push towards a rallying flag, you get the opposite phenomenon of “not getting the joke”. The first generation pretends to believe in the ideology because it is in their interests to do so. The second generation truly believes in the ideology, having had it instilled from birth. Third generation believes a more radical/literal interpretation of the ideology because it allows them to stand out as being specially committed to the ideology. The result is a holiness spiral.

    Finally, let me indulge in some tribalism and say that I love you guys (no homo). The rationalist community is definitely the best cult I’ve ever joined.

    • Anonymous says:

      I love you too, and not just because of those Dark Triad charms

      :3

    • Thursday says:

      This only happens when all of the incentives push towards dissolution

      The failure to account for how many religious identities have lasted for a very long time was the biggest problem in an otherwise excellent piece.

    • LHN says:

      In my experience, criticism of fanfic as a concept isn’t based on its line of descent but on the idea that fiction that uses preexisting characters or story elements is by its nature inferior to work that doesn’t. So the fact that, e.g., Shakespeare never made up a plot or characters if there was one handy for recycling seems on point.

      I’m not personally in the fanfic community, though I’ve read occasional examples I’ve liked. (Ditto tie-in novels that tend to get tarred with the same brush. Sturgeon’s Law applies, but, e.g., John M. Ford’s The Final Reflection is an excellent novel that happens to be set in the Star Trek universe.) But I get irritated when people confuse a fairly young and local fashion for literary originality (or the practicalities of IP rights enforcement) for standards of overall merit.

      • Nornagest says:

        Not to diss fanfic unduly, but John M. Ford was really, really good. So good that pointing to anything of his doesn’t say much about its genre’s merit. I’m pretty sure he could have taken a Dean Koontz plot and characters and make them readable.

        • Protagoras says:

          His “Ask Dr. Mike” performances were also extremely entertaining.

        • LHN says:

          John M. Ford was a genius who should be better known than he is. But that’s kind of the point– whether a good writer can produce good work is orthogonal to the question of whether the building blocks are original or not. The idea that a real artist only uses plots and characters he built with his own two hands (or at least lightly filed off the serial numbers from) is a weird contemporary affectation rather than an enduring fact of art.

          I’d expect that in practice, a field like fanfic, uncompensated and with minimal gatekeeping, is probably going to have a higher Sturgeon Ratio than published fiction, and that the corporate strictures of tie-in fiction would be limiting. But those are both rebuttable presumptions.

          (Especially the latter, given how much great art has been produced in highly limiting contexts, and the general tendency for authors who become successful enough to operate with fewer limits to suffer a decline in quality.)

          • Thursday says:

            A lot of this has to do with copyright restrictions. If anyone could write a Star Trek novel, do it however they wanted, and then get paid for it, I suspect better writers would be attracted to Star Trek stories.

        • Thursday says:

          But the genre is obviously capable of being turned into something really great by a great artist. Most fan fiction is in the awful to decent range, but that’s because of the quality of the authors, not because of the genre. There seems to be an implied “amateur” put in front of “fan fiction” because most of it is by amateurs, but I don’t think that has to be taken as definitive.

          • suntzuanime says:

            If it were written by professionals it’d be canon.

            Ah I see you addressed this point above.

          • Anonymous says:

            A good editor is a critical element in most good to great novels. I imagine almost no fanfic is edited by a good editor. So even if the author is good they don’t stand much of a chance.

          • Naomi Novik talks about fan fiction, and specifically about the high quality of editing (beta reading) that one can get as a fan fiction writer.

            This is an hour long podcast (and not about Uprooted), but I recommend it as talking about just how good an obsessive gift culture can get.

          • Thursday says:

            The best creative writers are usually their own primary editors. A good editor can help these guys with a bit of trim and polish, but this isn’t the make or break factor.

          • Anonymous says:

            I don’t know where you are getting that from, but it isn’t true. Whether by sales or critical acclaim all the vast majority of top novels have had deeply involved editors.

            In fact, you can see the importance of an editor yourself. Just look at an author that gets famous–as the power shifts between the author and the editor the books get longer, less tightly plotted, more self indulgent, and so on.

          • Thursday says:

            I’m taking the long view. Outside editing is a fairly recent thing, so for your hypothesis to be true, writing would have had to have been pretty terrible in past centuries. That isn’t true, therefore editing is not essential.

          • John Schilling says:

            Most writing has been pretty terrible in past centuries. Which is why most writing from past centuries isn’t read any more, unless by someone desperate to find material for their [X] Lit doctoral dissertation. The tiny, tiny fraction of old literature that we still think is worth reading, has been filtered through a process as coarsely selective as the harshest editor.

            Which isn’t quite the same as the fine editing at the detail level – but it may not be coincidental that the man generally acknowledged as the greatest writer of the English language in centuries past, was a hack playwright whose works were necessarily “edited” by the collective consensus of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with extensive audience feedback before being fixed in their current form.

          • Thursday says:

            There isn’t actually a higher amount of really good writing in this age, despite the wide availability of editing. The really great authors didn’t need editors then and the really good authors don’t need it now.

            Shakespeare would have been Shakespeare even with just the contemporaneously published quarto editions. As well, modern editors of Lear and Hamlet tend to include everything they can find from both quarto and folio, and no one actually thinks any of that material should be left out.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            People *do* leave out chunks of Macbeth, most notably the witches songs (which were not written by Shakespeare), when it is performed.

          • John Schilling says:

            Even the “contemporary” quartos were published well after theatrical performance, and therefore after in-house editing and likely several rounds of audience feedback.

            And Shakespeare’s enduring reputation is based on the folios. That, when an author makes it big, there will be people interested in seeing their every literary dropping in print, is a given. It doesn’t follow that these works would have made them famous if they were all we had.

          • Thursday says:

            People *do* leave out chunks of Macbeth

            When people leave out stuff of Shakespeare performances, it is almost always for a shorter run time, not because they think the stuff left out detracts from the play.

            Tellingly the only Shakespeare play people really think outright benefits from editing is Richard III.

            Even the “contemporary” quartos were published well after theatrical performance, and therefore after in-house editing and likely several rounds of audience feedback.

            If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. You were trying to use the Folio as an example of editing improving the supposedly unfinished work of Shakespeare. But the earlier versions are fine, so now you have to claim that those were edited, even though there is not any evidence for that.

            And audience feedback isn’t really the same thing as editing.

            —–

            Incidentally, I was just reading some stuff on Cormac McCarthy’s relationship with his editor, which apparently consisted mostly of McCarthy ignoring him. Philip Roth too has a finished manuscript before editors get ahold of it, and will only make minor change thereafter. Nabokov referred to editors as “pompous avuncular brutes” and wouldn’t let them do anything more than look at his punctuation.

            One of the most interesting writer/editor relationships was between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. Lish notably improved Carvers earlier work, but Carver’s best story “Cathedral” was written after he told Gish to go take a hike.

            The existence of many posthumously discovered masterpieces also attests to the superfluity of editors: Hadji Murad, The Mysterious Stranger, Billy Budd, most of Kafka, Confederacy of Dunces.

            Let’s not even mention the preference among literary scholars when preparing texts for going back to author’s original manuscript rather than the edited versions.

            Obviously, a lot of writers get some feedback at some stage, but for the really good ones the changes tend not to be terribly significant.

          • LHN says:

            When people leave out stuff of Shakespeare performances, it is almost always for a shorter run time, not because they think the stuff left out detracts from the play.

            Tellingly the only Shakespeare play people really think outright benefits from editing is Richard III.

            My impression is that there’s a consensus that the dumbshow in Hamlet is redundant and doesn’t add anything to the spoken play-within-a-play. Unless that’s changed?

          • Doctor Mist says:

            I love Shakespeare, but there are parts of it that are painfully tedious. If you ever see a performance that tries explicitly to be “complete” this will be obvious.

            My favorite example is from Romeo and Juliet. Juliet [spoiler warning] has taken the potion to simulate death. Her nurse, parents, and fiancee come in thinking to take her to her wedding, and they are horrified, bereft, miserable. They take her body off to the crypt where [spoiler] Romeo will find it and slay himself in his own grief. We are right at the cusp of the events that make this a famous tragedy. And then, BAM!, the action stops dead while some Capulet functionary pays and dismisses the musicians who had come to play for the wedding. It takes several minutes to do so, because it occurs to him to ask the musicians why poets say music has a silver sound; there’s a lot of back-and-forth, but eventually each musician answers slyly with an almost identical pun: “silver hath a sweet sound”, “musicians sound for silver”, “musicians have no gold for sounding”. It’s just endless. When I saw a performance with this scene, I thought WTF? but it’s there in the text — you just rarely see it on stage. For good reasons beyond just total run time.

            The smartest thing Branagh did in his film of Love’s Labour’s Lost was to reduce the Pageant of the Nine Worthies to fifteen seconds of newsreel footage.

  25. Honestly I kind of wish the rationalist diaspora was better at being a tribe than it is right now. For all the accusations I see out there about rationalist groupthink, sometimes it seems like all I see from rationalists is negativity about rationality: criticisms of Eliezer, people boldly taking stances against some piece of rationalist “orthodoxy” or another, people rushing to make sure it’s known that they’re not one of “those” rationalists who believes in silly things like cryonics or transhumanism or utilitarianism or whatever.

    And look, it’s not that Eliezer doesn’t deserve any criticism, or that LW is right about everything. Obviously he does and it isn’t. It’s just…I don’t know, doesn’t anyone still just think that rationality is great? That the sequences are straight-up amazing? It doesn’t seem like you can say that anymore without seeming naive, which is a shame.

    The rationalist community was initially really great about not taking cynicism to be a mark of sophistication, and that was one of my favourite things about it. Now I worry that people in the community are becoming more and more cynical about rationality itself, and that doesn’t strike me as a good trend.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      I’m inclined to agree with this. There’s a lot of negativity.

      That’s better than some kind of environment where you can’t criticize the Fearless Leader, but it is nice to occasionally hear about commonalities instead of disagreements.

      • expjpi says:

        I also agree with thepenforest. I think that criticizing the Fearless Leader while still supporting the community is something we all should practice.

    • blacktrance says:

      What I’d like to see is critiques of the rationalist community from a We Need Fifty Stalins perspective – something like that we’re leaving utility on the ground by being too normal, that we hold too much sacred and that interferes with instrumental rationality, too much Guess Culture, not enough “autism”, and so on.

      • FeepingCreature says:

        So I hear Vaccines cause autism! Not quite sure if that’s true, but if so, it opens some exciting opportunities… 😉

      • Deiseach says:

        we’re leaving utility on the ground by being too normal, …not enough “autism”

        Well that’s great if you’re a functional autistic, but for those not so functional, where does that leave them? And do the more functional autistics look after the less functional ones or have any interaction with them? Do the highly mathematically talented autistics have great talks and interaction with the autistics who have to wear helmets because they bang their heads off the wall and cause themselves injury* in Real Life, rather than the rosy idealised notions of online interaction and speculation? I think what goes largely unspoken and unexamined there is “more autistics like us“, not “more autistics in general”.

        My paternal family has a raft of largely undiagnosed mental and socialisation disorders and we’re probably mostly scattered somewhere along the autism spectrum all over the place (before it became politically incorrect to differentiate Asperger’s Syndrome from autism, a lot of us would probably count as aspies), and I would very much not like to produce offspring that have my problems. That’s a large part of why I never wanted to marry (and being asexual/aromantic was a happy and fortuitous coincidence there): I did not want a raft of autistic babies (though I had no idea autism was a thing) because no not a good idea, I would not be a good mother and the sum total of misery would be increased all round.

        We’re not all happy Silicon Valley employee types, we’re socially crippled (that includes ability for work, ability to form friendships and other relationships, functionally agoraphobic, etc.) and it’s not fun and I’m sorry, all the offended neurodivergent people, but “normal” is better.

        *Again, real-life examples from the job when applicants for social housing are giving medical necessity reasons; one family had two autistic kids out of three children, late teenage years, need separate rooms because of environmental stimuli sensitivity, cause themselves this kind of damage, etc.

        • blacktrance says:

          “Autism” is not autism (the mental condition), it’s a reclaimed insult, typically aimed at analytical thinking, consistent application of moral principles, empiricism, “nitpicking”, and other things in that cluster. Grey-tribe libertarianism, consequentialism, EA, New Atheism, and Ask Culture are all archetypal examples of “autism”.

          • Frog Do says:

            So it’s an insult you’re trying to turn into an applause light, is what I’m getting out of this.

          • Viliam says:

            I tried to complain that “nitpicking” is closely related to the problem we are debating here (too much negativity in the rationalist sphere)… then I realized that I am doing exactly the same thing here… and now I am lost in the recursion. 🙁

          • Deiseach says:

            “Autism” is not autism (the mental condition), it’s a reclaimed insult

            So you are telling me that “autism” is the new word for what previously was called “anal-retentive”? Then what about all the “yeah, we need more neurodivergence, we need non-neurotypicals, don’t want don’t need a cure for autism” that I see floating around?

            If you can be a non-autistic “autism” person, it would be helpful to indicate if you mean “I really am a diagnosed autistic” or “I’m reclaiming the insult, like “fag”!”

          • Nornagest says:

            So you are telling me that “autism” is the new word for what previously was called “anal-retentive”?

            I think the new word for “anal-retentive” (in the colloquial sense, not the Freudian sense that I’ll admit I don’t really understand) is “OCD”.

      • Viliam says:

        critiques of the rationalist community from a We Need Fifty Stalins perspective

        We need fifty Eliezers, because the existing one doesn’t write the Sequences anymore. We should perhaps use them sequentially, one Eliezer per year, so we have the next fifty years covered. (Then, the Friendly AI takes over.)

        Let’s say that Scott more or less qualifies for the role. He promotes good thinking and good manners among highly intelligent people. That’s still 48 Eliezers missing, and even using the “one Eliezer per year” rule we are still behind the schedule.

    • MicaiahC says:

      I agree. The thing that initially drew me to the rationalists was their sincerity and their willingness to get *excited* about things. It’s not that there shouldn’t be skepticism about a lot of things that rationalists espouse, but… how do I put it… do people have to be so world weary about how hard things are hard?

      • “The thing that initially drew me to the rationalists was their sincerity and their willingness to get *excited* about things.”

        Bingo– I wasn’t consciously aware of that, but it’s something which makes rationalists seem curiously un-modern, in a good way.

        • John Nerst says:

          If “modern” means “contemporary”, then sure. Otherwise it’s more like “un-postmodern” as modernism was quite a lot about getting excited over stuff…

          • I meant “modern” in the sense of “contemporary”.

            “Modern” did mean “contemporary” when I was growing up– I’m 62. I know both meanings (contemporary vs. a specific movement), but when did they split?

            This counts as an example of how hard it is to get language from a specific time right.

          • John Nerst says:

            Yeah, when modernity as such was new, “modern” and “contemporary” referred to the same period. When modernity got older, the difference between them got greater and the words drifted apart. I’m 32 and to me, using “modern” to mean “contemporary” feels a bit old-fashioned for that reason.

          • Bassicallyboss says:

            @John Nerst and @Nancy Lebovitz:

            I’m only 24, and I never realized “modern” had a meaning other than “contemporary” until I went to college. Nancy’s usage seems perfectly natural to me. Perhaps it’s regional? I’m from the Western (non-coastal) US. Or maybe it comes from reading so much Asimov as a child.

            For what it’s worth, I find it convenient to always capitalize Modern when discussing the movement/culture/period, and to never do so otherwise.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          Yeah, it’s the Enlightenment spirit, or the late Victorian Progress spirit.

          Which, as John Nerst points out, are both considered “modern” in the historical context. But I assume you meant modern in the sense of “modern art”.

      • moridinamael says:

        I blame CFAR. The excitement has been paywalled.

        • Nick Roy says:

          This.

          • Viliam says:

            I usually don’t post comments that don’t have more content than “upvoted”, but this is important enough to make an exception.

            Upvoted.

            I remember people talking about “raising the sanity waterline”. I don’t remember them adding “…about dozen people a year”.

        • I’m hoping that CFAR is in a development, testing, and training teachers phase, and will eventually be spreading their methods on a larger scale.

          • moridinamael says:

            I suppose I’m hoping that as well. In practice, CFAR has vacuumed up and hidden away the majority of the most passionate and dedicated Rationality-folk for a significant period of time. I would go so far as to say that CFAR has contributed to the demise of Less Wrong.

            I’m expecting one hell of a payoff, from an organization that has so far, from my perspective, done nothing but absorb money and energy.

          • Viliam says:

            CFAR started doing their workshops in 2012. It’s 2016 now. If four years were not enough, how much more do they need? Is there even an estimate? Are we going to have the same discussion in 2020 again?

            If the goal is to “raise the sanity waterline”, training a few dozen people (on the whole planet) each year is not enough; it’s a drop in the ocean.

            To expand, new teachers need to be taught. Not everyone wants to become a rationality teacher; there should be special workshops for those who do. The new teachers could be certified by CFAR; have their names displayed on the CFAR website. Then they would receive printed materials for their students (and printed materials for themselves), and go teach their own students. Then, they could provide most of the workshops, sending some of the collected money to CFAR, and CFAR would have more free time to explore new methods and update the materials.

            Geografically speaking, if you are not in the Bay Area, you are a “second-class rationalist”. If you want to get to the inner circle, you will be advised to move to the Bay Area. That’s bad for scaling. Also bad from the security point of view (one meteorite falls there: MIRI gone, CFAR gone), maybe people interested in existential risk should consider this, too. Economically speaking, if your product is people teaching people, you don’t want those people to live in one of the most expensive places on the planet, because that obviously increases the cost of the workshops.

            Now imagine how the situation could be different if people at every LW meetup could get CFAR-approved rationality lessons, which they could offer to local people, for dramatically lower costs, or even completely free (donating their own time to the cause). They could visit local high schools and universities, and even if most students wouldn’t get interested in the LW stuff, a fraction of them would.

            At this moment, unless CFAR changes, I guess the best strategy would be to have someone else develop their own, publicly available, curriculum. Duplicating the work, which is wasteful, but what else can we do?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Am I misunderstanding something? CFAR looks like it is composed of 12 people. Is there any reason to expect their output to be larger?

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Agreed there should be more bringing CFAR and MIRI to task happening, given amount of resources that go in there.

          • Viliam says:

            CFAR looks like it is composed of 12 people. Is there any reason to expect their output to be larger?

            12 people working for 4 years on developing a rationality curriculum? Okay, they probably were not 12 at the beginning, and they also have some overhead with organizing the workshops, etc. So let’s assume CFAR had 8 employees on average during those 4 years, and that half of their time was spent on the overhead. That still gives us 16 man-years.

            Yes, I would expect a larger output.

            (I also suspect that most people working in private sector would. Please correct me if I am wrong.)

          • CFAR is more careful than most organizations (especially in the human potential field!) to check on whether what they’re doing actually works. This is going to slow them down.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Nancy

            How do they go about checking that their methods work?

          • I believe CFAR checks in with students to find out whether they’ve used what they’ve learned and if so, whether their lives have improved.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            Why should that sort of checking slow them down significantly? I am worried you are just running interference for them.

          • Checking on what you’re doing– and possibly giving up tings that don’t work– is slower than just making stuff up and selling it. Why wouldn’t checking slow things down?

          • nimim. k.m. says:

            As an outsider, this whole discussion amazes me, and in the wrong way. (Caveat: I don’t know much else than occasional comments threads here on SSC and some LW sequences.)

            Rationality was supposed to be about, err, rationality? Now, what. Certified teachers? Some center that sucks money, outputs nothing, no outside checks?

            It also is terribly frustrating that if I want to discuss the philosophical concept of “rationality” as it has been understood by academia since forever, there would be “certified teachers of applied rationality” around, teaching some curriculum for *true* rationality.

            I don’t like it at all. If you have great philosophical ideas about rational thinking, developing them in secrecy and then commercializing them sounds very antithetical to the how Western philosophy is supposed to *work*. Your ideas are supposed to be tested by others. You’re not supposed to be salesman, you’re supposed to love truth.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “Rationality was supposed to be about, err, rationality?”

            No. LessWrong is built around EY attempting to solve the problem of friendliness (aka how can we build an AI that won’t kill us all). The entire foray into rationality appears to be an attempt to provide a common grounding for people to talk about and build on, as well as a way for him to get people to provide useful insights (more cynical people generally insert signaling, cult building or egomania).

            Unfortunately it ran into a couple problems (I agree with a lot of their basics so I’ll skip defending those); solving the basics is the easiest part since you can simply take a look at the current work and pick out the correct stuff. Actually coming up with new insights that are useful AND can be programmed is nontrivial and the best people at this already work at Google. People who like to learn about things on the internet and find a group are really, really bad at actually accomplishing anything. Finally transitioning from “this is a problem” to just finding a system for getting a solution is really hard; even if we accept CFAR is doing everything correctly, their approach might not even work (since there are multiple Ai paths and we don’t know what the best one or fastest one is).

            “If you have great philosophical ideas about rational thinking, developing them in secrecy and then commercializing them sounds very antithetical to the how Western philosophy is supposed to *work*. ”

            It isn’t secret.
            https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationality_materials

          • Viliam says:

            @ nimim. k.m.

            Creating the definition of rationality, that’s the easy part. The hard part is to make people actually use it in their lives.

            It is easy to memorize the “teacher’s password” that there is e.g. a selection bias, and that you should avoid it. It is hard to devise a good strategy for a human to actually avoid it, and to keep remembering “oh, this is the situation where I need to use the strategy for avoiding selection bias”.

            It also is terribly frustrating that if I want to discuss the philosophical concept of “rationality” as it has been understood by academia since forever, there would be “certified teachers of applied rationality” around, teaching some curriculum for *true* rationality.

            No, the concept is easy, but as far as I know, there are no generally known exercises that would actually make you more rational.

            And as soon as the exercises are published, anyone at academia can create their ad-hoc explanations for why they work. And ignoring possible copyright issues, anyone can use and/or teach the lessons.

            It’s just frustrating that the exercises are not published yet.

            If you have great philosophical ideas about rational thinking, developing them in secrecy and then commercializing them sounds very antithetical to the how Western philosophy is supposed to *work*. Your ideas are supposed to be tested by others.

            Every idea is first developed in private, and only then published. I believe that at one point CFAR will publish something. I just think that four years was enough time to already have the first version published.

    • chaosmage says:

      I very much agree. We used to have events that brought us together, if only online: New Sequence posts, new HPMOR chapters. I feel much was lost when that ended.

      Everyboy can reread the sequences and HPMOR at any time, but you don’t get that effect anymore where a new one comes out and you alert your friend about it and they already read it half an hour ago and want to tell you what they thought about it.

      Slate Star Codex now offers the same, and I’m pretty sure that’s one of the reasons why this is now the rallying flag for a lot of cool kids.

      I strongly identify as a rationalist, and for me it is very much because I have enjoyed rationalist events like Secular Solstices, the HPMOR wrap party, or the Less Wrong Europearn Community Weekend.

      In my view, communal events are the missing piece of this Tribe Theory. But of course I’d say that, because my pet project is to create an art performance/ritual that might aspire to be such a rallying flag.

      • Yrro says:

        I also think there’s a strong overlap between “people who feel like part of the rationalist tribe” and “people whose pleasure centers light up when they encounter a new insight.” When everyone is reading the Sequences, we’re all getting those wonderful Skinner box shocks from the same source, which is another great way to build a tribe.

      • Viliam says:

        I get it that Eliezer does not have time anymore to write new Sequences or new HPMOR. He has other things to do, and that’s how it should be.

        But then, someone else should take the role of the “community leader”. Like, officially, with Eliezer’s blessing. (I have always imagined that Cat Lavigne from CFAR would be perfect for this role.) Not sure what exactly would the role be about; probably just providing a common focus of attention, and adding some personal enthusiasm.

        Just a random idea at the moment… how about making a regular video news about the rationalist community? Something like, once in a week, briefly mention everything important that happened: scientific or technological progress in the world, most popular recent articles from the rationalist blogosphere, real-life events from the rationalist community such as meetups, etc. (Avoid this kind of nitpicking / negativity / status seeking by being obstinately contrarian. I mean, if something bad happens, for example an important scientific lab explodes and kills all scientists, mention that. Just please don’t analyze the basilisk for the millionth time, don’t criticize people for being insufficiently pessimistic about themselves, etc.) Of course the video itself would be published as an article on LW, and shared by anyone who feels like sharing.

        • discursive2 says:

          Well, nothing’s stopping you from doing it yourself! I bet if the videos are halfway decent and you publish on a regular cadence, people will pay attention.

          • Viliam says:

            I regret not having this idea one year ago when I had much more free time. Or at least I should have gotten some practice at making and processing videos.

            But I’ll try to convince someone to cooperate at the nearest LW meetup.

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      There was definitely groupthink about 2009-2011ish. It new seems cooler and eguet to position yourself as some sort of post rationalist.

    • Viliam says:

      Eliezer wrote about this topic in 2009. And generally, expressing pesimism about everything is a cheap way to seem wise. (Of course, sooner or later something fails, which lets you say “I told you!” And when people point out the things that didn’t fail, say “Just wait…”) I expected LW to be better than that, and it was, for a while.

      Most talking about “orthodoxy” is… well, putting a few different kinds of things together and pretending it’s all the same stuff. (1) Do you believe in the Bayes Theorem? It’s a f***ing equation; it’s either correct or incorrect, and it just happens to be correct. Anyone can feel free to disprove it mathematically. Do people also get accused of believing in the Pythagorean Theorem? (2) Eliezer’s explanation of the quantum physics? I admit that it seems quite reasonable to me, more reasonable than other explanations I have heard, but I didn’t actually study physics, so my impressions don’t mean that much. If someone disproves it, I’m definitely not going to get mad. (3) Eliezer prefers polyamory? So what. It’s a choice with obvious risks and obvious benefits, and if he believes he can manage it, who am I to judge. I wish him luck. Half of classical marriages end in divorce, so it’s not like people who go mono don’t take a huge risk. (4) Roko’s basilisk? The only reason why most people on LW ever think about it, is that some people keep repeating that “this is what LW is about”. Guys, you are the ones obsessed with the basilisk, not us.

      There is a difference between critical thinking and signalling critical thinking, and I am really tired from all this signalling. If someone believes that we are all horribly wrong, I encourage them to found another community and show us how to do it better. Write better Sequences, collect better thinkers, lead by example! All you need is a blog. As long as you are not spamming, you can even link to it from LW and SSC open threads.

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        > Do you believe in the Bayes Theorem? It’s a f***ing equation; it’s either correct or incorrect, and it just happens to be correct

        That’s rather disingenuous . There is more to the LW attitude to Bayes than just an equation,…look at the issues raised in Chapman’s critique, for instance. Its not about whether the equation is true it false, it is about whether Bayes is the only epistemology anyone needs, whether you can think real good just by applying an algorithm.

        > (2) Eliezer’s explanation of the quantum physics

        Some people did get mad when actual physicists criticized EYs physics. Its not the physics itself which is the issue, its the question of who gets to be treated as an authority.

        > (4) basilisk

        Again, the issue is what it tells you about the quality of LW epistemology, why it wasn’t just laughed out

        > There is a difference between critical thinking and signalling critical thinking

        Yes, and LW has received real critical thinking.

        >. If someone believes that we are all horribly wrong, I encourage them to found another community and show us how to do it better.

        Why is a community necessary? Is the only solution to wrong groupthink some other kind of group think?

        Why is self correction not an option?

        Hasnt self correction occurred? As noted elsewhere in the comments, many rationalists have quietly dropped cryonics, strong Bayes, etc.

        • Viliam says:

          I would say that the LW attitude is that “reasoning is probabilistic”.

          This epistemic position is not obvious. There are many people who simply classify statements as “true” or “false”. And when they find a statement without obvious proof either way, they use some armchair reasoning to conclude which way it should be, and if anyone wants to convince them otherwise, the burden of proof is on them. And sometimes as an exercise in ‘skepticism’ they make the burden as big as possible, which means that no one can make them admit being wrong about anything. As a consequence, when two people of this kind disagree with each other, the whole debate is focused on whose armchair reasoning is the right one, because it is obvious to both of them that whoever gets the burden of proof will inevitably lose, because evidence actually plays no role in this kind of reasoning. Another frequent gambit is to invoke Popper (most likely a strawman version of him) to argue that nothing can ever be proved, and hypotheses can only be falsified. Again, when two people of this kind meet, one side will argue that “X, not Y” is the hypothesis that can only be falsified but never proved, therefore X never wins, while the other side will argue that “Y, not X” is actually the hypothesis that can only be falsified but never proved, therefore Y never wins. Again, evidence actually plays no role in this kind of reasoning.

          But as long as you accept the premise that reasoning is probabilistic, I guess the conclusion that upon encountering probabilistic evidence you should update your probabilistic opinion according to the Bayes Rule is quite straightforward, at least for people with math background.

          Of course in real life you can use a heuristic that approximates the Bayes Rule. But the reason why the heuristic works, and the degree to which it works, is the similarity to the Bayes Rule. Also, even with using the Bayes Rule, your conclusions can systematically only be as good as your evidence. Proper updating prevents you from losing the information you already gained, but it cannot itself gather more information from the territory.

          > Why is a community necessary? Is the only solution to wrong groupthink some other kind of group think?

          Because humans are social species, and because each individual has limited power, including brain power. That is something that ‘our kind’ habitually underestimates, because we are culturally conditioned to compete against each other instead of cooperation.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            “Reasoning is probabilistic” is the motte — that’s the kind of stuff I say to what LW-adjacent people actually say, re: Bayes, which I think ranges from crazy to misinformed.

            It comes across that you have a deep psychological need for this community, which is a valid need, and I don’t want to rob you. But I will suggest that this type of community be divorced from important ideas (since what you build a community around is somewhat arbitrary, after all). I have been saying this to rationalists for a while, rationality has to be like a job. Mixing important ideas and communities is dangerous.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            ““Reasoning is probabilistic” is the motte — that’s the kind of stuff I say to what LW-adjacent people actually say, re: Bayes, which I think ranges from crazy to misinformed.”

            You are going to need to expand because wiki gives
            “There are a variety of competing interpretations; All have problems. Major interpretations include classical probability, subjective probability and frequency interpretations.”

            and subjective probability links to Bayesianism.

          • Ilya Shpitser says:

            I can hunt some things up from LW (not the wiki), if you want. I stopped posting there, though. It’s not very hard to find.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @Villam

            > I would say that the LW attitude is that “reasoning is probabilistic”.

            Is that what LW means by Bayes? Is it what you mean by Bayes? If so, why describe it as a [redacted] equation.

            The equation is easy enough to defend, but not something thats very relevant, by itself, to making the world a better place.

            The non-mathematical claim that reasoning is probablistic is more worth making a fuss about, but harder to defend than the [redacted] equation..and doesn’t amount to the [redacted] equation.

            You give a list of things, using probabilities, using evidence, actually updating, and so on, which typically get tacked on to the wider , more-than-an-equation versions of Bayes.

            The strongest version of Bayes says that is is pretty much all you need. I am not sure if you agree with that.

            I agree that most people are terrible at these. But they are also terrible at old-fashioned, bivalent, Aristotelean logic. They would be better reasoners if they could do bivalent logic, even if they might be much better reasoners if they could also do probablistic reasoning. The point being that Bayes isn’t an obvious entry-level, bare minimum thing.

            It also isn’t a ceiling. What we don’t have, as Chapman points out, is a formalisation that deals with both probabilities and quantification over objects. Bayes is not the ultimate theory.

            It’s also not clear what the point of teaching better reasoning to ordinary people is. Is it supposed to make their own lives better? A lot complain that it hasn’t. Is it supposed to change society, one person at a time? Again, it is difficult see the gain, unless you outraged by the very existence of theists and copehagenists.

            In more science orientated societies than the US, people tend to just believe scientists rather than trying to work it all out themselves.

            > Because humans are social species, and because each individual has limited power, including brain power.

            That’s two different explanations which pull in different directions.

            If you are joining a rationalist community just because it feels good, then you may be undermining you truth-seeking, you run the risk of undermining your truth-seeking through groupthink. LW’s critics may be better rationalists as a result of *not* forming a community.

            Alternatively, if it is a matter of using combined brainpower to solve a difficult problem,then LW’s critics are already in a community (albeit one without a fixed body of doctrine), the community of science, or academia in general).

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Ilya
            “I can hunt some things up from LW (not the wiki), if you want.”

            Sure.

            TAG
            “Is that what LW means by Bayes? Is it what you mean by Bayes? If so, why describe it as a [redacted] equation.”

            Because that is what wiki gives. It is the only category under subjective probability.

            “The strongest version of Bayes says that is is pretty much all you need. I am not sure if you agree with that.”

            http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/
            ???First, the Bayesian formalisms in their full form are computationally intractable on most real-world problems. No one can actually calculate and obey the math, any more than you can predict the stock market by calculating the movements of quarks.

            This is why we have a whole site called “Less Wrong”, rather than simply stating the formal axioms and being done. There’s a whole further art to finding the truth and accomplishing value from inside a human mind: we have to learn our own flaws, overcome our biases, prevent ourselves from self-deceiving, get ourselves into good emotional shape to confront the truth and do what needs doing, etcetera etcetera and so on.???

            “It’s also not clear what the point of teaching better reasoning to ordinary people is.”

            The original goal was “lets get a bunch of smart people and solve friendliness”. Then… well, think of it as what happened with the MLP fandom. Guys, we have to tell EVERYONE. What followed was mission creep because Knowledge Is Good. No comment on how un/productive this was/is. I assume the people involved love it.

            “Alternatively, if it is a matter of using combined brainpower to solve a difficult problem,then LW’s critics are already in a community (albeit one without a fixed body of doctrine), the community of science, or academia in general).”

            Can you name other groups trying to deal with Friendliness and the differences in their approaches? I’m aware there are other AI researchers, but I don’t know of many who deal with amateurs to solve their problems.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            > First, the Bayesian formalisms in their full form are computationally intractable on most real-world problems. No one can actually calculate and obey the math, any more than you can predict the stock market by calculating the movements of quarks.

            I know

            > This is why we have a whole site called “Less Wrong”,

            That doesn’t explain why all the extra, non-algorithmic stuff gets called Bayes, nor why “Bayes”, on other occasions, labels the equation alone.

            > The original goal was “lets get a bunch of smart people and solve friendliness”.

            If you want to Solve friendlie3nss, you presumably need specialists in AI, philosophy, DT, etc. It is not clear how much progress can be made by teaching smart non specialists. It is definitely not the case that generic smartness substitutes for domain knowledge. It is also not clear why this process has to be detached from mainstream AI.

            > Then… well, think of it as what happened with the MLP fandom.

            I don’t know anything about My Little pony. I’m not a little girl.

            > Can you name other groups trying to deal with Friendliness and the differences in their approaches? I’m aware there are other AI researchers, but I don’t know of many who deal with amateurs to solve their problems.

            If it’s all about friendliness, why were MWI or atheism even brought in? The ground shifts constantly. The original question was why you needed a community to be rational.

          • Viliam says:

            @ Ilya Shpitser

            Yes, I do have a deep psychological need for the kind of community of which LessWrong is currently the only example I know. Especially the meetups, because writing online is much less satisfying.

            Having this said, what’s actually so bad about communities? Programmers have their communities. Does it make them worse programmers? Does it distract them from real programming? Or does it provide motivation to explore and master new skills? Even people who have a serious job, whether it is at academia or private sector, sometimes talk to each other during the lunch break.

            There is also the kind of communities where it is all talk and nothing gets ever done, and I agree that their value is limited to providing some psychological comfort. I expect the rationalist community to do better, but I agree that there is a risk of merely having “rationality” as an applause light.

            @ TheAncientGeek

            I see the Bayes Theorem mostly as a tool to prevent slipping from “reasoning is probabilistic” into “therefore everything is exactly the same shade of gray, and I can believe whatever I want”. It gives strict rules to uncertainty, and allows to explain why e.g. you weren’t 100% sure yesterday, and you aren’t 100% sure now, but still after seeing the evidence you can now be more sure than yesterday.

            It is probably useful mostly to people who already have a decent mathematical background but haven’t heard about this specific equation. Then it can “click” most powerfully. Or maybe people who have learned the equation at school, but never actually thought about how could it apply to real life.

            For people with worse math background it probably only gives some assurance that probabilistic reasoning doesn’t lead into completely arbitrary outcomes. Plus they can learn some simplified extreme cases, such as if something is 10^9 improbable, and you get a 10^3 evidence in favor of it, it still remains 10^6 improbable. Instead of merely thinking that 1:1000 is a damned strong evidence and everyone should be convinced by it. It can also explain how most studies with p=0.02 fail to replicate, without disproving the math or the scientific method as a whole.

            If you are joining a rationalist community just because it feels good, then you may be undermining you truth-seeking, you run the risk of undermining your truth-seeking through groupthink.

            Let’s try reverting this. If I could take a pill that makes me feel bad, would it improve my truth-seeking?

            Because it’s not like I lived in a perfect vacuum, isolated from all human contact, until I decided to step out of that vacuum and join a rationalist community. Instead, I was in contact with other kind of humans, also exposed to all kinds of emotional influences and biases. Except that these other people didn’t even try overcoming them, and a few of them actively promoted some kind of bullshit. Replacing them with rationalists was an obvious improvement.

            LW’s critics are already in a community (albeit one without a fixed body of doctrine), the community of science, or academia in general).

            That’s great for solving academic problems within their own specialization; I am not sure about generally “winning at life”. I have seen academics who were quite irrational outside of their specialization. But I agree that academia in general is probably much better than most of the alternatives.

  26. Walter says:

    This contextualizes something that’s always puzzled me. So, I’m still close with an old fraternity brother from back in college. We were getting together to hang, and I noticed in a corner a Klan robe. I asked him wtf, and the way he tells it the Klan aren’t racist. Or, not mostly. Or rather, they are formally racist, but who’s got the time? I’m dubious, but he’s adamant that its a social club that it all about rituals and stuff, and that when they get together they spend basically 0 time talking about hating on black folks unless there are new people there, and even then the old timers find it slightly annoying.

    I never really understood how that could be the case, but in light of this article it makes a lot more sense.

    • FacelessCraven says:

      http://www.npr.org/2014/11/14/363896136/the-silver-dollar-lounge

      More generally, social pressure can push people tighter together. I think that for some groups, the pounding on their walls is the only thing holding the walls up.

      • Ghatanathoah says:

        This is a common explanation given for why Judeaism survived centuries of anti-Semitism but is doing far less well in an era of tolerance.

        • I’ve made that argument with regard to the Romani–that North American tolerance may destroy them. On the other hand, the Amish are doing just fine despite having a generally positive public image and being surprisingly successful in getting special treatment on issues such as Social Security and compulsory schooling.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          Well, at least that means that given more recent events both geopolitically and culturally, Judaism’s future is now assured for decades to come. 🙁

          • Hlynkacg says:

            I would hope so.

            If Judaism somehow get’s wiped out in the next 50 years, I think it’s safe to say that something has likely gone seriously wrong.

  27. SJ says:

    I will say that I was mildly surprised when I ran into an obvious tribal-religion sentiment on the front page of LessWrong. It was a post about the future of the movement, brimming with happiness about movement members initiating their children into the values and practices of the sect…er, tribe.

    The effect was a little disconcerting, but not really off-putting.

  28. Daniel says:

    Can anyone help explain to me why some things that have the conditions to become tribes don’t? and similarly, why tribes end/merge?

    Thanks

  29. caethan says:

    > But Christianity is about being part of the Christian tribe, and although that tribe started around the Bible…

    Uh, Christianity pre-dates the Bible [sic, there are multiple texts referred to as the Bible] as a unified text by literally centuries. The oldest parts of the New Testament are letters from major players in the formation of the Christian “tribe” (i.e., apostles) to various little churches all over the Roman world, doing their best to cohere them into a single institution.

    • Evan Þ says:

      Literally centuries? We know the New Testament was already written by the mid-second-century, because people were already arguing about what books were part of the canon. That gives you at most 120 years of Christianity before the Bible – and very strong reason to think it’s much less.

      • Arguably, the Bible as such didn’t exist until after everyone had finished arguing about what books were part of the canon. I don’t know how much that changes the timeframe, mind you?

        • Evan Þ says:

          I suppose you could say that (in which case the Bible slightly postdates Constantine; Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History mentions still-extant debates about a handful of books), but that’s disproportionately elevating the disputes over the agreed-upon context. The Gospels and Pauline epistles – undisputed by the time of our earliest sources, in the mid-second-century (okay, except for Marcion, who was ruled a heretic) – give you a very solid theology to found Christianity around. III John or Revelation or the Shepherd of Hermas adds some nice details, but it doesn’t even begin to touch the core – nor was their canonicity ever held to be a tribal marker.

          • Mary says:

            But did Christianity begin in the mid second century?

            Now, the Reformation, THAT began around (their interpretations of) the Bible. And Protestants have a certain tendency to write that back into history. But many Protestant-to-Catholic converts cite serious study of history as the source of their conversion.

          • Evan Þ says:

            … You’re right; I went too far in my last comment. Christianity was founded on the teaching of (the Holy Spirit through) the apostles, which was very quickly recorded in the New Testament, and then that became the central defining mark (or, one of the central marks) of Christianity.

      • Mary says:

        One decade before the Bible would be enough to prove that it didn’t start around the Bible.

        The process by which the Bible came to its current form started very early, but the process was pre-existing Christianity.

    • Furslid says:

      Yes, Christianity is old. However, the modern American Christian tribe isn’t the original Christian tribe. There have been multiple different tribal structures using Christianity since then.

      Thinking of Christianity as a tribe is not the members saying “I’m a Christian.” It’s the members saying “I’m a Christian, not an X, Y, or Z.”

      Brand new Christians vs mainstream Judaism and Roman overlords in Judea.
      Underground Christianity vs Roman civic religion and other mystery cults.
      Official Roman Christianity vs barbarian encroachment.
      Feudal Catholic Europe vs non-Christian fringes and imperial Byzantium.
      Catholics vs Protestants.
      —–Christianity moves to the Americas—–
      The dominant local denomination vs native religions and transplanted African cultures.
      My denomination vs other denominations, religions without much American presence, and fledgling secular tribes.
      All of us Christians vs Muslims and mature secular tribes.

      The latest system of tribes with Christianity arose within living memory. Within living memory the Mormons moved from a competing tribe to part of the Christian tribe. That doesn’t look like a Christian tribe stretching back to Saint Paul or Jesus.

  30. Esquire says:

    This post gives me one of my favorite feelings: the (possibly false) sense that I am reading a thoughtful presentation of what I have long ago worked out for myself but never quite articulated.

    • Creutzer says:

      Yes, I had the same here. I think this is a known thing for some of Scott’s posts to do. This nudging of ideas from the realm of the semi-explicit into the explicit is a great service to everyone, and not one easy to perform.

    • Lambert says:

      Same. I also feel like Golding was trying to express the same or similar ideas with Lord of the Flies.

    • Frog Do says:

      The jargon is “insight porn”, IIRC.

      • William Newman says:

        I don’t know any jargon for it in math, but the distinction seems to exist fairly strongly there. Some mathematical concepts tend to just surprise people even though the concepts are very applicable to the real world — imaginary numbers, eigenvalues, and the behavior of analytic functions, e.g. Other concepts — like integral and basis set and perturbation theory — can be at least somewhat recognizable to people who’ve thought about physical problems before they reached the relevant math. The precise formalizations are new, but the basic concept is “what I have long ago worked out for myself but never quite articulated”.

      • Esquire says:

        Huh, I always thought “insight porn” referred to TED-talk type stuff: very light on rigorous grounding, but heavy on “gee whiz that really makes me think”.

  31. Mark says:

    This is fine, but doesn’t give a good feel for how religious people actually think. Evangelical Christians really do believe in what they think the bible says. They don’t believe that there are contradictions. They wouldn’t believe they are a tribe (I’ve met people who didn’t think Christianity was a religion because it was so obviously correct).

    People are really good at convincing themselves of things. And really good at compartmentalizing. Not that this is news to anyone here.

    • Interesting that they’d apparently internalized the idea that “religion” means stuff that isn’t necessarily true.

      • Evan Þ says:

        I grew up on the borders of the conservative Christian subculture (and I’m still there), and that definition was certainly floating around. A popular saying was “Religion is man’s search for God. Christianity is different; it’s God’s search for man.”

        • stillnotking says:

          My ex-wife, raised in a conservative evangelical Christian household, kept the terminology even after becoming an atheist later in life. The word “religion” never included Christianity when she used it, and even more amusingly to me, “Christian” didn’t include anyone but Protestants. She would say things like “Christians and Catholics”, then ask me why I was chuckling.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      I’ve more often seen people who try to make that claim saying that the difference is that ‘religions’ are about blindly following rules, whereas [insert my system of supernatural beliefs and the behaviours that follow from them] is about having a personal relationship with [insert deity].

      It takes a lot of chutzpah to make that claim and expect anyone from outside to take it seriously, but you can kind of understand it. If you do experience whatever mystical sense of being-in-touch-with-the-divine that your religion cultivates, and you believe that you get those sensations because you are actually being put in touch with the divine, and that that is because your beliefs about the divine are correct and rival sets of beliefs are incorrect, then it follows that anyone who claims to similarly be in touch with the divine while espousing incompatible beliefs is likely lying or mistaken, and is simply practising empty ritual that doesn’t actually curry [insert deity’s] favour. If you are an X-ist, and you believe that X-ism is the true path, and that Y-ism and Z-ism are mere error and superstition, there will be a potentially unbearable amount of cognitive dissonance with the idea that X-ism, Y-ism and Z-ism are all instances of the same category of thing.

      • Alexander Stanislaw says:

        I’ve more often seen people who try to make that claim saying that the difference is that ‘religions’ are about blindly following rules, whereas [insert my system of supernatural beliefs and the behaviours that follow from them] is about having a personal relationship with [insert deity].

        I’ve only heard this form protestant Christians. (devout) Catholics don’t think this way and neither do Muslims. Not sure about other religions.

        • Mark says:

          This is generalizing the experience of a lot of people. But I guess it could be true on balence. Do you have anything to back it up?

          I’m genuinely interested, I’ve only know the inside of a wacky strain of American protestantism.

          • Alexander Stanislaw says:

            Re: Catholicism – 17 years of going to church and being an amateur theology fanatic in the last 2 before de-converting.

            Regarding Islam, mostly from reading parts of the Quran and listening to how Muslims talk about other religions in mosques, and other gatherings.

            I’ve never heard anything about a “personal relationship” in either one. In both cases other religions are wrong because they worship false God’s or deny the truth of the one true God. And from Catholicism to Protestantism – they think they are wrong because their beliefs are not grounded in anything biblical or theological – particularly the “by faith alone” concept. I’m not saying I know anything about Protestantism – I just know the Catholic attitude towards them.

            I have a suspicion form reading this comment’s section and from Scott – that almost no one here has actually met a really smart person who takes religion seriously. Not a set of customs and etiquette. Not a fuzzy philosophy for how to live your life with some mystical stuff tacked on. But rather a real and accurate way of describing the world, that isn’t even that different from the way we usually understand the world. I would write more on that, but I’ve run out of time on my WastenoTime plugin

          • Anonymous says:

            I think there’s probably a reason most of us haven’t met a really smart person over the age of say 25, that takes religion seriously on an intellectual level.

          • dndnrsn says:

            What does “takes religion seriously” mean? Is a scholar of religion who, while not personally religious, treats it with respect taking it seriously?

          • Hlynkacg says:

            Speak for yourself Anon, alternately take dndnrsn’s advice and be a bit more specific about what you mean by “smart” and “seriously”.

          • Anonymous says:

            Alexander provided such a definition: “But rather a real and accurate way of describing the world, that isn’t even that different from the way we usually understand the world.”

          • Mark says:

            I actually get the same vibe as Alexander S about the comment section here.

            I think “the pesonal relationship with god” is more doctrinal than evangelicals would like to admit. In practice it can mean almost anything.

            So the post could be reworded:

            I’ve more often seen people who try to make that claim saying that the difference is that ‘religions’ are about blindly following rules, whereas [insert my system of supernatural beliefs and the behaviours that follow from them] is about [something I have been conditioned to think is obvious].

          • dndnrsn says:

            I spent a bunch of time around academics of religion and people studying to be ministers, and I can confirm that there are such people.

            Even if we rule that those with liberal sentiments in regards to religion don’t really take it seriously because they have found reasons to reject the epistemology and rules of the 10th century BC or 1st century AD or whatever, there are definitely conservatives who are intelligent: Biblical scholars who have the brainpower to learn multiple dead languages and function in academia, Orthodox rabbis who are very learned, etc.

          • I have a suspicion […] that almost no one here has actually met a really smart person who takes religion seriously.

            I have: part of my wife’s extended family. I haven’t spent enough time with them to have any useful insight, but I can affirm their existence.

            The little time I did spend with them was … disconcerting.

          • Anonymous says:

            I didn’t intend to imply none exist. Just that it’s unsurprising that many of us have never met any. At least among Orthodox Jews, those that are deeply religious and have significant interaction with the outside world are few and far between. R. Twersky was one such, but I’m afraid I have had the pleasure.

          • “I have a suspicion form reading this comment’s section and from Scott – that almost no one here has actually met a really smart person who takes religion seriously. ”

            Do you count meeting people in their books? GKC surely qualifies, and there seem to be a fair number of GKC fans here. So does C.S. Lewis.

    • Anonymous says:

      You hint at what’s going on with the word compartmentalizing. They are saying the words that demonstrate loyality to the tribe — “Of course the Bible is inerrant” but they haven’t internalized that belief as their actions show.

    • illidanstr says:

      Disagree!

      Most “Evangelical Christians” fit Scott’s description perfectly. Yes, they *say* the right things, but that is not the same as actually living their life as if they believed them.

      In the most conservative churches of the most conservative denominations (certain branches of Calvinism, some of the rightward branches of Baptists) – there are segments of the population who actually hold to the text and beliefs above all else – above tribalism and popularity. Not surprisingly, this causes immense turmoil. Groups leaving / getting kicked out of churches and founding new ones, etc.

      • Wrong Species says:

        Just because they don’t live up to their beliefs doesn’t mean they don’t believe it. No one lives up to the ideals of Jesus, does that mean that every Christian is a liar? Of course not, it just means they aren’t perfect.

        • Jiro says:

          It’s not just that they don’t follow their beliefs. It’s that the way their society works depends on them not following their beliefs, to the point where anyone who tries to follow them is at best considered weird and at worst kicked out.

      • Alexander Stanislaw says:

        What is your experience with Evangelics? Most of my family is Catholic and I would say they absolutely believe the teachings of Catholicism – that there is a very specific path to heaven and all else leads to eternal damnation.

  32. A H says:

    Blindness to how Ideology works is probably the biggest bias of liberals and rationalists (as uber-liberals).

    This is the basic argument:
    1. Human Groups take certain forms regardless of ideology
    2. Therefore ideology is irrelevant to human group formation.

    the problem with this argument is in the first premise. There is a hidden assumption there that it is possible for humans to form groups absence from the influence of ideology. Take the Robber’s Cave experiment. This is far from a controlled experiment as these childern had been raised in an American environment with explicit ideological messages about competition and teamsmanship.

    Of course psycho-social effects are important in group formation, but in groups that effect history in a meaningful way ideology is fundamental.

    This passage shows were you go wrong:

    “If you take only one thing from this essay, it’s that communities are best understood not logically but historically. If you want to understand the Shia, don’t reflect upon the true meaning of Ali being the rightful caliph, understand that a dispute involving Ali initiated ethnogenesis, the resulting culture picked up a bunch of features and became useful to various people, and now here we are.”

    If you want to understand communities historically, you have to understand them ideologically. To say that “Ali initiated ethnogenesis” is to say he started a group, which is to say nothing interesting at all. Late antiquity was a time of massive ideological movements, the issue of the proper ideology/theology that ruler should have was the issue of the day (think constantine). The issue between the early Shia and Sunni was about the proper ideological foundation for rulership under an islamic theology. In framework, even miltary success can be seen as an ideological act because it was taken as evidence of god’s favor. These strong ideological foundations were critical to Shia success. (Though modern Shia Sunni conflict has more to do with the Safavid conversion of Iran to shiaism, than with the original Shia Sunni split.)

    So the answer to your question:

    “I think some of the most interesting sociological questions revolve around whether there are any ways around the practical and moral difficulties with tribalism, what social phenomena are explicable as the struggle of tribes to maintain themselves in the face of pressure, and whether tribalism continues to be a worthwhile or even a possible project at all.”

    Is that Rationalists or progressives or whatever force for progress you back needs to have an explicit ideology that is targeted at converting people. Basically you need to have propaganda. And you need critical eyes on this ideology to make sure it doesn’t diverge into the scary places we know ideology can go.

  33. Daniel Speyer says:

    Despite the tribal attractor, some groups of people *are* about something. Maybe not 100%, but not 0% either.

    I would not want to see the rationalist community become just a tribe and forget about becoming more rational.

    Partly that’s because rationality is important. But it’s also because groups that aren’t about anything don’t seem like very pleasant places. After all, if you’re not doing the thing, you’re doing something else. Like building increasingly-elaborate shibboleths. Or engaging in malicious gossip. It’s a lot like what Paul Graham called school, prison, [or] ladies-who-lunch society.

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      Yes. Tribalism is an attractor, but pure ideology free tribalism isn’t stable,, because it opens the tribe to the accusation that the are a pointless talking shop.Groups With a Goal (teams?) need ideology, its their mission statetement.

  34. Ryukendo says:

    Congratulations Scott, you have outdone yourself. May this post become an everlasting classic.

    And are you sure *you’re* not the rightful caliph? I’ll join the rebellion if you need me.

    On a more serious note, it is nevertheless true that, cultural and political groups have grown larger and larger throughout human history, and more and more tribes have been able to occupy the same space, generally controlled by a state, with fewer and fewer threats of violence between political coalitions. Political scientists often ascribe this to changes in ideology facilitating easier and easier interactions with non-kin, with the Axial age philosophies and religions in Bronze Age Eurasia representing a flowering of intellectual experimentation, as tribe and kinship-based communities transitioned to societies where unrelated coalitions of individuals can cooperate to generate economic resources or hold political power.

    I guess this should increase our expectation of how much ideologies can modify human behaviour, as opposed to just being symbolic markers? Though there is a vast gulf separating totemistic ancestor-worship + honor-based morality in clans, vs. the impersonal Gods and abstract, private philosophies held by families in complex civilisations, which may be much more different on some level than, say, liberalism vs communism, or democrat party liberalism vs conservatism, which are the types of ‘ideological difference’ that we are used to thinking about in our modern societies.

    Or maybe the effects of ideologies on human behaviour operate on a different level, or derive from a completely different type of ‘intellectual culture’ or different process of culture-based causation, than the level of ‘ideology as a symbolic marker for tribes’? Or, despite the fact that ideology is a symbolic marker most of the time, maybe the relationship between ideology and cultural norms is still there, just that it tends to be occluded by short-term fluctuations in culture due to idiosyncratic factors? I tend to suspect that changes in ideology within a tribe tend to have little impact in the short term, say decades or a couple generations, but huge impacts in the long term, over centuries and millenia.

    • Jiro says:

      I don’t think that this post of Scott’s is all that good.

      It’s certainly true that human groups have some tribal aspects which are independent of the paritulcar ideology of the group. But “some aspects” isn’t really the same thing as “are based on to such a degree that anything else is insignificant by comparison”.

      • Ryukendo says:

        Jiro, I don’t think this post is very new in any sense. I just think that this article is a great way for people, especially more conventional-thinking people who process things on an object-level, to get some insight via an outside view.

        Also, won’t you agree that the ideologies pre-and post- Axial Age are very different in the effects that they had on the tribes that held them? Scott thinks we may have to get rid of tribes altogether, I don’t think so. Tribes, as imagined communities, have changed a great deal already, and a study of the types of effects that ideologies have pre and post Axial Age may tell us a great deal about the kinds of ideologies that both survive in, and support, a world with little conflict.

  35. TD says:

    “On the one hand, their argument might be convincing. On the other, you are pretty sure that if everyone agreed on this, your culture would be destroyed.”

    This was a South Park episode.

  36. Simon Penner says:

    I’m happy to hear someone else recognize this about video games. Lots of people when faced with the various rhetoric around GG and related issues, seem to come to the position “why is this such a big deal?”. This is why it is a big deal. This is why it’s so upsetting to so many people that the indie game elites and their journalist friends are pushing so hard for their political issues. These sorts of changes will destroy the existing culture of gaming. It’s really easy for outsiders to walk in and say some variant of “why do you want to defend 12 year olds calling you fa**ot online?”, but they don’t understand. The toxicity is irrelevant. The point is that this is a tribe for people who are largely outcast from other tribes, and it’s all that they have.

    I think there’s a large parallel between the ongoing efforts of feminist and social justice folk to ‘clean up’ the gaming communities, and the idea of gentrification in a neighbourhood. This is cultural gentrification. People with large amounts of social capital have identified a culture that they really want to have/be a part of. But it’s got all this unpleasant riffraff in it. They just want to clean it up and make it nicer, so it can reach it’s full potential. And if it happens to displace the existing residents? Who cares, they were probably criminals anyway.

    Having been one of those outcasts myself, but being bothered by a lot of the toxicity that SJ people talk about, this puts me in a frustrating position. I don’t like the slurs. I don’t like the ridiculous hypersexualized characters and all the games about graphic violence. But I appreciate the community that I had, and I know it means even more to some of my friends than it did to me. I found myself having to fight against ideas that I would prefer, because I knew that they will destroy one of the few cultural havens available to me.

    It feels today that I’m not allowed to like video games anymore. Venues for gamers are filled not with the weird aspergic nerds who accept me as their own, but pale skinny tattooed folk who talk about how my demographic is destroying their city. The conferences and conventions that haven’t been completely commericalized and opened to the masses, put up with constant complaints and demands from a vocal minority of outsiders (not unlike what my friends and I are dealing with right now) . The publications that are ostensibly for my group, tell me that my group is dead. Of course I’d rather my community be more pleasant, less offensive. But in the process, the cultural appropriators destroyed our tribe and replaced our rallying flag with their own.

    I don’t get to be a gamer anymore. I don’t get to meet interesting people who like me, just a bunch of strangers who make it clear that I’m not welcome. And this in the community I thought was my home. But in the process of cleaning up the place, the cultural gentrifiers destroyed its soul, and now I have one fewer tribe

    • Nita says:

      this is a tribe for people who are largely outcast from other tribes

      I tried to imagine what “other tribes” you’re talking about, and failed. Could you give a few examples?

      Maybe at some point in the distant past games used to be a nerdy pastime, but it’s been a huge mainstream industry for a while. They’re not making billions of dollars in revenue by catering to an outcast minority.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/06/06
        https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/11/08

        As recently as 2000 or so, gaming was still pretty damn niche. WoW, Halo, and COD started the breakthrough into the mainstream, and the app store finished it relatively recently. On the other hand, the rapid popularization burns hot but shallow, and there’s still a core who are in it for the long haul, and resent the interlopers bitterly. COD makes billions of dollars, and it is genuinely a high-quality product… and it is still mocked and looked down on by a good chunk of the audience, and one reason for that is that it’s seen as designed for the interlopers, not the tribe. Ditto for mobile gaming, which is pretty roundly reviled.

        • Nita says:

          FC, 2000 was 16 years ago.

          So, whose interests do the most ardent defenders of modern “gamer culture” really represent — the original nerds’ or the douchiest of the mainstream “interlopers'”?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – “FC, 2000 was 16 years ago.”

            The first version of Dwarf Fortress was released in 2006. There’s a guy I’ve recently befriended who was in grade school in 2000; he’s still deeply messed up, utterly alienated, and gaming is one of the few things in his life that have brought him anything approaching joy.

            “So, whose interests do the most ardent defenders of modern “gamer culture” really represent — the original nerds’ or the douchiest of the mainstream “interlopers’”?”

            Prior to Ants, definitely the former. From 2000 to 2010 or so, the main push in gamer culture was for social acceptance. This was most obvious in things like the fight against Jack Thompson in the early and mid part of the decade, and the “Are Games Art” debate kicked off by Roger Ebert in the later part. As the threat of censorship waned, the community started talking a lot more about what it actually wanted to be. There was strong pushback against the mainstream, lowest-common-denominator output from the triple-A industry, which ultimately culminated in the indie explosion once digital delivery was available through Steam and XBOXLive. Harassment and toxic behavior, female characters as fanservice and the monotony of gratuitous violence were live topics throughout the community, things the community generally agreed were problems that should be fixed. Motte-style Social Justice ideas were the de facto norm.

            Post-Ants, a sizable chunk of the community concluded that the “douchiest of the mainstream interlopers” are preferable to Social Justice types. I don’t think anyone really knows how large that chunk is, but it’s apparently large enough to make a profit off of, and it includes me and a lot of my friends. We can live with them; no one can live with SJ.

            [EDIT] – This took about thirty tries to post. For some reason, posting the original wording of that last paragraph resulted in the whole post automatically being deleted. Some sort of word-filter system?

            [EDITEDIT] apparently “orbedud” reversed is a forbidden word? grah.

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            [EDIT] – This took about thirty tries to post. For some reason, posting the original wording of that last paragraph resulted in the whole post automatically being deleted. Some sort of word-filter system?

            [EDITEDIT] apparently “orbedud” reversed is a forbidden word? grah.

            We really need to start keeping track of all the forbidden words. So far I know that the reverse of “xrn”, “noitcaeroen”, and “ynnart” are banned. Anything else?

          • Murphy says:

            Is “etagremag” on the filter list?

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            Test: Gamergate.

            Edit: Nope. But I have just used the testing method to confirm that the other four words are, in fact, on the list.

          • Nita says:

            @ FacelessCraven

            This took about thirty tries to post.

            My sympathies. Apparently, Scott’s secret anti-toxoplasma defenses cover a lot of ground.

            I don’t have a problem with individual gamers deciding what kind of people to hang out with, what kind of reviews to read etc. Communities can split over all sorts of disagreements.

            But Simon’s comment basically says that anyone who doesn’t agree with the Fertile Worker Ants must be an outsider guilty of destroying the last haven of outcast nerds.

            That’s like saying that PZ Myers can’t have been a true atheist because he sided with Rebecca Watson.

          • Anonymous says:

            His post isn’t about passively disagreeing, it’s about actively trying to “clean up” the community.

            I don’t know who PZ Myers is but I’ll go along with the analogy anyway. If Stacy notices that some toxic people are deterring her trans friends from gaming, she may suggest that we kick out the toxic elements so her friends can replace them and everyone can get along. It sounds good and just, but at the end we’ll replace some of the autistic nerdy people (the toxic ones and the socially clumsy ones) with outsiders we have nothing in common with, weakening the group. Any gamers who support the cause because it is good and just, as indeed it is, are still contributing to the destruction of their own tribe. PJ Myers may be good and just and a true atheist while also being sociocidal or culturally genocidal or whatever you call this.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Based on r/KotakuInAction, the original nerds. The “interlopers” (douchey or otherwise) don’t really care about gaming culture, because they’re not really interested in it; they’re part of mainstream culture and just have an interest in specific games. Whether or not there are “cultural” gamers, there will be another Call of Duty, another Madden, etc.

            I think it’s possible to say now, that the
            “motte” of cleaning up game culture really was nothing more than the motte, and what was actually desired was to boot the gamer tribe out of their own territory and replace them with the Social Justice tribe. Just as they would like to everywhere else.

          • suntzuanime says:

            It’s cute that modern technology gets around the Censor’s Dilemma by making it possible to prevent people from saying things without having to disseminate a list of what people mustn’t say. Oh brave new world.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – “But Simon’s comment basically says that anyone who doesn’t agree with the Fertile Worker Ants must be an outsider guilty of destroying the last haven of outcast nerds. That’s like saying that PZ Myers can’t have been a true atheist because he sided with Rebecca Watson.”

            How many Tribal signifiers other than non-belief in a deity does PZ have to trample before that’s a true statement? Isn’t the whole point here that the Tribe called “Atheism” is about more than simple non-belief in a deity, and that those other interpersonal bonds are what do the heavy lifting of binding a group together? I would put forward that one of the most important of those bonds is the idea that you protect the tribe’s ideals and members and defend them from outside attack. Your Tribe is the place where your status is relatively unquestioned, where you don’t have to be on your guard. I hate the term, but the concept seems similar to what people mean by a “safe space”, only it’s a natural one, and all the more comforting for that fact.

            You can have disagreements and fights within the tribe, but in a healthy tribe the conflict is limited by the social rules. Attacking other tribe members too aggressively is seen as low-status, as an attack on the tribe as a whole.

            Ben Kuchera (former lead editor of the Penny Arcade Report, currently one of the senior people at Polygon) seems like a decent example. He was definitely a “true gamer”, a high-status member of the tribe. Since GG broke out, he’s seen as attacking other high-status members of the tribe viciously and unfairly, enthusiastically supporting obvious outsiders, and repudiating key tribal signifiers like meritocracy and especially opposition to censorship and the idea that games should be fun. When people say he isn’t a true gamer, they aren’t saying he hasn’t beat the original zelda or that his KDR sucks. They’re saying he can’t be trusted in any of the ways that matter, that actually make a tribe member valuable. He’s [i]not of the body.[/i]

            Likewise, GG really was the destruction of the last haven of outcast nerds. I used to spend a decent chunk of my day reading Kotaku, PAR, Rock Paper Shotgun, Giant Bomb, Gama Sutra. Those sites were my community online from 2009-2015. Gamergate destroyed all that, and the sense of a complete loss of community was quite real. GG fulfilled that role in the short term, but community based around conflict is psychologically exhausting, and I ended up here looking for something better. I’m still a hardcore gamer; I play quite a bit, I make them for a living, my long-term goal is to make my own game and get rich and famous like notch… but it’s a shelled-out warzone now, not my home.

          • Anonymous says:

            >Likewise, GG really was the destruction of the last haven of outcast nerds. I used to spend a decent chunk of my day reading Kotaku, PAR, Rock Paper Shotgun, Giant Bomb, Gama Sutra. Those sites were my community online from 2009-2015. Gamergate destroyed all that, and the sense of a complete loss of community was quite real.

            have you tried /v/ or /vg/?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Anonymous – former fa/tg/uy. don’t really hang around the chans too much any more. they eat too much time.

          • Nita says:

            @ The Nybbler

            The “interlopers” don’t really care about gaming culture, because they’re not really interested in it

            They are interested in having fun without various killjoys harshing one’s mellow with their stupid opinions. And that’s one of the core “rights” being defended, as far as I can tell.

            @ FacelessCraven

            Attacking other tribe members too aggressively is seen as low-status, as an attack on the tribe as a whole.

            Right. That’s how tribes maintain cohesion and suppress dissent. It also turns into a handy weapon in case of intra-tribal conflict: if a fellow tribe member criticizes your behaviour, brand him a traitor and let the wave of tribal outrage carry you to victory.

          • Max says:

            @first Anonymous in this subthread:

            Why are you assuming that “Stacy’s trans friends” aren’t nerdy and autistic and don’t fit in? Maybe they even used to be in the tribe but left because of “toxic people”.

        • Anonymous says:

          I played a MUD over dialup and even went to a con. I was an Ultima Dragon in the Prodigy days. I subscribed to Nintendo power.

          If the FPS gamers are being gentrified out of existence it is from neighborhoods that they destroyed with their riots and rampant criminality. Neighborhoods that were once nice welcoming places.

          So fuck em. What goes around comes around.

          • EyeballFrog says:

            But the people replacing them aren’t nice or welcoming either. And in many ways, they’re worse than the FPS crowd. The FPS crowd at least stuck to their area of gaming. The people who want to gentrify gaming culture won’t stop until everyone they consider unworthy is purged. We can’t have spaces that aren’t “safe”, didn’t you know?

          • Anonymous says:

            I don’t have any illusions that the good old days are going to be reborn. That’s not what I’m saying.

            The FPS crowd did not stick to their own area of gaming. They destroyed the entire preexisting culture and took over everything online. The MMOs, which should have been the heirs to the MUDs, were and are full of the idiots screaming about faggots and waiving around their epeens. And even the stand alone game world was massively hurt by the jejune interest and short attention span of the new gamers.

            I care not one whit if those people feel like they are being forced out of their homes. After all their spiritual ancestors forced me out of my home.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            Eh. I find it hard to fault the FPS crowd since that was just a natural migration of people.

            Change happens, it wasn’t actually an invasion. They didn’t actually try and force poeple to leave, they came in, they had money, companies catered to them. It’s sad, but nobody’s to blame.

            For what it’s worth, a survey of gamergate by Brad Glasgow said that the favourite genera was RPGs by a landslide. FPS came third, after strategy and not far ahead of Adventure.

            https://twitter.com/brad_glasgow/status/693095355907465216

          • NN says:

            The frat boy types that make up much of the modern FPS scene aren’t being gentrified out of their homes. The overwhelming majority of them have probably never heard of L’Affaire de Reproductively Viable Worker Ants, and wouldn’t care if you told them about it. These sorts of people are borderline casual gamers who only buy the annual release of their favorite FPS series, and maybe also the annual release of one or more Sports game series, to play with their bros, and don’t participate much if at all in online video game forums and the like.

          • Urstoff says:

            Anon,

            That’s not the FPS crowd. That’s the mainstream gaming crowd, which first populated FPS’s en masse. Playing the Quake or Descent online in the mid-late 90’s was not like playing Halo online is today. Accessibility brings the assholes en masse.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Forlorn Hopes
            There hasn’t been a decent CRPG in a decade and a half. So I can’t imagine what games those being surveyed are thinking of. Some bastardized first person RPG-lite like Mass Effect maybe?

            As for just being the natural order of things, perhaps or perhaps not. But either way you can’t expect me to have much sympathy for the Eternal September-ists of the cable modem variety given what they destroyed, even if they didn’t mean to.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            There hasn’t been a decent CRPG in a decade and a half.

            I beg to differ. Pillars of Eternity is a very decent CRPG in the classic mold, I enjoyed it very much.

            I’ve also heard great things about Wasteland 2, Age of Decadence, and Divinity: Original Sin; for games in the style of Baldur’s Gate.

            Mass Effect, Fallout: New Vegas and Witcher III may have hybridized the genera but they do good on the roleplaying side.

            Then there’s smaller indie games like everything Spiderweb Software does, they’ve been continuously producing RPGs with a similar style since the golden age.

            Or Serpent in the Staglands which got great reviews and is done in the style of Darklands.

            And both Good Old Games and Steam are making it easier than ever to play old games. I tracked Planescape Torment way after it faded from the shelves when I was a teen, no reason why today’s gamers can’t do the same.

            So don’t be so quick to dismiss the possibilities that they like whatever narrow kind of RPGs you consider decent.

          • Alex says:

            RE: CRPG

            Divinity: Original Sin is fantastic. Wasteland 2 is overhyped IMHO

          • Simon Penner says:

            Ponder the reified form of my metaphor and consider whether or not your opinion reverses polarity in the other scenario

          • multiheaded says:

            I hope Torment: Tides of Numenera will be good!

          • Anonymous says:

            @Simmon Penner
            I thought I had.

            Suppose you grew up in Newark in the 50s and early 60s. It was a lovely place. Close enough to NYC to have a strong economy but separated enough to have a smaller, more intimate feel. Beautiful architecture, tree lined streets, kids playing in parks and so on. Not a perfect place, there were problems and injustices, but a nice to grow up. The in 1967 came the riots. Much of the city burned down. All your friends started moving away. Your parents tried to stick around but the crime rate began to skyrocket, litter piled up in the streets, people started openly using drugs in the parks. Your parents gave in and moved away in the early 70s receiving almost nothing for their house. Everyone you think about the last Newark of your youth and ache.

            All these years later you open up a paper and read angsty articles about gentrification in Newark. How poor people that have lived in thier neighborhoods “forever” (really just since the late 60s/early 70s) can’t afford to pay the rent now that crime is falling and some nice coffee shops are opening up.

            Do you really think your first instinct is going to be sympathy for the people trying to shoot up heroin in the park over losing their “safe space”? Or their more articulate friends that want to excuse anti-social behavior with — they didn’t have any other place to go, we accepted everyone, kick them out and we won’t feel at home?

            (PS American Pastoral is a very good book, vaguely related.)

          • Alex says:

            Anon Newark Example:

            In the end it comes down to what qualifies as antisocial behaviour.

          • Are the people displaced by gentrification always characterized as criminals/hard to be around, or are they sometimes characterized as the respectable working poor?

            This is a real question. I don’t follow gentrification discussions enough to have an answer.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Alex

            Maybe that’s one of the root disputes. But if you read this whole tree of posts starting with Simon Penner’s at root, you’ll see some self-identified gamers acknowledging the bad behavior but excusing it. “Oh that’s just part of the culture” or “Yeah he’s socially awkward, what can you do” or “We accept everyone how can you be against that”.

          • keranih says:

            Are the people displaced by gentrification always characterized as criminals/hard to be around, or are they sometimes characterized as the respectable working poor?

            Depends if the person doing the characterization is supporting the gentrification or opposing it.

            In my practical experience, it’s neither. In a given rundown area, there are criminals & the difficult to live with (like the young man (early twenties) who would, when off his meds, stand in the street and have obscenity-laden shouting matches with people who were not there); there are the homeowners – some of whom are aged and who can’t manage the energy or the funds to keep their homes in repair; and there are the renter families.

            None of these are distinct separate groups. A stable homeowning family may have an unbalanced drug addicted family member. A renter family or singleton may be the support for the older couple who are homeowners one block over.

            Gentrification impacts each of these differently. Criminals and mentally challenged are subject to greater official attention. (The new comers will call the cops and keep calling, rather than just learn to live with the shouting young man.) Eventually they are moved someplace else.

            Sometimes the rental family and the homeowners go with the displaced criminal/difficult to live with. Sometimes not.

            Homeowners are subject to increased code enforcement pressure to keep their homes in repair, not have excessive vehicles parked in the yard, and keep the dogs and car radios quiet. Some of them get mad enough to move when offered a good price. (It helps to remember that people with the financial flexibility to move to a place without hookers and drug dealers have left years ago.)

            The renters are subject to the same pressures as the homeowners, but via their landlords, who are also now doing more frequent inspections and billing/evicting tenants who damage dwellings. Outright raising the rent and forcing working poor families to move is rare. Much more frequently, the working poor families are constantly shifting dwellings as their fortunes rise and fall. They go from a cheap home to a more expensive apartment to a cheaper apartment as employment and wages change. Gentrification dries up the supply of low rent options, so that when a family wants/needs to move, there is no where in the area that is available, and the family leaves the neighborhood. This can start a chain reaction to move the whole family group out.

          • brad says:

            It’s hard to have much sympathy for the homeowners despite increased code enforcement or increased property taxes or what have you. They also are sitting on an asset with dramatically increased value.

            It’s the renters that end up with a lot of downside without too much upside (though the early stages often involve better conditions for the same rent).

          • Cauê says:

            I’m not feeling the gentrification metaphor.

            Sure, there’s the thing where people don’t want criminals around where they live or work.

            Then there’s the thing where criminals do drugs, people who do drugs have bad teeth, and hey I heard there are people with bad teeth over there by the river, what are you going to do about it, what if somebody wants to move there, do you want them to be victims of crimes?

      • Forlorn Hopes says:

        I tried to imagine what “other tribes” you’re talking about, and failed. Could you give a few examples?

        Modern Secular Consumerism
        Jocks
        Plastics (as defined by the film Mean Girls)

        Maybe at some point in the distant past games used to be a nerdy pastime, but it’s been a huge mainstream industry for a while. They’re not making billions of dollars in revenue by catering to an outcast minority.

        Um. I think this is an enormous case of missing the point. The ideology is playing videogames. The movement is the gamer tribe.

        The ideology is not the movement.

        The gamer tribe itself remains one that is welcoming to outcasts, and for many it is the only place they have. Thus the tribe is highly protective of them. But on the whole we have no quarrel with the mainstreamers playing Call of Duty. They do their thing, we do ours, and there is no real conflict. If the social justice community was happy to ignore us instead of attack us and the games we love, we’d be happy to return the favor.

        There was some worry for a while that the entire industry would exclusively cater to the mainstream; but digital downloads and the rise of indie games have shown that that was all worry over nothing.

        But Simon’s comment basically says that anyone who doesn’t agree with the Fertile Worker Ants must be an outsider guilty of destroying the last haven of outcast nerds.

        A bit of an exaggeration I think. I didn’t see anything saying disagreement automatically makes you an aggressor.

        It is possible to be neutral, and I’m saying that as an ant.

        • Nita says:

          Hi, FH! Long time no see.

          1. I’m pretty sure that having mass-manufactured products at the heart of your tribe is the epitome of Modern Secular Consumerism.
          2. OK, jocks and… super-popular girls in high school? (Haven’t seen Mean Girls, sorry.) Not being in the top 5% of “cool” kids makes you a social outcast? That’s a lot of outcasts…

          The ideology is not the movement.

          Fair enough. But you’ve added new tenets to the ideology. This tends to split a movement, and you won’t be able to simply define your opponents out of existence. American Evangelicals may have redefined “Christian” to exclude Catholics, but Catholics still exist (and are still Christian).

          It is possible to be neutral, and I’m saying that as an ant.

          Sure, it’s possible to be neutral. Is it possible to actively disagree, e.g., to say that criticizing games is perfectly fine? Or is your community only welcoming and protective of those who don’t contradict the new ideology?

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            Hi, FH! Long time no see.

            I never left, I was just waiting for video games to tempt me out of lurking 🙂

            I’m pretty sure that having mass-manufactured products at the heart of your tribe is the epitome of Modern Secular Consumerism.

            First disagreement. Video games are not mass-manufactured.

            Each game is unique, and each game means different things to each gamer.

            Games might be made by corporations intending to make mega-bucks. But Shakespeare was writing to put bums on seats.

            ———–

            I think the best way to demonstrate that gamer culture is distinct from Modern Secular Consumerism is that gaming is interactive.

            You can consume a bottle of coke. But with a game every player produces a unique experience.

            The culture reflects that. I can guarantee you that in gamer culture creating an awesome mod or beating a difficult game will earn you more status than spending a pile of cash on games and a battlestation.

            OK, jocks and… super-popular girls in high school? (Haven’t seen Mean Girls, sorry.) Not being in the top 5% of “cool” kids makes you a social outcast? That’s a lot of outcasts…

            You asked for examples, not a comprehensive list. There’s way more examples than just the first three to come into my head.

            Fair enough. But you’ve added new tenets to the ideology.

            I don’t think I did, but lets roll with that.

            This tends to split a movement

            This again feels like it’s missing the point of Scott’s post.

            The ideology comes first, then the movement comes later. Adding and reinterpreting tenants is inevitable when a movement is growing out of (in both the “out of a seed” and “growing out of old clothes” sense) an ideology.

            Is it possible to actively disagree, e.g., to say that criticizing games is perfectly fine

            Of course criticizing games is fine. We do it all the time.

            There’s really only one simple rule about criticizing games that gamer culture imposes: Your criticism must not be based on morality.

            “The demons in this game are generic and dull” – fine.

            “It is immoral and unchristian to have demons in this game” – not fine.

            This rule is due to the long history of people outside gaming culture attacking gaming culture for not adhering to the morals of mainstream culture (e.g. Jack Thompson).

            And like all such rules it has exceptions, but I’d say as a rule of thumb if you’re in the social justice tribe and you want to make a moral criticism, it’s probably not an exception.

            (Well I suppose your criticism must also be accurate. No one would take your demon criticism seriously if there are no demons in the game).

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – “I’m pretty sure that having mass-manufactured products at the heart of your tribe is the epitome of Modern Secular Consumerism.”

            Respectfully, I think you’re dead wrong.

            Jagged Alliance 2 is probably my favorite game of all time. It came out in 1999. I’ve probably got something like a thousand hours in and I’m pretty sure I’ve only played four or so games of it, so by the standards of the sub-community I’m a step or two up from a “casual”. When the company that made JA2 went out of business, they released the source code for the game to the community, which was already more or less obsessive. Since then, the community has spent the better part of a decade dramatically enhancing and expanding the game beyond all reasonable expectation, for free, simply out of love of the game. You get similar stories with lots of other games; the Elder Scrolls series, Halflife, Arma, Dwarf Fortress, and so on. (Good) games are not digital versions of coke and the big mac.

            I don’t think that sort of thing is what most people think of when they talk about “modern secular consumerism”. Harry Potter books are produced and marketed commercially for a profit; are the fan communities who write whole new series worth of material for each other an example of MSC?

            “But you’ve added new tenets to the ideology.”

            Have they? Anyone who called themselves a gamer while claiming that censorship was a good idea and that games shouldn’t be fun would have gotten massive backlash in the 90s or the 00s as well. Granted, some of the anti-GG points have a history in the movement as well; some real gamers really did go anti-GG. But the Bailey-style social justice content was definately new, and I don’t see anything near that on the pro-GG side.

            “Is it possible to actively disagree, e.g., to say that criticizing games is perfectly fine?”

            Assuming “criticize” is used here in the humanities-academic sense, criticizing games is the new ideology. The Academics didn’t give a crap about games back when we were fighting Jack Thompson. You seem to be framing this as the COD jerks taking over the community, but that just isn’t so. Ben Kuchera was a “real gamer”, but he’s less of one than Gabe or Tycho, or Notch, or John Bain. Phil Fish went profoundly anti; Edward Mcmillan did not.

            “Not being in the top 5% of “cool” kids makes you a social outcast? That’s a lot of outcasts…”

            …I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with nerds on a personal level. If you were trying to explain what it meant to be a nerd, how they’re looked down on by jocks and the cool kids in school, say, and I responded with “Not being in the top 5% of “cool” kids makes you a social outcast?”, how would you react?

            I’m doing pretty okay these days. On the other hand, I had a lot of good breaks. In that last comic I linked, that guy with the cheeto dust all over his face, that guy is there for a reason. And I guess this is the thing people just don’t get: people anywhere near the top 5% of popularity aren’t the sort of people who can carry a movement like GG. The reason GG is so resilient is because the people in it have spent their whole lives being shat on by mainstream culture. We get called sexists and racists today. Yesterday we were mass shooters and sociopaths. Same old same old.

          • Nita says:

            @ Forlorn Hopes

            There’s really only one simple rule about criticizing games that gamer culture imposes: Your criticism must not be based on morality.

            You guys have been telling me that (at least some) games are a lot like books — they provide a unique experience for each player, they inspire creative fan works etc.

            But we do criticize books from all sorts of angles. Despite historical examples of censorship and book-burning, there are still no limitations on literary criticism. People are allowed to express their critical opinion even if it’s based on morality.

            E.g., the Harry Potter books have been accused of promoting witchcraft. That’s criticism by outsiders. Inside the fandom, I have seen serious discussions of antisemitic stereotypes, tokenism, glorification of cruelty and perpetuating harmful myths about HIV-positive people. If such discussions can happen in book fandoms, why do they have to be banned when it comes to games?

            @ FacelessCraven

            Harry Potter books are produced and marketed commercially for a profit; are the fan communities who write whole new series worth of material for each other an example of MSC?

            Well, I certainly would not say that the Harry Potter fandom consists of outcasts from MSC. It exists in symbiosis with MSC. You can be a small-time fan (like me) without owning the books, but having canon on hand for writing or discussion requires either buying the books or ignoring copyright laws.

            The Academics didn’t give a crap about games back when we were fighting Jack Thompson.

            This Jack Thompson fella sure gets mentioned a lot. So, some oddball lawyer went on a personal crusade against video games. He also went on a personal crusade against rap music. Are we no longer allowed to mention misogyny in rap music because it might remind rap fans of Jack Thompson? And if Jack Thompson’s next crusade targets movies or books, will we have to limit film and literature criticism to technical aspects?

            If you were trying to explain what it meant to be a nerd, how they’re looked down on by jocks and the cool kids in school

            We don’t really have jocks here (no school sports culture), but the problem with the popular bullies was not that they looked down on us. We looked down on them right back. The problem was that they lacked the dreaded “basic human decency”. They felt that their fun was more important than anyone’s feelings, and they acted accordingly. Now do you see what bothers me about “gamer culture”?

          • rockroy mountdefort says:

            >Now do you see what bothers me about “gamer culture”?

            Yes: your own belief in having a monopoly on what constitutes “basic human decency”, as well as your belief that your feelings and the feelings of people you identify with are very serious and important, while the feelings of people you don’t identify with can be reduced to “fun”.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            But we do criticize books from all sorts of angles. Despite historical examples of censorship and book-burning, there are still no limitations on literary criticism.

            Yes, and?

            Book culture is not gamer culture. I should no more expect book and gamer culture to share a taboo on moral criticisms because of past censorship than I should expect the United Kingdom and Hawaii to share a love of hula dancing because they’re both islands.

            If such discussions can happen in book fandoms, why do they have to be banned when it comes to games?

            Because game tribe wants them to be banned, and Harry Potter tribe doesn’t mind.

            That’s all the justification that’s needed.

            Well, I certainly would not say that the Harry Potter fandom consists of outcasts from MSC.

            Then why are you comparing it to gamer culture?

            This Jack Thompson fella sure gets mentioned a lot. So, some oddball lawyer

            “Jack Thompson” is not an oddball lawyer. “Jack Thompson” is the name given to a decades long campaign to ban or limit videogames (that is still ongoing, but pretty weak today).

            Video games were only listed as protected speech (USA) in 2005 and you still get people arguing that video games need to be limited for causing violence today.

            Heck, you still get people saying video games cause satanism today – though to be fair, the I don’t think the authors of the UN report saying that even read the stuff they were citing.

            Are we no longer allowed to mention misogyny in rap music because it might remind rap fans of Jack Thompson?

            I’m not a rap fan, and can’t speak to their culture. I propose an experiment that’s equivalent to what social justice culture are doing to gamer culture.

            Go into whichever part of town is predominantly African American (I think you’re American Nita?) Find a group enjoying some rap music, and tell them that their culture is misogynistic.

            And do let me know how it goes.

            They felt that their fun was more important than anyone’s feelings, and they acted accordingly. Now do you see what bothers me about “gamer culture”?

            You’re forced into close physical confines with gamer culture?

            Because that’s the problem with fictional-teen-drama-jock-culture (the real life jocks I’ve known have all been decent).

            It’s also the problem I have with social justice culture (by forced, I mean SJ are doing the forcing). I wouldn’t mind them if they stayed over on tumblr.

          • Alex says:

            “Because game tribe wants them to be banned, ”

            Only if you define “game tribe” to coincide with the group in favour of such bans.

            I have been videogaming since the mid-90s and I know a lot of people from my age cohort with the same property. And guess what, we are great fans of Anita Sarkeesian. There, I said it.

            So what you are saying is that we cannot possibly be real scotsmen.

            And that is fine by me. But please do not confuse the likes of me with some recent outside invasion into the world of videogames, thank you.

          • So now I’m thinking about what sensible conservative criticism of HP would look like, and I realize I have no idea– I don’t model sensible conservatives well enough.

            However, Slytherins being the driving force behind the Pure Blood movement gets on my nerves. Pure Bloodism is a movement which is too theoretical and risky to appeal to the average Slythern. To my mind, Slughorn is what Slytherin is really like.

            In my ideal HP, Pure Bloodism would be mostly Gryffindor and Ravenclaw.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Alex

            It is not surprising at all that there are some gamers who are sympathetic to SJ. Unless your tribe consists of ten people no value of its will be held by everyone.

          • Alex says:

            Anon: Not my point. My point: please don’t true scotsman me.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Criticisms of misogyny in games are not “banned”. They are simply not part of gamer culture. They are criticisms _of_ one culture or tribe (gamers) _by_ another (feminism).

            As for misogyny in rap, I don’t know rap culture, but it appears that rappers themselves respond to such criticism by turning up the nastiness in the lyrics and raking in the cash. Which is to say they cater to their fans, not to outside critics.

          • Alex says:

            “Criticisms of misogyny in games are not “banned”. They are simply not part of gamer culture. They are criticisms _of_ one culture or tribe (gamers) _by_ another (feminism).”

            Fair point. Then again, remember, nothing is ever new, “card carrying feminist” Earnest Adams of 1998 probably also is not a true Scotsman?! http://www.designersnotebook.com/Columns/004_Games_for_Girls/004_games_for_girls.htm

            I now understand why it was so important to “prove” that Sarkeesian, despite her claims, never loved videogames and never will. No true Scotswoman there either.

            Frankly I never understood gamergate and this thread helps me a lot. My preliminary conclusion is:

            Have your tribe all you like, but for the love of God or John Carmack, please stop calling yourselves the “gamer” tribe. Outsiders might confuse you with “people that like to play and think about videogames”.

            I’m reciprocally willing to also not call my tribe “gamers” any longer. Fair is fair.

          • Jiro says:

            >blockquote>I now understand why it was so important to “prove” that Sarkeesian, despite her claims, never loved videogames and never will. No true Scotswoman there either.

            You know, it *is* possible for people, even Sarkeesian, to make false claims. It’s not as if any claim is automatically true.

          • Alex says:

            “You know, it *is* possible for people, even Sarkeesian, to make false claims. It’s not as if any claim is automatically true.”

            My reading of Sarkeesian is that she cares about videogames to a degree where she has sacrificed a lot of what most people take for granted ™ just to make a point abot a thing she cares about.

            Of course neither of us _is_ Sarkeesian so we will never know.

            Note that my reading is not something that can be falsified by [thing she said prior to “Tropes vs. Women”]. Also note that I’m am not up to date in [proof that Sarkeesian hates games and gamers]-ology, because frankly I don’t care. My entire point was that this thread made me realise why others do care to undertake this “proof”. In fact care a lot, as you may be aware.

          • The Nybbler says:

            It was possible, in 1998, to without contradiction be a member of both tribes, “gamer” and “feminism”. The Adams piece appears to be mostly from a “gamer” perspective. He considers, then rejects, the idea that there’s some moral reason that stereotyped “games for girls” shouldn’t be made.

            (Ironically, today, feminists trumpeted the success of a Kim Kardashian dress-up game as ‘proof’ gaming wasn’t for those horrible male gamers anymore)

            Compare that article to Sarkeesian’s complaints about Hitman:Absolution’s strippers.

          • Alex says:

            Nybbler:

            So you are saying Sarkeesian, and presumably the likes of her, are forcing us to take sides where the people of 1998 needn’t?

          • Nita says:

            @ Forlorn Hopes

            Then why are you comparing it to gamer culture?

            Firstly, because gamer culture doesn’t consist of people rejected by consumerist society, either. It fits perfectly well into consumerist society, just like various literary fandoms.

            Secondly, just like the Harry Potter fandom, gaming is now mainstream. The True Core Fandom can no longer control the discourse. Your favourite thing becoming popular is your community being fused with the Big Mainstream Supertribe. And in the current BMS, cultural artifacts are valid targets of cultural criticism.

            People are free to comment on games from whatever perspective they want, and if you try to stop them, the only thing you’ll achieve is looking like a jerk.

            “Jack Thompson” is not an oddball lawyer. “Jack Thompson” is the name given to a decades long campaign

            No, Jack Thompson is definitely a (former) lawyer and an oddball. A real, actual person with a rather sad professional history. I mean, you can use words in a completely arbitrary way, but it might get rather confusing.

            Yes, people are saying all sorts of things about games. People are saying things you don’t agree with about something you like. And you can try to change their opinion, but you can’t shut them up.

            Find a group enjoying some rap music, and tell them that their culture is misogynistic.

            Did someone interrupt you while you were playing a game to deliver their critical opinion? Or did they publish their opinion on the web, where you chose to peruse it?

            Here are some things people have written about misogyny in rap music:

            Rap music clearly has a serious misogyny problem.

            According to the textbook Women: Images and Realities, this music sends the message to young adults, especially Black youth that their enemy is Black girls and women. The music portrays the women as selfish, untrustworthy, and as subordinate.

            As gangsta rap pioneers and beneficiaries of the corporatization of rap/hip hop in the 1990s, N.W.A. played a key role in yoking rape culture and rap misogyny.

            Remember when Drake was touted a “feminist” rapper? As it turns out, he’s quietly been spouting deeply misogynist, troubling lyrics all along, and most of us have been none the wiser.

          • Alex says:

            “People are free to comment on games from whatever perspective they want, and if you try to stop them, the only thing you’ll achieve is looking like a jerk.”

            Of course there is a meta-game going on, where the tribal coherence gained from framing the triviality cited above as outrageous is a net win for the tribe.

            Like I indicated above: “[Sarkeesian Stereotype] is destroying my tribe” has become part of what defines said tribe. It does not mean that the tribe is actually in any danger of being destroyed.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Alex, Sarkeesian et al are not forcing us to take sides; there’s still the option of not caring about the issue. They are making it extremely difficult to hold an opinion on the issue without taking sides.

            Back in 1998, you could say “These games might be pandering to gender stereotypes but that’s OK”; today that would put you squarely in opposition to the “feminist” tribe.

            As for the idea that ‘gamer’ is defined by thinking that those like Sarkeesian are destroying the tribe, I don’t think so. You might include that in a working definition of Gamergate, but Gamergate is still only a subset of gamers. That the tribe was in any danger of being destroyed is certainly a debatable question. That attempts were made is not really one; the slew of “Gamers are Dead” articles was the triggering event for the second stage of Gamergate.

          • Jiro:

            >>I now understand why it was so important to “prove” that Sarkeesian, despite her claims, never loved videogames and never will. No true Scotswoman there either.

            >You know, it *is* possible for people, even Sarkeesian, to make false claims. It’s not as if any claim is automatically true.

            It’s certainly possible that Sarkeesian never loved games, but why is this an interesting or plausible claim? (There’s something in the Sequences, I think, about thinking about what you’re spending your attention on, but damned if I can remember the catchphrase).

            I watched a few of the videos, and I think it’s very likely that she played a lot of games for the fun of it. There’s a kind of detailed knowledge which seems unlikely to be acquired unless one is fascinated.

            Also (and maybe I’ve missed something) the anger against Sarkeesian is because she’s spoiling people’s fun, not because she’s getting the details wrong.

            By the way, I quit after those few videos because I didn’t like them. There was a lack of variation of the emotional tone, and I was suspecting that she was overgeneralizing and assuming the worst.

          • Alex says:

            Nybbler:

            Makes sense.

            Still: “Gamer” and “Feminist” have become labels for very extreme stances. Caring about (a) games and (b) stereotypes at the same time is entirely possible, we just have lost the proper words for that. The gamer-feminist has become infeasible since 1998 only insofar as the meaning of the words has changed.

            And I hate concepts I care about being monopolised by the extremes.

            Nancy:

            I mostly agree (perhaps not surprisingly).

          • Do we want or need to have a discussion of what consumerist society is?

            Gamers are buying stuff, but they’re also mixing more of their labor with it than one does with a lot of other consumer products.

          • Jiro says:

            It’s certainly possible that Sarkeesian never loved games, but why is this an interesting or plausible claim?

            Because arguments seldom involve pure factual statements, but rather judgment calls and feelings (especially in a social justice context where making people uncomfortable is an easy complaint). Those things depend on the speaker’s motivation and biases.

            And when you combine that with being an influential speaker, it’s a subject for concern. SJWs get people fired, opposing speakers silenced, and games censored. (And of course no company will admit the reason they censored a game beyond generalities, so you get built-in plausible deniability.)

          • Viliam says:

            @Nancy

            It’s certainly possible that Sarkeesian never loved games, but why is this an interesting or plausible claim?

            Whether Sarkeesian in an insider or an outsider of the gamer community, that’s relevant for framing the whole situation as “many gamers are dissatisfied with the currently existing computer games” or “outsiders are dissatisfied with the currently existing computer games, but gamers are okay with them”. That effects the tribal feelings (is this a discussion within our tribe, or an attack by outsiders?), but also has potentially economical implications.

            Gamers spend billions of dollars on their hobby, globally. Finding out that many of them are dissatisfied with the current products, that would imply there is a billion-dollar market waiting for you to take over. And the advantage of producing software is that when you have the game ready, it only costs a little to create a copy for everyone. If you believe that Sarkeesian is correct, then you should immediately start producing a game based on her advice, because that’s how you will become a millionaire, unless too many other people do it first.

            On the other hand, if gamers are happy with the existing games, and the people who complain about them are those who wouldn’t buy them anyway, then there are no millions to be made by following Sarkeesian’s advice.

            (And this is why Sarkeesian, assuming that she is not a gamer, would have a motive to pretend to be one. The more people believe there is a billion-dollar market ready to be taken over if only they follow her advice, the more potential generous employers for her.)

            Of course, “Sarkeesian is a gamer” and “many gamers agree with Sarkeesian” are two different claims, the latter screening off the former. (But if Sarkeesian is not a gamer, that is an evidence that gamers are mostly okay with the situation, because otherwise why wait for an outsider to make the criticism.) Also “the games are sexist” and “gamers are dissatisfied with the sexism in games, and would prefer to buy games without sexism” are two different claims. It is quite possible that the games are sexist, but the gamers don’t mind.

            (The LW expression you are looking for is probably “hugging the query.)

            I watched a few of the videos, and I think it’s very likely that she played a lot of games for the fun of it. There’s a kind of detailed knowledge which seems unlikely to be acquired unless one is fascinated.

            Some people say that the game footage in her videos was taken from other people’s youtube videos; this would suggest she actually didn’t play the games. And the detailed knowledge can be found online. And she is sometimes factually wrong. (If I remember correctly, there is a game Hitman, where your goal is to kill a target, and avoid killing random bystanders; you get penalized for killing the bystanders, because that kinda makes you a less efficient hitman. Sarkeesian claimed that the game rewards you for killing the bystanders. That fit her narrative, because the bystanders in the video happened to be women.) This kind of mistake is unlikely to happen to someone who actually played the game. — I haven’t personally verified any of this information.

            Also (and maybe I’ve missed something) the anger against Sarkeesian is because she’s spoiling people’s fun, not because she’s getting the details wrong.

            You know how it goes: first you accuse a game of sexism or racism or whatever, then you sic a Twitter mob on the publishers or the shops, and if you are lucky, the game is no longer available. People do get angry when such things happen to books; and gamers see games as something similar to books.

            Another problem is, you cannot actually write a game that would make Sarkeesian happy, because she has all bases covered. Her “tropes” cover the whole spectrum. Not having female characters is sexist. Having typical female characters is sexist, too. Having female characters that behave like male characters, that’s what she calls “men with boobs”, and that’s also bad. If a female character dies, that’s horrible. Killing a female NPC, also unacceptable. So, I guess you better make another Tetris clone.

            In some situations where Sarkeesian gives actual advice about how to make a perfect games, she contradicts herself; her own imaginary game already contains some of the tropes that she criticizes as sexist.

            Oh, a huge elephant in the room that I almost forgot. Sarkeesian collected a lot of money on Kickstarter to create videos, she got an order of magnitude more than she asked for, and she actually didn’t deliver what she originally promised. Among her critics are the people who contributed money to her originally, and were disappointed with the results.

          • BBA says:

            It’s certainly possible that someone who talks about video game politics at length and in detail is just a charismatic mouthpiece for a team of writers, none of whom actually care about the subject except as a vehicle for self-promotion.

            I’m talking about Milo of course.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – “But we do criticize books from all sorts of angles.”

            This is the point I really want to get across, if nothing else in this post does: *people criticized gaming from all sorts of angles too*. There was a broad, lively, and flourishing community of criticism that had significant engagement with the audience, going back the better part of a decade, and it was having a significant effect on the output of the industry. What you are saying you want actually existed, and was going quite well. Nor were Gamers the ones that closed that conversation down. Social Justice was, by declaring that anyone who disagreed with them were untouchable scum, and then trying very, very hard to make it stick. Of course, you might argue that their hands were forced by the unprecedented behavior of the Gamer community. Let’s address that in a moment.

            “This Jack Thompson fella sure gets mentioned a lot.”
            “No, Jack Thompson is definitely a (former) lawyer and an oddball. A real, actual person with a rather sad professional history.”

            How do you expect to communicate with people who disagree with you if you can’t engage with the facts and history they present? If you are talking to a comics fan and they mention Wertham, they are very unlikely to be referring simply to the misguided social scientist who wrote Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham was the leader and figurehead for a massive, highly successful censorship movement that crippled and stunted an entire artform for a generation or more. Jack Thompson was (we thought) the last, loudest and most successful leader of a similar movement aimed at video games that lasted decades and had broad support from senior politicians, the media and social science. The fact that as recently as a decade ago we were fighting tooth and nail to keep from having our medium’s content restricted by federal law doesn’t have to mean anything to you. But if you can’t take that history seriously, why should we take anything you say seriously?

            On the other hand, maybe this is the first you’ve heard of that history. In which case, given that you were completely unaware of the largest issue in the entire community for the last thirty years, maybe you should update your confidence in your understanding of the rest of the story?

            “Are we no longer allowed to mention misogyny in rap music because it might remind rap fans of Jack Thompson?”

            I would literally pay money to see someone try. Find a kickstarter for the rap version of Anita Sarkeesian, and I will donate right now.

            “They felt that their fun was more important than anyone’s feelings, and they acted accordingly. Now do you see what bothers me about “gamer culture”?”

            This statement is fascinating in its ambiguity. What behavior exactly are you referring to when you say that for gamer culture, “fun is more important than feelings”? Two obvious interpretations spring to mind: problematic content or harassment.

            If the former: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq5dNcrHE8w …Which has been the general-purpose answer to complaints by a wide variety of groups for a very long time, mostly coming from people at least Social-Justice-Adjacent. If you think that standard should be abandoned now, are you willing to start taking other people’s concerns seriously as well?

            On the other hand, we arrive back at the question of harassment. One could argue that Social Justice was forced to end the conversation because of vicious harassment instigated by the gaming community, particularly against Zoe Quinn. I would be sympathetic to this argument if it weren’t for a few inconvenient facts:

            1. Quinn was pretty clearly an abuser, Gjoni was pretty clearly a victim. The Social Justice community within gaming ignored the facts, closed ranks around her anyway, and engaged in a flagrant and protracted campaign of victim blaming that continues more or less to the present day. This included encouraging blatantly dishonest legal harassment of the victim by Quinn over the next year or so.

            2. The harassment Quinn received, certainly in the first week or two of the fracas, was apparently typical in scale and intensity to a number of other viral shitstorms stirred up in the community previously. No one cared how many death and rape threats Paul Christophero, Jack Thompson(yup, he comes up a lot), or the All I Want for Christmas is A PSP people received. Massive viral harassment campaigns were treated as an amusing, exciting form of public protest by pretty much everyone, gaming’s Social Justice contingent included. Further, Social Justice both inside gaming and out has a considerable history of explicitly encouraging such behavior, and as far as I know still does even post-GG.

            I am sympathetic to the argument that Quinn, despite being a truly despicable person, does not deserve that sort of treatment. I am not sympathetic to the argument that such treatment is fine so long as it’s aimed at anyone but Quinn specifically or other members of the Social Justice clique generally. That such behavior is acceptable and should even be encouraged toward Quinn’s victim and anyone defending him inspires active, burning contempt.

            Of course, I could be wrong about all of the above. If so, it would help if someone had addressed any of those points over the past year and a half, rather than attacking anyone who raised them publicly.

            I think gamers are happy to have a conversation. They are happy to have a war, too. Social Justice got impatient with the conversation and decided on war instead, and discredited itself with a large chunk of the core community in the process. This has made it vastly more difficult to actually address and solve the very problems Social Justice claims to care about. I am not trying to argue that gamers’ priorities are more important than Social Justice’s priorities. I am trying to argue that Social Justice has sabotaged its own priorities by acting in a disastrously irresponsible and unprincipled manner, and pointing the finger at gamers isn’t going to fix the problem.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Villiam – “This kind of mistake is unlikely to happen to someone who actually played the game. — I haven’t personally verified any of this information.”

            I have. Further, being penalized for killing anyone but the primary target has been a mechanic in all nine games of the franchise to date. On the other hand, this is the only unquestionable factual inaccuracy I’m aware of.

            Very good post, by the way. thank you for writing it.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            @Alex

            Only if you define “game tribe” to coincide with the group in favour of such bans.

            I have been videogaming since the mid-90s and I know a lot of people from my age cohort with the same property. And guess what, we are great fans of Anita Sarkeesian. There, I said it.

            So what you are saying is that we cannot possibly be real Scotsmen.

            No. I think you’ve missed the entire point of Scott’s post.

            Playing video games is the ideology. It is not and never was the movement.

            You’re using the definition of the ideology to say that my definition of the movement is wrong. As this entire blogpost says, that’s the wrong way to think about things.

            Have your tribe all you like, but for the love of God or John Carmack, please stop calling yourselves the “gamer” tribe. Outsiders might confuse you with “people that like to play and think about videogames”.

            This confusion appears to be a human constant. Observe the confusion between “Christian tribe” and actually following the bible as written in the original post.

            It would be nice if things were named more accurately, but don’t hold your breath.

            I’m reciprocally willing to also not call my tribe “gamers” any longer. Fair is fair.

            Could you also ask your tribe to stop attacking mine please.

            @The Nybbler

            Criticisms of misogyny in games are not “banned”. They are simply not part of gamer culture.

            Yeah, you’re right here. “Banned” was probably the wrong word.

            but it appears that rappers themselves respond to such criticism by turning up the nastiness in the lyrics and raking in the cash.

            And notice similar behaviour with games like Hatred and Dead or Alive Xtreme 3

            There’s probably an important insight here. If someone’s successfully making money by thumbing their nose at an outgroup, that’s probably a very accurate way of telling where ingroup outgroup boundaries lie.

            @Nita

            Firstly, because gamer culture doesn’t consist of people rejected by consumerist society, either.

            Care to back up this assertion?

            Your favourite thing becoming popular is your community being fused with the Big Mainstream Supertribe. And in the current BMS, cultural artifacts are valid targets of cultural criticism.

            Seriously, you’re defending that position? If the BMS like’s something, it’s ok for them to fuse it to themselves and dictate the rules for it. In the parlance of social justice isn’t that cultural appropriation?

            Personally I’m fine with BMS doing what they want, providing they have a little respect for diversity and respect their hosts when visiting smaller tribe’s spaces.

            and if you try to stop them, the only thing you’ll achieve is looking like a jerk.

            Who’s trying to stop anyone? We’re just criticising them back.

            Look at gamergate, which side built a blockbot?

            No, Jack Thompson is definitely a (former) lawyer and an oddball. A real, actual person with a rather sad professional history. I mean, you can use words in a completely arbitrary way, but it might get rather confusing.

            I’m using words in the way they’re commonly used in the parlance of my tribe.

            When I brought up Jack you replied with essentially “but he’s just one guy”, I responded by pointing out that when gamer tribe we use him as a symbol of the entire decades long campaign against games.

            Arbitrary? Sure, all words are somewhat arbitrary. Confusing, sure but easy to understand after it’s been explained. But was the definition I gave you wrong, no it wasn’t.

            Did someone interrupt you while you were playing a game to deliver their critical opinion?

            As a matter of fact, yes they did. Look at the Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonsphere controversy going on right now. For the record, the gamer tribe response has been to criticise, leave negative reviews, and ask for refunds or not buy it if they haven’t already. We haven’t tired to shut anyone up. At least most of us haven’t, sadly there’s assholes everywhere.

            Mostly though it happens when I’m reading gaming websites, which is as much a part of gamertribe as playing videogames.

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            It’s certainly possible that Sarkeesian never loved games, but why is this an interesting or plausible claim?

            It’s a plausible claim because there’s a video of her in university saying she doesn’t play video games (I can’t remember the exact wording she used).

            Proof, I think it is, others on this thread disagree. But enough evidence to be “plausible”, I would think that’s unambiguous.

            Also (and maybe I’ve missed something) the anger against Sarkeesian is because she’s spoiling people’s fun, not because she’s getting the details wrong.

            I think you missed something.

            The anger isn’t really against Anita. The anger is between the gamer tribe and the social justice tribe. Anita isn’t really the enemy here, at least not beyond any other random SJ poster on the Internet. Rather Anita is the battlefield. Large parts of social justice tribe have said Anita is right, so if we prove her wrong we prove that all of the social justice tribesmen who’ve placed their reputation on hers are are wrong.

            Given that Anita is a sex worker exclusionary feminist in social justice parlance, and her analysis of videogames consistantly make basic errors. She’s basically the weak front in the tribal conflict. Hence, everything.

            And yes, saying she’s the battlefield does sound pretty objectifying and bad. It is, and I won’t deny it. I will however point out that the social justice tribe objectify Anita too in very similar ways. Pedistalising isn’t a good thing.

            Do we want or need to have a discussion of what consumerist society is?

            Gamers are buying stuff, but they’re also mixing more of their labour with it than one does with a lot of other consumer products.

            Yep.

            And a discussion on what a consumerist society is and if gamers qualify is a good idea; but buried this deep in a comment chain is probably not the place for one. Next open thread?

            @Vilma

            Very good points.

            People are trying to make games following her advice – what little practical advice she offers. However games like Gone Home, or Sunset really don’t sell. You could argue though, that that’s because they’re not particularly well crafted.

            Ironically there is a thriving market of games for women on facebook, smartphones and tablets with a predominantly female audience. Gamer culture ranges from unaware to disinterested, and it doens’t look like you’ll see a “hidden object game” tribe anytime soon. (Look at Total Biscuit’s review of one to see what gamer tribe thinks of them; “this is written for a different culture, good for them”). My mum loves simple tablet puzzle games like 2048 and I’m not ashamed to admit that she can kick my butt at them.

            I bring this up to say that the invisible hand of capitalism already looks for gaming markets beyond gamertribe and the Big Mainstream Supertribe. If there was a billion dollar market of games for women, that was completely separate from the billion dollar market of facebook/phone/tabet/hidden object games mostly sold to women, I think we’d already have seen it.

            I haven’t personally verified any of this information.

            I personally verified the information about hitman back in the day by looking at online walkthroughs. Anita made exactly the misunderstanding you said she did, and that’s a really basic misunderstanding.

            It’s certainly possible that someone who talks about video game politics at length and in detail is just a charismatic mouthpiece for a team of writers, none of whom actually care about the subject except as a vehicle for self-promotion. I’m talking about Milo of course.

            I’ve seen Milo debate about videogames live, and he wasn’t wearing any earpiece I can see. Milo seeing it as a vehicle for self-promotion, probably. Being just a mouthpiece seems less likely.

            I think most people in gamergate would agree that with Milo it’s an alliance of convenience; but Milo’s upholding his end of the deal.

            Speaking of Britebart, their article (Nate Church’s) about the Baldur’s Gate controversy (so tempting to call it Baldur’s Gategate) was actually one of the best on the subject. It doesn’t talk about how poorly Beamdog treated the trans community (there’s some very on the nose posts from the trans community on the steam and official beamdog forums) but the aspects it covers it covers very well.

            It actually seemed very similar to a video by Liana Kerzner (left wing feminist game critic; she’s good, one of the few who manages to be both gamer tribe and feminist tribe at the same time even today), though my personal tastes prefer a short text article over a long video. Still, Britebart and a left wing feminist agreeing. Thing have gotten weird these days.

            @FacelessCraven

            Very good post

          • Nita says:

            @ FacelessCraven

            Thanks for the essay 🙂

            There was a broad, lively, and flourishing community of criticism that had significant engagement with the audience

            I’m glad to hear that.

            by declaring that anyone who disagreed with them were untouchable scum

            Did Carolyn Petit call anyone scum in her 9/10 GTA review? IIRC, fans of the game came down on her pretty hard, even starting a petition to get her fired. And that was before GG.

            Jack Thompson was (we thought) the last, loudest and most successful leader of a similar movement

            I mean, if Thompson was a leader, he must have had followers. Did he? Or perhaps it was a bunch of different organizations and individuals all making the same claims and using the same tactics. Then you could call them “the conservative campaign against violence and ‘obscenity'”. But calling them all “Jack Thompson” is just unintelligible, sorry.

            On the other hand, maybe this is the first you’ve heard of that history.

            No, it’s something like the 10th time, because you guys bring it up in every conversation. Look, I personally don’t have any negative feelings toward GG or “gamers” in the narrow sense, so I’m not trying to find a reason to dismiss it. But it honestly doesn’t seem as relevant to me as it seems to you.

            It’s like the Deaf people who are aggressively against colchear implants because they remind them of the oppressive oralists. It’s understandable on a psychological level, and there are some actual issues with the implants, but the backlash still seems disproportionate both to naive observers and to people trying to weigh the pros and cons carefully.

            Find a kickstarter for the rap version of Anita Sarkeesian

            I posted some quotes elsewhere in the thread. There seems to be a lot of material on this — news, tweets, articles, more articles, books, a Wikipedia page, even academic papers. If you prefer videos, there are a few student projects: 1, 2, 3 — apparently, this is a popular type of homework assignment.

            What behavior exactly are you referring to when you say that for gamer culture, “fun is more important than feelings”?

            I’m talking about an attitude, not a behavior. Attitude does have an influence on behavior, right?

            the general-purpose answer to complaints by a wide variety of groups for a very long time

            Well, luckily, Sarkeesian’s videos don’t consist of her saying “I find that offensive”. As far as I can tell, her message is “hey, look at how common some of these tropes are — does that say something about our cultural attitudes?”

            Quinn was pretty clearly an abuser, Gjoni was pretty clearly a victim.

            1. What does that have to do with games?
            2. My literally first encounter with GG was random redditors commenting in non-gaming subreddits about how ZQ is a huge slut, and therefore a cancer to be purged from the world of games. Apparently, they had seen something else than you did in that “pretty clear” situation.

            Massive viral harassment campaigns were treated as an amusing, exciting form of public protest by pretty much everyone

            Uh, yay? The culture is perfectly fine, move along, nothing to see here?

            Social Justice both inside gaming and out has a considerable history of explicitly encouraging such behavior

            SJ culture does have a major harassment problem. And they did neglect to read the Zoe Post carefully, which led to a failure to notice the abuse in the enormous volume of text and screenshots.

          • Jiro says:

            Then you could call them “the conservative campaign against violence and ‘obscenity’”.

            Yeah, Hillary Clinton is really conservative. (And since you’re phrasing this in a general manner, Tipper Gore too for campaigning to censor music.)

            For that matter, Frederic Wertham was a liberal too; he thought that comics needed to be censored because they were an example of big business exploiting the youth.

            My literally first encounter with GG was…

            You should know better than to treat a movement as though it’s the first person you ran into, especially online and when there are no criteria for membership.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @BBA: You say “It’s certainly possible that someone who talks about video game politics at length and in detail is just a charismatic mouthpiece for a team of writers, none of whom actually care about the subject except as a vehicle for self-promotion.

            I’m talking about Milo of course.”

            This is a good point and something I had been thinking about: Sarkeesian and Yiannopoulos are two sides of the same coin, in a way.

            She, as far as the accusations (which I can’t really speak to) goes, wasn’t a gamer, but saw a niche where she could be the only person doing feminist criticism. Regardless of the accuracy of these accusations, it’s certainly true that video games are fresher territory for feminist criticism than pop culture in general. Whether or not she’s acting in good faith, she’s a bigger fish in a smaller pond than she would be had she not done the video games thing.

            He (for the purposes of comparison, I’m assuming Milo isn’t just a flesh puppet for however many right-wing ghostwriters, but sub in “Milo’s right-wing ghostwriters” if it works for you) previously – and this is verifiable, not accusations – made fun of gamers in all the most predictable ways. When games became a front in the culture wars, he either (as he claims) saw gamers being bullied by people he dislikes, stepped in to help them, and came to like gamers, or (if you think he’s acting in bad faith) saw an opportunity to score some points on his enemies, convert people to his side, get some clicks, and make a name for himself. Whether or not he’s acting in good faith, he’s a bigger fish in a smaller pond than he would be without the games thing.

          • Forlorn Hopes, thanks for the background information about Sarkeeisan.

            She is a person as well as a symbol, and I’m willing to believe she was getting a lot of death threats. This has happened to women (possibly to men as well who I haven’t heard about) who weren’t going after tribes:
            notably Kathy Sierra.

            Feel free to bring up what consumerist society means in the next open thread if you like.

            I’m fond of some abstract? no-narrative? games. I got very good at Blockout (a three-d tetris game), up to the skull level. I play Minsweeper 3d. I hope to win Diamond Mine (Bejeweled) someday. I’ve almost worn out my interest in Zuma Deluxe.

            Your comments about how no one has been able to come up with the sort of games SJWs say they want reminds me that I decided one of the major features of sf fandom is the promotion of play for adults. The culture has shifted to make that more acceptable, and something I might put in the next open thread is how much of current mainstream culture has come out of sf, both creators and fandom.

            One of the things I see and don’t like about SJ is that it puts people’s pleasures on trial. I assume that all cultures have some of that, but SJ takes it to an extreme degree. When I first saw the sea lion cartoon, I wondered whether it was about SJ-in-your-head, but that didn’t quite fit.

          • Alex says:

            Villiam:

            >> Whether Sarkeesian in an insider or an outsider of the gamer community, that’s relevant for framing the whole situation as “many gamers are dissatisfied with the currently existing computer games” or “outsiders are dissatisfied with the currently existing computer games, but gamers are okay with them”. That effects the tribal feelings (is this a discussion within our tribe, or an attack by outsiders?), but also has potentially economical implications.

            Yeah. My whole point was “thanks to Scott Alexander I now get this”. And I assume Nancy got it too.

            >> Gamers spend billions of dollars on their hobby, globally. Finding out that many of them are dissatisfied with the current products; that would imply there is a billion-dollar market waiting for you to take over. And the advantage of producing software is that when you have the game ready, it only costs a little to create a copy for everyone. If you believe that Sarkeesian is correct, then you should immediately start producing a game based on her advice, because that’s how you will become a millionaire, unless too many other people do it first.

            Sorry, but this is b/s. It would imply that the participants of the billion dollar market will change their product strategies while the costs for you to enter that market are as high as ever. Someone in this thread called the changes that were made “censorship”.

            In other words: A possibly small group of gamers claims that its members, only them, and certainly not, let God forbid, Anita Sarkeesian know what the market wants. This is insane. It is the exact opposite of true belief in free markets.

            >> On the other hand, if gamers are happy with the existing games, and the people who complain about them are those who wouldn’t buy them anyway, then there are no millions to be made by following Sarkeesian’s advice.

            If publishers ignored Sarkeesian and she is wrong, in what way has she spoiled gamers’ fun or whatever it is she has supposedly done? If publishers did hear her and “censor” your beloved games, why do you think that is. What other goals outside of “making millions” do publishers have?

            >> (And this is why Sarkeesian, assuming that she is not a gamer, would have a motive to pretend to be one. The more people believe there is a billion-dollar market ready to be taken over if only they follow her advice, the more potential generous employers for her.)

            I’d love to say “do you really think publishers are that stupid?”, but I suspect the suits at e. g. EA and UBI in fact are. So I rather ask: why do you care about the mostly inferior products the likes of EA and UBI put out?

            >> Of course, “Sarkeesian is a gamer” and “many gamers agree with Sarkeesian” are two different claims, the latter screening off the former. (But if Sarkeesian is not a gamer, that is an evidence that gamers are mostly okay with the situation, because otherwise why wait for an outsider to make the criticism.) Also “the games are sexist” and “gamers are dissatisfied with the sexism in games, and would prefer to buy games without sexism” are two different claims. It is quite possible that the games are sexist, but the gamers don’t mind.

            Lacking an accepted definition of “gamer” there is little to argue. Therefore I framed this in terms of “does she love games”.

            >> Another problem is, you cannot actually write a game that would make Sarkeesian happy, because she has all bases covered. Her “tropes” cover the whole spectrum. Not having female characters is sexist. Having typical female characters is sexist, too. Having female characters that behave like male characters, that’s what she calls “men with boobs”, and that’s also bad. If a female character dies, that’s horrible. Killing a female NPC, also unacceptable. So, I guess you better make another Tetris clone.

            How come, you have insight into Mrs. Sarkeesian’s happiness? If Sarkeesian is a gamer in any meaningful sense, games that make her happy have already been written, despite the tropes. If she is, as claimed, not a gamer, maybe we should think less about writing a game with her as an audience (I’m with you on that one) and more about if she is up to something regardless, and what that might mean for games that _can_ be written.

            This is not what happened. The mere thought was declared threatening and her input was dismissed on the grounds of her being an outsider. Which certainly makes sense from the tribal perspective, but makes very little sense in terms of intellectual honesty.

            >> In some situations where Sarkeesian gives actual advice about how to make a perfect games, she contradicts herself; her own imaginary game already contains some of the tropes that she criticizes as sexist.

            I’m unaware of such situations. Sarkeesian is not a game designer and I would not turn to her for such advice any more than I would turn to a restaurant critic for advice on how to cook. I do not see the problem.

            >> Oh, a huge elephant in the room that I almost forgot. Sarkeesian collected a lot of money on Kickstarter to create videos, she got an order of magnitude more than she asked for, and she actually didn’t deliver what she originally promised. Among her critics are the people who contributed money to her originally, and were disappointed with the results.

            This doesn’t make her wrong. It’s an obvious move intended to prove her wickedness or something. I’m sick of it. Also, becoming outraged on behalf of some Kickstarter backers one has no acquaintance with is a very social justice-y thing to do.

            FacelessCraven:

            >>Social Justice was, by declaring that anyone who disagreed with them were untouchable scum, and then trying very, very hard to make it stick. Of course, you might argue that their hands were forced by the unprecedented behavior of the Gamer community. Let’s address that in a moment.

            I have not followed the debate in its entirety. You can correct me if I miss something. I would be very surprised if e. g. Sarkeesian ever said such a thing as “untouchable scum”. Also it would contradict her own claim that she enjoys gaming, regardless of that claim’s correctness. Is she that stupid? Nevertheless she has been threatened with rape (and as far as I am aware has remained polite even after that). There is _no_ possible framing of events in which “she had it coming”.

            The tribal reading of this is that indeed she had it coming for her misguided membership in the evil Social Justice tribe no matter what she personally did or did not.
            With all respect to the merits of tribalism, I find that disgusting.

            >> I think gamers are happy to have a conversation. They are happy to have a war, too.

            I think once you have gotten to the stage of rape threats, others might be less happy to have a conversation with you (generic you) No matter what atrocities the other side committed. And while it might be unfair towards many gamers to associate them with rape threats, so is associating Sarkeesian with every evil of Social Justice.
            The sword of tribalism cuts in both directions.

            Forlorn Hopes:

            >> No. I think you’ve missed the entire point of Scott’s post.

            Easy there. It is a long post and I might have missed some finer points of failed to correctly apply the idea to specific examples (here: gamers). But I did get the point, believe me. And please don’t Dunning Kruger me now.

            >> Playing video games is the ideology. It is not and never was the movement.

            This is like saying “being a spiritual successor to the prophet” is the ideology. It is true, but absolutely useless in differentiating the movements under discussion. Scott Alexander is telling us that the ideology is not gospel to be taken literally but a quick and easy membership test for a group defined by complex properties. As such a test, “playing videogames” totally fails. It might have worked in the 80s. Actually that was my point precisely.

            >> The anger isn’t really against Anita. The anger is between the gamer tribe and the social justice tribe. Anita isn’t really the enemy here, at least not beyond any other random SJ poster on the Internet. Rather Anita is the battlefield. Large parts of social justice tribe have said Anita is right, so if we prove her wrong we prove that all of the social justice tribesmen who’ve placed their reputation on hers are are wrong.

            I find it very very sad, that a tribe I once belonged to (games, not SJWs, mind you) has made this woman a “battlefield”. A very fitting analogy that goes way beyond proving who is right and who is not, as you are surely aware of. And please, please do not insult both our intellects by replying “but the other tribe has started it”.

            >> Given that Anita is a sex worker exclusionary feminist in social justice parlance

            Not familiar with that parlance. What does that mean?

            >> However games like Gone Home, or Sunset really don’t sell. You could argue though, that that’s because they’re not particularly well crafted.

            Huh? What does that prove? Gone Home (have not played it myself) has been at the center of a massive circle jerk of critics. However it did not sell well. GTA did sell very well. Cf. every artsy movie vs. every action flick ever made.

            >> Gamer culture ranges from unaware to disinterested,

            Are you sure? Have you ever been to a place like, dare I say it, 9gag? Or is the next move that self-identifying gamers on 9gag are not true scotsmen?

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            @Nina

            But it honestly doesn’t seem as relevant to me as it seems to you.

            Nobody’s asking you to self hypnotise yourself until you Get It ™. But I put forward the idea that if you don’t Get It ™ you don’t understand gamer culture; and if you don’t understand gamer culture you should refrain from criticising it’s cultural products – if for no other reason than a criticism made without understanding will probably just be inaccurate. (That’s probably addressed to social justice tribe more than you)

            What does that have to do with games?

            games nothing. Gamer tribe’s issues with social justice tribe, everything.

            But calling them all “Jack Thompson” is just unintelligible, sorry.

            Social justice tribe’s terminology is weirder. You call a distributed system perpetuated by both gamers and affecting both genders “patriarchy” for example.

            Terminology gets weird, this is a thing that happens, but it should be easy to memorise “when a gamer says Jack Thompson they have a much larger issue in mind”. And Jiro is right to bring up Clinton, I believe she’s quoted as saying “videogames increase violence in children as much as lead exposure decreases iq scores”.

            She is a person as well as a symbol, and I’m willing to believe she was getting a lot of death threats.

            Absolutely, as I said above I am aware that Anita is in a bad situation, and that the death threats are real.

            Lots of people are in a bad situation, and lots of people are getting death threats. Culture wars aren’t pretty.

            I’m fond of some abstract? no-narrative? games.

            In that case I recommend English Country Tune and Systems Twilight (though last time I played Systems Twilight I needed to set up a classic mac os emulator. And I find ECT quite straight forward, but I’ve heard many say it’s extremely hard)

          • Jiro says:

            If Sarkeesian is a gamer in any meaningful sense, games that make her happy have already been written, despite the tropes

            But one obvious possibility is that her tropes can be used to call any game sexist, but she makes unprincipled exceptions for games that she likes.

            If so, then it will be technically true that there are games that can make her happy, yet untrue that game developers can make her happy by following her stated principles, or that her stated principles are even workable at all.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Nita – “Did Carolyn Petit call anyone scum in her 9/10 GTA review?”

            Nope. Neither did the FPS dev who announced a patch that nerfed the fire rate of one of the game’s rifles by .1 seconds, and was immediately flooded with death threats. This is the internet, and the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory is a fact of life. The best we can do is to behave well ourselves and try to push others to do the same whenever possible.

            “I mean, if Thompson was a leader, he must have had followers. Did he?”

            Yup. He was a media darling for a couple years there.

            “Then you could call them “the conservative campaign against violence and ‘obscenity’”.”

            As others have noted, Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, and the Social Sciences Academy will be quite surprised to learn that they are now conservatives.

            “It’s understandable on a psychological level, and there are some actual issues with the implants, but the backlash still seems disproportionate both to naive observers and to people trying to weigh the pros and cons carefully.”

            …I think the inferential gap is just too wide there. Do you feel this way about hard stances against censorship in general?

            “I posted some quotes elsewhere in the thread.”

            And all of them are completely ignored[edit- by the rap tribe, that is]. I suppose, if I could restate a bit, get one of those critiques supported and pushed by the enthusiast press, so the fans have no choice but to engage. Have Rap blogs headline their material, and pre-emptively close the comment sections with a note that it’s time for the fans to sit down, shut up and listen to a new perspective for once. The full Sarkeesian treatment, one might say. Shouldn’t their misogyny be confronted bravely and directly?

            “I’m talking about an attitude, not a behavior. Attitude does have an influence on behavior, right?”

            Sure. But I still have no idea what you are claiming that attitude is, because you seem to be optimizing for ambiguity and innuendo.

            “1. What does that have to do with games?”

            The Zoe Post and the subsequent reaction are the usual justification given for Social Justice turning a viral shitstorm into a year-and-a-half-long, community-destroying civil war. Their action was profoundly destructive, gained them nothing, and was undertaken for extremely bad reasons.

            “Apparently, they had seen something else than you did in that “pretty clear” situation.”

            I don’t really care what a random redditor thought. I care what the games journalists and the indie devs, some of the most influential people in the whole community, did when they were confronted with an ugly situation.

            “Uh, yay? The culture is perfectly fine, move along, nothing to see here?”

            Pre-GG, what was your attitude toward Internet shitstorms? Have you ever observed any in your own communities? How did they react to them? How did you, for that matter? Were you around for RaceFail? If so, did you stand up bravely against the vile harassers then too?

            In any case, the question isn’t whether the Gaming community contains a ton of toxicity. It does. The question is whether we’re going to try to fix that or actively make it worse. Social Justice chose the latter.

            “And they did neglect to read the Zoe Post carefully, which led to a failure to notice the abuse in the enormous volume of text and screenshots.”

            I’m sorry, but no. Numerous summaries and abbreviations were available from quite early on. I came in early in the second week, started from the assumption that Quinn was the victim, and found sufficient contrary evidence to change my mind within an hour of sitting down at my computer. The Social Justice community went with their instincts from the start, and not only ignored contrary evidence but actively worked to suppress it.

            @Alex – “Someone in this thread called the changes that were made “censorship”.”

            Are you sure they weren’t referring to, for example, the explicit calls that GTA5 or other “problematic” games be banned from sale, or that content be cut or modified? both seem like pretty good matches for censorship to me.

            “In other words: A possibly small group of gamers claims that its members, only them, and certainly not, let God forbid, Anita Sarkeesian know what the market wants.”

            Nope. A majority of the Gaming Press were already working together to try to change the industry’s output since 2010 or so, coinciding with the “are games art” debate and the indie and app booms. This was done openly and with a great deal of support from the community; it was pretty obviously the whole point of PAR, and at the time I thought it was a fantastic thing. Sarkeesian’s critique slotted into that existing structure, and helped focus it particularly toward Social Justice ideals rather than a general call for more innovation. Gamers argued that that particular focus was what the journalists and social justice types wanted, not what the market wanted (which was, incidentally, the exact sort of general innovation people had originally been calling for). By all available evidence, they were entirely correct.

            “If publishers did hear her and “censor” your beloved games, why do you think that is. What other goals outside of “making millions” do publishers have?”

            you underestimate the degree of influence the gaming press have on the industry, and especially the difficulty in determining why exactly games succeed or fail.

            “So I rather ask: why do you care about the mostly inferior products the likes of EA and UBI put out?”

            I certainly don’t. On the other hand, I don’t want a bunch of ideological social justice fanatics playing kingmaker and dreambreaker in the indy scene either.

            “I would be very surprised if e. g. Sarkeesian ever said such a thing as “untouchable scum”. ”

            Crossed signals there, mate. I was referring to the early stages of Gamergate proper, where several prominent social justice proponents in the press did in fact declare that anyone who disagreed with their views was evil, should be shunned/sabotaged, and acted accordingly. I wasn’t referring to Sarkeesian at all.

            “Nevertheless she has been threatened with rape (and as far as I am aware has remained polite even after that).”

            To the extent of my knowledge, every public figure even tangentially involved got threatened with rape and murder, and most of them have likewise remained polite throughout. What particularly makes the threats Sarkeesian recieved more significant that those received by, say, John Bain, much less Gjoni?

            “There is _no_ possible framing of events in which “she had it coming”.”

            No, there isn’t. None of them deserved it. If I could pick one person who deserved it the least, though, it would be Gjoni, who was in actual fact a victim of a hell of a lot more than internet threats, starting with a long-term abusive relationship and ending with harassment via the legal system and a coordinated and extremely malicious smear campaign across the entire For-Real media.

            But the popular narrative holds that the threats were one-sided, which they most certainly were not. Likewise the narrative ignores that quite a few prominent figures on the Social Justice side publicly encouraged harassment, while GG fought futilely to stop it. Those facts are of some comfort, whether they are admitted by the general public or not.

            “The tribal reading of this is that indeed she had it coming for her misguided membership in the evil Social Justice tribe no matter what she personally did or did not. With all respect to the merits of tribalism, I find that disgusting.”

            I…agree? Obviously? I feel like you are responding to someone else’s post, maybe?

            “I think once you have gotten to the stage of rape threats, others might be less happy to have a conversation with you (generic you) No matter what atrocities the other side committed.”

            …Including rape threats, yes. That is, when one side gets to publicize the bad behavior of the other and conceal that of their own, they win the public relations fight. On the other hand, gaming culture has a couple of decades-worth of practice ignoring the disapproval of the broader culture, and that disapproval in fact had very little effect on the community. So to hell with them.

          • Cauê says:

            I found it weird to see a discussion about a “ban” on certain kinds of criticism without mention of the accompanying explicit or implicit threats of censorship (or at least “change”). We don’t have to worry about this with books, at least not in the places where people participating in these discussions are likely to be from.

            But how would you say that videogames promote misoginy, *phobia, and cause violence against *, without saying or implying that they must change? You don’t, and they don’t. Sarkeesian has already said that “if you don’t like it, just don’t play it” is not an acceptable position. Nobody is complaining about people also making the games they want, and that’s usually the answer with all kinds of criticism except those based on morality, where (maybe given some factual assumptions) sometimes this answer is not acceptable to the critics.

            ETA: Criticism of videogames has traditionally been tied to a score system, and this numeric score was presented and compared with others as a summary of the game’s worth. This has commercial implications, and has been even used by publishers as a criterion to determine how much the developers are paid.

            This system sucks. But, inside this system, when this magic number starts to be influenced by moralistic reasoning which most or at least much of the public doesn’t share, we have obvious problems, without clear parallels in books.

            Sarkeesian is like the villain in a children’s story, the big sister who tells lies that are obvious to everyone involved, but not to the adults in charge.

            I can’t imagine how someone familiar with games can watch some of her videos and not conclude that she’s outright dishonest, but they probably look plausible to those who don’t have a clue.

            She is a person as well as a symbol, and I’m willing to believe she was getting a lot of death threats. This has happened to women (possibly to men as well who I haven’t heard about)

            This is extremely frustrating. I have no reason to think this happens to women more than to men, but people only talk about the women.

            I remember, in the beginning, someone going looking for “data” to write about ants on his blog, asking “women who had been targeted” to tell their stories. After some noise from the ants, he goes ok, fine, “female ants who were targeted can tell their stories too”. You get many people doing this, and going “see, and you say women aren’t targeted!”, and I don’t even think they realize they didn’t actually try to look at relative frequencies. It’s all just collecting stories of chinese robbers.

            Meanwhile, I’m pretty confident I can at least match the stories you heard of women with stories you haven’t heard of men. And when I see someone actually trying to look at the whole picture, they show similar levels of harassment (although women get more upset).

          • Viliam says:

            @ Alex :

            A possibly small group of gamers claims that its members, only them, and certainly not, let God forbid, Anita Sarkeesian know what the market wants. This is insane. It is the exact opposite of true belief in free markets.

            The claim is that the market wants more or less what the market currently buys. Doesn’t strike me as too insane, more like a reasonable default assumption.

            Or rather, as a reasonable approximation. Because there are always moments when someone creates e.g. Angry Birds and it becomes a huge success, so it could be argued that the market wanted “something like Angry Birds”, but the existing game producers didn’t satisfy their need, until now.

            But I would be really surprised if it turned out that e.g. despite spending billions on dollars on them, most gamers actually hate first-person shooters, and would rather buy HTML “choose your own adventure” stories exploring social justice topics.

            Of course there can be a niche for this kind of product, but the question is, how big. The current attempts seem to prove that it isn’t big at all.

            I’m unaware of such situations [“where Sarkeesian gives actual advice about how to make a perfect games”]. Sarkeesian is not a game designer

            Here is her Masters Thesis, and here is a review of it.

        • Forlorn Hopes says:

          Scott Alexander is telling us that the ideology is not gospel to be taken literally but a quick and easy membership test for a group defined by complex properties

          Exactly! And your post was basically saying “if you don’t use the literal reading of the gospal as the definition for membership it’s a no true Scotsman” and “if you don’t take the gospal literally, please don’t call name your tribe after the gospal”.

          Though to be fair, I did agree with you on the second one. I’d be more than happy to rename it from gamer-tribe to something more accurate. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

          I find it very very sad, that a tribe I once belonged to (games, not SJWs, mind you) has made this woman a “battlefield”.

          How did you feel when we did it to Jack Thompson back in the day?

          Or what about how politicians? It’s hard to be a famous politician and not a battlefield? Right now Trump is a battlefield with Red Tribe, Blue Tribe, and whatever we call the rich guys who vote Republican for lower regulations and tax breaks?

          Obviously it’s never nice for the person in question; and the relative ratio of abuse to tools to deal with it is worse for Anita than Obama. But in the human species figureheads and battlefields are synoynmous in culture wars. I don’t think anything can be done with it, short of getting everyone to use innanimate objects as figureheads (observe how atheists spend more time attacking the bible than the pope. Many even like the pope).

          please do not insult both our intellects by replying “but the other tribe has started it”.

          I won’t do that. I know the first shots were fired by the dregs of gaming culture.

          Social justice culture came later, and escalated the fighting to include more of gaming culture through disproportionate retribution and pedistalising Anita.

          The rest is history.

          Not familiar with that parlance. What does that mean?

          I’m an outsider to social justice tribe, but this website called sjwiki.org was on the first page of google and the article had a good definition about half way down. Given the name “sjwiki” I hope this is accurate for how social justice tribe uses the term SWEF; it did match how I intended it.

          sjwiki.org/wiki/Trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism

          Huh? What does that prove? Gone Home (have not played it myself) has been at the center of a massive circle jerk of critics. However it did not sell well. GTA did sell very well. Cf. every artsy movie vs. every action flick ever made.

          It is evidence (I would not go so far to say that it is proof) that social justice tribe is not able to accurately advise games companies on how to increase their sales. Critics like Anita might partake in a “massive circle jerk” over Sunset but that did not translate into sales – clearly their tastes are out of touch with the market, so when they tell the hypothetical game developer that he should do X to increase sales, where X is something that appeals to their personal taste (it always is), why should the game developer trust that advice.

          • Alex says:

            I just wanted to comment to say that I have seen your and others’ replies. Your effort is not going to waste. However, I feel that I have said what I had to say, so please excuse my reduced enthusiasm in replying. [Also, since a new post came up, this thread will soon die]

            One thing though:

            >>It is evidence (I would not go so far to say that it is proof) that social justice tribe is not able to accurately advise games companies on how to increase their sales. Critics like Anita might partake in a “massive circle jerk” over Sunset but that did not translate into sales – clearly their tastes are out of touch with the market, so when they tell the hypothetical game developer that he should do X to increase sales, where X is something that appeals to their personal taste (it always is), why should the game developer trust that advice.

            Im genuinely confused.

            Someone above made the proposition that if Sarkeesian were right and gamers were anything like her (i. e. she had superior information on what gamers wanted), there would be millions to be made for an outsider.

            This claim is wrong in general because superior information is often not sufficient to successfully enter a saturated market.

            It is wrong in particular because it implies that existing players in the market with existing infrastructure must have ignored said superior information which in reality they apparently have not. That in itself is one central complaint about Sarkeesians work as far as I get it.

            I guess you wanted to somehow contribute to that line of discussion with the Gone Home example. How? I mean I could speculate but even my most charitable hypotheses what you could have meant, make very little sense.

            Why would Sarkeesian want to be a valuable advisor to game makers? How is “knowing what the market wants” causally related to having an acceptable point of criticism? Who ever implied that it was somehow her intention to advise game makers on how to boost sales?

          • My impression is that people like Sarkeesian are much more focused on discouraging the art they don’t like than they are on getting art they do like.

          • Alex says:

            Nancy, why would anyone let Sarkeesian discourage them?

          • keranih says:

            My impression is that people like Sarkeesian are much more focused on discouraging the art they don’t like than they are on getting art they do like.

            Well, to be fair – while I strongly disagree with Sarkeesian and all her works, “castigate the bad instead of celebrate the good” is a strong human/Fannish tendency.

            While Fandom may have give vocal support to the idea that we should celebrate the stuff we like and let those who like other stuff do as they will (the “it’s all good” doctrine) this is an idea that has (repeatedly) broken down in practice – the resulting flame wars over incest fic, RPS, and competing ‘ships are far too numerous to mention.

            For every “well, if you don’t like abortions don’t have one” there is the corresponding “well if you don’t like slavery don’t keep slaves.”

            (And one of the least appealing things about fandom is that we will put Rod/Hermione vs Harry/Hermione in exactly the same bucket as abortion and abolition politics.)

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            I guess you wanted to somehow contribute to that line of discussion with the Gone Home example. How? I mean I could speculate but even my most charitable hypotheses what you could have meant, make very little sense.

            I’m not sure why you’re finding it so confusing, because the stuff I’m saying is in your post.

            In particular:

            It is wrong in particular because it implies that existing players in the market with existing infrastructure must have ignored said superior information which in reality they apparently have not.

            Is is the thing the failure of Sunset demonstrates.

            1) Anita says “I have superior knowledge, there is a gap in the market for games like Sunset”
            2) Sunset fails.
            3) Game companies say “The fortune we spent on market research wasn’t inferior to one woman with a kickstarter. This is a relief.”

            Why would Sarkeesian want to be a valuable advisor to game makers?

            I’m not even sure if she does, at this point I’m not even sure if Anita knows what she wants anymore. I’m suspicious that she may be finding it hard to separate Anita the person from St Anita on the pedestal of social justice.

            But there’s money and status in changing games, and she might genuinely think it would weaken patriarchy if she became an advisor and changed games – so if she wants to those are the likely reasons.

            How is “knowing what the market wants” causally related to having an acceptable point of criticism?

            There’s no direct causal link. I don’t think anyone said there was.

            This is more about the accuracy of her criticisms than the acceptability of her criticisms. When she says women are excluded – can we take her word for it if she thinks women want games like Sunset or Gone Home and they clearly don’t?

            Who ever implied that it was somehow her intention to advise game makers on how to boost sales?

            She did.

            At one point Anita was listed as an adviser to Silverstring media (now there’s a name I hadn’t thought about for a long time). Silverstring was a consulting firm that worked with game developers.

            I don’t know any of the details. But I’m confident if you’re working with a consultancy firm you have a pitch that involves making your clients money.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Alex – …huh. Now I’m confused too.

            “This claim is wrong in general because superior information is often not sufficient to successfully enter a saturated market.”

            Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? As someone who works in the industry, I can say that it certainly doesn’t sound true. The market was saturated before Steam came out and became the cornerstone of the industry. The market was saturated before Minecraft became the biggest game in the history of games. The market was saturated before the app store opened and generated a completely new market ex nihilo.

            Making games is a very weird occupation, and planning and prediction are both extremely difficult and extremely lucrative. The reason Kickstarter and Early Access are things is because it’s so insanely risky to do development without them; they help prove the market is there, and help close the gap between investment and return.

            “It is wrong in particular because it implies that existing players in the market with existing infrastructure must have ignored said superior information which in reality they apparently have not.”

            …It wasn’t just Sarkeesian claiming this, and in fact this was one of the central arguments of the “gamers are dead” push. I would argue that it’s probably not true, but it’s not exactly a settled question now, and certainly wasn’t a year and a half ago. I’m seeing arguments now that VR might even be the secret sauce that walking simulators like Gone Home needed. They might be poised to explode!

            “Why would Sarkeesian want to be a valuable advisor to game makers? How is “knowing what the market wants” causally related to having an acceptable point of criticism? Who ever implied that it was somehow her intention to advise game makers on how to boost sales?”

            Being “a valuable advisor to game makers” has been the entire role and purpose of the new games journalism since 2010 or so, both in terms of marketability and in terms of aspirations for the medium. Sarkeesian and the other Social Justice members of the media argue that the community’s rampant toxicity have artificially limited its growth, and a cleaned-up community and/or the right sorts of games could lead to another money geyser like the app store.

            There’s this idea, poorly defined but omnipresent, that the medium can be revolutionized, leading to massive growth/whole new experiences/huge payouts/total cultural dominance, whichever you want the most. We are all looking for The Way Forward. Sarkeesian and her supporters claimed they’d found it.

            [EDIT] – In my experience, games criticism is pretty different from, say, film criticism or literary criticism. There’s a lot more money involved in games, for one, and for two, in some ways they’re way, way easier to make. I don’t think most film critics want to actually make their own movies, and those who do aren’t under the delusion that they actually can. But you can make a game in an evening. I’ve made one in two days, with one other friend, while fighting off a crippling bout of depression. Everyone in the games community wants to make them, or influence them, or contribute in some way.

            [EDIT EDIT] – “why would anyone let Sarkeesian discourage them?”

            Why did Blizzard drop Tracer’s “sexy” pose from overwatch?

            Bad press could sink my current company. It has the threat of killing sales, turning away fans, killing your prospects with the wider culture, damaging your IP. Unless you’re extremely sure of your core audience, it’s extremely scary, and is a huge part of why I use the name I do here.

          • @ForloneHope:

            How did you feel when we did it to Jack Thompson back in the day?

            Speaking as an outsider, learning from this thread that ZQ was not an isolated incident leaves me with a far more negative impression of the “gamer” tribe than anything I heard about it during GG itself. (This is not intended as a criticism, just an observation.)

            But in the human species figureheads and battlefields are synoynmous in culture wars. I don’t think anything can be done with it […]

            I don’t know whether anything can be done about it, but I think we [i.e., humanity in general] should try. I can’t believe that the sort of vicious attacks we’re talking about are entirely unavoidable.

            (I’m reminded of this blog post by Scott Aaronson, in particular the part where he talks about why he now self-identifies as a rationalist.)

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            “why would anyone let Sarkeesian discourage them?”

            Because money from selling your game is nice, but it’s also nice not being Primary Target #1 of an obsessive harassment army that controls the industry media and trade groups.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            Harry Johnston – “Speaking as an outsider, learning from this thread that ZQ was not an isolated incident leaves me with a far more negative impression of the “gamer” tribe than anything I heard about it during GG itself.”

            Well, let’s take a look at what things are like in pop music fandom.
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxrWuE5qC5c

            Ouch. How About Harry Potter Fandom?
            https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/23/we-are-all-msscribe/

            Sports?
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_riot

            Malice is a very human emotion.

            “I don’t know whether anything can be done about it, but I think we [i.e., humanity in general] should try.”

            Any ideas? Spreading a cultural rule that harassment is unacceptable is a good start on mitigating the damage, but even that is easier said than done, and even relatively small-scale, tightly-controlled venues have proven more or less impossible to police.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            Speaking as an outsider, learning from this thread that ZQ was not an isolated incident

            I find it very very sad, that a tribe I once belonged to (games, not SJWs, mind you)

            I knew it.

            Creepy Cultist Chanting

            Never were one of us! Never were one of us! Never were one of us!

            /Creepy Cultist Changing

            Sorry about that. But seriously, following Jack Thompson and related things was a life experience for me as a teenager.

            I wouldn’t say it’s a defining life experience or even that important in the grand scheme of things, but I did grow up thinking very tribal thoughts about gamers being Us and Jack Thompson being the leader of Them.

            I don’t know whether anything can be done about it, but I think we [i.e., humanity in general] should try.

            Of course we should try, but we also shouldn’t hold it against any particular group when every group does it.

          • @Faceless: it’s interesting that all four of your examples are fandoms of one sort or another, but I guess SJW is a counter-example to any theory one might be tempted to draw along those lines. (Unless someone cares to argue that they’re fans of feminism? But the ideology is broader than that, so I don’t think that works.)

            Can’t be size per se, because Stack Overflow manages pretty well, though oddly enough I know there have been problems with the Science Fiction and Fantasy site. Nothing like GG/SJW/Soccer-Hooligans though. And of course we have SSC and (I guess?) LW / rationalism in general. I don’t have any sort of coherent picture here.

            In retrospect, I guess when I said that humanity should try to do something about it, what I really meant was more like “I wish people would stop rationalizing and/or excusing it” rather than anything particularly productive. Mea culpa.

            Still, the idea isn’t entirely worthless. I might at least hope there are smart people somewhere being paid to think about deradicalization and the like in slightly broader terms than just traditional religion and physical terrorism. And it might turn out to be a more tractable problem than we think.

            After all, most of western society did eventually manage to establish a cultural norm against outright violence over the same sort of disputes. There’s no obvious reason to think it isn’t possible to establish a cultural norm against the Internet Warrior.

            Edit.

            @ForlornHope: personally, I don’t hold it against any particular such group. I hold it against every such group. Perhaps it’s just a Grumpy Old Man thing.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Harry Johnston – “Can’t be size per se, because Stack Overflow manages pretty well, though oddly enough I know there have been problems with the Science Fiction and Fantasy site. Nothing like GG/SJW/Soccer-Hooligans though. And of course we have SSC and (I guess?) LW / rationalism in general. I don’t have any sort of coherent picture here.”

            I think some of it is just pretty clearly human nature. The first online community I ever hung in had a member engaging in a years-long sockpuppet campaign for social influence purposes. John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is a real thing as well, and is probably irreducable. On the other hand, both of those are somewhat smaller-scale versions of the problem. The big version, the one that gets the truly massive shitstorms going, may just be growing pains of the internet.

            I think it’s possible that a whole lot of it comes down to the personal histories of the people involved. Keep in mind that internet communities have only been a truly mainstream thing since the 2000s or so. SomethingAwful was founded in 1999, and I’ve heard a lot of people argue that it was the primary source of modern internet troll culture, giving formative experience to a lot of the nastier people on the social justice side, as well as spawning 4chan and its progeny. A lot of the early viral harassment storms were either niche enough that the trolls got to write the dominant history of them, or they were aimed at targets that no one had any sympathy for, so this sort of behavior got reinforced quite a bit. GG is the first incident I can think of where large-scale harassment has actually been condemned as a bad thing on a really pervasive scale within the internet culture itself; It’s possible that the tactic will pick up enough negative affect from its use in the mainstream culture war that opinion will turn against it decisively in the majority of communities. That won’t eliminate it entirely; groups like /baphomet/ aren’t likely to change their attitude, but keeping it fringe and unsavory would go a long way to cut down on the harm.

          • Why people leave authoritarian groups. You might want to skip down to [pushed to the wall].

            This may only have moderate applicability about people leaving SJ or moderating their use of it, since SJ isn’t structured like a conventional cult. More research is needed.

      • Vorkon says:

        @Nita

        Maybe at some point in the distant past games used to be a nerdy pastime, but it’s been a huge mainstream industry for a while. They’re not making billions of dollars in revenue by catering to an outcast minority.

        Isn’t this precisely what Scott was talking about, in reference to rich white people getting into rap about the Founding Fathers?

        Sure, “gaming” is now a mainstream pastime. However, “gaming culture” and identifying oneself as a “gamer” still are not. Admittedly, the specifics of what those terms entail are pretty vague, but that’s exactly what Scott was talking about in this essay. You could define it as something like, “people who spend more than 10 hours a week gaming” or “people who hang out on gaming websites in their spare time, when they’re not gaming,” or some similar definition which definitely does not constitute the majority of the people who buy games, but what matters is that they rally around the “gamer” flag and identify that as their tribe. Gaming may be commonplace now, but identifying as part of that tribe is not.

        That tribe may have some problems. I’m certainly not trying to argue otherwise. But trying to argue that it isn’t a tribe which exists, and which some people have found comfort in when they couldn’t find a different tribe to belong to, seems to be missing the point of this entire essay.

        • Nita says:

          I’m saying the tribe has both grown and changed. The original Christian community was persecuted by the Romans, but then Christianity took over Rome, the rest of Europe, and large parts of the rest of the world. At some point along the way, the Christian tribe had to stop identifying as cultural underdogs.

          • Um. Wouldn’t it be a different tribe, even if by the same name?

          • Nita says:

            Sure, it’s a different tribe in some ways. But many modern Christians will tell you that their tribe was persecuted by the Romans, so it’s also the same tribe in some ways.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            I’m saying the tribe has both grown and changed

            With Christianity I believe this to be factually wrong.

            Once Emperor Constantine became Christian an entirely new tribe formed around the flag of Christianity.

            They didn’t oppress the early Christians (who probably thought they were a step up from being thrown to lions) but they were clearly not the same tribe.

            The original Christian tribe – by which I mean people who would have joined the original Christians if they lived in Roman times – remain a minority and thus an underdog today. Even if no one’s been thrown… I guess Quakers, to lions.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Certainly the tribe has grown and changed. It has not merged with the mainstream, however. Not all people who play games are part of the tribe. Just as people who watch “Downton Abbey” (mainstream) aren’t necessarily period drama enthusiasts.

          • anonymous says:

            “At some point along the way, the Christian tribe had to stop identifying as cultural underdogs.”

            Ha!

            Don’t worry though – when an unemployed pink haired loser says that a project is misogynist or racist and a giant corporation jumps to cater her demands that isn’t a sign that SJW is actually backed by amazingly powerful cultural forces – SJWs are still cultural underdogs.

    • Murphy says:

      All in favor of adding “cultural gentrification” to the lexicon.

      I think it’s actually better than “cultural appropriation” for describing this. Appropriation is someone taking an aspect of your culture into their own as a bauble but gentrification far better describes the process of the original residents being pushed out.

      Everyone is doing what they feel is “right” or vaguely “good” much like someone moving into a house in a poor neighborhood and making it better before selling but the end effect is that of pushing out the old residents and leaving them without a community.

      • moridinamael says:

        “Cultural gentrification” is definitely more connotationally acceptable than “cultural genocide” and probably more precise, too.

      • Simon Penner says:

        An important connotation of gentrification that often gets lost in different metaphors is that, in the perspective of outsiders, it is very obviously a net good. It seems like a natural step on the path of progress and nobody understands why someone would be against it.

        The problem is it causes collateral damage to the people it clears out, and nobody cares about those people. Nobody provides them with transition support, nobody gives them.new alternatives, nobody even tries to empathize with them.

        The entire gg narrative takes as axiomatic that what the sj types are doing is good. They ignore the damage they do, because they do the damage to an (to them) outgroup. Damage is sad

        • Randy M says:

          The entire gg narrative takes as axiomatic that what the sj types are doing is good.

          You mean the mainstream narrative about gg, not the narrative gg tells itself, right?

        • I think the mainstream GG narrative is more along the lines that SJ wasn’t even involved until after GGers started viciously attacking a woman for no readily apparent rational reason, and that once the whole thing finally blew over, things would be more or less back the same way they always were. Gentrification (by any name) wasn’t part of it.

          At any rate, that’s certainly the impression I got back at the time. (Mostly via Popehat, I guess.) I’m not trying to argue any position, incidentally, just providing a data point.

          The “defending my tribe from interlopers” narrative certainly makes more sense of the whole thing. Far more so than “ethics in gaming journalism”, to which my response (at the time) could only be, “yeah, right – what’s that got to do with someone allegedly sleeping around”, and “if you don’t like the ethics of the publishers, just stop buying the magazines”.

          (Although that last part still seems kind of applicable. It just becomes “if the magazines aren’t representative of your tribe any more, stop buying them” and perhaps “aren’t there plenty of in-group game reviewers with blogs you could read instead?” Not sure if I’m still missing something. Perhaps buying gaming magazines is/was one of the tribal flags?)

          • birdboy2000 says:

            We did stop buying the magazines. We also told other people to stop buying the magazines, and why we stopped buying the magazines. We also urged the advertisers of the magazines to drop them. This was probably the single most sustained and coordinated action Gamergate took as a group.

            For this we were called misogynist terrorists, accused of things which may or may not have happened to individuals we were critical of – but which we repeatedly condemned and wanted nothing to do with – and purged from most of the web. And had a ton of personal abuse hurled at us, much of which would be written up in Kotaku if it happened to someone they liked.

            (The division you talk about exists now, after the dust has mostly settled – people who support Gamergate read Techraptor and Niche Gamer, people who oppose it still read Kotaku and Polygon. It didn’t in 2014.)

          • We also told other people to stop buying the magazines, and why we stopped buying the magazines. We also urged the advertisers of the magazines to drop them.

            Yes, I remember that. (I seem to also recall GGers threatening games manufacturers with a boycott if they didn’t stop providing the magazines in question with pre-release games for review.)

            And all of this is exactly the sort of thing that didn’t make any sense to me until Scott wrote his post. If I just don’t like a magazine’s editorial changes, I’ll certainly stop buying it, but I’m not going to try to drive it to bankruptcy. Boycotts and the like indicate that there’s some other motivation in play, and it was never obvious what that was.

          • Equinimity says:

            > I think the mainstream GG narrative is more along the lines that SJ wasn’t even involved until after GGers started viciously attacking a woman for no readily apparent rational reason, and that once the whole thing finally blew over, things would be more or less back the same way they always were. Gentrification (by any name) wasn’t part of it.

            Something that’s been dropped by both sides, is the reason proto-GG was going after her. She started a raid on a forum where chronically depressed men wallowed in their depression, based on a supposed slight against her. (The initial post and two dismissive followups were later shown to have all come from the same IP address, one which had not posted on that forum in the 3 months that the logs went back.) Several of the regulars on there have never returned, believed to have suicided.
            The twitter mob she riled up to raid the forum were mostly former Something Awful goons, following a pattern they’ve used against other groups in the past. That led to the 4channers deciding to go after the goons, as they have done in the past. At this point, the “attacking a woman for being female!” narrative got launched, apparently just as a way to knock the 4channers back. Instead, SJ saw this as their chance to attack the entirety of the gaming tribe with the mass censorship to keep the wizardchan suicides story hidden while they put out the “Gamers are dead” articles. The censorship across most gaming sites and “Gamers are dead” is what brought in the rest of what became GG.

            If you want to go with the cultural gentrification analogy, a handful of people got drunk and drove too fast through a shady part of town, running over and killing a few people. The people who lived in that street chased them out, at which point they called the cops and said they were attacked by a mob just for being from another part of town. So at this point various groups that saw the potentially prime real estate began screaming for law and order to drive those scum out of town, which led to the whole area turning against them.

            That start has given me a personal stake in this, even though I’m not in the gamer tribe. I’m a furry, and the SA goons involved in that raid used to raid our forums in the past. Someone I knew back then committed suicide after he was outed as gay by them and kicked out of home. That died down years ago, but now SJ appears to be absorbing the SA meme that it’s ok to harass weird men, even to the point of suicide, because they’re not really people. Unlike the SA and 4chan arseholes who went after weird people like me in the past, SJ has mainstream backing. My social groups have gone predominantly SJ these days, it’s not nice to realise that I’m surrounded by people who could turn on me at any moment and get away with it if they knew a bit more about me. As I’m also a former game dev, the stuff I get from my friends comes across as, “Of course you hate all the people like you, people like you are absolute scum who don’t deserve to exist, you must agree with us on this, any sane person would!”

            That got a bit more personal than I intended at the end, but I’ll leave it.

          • Alex says:

            birdboy2000:

            Wait, what? You actually bought game magazines prior to gamergate? You knew _other_ people, who did?

            In my country, magazine market is practically dead thanks to the internet across all genres. The big names capitalizing on whatever value the names still have and catering to a rapidly aging and shrinking audience. I predict in 10 years time the print magazine will be but a curiosity. All of this also holds for the specific case of game magazines.

            Is there a parallel universe somewhere?

            Equinimity:

            You do realize how your post perfectly resonates with the formation of legends about early heroes as described the article?

          • Viliam says:

            The “ethics in gaming journalism” is about the interlopers, but it includes the idea that the actions of the interlopers would be regarded morally wrong even by people who have no personal feelings about the specific tribe.

            It is assumed that the public at large would agree that journalists shouldn’t accept bribes for writing positive reviews, and shouldn’t review products created by their friends without declaring the conflict of interest. That even people with no respect to computer games would agree with that principle applied to e.g. books or movies, and therefore by analogy they should see how the gamer tribe was wronged here. — In other words, it is an attempt to find allies outside the tribe.

            The accused journalists try to weaken the analogy by suggesting that computer games are a different magisterium: that games are low-status, and only low-status men really care about them, therefore it is unreasonable to expect the rules for high-status products such as books to apply there in the same way. (Also, the journalists switch their own identity between “journalist” and “blogger”, depending on whether they want to enjoy the privileges or avoid the responsibilities typically associated with journalism.) They conclude that therefore even the gamers themselves cannot be serious in their own expectations, so the whole thing is merely a pretext for the hypothetical desire of white cis male gamers to drive women and minorities aways from computer games, and computers in general.

            Because the magazines were the place where the tribe communicated, switching to different magazines is a complicated coordination problem. Of course the magazines themselves will not encourage the transition, and their forums are heavily censored. When you create a new forum, how will the existing tribe members know about it? And of course the magazines provide their own version of the events, to confuse the tribe members who have not received the message yet. So it happens, it’s just slow and complicated precisely because the traditional communication lines were taken over, and are actively used to disrupt the process.

            (Luckily for the gamer tribe, the interlopers often overreact, which ironically provides the previously clueless members a signal that something is wrong, and when they try to find out more, further overreactions often push them further away. Thus the saying that “aGGers are the GG’s best recruitment tool”. Because it is difficult to not overreact when your movement has a cultish dynamic, and it is difficult to practice the virtue of silence when you are in the clickbait business.)

          • Nita says:

            The accused journalists try to weaken the analogy by suggesting that [..] only low-status men really care about [computer games]

            Did someone actually say that?

          • Alex says:

            Villiam:

            Makes absolutely no sense to me. Seriously, what parallel universe is this?

            Like I said, both traditional journalism and the market for products of traditional journalism have been declining or outright broken for at least a decade. “ethics in journalism” has been a lost (and largely irrelevant) battle before gamers even decided to join. Ethical or not, self-identifying game journalists would certainly not alienate their own audience by calling it low status?! That has to have come from the outside?!

            And nobody coordinates and communicates via magazines. Am I missing something? Is “magazine” a term for the likes of (thankfully gamegate free) rockpapershotgun? Then what was bird’s point about “buying” magazines?

            Granted, an organised exodus of the scale digg -> reddit or lw -> ssc is very very hard to pull off. But my impression is that a lot of people did not care enough about the issue to _want_ to participate in an exodus. Especially not after things got ugly.

          • Nita says:

            @ Viliam

            it includes the idea that the actions of the interlopers would be regarded morally wrong even by people who have no personal feelings about the specific tribe

            When outsiders hear “ethics in gaming journalism”, they imagine issues like this:

            a need for access to publishers, developers, and titles makes journalists play softball rather than upset the powers that be far too often, and especially with AAA titles

            or this:

            video game critic Jeff Gerstmann was fired from his job at GameSpot for penning a negative review of Kane & Lynch. According to Gerstmann, the game’s publisher Eidos Interactive threatened to pull advertising from the site following the 6/10 review

            or this:

            Today, Capcom sent me a really heavy box. A $300 chess set was in it.

            But then they learn that mentioning a tiny donation-supported indie game is apparently a much bigger deal than any of the above, and that goes against their intuition. Generally, people tend to care more about the conflicts of interest where more money is involved.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Equinimity – Hail, game dev! Game artist here.

            @Alex – “You do realize how your post perfectly resonates with the formation of legends about early heroes as described the article?”

            Even better, I wrote my own abbreviated account of the origin of the Ants above, and mine and his share almost no points of commonality. People retain whatever resonated most deeply with them at the time.

            @Nita – “But then they learn that mentioning a tiny donation-supported indie game is apparently a much bigger deal than any of the above, and that goes against their intuition.”

            The Gerstmann incident in particular provoked massive outrage and denunciation across the entire community. The other incidents you describe fit into the simmering crisis in games journalism in the five years or so preceding GG, which undoubtedly helped to prime the pump. But again, what really drove the outrage wasn’t just journos behaving badly, but behaving badly while openly attacking the tribe and its values.

          • Anonymous says:

            But again, what really drove the outrage wasn’t just journos behaving badly, but behaving badly while openly attacking the tribe and its values.

            You can see I hope, at least in retrospect, how it was a terrible idea to send people out saying it was about ethics in game journalism. Because the first a lot of people ever heard about the whole thing was two people arguing, one claiming it was about driving women out of gaming and the other it was about ethics in game journalism.

            So naturally, the first thing the observer did was go look up a few of the GG websites. And what did he find? A confused mess about Quinn, a little bit about payola, a whole lot about the unfair coverage of GG in the game press, and a whole lot about some woman who critiques video games on youtube (i.e. not a journalist). He concludes (correctly) that this is mostly not about ethics in games journalism and the next (perhaps incorrect) conclusion is that if the ethics in games journalism guy was lying then the driving woman out of gaming guy must have been right.

            Contrast Sad Puppies, whatever else you want to say about them, when you went to their sites they really were complaining a whole bunch about pulpy SciFi and Fantasy being shoved aside for literary versions. Sure there was also stuff about whose fault that was, some of it noxious, but the basic claim about themselves checked out.

          • Equanimity, thanks for the background.

            I’d been convinced that the story wasn’t just about misogyny when someone pointed me at Gjoni’s original post. To my considerable surprise, not only was it not about ethics in gaming journalism (not very surprising), it wasn’t (as I recall) misogynistic. Instead it was a long account of pretty ordinary emotional abuse, claiming that Quinn hadn’t just been cheating on him, she’d mounted a cognitive attack to get him to not believe the evidence that she’d been cheating. (In general, I think people underestimate the cognitive side of abuse, and this includes physical abusers claiming that their abuse doesn’t matter.)

            When I brought this up, people told me that Gjoni should have realized that his post would cause a online mob to attack Quinn. This is not reasonable.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Nita: “‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences. Because of video games. ” — Leigh Alexander, writing in gamasutra.

            That was from one of the articles which touched off the second phase of Gamergate (coincidental with the coining of the name; phase one of course started with the ZoePost).

            Did she say “only low-status men care about video games”. Not in exactly those words.

            Alex: About magazines vs online, one of the things early second-stage GG did is recommend not visiting certain web outlets (such as the Gawker properties), or using an ad-blocker, so as to deny them ad impressions.

            The “coordination” was done in various spaces — certain reddit groups, comments and forums section of those web outlets, and 4chan among them. When all of those were censored, it was a pretty good signal to the undecided that something was wrong.

          • Zorgon says:

            Equinimity and FC:

            Thank you both for sharing that. I’m a game dev, too (is this becoming a thing?) and I ended up getting into anti-anti-GG (I have some issues with GG’s approach and ideas) the exact moment I read the Zoe Post.

            I’ve been with a BPD sufferer before. I’ve experienced that kind of abuse, it bloody sang to me. I knew exactly where he’d been and how he felt. Everything about it was so utterly recognisable.

            Aaaaaand then I discovered that because his abuser was a high-status SJ person (and female of course), the entire freaking gaming press had joined ranks to demand his head and that of anyone who dared defend him or speak ill of his abuser.

            Which was also rather familiar too.

            Then I noticed the whole Internet was getting censored, and I got a feeling I’ve had before and I’ve been having ever since; the feeling that I’m in occupied territory and being hunted.

          • Cauê says:

            I’ve got the impression that the “ethics in journalism” phrasing came from the people involved initially not having much familiarity with previous SJ, hm, “events”.

            The other things people say “ethics in games journalism” should refer to were always discussed and complained about, but the press had never reacted like this. The story they told was so false, and so obviously false to those who were seeing it happen*, that the way many people managed to make sense of it was as “corrupt journalists are lying to defend their corruption”. It took some time for them to understand the ideology behind that, and to be joined by people who had been fighting in other fronts of the culture war. At this point (the height of “is it about ethics or ideology”) I remember people saying things like “I was calling it corruption, but I came to understand the corruption was caused by ideology”.

            (*It still takes immense effort for me to attempt to understand someone reading that “thousands of people are sending rape threats to women for being women, with the goal of driving women out of gaming”, and believing it. It’s not surprising that they’d look for a framing that made more sense than “these journalists actually believe what they are saying”)

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            @Nita: “But then they learn that mentioning a tiny donation-supported indie game is apparently a much bigger deal than any of the above, and that goes against their intuition.”

            With respect, that’s like reading a book about World War I and saying “what the heck, why did everybody freak out so much just because some random nutcase shot an archduke?” These things often get set off by trivia. Giant armies that were already in place get called up, outsiders jump in for their own reasons, and we’re off to the races. It doesn’t mean that either side is right, or wrong, in and of itself; just that tensions were high and nobody anticipated how a quick fight would turn into years of bloody trench warfare.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @Anonymous – “You can see I hope, at least in retrospect, how it was a terrible idea to send people out saying it was about ethics in game journalism.”

            Once the ants entered stage 2 following the “Gamers Are Dead” push, they more or less dropped all their strategic attention off Quinn and the other women claiming harassment, and focused it on the press. Obviously trying to interact with quinn, wu or sarkeesian would play into the opposing narrative, and also there wasn’t really much to be done constructively with any of them, since they were all more or less outsiders anyway. the press on the other hand were much softer targets, and attacking them wouldn’t play into the “harassing women” claims. So that’s what they organized around. Not a great choice, as you say, but the best available at the time.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @ThirteenthLetter:

            That’s funny. I was just thinking that the whole ants shitshow was kind of an inconsequential and silly version of that – two sides, both have a narrative in which they are the victim and the other side is the aggressor, neither side is correct, tiny thing that is basically irrelevant by the end sets it off, all sorts of allies get roped in who had nothing to do with it, and even quite a while after the smoke has cleared, people are still arguing about basic matters of fact.

          • BBA says:

            Here I figured that GG was the culture war equivalent of the Dreyfus Affair, the difference being that this time Dreyfus was guilty.

          • Equinimity says:

            @FacelessCraven
            > @Equinimity – Hail, game dev! Game artist here.

            Well, former dev. It’s been a few years since my name was last in the credits. Seventeen years as a code monkey though, before I left.

            @Nancy Lebovitz

            > When I brought this up, people told me that Gjoni should have realized that his post would cause a online mob to attack Quinn. This is not reasonable.

            If his public posts can be taken at face value, it sounds like he is, or was, a genuine believer in the ideology of SJ. He posted because callout culture says that abusers should be exposed to their community. It’s possible to frame the events there as pre-SomethingAwful SJ vs. post-SomethingAwful SJ, although based on my own experience with abusive types I doubt that callout culture has ever worked the way they claim it did.

            @Zorgon

            Anti-anti-GG is probably close to my position too. I expected GG to go a lot more anti-feminist than it has, but it’s still gone farther than I want to be associated with.

            > Then I noticed the whole Internet was getting censored, and I got a feeling I’ve had before and I’ve been having ever since; the feeling that I’m in occupied territory and being hunted.

            At least I’m not the only one feeling that. I am mentally ill (formally diagnosed, not tumblr-style), sometimes it’s hard to tell whether my responses are sensible.

          • BBA says:

            “When I brought this up, people told me that Gjoni should have realized that his post would cause a online mob to attack Quinn. This is not reasonable.”

            Reasonableness is in the eye of the beholder. When your priors are “women get death and rape threats just for being women”, it’s totally reasonable to think TZP would trigger a hate mob. (No comment on the reasonableness of the priors.)

            I do think that it’s unreasonable for a cis het white man to expect social justice to support him on any issue whatsoever, especially when he’s going against a member of an oppressed class. This is just common sense to me, but clearly it needs to be said, because too many people take all that equality talk at face value.

      • Dan says:

        It may make more sense to think of it as “gentrification” rather than “appropriation”, but I don’t think this quite captures the whole dynamic. Hmm. Still thinking.

        When “gentrification” happens, it’s really usually just a name for ongoing change due to the faceless markets Murphy is talking about. People complaining about gentrification just want things to stay static, and are worried about the damage done by the process.

        In the real world, the way to fight gentrification is… ??? I don’t really know. To move out and make a new neighborhood you feel comfortable in? In the gamer niche, the way to fight “cultural gentrification” is… again, I don’t know. But it’s probably not to complain loudly about how your neighborhood is different and how all the people who live there are different than before. The system is faceless, it’s not going to commiserate with you or give you an alternative place to live. The real way to deal is to move on, build a new neighborhood containing the properties you liked before. Time will tell if that was actually a good idea or not, or if those properties you try to engender are actually better or worse than either the original neighborhood (games in the 1990s and early 2000s?) or the current neighborhood. Wow, this metaphor is getting strained. Sorry.

        I am a looong-time gamer, but I don’t personally feel very moved by the general complaint that Simon Penner makes. Perhaps I understand the tribal nature of it differently? Things change. Societies dwindle and are invaded. Learn from the punk rockers: their culture got invaded and very few of them spent that much energy whining about it. [I’d argue that the people who did whine were “poseurs” in the first place.] People who care just DIY stuff and find new, smaller groups to identify with.

        So: to fight “cultural gentrification” and the collateral damage, I think all you can do is make new things, make new friends, and not give up. The tribe has grown and splintered, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some unnecessary pain is caused (on both sides), but hopefully we can all learn and build, still.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          I agree with this. I think it also has something to do with what Virginia Postrel talked about in The Future and Its Enemies as the “dynamism” vs. “stasism”.

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      But there’s another side to this “cultural gentrification” thing.

      I’ve always liked video games, ever since I was a little kid. And as someone who hangs out in the comments of this website, I’m a bit of a “nerd”. But I don’t try to make that my identity.

      If video games are the rallying cry of “weird losers with no jobs”, that’s terrible because I’m not one of those, nor do I wish to be thought of as one for bringing up playing video games. I want them to be thought of as something that normal, conventional people do.

      I imagine it’s the same way for rap. If you like rap and are not some kind of uncultured philistine, you’d like rap to be thought of as something that cultured, sophisticated people also listen to.

      • Frog Do says:

        Doesn’t this continue down to “there are no normal, conventional people”, and being specific with language requires you to state which tribe you are referring to?

      • Murphy says:

        Slightly older gay people and the more recent generations have very different experiences. One grew up in a world where they were weird, shunned and persecuted subgroup. A lot of the younger ones have a far more watered down experience.

        Whenever there’s a gay pride parade there’s a non-trivial number of gay people who complain that they don’t want to be associated with the weird people prancing around in leather and as such don’t like the parades.

        It actually causes quite a bit of conflict.

        Should the people who never had to group together for protection and make it part of their tribal identity get to shut down the older “weird” groups?

        Gaming isn’t weird now. Top games gross more than top movies. There’s a lot of people like you who aren’t weird. Do you get to push out the weirdos on the basis that you want to make sure that you don’t get associated with the weirdos?

        It’s why I think “gentrification” is the right term. You move into a poor neighborhood, of course you want your place to look nice, of course you want your area to look good, of course you want it to be more fashionable and it’s clear to you that you’re just doing a public service helping to drive up property prices which helps everyone who already owns a house there…. but as the rents get pushed up the people who used to live there get pushed out. You get a nice clean street filled with sophisticated people very much like yourself and the uncultured philistines lose the community they grew up in and end up scattered to the winds.

        Every step you want to take is positive for you and people like you but it’s utterly rational for the people who were resident before you to be utterly hostile to you and everything you are.

        • Anonymous says:

          Whenever there’s a gay pride parade there’s a non-trivial number of gay people who complain that they don’t want to be associated with the weird people prancing around in leather and as such don’t like the parades.

          Should the people who never had to group together for protection and make it part of their tribal identity get to shut down the older “weird” groups?

          These seem to me to be describing two very different scenarios. Are the younger gay people refusing to associate with the gay pride parades? Or are they getting to shut them down?

      • Simon Penner says:

        This is actually my point about cultural gentrification. Cultural gentrification makes the culture more.accessible for people like you. This is a very good thing for all the yous in the world.

        The problem comes with discounting the bad it does to the people being gentrified

        • Forlorn Hopes says:

          While that’s a good point about actual gentrification, I think that the SJ crowd are overall worse than many of the groups they replace.

      • Anonymous says:

        Beyond that, this seems like one of those situations where concentrated effects end up getting more attention than dispersed effects, even when the former are on net smaller, because something big happening to a few people is much easier to fully comprehend than something small happening to a very large number of people.

        For example, I think the net utility gained from Call of Duty and smartphone gaming is almost certainly much greater than the net utility gained from hardcore gaming. The latter is very important to a relatively small number of people, the former is slightly important but to a vastly greater number of people.

        I think this applies more generally. Consider that for every activity you partake in, every object you interact with, there is a community of enthusiasts who are deeply passionate about that activity or object. Imagine a world in which the only people who get to do each thing are those who are passionate about that thing. Only cycling enthusiasts get to ride bikes. Only audiophiles get to use speakers. Only architecture lovers get to use buildings.

        So not only would we all be worse off if we each got to enjoy our own hobby without any filthy casuals getting their hands on it, but I think you can point to a great many examples where a tribe of X-enthusiasts manages to exist and persist even as X is enormously mainstream and used (if only casually) by hundreds of millions of people.

        A final thought… To what extent do you think part of the fun of being an X-enthusiast is getting to sneer at all the stupid casuals who use X without even appreciating it properly?

    • Alex says:

      Has that much really changed?

      My feeling is that I can get the same sort of game related quality content, e. g. Earnest Adams served on Gamasutra around the Millenium today from Shamus Young’s blog with basically no gamergate related fuss whatsoever.

      [But just to prove that nothing is ever new under the sun, here is a Earnest Adams piece from 1997 titled Why “On-line Community” is an Oxymoron:
      http://www.designersnotebook.com/Columns/002_Oxymoron/002_oxymoron.htm ]

      Judging from the outside places like civfanatics and paradoxplaza seem pretty decent still.

      Memory is blurred now, but I recollect that slurs of all sorts were already present when Counter Strike was a thing in what now feels like 1999 (but I cannot be bothered to look up actual release dates). Not much of a cozy community there.

      One thing that has changed through mainstreaming is that my s/o is looking over my shoulder when I play The Witcher like it is a freaking movie or something. Unthinkable in the Days of, idk, Doom 3.

      Maybe I do not qualify as a real gamer ™ But I would be very interested to hear your take on the above.

      • Nita says:

        my s/o is looking over my shoulder when I play The Witcher like it is a freaking movie or something. Unthinkable in the Days of, idk, Doom 3.

        [warning: ex-Soviet anecdote, potentially unrepresentative of American culture]

        I’ve watched my mom play the original Doom — not when it first came out, but way before Doom 3. And when I was a little kid, I watched my country cousins play Mario and Contra from fantastic bootleg cartridges like this. (Mario is a classic, of course, but from a movie-like perspective Contra was more fun to watch — with two players, you could have teamwork, and the plot was more engaging.)

        • Alex says:

          In Soviet Russia, Doom watches you. 😀

          My bourgoise parents certainly would have had none of it.

        • multiheaded says:

          I watched my dad play Duke Nukem 3D and soon after played it myself (with cheats), when I was like 9.

          • anonymous says:

            What an unusual little girl you must have been multiheaded.

          • Nita says:

            Come on, anon. “Girls don’t cheat at Duke Nukem” is a stifling gender stereotype. Whether to use cheat codes in a single-player game is each girl’s personal choice. E.g., I didn’t, multi did — it’s all good.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      Wait a minute, it is you people that killed my gaming tribe! Ha ha. Pinball, arcades. We had to actually be at the same physical place to play games. And there weren’t any girls at all. You haven’t gained real status until you can get the highest score on Defender possible 999,975, and you need to lose your last man with just the right score to do it. You want respect? Have 5 people watching you play a game for 15 minutes. There wasn’t any headsets, death matches, and trash talking. The high score screen told everyone everything they needed to know.

      Alas, the consoles came.

      • Nero tol Scaeva says:

        There was certainly trash talking in arcades. Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Samurai Showdown… countless others.

        I remember multiple times when some hotshot was “stealing people’s quarters” just because he beat everyone that challenged him. He would definitely be talking shit.

        Granted, this was NYC where trash talking literally became an artform.

    • Ghatanathoah says:

      If there are that many people who hate the changes SJ has brought, why not try to organize new spaces that keep them out, or at least keep them suppressed? It should be easier than ever in the age of the Internet.

      Start messageboards for gamers to congregate, but ban all discussion of politics. Do the same for meet-ups, conventions, etc. Once you get enough people together, maybe start a conference that again bans all discussion of politics.

      It’s hard to find a new home, which is why gentrification sucks. But cultural gentrification doesn’t destroy your actual home. It destroys a metaphorical home, and those are easier to rebuild.

      • Anonymous says:

        But you see, not driving out women isn’t politics, it’s common human decency!

        [Something along those lines was how RPS justified their increasing number of SJ articles, pre-GG, when some readers were pointing out that they don’t come to a gaming journalism site to read politics.]

        Maybe being anti-politics would work, but my suspicion is that SJ can worm itself in unless you’re explicitly anti-SJ (which anti-politics by definition isn’t).

        • Jiro says:

          my suspicion is that SJ can worm itself in unless you’re explicitly anti-SJ (which anti-politics by definition isn’t).

          That’s Conquest’s Second Law: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left wing.

          • TD says:

            Re: Conquest’s Second Law:
            I’ve always thought that law juxtaposes interestingly against the claim that right wing ideology is somehow more “natural”.

            “Maybe being anti-politics would work, but my suspicion is that SJ can worm itself in unless you’re explicitly anti-SJ (which anti-politics by definition isn’t).”

            Unless you are really really anti-politics. What most people mean by anti-politics is a neutrality towards it, whereas in theory you could aggressively shut down any discussion that smells of politics until this becomes such a norm that people engage in self-policing. This would probably be a terrible idea, but a very interesting experiment.

        • Tom Scharf says:

          Any tech site that has started veering into politics has gone left wing in my experience. Some do it better than others. If you do it, you need to be careful how you do it. If you start taking positions on controversial topics you will start subdividing your readership and start to lose revenue. Most of it is pretty tame and unobjectionable, reporting on the intersection of politics and technology.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Banning discussions of politics doesn’t help. See, what the SJWs are talking about is politeness and being welcoming and inclusive and empathetic; politics is that nasty thing Trump supporters do.

      • FacelessCraven says:

        @Ghatanathoah – “If there are that many people who hate the changes SJ has brought, why not try to organize new spaces that keep them out, or at least keep them suppressed?”

        This is the obvious thing that people do immediately. The obvious counter-move, which Social Justice likewise does immediately, is to brand anyone taking this or any other anti-SJ action as racist, sexist, bigoted neo-nazis, and then to publicize their version of the dispute beyond all hope of counter-argument.

        Social Justice does not like being resisted.

        • ThirteenthLetter says:

          “This is the obvious thing that people do immediately. The obvious counter-move, which Social Justice likewise does immediately, is to brand anyone taking this or any other anti-SJ action as racist, sexist, bigoted neo-nazis, and then to publicize their version of the dispute beyond all hope of counter-argument.”

          See also: Freedom on the Centralized Web. Oh, there’s a website that doesn’t have anti-witchcraft policies? Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t go to that website unless you were a witch. You’re not a witch, are you?

      • Arbitrary_greay says:

        One of the spaces that has more successfully done this (remained relatively apolitical) is RoosterTeeth.

        And they do this by being nice and entertaining.

        As per one of the things I said in the open thread on how to avoid political writings, I feel that RT has escaped a huge SJ scrutiny because it’s dismissed as too obviously low-brow. Plenty of SJ-sympathetic people go to RoosterTeeth for some brains-off escapist crude jokes. People don’t expect articulate essays on issues out of RT, because they’ve established that their reviewing format is extemp, and scripted stuff is for comedy. And because they do have a fairly diverse staff, they’ve inadvertently already moderated out some of the douchier opinions in their midst.

  37. W.T. Dore says:

    >The tribe would be eliminated – thus “cultural genocide” is a reasonable albeit polemical description.

    Then, after the Yugoslavs, call it “sociocide.”

  38. Alex says:

    There is a much simpler explanation for why black Republicans like Thomas Sowell, Herman Cain, etc. so much: It gives white Republicans a chance to prove that they aren’t racist because there are black people who agree with them.

    Whether or not you personally accept that as a valid refutation of the racism accusation (or even accept the racism accusation as valid) is irrelevant: They do face the accusation, and they do consider black Republicans to be powerful counter-arguments.

    • FeepingCreature says:

      I’ve experienced this effect at work myself – for instance, when some group I identify with is accused of racism or mysogyny, I’ll tend to pay special attention to group members that are non-white or women, istm primarily because it assuages my insecurity that the group really is racist or women-hating.

    • TheAltar says:

      I think there is often overlap and likely a see-saw effect going on with both being true. Equal opportunity forced doors to be opened upon punishment of being accused of racism. After the doors were opened, people saw that a rare few minorities actually matched their group’s personality traits and ideologies very strongly and those few became acculturated into the tribes. These few aren’t minded very much at all because they are heavily acculturated, often good looking, wear all the correct trappings, and don’t resemble whatsoever the stereotypical culture they would be assumed to belong to by their skin color (often to the point of being ostracized from their original culture).

      Living in the southern US and even working at a good ‘ol boys club-type Fortune 500 company I’ve seen a few minorities do extremely well and be fully accepted by following this pattern. The doors were open at all for them because of equal opportunity reform, but they are willingly accepted and able to slip into the fold because of they are far more acculturated and cooperative to the group than almost every one of the white members.

    • Tom Scharf says:

      It depends upon how much you buy into the theory that race ratios are prima facie evidence that a group is racist. I would suggest that those employing this theory tend to do it very selectively. The social sciences which is very fond of race statistics is blind to the fact that their own ranks are overwhelmingly liberal. They assert they can overcome this lopsidedness, but have little faith others can.

  39. NN says:

    It’s also worth noting that tribal boundaries can fade away for a time but then come back to life with a vengeance after a long period of dormancy.

    The Sunni/Shia split, for example, wasn’t that big a deal as little as 50 years ago. I have an audio-book of an autobiography of Zainab Salbi, the daughter of Saddam Hussein’s personal pilot. From the descriptions of her childhood she never had any sense that her family, which was Shia and had distant relatives living in Iran, was “different” in any significant way. Until that is, a few days after the 1979 Iranian revolution one of her classmates pointed at her after morning prayers and said something along the lines of, “hey, that girl prays like the Iranians.” Things got much worse after Iraq invaded Iran, all Shia including her family were suspected of being disloyal, and her neighbors started mysteriously disappearing in the dead of night…

    Fast forward a few decades and the entire Middle East is being torn apart by Sunni vs. Shia conflicts.

    From what I understand, the process went a little like this:

    1). After Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran, he put out a call for all Muslims around the world to overthrow their oppressive governments just like the Muslims of Iran had done.
    2). This scared the shit out of all the secular dictators who ruled most of the Arab world at the time. They decided that the best response was to tell their people, “don’t listen to Khomeini, he’s just one of those crazy Shiites.”
    3). Saddam Hussein took a look around and realized that his country was majority Shia, he was Sunni, and so were most of the cronies that he had put into positions of power. Around the same time, the king of Saudi Arabia took a look around and realized that his country had a sizeable Shia minority that was standing on top of the oil!
    4). To counter the rising Shia “nationalism,” these and other Sunni-led governments put substantial efforts into bolstering a Sunni identity. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan gave Sunnis their own cause celebre to rally around, and everyone involved was so grateful to have a rallying flag that nobody had any worries when a son of a Saudi Arabian construction magnate went to Afghanistan to “fight jihad.” The rest is history.

    • sweeneyrod says:

      To add to this, consider Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. There is still debate about whether he was Sunni or Shia, which is made possible by the fact he never specified either in his speeches, instead focusing on the idea of Pakistan as a relatively secular Muslim republic, without emphasis on either tribe.

    • Ith says:

      This reversion to older tribes in modern times isn’t limited to the Middle East, of course. The end of Communism in Europe was in part driven by nationalism, and saw large parts of Eastern Europe changing into traditional nation-states: Czechoslovakia split into Czech and Slovak parts, Yugoslavia fractured into nations based on its various ethnicities, Germany was reunited and the USSR itself split into nations based on its constituent republics which were largely divided on ethnic lines.

      Today we have the conflict in Ukraine, where the sides are the Russian-speaking east and the Ukrainian west, and the reignition of the conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish state. There’s the already mentioned divide in Belgium, the Catalan seccessionist movement in Spain and, perhaps most surprising, the Scottish independence movement. In the EU as a whole there’s also growing minorities many member nations wanting to weaken the EU or leave it in favour of national independence, typically more pronounced in the richer nations.

      The importance of tribal affiliations changes over time; you see a pattern of people realigning along older more organic tribal lines as the larger, usually synthetic entity becomes dysfunctional, hurts people more than it helps them and loses their loyalty. The ethnic groups then come to the fore because they have a lot of the tribal infrastructure in place: Shared history, language, culture, norms, mentality etc. This lets people ditch the old tribe without having to create a new one from the ground up.

      I suspect that nationalism will become more important in many parts of the world as many states lose the ability to inspire loyalty through other means; see for instance Turkey, Poland, Hungary and Russia.

    • Salem says:

      Your narrative is messed up. What actually happened is that the Shi’a were historically quietist in the Arab world, then Wilayat al-Faqih gained popularity. The Iranian Revolution happened for all kinds of reasons, but because it took place in the one overwhelmingly Shi’a country in the world, the resulting government wasn’t just Islamic, it was specifically Shi’a, and based on ideas largely alien to ordinary Muslims.

      This was particularly destabilising in Iraq, because the revolutionary leaders had all lived, studied and taught in Iraq, and the very doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih was developed in Iraq. Suddenly the denominational divide (which had been irrelevant since the Turks left) started to matter. Sunnis were not interested in Khomeini’s message – but might Iraqi Shi’a be receptive to it? Imagine if a group of Mexican-Americans exiles returned from the US and set up an explicitly Catholic theocracy in Mexico, calling upon Christians everywhere to do the same. Yes indeed, Protestants would start to look at Catholics differently. And this was particularly the case because the doctrine of Arab Nationalism had become thoroughly discredited by this point; when old divisions break down, new ones spring up.

      It’s more like:

      1. Shi’a clerics set up sectarian government in one region, call for this to happen everywhere.
      2. Mainstream Muslims not interested, but now suspicious of their Shi’a neighbours.
      3. Some Shi’a rightly resent the suspicion that they are agents of Iran and a destabilising force in their own countries. Others act as agents of Iran and destabilise their own countries (e.g. Hizbullah).
      4. Iraq and Lebanon, as the countries with large Shi’a populations, worst affected.

  40. Lemminkainen says:

    I think that you’re working your way into a bunch of interesting sociological/anthropological insights here, and that you (and everyone else reading this blog) might enjoy reading what some people in the humanities and social sciences have said about this/be able to build on it. Since “you don’t read enough in the humanities!” is often just used here as a sneer by outsiders, and because it’s just fucking unhelpful, I wanted to list some specific books about making and maintaining tribes (which you could probably get any friend studying or working at a university in to get for you, either at their library or via ILL) and offer some reasons why you might want to check them out.

    First, books about the making and maintenance of tribes in the distant past, over long historical periods:

    “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson– in this book, Anderson tries to offer an explanation of how nation-tribes happen, and, pretty famously (at least in history, which spawned him), acknowledges their rallying-flagness in his intro. I (and most other historians) think that the book’s account is actually factually wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that’s insight-provoking to understand and discuss, and it’s a really short read. (Also, you can probably find a pirated pdf floating around somewhere online, and like, a fuckton of used copies in any online bookstore you frequent. This one is really widely read).

    “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” by James Scott. This is an ultra-long-duree history of people who live outside states’ rule, and it’s super-readable and awesomely insight porn-y (since most history is written about people who live in states, the story of people who live outside them feels pretty fresh). A bunch of its sections deal with how outside-of-state peoples’ social organization works, how their ethnic groups form (including how state persecutors can, ironically, give these groups the labels they ultimately rally behind), and why their religions and literatures tend to possess certain traits. It’s an interesting study in how pre-existing differences can help create tribal identity.

    “The Graves of Tarim” by Engseng Ho. This is the story of a really weird tribe– a family of descendants of Muhammad originally from Yemen, scattered across the entire Indian Ocean, and encompassing people who outsiders would probably consider Arabs, Africans, Indians, and Malays, which has kept its cohesive group identity over the course of a history over a thousand years long. What’s of interest here is the way that the group keeps together– genealogies, pilgrimages to ancestral graves, and a system of Islamic law education which provides the tribe members with their livelihood and requires them to send their kids to study back in Yemen, have all been really important.

    “Drawing the Global Color Line” by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds. This is a history of how early 20th century people in America, Britain, Australia, Canada, and South Africa built a common tribal identity– not on the basis of shared language or religion (although those factors probably helped the groups cohere), but on the basis of whiteness, and a desire to maintain white supremacy.

    “Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home” by Madeline Hsu. This is basically a history of a Chinese immigrant tribe which has grown and persisted across time and space, its identity shaped by a shared origin (and frequent returns to) Taishan County in Guandong province, and legal discrimination in the US which made forming a separate autonomous community there more difficult.

    Other Group: Things Related to Tribalism in the Present-Day US:

    “Staying Alive” by Jefferson Cowie. This book is basically about how the White Working Class of mid-20th century America turned into the present-day Red Tribe. Cowie is a lefty author, but from a poor, uneducated white family, so he’s pretty attuned and sympathetic to the tribe’s problems. The book moves between labor history, politics, and pop culture in a cool way.

    “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam– basically, about the collapse of small-scale communities (which I think that Scott would identify as tribes) in modern-day America

    “The Metropolis and Mental Life” by Georg Simnel. This essay (easily found online) covers phenomena which started in the early 20th century, when Simnel wrote, but continue into the present day. It explores some of the reasons why modernity and city life might disrupt communities.

    “Gay New York” by George Chauncey. This is basically a history of how New York City’s early 20th century Gay Tribe came into being and interacted with the outside world. It sort of explains why we can talk about gay culture in the US as a coherent thing. Very readable.

    • MicaiahC says:

      Thank you for posting a list of books to read. I really appreciate it when people are specific about what they mean when they say “educate yourself” (er, in the non-sneering sense).

      • Lemminkainen says:

        Yay! I’m glad that I successfully conveyed “yo, here is this other interesting shit written by a lot of other smart people who are working on the same problem, and I bet that you might be interested in reading it, and I’d be really curious to hear what you’d think about it” rather than “you motherfuckers are ignorant crypto-racist trash!”

        • Dan says:

          This ignorant trash is gonna learn some stuff!

          I’ve read about half of this, and some James Scott, but not “The Art of Not Being Governed” — looking forward to that especially.

          • Lemminkainen says:

            I think that it’s either his best book, or his second-best after “Seeing Like a State.” You’re going to have a good time

    • Salem says:

      I can particularly recommend the book on the Hadramawt.

      • Lemminkainen says:

        For everyone following along at home, that’s “The Graves of Tarim.” Hadramawt is the part of Yemen where the big family of sayyids is headquartered.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I’ll take a look. Many of these have been recommended to me before in other contexts and are already on my (long) list.

  41. Lemminkainen says:

    Oh, and also, your history of the Sunni/Shia split is missing or wrong about a lot of stuff, but not really in ways that invalidate your argument. The omission which most interestingly interacts with your argument is that the importance of the Sunni/Shia split has fluctuated a lot across time and space throughout Islam’s history (the Ottoman Empire accepted its Shia subjects, although it sometimes squabbled with them; the Mughals didn’t really give a shit), and it’s actually flared up recently in part because states which take hardcore versions of the Sunni and Shia faiths as rallying flags, Saudi Arabia and Iran, have been using sectarian politics to battle for influence throughout the Middle East.

  42. Steve Sailer says:

    By the way, the wonderful “Robber’s Cave” experiment demonstrates why you should always show up on time for the orientation period when joining a new group, such as starting at a new college. When everybody is new, you will likely make more long-lasting friends. Orientation periods are a real window of opportunity for relationship-building.

    For example, the guys who were in my freshman orientation group at Rice U. in August 1976 were more or less the same guys who were on my intramural softball team at Rice in April 1980.

    I almost missed the Rice orientation in 1976 because the Pournelle family invited me to go with them that week to the Sci-Fi convention in Kansas City where Robert Heinlein would receive his lifetime achievement award. I think going to the Rice orientation was a good choice for my college social life, but I also regret missing out on making friends in the sci-fi community.

  43. Richard says:

    “Why Tribalism Is Stupid And Needs To Be Destroyed”

    How is this still not a great title? Reading the essay and the comments, my takeaway is that tribalism is people rallying around a flag, not because it is good or true, but because it is a flag. The extreme extrapolation is that if people had never done that and only worried about what is actually true, no human would ever have harmed another and we would have colonised Tau Ceti IV some time around the reign of Charlemagne.

    On the other hand, it goes a long way to explain why I don’t have friends.

    Oh, and the autism argument isn’t that their brains work differently, it’s that they work objectively better and if we find a fix, it should be applied to everyone else, not the autists. (Provided that there is a fix for the sensory overload thing that can be applied without messing up the good bits.) With respects to tribalism, I’m not sure they are wrong.

    • Mary says:

      Because destroying tribes is the end of humanity. What a different species of being, which does not engage in tribalism, would have done or left undone is moot as long as we are talking about human beings.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        I’m not saying tribalism can be or should be eliminated—but there’s nothing about the definition of the human species that makes tribalism intrinsic to it.

        • Frog Do says:

          “The evolutionary psychology angle here is too obvious to even be worth stating.”

          ?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Did you post this in the wrong place?

          • Frog Do says:

            Nope.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            Then I don’t see your point. I interpreted your comment as questioning Scott on what the “obvious” evolutionary psychology angle is.

            If you were trying to say to me, “but there are evolutionary reasons for tribalism”, that doesn’t seem to address the point at all. The fact that there are strong evolutionary reasons for something doesn’t mean it’s essential to what makes us human. There are strong evolutionary reasons for having functional eyes; that doesn’t mean blind people aren’t human.

          • Frog Do says:

            So then you do see my point.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            No, the first time I read your post I interpreted it completely differently from how you meant it because it was unclear.

            The second time I read it, it seemed obvious that you were making a non sequitur, so you didn’t really have a point. I still don’t see your point.

          • Wrong Species says:

            Sociality is far more important to being human than eyes are. Many species have eyes. Few have culture and none of them to the extent that we do. Our ability to learn a wide variety of skills from others is what makes our species great.

        • Mary says:

          When tribalism is found in every known human society, I would say the burden of proof is on those who say it’s not part of being human.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I’m not disputing the universality of tribalism.

            I’m disputing the idea that you have fully fleshed-out criteria of what it means to be human and know that “tribalism” is on that list.

            If, for instance, to be human is to be a rational animal, then tribalism is not a necessary part of being human. If it’s based on phylogentic similarity and capability of interbreeding, then tribalism is not a necessary part of being human. If it’s based on something more vague and open-ended, it still doesn’t seem to me obvious that you would not consider someone who was just like us but had no tendencies toward tribalism “human”.

            What is your definition of “human” under which individuals who were not tribal would not qualify as members of the species?

          • nyccine says:

            If to be human is to be a rational animal, are infants not human? What of the senile, or the psychotic? If to be human is to be bipedal, or to have 5 digits on each hand and foot, are the paraplegic or the polydactylic not human?

            Of course not, we properly recognize that there is supposed to be a certain function, and, if lacking, then this is abnormal. Behavior is no different.

            I saw a wonderful program some time ago about a lioness who shockingly “adopted” a gazelle calf, keeping it for several days, until they went to a watering hole and a male lion snatched the calf. The lioness then repeated this behavior several times. This is not normal; the host of the program noted as such, and reached out to several colleagues for ideas on what might have prompted such behavior. Most guessed that the fact that the lioness was apparently without a pride meant that she had been thrown out, and the trauma caused her to behave in this manner. Not one suggested that this behavior didn’t make the animal a lion any longer; nor did they chide the host, insulting her for assuming that there is some certain way a lion is supposed to behave in the presence of a gazelle, and how dare she force her heteronormative belief structure on the animal.

    • Anonymous says:

      Tribalism is also a mechanism for cooperation, see the paragraphs about poor people finding comrades via rap communities. Then rich white people enter the picture, dissolve the tribe, and suddenly “likes rap = can trust/form a cooperative relationship with” is no longer a reliable heuristic.

      Removing tribes may remove intertribe conflict. This doesn’t necessarily lead to total cooperation. It may instead lead to less cooperation as intertribe conflict is replaced by interpersonal conflict (people have less reason to cooperate/cooperate with strangers).

      • Hlynkacg says:

        intertribe conflict is replaced by interpersonal conflict as people have less reason to cooperate/cooperate with strangers

        Exactly

    • TD says:

      “The extreme extrapolation is that if people had never done that and only worried about what is actually true, no human would ever have harmed another and we would have colonised Tau Ceti IV some time around the reign of Charlemagne.”

      But who is “we”? “We” is not value neutral. I don’t think tribalism can be destroyed, because you inevitably just create the tribe that wants to destroy all other tribes, which is the same as any sufficiently fired up universalist ideology.

      “Oh, if everyone adopted Islam/Christianity/Communism/Pan-Nationalism/Objectivism etc then we wouldn’t have all these troubles!”

      Besides, I don’t want to go to Tau Ceti IV; I want to go to Kepler 452, and I want to go with people I actually like. Hell is a random assortment of humanity.

    • EyeballFrog says:

      > The extreme extrapolation is that if people had never done that and only worried about what is actually true, no human would ever have harmed another and we would have colonised Tau Ceti IV some time around the reign of Charlemagne.

      There is no basis for this statement whatsoever. And, as a general rule, you should be really suspicious of yourself when you start saying “The vast majority of people think differently from me. They must be wrong and I must be right.”. It might be true, but I would put a low prior on it.

    • Ghatanathoah says:

      I think that Scott tries to distinguish between “good” and “bad” tribalism, but the difference isn’t readily apparent if it’s not an issue you’ve thought a lot about before. Tribalism has some practical advantages, in particular it makes it easier to find people you have a lot of things in common with. Finding people you have things in common with and socializing with them is fun.

      I’ll try to identify the differences between good and bad tribalism:

      Good
      – Rallying flag has some value separate just from being a flag. For instance, “videogames” is a good rallying flag because videogames really are fun for a lot of people. “Charity” is a good rallying flag because helping people is good.
      – You are allowed to join multiple tribes at once.
      – You are allowed to leave your tribe without suffering excessive hardship.
      -New members are attracted by emphasizing how fun or rewarding membership is.
      – Tribe coexists peacefully with other tribes.

      Bad
      -Rallying flag is arbitrary.
      – Tribe is exclusive, discourages membership in other tribes.
      – Tribes tries to stop people from leaving by imposing hardships on them.
      – New members are attracted by the Dark Arts.
      -Tribe tries to destroy other tribes.

      Tl;dr: Tribes were made for man, not man for tribes. Good tribalism recognizes this fact, bad tribalism doesn’t.

      • Vorkon says:

        Don’t have too much to add, just wanted to say that I liked this comment.

        Tribalism can be a good thing, if for no other reason than because we’re hardwired to seek it out and feel fulfilled by it, but it can also be a bad thing, if we let it get out of hand.

        It seems to me, the best solution to this problem might be to be constantly asking yourself “am I saying/doing this thing because of tribalism?” Even if the answer is “yes,” that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing, but at the very least it could help to keep us on the lookout for the bad sorts of tribalism.

        (The failure mode of this, of course, is “The Bad Tribe over there practices bad tribalism, but what I’m doing is just good tribalism” when that isn’t necessarily the case, but at least it’s a starting point.)

      • Anonymous says:

        I think there are definite advantages to a rallying flag that’s arbitrary. If your tribe is based on some positive claim about reality, it will be tempting to maintain the tribe even if the claim is disproven, which in turn will perpetuate the claim, which in turn will cause people to act on it even though it is false. If your tribe is based on having some harmful characteristic, it will cause people with this characteristic to try to maintain it even though it causes them suffering.

        You don’t get this problem with, say, sports teams. A sports team is not going to be disproven. A sports team is not a harmful characteristic.

        • Protagoras says:

          Hmmm. As a Patriots and Vikings fan (based on where I live now and where I grew up), I do feel a bit guilty, due to the whole football causing brain injuries thing. Sports teams can be at least somewhat harmful.

        • Ghatanathoah says:

          This is a good point, there are obviously some non-arbitrary tribal characteristics that can be bad. What I was thinking of wasn’t tribes based around shared traits or shared factual beliefs, but rather tribes based on shared interests (i.e. the gaming and charity examples I gave earlier).

          The advantage of a Shared Interest Tribe is that you can kill two birds with one stone. You can get the benefits of being in a tribe, and you can also do something you like at the same time. And since the flag isn’t arbitrary you are much more likely to attract people you have other things in common with than you are with arbitrary flags.

  44. jbay says:

    About the Myers-Briggs test cleaving reality at its joints —

    At MIT I joined an extracurricular grad student society that gathered for weekly discussion topics (featuring a variety of themes, like politics, philosophy, current events, research, etc).

    One week we decided to discuss the Myers-Briggs test. All eleven attendees that week took the survey in advance. All eleven of us registered INTJ, an astounding improbability given that INTJ is supposedly a statistical minority, unless somehow “being an MIT grad student who takes time away from their busy schedule to discuss the Myers-Briggs test” is an immensely strong filter for INTJ individuals.

    • Lemminkainen says:

      Because the MBTI is really easy to game, I think that what it tells you is what personality traits people prioritize or would like to have. So, a person’s type does tell you something, just not what the tests’ designers think it does.

      • Jbay says:

        Regardless of what the test’s designers may or may not have intended, that particular example is extremely unlikely to happen by chance, but I also know from subsequent surveys (as this piqued my interest) that the population of MIT at large has a much broader distribution of Myers-Briggs personalities.

        The prior for that scenario is extremely low.

        • moridinamael says:

          I find that my Myers-Briggs result depends entirely on my frame of mind when taking the test. Specifically, if I take the test thinking only about “how I see myself” I usually get INTJ. If I take it considering some measure of how other people describe me and how I behave in real life, how I imagine a friend might answer the questions on my behalf, and generally striving for objectivity, I get ENFP, almost opposite to INTJ.

          When you’re taking Myers-Briggs in context of a Rationality survey, you’re going to emphasize all your INTJ-aligned traits.

          • nimim. k.m. says:

            When I first did a Meyers-Briggs test, I couldn’t stop thinking “this is weirdly similar to an astrology quiz, except without lunar calendar”.

    • eponymous says:

      > unless somehow “being an MIT grad student who takes time away from their busy schedule to discuss the Myers-Briggs test” is an immensely strong filter for INTJ individuals.

      It is. I would have predicted this.

      I’m only surprised there weren’t some INTPs worked in. But we probably are more common at lower-ranked schools given our lower conscientiousness.

      MBTI characteristics correlate with the big-5. E = Extroversion; N = openness; F = agreeableness; J = conscientiousness. So there is some pretty decent reality-carving happening.

  45. So I’m reading this:

    The holy book is the rallying flag for a religion, but the religion is not itself about the holy book. The rallying flag created a walled-off space where people could undergo the development process and create an independent culture. That independent culture may diverge significantly from the holy book.

    … and I’m thinking, “Right, the walled-off space is called the Church, and the culture is called the Holy Tradition”.

    Which is sort of an interesting observation, because in this case part of the tribe’s self understanding is the explicit acknowledgement that the rallying flag is not the whole story, and there is a set of institutions and practices which don’t follow directly from the Scriptures but which are essential for the existence and maintenance of the tribe.

    I note that Jews have something very similar, and I wonder if this isn’t a crucial feature of really resilient long-lived tribes.

    This also explains a lot of what we observe about the process of secularization. Both liberal Christians and liberal Jews have attempted to drop the rallying flag but keep the culture. This seems to lead to decay of the culture and assimilation the mainstream on a timescale of 2-3 generations. Evangelical Christians attempt to keep the rallying flag but drop the culture; this only seems to work covertly, as Evangelical Christians do have a Tradition, but it’s not acknowledged and never explicitly defended. This system seems fragile, as Evangelicals are periodically stricken by fads which attack their culture as “unbiblical”, and anyone who falls for it typically gets assimilated to the mainstream within a generation or two.

    The groups which are most successful are resisting assimilation are those which have both a strong flag and a strong culture: non-liberal Catholics and Orthodox, hard-line fundamentalist Protestants, and the small handful of non-liberal high-church Protestants (who are a bit up the creek because their own institutions tend to be against them). The Protestants in general have a harder time of this because the Protestant Reformation itself had a large element of “keep the rallying flag but drop the culture”, and all Protestants are susceptible to the repetition of this attack.

    So a hypothesis: if you’re interested in preserving the values of your tribe, you should encourage the group to acknowledge itself as a tribe. Pretending that it’s all about the rallying flag is counter-productive.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      “if you’re interested in preserving the values of your tribe, you should encourage the group to acknowledge itself as a tribe.”

      This is a good chunk about what is freaking the Establishment out about the Trump phenomenon: white gentile Americans aren’t supposed to acknowledge themselves as a tribe with self-interests the way that, say, blacks or gays or transgenders or white American Jews are encouraged to acknowledge themselves as a tribe.

      White gentiles are, at most, supposed to have an ideology: e.g., the Tea Party had Ayn Randism. But Trump comes along, however, and says: who cares about ideology? I care about Americans winning, just like everybody else cares about their tribe winning. And this freaks out everybody who is doing well under the current rules of who can be a tribe and who can’t.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Of course, there’s little evidence that Trump himself cares about whites more than he cares about other Americans. My guess is that Trump himself sees multiracial individuals like Derek Jeter and Tiger Woods as the future of the American citizenry.

        But, it’s so obvious that whites are disadvantaged under the current rules of what is allowed to be thought that Trump’s opponents automatically assign to him what they would do if they were in his shoes: rally people based on race.

        • Mary says:

          When a race is discriminated against, calls for equality are rallying about race.

          • Ghatanathoah says:

            I think the issue is that there are two types of people, “egalitarians” who want everyone to be equal, and “jerks” who care about advancing the interests of their tribe.

            When a race is genuinely discriminated against egalitarians and jerks can make common cause. Egalitarians want to fight racial discrimination because they value equality, jerks because they want to advance their race’s interests.

            However, when the movement starts to succeed the jerks start to become a problem. While the egalitarians are content to lay down their arms, the jerks will continue fighting to make sure their tribe is treated even better, even if that’s not fair. Jerks will try to borrow credibility from egalitarians to convince everyone they are still fighting for equality.

          • Mary says:

            Oh, yes. You can easily see that in Tennessee where a BLM meeting was told that library policy was that all meetings had to be open to all races and the media, and the people meeting called this “white supremacy.”

    • Randy M says:

      So a hypothesis: if you’re interested in preserving the values of your tribe, you should encourage the group to acknowledge itself as a tribe

      This is hard to do with a tribe that explicitly sees itself as universal. Of course, Universal is what Catholic means, so obviously it can be done.
      Evangelical Christians see themselves as a separate tribe that wants to engulf the rest of the world’s tribes (not necessarily destroying any other differences or subtribal affiliations in the process, though) by any means short of jettisoning the flag around which it is formed.
      A lot of the tension comes from debating how much to accommodate the world; what parts are truly essential, and what are hinderances to others acceptance. Ironically, the lack of adherence to some of the more arbitrary components of the culture may well lead to internal losses as people feel less of a culture to be a part of.
      This may be why America is more Christian than Europe–there are a myriad of denominations to hold loyalty to, with often “irrational” attachments to somewhat idiosyncratic differences. It’s funny to think that a movement towards eccumenicalism may be a net loss for this reason (but probably not the largest driver of allegiances).

  46. free flanders says:

    >Modern Belgium seems like an unusually non-tribal nation

    Stopped reading for a moment to post LOL here.

    LOL

    Now back to reading.

    • anonymous says:

      I assumed that part was a joke – Belgium is a country divided into two moderately hostile tribes and an invading tribe that is amazingly hostile – to the extent of blowing people up and mass murdering them recently.

    • JBeshir says:

      I think he means in the sense of not having a national tribal identity rather than in the sense of the people in it not being very tribal.

      Elsewhere in the comments section he notes that the presence of strong other tribes might be part of *why* it doesn’t have a strong national tribal identity.

  47. Steve Sailer says:

    By the way, it’s possible to institutionalize tribalist feelings even with completely random distributions of individuals. For example, Rice U. doesn’t allow fraternities or sororities because donor William Marsh Rice didn’t approve of them. But students, finding dormitory life unsatisfying, kept forming crypto-fraternities, often in the guise of of literary appreciation groups, such as the Owen Wister Literary Society (OWLS, the Rice mascot animals). So in 1956, after two freshmen died in a literary society hazing incident, the U. compromised and assigned all incoming freshmen largely at random to one of eight “colleges:” i.e., dorms with attached dining halls around which campus social and sporting life are organized. Students live all four years in the same building, which is rare at most colleges.

    From age 17-19 I found this an emotionally satisfying arrangement. I really cared about Sid Rich College defeating other colleges in intramural sports and water balloon fights. From age 19-21, however, I was kind of bored by it. But I think overall this arrangement made my college years happier overall than the usual anonymous college dorm experience.

    • Lemminkainen says:

      I attended Rice more recently (I was in Wiess College), and I can attest to the system still functioning. I never cared all that much about the intramural sports and so forth, but it was easy to make and maintain friendships with a bunch of my dorm-mates, and a lot of the traditional tribal events, like Beer Bike, Baker 13, the Sid Rich Orc Raids, and the Night of Decadence were a lot of fun to participate in or watch.

      Interestingly, the Colleges all had distinct reputations and even something like recognizable institutional personalities, even though, with the exception of legacies, students were assigned randomly. Each building’s architecture seems to have influenced its social life. (Wiess, where all the dorm rooms opened out onto a central quad and had their own bathrooms, had subgroups largely organized around who sat with who at lunch, while the dorms with more traditional architecture tended to have subdivisions organized around hallways and floors.)

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Thanks.

        Yes, different randomly assigned dorms at Rice have different enduring personalities. It’s pretty funny.

        By the way, while I’ve often recommended the Rice college system as a counter to racial divisiveness, I have to point out that the Rice system is based on models at Harvard and Yale. And last fall’s insane Yale Halloween costume crisis grew directly out of Yale’s college system: that memorable video of the Yale coed screaming obscenities at her “college master” is related to the “college system.” So modern SJW racism can overcome even the anti-tribalist college system:

        http://www.unz.com/isteve/yales-halloween-costume-crisis-escalates-on-day-10/

        • CatCube says:

          It’s not surprising that enduring differences would happen, even if the personnel are randomly assigned. Organizations have “personalities” that will exert an influence on their members. The only people who didn’t have this are the founding group, but the organization will ossify into a distinct culture pretty quickly thereafter, based on what founders have the biggest influence. When you drop in newcomers after that, they’ll be pulled to the culture. They may exhibit some impetus for change, but it’ll be pretty gradual. There’s a lot of path dependency.

          This is why government organizations have a rigid bureaucracy: newcomers are dribbled in one at a time, and will adjust themselves to fit. They will have some influence, but the culture around them will have a bigger influence on them.

        • Lemminkainen says:

          I think that the residential colleges are much more important institutions at Rice than at Harvard or Yale, though– mostly because Rice has no regional rivals to serve as an outgroup.

          I can attest to Rice still being less race and class-divided than other institutions (my own group of friends, which I think was pretty typical in some ways, although we were way more pre-academic than most groups of students, looked like a Benneton ad with a few more Asians), but there were some groups (Chinese international students, athletes) who had more trouble fitting in

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Back in my day, Rice was really homogeneous, in an easy to deal with way: a huge fraction of the students had at least one engineer for a parent.

            When I got to MBA school at UCLA I finally started to notice how much more complex social standings could be.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        By the way, it’s interesting that two products of the Rice U. Random Tribalization system both find tribalism intellectually interesting but not hugely emotionally agitating.

        Oddly, I’ve never noticed Harvard or Yale people taking away similar conclusions from their similar backgrounds.

        • I was in Lowell House at Harvard and don’t remember any serious feelings of group identification with other members of Lowell.

          My memory is that assignment to houses was not entirely random, that you got to express a preference but might not end up in your preferred house.

      • Fazathra says:

        It’s the same at Oxford which has a collegiate system where incoming undergrads are assigned, more or less at random, to a college where they live and study for the rest of their degree. Colleges also have their own distinct reputations and stereotypes – the super-posh college, the heavily-academically-focused college, the crazy-left-wing-politics college. Lots of people are somewhat patriotic about their college, even if only “ironically” (so they claim). It’s also a great demonstration of the concentric nature of identity. You support your college against the other colleges, all of Oxford against Cambridge, and Oxbridge together against all the less elite universities.

        On the other hand the ‘tribes’ formed by college differences are really really weak – often weaker than what football team you support, which is odd considering you live for most of the year with your college mates and never really interact with your football team except for perhaps going to a few matches a year. I strongly suspect that ethnogenesis by random allocation is by default pretty weak unless there are strong social pressures towards identifying with the group while other differences such as race, religion, and political beliefs are much more salient and will tend to become the lines of demarcation unless strong social pressure is applied to stop that happening.

        • g says:

          Oxford which has a collegiate system where incoming undergrads are assigned, more or less at random, to a college

          At both Oxford and Cambridge, incoming undergraduates can say what college they would like to go to. They are not guaranteed to be accepted by that college, of course, but if they are impressive enough they will be. Students *can* make an “open application” that doesn’t specify any particular college, but I think only about 20% do.

          Different colleges have different preferences (in what characteristics of a student they care about, and in what numbers they want for each subject), so even when a student doesn’t specify a college or isn’t accepted by the one they specified the choice isn’t so very random.

          So I think there’s more actual underlying difference feeding into tribal identities at Oxford than at Rice.

          • Fazathra says:

            At both Oxford and Cambridge, incoming undergraduates can say what college they would like to go to.

            Yeah, I know. I go there :). I still think it’s mostly random though. At my college roughly 30-50% of the year were pooled here from other colleges (it’s not a very popular one) so there is perhaps more randomness than at Christ Church or something. When I was choosing which college to apply to I didn’t know anything about the internal reputations and just chose the one that had the nicest gardens. I think a lot of people followed that sort of strategy. You’re right though in that it could create a slightly more tribal identity than purely random allocation.

          • Tom Womack says:

            It’s one of the distinct problems with Oxbridge admission that people at schools which historically send lots of people to Oxbridge tend to be explicitly told to pick the richest college which has resident tutors in their subject, and people without that tradition tend to pick much more at random. Ending up in a college without a tutor in your subject isn’t awful, though it requires slightly more effort than you expected to get from St Hilda’s to St Hugh’s for 0830 tutorials; but being at a college which has scholarships and awards available by the dozen is really very helpful under all circumstances.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Right.

          But, on the other hand, random assignment is a pretty easy cure for problems like racial divisiveness during college. As the robber’s cave experiment showed, you can get young males to identify with practically any organization for awhile.

  48. free flanders says:

    >Given that the New Testament clearly says you have to give all your money to the poor

    I’m not even sure this rises to the level of being a stretch

    >and the Old Testament doesn’t say anything about mixing meat and milk

    Similarly, I don’t have to pay any taxes, because the US Constitution doesn’t set any tax rates. I also don’t have to obey any court orders, because those are set by judges, who are humans, not lines of text in the Constitution, and as for the orders themselves, their text does not appear in the US Constitution *even once*.

    Are you just phoning this post in to meet some kind of posting quota? Next time post more Swifties pls

    • Pilgrim of the East says:

      Yeah, as a Christian and I guess a kind of fundamentalist one, I was kind of surprised by that (although I understand where he is coming from) – on the other hand I’m used to so much anti-christian stuff (I’m Czech, Christianity here is very far from being as common as in the USA), that I just ignore such parts and enjoy the parts I don’t have any problem with (you’re kind of throwing out the baby with bath water), that said I was more “offended” by that part that said holy books are always wrong…

      That said, I always thought of not mixing meat and milk in Judaism as a kind of interesting peculiarity, but I recently found out I was on the brink of being iron deficient and found out that while the meat is quite rich in iron (common knowledge, ofc), milk (and most? dairy products) inhibits its absorption, which makes rule of not mixing meat and milk quite reasonable, especially given the fact iron deficiency is much more spread in developing countries…

  49. Nestor says:

    Robert Ardrey’s book “The territorial imperative” goes over similar terrain, he coined the term “noyau” for a grouping of animals or people primarily defined by their antagonism to the outgroup. He said nations like Italy are more a collection of noyaus than a true nation. It’s been a while since I read it so I don’t recall much else. The text used to be online but the links 404 right now, perhaps you can find one somewhere.

  50. Captainbooshi says:

    You know, as a ‘good liberal’ and all, I had always wondered why the idea of appropriation never really bothered me. I mean, I could explain why I didn’t think the arguments against it were compelling, but I never understood why so many people found it to be such a horrible thing. This helps explain to me where the people so firmly against appropriation are coming from, even if I still can’t make myself care much about it.

    I guess it also explains why I’ve also always found the Fake Geek Girl/GamerGate thing to be petty and ridiculous, and one of the reasons why I can get along with people perfectly well, but have trouble maintaining friendships over long periods of time. Tribes apparently just don’t matter as much to me as they do to a lot of others. Really insightful post!

    • Jiro says:

      What GamerGate thing? Gamergate is certainly being attacked as if it’s a tribe, but it’s not clear that it actually is one.

    • Deiseach says:

      When an item or artform becomes the rallying flag for a tribe, it can threaten the tribe if other people just want to use it as a normal item or artform.

      I tend not to be too pushed about the grosser forms of appropriation (or what the very “you can’t do that!” types call the grosser forms), but I can understand the rationale behind it.

      Let’s face it: if someone puts up a poster of a swastika in their front window, what is your immediate likely reaction going to be: (a) Oh this person must be, or at least admires, Hindu/Buddhist as this is the sun-wheel symbol! (b) Oh this person is probably somebody of a certain strong political opinion?

      Mostly due to the appropriation of a cultural symbol and its misuse.

      My own local example is Hallowe’en – American Hallowe’en is a very different thing from Irish Hallowe’en, and although American Hallowe’en grew out of Irish and Scottish traditions and customs brought by immigrants to the USA, ironically now it has re-crossed the Atlantic, colonised the lands of its origin, and replaced the traditional manner of celebrating it.

      As I may have mentioned here before, we have pumpkins appearing in the greengrocers section of supermarkets where never a pumpkin was seen before, and since we have no native recipes for things like pumpkin pie, these will be used purely as decorations (and then thrown out which is huge wastage). The kids growing up now will only know Hallowe’en in its Americanised version, which has been absorbed from TV and movies, and what little they’ll know of native traditions will be what they’ve learned in school, not from their environment.

      That’s what people object to when they object to cultural appropriation: something – dress, a custom, practice or festival, a symbol, a style of art or music – is taken out of its context, deracinated and simplified, treated as “exotic” and then exported back in a commericalised form to its native culture, where it competes with and maybe even replaces the native original version, and the younger members of the native culture only know their own heritage in a bastardised form or learn about it in school as a fossilised artifact of history rather than a living tradition.

      Imagine, I don’t know – Japanese Thanksgiving? (I have no idea if the Japanese have incorporated that into the mix of adopted Western holidays). And it becomes popular in the USA because all the kids watching anime and reading manga are influenced by this cool, novel way of celebrating something that at home is associated with old-fashioned, rural, “bad old days of poverty and misery” past.

      So gradually Japanese Thanksgiving crowds out the American Thanksgiving, and future generations of American kids only learn things like “traditional Thanksgiving foods included cranberries” in history lessons in school (wow, people used to eat cranberry sauce instead of using the berries for making decorations? But nowadays everybody buys the strings of plastic berries you hang up from the shops, nobody uses real berries! Eat them? Why would I want to do that?) 🙂

      • Pie pumpkins and jack-o-lantern pumpkins are different from each other– the latter are only occasionally used for pies.

        I’ve tried to post about this twice– I’m assuming there was something offensive about the link.

        The link was at sheknows dot com.

      • Ghatanathoah says:

        There is a lot of truth in this, but there are also some advantages to the process you describe. Sometimes the appropriated culture serves as a gateway to the original culture. For instance, like many people, I got into comic book fandom by watching the cartoon adaptations of comic books.

        Also, sometimes the products of the appropriated culture is just as good, if not better, than the original. To use comics as an example again, the DC Animated Universe is I think, comparable to the DC Comics Universe on an artistic level.

        • LHN says:

          As a DC fan for decades, I’d say the DCAU is a distillation of much of what’s great about DC Comics. While DC has published individual comics and sequences that are better than the best of the DCAU, the average quality of all the animated series, taken together, is rather higher than the average quality of the comics of any period of comparable length in the company’s history.

          • God Damn John Jay says:

            On a funny note Kevin Smith claims he reccomended that the writers for Batman the Animated Series write a potential Batman movie and was rudely told that those cartoon guys wouldn’t touch a “real” movie

      • J Mann says:

        Deiseach & Nancy,

        Nancy’s right that it’s literally tough to eat a decoration pumpkin, but you should encourage people to save and roast the seeds. (Wash clean, toss with olive oil, salt, and some flavors like garlic powder or chili, lime, etc., spread out on a tinfoil covered cookie sheet and roast at 400 degrees F or so for an hour or until they start to brown, stirring occasionally). Our kids look forward to that every year and it’s a nice addition to the pumpkin carving tradition.

        Speaking of appropriation, let me thank all the world’s Irish for being such good sports about the US and St Patrick’s day, Notre Dame, etc. I’ll grant that it probably contributes to some negative stereotypes in some degree, but IMHO it much more gives a feeling of camaraderie, to the point that I don’t think anyone under 50 takes the stereotypes seriously. I’d love to see Cinco de Mayo, etc. become similar de facto US national holidays, but it looks like appropriation theory is moving things the other way.

  51. Eric says:

    > the Old Testament doesn’t say anything about mixing meat and milk

    Do you not count Deuteronomy 14:21, “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk”?

    • That’s about boiling a kid in its mother’s milk. It says nothing at all about serving cheese and steak at the same meal, let alone using different dishes for them.

      • Vamair says:

        I’d say it generalizes to “not hanging up a ram in a noose made of his mother’s wool” or “not stoning a person with stones that her father worked to mine” or “don’t use the results of someone’s kindness against something they care about”. No one cares about my opinion on this, though, not even me. But if you go technical, it doesn’t prohibit you to boil a young goat in the milk that’s not its mother’s.

    • Rowan says:

      He’s pointing out a stricter-than-usual interpretation of the rule, I think: A pedantically literal reading could be “boiling other animals in their own mothers’ milk is fine, but don’t do that to goats”, while the actual practice is “just to be safe, let’s never mix meat of any animal with milk of any animal”.

  52. I’m not sure of the basis for your explanation of the Sunni/Shia split. You do realize that Ali ended up being the fourth Caliph? And that the association of Shia with Iran was a late development. The most powerful Shia movement prior to that was the Fatimids, who ruled Egypt and a good deal of North Africa—and were seveners not twelvers.

    A story possibly relevant to your post. I’m a long term member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group that does medieval and renaissance stuff for fun and pretty well fits your definition of a tribe. There is a much smaller group called the Tuchux, which has interacted with the SCA a good deal but isn’t part of it.

    Many years ago, I came across a Usenet post by one of the Tuchux offering to tell any interested SCA people about his group. Being curious, I responded.

    What I found interesting was that his view of the Tuchux relative to the SCA looked a lot like the SCA view of the SCA relative to “Mundanes”–non-SCA people. Insiders take care of each other, can trust each other. Outsiders can’t.

    I’ve been reading quite a lot about the Romani, most recently the Vlax Rom, the descendants of the Gypsies who were serfs in Romania for four or five centuries and are the largest Romani population. They have a word for adult male Rom. For adult female Rom. For adult male and adult female not/Rom. They do not appear to have a word for “Adult male.” Similarly for unmarried male or female past puberty (“adult” is defined as “married”). They have a whole different set of rules for interacting with each other than for interacting with Gaje–non-Rom. It’s only a mild exaggeration to say that they don’t view Gaje as fully human–consider them more nearly a part of the environment than a part of the society. An extreme case of tribalism, with sub-tribes within it–and it’s been going, in some form or other, for about a thousand years.

    Your point about wanting a reference group small enough to matter I think of in terms of non-geographical villages. I don’t think they have to be tribes in your sense, although they can be.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      Over the centuries, Europeans have tried a remarkable variety of carrots and sticks to persuade Gypsies/Roma to treat non-Gypsies like human beings, with only marginal success.

      Gypsies seem to have a tendency toward dyslexia, so they aren’t terribly literate and thus their aren’t very many Gypsy intellectuals (although there are numerous Gypsy musicians and actors). So it’s hard for outsider intellectuals to understand them. The most useful explanation I’ve heard, from a woman intellectual who is half-Gypsy and half-Jewish, is that they are the polar opposite of Jews.

      • Winter Shaker says:

        And yet (assuming that ‘j’ works in the usual Eastern European way, i.e. sounds like an English ‘y’), their word for ‘not one of us’ – gaje – is pleasingly similar to the Jewish equivalent – goy.

        • Doug S. says:

          And Japanese “gaijin”, the word for people who aren’t Japanese. (The ancient Greek word for people who weren’t Greek was “barbarian”.)

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            While the Mandarin pronunciation for the 外 kanji (the “gai” part of gaijin) is “wai,” and the Korean pronunciation “oy,” the Cantonese, Vietnamese, and other Chinese dialects also involve pronunciations with a g-sound.

            On the other hand, a Chinese slur against foreigners involves a word pronounced “gwei” in Mandarin/most dialects and “gwai” in Cantonese.

        • Tibor says:

          I know that the Bohemian Gypsies use the word “gádža” (Czech spelling) “gahdja” (approximate English spelling) for a non-Rom male, so unless the Vlach Rom have a different dialect, it is the “j” as in French.

    • Mary says:

      (“adult” is defined as “married”).

      There are still English-using cultures in which “boy” and “girl” are any unmarried man or woman.

      • Alliteration says:

        There english-using culture in with “boy” and “girl” can refer to all members of their respective gender. For example, the “boy’s washroom”

  53. John Nerst says:

    There really needs to be a book. The posts you’ve written over the last few years about tribalism and bravery debates, ethnic tensions, weak-manning, motte-and-bailey, social event horizons, etc. are close to forming the basis of a grand theory of the failures and patterns of online (and to a lesser extent, offline) argumentation and disagreement. I’ve been inspired to try to create some theory like that (I even gave it a name, because concept handles are great), but your work on it is much better than I have been or are likely to be able to produce, and given how revelatory your best essays have been, a book with a grander scope could be something truly great.

    You having the cultural influence of a Beethoven is likely beyond reach (very few people approach a whole Ludwig of significance) but you’re far closer to it than most of us, and using it to push out such a book at some point could be a good idea and do a lot of good.

  54. 4bpp says:

    Per IV 6. and 7., I get the impression that certain “entryist tribes with explicit goals of invading and destroying competing tribes” are navigating the tribal landscape this post paints in a very well-adapted manner, whether this is due to explicit awareness among the “leadership” or just courtesy of the blind idiot god of memetic evolution – there is a distinctive combination of directly attacking the rallying flags and cohesion mechanisms of the competition, and setting up ideological barriers (the “primal/reverse -ism” distinction is a particularly clear-cut example of one) to defend against retaliatory attacks of the same type.

    Am I just being historically short-sighted, or is this sort of more tactical tribal warfare (as opposed to the plain “kill them, shut them up or make them low-status” approaches, which seem to amount to “first get more HP than the opponent, then trade blows even if you are dealing equal DPS” rather than “invest in DEF”) a new development?

    • Fazathra says:

      > there is a distinctive combination of directly attacking the rallying flags and cohesion mechanisms of the competition, and setting up ideological barriers (the “primal/reverse -ism” distinction is a particularly clear-cut example of one) to defend against retaliatory attacks of the same type

      Yeah, there seem to be several distinct mechanisms for this. The first is a straight up ideological coup in which members of the infiltrating tribe get themselves into positions of memetic power within the infiltrated one and then abruptly declare that the old ideology was bad and wrong and here is the new shiny one which all decent people should follow. The whole gamergate saga seems to be a story of a failed attempt at this. Where the SJW-y ‘tribe’ got themselves primarily into positions of social/memetic power (journalists) and then basically tried to replace the entirety of gaming culture wholesale – i.e. that whole rash of “gamers are dead” articles, which then failed and basically split the gamer tribe in two. The reason it failed is likely because they attempted the coup too early after their hand was forced by the zoe quinn scandal.

      The second example seems to be where they attempt to postulate additional (and theoretically equal) rallying flags for the group so as to basically give it a hybrid identity. This is what seems to have been attempted with the atheist+ movement which tried to set up social justice as a rallying flag as well as atheism within the atheist movement. This doesn’t appear to be a very stable solution as atheism+ has now been fully assimilated into the broader social justice movement, but perhaps that was the point all along.

      The third mechanism seems to be guided memetic drift in which people of a different ‘tribe’ gain control over the ideological-propagation institutions of another group such as media, schools etc, and then slowly shift the overton window of the group as a whole towards their desired outcome. I don’t have any examples of this because it will be hopelessly politicised and in any case it is often hard to spot because there is no defining break and successful examples just look like natural memetic drift.

      All of my examples above were about the Social Justice movement infiltrating other tribes. I’m not sure if this is due to my own biases or simply because Social Justice is the most effective and salient ideology doing this at the moment.

      I think Social Justice’s success comes from the fact that they start off with a significant amount of social power and the (perceived) moral high ground by default. This is because they start from and extend all the assumptions of anglosphere liberal-leftism. Almost everyone agrees that racism is bad, so when these guys come in and start arguing forcefully against racism, it’s hard to argue against them because then that sounds like you’re supporting racism. And fighting racism is surely more morally important than video games or whatever dumb hobby you supported before, so it’s hard to argue that though you agree with them about everything, you just want them to go away so you can do your thing, because that sounds like you’re condoning racism. And you agree that racists are bad too and should be shunned, so when they call people racists you automatically shun them, and so on and we all know what happens after that. The only way to defend yourself seems to be to either have strong norms against politicisation like this, which is hard because politics is salient and fun and can often draw more people than the original hobby. The other is just to straight up deny their frame – i.e. deny that racism, sexism, etc are real things or that they are bad. It’s been really interesting to watch this happen with the gamergate crowd who though at the beginning were about as liberal as you would expect mostly college educated youths to be, slowly drift towards alt-right positions simply because they provided a coherent intellectual justification to reject the doctrines of those they hate.

      I think Social Justice is basically the western secularised form of religious fundamentalism. They take their cultural norms and ideals literally, extrapolate them to their logical conclusion, and then refuse to compromise or trade-off their ideals against less sacralised ones. The only difference is that their starting point is anglosphere left-liberalism rather than Islam or whatever. You can see this by the way their mainstream critics attack them. They don’t say: “your ideals are dumb and wrong”, they say: “we agree with all your goals and ideals, but aren’t you going a bit too far? Aren’t your methods a bit zealous with the possibility of causing a backlash?” They are fundamentally working from the same frame. Of course, to the idealogue, this just sounds like the hypocritical whining of those who benefit from the status quo while wanting to claim the status afforded to pious members of the ingroup. This is also why reverse claims like “you’re the real racists” fail to stick. It’s like a guy who eats pork, drinks, and never prays claiming to be more Islamic than ISIS. It’s just laughable.

      I often wonder if a similar dynamic plays out in muslim countries with radical Islam. Like there are a bunch of saudis who get together to geek out over hadith verses or something, and then some radical salafists come in and start talking about how the main goal is jihad against western imperialism (or something?? I don’t really know much about salafism tbh) and that it’s your moral duty as a muslim to go on jihad and anyone who doesn’t want to is anti-muslim and an apostate and should be shunned etc and so soon the previously apolitical hadith appreciation society becomes ideologically dominated by the salafists and preaching jihad and so on. And the more moderate muslims can’t criticise them for being not muslims because they quite clearly are muslim, and closer to the words of the Koran than the moderates, so they are forced to pursue the same moderationist approach.

      This is a really long and meandering comment. Sorry about that. Sometimes you just need to dump all your thoughts onto the page.

      • dndnrsn says:

        @Fazathra: you write “All of my examples above were about the Social Justice movement infiltrating other tribes. I’m not sure if this is due to my own biases or simply because Social Justice is the most effective and salient ideology doing this at the moment.”

        A thought vaguely related to this: a lot of social justice stuff has been infiltrated by/has adopted some very conventional thinking. While a lot of them think of themselves as radicals, and sneer at “liberals”, when you look at what they’re calling for, it’s not very radical. Calling for more female CEOs or LGBT people in high-powered law firms or black tenured professors, for instance.

        • The Nybbler says:

          The SJW tactic and hallmark is the motte-and-bailey, so “calling for more female CEOs or LGBT people in high powered law firms or black tenured professors” is the defensible motte.

          The bailey is something like “How dare you hire anyone who isn’t One Of Us in a position of power, and how dare you oppose One Of Us for a position of power”.

          • Nita says:

            The bailey is something like “How dare you hire anyone who isn’t One Of Us in a position of power, and how dare you oppose One Of Us for a position of power”.

            Examples?

          • Theo Jones says:

            @Nita
            *The whole Brendan Eich incident.
            *The Yale college master shitshow
            *Really 2/3rds of the stuff FIRE deals with. See, https://www.thefire.org/category/torch/ for a good list. See, for instance, the student council leader who was removed from office for inviting a conservative editorial writer to give a speech. The student council leader also had the stipend that was due at the end of the semester for his time on the council revoked. https://www.thefire.org/yiannopoulos-invitation-leads-usc-student-government-to-strip-senator-of-stipend/
            *The various campus activists that think that even expressing support for the current GOP frontrunner is “violence”
            *The increasing attacks on Clinton supporters from campus activist types. This seems to be something that splits the SJ types, some think that supporting Clinton means you betrayed social justice, some seem to think supporting Bernie means you are evil. This line seems to mostly be along age lines. On my campus the Bernie oriented SJ types have a huge upper hand — to the extent that I can’t even express that I’m a Clinton supporter in a class without huge bite back from SJ oriented students. Bite back as in a massive in-person callout session in that class, and defrendings on Facebook after.
            *The people who try to get political opponents fired.
            *Multiple cases where normally non-political companies are pressured to take sides on culture war issues, and boycotts of various types over these issues.
            *The “freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences” types. This is such a common sentiment (combined with the labeling of even mainline conservatives and centrists as ideologically unsuitable) that probably the only reason why more real-world incidents haven’t occurred is the fact that there are only a few communities where SJ has captured a majority.

          • Urstoff says:

            Just call them Berniebros. They won’t have a comeback for that.*

            *yes they will, and it will be annoying

          • Randy M says:

            I can’t even express that I’m a Clinton supporter in a class without huge bite back from SJ oriented students. Bite back as in a massive in-person callout session in that class, and defrendings on Facebook after.

            This is funny. One of my friends back at our evangelical Christian college labeled himself as pro-choice and didn’t suffer for it, afaik.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Fighting against freeze peach and freedom of religion are actually very radical in an American context. They’re not trying to destroy certain power centers like the leftists of old, but that’s largely because they’ve infiltrated those and expect to be able to control them. Lenin didn’t try to dissolve governmental power either once he held it.

          • dndnrsn says:

            It’s hardly as though this is the first movement in the US that has sought to, or successfully has, limited freedom of speech.

            And forget “they won’t destroy the centres of power if they get into power”. They aren’t even saying they will. “There should be no CEOs” is radical; “the makeup of CEOs should be more similar to the makeup of society in general” not so much.

  55. poignardazur says:

    I’m not actually sure Less Wrong’s depiction of the Robbers Cave experiment is accurate. Less Wrong says that the tribes formed in the experiment started identical, became adversarial as soon as they learned the other tribe existed, then started developing tribal identities.

    But, according to Wikipedia’s “Realistic conflict theory”, the experiment actually had three phases: forming two (very similar) groups, making them oppose each other with competitions and zero-sum games, and then trying to integrate them, and doesn’t mention the “spontaneously started hating each other” thing at all.

    Now the article on wikipedia might be wrong or incomplete, but I wanted to point out the divergence, since I see I see a lot of mentions of LW’s interpretation of the RB experiment and I’m always uncomfortable with people Disagreeing With Wikipedia.

    • Emily H. says:

      Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment is on the web – I only browsed it briefly, but it seems like the LW writeup is correct here. (And the Wikipedia article also is: the experiment did have the three phases Wikipedia described, but the groups started having hostility toward each other even before the competitions started.)

      • > They needn’t have bothered with Stage 2. There was hostility almost from the moment each group became aware of the other group’s existence: They were using our campground, our baseball diamond. On their first meeting, the two groups began hurling insults. They named themselves the Rattlers and the Eagles (they hadn’t needed names when they were the only group on the campground).

        That last line, at least, is just blatantly false. From your source:

        > Caps and T-shirts were available through the canteen for purchase at nominal cost. Mills asked if “Tom Hale” (name of the Boy Scout campsite) would be on them. The staff reply was negative. Harrison (middle status) suggested putting “Robbers Cave Robbers” on them. Later Mills proposed stenciling “Tom Hale Rattlers” on the shirts, drew a rattler design, and requested orange and black paint, all of which was approved by the group.

        > The next morning the boys stenciled shirts and hats with staff assistants. White material available for crafts was selected by Mills for a flag with the same design. Staff proposed practice at tent pitching. It was undertaken in disorganized fashion. Baseball practice revealed stabilization of playing positions.

        > After supper, the group was allowed to wander within hearing distance of the Eagles who were playing on the ball diamond. The immediate reaction was to “run them off” and “challenge them.” After this, Harrison (who had had to surrender the catcher’s position to Hill because of a hurt hand) cried bitterly. Hill and Martin comforted him, and he stopped crying when Mills asked him to read a comic book aloud.

        > At baseball work-out the next day, the group noted improvements they had made on the diamond and declared: “Now this is our diamond.” The boys revealed a consciousness of the other group by frequent reference to “our baseball diamond,” “our Upper Camp,” “our Stone Corral.” That afternoon the staff informed the group that there was another group in camp and that they wanted to challenge the Rattlers. The reaction: “They can’t. We’ll challenge them first… They’ve got a nerve…” Other activities in which they could be challenged were mentioned, including tent pitching. Now that tent pitching appeared a competitive activity, it was enthusiastically supported even by those formerly opposing it. The boys initiated shifts in work positions which produced an amazing change in execution of the task. All members cheered the results.

        They began calling themselves the Rattlers the day before “discovering” the other group.

    • moridinamael says:

      I don’t really see any reason to doubt the finding, regardless. My experience in Boy Scouts easily confirms that if you put two groups of boys in proximity, wearing identical uniforms, except one group has a patch on their shoulder that reads “143” and the other group has a patch that reads “120”, they will be violently brawling within 24 hours.

      • Alex says:

        Thinking of it, I had my parents abort my first and last stay at a boy-scout camp after like one night (of maybe five or so) because I was completely overwhelmed by what to pre-teen me seemed unexplicable and unprovoked hostility of groups from other places.

        I cannot say what defect in my genetic makeup and/or upbringing left me unprepared for what science ™ as in Robbers’ Cave had long established to be an (albeit sad) Fact of the Human Nature ™. The other boys for sure seemed to have had less problems coping. Anyways, I found my self unable to comprehend what was going on, let alone why.

        Don’t know what one should conclude from that data point though.

        • moridinamael says:

          I think it’s at least partly a case of “assholes ruin everything.” My own Scout camp experiences were 95% positive, marred by freak run-ins with kids who were probably huge headaches within their own communities, now using the presence of outsiders to justify their aggression.

        • sweeneyrod says:

          Sounds like something’s wrong with American scouting! I don’t remember any violent inter-unit tribal rivalries in my UK group (not to say it was perfect, there was still that kid who would steal anything not nailed down and punch anyone who looked at him funny).

    • Jaskologist says:

      The minor criticism is that EY exaggerates in some significant ways. “That turned out to be quite sufficient,” except not really. One man’s “hurled insult” is another man’s “playful taunt.” The claim that names were not needed before they became aware of the other group is half true (the Eagles adopted a name after asking if the other group had a name; it doesn’t seem to have influenced the Rattlers). The initial reaction to learning of the other group was not hostility, but rather “desire to compete with the other group in team games, and enthusiastic preparation to do so.”

      The medium criticism is that the experimenters were trying to create conflict between the groups (“This flag-burning episode started a chain of events which [p. 105] made it unnecessary for the experimenters to introduce special situations of mutual frustration for the two groups. The only manipulation necessary to insure that the actions of one group were frustrating to the other was careful timing of arrivals and departures of the groups on certain occasions.”). Given that this outcome was pre-ordained, we shouldn’t conclude much about human nature from the fact that they were successful. This was not a double-blind test of the tendency of people to fight people in the outgroup; it was a test of the ability of adults to get children to fight each other. Turns out they can (but see the next point).

      The major criticism is that this was the third such “experiment” that had been performed.

      In the first version of the study, the two groups ended up ganging up on a shared enemy, while in the second study they ended up turning on the experimenters themselves.

      • Anonymous says:

        >In the first version of the study, the two groups ended up ganging up on a shared enemy, while in the second study they ended up turning on the experimenters themselves.

        What’s the difference?

      • Jiro says:

        I suppose next you’re going to tell me that the Kitty Genovese story was exaggerated.

  56. lbb says:

    I feel that tribal identity in the city I live is often a question of resources, and that religion tends to be a comparatively cheap and stress-free tribalism. For some people, perhaps, the only affordable option.

    How much work, time and money do you need to put in for membership and for the tribe to function? And who does what work? To me, two important advantages of religion and nationalism seem to be the clear distribution of tribal work, and some guarantee of robustness.

    More complex and individual communities seem like they require conspicuous amounts of work (Eliezer and Scott’s blogs possibly being examples) and the communities are more uncertain (as compared to your local church)

    If this is true, universal base income could perhaps lead to a development of new tribalisms. Would be interesting to read more about this.

  57. mitchel l kotula jr says:

    Could this whole post be distilled into the old chestnut from Chesterton: “if you don’t believe in God you’ll believe in anything”? Tribalism abhors a vacuum, so we make one up to join.

  58. Nathan says:

    This post makes me think about the concept of “race traitors” and if it generalises to other tribes. Republican complaints about Obama “apologising for America” possibly apply. He’s a prominent American contradicting their cultural norm about how Americans should behave. That creates a feeling of betrayal – stronger than mere dislike.

    Maybe indie bands “selling out” by signing to a big label. Even if the music is the same the fans may well feel betrayed.

  59. TheAncientGeek says:

    > atheists are often pretty similar to one another even before they deconvert from their religion

    Speaking of tribalism, not everywhere is religious by default, and not every atheist needs to deconvert. The basic difference between the less wrong and rational wiki tribes.

    > Modern Belgium seems like an unusually non-tribal nation;

    I suppose you mean as a whole. There is the Flemish/Walloon divide, internally.

    > (rationalsm) doesn’t have much of an outgroup yet

    I thought that was Kruel, Gerard, Loosemore and yours
    truly …the gang of four.

    • Anonymous says:

      Could you provide links to the other three? Not lazy, Gerard is way too common a name.

    • Frog Do says:

      The shorthand “tumblr communists” that I’ve seen used in the comments here and elsewhere a few times seems well on its’ way to becoming a name used for certain parts of the outgroup.

      • anonymous says:

        The bannings here aren’t of the alleged outgroup of communists.

        The bannings are of anyone who might have a thought in their head that isn’t communist approved.

        You don’t grovel for the approval of the outgroup.

        • suntzuanime says:

          The bannings are not broadly popular (at least some of them aren’t). There is a discordance between the community and its leader, due to its leader being in more than one community (in particular, he is on tumblr, with all the communists).

          • Protagoras says:

            How do you know how popular the bannings are? I would generally expect more complaints from people who dislike them than favorable comments from those who like them, so the presence of some complaints from a small number of commenters doesn’t impress me much as evidence, if that’s what you’re going on.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Until our host adds a referendum on his bans to the SSC survey, complaints are all we have to go on. They’re evidence, even if there’s a possibility of a great Silent Majority that hated how those fuckers were making us look in front of the tumblr commies.

          • anonymous says:

            I love the bannings – they show exactly how dishonest Scott usually is.

            He’ll consider every argument right up until the point where his writing might not just offend but truly alienate the tumblr communists but he’s human so he hates getting pantsed in his own comment section.

            His only choice left is to pretend those horrid right wing arguments don’t exist. After all, he’s admitted that he knows they’re right (in the infamous comment that he later – of course – deleted).

            It’s not some mystery – he knows exactly how dishonest he is – personally I hope his readership catches on so this place doesn’t serve as a trap.

          • Anon says:

            Well, ok, in the interests of calibrating your impressions, I’m pretty much in favor of everything on the register of bans on discussion-norm grounds.

            I lean objectivist; I grew up on Rand. I do not get the impression that Scott is banning people because of how they make us look in front of the tumblr commies. They’re just people who are violating discussion norms.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            I usually end up on the red tribe side of things here these days. All the bannings I’ve seen seemed entirely justified.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Anon
            I’m pretty much in favor of everything on the register of bans on discussion-norm grounds.

            Me too. Speaking of Rand, I hope Scott doesn’t get to the chapter where Rearden thinks about how he is giving hospitality to people who insult him in his own house.

          • Deiseach says:

            in particular, he is on tumblr, with all the communists

            Jesus, Mary and Holy St. Joseph. I don’t know whether to take that statement as-is or as a tongue-in-cheek provocation.

            Hello, (one of) my name(s) is Deiseach, I’m on Tumblr and I’m not a Communist! Third-generation Fianna Fáil but pretty much fed-up with the whole boiling right now!

          • suntzuanime says:

            That comment cannot reasonably be taken to say everyone on Tumblr is a communist. You might be on firmer ground taking it to say every communist is on Tumblr, but if you engage in a moment’s reading comprehension you would consider the possibility that “all the communists” refers to all the salient communists. In this case, the communists that had been mentioned upthread.

          • Anonymous says:

            Can someone point out three examples of communists on tumblr that Scott is scared of offending?

            Because having perused his tumblr and those of people he’s rebloged I haven’t seen a reblog about socializing the means or production or establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.

            I suspect this may be yet another manifestation of the tenuous grasp on reality those on the alt-right seem to have.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I can get you two off the top of my head, Multiheaded and Oligopsony. I don’t exactly keep a list of communists, not after what happened to McCarthy.

          • Frog Do says:

            A third would be leviathan-supersystem, however l-s has been recently blocked by Scott. There is a relatively large left-wing social group on tumblr that would either identify as communists or do some coy no-we’re-not-we’re-just-far-left, you can get to most of them by doing the usual “follow the social networks”.

            Oligopsony seems to be relatively sane, decent human being, occasionally a degenerate memester (so better than decent).

            leviathan-supersystem is hilariously insane, writing up lefty Protocols of the Elders of Zion, see this post http://leviathan-supersystem.tumblr.com/post/114866240639/the-jesus-movement-and-the-church-of-satan-as

            Multiheaded shows up in the comments here sometimes to talk about videogames, call people fascists, and complain about being misgendered (the correct ones are female); oscillates between sane and insane depending on the alignment of the stars.

            ————–

            Also, Scott isn’t afraid of offending the Tumblr commies, that is a dumb alt-right meme. He’s more afriad of offending the Consensus Vaugely Left-Liberal Middle, which is a larger subgraph of rationalist
            Tumblr. The alt-right calls them all commies because that’s consistant within their own system. When I said “tumblr commies”, I was mostly referring to l-s and related, mostly in referrence to the first paragraph of this comment.

        • John Schilling says:

          The bannings are of anyone who might have a thought in their head that isn’t communist approved.

          I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of the thoughts in my head are not communist-approved, and that Scott and most of the regulars here understand that my head is full of anti-communist thought. And yet, here I am.

          Not only unbanned, but speaking with cautious approval of the Reign of Terror. I’d prefer a nuanced approach with more warnings and temporary bans, but given the logistical constraints of one guy running a blog of this scope in his spare time, that probably isn’t practical. The people who have been banned, even when I agreed with what they were saying, were greatly diminishing the quality and the civility of the discussion.

    • Anonymous says:

      Until the above post, I had absolutely no idea who any of those guys were (except you, obviously).

  60. Muga Sofer says:

    Typo thread!

    > for various reasons I enjoy dinner parties with those people about 10000% more interesting than dinner parties with randomly selected individuals.

    Should be either “I find more interesting” or “I enjoy more”, not “I enjoy more interesting”.

  61. Sastan says:

    My day has come! Thanks for writing about this, Scott, I look forward to the discussion.

    My one addition would be to say that what you call “rallying flags” always include an outgroup. Groups seem (and I’m happy to be shown exceptions here, but none spring to mind) to be unable to form cohesion until they have an opposition. One of the best examples of this is the proto-Levant tribes which became the Jews. From archaeology, we find that they had small-tribal loyalties, but no overarching identity. Some ate pork, some did not, some circumcized, some didn’t. But when the Phoenicians invade and take over the coastal strip (Philistines), and their primary dietary protein is pork, and they are not circumcised, suddenly all those hill tribes circumcise, they all stop eating pork, and even their house structure and pottery becomes more similar.

    Fast forward, you see the same thing, ironically, with the Palestinians. In 1900, there is no such thing as “Palestinian”, they are a diverse group spanning four or five religions, many races, all living in the same area and having been ruled by various empires for hundreds of years. No shared identity. Jewish immigration begins to form them into a distinct group, and the declaration of the state of Israel cements it. Now we have Palestinians. Palestinian identity is formed in resistance to Israel, which is one of the (many) reasons the conflict is so intractable.

    • Thanks for the information.

      I’d assumed that not eating pork was a low-cost in-group marker (pork would be a luxury in a dry environment), but now I know there’s some history, too.

      Now that I think about it, it might not have been such a dry environment, either.

      • Sastan says:

        From my best memory of the work, there seemed to be little trouble raising pigs in the Levant. If you can raise goats, you can raise pigs, and goats/sheep were the standard in the area for a long time. Cattle are more difficult. So the ban on pork was actually a fairly large commitment, dropping half the major species of broadly available large farm animals. And circumcision, especially for the first generation to decide to use it, was DEFINITELY not a “low cost” marker.

        Do note the almost constant pairing as an epithet in the Old Testament of the Bible the terms “uncircumcised” and “Philistine”. The legends of the time make a big deal about this, probably because it was a new and important dividing line.

      • keranih says:

        Less the water than the lifestyle.

        Livestock are a society-feeding tool that shapes the hand that wields it. The social patterns for keeping sheep and goats (generally in a highly mobile fashion) are different from those in more sedentary farm villages who keep swine.

  62. Innocent Bystander says:

    Another view on the Robbers Cave experiment below. This was actually the third attempt to create the conflict. They actually had to get quite a lot of things right to make them fight and keep fighting (prevent fraternizing, make sure they didn’t know each other beforehand, ensure that the environment was zero-sum, etc). One might even suspect the researchers had an agenda and got the answer they wanted. Which would not be the first time this has happened in psychology.

    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/inside-robbers-cave/4515060

    • Vorkon says:

      Yeah, I’ve read similar things about both the Robber’s Cave experiment, and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

      I don’t think it detracts too much from the central point of Scott’s essay, mind you. In this case, it was only an example he used to illustrate his point, rather than the only source of evidence for his entire point, so in a way it helps that the result is a little extreme. But yeah, I think it’s safe to say that there were issues with the methodology of both experiments, and they got exactly the results they were planning to get. I don’t think either experiment is completely useless or anything; at the very least, I think it says something about human nature that you can at least fairly reliably set up situations to end up this way, even if it takes more work on your part, and is less of a foregone conclusion than the widely publicized descriptions of the experiments might suggest. But I also think that experiments like these ones are taken a little too seriously in some circles.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        The Robbers Cave experiment was run shortly after WWII, and by then everybody had a lot of familiarity with team-building among young males. The U.S. and Britain had a lot of trouble on the home front, for example, with excesses of team spirit, such as Army vs. Navy brawling by bored, antsy young men waiting to ship out. (There’s a good Army v. Navy wingding in the Coen Brothers’ “Barton Fink.”)

  63. Muga Sofer says:

    >One comment complaint I heard during the height of the Atheist-Theist Online Wars was that atheists were a lot like fundamentalists. Both wanted to interpret the religious texts in the most literal possible way.

    >Being on the atheist side of these wars, I always wanted to know: well, why wouldn’t you? Given that the New Testament clearly says you have to give all your money to the poor, and the Old Testament doesn’t say anything about mixing meat and milk, maybe religious Christians should start giving everything to the poor and religious Jews should stop worrying so much about which dishes to use when?

    Because “interpreting everything in the most literal possible way” means “misinterpreting everything”. Because that’s not how humans or language works.

    (Not to imply that people actually try their hardest to interpret the texts correctly.)

    Have you ever noticed that the worst atheists often have very similar misconceptions about how science works as creationists?

    >On the other hand, in countries that have non-ethnic notions of heritage, patriotism has an opportunity to substite for racism. Think about the power of the civil rights message that, whether black or white, we are all Americans.

    “Immigrants”.

    >Maybe an even stronger example is the human biodiversity movement, which many people understandably accuse of being entirely about racism. Nevertheless, some of its most leading figures are black – JayMan and Chanda Chisala (who is adjacent to the movement but gets lots of respect within it) – and they seem to get equal treatment and respect to their white counterparts. Their membership in a strong and close-knit tribe screens off everything else about them.

    Well … yes? Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are quite a lot of female anti-feminists as well.

    Belonging to a group doesn’t mean you can’t discriminate against it perfectly well; indeed, you may recall that women and black people are just as racist and misogynist as white men.

    >Is there such a thing as conservation of tribalism? Get rid of one tribal identity and people just end up seizing on another?

    “Atheists just end up worshipping something else as God.”

    > holy books (which are always wrong)

    Really? You couldn’t have written this paragraph without throwing in a tribal signifier? Now I can’t recommend this to people, which is basically the whole point of this essay.

    • Creutzer says:

      Because that’s not how humans or language works.

      No. It’s not how humans work. Human language is perfectly fine for much more literal use than is common. Don’t blame the nonsense that is religious scriptures on language itself.

    • Jiro says:

      Well … yes? Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are quite a lot of female anti-feminists as well.

      The trouble with this idea is that showing that a substantial portion of group X believe in an “anti-X” ideology is, given that people normally follow ideologies that are in their own interests, a way to falsify the claim that the ideology is really anti-X. Using the defense “well, you can be X and still anti-X” is a way to evade a major way to falsify one’s beliefs. And is pretty much a false consciousness accusation.

      If there are lots of female anti-feminists, that tends to show that “anti-feminist” isn’t anti-female. If there are a substantial number of women and minorities in #notyourshield, that shows that Gamergate isn’t misogynist or racist. And if a movement has many black people in it, it probably isn’t racist (against blacks).

      It’s true that the existence of one black person, woman, etc. in such a movement doesn’t falsify such claims. It’s always possible that someone could be paid off or otherwise benefit in a personal way that won’t generalize to other people like him. But when there are lots, this becomes unlikely.

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        The trouble with this idea is that showing that a substantial portion of group X believe in an “anti-X” ideology is, given that people normally follow ideologies that are in their own interests, a way to falsify the claim that the ideology is really anti-X. Using the defense “well, you can be X and still anti-X” is a way to evade a major way to falsify one’s beliefs. And is pretty much a false consciousness accusation.

        People follow ideologies all the time that are not in their actual interests.

        And yes, that’s a false consciousness accusation. That’s what the term means: people misunderstand their own interests.

        Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, for instance, is an attempt to explain how people are systematically subject to false consciousness. I don’t think it’s a rare phenomenon.

        The fact that there are black people in the Republican party proves that Republican ideology is not subjectively intended (at least on the part of many Republicans) to harm black people. Unless, I suppose, one thinks those black Republicans are “race traitors”. However, the presence of black Republicans does not prove that Republican policies don’t have the actual effect of hurting black people. Not that I am arguing that they do have such an effect.

        It can even be the other way around: a group can subjectively intend to hurt another group and as a result support policies with the actual effect of helping them. That’s at least many people’s opinion of U.S. foreign policy in regard to Islamic terrorism.

        • Jiro says:

          How do you prevent false consciousness from becoming a fully general argument?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Well, you don’t just assert “false consciousness”. It’s not an argument at all.

            You have a theory that explains how the world works. Marxism, or for Caplan, neoclassical economics. You argue the truth of this theory on the merits of the evidence. For Marxism, the theory explains why the workers should seize control of the means of production. For libertarian economics, the theory explains why virtually everyone should want substantially less regulation and economic interventionism.

            Then you come to the question of why people don’t act that way. One type of explanation is to say that people’s interests are in conflict. For Marxists, that’s the bourgeois class interest in maintaining the status quo. For libertarians, it often involves politicians and other corrupt people who have an interest in maintaining a system of “legalized plunder”. (Libertarian differ on the extent to which they emphasize this one; Caplan thinks it plays a more minor role.)

            Another type of explanation is collective action problems: e.g. everyone wants to overthrow the government, but they can’t coordinate on it. That’s the James Buchanan school of public choice theory.

            The last type of explanation—why the workers don’t want to seize the means of production, or why the taxpayers don’t want to overthrow the welfare-regulatory state—is false consciousness. People don’t know what their interest is, or they know but have been led wrongly to act contrary to it.

            None of these explanations is totally exclusive with the others. But false consciousness necessarily plays a large role in any theory that doesn’t attribute everything to “Moloch” or their opponents’ being Orcs who hate the light for being light.

            ***

            How do you respond to an accusation of false consciousness?

            Simple: if someone argues that your interest lies in overthrowing capitalism, you can point to the evidence that capitalism is a beneficent system and that communism doesn’t work. You argue that the false consciousness is the other way around: that communism doesn’t serve the interest of the workers.

            Whoever’s “consciousness” is false depends on the object-level facts.

            It’s a separate issue from polylogism, which is also associated with Marxism and other illiberal ideologies. Polylogism says that there is literally a proletarian logic and a bourgeois logic, or a white logic and a black logic, or a male logic and a female logic, and so on. And that’s the theory that reduces every dispute to violence because there’s no common ground: “male logic” justifies patriarchy and “female logic” justifies feminism, with there being no objective truth of the matter apart from group dynamics.

          • Jiro says:

            You have a theory that explains how the world works… Then you come to the question of why people don’t act that way. One type of explanation is to say that people’s interests are in conflict…. Another type of explanation is collective action problems… The last type of explanation… is false consciousness.

            But that’s incomplete. It leaves out a fourth explanation: the theory isn’t correct. And having the false consciousness explanation available means you don’t need to bother with the fourth explanation.

            if someone argues that your interest lies in overthrowing capitalism, you can point to the evidence …

            Real-world ideas often have incomplete evidence and evidence which is to be interpreted partly on the basis of people’s personal experiences and perceptions. “I am in this movement, and I am female, and it has not been misogynist against me” is, in fact, evidence, and often more powerful than any evidence based on statistics, but “false consciousness” doesn’t let you point to that evidence–it rejects it. (Worse yet, it rejects it in a one-sided manner–people who oppose the movement get to quote their experiences with it as gospel.)

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            But that’s incomplete. It leaves out a fourth explanation: the theory isn’t correct. And having the false consciousness example available means you don’t need to bother with the fourth explanation.

            Obviously, the theory’s being false is a possibility.

            But then whatever theory you replace it with has the the same problem. Say Marxism is totally false (as I believe it is). Why, then, have movements of workers and peasants around the world campaigned and fought so hard for Marxism? The answer is some form of false consciousness—unless you believe they wanted death camps and poverty as end goals.

            Maybe having false consciousness “available” is a useful path to rationalization. So what? It’s “available” because it’s true for some people regardless of what theory is actually correct.

            Having the concept of “being wrong” available is a useful tool for attacking people. Every time someone says something you disagree with, you can say, “No, you’re wrong.” That doesn’t mean no one’s ever wrong about anything.

            Real-world ideas often have incomplete evidence and evidence which is to be interpreted partly on the basis of people’s personal experiences and perceptions. “I am in this movement, and I am female, and it has not been misogynist against me” is, in fact, evidence, and often more powerful than any evidence based on statistics, but “false consciousness” doesn’t let you point to that evidence–it rejects it. (Worse yet, it rejects it in a one-sided manner–people who oppose the movement get to quote their experiences with it as gospel.)

            False consciousness doesn’t “let” you do one thing or another.

            To address your example: “I am in this movement, and I am female, and it has not been misogynist against me”. That absolutely is (some) evidence that the movement is not driven by misogyny.

            Whether it’s driven by misogyny is separate from the question of whether it’s against the interests of women. That’s another issue (often conflated by feminists, though). If you’re a traditionalist anti-feminist woman who enjoys life in the home, that’s (some) evidence that anti-feminism is not against the interests of (all) women.

            “False consciousness” is a label for certain mechanisms causing people to misperceive their interests. It’s not something that stands on its own as an argument. Saying “you suffer from false consciousness” is equivalent to saying “you’re wrong”. You counter it by supplying evidence that you’re right. If the other side doesn’t provide any actual evidence that you’re wrong about what you’re interests are, they’re just making arbitrary assertions.

            Asserting “false consciousness” is not an excuse to invalidate evidence of true consciousness of one’s interests. It can be used that way. But the same goes for just saying “no, you’re wrong” without evidence.

          • Jiro says:

            Saying “you suffer from false consciousness” is equivalent to saying “you’re wrong”. You counter it by supplying evidence that you’re right.

            But how it is usually used is that someone is already providing evidence, and false consciousness is used to say “that evidence doesn’t count because it is based on false consciousness”. How can you counter that, by supplying evidence for your evidence?

            If “false consciousness” was actually used like “you’re wrong” with respect to burden of proof, that would be different.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jiro:

            But how it is usually used is that someone is already providing evidence, and false consciousness is used to say “that evidence doesn’t count because it is based on false consciousness”. How can you counter that, by supplying evidence for your evidence?

            Again, false consciousness as such is not the same as polylogism or the view that ideology is a “superstructure” determined materialistically by economic interests.

            The latter two are ways to automatically invalidate any disagreement: “of course a person born into bourgeois privilege would defend a sanctimonious bourgeois morality of ‘human rights’ that says we can’t exterminate the kulaks”. Or: “necessarily a worker raised according to the late capitalist mode of production is going to suffer from false consciousness induced by corporate control of the media.”

            All I am saying is that you don’t have to subscribe to such a theory in order to believe that people are often unconscious of their real interests. It’s the difference between saying they can’t know them and saying they don’t know them.

            If “false consciousness” was actually used like “you’re wrong” with respect to burden of proof, that would be different.

            It’s often used as part of the arsenal of certain groups of people fond of dishonest debating tactics. But so is every other form of logical fallacy.

            Anyway, I doubt we really even disagree on the central point here. It is possible for people to be wrong about what their interests are. But people often assert this dogmatically of their opponents instead of arguing for it.

        • Randy M says:

          The fact that there are black people in the Republican party proves that Republican ideology is not subjectively intended (at least on the part of many Republicans) to harm black people. Unless, I suppose, one thinks those black Republicans are “race traitors”. However, the presence of black Republicans does not prove that Republican policies don’t have the actual effect of hurting black people. Not that I am arguing that they do have such an effect.
          Isn’t it the other way around? Black members prove that those members do not see the policies as (on net) harming their interests (including longer-term, less tangible ones). Presumably they are basing this on evidence and experience, in as much as anyone does, which admittedly isn’t much.

          It [the party having black members] doesn’t say anything about what they non-black policy crafters subjective feelings about anything are, except that if their policies are intended to harm blacks, they either do it inconsistently, ineffectively, or covertly.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Isn’t it the other way around? Black members prove that those members do not see the policies as (on net) harming their interests (including longer-term, less tangible ones). Presumably they are basing this on evidence and experience, in as much as anyone does, which admittedly isn’t much.

            It [the party having black members] doesn’t say anything about what they non-black policy crafters subjective feelings about anything are, except that if their policies are intended to harm blacks, they either do it inconsistently, ineffectively, or covertly.

            Sorry, I was thinking more of black “higher-ups”. But it was unclear.

            You’re correct that there’s a distinction between the leadership and the rank-and-file. Having black people in the rank-and-file shows that the rank-and-file (or part of it, at least) doesn’t intend to harm black people. Having black people in the leadership shows that the leadership (or part of it) doesn’t intend to harm black people.

            Both of these I would group under “subjective intent”. All I was trying to say was the simple point that what people’s interests are is not the same as what they think they are, so the presence of X people does not show that the agenda is contrary to the interests of X people.

          • Randy M says:

            Sorry about my formatting error.

            It may not prove it, but it should certainly provide evidence, assuming that the party is actually implementing at least some of what they are promising to do, unless you want to say you know their interests better than they do.
            While this may be true (may) it is going to be difficult to argue.

  64. Adam Casey says:

    This and the Free Northerner post in the last links are … interesting. I need to go away and think for a long time about them. Thanks very much for the insights.

  65. tsartomato says:

    thank eggs i’m no part of any tribe and have no flags

  66. Julie K says:

    > the Old Testament doesn’t say anything about mixing meat and milk

    This is a bad example; the rallying flag of religious Judaism is not “belief in the Old Testament”; it’s belief in both the Written Law and the Oral Law. The details about mixing milk and meat are in the Oral Law.

    (On the other foot, I was interested to see that 42% of American Jews- but only 9% of Israeli Jews- say that “having a good sense of humor” is an essential part of what being Jewish means to them personally.)

    • Moshe Zadka says:

      Came into the comments to say exactly that bit (re: oral law), so happy someone already made the comment. Tribal high-fives all around!

      • The nice thing about the oral law is that it’s oral, so contains whatever the current generation of legal scholars claims it contains. When its content is sufficiently inconsistent with the written law, there is reason for suspicion.

        For outsiders to this exchange … . The oral law was supposedly transmitted by Moses and handed down in oral tradition via the legal scholars. The written law is the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament.

        The written law says that if your son is disobedient and badmouths his parents he is supposed to be stoned to death. The oral law, at least by the time it gets to Maimonides and probably much earlier, imposes a long list of implausible conditions that must be met and concludes that it will never happen.

        This is part of the reason I like to claim that, by the standards of the rabbis, every Supreme Court justice in history was a strict constructionist.

        • Anonymous says:

          But the oral law hasn’t been oral for almost 2000 years. Contemporary Rabbis can play around here and there (e.g. abolishing mamzer is relatively recent) and have a mostly free hand when it comes to new technology, but in many areas they are far more hemmed in than Supreme Court justices. At least in the leniency direction.

  67. Julie K says:

    Speaking of Myers-Briggs, I understand the first 3 elements, but not the 4th. How do I figure out if I am INTP or INTJ?

    • Vox Imperatoris says:

      Going by this link, Judging is basically high Conscientiousness.

    • Rob K says:

      The actual answer is probably more complicated than this, but I just think of it as a proxy for the “clean room and keeps a planner -> messy room and disorganized schedule” continuum.

      • Urstoff says:

        That finally explains why I’m always on the J/P borderline. My office is somewhat messy, but not excessively.

        Edit: yes, Myers-Briggs is basically nonsense. Still, there is at least some consistency across tests.

      • John Nerst says:

        What about clean room and messy/nonexistent schedule? I never know what to think about “conscientiousness”.

    • I think of it as Js want things settled and Ps want things left open. It’s not much like the normal meanings of judging and perceiving.

      For that matter, Thinking is actually taking things as they are in a neutral way, and Feeling is assigning positive and negative value.

      • Frog Do says:

        “Thinking is actually taking things as they are in a neutral way, and Feeling is assigning positive and negative value”

        Well I guess we know which one you value, lol. I would phrase it more as a matter of which system you trust more, 1 or 2; acknowledging that both are useful (“rational”) ways of decision making.

        • For what it’s worth, I assign value reflexively. However, I seem to have been writing in rationalist mode.

          • Frog Do says:

            I feel you, code-switching is never the easiest.

            Ugh, on second thought, that was tecnhically a call-out on my part, wasn’t it? Now I feel terrible, lol.

  68. Anonymous says:

    political positions – ie clubs for hating their fellow citizens.

    This is a pretty strong condemnation of parliamentary democracy (and perhaps democracy in general), because it rests on the existence of political parties.

    • Anonymous says:

      Only in the context of no tribal affinity between members of different parties (nationalism, ethnicism, racism, etc.)

    • Democracy does seem to have always resulted in the existence of political parties, but I wouldn’t say it rests on them. You can in principle have a democracy where all candidates are independents.

      • John Schilling says:

        I’m not sure that’s workable in anything bigger than a small town. Rational ignorance of voters is a real thing, and at the national level that is likely to mean that truly nonpartisan elections could only be won by A: the incumbent[‘s next of kin], B: the rich and/or famous demagogue, or C: the general who won the last big war.

        That’s not going to work well in the long run.

        Democracy does rest, in part, on having some non-democratic mechanism for winnowing thousands of wannabe presidents or parliamentarians into a tractable number of “serious candidates” for the consideration of voters who aren’t going to spend more than ten minutes at a time thinking about such things. Whatever performs that function, and yet does not wield such overarching power as to render the whole thing non-democratic in fact, is going to waddle and quack like a “political party”.

        • Hmmm. We’ve traditionally managed to elect city councils and Mayors without having political parties[1], so I don’t see any reason in principle why we couldn’t elect the city’s MPs in the same way. Electing a President would be a problem, but I’m not greatly in favour of directly elected Presidents anyway. Neither, if I remember correctly, were the people who wrote the US constitution. 🙂

          Possibly, though, the only reason this works for local politics is that being Mayor or on the city council isn’t as appealing as being a Member of Parliament, so isn’t going to attract as many potential candidates.

          On the other hand, doesn’t the fact that US Presidential party candidates are decided by popular election rather than by the party leadership kind of derail your argument? Why couldn’t the President be chosen using the same sort of mechanisms by which the Republican and Democratic candidates for President are chosen?

          I’m also given to understand that Republican politicians voting with the Democrats or vice versa isn’t even unusual, which seems to weaken the relevance of the parties significantly. (Over here, only certain votes are designated as conscience votes; the rest of the time, failing to vote with your party will result in disciplinary action and usually dismissal. If dismissed, you’re still an MP, of course, but no longer a party member.)

          I would guess that the more important reason why we don’t have any party-free democracies is that in a democracy you can’t really stop people from creating parties, and they’ll tend to have an advantage over independents. (But that still leaves the possibility that if it did happen, it would turn out to be dysfunctional.)

          [1] Well, actually I think there were some political parties in the last Council elections here. But I think that’s relatively new, and there were plenty of independents as well. I may be misremembering, but I don’t think the independents did particularly badly.

          • John Schilling says:

            On the other hand, doesn’t the fact that US Presidential party candidates are decided by popular election rather than by the party leadership kind of derail your argument? Why couldn’t the President be chosen using the same sort of mechanisms by which the Republican and Democratic candidates for President are chosen?

            The way that candidates for President are chosen in the United States, is that a veteran party insider calls upon his network of party loyalists to start arranging financing and media exposure, collecting signatures, setting up local meetings, recruiting delegates, and doing all the other groundwork necessary for even a primary election campaign.

            In the current US presidential election, a few people who aren’t veteran party insiders have tried to use personal fame and fortune as a substitute. The only one who is still in the running, is stumbling on his ground game, e.g. finding that the delegates he thinks he has arranged to be elected on his behalf aren’t entirely loyal to him on account of his not having a network of party insiders to handle delegate selection.

            There is no substitute, in any election for anything bigger than a large town or small county, to having a network of people dedicated to the myriad details of running an effective political campaign. And unless the network is built around a cult of personality, it will not limit itself to a single candidate nor disperse after a single election.

            That’s a political party whether you call it one or not. People who want to win elections will establish such organizations whether you call them parties or not. And I will wager that you had at least two of them backing candidates for mayor in every election you can remember.

            If you make “party” a bad word and party organization a shameful thing, they’ll indulge you by hiding it. But the ones who win, aside from a handful of rich, famous demagogues doing the cult-of-personality thing, will have parties backing them.

          • I will of course defer to your description of US presidential politics. (I’m not quite sure why the network of people can’t be professionals, working for anybody for a fee, rather than members of a tribe; but that wouldn’t really help, since only the very wealthy could afford it.)

            But I still think that for a Parliamentary democracy or similar (or, at least, a sufficiently small one) political parties are only necessary in a game-theoretic sense, i.e., can’t stop people from using them, and can’t win without one once they are.

            In particular, the way our council elections are handled really should work perfectly well in a counterfactual world without political parties. I know that personally, I’ve always voted almost entirely on the basis of the information provided in the voting pack; I may not have been able to avoid being influenced by advertising and whatever other campaigning they got up to, but it isn’t as if I’d have been totally lost without it and unable to vote.

          • BBA says:

            Some (most?) states in the US have nonpartisan local elections. In practice most local elections don’t really fall on party lines – Rahm Emanuel and Chuy Garcia, the candidates in the last Chicago mayoral race, were both Democrats, but represented bitterly opposed factions within the party. Meanwhile no Republican stands a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming mayor of Chicago.

            Contrast my hometown of New York, where local elections are partisan and for just about every office the Democratic primary is the real election and the official election is just a formality. (True, we recently had 20 straight years of “Republican” mayors, but Giuliani and Bloomberg were both deeply unusual and nobody like either of them is anywhere on the horizon.)

          • John Schilling says:

            I know that personally, I’ve always voted almost entirely on the basis of the information provided in the voting pack;

            How is it that you get a voting pack that contains useful information on a tractably small number of candidates rather than the manifestos of every nutcase in the district?

            Typically, there’s a gatekeeping process that involves collecting some number of petition signatures to prove that you are a “serious” candidate. Since nutcases can be persistent, and/or difficult to dissuade from fraud, the number of signatures and level of verification required to get on the ballot for any major election tends to be set at a level that, de facto, requires a dedicated standing organization to reach.

            Case study: The recall election for the Governor of California in 2003, used a nonstandard process whose ballot access requirement hadn’t been updated in something like a century, didn’t recognize the role of political parties, and required the sort of signature drive a nonprofessional candidate might conduct in a frontier state.

            We had one hundred and five candidates qualify for ballot access. One of whom was backed by the Democratic Party, one of whom was backed by the Republican Party, one of whom was a celebrity who was also backed by the Republican Party, and one hundred and two of whom were charitably described as “protest candidates”.

            I’m pretty certain that no significant number of voters were going to read one hundred and five voter information packages and make an informed decision as to which person they were going to vote for. Not to mention the question of the perceived legitimacy of an administration whose “mandate” was a whole three percent of the popular vote or whatever. They didn’t have to, because the Republican and Democratic parties ran expensive, professional campaigns that made it clear who were the three serious candidates and who were the whackos nobody had to waste their time with.

            So I ask you, how is it that your council election voting pacts avoid this fate?

            Also, does almost every “nonpartisan” election without an incumbent coincidentally have one candidate on the ballot for each major party in your country, with the voter information pack written so that someone with a sixth-grade reading level and sixty-second attention span can reliably match the candidates with the parties?

          • How is it that you get a voting pack that contains useful information on a tractably small number of candidates rather than the manifestos of every nutcase in the district?

            That is an excellent question. I have no idea; I’ll have to do some research. Although I could speculate that it really is just a question of size; if an election applicable to all of California, population 40 million, only attracted 102 nutcases, then statistically we might expect Hamilton, population 150 thousand, to attract about 0.38 of a nutcase.

            Hamilton has two seats in Parliament, so if we held MP elections on the same basis, we might expect only 0.19 of a nutcase in each electorate. 🙂

            Edit: come to think of it, we have had at least one nutcase standing for Parliament (as an independent) in my electorate over the 20-odd years I’ve lived here. Not counting the candidates from joke parties. One candidate, about seven elections, 0.14 nutcases/election – that’s actually pretty close!

            Also, does almost every “nonpartisan” election without an incumbent coincidentally have one candidate on the ballot for each major party in your country

            If I understand you correctly, no. The parties that compete to control the national government never [1] endorse candidates for our local government elections. As I mentioned before, we do have some local government political parties here in Hamilton, but they aren’t associated with the national parties in any very obvious way.

            [1] Not formally, at any rate; none of the candidates indicated any such affiliation in the information pack. I can’t be as sure about more informal endorsements, but I’m not aware of any. I have the vague impression that it is thought important that the national government not be seen to be interfering in local politics.

          • John Schilling says:

            Certainly if you have a small polity, you can have an informal process for selecting and publicizing candidates. But rarely is it the case that all you have is a small polity. Iceland, maybe (though their system for choosing leaders isn’t looking so good this week…)

            If you’ve got to elect leaders for a community of millions of people, and you’re past the first generation when, duh, we elect George Washington or whomever, I think formal political parties are the least-bad way of arranging a practical election. And if you have parties at that level, the only question is how far down they are going to exert their influence (formally or otherwise)

          • Going back to the California example, there’s no obvious reason in principle why California couldn’t have a Parliament instead of a Governor. To keep the nutcases in each electorate manageable (based on too few examples, admittedly) you’d need to divide California into perhaps 40-60 electorates. That doesn’t sound unreasonable.

            But I have to concede that for the US as a whole, you’d need a Parliament on the order of a thousand MPs, and I’m not sure that would be workable. You could try to make things hierarchical (the California Parliament sends a representative or two to the Federal Parliament) but that also seems too unwieldy to me.

            Still, if you really, really wanted a party-free democracy, and if you could somehow solve the game theory / coordination problem, all you’d need to do is dissolve the United States and go back to being 50-odd separate nations. 🙂

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            You could try to make things hierarchical (the California Parliament sends a representative or two to the Federal Parliament) but that also seems too unwieldy to me.

            That’s more or less how the U.S. Senate originally worked — each state’s legislature would appoint two senators. The 17th amendment to the constitution changed it to the current system (senators are directly elected by the people of the state) in the early 20th century.

            One of the big problems with the appointed-senators system was that sometimes a state’s legislature would be unable to agree on who to appoint as senator (and then that state would have no representation in the Senate). I imagine that not having formal political parties would make the problem even worse.

  69. Emile says:

    I’m not sure exactly what the difference between ethno-nationalism and racism is, or whether there even is a difference, except that “race” is a much more complicated concept than ethnicity and it’s probably not a coincidence that it has become most popular in a country like America whose ethnicities are hopelessly confused.

    I think the two are pretty much the same thing – or at least, the role “race” plays in American society is pretty much the same role “ethnicity” (as a mix of language and ancestry and sometimes religion) plays in Belgium or Yugoslavia or China or Rwanda or Russia. -they are identifiable subgroups with their own cultures and grievances, and varying degrees of assimilation and state “enforcement of one culture”.

    There are two reasons Americans talk of “race” and not “ethnicity”:

    * America ended up with a mix of people from *very* different origin, pretty much as different as humans can be – so “race” becomes a better way of describing the differences than it would in e.g. Yugoslavia
    * Some major aspects of America’s society (Emancipation of slaves, mass immigration from Europe) were formed in the 19th century / early 20th century, when “scientific racist” ideas were much more popular than they are today

    … so now the old word is still used even to talk about differences that are *exactly* like those in Yugoslavia and Belgium etc. i.e. Latinos.

    • Nita says:

      How are Latinos exactly like Serbs or Albanians or Walloons or whatever? They don’t even have a language in common.

      • Koldos the Shepherd says:

        I think Emile was trying to say that the differences between Latinos and Anglos are exactly the same as the differences between the subpopulations that make up Belgium and (formerly) Yugoslavia.

        • But this seems incorrect, which is what I think Nita was trying to say. Latinos and Anglos differ in native language, ancestry, and religion, although the last one is probably less important than the other two, and the extent of the ancestry difference depends on which subgroup of Latinos you’re talking about (there’s more difference with mestizos than with criollos). Walloons and Flemings differ in native language and ancestry (the difference is more comparable to the Anglo-criollo difference than the Anglo-mestizo one), but not in religion (both are Catholic, and IIRC this is what historically helped keep the Belgians together against the Protestant Dutch). The various Yugoslav groups differ primarily via religion and much less by the other two things, as far as I can tell (at least wrt the primary Serb-Croat-Bosniak split, the Slovenes, Macedonians and especially the Albanians are more ethnolinguistically distinct).

          But I would say that in Emile’s sense that the differences correspond to ‘identifiable subgroups with their own cultures and grievances, and varying degrees of assimilation and state “enforcement of one culture”’, they are analogous.

        • Emile says:

          I’m not sure anybody in this subthread is disagreeing much.

          I think that if we found various metrics to describe a group’s position in a country (like, what proportion speak the majority language, how persecuted they are/feel, how easy it is to enter/exit the group, how common intermarriage is, etc.), then latinos in the US wouldn’t be an outlier compared to other ethnic minorities in other countries.

          Or for a non-statistical approach – I’d expect that the typical stories about how latinos feel about their identity and the US and integration and discrimination etc. will be similar to stories other ethnic groups face in their countries.

    • John Schilling says:

      There are two reasons Americans talk of “race” and not “ethnicity”:

      Three: Americans explicitly allow people to change their ethnicity, in cases where the new ethnicity is not explicitly defined by race. Which the mainstream “American” ethnicity mostly isn’t (though it used to be).

  70. Peter says:

    There’s a flip side to all this; outsiders who have something to do with the rallying flag, but who don’t get on with the community associated with the flag. Like there’s something there which is supposedly there for you, but when you turn up, you don’t actually fit in. Or maybe you don’t change and the community does and you end up feeling like a stranger in your own community.

    I suppose a lot of the social justice arguments in the last decade or so – on both various sides – have revolved around this issue.

    Of personal interest – the autistic spectrum issue. There are some formal explicit movements and groups specifically for these people – where it’s the rallying flag, there are also various other movements or groups or vague ill-defined things where people on the spectrum end up fairly well represented. The classic example is various bits of nerd/geek culture but there are some others too. I got my diagnosis fairly late in life. Nerd/geek culture feels like home to me, the explicitly, specifically autistic-spectrum stuff doesn’t so much. That said, there’s a lot of variety within the latter. Anyway, one effect of this seems to be that I’m a lot less anti-cure than many; the “autistic spectrum” community doesn’t feel like my community, I don’t have any special attachment to it.

  71. Murphy says:

    Reminded me of “The Conscience of a Hacker”

    http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

    a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is
    found.
    “This is it… this is where I belong…”
    I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to
    them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…

    It also pattern matches strongly to my local hackspace. I like giving tours to newbies and it’s generally not hard to spot who’s going to be there for a few weeks using it as a utility for a project and who’s going to be part of the community long term. I’ve seen a lonely old man tear up saying that it felt “like coming home”.

    Some people suddenly find themselves in a room full of people like themselves.

    The kind of people who can’t see something broken without their fingers itching with the need to take it apart and fix it.

    It’s particularly cute to see members bringing their kids along and seeing a 7 year old who can pick a lock, disassemble something, fix solder joints and close it up again working.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60P1xG32Feo

  72. g says:

    Scott, your third stage is called “differentiation” at one point in the article but “development” everywhere else. I’m guessing you changed your mind about the terminology. You might want to make it consistent.

  73. Vaniver says:

    As well try to predict the warlike or peaceful nature of the United Kingdom by looking at a topographical map of Great Britain.

    I think this undersells the effect of geography on politics. One cannot predict the weather from a topographical map, but one can predict the climate.

  74. JBeshir says:

    I think this is a great post.

    I think the biggest insight was that the initial flag brings already-like-minded people together; this would explain why you can’t just grab any conceivable flag and immediately get a working tribe, but also why the range of things which do create tribes is so wide.

    And this has useful implications to any efforts to artificially create tribes to provide structures of support and belonging and fun social interactions, and might even be the key insight needed to do so. And that- if they can be set up to avoid some of the nastier traits of tribes- could be a valuable endeavour, and not just because it’d potentially weaken some of the more pernicious tribes.

    It also has useful implications for efforts to fix some of the troublesome elements of tribalism in tribes we are in; can we find alternative things which would still draw in and connect people-like-us, maintain boundaries, etc, but don’t have the same troublesome nature? Which aren’t an incorrect ideology and don’t involve mocking outgroup membrs or whatever? (Doing this for tribes you aren’t in would probably best involve convincing people who ARE in it to do it)

    For me, this crystallised that I probably need to grudgingly accept that tribalism itself shouldn’t be suppressed entirely even if it could be.

    It remains that the suppression of tribal stuff in the West and resulting atomisation is probably responsible for a lot of its success- its reduced levels of corruption, the creation of internally cooperating nations rather than competing subtribes, its peaceful nature, the mutually supporting welfare systems and similar- so we don’t want to go too far in favour of tribalism. I think it’s even likely that reducing tribalism further would lead to more cosmopolitanism and less international tension. We do need to keep Enlightenment, universal/egalitarian values, and consider tribalism being allowed to violate them to be wrong, and find ways to strongly suppress the whole defecting-on-everyone-else-to-benefit-the-tribe impulse.

    Ditto for needing to deal with the “ideology becomes twisted towards identification of enemies, who can then be punished to show how loyal I am to my tribe, whose members care more about demonstration of loyalty than they care about ethics” problem, and others.

    But we probably shouldn’t do this by trying to suppress tribalism entirely. Maybe we can just limit tribalism to the construction of fun social groups of like-minded people of similar interests with mutual support, and encourage lots of those so people don’t get so tribal about other things? But then there’s the whole associations game talked about in Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments which suggests we might find important things being caught up in the tribalism anyway. Is there a way to disassociate things from tribal connotations or prevent them forming? It’s a tricky problem.

    • Vaniver says:

      Which aren’t an incorrect ideology and don’t involve mocking outgroup membrs or whatever?

      The first part is a feature, sure. But is the second part?

      • JBeshir says:

        Well, to declare that mockery is an okay thing for you to do, means declaring that it’s an okay thing for everyone, and giving up any grounds to complain about it until such time as you commit to not doing it yourself.

        It’s the old speech norm problem; egalitarian “I can do X without receiving Y” norms require that sets X and Y be disjunct. You can’t put something in X while also having it in Y, can’t expect to be able to say a thing then complain about mistreatment when other people say the same to you.

        You can (and probably do) want to go for complicated ideas of how bad various kinds of mockery are as a result, but tribal-based mockery is some of the worst and most misrepresenting, so it’s hard to see how it could be okay. I certainly wouldn’t want to give up the ability to complain when it happens to me.

        Maybe some could be if it stayed in private? In which case “public mockery” would be what you’d want to prevent.

    • I think that we need to look back at the walled garden model here. The idea, the hope, is that we can get a bunch of people from a bunch of tribes and form a tribal coalition based on actual shared values of “Don’t be evil.” and all that, and conspicuously offer the benefits of the tribal coalition to people who embrace Don’t Be Evil, and turn away from ones who do, no matter what other tribes they belong to.

      In practice, I strongly suspect any walled garden that’s got humans in it will get co-opted by tribalism sooner or later, and Evil will get quietly redefined to What The Current Tribal Leaders Don’t Like.

      Tribalism look like one of those cognitive states most people are hard-wired to fall into, and it offers a lot of advantages against a diffuse coalition of people working together under abstract principles. I don’t think we can really get rid of it or outcompete it; the best I think we can do is be aware of it, and extra-aware of what our own tribes are up to.

  75. Anon. says:

    You say you “enjoy being in tribes as much as anyone else”. Well no shit, memes proliferate because they’re good at proliferating. They wouldn’t be successful if they didn’t make you feel good. It’s not even that you’re voluntarily subordinating yourself to memes, it’s even worse: it’s involuntary subordination that the meme then tricked you into thinking is voluntary.

    It’s a parasite that has manipulated you into liking it.

    • Murphy says:

      I dunno, there’s some very successful tribes/religions with strong shame themes that work very hard to make people feel a great deal of shame for everyday stuff.

      • Self-hatred has an emotional hook to it for at least quite a few people. It’s not pleasure in the ordinary sense of the word.

        • Hlynkacg says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz

          I have a lot that I want to say on this topic but I’m not sure I have the vocabulary. It ties into your rant further down about Joan of Arc.

          I’ve got a bit of an odd background, I spent 8 years in the Navy but spent most of my time attached to Marines or in foreign stations rather than going to sea. I’ve been a boxer and a shift a supervisor in a major metropolitan ER. I even did a short stint as a “Private Military Contractor” (aka mercenary). Eventually I got tired, and went back to school to be an engineer.

          I offer this background information because I’ve noticed that pretty much all of my previous occupations attract a particular personality “type” that to me is immediately recognizable but at the same time very difficult to describe. One of, if not the, defining characteristics seems to be an attraction to hardship and physical/mental “tests” that borders on (and in some cases ends up) being self-destructive. I wouldn’t call it “self hatred” so much as an “impulse towards martyrdom”.

          It pops up in discussions and in literature as “the spark” or “the bug” and “so-and-so has a terminal case”. The “Hook” that I think you are looking for is the veneration of “Grit”, and the sense of clarity, self-actualization, and being “in the zone” that comes from mind and body operating at the limit of their design spec. Joan of Arc definitely had it, and I suspect that it is this quality that her fellow soldiers latched on to.

          • Thank you very much for the information, but you’re talking about something completely different from sitting in a safe place thinking that I’m should kill myself because I still like books by white male authors with white male main characters. I’m past that one, but I haven’t solved the general problem.

            During racefail, there was some discussion of including neurodiversity, but the project never went anywhere. I can’t see any way to build a movement that includes people who are (at least) highly tolerant of conflict and people who are highly conflict averse.

          • keranih says:

            [I] should kill myself because I still like books by white male authors with white male main characters.

            …*shakes head* Damn those fuckers.

            Yes, yes some of them were very decent people and some of them were dear friends and some of them were both…but. Damn those fuckers.

            I can’t see any way to build a movement that includes people who are (at least) highly tolerant of conflict and people who are highly conflict averse.

            I won’t say there isn’t any way for that to happen, because the horse may yet sing, but in the same way, I see any movement/society/group that tries to be equal things to smart people and to dumb people, to socially outgoing people and to shy people, to wealthy people and people who only own the clothes they are standing in, to people who speak the local language well and to people with a bad lisp, to literate and illiterate people both, and to people who need ten hours of sleep and people who do very well on only five hours…

            It all comes out Harrison Bergeron, no matter the best intent – and that’s on the good days.

          • Just to clarify– I wasn’t suicidal. I wasn’t making plans or having an intention. I was obsessively thinking that I should kill myself, and part of it was feeling that I couldn’t live up to people’s standards and didn’t want to, and part it was “look at how bad these people are for making me feel so bad”.

            Still, by their standards, intention doesn’t matter, only effect… if their feelings and the feelings of those they choose to defend are hurt. They get to do what they please because they mean well.

            I’m not sure whether this is fair, but I see “ally” as meaning that if you grovel hard enough, you get to be an enforcer.

            As you say, damn those fuckers.

            By the way, Mieville’s Railsea is a threefer. Doesn’t read it if you care about scientific versimillitude, but it’s quite a good thrill ride with some charming meta humor. White male author, white male main character, and Eric Raymond doesn’t like Mieville for being a communist.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            @ Nancy
            I was trying to describe the impulsive drive towards self-destruction, and how it can be adaptive and even freeing in it’s own way.

            I hear undertones of it in in your described case, as the fear of being weighed and found wanting is always burbling just under the surface, but there seems to be an inferential step missing. Specifically “why this specific thing”, why is liking “books by white male authors with white male main characters” so much worse than *randomly selected horrible thing*?

          • I’m not very sure about what’s going on, though I clearly have an attraction to standards I can’t or don’t want to meet.

            I’m inclined to think that the real problem is the background “want to die” stuff, which is somewhat hard to get at– superficially, it isn’t emotionally charged, while the stuff about Social Justice is highly charged.

      • TheAltar says:

        Pleasure isn’t the only addictive emotion and behavior. It’s a common and easily observed, but it’s not the only one there is.

        • Granted, but how do non-pleasure addictions work?

          We’ve identified the “do it” hook (the one that drives video gaming, but what’s the hook on self-hatred?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            hope.

          • pjz says:

            “… but it feels so good when I stop.” ?

          • FacelessCraven says:

            to elaborate, making the self-hatred explicit rather than a free-floating feeling allows you to make it explicit, therefore finite, therefore conceivably solvable. That allows you to hope, and hope is what keeps you alive.

          • “to elaborate, making the self-hatred explicit rather than a free-floating feeling allows you to make it explicit, therefore finite, therefore conceivably solvable. That allows you to hope, and hope is what keeps you alive.”

            People’s experience varies a lot. In my case, putting that feeling of aggravation with myself into words made things *much* worse. There were other factors which amplified the problem, but giving self-hatred a voice was very bad for me.

            My tentative theory is that self-hatred has a strong emotional hook because it involves identifying with a part of oneself which is claiming high status, even if the total effect is destructive. It’s almost a luxury.

    • Brad (the other one) says:

      >It’s a parasite that has manipulated you into liking it.

      So? My pet dog is “cute” because she has a lot of neonatal features than make me want to cuddle her and she mostly functions as a financial drain, but I’m not going to throw her out any time soon.

  76. I have a theory about group self-congratulation.

    People want to believe that they are made of good stuff, which is to say, better stuff than other people. This is hard to sustain by yourself, but easier if you’ve got a bunch of people agreeing with each other that they’re made of better stuff than their neighbors.

    As far as I can tell, group self-congratulation isn’t built around total delusion so much as it is built around overvaluing traits the group actually has.

    Heaven help you if you get caught up in some opposing group’s self-congratulation because that can leave you feeling as though your traits are intrinsically inferior.

    My alternate phrasing for “applause light” is “We…Like…Us”.

    • William Newman says:

      “built around overvaluing traits the group actually has”

      Overvaluing connotes incorrectness: a mistake or dishonesty. But there’s a possibility of honest disagreement, too.

      Periodically people will report a survey about what a high proportion of people think of themselves as above average drivers, and how a high proportion shows that people are poor observers or otherwise fundamentally mistaken. Seldom do people seem to think about how it can also show that surveys are often carelessly constructed. A very cautious driver tends to be a person who thinks being very cautious is particularly important and honestly assesses himself as above average, while a fast driver can easily be someone who thinks it is important and gets irritated at the very cautious driver and thinks of himself (and various other fast drivers) as above average.

      I don’t know if there are many groups of very cautious drivers or fast drivers forming themselves into tribes, but if there were they could have tribal solidarity in their disagreement about the values of these traits, and it still might be misleading to say that they were “overvaluing” them. (Because there are some reasons to prefer one, some reasons to prefer the other.)

    • Sastan says:

      Extend that a little more. What all tribes need to perpetuate themselves is status independence. They* need to be able to reward members with the respect of men and sexual access to women. If your group is not large enough or cohesive enough that good deeds done for the group result in either of these things, it will not last. As an aside, any group without sufficient women must either fail quickly or parasitize other tribes. So, for instance, militaries are sub-tribes of larger tribes, capable of providing respect, but not sexual access. If status within the military does not translate into status in the larger tribe, the military will either be terrible, or get its sexual access through more direct and less consensual means.

      Subtribes provide a smaller pond in which to be a comparatively larger fish. Unless your path is easier to status within a smaller group, there is no reason to join it other than temporary interest. These groups form and crumble quickly. It’s the difference between a cult and a book club.

      *Not to suggest that groups or leaders of them do this all that intentionally, it’s just an outgrowth of how things happen usually. Sometimes it is intentional, sometimes not.

      • “They* need to be able to reward members with the respect of men and sexual access to women”

        So women don’t have tribes or status for women doesn’t matter?

        I suggest at least including access to help with raising children and getting increased status for grandchildren.

        Recommended reading: Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy. It’s about the complex process mothers (both human and non-human) go through for getting and allocating resources.

        • Hlynkacg says:

          So women don’t have tribes or status for women doesn’t matter?

          More like women’s status exists independently of men’s I think.

          There is a dynamic I’ve observed where women who compete in, and are successful in, men’s status games seem to loose status among their fellow women even as they gain status among the men and vice versa.

        • Anonymous says:

          Woman, excuse me, females aren’t real people. Just objects to be won.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            It’s weird to me that so many erstwhile “adults” don’t seem to understand where babies come from.

            Have you ever watched a nature program?

          • Anonymous says:

            It’s weird to me that so many erstwhile “adults” don’t seem to understand where babies come from.

            Have you ever watched a nature program?

            It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s non sequitur man!

          • Randy M says:

            Do you think that there is some idealized world without competition for mates?

          • Hlynkacg says:

            That males compete for female attention / breeding rights is such a basic component of both biology and sociology that one would think it would go without saying.

            It should also go without saying that females compete amongst themselves to attract high status males.

            The fact that you seem to find this idea controversial says a lot more about you and your biases than it does Sastan.

            That or you’re just being shitty.

          • Anonymous says:

            The comment says “What all tribes need to perpetuate themselves is status independence. They* need to be able to reward members with the respect of men and sexual access to women.” It doesn’t say “Tribes need to help members find high quality mates”. It presupposes that men are the only people that matter.

            If you can’t see that then try spending less time around misogynists.

            Also MA you must be very happy that ESR is posting in this thread. It means you aren’t most pretentious ass.

          • NN says:

            That males compete for female attention / breeding rights is such a basic component of both biology and sociology that one would think it would go without saying.

            It should also go without saying that females compete amongst themselves to attract high status males.

            Except in the countless human societies that arranged marriages. From what I’ve read, that includes the vast majority of known human cultures throughout history, including forager cultures.

            The existence of prostitution in every known human culture also throws a wrench into the idea of human males constantly competing with each other for “sexual access to females.”

            Which is not to say that this never happens, but claiming it to be a human (let alone animal) universal seems to require ignoring a lot of alternative practices.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            @ NN:
            As a general rule, those arrangements are being made by mothers and fathers who are trying to secure the most advantageous match possible for their offspring. Not by drawing lots.

            The fact that the bulk of the competition occurs between parents rather than individual sons and daughters seems to have little bearing on the underlying mechanism.

            I’m also unclear on why you think the existence of prostitution undermines this theory, especially when considering the transactional nature of it.

            @ Anonymous:
            Did you stop to wonder where those mates are coming from? or are you going to insist on taking the “just being shitty” option?

          • Hlynkacg:

            “That males compete for female attention / breeding rights is such a basic component of both biology and sociology that one would think it would go without saying.”

            If it should go without saying, I don’t know why people keep saying it and saying it.

            “It should also go without saying that females compete amongst themselves to attract high status males.”

            I don’t know whether you noticed it, but that’s not what I said. I said females compete with each other for resources for their offspring.

            Sometimes those resources come from high status males, but (by definition, almost), that’s not most of what’s happening. Females also get resources themselves, from lowish and medium status males, from each other, and from family members.

            Even if you ordered a copy of Mother Nature immediately, you haven’t had time to read much of it, so I’ll tell you about the beginning. Scientists (mostly or entirely male) studied maternal behavior in animals by putting a mother and child in a cage and observing what the mother did. This left out the complexities of having more than one child, needing to get food, and social relationships within the mother’s species.

            It was “objectivity” of a sort which eliminated most of what was going on.

            I suspect you’re hypnotized by the fascinatingness of high-status people and you’re not seeing most of the world.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Hlynkacg
            Why don’t you try sketching out an actual argument instead of just waving vaguely in the direction of evo psyche?

          • NN says:

            As a general rule, those arrangements are made by mothers and fathers who are trying to secure the most advantageous match possible for their offspring. Not by drawing lots.

            The fact that the bulk of the competition occurs between parents rather than individual sons and daughters has little bearing on the underlying mechanism.

            How, exactly, does Bob’s mother and father meeting up with Alice’s mother and father and arranging a marriage between Bob and Alice qualify as “males competing for sexual access to females and females competing for the attention of high status males”?

            For one thing, the opposite sex parent (and often opposite sex members of the extended family) frequently has a lot of input on who their son or daughter marries, so saying that “males compete” or “females compete” is obviously inaccurate. For another thing, arrangements are often made based on factors that have nothing to do with the man or woman’s individual quality as a mate, including things like how big a dowry Alice’s family is willing to pay, or whether a marriage between the two families would create a useful alliance or end a feud, or any number of other things.

            Even ignoring all of that, parents trying to find the best possible match for their offspring is obviously a very different sort of competition from two male deer fighting with their antlers to determine who goes home with a female.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            @ Nancy Lebovitz:
            Maybe I’m just “hypnotized by the fascinatingness of high-status people” but it seems kind of obvious to me that male status is almost entirely determined by the potential resources and utility they bring to the table either as allies or potential mates. As such trying to count them separately from the resources/utility they provide feels a bit like equivocation to me.

            That said, there is probably an interesting argument lurking in your post about how a lack of scarcity basically makes the concept of fatherhood obsolete but I don’t think I have the knowledge or background required to make it.

            @ NN:
            Because, as a general rule (especially in a society where arranged marriages are the norm) Bob’s mother isn’t thinking about finding Bob a nice gay partner to settle down with. Bob’s mother is thinking about grandbabies.

            That means convincing Alice’s family that marrying Bob is a better deal than marrying Carl. Meanwhile Alice’s family might have their eyes on Dave the second son of a wealthy family from the next town over who in turn is wooing Edith…

            …and so it goes.

            It’s the exact same mechanism in play, just with the parents acting as their children’s proxies.

          • Nita says:

            @ Hlynkacg

            Have you ever watched a nature program?

            I’ve watched a few nature documentaries. Can’t say I’ve ever heard “a pride needs to reward its members with sexual access to females”. In fact, that would be a rather odd thing to say.

            After all, female lions themselves are members of the pride, so:
            – clearly you can’t reward them as described, unless they’re lesbian lions;
            – it’s odd to imagine the pride as a separate entity that keeps a stash of female lions and hands them out for good behavior.

          • It was only found out recently through DNA tests that female chimpanzees were having covert sex with members of other troupes.

            I thought it was hilarious that the female chimpanzees weren’t just fooling the males of their own troupe, they’d been fooling the scientists.

            http://www.deseretnews.com/article/562673/Female-chimps-are-sneaking-off-with-neighboring-hunks.html?pg=all

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            @Nita: A pride is a stash of female lions that male lions compete for sexual access to.

          • Nita says:

            No, a pride is a family of female hunters, their cubs, and one or two adult males useful for sex and defending the food.

          • hlynkacg says:

            As jaimeastorga2000 said a “pride” is a stash of female lions that male lions compete for sexual access to.

            The reason you almost never see prides with more than one or two adult males is that the competition for mates is literally cut-throat.

          • Nita says:

            the competition for mates is literally cut-throat

            Yeah, adult male lions are not very good at social cohesion — they also don’t do much hunting or cub-raising. The females value and feed the males while they’re in their prime, but attack them when they get old. So the males are more like outsiders living with the long-term social group for a few years, whose main contribution to the group is driving other outsiders away. (And this is why male coalitions exist at all — prides with better protection raise more offspring, which creates an evolutionary pressure on males to coexist in peace.)

            Of course, in other species, such as African wild dogs or humans, males are as social as females and fully participate in the life of the tribe. There is a lot of diversity in nature.

          • Nita:

            “There is a lot of diversity in nature.”

            I which people go into for psych bio and soc bio would remember this more thoroughly.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            There is a lot of diversity in nature.

            Yes there is, and yet “males compete for access to females” appears to be a universal mammalian trait, and quite common as far as the wider category of warm-blooded macro-organisms is concerned.

            You might think this is “evo pysch” nonsense but sooner or later you either have to admit that biology influences outcomes, or make the claim that humans were created out of a whole cloth rather than evolving naturally.

        • Sastan says:

          That’s a rather uncharitable characterization of what I wrote, Nancy.

          I’ll be the first to confess, I don’t understand female status games, but I know they exist. And I know that sexual access to the most desirable men is part of it. Women are a part of almost all tribes, but their status seeking will always be different in some ways than male. If you’d like to write up your take on female status games within tribalism, I’d love to read it.

          • “They* [tribes] need to be able to reward members with the respect of men and sexual access to women.”

            I don’t think I’m being uncharitable. I think the quoted bit implies that you don’t see women as members of tribes. I’m trying to imagine a set-up where functioning tribes make lesbian sex easier, and I just can’t manage it.

            Part of what I hate about soc bio is that it’s got a (presumably male) excessive focus on sex. Obviously (until fairly recent tech), sex is the first filter– no sex, no children. However, it’s not the only filter. We are an R species. Raising children takes a lot of post-birth support. You need to pay attention to how that works if you want to understand people and other R species.

            I don’t know much about how competition between women works in tribalism, so I can’t write you something about it, though I do think it would be a good idea for you to read Mother Nature.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Nancy Lebovitz:

            I agree. The problem with the general “one-line evopsych answer to everything” is that it’s motte and bailey.

            The initial claim will be something like “all of human love and relationships reduces to women competing to get impregnated by high-status men, and men trying to impregnate as many women as possible.” Then someone says, “Really? Everything?” And the first person says, “Well, that’s involved somehow.”

          • Sastan says:

            It “implies” nothing of the sort. My main point was that groups need to be able to provide status which (for men) mostly breaks down into those two things. Money, power and all the rest seem to map onto those well enough that we can dispense with the secondary tokens as descriptors. Whatever the analog is for women applies just as strongly. This isn’t an evo psych argument, has nothing to do with genetics, is all about tribes and how they need to provide a benefit to go along with the costs they impose.

            A tribe which cannot enhance the status of those who sacrifice for the group will not last. Sometimes this is just an organic thing. Think how being in Fugazi is a status enhancer within the punk/hardcore community for refusing all recording contracts for so long and “living” the punk lifestyle. No one gets together and says “welp, best reward them with respect and hoes!”, but because they exemplify the values of the group so well, and have proven their dedication, they are seen as the anti-sellout. And so they get respect. And being a successful sub-genre musician has always translated into sexual access.

            For a more concrete and direct example, look at the Shia veterans of the Iraq/Iran war. The state of Iran, the supreme leader and his mullahs made a very public push glorifying the fallen, painting their portraits on buildings, etc. But for the survivors, many of whom were horribly disfigured by poison gas, with lifelong disabilities, they preached that it was the “jihad”, the holy struggle, of devout young muslim women, to marry and care for these veterans.

            The ways in which women attain status vary somewhat from society to society. And once again, here I’m on less sure footing. I’m in a bind, if I talk badly and wrongly about something I obviously understand less well, because I’m a man and have lived my life mostly in male spaces, then you get to accuse me of sexism for misunderstanding. If I just leave them out of the partial formulation, I am accused of not thinking they can be tribe members? So let me talk about status and my mom.

            My family belonged to a cult back in the ’80s. Sort of faith-healing, proto-quiverfullers. So, if you’re going to encourage women to have lots of kids, you had damned well better reward them for it with status. When women spoke to each other in the group, they would almost always ask how many kids someone had. “Seven!? Oh how wonderful!”. When I tell normal people that I’m one of seven kids, they say one of two things about her: either “So she didn’t have a job?” or “your poor mom!”. She married a prominent member of the cult (my dad), had seven kids, and was well-respected within the church. What she did was low status in the secular world, but high status in her tribe.

          • Nita says:

            @ Sastan

            If I just leave them out of the partial formulation, I am accused of not thinking they can be tribe members?

            You could have written, “a tribe needs to reward its members — e.g., for male members, these rewards can be the respect of other men and sex with the women”.

          • Sastan says:

            I could have written many things, Nita. Somehow I doubt anything I could have written would have been well crafted enough to dodge the charges of misogyny some people feel the need to scatter like confetti at a VE day parade. And honestly, I don’t care that much. If this be misogyny, make the most of it.

          • Nita says:

            @ Sastan

            Seriously? Look, everyone accidentally says something they don’t mean sometimes. It’s OK. You don’t have to make defiant political declarations every time it happens.

  77. John Ohno says:

    So, one thing you gloss over entirely that I find incredibly interesting is shibboleth formation / exclusionary behavior. After all, the defining attribute of a tribe is rarely one of those pre-existing differences — often it’s something purely artificial, emerging spontaneously under the pressure of group growth, as a proxy for either these differences or for group loyalty. When a shibboleth is a proxy for group loyalty, it often has next to nothing to do with the attributes of the group in question and everything to do with sacrificing a member’s ability to later operate in some other group. Sometimes these shibboleths are ritualized and become hazing rituals or initiation rituals (such as masturbating on a stolen skull to join the Skull & Bones society — performing an illegal and embarrassing act surrounded by your peers in order to open yourself up to blackmail in the case of some future defection), while others involve body modification (prison or biker tattoos, or the removal of finger joints in the yakuza — which, while ostensibly a punishment, is common enough that it’s an indicator of group membership to outsiders). On the far side is fashion: fashion of teenage counterculture movements is fairly temporary (no missing limbs — the most long-lasting side effect visible to outsiders comes from earrings) but consists largely of wearing things that would be considered explicitly unreasonable in more conservative groups (a dedicated punk or goth could not find employment, outside of dedicated shops intended to cater to punks or goths, without removing their group membership badges, and this is important to their operation as shibboleths). Even the good old ‘nerd purity test’ slots in here as a shibboleth mostly of loyalty demonstration: one sacrifices one’s time and effort to learn objectively useless information in order to demonstrate one’s dedication to group membership, and as the group grows the loyalty test becomes more extensive (up until it becomes profitable and a mirror version of the group appears wherein group membership is determined by spending money on objectively useless objects).

    • Sastan says:

      I don’t have much to add, other than to say I agree.

      And who can forget the last scene of “SLC Punk” when the protagonist slicks down his mohawk, dons a suit, and leaves the tribe for law school!

  78. Leonard says:

    Is there such a thing as conservation of tribalism?

    Interesting, but I don’t think precisely correct. I think a bit closer is conservation of happiness + tribalism. Modern consumer society tends to dissolve all the tribes, without replacing them with anything; this leads to people feeling rootless, alienated, etc. Unhappy.

  79. Mary says:

    I always thought of it as meaning literally killing every member of a certain group – the Holocaust, for example – but the new usage includes “cultural genocide”.

    Oh, that’s very old usage. At least in the formal, legal sense. A lot of “bad things the Nazis did” got lumped under “genocide.” For instance, the systemic kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of children from eastern Europe (particularly Poland) for “racially valuable traits.” “When we see a blue-eyed child we are surprised that she is speaking Polish…. if we were to bring up this child in a German spirit, she will grow up as a beautiful German girl.” — Hans Frank

    The problem is, of course, that in ordinary speech it means “mass murder,” and lumping them all together is problematic to say the least.

  80. Mary says:

    ” And even if He does, it’s probably in some vague and complicated way, and not the way that means that the Thrice-Reformed Meta-Baptist Church and only the Thrice-Reformed Meta-Baptist Church has the correct interpretation of the Bible and everyone else is wrong. ”

    One wonders how the former contradicts the latter. . . .

  81. Anon. says:

    If there is such a thing as conservation of tribalism, Cleisthenes’ solution is absolutely brilliant. You can weaken geographic/religious/economic/ideological/etc tribes by using state power to force a _completely_ arbitrary tribal structure. It actually worked quite well.

    Imagine if congressmen were not elected from gerrymandered geographical areas but from a randomly selected 1/435th slice of the population.

    • Murphy says:

      Then there would be no constituency. If the slices are randomized each election then you have no congressman looking to serve your interests.

      Right now, say you’re an unpopular minority but living in a community of such. You’re a voting block in your local constituency and have a decent chance of bartering that voting block for decent representation from your representative.

      On the other hand, with the random system if there’s only a few thousand of you he knows that next election he’s likely only going to have one or 2 of you among his voters.

      Random constituencies would appear to pretty much only help the largest demographic groups since every politician will have an almost perfectly even incentive to serve them and only them.

      Liquid democracy would appear to be somewhat preferable.

      • Anon. says:

        >Random constituencies would appear to pretty much only help the largest demographic groups since every politician will have an almost perfectly even incentive to serve them and only them.

        Well that’s just a technical detail. You can split into fewer groups, and have them elect multiple candidates. That way minority candidates are electable.

        A similar issue that is not easy to solve is that sufficient geographic concentration would make it profitable for candidates to pander to a single area (e.g. New York City) because it has a sufficient number of people to elect them.

      • Richard Gadsden says:

        Proportional systems can do this really well – if you’re a disliked minority, but you’re more than 1/435 of the population, then you can get a congressman of your own.

        • BBA says:

          Which is precisely why we don’t care for proportional systems in America. For a few years the New York City Council was elected by Single Transferable Vote, which led to a solid anti-Tammany majority on the Council for the first time in decades. Then the Communist Party won a couple of seats, there was a massive outcry, and the Council went back to single-member districts. (And, in what I’m sure was totally a coincidence, Tammany Hall went back to winning everything.)

          For similar reasons, every other city council with PR did away with it around the same time, except for Cambridge, Mass., where the Communist Party would win an election under any system.

  82. I’m still hoping that at some point you will notice the points in your own politics that you would not be “tempted to defend for any other reason.” Actually this has already happened to some extent, but there are still a few egregious examples where you appear to be totally oblivious.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Lucky I have people like you with perfect unmediated access to the truth to point out when I deviate from it.

  83. ButYouDisagree says:

    This reminds me of what Scott Atran has written about Muslim terrorists.

    I think the “tribal theory of groups” has some limits.

    For one thing, even if many people’s motivation for joining and upholding groups is tribal, the theory kind of treats the details as arbitrary. But it makes a huge difference what texts, beliefs, and rituals groups use to bind themselves together. If you observe a bunch of atheists celebrating Saturnalia, you might want to know why they’re doing that. And the tribal theory of groups gives you part of the answer: these are people who have certain personality and intellectual traits, and they’re forming positive feelings of in-groupishness with others who share those traits. But you might not be satisfied with that answer. Why are they doing that ritual in particular? To get the full answer, it would be helpful to understand the content of atheism. More broadly, if we can decently predict the behavior of different groups based on the content that defines them, we should spend a lot of time thinking about that content and not just round off all group behavior to tribalism.

    I’m also skeptical that the “tribal theory of groups” succeeds for all the groups we would want it to explain. For Orthodox Jews, it seems like the ideology is the movement. You can’t really be in the group unless you follow basically 100% of the religious proscriptions. Apikorsim who share the history, cultural references, etc. are not in the movement. At the same time, the movement contains Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, who have significantly different history, customs, appearance, etc. (Of course there are also insular subgroups who are all about coming from the same small geographical region.)

  84. Anthony says:

    A topic I’ve thought a lot about!

    One of the things I find most interesting about this is that the membership of what you call “tribes,” and I call “societies,” often overlap. These overlaps create awkward situations for individuals who find themselves beholden to two (or more) mutually incompatible ethical codes. An example:

    My girlfriend’s family own property in a little religious community on the shores of a Great Lake. The religious community is explicitly Christian, and you need a letter from a pastor declaring you as such before you can have full voting rights as a community member. One member, a fairly wealthy man, would like to sell his property to a non-Christian (easy decision: bigger market == higher price), and he’s suing the community on the basis that their rules are discriminatory and thus in violation of the US constitution.

    Members of the community are in a bind. On the one hand, they’re Americans — members of a large community whose established mores explicitly prohibit religiously discriminatory economic practices. On the other hand, they’re members of a small lake community, whose families have known each other for generations, who grew up as children together and who hope that their children will grow up together, and they understandably want to preserve that. They know that many members of their community are (not so) secretly unreligious, but they also know that if they take down the religious requirement, demand for lakefront property will drastically increase their home values, until individual families begin selling because to not do so would be insane. And once families start selling to strangers, well, that’s the end of their idyllic anti-Molochian community.

    The community is acting, in other words, to protect itself against both internal and external interference. “External interference,” however, refers to interference by regular citizens of the United States — which every community member is. The United States is the very country which protects their property rights, and allows their smaller community to exist in the first place!

    I don’t really have an opinion on who should win in this case. I think that members of the organization will fight for their integrity, and eventually lose, but they’ll provide their children with nice, social, connected childhoods as long as they can. Those children will eventually leave, even without high property values, because you can’t keep the 19th century going into the 21st, and religious hypocrisy is an actual burden to carry with you. It’s a tragedy all around.

    • John Schilling says:

      One member, a fairly wealthy man, would like to sell his property to a non-Christian (easy decision: bigger market == higher price)

      This member is proposing to sell a plot of residential property to someone who will not be admitted into the local community. If he discloses this, his market is effectively limited to various hermits, misanthropes, and loners, which is probably a smaller market than Christians and which will likely use that circumstance to negotiate a lower price. If he does not disclose this, he is proposing a fraud. Seems to me that selling to a Christian would be both easier and more lucrative.

      It would be better still for this man if the local community didn’t exist or didn’t hold its present attitudes, of course, and wishing for reality to be other than it is has a lot going for it in every respect except efficacy.

      • Anthony says:

        You have the situation exactly, except for one thing: if the local community’s bylaws are erased, there will be no restrictions on sale for anyone, and the seller thinks (as do the community members) that this will lead to a general sell-off, as individual members jump ship and cohesion is lost.

        The fragility of the situation has a lot to do with the fact that the religious community is geographically contained inside a larger, more ordinary town, with the usual Great-Lake-tourism summer-renters. If the walls come down, that larger community would engulf the smaller religious one.

        • John Schilling says:

          Ah, so this man wishes the local community didn’t exist, thinks it might be within his power to destroy it, and proposes to do so for his personal financial gain.

          And he’s still proposing fraud if he doesn’t disclose to potential buyers that they will be playing a crucial and highly visible role in his master plan to destroy a community that might not take kindly to being destroyed.

          • Anthony says:

            I think you’re overstating the nefariousness of these plans, or the conspiratorial nature of them. It’s quite simple: there are currently laws in place which give this community special rights to restrict the rights of non-Christians. As you understood, these laws serve as a “keep out” sign to average vacation-house buyers, and depress prices. If these laws were declared unconstitutional, prices would rise as consumers realized, correctly, that they were not buying into a legally closed-off community.

            Anyways, I don’t think anyone is talking about anything that amounts to fraud or criminality or even conspiracy, and I don’t think that any of that is really relevant to what I’ve written.

    • gbdub says:

      Is there a particular reason you’re not disclosing the name of the particular association? Just curious because there’s a chance it’s one in my hometown.

      • Anthony says:

        Uh, yeah — it’s not my town, but my girlfriend’s, and while I don’t think it’s a private matter, I don’t think it would be appropriate for a non-resident whose information is all second-hand to act as an authority on an issue where outside interference has an actual impact on people’s lives and families. I’m not excessively worried — really, I just don’t want this coming up in search results.

  85. Erik says:

    If you’re looking for further reading on the subject of tribalism, I’d recommend http://smile.amazon.com/Us-Them-Understanding-Your-Tribal/dp/0316090301/. I remember it as a thorough overview of what tribes are, how they form, and how they behave, that didn’t challenge any of my pre-existing biases. Basically a longer version of this exact post.

  86. stillnotking says:

    I’m glad this essay departs from the usual “tribalism, boo!” shtick that so many have been guilty of — including, if I may say so, you. It isn’t going anywhere, and all efforts to overcome it merely result in some variant of an anti-tribalism tribe, uninhibited and terrible in its self-righteousness, like Red Guards. The only thing that works is the establishment of supra-tribal norms and authorities to ensure that sectarian conflict is limited to speech. Even that only sort of works, but the good news is we’ve gotten quite good at it over the centuries and don’t need to start from scratch. Or some of us have. The Muslim world never has gotten its act together in that respect, for a variety of historical reasons, some of which you mentioned (lack of established clerical hierarchy being the biggie).

    • Sastan says:

      Anti tribalists are usually just in denial about their tribal membership.

      “I don’t belong to a tribe! I just have like minded people who are all more intelligent and moral than those evil tribalists over there, who are clearly inferior!”

      Claiming to not belong to a tribe is usually either out of immaturity (fish don’t see the water), or as a dodge to conceal a different allegiance. Everyone has tribes. Some more than others, fanatics often have only one, moderates are usually squishy members of many. But we all have them.

  87. Brendon says:

    If you are interested in the subject of tribalism, you’ll want to read “Becoming the Barbarian” by Jack Donovan – one of the best books on tribalism I’ve ever read. Just came out – highly recommend.

  88. Steven Hales says:

    An excellent post. All throughout it I couldn’t stop thinking about Nietzsche’s idea that in their origin gods were a community rallying point, a sort of tribal mascot that then changed and altered over time to a kind of abstract flashpoint for a rule-governed religion. I think Nietzsche was on to something when he argued that this change in remit might not be a good thing—we could be enslaved by an outmoded tribalism that is harmful to our lives in modernity. So it’s not just a matter of in-group/out-group, or an archipelago of tribes, but maybe some tribal loyalties really ought to be replaced with better ones.

  89. Arthur B. says:

    “I’ve found that I enjoy being in tribes as much as anyone else.”

    Of course you do, much like you probably enjoy refined sugars and oversleeping. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to give in to the cushy sensation of turning off your individuality and joining the tribe. If you interiorize what tribalism does, it should disgust you so much that you can’t even enjoy partaking in it.

    • Frog Do says:

      A bad analogy, you still sleep and consume carbs, you just don’t overconsume them. Similarly with tribalism, unless you want to be a beast or a god.

      • Rowan says:

        “A beast or a god” sounds so cool a way to describe it that I’m half-tempted to oppose tribalism for that reason alone.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      You lost me when you compared not being in a tribe to not oversleeping. You’ll drag my sleeping-until-noon-on-weekends from my cold dead hands.

  90. Nero tol Scaeva says:

    I always felt I was weird because I never really got the burning need to belong to a tribe. I just sorta float between tribes without any loyalty. But a lot of my hobbies I see as super tribal: My first real deep dive into a particular culture was the metal subculture back in the late 90s. This was around the time that Nu-metal started getting popular and there was SO MUCH HAET for it among the “real” metalheads. I mean, I didn’t particularly care about nu-metal because I preferred faster/heavier stuff but man! This one band called Nevermore decided to tune their guitars down and there was a collective apoplexy among my “community”; which was really just a few message boards since I lived in the middle of nowhere.

    Speaking of that, the reason I lived in the middle of nowhere was because I was in the military. Again, lots of tribal stuff in that culture goes without saying, but I was still somewhat not drinking all of the Kool-Aid (I did enjoy inter-service cracks like “Do you know what ARMY stands for? Aren’t Really Marines Yet! LOL!”); hell I was even on the honor guard — performing funerals/folding flags for WWII veterans and their families, being in charge of the colors at official military functions — but that honor guard subculture of the military was probably the closest I came to being super absorbed in the tribalism bug that I really felt it was my identity.

    And then it wasn’t until I got out of the military that I was able to actually meet nerds in real life: I found people who were passionate about video games like I was (since I had been playing video games for as long as I can remember) and who also thought it was cool to listen to video game music as well. I also met some atheists in real life too. And then I started getting involved in the dance scene, which is another community besides the rationalist one where, on the male side at least, 90% of the people are in some STEM field. I always found that pretty odd. How/why does social dance attract male nerds? Though I fit in pretty well since I’m a programmer as my day job and I’m also in grad school for computer science.

    But tribalism exists in the dance scene too! At some early lindy hop exchanges late at night (e.g., 3am) some people would start playing blues music in a separate room because it was slower to dance to and it’s freaking 3am people get tired! Blues dance then congealed into its own thing and then the swing/blues scene became standoff-ish (no blues music at lindy events!!). A couple of years later there would be camaraderie among the two scenes and then a few years later more standoffness. This seems to cycle every 4-5 years. And then there’s the tribalism between lindy hop/east coast swing and west coast swing (lindy hop is by black people! West coast is by stuffy white people mangling the original black people lindy hop! Etc).

    It actually looks like a modern version of the Shia/Sunni split. East coast/lindy hoppers try to recreate the original form of lindy hop, whereas west coasters are more affluent/flashy and more popular.

    And then some ethnogenesis happened in the blues dance scene too: Some people started doing blues dance to (gasp!) non-blues music! And then these dancers dancing to non-blues music started incorporating other dance styles into the dance (e.g., west coast swing, salsa, tango, etc.). As you might predict, this created some more heated debates and cries of things resembling “contamination”; we had blues dance and blues-fusion dance — which is still a thing to a lot of peoples’ chagrin — and now there’s a separate category of fusion dance.

    Fusion dance is probably the tribe I identify with mostly these days, since its very nature is a joining of multiple different dancer-tribes. Which fits my float-between-tribes lifestyle: Non-tribalism seems to be my tribe.

    • Urstoff says:

      Jeff Loomis destroys.

      Fortunately, I think that the metal subculture, such as it exists today, tends to make fun of the TRVE KVLT type of metal fan as much as anyone else.

      • Nero tol Scaeva says:

        BLACK METAL IST KRIEG!

        Also, as one of my waffling-between-tribes acts, I’m writing a fusion-dance song that’s actually a cover/remix of a My Dying Bride song.

    • ThrustVectoring says:

      > How/why does social dance attract male nerds?

      My pet theory is that both math and dance express some base un-named thing, only math is much more abstract (and uses the verbal/rational part of the brain instead of the kinesthetic). I’m not sure how exactly to communicate what that thing is – playing around with communicating ideas?

      In any case, blues dancing has a lot of interesting things for nerd out over, and it’s in a very different area than a lot of more traditional nerd interests. Like, perhaps the demographic is “nerds that stopped wanting to be seen as clever”

      • Psmith says:

        I think the explanation is much simpler than that. It’s really nice to have an activity that’s explicitly structured around interacting with members of the opposite sex where the rules are not just written down but actually posted in multiple locations in the venues.

        • ThrustVectoring says:

          Right, so it’s not selecting for male nerds, it’s selecting for people with anxiety over accidentally violating social norms.

    • Anon says:

      Fusion dance, as a community, also puts deliberate effort into community building: witness for example recess. For myself, I’ve felt more community at recess than at almost anything else I can recall – hundreds of people, most of whom I didn’t know, yet I smiling at strangers and passers-by stop to sit around our fire and talk.

      • Nero tol Scaeva says:

        Yeah, I enjoyed recess, but the explicit community-ness just rubs me and my not-wanting-to-be-in-a-tribe feels the wrong way.

  91. SUT says:

    The volume knob on these inter-group conflicts comes down to one question: “Do we need a central authority that exerts power of both you and I?”

    For example, when the Pope was the most powerful man in Europe, and controlled “the media” (all writing and thinking), had implicit control over vast properties in every country (church estates), there were wars over who would be Pope. People fought, because the reward was worth it.

    When Christians came to America, there wasn’t some eureka moment of tolerance, there was just enough space to spread out among groups at each other’s throats. And there was no need to create a central authority who would govern the intractable divide between the Puritans in Boston and the Puritans in Rhode Island – to each his own.

    Now the Sunni/Shia thing is driven by the need to have state government which will get paid with the oil money. And then distribute that wealth. If you’re a Sunni minority in Iraq you’ve got a problem: the Shia think they might as well cut you out, and distribute more wealth to themselves. And the same thing happens when the Sunni controlled Iraq. There is no pie growth, only ways to make it get cut up into less pieces. Remove the imperative to have a state oil money comptroller, and this conflict goes away.

  92. RobertKerans says:

    Really good post. I think Randall Collins’ ritual chains theories are pretty relevant to the ideas discussed, certainly re how groups/tribes sustain themselves (Nice overview/review of Interaction Ritual Chains and Randall Collins’ blog is generally interesting).

  93. gattsuru says:

    It doesn’t have much of an outgroup yet – maybe just bioethicists and evil robots.

    Nah. We rail against RationalWiki, we hiss and repel from Arthur Chu’s articles, and even if we oppose trash journalism like Fox News it’s the stuff putting on airs of respectability like Vox we can’t stand. Even the folks that are fairly friendly to feminism as a goal will get in tooth-and-nail fights with Social Justice as a competing tribe, especially in the tumblrsphere: see the interactions with StormingTheIvory or even RedDragDiva.

    I think the outgroups defines a tribe as much, or maybe even more, than the rallying flag or even the pre-existing differences. There’s a reason that some of the strongest tribes in video games were Horde or Alliance, or the mess going on in EVE, instead of simple unopposed affiliation. That’s probably the big danger.

    ((This raises that question of whether you can mitigate the negatives, such as by having an outgroup that you can’t harm or maybe isn’t even real people.))

    • stillnotking says:

      ((This raises that question of whether you can mitigate the negatives, such as by having an outgroup that you can’t harm or maybe isn’t even real people.))

      This seems to be the implicit purpose of a good deal of fantasy & sci-fi. The most effective means is to portray the outgroup as real-ish, but possessing entirely negative qualities so that their outgroup-ness is natural or inevitable, like Tolkien’s orcs.

    • Jordan D. says:

      I think that last bit has been tried, at least- I know a number of Christian sources, for example, who use Satan primarily as a way to try to redirect natural disgust reactions and antipathy away from real people. Hate the sin, love the sinner.

      Results have been mixed.

    • Horde or Alliance was a weird case, because a fair number of players had characters on both sides.

      • God Damn John Jay says:

        Wasn’t there a dynamic where horde players were the nerdier more focused ones, while alliance were more casual. (The mechanism I heard was that nerdier people like playing as Orcs and Undead while more normal people liked to play as the more humanlike races.

        I know that Horde guilds dominated which guilds cleared new dungeons first.

        • Sivaas says:

          The dichotomy I’ve always seen, and experienced in-game, is that Horde players are stronger at the game, but less forgiving of mistakes, which leads to more unpleasant interaction (“git gud, scrub”). Alliance players, on the other hand, were much nicer to interact with, but would get much worse results in progression content, potentially because poor players would be able to get by without being called out for a much longer time.

          This may have been because for a long time Horde had mathematically superior racial abilities for PvE content, so the top raiding guilds always had an edge by picking Horde (although there were always high-end competitive guilds on both sides). It wasn’t a huge advantage, but it led to a slow drift towards Horde, and thus players still playing Alliance were picking the look of the races, their friends, and/or identification with the Alliance in the storyline over a slight increase in effectiveness in the game. Unsurprisingly, the players who are more interested in the slight effectiveness edge make for more successful group content.

          • Sastan says:

            Pretty much this. I played both, but primarily Alliance, but my horde toon was by far the most advanced, even with much less play time. Both sides had progression-focused people, but the Horde ratio of those to casuals was much, much higher.

            And because of path dependence, once this was established by the early-game mechanics, it became self-sustaining even after the mathematical advantages were mostly balanced or eliminated.

          • Andrew says:

            This is approximately correct, but was a lot smaller in effect than it was usually purported to be. I dropped out of college the first-time thanks to being a member of a high-end Alliance raiding guild for a while- and also did Gladiator-level PVP as Alliance – but also raided somewhat more casually as Horde, so got to see both sides pretty thoroughly. One of the larger bits I noticed was that you’d see a LOT more women on Alliance-side, which generally made larger raid groups much more enjoyable. Mixed-gender groups are generally more polite and more constructive, I’ve found, in most cases. Smaller 5-man groups were far less dependent on such dynamics, and I had an impression that it was easier to find reliable hard-core “random” mates for 5-man or 10-man content as Horde. But once you started looking at 40-man/25-man stuff, it was far less stressful in the better-organized less-hateful Alliance guilds.

            EDIT – I’d like to stress that the differences were minor, though. We’re talking 99% similar between the factions, so the changes I’m talking about are quite marginal.

          • Sivaas says:

            Yeah, it’s important to note that you can find a group at any level of skill in either faction (although top-end progression has pretty much been dominated by Horde for a while now).

            I think the effect magnifies though: if the Horde is just a LITTLE more rude/effective, you’ll typically hear about this at some point, and may end up choosing a faction based on “well I want to succeed” or “I want nicer people to play with”. So now you have, in addition to the original impetus, self-selection for success or niceness over the other. Now more people are noticing the differences, and maybe they take it a little more seriously, and more people feel like they need to take these stereotypes into account, and then the differences widen, etc.

            I think one of the advantages of large-group raiding like you mention is that there’s less individual responsibility. One of the common problem in a raid group is a player who isn’t doing his job well, but is well-liked within the group. In legitimately challenging 5 or 10-man content this is a non-starter, the player is such a large percentage of the group that every time they mess up significantly it’s almost a guaranteed failure. In a 25-man or 40-man raid, their contribution is something that can easily be accounted for, and maybe a pleasant raiding environment counts for more than a couple other players having to work a little harder. Of course as the skill required increases, this becomes less and less possible, and the stress factor becomes less about the raid leader pressuring you and more about the actual challenges of the raid.

    • Wrong Species says:

      What Scott is referring to when he says rationalists and the people who comment here are not quite the same group of people.

  94. I found the post very helpful in thinking about how people change throughout their lives – they slide into new tribes, although possibly alongside their peers.

    This isn’t exactly an ‘ages of man or woman’ explanation, but it seems to me that children probably align with different tribes than teenagers. Teenagers in general form strong tribes to identify themselves and seek partners. Adults definitely join different tribes when they have children, and also when they find(!) settled employment. Older people (personal anecdote) find it hard to find a new tribe once they leave or are expelled from their work tribe. I guess really old people join the ‘not as young as I used to be’ tribe and stereotypically spend time with other members of the tribe comparing medical histories.

    Your mileage may vary.

    • Richard Gadsden says:

      My parents found the U3A tribe when they retired from work (they’re Silents, of course they were able to retire, says the Xer).

      As far as I can tell, they don’t do much of the actual learning stuff, just the tribe-building stuff.

  95. Urstoff says:

    For better or worse, my compulsive contrarianism and severe skepticism of any strongly-held belief has kept me out of most belief-based tribes. That’s why I find the rationalist community (along with most other online communities, as well as religions, political parties, etc.) personally distasteful. I would imagine a society full of skeptical, compulsive contrarians would disintegrate within a year, though.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      There are a bunch of societies full of skeptical compulsive contrarians! This is probably one of them! Classical skeptic groups like CSICOP and so on are another. I admit they are not perfectly contrarian, in the sense that the CSICOP people generally don’t go “Wait, what if there’s paranormal stuff after all” to annoy other CSICOP members, but I’ve seen some college atheist groups that degenerate to that level, and rationalists definitely do.

      • Urstoff says:

        That’s true about the SSC comments, which is why I visit here every day. Other skeptic groups always seem to be too adversarial to me. I got over being overtly mad at religion and other non-science nonsense as an undergrad. I consider it kind of unfortunate that the word “skeptic” conjures images of angry internet atheists rather than, say, Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, or Hume.

  96. mercrono says:

    Scott, this is a characteristically excellent and thoughtful post. In the All Debates Are Bravery Debates sense, this is helpful for me, because my instincts run toward “deafness is bad, curing it would be a no brainer”; “the Bible is wrong/contradictory/abhorrent, social/charitable communities should eschew all this religious claptrap; “cultural appropriation is a silly concept, people should enjoy whatever art they want.” But it’s worth acknowledging the real costs of attacking or abandoning even obviously silly rallying flags (while also trying to avoid planting such flags in the future — cf. “Don’t be born with a stupid prior.”).

    However, I wonder if you think it would be fair to characterize this post as “we should be a lot more sympathetic to Colonel F then I used to believe.” Because I can’t help but see this post as the mirror image of your LessWrong post on the same subject — both thoughtful and charitable, but taking close to opposite positions on how essential rallying flags are, and how much respect we should show them, even when they seem stupid from an outside perspective.

    In other words, I’d love to see a dialogue on this subject between 2009 Yvain and 2016 Scott Alexander.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yes, I admit my position on this subject has evolved a lot. I guess my main argument against Colonel Y is that it’s really hard to root out an entire culture and replace it with a better one, and that cost has to be balanced against corresponding benefits.

      On the other hand, the tribe of Germans is probably going to exist no matter what their ideology is, so might as well get rid of a terrible one.

      • JBeshir says:

        Germans are known for being very not-nationalist, though, even by European standards*, which are themselves way less nationalist than the US. Probably is a tradeoff here, but a worthwhile one to avoid resulting in people a generation or two down asking why their life sucks and deciding it’s because they’ve clearly abandoned the Obviously Correct principles they should be following, as has happened in other communities.

        (*American nationalism was downright creepily strong to me when I visited. Flags everywhere. I don’t know about everywhere in Europe, but by UK standards the compulsory state-worship was unsettling, even if in practice it is worship of some abstract state that doesn’t preclude a fiery hatred of the actual state. And the Germans are exceptionally not-nationalist from *my* perspective.)

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          Germans are known for being very not-nationalist, though, even by European standards*, which are themselves way less nationalist than the US…

          *American nationalism was downright creepily strong to me when I visited. Flags everywhere. I don’t know about everywhere in Europe, but by UK standards the compulsory state-worship was unsettling… And the Germans are exceptionally not-nationalist from *my* perspective.)

          Reminds me of this video of Angela Merkel getting a look of visceral disgust on her face when someone handed her the German flag.

        • God Damn John Jay says:

          Something, Something… Looming over America… Something, Something?

        • JBeshir says:

          It’s mostly creepy because you see otherwise reasonable people need to suddenly kind of adopt this plastic posture and tone and exultation of the glories of the state and its past, which gives you the sense that they’d hate you if you revealed even a mostly positive but less than glowingly perfect opinion.

          The closest point of comparison I can make is that it’s like being in a church as a non-believer, or that it’s the same sense you get watching videos of North Koreans saluting Glorious Leader.

          It also results in unrealistic fictions about the past, with corresponding reactions to observing the imperfect present. And it makes discussion of the effectiveness of military action extremely divisive, and the predominant military power being like that is a problem for the world.

          This is countered by the probably-locally-predominant-in-the-Bay-Area counter-culture where being anti-patriotic is actively preferred, but that’s not really fixing anything. Either way the discourse lacks a realistic balanced measure of past performance.

        • Evan Þ says:

          Just how recent is German anti-nationalism, though? I get the impression from the history books that things were a lot different during (say) the 1920’s.

          • JBeshir says:

            Well, my point was that we might plausibly have seriously dented the strength of German nationality as a tribe in the post-WW2 Nazi purges, so we can’t quite write off those purges as having had no effect on the strength of national identity, and instead need to rest on the idea of it being a worthwhile tradeoff.

            If we could concretely date the lack of nationalism (and anti-nationalism, although I think that’s distinct, and possibly even opposed, because anti-nationalism and nationalism probably tend to be a toxoplasma) we could confirm or refute that.

        • NN says:

          In the 2008 German Movie The Wave, there is a scene early on where a class of high school students are discussing the role of nationalism in dictatorships, and someone brings up all of the flag-waving during the 2006 World Cup, describing it as “revolting.” Another student disagrees, saying, “If Germans can’t be proud of their country like everyone else, then it just lead to the opposite, to hatred of everyone else.”

          According to the director, much of the dialogue in this scene was taken from real conversations with actual German high school students.

        • Urstoff says:

          Nationalism is kind of silly, although it’s a pretty well-known fact that the American flag and national anthem are top notch.

          • suntzuanime says:

            ??? The national anthem is famous for being impossible to sing and the flag for being impossible to draw. Is this one of those hazing things where making it torturous to express your patriotism just ends up making your patriotism stronger?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            The flag’s alright. The anthem is hideous.

            The French one is the best, and the Russian one is up there, too.

          • Urstoff says:

            Haters, all of you. The Star-Spangled Banner is not generic, church hymnal anthem #148 that you get with most countries (the Russian Anthem is also a good one that stands out). It’s got range!

          • gbdub says:

            I don’t know, the anthem is pretty good in the standard “Marines, explosions, and jet fighters” version. Drowns out the so-so tune.

            (And the flag is awesome. Yeah, bit hard to draw, but most of the alternatives are barely distinguishable tricolors)

          • sweeneyrod says:

            As a non-American, I certainly prefer the American national anthem to our dreary God Save The Queen (although Pomp And Circumstance, Jerusalem and I Vow To Thee, My Country are better than either). Can’t say I like the flag much.

          • Nornagest says:

            As an American, I gotta admit that the Soviet Union had a better anthem than we do.

            Our flag’s better, though. The hammer and sickle are nicely iconic on paper, but impossible to make out on an actual piece of cloth on a flagpole — same problem as with the Turkish flag, or the Brazilian. Canada does the national symbol bit well, though, and so does Israel.

          • roystgnr says:

            The American anthem only works when you sing at least half the verses. Verse one is all about jeopardy of the country and flag, it ends with “is the flag still flying?”, you need verse two for the answer, and the answer is not “Play ball!”

            (I understand the motivation for leaving out verse three, but even that’s borderline. It’s a shame to lose one of the best insults in history.)

          • Tibor says:

            My favourite anthem is probably that of Canada. I really like the melody of the German and Italian anthems, I also like the Czech one but I am probably a bit biased there (it probably less aggressively “we are the best and everyone else sucks” than most anthems though). The French has a really catchy melody but good grief the words! That is an anthem of a European country in the 21st century? “Let’s march, let’s march!, Let an impure blood soak our fields!” Really? :))

            The Russian just sounds ominous to me and I am not very comfortable about it but that might also have something to do with certain prejudices of mine. I wanted to point out that it is the same anthem (just different words) that the Soviet Union used and draw conclusions from there, but I realized that the German one also had the same melody during the Third Reich, so that would not be fair.

            The most boring anthem I’ve heard so far is probably the Swiss one. Even the words are kind of boring.

          • Ant says:

            The European one is the best. The ode to joy is one of the best of Beethoven. Hard to sing, but nice to hear.

          • Emile says:

            The US should just pick the Battle Hymn of the Republic as their national anthem. It’s *way* more rousing than the star-spangled banner. It would make a good “angry mob” song, like the Marseillaise.

        • gbdub says:

          On the other hand we Americans find that lack of nationalism a bit weird, especially for politicians. Like, why bother trying to run a country if you don’t think there’s anything particularly special about that country? It would be like Tim Cook showing up to the next Apple preview with a Samsung phone. It takes a lot of effort to get into Angela Merkel’s position – if she’s not at least a little proud of Germany, maybe her motives are selfish…

          For citizens, heck 1/3 of my labor goes toward supporting the state. If I’m not at least a little proud of it, what’s the point? Honestly I think this whole liberal representative democracy, nation of ideals instead of nation of ancestry, etc. etc. is a pretty great idea, even if we don’t often live up to it. If we stop believing that – well why not let those nice gentlemen over there with their beards and intolerance and honor killings come on in and do their thing. After all, all cultures are equally valid, no reason to worship the empty symbols of mine.

          Plus, when we stop rallying ’round Old Glory, people tend to fragment into other tribes and getting at each others’ throats, as Scott noted. This seems suboptimal.

        • Berna says:

          @gbdub “It takes a lot of effort to get into Angela Merkel’s position – if she’s not at least a little proud of Germany, maybe her motives are selfish…” No, why? You can want a country to be well-governed, just out of concern for the people who live in it. No pride necessary.

        • JBeshir says:

          What Berna said- I don’t see how pride in a thing relates to a desire to run it well. Same for a desire to contribute to a communal support system. Presumably you have to prefer its existence and effective operation to the opposite, but that’s far short of even pride, let alone Patriotism.

          And even if a bit of pride was psychologically helpful, there’s a fair difference between pride of the sort one can healthily have in oneself, and Patriotism, which involves pride of the sort that would make you incredibly narcissistic and a bit delusional to have of yourself- even if you were a pretty good person.

          Like being quietly satisfied that the EA organisation you run is doing good work would be great, but holding anything resembling Patriotism and the corresponding detachment from reality would probably cripple its effectiveness in short order.

        • gbdub says:

          “And even if a bit of pride was psychologically helpful, there’s a fair difference between pride of the sort one can healthily have in oneself, and Patriotism, which involves pride of the sort that would make you incredibly narcissistic and a bit delusional to have of yourself- even if you were a pretty good person.”

          Well sure, if you take all the negative aspects of “pride” and assign them to “patriotism”, then of course patriotism looks pretty bad. I don’t think that’s entirely fair though.

          “You can want a country to be well-governed, just out of concern for the people who live in it.”

          Then why have it continue to exist as an independent country, when so many other countries (some better, some worse) exist? Why do you have a concern for the people that live in your country in particular?

          Your leader doesn’t just quietly manage the country’s internal affairs in isolation – they are expected (especially in the American independent executive system) to be the face of the country to the world. Is “eh, we’re alright, beats the alternative” a strong face to put on when negotiating against actual adversaries? Maybe if the whole world goes non-tribal and non-competitive that will work, but at the moment a massive meteor strike seems more likely so I’m not going to hold my breath.

          Anyway, “patriotism” strikes me as useful shorthand, and frankly a “teambuilding” exercise. “We’re all Americans in this together” is more effective than “We’re Democrats and we hate you Republicans SO MUCH and YOU SUCK and oh crap while we’ve been arguing with each other the world just exploded”. In that sense a pause for flag-waving can be a sort of meditative togetherness moment, like “hey, let’s take a quick break from our intra-group conflict to remember at the end of the day we’re all on the same side here”.

        • SUT says:

          Erick Fromm’s Escape from Freedom which tried to diagnose what went wrong in Germany to start the War made made what I consider an interesting observation: Nationalism is the “poor man’s narcissism”. E.g. even if you’re this fat guy that works in a toll booth- hey at least you’re an Aryan, and they’re like the best!

          So what makes patriotism revolting? I’d argue it’s not the narcissism part, it’s the “poor man” part. It seems to signal – “I have nothing else going for me except being a member of this state that I just happen to be born into”.

          I’d leave you with one other thought experiment: Imagine a bunch of Harvard alum’s sitting around unemployed and one says- “Hey, at least we went to Harvard!” It’s not that school pride is bad, it’s just if it’s used as a crutch too often it becomes resented in certain circles.

        • blacktrance says:

          Then why have it continue to exist as an independent country, when so many other countries (some better, some worse) exist?

          In the case of the United States, it has a fairly unique set of institutions, many of which I think are superior to those of other countries. and worth preserving for that reason, e.g. relatively extensive protections for free speech. But if there were a country that had the positive aspects of the US and fewer of the negatives, there’d be a strong case for handing over rule to them. But there’s also the caveat that governments that work well locally may still do poorly with faraway territory.

          There’s a difference between “our country is the best because it’s ours, yay us, go team!” and “our country is the best at implementing [ideal], which is good”. If the second turns out to be false, maybe the country should sign away its independence.

        • Vox Imperatoris says:

          @ blacktrance:

          You don’t even have to think your country is “the best” at implementing a certain ideal (though that helps).

          Suppose you think New York City and Houston are exactly equally good places to live. Does that suggest some kind of reason why Houston should not exist as a separate city? Clearly not. The NYC government can’t run Houston, no matter how good they are; they’re extremely far apart and have totally different issues affecting them.

          So even if you think that Germany is no better or worse than any other European country (not that I think so), that doesn’t somehow suggest that it should not be independent. Maybe you think controlling everything from Brussels would be inefficient.

        • Ith says:

          >It takes a lot of effort to get into Angela Merkel’s position – if she’s not at least a little proud of Germany, maybe her motives are selfish…

          I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t been brought up, but European nationalism was a pretty big factor in the world wars, so after the second one we kinda decided to tone it down, I think. This goes triple for the Germans. I can guarantee you that a Proudly German Chancellor would provoke at the very least strong dismay in the rest of Europe. There is still a residual awareness that nationalism can be a very strong force.

          A second reason is that Western European national identities are by and large pretty strong, and in my view far more cohesive than that of the US. Thus, they don’t need reinforcing all that much, so anyone who starts waving the flag around is suspected of having goals other than strengthening national pride.

          Contrast this with Eastern Europe, where overt nationalism is more common and accepted. These are mostly pretty new countries in their current incarnations, so the need to bolster the national spirit/tribal markers is stronger.

          Incidentally, I think the strength of national identities in Europe is one of the reasons why you don’t see a Red/Blue tribe split there to anywhere near the extent you do in the US; the national tribe is still strong enough that it’s what most people still primarily identify with.

        • I think maybe a lot of the difference in attitudes to nationalism in Europe and the USA can be attributed to the fact that the USA is… actually a lot more powerful than any European country, and more of an independent, sovereign actor on the world stage. I think the key factor is how far a country asserts some degree of independent power against other countries. Some European countries like Britain and France are pretty powerful, but they largely do as the USA says when it comes to international politics. That doesn’t seem like a good position for inspiring strong nationalistic feelings. Russia doesn’t, and its population is much more nationalistic. Armenia and Azerbaijan are not powerful at all globally, and clearly have “protectors” in Russia and the USA respectively, but they have a conflict with each other in which they act independently, so I would guess their populations are also pretty nationalistic.

        • TrivialGravitas says:

          I think you mean ‘patriotic’, he United states is so un-nationalistic it’s arguable wether or not its even a nation. Even the nativists have very unorthodox (by European standards) ideas about who is and isn’t American, and its drilled into us by the public education system (melting pot etc).

        • I think part of “if Angela Merkel isn’t a patriotic German why did she go to all the trouble of getting to her present position” argument has to do with two different sorts of incentives.

          Suppose I want to do X because my doing X, along with millions of other people doing X, has some desirable consequence. I might do it, but I might not, because of the public good problem—almost as much of X gets done without me and almost as much of the desirable consequence happens.

          But suppose I want to do X because I strongly feel that being someone who does X is good, is right, makes me the sort of person I want to be, is part of my identity. Now that problem disappears.

          “Making lots of Germans better off” is in the first category. “Working for Germany because you are a patriotic German” is more nearly in the second. So the latter does look like a more plausible explanation for Merkel’s past actions.

        • Anonymous says:

          American patriotism is so strong (and partly mandated) because of nation-building. Most western European countries have centuries of shared ethnic history, America is a nation of immigrants from all over.

          • Daniel Keys says:

            I would have said, ‘Because we are an empire that conquered most of the continent aside from the frozen north – we beat our hated southern neighbor but then let them go for racist reasons.’

            I know that China is an empire with strong nationalism – does anyone know how India compares to the US?

        • Tibor says:

          In Switzerland, you also have flags everywhere, albeit perhaps not as much as in the US.

        • Tibor says:

          @Ith:

          Counterexamples:

          1) Switzerland. Probably the most stable country in Europe. In a sense more nationalistic than probably any other European country (depends on whether we include Russia in Europe or not).

          2) Belgium. A very instable country constantly being on a verge of splitting into two. Based on your hypothesis one would expect quite a lot of nationalism to compensate for the insecurity. This does not seem to be the case.

          3) Czech republic. Unlike in Poland or Hungary which seem (Poland especially) quite nationalistic, nationalism is not very common there. In fact, I don’t know any other country whose language (which is spoken only there) has a derogative term for its own population.

          4) France. The French are very nationalist to the point that some of them refuse to talk English or German to you even when understand you sometimes (in France) and you don’t speak French. And that includes people working in the tourist industry.

          Also, most countries in Central and Central-Eastern Europe have changed regimes fairly recently, but have not changed borders since 1945, sometimes longer than that.

          The two exceptions are Czechoslovakia which however split in a rather mundane way (no wars or other serious conflicts) and Germany which unified at the same time Czechoslovakia split. Germany indeed has a very low level of nationalism which however goes against your thesis. Czech republic has a rather low level of nationalism too, Slovakia is perhaps slightly more nationalistic, I think and also an entirely new country (there has never been any Slovakian country prior to 1993), so that would be one, albeit rather weak (as the Slovaks are not nearly as nationalistic as the Hungarians or the French), datapoint for your thesis.

        • Ant says:

          Most of the French who won’t speak to you in any language but French don’t do it out of nationalism but because they consider that not talking the language of the country you are in is rude and impolite.

          Nationalism itself is associated as far right and a poor excuse to be racist. And American nationalism sounds weird to me: a similar emotion would be someone who is very proud about his ancestor.

        • Civilis says:

          Could it be that American nationalism is a state-based tribalism that takes the place of more ethnic tribalism? As an American with scattered ancestry, it’s hard to distinguish nationalism based on the nation of France from ethnic tribalism based on the ‘French’ ethnic group (which, admittedly, is a bit more coherently defined than the ‘German’ ethnic group).

          I pick France rather than Germany as an example, because I see what to me like some form of French tribalism as widespread that would be unacceptable in America, in part because of the close and highly visible example of the quasi-French Quebec. America, while it has US flags everywhere, doesn’t have the need to block foreign concepts with laws about the minimum of American-sourced content in media (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-34402849) or attempts to block foreign words from entering the language.

          I guess because I’m an American, seeing US flags everywhere doesn’t set off alarm bells, and my trips abroad, I don’t notice the absence of local flags. I do notice a lot of non-American nationalism in the US with regard to certain ethnic groups, predominantly central American but also Filipino, Portuguese, and Irish where they will make prominent use of the flags both the US and their ancestral homeland, so perhaps flags in general are an American thing.

          • John Schilling says:

            Could it be that American nationalism is a state-based tribalism that takes the place of more ethnic tribalism?

            Outside of Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii, very few Americans identify with their state of birth and/or residence at anything resembling a tribal level. I can see where you are coming from, because the United States clearly does host strong tribal identifications at a sub-national level and you can sort of map these to states, but that’s mostly a matter of coincidence when you look at it closely.

            The media tried to map this as “Red State” vs “Blue State” a few election cycles back, but outside the realm of electoral politics that doesn’t really work. Scott’s attempt to reframe this as Red, Blue and Grey tribes is an improvement, and if we add a few more colors we might be getting somewhere.

            But explicit state-based tribalism, not really a big thing here.

          • Jordan D. says:

            My impression of flags in America looks like this-

            1) American flags flown in abundance signal Republican tendencies, but people and businesses do occasionally just fly them. It doesn’t seem to me that the people who fly an individual flag are all that much more likely to be any discernible tribe than their neighbor.

            2) State flags, outside of Texas, signal that you’re probably on that state’s property because nobody else flies them.

            3) Football paraphernalia tells you which tribe somebody’s in.

            So for example, the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is a very purple state, with a lot of Democratic voters in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and a lot of Republican voters throughout the rural areas between.

            In Pennsylvania, you’ll see the American flag flying over a lot of businesses and on houses, but that doesn’t signal much about the area. Only in Harrisburg will you see a lot of State flags, because much of the city is State property. All of this is because the state is actually divided into three parts- Philly people, Pittsburgh people and people who live near a rural town and don’t care for either. (Sometimes I call those people ‘State College People’ since that’s usually the largest city they speak highly of.)

            Now, neither Pittsburgh nor Philly have flags, but that’s fine because you can identify them based on whether they’ve got gold-and-black decorations or green-and-white ones. This isn’t just a football thing- people from Pittsburgh and people from Philadelphia have *pretty different* cultures, accents and even values, and there’s a stunning rivalry between the regions those cities are located in.

            Now obviously people are members of a lot of different tribes, but I often perceive Pennsylvania’s state government as less an institution and more a contained and sustained cultural battle between Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and the interior counties.

          • BBA says:

            Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, like many cities, do have flags that nobody but the city government ever flies. The only US city flag I’ve seen used in a non-governmental context is Chicago’s.

          • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

            I doubt this comment will ever be seen or read by anyone, lost as it is within the great mass and 5 days late, but here in St. Louis lots of people fly the city flag or feature it prominently on their cars or houses.

            St. Louis seems like an especially tribal city to me, however.

          • brad says:

            I was in Chicago last weekend and saw the city flag pattern, if not the actual flag itself, in a bunch of different places. I don’t even have any idea what the NYC (where I’m from) flag looks like. Maybe it’s a mid-west thing?

          • Nornagest says:

            Oakland, CA doesn’t fly its flag a lot; I’d actually never seen it until I looked it up just now. But the oak tree on its street signs (similar to, but more stylized than, the one on the flag) shows up in a lot of places, not all of them governmental.

        • Tibor says:

          @Ant:

          Well, actually that already sounds quite nationalist to me. I would not expect any foreigner to speak Czech, especially not a tourist. Most tourists who visit France probably don’t speak French either. They are so impolite to visit France before learning the language! :)) Even in Germany where it would be a bit more understandable (German being spoken by way more people than Czech) people won’t be offended by the tourists not speaking German to them. In fact they are not going to expect that at all and you can run into the opposite problem if you want to improve your German – people will try to make it easy for you and speak in English if they can. After I started my PhD here in Germany, I had to take some courses to improve my then rather poor German to be able talk to people in German without them switching to English after two sentences. Of course, in English speaking countries it is different, but English is the lingua franca of our time and so people, even tourists, can be assumed to speak some English.

          Also, France even has a law which prescribes the percentage of songs that have to be in French on the radio…that still does not sound nationalist to you?

        • Lyyce says:

          @Tibor A lot french refuse to speak others languages because they struggle at them, especially the older generation.

          There is some brand of nationalism in France, but it is focused on the culture, like the language, the food rather than being proud of the country (which is indeed branded far right).

          My impression is that France is as a whole less nationalist than USA but more than Germany.

        • Tibor says:

          @Lyyce: That sounds about right.

          I am not sure what the difference of being proud of the culture and “of the country” is though. What is there to be proud of in a country which is not based on an ideal (such as the US) other than the culture?

        • Creutzer says:

          Well, actually that already sounds quite nationalist to me. I would not expect any foreigner to speak Czech, especially not a tourist. Most tourists who visit France probably don’t speak French either. They are so impolite to visit France before learning the language!

          There is a difference here, though. The French simply haven’t quite got the message that not everybody learns French anymore and their language is not a lingua franca. The Czech are under no delusion that anybody learns Czech.

          The French are indeed attached to their language and culture, and they are actually rather xenophobic in some ways. Even if you’re fluent in French, it’s generally difficult to fully integrate socially, even for intelligent, educated immigrants from other western nations. But here is my theory of why this is sort of rendered impotent and doesn’t give rise to substantive patriotism/nationalism: France also has an identity as an egalitarian and meritocratic country; so they cannot just say “this is our place, we don’t want you here”. They have to pretend that if you do everything right (which of course includes speaking French), you’re just as good as them. And why wouldn’t you want to? My impression is that they’re quite baffled by the existence of fellow French citizens who blow up people: They’ve overlooked that it is now quite possible to be a French citizen without feeling cultural allegiance to France. How could people not adopt such an obviously superior culture, to which they (allegedly) have access since they’re born there? There is a sort of disconnect between the cultural borders and the legal and geographical borders, but there is an impediment to bridging that gap: With language and culture, you can pretend these things aren’t fixed and not just matters of luck, unlike place of birth and genetics. But once you take seriously things that are immutable and matters of chance, that’s not meritocratic and much too close to the… infelicitous kinds of nationalism that Europe has seen in the past.

        • Tibor says:

          @Creutzer:

          Sure, not Czechs. But there are more German speakers worldwide than French speakers and the Germans do not expect the tourists to speak German either. Not even the Spanish do it, even though Spanish is just after English in the number of speakers (and before English in the number of native speakers), and it might even surpass English in a few decades.

          What about this:

          http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/06/spain-to-france-dont-dump-90000-bottles-of-our-wine-into-your-streets/

          “The Spanish Foreign Ministry claimed in a statement Wednesday that Monday’s rampage, which took place around 10 miles from the Spanish border, was a violation of European Union rules that allow goods from member states to travel freely throughout the government bloc.

          French winemakers disagree. Denis Pigouche, president of a Pyrenees-Orientales winemaker association, told reporters that the Spanish “have no place in France.”

          “What’s more they’re not even necessarily European,” he said. “I suspect they are from South America and then ‘Hispanicized’ in Barcelona and then Europeanized, or even Frenchified in France.” ”

          The last paragraph…wow. Of course a winemakers’ union does not represent all of France but still.

          By the way, I met a Taiwanese guy recently (in Germany) who learns (and already speaks very well) Czech. That was a big surprise to me, obviously. I asked him why he learned Czech and he said he really likes Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal and wants to read their books in the original (although, he’d have to learn French for Kundera too 🙂 ).

        • Creutzer says:

          Wow. That surprises me and I don’t really know what to say or think of it. It’s not something I’d have expected anyone to think is acceptable. But I’m also too lazy to look up what French news sources say about it.

          Yeah, unfortunately, there is an extremely good translation of Švejk into German, which really removes a major incentive. 🙂

        • keranih says:

          This sort of commerical-thuggery-as-political-nationalism has been the tool of choice for rural/ag nationalist in France for quite some time.

          I don’t have the reference, but part of the Marie Antoniette/”Let them eat cake” economic mess was meddling with the global (national?) price of wheat by forbidding transport of foodstuffs between different regions, in order to serve as a price protection for the products of the region.

        • Creutzer says:

          Well, yes, the French can be quite fiercely protective of their economic situation. What puzzles me is that the guy is basically overtly racist about it.

          EDIT: Actually… I just realised that “they are not even necessarily European” most likely means wines, not people. I understood it the other way at first because the previous sentence, which wasn’t a quotation, was that “the Spanish have no place in France”. I thought he was objecting to immigrants working in Spanish wine production and transport, which would be really messed-up. I mean, the whole thing is still messed-up, but in not quite the same way.

        • Tibor says:

          @Creutzer:

          Švejk – really? I ought to pick something in German to read, I’ve already read Švejk in Czech, so I know what’s going on and it might be a relatively easy read (compared to reading Kafka in the German original, I don’t think I would manage that yet), so I might just start with that.

          Wines/Spanish. Oh, I also understood it as being about people. It actually makes more sense when it is about wines. But it is still pretty nationalist (and extremely protectionist, mercantilists would be proud).

        • Creutzer says:

          I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the Švejk (I’m talking about the translation by Grete Reiner) to start with, because it has certain peculiarities. The language is in part somewhat period-specific, and it crucially makes use of (a codified, stylised version of) the German of Czech immigrants in the Austro-Hungarian empire. If Švejk had learned German, that might have been how he’d have spoken. The result is, and this is what I think makes it great, that the book doesn’t read like a translation. It is something that could be an original written by a German-speaking Czech or Austrian author. At the same time, I suspect that the feel of the translation might be quite a bit different from the original.

          One early-20th-century writer whose language is pretty simple is Josef Roth.

        • Tibor says:

          @Creutzer:

          Thanks. In the Czech original, Švejk (and other characters) uses a lot of German words, or “Czechized” German words of which there are quite a lot still in use in the language today, some with no Czech equivalent (mandle = Mandel, mince = Münze, hák = Haken, trychtýř = Trichter, šroub, = Schraube, lavina = Lawine,…), some with a Czech version and a “German version” of which the German is then usually colloquial and the Czech is the “Hochsprache” (for example “šnek = Schneke”, but also “hlemýžď”, šnek is more common, “sicherhajcka = Sicherheitsnadel”, but properly “spínací špendlík” although nobody ever uses the proper version in everyday speech). Švejk also uses some “German” words which have dropped out of use since “Švejk’s” time (forháňky/ Vorhängen for example). Although he mostly uses military-related words like “obrlajtnant, mašírplatz, feldkurát” which Czechs would understand today but would use the Czech variant instead.

          It seems like a smart choice for the translator to simulate that feeling of language with using a lot of Austrian German or Germanized Czech words (Powidl, Kolatschen, Palatschinken … although I guess Švejk does not talk about food so much). Anyway, it looks like it could be fun to read it in German, if perhaps a bit later. Right now my level of German is something around very good B2 or a rather weak C1. I guess I ought to wait till it’s closer to C2.

          I’ll check Josef Roth out. I am not looking for early 20th-century writers in particular, just something relatively simple but not a studying book designed for learning the language (those are usually a bit too easy and also boring). So far I’ve only read the news, which is also useful, although the language journalists use tends to be quite specific (for example I’ve never heard anyone use the Konjunktiv I in real life)

      • Jiro says:

        In the Colonel F example, Hitler is an actual historical figure who believed and wrote specific things. You can reinterpret him how you want, but there’s only one straightforward way to interpret him, and the straightforward way is always going to exert a pull in its direction, because it is so straightforward.

        Not all tribes are based around such things, and I think a distinction can be made between ones which are and ones which aren’t. There is no holy text of leftism, so the fact that the left once believed in eugenics doesn’t mean that people on the left today will be drawn back towards eugenics because it’s easier to interpret their holy book that way.

        • NN says:

          On the other hand, Hitler’s modern followers have shown themselves to be pretty flexible in their interpretations of him and his work. For example, an estimated one half of the world’s Neo-Nazis are Russian even though Hitler hated Russians (and most Slavs in general) almost as much as he hated Jews. For an even more extreme example, there are gay Russian Neo-Nazi groups.

          • Mirzhan Irkegulov says:

            As a Russian-speaking person, who engaged with various anarchist/Marxist/antifa/trad-skin/punk people both personally and online for at least 5 years, I am 80% sure this GASH group doesn’t exist and is a troll.

            It’s an old pastime of Russian antifa to make fun of Nazi-skinheads’ homophobia by telling them they are latent gays.

            For example, I’ve seen this picture (NSFW) in many antifa groups in VK.com (Russian Facebook analog) and I’m pretty sure it was created by some antifa to make fun of neo-Nazis.

            Jokes include “Gay whites against women and straights”, “Russian, jerk off your fellow Russian!” (play on neo-Nazi slogan “Russian, help your fellow Russian”), “I fuck in the ass for Rus’” and so on.

          • TD says:

            “It’s an old pastime of Russian antifa to make fun of Nazi-skinheads’ homophobia by telling them they are latent gays.”

            I’ve always wondered to what degree this tendency itself is concealing homophobia.

          • Jiro says:

            Somehow nobody claims that Democrats who call Republicans racists are secretly racists themselves.

          • hlynkacg says:

            @ Jiro:
            They don’t?

            I’ve heard numerous variations on “If you hear dog whistles you’re the dog”. Or to be a bit more blunt…

          • keranih says:

            Yeah, I’m with hlynkacg here. The non-rational, rather sophomoric return taunt of “oh yeah? well, you’re the racist/stupid/bigot/retard/traitor/bad person” is a lot more prevalent than I’d like.

            To me, looking at the facts on the ground, there is a great deal of room to discuss widespread racial and sexual identity bias on the part of the left, but the accusation doesn’t help the discussion.

            Of course, the original accusations weren’t intended to help the discussion, either, so there is that.

          • TD says:

            @Jiro

            That’s a different thing. The actual equivalent would be if Republicans were calling black people the N word, and then Democrats turned up and insinuated that Republicans were the N word, which obviously doesn’t happen. Republicans aren’t sneaking around at night wearing bandanas and having rap battles in public bathrooms.

            With homophobia we have social conservative right wingers (far-right wingers, so relax moderate cons) calling people faggots as an insult and generally hating gays. They do so because they consider homosexuality to be a very bad thing worthy of attack and ridicule. This is group A.

            Then we have left wingers, moderates, and right-liberals/libertarians coming along and calling the socons out as secret homosexuals in denial, usually very very gleefully. This is group B.

            Group B claims that the reason a closet gay homophobe is funny is merely because of the poetic justice involved and the humor involved in the cognitive dissonance.

            There’s no way of proving that this isn’t the case, and I’m not making any positive claim here, but I do wonder since most of the mockery of someone like Ted Haggard consists of drawing attention to the visceral sex acts he must have engaged in. Without it being explained what the context is, you wouldn’t be able to tell that the joke is “Haha! He’s a confused idiot!” and not “Haha! He sucks dick!” This is what all of the humor around it actually looks like.

            Trying to turn something back on the opponent is often a bad idea, because it allows those same values to be expressed stealthily on your own side.

        • mercrono says:

          Whether or not you’re right about Hitler and Nazism in particular, that’s not what Scott/Yvain’s 2009 post was really about. Rather, it was in response to debates about religious experience and the value of religious community, even on the supposition that actual religious assertions are wrong. The point of the post-war Germany framing is to show that the clever arguments you could make in favor of preserving religious traditions (which many might find reasonable) are isomorphic to arguments in favor of preserving Nazi texts and symbols (which most would find abhorrent, and which was historically unnecessary to preserve German culture). To wit, the most upvoted comment on that post states in its entirety “Reading this article is one of the things that caused me to become an atheist.”

          Now of course, it’s perfectly fair to say, as Scott basically does above “yeah, sometimes removing a rallying flag and dissolving a community is worth it, and in the case of Nazism, it probably was; in other cases, it’s hard to say, and you have to weigh costs against the benefits.” There’s no reason you always have to pick the same side on “preserve a problematic rallying flag: yes or no?”

          But in terms of a general gestalt on the subject, there’s a major difference between the two posts. And I find that interesting, because it’s an issue I feel torn on. I was nodding along to this post thinking “yeah, that makes sense, good point” — and then realized I could still go back and read “A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies” and nod along in basically the opposite direction.

          Again, maybe this is just an “All Debates Are Bravery Debates” kind of issue, and different people need to be reminded of different sides, without there being a “correct” answer. But given that Scott has written on both sides of this, I’m curious about what specifically induced his evolution in general attitude.

          • Jiro says:

            Whether or not you’re right about Hitler and Nazism in particular, that’s not what Scott/Yvain’s 2009 post was really about. Rather, it was in response to debates about religious experience and the value of religious community,

            Religions have holy books with one straightforward reading (and a lot of interpretation that ignores it) just like Hitler does in Scott’s comparison.

            (Using previous examples, I do believe that violent Koran verses have had some influence on the level of violence accepted in Islam, and that the interpretation of the Constitution of the US is affected by the literal wording stating a right to bear arms.)

        • On the leftism changing case:

          Back when Obama was first running for president, I thought there was a possibility, although not a high probability, that he might end up being pretty good. The reason was his association, in my mind and to some extent in reality, with a group of intellectuals connected with the University Chicago who, as I saw it, were people who identified with leftism, had accepted a good deal of the Chicago School critique of leftism, and wanted to remold leftism accordingly. That included Cass Sunstein and Austin Goolsby, who ended up playing some role in the Obama administration, and Larry Lessig, who didn’t.

          It did not work out as I had hoped so far as the administration was concerned—as I think my wife put it, Obama wasn’t a Kenyan or a Communist, he was a Chicago machine Democrat. I don’t think it is working out that way in the intellectual world of leftism either, although I’m not enough of an observer of that to be sure.

          For my comments back then, see:

          http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2008/05/thoughts-on-obama.html

          • Deiseach says:

            as I think my wife put it, Obama wasn’t a Kenyan or a Communist, he was a Chicago machine Democrat

            Then your wife and I were of the same opinion, and may I congratulate you on your good fortune in such an intelligent, insightful spouse 🙂

        • Daniel Keys says:

          I downvoted Yvain’s post, back when I encountered it, because it didn’t have enough content to justify going Godwin. And that rule is important.

    • Alex says:

      “However, I wonder if you think it would be fair to characterize this post as “we should be a lot more sympathetic to Colonel F then I used to believe.” Because I can’t help but see this post as the mirror image of your LessWrong post on the same subject — both thoughtful and charitable, but taking close to opposite positions on how essential rallying flags are, and how much respect we should show them, even when they seem stupid from an outside perspective.

      In other words, I’d love to see a dialogue on this subject between 2009 Yvain and 2016 Scott Alexander.”

      In terms of the article at hand (The Ideology is Not the Movement), the Colonel F parable is about the magical and instantaneous transformation of a world with identity of ideology and movement (i. e. the actual third reich) into a world without this identity (i. e. the post-war society as envisioned by the parable).

      There is an actual word for “identity of ideology and movement”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung and my interpretation is that it was Hitler’s/Goebbel’s expressed goal to achieve such identity.

      As far as I understand the Colonel F parable is to say that since we implicitly know that such magical conversions as described by the parable, do not happen in reality, we should not assume that [ideology] has in fact converted from its [atrocious past].

      And this is likely true on a few years timescale but is it true e. g. on a timescale from The Spanish Inquisition till now?

      Conclusion:

      – The article at hand should probably be “… not ALWAYS …” with the third reich as a prominent counterexample to the absolute.

      – The author goes to some length to explain that the ralley flag is not arbitrary (atheism vs. white nerd male) but seems to shun the conclusion that sometimes, especially in the early stages, the movement is very much about (and identical to) the movement.

      – Separation of ideology and movement can take long timescales, especially for strong (how should we define strong here? Salient?) ideologies.

      – Bad ideologies can give rise to overall good movements but only when viewed from a (temporary) distance.

      Im less sure about the last point. Illustrative example:

      Europe has witnessed a rise of “right-wing populism”, whatever that might be, over the last decade or something. This surely gave many red tribers an actual tribe, because Europe is scarce when it comes to institutional red tribes (I assume: in contrast to the US). This is a good thing. However I fear if this new tribe is going to have its ideological way, people will get hurt. Which would be a bad thing. Best case scenario is that they separate their ideology from the movement as fast as possible so that they can have a tribe without hurting anyone.

      And there comes Colonel Y and says that this “best case” is just wishful thinking.

      • Best case is that they morph their ideology into a critique of parts of the current orthodoxy that are wrong.

        • Alex says:

          I’m not sure if I understand.

          To gloss over _a lot_ of details:

          In the following I will use “we” to refer to blue tribe and “them” to refer to people who flock to the likes of Marine Le Pen in lack of a real red tribe. I am aware that both groups are defined incredibly vaguely.

          What Scott Alexander, the SSC “commentariat” and Donald Trump made me realize, is that my tribe and its ideology insofar as they are different constantly inflicts harm on their tribe by having stacked the deck of the game we call society vastly against them. [Tangetially, I used to believe (again simplified) that the stackedness was perfectly described by wealth distribution and from there on its all Pareto. But there seems to be more to it, one might call it culture or, if so inclined, “the Cathedral”]. There is a war going on, and I am on the winning team. Yay!

          Their tribe I cannot understand for I am not part of it. Their ideology, however, seems to involve things very close to shooting refugees at borders. [Another tangent: I have been to Calais twice the last 18 month, once on Eurostar once by car on the infamous motorway through the so called “Jungle”. Political positions aside, it is heartbreaking what a dehumanized place of fear Europe has become.]

          So here is the thing. I come from a mindset where the deck being stacked is just the way things are and shooting fellow humans is a very bad thing to do. But: I find it very easy to imagine the opposite mindset, where shooting intruders is a natural right but stacking the deck of society is a crime against humanity.

          In other words: when I wrote about people getting hurt in the post above, I was aware that I used a very biased definition of “hurt” of the sticks and stones variety. “… but being an outcast from the culture of mainstream success can never harm me”.

          And, I find it very hard to see how this problem could be framed in terms of orthodoxy and wrongness. Perhaps you could elaborate.

          • EU orthodoxy, especially in Germany, combined two incompatible policies–generous subsidies to refugees and easy immigration of people claiming to be refugees.

            One possible, and I think desirable, solution is to eliminate the subsidies, make no serious attempt to check whether people are refugees, not even require the claim. People who want to come to work and support themselves come. People who want to come because they are desperate come. People who want to come to free ride on European level welfare payments do not come. That, as I understand it, is pretty much the current Czech policy.

            People hostile to the current orthodoxy could conceivably modify their position in that direction. Their enemies are then not all foreigners but foreign freeloaders. Still an out group to define themselves against–along with the outgroup of the current political ins who support the current policy.

            I don’t know the movements well enough to guess whether that particular example works, and I don’t know enough about the EU to offer other suggestions of mistaken orthodoxies that could be organized against.

          • Alex says:

            David:

            Thank you for the reply.

            I guess what you are missing, is that “red tribe as defined by Le Pen (the stereotype, not actual Marine Le Pen)” itself heavily relies on subsidies. There is no way they would be taken serious with the claim to “cut their subsidies not ours” and I assume that they are very well aware, that a more general claim will harm their own (you might say shortsighted) interest.

            Anecdotes:

            – We get newspaper coverage along the lines of “Good patriotic mother of two thrown out of her house to make room for filthy immigrants” where close inspection reveals that it was not in fact “her” house but communal owned. She just happened to live there for whatever sad story of her life.

            – Knowing this, Germany is on the verge of an arms race in terms of who gets more subsidies (patriots or newcomers), which might revert the belated Thatcherism of the last 20 years. This is actively discussed on the level of federal government. Keynes might have applauded, but I assume you might not.

            – Germany’s local brand of Le Pennists was founded by an economist along the lines of your reasoning but was practically overrun by the disenfrachised “no, lets not do that, better shoot at borders” types. I have zero hope that this is reversible. Or phrased differently: actual events are the precise opposite of your best case, sadly enough.

          • John Schilling says:

            – We get newspaper coverage along the lines of “Good patriotic mother of two thrown out of her house to make room for filthy immigrants” where close inspection reveals that it was not in fact “her” house but communal owned. She just happened to live there for whatever sad story of her life.

            I am reminded of the fact that most of the pre-1948 residents of That Bit Of Land Between The Jordan And The Med, didn’t own their homes and farms but happened to live there until the legal owners decided to sell the land to someone with more money. Such was the sad story of their lives. Now they are part of an exciting new story…

            Please understand that people who live in a place for a long time will, regardless of legal ownership, come to think of that place as home. And as theirs. A claim whose moral legitimacy will be recognized by all their tribe. If there is any contention on that point, they will take what is theirs with fire and blood. And without close examination of newspaper reports saying that your team is and ought to be winning, yay.

          • Alex says:

            John:

            I feel that you could have phrased that with less mockery of my post. Regarding “saying that your team is and ought to be winning, yay.” I suspect, you misread my intentions. Other than that, insightful, as always.

            Maybe I came across less charitable than I thought. Heck, maybe I _am_ less charitable than I thoght in that regard. I actively hate entitlement. I find it to be one of the greatest bugs in human psyche. If a public entity cannot give a poor woman (I did certainly not say the sad story part in cynism) a home without her gradually feeling that she has a natural right not to social security in the abstract, but to this particular home, from were I’m coming that is a problem. Though not her fault of course.

            In the abstract it is society’s job to ensure that this woman is not dependent on communal alms and society has terribly failed. This in the spirit of the Scott Alexander piece “Burdens”.

            But in the particular, this house is not hers and I find myself unable of mercy. Probably my fault.

            EDIT: One other thing. The Palestine analogy does not hold because a new state was established. I’m talking about consensus of ownership within a state. If you throw that under the bus, I’m unsure what is left of modern capitalist society ™.

          • Tibor says:

            @David: Almost the Czech policy. You still need to get a working visa. I think it is relatively easy, demonstrated by the fact that many Ukrainians and Vietnamese usually with rather low qualifications work in the country (I think that the Vietnamese usually plan to immigrate, Ukrainians more often do not plan to stay). Still, an ideal policy from my (and I believe your) perspective would be to abolish those working visas (which would probably not be even possible from the EU perspective if for no other reason) and to introduce tax deductions for the immigrants before they are eligible for welfare, so that they would not have to contribute to the welfare system they do not profit from (this is politically completely impossible).

            What I find especially annoying about the current German policy is that a lot of its advocates talk about the needed “Arbeitskräfte” and how the refugees will provide this workforce for Germany, but do not seem to make much efforts to make it easier for non-EU citizens who already have decent qualifications (regardless of whether they come form Syria, Albania, Bolivia or Vietnam) to immigrate and work in the country. This suggests to me that they do not really care about open borders but about something else, I am not sure what exactly to be honest and I don’t quite understand it.

            @Alex:
            As for Frauke Petry’s “shooting of immigrants at the borders”, this is a little bit twisted. What she said was that there should be a limit on the number of refugee immigrants and that one should stop them at the borders. The journalists asked her whether that would mean shooting at people and she said something like “yes, if it were absolutely necessary to stop them”. I am no fan of AfD (past Bernd Lucke, who was much less conservative and much more libertarian), but I don’t like when someone’s words are twisted like this. I am not saying that you are twisting them, the media simply reported “Petry wants to shoot refugees at the borders”, which is a very uncharitable interpretation of what she said. That said, there probably are people among the AfD supporters who actually would not shy away from shooting people at the borders, there are probably some outright neonazis who vote for them. At the same time, there are probably radical communists who vote Labour in the UK, who would want to nationalize the economy and purge the country of the “bourgeoisie”, who are just as awful. It would be misleading to say that all Labour voters are like that though. Similarly, AfD draws supporters for various reasons and it is not even all about the Refugee politics (even though it is a major factor). The problem with German politics today is that Merkel managed to create something akin to a “national unity government” with no real opposition and many people are displeased with that. Other questionable issues which make people either vote the FDP (kind of like a very very moderate libertarian party) or AfD are the way Merkel has moved her CDU much further to the left (in economic issues, for example she caved in to the SPD and introduced the minimum wage law which the CDU was strongly against), her sudden change of mind after Fukushima, when she worked hard in the Bundestag to push through a legislation to postpone the closing date of a lot of German nuclear plants and a few months after she did that (i.e. after the Fukushima accident) she turned around 180° and decided to close the nuclear plants much faster than even originally planned (which causes quite a lot of problems in Germany since it is a big change and too fast). Many people were also displeased with the way she dealt with the Greek debt crisis and generally about her inconsistent politics. AfD gains supporters for all of these reasons, it is definitely not as simple as “there is a bunch of ‘ignorant red tribers’ who want to shoot foreigners at the borders”.

          • @Alex:

            Why can’t the Le Pen people take the position that good French people are entitled to subsidies but foreigners are only welcome to come it they are willing to pay their way? Most people in most countries take it for granted that fellow citizens get better treatment than others.

            Indeed, they could argue that letting foreigners come in and go on welfare threatens the needy and deserving French welfare recipients, whereas letting foreigners come in and pay taxes helps support them.

          • At something of a tangent, but relevant to the Le Pen movement (pere).

            Many years ago I was invited to a conference on something or other in Paris. A little while before it was due to happen I was told that many of the American participants had withdrawn in protest of a French fascist being invited.

            My reaction was that that was a reason to go. Fascism had obviously been an ideology that appealed to lots of people, talking with a fascist would help me understand it, and I had never before had a good opportunity to do so.

            As it turned out, the “fascist” withdrew in counter-protest, but I managed to arrange to have dinner with him. He was part of Le Pen’s movement, hence the label. But I wouldn’t call him a fascist–for one thing he was as down on Christianity as on Judaism, perhaps more so. He thought classical antiquity had been the high point of European civilization and it had been all downhill since then.

            His view of America was wall to wall McDonalds, so I enjoyed telling him about the Society for Creative Anachronism. Interesting dinner.

            Apologies if I have told this story here before, as is possible.

          • Creutzer says:

            As for Frauke Petry’s “shooting of immigrants at the borders”, this is a little bit twisted. What she said was that there should be a limit on the number of refugee immigrants and that one should stop them at the borders. The journalists asked her whether that would mean shooting at people and she said something like “yes, if it were absolutely necessary to stop them”. I am no fan of AfD (past Bernd Lucke, who was much less conservative and much more libertarian), but I don’t like when someone’s words are twisted like this.

            On the one hand, you’re right, of course. On the other hand, given that we know how the press behaves, it strikes me as a really dumb mistake on her part to utter the word “yes” as part of her response. She should have said “only if it were absolutely necessary to stop them”, which is quite a bit harder to twist.

          • Alex says:

            Tibor:

            Nah. “Shooting people at borders” was me, vastly oversimplifying how “my tribe” perceives “their ideology”. I thought I made that transparent. I even put “very close to” in there to signal that I realize that shooting might be an extreme stance within “their tribe”. It was intended as an image to convey the tone of the discussion to non european readers. Might have failed.

            I have basically no interest in discussing what Mrs. Petry in particular might or might not believe. For one thing I do not see how we could get reliable insight into that question. (David might say: revealed preferences. As far as I am aware she has not actually shot someone so there is that.)

            David: Re: “Why can’t the Le Pen people..”

            I hope I have not given the false impression of being a Frenchman. I choose Le Pen as my stereotype because I suspected she was best known internationally. For the purpose of the narrative of “my tribe” (it might have becaome apparent by now that I am reluctant to really identify as blue tribe, but who would I be kidding) it could have been Geert Wilders or aformentioned Frauke Petry or even Victor Orban (i. e. someone in an actual position of power).

            That being said, what you suggest might be inside the Overton window in France, I really don’t know. “Here” it would come across as incredibly hypocritical.

            [And while some might have been able to guess my actual country of origin, I’d like to maintain plausible deniablity for anonymity reasons.]

          • Creutzer says:

            @David, Alex:

            Why can’t the Le Pen people take the position that good French people are entitled to subsidies but foreigners are only welcome to come it they are willing to pay their way? Most people in most countries take it for granted that fellow citizens get better treatment than others.

            I’m actually not sure of the extent to which this is still taken for granted in the EU. The Nazis have made everything within a vast perimeter around turf-based or ethnocentric nationalism completely untouchable.

            The Germans have tried a workaround: Be proud of the country’s institutions and your contribution to them. But that leaves out in the rain precisely all those who are too unfortunate to be able to make a meaningful contribution to society. If you do not contribute to the institution, you have no basis for claiming that you’re more deserving than a foreigner.

            The French are in a similar predicament: They like to think they’re egalitarian and meritocratic, so if you come there and behave well, what grounds does a Frenchman have to claim that you’re still not as good as him?

          • Alex says:

            What Creutzer said.

          • Tibor says:

            @Creutzer:
            You’re absolutely correct. But then it becomes a criticism of her political skill and not of her opinions.

            @all:
            I am not sure to which extend the other “far-right” parties in Europe are actually as socialist as Marine Le Pen. I know that Lucke’s AfD was a bit socially conservative and quite economically liberal. I think Petry’s AfD is definitely way more conservative but I am not sure the party if has also become more economically socialist or not. I have no idea about Geert Wilders’ or Orban’s economic policies. UKIP seems to be quite economically liberal. All of those parties get some votes from the “angry working class” who mostly also prefer the welfare state (and who used to vote some kind of social democratic parties), some votes (at least in the case of UKIP and probably still AfD) from people who are economically liberal and willing to “bite the conservative bullet” (or are also socially conservative), finding it the lesser of two evils. The question is how much these parties depend on the votes of “the working class” for whom cutting welfare to everyone would be a no-go and how much on the votes of economic liberals who would actually applaud cutting the welfare state down, or reducing it at least. My impression is that the first care more about limiting welfare immigration than about keeping the welfare state (at least in Germany) at the current level.

            Also, there are different welfare programs with different payments and rules for the citizens who are “in need” and for the asylum seekers. So the system in Europe (or at least in Germany) as it is today actually does favour the citizens. Saying that it should favour them even more is not such a big step further, I would imagine. In Germany, it also probably depends a lot on the Bundesland. I think that in Bavaria or in the former DDR, “welfare for us, not for them” would not be met with any serious opposition. In NRW, I would expect the opposite.

            Denmark seems to be particularly stern with the refugees (even confiscating their property on arrival and using it to finance the welfare payments) and for the Danes the idea of “welfare for us, not for them” seems to be quite natural. It might have been different 10 years ago, but with the Folkeparti as a de facto part of the government (and perhaps still on the rise), it looks like that is the current Danish mainstream. In Austria, my impression is that the government is keeping the FPÖ at bay more or less by doing the FPÖs program. France seems to try to get rid of the refugees about as much as Austria, which does not strike me as very egalitarian or “it does not matter whether you are French or not”. Keeping the welfare recipients away from the country or limiting their numbers based on their nationality is just another way of saying “welfare for our citizens is more important than for other people”. Even Germany is indirectly limiting the number of new welfare recipients in the country – by the (IMO horrible) deal with Turkey and also by relying on Austria and the Balkans to keep their borders shut.

          • Tibor says:

            @Alex: Ok, sorry I did not get that. I’ve just heard some people say things more or less like “look at them, they all want to shoot foreigners at the borders, they are all nazis with a different name”. And that is just too easy. I would have objections against the AfD (but also against the current German government) but the objections ought to be about concrete policies or suggested policies, not about who was caught saying this or that outrageous thing in the media (especially when it was in fact at least a bit less outrageous than it appears) which is unfortunately what it boils down to most of the time. And because of that, I jumped into a conclusion that you are also one of those people. So sorry again for that.

  97. Bettega says:

    There is a whole tradition of French liberalism which is concerned with what they call the “corps intermédiaires”, social institutions that stand between the central government and the common people and stand as “protective bodies”, restraining abuses and over-expansion of the central government at the expense of civil society. These French liberals, such as Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville and Bertrand de Jouvenel, criticize the Revolution for destroying such institutions in their drive to remodel society through political action, which could only be achieved through a massive centralization of the government. Jouvenel goes further and argues that a “high-low” alliance between the central government and those who either are not part of any social authority, or are oppressed inside the social authority they belong (think women in a Church or workers in a corporation) is one of the main features of democratic politics. According to him, central power can only expands at the expense of independent social authorities, what you call “tribes”.

    Now, that may explain something about the popularity of anti-tribalism across the state educational apparatus. I know many good libertarians are anti-tribalist because it harms individual thinking and yet they don’t recognize that the price of man’s absolute freedom from family and social authority constraints is submission to the state.

  98. Dirdle says:

    It seems like “we’re all rallied around the doesn’t-like-rallying-around-flags flag, and have all the corresponding tribal behaviours” is something you could meaningfully not want to know. Or at least, not want to become common knowledge. Then again, it would be hard for the community to be more fragmented and self-loathing, so…

    Wait, didn’t we go over this a while ago?

  99. Tor Klingberg says:

    1. Does this mean the Rationalism is doomed to be nothing more than a social club? A useful tool for its members to find like minded friends, but ultimately no more important to the word than a minor music genre or a book club?

    2. Sometimes tribes do not fully own their rallying flags. Various Christian denominations share the same bible. There are many who do not believe in god, yet are not part of the atheist tribe. There have always been many who play video games but are not part of the Reddit-style gamer tribe.

  100. walpolo says:

    Are there really white fans of rap who want it to become less violent? In my experience the edgy lyrics are a big part of what white fans appreciate about rap.

  101. onyomi says:

    Since you rightly suggest we look at the history, not the stated purpose, of tribes, why can’t we then judge statements like “x is a religion of peace” based on history? For example, while it’s true that one could found either a very pacifist or a very violent tribe based on the Qur’an or the Lotus Sutra, what is the actual history of groups which have used those books as rallying flags?

    To take an extreme example, it’s technically possible that the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky could become a rallying flag for people who love tarot cards, astrology, and knitting. It’s possible, but highly unlikely. And if they did, we might start noticing a weird trend of grannies unusually concerned with statistics and AI. Because it is a two-way street.

    • Thursday says:

      To take an extreme example, it’s technically possible that the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky could become a rallying flag for people who love tarot cards, astrology, and knitting. It’s possible, but highly unlikely.

      Right. The actual content of scriptures does matter. Not as much as some believers would say, but it does matter.

      • arbitrary_greay says:

        This is getting at something that’s been niggling at my brain for a while, which is:

        At what point can we dismiss the text?

        1. Pop culture source material analysis: there are schools of criticism that ignore the text (going beyond death of just the author) and focus on their societal ramifications. For certain short-term consequentialist mindsets, that’s good. Bad for any texts that are “misunderstood,” unless they’ve got a sizable audience promoting a redemptive reading. (Complex example, or the SJ criticism of Age of Ultron, or the excellent danceability of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines)
        (The general solution to this has been “just don’t consume them in a way that supports their continued existence,” like pirating, not participating in fandom, not promoting it to others, etc.)

        2. Movement leadership. As many compelling reasons I might read about The Donald’s potential leadership skills, there’s also a voice at the back of my mind reminding me that supporting him also validates his other supporters that I really do not want validated. And even if when in office, he does go about with his potential great leadership actions, his other supporters might go about their not-so-great actions because they’ve still been validated. Therefore, I ignore the “text,” in this case, who The Donald really is as a leader, and/or his policy positions.
        2a. Other way around also applies, where the leadership/text is problematic, but they’re relegated into the embarrassing old uncle corner, and the majority of the movement seems fine.

        3, 3a. Ideologies, wherein the text is the motte OR bailey. As the discussions concerning religion above show, certain text-mottes seem more slippery-slope prone than others, and should that be evaluated? Or in the other case, should we be more lenient on radical ideals fairly prone to being diluted into reasonable forms? (which I’ve seen for both far left and far right ideas)

        4. Gun culture (but I’m waaaaaaaay not prepared or that interested in having that discussion)

        • onyomi says:

          It is interesting how the foundational text can be either the motte or the bailey in different circumstances. Nowadays, it seems more often to be the bailey, because nobody reads (not that they ever did).*

          Reminds me of something I was thinking about a recent discussion here of Mein Kampf. Some mentioned that it is not especially inspiring or pleasant reading, but just as polemical and yucky as you might expect. But how many who weren’t already true believers actually read it in order to form their opinion of Hitler and the Nazis?

          Reminds me a bit of the ghost-written “books” presidential candidates always put out. I’m pretty sure very few people actually read them, but they need to be there, sort of like one’s doctoral dissertation, as something someone can point to to prove you are a Serious Thinker.

          Mao had his Red Book, Gaddafi his Green Book. True Believers may be required to read these, but no one believes it’s because of the brilliance of the writing in these that they wielded so much power, just as most of the people who voted for Obama never read Dreams from my Father.

          *I think the metaphor breaks down somewhat here, because what I mean when I say “bailey,” is “the crazier part,” but with cults, you save the crazy part until people are already deeply committed, whereas the motte and bailey thing is more about acting crazy but then retreating, rhetorically, to a more defensible position when challenged.

        • Thursday says:

          OT: why exactly did Blurred Lines attract so much hate? (Genuinely wanting to hear some theories.) As one of my friends said, “By hip hop standards, that’s children’s literature.”

          • The Nybbler says:

            I think it’s mostly the title, which pattern matches to a bingo square. The song’s lyrics describe crude propositions, not rape.

          • Anonymous says:

            Positive feedback.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            Because it was popular.

          • Daniel Keys says:

            You say that like sexist children’s literature would be a good thing.

            There were a few parodies of the video, but I recall one that just reversed the sexes and had scantily-clad men dancing seemingly for the pleasure of be-suited women. And I recall The Dire Outgroup-Member saying she found this sexy, but we wouldn’t see music videos like it because our culture codes sexual objectification as gay/feminine.

          • Anonymous says:

            >You say that like sexist children’s literature would be a good thing.

            What?

            >The Dire Outgroup-Member

            Who?

            >saying she found this sexy, but we wouldn’t see music videos like it because our culture codes sexual objectification as gay/feminine.

            Most of the heavy criticism of the song came from the angle of “Rape Culture” as it pertained to the lyrics.

          • Proximity, I guess?

            I mean, I figure it’s some percentage of the author of Blurred Lines having the right race and sex to be hated, and some other percentage of the fact that the more aggresively bitches-and-hoes-esque hip-hop songs aren’t being played near where the people doing the hating have to listen.

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            The Todd in the Shadows review (check Youtube or Vimeo) covers what even relatively “normal” people found creepy about it.

            But otherwise, yeah, the popularity. The other songs are so obviously Wrong they aren’t worth addressing, and the critics probably haven’t even heard of those songs, so they don’t have nearly as much reach as Blurred Lines.

          • Thursday says:

            These explanations mostly make sense, though some really harsh bitches-and-hoes material from Dre, Snoop and Eminem is not exactly unknown to the public at large.

          • Deiseach says:

            It wasn’t a particularly great song, the guy was your standard Whitebread trying for some easy cred by co-opting Rappers as backup/joint singers, and the general attitude of the lyrics was “I know what you want better than you do and what you want is to be slapped around and treated like a slut” which wasn’t any too flattering as a proto-love song:

            “But you’re an animal
            Baby, it’s in your nature
            Just let me liberate you” – is this about what she’s really like or his image of what he wants her to be like?

            “I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two” – yes, that’s what every woman wants from sex, that it is uncomfortable and makes her bleed.

            “Nothin’ like your last guy, he too square for you
            He don’t smack that ass and pull your hair like that” – see, you don’t want a Nice Guy, you want a Bad Boy to treat you mean and keep you keen

            All of which is your standard rap misogyny (unfortunately) but the real trouble was the chorus:

            “I hate these blurred lines
            I know you want it
            I know you want it
            I know you want it
            But you’re a good girl”

            In other words, “oh who can tell what ‘no’ really is or means?” and continuing on with the idea of “There are Good Girls who, for the sake of their reputation, have to say ‘no’ when they really want sex, so take it that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ and keep insisting, even forcefully, until she gives in and does what she really wants all along, that is, have sex with you” (and the kind of “ripping your ass in two, work it like it hurts, slap her ass and pull her hair” sex is what she wants, not tender love-making like her last boyfriend who was too soft and tried to domesticate her, so treat her like a bitch and don’t take ‘no’ for an answer).

            Mainly it was a crappy song and the attitude on display was that of a fourteen year old boy adopting the bravado of his favourite rappers with regard to his first date, not an adult married (at the time) man.

            For ‘sleazy yet disarms you with sheer attitude and ends up charming you in spite of yourself’, Robert Palmer did it better with Addicted To Love 🙂

          • Thursday says:

            In other words, “oh who can tell what ‘no’ really is or means?” and continuing on with the idea of “There are Good Girls who, for the sake of their reputation, have to say ‘no’ when they really want sex, so take it that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ and keep insisting, even forcefully, until she gives in and does what she really wants all along, that is, have sex with you” (and the kind of “ripping your ass in two, work it like it hurts, slap her ass and pull her hair” sex is what she wants, not tender love-making like her last boyfriend who was too soft and tried to domesticate her, so treat her like a bitch and don’t take ‘no’ for an answer).

            That’s seems like a plausible, but still rather tendentious reading of the lyrics.

            But thanks for the clear exposition.

          • Sastan says:

            @Deiseach

            I agree with you about the comparative merits of the song, but it’s worth noting that the “good girl secretly longing for a near-rape experience” trope is the standard one for romance novels (I did a study, don’t ask). This is fiction written by women, for women, so I think the fantasy is there at least. Of course, I assume that like many male fantasies, the dream is far more desirable than the reality. However, it’s hard to blame men for picking up on it and using it to sell whatever shit they’re peddling as well.

          • Sastan, I’ve been told that romances have moved away from the rape trope, but I don’t follow the genre. When were you researching this?

            For what it’s worth, there’s a lot of romance in sf that doesn’t seem rapey. On the other hand, if the back cover blurb is about a romance between a woman and an extremely scary man (half demon, half vampire), I put the book down. I don’t know whether the blurbs are accurate.

            I have a faint memory of a feminist (Germaine Greer?) complaining that romance novels were instruction manuals for seducers.

    • Frog Do says:

      Because history is path dependant. To do some comment thread necromancy, a while back I made the claim that there were a lot more oppertunities for Islam, say, to construct relatively fair laws to deal with Christians and Jews; while Christianity did not, because it came first. Only until Christian nations could reliably conquer Muslim nations did we get relatively fair laws for Muslims. (No one wanted to answer that objection, being obsessed with the treatment of Jews in Muslim Spain vs Christian Spain, but there you go, history is really hard to talk about.)

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        “No one wanted to answer that objection”

        Because you didn’t actually make it there. But lets go over it, shall we?

        “a lot more oppertunities for Islam, say, to construct relatively fair laws to deal with Christians and Jews; while Christianity did not, because it came first.”

        “being obsessed with the treatment of Jews in Muslim Spain vs Christian Spain,”

        These two claims contradict each other. Unless you are claiming Jews did not come before Christians of course.

        “Only until Christian nations could reliably conquer Muslim nations did we get relatively fair laws for Muslims. ”

        You mean like the Reconquista? Or does that not count somehow?

        • Frog Do says:

          I did make that claim, several times, and it remains unanswered in your comment here. You’re a person who was in that comment thread, you should remember this, and if not, you can check the archive.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            No, you made a different claim. The two claims are not the same.

            You also ignored everything else I wrote. If you wanted people to ‘look at your argument’, you could have simply said you communicated poorly/I misinterpreted and move on to replying.

    • NN says:

      Since you rightly suggest we look at the history, not the stated purpose, of tribes, why can’t we then judge statements like “x is a religion of peace” based on history? For example, while it’s true that one could found either a very pacifist or a very violent tribe based on the Qur’an or the Lotus Sutra, what is the actual history of groups which have used those books as rallying flags?

      The Lotus Sutra is held in very high esteem in Japanese Buddhism, so one group that used the Lotus Sutra as a rallying flag was responsible for some of the most destructive wars in human history. Here is a small sample of statements made by Japanese Buddhist monks in favor of Japan’s 20th century imperialist wars:

      “[If ordered to] march: tramp, tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom [of Enlightenment]. The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war [now under way].” – Harada Daiun Sogaku

      “Showing the utmost loyalty to the emperor is identical with engaging in the religious practice of Mahayana Buddhism. This is because Mahayana Buddhism is identical with the law of the sovereign.” — Seki Seisetsu

      “I wished to inspire our valiant soldiers with the ennobling thoughts of the Buddha, so as to enable them to die on the battlefield with confidence that the task in which they are engaged is great and noble. I wish to convince them…. that this war is not a mere slaughter of their fellow-beings, but that they are combating an evil.” — Shaku Soen

      “In the present hostilities, into which Japan has entered with great reluctance, she pursues no egotistic purpose, but seeks the subjugation of evils hostile to civilization, peace and enlightenment.” — Shaku Soen

      “It is just to punish those who disturb the public order. Whether one kills or does not kill, the precept forbidding killing [is preserved]. It is the precept forbidding killing that wields the sword. It is the precept that throws the bomb.” — Sawaki Kodo

      • onyomi says:

        The Lotus Sutra and Japanese Buddhism were not rallying flags for Japanese Imperialism. Not even close. The rallying flags were the Emperor and state Shinto and Bushido and Hagakure*…. The fact that some Japanese people who happened to be Buddhist monks supported something nearly every other Japanese person was supporting at the time that doesn’t prove their religion was a rallying flag.

        A lot of cardiologists supported the Nazis. Doesn’t make a treatise on heart surgery an equally good fascist rallying flag as Mein Kampf.

        *Hagakure, indeed, was only meant as a guide to samurai life at a time when samurai were 5% of the population. It certainly wasn’t intended to inspire fascism or act as the guiding ethos of a nation state. But it still lent itself better to that purpose than the Lotus Sutra could.

  102. eponymous says:

    This essay was really insightful. Among your best work. You have serious talent for ethnography.

    I also found it rather amusing, because I basically perfectly fit your description of the Rationalist crowd, except that I’m an Evangelical Christian.

    Now you might say that this is just an example of the “How can I be a rationalist if I lack defining feature X?” fallacy. But I haven’t told you the amusing part yet. You see, there *is* a tribe that I strongly identify with; a group of people who *also* fit your description of rationalists; a set of nerdy INTx types with interests in philosophy, math, science, science fiction, etc.

    This group is my Christian fellowship from college. Even years later it’s my primary tribal identity.

    It’s as if a bunch of your Christians-at-risk-for-atheism got together in college, bonded over how much they had hated high school youth group, and discovered that Christianity was really awesome once you could figure it out with a bunch of fellow rationalist nerds.

    • Evan Þ says:

      That sounds awesome! I think another half-dozen of us have managed to get together in my church’s young adult post-collegiate small group, too…

  103. Frog Do says:

    This is broadly what I was trying to get at in my comment thread on https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/09/links-316-rulink-class/ about how “The New Testament reads like an instruction manual by our creator in terms of its helpfulness in this world, consistency with healthful psychology, ethics, and economics.” can be understood as a reasonable statement. I suppose I failed to communicate this properly, which is why all of the sudden I was Defending Christendom Against The New Atheist Horde.

    Related to this, one thing that does bother me about the rationalist community is some kind of “performative incomprehension”. Not just to pick on drethelin, I know nostalgiabrist legitimately didn’t understand how people could have nonutilitarian ethical systems, or Scott’s occasional swing-and-misses when he comments on religion. Not understanding things is fine, I don’t understand nearly everything, but performative incomprehension I think is probably not helpful. Hopefully embracing tribalism makes everyone a bit more cosmopolitan.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      I’m not seeing a connection between a post on tribalism and the use of the bible as an instruction manual.

      • Frog Do says:

        No, you probably wouldn’t. Reread Scott’s post and try it again.

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          I’m sorry, this is the charitable blog. You actually have to say what you mean and not be offended that people don’t read your mind.

          • hlynkacg says:

            I would think that it’s pretty clear he’s talking about this part here…

            … his argument is definitely filled with a lot of framing and language I immediately recognize. That said, I suspect a lot of these beliefs are there to sort of signal in-groupishness, so they are literally like a foreign language.

            Practically speaking, how much of your life alters if you go full creationist? Not the story you tell about your life, your actual lived experience?

            While a “Tribe” may be shaped by it’s “Ideology” it still exists independently. To put it another way, The Ideology Is Not The Movement.

            …Which leads us back to Scott’s own comments in this post and others about the importance of shibboleths and ritual when it comes to fostering cooperation and tribal cohesion.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            And? That has nothing to do with the bible.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            It has everything to do with the Bible.

            Were you not paying attention to the bit about …the importance of shibboleths and ritual when it comes to fostering cooperation and tribal cohesion?

            Or about how tribal membership is exists separately of ideology?

      • drethelin says:

        the connection is that it’s not, the real instruction manual is the friends you make along the way

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          I’m pretty sure Frog Do’s believes his religion so that doesn’t work.

          • Frog Do says:

            What’s my religion, oh learned prophet?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            You talk about the bible so you are a Christian. Now are you going to have content to your response or is it all going to be passive aggressive shit flinging?

          • Frog Do says:

            “You talk about the bible so you are a Christian.”

            “You talk about the bible so you are a Christian.”

            “You talk about the bible so you are a Christian.”

          • Samuel Skinner: “You talk about the bible so you are a Christian.”

            Well, no. Which parts of the bible you talk about and what attitude you take towards them supplies some significant clues about whether you’re a Jew or a Christian.

            Or an ex-Jew or an ex-Christian.

            There’s some sort of chance that someone who talks about the bible is just someone who’s fascinated by biblical religion without having a personal connection to biblical religion, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

          • Deiseach says:

            You talk about the bible so you are a Christian

            My avatar on here is Shiva, does that mean I am a Hindu? 🙂

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            He previous stated the New Testament was an instruction manual. It is pretty clear that is what he meant by the bible folks.

          • Frog Do says:

            “He previous stated the New Testament was an instruction manual.”
            You can’t just tell lies, Sam, no matter how much you wish they were true. I said “’The New Testament reads like an instruction manual by our creator in terms of its helpfulness in this world, consistency with healthful psychology, ethics, and economics.’ can be understood as a reasonable statement.”

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Deiseach:

            If you talked glowingly about Hinduism instead of never ceasing to talk about Catholicism, I would assume you were a Hindu based on the contextual evidence. Even if you never explicitly said “I am a Hindu.”

            @ Frog Do:

            If you walk like a duck and quack like a duck, what kind of uncharitable asshole would assume you’re a duck?

            If you have a habit of speaking positively about Christianity and never give a disclaimer clarifying matters, people are going to assume you’re a Christian. It’s called inductive evidence.

            Instead of dragging this out with coy remarks, all you had to say (if you are indeed not a Christian): “I’m sorry I gave the wrong impression, but I’m actually not a Christian.” As it is, I still don’t know whether you’re really not one or just being pedantic.

          • Frog Do says:

            http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142194796166/save-lambdaconf-and-an-open-society-by-status

            @Vox
            I have only ever replied to other people bring up Christianity. Saying that people say “The New Testament reads like an instruction manual by our creator in terms of its helpfulness in this world, consistency with healthful psychology, ethics, and economics.” might not be completely insane is now “speaking positively”? This is utterly ridiculous. Complete insanity should be the default assumption, then? I would have said the same thing about Hinduism, or Islam, or Objectivism, or Communism. But of course, the context is always lost in the rush to Defend Atheism Against The Christian Horde. Good grief, and I’m supposed to be insulting and lack charity. Do you hear what you’re saying?

            The fact that my identity needs to be a core of my arguments kind of says a lot about you, though. I refuse to answer that question for this reason. You desperately want to make this identity politics, and I refuse to play that game.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “might not be completely insane is now “speaking positively”?”

            Yes. There already is an instruction manual in the Abrahamic faith- it is called the Old Testament.

            “I would have said the same thing about Hinduism, or Islam, or Objectivism, or Communism. ”

            None of those are texts. If you are referring to Ayn Rand’s or Karl Marx’s output, claiming their writings are consistent with God trying to provide a blueprint for ethics, economics and psychology…

            As for Islam and Hinduism… their holy texts do not look like the New Testament. That is sort of an issue to claim they are all doing the same exact thing.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            It’s not about “identity politics”, if you mean that to say I’m going to argue that whatever comes out of your mouth is inexorably determined by your identity in some kind of postmodernist way.

            It’s the fact that ideological “labels” are useful summaries of what people believe about important issues.

            I have only ever replied to other people bring up Christianity. Saying that people say “The New Testament reads like an instruction manual by our creator in terms of its helpfulness in this world, consistency with healthful psychology, ethics, and economics.” might not be completely insane is now “speaking positively”? This is utterly ridiculous. Complete insanity should be the default assumption, then? I would have said the same thing about Hinduism, or Islam, or Objectivism, or Communism. But of course, the context is always lost in the rush to Defend Atheism Against The Christian Horde. Good grief, and I’m supposed to be insulting and lack charity. Do you hear what you’re saying?

            If people are saying something bad about it and you counter them at length, yes, that’s defending it. As a general rule, the people who are most motivated and eager to defend something are people who endorse it. Therefore, it’s reasonable to infer inductively from the fact that someone is defending something that he endorses it. This is despite the fact that one can operate in the manner of a lawyer, giving the best case for something he does not endorse.

            That’s why if you want to defend something and don’t want to give the impression that you endorse it, it is common to make a remark to the effect of “I don’t endorse this, but…”

            For instance, I said a few threads ago that I can believe it’s possible that there were people who were honestly convinced of Nazism and therefore not to blame for supporting it. Since this is a partial defense of some Nazis, it was necessary for me to emphasize that I do not endorse any part of Nazism.

            I don’t know why you interpret the probabilistic inference that you were a Christian as uncharitable or an insult to you. Your M.O. seems to be to behave with maximal uncharitability and general orneriness—and then accuse everyone else of the same when they call you out on it. I’m sick of it.

          • Frog Do says:

            I see, I didn’t strenuously disparge the outgroup enough. I should ritualistically denounce people I disagree with before defending them, because my argument depends entirely on which group I belong to, so if I imply I belong to the wrong group, I am wrong by default. In fact, I should assume the outgroup is totally insane, this is the default “neutral” position, because if you say something with the right tone, it’s neutral, regardless of content. Furthermore, defending something is endorsing it by default, because no one, no one goes meta in rationalists spaces, ever. Seriously.

            s e r i o u s l y

            Being assumed to be Christian is not an insult to me, though I suppose it should be, if it means “assumed insane by default”. Being assumed to be Christian in a pattern of deliberately misinterpreting about what I said or literally (literally!) lying about it (because of course I’m lying about it, I’m the outgroup), that doesn’t sit well with me.

            Your M. O. is being maximally rude in content as you are polite in tone, and being surprised when people don’t like it. Well, surprise.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Frog Do:

            Look, I really don’t just have a fundamental desire to get into yelling matches with you.

            What you are saying I am saying bears no resemblance to what I am actually saying, let alone intending. I don’t know why. I suspect it’s because you think I’m being rude to you, which is causing you to be rude to me, which is causing me to get angry at you and be rude to you for real, and so on.

            I’ll just point to the post I made right before this. Because I would like this conflict to stop.

          • Frog Do says:

            For the record, my response is also in the post above. Truce accepted.

          • Deiseach says:

            If you talked glowingly about Hinduism instead of never ceasing to talk about Catholicism

            Vox, can you be sure this is not a cunning plan of misdirection on my part and I am hoping to subliminally influence you all to become Shaivates by disgusting you all with Christianity via my “never-ceasing talk about Catholicism”?

            🙂

          • Jiro says:

            Being assumed to be Christian is not an insult to me, though I suppose it should be, if it means “assumed insane by default”. Being assumed to be Christian in a pattern of deliberately misinterpreting about what I said or literally (literally!) lying about it (because of course I’m lying about it, I’m the outgroup), that doesn’t sit well with me.

            You are being assumed to be Christian because you say things that it is much more likely that a Christian would say than anyone else, even if technically speaking it is possible for someone else to say them.

          • Frog Do says:

            @Jiro
            Yes, I know, and that doesn’t bother me, that’s an entirely reasonable assumption. But that assumption is not occuring in isolation here when Samuel Skinner uses it, he’s using it to attack me. Everything in context.

          • Jiro says:

            If it’s a reasonable assumption for anyone to make, it’s also a reasonable assumption for attackers to make.

          • Frog Do says:

            It is a reasonable assumption to make, full stop. However, Samuel Skinner doesn’t really understand reason, so the reasonableness of the assumption is not relevant. It is being used purely as a weapon to play identity politics, my claims (which are identical to Scott’s in this post) are being dismissed because he’s attempting to banish me to the Outgroup. Thus, all this “papiere bitte” nonsense.

            Given that Sam repeatedly cannot distinguish between “I endorse [x]” and ” ‘I endorse [x]’ can be understood as a reasonable statement” as statements, I feel claiming that he is doesn’t really understand reason is a fair claim. If one can’t go meta, why would one hang out with rationalists?

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            ” my claims (which are identical to Scott’s in this post) ”

            No, your claims are not identical to Scott’s post. As I previously stated
            —There already is an instruction manual in the Abrahamic faith- it is called the Old Testament. —

            Unless your position is it makes sense because the statement is literally meaningless. Given
            “I would have said the same thing about Hinduism, or Islam, or Objectivism, or Communism. ”
            that might actually be the case. I don’t know because you decided to derail the conversation instead of expanding on it.

            “Thus, all this “papiere bitte” nonsense.”

            Previously
            —I’m pretty sure Frog Do’s believes his religion so that doesn’t work.—
            “What’s my religion, oh learned prophet?”
            —You talk about the bible so you are a Christian.—
            ” “You talk about the bible so you are a Christian.”

            “You talk about the bible so you are a Christian.”

            “You talk about the bible so you are a Christian.””

            (yes, he typed that three times. No, I don’t know why)

            You brought up a specific religion. You could have said “it is irrelevant” or “I wasn’t talking about myself”.

          • Frog Do says:

            If you keep repeating lies, it doesn’t make them true. Sorry, Sam.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            “What’s the best way to convince everyone that I’m the reasonable person in this dispute who’s being viciously misinterpreted?”

            “I bet it’s to keep repeating the same ‘clever’ line accusing my opponent of being a liar in a chummy sort of way. Maybe I’ll throw in some other insulting one-line posts while I’m at it. That’ll bring him around.”

            I don’t want to start anything up again between me and you, but even if you are being maliciously misinterpreted, your approach is not making anything better. In any case, I do not think Samuel Skinner is lying about how he interpreted your statements. He is perhaps wrong about what you meant—if so, it is probably because your intentions are not as transparent as you think they are.

          • Frog Do says:

            I am still being charitable, actually!

            I began with, ” ‘The New Testament reads like an instruction manual by our creator in terms of its helpfulness in this world, consistency with healthful psychology, ethics, and economics.’ can be understood as a reasonable statement”, together with the acknowledgement that I probably didn’t communicate that properly. The obvious interpretation is that I can understand how [x] can be a reasonable statement without necessarily endorsing [x]. Given that it’s a comment on this particular post, that interpretation should be obvious, given that drethelin and Hlynkacg chimed in, it should be obvious from perspectives that also aren’t mine. I’m sure even you understand what I’m getting at here, even given our past inability to understand each other.

            So, Samuel Skinner still wants me to defend endorsing [x], which of course I did not do and have said repeatedly I am not interested in doing. Various dogpiling happens, assumptions about my argument are made based on assumptions about my religion, the usual identity politics dumpster fire. So there are two options I have, as I see it. He either doesn’t understand the difference between endorsing [x] and endorsing “endorsing [x] can be understood to be reasonable”, or he is deliberately lying to play identity politics. Given that Scott’s post is about this difference, and given that other people have replied getting this difference, I do doubt I am being misunderstood. So these are the only two options: he’s either pretty clueless or deliberately lying. If he’s clueless, and I accuse him of lying, he gets to save face. If he is lying, then I’m right. So it’s a win-win. I obviously can’t convince him of anything he doesn’t want to convince himself of, of course, that’s not really how people work.

            And really, I get that “snark” is probably the safe default assumption of all internet conversation, especially with us nerds, but I don’t think my comments are particularly clever, and assuming my emotional state is probably not the most effective practice, given your past difficulties understanding me. When all I see is a nail, all I need is a hammer.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “He either doesn’t understand the difference between endorsing [x] and endorsing “endorsing [x] can be understood to be reasonable”, or he is deliberately lying to play identity politics.”

            This may shock you, but I really don’t care. All that matters is you support the argument you make. I keep on asking you to do that, and you keep refusing. Pick A or B, say you pick A or B and provide arguments in support of A or B. This is not complicated.

          • Frog Do says:

            I know you don’t care, you can’t, because you don’t see the difference.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            You are already aware of A

            For B
            —No, your claims are not identical to Scott’s post. As I previously stated
            —There already is an instruction manual in the Abrahamic faith- it is called the Old Testament. —

            Unless your position is it makes sense because the statement is literally meaningless. Given
            “I would have said the same thing about Hinduism, or Islam, or Objectivism, or Communism. ”
            that might actually be the case. I don’t know because you decided to derail the conversation instead of expanding on it.—

            Apparently asking if that was your position was too charitable. Perhaps I should have jumped straight to mocking you? Pointing out that if you ask Christians for examples they will freely give them? That the examples can be coherent? That most people don’t read moral philosophy for fun and so the bible is their main exposure? That “hard to read text decoded by specialists with years of training” describes, medicine, law, engineering and other fields and they might be treating this exactly the same way?

            Now, this is falsifiable. Do Christians turn to the New Testament when they have questions? Do they look to their pastors? These should be different if they actually consider that it has profound knowledge versus if it is just applause lights.

          • Frog Do says:

            You don’t understand the argument I am making, because you don’t understand the difference between [statements] and [statements about statements]. Take a basic course in mathematical logic, this kinda thing is all over Less Wrong.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Statement about statements? You mean B?

          • Frog Do says:

            If you understood B, you would understand how B has nothing to do with the Bible, or Christianity at all, it is making a statement about a statement. The statement (or, A) is about the Bible and Christianity, the statement about the statement (or, B) is not. So for the nth time, since you keep confusing A and B, you cannot properly distinguish A and B, thus you don’t understand my argument.

            This stuff is basic mathematical logic, in particular, it shows up a lot during the Metaethics Sequences in Less Wrong, and in the general background knowledge needed for the discussion of Lob’s Theorem. One cannot force somebody to learn things, they can only learn them themselves.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “So for the nth time, since you keep confusing A and B, you cannot properly distinguish A and B, thus you don’t understand my argument.”

            —Unless your position is it makes sense because the statement is literally meaningless. —

            B

            As is
            —Perhaps I should have jumped straight to mocking you? Pointing out that if you ask Christians for examples they will freely give them? That the examples can be coherent? That most people don’t read moral philosophy for fun and so the bible is their main exposure? That “hard to read text decoded by specialists with years of training” describes, medicine, law, engineering and other fields and they might be treating this exactly the same way?

            Now, this is falsifiable. Do Christians turn to the New Testament when they have questions? Do they look to their pastors? These should be different if they actually consider that it has profound knowledge versus if it is just applause lights. —

            If this isn’t relevant to your argument, say so and provide the argument.

          • Frog Do says:

            Statements about statements aren’t “literally meaningless”.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Then it would be about the statement itself, wouldn’t it?

          • Frog Do says:

            Statements have meanings. Statements about statements have different meanings. Neither are “literally meaningless”.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “Statements have meanings.”

            Then state it.

          • Frog Do says:

            Statements about statements have meanings, too.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            And if you don’t actually say what the meaning is, no one has any idea what you are talking about. At no point have you actually written out anything, only rejected what I listed as what I thought you were talking about.

            If you are saying that what I think is your position is wrong, you are going to have to actually explicitly state your position so that other people can know what the heck you are saying.

          • Frog Do says:

            “This is broadly what I was trying to get at in my comment thread on https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/09/links-316-rulink-class/ about how ” “The New Testament reads like an instruction manual by our creator in terms of its helpfulness in this world, consistency with healthful psychology, ethics, and economics.” can be understood as a reasonable statement.” “

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            I’m aware you wrote that. You need to actually elaborate why ‘can be understood as a reasonable statement’. You seem to be saying it can be seen as reasonable because it is totally meaningless; it only exists as an applause light. I’ve pointed out that does not mesh with how Christians actually behave so it is almost certainly not what they believe.

          • Frog Do says:

            I doubt anything is an applause light, something can only be used as an applause light, this is a crucial distinction. The founding documents obviously have influence on the culture and tradition of the tribes they serve, there are comment threads above discussing this. The statement is clearly reasonable because evangelical fundamentalist Christianity is a relatively long lasting revivalist type interpretation that I don’t think is going away any time soon. The meme lives, it reproduces, it’s successful. Given that most new religious interpretations fail, this is not trivial.

            But it’s okay, “Frog Do’s believes his religion so that doesn’t work”.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            We finally have your explanation; although I’m touched you can’t post it without also ranting about me as well. Unfortunately it doesn’t make any sense at all.

            Reasonable has a definite meaning.
            ===
            rea·son·a·ble
            /ˈrēz(ə)nəb(ə)l/
            adjective
            adjective: reasonable
            1. (of a person) having sound judgment; fair and sensible.
            “no reasonable person could have objected”
            synonyms: sensible, rational, logical, fair, fair-minded, just, equitable; More
            intelligent, wise, levelheaded, practical, realistic;
            sound, reasoned, well reasoned, valid, commonsensical;
            tenable, plausible, credible, believable
            “a reasonable man”

            •based on good sense.
            “it seems a reasonable enough request”

            •archaic
            (of a person or animal) able to think, understand, or form judgments by a logical process.
            “man is by nature reasonable”

            2. as much as is appropriate or fair; moderate.
            “a police officer may use reasonable force to gain entry”

            synonyms: within reason, practicable, sensible; More
            ===

            None of those are remotely related to “the tradition the statement belongs to lasted a long time”.

          • Frog Do says:

            I was reminding you of your Righteous Crusade Against The False Religion and how meaningful communication can happen once you stop being a True Believer Fighting The Heathen. I managed to dumb it down enough so that you could finally understand it days after everyone else did.

            Unfortunately, you continue to reveal your ignorance by misusing a dictionary. Dictionaries do not define words, they record their common uses, which you would know if you had a basic knowledge of linguistics. “Rationality” doesn’t translate to “winning”, either, but then, that’s why Yudkowsky said it. Context is key, which is something you still doesn’t really understand yet.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            ” how meaningful communication can happen ”

            Meaningful communication is apparently repeatedly insulting the person you are talking to and refusing to actually communicate by ignoring the content of their response.

            “I managed to dumb it down enough so that you could finally understand it days after everyone else did.”

            No one else in the thread has actually showed comprehension so I have no idea where you are getting ‘everyone else’. In fact h…cg gave an explanation and according to you, its wrong (it is the friends you make along the way) so the only other person who stated what your opinion was didn’t get it.

            “. Dictionaries do not define words”

            No. They do however show how other people are using them. If you use a word and the definition is not how another person is using it, you shouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t clued in to your definition. You should also explain what definition of the word you are using.

            As it is you seem to have grabbed a bunch of buzzwords but aren’t aware of the reason or wider meaning behind them.

          • Frog Do says:

            No, we’re now in the meaningful communication stage. I have to let True Believer types run themselves down, so they reveal where they’re ignorant and then communication happens. That doesn’t mean I have to just accept your attempt to attack me, obviously I’m going to fight back. Of course, when they outgroup defends themselves it’s always illegitmate, isn’t it. Which is especailly funny, because I’m not even in the outgroup, but there isn’t any reasoning with True Believers when they get all worked up.

            Making friends, though a little glib, is an excellent way for a meme to reproduce, especially if it’s focused on establishing community norms. Everyone but you participating in this comment thread has shown basic comphrension of this point, since it was also one of the points of Scott’s post.

            And I know your grasp of the English language leaves you reaching for the dictionary several times in the comments for this post, but don’t Typical Mind here, other people are perfectly aware of following conversations via contextual clues. Your ignorance is not general.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “No, we’re now in the meaningful communication stage.”

            No, we are not meaningfully communicating. You have still not explained what you mean. You continue to attack my motives and continue to resist putting up something coherent.

            “Making friends, though a little glib, is an excellent way for a meme to reproduce, especially if it’s focused on establishing community norms. ”

            Except that is an entirely different thing than being reasonable and a different thing from being good at reproducing itself. It also appears to be a total rejection of the idea that people could be actually communicating information; that they actually believe what they say and it isn’t just empty words.

            “Everyone but you ”

            Feel free to quote them. Only H…cg seems to have stated anything.

            ” but don’t Typical Mind here,”

            Jargon is not magic spells. If I don’t know what you are talking about because you are not using words in their normal definition, you use words in their normal definition or define what you are talking about. I could try to guess but you keep calling me a liar when I do that. So you are complaining when I don’t guess AND complaining when I do guess and since your position doesn’t appear to be logically coherent all attempts to make a logically coherent guess will be wrong.

          • Frog Do says:

            Well, we clearly aren’t communicating anymore.

            Words do not have precisely the definitions that are in whichever dictionary you’re using. Human languages are not computer code, and should not be treated like computer code. Languages that are not computer code are not “literally meaningless”, otherwise people couldn’t compile dictionaries. If you don’t understand this, I don’t know what to tell you. I’d say study lingustics, but this is such a massive gap in understanding I’m assuming an actual autistic lack of understanding at this point. Languages, communication, it really doesn’t work the way you think it does.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            Reasonable has a definition. If you aren’t using that definition and someone points that out, you should explain what definition you are using. None of what you wrote does that.

        • Frog Do says:

          Dictionaries don’t work that way, which you still cannot comprehend. I am not your English teacher, nor your communication therapist.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            If you are communicating with another person and they say “what does that word mean” and point out it isn’t the meaning in general usage, you are going to have to explain what you mean.

  104. onyomi says:

    If there is such a thing as “outgroup exhaustion,” I think it may be a strong part of the cause of the growth of the alt-right and Donald Trump. The rural, white, straight, cisgendered, Christian man grew tired of being everyone’s favorite outgroup.

  105. moridinamael says:

    Dark Arts strategies for re-tribalizing the rationalsphere:

    – Synthesize or narratively construct a Hated Enemy. Establish the culture and beliefs of the Hated Enemy as being in opposition to Rationalist culture and beliefs. Bonus points if there actually exists a group of people who happen to coincide with the synthetic Hated Enemy.

    – Freely mythologize the formation of the Rationality Movement. Consistently refer to it as the Rationality Movement. Lionize the founders of the Movement.

    – Carefully establish a core dogma. Design it to be inclusive rather than exclusive, such that practically anybody can call themselves a Rationalist, similarly to how you can call yourself a Christian even if you don’t go to church and harbor serious doubts about major pillars of Christian ideology.

    – There are two ways of dealing with the heretical Post-Rationalists. The first, and superior option, is to insist that they are still Rationalists who just don’t see themselves as Joiners and so insist on calling themselves something different. This is a basic condescending/paternalistic approach, reminiscent of “you’ll grow out of those doubts.” The second option is to cast them as despicable infidels who undermine our Pure and True Rationalist Movement. I just don’t think this would work.

    – Choosing a costly, useless signaling token is difficult for Rationalists because they see themselves as exempt from such things by default. Something like “donate to effective-altruist causes” doesn’t count because it’s not viewed as useless signalling, it’s instrumentally valuable. The most organic way to create a costly-signal is to exaggerate something already associated with the core dogma. Brainstorming: invasive levels of Quantified Self practices (with obligatory sharing of data) are required; complete truthfulness at all times, like Eliezer does, is a commandment; etc.

    Feel free to contribute your own borderline-unethical suggestions below.

    • Jiro says:

      Something like “donate to effective-altruist causes” doesn’t count because it’s not viewed as useless signalling, it’s instrumentally valuable.

      Most members of groups don’t view their useless signalling as useless signalling. Try telling a Mormon, for instance, that the reason why Mormons become missionaries is to force Mormons to signal commitment to the religion rather than to actually gain converts.

      I would argue that effective altruism actually is such an example of signalling. It may technically be valuable, but gaining converts from missionaries is also valuable to the Mormons.

        • The whole point of signalling is that you signal characteristic X by doing something that is less costly to people who have characteristic X than to people who don’t. If contributing to EA charities is something less costly if you are a rationalist than if you are not, because rationalists want to do good in the most effective way, then it works as a signal of rationalism.

    • Bugmaster says:

      In terms of a costly signalling token, donating to MIRI and similar AI-risk organizations would work fairly well. Such donations have few (if any) tangible short to medium term benefits, and yet promise a nearly infinite payoff. Thus, they would work similarly to religious tithing.

      • Nita says:

        As far as I can tell, that was the intended result of the cluster of Eliezer’s ideas around “money is the unit of caring”, “purchase warm fuzzies and utilons separately”, “shut up and multiply”, and even “why our kind can’t cooperate”.

        But he kept it too subtle, so some people misunderstood and started donating to AMF instead.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          But he kept it too subtle, so some people misunderstood and started donating to AMF instead.

          Top kek.

  106. onyomi says:

    As a white, straight, cisgendered, secularish man whose ethnicity doesn’t mean much to him (can lay some claim to being Irish, but it’s not like I make a point of hanging out with other Irish Americans), I recall being jealous, as a child, of people who had some sort of natural group identity: the Chinese, the Jewish, the Greek-and-very-into-being-Greek.

    At the same time, in college, I always remember thinking that people who formed social groups on the basis of superficial similarity: the Asian American clique, the Jewish clique, the Indian American clique, were dumb. Of course, I ended up in my own clique of sorts–the nerdy white libertarianish-leaning male-dominated clique, though that seemed to me less dumb as it was, or at least seemed to be, based on modes of thinking which happened to occur more often in white men, but which were not inherent to being a white man.

    Though I also wonder if the dominance of white men in nerdy subcultures isn’t also an effect of the lack of other places for them to go and be around people like them: straight, white, male is the only identity which can’t be an explicit reason for a group because it is assumed to be evil.

    It still shocks me the extent to which, even in the most highly educated, tolerant, cosmopolitan groups, if you look at how people self-sort, they still tend to do so in accordance with superficial physical similarity: look around your ultra-progressive, elite university’s cafeteria for the black people table, the Asian table, and the Indian table. I was recently at a banquet for people studying China which consisted of about 75% Asians and 25% white people. There was no assigned seating. I somehow ended up at the white people table.

    • Randy M says:

      Maybe because the superficial similarity correlates with more meaningful personalty traits.
      Or, maybe skin color etc is just a handy jersey.

    • blacktrance says:

      My experience was the opposite. Growing up, doing things because of your ethnic identity and/or being really into it always struck me as wrong: you’re a person with lots of interests, why set them aside in favor of acting like people you’re very distantly related to?

      And at my relatively elite liberal arts college, there was a lot of racial diversity at most tables, the main exception being the Chinese international students who tended to stick together.

      • onyomi says:

        It struck me as wrong too, albeit more so after high school, but I also felt a little jealous of it because of the ready-made durability it offered. I was pretty socially awkward as a kid, though I still had a few friends. But my friendships were based on things like “we both like video games,” or “we just seem to get along well,” which is fine, but which could, and did, easily dissolve in many cases. If you’re Jewish-and-really-into-being-Jewish then you can always choose to stop being so into being Jewish, but that ready-made tribe doesn’t disappear, and is, to some extent, always there for you to fall back on if necessary.

        In college I moved more towards disliking that kind of thing because my university had a very strong tendency for all the Jewish kids to hang out with the Jewish kids, all the Korean kids to hang out with the Korean kids, etc. and that started to irk me more than inspire envy.

        • Some possibly contrasting observations from my own history:

          At some point my parents asked me if it had been a mistake not to bring me up within Jewish culture–going to Hebrew school, regularly celebrating the holidays, and such. My response was that I preferred to have been brought up within the religion I actually believed in, 18th century rationalism, the “religion” of Smith and Hume.

          On the other hand … . Some years ago I visited Israel. Talking with a stranger in the airport, someone local manning a desk, I felt more at home than I ever had in similar contexts elsewhere in the world.

          And, a very long time ago, I participated in a libertarian get together on Santa Catalina Island organized by Robert LeFevre (one of the models for Prof in _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_). That and the socializing that I think preceded it in the L.A. libertarian community, gave me a positive feeling of group membership that I cannot remember having ever had before.

    • Quixote says:

      Do you speak Mandarin or Cantonese?

    • Sastan says:

      Try going to jail for a bit, see how you feel about racial groupings after that.

      In a sufficiently protected and safe society, we have the luxury of allowing racial solidarity to decline, and that’s a good thing. But don’t think for a minute it is gone. It only awaits the situation which makes it important. Race is the ultimate tribe, and unless we maintain a very high standard of civilization, it will be returned to.

      • For more information on why racial classification is important in present day prisons, was much less important a few decades back, I recommend David Skarbek’s very interesting _The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System_.

      • NN says:

        Though one should note that the definition of “race” varies quite a bit from place to place. Virtually everyone who lived in Yugoslavia would be considered “white” in the US, but having the same skin color did exactly nothing to keep the Yugoslavs united after the fall of Communism.

        • onyomi says:

          I recall an interesting experience:

          I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty generic American white guy/mutt, though I can lay some claim to being Irish–I have a fair number of Irish ancestors, freckles, a sibling with red hair, etc.

          One day I was passing through the vast terminal of an international airport when someone carrying a sign labelled “Aer Lingus” and leading a herd of what appeared to be my long-lost cousins started beckoning at me furiously, since I clearly looked like I belonged in that particular herd.

          That was the first time that I realized there are sub-phylums of white people whose resemblance to me among other white people is arguably as salient as the resemblance I bear to all white people relative to say, Asian people.

          As a 21st-c. American it is always hard to imagine the days when, for example, Irish were the object of specific bias, because now Irish people just look like “white people” (also culturally integrated, and speaking with American accents now, of course) within the multi-racial world of much bigger differences we see in today’s US.

          But one can also imagine that, within a world of all white people, the difference between say, an Irish and an Italian might seem huge.

          It’s a movie cliche, but one imagines encountering aliens might unite humanity, as it would just give us a more different thing in comparison to which differences in skin color and language among humans might seem insignificant.

          • onyomi says:

            I think accents and voices work this way too. Sometimes I have the experience of thinking “so-and-so’s voice sounds a lot like so-and-so’s voice” only to later learn they’re from the same small town in Vermont or something. But neither of them sounds like they have an “accent.” But really they do–it’s just that it’s close enough to some abstract “standard American English” that variations are–wrongly–perceived as just individual idiosyncrasies.

    • Tibor says:

      I remember playing with the idea of buying the Jewish star pendant and wearing on a necklace it as a teenager (my mother is 1/4 Jewish, so I am not really Jewish in any meaningful way) to look “cool and special”. I never actually did that though.

      The sorting – yeah, this is unfortunately a real thing. I usually try to, if not actively avoid, then at least not to seek out the people from my country when I am abroad, but most people, regardless of where they are from, seem to do the opposite. It is also easier for me, since I come from a country of 10 million so I rarely meet many Czechs abroad anyway. But I would definitely go to the Asian table in your example.

      I had an English teacher in my hometown who had been living in Bohemia for some 10 years, but who had never learned any Czech and who would hang out with other English (and one Scotsman I think) in a local Irish pub. I wonder why he came to the country in the first place. Actually, at least based on my very limited experience, Americans tend to be more interested in interacting with “the locals” than the English, when they live abroad.

  107. LTP says:

    I think this is a very interesting post, and one that resonates with me in many ways. I think trying to get the best of both worlds of tribalism and atomization is something that people should be thinking more about.

    That said, I do disagree with a couple things. First, I think you overstate how important the kind of intense tribalism you’re talking about is to developing a satisfying social life. Certainly being apart of a high-trust, smaller, cohesive tribe does make it easier, but I think most people aren’t apart of any of these intense tribes and at the same time are apart of many weaker less intense tribes with weaker rallying flags. Such people make friends with individuals across these tribes, but are not friends with all in a particular tribe.

    Also, I think that intense tribes don’t necessarily have to be threatened by appropriation and entryism. Maybe it makes it a little harder to find and maintain an intense tribe, but I know lots of really hardcore nerdy people who still find the community they want despite the widening popularity of nerd culture.

    • Sastan says:

      They are threatened because entryism is threatening.

      Smaller groups are easier to gain status in. If you’re going to be fully devoted to a group, you need to be getting status for it. Entryism and turning a group threatens the accumulated status of the members. If the entryists manage to change the core values of the group, the whole power dynamic changes.

  108. ArlieS says:

    I am a software engineer of nerd-like disposition, clearly somewhere on the autism spectrum. I am also female. I’ve found myself very conflicted in the last few years, over attempts to make software development – and particularly open source development – more hospitable to women and girls.

    The problem, in a nutshell, is while I agree that people shouldn’t be excluded from a career for social reasons, most of the things deemed welcoming for women are somewhere between unpleasant and actively exclusionary for nerds, Aspies, and long time members of the tribe of software engineering geeks.

    I recently attended a gathering for women in tech which reminded me so severely of unpleasant exclusionary experiences in my past that I developed a serious headache and left the place early. I couldn’t decide whether I was, emotionally, back in high school, or at the one job in my past that stressed “social skills” over technical ability, where I developed a serious stress related illness. [Perhaps unsurprisingly, that employer has a good reputation for including women.]

    I listen to a lot of my fellow computer geeks, mostly white males, bemoaning adaptations being forced on us by well meaning people, and I’m extremely torn. On the one hand, there’s a lot of casual misogyny going on, and I’d like to see that stopped.

    But on the other hand, I don’t want to “pretend to be normal” in other to make a bunch of neurotypicals comfortable, at the cost of making myself uncomfortable. I don’t want their norms, of not talking shop during social events, not geeking out over tech toys, and especially of never ever saying what’s literally true. I don’t want my status based on my skill at a type of social interaction I experience as vicious politics and/or rampant ableism. And while I accept that I may well have lots of coworkers with whom I have nothing in common, I prefer a workplace where I enjoy hanging out with my coworkers – and I am really not going to _volunteer_ for an organization whose norms don’t accept me.

    What this article gives me is something to point to, in this context, to try to explain the positions of those nerdy male engineers who are a lot more outspoken on the subject than I am, but with whom I at least partially agree – without violating current taboos about what may and may not be said.

    It doesn’t help with the elephant in the room – tribes with power differentials, i.e. in this case the comparatively good financial prospects of software engineers, which make loads of social butterflies [= non-Aspie, non-nerds, non-compatible social style] want to join our tribe, at least briefly as a stepping stone to their true destiny in sales and/or management. [Sales and management being of course our anti-groups ;-)].

    But maybe pointing here may allow me to raise the issue without the usual predictable push back. I don’t care whether rampant extroverts enjoy programming, or get jobs doing it. But I want to hang out with my own kind, and not have my preferred style of social interaction actively rejected.

    • Thursday says:

      One of the things that is lost when mostly male groups are opened up to too many women is the bluntness, even rudeness that mostly male groups tolerate. That sort of moderate rough and tumble is really good for generating new ways to solve problems.

      You might want to take a look at this post by Jack Donovan:
      http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2014/07/donovans-10-law-of-female-sex-pollution/

      It’s interesting that there are some women who flourish better in these mostly male environments.

      —–

      I should note that there are (at least) two sorts of male style, nerd and Big Man:
      http://isteve.blogspot.ca/2007/08/nyt-says-nerds-are-hyperwhite.html

      • Anonymous says:

        It’s pretty amusing to track how Donovan swaps from guys, chicks, men, women in the first half (with one slip up) to the awkward males / females in the second half (with one slip up). Maybe he thinks his “law” is legitimate science and thinks the second usage sounds more science-y?

        In any event, in case anyone is trying to decide whether to click, it’s standard MRA nonsense.

        • gbdub says:

          I’m not into MRA, but the “groups of men are more blunt / rude than mixed groups” thing seems reasonably true, at least in a professional setting. And to some extent it’s a way to signal trust and in-groupness among peers. So when HR comes along and tells you not to do any of that lest you get fired and sued, it’s hard not to resent the policy – and the new employees that inspired it. And much as I hate to admit it, I do find myself being more guarded in my interactions with women at work, because a social faux pas that gets written off with “one of the guys” gets you canned if directed at a woman (or at least that’s the general feeling). It’s harder to trust / in-group someone you don’t feel you can be open around.

          Sad / funny anecdote: A woman in our office (we’re engineers, maybe 20% female) recently left for another job. Now, this woman had recently lost 50+ pounds – clearly put a lot of work into it and was very successful and justifiably proud about it. At a going away event, she lamented that no one had commented on her weight loss. Now, obviously we’d all noticed, and were suitably impressed – but were all so afraid of HR policies that no one said anything. So she felt crappy that no one noticed her effort, and we all felt like we had to walk on eggshells, when really we all would have been happier being open.

          So any the trick is to be welcoming without losing the openness and in-grouping that good-natured inter-nerd ribbing can create. Not really sure how to do that.

        • Daniel Keys says:

          Does it have a quote from CS Lewis about how feminist women will be welcome in male spaces when they can adapt to the blunt speech used there? Because I was looking for that quote recently.

        • Anonymous says:

          Doesn’t read like nonsense to me.

        • John Schilling says:

          I’m not into MRA, but the “groups of men are more blunt / rude than mixed groups” thing seems reasonably true, at least in a professional setting.

          Like you, I am an engineer – in a field that is maybe 10% female overall, and having worked in small remote sites where it was likely as not the only woman in the building was the secretary. I didn’t notice any general difference in the [generaly low] level of bluntness or rudeness between the no-women and few-women groups, nor even a change when women joined a previously all-male group. So I am skeptical of the claim that this is generally true in professional settings. The stereotype seems more appropriate to blue-collar settings, but I’m not in a strong position to comment on that.

          Top management sending down policies on how everyone had to behave themselves around women, that caused problems – but as much because of the inconsistent enforcement as the needlessly offensive nature of the policies.

          • I’ve heard that a shift in norms happens when a group is at least 10-15% women.

            I’m not sure whether secretaries count as part of the group so far as norms are concerned.

          • gbdub says:

            I would say the secretaries don’t, because they aren’t really “peers”. You go out of your way to be nice to them either way, because they’re the ones that keep the place running 😉

            John can you elaborate on the “Top management sending down policies on how everyone had to behave themselves around women, that caused problems “? Because that may actually be what I was getting at, I don’t necessarily think most women engineers here expect special treatment, just that a lot of men tend to treat them differently out of concern for the policies. You need a higher level of trust with your female co-workers before acting “natural” around them. (Then again there are a certain percentage of mostly old-timers that are legitimate anti-women-in-engineering, but they are a small and shrinking minority).

            It’s also entirely possible it’s company-specific, or that I and my direct peers are unusually conscientious about it. Or Nancy’s theory that you may be just below the norm threshold and we’re just above.

          • John Schilling says:

            Then again there are a certain percentage of mostly old-timers that are legitimate anti-women-in-engineering, but they are a small and shrinking minority

            This is certainly true, and part of the problem as I experienced it was that this minority of old-timers dominated the senior management, engaged in fairly blatant sexual harassment, while piously insisting on mandatory anti-sexual-harassment training and strict enforcement of ill-defined codes for everyone else.

            None of which resulted in any specific, useful guidance as to what sort of behaviors should or should not occur. Most of which sent the clear message that, if someone without a Y chromosome complained about sexual harassment, someone with a Y chromosome (but not old-guard management or their friends) would be thrown to the wolves in hopes of avoiding a lawsuit. This happened repeatedly and with disturbingly little correlation with actual sexual harassment.

            That was a particularly toxic environment, and one I am glad to be away from.

            Or Nancy’s theory that you may be just below the norm threshold and we’re just above.

            I have worked in groups of anywhere from 0% to 50% female engineers, and I haven’t seen any sign of a threshold effect.

            My hypothesis is that, aside from the oldest greybeards, pretty much everyone in engineering learned the profession at a college or university that was well above any “femaleness” threshold and so is accustomed to working professionally with women as intellectual equals. There’s no norm of e.g. posting centerfolds in your cubicle or other gross indecency – and on the other side, no expectation by female engineers that they will be working with male feminists carefully policing themselves against microaggressions. Everybody knows how to make this work.

            Management knows how to break it, and sometimes can’t help doing so because general demoralization and low productivity doesn’t end a management career but sexual harassment lawsuits sometimes do.

    • Andrew Wilcox says:

      ArlieS, I’d love hear what you’d like to see in terms of cultural norms or rules to avoid the problems with misogyny you’ve experienced.

      I think it would be great if we nerds and geeks came up with a code of conduct that would protect all of us while not damaging our style of social interaction.

      • ArlieS says:

        It’s a complicated thing and I don’t really have solutions. I know what would make me more comfortable, but I’m pretty sure others might want something else. The following are expressed in terms of women, but substitute any category you chose:

        There’s a continuum from:
        – active violence against women [with an internal continuum, from murder to e.g. butt pinching]
        – active exclusion of women [don’t hire her because she’s female, etc.]
        – reduced rewards to women for similar ability/activity etc. Including presuming that in a mixed team, the woman did the UI design etc.
        – regular derogatory references to women or girls as a category; also using the category itself as an insult [males refering to other males as “girls” to be insulting]
        – regular statements about all members of the category, as if we were all identical
        – requiring an individual woman/girl to deal with a male’s issues about women/girls. At it’s worst when the issue is that the male is unsuccessful at his desired heterosexual activities.
        – scheduling that tends to exclude women, such as the meeting at the strip joint, or conflicts with responsibilities more commonly imposed on women – which may be OK, if you know the people involved well enough, of if they are geek enough to speak up and push back, and you listen/negotiate.

        These are not things most nerds want to do to fellow nerds of any gender. But some are incredibly easy to do unconsciously, and others seem to result from a basic belief that few women are geeks, and that non-geeks want to muscle into geek social groups.

        Most of the casual derogatory references seem to be unconscious. I’ve discovered it’s hard to talk about someone whose behaviour I don’t like without using some none too accurate collective term as a handy pejorative shorthand. [Trying to stop doing this for 2 days was an amazing learning experience.]

        But the main thing is laziness, using heuristics to decide someone is “probably not a geek”, and coverting that to “can’t possibly be a geek”. So if a person doesn’t look like a geek, whether because they have breasts or because they are wearing a suit, better push them away without considering them as an individual 🙁 And besides, most geeks have a lot of grievances from past treatment, and between being triggered and wanting to “get back” at past oppressors, can easily act as someone else’s present oppressor.

        I believe we can and should work on overcoming these biases. But also that with some of the current inclusionary demands, we may not have sufficient motivation.

        Note also that I’ve intentionally left off the bottom of the usual continuum which would be cited by those trying to get more women and girls involved in just about anything. Those are often things which most geeks believe, with some reason, would not bother anyone who was a real geek.

        Thus for example, is it really worthwhile providing newcomers with a ration of idle social chit chat, or a face to face meeting, so that they will feel welcomed? Yes, if the goal is to get the job done, and data is gathered to demonstrate that newcomers who gravitate to such opportunities contribute to getting that job done – and no if they merely take a little longer, because of feeling welcomed, to decide that the project is not really for them. And also no if the goal is primarily to produce a congenial atmosphere for existing participants, and they regard social chit chat as slightly less attractive than e.g. a dental appointment ;-(

        Here’s an example that has stuck with me. I was late in discovering Stack Exchange, and when I found it, I loved it. My first question was not formatted according to community standards, and someone with sufficient privilege corrected it. I thereby learned the relevant standard, and followed it thereafter. Somewhat later, I attended an event for women in tech – a good one, overall. But it was taken as self evident there that Stack Exchange was an example of a nasty unwelcoming atmosphere, particularly uncongenial to women – because of precisely this behaviour. I frankly do not see this as a reasonable objection. And yet, I *have* seen some over the top knee jerk negative reactions on Stack Exchange, and recognize that the reason I don’t have them directed at me is fundamentally that I’m a member of the same basic subculture, and thus mostly do the right thing without being told – the very mind reading I object to when required of me elsewhere. With less feeling of belonging, perhaps I’d be expecting random people to “go off” at me, and avoid ever posting there.

        • Andrew Wilcox says:

          Derek Sivers had an observation that I found interesting: that the variation *among* men and the variation *among* women is greater than the *average* differences between men and women.

          For example, I’m a man, and I’d be very unhappy if I were pressured into attending a professional meeting at a strip joint. Some women would like to have a meeting at a strip joint. *On average*, of course, more men would like to have a meeting at a strip joint than women. Knowing the average however is not a strong predictor of individual preference.

          I think you’re right about laziness. I notice my instinctive brain (my “system 1” in Daniel Kahneman’s terminology) is highly attuned to noticing gender and prominently brings it to my attention. But of course just because my brain makes gender highly noticeable to me doesn’t mean I need to then be lazy and make no effort to learn anything else about a person.

          I wonder if much of what you describe could be covered by something like “don’t impose things on people that they don’t want that aren’t necessary for getting the job done”.

          Well that’s kind of a laborious formulation, but

          – if someone prefers a simple technical correction, or else prefers a warmer social interaction, don’t needlessly push them into a different form of interaction (even if currently most team members happen to prefer it)

          – if the job doesn’t require a schedule that would prevent someone from taking care of their kids, don’t force them into such a schedule (even if at present such a schedule wouldn’t be a problem for current employees)

          – don’t make derogatory comments about someone who doesn’t want that form of interaction (even if other people enjoy exchanging insults)

          – don’t impose your personal stuff on someone when that’s unwanted

          – this is kind of a stretch… but assuming that someone isn’t technical because they’re a woman, or paying them less because they’re a woman, or excluding someone because they’re a woman ~ sort of ~ fits — you’re making an imposition that’s unwanted and unnecessary.

          – and assault, aside from also being illegal (which some of this other stuff is too), also fits under “don’t do things that are unwanted and aren’t necessary for the job”

      • birdboy2000 says:

        Producing it is one thing, getting it accepted by a meaningful number of people (many of whom do not care about who gets swept aside, and a non-trivial number of whom are only interested in the subject because it gives them a socially acceptable way to hurt, ostracize, and bully others) is another.

  109. nomenym says:

    Remember, there are both inter- and intra-tribal forms of competition. That is, tribes compete with other tribes, but members also compete within the tribe. Presumably, we’ve evolved social instincts for both types of competition. The general rule seems to be that the red tribe is better at inter-tribal competition, and the blue tribe is better at intra-tribal competition. For example, many in the red tribe feel betrayed by people in the blue tribe, but they don’t feel betrayed by outsiders who oppose them (e.g. radical Muslims). Betrayal is a feeling reserved for members of your own tribe, or at least people who used to be in your tribe. Similarly, the blue tribe often feels embarrassed or ashamed by the red tribes sexism or parochialism. But again, despite universalist rhetoric, they don’t seem to feel embarrassed by outsiders who engage in even more extreme transgressions (e.g. radical Muslims). In other words, both continue to psychologically differentiate between the same groups, but it’s just that the blue tribe seems to invert many of the ordinary rules.

    The human monkey brain says that it’s better to have high status in a small tribe than to have middling status in the big tribe, so it’s often advantageous for social entrepreneurs to divide the group. However, it’s better to have middling status in a big tribe than to be conquered by another big tribe and reduced to low status.

    Perhaps this is why Cthulu always swims left. In times of relative peace and prosperity, people engage in more intra-tribal competition, and those who excel at intra-tribal competition will rise to the top. Intra-tribal competition also tends to fracture tribes into smaller units. It could be that modern identity politics is reaching the apotheosis of this trend, weakening the old religious and national identities by creating ever more antagonistic sub-groups that find it ever harder to coexist together in the same political system. The human propensity for intra-tribal competition is effectively running unchecked.

    The irony is that this slow dissolution of broad umbrella identities, like nationality and religion, that help bind large groups of diverse people together is being conducted in the name of universalism, but appears to just result in more fractured and narrow identities that are actually smaller and more homogeneous. Perhaps a good contemporary example would be the erosion of Britishness as an broad umbrella identity that bound together not just people of the British Isles, but even the extended British empire. Western elites have engaged in a sustained campaign of undermining that identity–framing it not as something to be proud of but rather ashamed of, or at least conflicted about. This was often achieved through universalist rhetoric and arguments, but the result has not been a flourishing of universalist sentiment. Rather, in the absence of a British identity, people are actually starting identify more strongly as English, Scottish, and Welsh, to such a point where Scotland very nearly and may yet leave the UK, while the UK is very close to leaving the EU.

    A broader and more inclusive identity is slowly being replaced by multiple narrower and less inclusive identities through intra-tribal competition which has so often takes the rhetorical form of left-wing universalism. Better to be high status in a small tribe than low status in a big tribe, right?

  110. Steve Sailer says:

    Rap was highly integrated 35+ years ago. I heard “Rapper’s Delight” on AM Top 40 radio in December 1979 and it struck me as a fun novelty style (although obviously culturally appropriated from Jamaican toasting) that would be big for a year or two. In 1980-81, cutting edge white bands like Talking Heads (Crosseyed & Painless), The Clash (Magnificent Seven), and Blondie (Rapture) all had rap hits. I assumed at the time that blacks would simply invent more new styles, as they had so many times in the past.

    Instead, however, blacks dug their heels in and stopped innovating. At the time that was stunning. Since Scott Joplin in the 1890s, African Americans had been great pop music innovators. But now they were stuck in a rut (that’s now 37 years old).

    • Brad (the other one) says:

      >But now they were stuck in a rut (that’s now 37 years old).

      I can’t tell if you’re serious or not

      Because, clearly, this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5vw4ajnWGA) has zero innovation, right?

      • Thursday says:

        I’m not saying it’s bad, but it sounds like a lot of other hip hop songs.

        • Urstoff says:

          Which can be said about any song in a genre one doesn’t regularly listen to.

          • Thursday says:

            Or it could just be true.

          • Urstoff says:

            Could be. You’d need to ask someone that’s quite familiar with the genre, though.

          • Thursday says:

            I don’t put stock in the claim that you need to be deeply learned in the way of hip hop to make such a judgment, just like you don’t need to be some expert in classical music to tell that Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner and Tchaikovsky are all doing something really different. Even more obviously you don’t need to be an expert to tell that today’s hip hop vs. 1980s hip hop isn’t much of a stylistic innovation compared to the differences between jazz, gospel, blues, soul, reggae.

            Talk about stating the obvious.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Thursday
            Is that obvious? How different do Mozart and Beethoven sound to you? How do you think that compares to how different they would have considered gospel and soul?

          • Urstoff says:

            Seems odd not to accept that; it’s a basic principle of pattern learning. People of an unfamiliar race look quite similar until you spend a good amount of time around them. Sports generally look like unorganized chaos until you are quite familiar with them. Why would it be any different in music?

          • Nero tol Scaeva says:

            80s rap sounds almost completely different from 90s rap. The fundamental differences are in the way that they rap; so “Rapper’s Delight” sounds nothing like “Diary Of A Madman”.

            And then there’s rap/hip hop made in France that sounds markedly different than rap/hip hop made in Mexico.

          • Thursday says:

            Seems odd not to accept that; it’s a basic principle of pattern learning

            You’re wildly exaggerating how much experience is necessary. It’s pretty easy to tell jazz from reggae, for example.

            Incidentally, the example of a new development in rap that sweeneyrod links to before sounds like a riff on Ice-T.

          • sweeneyrod says:

            @Thursday To you maybe, but I think many others would consider switching time signature every 8 bars quite innovative (in rap). What about this or this?

        • sweeneyrod says:

          I agree that that isn’t necessarily the best example of innovative hip hop (apart from anything else, it’s over 10 years old). But there’s been development from this to this (or even someone like Kanye’s stuff).

    • TheAltar says:

      A large portion of this may simply be changes that occurred in ownerships and popularizations of music around that time period rather than a reflection of the art being made. Billboard (who made the charts telling everyone what was a hit and what wasn’t) was bought by Affiliated Publications in 1987 and I’ve heard people complain that the methods used were changed along with the songs that started getting to the top of the charts. Billboard was later own by VNU/Nielson and now Prometheus Global Media.

      Currently, I am very strongly confident that massive amounts of innovation and creativity are taking place in music inside the US, but it all appears on youtube or other websites and outside of the public eye. The music I see while searching new and strange subgenres of music resembles nothing like what you hear on the radio or would easily come across unless you were looking for new and interesting music intentionally.

      • James Kabala says:

        At least for albums, the SoundScan-based charts of the 1990s were generally considered to be much more accurate than the previous charts. (I am less sure about the singles charts, since they included an airplay element, and I have no idea about today.)

    • arbitrary_greay says:

      But the question is: where is the new innovation coming from?

      The birth of genres has almost always coincided with the rise of new instrumentation/technology, and then the honing of how to play them. Blues and jazz arose from the guitar and saxophone, rock and funk driven by the creation of electrical guitar and bass, hip hop from the ability to sample and sequence.

      But the new genres? Synthesizers.
      So for a while, new music innovation became cost-prohibitive.

      Now that software-synths are becoming more and more available, no longer so hardware-bound, I expect innovation from some demographics to rebound.

      Another take is that innovation is just so global and cooperative now, that no one demographic is so solely responsible for the birth of new genres. Everyone’s jumping in at the beginning already. Location-based “scenes” never last as long as they used to. All roads lead to LA.

    • J Mann says:

      Tangential question: Has there been any major influential musical innovation by anyone in the last 20 years? It seems like psychedelic, disco, rap, and maybe even grunge are distinct musical fads, but has anything happened since then?

      I’ve been hearing more dubstep recently, but I think that’s just my listening habits changing. I guess there are a number of post-Amy Winehouse singers like Adelle or Elle King – does that count?

      • Nornagest says:

        The answer’s almost certainly yes, but it’s gonna be hard to distinguish a fad from a major influential musical innovation until its children have been around for a while and there’s a clear line of descent to study.

        We can easily say that for the likes of rap — twenty years ago (well, closer to twenty-five) was just about when it hit the mainstream, and now it’d be tough to find a mainstream genre that isn’t influenced by it in some way. The early electronic music scene too. But it’s gonna be hard to look at music today and use it to predict what weird little scenes will beget stuff that’ll take over the world in 2030, because that won’t happen until 2030.

        • J Mann says:

          Hmm. It seems like people who were into disco or new wave or punk knew they were into something new-ish. Those trends had distinct sounds, proponents, names, and sometimes even a fairly clear artistic aesthetic to separate it from everything else.

          I agree with you that it’s hard to know that punk would be seen as something more important than grunge when you’re in the middle of it, but is there anything like that now? Put another way, when my kids’ music annoys me, it’s because I think it’s a not-as-good example of something I’ve heard before.

          I’m going to chain off my Glee point below – I wonder if the popularity of Glee and singing competitions like American Idol mean that today’s kids are more comfortable buying stuff that’s more an update of past sounds than an innovation.

          Alternately, maybe I’m just too old, or my kids aren’t hip enough, for me to understand today’s innovations at all.

          • Here’s a general thought rather than a specific reply. By the late 60s/early 70s, I thought rock music (which I defined as music with a 4/4 rhythm and a great deal of its energy in the bass range) wasn’t going to last.

            It wasn’t that I didn’t like rock, but I’d bought the idea of young people as rebellious and innovative, and I thought there would be something as different from rock as rock was from Sinatra. I speculated that maybe there would be more complex rhythms or a return to romanticism.

            Instead, (I’m speaking as a person with pretty casual contact with popular music), rock never went away. Admittedly, techno has a faster and somewhat higher pitched beat. Rap is spoken rather than sung.

            There’s still new popular music which isn’t wildly different from the Motown I imprinted on. I will say I’m amazed at how mild the Stones sound to me now.

          • J Mann says:

            Nancy – it’s a Great Stagnation ™ of innovation! Clearly, musical innovation will continue to approach zero until we’re left with only repeating boy bands and Katy Perry clones.

          • Deiseach says:

            It seems like people who were into disco or new wave or punk knew they were into something new-ish.

            Anyone else remember the New Romantics? And the arguments about Spandau Ballet and were they promoting fascism with the release of Musclebound? 🙂

      • Hlynkacg says:

        I’d say that the mainstream acceptance of rap and the rise of EDM are probably the two most recent “innovations” that are readily identifiable as such. As Nornagest says, it’s hard to distinguish a major innovation from a passing fad until it’s children start showing up.

        As an aside I’ve been really enjoying the recent resurgence of old school blue-collar lyricism. (of which I would consider Adele an example) In the 50s it would have been classified as “country” but it is definitely it’s own thing now.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        I was hearing Jamaican dub on the B-sides of Clash singles in 1979, just as I was hearing Jamaican toasting, which then was culturally appropriated by American rappers.

        There’s not all that much stylistically in big time pop music today that didn’t exist in some rudimentary form on, say, college radio stations in 1979. In contrast, 37 years before 1979 was 1942 and popular music was very different, so different that people who had liked 1942 music could only shake their heads at what kids in 1979 were listening to. But, instead, today I listen to, say, dubstep and say, oh, yeah, Lee Perry was screwing around like that in the 1970s.

        There’s much less of a generation gap today than in the past. My tuba-playing father-in-law (b. 1929), the head of the Chicago musician’s union, loved classical, liked jazz, and despised rock. You don’t see those kinds of generation gap anymore.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Mid-Century America used to have generation gaps because it didn’t have all that much of other kinds of diversity. For example, the Catholic vs. Protestant gap pretty much disappeared on 11/22/63, which opened the door for the Generation Gap of the Sixties to be launched on 2/9/64 with the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show.

          Now we have other forms of diversity that seem more important so there isn’t much room for generation gaps. For example, urban white people have been wearing Ramones t-shirts for four decades now. There are probably 13 year olds wearing a Ramones t-shirt whose grandfathers wore a Ramones t-shirt.

          • J Mann says:

            On another tangent:

            Based on my observations on my own teenager, one change from my day is that because American Idol, Glee, and the like, kids today know and enjoy many of the rock hits from the 70s on. If you go to a highschool dance, the girls are as likely to sing along to Journey or Madonna as to Pit Bull. Back in the late 80s, even stuff like the Doors or the Beatles was for music aficionados, not cool kids.

      • arbitrary_greay says:

        We should all remember that Classical Music spanned centuries. Individual eras were each roughly a century long.

        20 years without a paradigm change is not that dire.

        And most genres’ evolution and development have basically been re-discovering/inventing concepts already well-plumbed in classical music, anyways. Note that the critical pinnacle of any particular genre tends to be the rock opera, the rap opera, the jazz opera, the unified album, where the album concept was tailored to a physical format length chosen just because it could accommodate the entirety of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          But popular music changed rapidly in style for most of the 20th Century, so rapidly that it was closely associated with the Generation Gap.

          But then it stopped changing dramatically and rapidly. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it’s a big change in pop culture over the course of my lifetime.

          • Arbitrary_greay says:

            Sure, but I’m just not sure that it’s something to worry about.

            The beginning of the Baroque Era would also have been a time of change, as the various structures and instrumentation of classical music were invented for the first time, but subsequently, it spanned for centuries.

            So as current music structures and instrumentation have stabilized, we may be in for a few decades of relative stability.
            (Of course, to me, it’s more that experimentation is occurring at such a rate that it feels more like noise than signal. No unified movements because everything is boiling in new directions all of the time.)

  111. Grob Nob says:

    As a deaf person I have to correct you — not all deaf people are patentedly ridiculous about their disability and enjoy the benefits of surgery. In fact, there are cochlear implant tribes (which are mostly correlated with the manufacturer of the individual’s implant) and they do function as support groups, and help each other with various things, nominally related to cochlear implants. Bearing a cochlear implant has its own trials, tribulations, and issues and it’s quite helpful to connect with other people who have shared life experience, obviously, since there are not a lot of us floating around.

  112. Sam says:

    Sorry, I haven’t read all the comments so I don’t know if this is raised above—please forgive me if it is!

    Scott’s point about the rallying flag being wrong has a second angle to it: if you’re willing to commit *that* much to the tribe, by using such an obviously self-harmful signal, it must mean you care very much about being a member of the tribe, right? I recall Robin Hanson talking about this (or, if not, it’s definitely in the ‘something I can imagine Robin Hanson talking about’), and here’s a link to Paul Krugman: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/tattoos-incompetence-and-the-heritage-foundation/ (Actually, now I’m not sure that this wasn’t linked from an SSC linkspost…)

    So—in a sense, the ‘worse’ the rallying flag is, the stronger the (potential) tribe it can build, because the tribe’s members will be signalling their commitment to each other by violating the out-group’s mores (or offending their sense of logic or decency or…). Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised that so many of the longest-lived, biggest, and just most successful tribes are, seen from a distance, based on obviously wrong premises and full of incompetents high-up in the hierarchy. (c.f., toxoplasma of rage—mutual agreement or even workable disagreement don’t generate enough heat and light to cultivate a bunker mentality and the bonding you get in a bunker.)

  113. ThrustVectoring says:

    This, in part, explains why I’ve heard reports of participating in social dance causing religious deconversion. Human natural abhors a social vacuum: most people will not drop their only or primary tribal affiliation.

    There’s an interesting language thing, too – you can often refer to, say, a Mormon person as just “a Mormon”. In some sense, people think of each other as instances of their tribal affiliation. It takes extra intellectual effort to not blur the line between being and belonging.

  114. TheAltar says:

    I witnessed some trends in rationalists during a visit in the Bay Area recently that make far more sense to me now when seen through the lens of your generation descriptions. The instrumental rationalists seemed to fit into 3 Generation type groups.

    Generation 1 agreed with 50% or greater of The Sequences and attempt to use the ideas from it, CFAR, and other sources in their daily lives to improve themselves. They seemed to take all of it quite seriously.

    Generation 2 possessed a mild respect for CFAR, less respect for The Sequences themselves (and likely read next to none of it), made sure to make a comment of disdain for EY almost as if it was a prerequisite to confirm tribe membership (maybe part of the “i’m not one of THOSE rationalists”?), and had a larger interest in books that their friends recommended for overall self-improvement.

    Generation 3 hadn’t read any of The Sequences, had read only a few blog posts, loosely understood some of the terms being regularly thrown around (near/far mode, far mode, object level, inside/outside view, map/territory etc.) but didn’t know the definitions well enough to actually use the mental actions of the techniques themselves, and considered themselves rationalists via group affiliation, showing up to events, and having friendships rather than being rationalists due to becoming more rational themselves and attempting to optimize their own lives and brains.

    I had limited exposure to the Bay Area and would be very interested if anyone else thinks these categories actually match the territory there. This also leaves out epistemic rationalists (some of whom I met) who don’t fit into the three generations presented above.

  115. discursive2 says:

    Re “I’m reluctant to say for sure whether I think it’s okay to maintain a tribe based on a faulty ideology, but I think it’s at least important to understand that these people are in a crappy situation with no good choices, and they deserve some pity.”

    That’s every tribe. If an ideology isn’t faulty, it doesn’t make a good rallying point because everyone just agrees with it, insiders and outsiders. No one is forming the sky is often blue tribe.

    Ideologies always deviate from reality in smaller or larger ways (because reality is fluid and beliefs are fixed). As soon as your tribe is based on an ideology, changing your beliefs to adopt to new information becomes a source of friction.

    Some ideologies are closer to reality than others (creationism for instance), and some tribes have better internal processes for updating their flags so create less friction. But if you are really interested in aligning your beliefs to reality in the most immediate way possible, then tribalism is always an impediment.

    The rationalists are interesting and ironic to me because it is a tribe formed around the flag of eliminating cognitive biases, but tribe-building is one of the most powerful cognitive biases out there. The end result is that rationalists seem to develop strong controversial views on subjects that don’t lend themselves to easy empirical testing (ai risk, utilitarian ethics, etc).

    • stillnotking says:

      But if you are really interested in aligning your beliefs to reality in the most immediate way possible, then tribalism is always an impediment.

      I don’t think this is true. If you are an Allied soldier in WWII and Tokyo Rose tells you to lay down your weapons because the Allies have surrendered to Japan, you will greatly benefit from having the knee-jerk response of disbelieving everything Tokyo Rose says. This is the most likely explanation for why tribalism evolved in the first place. If it had no survival value (= reality congruence, at least to a first approximation), it wouldn’t exist.

      • discursive2 says:

        I’m not saying that ones’ tribes’ beliefs are always wrong. A broken clock is right twice a day. And incorrect beliefs that are empirically falsifiable tend to gradually disappear from a tribe’s set of flags over time (though it can take a while). I’m just saying, if your goal in life is having as correct a set of beliefs as you can, then tribalism is an impediment because you’re going to have a hard time in the cases where your tribes’ beliefs do diverge from reality (whereas, someone who wasn’t a patriotic american could still pretty easily reach the conclusion that Tokyo Rose wasn’t on the up-and-up).

        Re: why tribalism evolved, I’ve heard the theory that tribal beliefs are in fact likely to be costly to hold, because if it wasn’t costly to believe them, outgroup members would believe them too, and they would be a weak signal of tribal affiliation. In other words, the survival cost of reality-incongruent beliefs is outweighed by the survival benefits of having a bunch of people who trust you because you share their wacky theory of reality.

  116. Stezinech says:

    Typo in section 4, fifth last paragraph: “On the other hand, in countries that have non-ethnic notions of heritage, patriotism has an opportunity to substite for racism.”

  117. blacktrance says:

    One advantage of groups that rally around an idea is that they develop reputations based on their secondary characteristics, which reduces search costs – someone who wants to find similar people can just look for the flag. This causes the problems in the post, such as another group taking the flag from yours, or the flag being a belief that turns out to be false. But to what extent are flags actually necessary? On a small scale, there are groups of friends who have a lot in common with each other but aren’t united by anything in particular – maybe it’s possible to scale that up.

    Maybe there’s room for some kind of hybrid of Facebook, OkCupid, and Meetup.com, where people would be matched to social groups based on a combination of their interests and personality traits. Such a community wouldn’t be founded around an idea, so there would be no need to worry about a foundational belief being false, nor any single hobby, so they wouldn’t be able to identify as gamers, mountain climbers, etc, so they wouldn’t be threatened by people moving into any one hobby. And if you choose to leave a community, it would make it easier to find another.

  118. catullus63 says:

    The obvious response is that these issues are actually discussed at length and in detail, but in the social sciences, esp. anthropology and sociology, which are often not as familiar to hard science and comp science types.

    I would warn against assuming that there are pre-existing qualities that cause humans to form associations. Human beings naturally form associations and create the qualities that they feel distinguish them from other people. I’ve met comic book fans who were very sexually active, but this didn’t stop them from viewing themselves as basically sexually inept, and adopting the appropriate misogynistic beliefs to match. People rate their personal qualities very badly, but ascribe personal qualities very freely.

    • John Ohno says:

      A really important point, here. Scott seems to systematically overestimate the importance of genuine differences in early stage tribe differentiation, when really such differences can be arbitrary or (mostly to fully) imaginary.

    • Came here to basically say the first part of your comment. These sort of insights will be typically discussed in an undergrad course in more detail. I feel Scott and many others with an interest in this sort of thing would like sociology if they weren’t horribly put-off by the SJ theme that dominates the field’s image.

      • Samuel Skinner says:

        Some of us got tempted into economics because it offered the same thing but with math 🙂 It was a trap 🙁

      • Scott Alexander says:

        I’ve read some sociology. They certainly discuss ingroups and outgroups forming over different things, and probably some sociologists understand this very well, but I felt like I didn’t understand it reading sociology until I figured it out for other reasons.

        • Fair enough, as always I think very highly of your writing, just was surprised how similar to sociology this felt when I know you’re not a huge fan of the field. It would probably be more helpful for me to try to be more specific too, but memory is fuzzy – Weber is obviously very big in sociology of religion (but takes a sort of inverse approach to this iirc, not so good on this part of Weber), and I think Focault is (despite being totally nuts) good at putting ideas into their historical and institutional context, but I know there’s probably better / other stuff I just can’t remember. Sociology of religion isn’t my strong point, maybe somebody else can make better suggestions.

  119. A couple of points, separated by more than two centuries, on a desirable feature of tribes:

    Responding to Hume’s argument in favor of an established church to bribe the indolence of the clergy, Smith writes, of a member of a society with many small sects:

    “All his brother sectaries are, for the credit of the sect, interested to observe his conduct, and if he gives occasion to any scandal, if he deviates very much from those austere morals which they almost always require of one another, to punish
    him by what is always a very severe punishment, even where no civil effects attend it, expulsion or excommunication from the sect. In little religious sects, accordingly, the morals of the common people have been almost always remarkably regular and orderly; generally much more so than in the established church.”

    And David Skarbek, in his very interesting book on prison gangs, argues that a major part of their function is to maintain the reputation of their members. The gangs are racially defined, loosely speaking. The reason is that race provides a marker easily observed by outsiders that tells them “this person is part of gang X and they will punish him if he buys drugs from me on credit and then does not pay for them, or does anything else that lowers their group reputation.”

    • Sophie Grouchy says:

      I thought I had written a blog post about this exact thing, but it must have been a Facebook post :p.

      Amusingly, I was comparing how I felt that in personal situations I could trust SCA members (where anti-social behavior is noted and harms reputations, and people are often members of a visible groups/households) significantly more than I could trust members of the rationality community (who consider it a badge of honor to not care about someone’s personal qualities or anti-social behavior as long as they were interesting.)

  120. Cererean says:

    “Is there such a thing as conservation of tribalism? Get rid of one tribal identity and people just end up seizing on another? I’m not sure.”

    On the other hand, is there such thing as conservation of tribality? That is, the more tribes a person is a member of, the less strongly they associate with the average tribe of theirs. In which case, the way to bring down barriers between people would, ironically, be to promote the formation of lots and lots of tribes.

    Say that everyone is a member of three tribes – the left or right, up or down, back or forward tribes, which come in opposing pairs. But the tribes overlap such that there will never be a person who is left-up-back *and* a person who is right-down-forward, so any two people picked at random will both be members of at least one of the tribes…

    Alternatively, we could stick it to E.T. and give humanity something to aspire to, such as galactic supremacy. We don’t know if there are any aliens out there, but we do know this – humans are superior!

    • Sastan says:

      I would say probably.

      But always think in terms of status. If you belong to a lot of groups, you need to have pretty high status in your primary group. No one wants to be low man on the totem pole in sixty different groups. Hence, high status people often like to pretend to be “above” tribalism. Easy for them to say, the whole tribe is behind them. Low status people need their tribes, because it is the only way to increase their relative status above where it is in the larger society. You may be overweight and unemployed, but if you can tell a story, you can be DM! On the other hand, if you’re John Lennon, and you literally cannot fight off all the women trying to mount you like a pony, sure, “imagine no nations!”. When you are on top, enlarging the number of people in your tribe only benefits you. If you are on the bottom, it hurts you.

  121. stargirlprincesss says:

    Hail Scott the True Rightful Caliph.

    [The article is really great. Its hard to come up with anything to say except to praise the true king.]

  122. AR says:

    I find that I’m thinking more and more these days of the “philes” (intentional tribes) in Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age.”

    • Nornagest says:

      I’ve thought for a long time that the Death Eaters, as much as anything else, represent the ideas in the first half of The Diamond Age finally bubbling to the surface of geek culture in a big way. There had been rumblings before — I used to be friends with a guy who was trying to design a system of culture-neutral ideographs inspired by the book — but nothing on this scale.

      No obvious representation for the second half yet, but I’ll give it time.

      • jeorgun says:

        What would an obvious representation of the second half even look like?

        • anonymous user says:

          The Yellow Turban, Taiping, Zhang Xianzhong or Boxer rebellions, to name a few possibilities

          • jeorgun says:

            I wasn’t thinking of the Red Fists— it seems like They Who Must Not Be Named are perfectly happy to take up that mantle— so much as the Drummers and the Mouse Army.

    • Wrong Species says:

      This is one of the things that religion does better than secular institutions. Philes already exist all over the world. They’re called churches. Secular people just need to find a way to build that same sense of community without the spiritual aspect.

  123. jes5199 says:

    I wish that there was something that captured the thing that Myers-Briggs types was dancing towards. I’m a member of a community that has an unusually high concentration of people who identify as INFP or other NF variants (I’m the only INTP in the group, as far as I know.)

    But everyone agrees that Myers-Briggs is bunk, right? So what’s going on?

    • suntzuanime says:

      Psychology is completely incapable of telling what’s bunk and what isn’t. Makes sense there’d be some false positives along with the false negatives.

    • Frog Do says:

      What is this INFP group, so I can join it.

      • jes5199 says:

        Your best bet would be to join everything2.com in the late 90s or early 2000s.

        (but a bunch of us ended up in Portland, Oregon. also Vancouver, B.C.)

        • Frog Do says:

          Well I have always been looking for reasons to head north and west.

        • Nornagest says:

          I’ve met a bunch of the Portland noders, though I was only ever peripherally involved in E2. Strikes me as a weird scene.

          • jes5199 says:

            and this place doesn’t?

          • Nornagest says:

            Did I say that?

          • The Facebook climate arguments strike me as a weird scene, full of people interested in strutting themselves and insulting those who disagree with them, with very little interest in actual arguments.

            This place strikes me as entirely normal. Most civil and mostly reasonable people talking about stuff.

    • Alraune says:

      The systemization is a lie. Some of the data points are real.

    • nomenym says:

      Keirsey’s Temperament Sorter is a better version of MBTI, mostly because it’s a lot more modest in its aims. That is, it’s mostly just a shorthand way of describing particulars clusters of personality traits. It may not be the best system, but it’s good enough for many purposes.

      It’s really not all that dissimilar to the five factor model. MBTI’s extraversion/introversion axis is more or less the same as the big five’s extraversion factor. MBTI’s judging/perceiving axis sort of folds together the big five’s conscientiousness and openness to experience factors. MBTI’s thinking/feeling axis sort of folds together the big five’s agreeableness and neuroticism factors. Finally, MBTI’s intutive/sensing axis is basically abstract vs. concrete thinking or communication and seems to be rather mixed up with IQ, though people tend to be kind of squeamish about acknowledging that.

    • onyomi says:

      Apparently a hugely disproportionate percentage of libertarians, like myself, get INTJ, so it must be measuring something, though maybe not exactly what it claims?

  124. Bugmaster says:

    The flip side to all this is that, if your tribe is reasonably mature and has a decent number of members, then your tribe’s banner is probably just an empty symbol. Thus, if you truly believe that your tribe of like-minded people is saving souls for Jesus / protecting the primacy of the rightful Caliph / raising the sanity waterline / saving minorities from oppression / etc., then you’re wrong. All you and your people ever do is just hang out with each other, and bash all the other people who are not your people. That’s it — but then, maybe that’s already enough.

    Sure, there may be a few powerful and charismatic individuals in your movement who seem to be advancing the cause; but, most likely, they are just advancing their own personal agendas at your expense.

    • Minor point, to correct possible historical misunderstandings.

      The Shia don’t claim that one of theirs is the rightful caliph. They gave up the claim to the caliphate very early in the conflict and shifted to the position that their Imam, a descendant of Ali, was the inspired religious authority.

      According to the Ashari, the group running Iran, there were twelve Imams in the line of descent and the twelfth went into occlusion–is still invisibly around. Some other Shia recognize seven. There was no principle of primogeniture, so different Shia groups divided on which descendant to follow.

    • hlynkacg says:

      Granted, get a large enough group and you’ll find a lot of people sitting on their asses or just doing the bare minimum to maintain. Human’s gonna Human.

      But there are people who take up the burden and that too has a certain appeal to a certain sort of person. Where do you think all the money for “bed nets” (or whatever else) goes exactly?

  125. Lola says:

    Smiley face to you for articulating a bunch of things I have thought about. 🙂

    I try not to judge people based on tribal affiliation ever since I realized a handful of those things.

    However, I do think it is subtly detrimental to hold any detrimental (e.g. false) rallying flag. For my part, I often try to define my tribe membership either with no especial flag (“I just like hanging out with these people okay”) or with a flag I expect that people can accept or not with few consequences (e.g. we really like hexagons here).

  126. -_- says:

    I think that very neurotypical people naturally think in terms of tribes, and the idea that they have to retool their perfectly functional tribe to conform to the exact written text of its holy book or constitution or stated political ideology or something seems silly to them. I think that less neurotypical people – a group including many atheists – think less naturally in terms of tribes and so tend to take claims like “Christianity is about following the Bible” at face value.

    This seems to come out of nowhere? Like, why the assumption “Atheists take the claim ‘Christianity is about following the Bible’ at face value because they skew neurotypical”, rather than assuming it derives from either judging the Outgroup or just not caring enough to think about the nuances of other tribes? I’ve had to spend as much time explaining “I’m Jewish and I don’t believe in God” to atheists as well as Christians, I’m pretty sure. And just spend three seconds searching for “[tribe/group with a moral (sometimes factual) component] are hypocrites”.

  127. Kevin C. says:

    “Is there such a thing as conservation of tribalism? Get rid of one tribal identity and people just end up seizing on another?”

    According to Carl Schmitt’s “The Concept of the Political”, yes. For him, all politics ultimately reduces to the distinction between “friend” and “enemy”; to quote on his definition of the latter:

    The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.

    The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy. A private person has no political enemies.

    In other words, the “enemy” is any group which your tribe would rather fight than allow to control your tribe and its way of life. And thus, Schmitt essentially says all politics comes down to tribal boundaries: who is in the tribe and who isn’t.

    Even without Schmitt, it seems clear to me that, given our evolution as small-group-social hunter-gatherer omnivore apes, tribalism of this sort appears pretty well “baked into” our make-up.

  128. Kevin C. says:

    When I read this:

    These cultural change projects tend to be framed in terms of which culture has the better values, which I think is a limited perspective. I think America has better values than Pakistan does, but that doesn’t mean I want us invading them, let alone razing their culture to the ground and replacing it with our own.

    the part of me that likes to play Devil’s advocate asks, “well, why not?” History is full of people who’ve believed in forcefully exporting their “better” values (some groups seem to have made a habit of it). And can’t a consequentialist case be made, so long as the lost utility from coercing the change is outweighed by the utility gain from switching to the superior tribal values?

    • NN says:

      Historically the “lost utility from coercing the change” has frequently involved millions of deaths, even in the most successful cases like Japan after World War 2. And often times it doesn’t work. After all, Pakistan is itself the product of a centuries long attempt by Great Britain to forcefully export their “better” values.

  129. NoahB. says:

    So can we think of groups or cultures or societies where “average tribalism” is markedly lower than it is in, say, the US? My rough impression is that there is some substantial variation here, I’m not sure, at for example the cross-national level. I think this could speak to the conservation of tribalism idea that grabbed my attention. The extent to which we should be worried about trying to reduce patriotism backfiring on us by simply pushing people to substitute one kind of tribalism for another will depend on that rate of substitution. My guess is that Swedes are, on average, less tribal or at least less attached to their tribes than are Americans. So can we reduce American nationalist tribalism and end up with net less tribalism? I would like to think so. I’m not sure what factors might be behind any of my supposed cross-national (or cross-group) differences in tribalism, though. Education? Liberalism of the social space in which you grew up? A stable economic situation allowing you to not worry about competition with other groups for a nice, good life? Simple homogeneity? Rural-ish demographics?

    • Sastan says:

      I think there is a conservation of tribalism. The energy that Swedish tribes once directed at the German tribe, for instance, might now be focused on some internal conflict (the Swedish Democrats spring to mind). With peace and prosperity, the tribal divisions that matter shift to internal ones. The tribes that become important are within, rather than without the national one. It’s becoming similar in America. But because we’re the biggest thing going, we have to* be involved in all these outside disputes, and hence have to keep some small bit of nationalism going.

      *I mean, not really, but the people demand it.

      • NoahB. says:

        Sounds like a plausible and reasonable proposal. I’m not so ready to make the fairly strong assumption that all groups of people or all tribes have equal strength of tribalism. Certainly, as discussed in the post, some tribes seem inherently stronger than others, often due to an interlocking set of identities plus family ties, early socialization, and so on. And it seems reasonable to think that there is quite a bit of individual variation in how tribal one is — let’s say the individual-level sum of all tribal ties. I guess I’m just thinking that it’s quite plausible that some tribes, say, the Swedes, have successfully included a norm of “let’s be a bit less tribal about everything” into their tribe’s norms. Not zero tribalism, of course. Swedes still root for their sports teams, political parties, local cultures, and everything else. But already if they’re generally not very religious, not very nationalistic, not super strongly racially or ethnically identified, and more clustered around left-ish liberal-ish politics, we’ve already cut away some of the biggest tribalisms. Feelings about the social democrats vs greens or whatever seem likely to be less strong than those things.

        Or let’s take Germany as an example. Germans clearly set themselves a goal of essentially eliminating one sort of tribalism after WWII and they did pretty well at it. If conservation of tribalism held, wouldn’t we expect to see Germans being super-rabid about all sorts of things — way more rabid than the French or Brits or Swiss? I don’t feel like we see that. Political, sporting, religious, ethnic, cultural tribalisms all seem about the same or weaker to me in Germany compared to any number of other countries.

        • Sastan says:

          You may be right, but we’d have to wait for a semi-serious external threat to see for sure.

          If they’ve really become less tribal, it will be apparent. I suspect that peace, prosperity, and the US providing all the security muscle has lessened the need for tribalism displays, but it remains as strong as ever. I don’t know how one would test for that, and I could be completely wrong. If the mass influx of refugees continues and the attendant crimes rise more than would be probable, perhaps we will find out.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I’m just not sure what your point is.

            Yes, I believe that in the zombie apocalypse, tribalism and racism would become a lot stronger. That’s not too controversial. What is your takeaway from it, that causes you to keep bringing it up?

            Are you arguing we sharpen our tribalist instincts because things are likely going to collapse? Are you saying we should do more to promote economic prosperity so that tribalism doesn’t become stronger?

            Or are you just pointing it out for no reason? I imagine not, but I’m not sure what you want people to take away from your comments on the subject.

    • Psmith says:

      I’m not sure what factors might be behind any of my supposed cross-national (or cross-group) differences in tribalism, though

      Historical levels of inbreeding. See:
      https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/start-here/
      https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/clannishness-defined/
      https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/where-hbd-chicks-hypothesis-works/
      etc.

  130. Ghatanathoah says:

    I’ve heard that steelman of cultural appropriation before, and while I agree that it could happen in theory, I’m skeptical of how frequently that could happen in practice, especially in a large and pluralistic society. It seems like in most cases people should be adept enough to figure out new ways to filter out people who don’t share all their values. Why couldn’t the rappers in the hypothetical divide rap into two genres let’s call them “Old School” and “Founding Fathers” and then get a couple more markers to differentiate them? They do that in real life, there are different subgenres of rap!

    I have heard of some instances of people conducting hostile takeovers of subcultures, but it seems like eventually people who escaped the subcultures formed somewhere else. And the same norms of pluralism that occasionally result in subcultures getting taken over are also the ones that allow them to exist in the first place.

    Furthermore, there are many advantages to letting a culture spread. Sometimes the changes people make are genuine improvements. For instance, when comic books fandom was taken over by adult fans and started appealing to them instead of children, children benefited too because they now got to read cool violent comic books made for adults instead of dumbed down Bowdlerized comics made for kids. Sometimes “appropriated culture” can serve as a gateway into the old culture. I know a lot of people who have become fascinated by the history of rap music, learned a lot about it, and come to revere the earlier rappers.

    On the other hand, most of my objections to anti-cultural appropriation rhetoric would disappear if people replaced “You’re a horrible culture thief!” with “When you’re doing that, make sure not to accidentally trick people into thinking you have more in common with them than you really do. You might get their hopes up.”

    Of course, I say this from the perspective of someone who grew up in a small town where finding someone who was even mildly interested in the same fandoms as you are felt like finding a glass of water in Death Valley. I have a lot of trouble empathizing with people whose problem is that too many people like the same things they do.

    EDIT: To clarify what I’m saying, let me quote Scott’s Fake Consensualism Post:

    I no longer try to steelman BETA-MEALR arguments as utilitarian. When I do, I just end up yelling at my interlocutor, asking how she could possibly get her calculations so wrong, only for her to reasonably protest that she wasn’t make any calculations and what am I even talking about?

    I think the steelman of appropriation is giving it way too much credit, in the same way the idea that BETAMEALRs are doing utility calculations is. It seems like much of the reaction to appropriation is a knee-jerk emotional reaction. The whole steelman is a plausible ev-psych reason why such a reaction would have evolved, but it’s far from the only one (for instance, insisting that people treat the same things sacred as you is a good way to assert dominance over them).

    I think another thing to consider is that in a pluralistic society that instinctual knee-jerk reaction, even if it evolved to protect a culture, is much less useful in a dignity culture with rule of law. In a stone-age village your culture could be destroyed if its sacred values are mocked by other people. That’s still possible, but much harder in a society with rule of law and a right to privacy, where if people disrespect your tribe you can just hold tribal meetings in private places where they aren’t allowed in.

    • suntzuanime says:

      I dunno, I would use comic books fandom as an example of the exact opposite. I was a kid after the colonization of comic books, and I found my dad’s old comic book collection to be much more appealing than the overproduced alien nonsense that was currently for sale. Not all children want dark, gritty, hyperrealistic “cool violence”? The brighter, less complex stuff that people try to sell to children is that way because in general that’s what children want.

      Although I guess you framed it in terms of what benefits children, rather than what they want. Possibly watching Spawn rip someone’s spine from their body as detailed gore drips onto the panel boundary builds character or something.

      • Nornagest says:

        Can we really describe the situation with comics as a colonization process? The medium pivoted to adult fans through the early-to-mid Nineties, but those adult fans were there already, they just weren’t being catered to until someone noticed that collectors were buying a large fraction of issues. It’s more or less the opposite of the shift toward casual gaming, for example.

        Artsier, more literary titles like Watchmen and Sandman were involved in some of the contemporary changes in style and emphasis, but by and large the artsiest and most literary came out early on — the lessons the industry learned from them had less to do with complexity or sophistication and more to do with being adult in the sense of R-rated. Spawn is easily a less literary work than, say, Claremont-era X-Men, and Spawn was nowhere near the bottom of the barrel as Nineties titles went. Trust me, I’ve got a toy plastic suitcase somewhere full of the most miserable shit imaginable.

        • LHN says:

          It was in many ways the opposite of colonization: the pattern for the first few decades of comics was for kids to read them for a few years and then stop, to be replaced by the next wave of kids reaching the appropriate ages.

          But there was a slowly growing number who kept reading and talking about them. Some of those went into the creative side themselves, pushing in the direction of the sorts of stories they’d want to read. That overlapped with older readers who began to organize into communities, open and patronize specialized comics stores, and engage in dialog with the creators (first via letters columns, then through conventions, later through the net).

          The emergence of the direct market (nonreturnable sales to comics stores, vs. returnable newsstand distribution) was another push. DM books were more reliably profitable, and as sales declined overall comics became less attractive to newsstands.

          That was somewhat self-reinforcing, since if they’re not in places kids go with their non-fan parents, then those kids were unlikely to become part of the comics-reading audience at the traditional age. So the average reader age continued to creep up, and it made increasing sense to for the market to shift likewise.

          So it’s not colonization in the sense that new people came and pushed out the old. Rather, the old group decided not to leave as their predecessors had, and that reduced the space available for catering to newcomers.

          That said, given the decline of serial magazine fiction in every other field, increasing competition for kids’ attention from TV, video games, big-budget action movies, etc., and even other comic genres (mostly manga or manga-derived), it’s very possible that the alternative to that shift would have been for mainline superhero comics to fade out entirely.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Yeah I’ll agree that the cohort issues make the “colonization” metaphor a little strained here. I’m not saying that any particular person did anything wrong, just that it’s a shame what happened to comic books and not something we should be pointing to to demonstrate the wonders of cultural appropriation.

          • LHN says:

            It really seems as if it should have been possible for comics-for-kids and comics-for-fans to coexist. I’m not sure if it’s largely coincidence (a happy one for the continued survival of the industry) that decline in public availability and interest happened at about the same time fans began to emerge as a market. Or if the idea of stories being canonical combined with the sales power of crossovers meant one had to replace the other.

            (DC has done a fair number of all-ages books set outside the main DCU over the decades, some quite good. But none has really caught fire. It also firewalled the over-17 books in its Vertigo imprint for a while, but the mainstream books were still often filled with material most people wouldn’t give an eight-year-old.)

    • arbitrary_greay says:

      As with the re-definition of “X is X plus power,” new cultural appropriation discourse builds in harm as the impact of it. Under that framework, appropriation is when the older sub-category receives no benefits from the overall popularization engendered by the new sub-category. Often, the older sub-category is discriminated against for the same traits that make the new sub-category cool.

      For example, cheap ethnic food by original ethnic populations is mocked in the school cafeteria, sneered at by Yelp reviewers as dirty places for poor foreigners. They barely turn a profit, hence lacking the labor to clean the place.
      Ethnic food subsumed into fancy fusion venues, helmed by a majority ethnicity person who was so nobly inspired by ethnic food is critically praised and priced to match. Such places gentrify the area, and soon all of the original restaurants have to close shop because of the appropriation.
      Yes, I’m going to resent the non-Asians who never order anything but Glistening Orange Lumps and Glistening Brown Lumps and Fried Rice with Soy Sauce (which is a true abomination) who turn right around and deride the smell of my chives dumplings and make jokes about our eating dogs. But keep in mind that it’s the latter part that is the problem, and not the former all by itself.

      What exactly is being appropriated and why matters. Some people appropriate rap/black culture because they associate crime signifiers as edgy, taking on those traits makes them look/feel more badass. But they’re making money from that image, while a black person with the exact same posture/clothing gets profiled by the police.
      That’s where the harms in the new steelman of cultural appropriation are.

      For a geek example, consider “glasses make one look smart.” For hot people, that makes them look hot and smart, and thus even more attractive. For some geeks, that singled them out to be bullied back in the day. (“Know-it-all four-eyes!”)

      So it’s less “accidentally trick people into thinking you have more in common with them than you really do,” it’s that damaging stereotypes tend to be perpetuated by appropriation. Thinking the beat has a cool mathematical pattern and is very danceable, fine. Thinking the beat is edgy and exotic, not fine.

      Too bad most actual talk about appropriation doesn’t investigate the difference. Damn those baileys.

    • EyeballFrog says:

      It seems like most of the examples of cultural appropriation that are usually pointed to is stuff like white people wearing cornrows, which doesn’t fit the steelmanned definition of cultural appropriation at all. It’s an arbitrary way to shame people into submitting. In other words, it’s yet another example of Social Justice and Words Words Words.

    • Deiseach says:

      you can just hold tribal meetings in private places where they aren’t allowed in

      And then they go to court to force you to permit them entrance because under the law this is discrimination on the grounds of race/sex/belief etc., or they crash your events in the name of bold acts of striking a blow at patriarchy/equality/whatever.

      For instance, when comic books fandom was taken over by adult fans and started appealing to them instead of children, children benefited too because they now got to read cool violent comic books made for adults instead of dumbed down Bowdlerized comics made for kids.

      Um – what benefit is it that a twelve year old can now ogle zeppelin-sized breasts on a superheroine or read about blowing brains out in full Technicolour because grimdark is cool?

      Yeah, if you’re twelve, you probably are easily impressed by sex and violence being “adult” and ever so grown up. But the adult graphics novels lost out on the promise of “no easy black and white morality where the good guys always save the day and there are no hard decisions”, instead we got gray morality where the semi-good guys always save the day because killing the worse guys is the one sure answer to all problems. If you’re still impressed by this in your 20s, that’s a problem.

      The idea that, whether you’re talking about Batman or the Punisher, crime will always continue and as soon as you put one villain away in Arkham/blow up a Mafia headquarters, another one will come along to fill the power vacuum, so what is the real solution here is never raised except in rare instances; “Watchmen”, for all its faults, did raise that question because Alan Moore has a consistent philosophy of distrusting “heroes” and valorising “the little guy” (often to a romantically idealised extent); his solution is not “we need these superheroes and caped crusaders to help us” but “the ordinary rule of law by ordinary people, unsatisfactory and often flawed as it is, is what we need and the only thing we can rely on; the little people, the unheroic, the non-super, the plain men and women, trying to live fairly decent lives and not be too shitty to one another – that’s the society we should admire”.

      Too much adult comics is “Let’s portray as boobs and blood as we can get away” rather than trying to get depth. It’s the same underlying foundation (and there’s nothing wrong with a simple, mythic-style Good Guys versus Villains storyline) but dressed up as “now we talk about sex and murder, that makes it grown-up!”

  131. Slacklawed says:

    Why is it that Deaf culture seems so much more cohesive than other tribes of people with disabilities (like the blind)? Is it the (sign) language difference?

    • NN says:

      Based on my conversations with a (hearing) friend who took some sign language classes in college, I’d put money on it being due to sign language.

    • Nita says:

      Most likely, yes. Basically, it’s the community and culture of sign language speakers users. Or, rather, communities and cultures, since there are many different sign languages.

      Becoming Deaf culturally can occur at different times for different people, depending on the circumstances of one’s life. A small proportion of deaf individuals acquire sign language and Deaf culture in infancy from Deaf parents, others acquire it through attendance at schools, and yet others may not be exposed to sign language and Deaf culture until college or a time after that.

      They also have something like a shared history, e.g., the period when sign language was suppressed in schools.

  132. GTKRWN says:

    The Human Biodiversity movement is really just the latest rebrand of scientific racism. They’ve taken the position to ignore people’s race while jointly advocating racism. This is helped by the fact that the movement is small enough that each person’s quality can be evaluated directly without having to resort to predictors like race. In addition, the movement is only online, so the costs that racial diversity imposes on crime rates and in-group trust are not imposed.

    • Does your critique include the claim that their views are false? Perhaps you could define “scientific racism” more precisely.

      Suppose it is true that there are significant differences in the distribution of heritable characteristics by race as conventionally defined. Does saying it is true count, in your usage, as racism? If so, what if anything is wrong with it?

    • Murphy says:

      I don’t identify with the Human Biodiversity movement but I do work in genetics and I get a deeply uncomfortable feeling whenever I encounter people like you.

      There are lots of genetic variants. I’ve got a database of thousands of peoples exomes in front of me right now and I can do PCA pretty easily which splits them pretty neatly into ethnic groups with each person as a dot in the cloud.

      It tends to give you something that looks like this:
      https://static-content.springer.com/image/art%3A10.1186%2F1753-6561-5-S9-S116/MediaObjects/12919_2011_Article_1167_Fig1_HTML.jpg

      I can do this now with my data but I’ll leave the groups unlabeled.

      Without looking up the meta data I have no idea which groups are which actual population, which are europeans, which are africans, which are chinese and which are japanese but I can see them grouping naturally in front of me in clusters of people who are more closely related to each other and I know that if I colored the dots by population origin they’d be almost perfect matches to ethnic groups with a few dozen out of the thousands being hard to classify.

      This is not controversial and is a standard part of looking for confounders or errors in the data. If samples that are supposed to be from chinese people start showing up grouped with your africans you can be pretty sure something has gone wrong with your sample management or your samples have got mixed up.

      I can highlight carriers of variants known to be strongly linked to various health problems.
      They are not evenly distributed across the different (unlabeled) populations.
      This is apparently politically acceptable.

      I can highlight carriers of variants known to be strongly linked to problems metabolizing certain medications.
      They are not evenly distributed across the different populations.
      This is apparently politically acceptable and is well known and accepted in medicine.

      I can highlight carriers of variants known to be strongly linked to diabetes and heart disease.
      They are not evenly distributed across the different populations.
      This is apparently politically acceptable.

      I can highlight carriers of variants known to be strongly linked to risk of schizophrenia, variants linked to IQ, variants linked to increased violent behavior problems or variants linked to various mental health problems.
      They are not evenly distributed across the different populations.

      But apparently that last set of highlights are not politically acceptable.

      People like you have decided that they don’t need to look at the data, they know the “right” answers in advance and anyone who gets the wrong answer is an evil racist who must be wrong and must be engaging in “scientific racism” and must be a bad person.

      It’s an odd feeling to be able to look at data in front of you, to know it says one thing but also know that if you want a stable career without the p̶o̶l̶i̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶i̶s̶s̶a̶r̶ diversity-officer ejecting you from your job then you should never talk about the data or it’s implications publicly in anything except the most vague sense while too closely linked to your real life identity.

      Because there are a lot of people like you who are gleefully in favor of academic purges of anyone who voices politically unacceptable things about the data sitting in front of them.

      I wonder if biologists felt like this whenever they found themselves looking at simple refutations of Lysenkoism…

      So the best thing to do is to delete the quick little R script in front of me, close the program or risk being hounded out of my job by people like you who believe they don’t need any data to know what’s true.

      With people from the HBM I imagine that I could argue with them without worry, I could dispute their data, I could argue about how they did their statistics or their sampling methods and none of them would ever harm me for disagreeing with them.

      But you. You and people like you would destroy my life if I disagreed with you. You don’t care if the stats are right or wrong, you don’t care if the sampling methods are good.
      Because you believe you know what is true in advance and you would destroy anyone who disagrees.

      • Alex says:

        Thank you!

      • +1 to Murphy.

        I have a post in draft on my blog titled “Grappling with HBD”. It’s going to cause some fireworks when I publish it. I am certain I will get tagged as a racist by large number of fools like GTKRWN.

        I am temperamentally incapable of not publishing it anyway.

      • Urstoff says:

        Unfortunately, the alt-right using HBD as a justification for white identity politics certainly isn’t doing it any favors.

        • Sastan says:

          The political implications of facts are always up for debate. The facts are not.

          So, to take the most obvious and contentious one, you have the fact, the observable, reproduced a million times, fact, that some races score better on IQ tests than others, and this has a strong correlation with certain life outcomes.

          Yes, obviously you have racists grabbing this and shouting about how they were right all along.

          So to oppose them………the left has decided to deny bald fact, because of course the only possible response to one group with a slightly lower average IQ would be to fully implement ethnic cleansing, right? Of course not!

          Basically the same thing that the right is doing with Global Warming. They have accepted that the only possible response if AGW is real is to throw all money forever at it, divest ourselves of capitalism and all live in huts made from our own urine like the left is pushing. So the science must be wrong! But actually, there are a million possible policy prescriptions that fit those facts*.

          We can debate the science, yes, but we should also debate the responses once we have the science figured out. Nothing is written.

          *staying agnostic for now on AGW, it’s at least less fixed than the IQ results at this stage, but the overall dynamic is the same.

        • Jaskologist says:

          This gets at an issue I still think Rationalists haven’t grappled with properly: What if the truth is maladaptive?

          I tend to bring this up in the context of religion, since most LWers believe “it” is false, but the evidence is pretty strong that it benefits everything from mental health to lifespan. At a societal level, it benefits group cohesion, and given fertility rates and the fact that religion evolved everywhere, I tend to think a religious population is inevitable.

          The HBD stuff is similar. It would lend some support to the white nationalists, but it’s also pretty clearly true. Do we suppress this knowledge for fear of what people might do with it? Given the place of the Scopes Trial and Belief in Evolution in blue mythos, that puts you in exactly the position of those religious people talked about elsewhere who claim adherence to the Bible but look askance at reading it too closely.

          • onyomi says:

            I think one of the core assumptions of rationalists is that the truth is worth knowing/grappling with even in cases where knowing it seems to be maladaptive. After all, describing and rooting out cognitive biases seems to be the modus operandi even though most, if not all of those biases are probably there for a reason (evolution would predict that we’d be good at perceiving reality insofar as doing so is adaptive, but no further; in cases when bias is more adaptive, we’d expect us to be biased, though the very cognitive tools which are adaptive for figuring out some things may sometimes be used to undermine our own adaptive biases).

            But I do think that it is maybe taken as too much of a given that rooting out bias, like rooting out tribalism, is an unalloyed good. There are certainly things I’d probably be happier not knowing. Yet it seems to be the nature of the mind that it must at least think it is pursuing the truth. It seems to be impossible to instrumentally believe in something your rational faculty tells you is false, so this may not be a viable alternative strategy.

            It is weird, however, to imagine a kind of “Chesterton’s Fence” rule for cognitive biases. I can see why most of them exist, and am correspondingly more willing to try to defy them, though there are some which are a mystery to me. The strong tendency towards denial of obvious problems and myopia about oneself, for example, though one might imagine it would enhance happiness in some cases, seems like it would be bad for survival and reproduction. “I’m pretty sure the fact that my foot has turned black is no cause for concern! In fact, I never noticed until you mentioned it!”

          • Jaskologist says:

            I agree that it is extremely hard to get yourself to believe something you think is untrue, but what about intentionally being hypocritical? You could be an atheist privately, but consider spreading atheism immoral because of the various harms those beliefs inflict on their holders, just as someone else might avoid promulgating data indicating a lower average black vs white IQ for fear of the societal effects if that became widely known.

          • Randy M says:

            And you have to consider how people seeing truth, or at least possibility, suppressed rather zealously is going t open them up to competing narratives and prescriptions they might not have otherwise considered.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Well, the problem with the evading the truth as “maladaptive” (or encouraging others to evade it) is, as Ayn Rand put it in the John Galt speech:

            Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all elsethat was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch—and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn’t, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.

            Translation: you can’t just have one fixed, irrational belief that sits incongruously with all your other beliefs. When you take that belief as an axiom—which you do in the process of refusing to reject it no matter the evidence—the contamination radiates outward as you adjust all your other beliefs to fit better with it.

            And the broader point, which I think is embraced by the rationalist movement, is that reason is the human means of survival, the means of accomplishing goals in reality. Nothing can be allowed to come before it, to sabotage it, to undermine it, to justify “comfortable illusions” or “blissful ignorance” because that brings a short-term gain at the cost of long-term destruction.

            The strongest case you can make is that blissfully ignorant types are “mooching” free-riders, accepting the material consequences of Enlightenment civilization while accepting premises that would destroy it if adopted by everyone. Which is a dilemma for egoists (haha), but not for utilitarians.

            Religious belief is a local optimum. This is what Karl Marx meant by saying that it’s the “opiate of the masses”. If you’re a peasant or a slave living a pretty bad life where you’re oppressed by your lord or master, it’s undoubtedly comforting to believe that there will be an afterlife in which everyone will be equal before God. But for that very reason, it takes away the incentive to actually fight to make things better on earth; excessive care for earthly things is a distraction from man’s true purpose.

            And I think rationalists have the same analysis toward transhumanist efforts to “immanetize the eschaton”. Religious belief discourages that. Something like cryonics or Friendly AI is an attempt to thwart God’s design, an act of monumental hubris akin to building the Tower of Babel.

            Of course, once attempts to improve human life by disrupting God’s design start getting widely accepted, the religious traditions tend to start coming along. See: anaesthesia for women in childbirth, contraception, in-vitro fertilization. But it’s precisely in being opposed to every new innovation that the biggest harm comes in.

            As for the strategy of being a hypocrite: then instead of poisoning your own mind, you’re poisoning everyone else’s.

          • Jaskologist says:

            I agree that Rationalists do hold a belief that Reason is the ultimate adaptation, and always beneficial in the long-term. I just think that belief has not been examined critically, or rigorously validated. To put it more plainly, what would falsify this belief, or even “adjust your priors” away from it?

          • Jaskologist says:

            @Vox,

            I’m temperamentally inclined toward that Rand quote myself, but it’s heavy on the bald assertion and light on the evidence. Humans are pretty good at compartmentalizing. And we definitely accept hiding a wide array of information.

            Do you believe it is wrong for the government to classify information? Should President Obama publish the nuclear launch codes, or keep that knowledge to himself for fear of what others might do with it? Was Hillary’s only wrongdoing her failure to paste her emails into wikileaks?

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Jaskologist:

            I agree that Rationalists do hold a belief that Reason is the ultimate adaptation, and always beneficial in the long-term. I just think that belief has not been examined critically, or rigorously validated. To put it more plainly, what would falsify this belief, or even “adjust your priors” away from it?

            Well, that is of course an interesting question.

            That reason is the only means of objectively answering questions is not a conclusion of rationalism. It’s an axiom.

            This “critical examination”, this “rigorous validation”, this “attempted falsification”; would it be conducted according to rational methods? Or would it be conducted according to non-rational methods like checking your “gut feeling”?

            A validation of reason by rational methods would be circular. You’re assuming reason works in order to prove it works. A validation by non-rational methods assumes that those work—and yet by rational analysis they don’t have a good track record.

            [Edit: I want to clarify that I bring all this up because “reason is the only means of objectively answering questions”, “reason points heavily in the direction of saying God does not exist and that, in particular, revealed religions like Christianity are false”, clearly sits in psychological tension with the proposition “you should believe in God, especially in a Christian God who loves you”.]

            However, I realize you want to focus on the question of, not whether reason provides the correct answers to questions, but rather on whether we need or benefit from the answers to those questions. And this seems closely related to Scott’s recent post, “The Price of Glee in China.”

            If modern, technological civilization and abundant material wealth are beneficial to people, then it seems that fidelity to reason is very useful in the long run. Since technological civilization seems to be the result of the consistent application of reason.

            If modern civilization is not beneficial to people, then one could legitimately ask just what’s the point?

            On the other hand, I recently ran across an interesting study that found:

            “[B]oth belief in scientific–technological progress and religiosity were positively associated with life satisfaction, yet the association with belief in scientific–technological progress was significantly larger.” In fact, life satisfaction was three times more likely to correlate with a belief in sci-tech progress than belief in religious doctrine. Progress enthusiasts also tended that have a much stronger sense of personal control over their lives, while religiosity was negatively associated with personal control.

            […]

            Stavrova and her colleagues speculate that this negative association between a belief in God and a sense of personal control might arise from dispositional differences. Primary control strategies aim to change the external world so that it fits with one’s personal needs and desires; secondary control strategies seek to change personal needs and desires so that they fit with the external world. Earlier research has found that religious believers tend to score higher on secondary than primary control strategies. Stavrova and her fellow researchers suggest that future studies might “examine whether a belief in scientific–technological progress, in contrast to a religious belief, entails individuals to rely more on primary rather than secondary control strategies.”

            So why do people who believe in sci-tech progress tend to be happier than the religious faithful? Stavrova and her colleagues propose that “achieving control over the world and mastering the environment has always been one of the major goals of science. Believing that science is or will prospectively grant such mastery of nature imbues individuals with the belief that they are in control of their lives.” This sense of personal control in turn contributes to a higher life satisfaction.

            So even if material progress doesn’t benefit anyone per se (which I doubt), perhaps belief in it benefits them.

            However, the study also finds (somewhat contrary to Ron Bailey’s editorializing) that belief in scientific-technological progress is not necessarily mutually exclusive with religious belief. (They are negatively correlated, but not by much.) So you can hold on to that. 😉

            Though one should also take into account the correlation among top scientists and intellectuals, and not just the general public.

            Do you believe it is wrong for the government to classify information? Should President Obama publish the nuclear launch codes, or keep that knowledge to himself for fear of what others might do with it? Was Hillary’s only wrongdoing her failure to paste her emails into wikileaks?

            I think you ought to realize this irrelevant.

            In such cases, we’re not talking about people having false beliefs on matters that are very important to their daily lives and personal decisions—or even very important to the larger course of civilization.

            We’re talking about known ignorance of small details of information. There’s no deception going on with the launch codes: people know they exist, just that they aren’t allowed to be told them, and they are given the reason why they aren’t allowed to be told.

            Similar considerations apply to non-controversial matters of national security, like the specific names of all undercover spies working for the CIA. Of course, when the government lies or leaves the public in the dark about the very existence of major operations, that raises questions about who’s watching the watchers.

            A better analogy to what you’re proposing would be some kind of massive conspiracy to suppress the atomic theory of matter in order to stop nuclear proliferation. Even that is hardly as important to people as the question of whether or not a particular religion is true, but it would have much a greater impact on people’s models of how the world works than knowledge of the nuclear launch codes. (Of course, telling everyone the launch codes would quickly cause a major change in the world—but through the medium of nuclear holocaust, not by changing their models of reality.)

            I’m temperamentally inclined toward that Rand quote myself, but it’s heavy on the bald assertion and light on the evidence. Humans are pretty good at compartmentalizing.

            People can certainly compartmentalize, and the passage does reflect what Nathaniel Branden criticized as Rand’s “tightrope” approach to morality: that if you don’t toe the line just right, “your soul is in big trouble”.

            The question depends on how seriously you want people to take religious belief. Most Americans don’t take it very seriously. They go to church on Sunday (maybe), but they do little to live by strict Biblical principles (or Papal commandments, or whatever).

            If you only think about religion for an hour a week and don’t incorporate it into your life in a meaningful way, it probably doesn’t cause too many negative effects, even in the long run. Belief in Thomas Paine’s deistic God probably has even less. (Though still some and perhaps quite negative in certain contexts: he still believed in an omnibenevolent God and that consequently everything that happens is for the best, which can lead one to rationalize existing evils.)

            But if you want scientists to believe that the Pope is right about research involving the destruction of human embryos being gravely sinful, that’s going to have effects. They’ll consider it unethical and not perform it.

            Also, you know, I’m skeptical about the causation in the correlation between religious belief and life satisfaction. As I’m sure you’d agree, much of it is mediated by community involvement and the feeling that your beliefs are shared by many others. That’s sort of the point of the OP.

            In any case, the correlation is not that strong, either. So even if you were sure infidelity to reason wouldn’t have any long-run negative effects, encouraging yourself to believe in religion against (what seems to you to be) the evidence is probably not the most effective intervention.

      • Could you publish anonymously?

        Is there any way to protect that sort of information from people who overgeneralize?

        Sickle cell isn’t a uniquely black disease. Cystic fibrosis isn’t a uniquely white disease, and neither is hay fever.

        • Murphy says:

          publish what? and why?

          I’m talking about 15 minutes work with a pretty normal data set.

          Showing that variants are not evenly distributed across human populations is nothing shocking or even novel. No geneticist would gain new knowledge from reading such a document.

          Of course almost nothing is totally unique to any group.

          It’s just that publicly talking about certain implications of that is not acceptable and may even be problematic and doing so is a good way to find yourself looking for another job.

          People far more senior than me have b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶i̶r̶e̶d̶ resigned-of-their-own-free-will-to-avoid-a-fuss over far more trivial stuff when they said something far less controversial and twitter got angry.

          Publishing anonymously carries almost zero weight, part of the point of publishing is that as an expert you’re putting your name behind something. Without that it has no more weight than anonymous posts on an internet forum.

          That’s assuming that a respectable journal wants to carry an uninteresting anonymous article which makes their journal a little problematic.

          Finally, I have no wish to stick my neck on the chopping block in a show of defiance against people who’ve already won.

          I can only lose and nothing of note is gained.

          • I’m interested in people having trouble getting accurate diagnoses, so I’m interested in stereotypes which make diagnosis difficult.

          • Murphy says:

            @Nancy
            If someone has a rare disease it’s rational to take that into account. Otherwise you’re highly likely to over-diagnose or under-diagnose people due to ignoring available data.

            If you hear hoofbeats while walking the mountains in italy it’s possible that someone has released a herd of zebras but it’s far more likely to be horses.

          • keranih says:

            Ah. I see where you’re coming from, I think.

            (I’m coming from the other way around, being population focused.)

            The problem is that it’s not “stereotypes” that would make it difficult to diagnose SCT in a non-African person. It’s the competing differentials which are far more likely than SCT to be causing the symptoms seen in a Caucasian person.

            The rational approach would not be to test every person for all diseases, but to choose the most likely ones (or: those with the cheapest least invasive tests that were most likely to give helpful information) and then work from there.

            Fighting an *inaccurate* stereotype would be useful.(*) Objecting to ones that are, actually, supported by the data is, I think, less helpful.

            Most people who have SCT are black/African; among the rest most are people of Hispanic descent with African ancestry is a true statement, not a stereotype.

            (*) With the note that “always” “all” and “none” statements are very frequently false, and so are largely inaccurate.

          • Maybe part of the problem is that the opinion of “you don’t have a rare disease because rare diseases are rare” doesn’t shift even if years of treatment for more likely diseases hasn’t worked.

          • keranih says:

            I agree that this is can be an issue…but.

            Person has been diagnoised with Congenital Novel Corpse Mite Mange.

            (Normally you get CNCMM upon your first exposure to cadavers in medical school, and only if a household parent (ie, you can get it from your adoptive parents) also attended a Western medical school.)

            The treatment for CNCMM is only successful in 65% of patients, ‘success’ means the itching and peeling only lasts for four days instead of two weeks and the residual symptoms wax and wane as the Moon moves in and out of the House of Jupiter.

            Furthermore, CNCMM occurs overwhelmingly in people who attend the same medical school – or who went to undergrad at the same campus – as their parent. People who are not the children of doctors contract CNCMM at the rate of…less than half of one percent. In children of MDs, it’s…7%.

            For 35% of patients appropriately treated for CNCMM, a mis-diagnosis is indistinguishable from a correct diagnosis with a failure of effect of the treatment. This is about 2.5% of the children of MDs. About the same percent of non-MD descent population has itches and peeling due to weekend sunburns.

            1.5% of the non-MD descent population has paranoid delusions of itching caused by invisible bugs. This percentage is even higher in the indigent poorly educated population who only read about CM on the internet.

            The test for CNCMM costs $5,000. The treatment is really cheap – dollars per daily dose for less than a week – but causes permanent baldness and persistent flatulence in 1.2% of patients with CNCMM, and 10% of non-infected patients.

            Rare conditions are rare, *and* hard.

          • Hlynkacg says:

            @ keranih:

            Your post makes me feel vaguely disappointed that I no-longer work in EMS and can no longer mess with the medicals students by slipping conditions like Congenital Novel Corpse Mite Mange into patient histories.

      • anonymous says:

        Comment reported for being untrue, unnecessary and unkind.

        Plus that image was very racist.

        • JBeshir says:

          I think that there’s an approximately 90% chance this is a troll, but just in case it isn’t: I think everything in Murphy’s post is entirely right, and the manner in which they’re at threat for just talking about their academic results is a terrible thing which needs to be improved.

          There’s expecting people to keep to the post-WW2 consensus against the playing of ethnic tensions with actual ethnicities, and then there’s reacting harshly to anything which might conceivably be something someone doing that might find useful to say, and doing no validation or consideration of the alternative, and the latter is bad.

      • GTKRWN says:

        Thanks for the reply. However, it didn’t change my opinion, because I’m a human biodiversity advocate and I already agreed with you. Race is real, abilities and traits are vary by ancestry, and these distributions have meaningful social consequences.

        I prefer to use plain language when talking about race, so to me scientific racism isn’t necessarily a slur or false. Human biodiversity is a great rebrand of racism when talking outwardly but there’s no need to use politicized and awkward language internally.

        I don’t want to purge anyone, although obviously there’s going to be a lot of bad blood if and when public opinion changes in favor of genetic racial differences in ability.

        Also, my understanding was that GWAS of IQ genes were mostly turning up false positives because IQ was too polygenic for existing datasets. Is this just outdated?

        • Anonymous says:

          I’m afraid your choice of username wasn’t quite obvious enough.

          • Anonymous says:

            For anyone else who is wondering “Gas the kikes, race war now”. Now I have to go take a shower. Lovely people you alt right types associate with.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Anonymous:

            Wow. “Wew lad,” as they say.

          • Theo Jones says:

            @Anon
            Wow.
            I got that the guy was a racist from his posts (hell, he even self IDed as one) — but I didn’t get the hidden meaning in his username.

          • Murphy says:

            Honestly I tried googling the username and still turned up blank for what it actually stood for.

          • JBeshir says:

            Yeah, wow. I didn’t catch that, made the same mistake as Murphy here.

            Motte is “there are non-trivial differences in distribution of important traits between people from different ethnic backgrounds”, bailey is… yeah.

            Murphy’s criticisms remain valid. We shouldn’t assume anyone who discusses their motte stuff is part of their group, and it sucks that that happens. The enemy-hunting-to-show-goodness-and-loyalty-and-friendship dynamic exists and is a bad thing.

            But, yeah, the motte-and-bailey dynamic is also real and there are going to be people who are pretty obviously sensationalising the facts for political goals who are going to try to use “I’m just discussing the truth” as a defence, which means that defence can’t be automatically trusted either. Need to make reasonable judgement calls and tolerate others who make them differently.

          • Murphy says:

            Sure, people would use those things to make horrible claims.

            People genuinely used and still sometimes use survival-of-the-fittest arguments against the poor and sick.

            Lysenkoism was more ideologically appealing. ‘natural cooperation’ is much nicer than ‘natural selection’ and is much harder for Scrooge types to use to argue in favor of decreasing the surplus population.

            Somehow we’ve mostly managed to get people to stop fretting so much that beliefs in natural selection might imply the desire to kill poor and sick people.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Murphy
            Honestly I tried googling the username and still turned up blank for what it actually stood for.

            GTKRWN

            Googling? Too Kaffeine-Retarded; Will Not.

            Go To King Richard Without Notice!

            Gone To Kmart, Return When Needed.

            Gratitude Toward Kindly Rationalists; Who Knew?

          • Anonymous says:

            If I knew we’d stop engaging them in discussion and instead start clutching our pearls, I wouldn’t have brought it up.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            Huh, you learn something new every day.

            GTKRWN banned for username

          • Has anyone offered any evidence that the interpretation of the name is what the user meant rather than an invention of the interpreter offering it? I haven’t seen any, but a lot of people seem to take it for granted.

          • Nita says:

            @ David Friedman

            Sure, it could be a tragic coincidence — this person could be a racist who takes a keen interest in race-related discussions and groups on the web, and yet happens to be unaware of this particular racist meme. What probability do you assign to that?

          • Anonymous says:

            @David Friedman: You clearly haven’t understood what Reign of Terror means, when the cause is just, then “burden of proof” is just a shield for the wicked.

  133. hnau says:

    Thanks for another great post! I only wish it were longer. 🙂

    One thing I think the argument leaves out: tribalism is just one way of explaining how people form groups, not necessarily the most accurate or useful one. In some cases tribalism doesn’t make sense, and the ideology really *is* the movement.

    For example, imagine trying to explain to a Civil Rights activist in 60’s America that his or her movement wasn’t really about ending segregation– that desegregation was just a ‘battle flag’ for a particular in-group / culture / way of thinking, and that it didn’t matter all that much in itself.

    • Carinthum says:

      Slight possible refinement to the theory- When you have a group all of whose interests are advanced by a collective goal in a real sense (e.g. ending segregation) they are capable of genuinely working to achieve it. Group outsiders can sometimes benefit from group signalling (e.g. charity). Otherwise, Scott’s version stands without need of correction.

  134. yento says:

    This article goes through a few motions. Rarely have I been so bewildered on SSC at simplifications to later on find very good and interesting conclusions drawn.
    For the moment I only like to recommend Manuel De Landa’s ‘A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History’ (https://mitpress.mit.edu/index.php?q=books/thousand-years-nonlinear-history) which looks at the trajectories of change between historical situations.

  135. Anonymous says:

    “8. Subcultures And Posers: Obligatory David Chapman link. A poser is somebody who uses the rallying flag but doesn’t have the pre-existing differences that create tribal membership and so never really fits into the tribe.”

    Hmm…I think EA is somewhat different here. My impression of an “EA poseur” is someone who adopts the labels, and the cultural signifiers, but doesn’t, you know, actually do good in the world (eg. donate or do valuable direct work).

    Actually, one of my greater worries right now is that EA will increasingly adopt tribal markers that are more and more orthogonal to actually making the world better, and cave in itself as another “awesomeness”/”rationality is cool” culture.

  136. Troy Rex says:

    Comment of the week definitely deserves to be Lemminkainen’s!
    slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/#comment-342571

    Lemminkainen’s comment is also quite encouraging – I think it shows Scott is thinking on the right lines here. And I agree with most of the other commenters here: I think this post has a lot of very clear thinking on how groups function.

    For a real-life Robbers’ Cave, I give you…mods and rockers, the terrors of 1960s Britain! The rockers wore lots of leather, rode motorcycles, and listened to Elvis Presley and other American rock and roll. The mods were modern – the nice boys – wearing suits and riding moto-guzzis or something.
    http://subcultureslist.com/mods-and-rockers/
    Reading about mods and rockers gave me chills. These guys had no idea at all that they were in the grip of the psychology of groups, no idea that they invented these differences due to forces outside their conscious awareness.

    (I learned about mods and rockers from Tyler Cowen’s interview with Jonathan Haidt
    https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-with-jonathan-haidt-35f76604464a#.97tvl3wie)

    The one quibble I have with this post is that the description of a Christian considering whether to disbelieve the Bible doesn’t match with my experience. I grew up a lot of the time in fundamental baptist churches, who would be more than happy to go a dozen rounds with you on any alleged inaccuracies of the Bible. For them, the content really mattered. The content may have had the heck interpreted out of it, but it mattered.

    This is a quibble and not a disagreement because it matches my observations of less fundie Christians, and the content of mod-ism or rocker-ism probably mattered to them as well.

    • Troy Rex says:

      I figured out my quibble: it’s about self-deception.

      Neurotypical people don’t consciously think, “Our culture is fine, why rock the boat?” They believe, and believe they believe, that their beliefs are absolutely true. But they are not very interested in debating it – which is a sign that for these normal people, their membership is about the tribe, not about the beliefs.

      But they won’t say that. Normal people don’t. They believe they believe.

      • Deiseach says:

        But they are not very interested in debating it – which is a sign that for these normal people, their membership is about the tribe, not about the beliefs.

        Well, how interested are you in debating “is grass really green, or does it only look that way to us?”

        Sure, you could have a whole discussion about wavelengths of light, human eye, optics, etc etc etc but most people don’t care that much.

        This is not to say they don’t think grass is green or don’t care one way or the other, it’s simply that if you think something really is true, unless you’re specifically arguing with someone who says it’s false, you’re not going to spend every spare minute talking about this is true and this is why it’s true.

      • Amanda says:

        “They believe they believe.”

        Hopefully I’m not being uncharitable here, but it seems either a little unfair, lacking in imagination, or just too convenient to broadly assume self-deception. The alternative is accepting that I (and others) actually do believe what I think I believe. It almost sounds like, “It’s so foreign from my experience to believe in things like that, that I can’t imagine other people really do, deep down, so they must be deluding themselves.”

        Not that that’s limited to any particular group of people. It’s how a lot of Christians tend to believe that non-Christians are secretly miserable without God, despite what they may say to the contrary. I mean, I think that sometimes (my apologies; that’s a bit awkward, isn’t it?). It’s basically impossible to disprove though, because of course few people would be willing to say, even to themselves, that their ideology is making them miserable. You have to either believe what people say or not. Which leads me to go by actions. So, checking my own actions:

        -The times we’ve moved and needed to find a new church, we’ve attended churches where we weren’t the most socially comfortable, but we most agreed with the beliefs held there.

        -We give 12-15% of our income to charity, about half of which we give directly to our church. No one but the church secretary, the IRS, God, and now the internet knows how much we gives, so no tribal benefit there. And, if God weren’t real, I might still give to reduce poverty, etc, but the portion going straight to my local church could go into my (currently imaginary) kitchen remodel fund.

        -I pray alone when no one can see me. Could be reading or poking around on the internet. And I don’t have to actually pray for everyone at church to assume I do, so no tribal benefit there.

        -I am totally unable to exert self-discipline about things, even things with an obvious short-term benefit to me, except when I give up something for Lent. Then, if I’ve given up eating between meals, and I pop a bit of food in my mouth when I’m making dinner, I find myself spitting it into the sink. No tribal benefit there, just feeling like commitments to God really ought not to be broken. The church I attend isn’t really one for observing Lent anyway, and I sometimes get side-eyes if I bring it up to the wrong person.

        Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t ever see or feel tribal forces come into play, and this concept is a helpful framework for thinking about individual and group behavior. Nor do I claim that everyone’s like me. But, based on the people I know, I’m not at all unusual in my actual commitment to actual beliefs.

        Striving for accuracy in interpreting behavior would have to take into account that some non-negligible fraction of people do really have an “ideology-first” mindset.

  137. Oh Scott the Rightly Guided :-), I think I found this post delightful in a completely different way than anyone else who has commented so far. I had to discover almost everything in it for myself between about 1990 and 1998 for very practical reasons, and it was fascinating to see the same insights arrived at by someone without those practical reasons and with a very different perspective.

    I will start by confirming that, modulo a few quibbles about the history of the Sunni/Shi’a split and the Robber’s Cave experiment that have been well explored by other commenters, most of this is dead on target. I’m going to disagree with you in a bit about one or two significant things, but they are more extensions of your model than falsifications of it.

    The reason I know you are on target is that I spent the years between 1990 and about 2005 driving a process of ethnogenesis from early stages to full tribal formation. I have described the process in detail in a blog post, The Uses of Tribal Cohesion, which you (and anyone else reading this comment) really ought to read before continuing.

    Many years later, I learned that what I had done was “prophecy” in a specific technical sense developed by a guy named Dave Logan who spent years studying psychological phase changes in organizations. Discussion at Culture hacking, reloaded. Sorry, you’ll need to skip over some specific stuff about agile programming; if you search for the phrase “I learned a new way to think about prophecy” you’ll get directly to the part most relevant to your interests. I think you will quickly recognize that Eliezer Yudkowsky was a near perfect example of what Logan calls a Stage 4 prophet. As I was myself in a different context.

    One thing that is missing from your model is precisely Logan’s stage classification. Tribes at different stages behave very differently, especially in the ways they relate to outsiders. This is difficult to notice because most human tribes are at Stage 3 or even 2. Also, these stages represent different levels of self-awareness. As you noticed, all tribes have alignment of values (I even used that phrase) but there are varying degrees of consciousness about that alignment. Generally speaking (though with dangerous exceptions) need for an outgroup to hate decreases at Logan’s stage 4. This has been a confusion to some of your commenters, who are members of a tribe that has recently entered Stage 4 but are still individually holding a folk model of tribalism based on stage 3 and 2 behavior.

    In fact, one of my challenges was weaning the hacker culture away from its Stage 3 reliance on various hate foci (Microsoft, marketing people, IBM, suits in general). It was a little tricky because in the early stages of the game I had to harness antipathy towards those groups in ways that wouldn’t damage our ability to make positive-sum deals with them later on. This is a problem Eliezer didn’t have, because he never needed more allies in the existing power structure than one wealthy patron.

    Elsewhere, I have written about Practical Prophecy which summarizes what I had to learn about how to drive an ethnogenesis forward. Eliezer has provided us with an even more powerful and elaborate example of “Right names are powerful” than I did in constructing a rhetoric around “open source”. He also did an excellent job of “Find the deepest yearning”, especially impressive since he had much less in the way of pre-established cultural capital to build on than I did. And oh, yes, “Give people permission to be idealists.” – I doubt I even have to unpack that one for you.

    The major place I’m going to disagree with you is that I think your model of the relationship between historical inertia and values alignment is oversimplified. Having discovered that the historical component of social cohesion is often more important than explicit flags, you overcorrected somewhat in your update. The relative importance of these factors varies more than I think you presently understand.

    Again, Logan’s stage model provides a useful framework here. In general, less conscious (earlier-stage tribes) rely more on history as glue precisely because alignment of values is less conscious and less effective than it becomes in later stages. A biiig part of what Stage 4 prophets like Eliezer or me do is partially replace cohesion by history with cohesion by a more explicit and consciously-articulated version of the tribe’s alignment of values. This is the exact way in which the Sequences are functionally equivalent to The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

    I said “partially” because cohesion by history never goes away entirely. Well, at least it doesn’t at stage 4, at least. I cannot, however, exclude the possibility that it dwindles to insignificance at Logan stage 5. I have a limited amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that, but I don’t claim to understand stage 5 very well. Stage 5 tribes seem to be rare, small, idiosyncratic, and unstable with a tendency to fall back to stage 4.

    I think there is also horizontal variation in the relative importance of cohesion by history and cohesion by alignment that is orthogonal to Logan stage, but I’m much less clear on the drivers of that. I’ve never had practical reason to analyze this part very hard. I might have some tacit knowledge here that could be elicited by questions.

    Even more relevant to your interests: Logan’s “prophecy” is a learnable skill. You are learning it. (It is really interesting watching you learn it.) Which is why it is extremely good that you have developed as much analytical awareness as you show in the OP. I think you are pretty likely to have to apply this theory someday.

  138. Joe says:

    I think its interesting to see where theology seems to have an impact on the average member and where it doesn’t.

    Like, I agree that ideology is not the movement for most people, but it is interesting to see how ideology seems to both greatly affect the ideology of the people of the movement, and not effect the people of the movement. That it is to say, its interesting because its not 1:1 agreement, but some parts of the ideology get solidly incorporated in the culture and other parts don’t, and its hard to tell what will be incorperated into the culture and what wont.

    The weird thing is trying to predict what followers will take seriously and what followers won’t take seriously.

    Like, In Mormonism, parents will take great pains, and pay a lot of money to root out perceived or actual homosexuality in their children, who they seem to genuinely love, even as they do things to them that I consider, child abuse (and main stream society actually agrees with me for once, at least I think it does, considering the reaction to “Saving Alex”).

    Theologically, this makes sense, as the official Mormon line is that homosexuality is a grave sin, parents have pretty strong duty / authority over their children, so its natural that a parent would say, beat their kid to a bloody pulp until they stop being gay, make love conditional on not being gay, and basically do all kinds of nasty things to stop the child from committing this really serious sin.

    But here is the weird thing, theologically heterosexual children that have sex before marriage, are *just as bad* yet I don’t see the kind of repression / social banishment of obviously none chaste 18 year olds that I see for gay children. The other weird thing is I’m saying a relative thaw in gay / Mormon relations, to the point where most Mormons consider it a now a days, despite the fact that the theology hasn’t changed! In fact, the theology has gotten even more anti-gay as priesthood leaders sense that people are being more accepting of gays!

    So my question is why that is, and how can we predict what theological ideas will translate into cultural realities, and is it really unpredictable? Is it worth it to promote cognitive dissident interpretations of religion so that people can chuck their more damaging beliefs, but still consider themselves part of the tribe?

    I dunno.

  139. grendelkhan says:

    I think that very neurotypical people naturally think in terms of tribes, and the idea that they have to retool their perfectly functional tribe to conform to the exact written text of its holy book or constitution or stated political ideology or something seems silly to them. I think that less neurotypical people – a group including many atheists – think less naturally in terms of tribes and so tend to take claims like “Christianity is about following the Bible” at face value. But Christianity is about being part of the Christian tribe, and although that tribe started around the Bible, maintains its coherence because of the Bible, and is of course naturally influenced by it, if it happens to contradict the Bible in some cases that’s not necessarily surprising or catastrophic.

    I feel a very strong sense of recognition here. Like, yes, it matters whether what you believe is actually true. I remember Greg Egan’s perhaps-smuggest work (it spoke to me deeply, it’s heartbreakingly autobiographical, and it’s still pretty smug), which presented the other side of this idea, the one I generally live in.

    “I’m perfectly happy with a God who resides within us,” offered the Transitional theologian. “It seems … immodest to expect more. And instead of fretting uselessly over these ultimate questions, we should confine ourselves to matters of a suitably human scale.”

    I turned to him. “So you’re actually indifferent as to whether an infinitely powerful and loving being created everything around you, and plans to welcome you into Her arms after death … or the universe is a piece of quantum noise that will eventually vanish and erase us all?”

    He sighed heavily, as if I was asking him to perform some arduous physical feat just by responding. “I can summon no enthusiasm for these issues.”

    • Deiseach says:

      Technically, Christianity is not about “following the Bible”, it’s about following Christ. The Gospel is the Evangelium, the Good News.

      The primacy of the Bible as a text within Protestantism comes from the Reformation, where the authority of the hierarchy (culminating in the pope) within the church was challenged. Against the power of Tradition, you had to set some over-riding ultimate authority, and that was the Bible – the “plain word of Scripture” which, if only read with an open heart and mind, would lead you inevitably to the same conclusions as Luther. Or Calvin. Or Zwingli. Or the Anabaptists. Or – but you know the rest.

      The Anglicans are fond of squaring the circle with Hooker’s “three-legged stool: Reason, Tradition, Scripture” but the Anglicans can comfortably (well….) accommodate every viewpoint depending on what the monarch (or parliament) of the moment prefers (the Vicar of Bray), which has caused a certain amount of disturbance between the progressive tendency in the West and those benighted Global South churches which inconveniently have not gotten with the programme of modernity and bowing to the Zeitgeist.

      And of course, about five hundred years before the Western Church split on the Reformation lines, there was the Great Schism between East and West.

      tl, dr: the insistence on the Bible comes out of the Reformation.

      • grendelkhan says:

        Is this a substantive objection? Christianity makes what look like some pretty solid truth claims–existence of the soul and its survival after death, existence of both a deity and a divine plan, punishment of the wicked for objectively-measured sin, and so on, and so on. I’m not talking about who begat who, I’m talking about the big claims about the nature of the world.

      • Deiseach says:

        Is this a substantive objection? … I’m not talking about who begat who, I’m talking about the big claims about the nature of the world

        It makes a difference if it’s based on a Book or on a Person. A large part of the Reformation was the appeal to the Book against the appeal to the authority of the hierarchy, in particular the Pope.

        Every time I read a well-meaning sentence, when discussing the rise of militant Islamic groups, such as “Islam needs a Reformation of its own”, I want to bang my head against the wall, because this is precisely the misunderstanding right here: the stripped-back version that appeals to the authority of the Book/the Word (as written down) only and primarily IS their Reformation. The Protestant Reformation claimed that the Church had become too worldly, too entangled with the culture of the time and had acquired a lot of man-made traditions. Same with the Taliban and Al-Quada (and the Wahhabi/Salifi movement within Islam) – the iconoclasm isn’t merely an odd coincidence, it’s a feature of both schools of thought: strip away the accretions of worldiness, go back to the pure plain simple faith, derive your understanding from the text of the Holy Book and not from anyone’s authority to interpret or make exceptions or add rulings or take away any of the laws.

        The well-meaning liberal Westerner calling for a “Reformation” thinks of the Reformation as something something primacy of conscience something something everyone free to believe what they want, which is how it eventually turned out after the explosion of competing denominations and having to find some way of living in a secular state where not everyone belonged to one major denomination anymore, but not where it began: ‘primacy of conscience’ was not about “if I don’t think this is a sin, you don’t get to tell me it’s a sin”, it was about “if I don’t think the Pope is the boss of me, I can point to this Bible text about ‘call no man father’ and stand on my conscience” but it certainly did not mean “you think X, I think Y, we agree to differ” when it came to matters of morality.

        • As I understand it, another problem with calling for an Islamic Reformation is that Islam doesn’t have sort of hierarchy that Catholicism does, so there isn’t the same sort of thing to rebel against.

          Also, it may be worth noting that the Reformation didn’t turn Europeans into nicer people in the short run.

          What I’m actually expecting is that the Overton window will eventually shift away from terrorism for Islam in general. I realize that the vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists, and don’t support terrorism unless they’re under threat for not doing so. However, the terrorist element is large enough to be doing a tremendous amount of damage.

          I’m betting that terrorism will become very rare, and people will argue about why it happened. This doesn’t mean that military opposition to terrorism is necessarily a bad idea, just that what worked won’t be obvious.

          • keranih says:

            Also, it may be worth noting that the Reformation didn’t turn Europeans into nicer people in the short run.

            Sing it, sistah.

            The cycle went Reformation >> Thirty Years War >> Enlightenment >> long slog of relative inter-Christian peace >>> Napoleon >> Intra-Europe peace ’cause too busy colonizing the rest of the world >> WWI >> WII >> current (and declining?) Pax Americana – or there abouts. (I am willing to entertain corrections.)

            What I’m actually expecting is that the Overton window will eventually shift away from terrorism for Islam in general.

            I agree, if only because peace leads to commerce which leads to more stuff and so long as people are convinced that it works this way, they are willing to vigorously oppose the 10-35% of the population who can get more stuff through violence than through peace.

            In the case of Europeans, though, I note that it took a generation and a half of really, really nasty violence – which tended to kill off a huge portion of the population that supported the use of coercive violence – before the survivors set down with weary exhaustion to seriously consider the options.

            This doesn’t mean that military opposition to terrorism is necessarily a bad idea, just that what worked won’t be obvious.

            And imo the military opposition is going to be crucial, in order to make all the sides equally horrified/miserable/exhausted. So long as the practice of…of coercive violence works for me-the-average-shop-keeper even though I’m not actually practicing violence, I’m not going to be *motivated* to stop the use. When “my” side is hitting back as hard as they can, and the other side is doing the same, then I’m going to be far more willing to cry a pox on all the houses, and support the guys on the other side calling for a cease fire over my cousins in la resistance.

            But what do I know? We have an n=1 going on here, and the future is always in motion.

          • NN says:

            What I’m actually expecting is that the Overton window will eventually shift away from terrorism for Islam in general.

            It already has. Terrorism isn’t a mainstream Islam problem. Mainstream Islam does have a number of serious problems, but terrorism isn’t one of them. Research has shown that people who join Salafi-Jihadist movements tend to be young, male, and disaffected. A disproportionate number of them are converts (2/3 of Muslim terrorists in the US and 31% of them in the UK have been converts, compared to 20% and 2-3% of the respective Muslim populations of those countries, respectively) and even those who were raised Muslim tend not to come from especially strict or conservative backgrounds. For example, receiving an Islamic religious education from a madrassa has been found to be negatively correlated with support for terrorism, and terrorists are disproportinately likely to have a criminal record. They’re almost never recruited in mosques, and are most frequently recruited by friends either online or offline.

            In short, terrorists tend to be born-again youth rebelling against their parents and society in general, whether that society is Western or Mainstream Islamic. To quote Scott Atran, “Violent extremism represents not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their collapse, as young people unmoored from millennial traditions flail about in search of a social identity that gives personal significance and glory. This is the dark side of globalization. They radicalize to find a firm identity in a flattened world: where vertical lines of communication between the generations are replaced by horizontal peer-to-peer attachments that can span the globe.”

            Trying to stop people from becoming terrorists by shifting the overton window of mainstream Islam away from violence would be like trying to stop young Americans in the 1960s from becoming hippies by shifting the overton window of mainstream American culture towards stricter standards of behavior. If these people listened to their parents and imams, they wouldn’t have ended up where they are now.

            In short, the problem with calling for an Islamic Reformation to stop terrorism is that the terrorists are an Islamic Reformation.

            However, the terrorist element is large enough to be doing a tremendous amount of damage.

            The terrorist element is able to do a tremendous amount of damage not because it is large, but because nowadays even a small number of people can do a tremendous amount of damage. The Paris attacks were carried out by 7 people. The Boston Marathon bombing was carried out by 2 people acting alone with no experience or training using nothing that you can’t buy at your local hardware store, and it shut down one of the largest metro areas in the US for 2 days. Breivik killed 77 people entirely by himself. The Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by two people and it killed more people than the Paris attacks. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attempted to blow up their school cafeteria and kill 500 people, and the only reason they failed is that they sucked at bomb-making.

            That’s the real root of the problem. Even if Salafi-Jihadism becomes uncool and stops drawing recruits, as long as terrorism remains an extremely effective way of drawing media attention to your cause (even if that cause is pure self-aggrandizement, as in the case of Harris and Klebold and many other mass shooters), people are going to keep pulling that lever.

          • Jiro says:

            Trying to stop people from becoming terrorists by shifting the overton window of mainstream Islam away from violence would be like trying to stop young Americans in the 1960s from becoming hippies by shifting the overton window of mainstream American culture towards stricter standards of behavior.

            Young Americans in the 1960’s became hippies by leaving mainstream culture, but they didn’t have a holy book that influenced in what direction people go when they leave mainstream culture.

            That’s the problem with Scott’s thesis here: the texts and ideas that a group is based on are important. Yes, tribalism has a huge influence on how the group behaves. But it’s not the only influence. The ideas are important as well, and may be so to greater or lesser degrees depending on circumstances. The actual content of the Koran is not very important to mainstream Islam, but the fact that mainstream Islam pays lip service to it makes it easier for that content to become more important to offshoots.

          • NN says:

            @Jiro: I have yet to see any evidence that the Koran is any more important to terrorists than it is to mainstream Muslims. Again, research indicates that attending Islamic religious schools, which tend to devote a large portion of their curriculum to memorizing and studying the Koran, makes students less likely to support terrorism. Broader surveys have found no evidence of any correlation between religious devotion and support for terrorism.

            There is also anecdotal evidence that at least some Muslim terrorists display high levels of religious illiteracy. See the British ISIS fighters who bought Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies before leaving for Syria. Scott Atran’s research seems to indicate that these two weren’t some kind of anomaly:

            But first, who are these young people? None of the ISIS fighters we interviewed in Iraq had more than primary school education, some had wives and young children. When asked “what is Islam?” they answered “my life.” They knew nothing of the Quran or Hadith, or of the early caliphs Omar and Othman, but had learned of Islam from Al Qaeda and ISIS propaganda, teaching that Muslims like them were targeted for elimination unless they first eliminated the impure. This isn’t an outlandish proposition in their lived circumstances: as they told of growing up after the fall of Saddam Hussein in a hellish world of constant guerrilla war, family deaths and dislocation, and of not being even able to go out of their homes or temporary shelters for months on end.

            Finally, a lot of terrorists aren’t rebelling against mainstream Muslim society because a disproportionate number of them are converts who weren’t raised in any kind of Muslim society in the first place. There’s no reason for someone who wasn’t raised Muslim to give the content of the Koran any kind of special importance, so it seems far more plausible that they were attracted to Salafi-Jihadism because it offered struggle, danger, a cause, and camaraderie, not in spite of those qualities. Why should we expect the terrorists who were raised Muslim to be any different?

          • Jiro says:

            Okay then, let me rephrase. The actual content of the Koran is not very important to mainstream Islam, but the fact that mainstream Islam pays lip service to it makes it easier for literal readings of that content to become more important to offshoots.

            I wouldn’t expect Koran study to correlate with terrorism. Studying a holy book doesn’t consist of just learning about the contents of the book; it also includes learning the right way to interpret it. In this case, the fact that terrorists are uneducated means that they are more likely to latch onto the straightforward reading of the book, rather than to the non-straightforward teachings that interpret it to not mean what it says.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “(I am willing to entertain corrections.)”

            The Enlightenment is a bit over broad; the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes happened during that time. I think it is better categorized as religion takes a back seat to the question “Can France conquer Europe”.

          • Thursday says:

            I wouldn’t expect Koran study to correlate with terrorism.

            There is a confounding variable here: bookishness. Why would you expect bookish people to become terrorists?

            But the contents of the book can still set the Overton window for the group. And that can be picked up on by more action oriented types.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “There is a confounding variable here: bookishness. Why would you expect bookish people to become terrorists?”

            I was going to question this, but then I remembered that people try to memorize the Quran; there is quite a large gap between the personality of those who do that and those who become engineers. Unfortunately I don’t know how much religious education orients towards that goal; wiki gives ‘millions’ of Hafizs which are presumably the best.

          • I’m rethinking whether anything about mainstream Islam needs to change for Islamist terrorism to fade out, or at least mostly fade out.

            It’s still possible. I could be wrong about this, but I think Islam has stronger group self-congratulation than I’m sued to, and I’ve come to hear “Allah is great” as “I’m great for worshiping a superior God”. I realize other religions have that sort of thing, but I don’t think they repeat it as much.

            The result is that Muslims have created a great huge gob of prestige, and it’s very tempting for people who like power to try to grab that prestige.

            It’s also possible that some things about the mainstream modern world need to change– the ideal of the revolutionary, the individual who takes drastic action to break existing institutions and make the world better, may need to be weakened. (Good luck with *that* project!)

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “I realize other religions have that sort of thing, but I don’t think they repeat it as much.”

            I think it is just like saying God Bless You; people do it because it is the phrase you use.

            “The result is that Muslims have created a great huge gob of prestige, and it’s very tempting for people who like power to try to grab that prestige.”

            I think that is the result of all other institutions being so garbage.

            “It’s also possible that some things about the mainstream modern world need to change– the ideal of the revolutionary, the individual who takes drastic action to break existing institutions and make the world better, may need to be weakened. (Good luck with *that* project!)”

            Unfortunately I don’t see how you can do that since history is replete with examples. As long as history is being taught, people are going to pick up on that (especially for nations with that as part of their heritage).

        • NN says:

          Agreed. Speaking as someone who was raised Lutheran, it’s obvious that most of the people saying “we need an Islamic reformation” or “we need an Islamic Martin Luther” have no idea what the real Martin Luther was like, especially his feelings about Jews.

          • birdboy2000 says:

            They also have no idea what sort of doctrine they preach in Saudi Arabia, and when and how it developed.

            We’re living through the Islamic reformation – with Muhammad Abdul-Wahhab as the Islamic Luther. And that’s kind of the problem!

          • Doctor Mist says:

            Wow, that’s kick in the head. I’ve been lamenting for years that Islam had had no Reformation, without once noticing that Christendom (mostly) did not have religious wars before the Reformation. Schisms, intrigues, heresy hunting, and literally violent quibbling over details, yes, but offhand I can’t think of anything grand enough to be called a religious war between different dialects of Catholicism. (Am I forgetting an obvious example?)

            This layman’s view of the consensus is that the Thirty Years War was what (mostly) burned out Christendom’s interest in religious war.

            So argh. Should I be lamenting that Islam has not had its Thirty Years War? Is there a better alternative? Note that apparently there wasn’t for Christendom. If there isn’t, is there any way they could be left alone to freaking have it without it turning into WW IV or V? I’m sort of afraid it will take development of zero-point energy to render the Middle East enough of a backwater that they can do what it takes to exhaust themselves without dragging the rest of us down that rat hole.

  140. mdv59 says:

    “Whether or not you agreed with him or found him enlightening loaded heavily on those pre-existing differences, so the people who showed up in the comment section got along and started meeting up with each other.”
    This sentence doesn’t make sense to me.

    I think this is the best essay you’ve written in the 6 months I’ve been reading SSC. Really thought provoking and insightful. Thanks.

    • thisguy says:

      “Whether or not you agreed with him or found him enlightening loaded heavily on those pre-existing differences” -> finding Yudkowsky enlightening or agreeable depended a lot on your own personality quirks and interests. Those that stuck around to comment on lesswrong were pre-filtered to all share in common “Finds Yudkowsky writings agreeable/enlightening/thought provoking/worth discussion” trait. If they didn’t then they wouldn’t have been able to get through the sequences and would have been seen as outgroup because of inability to understand Yudkowskiisms.

  141. John Buridan says:

    The theme of the Anglo-saxon poem The Wanderer is the lost of liege lord who in the culture *is* the rallying flag. Alienation afflicts every aspect of the Wanderer’s vision. He has no one of like mind to speak to. Bereft of friends the Wanderer gains that wisdom proper to the world weary, understanding the fleetingness of all tribes. Nothing lasts forever in middle earth, so we must fix ourselves on transcendence, which in the Wanderer’s case is the Father in Heaven. Who can truly say, “I am secure in my tribe, and my tribe is secure in the world,”?

    The Aeneid largely concerns mythologizing the establishment of a new tribe, the Romans. Their ethnogenesis although ordained by the gods comes at a great cost. In order to erect the walls separating the in-group from the out-group Aeneas has to break his relationship with Dido, travel over the sea, engage in bloody war against the Latins, and in the end brutally kills Turnus. The reader is left to ponder the costs of ethnogenesis. Virgil doesn’t paint a rosy view of it, though he does admit and admire the greatness of Rome.

    What are the costs of having a tribe? What allows some tribes to persist for thousands of years and others fizzle after one hundred? In what sense have the Catholic Church or the United States persisted, and in what sense are these no longer the same tribe?

  142. Dan Simon says:

    I have a bunch of minor thoughts on this, but none are as important as commending this excellent write-up on a hugely important idea. I hope you will follow up with a sequel focused on politics, where the principle that “the ideology is not the movement” is particularly true, particularly important, and particularly unappreciated.

  143. Dan King says:

    But some tribes make more babies than other tribes. Evangelical Christians almost certainly outbreed atheists. That gives the evangelical crew a Darwinian advantage over the others, and means that religion will not fade into secularism as easily as portrayed in the post.

    The orthodox Jews of Kiryas Joel are a good example: from 5000 people in 1950 to 35000 today, all by natural increase. Extrapolate that another 70 years into the future, and they’re the majority population in Orange County, NY. Amish, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, even Buddhists, are going to outnumber secularists in the future.

  144. tessa Barton says:

    While this probably does not detract from your argument, the forefathers of the Sunni clergy (the Ummayad Caliphs) did literally kill the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Hosein, along with all His kinsmen, and the mourning of this event figures prominently into the most important Shi’a holidays of the year, Muharram, specifically Ashura. Historian M Axworthy likens this to the early church being poped by Judas Escariot and Pontius Pilot.

    So while it is described above as trivially different, you might see how people could and have drawn on that history of oppression as a source of deep hurt.

  145. K. says:

    Speaking as a professional game developer who’s never not been a gamer: it’s the Gamergate types crying “fake geek girl” who are involved in a culture-change project, by insisting that one small subset of gamers are Real Gamers and the rest are interlopers. The feminists have always been here; there was no shortage of feminist gamers and feminist opinions among gamers 20 years ago, and there was a lot less hostility toward them.

    • Murphy says:

      Not quite the same thing.

      There’s no shortage of feminists or feminist opinions in the less-wrong crowd but if 10,000 tumblr-style feminists suddenly descended on the community and proceeded to try their damnedest to destroy all the less-wrong style norms and traditions and replace them with tumblr norms… then that would be a different matter and would probably generate a little hostility.

      Lots of people are members of multiple tribes and the opinions from one can be commonly heard in the other and that can be quite peaceful and normal.

      That doesn’t preclude one tribe turning around and crushing the other at a later date and trying to destroy all the cultural norms of that tribe to be replaced by their own.

    • The Nybbler says:

      The whole “fake geek girl” meme started here

      http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarabrown/2012/03/26/dear-fake-geek-girls-please-go-away/#6c6aa4df2afb

      Note Ms. Brown is a woman, and not speaking specifically about gamers.

      The phenomenon, and the noticing of the phenomenon, certainly predates this article, but blaming “gamers” for the cry itself is wrong.

      Gamers are more likely to complain about “casuals” (sometimes “filthy casuals”), gender neutral. (or, on the other side, the CoD/sports franchise only players termed with a male-specific word banned here)

      As for separating the real from the interloper, that’s a necessary mechanism in any tribe.

      • Urstoff says:

        So is this basically a complaint about cultural appropriation?

        • The Nybbler says:

          No. Objecting to cultural appropriation is objecting to taking elements of one culture and using them without being a member of that culture. The objection here is claiming to be a member of a culture while adopting only the superficial trappings of it.

          Cultural appropriation complaints from gamers would be silly; anyone can play games. But IMO cultural appropriation complaints are always silly.

        • Jaskologist says:

          “Stolen valor” might be more accurate.

      • NN says:

        Ms. Brown isn’t an exception. Most of the genuine complaints about “fake geek girls” that I’ve seen have come from women who claim to be the “real geek girls.”

      • dndnrsn says:

        There were always women in gaming and in “nerd space”, so the whole “nerd space/gaming was for outcast men” idea is kind of BS – it might have been more male than female, but there were definitely (outcast) women. Some of them were, undoubtedly, feminists.

        As far as I can remember, back in the mid-2000s perceived male interlopers were more complained about than female interlopers: the narrative went, “the idiot jocks just want CoD and Halo and Madden and everything is getting ruined because everything has to be turned into a shooter to appeal to them”.

        However, it never seemed to be as intense as the more recent campaign against perceived female interlopers, where the narrative is about “social justice types coming and taking away all the fun and they just want walking simulators” or whatever.

        Thoughts why?

        • NN says:

          However, it never seemed to be as intense as the more recent campaign against perceived female interlopers, where the narrative is about “social justice types coming and taking away all the fun and they just want walking simulators” or whatever.

          The recent campaign is only perceived to be against female interlopers because of the constant media campaign to smear it as sexist. I have seen far more vitriol and mockery from the Reproductively Viable Worker Ants directed at Jonathan McIntosh, Anita Sarkeesian’s co-writer, than against Sarkeesian herself, even on the chans.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Working from pro-GG sources, though, more women are attacked as interlopers than men, or so it would seem. Or, at least, actual named individuals are more likely to be women.

          • NN says:

            What sources, specifically, are you referring to? Because I see way more male names than female names here.

            Also, one of the largest parts of GG was an email campaign targeting the advertising revenue of Gamasutra, Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, Polygon, and Gawker. Every one of those sites has a mostly male staff, and the campaign against Gawker in particular was set off by a series of Tweets by confirmed male Sam Biddle.

            Finally, the treatment of Steve Polk before and after people found out that his Alison Prime persona was fake seems to be a significant point of evidence against the idea that the Ants are biased against women.

          • NN says:

            @dndnrsn: I see way more male names than female names here.

            There was also the whole Alison Prime AKA Steve Polk situation.

          • Zorgon says:

            Working from pro-GG sources, though, more women are attacked as interlopers than men, or so it would seem.

            Assuming that GG’s explanation for the events that have occurred is true, this would be the expected outcome; since The Narrative is that women are being attacked by “misogynerds”, then it follows that those who seek to gain status and money by posing as victims are much more likely to be women. The incentives line up.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @NN: That’s a list of journalists, though. When I, an outsider, think of “people the Ants view as the interlopers who are coming in and messing things up” (admittedly, this is not a scientific approach) it’s heavily women – Sarkeesian, Wu, Quinn, Nyberg, for some reason Lindy West comes to mind, Leigh Alexander (who is admittedly on the top of that list), etc.

            The impression I’ve gotten is that the journalists are viewed not so much as primarily interlopers, but rather as collaborators. The editorial-cartoon version of the GG narrative would be a blue-haired woman in a certain kind of glasses storming in clutching a gender studies degree, a bunch of student loans, and a Patreon account password, while some craven games journalist lays the red carpet out in front of her. Again, this is just the impression I’ve gotten from the sidelines.

            @Zorgon: But that doesn’t explain why the Ants would play along by attacking them.

          • Jiro says:

            When I, an outsider, think of “people the Ants view as the interlopers who are coming in and messing things up” (admittedly, this is not a scientific approach) it’s heavily women

            Since the means by which they are messing things up is indiscriminate accusations of misogyny, I would expect most of them to be female, for obvious reasons. It’s hard to complain that you’re personally feel discriminated against by misogynist gamers if you’re not female, or at least, it doesn’t get as much play in the media and clickbait sites.

          • Zorgon says:

            You miss my point. Based upon GGs explanation of events, the apparent victims presented by the SJ media would be primarily women regardless of what was actually happening.

            Incentives gonna incent.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Wu and Sarkeesian inserted themselves into Gamergate; Wu used (and uses) claims of harassment by Gamergate as a way to promote herself and her game (well, that’s the charitable version). I think she’s the one who got caught posting a screen shot of a _draft_ of a threat.

            Sarkeesian, while certainly disliked before, and an proponent of the views the journalists were pushing, wasn’t a focus until she blamed Gamergate for harassment she claimed was going on for years when Gamergate was only months old. She also attacked GG-supporter Thunderf00t for “harassing her” by making response videos to her videos. Like Wu, she seems to be using GG as a way to increase her own profile.

            Nyberg’s only connection to gaming at all seems to be attacking gamergate. She’s neither journalist nor interloper, just a troll.

            The blue-haired Patreon feminist is only one GG caricature of anti-GG. The other is the “gooney-beard” male SJW. I haven’t done a survey, but both are well-represented.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Jiro: So, what you’re saying is that, given that it’s mostly women making the accusations, it’s mostly going to be women who the Ants see as the enemy?

            @Zorgon: But I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about who the Ants present as the enemy. And as far as I can tell, their view is that the enemy is a combination of (mostly female) interlopers, and (mostly male) journalist collaborators.

            @The Nybbler: Huh. I’ve mostly seen the whole “male neckbeard etc” stereotype used as the stand-in for the Ants. In the editorial-cartoon version, the Patreon blue-hair (isn’t it weird how that term’s meaning has changed?) and some guy in cargos, a metal t-shirt, and an unfortunate hat are yelling at each other.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @dndnrsn: Unless you do a formal study, it’s going to be hard to determine whether those opposed by GG are mostly women. There’s no shortage of men, though. McIntosh, Grayson, Biddle, Chu, Cheong (before switching sides), and Golding off the top of my head.

            The gooney-beard caricature used by GG is pretty common; look up “Airport’s Law”.

          • Jiro says:

            So, what you’re saying is that, given that it’s mostly women making the accusations, it’s mostly going to be women who the Ants see as the enemy?

            There’s more than one type of accusation and I haven’t exactly surveyed them to see how common they all are. To the extent that the accusations made are ones that only women can make, I would expect the enemies list to contain women.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Plenty of men make accusations of misogyny, though – sometimes they’re quicker to do so.

          • Cauê says:

            I didn’t anticipate needing a list, so I didn’t take notes, and it would take a little work to make one now. But there’s no shortage of men that ants have complained about / mocked (/”attacked”/ “memed on” / etc.) for complaining about games or wanting to change them without actually playing them.

            There have been several rounds of “if you hate games and gamers so much, why are you a gaming journalist?” directed at a variety of men, for instance. But for reasons already mentioned, these are not the ones non-gg people will talk about.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Oh, I’m not demanding a list or anything. I don’t really think that it would be possible to prove anything, because it’s the internet: undoubtedly unaligned trolls (in the original sense of the term) got involved, undoubtedly there were people on both sides doing false-flag stuff, etc.

            Thinking about it, the “allies swooping in” thing on both sides definitely made it worse. The ants themselves may or may not have been even-handed in their target – but Milo seems largely to have feminists as a target.

        • Forlorn Hopes says:

          Thoughts why?

          Cod/Halo/Madden fans just brought the games and played them and the market responded. SJ types are directly and intentionally attacking the culture.

          • dndnrsn says:

            That is probably part of it. Which raises the question: are the newer interlopers fewer in number than the jocks, so the market won’t respond organically to them?

          • NN says:

            It depends on who you mean by the newer interlopers. If you mean casual/mobile gamers, then they are probably greater in number than the jocks and the market has already responded organically to them. If you mean socjus people, then yes they’re fewer in number, and yes it does seem that the market won’t respond organically to them. For example.

          • Jiro says:

            Define organically. Nintendo censored Fire Emblem Fates. They’re never going to say outright “this was because of SJW pressure” (see comment about plausible deniability), but suppose it is: would that count as organically responding?

          • dndnrsn says:

            Organically like FPS games incorporating waypoints on minimaps to help you find where to go next, NPC squads to follow you around and help in combat/you follow them around so you know where to go next [seriously, parts of the CoD games singleplayer are like rail shooters, practically], and respawning health so you don’t have to hunt for medpacks and there’s no chance you’ll get stuck in a situation where you can’t win due to too little health.

            This makes the game easier to play, more people buy it, publishers see it and decide to make more games with those features. Ordinary way markets work.

            Now, I’m not saying this is a bad thing. I don’t really play games much any more, but I don’t remember thinking “I’m not lost going in circles in this FPS! Boo!” or “This RPG keeps a log of my quests and tells me where to go next? Weak!”

            What makes the Halo/CoD model becoming more and more typical for FPS games “organic” is that there was never any campaign by stereotypical guys in popped-collar polo shirts to boycott game developers unless they made their games more accessible. It just became more profitable to cater to them.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            Define organically.

            Organic: Company makes change X in their product. Group A like X and buy the updated product. More companies make change X.

            Organic: Company makes change X in their product. Group A like X and buy the updated product. Group B do not like X and do not buy the updated product. Companies decide whether to sell to A, B, or create two products based on market factors.

            Not organic: Company makes change X in their product. Group A like X. Group B do not like X. Group B does something that prevents A from buying X. Companies sees that A are not buying, and X does not spread.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            “That is probably part of it. Which raises the question: are the newer interlopers fewer in number than the jocks, so the market won’t respond organically to them?”

            dndnrsn: It’s not about the market responding. It’s about being attacked.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I’m not saying it is or isn’t. I’m saying that if there’s enough “interlopers”, the games industry will change to suit them, without any need for them to openly act.

            The stereotypical jocks seen as interloper who only wants to play Madden, slay some brews, and finish off with some CoD on Easy didn’t have to start a letter-writing campaign, or set up Kickstarters to fund making jock-friendly games.

            If the newer people seen as interlopers aren’t enough in number to affect the market organically, and must instead rely on attacking it, that is probably one reason the reaction to them has been so hostile.

          • ThirteenthLetter says:

            @dndnrsn: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. As was said in a slightly different context, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Obviously, not the only reason, but it does help to explain why one group the stereotypical gamer nerd dislikes/fears (jocks) got less pushback than another (girls).

        • Nornagest says:

          Don’t take this as an endorsement of the opposite side, but there’s always been this strong streak of shared victimhood driving geek culture, and gamer culture specifically. I think it’s especially close to the surface in gaming because that’s become wildly popular, and so just being an adult that spends a lot of time playing video games is no longer strong evidence of having the background common to a lot of geeks (as it might be for, say, playing D&D or listening to filk). Gamer carries all these extra connotations of getting stuffed into a trash can in gym class, etc, and there are now lots of people playing games that didn’t.

          So, what is seen as evidence? For a long time you had to be playing the right kind of games — in the mid-2000s Call of Duty and Madden were looked down on as games for frat bros, then in the late 2000s it was Wii Fit and suburban wives. There’s still some of that going on, with the flak around artsy message games on Steam, but I think the shibboleths are shifting away from the kind of games you play and more towards what anthropologists call non-material culture.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I think I must be atypical in this. Younger me was a huge nerd, by any standard: shocked and horrified that D&D 3rd ed had been “dumbed down” by the rules no longer seeming like they’d been written by several different people who had no coordination, adamant that computers were better than consoles for gaming, owned many minatures, etc.

            But I never got bullied for it, and I was never especially socially isolated. A lot of people have stories of Nerd Culture being their refuge from being ostracized and bullied, which was never my experience.

          • Nornagest says:

            Don’t know how old you are, but I get the impression that there are generational differences here — nerds under 25 or so don’t seem to have experienced the level of stigma that older ones did, though they’re still often socially isolated. Dunno if this is thanks to changing mainstream attitudes toward nerdy preoccupations, the decline of broader youth culture and rise of (often online) subcultures, changing policies re: bullying (I doubt it’s this one), or something else.

            But the culture hasn’t changed to reflect that, or at least it’s changing more slowly than conditions have.

          • dndnrsn says:

            I caught the tail end of 2nd ed, so I’m a bit past that cutoff. I think more than any generational change, I just had the right social profile to get along with the cool kids – decent at social interaction, extroverted in some contexts, able to laugh at myself, etc. There were kids who were nerds who had a rough time, but I think it had more to do with people seizing on elements of their personalities and how they fit into social groups, rather than their interests.

            Of course, it could just be that I personally was lucky. Sometimes I’m surprised I wasn’t really bullied in any real way.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            there’s always been this strong streak of shared victimhood driving geek culture, and gamer culture specifically.

            Gamer carries all these extra connotations of getting stuffed into a trash can in gym class, etc,

            While getting stuffed into a trash can is on the way out (and I’m not sure if it was ever common here in the UK) I think the… maybe bullying isn’t the right word but there is definitely still something going on today. Then again, maybe it is. Remember Jack Biddle’s “Bring back bullying” tweet?

            Things have gotten better. Hillary Clinton, Jack Thompson or Anita Sarkesian aren’t going to physically shove anyone in a trash bin. But perhaps the issues that remain help explain why the victimhood meme can be successfully passed down to new generations.

          • Anonymous says:

            Not only were we shoved into lockers, when we were verbally bullied it was by real actual flesh and blood people finding out what bothered us most about ourselves and mercilessly taunting about it.

            Not some politician saying that video games cause violence. Give me a fucking break.

          • The Nybbler says:

            anon@gmail: The current set isn’t going to stuff us into lockers, simply because they can’t physically reach us.

            But as for “flesh and blood people finding some out what bothered us about ourselves and mercilessly taunting about it”, yeah, that’s exactly the sort of people many on the anti-ant side are. Go back to Scott’s “Untitled”, and what prompted it, for a _very_ clear example. Or read Leigh Alexander’s “Gamers are Over”, which appears to be intended to be JUST that.

          • Anonymous says:

            An article on some obscure corner of the Internet by someone you’ve never met and will never be forced to spend time with isn’t even close to bullying.

            My god, you millenials are so utterly desperate to be a victim that you invent tormentors out of thin air.

          • The Nybbler says:

            anon@gmail doesn’t even know which generation I am. But then, anon@gmail is just trolling.

        • blacktrance says:

          There were always women in gaming and in “nerd space”, so the whole “nerd space/gaming was for outcast men” idea is kind of BS – it might have been more male than female, but there were definitely (outcast) women.

          Responding “male” to relevant GameFAQs front page polls: 94% (2000), 95% (2002), 95% (2003), 95% (2004), 94% (2007), 94% (2007), 93% (2008), 93% (2010), 93% (2011), 92% (2014).
          In short, quite significantly more male than female.

          • dndnrsn says:

            1. GameFAQs is not necessarily a perfect sample of gamers, and it definitely isn’t a perfect sample of nerds.

            2. Even if gaming is a disproportionately male part of nerd space, there are parts of it that have been considerably more female – eg, sci fi/fantasy fandom.

          • blacktrance says:

            However, GameFAQs is a large and prominent center of gamer culture (or at least it was in the 00s), so if gamers are defined as participants in that, it suggests that it is/was significantly male, even if there were people who regularly played games who didn’t participate in the culture.

            And while GameFAQs poll results aren’t everything, combined with, say, LW survey responses (more than 80% men) and the like, nerd culture does seem extremely male.

          • NN says:

            Though it does depend a bit on your definition of “nerd culture.” Does fan-fiction and the associated culture count as nerd culture? Because if so, that’s at least one part of nerd culture that is heavily female-dominated.

        • BBA says:

          Many of the “interlopers” weren’t. And I don’t just mean journalists, there were plenty of gamers who agreed with the social justice narrative in principle, if not to the extremes that some radicals take it to. When some gamers complained about jocks coming in and ruining the hobby, everyone more-or-less agreed or didn’t care enough to argue. When some gamers complained about feminists and SJWs coming in and ruining the hobby, the feminist gamers fought back, and there’s a shitstorm.

          • The Nybbler says:

            That’s an interesting narrative, though it falls into the category of “not even wrong”.

          • FacelessCraven says:

            @TheNybbler – “That’s an interesting narrative, though it falls into the category of “not even wrong”.”

            Really? Because I was one of them. I thought Social Justice was just common sense even through the Dickwolves Fracas, right up until GG itself. PAR was headed by Ben Kuchera, and had been running a moderate Social Justice line for quite a while; RPS and Giant Bomb had as well, I believe, as had the Escapist. Heck, Penny Arcade itself was moderate-SJ.

          • The Nybbler says:

            That there exist SJW gamers isn’t the issue. It’s the narrative that the shitstorm started when gamers complained about feminists and SJWs coming in and ruining the hobby and feminist gamers fighting back that’s “not even wrong”.

            Phase 1 of the shitstorm started when one SJW gamer wrote a long post about another SJW, who he was in a relationship with, mistreating him. Phase 2 started when a bunch of game journalists let loose a broadside on gamers in general. This bears little relationship to the idea that “some gamers complained about feminists” and “feminist gamers fought back”.

          • suntzuanime says:

            That sounds just wrong then? Not everything that’s wrong is not even wrong, in fact it’s closer to nothing.

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            @BBA

            Re Nybbler’s response Are you saying that gamergate started when you say “feminist/sjw gamers fought back” or are you referring to pre-gamergate?

            Anyway. Even today you’ll see feminists on both sides of Gamergate. CultOfVivian (now going by Nonsense Nichole) is the most prominent example that springs to mind.

            I’d say the dividing line is anti-gg feminists saying that games have few good female characters and should have less sexual content; while pro-gg saying there’s lots of great female characters and they like or don’t mind that sexual content.

            Anti-gg says games have a moral requirement to change and pro-gg saying that sort of argument should be tabooed. I don’t know if pro-gg feminists share that view. I think they do but it’s possible they’re ok with that sort of moral argument in pricipal, they just don’t think it applies to games.

          • BBA says:

            I didn’t express this properly, but I was trying to give an aspect of the narrative that the previous responses didn’t acknowledge. GG was very much a conflict within the video game community – a civil war, not an invasion. And there were rumblings well before the Zoe Post.

            (Incidentally, the Zoe Post was so damn long that almost nobody actually read it, which is why neither side’s narrative accurately reflects what the post said.)

          • Forlorn Hopes says:

            @BBA

            Oh right. That.

            It’s actually both an invasion and a civil war at the same time, the two are not mutually exclusive.

            The most obvious example would be major news sites coming in to support the SJ side during GG. Pre-GG; I’d say that invaders were an important element despite the fact that most of the fighters were long term players of video games. I would not say they were the same tribe, but I would say they cohabited the same social spaces without anyone realizing they were different tribes. (Common story isn’t it).

            I think what happened was that gaming journalists were just feeling trapped and hated their job. They just needed an excuse to start a war and outsider feminists coming into gaming and getting a frosty reception was that excuse.

            Then again, maybe it was just inevitable. Look at Atheism+

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      When trying to figure out who is trying to destroy whom, remember who said “nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission.”

      • sweeneyrod says:

        That sounds like a joke to me. Of course, x-ist jokes can still be x-ist, but that doesn’t mean everyone who makes them wants to destroy all members of x.

        • keranih says:

          That sounds like a joke to me.

          Well, it didn’t sound like a joke to me. And it was from someone on the side that took a dim view of “jokes” that put down a particular side.

          And whether it was a joke or not, it’s certainly not evidence that side A was interested in getting along with side B.

          (Not a gamer, btw)

        • Forlorn Hopes says:

          It was senior Gawker staffer – Sam Biddle. So I can believe he meant exactly what he said.

          I think he thought he was making a joke. But he actually meant what he said. I’ve read a few articles from other journalists that gave me the impression Sam Biddle is a bully.

    • Nero tol Scaeva says:

      ” The feminists have always been here; there was no shortage of feminist gamers and feminist opinions among gamers 20 years ago

      I’m pretty sure the current feminists warring with gamers weren’t even alive 20 years ago

    • Zorgon says:

      Also speaking as a game developer who’s never not been a gamer.

      There were certainly feminist gamers and feminist opinions among gamers 20 years ago. There were regular articles on sexism in gaming in Edge and similar magazines for most of the late 90s and early 2000s. They received no more uproar than the occasional entry to the letters page.

      That they did not receive this degree of opprobrium should certainly tell you something, but it’s not that

      Gamergate types crying “fake geek girl”

      Are engaged in a culture-change project. It is that the criticism has ceased to be of the content of games, which could be considered opinion to be agreed or disagreed with, and has turned to gamer culture itself. What do you think a culture does when those who purport to represent it instead decide to portray it as a hive of subhumans and relentlessly attack and dehumanise them without pause?

      Is this a culture-change project, or is the culture ejecting a tiny minority that have turned against it?

      Gamergate don’t give the faintest shit about “fake geek girls” and never have. They care that the media that claim to speak for the gaming community bear a deep and passionate hatred for that same community and have made this extremely clear. They suspected, before, but now they know.

      I agree with them that this is the case, though I disagree somewhat as to the cause of the problem; they think it’s “SJW infiltration”. I think it’s “jobbing middle class fuckwits who have never lacked for anything and don’t want to be associated with all those awful smelly nerdy proles” and so far not a single blue-haired anti has done so much as a single thing to suggest otherwise.

      • Forlorn Hopes says:

        > There were regular articles on sexism in gaming in Edge and similar magazines for most of the late 90s and early 2000s.

        My first memory of this was in the Escapist. I read the Escapist most in it’s earliest days so this would be around 2005.

        I remember being instinctively turned away from them but I definitely agree with you though that there wasn’t even remotely the kind of uproar you see today.

        Sadly I can’t remember why I felt that way. If I had to guess I’d say it was defending the games themselves rather than defending the culture. The anti-Jack Thompson response.

        But my confidence in my memories of past me’s motives being accurate as anything except a lucky coincidence is low.

  146. Anonymous says:

    >Then other people with very different characteristics and no particular knowledge of the culture start enjoying video games just because video games are fun. Since the Gamer Tribe has no designated cultural spaces except video games forums and magazines, they view this as an incursion into their cultural spaces and a threat to their existence as a tribe.

    Ah I’m late to the comment party; nevertheless: this isn’t gamer girls. This is fucking casuals. Gamer girls are worse; they [are perceived to] deliberately infiltrate the tribe (if that’s the term you want to use), to leverage their female privilege for personal gain. See also: boobie streamers.

  147. lliamander says:

    > The holy book is the rallying flag for a religion, but the religion is not itself about the holy book.

    In other words:

    “The methods of rationality are the rallying flag for rationalism, but rationalism is not about the methods of rationality”

  148. lliamander says:

    Also, obligatory Meredith Patterson reference:
    https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c#.50avqmixd

  149. keranih says:

    Almost 1.5k responses and no one brings up the People’s Front of Judea?

  150. 4bpp says:

    > If I had written this essay five years ago, it would be be titled “Why Tribalism Is Stupid And Needs To Be Destroyed”. Since then, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve found that I enjoy being in tribes as much as anyone else.

    Reading this filled me with a certain sense of dread, and I realised that its nature was exactly the perception of threat to tribal cohesion that I imagine, for instance, a (blue, red) tribe member would experience if a singer or media personality they like came out in support of a (red, blue) tribe cause. This seemed very ironic at first.

    Then I realised that it actually isn’t. If prior reasoning concluded that tribalism is instrumental to a lot of bad things, can we not continue working to suppress it along with other ancestral instincts that have been deemed harmful for modern society? If the post instead read “Since then, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve found that I enjoy drinking the blood of the children of my enemies as much as anyone else.” and it gave me a strong urge to drink the blood of the children of rationalist diaspora members who would argue in favour of drinking the blood of one’s enemies’ children, it would not be inconsistent for me to argue that even if graphic retribution against the kin of those we disagree with activates our reward circuits, you shouldn’t do it and neither should I.

    Concretely, you say that you’ve changed your mind regarding tribalism, but comparing to everything you have previously put on the table against it, the reasons I can see you mention for you to now find it okay seem fairly weak.

  151. windmill tilter says:

    > I worry that attempts to undermine nationalism/patriotism in order to fight racism risk backfiring. The weaker the “American” tribe becomes, the more people emphasize their other tribes – which can be either overtly racial or else heavily divided along racial lines (eg political parties).

    Empirically you may find that more familialist societies are less patriotic, but I don’t see why the tradeoff above would exist. What would be the evidence for it existing? Also, is there any sense of American tribe that influences behavior-as opposed to, say, influencing a Fourth of July parade-that differs from racism? What does having American citizenship add to person’s status or prestige, if it adds anything?

    • hlynkacg says:

      Why wouldn’t it exist?

      The need to socialize and “belong” seems to be encoded into human brains at a very deep level and if you remove or reduce the effectiveness of one avenue people will naturally seek out others.

      As an aside, American citizenship used to carry a fair bit of prestige, not to mention practical advantage, but that has been waning for a while now.

      • windmill tilter says:

        How did American citizenship carry prestige? Also, if you are right and the importance of citizenship has been declining in a time when, pretty clearly, racism has also been declining, this might be evidence against a tradeoff.

    • Sastan says:

      I would argue that it exists, while postulating it’s damned near impossible to prove. I can however, explain some evidence with that theory.

      The formulation and strengthening of one tribal loyalty will tend to lessen all other tribal loyalties. One can only be finitely partisan, before you are a true fanatic or patriot, and your whole life is subsumed in the tribe’s goals. Most people don’t go this far, this is only as an upper bound for argument. The defining part of any tribe is its outgroup. Therefore, the appearance of a strong outgroup at one level of tribalism should lessen all subsidiary tribalisms. And broadly, this seems to be the case.

      Look at american society before and after WW2. The social convergence from 1945 to 1970 was remarkable, and we saw the crushing of a lot of barriers, the homogenization of culture, and the sweeping away of the old ethnic groupings that had been so important for hundreds of years. Irish, German, Jewish, English, Swede……….all became simply American. This was not because we suddenly decided to all get along, but because we were given an external struggle to focus on. WW2, followed by the Cold War.

      Look at Great Britain. The tenuous and often violent proto-empire melded Scots, English, Welsh and Irish into one identity, and the driver of this was external threat and empire building. With the end of both those, we see the fraying of that order with the Scottish vote last year.

      At the national level, external threats will tend to bolster national feeling and patriotism, and by corollary to reduce the pull of political partisanship, racial solidarity, class struggle, all that jazz. Germany was formed in this way, on purpose! Bismark was enough of a genius to realize he needed to get the loose alliance of german states to all fight a war together against someone (anyone!) to bind them together. The French bumbled into his trap like imbeciles and formed the modern nation of Germany.

  152. Alicia Parr says:

    The last paragraph is the real meat for me. Tribalism vs. Modern Secular Consumerism. They co-exist, even though the idealized version of one precludes the other. This implicit battle that shapes our collective meaning-making begs more analysis.

  153. Little Yid says:

    Wasn’t Abu Bakr long dead by the time the Ali dispute sprang up?

  154. Melody Guan says:

    Typo: can (provably) improveS their physical and mental health.

  155. Kazi Siddiqui says:

    I don’t think the people who complain of atomization are disappointed by the lack of tribalism. I think they are disappointed by the lack of opportunities our society furnishes them to persecute and/or kill other humans. You may think I’m way off the mark, but that is what I truly think. No matter how much tribalism you let them have, if you don’t let them persecute and/or kill others, they will continue to feel atomized.

    (This does not mean that your desire for community is a hidden desire for blood. Rather, people with no camouflaged desire for blood don’t usually complain of atomization in those terms. Such desires are often couched in left-wing formulations as well. Bloodthirst has no politics.)

  156. Jeff says:

    As I think someone else mentioned, I think that’s an incorrect definition of “fake gamer girls”.

    Casual gamers (male or female) are treated with less respect by some gamers who identify as “gamers”, but usually not with any serious vitriol. The concept of a fake gamer girl is a girl who is genuinely *not* interested in any games, but rather is only interested in various “meta-games” related to the game. Usually receiving money or attention through streaming or videos or flirting with people in-game or working as some representative for a company or cosplaying etc.

    I think many “gamers” greatly overstate and overestimate what % of girl gamers are “fake”, but they definitely exist.