Dogs’ reaction to magic tricks (EDIT: more at original source)
Automated theorem provers and the changing foundations of mathematics (does not require much math knowledge to read).
New American Statistical Association ‘premium’ membership plan will permit members to reject null hypotheses at alpha values > 0.05. Actually, the whole site is pretty good.
Some opponents of open borders argue that a lot of Third World countries (eg Afghanistan, Somalia) are kind of terrible, and worry that if we import many of their citizens here, then they might bring whatever factors made their country terrible to the First World and make our countries terrible. The open borders movement presents the start of a counterargument.
Canada passes a law saying they must eliminate one old regulation for every new regulation adopted. I didn’t realize libertarianism had a win condition, but I think Canada just reached it. Will be very interesting to watch.
National Review columnists debate the real primary contenders this election: Cthulhu versus the Sweet Meteor of Death.
Remember, “non-shared environment” doesn’t necessarily mean “sociology stuff” – Toddler temperament could be influenced by different types of gut bacteria.
Citizens of Baltimore living in (more) terror (than usual) as murders and all other types of crime skyrocket after Freddie Gray riots. Seems to be caused by the police not doing much policing. Dueling talking points are “recent media feeding frenzy has left police so scared of racism accusations that they won’t touch any majority-black area” versus “police are acting like toddlers and saying ‘well, if we can’t do policing with racism and brutality, then we’re just not going to do any policing at all, SO THERE”.
Old question “why does evolution allow homosexuality to exist when it decreases reproduction?” seems to have been solved, at least in fruit flies: the female relatives of gayer fruit flies have more children. Same thing appears to be true in humans. Unclear if lesbianism has a similar aetiology.
“Translating Finnegan’s Wake into Chinese” sounds like a bad joke or possibly a metaphor for life. It’s actually an unexpected bestseller.
If you’re not familiar with the Albion’s Seed
BoingBoing: Why Rickrolling Is Sexist
When I wrote a post calling the education system kind of useless (no, not that one, the other one) the first comment was Buck asking why developed countries with lots of education seemed to do better than developed countries with little education. A new study provides an answer: not because of education, because that seems to have no effect.
A novel but fascinating way of investigating gender discrimination in pay: do male-to-female transgender people take a pay cut? Do female-to-male transgender people get a pay raise? Obviously there’s a lot of trouble in adjusting for the effect of transgender itself on pay, but the study finds a 20% pay cut for M->Fs and a 10% pay raise (nonsignificant) for F->M, and concludes that this seems is likely more gender-related than transition-related. Probably should add this to my list of good social justice studies to replace some of the others that keep dropping like flies.
This is the most “we are living in the grim cyberpunk future” story I have ever seen: Russian billboard advertising contraband changes to a more innocuous advertisement when its computer vision system spots a police officer.
Back when I was writing about AI scientists who worried about AI risk, I somehow missed this great interview with Stuart Russell.
A mile-long machine is going to be deployed to the Tsushima Strait to clean it of floating garbage. If it works, there are plans to dispatch 1000 km (!) worth to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But actual ocean-garbage-ologists say it will never work and might be counterproductive.
Does Zoloft treat Ebola? Scientists decide to throw every existing drug at the Ebola virus to see if just by coincidence some of them work just by coincidence, and get some weird positives. But given how many drugs psychiatry has borrowed from infectious diseases, it’s about time we started giving some back.
The most important thing I’ve gotten out of this FIFA scandal is that being a complete loon is apparently no barrier to holding a very high position in the world’s most influential sporting body. Upon being arrested, vice-president Jack Warner promised: “Not even death will stop the avalanche that is coming” he said. “The die is cast. There can be no turning back. Let the chips fall where they fall.” About soccer negotiations. This is the same guy who cited the Onion article.
Latest hullaballoo: Curtis Yarvin (aka “Mencius Moldbug”) was invited to give a presentation on his new computer system Urbit to the Strange Loop tech conference. Then some of his ideological enemies (actually literal Communists) found out, objected to his political views, and he got banned from the conference. Article here, Hacker News thread here, impressively prescient Moldbug post here, demonstration of inevitable Streisand Effect here. I did consider not linking this since it’s so obviously toxoplasma, but I was convinced to do so by this letter where the conference organizer states he’s never read any Moldbug himself, but decided to cave to the ban request because otherwise politics overshadow the conference, which was supposed to be about tech. This kind of crystallizes a pattern I’ve been noticing recently where some social justice activists use a tactic along the lines of “Nice institution youse gots here, shame if somebody were to politicize it”. I sympathize with the desire to give into that to avoid trouble, but I think maybe the only way to avoid enshrining that kind of heckler’s veto always working is to make it clear that the choice to give in will also be politicized. Maybe if organizers know that banning all insufficiently-leftist-people and not banning all insufficiently-leftist-people will both result in politicization and Internet firestorms, they’ll say “screw it” and just follow their principles.
Is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy For Depression Losing Its Efficacy? New meta-analysis across almost 40 years shows that “effects of CBT have declined linearly and steadily since its introduction” with high significance consistent across multiple different measurement modalities. Study theorizes that maybe therapy is getting worse as a lot of people who aren’t very good at it or don’t stick to the evidence-based principles jump on the CBT bandwagon. Also suggests maybe as it becomes less “the exciting new thing” there’s decreased placebo effect. I would add a possibility that CBT ideas have become so prevalent in our society already that there might be less left to teach, and that as depression diagnoses have skyrocketed we may be sending a different population to therapy (eg people who are less severely depressed and therefore can’t be helped as much). Somebody should also try to unify this result with the finding that antidepressant drug efficacy has been declining over the same period. There’s something very important hidden here, but I’m not totally sure what it is.
Dalai Lama says is considering reincarnating as a ‘mischievous blonde woman’.
The economics of art museums. The first half of this article is a terrible ramble that demonstrates some, uh, creative understanding of economics. The second half is much better, and describes the economic forces that lead most art museums to keep most of their art in basements where no one can see it forever, even though selling the tiniest fraction of that could allow them to (for example) make admission free forever.
We already sort of knew that exposure to cat parasite toxoplasma was a risk factor for schizophrenia. Now researchers take the next step and find that children in cat-owning families are at higher risk of schizophrenia across multiple different studies. Odds ratio not on abstract, but it’s about 1.5.
Technocracy Inc was a pro-technocracy movement of the 1930s which had over half a million members, who “painted their cars Official Technocracy Gray, wore a uniform consisting of a gray double-breasted suit, and saluted [leader] Scott when they encountered him in person. At their most extreme, some members replaced their names with numbers, such as 1x1809x56.”
CuddleBids is…I should probably avoid saying “Uber for cuddle prostitution”, but I’m not sure there’s another equally concise way to describe it. Notable as example of the kind of website I hate, with all the information carefully hidden away where it can’t interfere with the sleek design. Other than that I so in favor.
Cool graphs on my Twitter feed: effect sizes of preschool interventions (low and dropping), funnel plot of preschool interventions, not very encouraging at all. Poor sociology. There’s always time to get into the gut-bacteria-studying business.
Cute confirmation bias experiment: when an education plan was pitched as “the Democrats’ education plan”, Democrats supported it 75%-17%, and Republicans opposed it 13%-78%. When the exact same plan was pitched as “the Republicans’ education plan”, Democrats opposed it 80%-12% and Republicans supported it 70%-10%.
The first review of this light fixture
“Crash blossoms” are complicated ambiguous headlines, like “Screenwriter Reveals He Tried To Commit Suicide During Awards Ceremony”. Language Log has nine whole pages of crash blossoms.
“”Is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy For Depression Losing Its Efficacy? … Somebody should also try to unify this result with the finding that antidepressant drug efficacy has been declining over the same period. There’s something very important hidden here, but I’m not totally sure what it is.”
I don’t know what’s going on either, but I’m vaguely reminded of one of nonagenarian historian Jacques Barzun’s dozen lessons he learned from history:
“A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy; that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.”
Maybe psychiatry is like art in that Boredom sets in?
The problem isn’t that older drugs/therapies are better than newer ones (or rather, that may be true, but it’s a different problem). The problem is that already invented things are failing to work as well. I can’t imagine why currents in the psychiatric intellectual world would make drugs suddenly stop working.
I can’t speak to why drugs may not be working as well, but re: CBT – I was surprised when you put it that the reduction in therapy effectiveness might be down to “people who are less severely depressed and therefore can’t be helped as much”.
My own view (which is why I’m avoiding going to counselling) is that it would work for mildly/moderately depressed people, the tactics that “get out of negative patterns of thinking, looking objectively at your situation you have more going for you than you think” do help because if there is a recent triggering event easily identified, then coping strategies and fresh outlook do help.
Whereas for long term depression, or people who really are stuck in bad situations or don’t have options, a few pep-talk sessions about “turn that frown upside down!” aren’t going to cut it.
I think perhaps it’s a combination of people have higher expectations nowadays (I don’t expect to feel happy if I got treatment, I’d settle for not feeling like bursting into tears every five minutes, but most people expect great improvements from feeling down to feeling as up and contented and fulfilled as social expectations tell them they should be feeling because PROGRESS and SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE and WE’RE NOT LIVING IN THE 19th CENTURY ANYMORE!) and that there may be more stresses nowadays re: work, relationships and the like. Thirty to fifty years ago, therapy was for the middle-class, and if you were middle-class there was a good chance if (for example) you were in a job that was making you unhappy, you could easily leave and get another as good or better. That’s not such an option nowadays for most people.
Why, it could be simply depression being multicausal, one of the causal factors was not well treated anyway, and that factor got stronger.
For example, it could have a dietary component and people today tend to eat worse than in the past.
The only plausible (non-psychological) explanation is that the early medical trials have a lot of financial pressure to prove the effectiveness of a given treatment, and we see a regression towards the mean as later trials have a smaller incentive?
I now have an idea for a story where depression starts to becomes drug-resistant. Humans eliminate the previously dominant strains of depression only to have other mutations flood in to fill the void. Depression isn’t tuberculosis, it’s influenza.
You know, this notion that each of us have our own gut bacteria ecosystem that may be influencing us in various ways, and that gut bacteria are constantly evolving and drifting in inordinately complicated ways, which may not be wholly independent from what’s going on in other people’s guts … well, we now have a causal agent that might explain everything … or, equally likely, nothing.
The Barzun comment remind me of my rice Christian theory of political cycles.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2012/06/rice-christian-cycle.html
That blog post seems to be drastically overestimating the extent to which it was impossible to gain respect and power as a conservative in the 60s or a liberal in the 80s. Even Reagan himself was governor of a liberal state before the Reagan revolution. American political cycles are 10-15% of normally undecideds leaning in a slightly different direction that winner-take-all election systems make seem like major watershed moments, followed by a backlash where the same voters that brought in new legislators say “wait a sec, guys, this isn’t what we meant.”
> when an education plan was pitched as “the Democrats’ education plan”, Democrats supported it 75%-17%, and Republicans opposed it 13%-78%. When the exact same plan was pitched as “the Republicans’ education plan”, Democrats supported it 80%-12% and Republicans opposed it 70%-10%.
A first reading made this sound like there wasn’t any partisan shift. This should be: Democrats supported, Republicans opposed, Democrats opposed, Republicans supported.
Thanks, fixed.
I would like to reiterate my opinion that when you write a blog post that contains an error, and someone posts a correction, and you edit the original blog post accordingly, you should make a note of that editing in the blog post. I often see people quoting passages from a blog post, go back to the blog post to find them, can’t find them, only to realize that the error has been edited out.
If you think that political party X is more likely to use principles you agree with than political party Y, the fact that a position is supported by X is Bayseian evidence that the position is based on principles you agree with, and is a legitimate reason to have a larger prior in favor of that position.
I’m not sure why you’d need Bayesian evidence for that. I mean…maybe this sounds naive, but can’t you just look at the position and decide for yourself whether it supports principles you agree with? Don’t most people have the ability to do that?
Maybe in some cases an issue is really complicated and people don’t feel confident in their ability to fully understand it. Fair enough. But using the approach of “whatever most people in my party agree with” to determine whether something supports your principles only makes sense if you assume that most people in your party are smarter than you.
TL;DR: Basically what you said. People are actually not bad at judging ideas based on their merits, but occasionally which side is better isn’t clear and then people just go with their tribe.
Here’s the survey they gave, for reference.
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/BPC%20Polarization%20Toplines.pdf
The questions everyone’s making a big deal about are (7a) and (7b), at the top of the fourth page.
There are a lot of studies out there on what happens when you change policy content *and* which tribe supports the policy, whether people are approving of your policies or your party. They’re split pretty much 50/50 on which is more important*. Experimenters usually have trouble tricking Democrats into supporting abortion restrictions, or Republicans into supporting gun control, but on issues that are complicated or where most people aren’t very educated, people base their decisions more on the political information because they have less to work with.
This suggests a less cynical narrative where people make a genuine attempt to judge policies based on their merits, and only if they’re totally lost do they just stick with their tribe.
If you’ve never been on welfare and someone tells you “here’s the welfare policy devised by party X, do you approve of it?”, what do you do? You don’t know how much assistance poor people need to get by, especially if you’re just a sophomore sociology major. So if you’re a Democrat and this is something the Republicans are apparently in favor of, you figure that this policy is probably pretty stingy and the Democrats want to offer more.
FWIW, of the four options listed (“reduce class sizes”, “teach the basics”, “raise teacher pay”, “make it easier to fire bad teachers”) I only identify “make it easier to fire bad teachers” as something that’s believably partisan. (In this case, I think teachers’ unions don’t want teachers to get fired and Democrats like unions, so my guess is this is a genuine “Republican” stance.) “Teach the basics” in particular seems like a meaningless platitude that either side could co-opt.
They also all sound like pretty good ideas to me. So I’m willing to believe that people got to this question, asked their brains what the better idea was, and their brains said “yeah, this is hard, but you’re usually a Democrat so guess them.”
*It’s late and I don’t want to dig up citations, but ask and ye shall receive.
I find it amusing that when this one is on the “wrong” side, apparently 10% of Republicans choose to answer “don’t know/no opinion” rather than either going against it or supporting it as a Democratic proposal.
As a teacher, all of the options are actually partisan. Increasing teacher pay and decreasing class size are Democrat talking points because on average the teaching profession is more Liberal and thus more likely to vote Democrat than their state/class average. (You have to hire more teachers to decrease class size).
“Teach the basics” is code for “cut technology, art, and humanities departments” and because those are blue-coded behaviors in much of the US, is a Republican talking point.
I don’t see how it follows from the fact that the teaching profession is more liberal than average that hiring more teachers would create more liberals, unless becoming a teacher when you used to do something else can actually turn a conservative into a liberal.
Hiring more teachers would create more jobs for liberals. This is something liberals are likely to favor even if it doesn’t mean creating more liberals.
Adam: Thank of it this way. Most politicians want to pander to their base. Teachers afraid of losing their jobs/want easier jobs would prefer an environment where the demand for teachers are greater. Thus, all else being equal, you would expect teachers to be in favor of hiring more teachers, and if there are more liberal teachers than conservative teachers, a policy of “hire more teachers” would disproportionately benefit liberals over conservatives.
Also, simply, it requires more spending.
Nicholas, it’s interesting to hear that they’re all partisan after all. “Pay teachers more” and “reduce class sizes” both seem like direct consequences of economics and/or math to me, neither of which belongs to a single party, and I didn’t read the subtext of “teach the basics” correctly. (“No, don’t teach the basics! Algebra before multiplication! Calculus before algebra!”)
> Cool graphs on my Twitter feed: effect sizes of preschool interventions (low and dropping), funnel plot of preschool interventions
The links are broken – looks like you have an extraneous break tag in them.
GAH! IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING!
Here ya go. http://www.drlinkcheck.com/ It’s free.
Also, that cat-schizophrenia link: it’s just for outdoor cats, right? I read somewhere else that indoor cats don’t carry Toxoplasma gondii, but the abstract doesn’t say.
Thank you! I’ve been looking for something like that!
(I’m not sure about the cats and I don’t have the article in front of me anymore. Anyone else?)
I’m fairly sure cat-lovers will immediately be up in arms about that – how dare you say Precious Pusskins might possibly not be good for the baby?
In my day (back when the glaciers were still visible in the hills), the old wives’ tales about cats stealing the breath of babies were still current enough that no responsible adult would have dreamed of letting a cat near a baby’s cot. Nowadays I’m seeing “cute” photos plastered all over social media of cats (and dogs) cuddled up to, sleeping on top of, licking and otherwise ALL OVER babies and small children.
I’m horrified by this but I imagine I’d be scolded about disgust reactions are irrational and that it’s my conservative bias meaning I’m overly concerned about “purity” that has me going “Possibility of disease!” 🙂
I’m fairly sure cat-lovers will immediately be up in arms about that – how dare you say Precious Pusskins might possibly not be good for the baby?
They MIGHT even be hearing the voice of Precious Pusskins in their heads, telling them not to allow such a terrible opinion to stand… >_>
Lately I’ve been wondering whether I should get tested for T Gondii, since my family had multiple outdoor cats who pooped in our sandbox when I was a kid, and I have had mental health problems like OCD, anxiety, and panic attacks. Does the latent infection continue to affect one for decades so long as it is untreated? I’m probably just being paranoid, but maybe that’s the fault of the T Gondii as well?
They MIGHT even be hearing the voice of Precious Pusskins in their heads
My youngest brother is a militant vegan/animal rights type (goes on protests and everything) and has a houseful of cats.
Coincidence? I think not! 🙂
I was wondering about that. Given that they only shed the virus for about a month, it seemed surprising that indoor cats would have much effect even if they’d been infected in kittenhood.
> the female relatives of gayer fruit flies have more children.
I’ve always been nervous about the “it’s genetic” thing, because it has the potential to backfire very badly. This article makes us sound like the defective byproducts of one of those awkward sexual dimorphism processes that have a lot of dysgenic tradeoffs…
Russell Bonduriansky at the U NSW evo bio lab has been doing some fascinating work on the subject of sexual selection and sexual dimorphism, and it sounds like it’s rather a hot topic right now.
Anyone have links to good studies on the subject?
I wonder if this sort of research will finally put the “everything is socially constructed” nonsense to rest, or if we’ll see it accused of being “the product of a sexed ideology”, like relativity was.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Either it’s true or it isn’t. We don’t actually have the agency to pick the outcome that might be more rhetorically convenient.
He said “nervous” not “doubtful.” Plenty of true things can cause worry, such as “these equations suggest that splitting an atom gives off one hell of a lot of energy.”
Like Randy said, my concern is with the social narrative we’ve been pushing, and the potential blowback if “it’s genetic” doesn’t turn out to be the positive “helpful gay uncle” scenario we’ve been hoping for.
You’re right that the truth itself doesn’t change. Facts are like bombs: they don’t care if you believe in them, but handling them carelessly makes them blow up in your face.
And we’ve been waving this one around for years.
It might be an explanation for the “mother’s brother” role as the main adult male in a child’s life in some cultures; if reproductive strategy means a daughter has more children at the expense of a brother, and this means childless adult males who are blood relations who can put the resources into helping raise the children (because the blood relationship means they have a genetic stake), then that would help explain why uncle rather than father is considered nearer kinship.
Wouldn’t the simpler explanation be that a child has exactly one father but likely at least 2 uncles, and it is therefore more likely for their one father to die than all of their uncles? Therefore structure your families to establish uncles as providers.
@ Alraune
Also, you don’t need to be particularly wise to know who your uncles are.
In a steady-state population, reproducing at replacement rate, the average child has one each of mother, father, aunt, and uncle – each parent has an average of one sibling surviving to adulthood.
Uncles as stand-ins for absent fathers is obviously a good hedge, but not due to any great surplus of uncles and I don’t think it is evolutionarily optimal to shift any number of males from the “father” to the “uncle only” group.
Seems more likely that the whole “wants to have sex with males” thing is a complex enough bit of neurobiology that evolution hasn’t yet figured out how to put a 100% effective off switch on the Y chromosome.
But replacement really involves some individuals failing to reproduce and others reproducing extra. P(individual has living brother|individual lived to reproduce) should be higher than the prior for P(individual has living brother); the siblings lived in similar conditions.
According to the Wikipedia article:
Consider how, in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”, Théoden refers to Eomer and Eowyn as “sister-son” and “sister-daughter”. What I’m saying is that, if it was sufficiently common that male sibling or siblings of a female had no children themselves, then social customs and structures reinforcing the genetic dominance (the male children are part of the mother’s family line, either by her father or her brother(s) taking on responsibility as ‘father’ than the blood father) of the female’s lineage would happen. And childless males who are blood-related and who help take on the burden of raising her children are going to help the reproducing female optimise her reproductive capacity; the only competition for these resources she faces is from any sisters she has, and since they’re blood-relatives as well, the common genetic inheritance holds sway. You’re not “giving away” children to a rival bloodline, you’re keeping them in your own family line, and the gay uncles are not having children of their own to compete with your own children for caretaking and raising.
I believe it’s the following:
The really obvious explanation for a genetic factor in homosexuality, as born out by this fruit fly and I believe some human studies, is that some X-chromosome polymorphism(s) simultaneously increase fertility in females and play a factor in whatever causes male homosexuality. The effect of the former is of greater magnitude, so people with the polymorphism(s) will have more great grand children down the line.
Perfectly typical sort of trade off in genetic mutations. Not dying from malaria increases your chances of reproducing. Potentially having sickle cell anemia reduces them. As long as there are enough mosquitoes around the effect of the first outweighs the second and the mutation sticks around.
The rest of the thought process is straightforward. Researchers theorize that mutation X functionally leads to homosexuality via an inadequate response to testosterone in the third trimester. They establish a clinical trial where 100 pregnant women with the mutation are followed into adulthood. Children of the 50 mothers given third TM testosterone injections are (OR 0.3, p<.02) less likely to report same sex attraction or homosexual behavior at age 20. Geneticists then start consulting pregnant women with the mutation that 3rd TM testosterone injections are an option for reducing the likelihood of homosexuality.
Or whatever. The specific mechanism and method of treatment isn't the issue. What scares the living daylights out of people is that some day the mechanism is discovered, treatments are created, utilized, and rates of male homosexuality go down throughout society.
^This. I STILL can’t find the study, but coding for sexual dimorphism is a really messy business. It’s not just a matter of “guy stuff goes on the Y chromosome”.
It would have to have one whopping great increase in female fecundity to counter effective sterility in males. Anyway, the identical twin concordance is so low, it’s obviously not a simple genetic mechanism.
There are a few other factors. First the mutation(s) need not always lead to homosexuality. If it increases odds by like 4% then it’s much easier for increased female reproduction to outweigh. Less important is that gay men aren’t actually sterile and many have and do father children.
But yes, obviously it’s not a simple genetic mechanism.
Excuse me? About 40% of males managed to reproduce at all, suggesting polygamy and the majority of men going thirsty. Sperm is cheap. If those guys who would find it really hard to find a girlfriend anyway are sterile it makes hardly a difference.
Is that before or after infant mortality, Shenpen? Honest question, but the difference would not be small.
I’ve seen this number bandied about many times, but never with a real source. I’m very skeptical that it is true, and I suspect that a lot of it comes from confusing “passed on the Y chromosome” (requiring an unbroken line of male descendants) with “passed on genes.”
Well, it isn’t that black and white. A lot of things are fairly heritable, but there are things (of which being gay is one) that have a low but non-zero heritability. Anyway, it’s true that examining the causal links can have different moral implications depending on the worldviews people have, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to figure out what’s going on.
Kuciwalker?!
Wow. It’s a small world.
(Is there something about people who do play (or have played) Civilization that draws them together? Scott himself was an avid Civver back in the day. I remembered your avatar from ‘poly.)
How on earth do you establish a fruit fly is gay? It marches (flies?) in Pride Parades?
This is pretty critical. I have often asked for a test to determine whether an individual is a homosexual, because this will be a crucial step in establishing good, falsifiable science in the area.
…I don’t usually get many responses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph + porn is the usual method, if you have a reason not to rely on self-reporting.
I mean, not for fruit flies obviously. Or women for that matter. But for male humans it works okay.
My understanding is that the APA disavows PPG. However, if you think it is the correct method, then I have a couple more questions. First, would you say that this method can also identify pedophilia in human males?
For a definition of pedophilia that is notably distinct from “child rapist”, yes.
Ok. Now, if the hypothesis is something along the lines of, “Pedophilia can be changed,” would you accept an experimental design as follows:
1) PPG test to establish pedophilia via penile response to child pornography.
2) Intervention.
3) PPG test to establish diminished pedophilia via penile response to child pornography.
The null hypothesis is that interventions would provide no difference in response.
You see, I think terms such as “homosexuality” are meaningless when we’re talking about animals, and especially when it comes to fruit flies. How do you establish “this fly has a preference for mating with flies of its own gender” from “this fly would mate with a scrap of banana peel because it hasn’t enough neurons to have a preference? So if it gets it on with same-gender flies, it neither knows nor cares, it has fulfilled the biological imperative to mate, which it can’t even think about, much less have a preference as to what gets it turned on.”
“1) PPG test to establish pedophilia via penile response to child pornography.”
a) You’d need to have a control group with a dummy intervention. Can’t trust it wouldn’t just be placebo effect.
b) You’re likely to only get people who don’t know they’re pedophiles, or people who’ve already been outed as them. Not many would trust the meager confidentiality of research with a secret as damaging as that.
@Deiseach
Unless you’re positing that fruit fly mating behavior consists of mounting anything that looks remotely fruit-fly like, and it’s simply pure chance that any particular mounting is of a female fruit fly, male fruit flies tend to have a general preference for female fruit flies. I find the idea that a fruit fly brain is too small to distinguish, at least probabilistically, between female fruit flies and not-female-fruit to be completely unsupported.
Beetles have been caught in the act of “mating” with beer bottles. It’s not that hard to throw off insect brains.
@Glomerulus
a) Of course.
b) Possibly, but this is likely the case for almost all research on sexual attitudes/desires/activity that is socially frowned upon.
The real question that a lot of people I converse with struggle with is whether there is any sequence of events which could possibly demonstrate a change in sexual orientation, especially when we apply it to homosexuality. If we follow the above path, the idea is to see if it’s even possible for one person to change. Then, we could do controlled experiments to gauge usefulness of various interventions… but many people seem to cling to the idea that it’s flatly impossible to change, and thus we don’t even get to the point of considering placebos, because the placebo effect is assumed to be zero.
Coupled with the above is interesting wrangling with the concept of bisexuality. Generally, when I construct a sequence like this for homo/heterosexuality (penile response (or whatever measure) to one class of stimulus at time 1; response to the other class of stimulus at time 2), a lot of people jump straight to, “Maybe that person is just bisexual. Aren’t you just an idiot, thinking that bisexuality isn’t a thing?” However, I think this kind of move makes the idea that sexuality can’t change unfalsifiable. Moreover, it seems to be a weird special case; we don’t have a label for ‘bipedosexual’.
I really just want to be clear about what our categories mean and how it would be possible to test some of the things we say when we discuss sexuality. To this point, most of what we say seems utterly unscientific and rather politically motivated.
Anonymous:
Would I correctly assume that you are picturing “interventions” as only going in one direction, homosexual to heterosexual? Or do you instead think it would be just as good an idea to perfect interventions to turn people gay, for the sake of additional scientific knowledge? If what you imagine is the former scenario and not the latter, then this is more of the “politically motivated” thinking that you warn against in your last paragraph; we should be neutral about the preferability of any orientation.
We don’t talk about hetero- or homo-pedosexuals either (if by “pedo” you’re referring to attraction to children — it’s a little unclear in context).
The question of whether bisexuality raises fallibility issues regarding the changeability of sexuality is interesting, but doesn’t have bearing on whether bisexuality (non-trivially) exists. Further, it’s really only a problem if we lack a reliable way to determine the sex(es) to which someone is attracted, and if we can’t then the whole conversation is moot. If we can, then just test for each possible attraction before and after the intervention, done.
Obviously, you would want to test both stimuli at both time 1 and time 2.
And the term you’re looking for is “nonexclusive pedophile”.
Yep! Let’s figure out what is actually going on inside people’s heads/bodies. We should also create some extra pedophiles, too.
This is precisely the point of this line of inquiry. Can we do this? If not, then we should be a lot more hesitant to make some of the very strong statements that are popularly bandied about, because they’re simply unscientific.
This is a weird term, because they’re defined by the attraction to children regardless of ratio. If a woman is predominantly attracted to females, but sometimes males as well, the main descriptor is bisexual. Occasionally, there is a qualifier added to it, but the analog to “nonexclusive pedophile” would be “nonexclusive lesbian”.
‘Nonexclusive’ makes sense in context: pedophilia as a technical term refers to sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children, rather than just to anyone under the local age of consent. At those ages there isn’t much to distinguish boys and girls, relative to adults anyway.
As for interventions to induce a paraphilia, that’s one of those things that might make for an interesting experiment but is usually banned by scientific ethics. It’s the difference between studying Phineas Gage and surgically removing someone’s frontal lobe. Though if someone wanted to perform such experiments on non-human primates I think most people would be ok with it.
I think we misunderstand one another. Suppose someone is attracted to pre-pubescent children as well as adults. That seems more ‘bi’ than ‘non-exclusive’.
This seems to be only because we disapprove of pedophilia, while we approve of homosexuality. This is the reason, after all, why Lenoxus insisted that we try to convert people to homosexuality. We wouldn’t want our scientific inquiry to be hamstrung by messy moralistic priors.
I heard once that you can actually see which gender someone is attracted to in an fMRI, but don’t remember any specifics. I’m just offering this is a starting point if you want to research it.
My understanding of fMRI work is that it’s basically the upstream version of PPG. We can probably see that you’re aroused. Do you think there’s a reason to treat fMRI differently from PPG (or some other physiological method of determining arousal in females)?
You can also use fMRI to read emotions. fMRI of a dead salmon.
The way I understood what I was told is that you don’t really need a state of physiological arousal for the stuff to show up in the fMRI, but I didn’t double-check that. I may have gotten a wrong impression.
If you can find any literature to this effect, I’d love to see it. My understanding is that if we try to invoke arousal, we can see it. Otherwise, gender differences are rather small. Interestingly enough, language-processing is one of the most gendered items in fMRI studies. I shudder to think what type of conclusions people will make from this.
Fruit flies have a complex mating ritual that male flies initiate. Usually, male flies learn that only unfertilized mature females are receptive to mating (corollary: usually male flies are unreceptive to other males’ advances).
This is interesting but does little to reassure as to the applicability to humans.
It sounds like that may have a lot more to do with the flies being stupid than with them being gay.
Either way, I find it unlikely that it maps to human sexual behavior in any meaningful way.
So a male fruit fly mating advances can be refused by:
(a) another male fly
(b) an immature female
(c) a mature but fertilised female
Yeah – that’s still not telling me that if it attempts to mate with an unreceptive partner, that it is ‘gay’ in any meaningful sense of the word. Unless we mean that the male fly which responds to the other male’s mating advances is the gay fly, and that is going to involve invoking tropes of, e.g. Classical paederasty (the lover and the beloved and the difference in roles and activity) that is opening up a whole minefield.
I really don’t see it being very applicable to humans other than “sometimes the wiring is joined up wrong” which, you know, gets us back to telos and the whole argument over the purpose of sexuality.
If ‘studies of gay fruitflies’ show that yeah, sometimes, the wiring is joined up wrong, I would hate to be the researcher who tries (a) announcing that result (b) saying it has any application to human sexuality, because the amount of vituperation and accusations of homophobia and being a secret right-wing Republican-voting anti-choicer het cis White Christian hater bigot – !
Well, it’s not (very) genetic, because the heritability of homosexuality in men is very low, less than 22%. Let me restate: identical twins are discordant for sexual orientation over 75% of the time.
(Obligate male) homosexuality is a disorder – indeed, a Darwinian disease. See my comment below for much more. (Note, before you ask questions, read the material linked in the said location. Not going to engage if you don’t.)
“Let me restate: identical twins are discordant for sexual orientation over 75% of the time.”
Unless I misunderstand what “discordant” means, that means that pairs of identical twins who are both straight make up less than 25% of all pairs of identical twins.
“(Note, before you ask questions, read the material linked in the said location. Not going to engage if you don’t.)”
You’re not my teacher, and you don’t get to assign me reading. But as long as we’re doing argument by link, http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/
The “dogs react to magic” gif is taken from this video. There’s a second part here.
Edit: And dog reactions to a different trick here.
“Old question “why does evolution allow homosexuality to exist when it decreases reproduction?” seems to have been solved, at least in fruit flies: the female relatives of gayer fruit flies have more children. Same thing appears to be true in humans. Unclear if lesbianism has a similar aetiology.”
I have only limited experience with fruit flies, and moreso on the killing end than the breeding end, but I find it highly unlikely that all the “gay uncle” fruit flies are busy caring for the offspring of their sisters like is often hypothesized was what allowed homosexuality to persist over the generations in humans.
This seems to indicate that it is something akin to sickle-cell anemia/malaria resistance, wherein an occasionally useful gene has deleterious effects in combination with itself or with some other genes.
Also, imagine the researcher tracking fruit flies to try to categorize them as “gayer” and, conversely, less gay. Correctly identify both the genders of the fruit flies involved in the sexual acts, and ascertain when they are doing the fruit fly equivalent of homosexual acts rather than getting that bit of banana stuck to the other’s wing. Also, making sure not to mix up which ones relations had more children, without subsequently mixing them up. I think there is a fair amount of margin of error here.
Yep. I think people were always hoping for a comfortable group selection narrative, where having gay people around just made everything more fabulous.
Unfortunately, at least ten years ago people were finding out just how many trade-offs are involved in sex-specific genetic inheritance, which opened the possibility of homosexuality simply being an “acceptable cost” for a positive trait in your other offspring.
Fortunately my country’s appalling science education means that none of the people who’d advocate throwing us off cliffs would ever make it past the abstracts…
Has anybody ever calculated what kinds of safety margins evolution considers acceptable? I’m not sure a phenotype that pops up 2-3% of the time really needs all that much explanation, especially since until recently society would have mitigated it by encouraging them to get married and have kids anyway.
Cultural evolution has done a lot to mitigate the genes’ effects. Of course, culture is changing in a way that brings out the biological evolution.
It’s amazing how many people don’t believe in evolution when you point out that it’s selecting for people who want to have children right now.
Yes, it’s often forgotten that obligate homosexuality wasn’t actually a barrier to reproductive success for most of civilized human history. I don’t think that we know enough to say whether it hurt much in the EAA, but I have read (somewhere here in a SSC comment thread, in fact) that hunter-gatherers have very low reported levels of homosexuality anyway.
Of course, now that we have social justice, homosexuals take themselves out of the gene pool much more effectively than before.
Most of the world doesn’t have social justice, so do you expect Western homosexuality rates to decline in the next generation relative to non-Western ones?
2-3% is too high, ridiculously too high. For anything which reduces fertility as much as obligate homosexuality to be genetically driven, it would have to be continually reintroduced by de novo mutations which are then selected against, and thus lost within a few generations. At best, that would give us rates around 100-1000 times lower than we actually see. (The mutation rate isn’t that high.) There has to be something else going on.
2-3% includes all bisexual and indeed, homosexuals who are not, in fact, obligate. (Witness that most homosexuals with children had them the usual way.)
Brett,
What else might be going on besides sexually antagonistic selection?
Are you proposing an infectious agent? (I have seen that proposed elsewhere online.)
It couldn’t be culture, b/c we’re talking about fruit flies, sheep, etc. And of course, as has been mentioned, the “benevolent gay uncle” theory doesn’t work for r-selected species like fruit flies without much (if any) parental investment.
Some epigenetic thing triggered by …?
Related:
All these “gay animals” studies are pretty recent, right? Do we have any studies (or at least more-than-anecodotal) observations of the phenomenon from the decades and centuries before we started dumping possibly endocrine-disrupting chemicals into the water supply? Would this fruit fly lab have been using distilled water or tap water–what’s the norm in biological research?
IOW, do we actually KNOW that gay animals are the product of millennia of evolution, and not just a side effect of industrial pollution in the Anthropocene? We know gay behavior is ancient in humans, but humans could be subject to culture, or “good gay uncle” genetic selection.
Yes, it’s possible that homosexuality is the result of recent the environment. But it has substantial heritability, substantial fitness loss, and at least a century’s history. You can propose that the genes were inactive up until they encountered environmental hormones in 1900, but that still leaves several generations of selection. This would seem to require that it was substantially more common a century ago.
That isn’t an explanation.
Douglas Knight,
I’m not really “proposing” anything. Just thinking out loud because I was wondering what Brett was getting at. Sorry I wasn’t clear about that.
@Douglas Knight: why “at least a century”? Homosexual behavior has been widely documented basically since the start of recorded history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_homosexuality). But *obligate* homosexuality might be more modern, is that what you meant?
Mainly I misread Irenist. I thought that he was proposing that homosexuality might be new, due to industrial pollution. I was taking that as given and saying that it’s still old enough to be pose an evolutionary issue. But he was just talking about sheep, where we probably don’t have measurements of heritability.
Yes, there are lots of ways that ancient and modern homosexuality differ. And many more ways that they might differ, but we can’t tell. In particular, it is hard to notice obligate homosexuals in (written accounts of) a setting where homosexual behavior is common. There certainly are examples, but it is not possible to compute a rate.
I don’t know what the correct explanation is, but I know that lots of the commonly given explanations (group selection, gay uncles helping their nephews, sexually antagonistic selection) can’t be true because the math doesn’t work out. Obligate homosexuality is just too deleterious to reproduction to be easily explained by evolutionary models like that. The infectious agent hypothesis is at least plausible, although as far as I know there’s no evidence for it and a little bit (we’ve seen no immune system things pop out of GWAS for homosexuality) against it.
Sure. Here’s a calculation. Let’s say that there is a mutation that is spontaneously created in 1 in 10,000, that it has a 10% chance of producing a homosexual phenotype and that the phenotype has 0.9 fitness, that is, yields an average of 1.8 children. Then the fitness of the gene in 0.99. So in equilibrium, the gene only reproduces itself 99%, so the remaining 1% must be made up by the spontaneous mutation. That is, the prevalence is 100x the spontaneous mutation rate. The prevalence is 1% of the population, of which 0.99% inherit the gene and 0.01% spontaneously acquire it. That’s a genotypic prevalence of 1%. The phenotypic prevalence is 0.1%.
I think 1 in 10,000 is the standard rule of thumb mutation rate. For example, achondroplasia (dwarfism) has a spontaneous mutation rate of 3 in 100,000 and an inherited rate of 1 in 100,000. Apparently dwarfs have about 1/4 of replacement fertility. (The fatality of homozygous achondroplasia complicates the situation. The gene definitely has a fitness of 1/4, but if dwarfs only marry dwarfs, the fitness of the people would be 3/8, I think.)
So, on the order of 0.1% prevalence of homosexuality, assuming homosexuality can be caused by a single point mutation.
W/re male homosexuality, homo sapiens obviously has the encoding for “you will want to have sex with males”, which may be complex beyond the scope of any single mutation but is necessarily encoded on chromosomes that males get copies of. So, crudely, there’s an off switch for that on the Y chromosome. Could plausibly get broken by a single mutation. But that gives you roughly half-strength desire for sex with men, probably bisexuality rather than homosexuality, and 0.1% for male homosexuality and bisexuality combined is implausibly low.
If instead of a crude off switch we have an s/male/female routine on the Y chromosome, that could probably get broken in several places with differing results, adding up to a percent or so of homosexuality, bisexualty, and asexuality among men. Still a bit low, but plausible.
But it’s difficult to explain female homosexuality in this manner. Have to ponder this some more.
Or, you know, read a textbook.
You see, I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as “you will want to have sex with males”. I think it’s more like “you can be aroused by your own and other genders”.
The idea of “purely attracted to own-gender” is a recent (19th century sexologist) categorisation. I think the proportion of obligate homosexuals (i.e. only sexually aroused by their own gender) was always a very small proportion, but that there was a greater proportion of those capable of being aroused by various genders and so within different cultural expressions, this was permissible: you married and had children to fulfil your duty to the family line, but you could have sexual partners outside of marriage, and older males/younger males pairings were accepted.
The idea that you’re rigidly gay or rigidly straight is modern; that if you experience same-sex attraction, that’s it (even if you’re previously married and have children), you must come out as gay and nothing else (see the notion of “bisexual erasure”). It’s political as much as anything.
Plato discusses sexual orientation of a sort in the Symposium, through the voice of Aristophanes. Aristophanes tells a myth about everyone having initially been part of a union of two (half-)persons, such that “the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two…”
He then recounts how the gods split these primordial humans in half, and says:
“Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are loves of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,-if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him.”
It’s possible that homosexuality may turn out to have a comprehensible genetic origin, but I think we need to accept the fact that, sometimes, the working of Azathoth are beyond human ken. If there is a genetic component to homosexuality, t’s quite possible that the answer to question of “Why?” is “Because of a complex interaction of phenomena that simply can’t be reduced to a form both comprehensible to the human mind and reasonably approximating the actual mechanism.”
Deploying oceangoing resources from Northwestern Europe to the Tsushima Strait doesn’t always turn out very well.
I’d feel less safe with the guy whose ideology led to the murder of a hundred million people than with the guy whose ideology led to a bunch of 10,000 word essays grumbling about the French Revolution
No, NO, NO! We either apply the worst argument in the worlds to both some random modern communist and Mencius, or we don’t. If modern Western communists are responsible for the actions of the Soviets, Mencius is responsible at least for colonialism and its consequences. If Mencius is responsible only for his own actions, writing, and its consequences, then so are the communists. You can’t have half of this, and half of that.
Fair point, removed.
Well, if the question is the participants personal safety, communists were much more well known for killing their fellow citizens than colonialists, so I think the original point stands even with all the sins of their ideological kin piled on their shoulders, which was merely an ironic tangent to the observation of the continuing death of political civility.
“Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”
-Borges
You should probably take your own advice.
I don’t see why this comment was singled out for that. Care to elaborate?
“I don’t see why this comment was singled out for that. Care to elaborate?”
Scott graciously conceded a point. The exchange of views came to a natural end.
This is where the Beginner’s Guides to Political Civility counsels “letting go” of your compulsion to break that equilibrium with petty point-scoring.
“You should probably take your own advice.”
That would make sense if the saying “silence is golden” inferred one should refrain from ever saying “silence is golden”.
Grace demands the host acquiesce when shouted at, perhaps, but not that others do not come to his defense.
I feel the relative pettiness of the point scoring is a rather subjective measurement, with novicecivility allowing enough give for a discussion in polilte, measured tones. (But for all I, an apparent beginner in civility, know, this defense is surely a faux paux as well. Alas, I am not overly intuitive, and beg pardon if so. )
“The verb ‘demand’ takes as its object a clause in the subjunctive mood. In the subjunctive mood, non-auxiliary verbs can be negated and thus the dummy auxiliary verb ‘do’ is superfluous.”
-an actual petty argument
I care about people equally regardless of if they’re my fellow citizens.
But wasn’t the objection that the conference “wasn’t safe” with him there? I was simply pointing out that it doesn’t make a lot of sense in this case to use such a (phony) complaint.
If modern Western communists don’t want to be associated with the Soviet Union they shouldn’t self-describe or identify as communists.
And put bloody hammers and sickles on everything. It’s like they want us to purge them.
That’s why they generally prefer “revolutionary leftist.”
No, “communist” is much more common. “Revolutionary leftist” is mostly an ecumenical thing directed towards anarchists, not liberals.
The HN monster thread had someone claiming “my ultimate allegiance is to Deleuze”… it took me considerable willpower not to crack out the old “oh yeah? you know who else was a Deleuzian?”
And by revolution, they usually allude to the French Revolution. You know, the peaceful one. Robespierre put it so perfectly: “No one loves armed missionaries”.
As much as I hate communism though, I have to agree with the original point. If all communists are lumped in with Stalin, then its only fair to link Moldbug with reactionary dictators.
In that case, count the corpses and you’ll find that you’re still safer with Moldbug than with the people purging him.
In addition to “what people they associate with did” we should also look at what they did, personally.
The people opposing Moldbug prevented him from participating at a conference, because of things unrelated to conference.
Moldbug… wrote a blog.
Assuming Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” (you don’t know which one of them you agree politically with), which one of them seems more dangerous?
How far does this extend? If all Neo-Nazis are lumped in with Hitler, must all environmentalist be lumped in with Ted Kaczynski? Is there no principled way of distinguishing between the two situations?
Does Mencius advocate colonizing other countries? Based on what I’ve seen, “neocolonial” is an extremely broad brush used by leftists to paint people who never actually said anything about colonization.
(I agree blog posts are the wrong reference point for Moldbug. I haven’t read much of him, but perhaps a better reference point would be early 1900s America, back before WWI when the US government was just a single-digit percentage of our GDP–incidentally, a time when the US was a rising star, not a falling star, on the world stage.)
I doubt modern communists advocate starving millions of peasants to death with ill-advised modernization schemes. Moldbug (I’d say “Mencius”, but that makes my inner historian squirm) has not to my knowledge advocated pith-hats-and-gunboats colonization in the modern day, but he’s as close to an unreserved advocate of it in the colonial era as I’ve seen.
(Well, I’ve met one sixty-year-old paleocon that might give him a run for his money, but that’s dark-matter-universe territory for most of the people around here.)
No Communists advocate starving millions of peasants to death with ill-advised modernization schemes.
They merely didn’t care whether they did so.
Actually the New Left wouldn’t mind getting rid of a few Billion people. Here’ s a pretty run of the mill quote on yesterday’s NYT Room for debate[0]:
M NYC 18 hours ago
The subject is: What did we learn from Paul Erlich’s false apocalyptic prediction? Apparently the lesson for every opinionist and commenter seems to be: we need population control even worse, and we need to highlight more apocalyptic predictions to justify it.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/08/is-overpopulation-a-legitimate-threat-to-humanity-and-the-planet
I’m not getting “getting rid of a few billion people” from that, merely “forcing a few billion people into living in a state of what a penniless Afghani bricklayer might consider prosperity, and/or keeping them from having more kids than we think are appropriate”. Which still strikes me as pretty vile, but doesn’t amount to genocide.
Of course it’s genocide. Merely taking children from a group to be adopted elsewhere is genocide. Compulsory contraception and/or abortion would therefore also be genocide.
For those of you going HUH? that’s “international law” not common usage. That is because genocide was pretty much defined as “bad stuff Nazis did,” so the attempt to Germanize allegedly ethnically German Polish children was thrown in.
International law is rarely intuitive, sometimes incoherent, and almost always toothless, so I feel justified in ignoring it here. But I haven’t heard many genocide accusations regarding e.g. China’s One Child policy, which seems close to the implication upthread. Plenty of complaints on other human-rights grounds, and rightly so, but not the G word.
I have heard genocide accusations around taking children from one group to be raised by another — sometimes couched as “cultural genocide”, sometimes not. I think we can sum common usage up by saying that “genocide” refers to either “systematically killing a whole lot of people” or “trying to eradicate a demographic group”, but not to bad stuff that happens to living people as long as no one’s trying to eradicate them or their culture.
Doesn’t the concept of genocide imply that the perpetrator and victim be of identifiably different groups? Can China commit genocide against China?
You’re right, which is one of the problems with the concept of genocide.
Why is the Holodomor not genocide? Because no one’s found the smoking gun of someone saying it was because they were Ukrainians. Except that no one sane would say that finding the smoking gun would make the Holodomor that much worse.
“As the King begins the transition from democracy, however, he sees at once that many Californians – certainly millions – are financial liabilities. These are unproductive citizens. Their place on the balance sheet is on the right. To put it crudely, a ten-cent bullet in the nape of each neck would send California’s market capitalization soaring – often by a cool million per neck….Imagine the garden that a population of ten or twenty million – all the most human of humanity – could make of the earth. Would they miss the six billion? Not a chance. Would the planet seem empty and boring without the favelas of Rio, the projects of Baltimore, the huge human warrens of Lagos? Not a chance. Nor, if your taste runs to Gaia, would the Earth. And if the few can figure out how to preserve the organs of the many, this new nobility can live for millennia!
Anyway. I am not actually making this Swiftian proposal. On the contrary! As I’ve said, I oppose it. Nonetheless, it is important to present it, because the attraction is real.”
– Moldbug
Swiftian proposals are by definition not attractive to the proposer. Yet claiming so offers all the plausible deniablility you’ll need to acquit your savvy sweetheart of normalizing genocidal fantasies. Little by little these new ways of thinking of, speaking about and organizing for the future disposal of unwanted humans becomes routinely incorporated into everyday chit chat. Does anyone relate?
The Republic has no need of savants.
I’d point and laugh, except that anti-natalists are indeed a thing and that the notion that humanity is a disease and scourge that should kill itself off so as to leave the planet to be reclaimed by the innocent and happy animals and plants is a real opinion.
Indeed, drastic population reduction was the premise of the plot for Channel 4’s short-lived series Utopia.
Delseach: to be fair, the Voluntariy Human Extinction movement is exactly that: voluntary. The mechanism through which humanity will be extinguished is through lack of reproduction, rather than any more direct genocide. And for what it’s worth, they know they’ll fail. They just hold that it’s deeply unethical to reproduce and (supposedly) hold themselves to it.
The proposal is Swiftian insofar as it resembles A Modest Proposal. Whether one is attracted to the idea of using people for their organs or not, one must recognise that it is firmly in Swift’s ambit.
“[T]he attraction is real” – but to whom? And for that matter, what is the attraction? The latter question is simple: increasing wealth. Then the former question becomes simple too: more or less everyone is attracted by the idea of increasing wealth. So Moldbug is saying that he, you and I will all feel, even if suppressed, some attraction to killing the unproductive. This is hardly incompatible with also being repulsed by the notion.
It might help you understand what is going on here if you think of this final solution to the incapacity problem as being a sin. People feel urges to commit sins. They shouldn’t act on them. Your response is the moral equivalent of saying “eww! how could anyone even think of making someone have sex! why is he talking about making people have sex! he wants everyone to be thinking and talking about it, so that one day he can make people have sex with him!”
See also his post on the Holocaust. I was dimly aware that the methods of killing whole ethnic groups were developed by tests on the mentally handicapped, but it did snap into focus for me how the decision to kill one group, based on a reprehensible but utilitarian analysis, inevitably led to the decision to kill others, based on insane nonsense.
What do modern communists advocate?
The answer to your question is “yes, more or less.” Google “From Cromer to Romer” to read the man himself on the subject. (But be warned that it’s very Moldbuggy; e.g. it literally starts “My n****z,” except not censored.)
(Also, Scott, does the comment system filter out posts with links to UR? I’ve tried a couple of times to post a link directly but it’s getting et.)
That links to Unqualified Reservations get caught in the spam filter has at least been observed by other commenters before, IIRC.
I think it’s all of blogspot.
There are simple ways to post links regardless of whether they are being filtered, albeit in such a way that they are not clickable. I’m not sure I should discuss what they are, however.
He thinks the British Empire was a better ruler than the post-Imperial governments, and that the East India Company was a better ruler than the British Empire. So, he advocates whatever we call that thing Chinese businessmen are doing.
FWIW, Moldbug pretty explicitly bites that bullet, and claims that colonialism was a huge net positive.
His arguments sure look convincing (very, very brief summary: governance and living standards, _for the colonized_, fall off a cliff as soon as the colonialists leave power), but I’m unequipped to double check them.
I’m not familiar with Moldbug specifically, but in theory, you can argue that even something that was morally wrong and had some unfortunate consequences was still a “net positive” in economic terms.
A conservative radio host I used to listen to once got in trouble for suggesting that American black decedents of slaves should be thankful that their ancestors were enslaved, because otherwise they would have been born over in Africa, and who wants to live there?
While on the face of it that seems pretty ridiculous, and while the vast majority of people would not claim this “justifies” slavery in any way, his primary point seems to have some legitimacy to it. While it was probably terrible for the ancestors, many of their decedents probably ARE in fact, better off for it.
Almost all people who exist today are better off than their distant ancestors. This seems completely unrelated to whether or not we should adopt the policies of our distance ancestors.
As for “thankful,” I mean, come on. I can kidnap 40 random girls from Afghanistan and flay their parents while they watch, bring them back to Texas with me, rape them to get them pregnant, then send the new kids into foster care and murder the girls I took. Arguably, those new kids would still be better off than if they had been born in Afghanistan. In what reasonable world does a person say they should thank me for this, though?
I doubt it has anything to be with being grateful TO the slave traders or buyers for their cruel actions, but rather looking at the standards of living of the two places at the moment and thinking that some good came from the evil, even if only personally.
And I didn’t see ay suggestion that we should then implement those policies.
Fair enough. I don’t know which conservative radio host Matt was referring to or what policies he advocates, but something like this same argument seems to come up with people who actually do explicitly advocate some form of return to aristocracy and exclusively white rule.
Dennis PRager has mentioned the book “Out of Africa” iirc, making a broadly similar point.
Most American blacks have about 15 – 25% European DNA. So they wouldn’t have been born in Africa had their ancestors not been enslaved. They wouldn’t exist.
Those are only better off because off the non-identity problem, which doesn’t apply to the original claim that compares American and African blacks.
My comment is pointing out that the original claim comparing African Americans (who are 25% European Americans) with Africans is a non-sequitur. It follows just as much as if we said that, had Africans not been enslaved, current African-Americans would be living in Europe.
For example, take hypothetical person Pat. Pat’s mother is from Bari, Italy and Pat’s dad is from Sao Paolo, Brazil. If Pat’s parents hadn’t met, where would Pat be living?
If their ancestors hadn’t been enslaved, the descendants wouldn’t be living in Africa, they just wouldn’t have been born, since presumably different people had children together as a result of slavery. I think this is the problem with that argument.
If that’s really the meat of the argument– colonized peoples’ living standards got much worse off after the collapse of colonialism, therefore colonialism was a good idea– that’s really dumb. Totalitarian systems of all stripes are notorious for leaving wreckage in the wake of their collapses. After the Soviet Union collapsed, for example, Russians’ average living standard went way down by many measures, and polls showed large percentages believing– no doubt some reasonably– that they had been better off under the Soviet regime. It does not follow that the establishment of the Soviet Union was a good idea!
The meat of his argument is “people’s living standards get much better when they are ruled by ambivalent foreign merchant princes.”
I think it would be good if, in general, people got over the fetish for being ruled by people “like them” (though I can think of strong historical reasons for that mentality). I would rather have my government run by competent foreigners than by corrupt, incompetent people who happen to have been born within the same geographic territory as myself.
It depends on the extent to which the foreigners’ interests align with the natives’. It’s never going to be a total alignment, of course — not even close.
If the foreigners don’t live in the country and there’s a lot of value locked in natural resources… well, developing the country beyond what’s necessary to tap those resources is a lot of effort. It’s easier to just run a huge slave plantation with cheap, disposable labor and get all the rubber.
If the foreigners live in the country, it’s likely that there are too many of them for them to be able to turn it into their personal wealth-generating machine, but few enough of them that they have to worry about a revolt. If the foreigners can go back to their homeland, that changes things — more so if they retain strong ties with the homeland, and more so if the homeland has need of the country’s resources, and is willing to extract them cheaply. They might develop some parts of the country enough for their taste, but if they’re there for cheap resources… well, the British prioritize the British over the Indians, so you get famines in the Raj.
If they don’t have strong ties with the homeland, on the other hand, they might want to develop the country — they have nowhere else to go. And presumably, since they managed to conquer the country, they’re capable of maintaining order and so on. They’ll preserve their own elite position, which is going to sting, but replacing them is likely to mean concentrating power in few enough hands that the leaders can use the country as their personal wealth-generating machine. I don’t know how much money Ian Smith had, but I’d be surprised if it turned out to be even a tenth of the lowest estimate of Mugabe’s net worth.
If replacing them isn’t likely to create a Mugabe, if the natives are capable of providing a similar quality of governance, that changes matters again: if the natives can retake power cleanly, they stand to gain by kicking out the foreigners. If you follow Benedict Anderson’s interpretation of the nationalist revolutions in the New World, that’s what happened: the American offspring of the British were of the same stock and had the same culture and so on, so the capacity for stable and functional governance was likely about equal (of course, Anderson doesn’t say any of that), and it stung the Americans like hell that they were lower in the hierarchy than the British. So they kicked the British out.
The point of Moldbug’s Fnargl thought experiment is that the interests of the foreigners will align perfectly with the interests of the natives, but, you know, homo economicus. And even then, you have the Belgian Congo. Which Moldbug chalks up to lack of stability… but then you have the famines in the British Raj.
On the one hand, it’s clear by now that the destruction of Rhodesia was a mistake, and it will probably become clear in a decade or two that regime change in South Africa was a mistake. (How does Thabo Mbeki compare to Mussolini? The >300,000 deaths caused by Mbeki’s ban on antiretroviral drugs were all people with HIV, so they would’ve died anyway, just later… but most of the deaths Mussolini was responsible for were casualties of war, and those tend not to get weighted anywhere near as heavily as peacetime deaths… but who knows how many HIV cases the ANC’s thoroughly fucked handling of that crisis was responsible for… and then there’s the violent crime issue. I’m not sure how the two compare. Which itself proves a point: regime change was supposed to be vastly, unambiguously better than literal Fascism, but, uh, well.) On the other hand, there’s the Belgian Congo and possibly the British Raj. On the third hand, Benedict Anderson has written in a manner that can’t exactly be characterized as unfavorable about Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, and he’s supposed to be playing the character of a Marxist, which, by the Grand Mosque principle*, suggests that the Dutch were alright.
It’s best not to expect one position to hold for all instances of colonialism. Think of it like democracy: it clearly works in Switzerland, has a mixed record in America, totally fucked up in Zimbabwe, Iraq, etc., and killed Jesus.
* When the Grand Mosque was seized, the Saudi government didn’t have time to get approval to retake it from all of the relevant religious authorities, so they called up the authorities of the most hard-line sect there was, figuring that, if they approved it, so would everyone else. This didn’t work out well for the Saudis, but the principle still stands: if a hard-line anti-Xer can’t bring himself to condemn a particular instance of X, that’s evidence in favor of X.
Yes, I’ve definitely encountered plausible arguments that the reason for at least some of the political chaos after decolonization was divide and conquer strategies used by the colonizers which exacerbated tribal divisions and made formation of any kind of stable post-colonial order more difficult. It might be more useful to compare the colonized to the uncolonized, but the latter are rare, and there are likely to be confounding factors in the reasons why the uncolonized were so. Still, since Japan stands out as an instance of the never colonized, it is clearly at least possible for an uncolonized non-western country to acquire the benefits of westernization and do much better than colonized countries, suggesting that it’s possible that there may be some costs to this colonization thing after all.
Japan is sort of a weird case; it did some small-scale colonization of its own as early as the late Sengoku period, has held onto its historical colonies of Hokkaido and Okinawa, and has shown an unusual cultural facility for appropriating useful institutions from other, larger civilizations. Before the 1800s that mostly meant China; after, Prussia, Britain, and the US.
Other nations that were never colonized by Western powers include Thailand, Mongolia and Tibet (note that these two share a complicated political legacy with China), and Iran. A number of countries also remained relatively independent despite brief periods of foreign rule or substantial influence, including Ethiopia, Bhutan, and Nepal.
Mongolia may have technically never been colonized, but it was a Soviet puppet state for most of the 20th century.
As for divide-and-conquer strategies: yes. An instructive example here is Burma. Britain administered both what is now Burma and what is now Bangladesh, and encouraged migration from the latter into the former — specifically, Rakhine State, which you may have heard of before. (Fun fact: the Rohingya language is closely related to Chittagonian. Another fun fact: the Burmese government considers the Rohingya to be descendants of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and given that they don’t have jus soli… yeah, that’s what that’s about. Can you guess who the British favored enough to arm in their WW2 retreat from Burma? And can you guess how that turned out?)
It’s not hard to see the motivation for a colonial power to allow that sort of immigration. It’s been remarked upon before: if you bring in a population, they owe their presence to you, and they know it, and your presence will be much better for them than your absence, and they know that as well.
Whether the 15 years leading up to the 1960s counts as a very short colonization of Japan by the United States is, as I understand it, something of an open question in Japan.
Eh. It seems to me that any definition of colonization that includes a postwar occupation government is too extensive a one.
Though now that I think about it, that’d probably bump Ethiopia up into the ranks of those countries never colonized by the West, for all that Mussolini’s Italy called it a colony (for a few years during and shortly before WWII).
…fall off a cliff as soon as the colonialists leave power
For a good while now I have wondered as to why in the hell *that* is taken as a point in favour of colonialism. I’d understand if, say, people defended huge conquering empires by pointing to their long-lasting legacy, like the Roman law
– but the European colonialists really often did that awful thing like in Rwanda and Syria and Nigeria, trading off increased control through their favoured ethnic/cultural group for enormous fragility once said group is left to fend for itself and must either rally around a dictator (Syria) or fall (Rwanda), plus in any case the general poor development of local institutions + old grievances result in a mess (Nigeria).
Edit: oo-er, the point about divide and conquer colonialism has already been made above.
Re: Nigeria – see the War Nerd
It’s going to happen in any multiethnic country anyway.
And there have been studies about that — apparently British colonies did turn out better than other countries’ colonies. Given that Moldbug doesn’t care about anything outside the Anglosphere…
I read on article that colonies run by Protestant countries did better than ones run by Catholics. Assuming that’s true, I don’t know whether it was a general trend, or whether it’s attributable solely to Britain.
I always wondered why either side of the coin didn’t simply own up to their ideology’s track record. Mencius actually would probably be fine with responsibility for colonialism. He has several posts on why at the least ending it was a very bad thing for everyone. And the communists didn’t just kill millions of people for shits and giggles (unlike many true demons of human history). They turned the Russian empire into an industrial superpower from an agrarian shit hole.
Communists didn’t used to be afraid of this. All through the 20’s and 30’s in the US apologetics was common place. Sure comrade Stalin throws priests in Gulags where they’re tortured and murdered. But it’s all in the name of the revolution!
Because, in my experience, most modern communists don’t actually think that industrial superpowers are worth the deaths of millions. They tend to think that that was a failure of communism that we can fix.
Maybe they did in the ’70s — “I continue to admire the goals of the Khmer Rouge, but I admit that I don’t particularly like the way they’re going about it” and all that, once the stories started to break (of course, some of them doubled down instead) — but communists these days aren’t exactly allergic to writing off entire races as counterrevolutionary and talking about how mass murder would actually be really cool and good.
Ah, but that’s just “venting”.
Or so I’ve repeatedly been told.
“They turned the Russian empire into an industrial superpower from an agrarian shit hole. ”
Actually, they didn’t. I think if you compare Russian economic development after the communist revolution to development in the decades immediately before WWI, the latter looks rather better.
The USSR was never an “industrial superpower.” It was a third world country with a first world military and elite. And good PR.
For an even cleaner comparison, try Taiwan and Mainland China. Mao killed a very large number of people—the estimate for the Great Leap Forward famine alone is thirty to forty million. When he died, Taiwan was a developed society, China still desperately poor. From Mao’s death to 2010, per capita GNP in China went up twenty fold.
When your “counterargument” for the position that open borders will cause problems via importing broken institutions from Third World countries involves bribing stupid Americans to give up their citizenship and leave (and hey, they’re stupid! How hard can it be!) then you might have some problems selling it. For one thing, stupid Americans are literally our brothers and sisters (in my case, my uncle, who’s retarded) and pushing plans to kick them out of the country makes me personally rather furious.
What would be the point of trading morons around, other than spite and pointless xenofetishism, anyway?
He is not recommending this proposal, he is saying that if “[c]ritics of open borders from a hive mind angle” wish to be consistent, they should recommend it.
Apparently the museums have a policy that they can’t sell art except to buy other art.
I wonder if they can rent it.
They’d write the policies for their own convenience. Renters need to be inspected and approved for ability to keep the art safe. The art is recallable on two weeks’ notice if the museum suddenly wants to display it, with prorated refunds or a replacement art option. Only works that would otherwise sit in a basement are for rent. The people who decide what to display don’t even look at the rental data.
It might not be quite as much revenue as selling the art and investing in index funds, but it also might. And it keeps the art safeguarded properly for future generations.
Museums rent art all the time, mainly to other museums. Occasionally I see stories about a collector dying and his heir repossessing artwork that was rented to a museum decades earlier.
The author was interviewed on Econtalk the other day. It sounds like the Museum Curator Association (or whatever it is) has a bunch of dumb rules that make museums actively worse.
SSC link roundups continue their trend towards being indistinguishable from Chaos Patch.
Those filthy neo-reactionary sad puppies think they’re entitled to those dog treats, because their privileged STEM worldviews can’t account for the mystical arts!
Thanks for pointing me to an interesting site though.
Part of me wants to say something like “There’s only one explicitly rightist link up there, the one about Moldbug being banned from the conference, and there’s also one explicitly leftist link up there, the one about gender pay disparity, so you’re yet another person who accuses me of being far-right if I attempt to be balanced instead of 100% leftist.”
But I hate the fact that I have to keep defending myself, all the time, against vague nod wink nudge accusations. This the same day that people are sending asks to my ex-girlfriend “DID YOU BREAK UP WITH HIM BECAUSE HE’S RACIST?” I’m sick of this, and I feel like your comment is obviously heckling with no attempt to debate or argue against anything I’m doing.
But it’s effective heckling with an undertone of threat, because it’s saying “You don’t want to look like you’re on the far-right, do you?” and given what obviously happens to people who get viewed as far-right (see above) no I don’t, but it’s hard to feel like you’re intending this in a spirit of friendly warning.
Can I please ask for fewer comments like this in the future?
Sorry to be flippant, but… they’re a social justice witch.
Asking a witch to stop muttering hexes at you is like asking a cyborg killbot not to kill you: it negates their one purpose in life/agonizing-mechanical-unlife.
Warlocks make pacts with Fae, Fiends or Old Ones. I wonder which this one did…
Fae keep their scales balanced, so that’s out. For Fiends vs. Old Ones… let’s look at the spell list: Burning Hands vs Tasha’s Hideous Laughter. More mockery, less flaming, so I think we’ve got a cultist of the Old Ones here.
Not too surprising, if you think about whom Scott plans to kill. Last time he wrote about a fiend the creature came off pretty well.
Well, I’m told Cthullu swims left, but the NRO pundits seem open to voting for him, so I guess the jury is still out about where he falls on our parochialpoliticalscales.
Yes, but who told you? I always get it from the Ministry of Truth.
If you’d stop grinding your axe for a second you might acknowledge what I suspect you admit when not busy working the refs: Things are more complex than that.
When the subject turns to to politics, the level of discourse here drops to dittohead depths. I don’t know how far you’d have to go back in the SSC vaults to find a post that isnt followed by trains of smug libertarian messaging blind to its indistinguishability from the agenda of movement conservatism. It seems important for many here to construct a definition of the left that’s merely congruent with identity politics, since throwing a perpetual resentment fiesta, means never having to acknowledge your freakish proto-elderly approval of the vicious, winner-take-all economic policy you hope to profit from when Peter Thiel rings you in your demented dreams.
Or are things more complex than that?
You are absolutely right about the level of discourse, but there’s an element of hypocrisy in pointing that out in a comment consisting almost entirely of fnords.
Libertarians can, and do, have productive intelligent discussions among thenselves. Ditto for Progressives. And they are capable of debating with one another intelligently as well. After all, those two groups and their overlap form the core OB-LW-SSC commentariat.
The issue here is, as you pointed out, a tribal one. When we have a common banner then even disagreements about core values seem unimportant but absent that any small aesthetic difference is grounds for a holy war. I think a more reasonable solution to flamewars is to reinforce the group identity of “people who value intellectual discussion for its own sake and admit when they’re wrong without shame” rather than purging one group or another.
It’s not even “smug libertarian messaging.” Libertarianism isn’t incompatible with social justice.
The problem is, you can identify as a member of that group all you want, and it doesn’t necessarily make you one. In fact, frequently people identify as members of that group solely to signal themselves as more reasonable when it’s convenient to scoring rhetorical victories and rationalizing axe-grinding.
>In fact, frequently people identify as members of that group solely to signal themselves as more reasonable when it’s convenient to scoring rhetorical victories and rationalizing axe-grinding.
While this may be true, I feel like this way of thinking can only lead to more ax-grinding an exponentially more ax-grinding accusations.
Can you give some examples of these “trains of smug libertarian messaging blind to its indistinguishability from the agenda of movement conservatism”?
I notice that almost every comment section now includes a complaint that the comment audience is becoming too libertarian, but with no examples of how that fact is lowering the level of discourse.
I also strongly suspect that these complaints are not disinterested, given that they probably come from non-libertarians.
>Can you give some examples of these “trains of smug libertarian messaging blind to its indistinguishability from the agenda of movement conservatism”?
I can’t (and I’ll add them to my list of things to record if/when they happen, together with sjw’s complaints about microaggressions), but I’m fairly certain that it happens. It’s mostly a lot of going for the “easy jab”, and then people piling up to add similar sentimients/jokes. I’m not put off by it, because I’m not a SJey person, but I do already get my fix elsewhere.
For the record, I am mostly libertarianish.
Which is, of course, why we need the increasingly inevitable SJ circlejerk about libertarian circlejerking. Forward the revolution!
You are writing almost complete nonsense. I am an actual real-life conservative and believe me, these threads are not what actual conservative love-fest comboxes look like. Not even close. I’m not sure how best to categorize the weird wonderful alchemy here, but I’m certain that calling it a dittohead tribal hoot-in is AUs from the truth.
Sure, and Barack Obama is a Stalinist.
Huh. I had to look up what “working the refs” even meant. Did you rip it right from The American Prospect?
I was going to pull nydwracu’s “fnording” trick on your comment, just to be catty, but realized I didn’t have to cut out _anything_.
If the standards of discourse really are dropping, I suspect we should all be looking in the mirror for the reason why.
“If the standards of discourse really are dropping, I suspect we should all be looking in the mirror for the reason why.”
“I was going to pull nydwracu’s “fnording” trick on your comment”.
Thank you. I haven’t had Nydwracu’s “fnording” trick pulled on me since my raccoon-coat wearing, jalopy joyriding days at State U.
“You are absolutely right about the level of discourse, but there’s an element of hypocrisy in pointing that out in a comment consisting almost entirely of fnords.”
What? am I the only red state Jew in this bitch?
“Huh. I had to look up what “working the refs” even meant.”
Really? I mean, I wasn’t aware of American Prospect’s particular meaning, but the general sense seems rather transparent to me. Were you unaware that “ref” is an abbreviation of “referee”?
Years ago, Republican party chair Rich Bond explained that conservatives’ frequent denunciations of “liberal bias” in the media were part of “a strategy” (Washington Post, 8/20/92). Comparing journalists to referees in a sports match, Bond explained: “If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.”
It’s mockery, not threat, and mockery only legible to those who would consider it a compliment anyway (see the other replies here.) Of course if you find this annoying, you can just ban me, obviously.
Those who harp on microaggressions can’t claim mockery is innocent. Mockery is a threat. It’s saying, “we’re going to exclude you from the protection of the tribe, and you know how we treat outsiders.”
>Those who harp on microaggressions
Since >we don’t do that here, it might be best to just let it go.
Isolated rigour trigger: Those who ceaselessly storify the trauma of that guy who got fired, can’t claim there arent people getting fired every day in every municipality for the flimsiest reasons imaginable.
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertarianism-and-the-workplace/
Its entirely intellectually/philosophically coherent to believe both of these statements are true:
1) Companies should have the right to fire people for outside of work, unrelated to job function, political speech.
2) It would be better for all of us if companies didn’t fire people for outside of work, unrelated to job function, political speech.
Find me an instance of me harping on microaggressions and I will upload a video of my eating my hat to YouTube.
I actually support warlock’s complaint, here. I dislike it when people are tarred for misbehaviors of others within their tribe. We should stop that.
I’d still like a confirmation that the hat exists, just in case said harping ever occurs.
I’ll cop to being guilty of addressing you-as-tribe rather than you-as-individual. It just seems to me that SJ doesn’t have much left if it concedes that mockery/shaming/bullying is no big deal.
Mockery qua mockery is an entirely normal and healthy thing. Of course with Scott being particularly sensitive on this topic (we all have something like that) then perhaps my behavior was culpable. But an anti-mockery-in-general position strikes me as stronger than you wanted to make.
Mockery qua mockery is an entirely normal and healthy thing
Well, it’s a very effective way of enforcing ingroup/outgroup distinctions, yes. But that’s not the sort of thing I’m here for.
Assuming our host were OK with it, what beneficial purpose do you imagine would be served by mockery here? Even if true, could it ever be necessary or kind?
@Mai La Dreapta,
calling yourself an SJW is explicitly identifying yourself with those members of the tribe who behave badly. It would be like a righty complaining that not all conservatives are homophobes when his adopted handle is Gaybasher.
I am fairly sure that calling oneself Social Justice *Warlock* can be interpreted as a satire of SJW in general. As I had understood the handle to belong to a mocking conservative up until this conversation.
Senpai’s handle goes back to one of Scott’s SJ essays – “Living by the Sword”, iirc – where he called Arthur Chu or another of his ilk a Chaotic Evil Social Justice Death Knight Warlock. Senpai was all like, \m/ fuck yeah!
Hahahaha oh lord. No. He’s from LF.
Of course he is, yeah; and his handle here was “Oligopsony” before he stole such a metal title from a post by Scott.
What’s SF?
It’s a bit of column A, a bit of column B. I mostly adopted the handle out of antagonism, since Scott and the community have generally constructed the “Social Justice Warrior” as a general figure of anti-Niceness, anti-Community, anti-Civilization leftism that I think to be a broadly correct stance. I don’t endorse every idea and reflex associated with the prhase – my roots are very much in the Old Left, and I think the concern with symbolism, microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and so on is frivolous – but I’m happy to wear the name as a death mask to offend nerds. I suppose this is neither true nor kind and I should switch back or something.
SF is a physical place that a lot of dumb ideas come from, but to be fair not only dumb ideas. LF is a metaphorical place where a lot of dumb ideas come from, but to be fair not only dumb ideas, and me.
@warlock
my roots are very much in the Old Left, and I think the concern with symbolism, microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and so on is frivolous
Right on.
I wish people would stop saying ‘nerds’ as metonymy for ‘sexists’ or whatever.
The only people who say that with any regularity are nerds themselves, fighting tooth and claw for what they perceive to be limited resources. Nerd-bashing internet communists of the sort senpai is friends with, or geek feminists like Veronica, can be safely predicted to be the *biggest* nerds, because outsiders wouldn’t care so much. People like gamergators or moldbuggers are huge nerds too, of different kinds.
How does that E.B. White joke go?
Well, to people who don’t, a nerd is someone who owns a computer; to computer users, a nerd is someone who uses it for more than work and Facebook; to them, a nerd is someone who has a blog; to bloggers, a nerd is someone with a Reddit account; to Redditors, a nerd is someone from 4Chan; for channers, a nerd is a /b/tard; for /b/tards, a nerd is a fa/tg/uy; and for fa/tg/uys, a nerd is someone who owns a body pillow with a naked picture of Farseer Taldeer on it.
That being said, you can legitimately draw lines around various things and call them “nerd culture”, and some of them are pretty dysfunctional. Though I don’t think sexism is as central as some seem to.
The real answer here is that using “nerds” in a derogatory way, in my experience, generally only offends the nerds worth offending. It’s a picoagression of the sort Scott mentions in Fearful Symmetry; and as multi notes I’ve only ever seen it used by people who also self-identify as nerds. I play D&D and MtG, I am posting here, &c.
“Fighting tooth and claw” is probably a romantic exaggeration, though.
It is not a metonymy for sexists because, as noted, not all nerds are sexists (except in the boring trivial ways all everyone is,) and because non-nerd sexists aren’t particularly easy to offend.
Ain’t nothing wrong with a body pillow. Why make it an explicit one when you can have it more cuddly, though?
Is not mockery bullying, and have we not been told bullying ruins lives?
Look, if Scott finds it painful and unfair to be told he’s right-wing when he’s not self-identified as right-wing, I think that his preferences should be respected (a) given that this is his sandbox and we’re all simply invited to play in it (b) given that there are lectures on respecting people’s self-identifications when it comes to all other categories (c) given that he may look more to the right if you’re more to the left, but for those of us who are more to the right, he is centrist/moderate.
This is not a “Yes, I’m Republican and to hell with what you think about that” blog. And not everyone who reads and comments on here slots neatly into the American Republican versus Democrat categories; even those of us more to the right (e.g. I’d consider myself a ‘Republican’, but in the Irish context that has a very different meaning and indeed could get me accused of supporting terrorism).
Fun story – I (an American) – put up a facebook post complaining about princess fantasy stuff, in particular the repeated description of my little girl as a Princess. It rubs me the wrong way! We’re a republican nation, damn it! Generally supposed to be light-hearted. I, however, have Northern Irish relatives (my wife’s family), and apparently I hit a nerve, because some of them got rather upset with me. Context is important!
Whoever came up with the names for the American political parties did a smashing job of making them non-indicative, didn’t they?
(Since I seem to get bitten every time I make a joke which relies on missing information or a non-literal reading of something: the names of both parties come, by different paths, from Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party of 1791, which favored decentralized government in opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists. And now I feel like an even wetter blanket than usual.)
No, mockery isn’t bullying. Bullying is harassment.
But more on topic, Scott gets called right-wing because he’s more okay with white male supremacist neoreactionaries than even the average conservative is, has several 10k+ word posts brutally excoriating leftists, and has dropped enough hints that it’s pretty safe to assume that he supports HBD. Does anyone not notice this?
>because he’s more okay with white male supremacist neoreactionaries than even the average conservative is
“white male supremacist neoreactionary” sounds more like a /pol/ caricature than someone he actually interacts with. But, how I see it, is that Scott is OK with those people as long as they’re not directly harming others and generally being assholes. I doubt Scott is OK with Vox Day the same way he’s ok with Steve Sailer.
>and has dropped enough hints that it’s pretty safe to assume that he supports HBD
While I don’t have the knowledge to debate inter and intra group diversity and whoever’s fallacy, HBD is either correct or not, but I don’t think believing it makes one right wing. Hell, it goes against some pretty core American conservative values.
Unless you mean these are things that make him seem right wing, which I guess I can agree with.
(@merzbot)
OK, so it’s not about his positions or the policies he supports, but that he doesn’t hate right-wingers enough, and writes not only against the right but also against the left?
@merzbot
Left-Right is the wrong axis to describe why NRx thrives here. LessWrong and this comment section is overwhelmingly utilitarian and NRx is a natural conclusion of utilitarianism if you believe:
1. Intelligence (aka your ability to optimize your happiness) is genetically determined.
2. Individual freedom is not necessary for human happiness.
From the last Friendly AI thread it seems that a significant number of commenters (Scott included) believe both of these to some degree, but they’re waiting for a post-human level intelligence before they’re willing to embrace the monarchy.
“1. Intelligence (aka your ability to optimize your happiness) is genetically determined.
2. Individual freedom is not necessary for human happiness.”
Most people here don’t think intelligence is the ability to optimize your happiness. And they think it has a genetic component (this is important; it means you can get smarter Africans by feeding them a better diet).
2 is also worded oddly. I think a better way is to they don’t consider public consent or approval a necessary feature of finding the best decision- they embrace the technocratic mentality of solving problems with experts.
“From the last Friendly AI thread it seems that a significant number of commenters (Scott included) believe both of these to some degree, but they’re waiting for a post-human level intelligence before they’re willing to embrace the monarchy.”
I’m not sure if an immortal computer program can be considered a monarch. How the consort or royal family work?
1 should along the lines of “…genetically determined in a way that would make a caste based way of allocating people to roles optimal”
> Most people here don’t think intelligence is the ability to optimize your happiness.
The fundamental tenet of Rationalism is that reasoned analysis allows you to make better decisions about ordering your life and the world. Is the idea that being smart makes you better at reasoned analysis really in question? I will concede I don’t know what percentage of the commenters consider themselves rationalist but it’s significant and seems to include Scott.
> And they think it has a genetic component (this is important; it means you can get smarter Africans by feeding them a better diet).
Calling it “a component” is weasel words. I can’t speak for what you believe but Scott certainly believes that more than 50% of your IQ is determined by genetics; and that barring radical biotech there is no way to convert a low intelligence human (IQ ~80) into a high intelligence human (IQ ~140).
> I think a better way is to they don’t consider public consent or approval a necessary feature of finding the best decision- they embrace the technocratic mentality of solving problems with experts.
How about “consent of the governed”? Given that the super-intelligent AI really & truly knows what maximizes human happiness there was a strong majority in the FAI post that supports implementing that by force. The NRx advocates that argue here really & truly believe that the low intelligence population would be better off if they were controlled by the highest intelligence humans. If you’re willing to accept the AI’s utilitarian imperative then the only moral failure of the NRx imperative is that they aren’t smart enough to be worthy yet.
The idea that being smart leads you to maximize happiness is in question.
Maximizing happiness and utility are not the same thing, and trying to maximize happiness leads to wireheading and blissfulk ignorance.
Mr. Yarvin would certainly raise an eyebrow at the charge of promoting “human happiness”, and quote more of his beloved Carlyle.
@Jiro
But does changing which virtue you think is the proper target of optimization have any bearing on the logic?
@multiheaded
I will fully admit that I am only attempting to address NRx as I have seen it defended/argued on SSC, and to the best of my knowledge Moldbug doesn’t post here. I don’t actually care about the broader NRx movement, “Why does SSC & the Rationalist community generate/attract NRx?” is the interesting question.
Yes. The original statement to which it applied was “Individual freedom is not necessary for human happiness.” If you don’t want to optimize human happiness, this becomes irrelevant. You’d have to argue “individual freedom is not necessary to implement coherent extrapolated volition”, and that’s quite a bit harder.
@Jiro
That’s fair and I would probably try to deflect by arguing that haven’t seen any evidence that quantifying a CEV is plausible. Most of my arguments here would be weak though as I haven’t given it enough thought.
But, I have only seen CEV used as the basis for utilitarianism by a very small number of FAI-proponent-utilitarians. All utilitarians I’ve met in physical space argued on the basis of maximizing human happiness (in the broad sense) and maybe minimizing suffering. That basis seems to encompass Scott and most utilitarian SSC posters (do you think that’s an inaccurate assessment?).
EDIT: On further reading, what definition of “individual freedom” could you use that would make you free under the CEV AI? All your actions are still dictated by the AI, it just knows that you’ll like them. This seems like a complete embrace of point #2 and still compatible with human authoritarianism.
it’s pretty safe to assume that he supports HBD.
Well, if someone insists on having a favourite haemoglobin protein, I suppose it may as well be HBD.
I had to Google the acronym to understand what you were talking about. I don’t think Scott is a white racist, which is what you seem to be accusing him of; I do think he approaches things from the angle of “science is objective and factual and real, and by talking about the data we can get to truth”. I think he’s still young, and lived mainly in places where everyone was mostly civil and mostly nerdy, and is only now getting to experience the joys of free and frank exchange of views where you can be Insufficiently Progressive even if you’re a moderate liberal.
I posted the objection about happiness because it isn’t clear what happiness correlates to; happiness survey’s don’t give good clues. We do know that people can get used to nearly anything (quadriplegics reported happiness normalizes after some time) so that doesn’t tell us much.
The only clear improvements are “not dying” (since being alive is a requirement) and wire heading.
I think, ironically, because Scott is generally a nicer, more even-handed person (or at least tries to be: see the Principle of Charity), then it’s harder for him when he gets castigated for being insufficiently liberal.
Whereas I am not a nice person, and hold personal views both social and religious which would get me tarred as five degrees worse than the Devil in Hell should I freely express them, so I don’t generally mind a bit of name-calling (by this stage, getting personally blamed for THE CRUSADES THE INQUISITION WITCH BURNING OPPRESSING WOMEN FACILITATING SLAVERY AND GENOCIDE OF NATIVE PEOPLES and whatever you’re having yourself because YOU’RE A CATHOLIC UNLESS YOU REPENT AND IMMEDIATELY SAY THE CHURCH IS AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN WRONG YOU ARE PERSONALLY TO BLAME has sufficiently toughened my skin in some regards).
Scott, on the other hand, has been brought up with the requisite ‘right thinking person’s’ values, lived and learned/worked in a progressive/liberal enclave, and even is connected to unconventional/non-mainstream groups (e.g. polyamory).
So being lumped in with the knuckle-draggers is going to feel like a very wounding personal attack on him 🙂
You know, this explains a whole lot.
Yeah, there’s a cultural difference here. In certain parts of America (the most powerful parts, incidentally), not being completely on board with progressivism is… I believe “a way to find out who your real friends are” is the euphemism for cases like these. Or perhaps “not a good career move”. In some cases, it’s seen as literally worse than murder. #freemumia #dornerdidnothingwrong
Deiseach, you forgot IN FAVOR OF CHILD MOLESTATION as one of the many, many alleged sins of Catholics. I carry a little bullet-pointed list in my wallet so I can keep track. 😉
Oh, FJ, I thought that went without saying! Didn’t Peter Tatchell use, as part of his apologia for “So why did you contribute an essay to a collection published by an advocate for paedophilia” with “At least I’m not the Pope!” 🙂
Score card: we hate
– women
-children
– LGBT+
– fun
– people getting married because sex
– people not getting married because no sex so no children
– science (of course!)
– anyone not Catholic
– anyone Catholic who does not kiss the Pope’s toe
– anyone not white and European (or do I mean North American? I get so confused)
– the great and glorious British Empire
– the great and glorious American Republic (see what I mean about getting confused as to whether I’m supposed to hate or love Americans?)
– capitalism and the free market
– communism and the triumph of the proletariat
– free thought
– free love
– free choice
– sex
– not having sex because no babies without sex (see above)
– free lunches
– the Jews
– the Muslims
– the pagans
– the Protestants
– probably the Hindus, Buddhists, animists, etc. if we don’t already lump them in with pagans
We love:
– power
– money
– oppressing people (which makes it tricky, since as a single, never-married, childless, asexual woman, I should be oppressing myself)
– slavery, genocide, rape, murder, witch-burning and probably illegal home-taping of music/file-sharing/piracy of video games
– every woman being a nun
– every woman being married and having thirty babies at a minimum
– old white men in dresses (the dresses thing is very important; bonus points if the person pointing this out mentions lace. You can’t say these are robes, or would you say the Dalai Lama wears a dress? Because only Catholic clergy wear dresses, every other religious garment is okay)
If you can think of anything I’ve left out, please upload it to the Vatican Mind Control Satellite and of course it will immediately be downloaded to the implanted Mind Control Chip which we all receive from the bishop during the ceremony of Confirmation 🙂
Wait a second… I like power and money…
IT’S ALL TRUE
I suspect you’re (badly) underestimating the number of non-NRx people here who’ve absorbed enough NRx culture through osmosis to get the gist. Not to mention the number of people willing and able to use Google if they’re confused.
“Chaos Patch”…
“Chaos Patch” -warhammer
The comparison between them and Scott actually made even less sense once I understood it.
Is this really how some people see the world? Not even able to tell black and white apart–just “red” and “everything awful”?
Yes. Yes it is.
It’s legible to Scott, and he clearly doesn’t see it as a compliment.
“Suffice it to say that the general flow of the progressive social graph is “no enemies to the left, no friends to the right,” and the general flow of the conservative social graph is – exactly the same. Who operates under the rule “no enemies to the right, no friends to the left?” Answer: basically, no one. If you doubt me on this, this one is worth investigating.”
— Mencius Moldbug (June 18, 2009)
Many people become reactionaries not merely because of their own reflective judgement, but are pushed into it due to exactly the experience you’re having here, repeated a thousandfold. It goes something like they: they disagree with the progressive narrative (I apologise for using such an imprecise term, but I have none better) on something small, like a matter of detail regarding an important sacred topic – say, about the statistical accuracy of certain claims – and find themselves subject to what you find yourself subject to now. Moldbug did not spring into this world fully-formed, like Venus Anadyomene; he got there in bits and pieces, in small rightward nudges and a few giant, beyond-the-Overton-window leaps.
To answer your question: yes, you may ask for fewer comments like this in the future. No, I expect you will not be granted them – because of the discourse norm Moldbug described. By writing something like ‘Untitled’ (which, FWIW, I agree with you on), and by being actually balanced, you crossed over to the other side (again, not by my standards, but in the eyes of SJW above and his ilk). From them, expect no quarter.
(It is because ‘the left’ imposes this sort of choice – to acquiesce completely, or to be punished for heresy for the slightest disagreement – that makes many reactionary. Might as well commit the murder for which you’re going to be hanged; in for a penny, in for a pound. (This obviously isn’t sound reasoning on its own, but it’s often how it plays out.)
I think that this dynamic is unsustainable, and that the consensus gets away with it only because it’s dominant. When a ‘system’ like this cracks, it cracks hard; because it cannot crack halfway – again, for the reason Moldbug described.)
I don’t think it has to do with the Left/Right axis (if there even is one). Back then, it was “the right” which imposed an ever harsher morality code and punished you for deviating. Nowadays, what us interpret people interpret as THE moral code is controlled by the left. As always, most people want to just be left alone to live their lives.
The differences come from differences in technology and society, today’s punishments are significantly less dangerous than they used to be, but far more invasive and repetitive.
I agree with the first paragraph.
But not the second. Brandon Eich could probably afford to get fired; most people cannot.
You are implying that Puritans are rightists. Moldbug argues that they are the ideological ancestors of modern leftists. Jim, who models the process of memetic drift as one of leftist signalling spirals, puts it as follows:
>You are implying that Puritans are rightists.
I don’t even know what I’m implying anymore, because it’s becoming increasingly hard for me to meaningfully distinguish what entails “right” and “left” outside its original conception without getting partisan.
That being said, I’m talking about a much closer timeframe than puritans.
@jamie:
My goodness, as if holier-than-thou could be confined to one tribe.
The modern business suit evolved from British formal dress of the Victorian and Regency periods, not from Puritan “plain clothes” — those diverged some two centuries earlier, and in any case weren’t normally monochrome (though they were somber). I don’t expect the rest of that progression to be any more accurate.
@jaime
It’s almost like when you define ‘left’ as ‘someone who is holier than thou’, the left is always holier than thou!
“Brandon Eich could probably afford to get fired; most people cannot.”
But it is precisely because Eich was in such a prominent position (and, therefore, presumably financially secure) that his political contribution received so much attention.
That doesn’t track with my experiences at all. Conservatives hate liberals just as much as liberals hate conservatives.
@Scott — The thing for me is, I like your blog, I basically like you (insofar as I can like a person who I have never met), so I’m not attacking you the way I’d attack “an enemy” (whatever that means in this context). But I do think you can get pretty messy on SJ issues.
Which fine, you’ve had some bad experiences and I respect that. I still think the broad sweep of SJ thinking is correct, and because politics is the mind killer, you’ve been recruited onto the anti-SJ side.
Like, I’m not saying you did this. I’m saying it happened.
So I dunno. I don’t think “balanced” can really be a stable position for very long. Nor do I think one can step outside the conflict and be a pure observer. It doesn’t work that way. Everything is meta in every way. Everything feeds back. There is no “outside.”
Which, a lot of people really wish they could speak from the outside, and they might try very hard, but they’ll get pulled in.
The key is to understand this, and then decide how and where you get pulled in.
If I can use a stale metaphor: You’re like ship in a storm. We all are. We can choose some things, but not others. And the storm gonna take us where it will take us.
Anyway, blah blah blah. I often feel a lot of hostility from your comments section — not from you, but from the community you’ve attracted. Like, I might want to talk dispassionately about SJ stuff, but if I do I’m gonna be attacked hard —
And I can play the attack/counter attack game as well as anyone, but it’s draining.
Anyway, it’s easy enough to (mostly) avoid the comments section. But still, something gets lost.
(And yes I realize the irony of making a comment in the comments section about how I don’t like the comments section and I can avoid it. There is no need to point that out.)
True, but only because the positions are moving targets and anyone who doesn’t constantly change their mind to keep up with the latest ideological fads is declared rightist.
Or more accurately: Because defending the status quo/ changing the status quo are, outside anything else, already political positions even if the reasoning for supporting that position is ultimately not considered political. SJ isn’t a question of making decisions political, it’s a question of pointing out that political decisions are being made, and proving opposition in what was already a political sphere. A sphere that only seemed non-political because there wasn’t any contest.
That is essentially declaring everything political. If you aren’t embracing the 5 year plan when you are selling toothpaste to customers you are reactionary upholding the status quo.
Needless to say most people consider a significant sphere of their life nonpolitical and would prefer not to have them considered ground for politics. Because politics (like religion and sex) is socially corrosive.
Not everything, but come on, it’s worth considering and being aware of the impact your positions and decisions have on other people even if you aren’t taking positions and making decisions for politically-motivated reasons.
@veronica d:
Your comment is gracious and thoughtful, which makes me trust you, despite being not really SJ-aligned. In what ways is Scott’s position “messy,” and what would be some good sites to read for a thoughtful corrective?
(I ask this not b/c I want to see Scott critiqued, but b/c I usually nod along with him, and I want to find out if I myself am wrong about something important.)
Thanks!
My problem is, the comments section is more impoverished without you. And that isn’t because I agree with you and I want to hear more things I agree with; generally the opposite, in fact. SSC is valuable to me because it brings a diversity of opinion that’s tough to get elsewhere. It has brought you and SJW and Multi into my life, as well as various breeds of NRx, and all sorts of other people. My life is broader because of all of it.
If, as a community, we’re going to lose members on the basis of “oh, I can’t post there, how can I be guaranteed that everyone already agrees with me?”, can it at least be the less-thoughtful folks? If I wanted a community where I could be certain that everything said was already vetted, policed, and pre-agreed with, well… there’s a whole internet for that.
I would have phrased this differently, but I agree.
One of the selling points of this place used to be that, through some sort of forbidden sorcery, Scott had managed to get SJ folks, communists, liberals, libertarians, catholics, neoractionaries, etc. under one roof, and the result was (often!) civil debate, not WW3.
It’s still somewhat true (better than the rest of the internet, for sure), but not as much. But the way to get back to that (and this isn’t directed to Veronica, I’m just taking the opportunity) would be folks getting back to the discussion, instead of complaining that there are so many non-liberals saying so many non-liberal things.
@Cauê:
This place is still better than most places I have found, so there is that. If you notice my posting trend, I clearly lean left, and I am currently quite active in the comments section, so I am trying to do my part on the discussion side.
But the overall tone of the comments section seems to be dominated by libertarians. With Scott recently saying that he tracks traffic and gets positive utility from seeing more traffic, things like talking up Mr. Sailer start to seem like Ron Paul’s “marriage” to certain organizations.
And why am I being elliptical here? Because I know the backlash that may result from what I might be hinting at. The idea that this backlash is uniquely a feature of the left is hardly anything like true.
From my experience, in a war of attrition between blue and red community members (that is, where the moderation doesn’t favor either side), the reds usually outlast the blues.
My theory is that there is simply a larger supply of blue internet communities, so the option of simply leaving a place with people with views that they find distasteful is more viable to them.
I’ve got a few theories, but I think there are two big issues.
First off, Ozy stopped doing her Race and Gender Open Topics that coincide with SSC. They provided a good vent for social justice related issues in a more SJ friendly area. This made the community more welcoming to those of a SJ bent while keeping the discussion out of the more libertarian SSC comment section.
The second reason piggybacks off WHtA’s point about attrition; blues (in my personal experience and in the greatest data point of all, my half remembered findings from a study about facebook political leanings) are far more likely to take their ball and go home from a community if they can’t dominate the discourse. I’m pretty blue myself and plenty of the blue message boards and communities I’m in have a few reds that just hang around like missionary’s that slept with a mob boss’ wife, refusing to leave despite nobody wanting them around. On the other hand, when I check out more red sites there’s a noticeable absence of blues, with not even a convenient scapegoat hanging on.
Overall I think we could do with a nice infusion of blues here; I’ve gotten tarred for SJWiness for statements that would get me attacked for the exact opposite reason on only moderately SJ leaning boards, which I think is a good indicator that we’ve skewed too hard to one side.
Any indication of how far to one side or another a community is skewed that only references the skew of other communities and not ground truths is a recipe for insanity in the name of balance. It’s like those jokes about how “reality has a well-known liberal bias”.
Yes, what if SSC comments tend to become more libertarian over time because libertarianism is the correct view and rational people having discussions tend to zero in on the correct view over time? As a libertarian myself, this is, of course, how I tend to think, but a leftist could make the same argument about why, for example, academia skews so hard left. If the representation of various views stayed roughly the same for a long time that would actually tend to indicate the fruitlessness of discussion, no?
If anything, if the comments on any given board were evenly balanced between the current interpretations of left and right in the US, then that would tend to count against their truth value, because, wouldn’t it be a nice coincidence if the correct position on everything just happened to be located right in the middle of the two currently dominant American worldviews?
Frankly, I don’t think we’re awesome enough to zero in on the correct view over time, and I say that as someone with substantial libertarian sympathies (though I wouldn’t call myself a libertarian).
I definitely don’t think social science/humanities academia is that awesome.
You don’t think commenters on SSC are awesome enough to, over time, come closer to the truth than they would have otherwise?
I think my own positions are at least a little better justified and/or nuanced by virtue of having had discussions here, and I’ve only been commenting for six months or so (and I certainly think my worldview is richer and slightly more accurate for having read Scott and Eliezer’s actual posts).
Individual commenters, maybe. The community as a whole, no.
A culture being able to get its common models recursively closer to reality is really an astonishingly high bar to clear; the scientific/technical traditions of a handful of cultures managed it, but only haltingly and with the help of a subject matter that’s inherently hard to politicize. The greater rationalist community was meant to improve on that, and it was a good try, but at this point I’m pretty much out of faith in it.
I don’t think any change in the aggregate political opinions of this comment section comes from us having truthtracking discussions in it. I think most of the change is not due to commentors changing their political opinions at all, but due to different types of commentators joining, leaving, or varying their comment frequency. If there is a truthseeking effect, it likely comes from Scott himself narrowing in on the truth and this being more or less acceptable to commentors in proportion to how well they accept the truth. (It’s likely that Scott has at least some persuasive effect as well, but I suspect it’s outweighed by change in community membership/engagement.)
But even if the shift in aggregate political opinion doesn’t arise from any truth-seeking process, it still could move closer to the truth by pure accident, and mere reference to other communities does not show that it hasn’t unless you can show those communities did in fact do a good job of seeking truth.
(Edit: ninja’d)
If onyomi’s theory were true we’d be seeing people changing their minds and becoming more libertarian, rather than a change in [active] population, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
To add to what I said about perfect balance among viewpoints tending to indicate distance from, rather than proximity to, the truth:
There probably still is a good reason to aim for some balance, albeit not at the expense of truth, and that is that partisan leanings are one of the biggest cognitive biases to which human minds are err. Therefore, I hope Scott will not censor himself by thinking “well, can’t post that or I’ll exceed my quota for right wing ideas this week,” but I also appreciate his efforts to always give ample consideration to both sides of a debate.
Theoretically, and I’m not claiming this is happening here, but a community could gradually become “less wrong” simply by virtue of gradually repelling people who are wrong and attracting people who are right, no?
Re. individual changes, I think political views in particular do tend to be very rigid, but may appear more rigid than they really are because changes tend to be subtle and people don’t usually care to advertise their former wrongness.
Like, if you looked at Onyomi posts from 6 months ago and Onyomi posts from today you’d probably be hard-pressed to detect any change in my views on anything. But that doesn’t mean my views haven’t subtly shifted in various ways only I’m aware of.
That is, if individual posters are getting “less wrong,” it probably will not usually be nearly so obvious as someone actually posting “I was a liberal, but am now a libertarian” or vice versa. I think we are more likely to occasionally witness changing views on particular issues, and that may actually be better since, presumably neither tribe gets everything exactly right.
Sure, that’s theoretically possible. The trouble is finding out when it’s actually happening, since the fraction of politicized groups that think it’s happening approaches 100% and obviously most of them are wrong.
Similarly, just about everyone thinks they’re living in the reality-based community.
It is possible for both of these to be true. Imagine that discussion shifts towards the truth, and then people stay or leave depending on something that is correlated with the truth. For instance, imagine that people tend to leave when faced with criticism that they can’t rebut. Providing that there is a certain percentage of people with correct ideas, people with wrong ideas will be preferentially driven away, so the ones left behind will be more correct.
In a conversation of the form “I suggest X has happened” -> “I suggest that X was caused by Y” -> “I suggest that in fact Y has not happened and X was caused by Z”, I don’t think it’s a relevant next step to say “but Z does not preclude Y”, because the claim was not that Z therefore not Y, the claim was that not Y, and the X that Y was introduced to explain could be explained by Z.
“missionary’s that slept with a mob boss’ wife”
Are you mixing metaphors or is this a particular reference?
Libertarians have virtually zero agreement on what truth actually looks like, so we can safely rule out convergence to the truth.
“I’m a libertarian” is one part vague philosophical declaration that we should have somewhere between 5% and 105% less laws than we have now, one part political signalling that you’re not an Evangelical Conservative or New England Democrat, and two parts personality signalling that economic models and explicit verbal reasoning make sense to you.
We can’t rule out convergence to the truth on that basis because even if libertarianism doesn’t lead to truth, truth might lead to libertarianism. Your description of libertarianism contains a number of positive claims; if those claims are true, then finding truth brings one closer to libertarianism.
Here’s a simple model.
1. Continued rational discussion does produce more accurate information over time
2. However, continued rational discussion does not affect core assumptions or premises.
3. Core assumptions or premises tend to be clustered.
Given those three assumptions, it could be true that continued rational discussion does converge on truth *and* communities of discourse tend to sort ideologically without the sort reflecting on the inherent truth of the underlying assumptions. Discussion would become less fruitful over time for those who don’t share the more common core assumptions. Meanwhile, those who remain would be converging on better models of reality than people who share their core assumptions but who don’t participate in the rational discussion.
“If onyomi’s theory were true we’d be seeing people changing their minds and becoming more libertarian”
Note that it doesn’t require libertarianism to be correct, just for it to be more defensible than most people in the conversation initially believed. My rather casual impression is that libertarians are more familiar with the arguments against libertarianism than anti-libertarians are with the arguments for it, so that isn’t all that implausible.
A good point, and I think accurate.
Although it’s much better than when I first became a libertarian (when most people had never even heard the word), it’s still true that most people don’t have a good grasp of what libertarians even think, beyond “government boo!” much less the stronger arguments for it. Therefore, if libertarians’ presence in a group seems to push the group more in that direction, it could be a “low hanging fruit” phenomenon.
I mean… isn’t saying that there is no “outside” view in any conflict basically taking a stand that rationality is impossible or incoherent?
I really really like Scott’s writing even when I disagree with him because I can tell that he’s committed to knowing *the truth*.
People like Scott are my escape from the hell of “everything is meta in every way”. It really actually isn’t!
Well, actually sometimes it is indeed impossible, because the discourse shapes the reality.
An example: imagine if the CEO of a company has done a good internal analysis, and she sees a reasonably high probability that the company will not last through the next quarter. It’s not a high probability of failure, just maybe in the 20% range.
If her company folds, customers with outstanding orders would be left high and dry. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that no one will insure this risk.
Let us add that “the market” has not yet figured it out. Perhaps they won’t. They cannot see her numbers.
Okay, so now imagine that the CEO desires to make an honest public statement about her company’s chances.
But she cannot. If she publicly says, “The company has a 20% change of failing over the next quarter, which would leave our customers in a lurch…”
Well, I bet you that by saying that the probability of failure would suddenly become over 20%. What customer will place a new, uninsured order?
Okay, so let us suppose she really wants to be totally open and honest. (Which would probably get her sued. But whatever. Let’s pretend.) Well, mathematically speaking, there is probably a fixed point solution of P(failure | current-state ^ public release of this information), but that seems quite a bit harder to compute than just the P(failure | current-state ^ no public release of information).
Thus she is limited in how honestly rational she can be.
Does that make sense? It is one thing to compute a first-order probability. It gets much harder to compute its second-order effects.
For example, perhaps the action “Scott gives his unvarnished opinion” has the effect “his blog becomes more popular with people to the right of him” and thus “less popular with people to the left,” which causes “Scott gets more flak from the left,” which causes “more people from the right support Scott and encourage him.”
And if Scott is perfectly resistant to all social pressure, then fine. He actually seems a pretty solid guy. But the community changes. But more, he is part of that community, and I suspect it will (to some degree) change him. I might not like the changes that happen.
I’m not saying this is good or bad, but it’s a think that seems to happen.
Whatever else, I totally trust Scott’s good faith. That matters.
@veronica —
I’m not seeing the contradiction here. If the CEO wants her company to succeed, the winning move is to spin or shut up as hard as she can. If she wants to be honest, she can do that too, but it carries consequences that she’s perfectly capable of seeing in foresight and taking into account. Where’s the irrationality?
Well, I suppose it proves rationality is impossible or incoherent if you equate rationality with the sort of radical honesty policies that some people around here seem to advocate, but I’ve never been super thrilled with those.
There is always meta. It’s that the meta can often be re-framed in terms of your values, which only seem meta if you’re in the presence of someone with different values. For example, there is an underlying statement about gender essentialism in putting in male and female bathrooms. This political statement about gender always exists, but until you have genderfluid people in your building it won’t seem political.
@Nornagest — It’s the “20%” that she cannot express. The facts are, a good faith estimate gave a probability of 20%, but that is based on conditions that exclude her sharing the information.
There is no “contradiction” per se. Reality remains consistent (if it is consistent; I dunno). Nor is it that she cannot say true things. Instead, it’s that she cannot say this one true thing and have it remain true.
Like I said, there is a fixed point, where she finds a percentage of failure that will match the percentage of failure after that number is released to the public. But that number will be harder to compute.
In math terms, say F is the computed chance of failure, and say P(x) is the new chance of failure if the CEO publicly states that x is the chance of failure. Solve for F:
F = P(F)
(Of course I’m kinda skimming over the formalities of probability here and assuming that we can make them more precise than perhaps we should. But still.)
(Also note that the fixed point could be .99999999…, which would suck for the company.)
(Also note, such equations are usually solved iteratively. More on that below.)
You are correct that in real life the CEO smiles to the camera and shuts her mouth.
Anyway, this is why I don’t get too upset when company executives and politicians lie to the public, at least when it seems as if their lie is less self-serving and more in the interest of their company/country.
I find this unfortunate, by the way, and indeed I understand it’s failure modes, but the failure modes of “be completely honest all the time” seem worse —
for people like political leaders and such. It’s perhaps different for you and me.
Anyway, my point about SCC is, discourse changes a community, and in ways that may be at odds with the object-level meaning of the discourse. These effects are dynamic, and the space is (if I can get super-mathy) “non convex” — that’s kind of a metaphor, but I think it’s an apt metaphor.
Anyway, observe and iterate. Fine a stable-ish place you are happy with. (Or embrace the chaos, if that’s how you roll.)
But notice trends. I hope Scott is watching the trends.
(Which actually, I suspect he is. I also suspect he might be making a decision I won’t like. Anyway, his house, his rules.)
Veronica:
a) I feel like I understand your “fixed point” reasoning and agree with your math and think your thinking here is cool and interesting.
b) Once again, and I’m sorry if this is a little rude, I feel like you are using an irrelevant very-low-probability theoretical point to rationalize. Scott’s writing is not really analogous to your example… yes he causally affects his commenter community but he (sadly) does not causally affect the larger world in nearly a strong enough way to create this kind of feedback loop. To the extent that “SJ” consists of factual statements, he is free to judge their truth value and write about them without worrying about epistemologically complex effects.
c) I guess maybe I am being unfair, because there is something epistemologically feedbacky about Scott’s parent comment specifically saying “can I please not get comments like this”, but…….. is that REALLY what we are talking about?
It is interesting that you say:
“I often feel a lot of hostility from your comments section — not from you, but from the community you’ve attracted. Like, I might want to talk dispassionately about SJ stuff, but if I do I’m gonna be attacked hard —”
You often post very high quality stuff. However you are also a very aggresive and unfriendly poster. Which is fine, not everyone is as insightful as you, even though most people are nicer than you.
To your credit I think you are being pretty unbiased in your hostility. For example you are rude to “SJ protected classes” and people who seem to be your friends. Explicitly you are not very charitable to nice (on thingofthings) and multi-headed (both trans and multi seems like your friend to some extent).
I value the diversity of the comments section here, and the civility, but the honesty, to the point of bluntness often, moreso. I’d rather have people from both sides say what they mean and why (within the wide norms of the blog guidelines) than politely dance around ten feet inside the edge of the overton window.
Also, I’d like everyone to keep in mind that “disagrees with me” is not tantamount to “was mean to me,” even if your sentiments were heartfelt and you were in the minority position.
Assuming bad faith and declaring that this is typical for members of [reference class] is pretty rude. I would feel attacked if someone said that about me.
@Mark:
Isn’t the start of this discussion premised on the idea that those on the left disagree with someone and express their antipathy forcefully? In other words, how can you really frame this as “your side does it” thing?
Well, sure, passive-aggressively-worded insults and denying someone’s frame of reality based on their political affiliation do not necessarily qualify as “attacking hard.”
You’re still proving her point, though, Mark.
I genuinely don’t understand what “denying someone’s frame of reality” means.
I think its like when your wife says you “aren’t validating her feelings”, and you say “Well, that’s because your feelings are invalid” and the next thing she says to you is “good morning”, not necessarily the very next day.
(Or is that just me?)
I think “denying one’s frame of reality” in this context is a reference to summarily dismissing one’s perception of being attacked as “being disagreed with.”
If the some of the counters use mostly ad-hominem arguments, straw-men, and/or rely mostly on snark and emotion instead of reason, these might be fairly categorized as “attacks” rather than disagreements. I’m sure there are other properties of arguments that could be put in the “attack” category. Broadly speaking, I think there are arguments that anyone could categorize as attacks.
Given that Mark does not attempt to determine whether Veronica has been attacked (by any definition, let alone one that is mutually disagreeable) this is an assumption that Veronica’s perceptions are simply invalid.
Have you considered that reading dispassionate talk about SJ stuff triggers some people? As such, is it possible that they feel “attacked” too?
I feel like you’re kind of doing a fallacy of grey here. “No one can be perfectly balanced and apolitical” – okay. But some people can be closer to that than others, and that’s often good. The guy who makes an honest effort to consider both sides, even if he never quite removes his own bias, is doing something different than the fascist stormtrooper. I worry that “no one can be perfectly balanced and apolitical” is eliding that difference and making it difficult to implement norms that favor the former rather than the latter.
I’m not sure that the argument from grey is the right reference. As I understand it, the general SJ premise in play here is “all decisions that take place in public have political dimensions. There’s no such thing as more or less political, because what is a political consideration depends on context. It doesn’t seem politically charged to say “Zeus is a fictional character” in a Christian church or rationality meetup, but it is definitely political in a Hellenistic Pagan Temple.” My reference of choice here is “Non-political is how some decisions feel from the inside, because whether or not a thing seems political says nothing about the thing, and everything about you.”
It does to me, although not as politically charged as the equivalent accusation of Jesus would be. “Fictional character” and “pagan god” are denotationally equivalent in a Christian context, but there is a connotational difference, and a lot of it consists of respect for religion as a category.
>There’s no such thing as more or less political, because what is a political consideration depends on context.
Lots of things depend on context which are nonetheless objective categories. What counts as “tall” depends on whether you’re among midgets or NBA players, but still there is such a thing as more or less tall. And there is such a thing, objectively, as tall-in-your-context.
So objectively, it *is* not political to say that Zeus is a fictional character if you say it in the setting of contemporary America. Because in contemporary America, the Olympian gods are almost never worshiped.
I think some people are using “political” as something like”likely to trigger tribalist sentiment and reactions”, and others are using it as something like “likely or intending to benefit a particular political position”.
With height, it’s particularly clear. Whether or not I count as short or tall may vary from context to context, but in all contexts, I’m taller than a 5’6″ person and shorter than a 6’6″ person, and indeed slightly more than twice as tall as a 2’11” child. Also, if I said I was sitting on a chair with my feet on the floor, you were to guess at where my head was and where my feet were, the error bars on your guesses would overlap very severely – but it wouldn’t stop you having a pretty good guess as to how far my head is from my feet.
The “because” bit in Nicholas’s take on the SJ premise is a non-sequitur, as far as I can tell.
>>I think some people are using “political” as something like”likely to trigger tribalist sentiment and reactions”, and others are using it as something like “likely or intending to benefit a particular political position”.
Right, but “Zeus is fictional” won’t count as political by either of these definitions (it isn’t likely to trigger any sentiment at all among present-day tribes, and it isn’t likely/intended to benefit any political position that anyone in the present-day world actually occupies).
Unless something should count as political if [it would serve some political purpose if people were very different than they actually are], but that seems like a strange definition.
In defense of the because non-sequiter. The point is something like “political as an adjective is not like tall, it’s like taller. You can’t say ‘He is taller.” as a complete sentence, you have to be taller than something. You can’t say “This statement is not political.” you can only say “This statement is less political than [x].”
An observation RE Hellenistic Pagan Tribe: I apparently know more Hellenistic Pagans than average and succumbed to availability, but it’s also interesting to note that one of the large Hellenistic political groups in Greece has asked the government to please give them their churches back. The government said no.
And the widest possible schelling point for defining political is “an action is political if it affects proximately another sapient being.”
Nicholas:
Finding a “than” is pretty easy, especially if we’re looking at Scott’s remarks. “X’s statement is less political.” (note full stop) is not meaningful, I’ll give you that, however, “X’s statement is less political than it would have been if X had not made an honest effort to consider both sides.”
Or even, “If you make an honest effort to consider both sides, your statements will be less political.” This is I think is OK as the “than they would otherwise have been” is implicit.
I thought “Frame of Reality” was part of the official LW/Rationalist lingo for interpreting informational input. Sorry the thread got derailed.
HBC, I was with you until “this is an assumption that Veronica’s perceptions are simply invalid”, which again just seemed to… lack meaning.
I get the reaction to the tone, but is disputing the framing somehow morally wrong?
(The interesting thing to notice, in my opinion, is that some seem to be arguing that “an ‘attack’ was perceived” and others that “no ‘attack’ was meant”, for maybe different values of “attack”. And hey, maybe we can agree on both things. If true, understanding this from both sides would probably be a good thing for several reasons)
@Cauê:
Mark does not attempt to argue that sometimes strong disagreement can be perceived as attack and that perhaps this is the case here . Go back and re-read his comment.
Rather he simply states that she (and all other SJWs) say they have been attacked when the moderator won’t ban opposing viewpoints.
He could have simply asked “How do you discriminate between disagreement and attack?” He doesn’t even come close to framing that question.
He says that, in this case, disagreement has been framed as attacks (also added that this is “standard SJ modality of engagement”).
(my last paragraph wasn’t an attempt to “explain” his post. Maybe an attempt to steelman the position, while arguing for a better one)
This would be more civil and productive, but I don’t think that disputing the framing by merely asserting a different one is unusual or particularly remarkable (tone aside).
You’re right, that is not unusual or remarkable by itself. Which is why that is not what people are criticizing Mark for doing.
No, it’s just the part of the criticism that I didn’t understand.
“But I do think you can get pretty messy on SJ issues.”
If you’re curious about why you get a hostile reaction in comments sections, phraseology like this is a good example. Statements like this don’t map to “you’re wrong, because X” or even “you’re wrong, you idiot,” they map to “you’re wrong, in the same way a child who writes on the wall with a permanent marker is wrong; I will now educate you in how to behave properly.” You aren’t attempting to convince someone, an action which acknowledges multiple points of view, even if you believe they are wrong. You are attempting to instruct someone, an action which admits of no other valid points of view whatsoever.
Or you could interpret that statement charitably, and interpret that as a claim that Scott is sloppy in his argumentation when it comes to issues within the SJ sphere.
You could ask for citations of what constitutes sloppiness/messiness.
You could even point out that this a sloppy/messy argument to make, as it is not very precise (which I agree with, generally).
But straw-manning the statement isn’t particularly helpful.
There is a similar issue with “check your privilege”. The message sent is “You should see whether you’re coming from a position of privilege. And if you decide that you’re not, then you’re wrong and should perform the evaluation again.” An evaluation where the “correct” answer has already been determined isn’t “checking”. Saying “check your privilege” is just a passive aggressive way of saying “you’re privileged”. If you really think that it’s important to communicate to someone that you think they’re privileged, you should just say “I think you’re privileged”.
@HeelBearCub:
Telling someone how their phraseology is interpreted is not straw-manning.
I always parsed the “check” in that phrase as meaning something similar to “halt” or “curb”, not “inspect”.
Less passive-aggressive but a lot more condescending: the message is “your thinking is so corrupted by social forces that you’re not worth talking to seriously until you’ve
seen the Matrixaccepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviorgrown some class consciousness.”Neoreactionaries have their own version of this meme, but they call it “pwning”.
A third possible interpretation is “check” = ‘set aside’ (as in “check your coat at the front desk”).
This third interpretation was how I initially understood it, but now I’m pretty sure they’d say that’s not possible.
It’s semantically a very strange case!—the one word can have three different meanings, but which meaning the word actually has doesn’t really matter, since the phrase has essentially the same pragmatic meaning either way.
That is, ‘be aware of your privilege’, ‘restrain your privilege’, and ‘set aside your privilege’ all basically share the same communicative force (‘don’t be guided by your privilege’) in slightly different metaphorical ways.
@Cauê:
Veronica’s comment is a self-report of her subjective experience in the comments section. The words “attacked hard” are simply the end-point of a statement of why she doesn’t want to discuss SJ issues here. Mark’s comment isn’t designed to engage her in debate. It’s not framed in a way that recognizes that her subjective experience might be accurately reported.
So, to get to your point about reframing, a way to reframe her argument without denying her subjective experience would be:
“Is it that you are being attacked, or are others arguing forcefully against the idea, and perhaps rejecting the premise of the questions?”
That is the meat of his reframe, isn’t it?
Let me clarify.
(Which won’t address the meta conversation about tone and stuff. But whatever.)
It’s this: I think that “privilege” exists and is important, and that “check your privilege” is really good advice sometimes. I think “mansplaining” is really a thing, and it has much to do with how status plays out in conversation and who, according to the terms of sexism, is supposed to have status —
alongside how unhappy some people get when those status roles are challenged.
Anyway, I am well aware that this stuff is hard to talk about. It’s unstable, in the sense of community dynamics, and thus leads to really ugly spaces where people say, “Go check your privilege you mansplainy shitlord!”
And yeah, that’s maybe less than helpful.
But I would still like to discuss how privilege works, and how “mansplaining” works and other things that women/minorities/queers/etc. have to deal with.
And also stuff that weird, autistic nerds have to deal with. So yeah!
I want to talk about how discourse reflects power, and how it shapes power, and how so much politics happens according to what is not said, and who is allowed to speak when, and who gets heard, and who pays the price for nonsense.
Cuz to me that topic is as important as map/territory disputes. Cuz most people here understand that the Overton Window shapes our world as much as base material reality, and that just talking about an ethical system can have effects that might be at odds with the tenets of the ethical system [1].
That seems important.
For me, what people say and think about transsexuality is profoundly important to my quality of life, and cis people who say dumb, hurtful things often pay little cost, but I pay much cost, and that’s the way it is. Of course I’m gonna fight over that topic. I only get one life.
#####
Anyway, back to my main point. I can’t really bring up these topics around here without immediately getting slammed by “OMG SJWs are sooooo terrible!”
(I’m exaggerating. A little bit.)
And that is a useless conversation, which I can hear endlessly on Tumblr if I want. (And don’t assume the SJWs are the only shrill people on
Tumblr. The anti-SJW brigade has some rather loathsome elements. If you want to find the most stupid and petty arguments possible, they’re easy to find. It doesn’t always take two sides, but in this case two sides are readily present.)
But anyway, these topic are worth discussing in a non-tribal way, on their own terms, based on whether they describe true things or false things. How they play out in discourse communities is a separate topic.
That latter topic is also worth discussing, but it seems like I cannot discuss the prior topic without endless derailment to the second. This, I think, is at odds with the spirit of rational discourse. YMMV.
(Plus, let me add, it can be pretty hard to be the “lone voice” on a topic, when surrounded by people who really don’t like your position. It’s unpleasant.)
#####
[1] Consider this, under a capitalist global economy, just talking about relaxing intellectual property law for anti-retroviral drugs, to treat the AIDS epidemic, could end up hurting victims more than it helps, at least over the long term. This might happen because investors steer away from anti-retroviral research, as they fear a change in policy could destroy their profits. Thus such talk increases the general sense of risk around that type of research, which under capitalism can hinder such research.
I don’t know if this argument is true, but it seem plausible. I’m not sure if I trust economists to measure something so subtle.
But anyway, maybe. I still think we should provide anti-retroviral drugs for free. I guess. But it’s a gamble.
(I wonder if just saying what I just said could, over the long term, if it gets repeated, end up hurting AIDS sufferers more than it helps, because it bolsters arguments against free drugs. Hmmm.)
What people around you say and think. What happens in Afghanistan doesn’t make any difference to you.
But USG made the name of the country take singular agreement and then wiped out the major language barrier, and now everyone thinks what happens on the other side of the country affects them, so there’s nothing for it but to try to take the whole thing over. So you can’t just take over Portland or Oakland or whatever — you have to take over the whole country.
Ideally, I wouldn’t have reason to go northeast of Pennsylvania, south of Maryland, or west of the Dakotas, and probably wouldn’t have all that great a command of English, so I wouldn’t have to worry about what y’all get up to in Portland or Oakland, or what nonsense some journalists in Brooklyn are trying to push on the Anglosphere that I wouldn’t be a goddamn part of. Memes don’t spread so readily across language barriers. And the federal government would be a handful of diplomats and the post office. But after the political consequences of three major wars, America is effectively a multiethnic empire ruled by a specific sort of person in a specific set of geographical locations, and that setup never works well for anyone outside it. Or anyone inside it, since they’re stuck having to civilize the hated savages.
@Veronica,
If you just want to speak about your personal experiences or your opinions, you should feel free to do so (within the rules of the blog, obviously). After all, that’s exactly what all of us are doing.
The point where people are disagreeing isn’t that you should be allowed to speak but that everyone else has to ‘shut up and listen’ as some delightful folks have put it. Much less unskeptically accept said experiences/opinions by never expressing doubt or requesting evidence.
Again, that doesn’t mean you or anyone else should have to deal with personal attacks. But it seems like, as the parent said, a refusal to privilege the discussion in favor of SJ viewpoints is in-and-of-itself seen as an attack. That is incompatible with rational debate.
We all take our lumps for unpopular opinions: I was treated like a weird alien and had my sanity questioned for expressing my dislike of Ian Banks’ Culture to cite a particularly trivial example. But by that same measure I’m equally free to criticize views I think are poorly thought out. Giving anyone immunity to criticism turns the comments section from a boxing match into curb-stomping.
But in this context, “around you” is the SSC comments section.
@HeelBearCub
Yes, or close enough. But isn’t the difference just tone? If he thinks her framing does not accurately describe what happened, that’s a valid point of discussion.
@Veronica:
You introduced too many topics at once for me to feel like engaging, but I’ll comment on this one, only to say that I know quite well what it feels like. In my academic life our places would have been inverted (it feels even worse in actual physical crowds, as you may know). Although things occasionally got ugly and personal, I always managed to have good discussions, and make and keep friends across the battle lines. I think this looks perfectly possible here as well.
[1] Consider this, under a capitalist global economy, just talking about relaxing intellectual property law for anti-retroviral drugs, to treat the AIDS epidemic, could end up hurting victims more than it helps, at least over the long term. This might happen because investors steer away from anti-retroviral research…
OK, but as with the other examples of harmful speech put forward here, that is harmful only to the extent that it leads to tangible action. Words turning into sticks and stones. I’m pretty sure that neither Moldbug nor Yarvin has any significant chance of implementing a neoreactionary regime, or any intention of trying. And I’m skeptical of the argument that anyone is justified in taking action against a speaker on the slightest, vaguest possibility that their speech might lead to future action.
Are there any credible examples anyone would like to put forward of speech being harmful enough to justify suppression even without the possibility of action?
Because if we are talking about speech leading to harmful action, the law has two very specific standards to apply. Speech leading to explicit agreement on action, and at least one actual overt action, can constitute criminal conspiracy. Speech intended or reasonably likely to result in immediate, specific harmful action – a stampede in a crowded theater, the actual audience of the speech lynching the guy the speaker is pointing at – can be blocked. Any less direct connection between the speech and the feared action, and you have to let the speech stand.
These standards aren’t legally binding on private actors, of course. But they are very good ideas, developed through centuries of careful thought by concerned experts in the field. Organizing private retaliation for speech on the basis of any lesser standard, even if legal, is IMO a very bad idea.
@John Schilling —
Right, but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to Moldbug, nor have his ideas get broad play in any subculture I am part of. Furthermore, words can hurt, and semantic clusters and meme-structures and all the other social preconceptions of who I am affect my life in big ways.
It’s not just that person calling me a “faggot.” Sure that sucks, but that’s not the big deal. It’s way more subtle than that.
But what does “take action” mean?
Which is to say, if someone asked their manager why his wife’s vagina smelled so bad all the time, they’d likely lose their job. Do you object to that?
But why, such a comment is unlikely to lead to “tangible action”?
When someone expresses contempt for me, that’s not okay. I’m not going to just sit by and let that pass.
I mean, I might. I get to choose my battles, but the psychological effects of being a broadly misunderstood and marginalized person are very real. It’s a weight I carry in my day to day.
In any case, the notions of free speech that arise from the model of idealistic colonials publishing pamphlets critical of the British crown — well that misses much about how people express power through speech, and the kinds of effects such power has.
The overwhelming majority of social power is not governmental. Most oppressive structures are not maintained by the police.
…which means that government constraints on speech shouldn’t be the only ones we should be worried about.
If free speech is desirable, that is.
Right, but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to Moldbug, nor have his ideas get broad play in any subculture I am part of. Furthermore, words can hurt, and semantic clusters and meme-structures and all the other social preconceptions of who I am affect my life in big ways.
Yes, words can hurt. The words and ideas of other SJWs drove me out of a subculture that was one of the few places I felt at home, and I can see signs of the same strain here. Less so from you personally, to your credit, and I hope that’s something you keep consciously aware of.
But the hurt caused by words alone, we either have to suck up and bear it, or isolate ourselves from the speaker – and it’s a rare case where that is legitimately accomplished by making the speaker go away. If we find it necessary to meet hurtful words with other hurtful words, we need to try and at least marginally de-escalate at each step.
Because everyone’s words, beyond the trivial and banal, can be hurtful to someone. And unless I am missing something, the only alternative to tolerance for hurtful words is to privilege some words above others, some opinions, some points of view. Some hurts.
If we’re going to play that game, I’m going to use all of the power at my disposal to ensure that my opinions and my point of view are privileged, that hurting me is the thing that’s not allowed, and I’m going to share that privilege with people like me, people I agree with. You imagine I have great power on account of being a cis-hetero white male geek with money. If we play the no-hurtful-words game, this is how I will use that power.
Let’s play a different game.
” I don’t think “balanced” can really be a stable position for very long. Nor do I think one can step outside the conflict and be a pure observer.”
I disagree. One can try to evaluate arguments and evidence on their own merits, not on whether they lead to conclusions you like.
To take a recent minor example … . I sometimes post on FB in a climate group, usually criticizing the orthodox CAGW position (C for “catastrophic,” that being the part I mostly criticize). But my recent comments have included a long series defending Margaret Sanger against a variety of fraudulent and slanderous claims, a comment explaining how the greenhouse effect works (something most people on both sides of the argument don’t understand), and an explanation of how it might be possible to provide good evidence that current warming is anthropogenic (as it happens I think it is, but my point was only that showing it was would not be impossible).
Part of what irritates me about political argument—less here than most places—is the unwillingness of participants to evaluate facts and arguments on their merits instead of on which side they support. The less you are willing to do that, the less reason you have to think you have chosen the right team to cheer for.
Being able to identify statements that are blatantly false and purely inconsistent with clear fact, and oppose them, is, while a disturbing rare virtue, quite different from there being an objective manner of evaluating more subjective issue. Is the time that you spend presenting arguments that go against your position equal to the time that you spend presenting argument that favor it? Is there even an objective meaning of “equal time”?
I spend more time presenting arguments for conclusions I agree with. But I don’t present arguments that I do not believe are correct, or deny the correctness of correct arguments for conclusions I disagree with. Avoiding those things is what I mean by being balanced–and one of the features I enjoy in Scot’s posts.
What about negative capability? Do rationalists rule it out? Is it too woo? Is it something only artists need attend to?
Scott’s use of “balance” seems to be “presenting arguments marked ‘Blue Tribe’ roughly as commonly as arguments marked ‘Red Tribe'”.
I don’t think so. I think his idea of balance is presenting good arguments and critiquing bad, whichever tribe they come from.
It’s the difference between bipartisan and nonpartisan. A bipartisan, if they found out that their last ruling was a mistake in favor of the Reds, will make their next ruling in favor of the Blues to balance it out. A nonpartisan will do their best not to make that error again.
@John Schilling:
Can’t we try an play the “find non-hurtful ways to express ideas powerfully” game instead?
I understand that “no hurtful words, ever” is essentially (well, should be) a non-starter. But I don’t think the only alternative to that is “any words are perfectly fine”.
Engage in spirited debate by steel-manning the ideas you are in debate with. Avoid mocking peoples positions as a general rule. Don’t mock the person.
If you want to have exchange of ideas, this is is a far better model than “I will bathe in the figurative blood of my enemies”.
@Cauê:
I think there is more than just a difference in tone. Mark rejects the premise that Veronica actually feels attacked and states that she is merely framing it that way for rhetorical gain.
This is a different position than accepting the premise of feeling attacked and disputing whether the subjective feeling aligns with objective reality.
I even think you could have awful tone, while accepting the premise. “You only feel attacked because you are too weak and immature to handle being challenged” would be a statement that has horrible tone, but accepts the premise.
Where words are concerned, “non-hurtful” and “powerful” are, if not mutually contradictory, aligned at about 135 degrees to one another.
So if “non-hurtful” is the rule, everyone is pretty much down to the most tepid version of their ideas. Or, more likely, someone figures out that they can use powerful words to drive away the people who would be hurt by them, and then we’re right back where we started.
Tolerating at least the unintentional hurt, or deploying power against enemies.
@HBC
If it was just a jargony way to object to his implication that she was being dishonest, ok, I get that.
@Cauê:
Yeah, that is probably what it it reduces to. Although I think even the simple statement “I think you are lying about feeling attacked.” would feel somehow less objectionable to me.
She didn’t say “feeling attacked”, though. We are reading it like that. Mark denied that she was attacked.
Which gets me back to my impression that there seems to be some low-hanging fruit to gather here – it seems that simple application of the principle of charity could significantly improve our understanding of what’s happening.
@Caue:
Yes. Agree completely. I was trying to get at this with my response to John above.
To completely nitpick, the link to commmag could have just gone to the hill, which is where I ended up anyway.
As someone who is a good bit right of Scott politically, I don’t really see it. Leaving aside the Moldbug thing, the rightist links here are to National Review and Charles Murray. Rather different beasts than Free Northerner and Spandrell, I think. Unless pas d’amis a droit means there’s no distinction at all a droit, of course.
By the way it’s “a droite” (meaning right-hand, or right-wing) not “a droit” (“droit” is pronounced “drrwa” and means “straight”, or “right” as in “right to bear arms”).
Breitbart, the National Review and the Daily Caller are “house organs” of the GOP. Along with Fox and multitudinous AM talk radio hosts, their news agenda changes day to day in precise lockstep with the demands of the RNC. [bracing for torrent of “both sides do it” bullshit].
Whosoever believes the uncritically repeated truism that Cthulu always swims left has been taken for a ride in the looking glass.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/02/this-astonishing-chart-shows-how-republicans-are-an-endangered-species/
I… don’t see how this is relevant to what I said? Free Northerner is certainly not a “house organ of the GOP,” regardless of whether those other institutions are. (Nor is Charles Murray, for that matter. You don’t see Jeb Bush pushing for a guaranteed minimum income.)
I mean, maybe you can’t see it, but there are in fact differences between Silicon Valley tech-libertarianism, Republican God-n-guns conservatism, and neoreaction. I promise you that I have no love in my heart for the GOP.
As I said above, I think this community has lost sight of the existence of outgroup homogeneity bias.
Granted, progressivism has a great deal of excuses for why outgroup homogeneity bias is actually right when they do it (see: Corey Robin), but we ought to be suspicious of things that come out saying “this well-known cognitive bias is actually right when we do it”, no?
>As someone who is a good bit right of Scott politically, I don’t really see it
Of course you don’t, you’re to his right.
The point was that he sees a few different variations on “right”, and the one that this thread could best be matched to is not a NRx version.
Kind of like how the leftists here used to complain that right wingers would lump everyone from European socialists to Lenin into the “communist” clade.
Jonah Goldberg upped that ante with “Liberal Fascism”. The book was highly influential in my neighborhood where Gore/Kerry/Obama sign-putter-uppers were semi-goodnaturedly regarded as both Nazi and Communist.
I fly an American flag all year round now. Things got scary circa 2001-04. My truck tires were slashed and sidepanel “keyed” with what must have been clipping shears. I even got an anonymous letter filled with baby powder during the anthrax scare in response to a letter i’d written to the Tennessean mildly critical of some vocal bullying Charlie Daniels and Hank Jr. were engaging in round wartime. Of course I didn’t know it was baby powder and I quickly had three firemen in moonsuits heavy-breathing around the house while I was restricted (sans moonsuit) from leaving for 8 hours. I was allowed to stand on the porch, though it was so hot I decided to take my chances and just hang out inside.
Things are great now. It’s a regular Knots Landing. And I’m glad to still be flying the flag. A fresh one every flag day. Just bought my 14th.
“Right” is an ambiguous term. I’m closer to a hard core libertarian than Scott.
I haven’t been here long enough or paid close enough attention to know whether the commenting community has gotten more libertarian, but it wouldn’t surprise me. At least three high profile online libertarians that I know of have commented enthusiastically about this blog, with links, which would tend to pull in people who read them.
In addition, there is the point an earlier commenter made—that red tribe (and in this context, although not all, I think that includes libertarians) members are more willing to participate in conversations that include many who disagree with them than blue tribe members. From my standpoint, the fact that this blog has civil conversations with people who disagree with my views in a variety of ways is an important asset. I’m not sure to how many SJ/progressive/… people the same is true, although obviously it is to some.
“I’m closer to a hard core libertarian than Scott.”
than to Scott, or than Scott is?
than Scott is.
Presumably “than to” too, since by most measures you are a “hardcore libertarian”.
It wouldn’t have been a very useful statement, though.
“In addition, there is the point an earlier commenter made—that red tribe (and in this context, although not all, I think that includes libertarians) members are more willing to participate in conversations that include many who disagree with them than blue tribe members.”
This seems plausible if you’re restricting your analysis to internet conversations, but what about IRL?
“but what about IRL?”
I think it’s true in the academic world, in part because it is so heavily blue and one wants to talk to someone. I’m not sure if it is true more generally.
You can’t just give a blog recommendation and not provide a link.
http://www.xenosystems.net/chaos-patch-65/
Oh, him. Hey, that’s a ludicrously unfair comparison.
It is on Scott’s short blogroll at the top of the page. The remark may have been unfair, but not ludicrously unfair.
Why is everyone afraid to say Snatch Soil’s name?
@darxan
Just hyperstitious, I guess.
“Alas, a Blog!” is also on the blogroll and it would clearly not be fair (to either side) to compare their link posts to Scott’s.
You feel that this blog has been improving in quality?
I am highly skeptical that anything in fruit fly behavior applies to humans. Neocortexes are a big deal. If it were mice, I’d consider taking it seriously.
This looks to me like an experiment to test evo-bio theories about selection mechanics. I don’t think it necessarily needs to apply to human biology specifically, as it’s supposed to be a theory that applies to everything with genes.
They’re not proposing an actual mechanism (or at least weren’t in ’04–the subject’s received a lot of attention since). They’re just talking about sex-specific trait selection in general.
It’s a really interesting experiment about gay fruit flies. Why should everything be about humans?
Because the genetic argument was invoked to respond to statements that homosexuality was unnatural. Look at all the gay animals who aren’t human! Look at the gay penguins and fruit flies and lions! Gay behaviour is perfectly natural!
The fact that non-human animals cannot be considered to “fall in love” or choose their methods of sexual expression in the same way as humans (unless you’ve over-dosed on Disney movie anthropomorphised animals) was an inconvenient fact to be discarded. Awww, look at the cute penguin gay dads instead! I’ve seen photos tagged “lesbian cats” on Tumblr because two female cats share raising kittens, and I’m not sure how much of that is tongue-in-cheek and how much is dead serious.
It has to be all about humans because we’re engaged in fighting over the culture. If it’s genetic, you cannot disapprove, and if you object to any element of sexual liberation for all, then it’s because you’re a bigot and a hater. There’s an Irish saying “What’s natural can’t be wrong” (of course it can; murder is as natural as anything else) and that’s the idea here: if there are gay fruitflies, then it’s as natural – and as good – for there to be gay humans.
When people talk about homosexuality being unnatural, they mean preferential homosexuality – being exclusively attracted to the same sex.
Sure, male bonobos jack each other off for fun and profit, but those males would probably also mate with a female if given the chance. But the idea of 3% of males not being interested in females at all…that’s very peculiar, and very hard to explain through Darwinian means.
As far as I know, only two mammals exhibit this behavior: sheep, and us.
But MawBTS – the gay penguin dads! How can you be so cruel as to deny the reality of their love it is so special? Don’t confuse me with facts 🙂
Is male obligate homosexuality even a human universal in the first place? As far as I can tell, it’s just assumed that a concept that didn’t even exist until recently must exist everywhere and therefore be biologically determined. I haven’t seen any references to it having been demonstrated. Now, maybe it has been and I just haven’t noticed, but if it hasn’t, there’s a simple explanation that no one is looking into.
Field researchers working with the Hadza in Tanzania have claimed that adult homosexuality is unknown there – although same-sex play among children has been observed and appears to be considered non-problematic – and that this is unlikely to be due to social pressure.
Yeah, that’s about what I figured.
I wish I could find those goddamn papers I read a few years ago — someone actually did the anthropological survey, and it turns out that it’s unheard of in some cultures and common in others.
(The most recent one I saw speculated that homosexuality was more common in contexts where births need to be limited. Which is interesting, no? Blues certainly think births need to be limited…)
@ nydwracu
(The most recent one I saw speculated that homosexuality was more common in contexts where births need to be limited. Which is interesting, no? Blues certainly think births need to be limited…)
I’ve often seen that idea; search terms might be ‘cities of the plain’ and ‘fleshpots’, or ‘survive vs thrive’. That is, a group in danger of dying out by lions and/or ‘native’ raids, need to produce as many babies as possible, and to keep everyone focused on real, practical survival stuff; none of that silly art and philosophy. Otoh, cities in the plain are in danger from over-crowding which breeds disease, shortages, and riots.
As for other things we Blues favor. Giving Universal Basic Bread to stoned beatniks performing at open mics, keeps them off the streets and is cheaper than circuses or riot police, is a policy of Lord Vetinari the Patrician, who does not himself indulge.
“Is male obligate homosexuality even a human universal in the first place? As far as I can tell, it’s just assumed that a concept that didn’t even exist until recently must exist everywhere and therefore be biologically determined.”
Wow, that’s a rather blatant abuse of the use/mention distinction. If you’re operating under use, then it is not true that homosexuality didn’t exist until recently. If you’re operating under mention, then no one I know of is claiming that it exists everywhere, or that it is biologically determined.
“if it hasn’t, there’s a simple explanation that no one is looking into.”
And what would that be?
Since it’s useful to everyone to hear that Other People aren’t always like they imagine: It didn’t occur to me to interpret the Drosophila study politically at all; I think it would be fine to be gay even if it were unnatural. But I’ve heard of the hypothesis that homosexual attraction might persist due to sexually antagonistic selection, and I thought it was interesting per se. I just actually think evolution is cool!
I don’t think the numbers work out for sexually antagonistic selection. There would have to be a really ridiculously strong effect in females to compensate. I’ll see if I can run some simulations to see exactly how big it would have to be.
@Brett
That depends on in what percentage of individuals the propensity-towards-homosexuality gene actually results in homosexuality, and how much of a survival cost homosexuality confers. If gap people get married and have children, or provide for their kin, then the effect is mitigated.
This is something I never really got about the politicization of the investigation, either. What does it really matter if being gay is genetically caused or “natural?” Rape, murder, genocide, infanticide, brutal subjugation of female sex slaves are all natural behaviors we observe in other animals. That hardly makes them morally acceptable practices for humans to engage in. If someone just arbitrarily decides they’d rather have sex with people who have the same genitals, free of any coercion by genes effect, what difference does it make? It’s not like the human race is in any danger of going extinct because we’re not reproducing enough.
So, according to you, the exchange goes like this:
Red Tribe: Homosexuality is unnatural!
Blue Tribe: Actually, homosexuality occurs quite frequently in nature.
Red Tribe: The question of whether homosexuality is natural is meaningless! You’re being intellectually dishonest by pretending otherwise!
“The fact that non-human animals cannot … choose their methods of sexual expression … was an inconvenient fact to be discarded.”
I see. So the Blue Tribe arguments against the Red Tribe position that homosexuality is a choice are defective, because they fail to take into account the fact that non-human animals can’t make choices, and therefore can’t be gay. Because homosexuality is a choice.
“if you object to any element of sexual liberation for all, then it’s because you’re a bigot and a hater.”
That sounds a lot like “I’m really tired of being called a bigot when I make bigoted comments, so I’m going to present a sarcastic straw man.”
RCF, I still maintain that claiming animals engage in homosexuality is meaningless if we’re trying to make correspondences between human and animal behaviour, because humans engage in a lot more voluntary, willed, and explicit sexual choice than animals do.
A male lion may mate with other male lions, and may even do this preferentially (that is, will mate with a male rather than a female lion, all else being equal). I still don’t think you can say this lion is “gay” the same way you can say that Elton John is “gay”.
Unless you are willing to uphold that animals can suffer from gender dysphoria, can identify as trans or non-binary, and would engage in BDSM as a lifestyle choice, then don’t scoff at me about animals not choosing how they express themselves sexually. Unless you want to get into “Don’t coercively designate at birth your puppies and kittens as male or female, that may not be their chosen gender identity” (as is argued for humans), then saying animals are LGBT in the same manner as humans are does not hold water.
No chimpanzee is ever likely to produce a simian version of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, a fact for which we should all be grateful.
When homosexuality is called “unnatural,” it is Natural Law that is being referred to, not “the things you catch dogs doing.”
This is all beside the point anyway. Within living memory, it was the left which was arguing that homosexuality was a lifestyle choice, and should be respected as such.
(Spoilers: it’s going to turn out to be some combination of genetic predispositions, cultural conditioning, imprinting, and environmental factors, just like everything else.)
Canada’s new law is terrible, what are you even thinking?
Here’s the text of the law.
It’s toothless, thanks to section 8. And it only applies to administrative regulations, not statutes, and in a parliamentary system the same people have control over both.
Section 8 is awesome. I just read that. They didn’t even bother to disguise the de-toothing.
It’s just as well – from the American experience these kinds of hard-and-fast rules tend to either get kludgy workarounds or backfire. If this rule ever started getting in the way of key policies up North, they could always start passing laws “notwithstanding the Red Tape Act” – it’s a Canadian tradition, after all.
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/26/409671996/canada-cuts-down-on-red-tape-could-it-work-in-the-u-s
A claim that it’s actually worked out pretty well, perhaps because it’s being enforced by sensible people.
I don’t see how “regulations” is countable. Is “Neither dogs nor cats are allowed in this park” one regulation or two?
Maybe infertility is also a genetic adaptation. After all, a gay guy could still get a girl pregnant. But with infertility, there is absolutely no chance of that so they would have to spend all of their time raising other peoples children. /s
I see the /s tag, but hey, you never know. “Heterozygous advantage” exists for some genes – one copy of the mutant gene is better than no copies (which means the gene is selected for if the advantage is big enough), but two copies is worse than one AND worse than none. The mutant trait is beneficial in small amounts and bad in excess.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someday we find out there are a few genes like that relevant to fertility. One copy of each gene variant, normal/original and the mutated variant, makes you more fertile or just more likely to make use of it (better survival, stronger attraction to the opposite sex, whatever) but two copies of the mutant type ends up going overboard and reducing sperm count / making menstrual cycles highly irregular / something else that’s not good for reproduction.
Huge difference between something being a useful adaptation and something being an unexpected side effect of a useful adaptation. I could believe the latter but the gay uncle theory defies rationality.
I figured the fruitfly thing was also an unexpected side effect of a useful adaptation.
Isn’t this just what eusociality is?
Most eusocial animals have odd chromosomal arrangements that make the effective degree of relation closer than we’re used to. Still, there are a few that don’t.
Do infertile people actually exert less effort trying to conceive children? Anecdotally, some of them devote their lives to finding a way to have children.
I realize that this is me being a political asshole, but I think there might be something logical there. Let’s step back and look at “Obamacare” vs the “90s Republican healthcare plan” and then move a bit broader.
These plans are sometimes considered to be broadly similar – both involve individual mandates, pre-existing-condition protections, and the creation of purchaser pools as core components, for instance. But Obamacare expands Medicaid, enacts strong minimum policy requirements, and offers more subsidies while the 90s Republican plan(s) included tort reform and Medicaid voucherization. So while both plans could largely be described the same way in brief, there are clear if subtle policy distinctions that reflect the ostensible aims of both parties.
I would expect that this can be extrapolated to other issues to the point where I think there’s some merit to a heuristic where you expect the party whose values you align with most to put together a bill generally more amenable to you and the party whose values you least align with probably has some less-visible parts of their bill that you might take issue with.
Yes, I was going to say something very similar. And indeed, more broadly, “I don’t really understand healthcare policy, but if a plan is endorsed by people who both (1) have access to experts in healthcare policy and (2) share my overall values, it’s likely that I should support it” isn’t an obviously awful heuristic.
Agreed. You could even describe it pithily as a form of “Vote on Values, Outsource Beliefs”.
There’s also the factor of who’s in charge. Back in the early days of the Iraq war run-up, some of my neoliberal friends ended up at the position of: “Unseating Saddam Hussein and engaging in a project of Middle East nationbuilding might theoretically be a worthwhile project, but I don’t trust W to get it right.”
Its important to keep in mind that American parties are a frustrating mix of similarities (insofar as they both optimize for the same things, winning elections), and opposites (insofar as they harness opposite passions.).
Your rule treats them the same, but I don’t think that this is one of the axes on which the parties are similar. Rather, I think on this one they are more opposite.
The Left -> Democrat connection is comfortable, casual. The Democratic party is the Left’s eyeglasses, slipped on every morning. On by default. Even if it wasn’t optimal the Left would have an official group.
The Right -> Republican connection is acutely uncomfortable. Its like a ridiculous Samurai mask. “The Party of Small Government” is exactly as much of a contradiction in terms as it sounds like.
I think the correct way to state your rule is “If you are on the Left you can trust bills on the Left to align with your values, but must read carefully those on the Right. If you are on the Right, you must read every bill carefully.”
I love the imagery of the glasses and the samurai mask, but I don’t think the conclusion is quite right. I think activist groups in any political party have to be wary that some other lobby in their party hasn’t gotten one over on them. The problem isn’t unique to people on the economic or cultural right. It’s just part of coalition politics.
Counter-examples to your claim: A person on the left during my more attentive political years (i.e., the Clinton Admin through the present) could not trust the Democratic Party not to favor/permit things like welfare reform, NAFTA, Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, Glass-Steagall repeal, the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, drone warfare, the Libyan War, the present ISIS War, etc. In particular, I think anyone on the economic left always has to watch anything that comes from Democrats in Congress or in the Treasury Department quite carefully to try to counter the influence of the i-banks.
You’ve got a second-term Democrat president. You still have Guantanamo Bay and drone warfare. Please tell me again how it’s all the fault of those horrible Republicans (particularly when for things like taking out Bin Laden they were very careful to release PR images of The President being all “on the spot in the War Room with his cabinet fully in charge and attentive”).
Look, I’m third-generation Fianna Fáil. Whatever our equivalent of a “yellow dog Democrat” is, I would have been it. I have been severely disappointed in my party. I would still choke rather than vote for the Blueshirts. Labour have sold their soul for a mess of pottage in order to get into and retain power as part of a coalition government, and have been more interested in the usual internal party purges that go along with the history of melding Trotskyites/Stalinites/Marxist-Leninsts/old-fashioned Socialists under one umbrella to actually worry about the working class.
That means, realistically, if I vote in our upcoming (sometime in 2016) election, my only choice is pretty much Sinn Féin. Which is not unproblematic.
Unless someone like the Monster Raving Loony Party runs. I miss the Natural Law Party – at least they were a reliably loopy choice to waste a protest vote on.
So yes, I’m damn cynical about politics and politicians of whatever stripe. If you got to see local parish pump politics in action, as (alas!) I have and do see in my last and current job, you’d be cynical too. There is no one Horrible Evil party and no one Lovely Nice party. There are parties who want to get into power. That’s it.
In the case of Guantanamo, the president is not a king. He needs Congress’ approval to move people out of the prison and close it, in particular to move them to other prisons in states represented by Congresspeople, or to send them home to Wherever. Congresspeople don’t tend to want prisoners their constituents view as Extremely Dangerous Terrorists in their state. Sending them back to the countries we took them from is also unpalatable for a variety of reasons.
I think you read the comment backwards from Irenist’s intended meaning.
@HeelBearCub:
Thanks! I was a bit puzzled by Deiseach’s reading, too.
Ah, apologies, I should explain. I wasn’t replying to a specific comment, I was referencing “Campaign promises before getting into power” versus “Actions while in power”.
A lot of people did a lot of embarrassing fawning over first-term Obama would be something even better than the Second Coming, and when he didn’t pull all the rabbits out of the hat, it was “Oh, those horrible Republicans in Congress are blocking him every chance they get” and “Well, one term isn’t long enough to get all the changes through”.
Well, he’s well into his second term. I have no doubt that the reality on the ground means he has no chance, or that politically it makes more sense, to keep up drone warfare (for one thing). He’s a politician, not the Messiah. I didn’t expect him to be anything other than what he is (me not being American probably helped in that regard).
But tribal party loyalty mean that Our Guy (whatever party Our Guy belongs to) is a hero only being held back by the Evil And Stupid Other Guys who have managed to cling onto enough power to stymie Our Guy is the explanation constantly trotted out, not the consideration that (a) campaign promises are like children’s bedtime fairytales (b) politicans are politicians not divine saviours (c) big complex clunky systems like government and bureaucracy are not that easy to turn around or disentangle.
Did Obama make any campaign promises regarding drone strikes?
@Deiseach:
The funny thing is that on Guantanamo he did try and shut it down, but didn’t get the backing of members of his own party. It’s pretty hard to go it completely alone on that front.
And on many other fronts he mostly did what he said he would do. On drones, he didn’t make a campaign promise to stop using drones (well, I don’t recall any). He said he was going to get out of Iraq and focus on Afghanistan, which is exactly what he did.
See this PolitFact article for one example of a claim that Obama said he would stop using a particular type of drone strike that shows Obama did not make that claim
I picture the negotiations as going something like this:
Obama: I don’t see the use of this prison; let us clear it away.
Democrats: If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
” Corporations and their trade associations now spend about $2.6 billion a year in reported [US] lobbying. … That … is about 34 times the total lobbying spending for all labor unions and groups representing public and consumer interests”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/opinion/a-better-way-to-rein-in-lobbying.html?_r=0
@ Walter
I think the correct way to state your rule is “If you are on the Left you can trust bills on the Left to align with your values, but must read carefully those on the Right. If you are on the Right, you must read every bill carefully.”
In the US, y’all on the Right have more voters willing and able to read every bill carefully; we on the Left are lucky if our voters even bother to vote. So it’s worthwhile labeling a pro-Business bill as pro-Environment or pro-Diversity or whatever; our masses will be attracted by the label, but yours will know more about what’s in the fine print.
Amazing how the Republican Party can manage simultaneously to be full of diabolical masterminds and illiterate backwoods yokels.
That charge cuts both ways and you know it.
Why yes, I do.
So, why not state it that way instead of being snarky about it?
Snark is really the mind-killer, or something.
I’m having more fun this way.
Honestly? I really don’t see where you got that from. They were offering a _compliment_.
It just seems off to jump down their throat about it.
@ Eggo
Honestly? I really don’t see where you got that from. They were offering a _compliment_.
Yes, I was complimenting y’all’s Republican voters and insulting our Democratic voters. But suggesting someone should reread a comment, is too often snark.
@houseboatonstyx:
Was that directed at me? I ask because no one seems to have done that here, but I did do it somewhere else in these comments. I wasn’t trying to be snarky though.
@ HeelBearCub
Was that directed at me? I ask because no one seems to have done that here
No, it wasn’t, and no, they haven’t. I didn’t either, because I thought it might sound snarky.
@houseboatonstyx:
Ah, yes, now I understand.
Our “trust them as far as we can throw them” attitude towards politicians stops us feeling betrayed, sure, but it also stops us getting powerful people into DC politics.
Which is probably why we always seem to end up electing diabolical yokels, rather than backwoods masterminds…
Powerful people don’t want to go into politics. Powerful people can exert their power by
buyingcontributing to political parties’ campaign funds and getting the politicians to do things in the national interest that just happen to advantage the powerful people also.And it matters little whether we’re talking about powerful people in business, or in the unions (both Left and Right have been beholden to large blocs holding the pursestrings and capable of getting out the vote both in America and in the U.K., and Ireland to a lesser extent).
A related rule here is to dismiss all political attacks of the form “did not vote for Obvious Good Thing Law” because Obvious Good Thing Law quite probably had horrendous subclauses, regulatory implementation, etc.
At this point, I think I trust laws with obvious feel-good names less.
A few years ago, I said something along the lines of “the lowest-hanging fruit in DC politics would be to enact a law saying that laws have to have boring and utterly emotional names, and cannot be so much as referred to by any other name, on pain of flogging”. Probably without the flogging part.
That would be a roaring violation of the First Amendment, but it’s only a matter of time until someone figures out how to take that out behind the barn anyway.
I think we could get away with a law saying that laws must be referred to by number (or otherwise nonindicatively, but by number would be easiest) internally, or in government publications, or on TV or radio programs receiving public money. The First Amendment protects private speech; it doesn’t prevent the government from restricting itself.
There’d be nothing preventing media or the political parties from coming up with their own clever names, but the manipulation there would be transparent, and at least bills wouldn’t come packaged with idiotic acronyms evoking safety or nostalgia or patriotism.
The thing is, the fact that politicians can benefit from naming laws things like the CUTEPUPPYUSA Act seems like a much much bigger problem than whether or not they are allowed to.
Given a populace stupid and/or lazy enough to fall for cheap tricks like that, what possible good is banning any single trick?
I don’t know, but I do know which can be fixed. It’s hard, the incentives point the wrong way, but on the other hand I wouldn’t even begin to know how to create a population that isn’t susceptible to that kind of manipulation on the margins, short of throwing out this “universal franchise” business altogether.
Playing whack-a-mole often feels unrewarding, but that’s mainly because we can’t know what the mole population would look like if we didn’t.
Hence “a few years ago”. These days I think the lowest-hanging fruit would be to pray very hard for God to smite Brooklyn to ashes or zap Gawker HQ until Denton’s microscopic balls boil off. Or just annex America to Liechtenstein.
I wish to creation such a law would be enacted; I get headaches seeing terms such as the DREAM Act. I think the legislation is well-intended and could be beneficial, but the cutesie-poo name, trying to get it passed by playing on sympathies and national associations – “the American Dream” – make me ill and I greatly fear this kind of naming will make its way into Irish politics 🙁
“That would be a roaring violation of the First Amendment, but it’s only a matter of time until someone figures out how to take that out behind the barn anyway.”
Godel would also probably have something to say about that, and mathematics is a bit more inviolable than the First Amendment.
The Albion’s Seed account is also relevant to the dialect geography of the US. The boundary between Yankee-settled and Scotch-Irish–settled regions in Ohio, for example, is to this day a major accent boundary as well.
Is it just me, or is the least-squares-model-fit the transgender study used an unnecessarily complicated approach? It makes me wonder if they tried different tests until they found the results they wanted.
From a quick skim, the statistical choices they made look reasonable. Breaking the symmetry in their model between trans men and trans women (Equation 3) seems like the sort of thing they might have done after having looked at the data, but I can’t get too upset since; why should the effect of transition be analogous in the two populations?
The biggest thing I would have done differently involves the fuzziness in when the transition is considered to occur:
I’d consider throwing out the data from the ambiguous years. Potentially, the reduction in model parameters and misspecification might more than offset the decrease in the number of observations.
(People who dislike the term “cissexual” might do well to consider how clunky the repeated use of “non-transsexual” is in the paper.)
People who object to “cis-sexual” do it because it puts trans and cis on equal footing, although I doubt there is so much objection to its use in technical papers, in everyday useage “normal” seems like it should work well enough.
Randy M., you know very well you cannot use judgemental and prescriptive terms like “normal”. That would imply that trans-sexism is “abnormal” and cis-sexism is the default.
I surely don’t have to point out to you the terrible, awful, horrible, “so you want to burn transsexuals at the stake, do you?” implications arising out of such cisnormative language, do I? 🙂
Two simple arguments against open borders:
1) The revealed preferences argument. If you’re an American, real estate is probably one of your top expenses. And if you’re reading this blog, you are probably paying a premium to live in a relatively safe area with lots of other smart people like San Francisco or New York. Empirically, there are tons of people who pay lots of money to live in nice neighborhoods away from loud, criminally inclined poor people. It’s not socially desirable to say that you want to live far away from poor people, but there seems to be a tremendous revealed preference for this and this revealed preference shouldn’t be dismissed IMO.
2) The nuclear weapons argument. Let’s say the US gets a bunch of immigrants from the Third World. After they’ve lived here for a while, they start to demand voting rights. It’s not socially desirable to restrict voting rights for immigrants, and anyone who says it might be a bad idea is labelled as a “bigot” in the press. So they get them. Immigrants continue streaming in. The immigrants are less intelligent, more clannish, and more violence-prone than existing natives. They elect politicians who share those characteristics. The US becomes a more belligerent world power and a few decades later World War III starts. (Remember, our current peace is anomalous.)
Another question for open borders advocates: what causal factors lead to the US having higher-quality institutions in the first place? My answer: To run a great company, you need great people. Companies that succeed like Google are extremely selective in who they hire. Running a great country is the same way. If your country is full of great people, you’ll have great institutions, great companies, great social norms, etc. If it’s full of lousy people you get the opposite. Laws and institutions are entangled with culture at a deep level.
Arguably one of the best things about the US is we have these highly prestigious universities that elevate the status of smart people and put them in positions of power even though most of the citizenry isn’t very smart. (If you don’t believe me that this is an issue, just look at how smart people who don’t have fancy degrees, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, get treated in the press and by the population at large.)
Open Borders advocates often use the rhetorical tactic of saying “well if great people are so valuable, then it makes sense to deport the lousy people already in the US, and clearly we don’t want to do that, right?” But this is a social desirability wedge. It’s not considered socially acceptable to say the US would be better off if high-crime, low-productivity populations were deported to Africa. But it might be true.
We should expect that anti-open-borders people will stay quieter than pro-open-borders people because most of the anti-open-borders arguments don’t sound socially desirable. For example, I would hesitate before writing this stuff under my real name.
I’m also annoyed by the motte-and-bailey tactic of advocating totally open borders but then retreating to just more skilled immigration if questioned. I’m in favor of admitting highly skilled, peaceful, friendly immigrants. I’m not in favor of open borders. They’re totally different and it’s dishonest to pretend that if the first is a good idea, the second is a good idea too.
Personally, I’m willing to bite most of the bullets Open Borders advocates lay out. For example, I’m completely in favor of all us rationalists packing our bags, heading to an island somewhere, and only letting people in if they’re super-smart like us. It seems like common sense: in the same way it makes sense to be selective about your housemates and coworkers, why not your neighbors, political leaders, etc.?
I would be willing to have open borders but only if freedom of association was taken more seriously and people stopped trying to give welfare to everyone who enters the country. America had that policy in the 19th century and it seemed to work pretty well.
Freedom of association is the right to join political parties and hold political meetings , and you have it. What you think isnt being taken seriously needs to be called by another name.
Wikipedia tells me that freedom of association is “the right to join or leave groups of a person’s own choosing, and for the group to take collective action to pursue the interests of members.” I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that it only refers to political parties.
In what way is it not being taken seriously?
@AncientGeek: It is illegal.
@TheAncientGeek
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not but employers are not allowed to discriminate on race/age/religion/etc. Businesses get in trouble by not catering to gay weddings. What I’m saying is that as long as people can get sued for discrimination, I think open borders is probably a bad idea.
It…freedom of association…isnt illegal. Discrimination is illegal. “Freedom of association” is not a synonym for discrimination.
You see, you have got into the habit of using FoA to mean discrimination, because saying “bring back discrimination” sounds unacceptable.
But exclusionary practices like discrimination were never part of FoA. FoA, as it is actually defined, is considered a humans right because it is a prerequisitffective engagement in politics.
Discrimination, on the other hand, is inimical to the rights to work, accommodation, etc. So there is nk way that someone who is promoting FoA as part of a human rights agenda is going to define it in a way that embraces discrimination.
@TheAncientGeek: you are not entirely correct. Freedom of association does include the right to discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics. See BSA v. Dale..
SCOTUS has said that this freedom may be limited under certain circumstances, especially when the group in question is not an “expressive association” (and thus has no real need to discriminate). But to declare that “exclusionary practices like discrimination were never part of FoA” is empirically incorrect for at least the past 15 years.
This is a “pro-life”/”pro-choice” (as opposed to “anti/pro abortion”) kind of fight, over assigning positive or negative affect to a position before (or instead of) dealing with substantive arguments.
We could try to leave these for the rest of the internet.
@TheAncientGeek:
Freedom of association is the freedom to exclude. It’s a mathematical identity.
I am not opposed to some prohibitions on types of discrimination, but I am not under the illusion that such prohibitions don’t reduce freedom of association on the margins. Suggesting that ALL discrimination is bad indicates that you don’t understand what the word “discrimination” actually means.
@DB
Technically it’s not an identity in the sense you’re thinking, it’s at best a dual (inclusion/exclusion). You could probably work it into some symmetric structure as an identity, but it really doesn’t matter because discrimination as the lawyer flies tends to entail a collectively enforced exclusion of a class for arbitrary or irrelevant reasons, not anything quite so simple as the freedom to not associate.
@Anonymous:
Yes, it’s common for people to sloppily use the word “discrimination” to refer only to discrimination against protected classes, e.g. racial discrimination. But “discrimination” without a preceding adjective means any classification of a set of things into two or more categories. My “identity” statement does not hold when three or more categories are involved, but we were discussing the binary choice of associating or not associating with someone in a given context; it does hold there.
Again, I do not oppose a few limits to freedom of association. For instance, compelling employers to do their best to judge job applicants by their merit instead of using shortcuts like disqualifying candidates based on race or gender, even if the latter may be more efficient in some contexts, leads to better societies (from my perspective, anyway) than the alternative, and this remains true for e.g. current type I and type II error levels in US enforcement of this. But such restrictions need to be considered and implemented carefully; it isn’t hard to imagine horrible implementations of the same basic idea that would destroy the competitiveness of many of America’s most innovative companies.
Businesses are not associations. It is perfectly legal to discriminate as to with whom you engage in social activities. It is not legal to discriminate as to with whom you do business. If the BSA were to acquire a primarily commercial character, its discrimination would be almost certainly be found illegal. In Dale, it was found that the BSA has little commercial character, and that that character is outweighed by its expressive character.
I’m not clear on what bearing discrimination has on immigration. Are you saying that you would be okay with having no restrictions on Mexicans immigrating, as long as people are allowed to discriminate against Mexicans? If so, I think that current immigrants from Mexicans would disagree with you as to how much of a solution that is.
“For instance, compelling employers to do their best to judge job applicants by their merit ”
Think about what that means in practice. Merit isn’t a simple, objective, easily observed measure. So what it really means is “compelling employers to hire people that the court thinks they ought to hire, rather than the people they would choose to hire.”
Does that version look as attractive?
“Businesses are not associations. It is perfectly legal to discriminate as to with whom you engage in social activities. It is not legal to discriminate as to with whom you do business. ”
And some of us think that is unjust and that the distinction makes no sense. If I hire you to mow my lawn or teach my child, we are engaged in a voluntary association for mutual benefit. But under your rules, it isn’t voluntary, since I can be compelled to hire you if the relevant court or regulatory agency thinks I should—that my reason not to is one it disapproves of.
@RCF:
The line is blurry. Tech conferences clearly have “commercial character”, but most of Curtis Yarvin’s defenders concede that Alex Miller is within his rights to disinvite Yarvin for noncommercial reasons.
“Wrong Species” is the one who wrote “I would be willing to have open borders but only if freedom of association was taken more seriously”; hopefully s/he will respond to your main question. (My position on open borders is a bit different.)
That this distinction has never made sense to me is one of the main reasons I’m a libertarian.
@ TheAncientGreek
Fine, then. I will be more clear. I think people should have the right to discriminate, even by race. I’m anonymous and won’t be tarred for expressing somewhat racist thoughts on this blog so there isn’t any reason to sugar coat what I’m saying. I honestly didn’t try to use freedom of association as a euphemism.
@RCF
How could it not be relevant to immigration? If people could discriminate, then they wouldn’t ever have to deal with “undesirables”. But many would love the cheap labor. So while immigrants would be able to get jobs and build a better life for themselves, people who don’t like immigrants wouldn’t have to live with them, hire them, go to school with them or deal with possible crime. You get the best of both worlds.
That said, I’m not an absolutist on the issue. If discrimination had sufficiently bad outcomes, then I might consider specific limits on it(just like there are specific limits on free speech). I just hate that the general idea is under attack.
@David Friedman:
I agree that it is dangerous, and I explicitly stated that it isn’t difficult to imagine a horrible implementation of the same idea.
However, I don’t see a silver bullet here. Discrimination based on race, gender, etc. appears to be an efficient strategy in enough contexts to significantly reduce the set of opportunities available to women and non-Asian minorities if it were explicitly allowed. Such a lack of opportunity might be on the economically efficient frontier (if the superstars are disproportionately white and Asian males, there may be essentially no opportunity to win big with a Becker-inspired contrary hiring strategy), but it is not quite the kind of society I prefer to live in; I am willing to accept slightly slower innovation in exchange for “greater than equilibrium” opportunity for members of groups with below-average performance.
Lots of Americans I know have similar preferences, hence the law is what it is. The US is still generally accepted as the most innovative country. I don’t rule out the possibility that one can do much better with an aggressively laissez-faire approach, and I want to see more other countries experimenting with that, but as ugly as parts of the US sausage look, its better systems still seem remarkably hard to beat in a scalable way.
I think you vastly overestimate the sophistication of voters. For most of them, their thought process is probably little more complex than “Racism is bad, so it shouldn’t be allowed.”
“Discrimination based on race, gender, etc. appears to be an efficient strategy in enough contexts to significantly reduce the set of opportunities available to women and non-Asian minorities if it were explicitly allowed. ”
Possible, although I’m not at all confident.
But the same is true if it isn’t explicitly allowed. Suppose an employer believes that race has a weak negative correlation with ability. The obvious policy is to hire based on other information, in the knowledge that if an employee turns out poorly, he can always be fired. Arguing that you were fired for racial reasons is a good deal easier than arguing that you were not hired for racial reasons, so anti-discrimination laws provide a perverse incentive not to hire members of the disfavored group.
Or suppose the pattern you imagine exists, with the result that blacks are willing to accept lower wages than equally well qualified whites. It then pays a employer who believes blacks are on average less qualified to hire them. But not if discrimination is illegal. In apartheid South Africa, it was the Nationalist Party that pushed for laws requiring equal pay—because doing so prevented blacks from competing with whites by offering to work for less.
@Jon Gunnarsson:
Well, I don’t claim that the median person I know is representative of the median voter.
But, while the level of sophistication may differ, the basic sentiment seems very common. Coherent extrapolated volition applies here, it’s not just for AI safety researchers.
@David Friedman:
Again, I don’t rule out the possibility that the right laissez-faire policy could work much better. Or that our own system is destined to become sclerotic over time. For both of these reasons, I want other countries to try different systems, when their populations consent. And it would be nice if it were easier to create new countries to experiment with this sort of thing (I understand that your oldest son has worked on this; really hard problem, though).
But I don’t think Americans want to turn back the clock on this, at least for now. This isn’t an issue like switching to an all-volunteer military, where there already was a huge amount of resentment toward the status quo.
@DB:
I don’t doubt that the median voter you know is quite different from the median voter, but you made the claim that lots of Americans having similar preferences to you is the reason for the law being the way it is. That would indeed require a far higher sophistication among the general voting population than actually exists.
Regarding your latest reply to David Friedman, I take issue with you characterising full freedom of association as “turn[ing] back the clock”. That phrase implies that freedom of accociation was tried in the United States in the past and then abandoned. What actually happened was a switch from compulsory segregation to compulsory de-segregation.
It may be gauche to say so, but compulsory desegregation was for the poor only. It is still very possible to segregate oneself using money, which is precisely what those who have it do.
@Jon Gunnarsson:
Okay, my initial statement was incomplete. To be more precise, I am making the following two claims:
1. Median opinion among people I know regarding hiring discrimination laws is substantially closer to the nuanced position I described than it is to the pure libertarian position.
2. This is also true for the overall likely US voter population. Patri Friedman’s Beyond Folk Activism essay remarks that “at most 16% of people have libertarian beliefs”. Most of the other 84+% are driving politicians in the general direction of the position I described. (With the caveat that typical voters and politicians are MORE statist than I am.)
Not true for some Northern states; Jim Crow laws were only universal in the South. Maybe it actually isn’t possible for blacks to have a better place in society than they had in those Northern states in the mid-20th century, but Americans nevertheless have the right to try to do better. “The common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”; if you don’t accept that, other countries are more compatible with your political ideas than the US.
@DB-
Discrimination based on race, gender, etc. appears to be an efficient strategy in enough contexts to significantly reduce the set of opportunities available to women and non-Asian minorities if it were explicitly allowed.
I don’t mean to straw-man you here, but think carefully about what you’re saying. The free-market argument is that by arbitrarily excluding certain classes of employee you are missing out on good employees that your less discriminatory competitor will be able to snap up. It sounds like you’re saying that there is no competitive disadvantage to being discriminatory.
That would seem to imply that, say, the pool of potential female employees is inferior to the pool of potential male employees, or that the pool of blacks is inferior to the pool of whites.
This is not something people usually want to say, so I wonder if you meant something different from what you said.
“The free-market argument is that by arbitrarily excluding certain classes of employee you are missing out on good employees that your less discriminatory competitor will be able to snap up. ”
He is talking about non-arbitrary discrimination. For example women tend to have kids. If you exclude women you’ll miss out on good female employees… but the male employees you hire are less likely to suddenly leave when you need them because of pregnancy.
Rational racial discrimination requires the metrics are not as useful for minorities (for example if blacks with GREs are likely to have gotten them in prison or there are different cultural norms for work effort so having the same level of education is only half the story).
They can be snapped up by the competition, but under statistical discrimination they would start off in slightly worse positions equal to their expected value which would improve if they were discovered to be good (under this model women over 40 and minorities with a solid work history shouldn’t face any discrimination- it is getting there that is the issue).
@Doctor Mist:
Yes, it’s reasonable to double-check the writer’s intention when you see a statement like that. If you continue reading that comment and the subsequent discussion, though, it’s very clear that I am in fact saying something that isn’t always safe to say out loud, at least in the West.
But why isn’t it safe to say it? As Paul Graham notes, “No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.”
Actually, the example of women in the workplace is obviously valid, even if we set aside the issue of relatively low interest in STEM (and I will grant that, after matching for interest level, the aptitude gap seems to be negligible). There’s something called “pregnancy” which imposes significant costs on the employer, but is frequently beneficial to both the person and society at large, and which younger women but not younger men are likely to experience. (Edit: Looks like Samuel Skinner beat me to this.) It’s not clear to me what the best solution is, but asking companies with more than 50 employees to bear their share of the burden doesn’t seem totally unreasonable.
And as for race, consider Malaysia, which expelled Singapore and set up a comprehensive system of preferences for the underperforming ethnic Malay (“bumiputra”) majority after race riots in 1964 and 1969. The Singaporean Chinese have clearly done better by exiting from Malaysia than they could have done by remaining in the country. Simultaneously, the bumiputra are also doing much better than they were in 1969; on top of a generally larger pie, they now control close to 20% of the economy instead of 3%, and popular opinion is now open to rollback of some of the preferences. It’s far from clear to me that laissez-faire policies wouldn’t have been much worse for the bumiputra. The Chinese and Indians who stayed in Malaysia when Singapore left didn’t get a great deal, but they did have the right to leave the country at any later time, and about a million have done so.
Someday, the entire human race may be in a position similar to the bumiputra, as AIs and/or cyborgs become more capable. Perhaps you are fine with just letting the human race die off at that point. But most people seem to prefer an outcome where humans still have a space to do their own thing, perhaps planet Earth or the solar system, while their successors expand across the rest of the galaxy. I’m not going to go all Roko’s Basilisk on you and claim that you have to support gender and racial preferences today to avoid being annihilated by an AI tomorrow. However, I am suggesting that it’s better to allow governments to enforce such preferences when they’re in line with popular will than to try to stamp them out everywhere, as long as right of exit is preserved.
@DB- OK , I understand. I’m not convinced by your argument even neglecting the Basilisk, but I have to grant you internal consistency, and apologize for thinking I had caught you in a contradiction.
I have to admit, though, that (assuming I’m not still misunderstanding you) you are the first person I have encountered who is willing to say that affirmative action is necessary and important precisely because the protected class is on average inferior. Is it your contention that it will over time make them less inferior? Or is affirmative action something we must do forever?
@Doctor Mist:
Note that I’m not 100% sure affirmative action is necessary.
But as long as a majority of the people in a democratic country want it for reasons that are resistant to e.g. typical libertarian counterarguments, they should be allowed to get what they want, good and hard. I prefer to see this sort of thing resolved at the state level, but unfortunately that’s pretty much what happened after the Civil War, and too many Americans now want to ensure that the South can’t try anything faintly resembling “separate but equal” again. So, it’s best to demonstrate the superiority of an affirmative-actionless policy suite in another country without America’s historical baggage.
As for long-term inferiority, we can divide this into two components, cultural and genetic. Judicious use of affirmative action can help an “obsolete” culture adapt to the modern world; I don’t see how the bumiputra would have had a chance if they were still locked out of 97% of their own economy, even though such a lockout may be “meritocratic”. And with any luck, new technology will be able to address any problematic genetic differences; the relevant differences that remain will increasingly be due to conscious choice. Affirmative action doesn’t have much of a place in that world; instead, groups of people “inferior” by choice can be left alone, like we do with the Amish today.
DB, Mencken’s formula is factually wrong. Americans do not know what they want. Whether they support affirmative action depends on how you phrase the question. In particular, your claim that they have nuanced reasons for their non-beliefs is absurd.
In California, the residents did vote on a ballot initiative to end affirmative action in college admissions. Do you support direct democracy, or do you support the college administrators who defy the law? Do you support other states having referenda?
I explicitly stated that the sophistication of the positions held by voters varies greatly. I also don’t claim that every specific preference in place is wanted by voters; as you note, Proposition 209 is an excellent example where government institutions had gone further than the populace wanted. I’m fine with other states having referenda of that sort; when you see other situations where the voters are actually on your side, by all means take advantage of the opportunity.
But your assertion that Mencken can be totally ignored is not just wrong, but dangerous; that’s often used as a pretext for completely screwing over an unliked majority. There is a range of policies that the public is willing to support, and I don’t think a return to a pre-1965-Northern-state scenario is in that range. (I will grant that your Proposition 209 example has made me reconsider the possibility that the popular support actually does exist and elites are preventing the public from getting what it wants, though.)
Prop 209 was not about affirmative action having “gone farther” than the public wanted. It was not about nuance. It demanded the complete end of all use of race by CA.
Most social issues are decided by elites, in opposition to the masses. I believe that gay marriage has passed only a single referendum (Maine).
Elites try to change things in their favor while in the minority, yes, but the American political system is still functioning well enough despite its age that they’ve frequently been stopped. Immigration policy provides the most prominent recent examples of this, with Dave Brat’s historic primary upset and the thwarting of the Obama administration’s attempt at unaccountable executive action. (Hillary may end up being elected and then proceed to do roughly the same thing as Obama attempted, but voters have fair warning in her case.)
As for Prop 209, experience is a substitute for foresight. Many University of California campuses are close to half-Asian today. Many non-Asian taxpayers aren’t entirely comfortable with this state of affairs, and have more nuanced opinions on affirmative action today than they did in 1996. The two major political causes Ron Unz has advocated for over the last few years have been a higher minimum wage and a reduction of Ivy League anti-Asian discrimination; the former has caught fire, but the latter has met a more ambivalent response. I really don’t think that an elite is suppressing the masses there today, though I’ll grant that that may have been the case earlier.
I’ll also grant that gay marriage may qualify as a modern-day example of successful suppression of the masses, but I suspect that it’s starting to succeed mostly because it isn’t very consequential. “If it matters that much to you, FINE.”
And they called it…. San Francisco!
If SF was all techies, maybe the laws would be semi-sensible and it would be legal to build more housing.
Okay, I’m going off no more knowledge of San Francisco than what I’ve seen on the telly, but isn’t part of the problem (a) very steep terrain in some parts (b) earthquakes?
So there’s only limited places you can reasonably build and expect your buildings to stay standing and the people not to need mountaineering gear to get there, and that means if you let anyone build as much as they like in those desirable areas, you’ll have huge density with the resultant problems about services and provision of things like sufficient water?
Of course, if by “San Francisco” is meant “including satellite towns and the commuter belt up to a hundred miles away”, that would be a different thing.
Nah, those aren’t really the issues – I mean, earthquake safety is an issue, but there are ways of building things to make sure that they’re safe. And while the terrain is very steep, that doesn’t actually stop people from building there; there are some places you just have to accept that you’re going to be hiking to your house.
I think what Orb is referring to is regulation & legislation that prevents people from building – for instance the proposed moratorium on building housing in the Mission – based on certain political attitudes about urban planning and development, and NIMBYs, and neighborhood groups, and things like that.
However, I’m not sure how true that actually is. I think it certainly used to be very true, and it is still true to some extent. But while there are still plenty of NIMBYs and lots of regulations and unnecessary red tape and neighborhood activists and things of that nature, I think most of the political mainstream in the city is firmly behind development, and I think the value of building housing is such that people are doing it despite all of those problems. It could certainly be EASIER to build housing, but I think a lot of the problems with housing come from some combination (A) San Francisco is just a quite small city in terms of land area (B) the complexities and inefficiencies of the market generally (C) an aftereffect of the like 40 years of planning policy that WAS probably anti-development (D) the insane amount of demand.
Nah. They both make building somewhat more expensive than it would be in, say, Sacramento, but neither one justifies the observed costs or low densities. And the largest flat parts of the city (the Richmond, the Sunset) are also the least dense; it’s really just the Financial District, eastern SoMA, and parts of the Market corridor that are both flat and densely built.
The hilly parts of the city actually take less expensive earthquake mitigation, because the hilly parts are solid rock and the flat parts tend to lie over unstable infill or Bay mud.
The thing blocking new buildings in SF isn’t finding places to build – there are plenty of empty/abandoned lots that aren’t being built on for political reasons. Largely, its homeowners who vote driving housing prices up.
It would be pretty hard to imagine it being a physical space issue – Manhattan, as an example, has 4x the population density and continues to build at a per-capita rate faster than SF. I think it would be hard to imagine that hills (most of which have plenty of buildings on them) and earthquakes could cut the sustainable population density by more than 1/4.
In fact, if you’re willing to go abroad, Manila has a population density 6x SF. Although I worry a bit about building codes in places like that.
San Francisco could easily be built much denser even with the hilly terrain and earthquake issues. There’s large parts of the city that are entirely single-family homes. A lot more of the city could easily be mid-rise or high-rise condos or apartment buildings. Quite a few multi unit buildings have been built recently, but it’s slow going, in large part due to politics.
It really depends what part of Manila. Places like Makati or Fort Bonifacio could easily pass as neighborhoods of Los Angeles (but with terrifyingly chaotic traffic that makes already-pretty-bad LA look like a quiet country road in Ohio). But the city’s not short on informally built slums without building codes or much in the way of services, either. I expect the latter drive density about as much as the former do.
Yeah, tell me about NIMBYs. Right now we have a councillor complaining about a plan to build (very much needed) social housing in a particular area.
It’s planned to build 20 houses on 2 acres. First, our councillor (allegedly speaking for the people of the area) doesn’t want any social housing because of the risks of anti-social behaviour; secondly our councillor thinks a density of 5-6 houses (maybe up as much as 12) on the site is the maximum limit.
At the same time, we have another councillor from a different area complaining because we’re not building houses in his area. One sees potential riff-raff being dumped onto nice private home-owners, another sees potential jobs and money in construction not being fairly shared out.
The fact that people want to live in Area 1 and not so much in Area 2, of course, along with other facts that we don’t have land in Area 2 and haven’t either money or permission to buy land there are not taken into consideration.
Talk about “you can’t please all of the people all of the time!”
For the Bay Area as a whole, I have seen the claim that between eighty and ninety percent of the land cannot be built on due to legal restrictions of one sort or another. I suspect it is true, since I have seen the same figure from people who think it is a bad thing and people who think it a good thing.
In Wellington, New Zealand, I lived in a flat that was in a building of 6 flats, 1 flat per floor, 4 flats on ground level, and the top-most flat, although not at ground level, was below street level.
Steep hill.
The immigrants also have revealed preferences – to immigrate. So if you want yours to supersede theirs, it’s only fair to force you to actually put your money where your mouth is, rather than use the legal system.
I mention these revealed preferences because I don’t see open borders advocates trying to understand or account for them.
“force you to actually put your money where your mouth is” – huh?
See the thing is if open borders happened, I can easily imagine going off and buying a bunch of land and forming a city where only people who don’t commit crimes live, and only leasing land to people who seem like they don’t commit crimes. And at that point I’m basically forming my own country-within-a-country. If I was to do that, I would take some time to try to rethink US institutions in my city and better optimize them for citizens’ welfare. (I’m sure you can think of a few improvements.) At that point, I get a bunch of open borders advocates telling me that I have a moral obligation to let a bunch of immigrants in to the better-run city-state I’ve created were people don’t commit crimes and institutions run smoothly…?
I’m basically a utilitarian, but I still believe in enforcing property rights because in the long run property rights lead to greater utility. And even if open borders lead to more short-run utility, in the long term the risk of institutional collapse means that open borders are a bad idea. That’s why I defend, say, the right of the Japanese to be xenophobic and make it difficult for foreigners to become citizens. Yes, this prevents some would-be Japanese immigrants from becoming better off. But in the long run, a homogoneous open-borders global monoculture is a bad idea for the human race. It’s like putting all of our eggs in a single societal basket. (And yes, consistent with this, I’m somewhat worried about globalization.)
Or let me put it this way. We can already weakly predict that immigrants to the US are not going to vote for and operate within functional US-style institutions. Why? Because they haven’t copied US-style institutions in their home country. Instead of respecting the rule of law and property rights, they nationalize companies when they get too profitable, etc. (I’m not an expert on politics and I probably shouldn’t be talking about this stuff at all, but anyway, I think this is referred to as the “privatization/nationalization cycle”.)
Warren Buffet says US institutions are the best in the world and thinks the US will continue to outperform in the global stock market. So why don’t foreign countries just copy US-style institutions, practices, customs, etc.? I don’t know. It seems like some (South Korea) do and others (Argentina) don’t. But I would like more investigation in to this question before we open our borders, because it *might* have something to do with their people and their culture.
Here is a paper I found that suggests that it does:
Under open borders, we’d have a flood of 3rd world immigrants pointed at whichever country had the best set of institutions at any given time… which might result in no country ever having very good institutions again.
Couldn’t we just let immigrants in to the US and, if our institutions get destroyed, fix them? Well if we could do that it’d be easy for people in foreign countries to fix *their* institutions so they’d be like ours. Institutions are difficult to fix once broken. That’s why it makes sense to play it safe. Call me back when you’ve replaced all the corrupt government officials in Russia and then we’ll talk.
You don’t own my employer. You don’t own the apartment complex a hypothetical immigrant employee of my firm would live in. Why should you get to tell the firm, or the apartment owner, who gets to work or live there?
If you want a say, buy the firm or buy the land.
You, the firm, and the apartment owner are all subject to the laws of your country. If the laws include some restrictions on immigration, as is the case in practically every functional country on the planet right now, the firm and the apartment owner must abide by them or relocate to a country with laws they like better.
If the firm/apartment owner are prevented from relocating, sure, that’s a problem and I’m guessing we’d agree that the exit barrier should be removed. But the exit barriers in the West are minimal; only the entry barriers are meaningful. This is a healthy framework.
If the immigrant could come to your apartment or your company without voting, changing the political discourse, using social services, increasing the cost of social services, or anything else with effects outside your apartment and company, you may have a point. Not many people are concerned about what immigrants do in the privacy of your own home.
Insofar as the country belongs to anyone, it belongs to all of us. As a part-owner, I don’t want it to be affected by unlimited immigration.
” Warren Buffet says US institutions are the best in the wor.ld”
Best for whom or what? The US education, health and criminal justice systems are not widely admired. Otoh, the US may well be a great place for investors and entrepreneurs. I think you’ll find that other countries aren’t stupidly failing to implementing a blueprint for creating paradise on earth, they are wisely trying to retain the best of their existing systems…and the best of both worlds is.nt an easy target to hit.
But this doesn’t work, and that’s the point of the article’s thought experiment at the end.
We already have a lot of examples of these “intentional communities” – communes of all types. Ignoring the ones that fail quickly (list most small businesses), we find that intentional communities actually tend to be pretty well. Like-minded people have a good time together and live happy lives, who could have guessed?
But almost all intentional communities hit a hard wall and break up almost exactly one generation later, because children born into the community don’t necessarily support the community’s values. Trying to build a “crime-free community” has the exact same problem – dirtbag teenager’s’ll fuck up your shit.
And that’s the point the article is making, except with countries and immigration.
The Amish, The Hutterites, Orthodox Jews, and probably some other groups all seem to be doing well as separate communities within communities for multiple generations. In a sense, the entirety of Hong Kong is an intentional community: It was founded on a useless swamp.
And plenty of people have a revealed preference to work for Google. Practically nobody believes that means it’s efficient for Google to employ all of them.
So, to continue the analogy, we should think it’s a good thing if all of the current Google employees banded together and coerced Google into never hiring anyone else?
+1
Nice strawman. Most Google employees want Google to maintain a high hiring bar, without stopping hiring altogether. Most citizens of Western countries want some restrictions on immigration, without reducing it to zero.
When the citizens coerce the nation, who are they “coercing?”
To continue the analogy, we should think it’s a good thing if all of the current Google employees banded together and coerced Google into not hiring people with an IQ of 70 or people fanatically loyal to Facebook or Microsoft or Apple, yes — except Google doesn’t need to be coerced into that, and in fact would have to be coerced into doing anything else.
An even more beligerant US government would be a sight to see. I’m not exactly pro-immigration myself but that seems like a weak argument given how frequently Washington antagonizes other nuclear powers today.
As for the rest, it seems like the issue is more that we need to remember there’s no foreign policy equivilent to the 14th ammendment guaranteeing all nations equal treatment by the law. Open borders with Honduras or Somalia is poor policy, but open borders with Switzerland or Korea is more sensible.
High barriers to immigration from low human capital countries means that we can filter out the best applicants, the way brain drain already works today. Low barriers to immigration from high human capital countries means a higher absolute number of satisfactory applicants. This sort of policy isn’t even a new idea, similar immigration rules were the norm less than a century agp.
In terms of diversity having a negative impact on trust a la Putnam, it seems likely that this is a based on people’s day-to-day experiences rather than from reading census statistics. If people were allowed to aggregate in semi-autonomous ethnic neighborhoods that could minimize the “surface area” for culture clashes the same way national homogeneity would. And the Swiss cantons show that you can scale that system at least to the size of a small state. A more federal US government could probably afford higher levels of immigration by virtue of moving visible policy decisions to the state and municipal levels which are necessarily more homogeneous.
You seriously can’t imagine a more belligerent USA? I say you lack imagination. Look at what Putin is doing (and getting away with) and then imagine the same thing with a several-fold factor of military effectiveness and economic confidence.
Just for a start, I could see the US fortifying the bejeebus out of Ukraine, Poland, etc. as well as Taiwan, to leash our two major geopolitical rivals. Israel would not be just a close ally but a bustling base of operations in the Middle East, daring Iran to do a thing about it. Sure the Chinese and Russians would rattle sabers, but that only works because we choose to give a damn.
Honestly the only limit on American adventurism is the (probably healthy) unease the American public currently has with it. There is no nation, or realistic coalition of nations, that could currently hope to succeed in a true total war with the United States. Even China is forced to rely on a military strategy of cause-attrition-and-hope-America-chickens-out. They would have more or less zero hope of successfully waging offensive war against the US.
What about taking chunks of Canada and Mexico?
Our “military effectiveness” relative to Russia really isn’t that overwhelming. Sure, we’re superior – but not that superior. Our confidence is much, much higher, which leads to us getting into fights much further abroad. With pretty terrible results, actually…
The RF attacks. And wins handily, because it has complete escalation dominance in its own backyard. Even if you believed in the propaganda about magic invincible US planes, when push comes to shove the US can’t go nuclear within an overseas altercation, while the RF can go nuclear within an altercation next to it.
Again you decide to go up against a nuclear power right where it is strongest. Again you’re up against complete escalation dominance. At the end of the day, the US HAS to fold when faced with all-out attack, because the cost of a nuclear exchange even with China is orders of magnitude too high to be borne for anything other than dealing with imminent destruction.
We have to give a damn because of the incredible damage either country can do. Russia could practically annihilate us with a one-two punch of nukes and smallpox/anthrax/God knows what, but even China can do too much damage with their small arsenal of nukes.
Eurasian countries the size of Russia and China only have to have the ability to wage war in their backyards to be able to wage war everywhere they could possibly need to. If they feel like weakening our hold on the world, they don’t have to reach out to do it. We’re engaging them right where they are strongest.
when push comes to shove the US can’t go nuclear within an overseas altercation
The United States spent two generations convincing itself, the Russians, the Germans, and everyone else, that the United States would go nuclear in an overseas altercation involving a Russian invasion of Germany. This conviction was never tested, but was never widely doubted and seems to have been sincere.
You are truly certain that the United States cannot be similarly persuasive now, w/re Ukraine or Taiwan, against adversaries that are absolutely and relatively inferior to those it faced at the height of the Cold War? What, in your opinion, caused this change?
What, in your opinion, caused this change?
Perhaps the conviction that, unlike the Soviet Union, modern Russia and China are not an existential threat to the United States if not provoked by America’s going nuclear? What’s more, it seems to me that conviction is correct.
There were plenty of people in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s who didn’t see the Soviet Union as an existential threat. And there are people now who believe that it is, or may become so. The conviction that you speak of, however certain you may be that it is correct, is far from universal.
So, again, are you truly certain that everyone agrees with you in this matter, and always will?
Tularemia is Russia’s favorite biological weapon.
(Note that I’m different from kernly.)
No, I’m certain that not everyone agrees with me on this difference. But I think enough people do to make a large difference. I’d say the people who didn’t see the Soviet Union as an existential threat were, by and large, the same people who wanted to rachet down the Cold War.
Why would China or Russia be any more likely than the U.S. to go nuclear over non-existential threats? Anything China can do to us, we can do to them, but more so. We wield the bigger nuclear stick in that scenario. Russia has nuclear parity (superiority in some cases) but we have sufficient second strike capability in our SSBNs alone to render any nuclear strike on the US suicidal.
I question your objectivity if you see the US as substantially more confident/aggressive than the RF. The RF has been on all sorts of adventures of similar magnitude. Closer geographically to Russia yes, but that’s a second order concern (especially when logistics and cash are precisely where the U.S. has the greatest advantage).
And the struggles of the American military are largely because of the missions we send them on – low intensity nation building / anti-insurgency / win hearts and minds stuff. When and if we go high intensity, blow shit up and damn the consequences, we’re very, very formidable. And that’s my point. A fully belligerent US would be very scary, and we’re nowhere close to that despite recent adventurism.
Depends how you define “go nuclear.” Use tactical nukes, or strategic-sized nukes in a tactical manner, to destroy invading forces? For sure. Initiate a full thermonuclear exchange with the USSR, by nuking strategic targets inside the USSR? No. For SURE, no. That was never credible.
The balance of power in terms of weapons of mass destruction isn’t that tilted. RF nuclear and biological capabilities are immense.
As far as persuasion goes, here’s the problem. Our willingness to fight can be gauged quite well from who we do and don’t attack. Stipulating sanity: it is not credible that the US would be willing to attack Russia for Ukraine but not China for its actions in the South China Sea, not credible that we would attack China but not Iran, not credible that we would attack Iran now but not Iran back when its program was more vulnerable and its military less capable, and not credible that we would attack Iran period but not Assad in Syria.
So when we topple Assad, Iran can get worried, when we topple the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un can sweat, when we topple him China has cause for concern, and when we bitchslap China Putin needs to give us a second look. But we balked at toppling Assad. Even after we talked a big game about red lines and had our red lines crossed. Our bark cannot matter to sane players anymore – we’ll have to bite before it matters again. And that has costs.
@kernly, John Schilling
I’m not sure you two are actually in disagreement. Schilling is right that US certainly could go nuclear in an overseas altercation. Kernly is right that the US does not currently have the spine to do so, and bad actors are free to act badly.
But spines can regrow just the same as they can go wobbly. It was only a decade or two ago that US assurances of protection were credible enough that Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons in exchange for it.
@kernly, My understanding from reading people who have studied international relations is that past behavior in seemingly similar incidents is both a poor predictor of future behavior (because circumstances are constantly changing) and, importantly, not generally given much credence by decision makers trying to predict future behavior.
On the former, engaging in aggressive behavior can sap resources needed for future aggressive behavior, making the next aggressive move less likely, and of course refraining from aggressive behavior can have domestic political consequences, either causing a change to a more aggressive government, or just causing a different government policy when the existing government sees what their last move did to the polls. And there are many other forces at work.
On the second, I believe the biggest heuristic actually used by leaders for predicting whether another state is at risk of being aggressive is how much military power that state has. Obviously, on this heuristic, governments do expect aggressive action from the U.S. (and based on recent history, reasonably so; the U.S. has spent most of its time involved in one war or another for a while now).
So nobody should conclude from the failure of the U.S. to topple Assad that the U.S. would or would not intervene in any other vaguely similar circumstance in the future (different cases are different; maybe we just didn’t care about Assad, or maybe even preferred him to the alternatives but were talking tough as a strategy for manipulating him, or any number of other things, and anyway whatever made us do it could change before the next situation). And the evidence is that leaders do not in fact draw such faulty conclusions, instead using other heuristics to decide what to be concerned about.
If you flipped a coin to predict whether a given country would get into a war in the next few decades, you’d do a lot worse than if looked at how frequently that country has gone to war in the past. Obviously past behavior is an excellent predictor of future behavior – compared to anything else. Perhaps you can improve from it using it as a foundation, but I am doubtful that this has been done. And I am dead certain that you have to use past behavior as your foundation for predicting future behavior no matter what.
Possible. The recent activities of the US and Russia put hard limits on how important that can be, though. If anything a better way to sum up their behavior is “wars are like potato chips – hard to have just one.”
Um, yes you should. You shouldn’t act as if it is set in stone, obviously, but you if the circumstances really are similar you should think “hmm, they didn’t do it last time – I’ve got to estimate that the probability of them doing it this time is <50%." Or you could try and fudge it based on other factors, but that's dangerous – I think in the long run you're outperformed by someone who just estimates based on the past.
Of course, no two situations are the same. But the places we might attack that aren't Syria are much much MUCH harder to deal with than Syria was. So the chance we'll attack them has to be estimated as <<50%, assuming our affront at their misdeeds is broadly similar to our affront at the Syrian regime using chemical weapons after we warned them not to.
Whether <<50% is low enough for you depends on your risk tolerance. It does not tell you anything on its own about whether you "should" antagonize the US.
My argument is that you shouldn’t engage in this sort of tea-leaf reading in the first place if the circumstances really are similar to those encountered in the past. But I gotta ding your tea-leaf reading technique. We certainly cared about Assad. We certainly did not, and do not, prefer him to the alternatives, or we would not arm those rebelling against him. We put a lot of effort into seeing him destroyed, stymied by the counter-efforts of Hezbollah and Russia.
The only way you could conclude that we actually “preferred him to the alternatives” is if you thought that our government was both putting tremendous effort into lying, and totally insane. And had for some reason flipped away from the school of thought that had very recently driven them to topple Gaddafi.
@kernly, I can see that you’re very confident in your understanding of situations that experts routinely misjudge. There have, however, been a considerable amount of huge wars started because country A figured country B wouldn’t intervene, since they didn’t last time, and, again, international relations experts who have examined the empirical evidence have concluded that most countries are either aware of this, or for other reasons make decisions based more on the perceived capabilities and dispositions of opposed forces than on nebulous reputations. Starting wars to “look tough” is a vast waste of resources; you look tougher by holding on to the resources and just making sure everybody knows you have them.
I am confident that I don’t know what the US is going to do years out, and I am confident that nobody can know. I also know that you HAVE to act on the assumption that past US actions are a guide to future US actions. A guide with a huge uncertainty factor, but also the ONLY guide.
Because no two situations are identical, you have to try to account for the changing variables, but your baseline always is and always must be past action.
And despite the fact that you will never achieve anything like perfect prediction, you have to base your actions on very loose predictions because there is nothing else to base them on. If you act like “probably won’t happen” means “definitely won’t happen” sooner or later you will have a bad time. On the other hand if you let the possibility of disaster stymie your every move you are doomed anyway.
Name them. The only war I can think of that would have clearly been stopped if the initiator knew a certain country would step in is the Gulf War. And it has nothing to do with your assertion, because there was no “last time” in that situation. There was, however, a certain incompetent US who gave exactly the wrong impression.
There’s not much use making reference to nameless “experts.” That’s even worse than claiming that some named expert agrees with you without providing a quote. If you have experts supporting your POV, then either rephrase their actual arguments or quote them, in order to actually serve the discussion!
Name them. The only war I can think of that would have clearly been stopped if the initiator knew a certain country would step in is the Gulf War. And it has nothing to do with your assertion, because there was no “last time” in that situation. There was, however, a certain incompetent US who gave exactly the wrong impression.
Er, well, actually there are quite a few. I’ll limit myself to wars since the Congress of Vienna, mostly because cataloguing the various 18th century wars would grow tiresome and I’m pressed for time.
Anyway: The Second World War started based largely on a miscalculation by Hitler that the Western democracies would not intervene in his annexation of Poland. The West had backed down at Munich, had it not, and why should millions of British or French men die for Poland? You can find many accounts by Nazi leaders published at the time, expressing confidence that the Polish campaign would be an incident similar to the Rhineland, Anschluss, or Sudetenland, not the Great War (who would risk another Great War?).
Speaking of, the Great War started in large part because of misunderstandings between the great Powers – and again, fundamentally, a German conviction that Britain would not intervene over Belgium – or, if she did, certainly not to the point of sending an army to the Continent! Faced with creditable evidence of Britain’s intention to defend Belgian neutrality, it is possible – though of course by no means certain – that Germany (and with it the Habsburg empire) backs down.
In Korea, we didn’t start a war, true – but we did press on into North Korea towards the Yalu based in large part on MacArthur’s conviction that China would not enter the war, or, if she did, that her contribution would not be sufficient to defeat the army of the United Nations.
And North Korea, of course, only invaded the South because they believed that the US would not intervene to save Korea (some discussion of errant remarks by the State Department would be apt here).
This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I recognize that I have neglected much of the groundwork, but the idea that countries can and do launch wars based on the expected response of potential adversaries absolutely has support. Their calculations on those expected responses, in turn, are based, among other things, on the country’s behavior in the past.
Anyway, back to you guys’ debate, I am having great fun reading it. I just wanted to step in for a second.
The Second World War started in 1941 based largely on a miscalculation by Hitler that the Western democracies would not intervene, etc.
Once we were able to read all their notes, and talk to their surviving officials, it is I think uncontroversial that the Nazis expected Britain and France to intervene against Nazi wars of aggression, but that this would occur in about 1944 when the Nazis were invading places far more significant than Poland. Hitler & company believed that Germany needed to expand or die, correctly understood that their planned expansion would be intolerable to the Western allies, and planned to win the ensuing war.
Giving the Nazis perfect knowledge of the actual threshold of Franco-British interventionism, doesn’t change any of those three fundamentals, it just saves them from making a quantitative error in assessing one or two of them. Probably they split the difference, spend another couple of years rearming, and launch a preemptive version of Fall Gelb in 1942 before swinging east.
The British and French, and the Russians, are also rearming, so this doesn’t necessarily change the outcome. It almost certainly doesn’t change the bit where World War II happens. And there’s a really interesting alternate history somebody needs to write where the British and French, with big armies and a quiet Germany, intervene against Russia in Finland in 1940…
World War I, as noted, is a different matter.
Issue in question was:
I think this is a fairly high bar – in order to pass it, I think we have to be able to assert that the folks who started the wars knew that intervention would end in disaster for them. Just because it did end in disaster doesn’t mean that it was crystal clear that that intervention would make that outcome inevitable.
There have been many who stood stalwart in the face of greatly superior foes, and some even came out ahead for it. You wouldn’t expect non-nuclear countries would stand up to the US direct intervention during the Cold War, but those conflicts often weren’t unambiguous US victories.
Those “little guys” had big allies, though. That’s what was missing in the Gulf War, and that’s why I think that that war does cross the first hurdle, but not the second (“since they didn’t last time.”)
I think it is fairly absurd to assert that Hitler would have backed down if only he knew that the western democracies that he so feared (lol) would declare war on him. Especially given that he later invaded the freakin’ USSR instead of totally focusing on them.
I don’t take issue with that. “Possible but by no means certain” is not quite the bar I would want to cross if I was to assert that a given war started “because” of something.
Granting for the moment that this is a Gulf War style situation – which I don’t think is the case, because NK had China and Saddam had nobody – we’re back to what I said about that war. It simply doesn’t fit the bill of something that was started because someone erroneously believed that past behavior would predict future behavior. It was something that was started because someone put faith in misleading signals sent by the other side.
But let’s look at what actually happened in the Korean War. War started, US intervened, China intervened, NK ended up basically where it started. It is pretty clear that the north was not, in fact, fucked Saddam-style if the US intervened. If we presume they had a good read on what would happen if the US intervened, then not invading is a negative “expected value” move – if the US does not intervene, you get everything, if the US does, you draw. If there’s a possibility the US won’t intervene, you’re “supposed” to go for it, from an EV perspective. This isn’t how world leaders actually think, of course, but I think it’s a useful analysis to do, to see if some course of action really is totally insane.
In light of that, I think it’s kind of crazy to call that a war “only” happened because the NKs thought the US probably wouldn’t intervene. For sure, that was a factor pushing for war – but does it overwhelmingly swamp all the other stuff that pushed the north towards starting a war, sooner or later, with the south?
Regarding the preferences – this is only true to a certain extent. We don’t want homeless people sleeping on the curb in front of our house, but at the same time, everyone wants to live somewhat close to a grocery store and restaurants and have nearby public transportation, all of which require you to have poor people around. So you don’t want poor people right next door, but you don’t want them halfway around the world either.
Regarding the company analogy – Is Google really selective about who they hire to cook the food and take out the trash? The problem with only hiring the best janitors is that at some point, they don’t feel like being janitors anymore, and then they become a threat to the established white-collar workers. In this way, a low-skilled foreigner is probably better for a middling white-collar worker than a low-skilled native, as the native is more likely to end up competing for his job (for a wide variety of reasons).
Normal solution to that is you have the cheap houses out in the suburbs/favelas/whatever and a bus service. America doesn’t do this because… bizarrely bad urban planning.
Right. But my overall point was that rich people would not see their utility improved if we rounded up everyone making less than six figures and deported them all to Africa.
Rich people want poor people out of sight, but prefer that their labor still be easily accessible. Heck, you might even bring one onto your own property if you need some cleaning, gardening, or child-raising done!
This is almost irrelevant on the current margin. The US, in particular, already has multiple underclasses that it cannot deport without breaking international laws. (Interestingly, Lincoln did seriously consider sending former slaves back to Africa en masse. But most blacks weren’t really interested in returning.)
The one country it might apply to is Japan. They appear to have collectively decided that robots are a better solution to the menial labor problem. As far as I can tell, their math is correct given what their preferences are.
Japan is a collection of islands with zero mineral and energy resources that already has some of the world’s highest population density. Importing laborers probably isn’t a tenable option.
@Adam:
Indeed. But that doesn’t stop New York Times opinion columnists and the like from trying to browbeat the Japanese anyway.
There is a silver lining here: anyone who is on the record claiming that Japan must increase low-skill immigration, and who doesn’t both retract the claim when confronted and avoid ever making it again, can be safely assumed to be acting in bad faith. (Strictly speaking, a valid counterargument would also work, but I’ve never seen one in twenty years; Japan is a pretty darn clear-cut case.) This lets truth-seekers efficiently filter out a lot of crap.
“Japan is a collection of islands with zero mineral and energy resources that already has some of the world’s highest population density.”
Number 40 on the Wikipedia table. About 1/20th the density of Singapore. About 1/50th that of Monaco, which seems to hold the record for independent states (Macao is even higher).
Seems outside the spirit of the question to include microstates like Monaco, and Singapore could fairly be called a city-state. But Japan is ranked below a number of small to medium-sized countries including some first-world ones, and also below India and the Philippines; it’s a dense country, but I wouldn’t call it one of the densest.
To be honest, I’m working from the basic assumption that importing a labor class would require that labor to live reasonably near the cities full of Japanese people they’d be laboring for, which are quite a bit denser than Japan as a whole, not on one of the remote outlying forest islands with no people on it.
Also, Monaco only allows people to become citizens by marrying citizens of Monaco, Singapore requires employers to pay and you can only bring your family if you earn at least $4,000 a month, they don’t grant citizenship by naturalization, and India and the Philippines don’t seem like the sort of places Japan wants to become.
I mentioned India and the Philippines because they’re large countries, not because I’d expect Japan to be particularly interested in their population policy.
Hmm. I actually got the impression you agreed with me and I was just adding information, not intending to argue.
Ah, sorry. Carry on, then.
> Regarding the company analogy – Is Google really selective about who they hire to cook the food and take out the trash? The problem with only hiring the best janitors is that at some point, they don’t feel like being janitors anymore, and then they become a threat to the established white-collar workers.
I may be taking the metaphor to seriously here, but the “threat” dynamic just isn’t there. I know one Googler who moved from Admin to Project Manager. She was qualified, so everyone welcomed her.
A healthy community doesn’t have a fixed supply of white collar positions such that every new person wanting one competes with established people. It creates those positions as it finds people who can handle them.
Right. The analogy isn’t great and I almost didn’t post it. I just think yours isn’t exactly perfect either.
Google is able to succeed by hiring “only the best” because they are able to out-source a lot of the “dirty” jobs that “the best” wouldn’t be willing to do. I suppose that’s my overall point here. Google wouldn’t run nearly as smoothly if it only hired ridiculously smart and accomplished people from top universities, and then was required to use these people to perform ALL tasks (including things like cooking, cleaning, garbage collection) necessary for the company to operate. They’d have a full-scale revolt on their hands in a manner of days…
I dunno. I imagine that they’d start coming up with really clever ways to automate garbage collection, cooking, etc. I don’t think it’s impossible to make it nearly entirely automated, and I am certain that there are lots of gains to be made in terms of making it easier.
@Orb, I want to live in a super-nice, fancy house with a hot tub and a two-car garage, and a low-income family as my neighbors. Where do I buy?
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, but it looks pretty doable: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-next-slum/306653/
In my experience? Houston.
Relevant link: http://pando.com/2015/04/19/the-war-nerd-the-art-of-turf-war/
“If you don’t believe me that this is an issue, just look at how smart people who don’t have fancy degrees, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, get treated in the press and by the population at large.)”
Smart unqualified people who make an undoubted contribution, and refrain from sneering at others, can be lionised, eg Edison, Ramanujan.
LOL! That goes way beyond just being an “undoubted contribution.” Might as well just say “well it’s OK if you don’t have a degree as long as you get a Nobel Prize…. And don’t sneer at others.” You’re actually pushing CRAZY hard for the perspective of the guy you seem to disagree with..
The fruit fly thing can’t explain homosexuality. No matter how many genes you find that cause homosexuality in males but are beneficial in females, the question remains: why didn’t evolution come up with a simple if-statement (if female, activate the gene, otherwise don’t)? Such an if-statement would be *tremendously* advantageous, and evolution had a billion years to figure it out.
“The evolution of condition dependent sexual dimorphism” from this university might be a good place to start looking.
The TL;DR is that genomic imprinting has costs, and it’s actually surprisingly difficult for peacocks to pass on large, colourful tail feathers to their sons without it affecting their daughters.
Genetics is hard, and evolution isn’t a wizard, basically.
Sure, but the whole point is to explain why it’s hard. Saying “the genes for gayness are beneficial in other ways” gives essentially zero information; what’s interesting here is why evolution can’t route around this with a simple if-statement or something.
Evolution may not be a wizard, but if the prevalence of homosexuality reaches single digit percentages is most species, persisting for a billion years, that seems like a *huge* design flaw, and explaining it seems nontrivial to me.
Think about it: eliminating homosexuality gives you a free ~5% reproduction advantage. Not only that, but this has held true for millions or billions of years in your ancestral environment. This should easily trump things like “slightly better eyesight”, which evolution successfully selects for. The only explanation I can think of is that getting sexual dimorphism consistently right is *extremely* difficult – harder than any problem evolution ever had to solve.
What I would like is an explanation of why sexual dimorphism is so difficult. The fruit fly thing is irrelevant.
The answer is in one or more of those papers I linked above. They have _some_ understanding of the mechanisms that govern gene expression, and it’s fascinating to see the trade-offs involved in stuff like genomic imprinting.
The costs of restricting gene expression can include birth defects, cancer, etc. So in a lot of cases it’s easier to tolerate traits that reduce fitness.
I’ll try to find the one with the best high level explanation–can’t remember the title.
Yes, please let me know if you find a good paper on this. Thanks!
if.
That “if” seems pretty true to me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
but feel free to explain why you disagree.
I don’t see many numbers in that article; mostly it is “has been observed.” Moreover, there is a big difference between “homosexual behavior” and a strong preference that is evolutionarily problematic.
Humans and sheep are the only mammals where a substantial number of males exhibit a strong preference for mating with males over females.
I think that there are a fair number of bird species that form long-term households in which a a substantial number of pairings are male-male. But not most species.
So homosexuality is prevalent in humans, sheep, some birds, and fruit flies, and homosexual acts are common in many other animals, but you don’t view this as puzzling?
The puzzle of it putatively persisting for billions of years is rather different from the puzzle of it persisting for a century or ten millennia. The resolution of the first puzzle is that it isn’t true.
I see, so I take it homosexuality separately evolved in humans, sheep, birds, and fruit flies, right?
Can we at least agree that homosexual acts go back a billion years, since most animals engage in them? And supposing that’s true, why are we assuming that homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon?
Sexual reproduction at all only developed about a billion years ago, and animals only appeared 600 million years ago.
@Adam you’re right, I should have said half a billion instead of a billion. I was rounding to the nearest order of magnitude.
eliminating homosexuality gives you a free ~5% reproduction advantage
How does that work? I’ll spot you 5% outright homosexuality, though I’m pretty sure that’s about half an order of magnitude high.
So 5% of lesbians are Kinsey-6 homosexual. For almost all of human history, that has about zero effect on their fertility; they’re going to be pregnant every few years from menarche to menopause or death, they’re just not going to enjoy getting there. And they’re not going to have as stable a bond with the father, which will probably have some effect on overall reproductive fitness but not 5%.
And 5% of men are Kinsey-6 as well, but even if we don’t force or shame them into marriage, so what? They pair up and go away, the rest of the male population looks at the effective 1.05 gender ratio and says (pick one):
A: “Such a tragedy; 5% of women will go unloved!”
B: “Now we don’t need to rape all the lesbians, and everything will balance!”
C: “More women in the harems of the Alphas, and slightly better odds for the Betas!”
At the individual level, yes, male homosexuality at least is a substantial evolutionary disadvantage and always has been. At the societal level, not so much. If the fundamental unit of human evolution is the tribe rather than the individual, then I’m not seeing the strong pressure to exclude every last trace of gayness that might be floating around the gene pool.
The fundamental unit of evolution *is* the individual: most evolutionary biologists that I respect argue against group selection.
+ on several points
If the fundamental unit of human evolution is the tribe rather than the individual, then I’m not seeing the strong pressure to exclude every last trace of gayness that might be floating around the gene pool.
If the unit of /whatever/ is the tribe, and most mothers have a husband to help with her children while gay uncles spend their time in monasteries and universities or trekking to see what’s over the mountain — then the more gay males the better. Up to some limit, which would be interesting to think about.
This would be especially true if homosexuality were more common in men than in women, since you don’t actually need all that many heterosexual men to keep women reproducing at their maximum possible rate.
But I don’t think that is the case (I think female homosexuality is just as common as male?). Then again, lesbians’ preferences about whether or not to have sex with men were probably even less respected, historically, than men’s preferences about whether or not to have sex with women, so it may not matter too much.
The positive correlation between number of older brothers and homosexuality (assuming that hasn’t been refuted?) suggests that the relevant unit of selection in this particular case is The Y-Chromosome, acting in a fashion that’s optimized for life in a defaults-to-cousin-marrying society where every male is heavily related to every other male and the Y’s primary survival constraint is that you not get into a disastrous war with your own brothers.
“And they’re not going to have as stable a bond with the father, which will probably have some effect on overall reproductive fitness but not 5%. ”
Arguable. You do have to remember that he will have greater paternal confidence, which will help.
“most evolutionary biologists that I respect argue against group selection.”
Group selection has been observed in action. By breeding hens from the best laying coop, not the individual best breeders, they got a lot of nasty behaviors (such as hens killing other hens) down.
The fundamental unit of selection is the gene, not the individual. If a particular gene is found in both males and females, and prevents males from reproducing but not females, it will still propagate.
@Adam Yes, the fundamental unit is the gene. But a gene that prevents homosexuality would give a huge evolutionary benefit.
In addition, if gene A causes homosexuality in males but is beneficial in females, then first of all, it better be *really* beneficial in females (because it is devastating for the gene in males), and secondly, any gene B that adds an if-statement that says “if female, activate gene A; otherwise don’t” would be a hugely beneficial gene. So there’s still a puzzle here: why doesn’t B exist?
How do we know these don’t exist? A gene’s existence doesn’t imply it’s universality. The overwhelming majority of people are not homosexual, presumably because of the overwhelming reproductive advantage due to not being homosexual. Look at all the other bad things that genes do. It’s very hard to completely remove any and all detrimental genes from an entire species.
@Adam, these other bad things don’t have a prevalence of 5% of the population. Many of them hardly affect the pre-reproduction age population at all (e.g. most cancers). 5% non-reproduction is huge! It’s so enormous that I can’t imagine any positive advantage that can outweigh it.
Think about it this way: suppose there was a gene that caused people to kill themselves before they reproduce. And suppose that 5% of the population had this gene. Further, suppose that this behavior existed in many other animals, and indeed it might be hundreds of millions of years old. Would this not strike you as surprising?
I don’t think it’s the case throughout animal evolutionary history that homosexuals had 0% probability of reproducing, and heterosexuals 100% probability. No doubt there is some difference between the two numbers, but clearly not enough to completely eliminate the behavior. I just don’t think it’s quite the drastically huge disadvantage you think it is. Plenty of gay people still have kids, especially gay women.
The argument against group selection is not that it is impossible in principle, but that the conditions necessary for it to work are so strict that they almost never arise in nature. It requires mutations to confer a ridiculously high ratio of rewards to the group versus damage to the individual, and minimal to no exchange of individuals between groups. Humans, of course, can artificially create an environment in which group selection happens. See Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “The Tragedy of Group Selectionism”.
This.
Even if the disadvantage was 1% instead of 5%, that’s still too large for the gene to survive for long.
@Adam: if they existed. the enormous benefit of the gene in females would make A spread to the whole population, basically, which would make B spread to the whole population. So you still wouldn’t see the situation we have now
What I would like is an explanation of why sexual dimorphism is so difficult.
A lot of things are difficult. Evolving an eye without a bass-ackward retina was difficult. Evolving testicles that could be stored inside the body cavity was difficult (though elephants have managed it). I’m not sure what’s informing your expectations here.
Putting the testicles inside the body, or getting the eye to not have a stupid blindspot, seem like nice advantages. But they can’t be solved using a simple if-statement. And they probably don’t give you a survival disadvantage that’s as high as 5% or even 1% (unless you believe that 1 in 20 chimpanzees in the wild get castrated by blows to the testes).
I think there’s still a legitimate question about why the prevalence of homosexuality is as high as 5%, while the prevalence of other sexual dimorphism problems (e.g. intersex people) is generally 1% or less.
@anon85: last time I paid attention, the leading theory said that whether you were heterosexual or homosexual was determined by hormone levels in the mother at certain critical periods. It isn’t clear to me how that could be fixed without at least potentially messing up a whole lot of other stuff.
Well, the fruit fly article linked in OP suggested there was a gene that caused homosexuality in males but was beneficial in females. If that were the case in humans, that could indeed be solved by an if-statement (if female, activate gene).
But is “if female” actually straightforward to implement genetically? I mean, it’s not like a digital computer.
How do genes activate and deactivate one another anyway? (I doubt it’s as simple as you’re suggesting.)
Genes can do that, but I believe it’s mostly very early in the developmental process before sex is even established.
@Adam: I would vaguely suppose that it might be possible for a gene on the Y chromosome to deactivate the gene that (hypothetically) causes male homosexuality. But I strongly suspect that it isn’t that simple. 🙂
(The most obvious problem: how does a gene that deactivates another gene identify the target? It can’t very well say “deactivate the 581st gene on the fourth chromosome”, so there must be some mechanism that links the two genes. Does the wrong gene sometimes get deactivated, or conversely, does it sometimes not deactivate anything? Does this mechanism only work for certain target genes, because of something about their structure?)
We’re talking about chunks of neurobiology far too complex to be coded in single genes, of course. But if it takes a thousand genes to code for the proteins that will nudge an embryonic brain into building what puberty will later activate as a male-oriented sex drive, it may take only one gene to code for a protein that might throw a spanner in the works, blocking or competing for resources with one of the thousand.
Put that protein on the Y chromosome, and Mr. XY gets a 99.9%-complete male-directed sex drive, as functional as e.g. an internal combustion engine that has every part perfectly placed save an undersized ignition coil. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, maybe it coughs and sputters intermittently, depending on how undersized the coil is, depending in turn on fine details of gene expression during fetal development.
And, evolution being efficient but imperfect, there will also be genes (maybe the same genes) on the Y chromosome that retask most but not all of that now-idle machinery to make a female-directed sex drive. Depending on which genes get “broken”, when and to what extent their broken-ness manifests, you wind up with obligate homosexuality, bisexuality, partial or total asexuality.
Maybe also some reproductively beneficial effect as well, but I don’t think anyone has found the smoking-gun candidate for that.
@Harry,
Embarrassingly enough, I used to originally be a biology major a lot time ago as an undergrad, and I should know this, but I completely forgot how it works. Someone here must actually be a biologist. I found a brief explanation from the NIH.
As someone working with transcription factors (I’m on the bus to my lab as I write this), gene expression is a really poorly understood and complex system. We know more now than at any previous point in human history, and we do know quite a bit in absolute terms, but there is still more darkness than light total.
The gist is that there are very few simple ‘switches’ involved. Each individual TF regulates dozens to tens of thousands of genes, and they tend to operate in concert with other transcription factors to form large complexes which do the real work. For extra fun, they are themselves transcriptionally regulated so there’s a hierarchy of factors, and related factors can sometimes substitute for one another if the one stops working even if their normal functions are different.
That’s not to say there’s no rhyme or reason to it, quite the opposite, but it’s a complex and highly redundant system. There are probably several different paths to roughly the same endpoint, each with their own quirks, rather than a singular “gay gene” or even a “gay enhancer region.”
My suggestion for anyone inclined to speculate about evolutionary whys and why-nots still stands: Go out there and play with a genetic algorithm, and you’ll see soon enough how perverse they can be about not doing the “obvious” thing.
I’ve coded genetic algorithms before, thanks.
I think this homosexuality issue still demands an explanation. If we just say “evolution doesn’t do the obvious thing, so don’t worry about it”, then the theory of evolution loses a lot of explanatory power. If we overuse antibiotics, will bacteria develop resistance? Well, you could say that “evolution doesn’t do the obvious thing”, so maybe not. This isn’t very useful though.
Then you know how much depends on your choice of representation! A simple if/then switch need not be simple at all.
For antibiotics, we know bacteria develop resistance, because we’ve seen it. But there are also a lot of things, which from a naïve point of view might seem like similar threats, which bacteria are not good at developing resistance against (such as bleach).
The point is that we can’t say very much without experimentation, or pretty knowledge of the genetic mechanisms involved.
Genetic algorithms can suck at certain things. But evolution in nature seems to suck less, which is why it can produce things that genetic algorithms can’t (such as intelligence). Even if for some reason evolution couldn’t come up with a solution to homosexuality, that would demand an explanation (for example, we have an explanation for why bacteria are vulnerable to bleach).
The bleach example isn’t even that convincing: if you use low enough concentrations of bleach, so that 95% of bacteria survive in each generation, and if you did it for a hundred million generations, I fully expect some creative solutions on the bacteria’s behalf, even if full resistance to bleach is impossible.
We have reason to think that nature can come up with a solution, since so many mammal species, including close kin, don’t have obligate male homosexuality.
How much obligate male homosexuality is there?
I’m defining it as a strong dislike of sex with women. It seems to me that homosexual men who find sex with women less satisfying than sex with men, or not especially fun but not awful are much more common than those who’d actively avoid it.
This also means that in societies where there is strong social pressure to have children (probably just about all of them until recently), there’s going to be less selective pressure against male homosexuality of all sorts.
I suddenly had a desire to go back to this comment and leave a reply about gingerbread made with almond flour, but SSC blocks commenting on old threads, so I have to make do with leaving this comment.
I don’t get it.
On closer examination, mandelbrot is usually made with wheat flour and chopped or sliced almonds. But maybe you’d use almond flour for a gingerbread hybrid.
Yeah, I would ban both Moldbug and the communists who complained from the conference.
Not sure how many people you’d have to kick out, but watering down the bill with politically acceptable “experts” and has-beens might not be your best bet.
+
It might be more efficient to ban anyone who objects to any qualified speaker because of any political reasons. If a speaker is qualified, zie has probably put zis energy into real accomplishments — though if zie has involved zirself in political flaps, zie may need a second look at zis common sense or zis interest in the field.
(to rephrase it):
Ban attendees who have proposed banning attendees who haven’t themselves proposed banning attendees.
It reminds me of Kantian style arguments that it’s irrational and immoral to tolerate the intolerant.
+1
“Ban the first person who calls for a banning”, seems to me little different than “shoot the first person who draws a gun”. If you want your gatherings to be as civil as possible, these are policies worth considering.
Except that it sounds like Moldbug has something of value to give to the conference (a presentation on Urbit). Do his communist detractors have similar value to add? Seems that should be relevant on who to ban.
Also, even if some of the communists do care about the conference and have something of value to add, they could simply select as their speaker someone who doesn’t. So the speaker gets banned, but doesn’t mind it.
This is the advantage of numbers, and of having enough pawns to sacrifice.
That supposes that the communists were actually planning to attend the conference.
I think Rickrolling really lost its impact when they monetized that video. It’s just not the same when you click a link and start hearing a Grey Goose vodka ad, instead of Never Gonna Give You Up’s distinctive opening.
Truly, a tragedy of capitalism.
Wait, some people see ads on youtube? When did this start happening?
After AdBlock came into existence. AdBlock updated to block Youtube ads extremely quickly once they started, because they are extremely annoying. I’m guessing you’ve had AB/NoScript installed for a long time?
People are more willing to eat an unfamiliar dish if they’re told it comes from their favorite restaurant than if they’re given the exact same dish and told it comes from a cabal of evil poisoners. This is a shocking example of confirmation bias.
I think the point is more to do with the narrative you see floating about that Republicans block perfectly reasonable Democrat-inspired bills simply because they are Evil and want non-hetero cis straight old rich white Christian males to suffer, while Democrats are reasonable and nice and vote on the merits.
Seeing actual politics in action is not a surprise to any of us over the age of fourteen, but for some people who believe “My side is the nice side and those over there are the nasty ones”, maybe it may shake loose some fixed notions?
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party…..The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition….The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html
From the same article:
Consider how the parallel(?) accusations of being a Nazi and being a Communist are treated.
Yep. Mr Lofgren says the Republicans are behaving like Fascists – perfectly fair comment.
Mr West says the Democrats are behaving like Communists – clear sign he’s nuts with his crazy conspiracy loon talk!
They’re both accusations of being a communist; “one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of the 20th century” is a standard liberal way of grouping together Nazis, Communists, and anyone else who isn’t a liberal.
Lofgren made an unflattering comparison.
West made a batshit accusation:
“Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party”.
You made an equivocating wisecrack.
30 seconds of googling leads to:
West: “It’s a good question. I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. … It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”
On Facebook, West elaborated: “I stand by the point of my comments. The press wants to write gotcha stories and talk semantics, but just look at the words and actions of the Progressive Caucus. You can call them socialist, Marxist, communist or whatever you want, but the point is, they oppose free markets and individual economic freedom, they want to redistribute wealth, and they want to see the nation fundamentally transformed. Their policies are destructive and I will stand up to them regardless of the critics. Members of this Caucus lavished praise on Fidel Castro following a 2009 visit, just to name one example. The Communist Party USA claims the Progressive Caucus as its ‘ally.’”
So Gene, dishonesty or motivated ignorance?
“So Gene, dishonesty or motivated ignorance?”
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/apr/11/allen-west/allen-west-says-about-80-house-democrats-are-membe/
Here’s rundown on non whig, federalists, dems or repubs. who’ve served in congress.
Adams Democrat – 1 (House)
American Laborite – 2 (House)
American Party – 40 (House)
Anti-Jacksonian – 44 (House)
Anti-Mason – 30 (House)
Conservative – 9 (8 House, 1 Senate)
Conservative Republican – 2 (House, Delegate)
Constitutional Unionist – 2 (House)
Democrat Farmer Labor – 3 (House)
Farmer Laborite – 13 (House)
Free Silver – 1 (House, Delegate)
Free Soil – 11 (5 House, 6 Senate)
Greenbacker – 12 (House)
Independent (unaffiliated) – 24 (20 House, 4 Senate)
Independent Democrat – 27 (26 House, 1 Senate)
Independent Radical – 1 (House)
Independent Republican – 15 (14 House, 1 Senate)
Independent Whig – 1 (House)
Jackson Democrat – 1 (House)
Jacksonian – A couple hundred, I’m not going to count them
Law and Order – 1 (House)
Liberal – 1 (House)
Liberal Republican – 9 (6 House, 3 Senate)
Non partisan – 1 (House)
Nullifier – 13 (10 House, 4 Senate; one was in both)
Oppostion – 14 (House)
Populist – 45 (39 House, 6 Senate)
Progressive – 23 (22 House, 1 Senate)
Progressive Republican – 3 (House)
Prohibitionist – 1 (House)
Readjustor – 7 (5 House, 2 Senate)
Silver Republican – 6 (4 House, 2 Senate)
Socialist – 2 (House)
State Rights Democrat – 2 (House)
Unconditional Unionist – 24 (18 House, 6 Senate)
Union Democrat – 2 (House)
Union Laborite – 2 (House)
Union Republican – 4 (House)
Unionist – 51 (40 House, 11 Senate)
Oh, for fuck’s sake. If Cthulhu’s quote is accurate, then in context West obviously means that as a rhetorical condemnation of the Progressive Caucus, not an accusation that its members are or have ever been literal members of the Communist Party of the US (whom I’ve never heard anything from, even when I was going to college at the hippest of hippie schools).
I don’t, as it happens, agree with him — old-school communism is quite a different animal from the present-day American Left, even the parts of it that call themselves Communist but especially those that have seats in Congress, and I don’t think old-school Red-baiting has factual or rhetorical legs. But I can see what he’s trying to do.
I realize that this commentiariat has pretty much thrown out nonpartisanship as a norm, but can we at least dial back the quote-mining? That shit’s worthy of Gawker.
Yes, this is a good example of Deiseach’s point.
That point being “both sides do it”? Because if you like that insight you’ll love the centrist fan fiction of David Brooks, George Stephanopoulous, and Bob Schieffer.
I’d normally try to be less blunt, but… Gene, I don’t think you’re making your side look good here.
But ok, maybe you don’t really think tribalism is something only the other tribe does (as it’s looking like). Can you give some examples of tribalism by liberals, so we can better understand each other?
I went to grad school at UMASS in the nineties. While I didnt strictly object to identity politics, I was furious that the left abandoned labor in favor of it. I slowly came to see that corporations had no problem with identity politics and that’s what i understood neo-liberalism to be. Socially liberal fiscal corporatism that attends to photogenic tokenism but gives fuck-all about the people I identity with: disenfranchised underdogs of every demographic. Growing up in the early eighties hardcore scene I never shook the antagonism for the powerful and priveleged.
In truth I’ve never met an SJW (i’ve read some Judith Butler?) and I don’t even know where to find them on the internet (I’m 48.) I’ve never been clear on what tumblr is. Could I get a link?
From what I can tell it sounds like the NRx/Libertarians and Feminist/SJW share my least favorite traits. Utter certainty and rush to closure. Also no sense of humor. Humor and ambiguity is my bread and butter.
“While I didnt strictly object to identity politics, I was furious that the left abandoned labor in favor of it.”
That is all the left has left. Communism, central planning, nationalization- they have all been shown as failures. Strong social safety nets are all that is left but they aren’t compatible with relatively open borders.
I mean just look at Bernie Sanders. Here are the 12 issues he thinks are important enough to list
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/recent-business/an-economic-agenda-for-america-12-steps-forward
His glorious plan to improve the position of workers is doubling the minimum wage and cutting back on international trade. That is all that is left wing economic to improve people’s lives on his goals. They are both pretty loopy (he explicitly calls out NAFTA and CAFTA- exactly what does he think will happen if the factories shut down in Mexico and the wages double in the US).
” I slowly came to see that corporations had no problem with identity politics and that’s what i understand neo-liberalism to be. ”
Sort of. The present is like the 1880s. The substantive issues about how society should be (slave vs free, planned vs market) are over, one side was totally eliminated and so tribalism filled the gap.
“I’ve never met an SJW and I don;t know where to find them on the internet. For all the talk of them on this site there’s never a link.”
Atheism Plus? You can also try Occupy Wallstreet’s progressive stack (where under privileged can override normal queue order)
“But from what I can tell it sounds like the NRx/Libertarians and Feminist/SJW share my least favorite traits. Utter certainty and rush to closure.”
Neoreactionaries are just people who have a big idea that explains everything. Unlike other versions of the grand idea (which seeks to solve politics) it declares the problem is not solvable in foreseeable future. Seriously, they don’t have concrete policy outlines for what their despot should do when they get into power- they are like Plato or Marx talking about the ideal/future state.
Libertarians is so broad you can’t really make a blanket statement about them. People agree with libertarians until the moment they start disagreeing (see freedom of speech). Feminists have no defined definition. Even the MRA’s who think Western Feminism is poisonous because of its ideological underpinnings have no objection to the idea of women’s issues.
@Samuel Skinner:
I don’t think your summary of Sanders’s viewpoint is fair. He’s not just proposing to double minimal wage, he’s proposing to:
1). Improve roads and some other infrastructure
2). Reverse climate change
3). Make it easier to create worker-owned co-operatives
4). Make it easier to create unions
5). Raise minimum wage (he doesn’t say by how much)
6). Raise the income of women (he doesn’t say how)
7). Reduce outsourcing
8). Cut college costs
9). Break up big banks
10). Create a single-payer health care system
11). Expand social safety net programs
12). Stop corporate tax evasion
Of these, points #3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are aimed at directly supporting workers; the other points are aimed at supporting everyone, workers included.
You might argue that some or all of these points are either impossible to implement or outright harmful, but that’s not the same thing as claiming that they are nonexistent.
I was furious that the left abandoned labor in favor of it. I slowly came to see that corporations had no problem with identity politics
Gene, I can certainly shake your hand in agreement on that. My own political views are that (up to really recently), I’d vote straight Fianna Fáil in every election and give the rest of my preferences to Labour.
My own party have made such an ignoble steaming heap of cronyism, incompetence and greed out of being in power that I am rendered physically ill by the notion of voting them back into power in next year’s election, even after a chastening period in exile. So that’s out.
I am not voting Fine Gael.
Labour have more and more abandoned their roots as ‘the party of the working class’ (ironically as they absorbed/were taken over by – which it is depends on your view – more ideologically rigorous parties such as the remnants of The Workers’ Party).
They have no problems with pushing a progressive, ‘identity politics’ agenda (the former Minister for Education in our current government and the former Tanáiste-cumMinister for Foreign Affairs, who is now the ex-leader of the party, were both out about being atheists and wanting to drag Ireland out of its backwards, priest-ridden past). As they have seen their working-class vote migrate to Sinn Féin, they keep chasing the undecided middle-class vote, and this in turn means they keep shedding working-class urban voters who perceive them as running to the centre.
Campaigns such as the recent same-sex marriage referendum were the perfect expression for this; it was an easy, feel-good victory. Things like standing up to the senior partner in power on cuts to social welfare and the austerity budgets? Big talk before the election, rolling over and caving in afterwards.
As you say, corporations have no problem with identity politics – indeed, one of the points urging voters to vote “Yes” in the referendum made by our Taoiseach was that if we wanted to attract multinationals, we needed to show we were a progressive society. The idea that big, foreign corporations should influence how our society was shaped, or the decisions the people took on national questions, slipped by unquestioned or unremarked upon – certainly not by Labour!
So I’m probably going to reluctantly vote Sinn Féin – or more likely, any Independent candidates.
Exactly.
Anyone who agrees that this is a problem should go read this and the book quoted here. Capitalism isn’t pushing atomization out of the goodness of its heart.
“I don’t think your summary of Sanders’s viewpoint is fair. He’s not just proposing to double minimal wage, he’s proposing to:”
I only selected left wing policies. There are policies that have been done by both American political parties
1 and 12
Policies agreed upon by all Democrats
2
Policy declarations that are nonsensical
4 (the requirement to form a union is 30% of workers), 6 (gender is already a protected category), 9 (The US financial industry’s relative size is smaller than many European countries in the categories he mentions)
Policy’s that preferentially help the better off
8, 11
That leaves 3, 5, 7, 10
I accidentally skimmed over 3; however it is not a program that would have a large impact (if the problem is workers don’t have a lot of money, making it easier for them to buy companies doesn’t help).
He states the amount he wanted for 5 elsewhere
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/sen-sanders-touts-15-minimum-wage-says-employment-states-higher-wages
I left out 10 because it isn’t clear how it differs from what Obama has provided
And you are understating 7. It isn’t “ending outsourcing”
“We must end our disastrous trade policies (NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, etc.) which enable corporate America to shut down plants in this country and move to China and other low-wage countries. ”
He openly states we need to eliminate our trade policies.
“Of these, points #3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are aimed at directly supporting workers;”
4 and 6 are already law- it is no more helping workers that arguing for women’s suffrage in 2015 is helping women.
I missed 3, however the laws are already pretty favorable to syndicalism. It is leftist, but it doesn’t state any actual policies.
5 and 7 I gave him as actual left wing economic plans. The state a novel policy and are aimed at improving specifically the position of workers. They happen to be nuts, but the question was “what policies are the left putting forth” and unique policy positions that differ from the right and neoliberal left are what he would be interested in.
Was that a rebuttal or an example?
This result is perfectly compatible with that model, though. How do people know a bill will hurt non-SCWMs? Because it’s promoted by the Republican Party. How do people know a bill is nice and meritorious? Because it’s promoted by the Democratic Party.
“How do people know a bill will hurt non-SCWMs? Because it’s promoted by the Republican Party. How do people know a bill is nice and meritorious? Because it’s promoted by the Democratic Party.”
The first time I read that i thought you were being evenhanded.
Shameless derailment, but I hope this is interesting enough that it doesn’t matter: Tumblr user xhxhxhx has had some very good economic history posts of late, including one about how the Great Depression was the most technologically innovative period in US history. Anyway, they stopped doing it (maybe?) because of low response, so I’m shamelessly plugging it here hoping that it is enough to get it started again.
If you’re going to link to two-year-old stuff that’s been republished on a list people expect to consist of recent things, would you also consider starting Amazing Breakthrough Day?
We’ve had that Canada “One in, One out” rule in the UK for about 4 years. Though here it’s based on cutting equal costs to the costs you impose rather than just counting regulations by number. Quite a few places have or are introducing that sort of rule, from my understanding.
>why developed countries with lots of education seemed to do better than developed countries with little education.
Education is an expensive consumer good and thus richer people/nations tend to buy more of it. This doesn’t necessarily make them richer. Let’s call this “The BMW Theory Of Education”.
There is no apostrophe in the book title Finnegans Wake.
It does when you backtranslate it from Chinese.
That Democratic/Republican policy proposal thing: reminds me of the way I believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs right up until Bush Jr. said he had them, and then I stopped believing he had them. You (you-plural) may make whatever remarks about epistemic standards and stopped watches you see fit.
Maybe you can keep that kind of sometimes useful skepticism, but apply it more broadly, to both parties.
Technocracy Inc is totally the early 20th century predecessor to grey tribe politics (or post-politics or apolitics). Everyone grey-o-sphere thinker should definitely read up on it. It’s a really quirky interesting movement and its shortcomings (odd economics) are well worth chewing on for a bit if you’re a post-politics rationalist type. They’re plan for post-scarcity economy with energy credits and the like is basically the direct ancestor of the similar chatter in /r/futurology and its related crowds.
So is Joyce more or less comprehensible in Chinese?
If the translation went a more literal route it should produce complete gibberish (I will resist the cheap joke) which makes me think they tried to translate the symbolism instead. In that case I could see the text becoming much less opaque since it would be drawing from a more unified ‘symbolic alphabet’ as it were.
I have to admit, I’m fascinated to know what the title translates as (or rather, what choice the translator made) because it’s a pun: is it the imperative of “wake, awaken, wake up” – “Finnegans, wake up now!” – because the novel is the collective dreaming of the Finnegan family; is it describing the moment of awakening – the Finnegans wake (up) – or is it “wake” as in the funeral celebration and ballad? Is there a practice in China analogous to a wake?
From what little Chinese I know, “Fenningen de Shouying Ye” seems to be a pretty literal translation of “Finnegan’s Wake”.
I’m guessing the translator probably toned down Joyce’s writing style a lot to make it readable in Chinese – still experimental and avant-garde to an extent, but probably more like Naked Lunch or something along those lines than the original work.
Instead of arguing about politics and religion, I think I’ll provide an excerpt of Doctors What Can’t Write Or Spell Good (arising out of what Scott said about the difference in Irish and American medical education and what I see at work).
From a self-typed letter by a G.P. (I know it’s self-typed as if you handed up these errors in a assignment on a secretarial course, your class tutor would lambaste you), misspellings of: practice, persistent, asthma, haemorrhoids, investigation, depression and oesophagitis (twice, two different misspellings).
From a hand-written letter by a consultant psychiatrist (in this case, it’s not so much the handwriting was bad as that it was full of flourishes which rendered it practically impossible to read): it started with something I managed to make out about “the patient is resistant to taking meds” and then the rest I could not interpret; the ending looked like saying something about trying the meds again if “elbow is persistent”, but I’m fairly sure that was not the proper meaning 🙂
I worked for a year and a half as a proofreader and copy editor at a small typesetting firm years ago. We did a lot of work for medical and psychiatric journals. If spelling accuracy was considered as important as relevant knowledge in medicine generally, not only would we have been out of jobs, but so would all of the medical professionals, bless them.
Yeah, skill with words doesn’t correlate with expertise and so on anywhere near as much as Blues might think. Ever seen a mailing list full of tech professionals?
I have no idea why half the country isn’t dead due to chemists handing out the wrong prescriptions due to bad handwriting or spelling on the part of doctors 🙂
This is why I’ve said I have experience in translating Techie into English. It’s also why, as someone engaged in clerical work, I get
really hopping mada little bit miffed when people make sniffy remarks about so-and-so is “only” a secretary, or that lower white-collar/pink-collar work isn’t particularly skilled, so it’s the niche of the less intelligent (those who couldn’t get into college).There are so many managers and bosses out there who can’t write a legible sentence in English to save their lives, and it’s the PAs and clerical staff who turn out documents (salvaged from what Mr Boss has provided) that present a professional image of the business or organisation. It’s particularly ironic given that “communication” is a perennial business buzzword and the importance of good communication is always being emphasised.
“two different misspellings”
One of my and my wife’s hobbies is medieval cooking. She likes to point people at a 14th century recipe in which the main ingredient appears four times, with four different spellings.
So things may be improving. Slowly.
I wonder, is there any actual advantage conferred by prescribing (heh) a single spelling of a word, if all the spellings of words correspond about as well to the pronunciation of the word as prescribed spellings do?
I think there is.
The obvious example is the case of two words that sound identical, such as “sea” and “see.” Further, individuals vary somewhat in how they pronounce words, so the spelling that worked for one reader would mislead another.
Well, most of the time we can already pick out which word is meant by context. So it seems to me that words that are phonetically identical could about as easily be spelled identically. But I think you’re right about pronunciations differing. Actually, given that there was much more variation in the past, just to what extent were English spellings even comprehensible from one region to another? I don’t know how to take it if many words had three or four spellings but everyone more or less always understood. Unless they didn’t, I don’t know the history of these things.
[citation needed]
We could switch to a 1-1 writing system for English, but, having occasionally tried to use one, you’d just get more variation there.
(How do you write unstressed vowels? With the letter for /ə/ or the letter for /ɪ/? Do the two contrast? I have no idea. This is probably more of a problem for Shavian than for Deseret; in Deseret, you’re supposed to write unstressed vowels with their stressed values (which introduces its own bag of worms, since, in a lot of cases, you can’t know their stressed values any other way than Latin spelling), and you can use any letter to represent the name of the letter in addition to the sound the letter represents, so /əm ən əl ər/ can usually be written /m n l r/.)
Interregional comprehensibility is one reason; it’s already been mentioned. (Standardization picks up with the printing press. Economies of scale!)
Another is the handling of words as data. Lexical ordering, recordkeeping, tokenization… pretty much all automated or otherwise algorithmic ways of dealing with written text depend on having a consistent symbolic representation.
How do you look something up in a dictionary if it doesn’t have a consistent spelling? (How do you write a dictionary?) The same goes for card catalogs, documentation, et cetera; anywhere you might want to look up a certain record or subject in a corpus will benefit from standard spellings.
This becomes even more relevant, of course, when dealing with computers—finding a given string in a body of text is very easy and very useful, but mechanizing phonemic English is a hard problem. Databases, search engines, etc. etc. etc.
(And computational linguistics. You can quibble about its immediate usefulness, but natural language processing is at the very least interesting, and it’s hard to imagine inconsistent spelling not complicating the problem.)
natural language processing is at the very least interesting, and it’s hard to imagine inconsistent spelling not complicating the problem
Indeed. NLP stuff at the very least attracts paying customers, and one of the things I had the joy of working on in a previous job was making sure our software could cope with the various spellings of “haemorrhagic septicaemia”. As well as the various spelling mistakes there’s a US/UK difference – nominally they write “hemorrhagic septicemia” on their side of the pond, but it turns out that mid-Atlantic spellings are pretty common. The problem grows exponentially with every part of the term that isn’t the same everywhere.
So abandoning standardized spelling really would complicate things massively.
The words as data point is an excellent one. Re dictionaries, it’s worth pointing to e.g. Noah Webster’s spelling reforms.
The obvious counterpoint to the difference in pay being caused by non-trans discrimination is that transwomen adapt typically female behaviour and if women’s choices tend to decrease their wage so will transwomen’s choices. This will increase after transition because they will need to unlearn male behaviour patterns they’ve been teached because they were treated as men.
Remember, few if any disagree with numbers showing women earning less than average. The argument is that women would make as much as men if they acted more like men. And when thinking of women trying to act like men, transwomen are among the last I will think of.
That’s not necessarily the case, at least not for modern transsexuals.
From what I understand, transwomen generally fall into two cultural camps: gay men who transition into straight transwomen and straight men who transition into lesbian transwomen. The former apparently behave more like South Asian “third gender” folks and make a great effort to pass, while the latter are more aggressive and politically active. Depending on prevalence, which one dominates (and which the study samples more of) is going to determine whether they behave in a stereotypically feminine or masculine way.
Of course this whole idea is pretty goofy even for a social science paper. It’s introducing a huge number of confounders from lack of a menstrual cycle (and correspondingly non-cyclical hormone levels) and maternity to skill at passing and local attitudes on LGBT, which common sense indicates will overwhelm any effect they are looking for.
The study didn’t try to distinguish the two camps, so any effect it shows would be the weighted average of those two camps. So your “that;’s not necessarily the case” doesn’t apply; it being the case half of the time is enough for the effect to show up, if the other half’s effect is merely neutral.
Estrogen and progesterone levels tend to fall into cyclic patterns even with regular doses, though not to as high a degree.
I would have expected the majority of the male-female difference to be due to:
1. Studying different subjects in school
2. Women getting pregnant and raising families more
3. Biology
The transgender study suggests none of these are a major option (well, you could make a stretch case for biology, but to a first approximation, no)
One possible cofounder:
It is much easier for transmen to “pass” than transwomen. I would not be surprised if visibly trans people get paid less on average, was this controlled for in any way?
I had the same thought. Seems the study is trying to prove gender bias while assuming there is no bias regarding trans people. Which is an odd set of priors to believe.
“It is much easier for transmen to “pass” than transwomen.”
Well, one question there might be “why”? Another question might be, what affect does that this have on on cis-gendered women who are not conventional looking?
In other words, I’m not sure that simply saying “they aren’t passing” is a good enough explanation even if it is true.
You’re probably trying to point to something about beauty standards, but judging from the transpeople I’ve known, the answer is actually “because biological men come in a wide range of heights and bone structure, and if they’re unlucky enough to get the more stereotypically male versions, then that’s hard to change surgically”.
We see a comparable range in female secondary sex characteristics: a (cis) woman with small breasts is in about the same boat as a man with a weak chin and no Adam’s apple, viz. they might be seen as a little boyish (effeminate) but they’re in little danger of being misgendered. The difference is that there’s less chance for a transman to have something he can’t leave behind, aside from a few less-obvious bits like the hipbones.
Hmm, no, not really. Really just conventional vs. non-conventional. My prior is that non-conventional looking males are perceived differently than non-conventional looking females. The males aren’t judged as handsome, it’s just that their lack of handsomeness is not perceived as a particular negative.
Maybe you could say this a different beauty standard, but I would rephrase to say that there is no expectation that a man be handsome to be acceptable in the work place.
If you pull members of the population at random, men look less like other men than women look like other women. We know this, and parse sex by assuming anyone that is not identifiably female is male. There’s also a major evolutionary bonus in there, since it means our snap assessments of physical danger are rigged towards androgyny returning false positives instead of false negatives.
Different standard deviations. Non-conventional-looking males are substantially less non-conventional-looking. (Now, you might be right even when you adjust for that, but that needs something like actual data.)
Depending on how you mean it, those statements are opposite each other. But I think I get your gist. You are asserting that because males have more “natural” variation in looks that you have to be really out there to look unconventional, because conventional is already so broad.
Do you have some citation that this is true biologically, and not simply socially constructed?
Not sure what you’re referring to by “this” but the general principle of higher male variances is a straight up XX vs. XY thing. Men must express one X-chromosome fully while women express a mediation of their two, which gives men a broader SD on virtually everything, including appearance.
Right. “What the hell is wrong with that cat?” vs. “Hey look, a poodle!”
“Another question might be, what affect does that this have on on cis-gendered women who are not conventional looking?
In other words, I’m not sure that simply saying “they aren’t passing” is a good enough explanation even if it is true.”
You seem to have missed the point. I am not saying that it has to do with attraction at all. I am merely saying that being seen as Trans can itself lead to lower wages, and FTM are less likely to be identified as trans.
If not accounted for, this effect explains away the study, as the passablity of trans people has 0 to do with ciswomens wages.
@anon: It would in no way explain the trans-men’s wages going up, so there is that (although it seems that effect may not have been measured as significant.)
@Alraune: This post on height calculates the SD of males as 7 CM and females as 6 CM.
Now, you are absolutely right that that is a bigger SD. But it isn’t anything like cats vs. dogs different. What you are saying isn’t a bad theory, but I would want something more than what are relatively subtle differences in amount of variation within the sex. In addition, from a trans perspective, it might be worthwhile to note that sexual dimorphism may be more important than variation within the sex.
For instance, as an average size male I am likely to take notice of a female taller than me, but not a male. As a female, I might take more notice of a male shorter than me, but not a female. Given a workplace environment where male supervision is still more prevalent (citation needed, I’m not sure how true this is) then the trans-woman may stick out more simply because she is taller. But in a world dominated by female supervisors, the trans-man might stick out more.
I am not advocating this theory, mind you. Just mostly spit-balling.
I’ll have to look it up and somehow but I heard about studies examining the effect of attractiveness of people to their wages that men’s wages are more influenced by their appearences.
Also, in addition to the rise in pay being non-significant, I would expect wages to go up anyway, which is why I mostly focussed on the transwomen so far. Granted, this just makes the decline of their pay all the more significant.
@Besserweiser:
That is a good point re: wages going up. Really though, it would be good to compare them vs. a reference class (if they are a programmer, what did programmer wages do during the period, etc.)
I don’t know if the study controlled for job description, which would actually be a big confounder, especially if the period studied included 2008.
A problem with this is that you’re assuming that male attractiveness and female attractiveness both derive from apperance by an equal amount, when it seems to me that there is overwhelming evidence that that’s untrue: that a woman’s attractiveness is determined by her appearance to a far greater extent than a man’s. And therefore that it’s inaccurate to correlate appearance and attractiveness like this when comparing men and women.
men look less like other men than women look like other women
What? I am having genuine difficulty understanding that statement, unless you mean something akin to the Disney Model of Female Faces: female characters are drawn according to a standard template but more variety is acceptable in male characters.
This whole topic is very tangled; social pressures about what is deemed attractive plus what is deemed acceptable behaviour and appearance for women probably does exert a lot of influence on “I have to wear heels and makeup and fit this dress size and dye my hair blonde” so making women en masse on the surface seem more similar – but I’m not sure.
You could test this mechanically. Just scan in a bunch of male and female faces, tag the positions of various facial features on every face, and see if the facial feature positions in the male faces will have bigger variance between each other than the positions in the female faces.
Besides the passing effect, there are many indications that transfeminine people face greater prejudice. They are more likely to be seen as ridiculous, gross, or hypersexualized. “Woman in a dress” is seen as a joke, but few would think twice about the reverse. A lot more trans women get murdered than trans men, even relative to their populations. Some theorists thus refer to “transmisogyny” rather than just plain transphobia.
It’s funny–I think many might view this as a reflection of society’s devaluation of women–that men who become women are treated worse than the reverse.
But I actually see it as the opposite–that men suffer more from rigid gender expectations and face violence when they fail to live up to them. And, of course, cis men are far more often murdered than cis women, so if transwomen are more often murdered than transmen, then that probably means that much of society sees still sees them as men. And if there’s one better target for violence than a man, it’s a non-gender conforming man. You wouldn’t hit a girl, after all?
I wonder about this myself. Julia Serrano argues that there’s two separate but related phenomena: a force that tries to keep people within their prescribed gender roles and a force that portrays the female gender role as worse. You could interpret things instead as separation of gender roles plus stricter enforcement of the boundaries of the male gender role. I am not sure this alternative explains all the phenomena I mentioned though, for example fetishistic hypersexualization of trans women doesn’t seem to align with this. Alternately, you could synthesize the two views: perhaps the male gender role is more strictly enforced precisely because femaleness is devalued (and thus moving away from femininity would be seen understandable, while moving towards it would be seen as perverse). I am not sure what to think of all this stuff in terms of causes, but I do think it’s a real phenomenon that transfeminine people generally have it worse than transmasculine people.
Or maybe it’s because femininity is *more* valued that its boundaries must be strictly policed?
A very conservative friend recently posted on Facebook: “Caitlyn Jenner will never have the same status as my wife or mother!”
On the one hand, I wouldn’t expect the gender which is valued more to also be killed more. On the other hand, maybe men are valued more precisely because their numbers are going down. I’ve heard people in areas where many men died due to war or genocide respect the surviving men much more.
Another explanation I’ve heard is that because bearing children is such an integral part of the female gender role, transwomen remain inable to fully fulfill this. Meanwhile, transmen can fulfill most of the male gender role since getting women pregnant is a much smaller part of it (one man can get several women pregnant anyway). I don’t necessarily agree with this but it’s food for thought.
Personally, I just think the kind of people who would attack transsexuals for being trans are also likely to assign sex based on genitals and enforce gender roles, thus attacking the more acceptable target, the ones they see as men even if they are equally disgusted with transmen. It could also be about female hypoagency and male hyperagency, where people blame transmen transitioning on external factors while transwomen are seen as men who make anything out for their own reasons.
I don’t think it’s half as complicated as all that.
The use of the word “trap” kind of sums it up: the idea that some small percentage of women are secretly disguised men (not endorsing just explaining) is a disgusting and infuriating thought. Moreover it hints at a predatory motive, after all why disguise oneself at all if you’re not trying to trick someone?
This could also underlie the popularity of the autogynophilia theory, since it’s basically a more cerebral version of the same idea. Transwomen are, according to that theory, recruiting unwilling bystanders as part of their sexual roleplay whenever they try to pass in public.
Add the castration angle on top of that and I don’t see any reason to resort to complex theorizing as to why transwomen catch most of the violence.
I can’t name one single trans man. But, between famous people, people I follow and interact with on the internet, and people I don’t follow but the internet throws at me regardless, I think I could name ~20 trans women.
Not that many, but 20 x 0 is a large enough difference to require explanation, and it would be pretty weird if that explanation didn’t have anything to do with the explanation for differences in other areas.
The first person who comes to mind when I try to think of a famous trans man is Chaz Bono, the son of Sonny & Cher. Admittedly not as famous as currently high-profile trans women like Caitlyn Jenner or Laverne Cox.
‘Biology’ is a vague term in this context. Any and all differences between men and women are ultimately caused by biology, because biology is the ’cause’ of sexual dimorphism in the first place.
People on the left tend to blame differences in average outcomes between genders on social factors. People on the right tend to blame them on innate differences in ability and preference. All of those may well play a part. However I think both of those only scrape at the main cause of difference: a specific kind of preference/social factor. Namely, that men on average find certain characteristics in women attractive; women on average find certain characteristics in men attractive; most people are straight; most people want to be attractive in the eyes of those who they are attracted to; therefore most men make attempts to do things that straight women find attractive, and most women make attempts to do things straight men find attractive.
In the case of pay, it’s simply that women find a high salary attractive in men while a high salary in a woman doesn’t make her any more attractive to men. Therefore men stand to become more attractive through earning more, and so prioritize work, particularly prioritizing pay over other factors like enjoyment or convenience; whereas women do not have this incentive to care about pay, and so consider it a lower priority relative to other factors.
I would base a lot of it on career choices later in life, such as women being significantly less likely to apply for manager positions. Granted, them putting family before career plays into this but it’s probably not the only reason and deserves a seperate category.
The theory that seems most plausible to me is that transmen pass *a lot* better than transwomen and I expect a non passing trans to be discriminated against far far more than either nontransexual men and women.
The same factors that affect whether they can pass affect whether they are considered attractive for their new sex and we know that pay depends on attractiveness as well.
Does anybody have recommended reading on the general subject of gay fruitflies? I agree with the commenters upthread that the subject sounds fascinating.
Okay, but Moldbug is a far-right, literal fucking white supremacist. This isn’t some anti-gay marriage Republican we’re talking about. Personally I’m okay with blackballing the scum of the earth from conferences. I prefer to live in a world where that happens, actually.
It is a fact that the neo-feudalists are in no danger of taking over the country. It is a fact that the neo-feudalists are not even in danger of being in danger of being in danger of taking over the country. The only way Moldbug’s ideology could ever end up being harmful to you would be that, if the rest of us somehow manage to burn civilization down around our own ears, he might get to laugh at us briefly before we are all eaten by the irradiated super-wolves.
So allow me to present an alternative explanation: you are sadistic, fascistic scum who will torment anyone they are permitted to on the flimsiest of excuses, even and especially if they are harmless, and the rest of us should hang you by your ankles before you try and do the same to us.
If you wait for the point where it’s clear that a group is in danger of taking over your country, you’re way past the point where you’re going to be able to ban people from that group from conferences. At that point, they are banning you from conferences. Better to get on that early.
We’ve got a lot of witch-hunter-burning ground to make up, yes.
By taking seriously groups that tell us they are opposed to liberal democracy (and engaging in some freedom of association against them), perhaps we can prevent the future *actual* burning of ideological minorities.
Alternatively, we could *not* take them seriously when they tell us about their values. We could say “it’s totally cool with us that you oppose how we live and govern ourselves, and we will make sure there are no consequences for this.”
The last time we tried that, the TSA stopped zero terror plots, but destroyed several American lives in wasted time, made life suck harder for minorities, and stole my toothpaste. And that’s just the domestic side, completely ignoring the part where we wasted billions of dollars, destroyed several countries, and gave the entire citizenry of two others PTSD.
This isn’t an issue you can have both ways. Either ideological freedom is a stable social equilibrium or it isn’t. If freedom is a stable equilibrium, there isn’t any excuse for ideological repression and sentiments like merzbot’s are just pathetic hypocritical sadism. If, on the other hand, ideological freedom is unstable, then we might as well write this whole mess off and start disentangling ourselves into nice ideologically segregated provinces that can hopefully secede from each other peacefully and with decent trade agreements.
Emily, I think what you say is a defensible position. But also I think it fits McCarthyism quite neatly. Do you think Joe McCarthy was right, or at least not wrong?
McCarthy was factually incorrect. In the alternate history where he came ten years early and with a list of actual Nazi agents and their dupes, in positions of power and influence, is there any doubt that he is the hero of the hour?
So, yes, if you are dealing with people who both intend and have the credible means to wage war against you, the rules are different. Where to draw that line, when the enemy hasn’t been polite enough to declare war on you and you consider it impolitic to unleash the full range of war powers and just want to get rid of the infiltrators, is a tricky question. But unleashing war powers, even culture-war powers, is a Really Big Deal, and ought not be done without dire necessity.
@Matt:
I think John’s response was a good one.
I’m still trying to figure out my beliefs on this. But I don’t think “that person isn’t a threat” is a good argument. First, because any group that becomes a threat at some point wasn’t. Second, because it suggests to me that we’re supposed to treat people with very serious critiques of how we live as if they’re just playing at it. I don’t think that’s even respectful of them. If the neo-reactionaries are just doing this as a hobby to meet people and gain status and don’t actually mean anything of it, they should, IDK, get into chess or WoW or something. And if they do mean it – well, people are going to notice and treat them differently as a result, and I don’t always have a problem with that.
“McCarthy was factually incorrect.”
Was he now? He may have been wrong about some specific individuals, but the general assertion that the USSR had implanted spies and sympathizers at the highest levels of government, media, education, etc. was absolutely correct.
If I squint and tilt my head just right, I can find a handful of communist agents at the third-highest levels of government, all of whom were gone by the time McCarthy got started. He was wrong about the level of communist infiltration, about the magnitude of communist infiltration, about the location of communist infiltration, and about the identity of the communist infiltrators, all of which he had specifically claimed to have certain knowledge of. And he was a fool for not checking his facts before going forward.
If McCarthyism was justified on account of communist spies not being entirely fictional, then Stalinism was justified on account of corrupt and oppressive capitalists not being entirely fictional.
McCarthy’s biggest failure, one that neoreactionaries do mention in a somewhat confused way, was his utter lack of distinction between “Western radical-leftist-sympathizer who also did not openly denounce the USSR” (many, many educated people) and “Actually a Kremlin patsy” (limited in their influence).
I dare say that, looking at China, even if a quiet socialist takeover of the sort Reactionaries imagine (and imagined at the time) actually happened in the US, handing everything over to Moscow was the one thing the radicals certainly *wouldn’t* have done. Overfitting the domestic political realities to the Cold War framing kept the American right (and center) quite confused throughout the 50s and 60s. Even LBJ, struggling to understand what’s going on, kept attributing things like black riots to a literal Moscow plot.
Except that we do have evidence that Moscow literally did encourage sympathetic journalists to try and encourage race riots and other such things.
Were those journalists the primary cause of race riots? Probably not. In any case, let’s be clear that I never said “McCarthyism” was justified. There’s a key difference between being factually correct and being justified. The ends don’t justify the means. That’s what’s SUPPOSED to separate us from the filthy commies in the first place!
Emily–
McCarthy was certainly not wrong about communists intending to subvert the liberal democracy of the U.S. and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat. (Or do you disagree?)
Your principle is that people who are openly antagonistic to liberal democracy deserve to be outed and ostracized, I think wherever possible. If I got that wrong, please clarify.
This principle applies to a lot more people than just Curtis Yarvin and NRX, including communists, anarchists, Earth Firsters, at least some Muslims, probably some Christian factions, and you can continue the list for yourself.
McCarthyism looks to me like a real life example of your principle, put into action against the communists. To say that McCarthy was wrong in the details isn’t really addressing the point. Let’s stipulate that he was wrong on the details. Was he wrong on principle?
What about all the other folks today who are in fact opposed to liberal democracy, but not currently ostracized by the mainstream? Should they be?
Then you have abandoned civilization, and we all need to start ostracizing you. You cannot have this both ways.
I agree. People who talk about opposing how we live and govern ourselves, who talk about actively working to destroy our current system, who ‘joke’ about politically-motivated mass murders, etc. are a serious problem, and we have to suppress them before they become a danger. Steve Klabnik and Bahar Mustafa should be purged and made unemployable.
Moldbug, on the other hand, explicitly and repeatedly says that no one should take any action whatsoever against the current regime, but instead should wait for it to fail.
Hell, Klabnik and Mustafa and so on are more dangerous than a lot of white nationalists — there’s a very large difference between wanting a small piece of land for your tribe and wanting violent revolution and/or mass murder. But it’s a huge problem when a few WNs decide to try to take over a not-even-a-town in North Dakota with a population of twelve, whereas, when communists advocate for communist violence, it’s just, like, a joke, man, chill out.
@nydwracu
If you got the communists uninvited from this, I would definitely not have a problem with that. Calling for mass murder is not ok.
I’m not sure about making people unemployable. I don’t want to make MM unemployable. But certainly, at a minimum, anything I wouldn’t object to being done to him, I also wouldn’t object to regarding the communists.
As I ‘ve said elsewhere, I think the law’s overt-act standard for punishing criminal conspiracies is a wise one and ought to be adhered to even outside of legal contexts. The most vile of communists, actively planning the overthrow of Western civilization, ought to be allowed to speak. I won’t invite them to speak in my space, but I won’t demand anyone else exclude them, nor see them forced into poverty.
Also, I want to be able to hear what they are saying to their minions, and I want them to have the sort of cushy jobs and lifestyles that give them very much something to lose if western civ goes down.
Whether overt actions are more likely to come from neoreactionaries or communists, I leave as an exercise for the student.
@Matt:
My argument is this: if you are a vocal, committed opponent of liberal democracy, I do not think everyone else is obligated to ignore that when deciding things like who gets to immigrate, speak at conferences, come to dinner parties, etc. I think it’s a totally valid thing to take into account in these types of situations.
That doesn’t mean in all circumstances we should ostracize them. In most, it would make us a less-good liberal democracy without much benefit. But we don’t ostracize en masse because we don’t want to be that kind of place, not because we owe them not-ostracism. Certainly, when someone is actually the leader of an anti-democratic ideological movement, I don’t see what grounds they have for objecting to this.
I don’t know enough about McCarthyism to have a rewarding conversation with you about it. I think John’s comments have been good. I certainly don’t think that what I’m saying obligates to me endorse every example of people ostracizing opponents of liberal democracy. I do think that a blanket no-ostracizing-opponents-of-liberal-democracy view requires one to reject every possible example of it.
Also, this is getting to be really clunky. Not to harp on it, but there’s a subreddit for exactly these sorts of conversations. Do you think we could continue it there? http://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/
” if you are a vocal, committed opponent of liberal democracy, I do not think everyone else is obligated to ignore that when deciding things like who gets to immigrate, speak at conferences, come to dinner parties, etc. ”
I agree. Since it’s a position held by some intelligent people and one that most of us get very little exposure to, one ought to favor such people in decisions such as who you invite to dinner or ask to speak at conferences. Immigration I’m not so sure of.
I’m serious. Many years ago I was invited to a conference in Paris. Shortly before it occurred, a bunch of people pulled out because one of the people invited was, by their account, a fascist and anti-semite—I think actually part of Le Pen’s movement.
My response was that that was a reason to go, since fascism had obviously been persuasive enough to get a lot of people to support it, I had never had a chance to talk with a fascist, and I would like to. The person in question responded to the protests by himself withdrawing from the conference, but I was able to arrange to have dinner with him. It was quite interesting.
He wasn’t exactly a fascist or anti-semite, since he was also anti-Christian. He was someone who saw pagan classical antiquity as the high point, and everything since as a decline from it. Also someone who imagined the U.S. as wall to wall McDonalds with no intervening culture. I enjoyed telling him about the SCA.
I understood you to say we should ostracize Yarvin because he was a committed opponent of liberal democracy (and therefore dangerous).
I think this is a difficult principle to apply consistently. It was worth poking at the implications.
If you are only saying that people should be allowed to take note of a person’s politics when they interact with them, well, sure they should.
I didn’t move to Reddit because I think the discussion is probably done at this point. If you’ve got more to say about this you could start a thread there and I’ll see it.
A person or group doesn’t need to “take over the country” to be harmful, if Moldbug’s writing manages to convince a few hiring managers to quietly stop considering inferior races/sexes for positions he’s done at least as much economic harm to others as getting banned from a conference has done to him.
Of course, maybe _your_ arguments end up convincing a few hiring managers that it’s a good idea to quietly stop considering people who privately hold eccentric but harmless political viewpoints for positions. In that case, given the damage you might do, perhaps you’re the one who should be banned from the conference…
This weapon doesn’t care what direction it points. Sure you’re comfortable with handing it out to everyone?
Comfortable? No, I find twitter shaming storms that destroy peoples lives to be quite scary because I am on the wrong side of many of those arguments.
But I don’t see a plausible path to verbal disarmament. The status quo isn’t all that great either and a not having these battles means conceding to keep it.
” if Moldbug’s writing manages to convince a few hiring managers to quietly stop considering inferior races/sexes for positions he’s done at least as much economic harm to others as getting banned from a conference has done to him.”
If I correctly understand you—quite possibly I don’t—the implication is that the right way of keeping hiring managers from coming to conclusions you think mistaken and undesirable is to keep them from hearing arguments for those conclusions, done by making it costly for anyone to publicly offer such arguments. Since the sort of pressure produced by not inviting people to conferences is unlikely to be sufficient for the purpose, doesn’t the argument suggest more direct restrictions on speech?
Are you comfortable with the idea that the proper way of dealing with other people is to get them to hold the conclusions you want them to hold by by preventing them from hearing arguments against those conclusions?
(Obviously I’ve read some of your work so I’m attempting to convince you of anything, only to expand your mental model of the outgroup.)
Somewhere else here you said that a plausible definition of a “terrible person” was someone motivated by malice. I hold that malice too narrow a word here because (close to) no one thinks they’re advocating for Evil, rather they base their views on first principles that inevitably lead them to malicious acts.
From that it’s morally OK to “suppress” a view (scare quotes because everyone so far jumps straight from publicly heckle to gulags) if there is no non-inevitably-malicious set of first principles that can give rise to it. Most of the left holds that “all men are created equal” or at least “all men must be treated equally” as necessary principle for non-terrible views.
> are you comfortable
Asking that in this context presupposes that there is always a comfortable path through life, or at least that the current level of bigotry in America is reasonably comfortable.
—
This is skirting dangerously close the the previous conversation, but please consider that I’m not proposing to imprison anyone or burn their books. The point of these actions is that most people do not have thoroughly reasoned beliefs to be argued into our out of. Making racists lives unpleasant is not to punish them but to make flawed logical paths less appealing to those who would casually tread them without analysis. I am comfortable assuming that racial supremacy is a flawed path.
If there’s some grand unified theory of racism that Moldbug feels a critical need to develop I’m not going to prevent him, but making his life unpleasant is an unavoidable side effect dissuading the vast body of dumb racists looking for rhetoric to validate their beliefs.
—
But the unaddressed point I was making in the comment you are replying to is that some acts (the hiring discrimination in aggregate) can cause harm morally equivalent to violence. If Moldbug was successfully running a “Puch a Black Man in the Face Today!” campaign most of society would be willing to ostracise him, but the fact that this happens in aggregate makes the terribleness of his views harder to detect. (And that point is probably the pinnacle of “things you’re not going to convince someone into or out of on the internet”.)
I’d actually find it a bit more reassuring if your goal was to punish racists: at least then the harm you’re willing to inflict might be tempered by some sense that there are limits to how much punishment a person deserves just for expressing an opinion. But combine your grandiose goal of eliminating racism entirely with your by-any-means-necessary ideas about how to get there, and it shouldn’t be all that surprising if some of us see a gulag at the end of the road. (That you’re not in favor of such measures now is cold comfort, considering that you’ve already made the long march from “Taxation is theft” to “Making a living is a privilege you forfeit by offending us”.)
“Making racists lives unpleasant is not to punish them but to make flawed logical paths less appealing to those who would casually tread them without analysis. I am comfortable assuming that racial supremacy is a flawed path.”
Thanks for the response.
Part of my problem with your position is the assumption that your belief that other people’s logical paths are flawed is not only reliable enough for you to act on it in your own decisions, such as not accepting the conclusions those paths lead to, but reliable enough so that you are entitled to prevent other people from accepting those errors by making it harder for them to hear the arguments for them.
The alternative position, which is the one that underlies much support for freedom of speech, is that the best way of finding out which beliefs are flawed is by letting people argue them out. It’s certainly not perfect, as demonstrated by the large number of people who, for some puzzling reason, fail to agree with me. But considered as a general policy, I think it leads to better results than each side trying to do its best to keep the other side’s arguments from being heard.
I haven’t read enough of Moldbug to have an opinion on him. But based on Scott’s attempt to sum up the neoreactionary position, it seems to me that they are providing a useful service by offering arguments against the views that practically everyone else takes for granted—even if most of those arguments turn out to mistaken, as Scott argued in his later piece.
Another part of my response probably comes from the combination of holding very unfashionable views and being more familiar with the arguments than most people I encounter. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of people who think certain views, in particular mine, are obviously wrong are not competent to hold that position, whether or not it is true–they don’t know the arguments on both sides. So that makes me skeptical of the “of course it’s wrong, so we ought to keep people from hearing arguments for it” approach.
Sincere question: at what point does a group’s potential to take over a country justify banning it? because the implication of your post is that there is, in fact, some point at which this becomes true.
Well, “sympathizers of the group stage terrorist attacks” certainly doesn’t seem to be enough, so I would guess “has a bunch of irrelevant blogs scattered through the internet” doesn’t make the cut either.
And my sincere answer is, I have no idea. I also don’t know who my tribal patriarch is. Living in a society with numerous lifetimes of peaceful power transfer is weird.
Wow. Too many houses, not nearly enough pox.
OTOH, if there a danger of neo-reactionaries taking over, we should invite them to conferences to keep an eye on them.
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”—Michael Corleone
“Every university should have two communists on its staff so we never forget what those people were like.”—Rush Limbaugh
[le escalated quickly face]
Link to his literal white supremacy, anyone?
It’s a bit of a crash blossom, but I think that Merzbot means that Moldbug’s sexual partner is a white supremacist. Or possibly that Moldbug is literally white, but that would be odd – not even Julian Assange is that.
He isn’t literally white, don’t be absurd. He just has sexual congress with literals (constant expressions in source code). Apparently.
He’s in congress? There’s a congress just for sex?
And here I thought that you muricans were all anti-sex (until I read the Murray piece, that is).
You’re such a wit. We shall have to intercourse at length some time.
Maybe not literally white, but at least supremely white?
Moldbug has written a blog post specifically outlying why he is not a white nationalist (also his father’s Jewish, which is a big no-go for a lot of actual white supremacists)
Moldbug and friends are not “white supremacists.” There own analysis ranks Asians over whites. Of course they really are anti-black/hispanic. But accuracy is important.
Feels good doesn’t it?
You’re following in the grand old tradition.
The sad thing is that I have the vague feeling that I’d have more luck convincing him to treat you with respect and decency than trying to convince you to treat him with respect and decency.
Agreed.
I also like this blog better when terms like “scum of the earth,” and “someone who isn’t a terrible shit” are not used, especially with respect to someone like Moldbug, who, so far as I can tell, is only guilty of politely, calmly offering arguments for unusual positions. (And though I haven’t read him that extensively, I nowhere get the sense that he advocates white supremacy, or anything like that, unless you consider Amy Chua to be a white supremacist).
I think there is a pernicious slippage between “hateful” ideology and “hateful person.” A hateful person may deserve to be called “scum of the earth.” A person nicely expounding an ideology you think is inherently hateful (but which they probably don’t see that way), probably does not.
Shouldn’t the literal go after the fucking?
He’s also a literal fucking computer system developer, which seems more relevant to whether or not he should be allowed to speak on that subject at a tech conference than any political ideologies he holds under a blogging pseudonym. At least I’d like to live in a world where that’s the case.
OK. This is a horrible form of argument. It substitutes passionate words for actual ideas.
But would people arguing against it at least steel-man it?
1) Can organizers of events make decisions about who they should invite?
2) Can organizers of events take into account whether the inclusion of the invitee is more or less likely to lead to the event being successful as they define it?
3) If you were personally organizing an event, would there be any ideas or associations (unrelated to the purpose of the event) which would marginally influence your decision on whether to invite a participant?
It’s not about the exact same thing, but I think Scott’s “the spirit of the first amendment” is quite relevant here.
@Cauê:
Actually, I agree that discussions around “Doctrine Of The Preferred First Speaker” are completely on point to this.
I would argue that the Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker example is a great reductio example.
See below for my reductio example.
I think there are principles that are in tension with each other here.
1. yes
2. yes, but if caving to threats about issues unrelated to the event, one has to wonder if he isn’t both impoverishing the event by disqualifying people for irrelevant reasons and also contributing to a larger culture of politicizing everything and discouraging free speech.
3. Though I can’t be entirely sure, not being in the situation myself, I’d like to say no. This is because I am committed to the idea that one can be wrong about one thing and still have something valuable to contribute with respect to something else (this cuts both ways, as Stephen Hawking being good at physics doesn’t necessarily make him a good theologian), and also that ideological witch hunts reduce everyone’s quality of life and thinking in the long run.
@onyomi:
If you were to find out that, out of a pool of 20 possible speakers for the last unfilled slot in your conference, one of those was a currently active and outspoken NAMBLA member, would your likelihood of using that speaker go up, down or be unchanged?
If it would change, why?
Edit: If not, why not?
And don’t assume that anyone warns you about it. They include it as part of their CV when applying for the job in the other activities/organizations section.
I have to admit that if there were other equally good or better options, the NAMBLA thing on the resume might tip me toward another candidate on the margins, especially since inclusion of such info on a CV used to apply for something unrelated to NAMBLA issues would signal to me that the person was potentially tone deaf or unable to keep his political activism separate from other professional activities. Paradoxically, it would bother me less to find out that he wrote pro-NAMBLA blog posts under a pseudonym, because that would tend to indicate he had more discretion. On the other hand, I think un-inviting someone requires a more serious potential problem than failing to invite someone in the first place, so on that score knowing about something like this beforehand might be better.
If the person with “NAMBLA Activist” on his resume were the best candidate by any appreciable margin, I might contact him and ask whether he is willing to avoid causing any potential distraction by using his presentation to talk about NAMBLA or other irrelevant topics. If he could agree to exercise such discretion, I’d probably still invite him.
This also brings up for me something I’ve been meaning to ask on an OT one of these days, which is whether or not I’d be able to resist using the Death Note (notebook with the magical power to kill anyone whose name you write in it) of the manga/anime of the same name. I’m not very confident I could resist the temptation to at least kill some people like Kim Jong Un, who seem to really, really deserve it, but it could be a slippery slope from there.
The current discussion reminds me of this because, while I talk a good game about what people in positions of authority should do when faced with choices like “do I hire slightly more qualified person with ideology I find odious,” I’m not as confident as I’d like to be that I would actually live up to those ideals were I in a position of authority.
This is, of course, because *my* political views are correct and *my* political tribe is routinely selected against for this kind of thing, so I’m just balancing the scales and helping the truth to win… is how I think I’d be tempted to feel. But it’s precisely because everyone feels this way that we can’t have nice things.
Kim Jong Un’s replacement would be unlikely to be much better, and would be very likely to have less legitimacy in his peers’ eyes (hence less stability for the country). There are few things I’d less like to see at my doorstep than a heavily armed totalitarian dictatorship, but one of them is a heavily armed collection of feuding warlords.
You could, of course, keep using the Death Note to knock over warlords, but information’s so sparse out there that using it in a way that decreased the total expected body count would probably be a full-time job.
Granted, I could probably find someone to use the Death Note on, even if I’m not sure who at this very moment.
Well, the obvious utilitarian option is to kill someone in a way that makes you rich (are celebrity dead pools legal?) and then use the money to improve the world however you see fit.
If I killed Kim Jong Un, it would probably not be for utilitarian reasons, but because I literally think he doesn’t deserve to keep breathing. That said, I would bet one could find a way to use such a power to destabilize that or any other regime, and it’s hard to imagine the DPRK being replaced by anything worse. In a world where non-libertarian politicians drop like flies, how long before politicians start becoming more libertarian, or everyone just stops wanting to be a politician altogether, resulting in de facto anarcho capitalism? What’s more I’m not even sure I would feel evil while doing this, because I think non-libertarian politicians are unfairly aggressing against innocent people, so theoretically I could think of it as helping people defend themselves. What is more, I could justify it on utilitarian grounds, since I am confident that eliminating governments would allow rapid economic and medical development, saving far more lives than the few politicians I’d killed.
I’m not saying I think this is the right thing to do, or even what I would do, but it is more tempting than I’d like to admit. What might hopefully save me from doing this would be some of the same ethical and empirical views that make me a libertarian in the first place, namely that concentrations of power are bad, the knowledge of central planners is limited, and no one has the right to force his idea of what’s best on others (or to take someone’s life except in extremes of self defense, etc.), but again, it’s kind of tempting.
@onyomi:
Remind me not to hire you to organize any conferences unless they are on the topic of the importance of free speech. 🙂
I think your prior position is swamping your assessment of what you would actually do if you had “skin in the game”. Having that knowledge should be a large disincentive to hiring him for that position, not just “might tip me” territory. Having his participation represents a big risk for the public event absent some other knowledge to the contrary, and represents a risk to you and anyone who can reasonably be seen as being responsible for overseeing/participating in your decisions.
Long before you get into the territory of “is it moral to support his activist work by voluntarily giving him custom”, you should discount his utility merely on the risk front.
Well, sure, if I thought there was a real chance that this person would ruin the conference and I’d lose my job then I probably would try to avoid inviting them, whatever the reason. But it strikes me in most cases like these, be it the one with Moldbug or controversial commencement speakers, that the the stakes are nowhere near that high for anyone involved. It’s more like “I don’t want the headache of possibly dealing with some complaints.”
In the case of Moldbug, a quick Youtube search will turn up totally innocuous presentations by him on his urbit ideas, as well as him reading poetry and debating futarchy. They are hardly riot-starting presentations. I think it’s pretty obvious that if inviting him were to actually cause any disruptions it would be because of the people who don’t like him trying to make it about his ideology, not about him injecting his ideology. And to cave to that sort of pressure is, frankly, pretty pathetic, imo.
Sure, it’s understandable to err on the side of caution, and I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t do the same if I thought there was a real chance that Moldbug’s presence would ruin the conference or get me fired, but on the other hand, I think there should be a presumption that people are mature enough to judge a presenter on his presentation and not his unrelated political views, and I think the idea that one shouldn’t listen to someone talk about computer programming if they have the wrong political views is a really nasty precedent to set.
Honestly, my initial reaction would be just to uninvite the complainers. Anybody who says “did you know person a, who is presenting on unrelated topic b, holds objectionable position c????” doesn’t sound like anyone I want at my event.
@onyomi:
Forgive me, I don’t want to debate Moldbug at this moment. I’m trying to get at the question of whether there are competing principles. As I stated above, I think arguing from a reduction is helpful to establish that a principal exists. The Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker real word example is a great reduction to the other extreme and establishes a different (competing) principle.
I think I’ve gotten you to agree that a conference organizer should, as a matter of principle, attempt to make their event successful, and that this principle allows them to take into account some views that are so outré as to represent real risk to the success of the conference. I don’t think that is a statement of the root principle, but I think we have established that there is one.
Hypothetical addition to the hypothetical scenario:
Suppose this slot is for someone to be the last speaker on a panel, and you know that one of the speakers on the panel you have already hired is a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse by their father. Does that have additional affect on your decision?
Do you really think Alex Miller would’ve done the same thing in response to complaints about someone on his side?
Look at his Twitter account. Dude’s not exactly trying to hide where he stands. The other organizers, even more so.
I think this is an important point. Suddenly people care a lot more about free speech when the controversial speaker shares their own views.
@Heelbearcub
I think my principle is pretty clear:
One should try, as much as possible, to pick event participants on the basis of their predicted contribution to the event, not on unrelated views they may hold but which you don’t expect to factor into their participation. If you expect there’s any possibility he might cause disruption by expressing unrelated views, then that is a factor reducing the predicted contribution in proportion to the severity of the possible disruption and probability of it happening.
If somehow this person’s views are going to ruin the event just by virtue of him holding them, then one doesn’t have to be doctrinaire about the above, since, as event organizer, your primary responsibility is successful event, but it’s hard for me to think of a case in which someone merely holding objectionable views which he doesn’t express at the event could ruin an event.
And, again, if what’s going to ruin the event is not anything objectionable position holder says, but others’ reaction to his presence, then, if it is at all feasible to do so, it is these others who should be uninvited, not the controversial view holder. To do otherwise encourages this kind of “victimization preemptive strike” which is becoming more and more common, and, imo, loathsome.
@onyomi:
I’m not sure that answer actually engages with my hypothetical. But, trying to interpret it in a way that does, I think you are saying that having a NAMBLA supporter and a survivor of child abuse on the same panel attempting to discuss, say, astrophysics has a high probability of negatively affecting the event, and that this is reasonable to take into account.
So, now reengaging with Moldbug, wouldn’t it have a high-degree of probability that putting Moldbug on a panel with, say, Neil Degrasse Tyson, trying to discuss (insert some area of shared expertise) would have a high-degree of probability of negatively affecting the event?
I don’t see why. Do you think Moldbug is incapable of having a rational discussion on an unrelated topic with people who disagree with him ideologically?
wouldn’t it have a high-degree of probability that putting Moldbug on a panel with, say, Neil Degrasse Tyson, trying to discuss (insert some area of shared expertise) would have a high-degree of probability of negatively affecting the event?
Almost certainly. But if it’s Curtis Guy Yarvin and Neil Degrasse Tyson, that ought to be a different matter. Probably wouldn’t be, IMO, but that has more to do with my opinion of Neil than of Curtis. Regardless, it’s the one you imagine would go off-script and introduce contentious politics to a civil technical discussion that you don’t invite to the conference. And if it’s ten instead of one, you don’t invite any of them; if it’s a hundred you cancel the conference and have a quiet private meeting with the handful of people who are willing to talk tech.
“…it’s the one you imagine would go off-script and introduce contentious politics to a civil technical discussion that you don’t invite to the conference.”
Yes, exactly.
Well, now I am going to ask you to go back and fully engage with my hypothetical. Why might a survivor of child sexual abuse and NAMBLA proponent have trouble having a rational discussion about astrophysics? What problems could it cause?
No problem, if they don’t know that about one another. And if they do, the one(s) who think they are incapable of even talking to someone whose view triggers their trauma, even if said person promises not to bring up said views, are the ones who should bow out. Everyone’s views are triggering and loathsome to someone. Wear shoes; don’t demand the world be carpeted.
And I still don’t get the analogy to Moldbug and Tyson. Was Tyson molested by a monarchist as a child? Or is it because he’s black and Moldbug believes in average IQ differences among groups? If the latter, does this mean we should uninvite Charles Murray as a speaker if his mere presence makes one black person uncomfortable, even if he’s not there to talk about race and IQ?
This idea that merely being in the presence of someone you know holds a view you dislike is threatening, even if the person is totally polite and not talking about said view, seems very pernicious.
@onyomi:
All I can say is, once again, I don’t think you are acting as if you have any skin in the game. I really honestly don’t think anyone would consciously put a childhood sex abuse survivor and a NAMBLA advocate on stage together unless it was to discuss that specific issue. The fact that you won’t even admit to any trepidation at all suggests you don’t like what that does to your position.
Imagine how the conversation would go with the person you already hired. “So, I’m hiring someone who happens to be a NAMBLA advocate for the panel, but I’m giving you the heads up in case you want to bow out.”
edit: Especially when you had the opportunity to hire 19 other candidates. It’s not as if this particular candidate is the only person who could fill the panel slot.
You’re assuming that I, as conference organizer, know or care about these peoples’ personal lives. Why would someone applying to speak at a tech conference tell me about their history of sexual abuse or their membership in NAMBLA?
My expectation as organizer of a tech conference is that everyone is professional enough to keep unrelated political views and past emotional traumas out of the discussion of tech. Anyone who signals that they can’t do that, be it because they can’t help talking about NAMBLA everywhere they go, or because they can’t stand to even be in the same room as someone who might privately support NAMBLA, should probably not be invited.
A card is being palmed in jumping all the way to NAMBLA, and I feel like this is done all the time. It’s always “but what about segregation when they turned the firehoses on black people? And that’s why we need to destroy this pizza place in the middle of nowhere for giving the wrong answer to a hypothetical question!”
No. Toleration of other viewpoints is* the rule, along with putting political disagreements to the side when discussing unrelated items. Everything else is an exception which should be granted only in extreme circumstances. Hard cases make bad law.
*should be/needs to be
I don’t think the NAMBLA example is a good comparison. A child abuse survivor experienced child abuse while, as far as I know, neither Moldbug nor these so called communists ever experienced Monarchy nor Communism.
@onyomi:
Again, you are refusing to engage with the hypothetical where you do know these pieces of information.
The question is, given you know this, what do you do, and what principles does that reveal? I have freely admitted all along this was a reduction argument and whatever principle it revealed is in competition with other principles.
@Jaskologist:
I am very specifically not palming the card. I am telling you straight out that this is a hypothetical reduction. You seem to be saying that because a principle of “toleration of other viewpoints” exists (which I have freely admitted exists) that this necessarily must void all other principles that might conflict with it.
I think principles that exist can be in tension with each other. Free speech does not allow crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater being the famous example, but not the only possible case of tension between principles.
In re falsely shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater: http://popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/
I have already addressed several variations on this hypothetical. If my views are still unclear, please reference earlier posts.
@onyomi:
You seem to have started out saying that their position would make a marginal difference and have now changed to the position that it wouldn’t make any difference as long as they assured you they wouldn’t mention NAMBLA during the conference. You started out saying that you would contact them if they were clearly the best candidate, and now don’t seem to think they would even need to be the best candidate.
My contention is that you started in one place, and it turns out you don’t like the implications of that, and have switched position because of this.
I think to make the NAMBLA example work, you want to specify that the only reason the conference organizer knows that a potential participant is a NAMBLA member is that a third party told him and demanded that he uninvite the man for that reason.
@Heelbearcub
If my position seems to change, it’s because I keep answering slightly different questions.
The initial response was about choosing between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, one of whom listed NAMBLA on his resume, and one of whom did not.
The other responses have been about whether or not to revoke an extended invitation or withhold an invitation to an otherwise superior candidate just because of an ideological position.
@onyomi:
My hypothetical situation has never involved either rescinding an invitation to speak or rejecting a clearly superior candidate. I tried to be clear about that, but obviously was not clear enough.
The reason I am framing it this way is because I want to explore only the marginal difference made by a) the association to NAMBLA itself and b) the knowledge of the negative effect this would likely have on an already invited participant.
This is why I have been insistent on resisting changes to the framing. Changing the framing allows one to ignore the marginal effects if one chooses to.
As for rescinding invitations, I am perfectly willing to stipulate (concede, if you want, although I never argued against it) that, say, “resisting coercive behavior intended to punish in fact what cannot be punished by law” is a good principle and one of those that is in tension with other principles.
@PSmith:
That article is in no way relevant to my point. As Popehat points out right at the beginning, the contention that all speech is not protected is not in dispute. In other words, the core concept that principles can be in contention with each other and still remain principles is not in doubt.
I apologize if this opinion is inconsistent, but this is how I feel it:
If an organizer decides to not invite a person X because of their political opinions, or because of their color of skin… that’s okay. As long as it is the organizer’s own decision, not an outside pressure. When it is a pressure from outside, it’s not okay.
The reason behind this opinion is approximately this: If one organizer decides to not invite X, some other organizer may decide to invite X. This way, the organizer also damages their own conference. This is feedback that in long term may support the conferences without censorship.
On the other hand, when the blacklisting of X is organized by an external group, that group will likely threaten all organizers. There is no feedback. All that is necessary is for the external group to precommit to cause more damage (e.g. by slandering the conference on Twitter) than the damage caused naturally by not inviting a few interesting speakers.
In one case, the conflict is organizer vs speaker, in the other case, the conflict is external group vs speaker. The external group has no responsiblity, is probably anonymous, is not in the business of organizing the conferences… and yet they take the power to decide who is allowed to go there and who isn’t. All power, no responsibility — that is the part I hate.
The question I have put forth is NOT “is it possible that political views can be unfairly discriminated against as a result of external pressure?”
I think it is fairly clear that not inviting someone to a tech conference because they have a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker (and I am Republican) is an easy example. That would clearly be wrong and establishes that a principle exists.
I am trying to establish that there are other, competing principles at work. As you are not an American (I am assuming), you might not be familiar with the NAMBLA organization. I would not suggest googling it though. It is an organization that promotes men having sex with young (prepubescent) boys. Here it is serving as a useful shibboleth in trying to establish that there are competing principles to be considered.
This isn’t Facebook. You don’t need to signal how progressive you are.
How much do you trust people to decide who “the scum of the earth” are? Whatever your views, they were outside the Overton Window at some point in history. Would it have been right for someone holding them to have been excluded from conferences back then?
I don’t really have much confidence in my ability to correctly identify the scum of the earth.
My favorite such title is “Three Sentenced on Counterfeit Charges.”
“Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant”
I liked “CT High School Slut Shames Students Over “Inappropriate” Prom Dresses” quite a bit.
Another There Is A Subreddit announcement: There is a subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/
(Scott: If these are annoying, or if you don’t want there to be a subreddit, please let me know and I will stop posting these/stop trying to make there be a subreddit.)
What? That’s not at all the start of a counterargument. It’s an argument that Nigerian doctors will be more productive in America than they will in Nigeria (yes, obviously). But I don’t see closed borders advocates most worried that Nigerian doctors will drop the quality of American medicine; I see them most worried that Chechens will ritually murder our Jews and blow up our marathons.
OK, I’ve read the “Open Borders” link, and I’m not seeing how it even begins to argue against the “killing the goose that lays the golden eggs”, aka Somali-immigrants-will-turn-the-US-into-Somalia, hypothesis.
Mostly, it evangelizes the author’s amazingly profound discovery that talented people achieve more in groups than in isolation, and the obvious first-order consequences of this – which he extrapolates well beyond the bounds where most of us are wondering about second-order effects.
More specifically, it focuses on the “hive mind” hypothesis that the author explicitly acknowledges may result in a substantial reduction in global productivity as the institutions of first-world nations are “much degraded relative to the pre-open borders rich world”. The author then claims that this is OK because the standard of living of poor unskilled laborers worldwide will rise to ~15% of the US level, which he claims is literally an order of magnitude higher than where they are now. And notes that he doesn’t believe the “hive mind” hypothesis that is the focus of this essay anyhow, but is presenting a worst-case scenario for the sake of argument.
Possibly he’s got an argument against the “killing the goose” hypothesis elsewhere, but I’m not seeing anything here beyond the fact that the goose’s corpse will feed some poor starving Africans for a while.
Problems I do have with his argument in this essay:
1. The claim that the goose’s corpse will raise the standard of living of the global poor by an order of magnitude, to 15% of current US levels, is unsupported in the essay and seems implausible. Just for starters, are we really agreeing that the current standard of living of the average unskilled worker is only 1.5% of the current US average?
2. Destroying the engine of prosperity of the US and Western Europe, for the sake of the Third-World poor, is a political non-starter. This argument cannot possibly hope to persuade anyone other than the tiny handful of pure consequentialists that make up, what, maybe 5% of the US electorate? To make this argument, is pure posturing.
3. The step from “smart/talented people work best in groups” to “if we stop putting borders between group formation, world GDP drops 25%”, needs to be explored a bit
more. I get that this is the goose-killing hypothesis that the author rejects, but if he’s taking a devil’s-advocate role in that respect he needs to actually advocate for the devil.
4. The author’s preferred solution seems to be semi-permeable borders and incentive pumps to concentrate all the world’s smart and talented people in a few “gated communities”, while most of the unskilled laborers and other stupids go Somewhere Else. Sounds like I’ve heard that one before. The part where it leads to an order-of-magnitude increase in the standard of living for the stupids, that I haven’t heard before, and I really need an explanation of how that’s supposed to work.
He is not recommending this proposal, he is saying that if “[c]ritics of open borders from a hive mind angle” wish to be consistent, they should recommend it.
“Contraband” was somewhat suggestive – I thought somebody was putting out ads for drugs when really it’s just genuine Italian meat that the Russians have no business banning in the first place.
Some would say that the US has no business banning drugs.
Although considering how badly that ad thing failed, I suspect the police don’t care much.
No, it doesn’t. What it argues against is the idea that it’s terrible for the imported workers, and for the world, not the idea that it’s terrible for the countries they immigrate to. I don’t care that immigration is good for the immigrants or for the world average, for the same reason that I don’t care that letting homeless people into my living room is good for the homeless people, and gives them more utility than I lose (thus increasing the average for the world as well).
Some people do care, though. My house is a bit too inside of personal space, but if I can make the entire world better off at a cost to my country, I’m more than willing to do that. Someday, I might even want to move, and it’d be nice if wherever I moved to also let me in.
The point is that Scott improperly characterized it (and in such a way that it looks good for more people than the correct characterization does).
Meaning-changing typo: so that it looks good to more people.
Few, if any, things are more dangerous than the overconfidence that fills the gap left by respect for tradition. In a flash the world is one’s own to be ordered as one wishes. These people would tear a nation into charter cities and gated communities like I would tear a pizza into pieces.
I think I would give about anything to end up sitting across the train from Voevodsky and Awodey, although I doubt I’d have much to add to the conversation. But still, like a lot of people who started learning “computer science” (as such) before they began to learn proper mathematics, I’ve always found myself in the constructionist/computationalist camp. As I was slowly exposed to that thing called “set theory,” I was pretty nonplussed.
But anyway, Turing machines are pretty cool, but they feel pretty ugly, as mathematical abstractions, and discovering type theory and the lambda stuff was a pretty big deal for me. This was pure computation, but beautiful. Anyway, “programs as proofs” was something that just kind of worked for me, mentally.
I’d love to see these ideas spread and more people develop these skills, but it probably won’t happen. (Pending some transhumanist mental revolution. Not holding my breath.)
#####
On the Moldbug thing, good grief. This kind of shit does not help.
Which, I don’t blame people for despising the man. He’s pretty horrible, which is to say his beliefs are horrible. But anyway, if I ran that conference, I think I’d talk to him, ask him, ”Hey, can you commit to keeping politics way, way, way out of your talk, like not mention the political context at all and just talk about your technology? Like, you can state your opinions on crypto and distributed computing and the value of provability and so on without having to state the political background? Will you promise to do that?”
If he promised, I would tell the critics to stuff it and listen to his technical results.
Or not. They can skip his talk. Or whatever.
Anyway, if his technical ideas have merit, they have merit. If they do not, they do not. We can view them separately from his politics.
That said, I suspect that his status as a truly terrible person will limit the adoption of his specific technology, just cuz social stuff. Which, fine. That’s life.
Well, and also I suppose his technology won’t be adopted because it is ridiculously impractical (so far as I understand it). But so what? During his talk he might show some slide with some stupid diagram, or perhaps talk about some idea or result, that causes a listener to get a really, really great idea.
You know, something practical. And something not associated with a hateful, toxic ideology.
Anyway, I’m a “social justice warrior” (or whatever), but I ain’t afraid to listen to math.
(That said, I wonder if this kerfuffle will get more people to look at his tech stuff, and then maybe someone who isn’t a terrible shit can take any worthwhile bits and work them up without association to Moldbug. That might be a good thing.)
(Actually I suspect his technical ideas will turn out to be a giant tower of nothing much, a curious glimpse into a troubled mind. But still.)
I am very sad that SSC readers are OK with the idea of “terrible beliefs”. IE if I genuinely think X is a true statement… can that really have a bearing on whether I am a good person? Like… it’s not like I *made* X true or *want* it to be true… as a (aspiring to be) rational human, I assign probability to X in a way that is unrelated to those things.
There could be beliefs which tend very often to cause people to behave terribly. Even though you might adopt a belief in all good faith, if it tends to cause terribleness in people who believe it, your believing it is still evidence about what sort of person you are.
If such a belief is also false, there isn’t really much to be said in its favor.
My usual view is that there is nothing to say about a belief except that it is true or false (or gets credence P). I guess you could posit that there are human cognitive bugs that make certain beliefs SO TOXIC that they must be avoided even when true because they lead to irrational destructive behavior. Like… we all know not to look in Pandora’s Box because (correct) knowledge of its contents drives anyone insane… and therefore we shun anyone who has looked. But… is that really what’s happening here?
Seems to me much simpler and more likely that veronica believes Moldbug is a terrible person because she strongly disagrees with him. Which, you know, is pretty normal, but just sad to see here.
EDIT: Realized Elissa and Veronica were different people and edited the above text.
I’d just like to point out that I am not the same person as Veronica and I am not taking any stance in this comment about the terribleness of Moldbug or his beliefs.
Let me give an example of a belief I would consider terrible which, while extreme, doesn’t require any basilisk-type cognitive bugs. Suppose there’s a fellow I know who openly holds a strong belief that women are not sentient and cannot suffer. Suppose also that he is sincere and came by this belief honestly.
This is terrible. I can’t trust this guy, because his belief means that he has no reason beyond self-interest not to hurt me. I don’t want to be around him, because I know he will give no weight to anything I say, which is inherently disrespectful. No matter how many times he promises to treat me as if I were a person, I am just not confident enough that he will– how surprised would you be to find out that this fellow had raped a woman when he thought he could get away with it?
I am also as sure as I can be of anything that he is wrong, because I am a woman and I know myself to be sentient and capable of suffering. I have no reason to want this belief around. It is bad and I want it to go away.
Elissa – thanks, I think this is a pretty fair response. BTW I did eventually notice that you were not Veronica (and edited the text before I saw your comment), but too late.
I can imagine a lot of situations where I have a hard time convincing somebody of something I have good reasons to believe, and as a result tend to avoid them or otherwise treat them differently due to anticipating their incorrect beliefs. (I am still not sure it is fair to say the person is “terrible”.) Knowledge of your own sentience is a great example of something that’s easy to know but hard to prove.
But… I think this is similar to my basilisk example, in that it is theoretically possible, but probably not what is happening. Moldbug’s writing doesn’t seem to be about the kind of epistemologically complex ideas that make this kind of thing possible, and if this is really what Veronica was thinking I imagine she would have used pretty different phrasing.
Also… can you think of an example of a *TRUE* belief that would cause similar problems? If women were indeed not sentient than your example would fail.
Esquire, if I had to think of true beliefs that were nevertheless net harmful, I guess I’d go for ones that would cause unjust action. I’ll think about it.
Right now I can’t think of any non-controversial examples of true beliefs which would cause the same kind of problem, but in this case the beliefs veronica is calling “horrible” are (I presume) ones she disagrees with, so the question doesn’t seem directly relevant.
My intent was only to establish that some beliefs constitute evidence that the people who hold them are “bad”, in the sense of “untrustworthy and to be avoided”. If you agree with that, I think we’re pretty much done here, since I can’t pretend to speak for veronica (although I wouldn’t be surprised if she did mean something like this by “horrible” beliefs).
Thanks for your civility toward me.
I guess I’m interested in an example of a true belief because if true beliefs are immune from horribleness than I am OK to continue trying really hard to believe X IFF X is true, and not worry about being horrible as a result.
Ok, here are some examples. All of them depend on someone applying the information illogically, so you personally can probably “handle the truth” in all cases.
1) Let’s say you sincerely want to maintain a healthy weight and are able to do so because of superstition (you swore to God that if you weigh more than 5 pounds over your goal at the end of a month, God should punish you, and the belief is helping you maintain your goal). Under those circumstances, you might not want to know that God won’t actually punish you for violations.
2) Similarly, you are getting actual relief from chonic pain due to the placebo effect as a result of acupuncture, and there is no equivalent relief available from anything real. I would have to be an a-hole to convince you that acupuncture is a scam.
3) You are a landlord, and if you knew that men are 3 times as likely to hold damaging parties and not pay for the damages, you would be unavoidably unable to refrain from discriminating against men on the margins. As a result of your ethical values, you would think this discrimination wrong. As a result, you try your best not to be convinced of any disparity.
Let’s substitute harmful for horrible, since harmfulness seems to be less politicised than horribleness. Nick Bostrom does a much better job of addressing this (http://www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf), but a good example would be murder.
Assume that murder is harmful, and that likelihood of committing murder increases as the risk of getting caught decreases. If there’s a false but widespread belief that >90% of American murder cases are solved, then the true belief that only ~60% of American murder cases are solved would be harmful if it became widespread. When paired with literature that takes a neutral or positive stance to the murder question, the writer themselves could be considered harmful.
What assumptions and values are Moldbug’s detractors bringing to the table? We can’t tell if Moldbug’s beliefs are harmful without establishing the ground rules for harm. If, for example, the belief “genes which raise and lower IQ are sometimes linked to ethnicity” (i.e. torsion dystonia in Ashkenazim) is assumed to be inherently harmful, then both he and the majority of biologists have harmful beliefs.
eh – Good example.
And would people be insisting that someone who has studied the research and found out that the true rate is 60% make some sort of personal effort to change their beliefs to believe that it’s 90%? Because that’s better for society, even if it isn’t true? Could they do that, even if they wanted to?
I can maybe see an argument of “If your beliefs are potentially harmful, you owe it to society to not promote them publicly,” but saying “If you hold harmful beliefs, that makes you a horrible person, even if the beliefs are factually correct” seems like a whole different animal…
The thing is, the people most likely to commit murder are those with a long pattern of antisocial behavior and poor impulse control: i.e. people who know from personal experience how the sausage is made, and who are not particularly good at following incentives anyway.
The false belief could easily end up as more of a tax on potential victims, who overestimate their own safety and underestimate the gains of better policing.
I’m not trying to fight the hypothetical for its own sake, but instead to point out that we can’t infallibly predict how any given lie will work out long-term. Choosing to deliberately lie should be something done in extremis, like an axe murderer at the door, not as a casual ‘social engineering’ practice.
“Even though you might adopt a belief in all good faith, if it tends to cause terribleness in people who believe it, your believing it is still evidence about what sort of person you are.”
Not so sure about this one. Are you suggesting that people who legitimately believe things that might have unfortunate implications, or things that often have led to other people who believe those things doing terrible actions, should simply refuse to believe the things they believe?
To what extent would that involve (or require) ignoring legitimate evidence because you don’t want it to be true.
To put it another way – it almost sounds like you’re encouraging people to base their beliefs on what they think would yield the best outcomes rather than on what they observe to be true.
I’m kind of agnostic on whether trying really hard to believe whatever is actually true is the best strategy. I do it, but that’s mainly because my brain isn’t wired to do anything else.
However, you can continue to use this strategy for choosing your beliefs without making it your only safeguard against horribleness. If you concede that wrong-and-harmful beliefs are bad in a way that wrong-but-harmless beliefs are not, you should probably 1) treat other people’s wrong-and-harmful beliefs differently than their wrong-but-harmless ones, and 2) treat your own harmful-if-wrong beliefs differently from your harmless-if-wrong ones. The first will protect you from other people’s horribleness, and the second from your own.
“If you concede that wrong-and-harmful beliefs are bad in a way that wrong-but-harmless beliefs are not”
What relevance does this have towards beliefs that are truly held and that the person does not think are wrong?
Can you clarify your concern here? It seems flippant to say “It’s relevant because people who are wrong don’t know they’re wrong,” but I don’t know what you’re getting at if that doesn’t answer your question.
I think my concern is that you seemed to be implying that beliefs are choices, and that deeply held beliefs can simply be modified if we discover that the consequences of the belief are generally bad, without considering the accuracy of the belief one way or another.
It almost gets back to the whole growth hypothesis argument. If believing in X produces better outcomes *even if X isn’t true* then it is perfectly logical to say that people should believe in X.
Maybe your brain works that way, but mine doesn’t. As odd as it sounds, as I get older, I become more and more convinced that I didn’t *choose* to be a libertarian, and that there is literally nothing that could convince me to be anything else. And it’s not that I’m closed-minded or unwilling to hear alternative viewpoints, I’m just absolutely convinced that my beliefs encompass a certain set of moral truths.
So even if you could conclusively prove to me that believing in socialism increases the wealth and happiness and life span, not just of the individual believing in it, but of everyone in the world, I still don’t think I could do it. I could try my best to fake it but I’m not convinced it would ever stick.
Ok, this is frustrating, because I specifically said that you don’t have to stop believing whatever seems most likely to be true for all this to apply. It really seems like your entire last reply is talking past me.
Guy-who-thinks-women-aren’t-sentient can and maybe should go on believing what he believes until he sees evidence that convinces him otherwise. Doesn’t change the fact that, under my point 1), I want to keep away from him and his wrong-and-harmful beliefs. Are you saying I’m obligated to hang out with him just because he’s perfectly sincere in thinking I’m not a person?
Under my point 2), he should definitely refrain from raping women, on the off chance he might be wrong, because even though he thinks it’s correct, he can still see that this is a harmful-if-wrong belief. He might also do well do look extra hard for evidence he is mistaken, and try extra hard to avoid identifying with this particular belief.
You’re obviously free to associate with whoever you want. I just have a small problem with the “he’s horrible because he won’t change his beliefs” is a bit unfair, particularly if there is some legitimate dispute regarding the factual basis for said beliefs.
Arguing that his beliefs can lead to harm (such as rape) is nice in theory, and you’re right that maybe he should hedge his bets and not rape people because IF he is wrong, that’s a huge harm and provides (relatively) little benefit to himself.
But let’s say he doesn’t rape people. I think the odds of getting him to change his beliefs (even assuming it’s possible at all) are pretty low if your approach is to tell him “Someone might listen to you and use your beliefs as justification for rape,” while not arguing the factual validity of the beliefs at all.
I’m not arguing with him for heaven’s sake. I’m avoiding him. I don’t like being around people who don’t think I’m a person, as perhaps you can imagine. I never said he was necessarily a horrible person; I just don’t feel safe that he isn’t. I am completely comfortable saying that his belief is horrible and the world would be better without it.
Do you actually object to any of this? Or do you just resent the fact that honest mistakes can cause a person to do horrible things, such that others are right to avoid them? Because that one’s on the universe, not me.
@Elissa
Your contention that Alawites should be shunned until they renounce their religion is very problematic.The only reason I’m not calling it bigoted is that I found out “bigot” is an anti-Norman slur.
The beliefs of people who believe “vaccinations are bad” perhaps lead people to behave in bad ways. But do we consider them to be bad people? I hope not.
While I can’t say there’s an explicit chain of reason behind it, I imagine that many people who discuss “terrible beliefs” don’t actually think there are real beliefs, just beliefs in belief with terrible motivations. (i.e. it is obvious that atheists believe in Jesus in the sense that they believe the sky is blue, they just don’t believe in believing in him because otherwise they couldn’t cause school shootings*.)
*-True story, the Baptist megachurch in my town has an awful pastor.
People pillory that conference organizers too much for this. They’re not in the business of being heroes for free expression and don’t need their event to turn into a WTO protest. They found out the guy is toxic and they were going to catch hell if they let him speak, and catch hell from a much smaller group that no one cares about if they didn’t let him speak, so they didn’t let him speak.
I don’t think people are blaming the organizers, or I hope they aren’t. We don’t blame people for making rational choices we don’t like, we blame the incentives for those rational choices.
Blaming the organizers is the easiest way to change the incentives.
Right. Not that it’s morally justified, but it’s easier to convince conference organizers that free-speech advocates can be just as annoying as communists than it is to convince the communists to be less annoying.
Two much smaller groups: neoreactionaries, and strong believers in freedom of expression.
As a member of the latter group, I am disturbed to hear that we are small and nobody cares, but I have to acknowledge that it may be an accurate assessment.
Next question: For members of a small group that nobody cares about but who aren’t ready to crawl into a hole and die just yet, what might be some good strategies for ensuring that people do care in cases like this?
You can’t, there’s nothing we can do, it’s doomed.
Slightly more serious answer: I think that it’s very difficult, because at the end of the day, the tribalism is very entrenched, and the tribal arguments are just almost inherently more appealing to people than the arguments about freedom of expression. And it’s also difficult because it can be kind of a tricky, complex argument to make sometimes – especially when you’re dealing with the actions of private individuals or organizations, and with social pressure on expression.
I’m honestly not sure what the best course of action is, except to try to shift people out of the tribal mindsets, and to do the intellectual work to ensure that we have a pretty good account of precisely what freedom of expression means especially outside the context of governmental repression.
It’s not so much about what freedom of expression means as it’s about whether we want to have it.
(and as one of the “strong believers in freedom of expression”, I can tell you that fights about it feel tribal to me, even when the one whose expression is being attacked is not of my tribe)
@Cauê:
That’s fair, and it’s very possible that my particular perspective is distorting my views here. So let me expand on what I mean.
First, I think it is both an argument about what freedom of expression means and and argument about whether we want to have it. I think there are people – I don’t know how many – who on some level agree in principle with the idea of free expression being important, but who don’t recognize it as a problem outside of government – this is, I guess, what Scott has called the ‘spirit of the first amendment’ question. And I think there really are a lot of complexities there. So I think both things are necessary – that freedom of speech is important, and that defining what freedom of speech means in a social context is important.
Regarding tribalness, this is very likely where my personal perspective comes from, because most of my conversations on this topic involve me trying to convince fellow blue-tribe members that expressing red-tribe views does not, in fact, make a person evil. That said, my sense is very much that tribalness plays a strong role here – the dialectic that I usually see is that there’s a conflict between allowing the expression of views on the one hand, and on the other hand the unacceptability of those views and the importance of maintaining a boundary between what is and is not approved of.
So I guess that’s, basically, what I mean to say here. I hope that’s a little more clear; I apologize if it isn’t.
I’m libertarian minded and I’m not outraged. Conferences should be allowed to ban whoever they want for any reason.
Libertarianism doesn’t require that you not be outraged, only that you want the conference to be legally permitted to do this. You can permit it legally and be outraged at the same time.
Honestly, I have no idea, but putting conference organizers in a position where they’re fucked if they do, fucked if they don’t probably doesn’t improve anything. Personally, I feel like I can wear two hats and see it differently depending on which. As a free expression advocate, I fully support the damn Ayatollah Khomeini presenting at Tel Aviv University if he develops some awesome technique relevant to the conference subject, but as a university rep, I can understand why they wouldn’t want that.
In 1940, Norway was fucked if it sided with the Allies (because it would have been invaded by the Axis), and fucked if it sided with the Axis (because vice versa, though the Allies would have started with “just” a blockade). And, really, fucked if it tried to remain neutral, because that actually lead to the Axis invasion force landing while the Allied invasion force was still boarding its transports.
There’s an alternate history where Churchill reasons, “putting the Norwegians in a position where they’re fucked if they do, fucked if they don’t probably doesn’t improve anything”, and with compassionate understanding tells them to go ahead and side with the Axis if that’s the only way they can have some peace. Does that alternate history work out better for anyone? Even the Norwegians?
John,
Yes, but war is being fucked *in extremis*. We have before us here a real life situation of someone being disinvited to a conference. That is worth talking about. We also have before us here a discussion about ethics — about what is good. That is a good discussion to have.
Some of us are *also* trying to discuss what we would do *in extremis*. Such a discussion can be interesting. But while hard cases make good intuition pumps, they make bad law.
There seems to me to be a line beyond which we are, as it were, at war, with the civil rules understandably going out the window. And it seems to me that many are tempted to draw that line far too early.
Yes, but we also have people saying here that the line has already been crossed, that we are at war, and that their side’s desired end state is for Yarvin to be alone in a room, ostracized from civil society, and stripped of all wealth beyond mere subsistence.
What I’d like to see, what I’ve asked for repeatedly, is a defensible line between “Yarvin can’t speak at Strange Loop”, and that extreme end state. He’s been disinvited from one conference – by a dynamic that seems likely to apply at any other tech conference he might speak at, any job he might apply for, and I expect any product he might try to sell will face the same sort of boycott threat that Mozilla faced when Eich was CEO.
That’s an extremely fucked-up situation. We need a defensible cease-fire line, and none is being offered. If Yarvin comes out of this OK only because his enemies are presently too weak to be 100% successful at denying him professional opportunities, that means we win this battle – it doesn’t mean there isn’t a war.
So it’s not premature to talk about who might be on what side of that war.
Frankly, I get a little tired of the war rhetoric. I just got out of the Army four months ago. I watched one of my gunners shoot an eight-year old kid in the face. The XO’s gunner took a direct mortar hit while he was asleep in his CHU and we spent the next day cleaning guts off his shit so we could send it back to his family. There are worse things happening in the world than people getting laughed at on the Internet and banned from video game forums, or Donald Sterling, who still owns half the City of Los Angeles, not getting to own the Clippers any more.
For what it’s worth, no, the conference organizers were obviously not that fucked. Nothing they could have done, including what they did, was going to result in a country getting invaded, and it doesn’t seem very useful to me to compare their situation to an alternate history where Norway sided with the Nazis.
“Which, I don’t blame people for despising the man. He’s pretty horrible, which is to say his beliefs are horrible.”
But the former didn’t always mean the latter.
I could grant you so much as “x is horrible because his recommendations (to actions) are horrible.” But merely beliefs? We seem to have slingshot-ed away from “virtue ethics”, bounced around abit, and ended up at “badthink ethics.”
Well, frequently beliefs both came from and lead unerringly to actions.
If I believe that people who eat the meat of turkeys are unclean and untouchable whose touch may damn me to eternal fire, that is going to lead to actions on my part. And it won’t be the kind of action that is limited to me not eating turkey. It will be the kind of action where I want certain things to happen to people who do eat turkey. I will want to be protected from them. I will want the right to treat them as a danger to me (because I believe they are).
Strong beliefs are rarely action neutral.
Beliefs may well lead to actions, and I am in favor of generally taking someone at their word. But I don’t think it is fair to be able to either ascibe very much predictive power to expresed beliefes, nor to ascribe moral worth to a person based on it, for at least two reasons.
One (and I realize how silly it is to say this about someone who writes voluminously, but then again, also opaguely) language can be an imperfect expcommunication tool. He doesn’t believe in equality may mean he sees inferior people as beneath consideration, or it could mean he sees himself with an obligation to help those genetically less fortunate. The best way to figure it out is to observe actual behavior, because (short of magic pills) we can’t read minds or predict the future. Second, I think actins speak louder than thoughts because one might have mixed, conflicting views or simply be confused about what one thinks. One might say, when asked, that everyone is perfectly equally lovely, but find themselves avoiding particular sorts. The behavior is what earns them the approval or approbation.
“He’s pretty horrible, which is to say his beliefs are horrible.”
…
“That said, I suspect that his status as a truly terrible person”
Which is it?
One of my colleagues is, I think, responsible for a greater reduction in the utility of the world, more human unhappiness, than anyone else I know, judged by her description of her role in legal changes that she thought good and I think bad. She not only holds bad beliefs, she has to some degree implemented them.
But that doesn’t make her a terrible person, and she isn’t.
Are there any terrible people? What qualifies one?
You have to think
Intelligence is measurable
The current tests work
African Americans and black sub Saharan Africans score worse
It isn’t necessary to think the last factor is caused by genetic (although it obviously doesn’t help).
You can still get away with believing all of those things as long as you qualify it with some belief that discrimination is the problem. Flynn still seems to be respected. It might depend on the audience though. If it’s the writers of Jacobin Magazine, believing the first thing if probably enough to make you evil.
You can think the current weight of evidence seems to suggest all that and it might be true, and still not take the further is-ought leap that then we should exclude black people from leadership roles, it’s perfectly rational and okay for police to preferentially beat the shit out of them, women need to get the fuck back in the kitchen, slavery and colonialism weren’t all that bad, and we need to get back to white monarchy if we want a better world. I really don’t see what’s hard about this distinction. It’s the political stances that are terrible. Darwin and Mengele both believed survival of the fittest was a real thing in nature. What it led them to do with their lives is what makes them different.
You know, I was actually interested in what David might have said there.
I was certainly not interested in having you drop in and spam your talking point on the flimsiest pretext of responding to what I was asking.
Everyone on SSC has been heard what you are saying over and over. It has probably been said a dozen times or more in this very thread. At this point it is not new or novel or interesting. It is not challenging or eye opening, it is not amusing or clever. It is just goddamn noise. Which then reverberates.
Please think a little bit next time and either say something of substance or emit the talking points somewhere else.
Moldbug says nothing about “white monarchy” other than that he thinks it’s stupid for people to care about the race of people in government — he thinks it’s stupid for people to care about any property of the government or the people in it other than its/their ability to provide good governance. He’s clear about this. So why are you attributing this “white monarchy” position to him?
I was about to apologize and say I’ve never read Moldbug and don’t mean to attribute those things to him, but then I re-read my comment and I didn’t attribute those things to him. I just said they’re what makes the difference between scientific race realists and legitimately terrible people. Whether or not this particular person is terrible I don’t know and don’t really care.
To Matt, I actually am sorry to ruin your thread, but that was intended to be a response to Samuel Skinner, not you.
Samuel and Adam–
I regret the peevish tone. It was already a noisy and bickering thread when I came here, I shouldn’t expect too much or get overly annoyed when it is my foot that happens to get stepped on.
“Are there any terrible people? What qualifies one?”
I think there are. I think what qualify someone are not factual beliefs but values, objectives. Someone who wants other people to be unhappy out of malice is, in that respect, a terrible person. Someone who wants other people to be happy, healthy, and wise, and believes the way to achieve that objective is to set up a communist totalitarian system may be dangerous, but not necessarily terrible.
That’s unusual, since it probably exempts some of the historical mass murderers from being terrible people. I imagine you’re OK with that.
Is acquiring wrong ideas so much different from acquiring wrong values? There are a lot of people out there who enjoy being vicious or cruel, but at least with adults I think most of them believe it is justified in some way or another. It’s needed to advance a more important goal, or they are “hitting back first”.
One terrible person I know (by your definition) comes to mind. He’s done a lot of bad stuff. But it’s obvious that he is very, very angry all of the time and I think also very unhappy. I don’t think he thinks of himself as sadistic or vicious, even though he is.
If I enjoy belittling my subordinates, but I don’t admit this to myself, and I really do think I am improving the company with my nastiness, does it still count as malice?
On historical mass murderers, I would say it does depend on their motives. To take an extreme and implausible case, someone who puts poison in a city’s water supply in the false belief that it’s the antidote to the poison he thinks someone else put in is not evil.
For real mass murderers it’s harder. I suspect that some of Mao’s motives were, by my standards, evil, but it’s hard to be certain. Stalin and Hitler are probably clearer cases, even though they killed fewer people.
If part of the reason you enjoy belittling your subordinates is malice, then to that extent you are wicked. If you would really rather treat them nicely but honestly believe that saying hurtful things to them is a necessary means to keep the company, and their livelihood, going, then no.
Fun fact: The more you understand math, the worse social justice looks. Not for any moral or ethical reasons, simply because the justifications made by its proponents are largely antithetical to the Enlightenment values upon which the modern incarnations of mathematics were built. In the mid-1800’s mathematics was a demonstrably useful tool in the natural sciences and engineering, but in many ways it was philosophically a mess. Bolzano was one of the first “purists” insisting upon rigorous definitions divorced from physical reality, making him a critical intellectual seed-planter for the Coq program in the link.
One layer into reality is the physical sciences, which seek to find congruence between the raw ideas of math to approximately predict observable phenomena. With one foot on each side of the line, mathematical physics, which seeks to derive connections between and general insight into the mathematical techniques demonstrating physical predictive utility. Essentially, by driving mathematics into the realm of pure ideas, Bolzano and subsequent thinkers forced the language of science into a realm as objective as any intellectual product of the toils of subjective beings could achieve—which is why there’s a significant contingent of researchers who scoff at mathematical physics: they see it bending the rules to try and make things fit, and it doesn’t help that much of the results therein cannot be verified experimentally.
Way the fuck in the stratosphere, far away from reality, is the postmodern epistemological clusterfuck that is critical theory. Unabashedly draped in social activism, its proponents are concerned primarily with inducing social or political consequences, and often seem convinced that every other field of scholarship have similar priorities. Thus they assert “objectivity” as a justification, not a goal in itself, and feel no compunction mixing and matching hard evidence, fabricated evidence, nonexistent evidence, and outright falsehoods in service of their greater goals. Selectively swelling and dismissing the value of a line of reasoning based upon the author’s relationship to the subject at hand abandons the storied epistemological tradition viewing humanity as one small part of larger whole. They assert “reification” of an idea contingent upon the existence and interpretation of the associated linguistic expression, recklessly reversing the causal arrow and taking a gigantic shit all over the wondrous insight of Bolzanno that underpins this fascinating piece of software.
Respect the Coq. Fuck SJ.
In re dogs and magic tricks: It does seem rather unfair to the dogs. However, I wouldn’t mind seeing how dogs react to food appearing out of nowhere. Also, it was interesting that some of the dogs seemed as much distressed as frustrated at the second link about the floating hot dog.
Two points against the Charles Murray link: I appreciate the summary of Albion’s Seed, but I live in Philadelphia, a fairly large city, and I do keep seeing the same post office clerks again and again, and we’re at least on mildly friendly terms. Not every post office in a big city is huge.
More importantly, when he says that small towns don’t need much oversight, I’m shocked. Hasn’t he heard of Ferguson? It’s conceivable that small town need better targeted oversight than they’re getting– less on the whole, but more intrusive about some things.
BoingBoing on Rickrolling: That link got me to listen to the lyrics. I feel doubly trolled.
iirc, Ferguson is only a small town in nominal terms. It has a high population density and is functionally part of St. Louis. They just declare a new municipality every five feet in Missouri for bizarre zoning/development control reasons.
Also, Ferguson had a lot of population turnover recently.
(Ferguson is under the 20k threshold that Murray suggests.)
In what way did Ferguson need more oversight? I belive racial disparities in arrests were fairly typical there. Open to correction.
Ferguson was using arbitrary fines collected from mostly poor, mostly black people to fund their local government.
Hadn’t heard that before, but doesn’t sound particularly atypical; many cities fund themselves in large part with fines and fees which the poor are more likely to be either ignorant of, or unable to avoid.
The fines were/are essentially kleptocracy. The fines/tickets didn’t serve the purpose of keeping the city safe/enforcing socially good behavior, but rather simply operate in lieu of a sane taxation system.
@HeelBearCub – “The fines were/are essentially kleptocracy. The fines/tickets didn’t serve the purpose of keeping the city safe/enforcing socially good behavior, but rather simply operate in lieu of a sane taxation system.”
…uh, yeah, that still doesn’t sound atypical. I’ve lived in a couple municipalities in Texas that were well-known for working like that. Likewise the dependency of state and federal agencies on asset forfeiture to keep their budgets padded.
Just because something has become typical doesn’t make it OK. The question at hand is does Ferguson (as a small community) support the narrative that small communities need less oversight.
Randy M seems perfectly fine with situation and think it is fine because it is typical. I’m not arguing against its typicality, but its OKness.
Maryland: “Looks like we have a huge budget problem. Time to install speed cameras everywhere!”
Allowing the state to collect fines is not the best of incentives, especially since people always want more state and lower taxes. But it’s only a problem in places where there are a lot of blacks. Doing underhanded shit like that to white people isn’t a problem, because for something to be a problem, there has to be a race/gender/”””sexual orientation””” angle.
Two tangents on fines to fund local government:
1. Kipling has a story about it (“The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat”).
2. It happens in modern China. At some point, operating an automobile in Beijing required payment of eleven different fees.
Actually, there a lot of complaint about speed cameras as a recent generation mechanism in the UK. Absent a race or gender angle.
Hampton, Florida was a town of a few hundred that managed to annex a few feet of a nearby highway and proceeded to milk speeding drivers for what they were worth.
This only went so far before drivers started complaining, and it turned out that the town had no financial controls to speak of and the fines just went into various government officials’ pockets. Oh, and the mayor was busted selling pain meds. Even for Florida this was a bit much.
“Allowing the state to collect fines is only a problem in places where there are a lot of blacks. Doing underhanded shit like that to white people isn’t a problem, because for something to be a problem, there has to be a race/gender/”sexual orientation””” angle.”
I thought you were sane?
HeelBearCub thinks our federal government will be more even handed and has the resources to give oversight to every municipality. I am amused on both counts.
Unless we were talking about oversight from the town citizens? I totally agree people need to be more involved in local politics.
Checks and Balances.
Re: Murry, Haidt speculated that less bureaucratized community built on interpersonal bonds, traditional authority, and religion might work well for most people, but fails people on the margins, such as racial and sexual minorities, people who’d prefer ad less traditional role, or people who are abused by their traditional authority figures.
For example, look at this Cracked article (Huge trigger warning regarding sexual violence):
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1440-5-things-i-learned-as-sex-slave-in-modern-america.html
While the piece is mostly about alleged personal experiences, when it wanders into statistics they include the usual red flag BS ones, and the whole story really sounds too much like the lurid, sensationalistic narratives of the anti-prostitution crowd to be believable. It’s possible that awful things happened to her that she’s embellished to bring closer to the anti-prostitution narrative (children being exploited by their parents is certainly believable, and perhaps she just tacked on the bits about the fictional multi-billion dollar international child prostitution conspiracies), but it’s also possible it’s all fiction (that’s certainly not unheard of in this area, sadly).
There are certain clues that the story is too perfect, like the fact that it checks a suspicious number of boxes of “things these activists fight against”. Considering this, the site it’s on, and previous experiences, I give over 50% probability that it’ll turn out to be a “composite character”.
(but I’m biased, including because I read the article immediately after reading your comment)
I read the story before his comment, and had the same reaction. Having read something of the opsec measures the kidde-porn community has to take to avoid being trivially rolled up by the FBI, a group of actual white slavers operating as openly as that article described – advertising on public web sites with “everybody knows wink wink” codewords, would be out of business and behind bars in their first year. The pricing structure feels off, as well, but that’s less certain.
Even the author’s personal story has inconsistencies that I’d like to see explained, like why a teenager groomed from birth to be a sex slave and sold into that position by her parents has her own car (or even knows how to drive one). Maybe I can cut her some slack on that; idiosyncracies happen and memory is fallible. But her description of the wider conspiracy, of which she can have at best limited firsthand knowledge, is not plausible.
The author does describe significant opsec for when her mother was selling. Apparently there were long chats with plenty of codewords before anything happened. If she was 6, she probably wouldn’t be aware of all the measures taken.
Also, regardless of how large a problem sex slavery and human trafficking is, the point of the link was the personal relations cutting through impersonal bureaucracy system that Charles Murray talked up completely failed this person. Even if you disbelieve this account, look at the sitiuation with the Duggars, where repeatedly sexual abuse of minors was brushed under the rug by the patriarch, aided and abetted by local officials and law enforcement.
If the point is how the local bureaucracy lets abusive parents and abused children slip through the cracks, that’s maybe a story that should be told. But it should be told without the patently implausible story of a vast international white slaver conspiracy wrapped around it. And yes, it is implausible. Conducting your slave trading on a public website in pig latin, which the author claims to have done herself when she was on the far side of sixteen, not six, is not the opsec that keeps the FBI from rolling up your network.
I mean, “UVA Jackie” may well have been done wrong in some way by a Phi Kappa Psi upperclassman. Throwing in the seven gang-raping pledges with the beer bottle and the broken glass, didn’t help her case. “Anonymous Sex Slave”, was very likely horribly abused by her parents and their friends, let down by the local authorities, and left feeling she had no choice but to become a prostitute. And as with Jackie, I don’t care any more, because I don’t know how much is real and how much she made up to pull my strings.
Hey, today’s article from the WaPo Fact Checker is about some of these bad human trafficking statistics (including links to previous articles on the topic).
Highlights:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/06/11/the-dubious-claim-that-on-average-girls-first-become-victims-of-sex-trafficking-at-13-years-old/
One commenter on the second video pointed out that the dogs were probably reacting to the humans’ bizarre body language rather than to the hot dog floating.
Our host investigated this sort of thing with exceptional thoroughness a while back. TL,DR version: American cops, prosecutors, et al are for the most part not racists out to stick it to black folks. But boy, howdy, do they have it in for poor folks, who happen to be disproportionately black in most cities.
Factor which may work in favor of net positive effect of open borders:
Maybe the goodness of good institutions becomes, to some extent, self-evident to those who live with them.
Missing talking point re: Baltimore. If police doing their normal jobs in these communities are the only difference between no murders and TONS OF MURDERS, it suggests that police activity is an enormous net positive for Baltimore’s poor minorities. Doesn’t mean abuses are OK, but certainly seems like a different background context than we usually hear.
When has Baltimore ever had no murders?
Uh is the factual content of the link text that crime “skyrocket”ed in dispute?
Actually, I haven’t seen anything that gives any sort of detail to the “skyrocket” claim. The linked article only states one number with no context at all.
No, the dispute is with what you said, that police doing their normal jobs is the difference between no murder and tons of murders. The rep in the article doesn’t even give a consistent account. On the one hand, he says police aren’t arresting anybody because they’re afraid of getting in trouble. But earlier, he says any time they arrive at a scene, they’re immediately surrounded by 30 to 50 people. If the latter is true, then sure, a city with continued rioting in which police cannot do anything at all is surely even worse than a city with overzealous racist police, but there are intermediate options between those two things.
Are there?
That’s not snark, I’m honestly not sure. It certainly seems like the reverse is true, at least anecdotally: I have never seen or heard of a police reform which didn’t substantially tilt the balance of power towards criminals.
The current situation re: crime and police abuse is appalling and unprecedented. But the solution of weakening the police only works if crime can be contained through other mechanisms. That has yet to be demonstrated.
Even if we find it morally repugnant (for a number of reasons), it’s not a bad attempt at a controlled experiment by the police officers.
Basically, “You think we cause net harm to your community? Fine. We’ll go away and let’s see what happens.”
Another one: isn’t it more likely that they’re thinking “if we show our faces, we’ll get lynched”?
That seemed to be what the police rep was saying, about officers getting swarmed by a mob anywhere they go, which I don’t think very manner would advocate as a sane means of enforcing police neutrality.
Baltimore still has a pretty high murder rate, right now is just a lot higher than normal.
” But earlier, he says any time they arrive at a scene, they’re immediately surrounded by 30 to 50 people. ” – this is an exaggeration. I haven’t seen it happen once and the police are always patrolling where I live. It was happening as much as they claim, they would be able to release dash cam video or offer some proof.
Right now I don’t think it’s neither narrative or the police can’t do they job because they are scared or they aren’t doing their job. I believe it’s a drug war going on. It appears that people are being executed; no shootouts, headshots, etc.
I have no particular reason to believe this is in fact happening; but surely the fact that it isn’t happening in your particular part of the city is not evidence that it isn’t happening elsewhere?
No discussion of the Moldbug/Strange Loop controversy would be complete without a link to Moldbug’s offer to recant.
I like how he’s framing this so that the truth of what is going on, and the injustice that is being perpetrated against him, is impossible to miss.
“But recanting is a serious matter – it’s the sort of thing you need to get right the first time.”
Ah Moldbug. Its really a shame he doesn’t blog anymore. He’d be fun to read even if I disagreed with him.
I found that smarmy and annoying.
Also… I know I shouldn’t use stupid Bingo card logic, but it’s impossible to resist. There’s a Crackpot Index and comparing yourself to Galileo scores you pretty big points. It’s a little different from the usual, and it’s not revolutionary new physics theories, but still.
You may now tell me off for being a bad bad person. I admit it.
This is probably the least appropriate place ever to use bingo card logic! http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html
Indeed.
Although, come to think of it, is reaching for one of Scott’s essays in this way our own version of Bingo carding?
Nah… we’re pointing to actual arguments, and would hopefully be open to discussing the merits of counterarguments.
To be fair, when crackpots compare themselves to Galileo, they usually do so in a favorable fashion: “They persecuted Galileo, but look, he was totally right ! And now they are persecuting me, that means I’m right too !”
Moldbug, on the other hand, is doing so in a self-deprecating fashion. He’s saying, “Galileo was perfectly willing to say whatever the powers that be wanted him to say, just in order to survive in society; I’m willing to do the same thing. Yes, this may not be brave or honorable, but if the alternative is to be burned at the stake like Bruno, then screw it, I’m signing on the dotted line”.
I believe the classic rebuttal to the crackpot is “They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
Which always seemed unfair to Bozo, who deliberately solicited laughter rather than unintentionally earning it.
@ fj
Being laughed at isn’t conclusive evidence for either side. Bayesianly, Wright Brothers are rare. But when one of them is right, the result is very important. The odder a claim sounds, the more important it may be — after being laughed at more loudly.
Some people want to rename Columbus Day to something more PC*. I’d like to rename it Queen Isabella Day, in honor of funding crackpot research that brings big unexpected results.
*Sheesh, I probably get counted as part of a Rightist dogpile** for using that term. But, ‘epidemic’, ‘SJW’, ‘PC’, ‘Homeopathic’, ‘Woo’, etc are part of how language evolves.***
** I have no idea what ‘attacked hard’ meant in the original comment. But like other Leftists, around here I usually keep my head down for … similar reasons. I’d call it ‘being dogpiled’, except that would be stretching ‘dogpiled’.
*** I’ll defend my use of ‘evolves’ and other footnotes if invited. “Let’s step out to the left side of the screen, buddy.”
I’m willing to give even more license than normal for smarminess and annoyingness when the perpetrator was barred from giving a talk on his new computing system for his unrelated political views. Given how seriously you usually take these kinds of cases, I’m surprised that’s your reaction.
…
Never mind. Spam filter hates me. Can’t comment.
Yes. However, as far as I’ve seen, there’s little by way of evidence that variation in gut flora is causal to phenotypic variation, rather than itself being just another result of said variation. However, this arena holds a lot of promise for future discovery.
Those people are crazy. They don’t see the obvious flaw in extrapolating from the fact that smart Third Worlders earn more in First World countries to conclude that the same would continue to be true if the bulk of the Third World moved to the First?
There is rather incontrovertible evidence on this point: poverty and wealth, particularly in today’s world, is endogenous. People are the source. Move the people, you simply move their conditions with them (a few marginal changes notwithstanding – but Gregory Clark’s work shows that even the supposed productivity boost that immigrants experience still has them end up fairly constant in rank-order from their place of origin to their new locations.)
Absolutely not. Any such putative sexually antagonistic genes would be quite easy to find in GWAS studies. Such studies have turned up none. See the discussion indexed here:
Greg Cochran’s “Gay Germ” Hypothesis – An Exercise in the Power of Germs | JayMan’s Blog
As for female same-sex attraction, the best suspicion is that its roughly selectively neutral. See here:
Female Same-Sex Attraction Revisited | JayMan’s Blog
See also of course:
American Nations Series | JayMan’s Blog
The rank order thing seems much less interesting than you think. Consider Maoist China. It was a hellhole. Consider non-Maoist China. It is rich and powerful and approaching First World living standards. All the open borders advocates are saying is that instead of waiting for China to become non-Maoist, we could have had the Chinese go over to places that were already non-Maoist.
Doesn’t that lead to something like 90% of the world’s population living in 10% of its habitable land, with 90% of the planet given over to the failed states that come when oppressive regimes can no longer find enough oppressees to keep the machinery running? And, since some of the 10% will do better than the rest at dealing with the massive influx, with 99/1 in the next generation’s self-sorting?
If the plan is that we then go knock over the failed states and set up our own institutions around the mostly-empty globe, then what you are essentially proposing is a calculated multi-generational plan for world conquest by NATO. So let’s talk about what the optimal timescale for shifting to the “conquest” phase should actually be, and how the targets of this plan are likely to react in any event.
Otherwise, you’re ceding the globe to tyranny and then anarchy, and hoping we won’t be utterly swamped by the refugees.
I think America having open borders would actually help the people who stayed in countries with worse governments than our own because it would introduce an element of competition for citizenry. Unless they go the opposite route and forbid emigration, like North Korea.
Imagine if anyone from Haiti were free to work and live in the US so long as they can get here. Haiti would empty out very rapidly at first, but the politicians there might actually start to suck less when they realize that their entire tax base is going to evaporate if they don’t start sucking less.
If we could somehow get all the nations of the world to have open borders simultaneously that would be better, but much less plausible.
Why Haiti and not Cuba? For almost 50 years, US policy has been that essentially any Cuban who makes it to the US coast is entitled to permanent residency, and hundreds of thousands of Cubans have taken advantage of this. Do you see any improvement in Cuban government or institutions that you would attribute to this factor?
I honestly am not familiar enough with the history of Cuba to say, but it wouldn’t surprise me if, in an alternate universe in which fleeing Cubans were sent back to Cuba, the Cuban government were even worse.
This has been tried and it doesn’t work. Puerto Rico did empty out. Equilibrium was achieved by receiving lots of money from the mainland.
(A lot more Cubans would leave if it were legal.)
When did Puerto Rico empty out? Census numbers seem to show steady, mostly double-digit growth decade-by-decade through 2000.
(Since then there’s been a ~2 percent drop, which doesn’t suggest a mass exodus.)
Edit: ninja’d, and evidently exposed as an unoriginal thinker.
That argument would seem to apply more towards pro-British colonialism than pro-immigration though, given that Deng was in large part looking out the metaphorical window at Hong Kong and Singapore’s successful capitalist economies instead of at, say, Chinese-Americans in California.
Besides, even if Mao had decided to let everyone leave, who is supposed to take on more than a billion Chinese refugees? That’s what the issue is now: if everyone can immigrate freely as a ‘refugee from poverty’ as it were, then what do you do with the hundreds of millions of new Americans? Why not emulate the Chinese transition to capitalism and improve their homelands instead?
Mao did, in fact, offer Nixon as many Chinese as he wanted, in blocks of 10 million.
Indeed. Isn’t open borders really just benevolent colonialism, anyway? The important thing is that they live under Western rule; the only point of disagreement seems to be whether to bring them to the West or bring the West to them.
And annexation does, at least, trivially solve the problem of where all the new residents are supposed to live.
Well, there is the fact of how voluntary it is (which is why I didn’t make this same point after seeing the two issues juxtaposed in this thread).
All the economic analysis forgets basic tribalism. As you well know, Scott, humans are built to ingroup/outgroup. The simple fact is, that a group of people who have an identity together are going to want to keep that grouping distinct and keep others out. You can wish people weren’t like this, but they are. Personally, I think the ethnic nation-state is probably the largest possible stable “tribe”. Being multi-ethnic brings many advantages, but just as many problems. And ending states? Good luck. Borders are what make nations. It is the whole point. As a thought experiment, open borders is interesting. As policy, it is hilarious.
China had a gdp pretty capita about 1/3 that of Mexico’s. It’s no where near first world standards
So let me see if I understand how GWAS applies here.
Your argument is that while heterozygote advantage & sexual antagonistic selection may have complicated nonlinear genetic-to-reproductive-fitness relationships where maybe a little is better than more or less or effects vary by gender, but still under both theories there should necessarily be a simple additive relationship from more of a particular variant to greater likelihood of being homosexual. (Is this based on the general observation that most genetics is additive, or do the twin studies specifically prove that the small heritability must be mostly additive?)
And that 23andMe GWAS finds no statistically-significant hits despite claimed high power to detect important additive variants; so we can infer from the absence of evidence that there probably are no important additive variants, hence no important variants, hence neither heterozygote advantage nor sexual antagonistic selection.
Is that right?
and worry that if we import many of their citizens here, then they might bring whatever factors made their country terrible to the First World and make our countries terrible.
So, like Californians?
(Not in the “third world” aspect, but in the “moving and bringing terrible policy ideas with them” aspect.
It’s a standard subject of mockery in Arizona and Colorado, and has been for decades in Oregon and Washington.
Exactly how true it is is hard to quantify, of course.)
It seems pretty damn untrue. California has been an extremely successful state.
Maybe if organizers know that banning all insufficiently-leftist-people and not banning all insufficiently-leftist-people will both result in politicization and Internet firestorms, they’ll say “screw it” and just follow their principles.
Additional bonus – if this behavior becomes widespread and usual, the politicization stops.
Incentives matter, as the economists say.
When politicization stops being a winning strategy, it will stop happening.
…so the gay-male-has-fecund-female-gene thing sorta explains* the well-known “younger brothers are more likely to be gay” thing (*I have no quantitative knowledge about these effects; maybe it doesn’t explain all of it). To be a younger brother, your mother had to be on the more-fecund side.
Family size is an obvious thing to control for, and I would be, I guess not shocked, but certainly a bit surprised if they hadn’t thought to control for it.
…I finally actually clicked through to the abstract and they thought of the point in my parent post. Skimming the paper, though, I don’t think they controlled for family size.
My understanding was that younger brothers are more likely than older brothers to be gay, controlling for family size. In other words, given that a family has 3 sons, the 2nd is more likely to be gay than the 1st, and the 3rd more likely than either. But the 1st son is not significantly more likely to be gay than an only son in a one-son family.
You seem to be thinking “all sons in multiple son families are more likely than only sons to be gay”. Which is not quite the same thing.
Were you guys aware that when a gay man has an identical twin, that twin is typically sexually discordant (ie, not gay)?
That seems a pretty strong indicator that male homosexuality has an environmental trigger, rather than a genetic one.
And yet we have no idea what that trigger is. Given that homosexuality has existed in some form in a massive range of societies separated by both time and location, it seems hard to narrow it down. Perhaps there is a hidden environmental connection between Sudanese gay activists, Elton John and King James I, but if there is, I can’t see it.
It’s interesting how the open borders piece keeps using the word “smart” to mean “high human capital”, as if intelligence were the only component of human capital that might generate externalities.
Yes, that grated on me as well. And a large fraction of his target audience is I think primed to reject anything that hints at IQ as a discriminator between classes of humanity, so this may have been tactically unwise as well as annoying and inaccurate.
I sympathize with the desire to give into that to avoid trouble, but I think maybe the only way to avoid enshrining that kind of heckler’s veto always working is to make it clear that the choice to give in will also be politicized.
I think there was a major game theory book that pointed out that making it a crime to give into blackmail can protect potential blackmail victims.
Similar: my idea to make yielding to terrorist threats a capital crime.
Sounds like Schelling, but I don’t have it on me to check.
Schelling absolutely gives that example, as well as an old law in England making it punishable by death to pay ransom/tribute to pirates.
Of course, there’s also the Walter Block theory in “Defending the Undefendable” which states that blackmailers add positive value to society by giving those with dirty secrets additional flexibility in deciding whether or not their secrets are exposed.
It’s the blackmail paradox; we’re technically better off in a one round game by letting blackmail exist because both parties are better off for the transaction… but you create a perverse incentive to hunt down dirty secrets that others have and then blackmail people for them, which is just rent seeking.
It’s one step more complicated. You also create an incentive for people not to do things they would be ashamed of having known, or likely to get locked up for, because other people have an incentive to find out about it in order to blackmail them. From that standpoint, blackmail looks rather like a decentralized private system of criminal enforcement—good or bad according to your view of the rules it enforces.
My complaint about Walter’s article is that, as best I recall, he ignores the incentive to find out secrets effect in the first half, where it undermines his argument (since it means the victim may be worse off as a result of blackmail being legal) and then discovers it in the second half where it supports the argument he is making there.
How is that giving me flexibility? I have a secret that, for whatever reason, I don’t want my family and/or my superiors and/or society at large to know. Now, whether or not it’s a criminal secret may affect if it’s a good idea for a third party to have knowledge of it, but someone calling to see me and saying “I know all about X, if you don’t pay me this amount every month, I will tell all” is not flexibility, it’s coercion.
No blackmailer:
Choices – I tell my secret. Result: my secret is revealed.
I don’t tell my secret. Result: my secret is kept.
Blackmailer:
Choices – I reveal the secret before the blackmailer can reveal it – depending on what the secret is and how big an effect it will have on my life, this could be the nuclear option. Result: my secret is revealed.
I tell the blackmailer go ahead, I won’t pay, tell all – the Duke of Wellington’s “publish and be damned”. Result: my secret is revealed.
I want to keep my secret secret and I can afford to pay the monthly sum. Result: my secret is kept.
I want to keep my secret secret but I can’t afford to pay – it gets revealed (or I try murdering the blackmailer, which probably gets it revealed anyway in the long run when I’m arrested for murder). Result: my secret is revealed.
Blackmail being legal or the existence of blackmailers seems to mean more likelihood of secrets coming out, and not by free choice but by coerced actions. Even when a crime is involved, a blackmailer is not a whistleblower; the blackmailer is happy to profit by my crime (after all, if I’m locked away in jail, I can’t pay the hush money every month). If the blackmailer reveals wrongdoing, the positive effect for society (real criminals are discovered and punished) only comes about by accident. I don’t see it as discouraging people from doing things that could later be used for blackmail, because we’re all young and stupid at some point (e.g. the modern example of girls sending naked photos of themselves to boyfriends and then being horrified when these end up for public consumption) or we get into situations that go out of control or we’re unlucky or we are sometimes really bad people who do really bad things.
You’re assuming “blackmailer” is an, er, black-and-white categorization.
Consider a marginal blackmailer. A person not already favorably predisposed to you, who stumbles upon your dirty secret. Dirty secrets are gossip-worthy, and any decent gossip has social value to whoever spreads it first. Keeping dirty secrets is shameful – not as shameful as the underlying act, usually, but if the first person to discover the truth doesn’t blab, they risk collateral damage should some later discoverer go public and the circumstances make clear that the first one had known all along.
If blackmail is effectively proscribed, the person who stumbles upon your dirty secret, tells all. The benefit to them is small, the risk to them instead keeping the secret may be small, but that’s balanced against no benefit to keeping your secret and no risk in revealing it.
Your dirty secret is revealed. You have no choice.
If blackmail is an available option, your dirty secret may or may not be revealed. You have a choice, even if not a free one.
Now, this is balanced against the fact that legal blackmail will encourage people to seek out your dirty secrets, rather than limiting your concern to people who might stumble across them. So I doubt it’s a net benefit in that regard. But the argument of increased choice isn’t entirely spurious.
Keeping a secret second-hand is only harmful to you if the secret is criminal (e.g. if it is later discovered you knew Tom Thumb was a swindler, murderer or rapist and never said). Indeed that’s where the whole impetus for laws about mandatory disclosure are coming in for teachers, etc. who have suspicions of child abuse and don’t contact the relevant authorities.
If, on the other hand, the dirty secret is that X who is married to Y is having an affair with Z, the collateral damage is much smaller; Y may be angry or distressed you never told them, but it’s not a criminal matter.
I don’t necessarily see gossip as the same thing as blackmail. For blackmail to be blackmail, the second party who stumbles across the secret has to threaten the person whose secret it is with revelation of the secret unless some item or act of value is paid to the blackmailer.
Susie telling Jenny who tells Annie who tells Winona that Mary has a crush on Tom may be embarrassing for Mary, and may even have an ill effect on her social standing in the group if Winona is Tom’s girlfriend, but it’s hardly blackmail unless Susie goes to Mary and threatens to tell Winona she’s trying to steal her man, unless Mary hands over her lunch money every day.
Also, re: blackmail being proscribed – and if you include gossip in the category of blackmail – we do proscribe it under the heading of confidentiality. Scott finds out embarrassing dirty little secrets about people as part of his job. Hell, so do I, and I don’t even want to know them. I’ve referred to some of them on here before, but only because (a) I’m not naming names (b) the majority of you are thousands of miles away (c) I hope it’s not in the spirit of gossip but rather as evidence of “this kind of stuff happens”.
I recently during the working week learned another juicy horrible dirty little secret. If I go around telling it to people in the neighbourhood, the benefit to me is small but the risk is indeed great – risk of losing my job and being sued for slander by the person and all other consequences of breaking confidentiality.
There may be no benefit to me in keeping their secret (and indeed, if Social Services were any damn good, they should know this type of thing already, or we should be free to tell them) but the risks are more than small.
Should we do away with client/doctor, client/lawyer, client/public services confidentiality in the spirit of not proscribing blackmail?
“I don’t necessarily see gossip as the same thing as blackmail.”
The point isn’t that gossip is the same thing as blackmail. It’s that one possible benefit of blackmail is that it permits someone to pay $100 to the blackmailer in order to prevent him from spreading gossip that would otherwise cost the equivalent of $200 in reputational or other damage.
Shooting from the hip on the depression thing: are treatments less effective across the board, or are they still as effective in some cases but ineffective in a growing number of cases? If the latter, perhaps what’s been changing is what cases are diagnosed as depression.
Peter Watts recently posted a (very) short story that seems highly relevant to the AI-risk crowd: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5968
The core thesis is that sufficiently high-bandwidth links between brains would act similarly to the corpus callosum, causing them to coalesce into a single intelligence. Assuming this is possible, I believe that the first superhuman intelligence will likely be composed of networked human brains and not silicon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
I don’t know much neuroscience, but I think the corpus callosum is collections between lots and lots of individual neurons. It’s not just a single wire connecting Relay Station 1 on the right to Relay Station 2 on the left.
I’m not sure how technology would duplicate that without some way of connecting billions of neurons individually to a wireless communications implant. That sounds really hard.
it would require something like the network of thousands of 100-micron passive sensors proposed in this
recently publishedtwo year old paper “Neural Dust: An Ultrasonic, Low Power Solution for Chronic Brain-Machine Interfaces” It’s summarized (quite well) here: http://upgrade.io9.com/neural-dust-is-a-step-towards-nexus-806802917.I can’t find any more recently published works by the authors, but assuming steady progress in micro or nano-scale fabrication I expect that similar systems will become feasible within the next few decades. The proposed neural dust would consist of passive sensors, but nodes with read/write capability are certainly possible. I expect it to arrive at approximately the same time as the first human-level AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAicTW7MGo
2013 lecture by Watts on networked minds which also digs into the split brain question. He seems to suggest in this one that a hive mind comprised of multiple networked brains wouldn’t be conscious because signal propagation time would preclude self awareness, a point he also makes in a throwaway line in Echopraxia regarding distributed AIs.
So if I understood it correctly, it has millions of regular human brains suddenly linked into one huge neural network for 21 seconds, and this results in a burst of superintelligence that manages to do a bunch of Getting Out Of The Box engineering before someone pulls the plug. Let’s assume the big connection somehow works as advertised, the brains can actually do some meaningful wide-scale communication right away through some kind of interfaces that have already learned each user’s personal idiosyncratic neural patterns and so on.
Every human brain is still running at a clock speed of somewhere under 100 Hz. The newborn hive mind is going to be one hell of a pattern recognizer and random association trip, but any new sequential thinking it’s going to do is going to have less than 2000 iterations to run before the plug is pulled. You can do something with that, but you’re not going to do the sort of iterative planning you need to design and launch a swarm of AI software agents. Making something like that is going to take a lot of cycles of coming up with a partial design, evaluating it and refining it, and that’s going to involve working off your earlier mind state. I don’t see how any brain could do anything at all with what it learned from the meld experience before the next neuron firings, so the whole mess would probably have to take quite a while longer to get its hivemind superintelligence legs.
Ooh, now that’s a clever, evil thought. Plausible.
Another factor is, there’s a lot of overhead to meaningfully initializing a million-node network, and I don’t know that it can be done ab initio in 2000 clock cycles. Sure, 2^20 ~= 1E6, so with a perfectly efficient binary tree you’ve got twenty cycles to send out the problem and twenty to collate the answer(s), only 2% of your time.
But that’s assuming the network is fully mapped before startup, the optimized software is up and running, the problem and each node’s role in solving it can fit into a single word or packet, etc, etc. If you’re burning 2% of your “lifespan” every time you do a simple ping-response across the distributed brain, you may not get much thinking done with even a million brains of raw meaty computronium.
On the other hand, as you note, maybe someone is inclined to leave precoded “and here’s how you bootstrap a megabrain in under a dozen ticks” routines lying around in hopes of a few crumbs of singularity-level reward…
Yeah, I imagine if a group wanted to create a hive-mind AI, then a resource like a huge, linking in brains and giving them virtual worlds to play in, network already set up would be catnip to them.
All(!) they need to do is go online in a group together, make a plan about how they’ll override the safeties, and what they’ll do from there – including the “here’s one we made earlier: how to bootstrap yourself to AI godhood” caches of information already embedded in previous trips online.
Good point, but in the linked story the brains were already connected to an optionally shared VR gaming/media environment. Those brains would already have access to whatever protocol that VR environment was using as a sort of base channel.
Also, central control may not be required. Network brains probably suck at emulating traditional computing environments, but it’s possible that something more distributed could still do useful work. (Baseless speculation disclaimer on this paragraph, though)
So, overall, on a scale of 0 to 9, where 0 is, “maybe just don’t live with cats while pregnant, if it’s not too inconvenient,” and 9 is, “GAS THE CATS, PET WAR NOW!”
…how much of a concern is Toxoplasma, really?
Current risk of schizophrenia is 1% per person, study finds an OR of 1.5, ORs are terrible but sometimes you can approximate them as RR, so that would mean there’s an absolute risk of +0.5% schizophrenia from having a cat.
That’s not nothing, but probably not worth holding a jihad over either.
God wills it!
Getting a little bit meta utilitarian here, we don’t know the apparent connection is real and non-negligible. We do know that losing a cat causes pain to the people who loved it.
I kind of don’t blame that guy for not reading Mencius Moldbug. I have tried more than once and I just find him incredibly dull.
Actually, I find him tiresome very much because he has this tendency to spend decades demolishing the irrational and emotional attacks his opponents could make, and then, after you’ve read through his 2000 word essay on why white nationalism is unlikely to cause global warming, you finally get to some bog-standard thing that any halfway competent opponent could mount a substantive argument against, AND to boot it’s an argument that other people have made with clarity and charm, rather than buried in some kind of impenetrable word-cocoon.
What I’m saying is that I really, really sympathize with anybody who hasn’t read him; I mean, I don’t understand who his enemies are, because I can’t fathom how anybody tolerates him long enough to even reach the point of disagreeing with him.
THAT SAID, I am amazed at how scared people are these days of expressing judgement. Everybody has political views and the right to express them. Now, I sympathize with a curator who says “The political views of our participants are irrelevant to the proceedings here”, but I can also sympathize with somebody who believes certain views are beyond the pale; perhaps the views of Neo-Nazis, or ISIS sympathizers, or whatever.
What you can’t do is pass the buck. Whoever got mad at Moldbug also holds a lot of controversial opinions, and Moldbug’s fans, as well as free speech types, are going to push back. You can make whatever decision you want, but you won’t succeed at pretending you haven’t made a decision.
Incidentally, all that aside, for somebody who doesn’t know Moldbug’s writings, what’s he said that’s actually so bad? I just can’t dig through his writing anymore. That thing about why he’s not a white nationalist flirts with white nationalism in a cutesy way but he never quite puts his opinion into plain language.
edited to remove a paragraph and make it a little less ironic that I’m dissing Moldbug for talking too much.
Judgment is for adults, and we are a culture obsessed with never becoming one.
As to the rest, the political winds shift. I find Moldbug interesting, but not enough to finish any of his writings. Christ he does bang on. In that respect however, he reminds me of Marx or Hegel, always the passion for detail, always sure yet vague. Always clearly smart but so confused in delivery most people will claim to know what he was talking about rather than admit he stopped making sense.
The left has stagnated. Political innovation will belong to the right for the next several decades, Darwin have mercy on our non-souls.
I would have no problem with banning Nazis or ISIS. But the problem is that these days on Twitter anyone can be called a Nazi or ISIS. I would not be surprised to find out that there are left-wing people on internet who have called even Scott a Nazi sympathizer or an ISIS sympathizer. These labels are used extremely cheaply these days. All you have to do is to disagree with some left-wing person on internet about some trivial detail, and you are “literally” Hitler.
It’s no longer “someone on the internet is wrong and I will spend the whole night arguing against them”, but it is “someone on the internet is literally Hitler and I will spend the whole night organizing my comrades to make them fired from their job”. Doing as much harm as possible has somehow became the default left-wing reaction to any argument they don’t like (which is pretty much anything).
In the country of my childhood, this is what would happen to Moldbug — He would spend a few hours questioned by the communist gestapo-equivalent; maybe tortured to confess what other people with similar opinions he knows. After a phone call, his blog would be immediately deleted by the server owner. He would be fired from his job, and never allowed to get any job that requires being “trustworthy”. His children would not be allowed to study at university, and his relatives would not be allowed to travel to other countries.
This whole story to me shows that communists are always the same; the difference is only how much power they have, and how much damage they can do to people who disagree with them. Banning Moldbug from a conference is as much as they can legally do, so this is what they do. If they would be in a position to legally kidnap him and torture him, I don’t see any evidence why they wouldn’t. In countries where they were allowed to do similar things, they did.
Yeah, but here in the country that isn’t the country of your birth, he’s doing quite well and just doesn’t get to speak at a conference, and Donald Sterling and Brendan Eich are still going to die billionaires.
Brendan Eich is not a billionaire. No one made a billion dollars off of Netscape. Marc Andreessen didn’t make a billion from Netscape and hasn’t been able as a VC to turn the money he did make into a billion. And Eich isn’t Andreessen. He was pre-IPO, but barely.
(Marc Andreessen probably was a paper billionaire at some point.)
Yeah, fair enough. I’m not sure Donald Sterling is actually a billionaire, but the point he owns many, many productive assets that are not the Clippers and kicking him out of one rich guy’s club is a lot less horrible than disallowing him from all clubs, and preventing Brendan Eich from being a CEO isn’t nearly as bad as preventing him from being employed at all.
For the record, I fully support kicking Sterling out of all clubs, period. He was a rotten person for decades who abused his tenants and the City of Los Angeles. Eich, not so much. He seemed like a decent enough guy perfectly well-qualified to run a company. But I’m not crying for either of them.
I’ll have to disagree with you there. Being CEO requires the ability to communicate effectively and earn the respect and trust of others. Eich’s incoherent sputtering in response to the boycott convinced me he had no business running anything bigger than a one-man consultancy.
Shame he couldn’t have stayed on as Mozilla CTO though.
Really? Is there something he could have said that would have indicated to you that he was a good CEO?
Hell if I know, but I know what he did say was the opposite of whatever that is.
(I know that’s not a very rational thing to say, but this is about “people skills” and people are often irrational. Rationalism has its limits.)
Do we really need to explain why “he has lots of money, therefore he’s doing OK, therefore we didn’t really hurt him, therefore it was OK for us to do what we did to him”, is a loathsome attitude? Do you really think that a person sitting alone in a room whom no one will ever talk to, approximately the state that Donald Sterling’s critics would like to reduce him to, is doing “OK” if there are enough digits on his bank-account balance?
Forget loathsome: do you think it is strategically wise to announce to everyone in the world with more money than you, that you consider them either fair game or acceptable collateral damage on account of their wealth? Do you think you can defeat them all, or do you imagine that they will not treat you with the organized contempt with which you treat them?
That’s not my attitude, though. My attitude is that it’s not a big deal some dude can’t speak at a conference. It’s not like anybody is going to not buy his product if it does what he says it does. It’s certainly not morally equivalent to throwing him in the gulag and torturing him. Look at what I was replying to.
> Forget loathsome: do you think it is strategically wise to announce to everyone in the world with more money than you, that you consider them either fair game or acceptable collateral damage on account of their wealth? Do you think you can defeat them all, or do you imagine that they will not treat you with the organized contempt with which you treat them?
That would only be relevant if he was targeting them because they had money. When people say “he’s still rich” they generally mean “unfortunately we can’t fix the fact that he’s still rich”. At least that’s what I mean when I say it.
Since a reply like this always loops around to “But what if they do it to you!” I will say that society owes everyone (horrible people included) basic dignities like food, shelter, medical care, access to information and freedom of movement (this list will likely expand as technology progresses); but the ability to earn large amounts of money or force people listen to your ideas are not on that list.
Hell, I’m not even targeting him at all, and I’m not sure Curtis Yarvin even has more money than me. I don’t even personally think he should be banned from this conference or that he’s a generally harmful person. I just meant exactly what I said. It’s not a huge injustice that will do him material harm.
Sterling, on the other hand. Yeah, there is no place for him in polite society.
“forcing people to listen”
Do you really think this is an appropriate description of these controversies?
People seem to go comically out of their way to find things to “not being forced to listen” to…
@Cauê
That was in reply to “sitting alone in a room whom no one will ever talk to”, if noone wants to talk to him then then yes he can live his life alone. Ability to share ideas to willing listeners is covered under “free access to information”.
I did look at what you were replying to; perhaps you should do the same. There were no gulags mentioned. Torture was a “maybe”, and brief. What was threatened, was ostracism and unpersonhood.
And, “some dude can’t speak at a conference”? Please explain to me what is unique about this conference, that the same dynamic won’t apply at any other conference Yarvin or Eich might speak at, any other job they might hold. “It’s not like anybody is going to not buy his product…”? Tell that to Eich and Mozilla, who faced explicit boycotts over the issue.
And that’s assuming the product can even be developed in an environment where anyone who codes for one of Them will never code for Us, and Us dominates the tech industry.
Eich and Yarvin will have financially secure forced retirements, if only because the likes of our undefined in scope do not have the means to impoverish them. Probably they will even find other conference organizers, other employers, willing to take a chance on them, but the relative courage of these hypothetical future individuals does not diminish Alex Miller’s moral cowardice.
And the relative inability of the SJ brigade to match Soviet Russia’s capability for institutional ostracism, doesn’t diminish their moral equivalence. I’m still looking for what distinguishes you from them. Where’s the line between harassing Yarvin out of one conference, and harassing him out of every place he might practice his profession? Presuming you had the means for the latter, where would you stop, and why?
“You?” Now I’m part of the SJ brigade? I’d employ him and wouldn’t ban him from my conference if it was my conference. I just said I don’t think it’s a big deal.
But anyway, it’s obviously time to bow out since this isn’t something one can discuss at all without being placed on the side of some imaginary line, which kind of illustrates my point about why it’s fairly reasonable to not want to deal with this from the organizer’s perspective. Allow him to speak and some people think you’re white supremacist sympathizers. Don’t allow him to speak and other people think you’re a free speech suppressing communist who would gladly imprison the guy if you only had the means. There is no winning position to take.
Good to know that you mean to impoverish people you disagree with on issues like this. Even better to know that you lack the means. But, on the matter of strategy, really? You think it wise to say to all of the world’s rich, “Your continued wealth is contingent on your agreeing with me, and/or my remaining politically impotent”? ISTM that even rich people who agree with you on the issues today, would be a bit concerned about that.
@John Schilling
Hah, things get inevitably weird dancing on slippery slopes like this so lets try something more comprehensive.
In general western society the statement “wealthy people should not be able to buy political power” is not exactly fringe, so yes, I expect them to remain as politically impotent as anyone else in a democratic society and I don’t consider stating that as dangerous (and if it is then well, the class war is already quite lost). People with opinions odious to the majority are not owed some extra underdog bonus where the are allowed to advocate publicly free of derision.
“Take away their wealth” is a tricky framing because of the way we (western society) view economic freedom. If you’re impoverished you’re probably dying of a preventable disease while living in a wet cardboard box; and no I don’t think that’s a reasonable outcome for anyone.
But from a more socialist perspective I am morally OK and even in favour of society refusing it’s benefits (aka your money being something other than funny green paper) to someone it finds horrid; while also being forgiving and letting them rejoin if they decide to stop being an asshole (America is pretty terrible at the forgiving part of this equation).
Assuming they want to continue being an asshole the discussion isn’t so much about what society should do to people but what it owes to people. It’s impossible to eject someone odious from society without condemning them to a painful death in hostile terrain; so that list comes down to “the veil of ignorance says any society must allow odious people lead a decent life” because as everyone will happily point out I might someday be odious to the majority. Beyond the veil of ignorance “don’t torture people, period” is a good moral rule that gives the same effect.
—
And no, I am not going to publicly advocate the socialist part of this agenda anywhere less fringe than here because that would only hurt that cause. But if we can politely discuss killing all the brown people in California with the NRx crowd surely socialism isn’t beyond the pale here.
—
P.S. > Even better to know that you lack the means.
The scary part of this modern world is that anyone with a twitter account theoretically has the means to do that to either of us (well, assuming you’re not independently wealthy enough never to need a job again).
But from a more socialist perspective I am morally OK and even in favour of society refusing it’s benefits (aka your money being something other than funny green paper) to someone it finds horrid;
OK, this is where we part company in a big way. Not sure if it’s even potentially reconcilable.
I make a deal with society. In exchange for e.g. helping launch a dozen GPS satellites, society grants me a certain measure of wealth. At no time was “…unless we later find you horrid”, listed as part of the deal.
And the deal was for wealth, not “funny green paper”. The paper was to make the negotiations easier, because barter is comically impractical at this level. But part of the general deal that society offers everyone is that the green paper will be maintained as a stable medium for storing and exchanging wealth.
I held up my end of the deal. You turn on your iPhone, it knows where you are, it gets you where you want to be, provides various location-dependent services. And when you want to blow up ISIS, the missiles usually don’t hit innocent bystanders. That’s on me.
What’s on you is, you pay up, and you let me spend the money as I see fit. You don’t revoke the currency or call the bank and have them zero out my account. Not even if I decide to use a thousand dollars’ worth to buy TV advertising for a political cause you find horrid.
You want to not make any deals with me in the future, fine. You want to organize a campaign to intimidate other people into not making deals with me, that’s not fine. But reneging on the deals you already made, with me or with Yarvin or Eich or even Sterling, taking against our will things that we have fairly earned, that makes you an enemy of the highest order and it removes us from any obligation or restraint in our dealings with you and the society you have bent to your will.
@ undefined in this scope“if noone wants to talk to him then then yes he can live his life alone. ”
Be honest with yourself. You don’t think that nobody wants to talk to Moldbug/Sterling/whoever. You do know that people want to talk to them, but they can’t, since they are intimidated. And you welcome that.
@John Schilling
> [Capitalism]
There is no way I would expect to convert someone politically in this skinny little comment box so yes we are going to have to disagree here.
> You want to organize a campaign to intimidate other people into not making deals with me, that’s not fine. But reneging on the deals you already made, with me or with Yarvin or Eich or even Sterling, taking against our will things that we have fairly earned, that makes you an enemy of the highest order and it removes us from any obligation or restraint in our dealings with you and the society you have bent to your will.
Making this about “me” is ignoring reality, “my side” (the liberals) consider Eich and Modlbug an existential threat and absolutely intend to destroy them. If they want to continue holding their views publicly the only rational option is to fight; but I expect they will lose.
A significant minority of American society is already out to destroy the publicly anti-gay and a majority quietly supports them, I am not sure if there’s a majority to support destroying white supremacists yet but I suspect that is coming.
—
Do you find it at all funny that when I, just another individual on a message board, advocate for “taking against our will things that we have fairly earned” that you consider me an existential threat that must be destroyed but you’ll argue that till your blue that attempting to destroy Moldbug is maximally evil after he repeatedly proposes the murder and enslavement of whole categories of people?
@Publius Varinius
No, I think that it’s a pointless hyperbole because the odds of there ever being someone so odious that literally “noone wants to talk to them” is 0.00% and I’m happy that they won’t lead a tortured solitary life. Maybe someday someone will even convince them not to be such an asshole.
Ok, this has gotten ridiculous.
Argument gets counterargument. An attempt to do something horrible may get “the only rational option is to fight”, but not “they want to continue holding their views publicly”.
@Cauê
Is that a moral statement or factual observation? Because “liberals remove Eich from his job” is an actual event that precipitated this thread of conversation and I don’t think you’ll be able to sell that as a moral statement to anyone significant because the left considers the public advocacy horrible to be “doing something horrible”.
I don’t see any possible future where saying “We should kill all the blacks” does not elicit a much more material response than the simple “No you shouldn’t”.
Making this about “me” is ignoring reality, “my side” (the liberals) consider Eich and Modlbug an existential threat and absolutely intend to destroy them. If they want to continue holding their views publicly the only rational option is to fight; but I expect they will lose.
So, to be clear, it’s not just one guy being excluded from one conference, and it’s not just a few extremists making noise. This is “the liberals”, as a class, trying to absolutely destroy Yarvin and Eich, and presumably anyone else like them.
Who are not, in fact, existential threats to anyone. Eich holds a modest opposition to gay marriage specifically while respecting gay rights generally. The process by which this leads inexorably to all of LGBT+dom being marched off to the camps is the most cartoonishly exaggerated version of the domino effect I’ve yet seen. Moldbug, is I believe rather less genocidal than you would accuse him of being, but more importantly is politically impotent.
If you all believe that these people are “existential threats”, then your threat assessment capabilities are as defective as the nutbars who wanted to round up every Moslem in America on 9/12/01 and send them off to the camps. You won’t stop at Moldbug and Eich. You won’t stop with with the anti-gay and the white supremacists. You will, inevitably, turn on me.
Your tribe is powerful enough that it is within the realm of possibility that you will succeed in destroying your enemies. That makes you an existential threat to me. Your tribe, at least to the extent that you speak for it, is arrogant enough to believe that its power is supreme, that its victory is certain, and that its lesser enemies will convert to your cause rather than face destruction at your hands. That makes you an existential threat that cannot be negotiated with.
Not sure there’s anything else to talk about. To the extent that you speak for Liberal America, that was pretty much a declaration of total war against everyone who is not liberal. We’ll see how that turns out for you.
@John Schilling
Pretty much! Can I ask you a question before you go though? Am I really the person bringing the idea of absolute culture war to your attention or are you writing that way for dramatic effect? Because by my observation being anti-gay in the public sphere has been political/career suicide for a while now.
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Ok, one more thing that you seem to really be missing here. Neither of these people are “threats” because of their individual power; Moldbug is indeed politically impotent but the class of $(white supremacist) is a real political and moral danger (if you disagree with me on that you’ll just have to take my word that the left absolutely believes this). Moldbug is being attacked because he’s an easy piece of that block to pick off and picking him off makes belonging to the $(white supremacist) class less desirable for anyone on the edge.
Obviously, you’re not the first person to bring the idea of total culture war to my attention. But, at least in my experience, most liberals do not speak of this as a necessary and desirable thing. Mostly, they speak of it as a thing that is being forced upon them by Evil Republicans, that they’d rather avoid if the ERs would let them.
This may not be entirely sincere, but even an insincere expression of hope for peace is a mildly positive sign. Or maybe the liberals I interact with are atypically tolerant of dissenting views.
But comments like yours are useful for gauging how the pro-war sentiment stands. Until it is clear that they represent the absolutely dominant strain of contemporary Liberalism, I am going to strongly question them when I see them. Because, really?
When it is clear that they represent the absolutely dominant strain of contemporary Liberalism, then we will go to war.
@undefined
The way to proceed from here would be going on about the reasons for defending free speech. To be honest, however, trying to talk you out of “war” would feel like roleplaying, and I don’t feel like it.
@John Schilling
Sorry to keep continuing this then but:
> most liberals do not speak of this as a necessary and desirable thing. Mostly, they speak of it as a thing that is being forced upon them by Evil Republicans, that they’d rather avoid if the ERs would let them.
This is a contradiction, “being forced” is what makes something necessary.
Ok, what do you think “peace” looks like to them? I’ll tell you, it means that there are no more racists, zero. I don’t want a war (it’s honestly somewhat aggravating that you think seem to think I’m sitting here cackling for red tribe blood). I think the level of turbulence we’re in and the amount of damage being done to small targets is fucking scary. But I also agree that advocating racism causes tangible harm and removing that from the public sphere ASAP is critical. This is not an even vaguely controversial position on the left.
> When it is clear that they represent the absolutely dominant strain of contemporary Liberalism, then we will go to war.
If you’re willing to abandon Eich and Moldbug I honestly unclear on which ideas you expect to be under attack for. If you’re worried about the fact that I’m an actual socialist I can reassure you that for now that’s a fringe position, and that if that battle comes class war is an entirely different mechanic than culture war. Probably involving robots and lasers (that was a joke (hopefully)).
@undefined:
I have been publicly and explicitly accused of racism, not by one crackpot but by the consensus of a community formerly as diverse, thoughtful, and tolerant as this one, for having expressed the belief that cultural factors can adversely effect the performance of one nation’s armed forces relative to its neighbors. When I pushed back, trying to clarify whether “racism” was really what they meant to say, even though the nations involved all had majority populations of the same race, the response was that yes, I was a racist, beyond the pale, unfit for civilized society, unwelcome in their company unless I recanted, and that offering such a defense as this made my comments doubly offensive.
It was, in hindsight, a mistake to have left quietly. But that was then, this is now:
A: When you say “no more racists, zero”, do you mean to include me on the list of people to be expelled from society, or am I one of the tolerable not-quite-racists in your view?
A’: Have you cleared this with all of your liberal friends?
B: Do you understand that removing racists from society has costs as well as benefits, and that these costs increase exponentially as you have to search wider and finer, probe deeper with less discrimination to find the increasingly few remaining racists?
B’: Do you and your colleagues really believe that those costs are worth the benefit, at the levels they will have to reach to get the very last racist? Because even the supposedly-intolerant Red Tribe is pretty much resigned to accepting a small residue of communists that can’t practically be eradicated.
C: Do you think your offer of peaceful coexistence if only I will denounce Eich and Moldbug is even remotely credible?
You cannot eradicate every last racist without waging war, and I mean to use that term without hyperbole. And you cannot exclude me from that war. I am, by the warped standards of your tribe, already denounced as a racist many times over. Also a capitalist, and a libertarian. And I’m one of those shy nerdy guys Scott wrote about in “untitled”, yet unwilling to declare myself unworthy of romantic attention. Probably a sexist in other ways as well, maybe a rapist and certainly an MRA. Do I need to go on?
If “no more racists, zero” is truly the standard, then I’m on your tribe’s hit list, my name carved in adamantine runes. I can stand with the enemies of my enemy, or I can stand alone.
>Ok, what do you think “peace” looks like to them? I’ll tell you, it means that there are no more racists, zero.
This is an incredibly laudable goal, but it sounds about as achievable as a Bush-era declaration that they will not rest until there are no more terrorists, zero. Our post-9/11 zealousness overseas led to a situation where impoverished Afghan goatherds could falsely denounce their neighbors as terrorists for massive cash rewards. In most cases, the government would snatch up said neighbor and ask some very pointed questions, which was especially handy if the informer had a grudge against them.
As the increase in clickthrough rate and social status achieved by calling out racists continues (and the profit margin of newspapers continues to fall), we’ll start to see similar phenomena.
No, it is the essence of evil. “Kill all X” does not become laudable because you picked the right X.
@John Schilling
Replied below https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/08/links-615-everything-but-the-kitchen-link/#comment-210679
Performing victimage is a bad look for an adult male. My apologies if you’re under 18,
but you come off like a real tearful fanboy.
When you feel scared just repeat to yourself “my side owns all the guns, they have nothing but shrill voices, mace and long fingernails. my side is represented by rightwing legislators running every statehouse in the land with fealty to nobody but your corporate heroes. The SJWs (so embarrassing-this term) have…..like zero political prescence?” You think Hillary’s strategizing with sleater-kinney or morgan stanley? Who’s running your world SJWs or the US Chamber of Commerce?
Don’t be such a pussy, kid. You’ll be fine.
Re: Gene Marsh – True? Kind? Necessary? I count at least two cases of sexist nonsense there, including one gendered slur.
Edit to add: Oh, you seem to have left of your own accord.
@Gene Marsh
“my side owns all the guns”
Did you really think that Morgan-Stanley is in league with “adult males”?
Of course not. That so-called “side” does not exist. You and your friends made it up to justify your genocidal tendencies.
I see you left this place. Good riddance.
Jews in Germany were doing “quite well” up until they weren’t. That in fact was a huge part of the rhetoric against them. Being in favor of all-out tactics against the enemy doesn’t go away when you become more powerful than them.
Christ almighty, here we go again. A guy get barred from presenting at a conference and already one person compares it to the gulag and another to the holocaust. Can we recognize the existence of degrees of things?
Can we say it isn’t a huge deal to prevent a guy from talking at a specific place to a specific audience and he’ll be fine, while also saying it’s not okay to confiscate all his property and throw him into a forced labor camp?
Haven’t we been told, repeatedly, that the reason we must shun and ostracize the likes of Yarvin is that from little things like emotionally-detached essays on nonliberal politics might grow something of real and great harm in the future?
I see real and great harm growing from petty acts of organized ostracism, long before I see Moldbug reestablishing the French monarchy. A small evil is still an evil. A small evil by an ambitious power, is a warning.
Indeed. The commies who will do literally as much as they can to destroy their ideological enemies seem, to me, to be a much bigger threat than someone who occasionally suggests that colonialism wasn’t that bad.
Even if we set them equal in terms of how bad it would be if they took over, based on current trends, the commies seem far more LIKELY to take over sometime in the forseeable future than colonialists do…
“Even if we set them equal in terms of how bad it would be if they took over, based on current trends, the commies seem far more LIKELY to take over sometime in the forseeable future than colonialists do…”
We are colonialists! This is a known known. You’re going to be so psyched when you finally read about the Iraq War. Double your pleasure when you discover the fall of communism. You’ll wipe the sweat off your brow when read Fukuyama and understand there is nothing else but capitalism. No competing system. My God. So fearful. This entire commentariat is like the twilite zone episode “monsters on maple street”.
Scott, as a mental health professional who has participated in the riling up of this absurd hysteria, you have two good reasons to talk these terrified gynophobes down. Its the most irrational place ive ever been on the internet.
… its been hysterical.
Been lurking for a year. Heading for saner pastures——bye bye
@Adam: you’re overlooking the damage to society. We have a crisis in computing – the unprecedented extent to which computers are now being used, and the number of new ways in which they are being used, have far outpaced our already limited ability to engineer reliable software.
We drastically need novel ideas like those that were to have been presented. Society can’t afford to lose this sort of talent for irrational reasons.
Les anybody think this is hyperbole, a few years back in China I met people to whom that happened (lost their engineer job, couldn’t get a new one, not sure about whether family members had problems but I think so), for belonging to Falun Gong.
I don’t know what it is that Moldbug thinks either. As you point out, his writing is long enough that I’m not sure anyone knows, even Moldbug.
My guess is that the case against Moldbug is the case against Limbaugh – that you could easily find several dozen snippets of language that are offensive, and that that’s enough to those who don’t want people presenting at tech conferences if the presenters have a sideline blog with offensive material.
ETA: I turned this into a post on LW Discussion. I’m not asking commenters here to go to LW, that would be wrong and impolite, but the comment posting system on LW is much nicer to use and I wish I could somehow help the SSC comments to be as user-friendly.
—
Regarding homosexuality: is it possible that the implementation of heterosexual attraction and its developmental link to gender is complex enough, and fragile enough, that it just doesn’t develop correctly in 3% of cases despite immense evolutionary pressure?
About 3% of all babies born have some sort of birth defect, and many others were spontaneously aborted at an earlier stage. Foetal development just isn’t very reliable. Genetic disorders which appear later in life and were fatal before modern medicine also probably add up to a few percent of all births. Could it be that the link between gender and sexual orientation is just one of those things that tends to go wrong, and there is nothing more to explain?
This is the best armchair explanation on this thread. Yes, exactly; the system is underspecified.
Possible.
Worth remembering that females have much higher rates of “soft” homosexuality or bisexuality, and are thought by those who study these things to be more “plastic” or changeable in their sexual preference. Those who study specifically arousal debate whether male bisexuals exist at all, but assuming they do (and I do, humans are infinitely diversified), the number is much, much smaller in men than in women. Not sure how that would be implicated by developmental issues.
The other fly in the ointment is that we know that certain experiences at formative times can shape sexual orientation, most notably with abused children subsequently being attracted to children.
I have this depressing feeling that once the politics blows away, we’re going to be left with the same answer for sexuality we are for most human phenomenon, 50/50 nature/nurture.
Could this be caused by a parasite that spreads through sexual intercourse?
An adult male can easily rape or otherwise persuade into sex a male child who will in turn grow up to be an adult male who can have sex with other children, spreading the parasite.
An adult male can also easily rape a woman, the woman then can’t easily rape anybody, but if she becomes a slut she can spread the parasite to many men.
Therefore it would be evolutionary advantageous for an STD to reprogram men to become pedophile rapists and women to become sluts.
Perhaps some STDs actually work that way. And maybe even the social norms against pederasty, and female promiscuity in Western societies culturally evolved due to parasite pressure.
EDIT:
Off the top of my head, historical recurrent outbreaks of plague seem to correlate with strict sexual mores and condemnation of homosexuality.
Off the top of my head, historical recurrent outbreaks of plague seem to correlate with strict sexual mores and condemnation of homosexuality.
As a starter for untangling some of the which-causes-which … on a large scale, which one is usually post hoc? And which other mores cluster with each side? Perhpas in the long term, strict sexual mores > more babies > crowded quarters > plagues; while in the short term, sexual promiscuity spreads disease faster, is blamed for starting it, is suppressed by strict sexual mores … and the cycle starts again.
The opposite seems more likely to be true now, but historically, I’d expect strict sexual mores to lead to fewer babies, not more — mostly by way of delaying childbearing. We might associate medieval sexual mores with marrying people off early, but for economic reasons that would only have been feasible for the upper classes.
Strict sexual mores seem to produce a tendency for people to view any effort to avoid STDs other than avoiding promiscuity to be something shameful, because only promiscuous people would need to do such things. Arguably, they do not actually have much effect in terms of actually lowering promiscuity, and even if they do have some such effect, it does seem like there are a number of cases where their effect in discouraging anti-STD precautions is greater than their effect in discouraging promiscuity, and so strict sexual mores end up encouraging STDs. This seems to be the pattern among heterosexuals in the developed world, from what I’ve gleaned from sexual health researchers. Of course, outside of the modern world, there would have been fewer anti-STD precautions, but but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any; knowing which symptoms to look out for and avoiding partners with those symptoms may have made a slight difference, for example.
Maybe this is true in the modern world where condoms exist and they are effective at preventing common STD infections, but in ancient societies condoms didn’t exist and even if they did, they would have done little to prevent infection by things like plague, smallpox or leprosy.
historically, I’d expect strict sexual mores to lead to fewer babies, not more — mostly by way of delaying childbearing.
On the level of a kid whose information comes from Vacation Bible School and Louis L’Amour, I’m seeing US pioneers, like the Old Testament tribes wandering in the wilderness, trying to limit sex to procreation so as to get more procreation. In the US, some of them would find places to settle and build towns safe from predators or raids, but eventually over crowded and becoming fleshpots themselves.
The resulting friction was easier to deal with while there was a Western frontier for dissenting people to trek on to. But at the Pacific Coast there was no more Western frontier, so we all piled up here, both sides, which makes California a very interesting place.
You must be reading different Louis L’Amour books than I did. Certainly I don’t recall aversion to recreational sex as a major plot point in, well, any Western ever. Well, occasionally you’d have a plot where the respectable townsfolk were trying to shut down the brothel, but that was usually pretty late in the “pioneering” phase and incidental to anyone’s reasons for coming to the West.
Historical pioneering and settlement, meanwhile, was generally about economic opportunity, with a side order of escaping from civilization by people who already had or expected they soon would bump up against civilization’s laws in a bad way. The only major let’s-practice-our-moralistic-religion settlement movement in the American West was the Mormons. Anyone whose brand of Not Getting Any was less incompatible with mainstream Christianity, could usually just buy some land and set up a commune in the more civilized regions without anyone bothering them, e.g. various Shakers, Quakers, and Amish.
“Worth remembering that females have much higher rates of “soft” homosexuality or bisexuality, and are thought by those who study these things to be more “plastic” or changeable in their sexual preference.”
Have you got a source? That matches my anecdotal experience but I always assumed it was more to do with society’s attitude to male vs. female bisexuality than anything more inherent. Especially as in other eras the opposite seems to have been the case (perhaps because women were discouraged from sexuality per se).
Really interested if we have info that suggests the difference isn’t just a cultural thing. My armchair supposition has always been that most people are probably at least potentially somewhere on a bisexual spectrum, but we get very strong cultural steers on attraction. Basically, I find it much more plausible that people will be culturally led to ignore/sublimate certain attractions than to create them entirely.
Testosterone increases sex drive in both sexes, and it also specifically increases sex attraction towards females.
Women in their early 20s are at peak testosterone, which causes significant sexual attraction towards other women. Whether they decide to act out such desires may depend on the social environment.
Worth remembering that females have much higher rates of “soft” homosexuality or bisexuality, and are thought by those who study these things to be more “plastic” or changeable in their sexual preference. Those who study specifically arousal debate whether male bisexuals exist at all, but assuming they do (and I do, humans are infinitely diversified), the number is much, much smaller in men than in women. Not sure how that would be implicated by developmental issues.
In modern Western cultures. In other societies throughout history, most famously Ancient Greece, male bisexuality appears to have been far more common than it is in our society.
Granted, it is hard to make a comparison to female bisexuality since there is much less historical data on female sexuality in general. Still, I would be very wary of trying to draw conclusions solely from our own society given the frankly overwhelming evidence that cultural mores can strongly influence the prevalence of this sort of thing.
I think your explanation is likely to be correct. Worth bearing in mind that we haven’t had much time, evolutionarily, to move from the somewhat simpler estrus-based sexual attraction that many other primates have, to the rather unusual visually and socially cued one that we have now. Hell of a complicated thing to get right in a few hundred thousand generations. Looks like lots of imprinting has to be going on (hence paraphilias), maybe with unreliable triggers. If Mother Nature took bug reports, you could file a raft of them on this feature.
@Daniel-
Food for thought, though I’m surprised you haven’t been pounded on for using the phrases “birth defect” and “tends to go wrong”. This sends me down a train of thought that doesn’t have much to do with your own comment; apologies.
If the explanation is analogous to a birth defect, we nevertheless are not inclined to treat it as a defect. Why is that?
The obvious reason would be if it imposes no significant harm on the victim, unlike for example being deaf from birth. (No matter how inclusive society might be, and no matter how real Deaf Culture might be, deafness is objectively disadvantageous.) Are there any disadvantages to obligate homosexuality beyond what is culturally imposed? I don’t know of one (difficulty in reproducing and susceptibility to AIDS both seem largely consequences of culture), but I’m not sure anybody would do a study to see if gay men are more prone to liver disease.
I gather if there were magic wands to “cure” deafness and homosexuality, there are some members of each group who would decline. But my own tendency is to feel that the obdurate deaf person would be making a mistake, while the obdurate homosexual would merely be making a choice.
I’m trying to think if there is a better analogy: a condition that might unexpectedly turn up in a friend or relative, that is moderately rare, that has such a profound effect on his life as to be a big part of his self-identity, but that has no physical downside. Extreme genius comes to mind, so maybe I should exclude both upsides and downsides. I’m not sure what I would make of such an example if I thought of one, but I’m intrigued by the fact that I don’t seem to be able to.
The reproductive disadvantage of obligate homosexuals, especially male obligate homosexuals, is absolute and not culture-dependent. A straight man can reproduce by having sex with a woman, by finding a woman who wants a sperm donation from a stranger or nonromantic partner, or (if we’re counting strictly memetic reproduction) by finding an orphan whose guardian will let him adopt. An obligate homosexual male can use only two of those methods, and the one they can’t use is the one linked to the biggest reservoir of eager wombs.
Susceptibility to AIDS transmission is also at least in part biological. Even if we assume that the traditionally greater promiscuity of homosexual men is entirely cultural, the regular swapping of penetrator/penetratee roles and the more frequent use of the rectum beyond its design specifications substantially increase the overall risk from what would otherwise be a marginally transmissible infectious
agent.
And, I would think that having a much smaller dating pool from which to select romantic partners would also be a substantial, culturally independent disadvantage, unless perhaps we’re postulating a culture where all the gays move to designated gay communities where they can fill their Dunbar number with fellow gays.
On the other hand if, as seems to be the case, males have a greater taste for promiscuity than females, a male who prefers sex with other males may be in a better position to satisfy that taste.
Or if he actually doesn’t want kids, it could be easier to just have sex with men than to worry about birth control, surgery, and finding a wife who also doesn’t want kids.
@ John Schilling- Valid points.
I was sloppy to call the reproductive disadvantage partly cultural; I meant to distinguish between simply making it harder to pass on your genes, which is incontrovertible but not the sort of downside to the individual that deafness is, and difficulty in forming a family and raising a child, which I think it’s fair to call partly cultural.
You may be right about AIDS. The cultural component of that to which I referred was the part of gay culture that embraces promiscuity. The prevalence of AIDS in African females makes me wonder how much difference your other observations really make, but I’m not well-informed. The argument about the design specs of the rectum strike me as having a little too much of the “Just-So Story” to it, but there are certainly sensible arguments from evolutionary biology that partake of the same apparent patness.
I don’t see how AIDs is at all relevant to human evolution, given that HIV only started infecting humans on a large scale within the last 40 years.
Obviously, there have have always been STDs, but in a pre-modern environment were male homosexuals really at that much greater risk of dying from disease?
Also, “the regular swapping of penetrator/penetratee roles and the more frequent use of the rectum beyond its design specifications” is far from a cultural universal. In Ancient Greece and Rome, for example, there were very strict social rules on who was allowed to penetrate whom, with the general rule seeming to be that only the older or higher status man was allowed to “top” (for example, a male Roman citizen was allowed to penetrate a male slave, but never the other way around). Similarly, in modern prisons there is often an attitude that only the men who are penetrated are “gay.”
From the discussion of Bentham a few posts back, classical civilization was big on what we would call pederasty, and didn’t have much to say about obligate male homosexuality. There may or may not have been obligate male homosexuality, but with socially acceptable pederasty available as a cover probably nobody is going to talk about it much.
Agreed that Greco-Roman pederasty wouldn’t have supported an epidemic of something like AIDS, unless it were being used as a cover for modern-style MSM obligate homosexuality.
@NN- Good point. As I said, despite the horror of AIDS I’m not inclined to think of it as a direct drawback of whatever causes obligate homosexuality. And I really am therefore still interested in whether there is a good analogy for a really significant but otherwise neutral moderately rare developmental variation (still assuming Daniel’s model is close to true).
To come at it from another angle, suppose we eventually get a really clear picture of how gender and attraction each happen, and pin down what causes them to be linked in the uncommon way. Would that change our view of homosexuality? What if we discovered at the same time that the cause was directly connected with something else, like an increased chance of depression, or a decreased chance of schizophrenia?
I honestly don’t know but it seems intriguing. Certainly if we found such associations to exist with regard to presence or absence of a Y chromosome, we would just shrug and say “That’s how it is,” rather than deciding that presence or absence of a Y chromosome was itself a genetic defect.
I honestly thought it was reasonably clear that it didn’t necessarily reduce reproduction. Males have extremely unequal sexual success, whereas female success is much closer to equal. Consider for example mitochondrial-Eve vs. Y-chromosome-Adam. Even in historic timeframe, identifiable individual males sired astonishingly nontrivial percentages of the world population. (Googling is an exercise for the reader.) Removing males from competition that were never going to mate anyway coupled with even trivial improvements elsewhere is a net gain. Reduced male-male competition related mortality? Increased female fertility? Assistance rearing? All of the above? At this point the exact collection of fitness improvements are more of an idle curiosity than a serious open question. Alteratively, in a much more flippant response, you may as well ask why evolution hasn’t turned our retina right side up yet.
Re: lesbianism. If there is a female around, someone is going to mate with her. You know, consentually, or… whatever. Why pretend female preference actually matters?
Being lesbian does not mean choosing to be child-free. Some even now choose at least occasionally to lie still and think of babies.
Yeah, exactly. Your limits on reproduction are the number of fertile females, not males. One man and ten women means (in theory) a year later – ten babies. Ten men and one woman – again in theory, and unless you get twins or triplets – a year later, one baby.
So you really need fewer males to keep up the population than are born (that’s why male animals are culled in domestic animal rearing, from chickens to cattle). Reducing the number of “alpha males fighting and seriously injuring/killing one another for access to females” by removing them – or making use of a mutation that means they’re removed – from competing for female means better chance of more males surviving (if they’re not engaging in mock or real warfare over mates, they’re around for protecting the rest of the group, for work, for all the male tasks), less expenditure of resources (those males help raising/protecting the young of their female siblings), encouraging group bonding by homosocial bonding, etc.
This argument, and the one that preceded it, assume group selection. I gather most evolutionary biologist believe that it is much weaker than individual selection.
The fact that 5% of the males have no children may not reduce the number of children produced in the society, but it reduces the number of children produced by those males, hence the frequency of genes they carry, in particular the gene that (hypothetically) inclines them to homosexuality, in the next generation.
Yes. A point against might be, if the Macho Alpha Jocks/Bloods/whatever are getting larger harems and the Betas/Omegas/whatever are having fewer children, that’s not so good for passing on genes for non-macho talents. Hm, so a gay artist/thinker should sow plenty of het wild oats before settling down in a gay university where he doesn’t have to take care of them.
that’s not so good for passing on genes for non-macho talents
Are you forgetting the maternal genes, or do the Jock genes overcome all? 🙂
My last comment here seems to have gotten caught in the spam filter. Let’s try that again.
Unless maternal and paternal genes are interacting in unusual ways, we’d expect this kind of sexual selection to exert pressure regardless of what the maternal genes look like — though “pressure” does not mean “conquers all”. The most probable scenario where it doesn’t would be if the same genes are adaptive in men proportional to their maladaptiveness in women (or vice versa), but I wouldn’t expect to see that very often.
At least, that’s true if the jock-alpha-male-bro-harem thing is real, which I’m not totally convinced of.
“Remember, “non-shared environment” doesn’t necessarily mean “sociology stuff” – Toddler temperament could be influenced by different types of gut bacteria.”
Plausible prior, but little update from this.
It’s an epidemiological correlational study. Looks like weak evidence and risk factors for p-hacking:
“Christian and study co-author, microbiologist Michael Bailey, PhD, studied stool samples from 77 girls and boys, and found that children with the most genetically diverse types of gut bacteria more frequently exhibited behaviors related with positive mood, curiosity, sociability and impulsivity. In boys only, researchers reported that extroverted personality traits were associated with the abundances of microbes from the Rikenellaceae and Ruminococcaceae families and Dialister and Parabacteroides genera…
To identify correlations between gut bacteria and temperament, researchers asked mothers to assess kid’s behavior using a questionnaire which measures 18 different traits that feed into three composite scales of emotional reactivity: Negative Affect, Surgency/Extraversion and Effortful Control. Scientists looked at the different genetic types and relative quantity of bacteria found in the toddler’s stool samples along with their diets.
The average gastrointestinal tract contains 400-500 different species of bacteria, and most of them belong to one of ten phyla of bacteria. “
The trouble with this study is that I can immediately see fast buck merchants leaping on it to sell supplements (like probiotics) marketed at toddlers (or rather, anxious parents of same) along the lines of “Want a confident, outgoing, friendly child that will do well at school? Take new BabyBio which helps your child’s temperament!”
Also, basing it on mother’s evaluation of their child’s temperament is dreadful. We’re pretty clear that girls and boys are socialised differently, right? So that what in boys is attributed to confidence, curiosity, etc. gets called different and less positive names in girls. I don’t much like the idea of a group of three year olds in a lab being scrutinised by a crowd of behavioural scientists behind a two-way mirror, but it at least would be a tiny bit more objective in judging what was and wasn’t aggression versus confidence.
Off-topic ranting and raving coming up, apologies in advance to all members of medical professions or their friends, family and loved ones (Scott, you’re a psychiatrist, you should be okay on this one but still, let me make it clear: I don’t mean you in the following jeremiad). Warning: coarse and vulgar language will be used.
Mid-morning today I had a doctor’s appointment. I comported myself in such a way that I am going to send a card of apology to my doctor. But do you know why I behaved like a boor and a rough, rude brute?
WHY DO DOCTORS DO THIS? PART ONE
The reason I was at a doctor’s appointment was that I got a letter asking me to come in to discuss the results of a recent blood test “but there was nothing to worry about”.
If there was nothing to worry about, why were you calling me in? Doctors don’t ask you to come in so they can tell you “Congratulations! Everything is fine!”
My doctor said, when I asked her “Tell me the bad news”, that she put that in so I wouldn’t worry over the weekend. I have Type 2 diabetes, which is a progressive disease, and which is managed by medical professionals scaring the crap out of me about going blind, liver and kidney failure, heart attack and stroke, and needing my feet amputated as complications of the disease, in order to keep me motivated to keep up the programme of metabolic control.
Of course I am going to worry about my blood test results, no matter if you put in a cheery line about “Don’t worry!”
This was the first unpleasant joust of arms. But it wasn’t the worst.
WHY DO DOCTORS DO THIS? PART TWO
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, I am minded to postulate your cause for canonisation, because were it not for the Internet, I would know damn-all about the true state of my health. I certainly can’t go by what my doctor is telling me.
Okay, turns out that my “nothing to worry about” blood test results show that not only is my metabolic control slipping (Hb1AC levels up, still within acceptable ranges but definitely gone up), my triglyceride levels are still way too high, now one of my liver enzymes is above the acceptable range (ALT, should be at a maximum of 33 units, mine is 38).
Yeah. Sure. Nothing to worry about there. Even though my liver panel before was normal and now it isn’t, and looking this up on the Internet tells me this particular enzyme is very indicative of liver disease.
Even though – and this is where I’m hitting the roof – I was put on statins, which I was very dubious about, and which have a known and recognised side effect of liver damage (that’s why they made me get a liver panel test in the first place, to set a baseline).
I did NOT want to go on statins for cholesterol, because (again, thank you Google) (a) my total cholesterol levels are just peachy, but my triglycerides are way too much (b) statins don’t do anything for reducing triglyceride levels (c) that liver damage thing. But she persuaded me, and again today wants me to continue with them because statins for diabetics help protect the heart.
WELL WAIT A MO, DOC: AFTER A YEAR ON THESE HEPATOTOXIC DRUGS, IT TURNS OUT MY TRIGLYCERIDES ARE STILL BAD AND NOW MY LIVER IS NOT SO GOOD? AND YOU WANT ME TO STAY ON THEM?
Oh, no, that’s not what she wanted, she wanted:
(1) Okay, you’ve been on them a year
(2) Your triglycerides are still bad and now one of your liver enzymes is elevated
(3) Elevated liver enzymes is a sign of liver damage, which these drugs are known to cause
(4) SO I WANT YOU TO GO ON A HIGHER DOSAGE OF THE SAME DRUG
You may take it my answer to that was “no”. I had to keep harping on that I was always dubious about statins, that I’ve been on them a year and I don’t think they’ve done me any good (as witness my high and remaining high triglyceride levels ) and now with the first time ever that I’ve had liver elevation, I am not happy with them. We’ve agreed (or she thinks we’ve agreed) that I’ll stay on the same dosage of statins but she has now prescribed for me to take as well a fenofibrate.
WHICH IS WHAT I WANTED IN THE FIRST PLACE A YEAR AGO, SINCE THEY DO REDUCE TRIGLYCERIDE LEVELS AND AREN’T AS HEPATOTOXIC.
Since the atmosphere was, to say the least, strained at this point, I agreed, took the prescription, and left in a huff (or a minute and a huff, as the great Groucho remarked).
Am I going to continue taking the statins, as she thinks I am going to do? Am I fuck! The remainder of my current prescription are going straight in the bin, and I’m discontinuing them as of today. I will stick with the fenofibrate and see how my next blood test (in three months time) looks.
I had to huff and puff and be the Big Bad Wolf to get some straight talk and scrap the notion of upping the statin dose, and get a different medication prescribed
as wellinstead. That’s why I’m sending the apology note. And my doctor is one of the good ones, much the best of the various ones I’ve seen. Imagine what kind of trouble I’d have with a bad doctor!But thank you God and Saint Tim for the Internet, because otherwise I’d be fucked as to how to know what is going on and how to treat it (e.g. I only know about the ALT ranges because I Googled it, my doctor didn’t tell me).
You are being excessively literal. The doctor didn’t put that in to keep you from worrying at all, he put it in so that you would worry less. Ask yourself: if the doctor had said “you have a really bad problem”, would you have worried more? Then you were worrying less with what he actually told you.
No, she said she put it in so I wouldn’t be worrying over the weekend, which didn’t have the effect she intended.
I really would have preferred a straightforward: “Your blood test results came back with this reading, which is why I want you to come in for an appointment”.
Unspecified “You need to come in BUT DON’T WORRY EVEN THOUGH I’M IMPLYING SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH YOUR RESULTS BUT NOT GIVING YOU ANY CONCRETE INFORMATION SO YOU HAVE A WHOLE THREE DAYS TO FRET OVER ‘IS THIS KIDNEY FAILURE OR ANY OF THE OTHER FUN THINGS THEY TOLD ME WOULD HAPPEN WITH THIS CONDITION????'” did not, as you can see, work for me.
I am very literal-minded; I don’t know if it comes with the territory of Autism Spectrum disorders that run throughout my paternal family line, but I much, much prefer concrete facts that I can research and gauge the likelihood that (a) this is remote chance of happening (b) this might be serious if not caught in time (c) better order the coffin now than a general anodyne “okay something’s wrong but you have to wait three days to find out what but don’t worry”.
Tell me not to worry, and I’ll worry (because why would you tell me not to worry unless there was something to worry about? People don’t normally go “Hi, Bob, lovely day, oh – and don’t worry about that thing”)
She said she put it in so you “wouldn’t be worrying”, but “wouldn’t be worrying” is not to be taken literally. It means “so you would worry less” and not the literal meaning “so you wouldn’t worry at all”.
Doctors are reluctant to tell you anything substantial in a letter becaise it might lead to liability under HIPAA for leaking your private medical information, if someone gets ahold of that letter.
Jiro, I don’t think Irish doctors come under HIPAA, and my brother’s hospital clinic had no problem sending him a printout of his blood test results in an ordinary letter sent through the post 🙂
She told me that she put it in so I wouldn’t worry – not “so that you would worry less” but “so that you wouldn’t be worrying over the weekend”.
It’s probably “different strokes for different folks”. I do better with information. Like my father before me, if it’s left nebulous like that (something is wrong, because you don’t get called in for an unscheduled appointment if something is right, but you’re not told what’s wrong and you have a condition where there are a whole lot of things that can go badly wrong), then I worry about what it might be and, I freely admit, leap to the ‘worst-case’ scenario.
Whereas if I got either the plain “Please make an appointment to come in and discuss your blood test results” or “This is the result that we need to discuss”, I wouldn’t have worried so much. If I had the information, I could have looked it up before (as I did after the appointment) and found out was this something minor, something that needed watching, or something really serious that needed intervention now.
Instead, I was fretting myself into conniptions about WHY DID SHE SAY NOT TO WORRY? THAT MEANS THERE IS SOMETHING TO WORRY ABOUT! YOU DON’T SAY ‘DON’T WORRY’ UNLESS THERE IS SOMETHING TO WORRY ABOUT! OH GOD, IT’S KIDNEY FAILURE, ISN’T IT? IT’S IN THE FAMILY! I KNEW IT – I’M GOING TO NEED DIALYSIS OR A TRANSPLANT!!!!
Yes. That’s over-reaction. But that’s my family heritage mental state (over-literal, tending to be pessimistic, expecting the worst when we hear “we need to discuss this”) 🙂
That’s why my point about not being literal. “Wouldn’t be worrying” doesn’t mean “wouldn’t be worrying”; it means “worrying less”. Or to phrase it in an even longer way, it means “wouldn’t be worrying based on X, without this necessarily mean you wouldn’t be worrying based on other things”. You can’t interpret this statement so literally that you think it’s false because you’re still worrying.
It occurs to me that the situation in Baltimore may be the classic bind wherein law abiding folks are not protected yet are also not allowed to protect themselves.
Like, people can run rampant robbing, raping, and murdering, but the moment somebody gets killed for doing that in the home of their would-rather-not-be-victim, then the police come in. In that case, you have somebody you can arrest rather easily; you already know their address, after all.
Likewise w/ armed militia patrols, or anything like that. Since part of their point is to be visible, the police can disperse them, and then leave the area before gangs and other criminals rush back in to rob, rape, and murder all the former militia members and their families who have had their weapons confiscated as evidence.
Would black Baltimorians be decently able to protect themselves without a professional police force? Without a firm policy to total police abandonment, we’ll never know.
Do you want gangs? Because that’s how you get gangs.
To clarify, there are two main pathways to organized crime. One is commercial: organizing to better offer illegal stuff, usually drugs, gambling, or prostitution. The other is self-defense.
If an area or a demographic group isn’t effectively policed, it’s left open to depredation by existing gangs, or by random opportunists. (The latter rarely organize.) The victims tend not to appreciate this, and they’re perfectly aware of the conditions that allowed it, so some of them often end up self-organizing to defend themselves. But in order to do that, they need funding, to pay for weapons, vehicles, and bribes, and to entice recruits.
They’re most likely poor, so there’s not enough money floating around to keep this sort of thing running as a side project. So they seek alternative funding. Inchoate gangs generally consist of lots of heavily armed young men without better things to do, and legal sources of revenue already have mature markets, so they expand to fill the available niches, often starting with protection rackets and later moving into other illegal trades.
Pretty soon they look a lot like the other gangs.
“We are just here to fight the fire that we set. As soon as you pay us to.”
“Do you want gangs? Because that’s how you get gangs.”
The police operate and function identically to a gang. So it’s not a matter of wanting them or not. We already have them.
If I wanted an example of a police department acting like a stereotypical gang, the LAPD’s CRASH unit in the Nineties would be a better example than Baltimore now. Stereotypes aside, though, the difference between gang and government is not one of kind; it’s one of age, refinement, stability, and perceived legitimacy. All of that can break down, of course; at this point I don’t trust many media claims about the situation on the ground in Baltimore, but I think we can safely say that it involves a crisis of legitimacy.
But in this context, I’m not trying to comment on the problem so much as the proposed alternative. All of the above goes for “armed militia patrols, or anything like that” as much as it goes for a rogue police department — and they’d be starting from nothing, disconnected from the structure of law and precedent that attempts to keep regular police forces in line. The results are unlikely to be pretty, as we’ve seen many times before.
If your bandits are small, independent, and mobile, they have no incentive to do nice things, and tend to prey on the communities they come in contact with, and leave.
If your bandits are large, stationary, subordinate to a larger body, and administratively competent, they are still bandits, but they have some incentives to be nice, to shear the sheep instead of slaughter them.
Stationary bandits are much preferable to mobile bandits. So yes, the police are a gang, but which gang do we prefer?
I would suggest to you that there are plenty of large gangs (bloods, crips, MS13, etc.) who are both large and who are stationary (meaning, they have a long-standing presence in many large cities and won’t be abandoning said presence any time soon).
Whether the police are truly subordinate to a larger body is up for debate. I guess if you want to get technical about it, I would identify the government as a gang, and the police are the enforcement branch, much like gangs surely have leaders, enforcers, accountants, etc.
Your ‘commercial’ route: my knowledge of gangs is more from Godfather and the Sopranos than any actual study, but aren’t a lot of the commercially started gangs designed to gain an advantage in businesses that are themselves legitimate? E.g. intimidating competitors, bribing/threatening those making decisions about which product/service to buy etc?
I seem to remember that keeping a stranglehold on the sale of (presumably legal) olive oil was a big early in the early Godfather, and that monopolising waste disposal is a thing in the Sopranos…
Another interesting thing on this ‘accidentally becoming a gang’ thing is that you often see claims this happens with originally ideological groups: e.g. in Northern Ireland. Once you’re armed, bound together as a brotherhood, and outside the law, the step from fighting the ideological enemy to extorting money with menaces and drug-peddling seems almost surprisingly small.
I don’t know a lot about the Italian Mafia, but I seem to recall that the olive oil thing was based on a real incident. That seems more the exception than the rule, though; most of the gangs I know much about have funded themselves through businesses that are, if not always outright illegal, then at least sleazy.
Gambling’s probably the most historically significant of these; it drove a lot of the history of the yakuza and the Chinese triads, and informal lotteries were important to a lot of American gangs in the first half of the 20th century. Through drugs are probably more important now.
http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/detail/how-policing-works-in-a-privatized-city
See also: Detroit Threat Management Center and similar agencies that pop up when law and order really breaks down. Apparently none of their clients has ever been injured and the injury record among their officers is like, 1.
Sussex, NJ privatized its police force in the early 90s, but I believe the state legislature forced them to stop. I’m kind of surprised the idea hasn’t taken off in more places. Police are kind of expensive, and we see the main complaint lodged by the dude who wrote this is oversight and accountability, but existing police already lack oversight and accountability.
FWIW, I suspect one of the problems in the US is that the police are part of local government, rather than being part of the state government as in most (?) of the rest of the world.
There are tradeoffs, as with most choices regarding degree of government centralization. The big advantages are that you get police forces that have skin in the game, which allows for closer ties to local communities and better responsiveness to local conditions, and that it becomes a lot harder for high-level authorities to use local police to enforce laws that’re locally seen as unjust. Medical marijuana laws, for example, wouldn’t yet have gotten off the ground in the States if the main police forces were federalized.
The big disadvantage is that they’re drawing from local governments’ often sharply limited budgets, which can encourage what could politely be termed nontraditional funding practices or more accurately be called kleptocracy. Especially during economic downturns.
(I assume here that by “state” you mean national-level government, not provincial. Most European countries [an exception is Germany] allocate the main responsibility for criminal investigation to a police force funded and organized at the national level but broken down into regional subdivisions; municipal police often exist as well, but have limited powers.)
Though in practice, in a lot of places cops seem to become isolated and tribal relative to the local population anyway. It might well be worse if they were responsible to the state or federal capital. (And it’s hard to see how it would make it better.) But getting the police to feel like part of the community rather than beseiged by it seems to be an unsolved problem. Despite efforts like community policing and beat meetings, to try to encourage regular non-hostile interactions.
There are clearly lots of places where a racial component makes things worse. But taking the anecdotal evidence of a local police blog my wife reads, while race is definitely a factor, it’s also pretty clear that they don’t have much use for any civilians.
@Nornagest: no, I meant like Australia – each State has its own police force.
@LHN: a lot of the abuses I hear about in the US seem to be due to local politics, and speaking personally I know I wouldn’t trust the city council here to be in charge of the police!
Big cities probably not such an issue – heck, some of them are as big as my entire nation, so I’m sure they can run their police forces just as well as we can. I’m less confident about towns and smaller cities.
(I’m not confident in this opinion. It’s just a guess.)
My city is bigger than dozens of countries (over a hundred by Wikipedia’s list, but that counts dependent territories), and its police periodically get exposed for engaging in systematic torture and/or “enhanced interrogation”, so. (And the state keeps getting the laws against recording them struck down by the courts and then reinstating them slightly rephrased, so shifting control centralward seems unlikely to help.)
But by now I’d be more curious to know which large US jurisdictions if any have police who continue to be held in relatively high regard in the age of ubiquitous recording.
(Examples from elsewhere are also of interest, but American police and criminal cultures seem to be one of the clearer examples of our exceptionalism. I’d be less sanguine about our ability to implement a model imported from a different cultural and constitutional environment.)
Cool graphs on my Twitter feed: effect sizes of preschool interventions (low and dropping), funnel plot of preschool interventions, not very encouraging at all.
As far as I can tell, these graphs aren’t differentiating between different kinds of effects — e.g., cognitive vs. non-cognitive skills. James Heckman claims that the latter are more impacted by these kinds of interventions than the former — informally, that we can improve character more than we can raise intelligence. I would be curious what the graphs would look like if different kinds of effects were separated out.
On CBT/Depression:
Alternative: if we believe therapy and drugs and diagnosis remain roughly as effective as they have been in the past, the skyrocketing depression epidemic and declines in treatment effectiveness could be due to depression just being that much worse.
People at risk for depression have often had something terrible happen to them. Unemployment, sleep deprivation while caring for an infant, death of a loved one. Real world outcomes are generally improving (fewer people getting shot or dying in car accidents), but our knowledge of bad things is unprecedented.
What if the depression epidemic isn’t over diagnosis but rather moar and worse depression?
> A new study provides an answer: not because of education, because that seems to have no effect
The study (linked above) seems to be from 2001, so not very new. Is this the correct link?
Wait, Mencius Moldbug is author of Urbit? Billions of internet users world wide, but I keep running into same people everywhere I go. Filter Bubble is real.
I had a similar moment when libertarian writer Julian Sanchez was published all over Fringe fandom as the first person to crack the cypher that they used to introduce acts.
Someone once told me that it isn’t a small world — it’s a big world, but it’s folded over so many times that it looks small.
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There’s been a gradual conflation of leftism and professionalism itself. It’s increasingly being considered pre-political, and a matter of basic courtesy and respect, to be a kind of soft lefty.
This completely depends on what you mean by “lefty.” In my last office my boss was an American black man, immediate supervisor a Filipino woman, closest co-worker a Jamaican woman (who was also pregnant). So to the extent that saying it would be unprofessional in that context to express the opinion that we need to roll back legislation and social attitudes that prevent employers from not hiring blacks and women, or that prevent businesses from not serving them, or that it’s okay to pay people less if you expect they’ll get pregnant, is considered leftist, then sure.
But it was the Army. We weren’t exactly a raging bundle of liberal softies. We just had a basic respect for each other (though we also fired people for being fat). It’s strange to be back out in the regular world and realize that the one place I’ve ever been where people best tolerated and respected each other’s differences and weren’t bigots about it, was full of gun-hoarding, small government-loving, Ron Paul voting Fox News watchers, and when I express the same opinions out here, I get labeled a leftist SJW. The Internet sucks, man.
Your first paragraph only makes sense if you assume that the personal characteristics you described imply the political positions you mention, which they don’t necessarily (granted, there’s a correlation).
As for the second, where have you personally been labeled a leftist SJW here? Not saying you weren’t, but it looked weird to me.
Right now, like 20 minutes ago, for saying it isn’t a huge tragedy that Curtis Yarvin didn’t get to talk at a tech conference, even after saying I would have let him speak if I was in charge of the conference!
Wait a second, here. What does this mean?
I do think that being a pregnant black female almost certainly implies you think it’s not okay for employers to not hire and businesses to not serve blacks, females, or pregnant people, but nothing beyond that. The issue I see is people conflating this with “leftism.”
Ok, I think I found it. It looks like a garden-variety conflation of “person defending group X in this particular instance” with “member of group X” (no discussion of free speech can go without a few of these!). I don’t think the position you actually stated would get you labeled “lefty SJW” around here, but hey, time will tell.
Most actual, real-world disagreements on this are not about whether “it’s ok”, but about the role of government in the matter, which is the argument I automatically thought of.
It might just be my own bias as a not (completely) white person speaking, but I feel like for every Rand Paul who honestly believes in the optimality of outcomes from purely private exchange with no state coercion (which I very nearly completely agree with), there are quite a few more than one paleoconservatives hopping on the “down with government” bandwagon for the almost exclusive reason that the most important freedom to them is the freedom to exclude black people. And frankly, I hate them for hijacking libertarianism when they did and am largely glad some of them seem to be leaving to call themselves something else now, but I don’t feel like taking that position, that you know what, in 1964 in rural Mississippi, it was okay for the federal government to step in if the market wasn’t going to make it happen (but not okay to make a wedding cake baker today serve gays, as a counterexample), makes me a leftist, and that it’s okay and coherent to take both positions, like there are intermediate positions between “no government, ever,” and outright state-controlled enterprise.
That position hardly “makes you a leftist”, really. Necessary but not sufficient.
“I do think that being a pregnant black female almost certainly implies you think it’s not okay for employers to not hire and businesses to not serve blacks, females, or pregnant people”
I’m a Jewish (ethnicity) libertarian atheist. I think it’s okay for employers to not hire and businesses to not serve Jews, libertarians and atheists—where “okay” does not mean that I approve of their doing so but that I think they should be free to do so.
Holding the opposite view of the question would imply a political position to the left (in some sense of the term) of the position I hold.
“for every Rand Paul who honestly believes in the optimality of outcomes from purely private exchange with no state coercion (which I very nearly completely agree with), there are quite a few more than one paleoconservatives hopping on the “down with government” bandwagon for the almost exclusive reason that the most important freedom to them is the freedom to exclude black people.”
I expect such people exist, but what makes you think they outnumber your first category? I may be getting a biased picture, but I’ve been an active libertarian for something over fifty years and I haven’t noticed such a pattern. It certainly doesn’t fit my observations of Students for Liberty or the Free State Project.
Well, like you said, you’re involved in libertarian academic groups. I called myself a libertarian for most of the past 20 years, but it didn’t mean a ton to me or matter much and most of my exposure to libertarianism actually being popular has come since 2008 when the Republican party realized they needed a way to mobilize young people who have conservative economic leanings but aren’t religious to combat Obama’s somewhat unprecedented effectiveness at getting out the vote, and the discussion shifted from how to do things like create effective markets in fisheries to combat the tragedy of the commons, to oh my God the Civil Right Act was the worst thing ever.
I’ll freely admit it’s largely mood affiliation. If the bastions of small government these days are going to be people like Ted Cruz, I don’t want a part of it, but frankly, I’ve never wanted a part in politics anyway. I don’t vote and mostly try to ignore politicians, but it bothers me that libertarianism was ignored for decades when it was all economists, but now that movement conservatives have used it to try and rebrand themselves, suddenly it’s hip.
David: re: comparing your minority group membership status to that of a pregnant black woman… how does that Anatole France quote go again?
See, as I tried to express above, I don’t even disagree with David’s basic sentiment. I believe, in general, businesses should be free to serve and not serve who they please. But I also believe, as a matter of sheer practicality, that in the American south prior to the Civil Rights Act, the practice was so pervasive that allowing universities and freaking drinking fountains to not serve black people was creating a permanent underclass, and the deleterious social effects were bad enough that intervention was warranted. That doesn’t mean it’s always warranted. I’m just more practical than ideological and the non-aggression principle doesn’t always automatically win the day. Sometimes the world can be improved by breaking it.
“how does that Anatole France quote go again?”
“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”
But you are missing my point, which is that the question of whether you are a member of a group and whether you believe there ought to be laws preventing discrimination against that group are separate questions. There are, as it happens, black libertarians, female libertarians, and pregnant libertarians, most of whom I would expect to share my preference for freedom of association. And there are lots of people who are not black, gay or female who do not share that preference and favor laws forbidding discrimination against members of those groups.
The implicit assumption of the post I was responding to was that the only thing determining what laws someone was in favor of was whether the law was in his favor.
David, what I was actually assuming is that a pregnant black woman I worked with wouldn’t like it if I thought people shouldn’t employ pregnant black women, but clearly I mis-expressed that. You can obviously believe, as a matter of principle, that people should be free to do so, even if their doing so would harm you. The thing I get from the Moldbug wing is not that people should be free to do so, but that it’s good and necessary to achieve the best world that people do so, and that is quite a different position.
Thanks for the explanation. My error.
David, I am tempted to agree with your point in theory, but I feel like the example you have chosen to follow up on really highlights its practical shortfalls.
Upholding unconditional freedom of association doesn’t sound like it would be attractive to people whose well-being – or survival – depends a great deal on others not being able to shun them.
(As a soon-to-be-refugee, this speaks to me – and yes, yes, your cred as a champion of open borders is not in doubt, but I still feel a parallel.)
…freedom of association doesn’t sound like it would be attractive to people whose well-being – or survival – depends a great deal on others not being able to shun them
People like Yarvin, Eich, and Sterling, then?
If you’re going to talk about people being shunned by “others”, you need to be a bit more clear on who those “others” are. Are you talking about being shunned by everyone else, or just by someone? And if we aren’t demanding that everyone open their communities to everyone else, then who is or is not allowed to engage in shunning?
The state can make other people pretend to accept you. It can make them give you jobs and pay you money no matter your ethnicity or gender identity or beliefs. It can’t make them like you. It can also make you pretend to accept Yarvin, Eich, Sterling, it can make you give them jobs and pay them money, no matter how much you dislike them. Why should it do one and not the other?
And consider the implications of the state being a democracy.
When you’re at work you need to work professionally. If you start fights about politics and religion or can’t get along with your coworkers then yeah that’s obviously grounds to kick your stupid ass out, I doubt most people would disagree.
(Generic you, not Adam particularly)
But if I’m reading Dain correctly here, what he’s talking about is more along the lines of people’s private behavior outside of work being dug up and used as evidence that they aren’t fit for their jobs.
For example, your campaign contributions might disqualify you from being in an executive or managerial position: after all, what if someone in a group you “hate” ends up as your subordinate? Or your flopped Facebook joke / leaked phonecall / doxxed blogging on some politically charged topic shows that you can’t be trusted to do your job.
Either your company owns you 24 hours a day and everything you say or do in your private life is related to your professionalism and employability (which is a bullet very few of us on either side want to bite), or we have to admit that personal politics and religious views are orthogonal to professionalism.
See, I don’t really disagree with that, but let’s say it came out that I was a fairly influential blogger who advocated white rule, segregation, and believed blacks were too stupid and violent to be trusted with power. Would it not be reasonable for my black boss at work to at least side eye me a bit, and maybe even fire me?
If you don’t mind me answering a question with a question, how about the reverse? If some white executive one rung up from him finds out he posted in favor of rioting in Baltimore on his Facebook page and wrote in favor of the Nation of Islam in his college newspaper, can he fire him in turn?
Being professional means finding a way to work with people who hold views you think are ridiculous or unethical.
The PI at my lab is a no-joke literal Creationist, but he’s also a top-notch computational geneticist and experimenter who knows not to let his religion interfere with his work. Should I try to get his grants revoked because he’s wrong in a way which has no effect on his research quality?
To the second, no, obviously not, being a creationist isn’t taking an openly hostile stance toward a person you work with. To the first, I don’t know enough about the Nation of Islam to take a position, but if white executive finds out someone working for him openly advocated killing, enslaving, subjugating, whatever, white people, and no longer feels comfortable with that person working there, that’s fine by me. The line is drawn at being publicly hostile to people you work with, not at being wrong about things.
It’s refreshing to have a productive conversation amidst the flame.
Public hostility towards coworkers would be a good rule-of-thumb, provided that hostile and public are defined sensibly.
For example I’d be nervous with a coworker advocating things that would fall under violent or property crime against my demographics, so no Stormfront or SCUM need apply, but less felonious negative feelings towards mischlings or cishets are rude but not really any of my concern. Similarly, reasonable expectations of privacy should apply: I would give a lot more weight to someone putting #killallmen or #hitlerdidnothingwrong on their public twitter than if they said the same things on 8chan.
Do you think a standard like that sounds reasonable?
The Nation of Islam is… odd. Its doctrine is, on its face, stupendously racist, but I’ve met a few of its followers in a martial arts context and they’ve universally been very polite to my pale ass. This may or may not be representative, and I doubt if “polite on the mat” would often extend to e.g. “happy with me dating their sister”, but I’d count it as evidence toward being able to work with them in other formal contexts.
Yes, that sounds reasonable.
Also, to add, what I was really intending to get at earlier isn’t necessarily that person deserves to get fired for it, but as a standard of professionalism, if you happen to work with a bunch of black people, and you’re plastering all over the Internet “hey guys did you know blacks are statistically more violent and have lower IQs, so when people don’t hire them for jobs and don’t want them to hold positions of public power and leadership, that isn’t racism, it’s just being good rational Bayesians and we should let that happen and, by the way, slavery wasn’t that bad and black people should be thanking us they aren’t in Africa any more,” at bare minimum that’s making for a pretty awkward, if not outward terrible, work environment should they find out about it.
Honestly, I don’t even know how to handle something like that. Say I was the owner of the place these people worked. I don’t believe the guy deserves to be ostracized for life from holding any job at all, but on the other hand, I want sufficient workplace harmony that people are able to productively work with each other. There is no answer that doesn’t hurt somebody.
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FWIW, after a couple days of thought and a lot of helpful comments upthread, I’m ready to take the radical stand that blocking Yarvin is not cool.
1) He’s there to discuss an unrelated idea – urbit, which I understand to be his proposal for a computer operating system that more easily allows for distributed processing among multiple computers. By preventing him from talking about that idea, people are functionally saying that because he’s guilty of expressing offensive opinions, his technical ideas should be shunned.
2) I guess I’m OK in theory that someone could be enough of an ass on the internet that we should shun them. Let’s say somebody ran a blog where all he did was find stories involving rich Jews, Jews who had committed financial crimes, Jews who ran banks and publishing companies, and republish them with “here’s another example of a Jew who . . .” I’d kind of think that guy was an a-hole, even if all the stories were true. (I don’t mean to privilege any particular group. You can insert any other minority and stereotype if you like, or you can change the hypo so Pam Gellar invented an operating system – same result).
3) But I don’t see a limiting condition, especially here. The rule isn’t “do we agree that Moldbug’s opinions are so far outside of reasonable discourse that we shouldn’t hear about his ideas for a distributed operating system?” Instead, the rule seems to be “if a critical mass of potential attendees are mad enough about what someone believes, then we shouldn’t hear their technical ideas.” That seems unreliable, and prone to abuse. Or as Ozy puts it, we’re apparently so unhappy with the status quo that we’ve summoned Cthulu and are hoping for the best.
I think one issue is this: For the most part, we already shun useless people because there’s no good incentive not to. So if you say “Shun people, but not their useful ideas.” You’re basically against shunning anyone who isn’t already being shunned. We had to set up a schelling point kind of thing around shunning good ideas, because otherwise shunning doesn’t work as a disincentive.
Thanks – my biggest concern is #3 – I can imagine a hypothetical where we shun someone’s potentially useful ideas because he’s an ass, but there doesn’t seem to be a reliable process to agree on a standard of shunworthiness, or to apply it.
Someone called for me? Because actually, as the representative of Cthulhu Leftswimmer on this comments page, I actually think that Yarvin shouldn’t have been disinvited from Strange Loop. Sorry, but blah blah complexity of values blah blah means that you don’t try to destroy someone’s professional and technical life just because you don’t like their politics. The trade-offs between these radically different domains of life need to involve direct violence before it’s acceptable to stomp Yarvin’s work life in favor of everyone else’s political decency (decent though it is, and wrong though Yarvin is).
I actually walked by the American Statistical Association’s headquarters a few days ago. Their address is:
732 +/- 2 North Washington Street
Alexandria, VA
I just looked this up and I am so disappointed to find out this isn’t true, at least according to the ASA website and Google street view.
Signal boosting this comment since it is buried deep in a comment thread. The comment does not directly capture my experience (I am often accused of being a sexist, I do not recall being seriously accused of racism). However despite being many standard deviations from the norm in my level of social acceptance (I consider furries to be badly oppressed for example) I often “Feel” myself to be on the right. As the comment says I stand with the enemies of my enemies or I stand alone. Sadly I think I am forced to stand alone.
“@undefined:
I have been publicly and explicitly accused of racism, not by one crackpot but by the consensus of a community formerly as diverse, thoughtful, and tolerant as this one, for having expressed the belief that cultural factors can adversely effect the performance of one nation’s armed forces relative to its neighbors. When I pushed back, trying to clarify whether “racism” was really what they meant to say, even though the nations involved all had majority populations of the same race, the response was that yes, I was a racist, beyond the pale, unfit for civilized society, unwelcome in their company unless I recanted, and that offering such a defense as this made my comments doubly offensive.
It was, in hindsight, a mistake to have left quietly. But that was then, this is now:
A: When you say “no more racists, zero”, do you mean to include me on the list of people to be expelled from society, or am I one of the tolerable not-quite-racists in your view?
A’: Have you cleared this with all of your liberal friends?
B: Do you understand that removing racists from society has costs as well as benefits, and that these costs increase exponentially as you have to search wider and finer, probe deeper with less discrimination to find the increasingly few remaining racists?
B’: Do you and your colleagues really believe that those costs are worth the benefit, at the levels they will have to reach to get the very last racist? Because even the supposedly-intolerant Red Tribe is pretty much resigned to accepting a small residue of communists that can’t practically be eradicated.
C: Do you think your offer of peaceful coexistence if only I will denounce Eich and Moldbug is even remotely credible?
You cannot eradicate every last racist without waging war, and I mean to use that term without hyperbole. And you cannot exclude me from that war. I am, by the warped standards of your tribe, already denounced as a racist many times over. Also a capitalist, and a libertarian. And I’m one of those shy nerdy guys Scott wrote about in “untitled”, yet unwilling to declare myself unworthy of romantic attention. Probably a sexist in other ways as well, maybe a rapist and certainly an MRA. Do I need to go on?
If “no more racists, zero” is truly the standard, then I’m on your tribe’s hit list, my name carved in adamantine runes. I can stand with the enemies of my enemy, or I can stand alone.”
Standing alone is for peacetime. In time of war, standing alone ultimately means not standing at all, and limiting yourself to alliances where every individual member agrees with the goodness of every other, doesn’t change that. In time of war, you stand with Stalin knowing he’s a murderer twenty million times over, needing no other reason than that he stands against the guy that plans to kill at least twice that number.
Moldbug wouldn’t be my first choice as a comrade, but undefined proposes to wage total war.
I feel rather conflicted due to my social views. For example my girlfriend is trans. Much of my family is on the “right.” My immediate family reacted poorly imo. My sister cried, my mom inquired if I needed therapy. My nuclear family would be rather horrified if I brought my GF to meet my father’s extended family. This is a rather bad spot. In general if someone is sufficiently left (but not into TERF feminism) they are likely to be cool with me and my GF. *
On the other hand I never fear for my job because of people on the right. I have been viciously insulted and mocked on a number of forums. Always the people doing the attacking where on the left (feminists). These people also generally try to get me banned.
I am starting to come to the conclusion that even if the right has problems with me the right is probably, overall, more tolerant. At least they will not wage “total war” on me. One sees the “tolerance” of the right even in the neoreactionaries. A number of neoreactionary writers are lbgt. Obviously some neoreactionaries insult these writers. But no one is purging them. Even Jim opposed purging people for interacting with Justin Tunny.
*The situation with my GF does however make me truly furious whenever people talk about cis people benefiting from transphobia. I do not fucking benefit from transphobia. I love my GF and honestly prefer to not be told to get therapy.
That sounds like a tough place to be in. Agreed that the right is unlikely to be after your job; some strains could give you grief in other areas of your life, but it seems like you are sensible enough not to be dealing with that sort.
Family, well, you don’t get to pick those. Per Frost, it should be a “when you have to go there, they have to take you in” situation, and that should always have room for an SO of any gender as well. And maybe it would turn out that way for you and yours, if you had to fall back on it, but you shouldn’t have to even wonder.
Best of luck finding places you can be comfortable, and I hope this continues to be one of them.
FWIW, I don’t know any trans people (as far as I’m aware), but this TERF stuff has a tendency to make me angry to the point of irrationality (i.e., it takes a lot of work to keep my emotions in check when the issue comes up).
So, LGBT activists and feminists have fought hard over the years to gain some legitimacy, legal recognition, and basic human respect. Many of their heroes quite literally risked (and, in some cases, lost) their lives for this entirely worthy cause. So, what do they do as soon as they’ve gained some measure of political and social power ? That’s right, they turn around and begin wielding that power to persecute someone even less powerful than themselves ! Woo ! Progress !
So, what do they do as soon as they’ve gained some measure of political and social power ? That’s right, they turn around and begin wielding that power to persecute someone even less powerful than themselves !
The Great Day
(W.B. Yeats)
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
So, LGBT activists and feminists have fought hard over the years…
Have they, in fact? Collaborating as groups, I mean, not individually fighting their own fights or individual Ls also being feminists. My own feminist history is hazy, but doesn’t seem to include any conspicuous examples.
And I can see several rational grounds for at least some feminists rejecting an alliance with LGBT. If you take it as axiomatic that such an alliance will be present, that all victims of the patriarchy must stand together or some such thing, then sure, the TERFs are traitors to the cause and that’s mind-numbingly infuriating.
Without that axiom, the TERFs seem quite a bit more comprehensible, and feminists overall seem a less perfect fit as allies of LGBT.
“Comprehensible”, of course, is not the same thing as “good”. But it is useful nonetheless.
As far as I know the movements are largely separable — and race is separable from both. Or at least were up until ten years ago or so, and outside of Tumblr I’m not sure how much has changed since; this talk about intersectionality is really quite a new thing, and it doesn’t seem to have made much of a theoretic or organizational splash.
The concepts of patriarchy and male privilege in particular are a messy fit with LGBT theory (and to a lesser extent with anti-racism), and I don’t find circumlocutions like “transmisogyny” very satisfying. Of course, I’m biased there.
A lot of TERFs are lesbians. Some of it is ridiculous fighting over un-privilege, but a lot of it is that they want safe spaces from trans (eg, MI womyn’s festival). The LGBT alliance is more fragile than the lesbian-feminist alliance. As for the latter, see the Lavender Menace.
Yes, the other dubious axiom in the equation is that “LGBT” is a natural alliance whose members are all closer to each other than to any outside group.
An L can be a member of feminism, or of LGBT(QBDSMXYZ…), or of both. But if feminism feels it has cause to stand against, say, G or T, then the Ls have to chose. And feminism is a bigger tent that may welcome unencumbered cis-female Ls.
It would suck mightily to be a T or BT or even an LT, if the natural alliances turn out to be L+feminist and GBT+whatever. But it may be so.
My thanks to the author of the above, for both that message and the rest of the thread.
@John Schilling
A: Is my personal view meaningful to your ability to say these things in public? For clarity no (though having not been there I don’t how much charity you’re giving yourself in that abstract), nor do I consider Eich really a bigot, nor the poor unsuspecting pizza place in Indiana to add some less blatant examples to this mix. I’m not sure debating these finer points is useful though because:
A’: While I lack a rigorous survey the statement “publicly making hateful statements is sufficient reason to fire/ostracize/exclude someone” would easily clear the bar.
B: Yes (did I not mentioned that these are scary times?), but the current approach to “where does this end” seems very much to be “we’ll know it when we see it”. The fact that this path is scary and morally troubled doesn’t dissuade people taking it if the alternatives look worse. A lot of people who thought that “live and let live” was working just fine were shocked by the past ~year of police brutality, GGate, etc. and they’re looking for something more proactive than cordial debate. The answer to why am I on the wrong side of the free speech is that I agree with them that the status quo is untenable.
B’: They didn’t resign themselves to a certain tolerable level of communists, they kept grinding until it proved ineffective (and if you look at American politics vs the general West they were quite effective at grinding). Whack-them-as-we-see-them doesn’t have a failure point until it starts trying to whack opinions held by a significant percentage of the population.
So pick any imaginary viewpoint, if you held a survey would 40% of America say “yes that’s racist”? If so you will probably not be able to get away with saying that on twitter (or any other forum where you hang your real name on it).
C: No, but not because I wouldn’t think better of you (I honestly think your defense of all speech damn the consequences is noble) but because this current phenomena is more an immune response than a guided movement. The fact that any sample of the movement only agrees about a subset of the targets doesn’t prevent it from surviving and perpetuating. Arguments about gulags/state sanctioned murder/etc. aren’t seen as convincing since the people expect the fever to burn out once it’s driven the perceived level of hate back down to pre-youtube levels (which might be a bad bet in our brave new voluntary panopticon).
“A lot of people who thought that “live and let live” was working just fine were shocked by the past ~year of police brutality, GGate, etc. and they’re looking for something more proactive than cordial debate.”
And so the toxoplasma spreads…
@undefined: People like you did make it impossible, or at least intolerably painful, for me to express my views in public. I’ve been working on my pain tolerance.
You all have apparently been working on your ability to ban politically incorrect coders from jobs and conferences in San Francisco, on the grounds that this will stop crooked cops from shooting poor black men in Missouri. Somehow. You’ve learned how to attack weak targets on your home ground, to send a message, in supreme confidence that this message will be understood and accepted in the way you want.
And you think that this war of yours will result in an improvement over the status quo?
@ John Schilling
You all have apparently been working on your ability to ban politically incorrect coders from jobs and conferences in San Francisco, on the grounds that this will stop crooked cops from shooting poor black men in Missouri. Somehow.
Well, that beats the 4th order effect (all four were about signalling) that I saw in a discussion of EA’s malaria nets, which ran something like this.
[I’m reproducing the use of the word ‘African’ as zis comment did.]
If you donate a large amount to EA and brag about it…
A) … you’re presenting as caring about African children
B) … and about all Africans
C) … which inspires you to be nicer to Africans you meet in the US
D) … which inspires other USians to be nicer to Africans they meet in the US.
Frankly, I think the paternalistic attitude it expresses towards African children, and by extension Africans in general, is going to far outweigh any potential benefits of presenting as being nice towards them. I’m no SJW, but there’s more to racism than being mean.
But I think possibly feeling a little more condescending towards people of African descent you meet is an acceptable tradeoff for actual Africans actually not dying of malaria. (And maybe Southeast Asians and Amazonians too, though I don’t know if any bednets are shipped to those locales yet.)
Italics might have been me. Ah, here we go: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/01/ot21-master-and-commenter/#comment-207863. I’m not quite sure that’s a 100% accurate rendering of my point, but it’s close enough – the incidental details don’t matter.
I seem to have voted 2:1 in favour of calling such reasoning sophistry. Anyway, if that really was what inspired that comment, then exasperation at the show of mental gymnastics with only the most tenuous connection to reality is… probably the best response.
Actually preventing actual Africans from actually dying of actual malaria does indeed seem like a far more sensible reason to donate to AMF etc.
@ Peter
Thank you. That was the right thread, which I had looked for but couldn’t find. My memory added some intermediate steps, and fairness would add intermediates to John Schilling’s example also. I pulled my italicized hypothetical quote from your declared steelmanning of inner SJWs, all within so many firewalls of disclaimer that I got lost trying to count and praise all of them.
It does sound like John Schilling, you, and I are on the same page as to real effects vs signalling.
‘Immune response’ or autoimmune disorder?
Is it likely that the perceived level of hate will recede, when the ‘fever’ is itself perceived as increasing the level of hate?
Is it reasonable to ask whether ‘whack-them-as-we-see-them’ has already hit the failure point you specified? As evidenced by, say, public backlash or the more easily quantifiable crowdfunding?
What result follows from rules of engagement that encourage any grouping of 40% of the population or more to seek public shaming and shunning for those that disagree? What if there are two opposed groups of 40%+? What’s the equilibrium?
Skip the arguments about the gulags and where all this could end – assuming the status quo is untenable, does this pattern of action improve things in the short run? In the long?
@notes
> ‘Immune response’ or autoimmune disorder?
Well that was Scotts argument in Toxoplasma of Rage; I would counter that it’s a rational last resort to moving a stuck Overton Window.
> What if there are two opposed groups of 40%+? What’s the equilibrium?
An epic and disastrous shitstorm until both sides realize that the losses are too high and move to different tactics? If there is actually a 40% army of the willing-to-get-ostracized for “blacks are an inferior species” that is a hill I am willing to die on. But do you consider that 40% vs. 40% case likely? It seems ironic to ask here but are there no beliefs that you would fight an unwinnable and/or dirty fight for?
> in the short run?
That would be rather hard to prove either way. In terms of some correlations: gender role issues are improving significantly (I don’t think Rage is the primary mover here but it is what killed the Indiana RFA) and the odds of a police officer being charged with murder has moved from its previously immutable 0%.
> In the long?
In the long run I expect it to stop! Overwhelmingly we are not fighting against people with thoroughly reasoned positions, if it successfully expels the disease of flawed memes the immune system shuts down.
How much, would you say, is your side unaware that they’re mostly fighting people whose positions are way, way removed from this, and how much is it actual dishonest misrepresentation?
I consider the 40% vs. 40% case to be an adequate approximation of where American politics currently stands. I don’t think there are currently 40% willing to be ostracized for ‘blacks are an inferior species.’ I do think there are two blocks of ~40%+ willing to ostracize back against the other tribe, be it blue or red, and I think this can escalate cyclically.
Sure, there are things in life for which I’d fight to win, and take the moral cost on my conscience after. The question I’m trying to ask is, are you sure these actions are actually going to help things?
I believe (and correct me if I misread you) that you argue that much ill, beginning with an ‘epic and disastrous shitstorm’ is an acceptable price to achieve a new and better status quo. The argument I’ve been making isn’t that you should have different preferences about how the world should be – it’s that you might wish to check whether your chosen means actually do move you toward your chosen ends. If they don’t, is that price still acceptable? For the chance of a better tomorrow, weighted against the chance of a worse tomorrow, and considered in the light of a certainly worse today?
I believe you when you say ‘a lot of people are looking for something more proactive than cordial debate.’ It’s entirely human that the term you use to describe what they seek isn’t effective.
Human and predictable as it is, the leap from ‘something must be done’ to ‘this is something, so let’s do it’ rarely achieves the ostensible goals. It does, however, let the newly proactive congratulate themselves and each other on their activity; the more violent the activity, the greater the plaudits.
And yet, greater sacrifices do not inevitably lead to greater results: often they simply lead to greater waste. Price and value are loose correlates, at best.
The short run is full of noise, and is – as you say – hard to prove. Still, against the changes you note must be set the backlashes. Are you confident that this process converts more than it antagonizes?
In the long run you ‘expect it to stop’… because the opposing positions are not thoroughly reasoned… and impliedly because mob shaming is an effective way of inducing people to adopt better reasoned positions?
Personally, I’d concur that mob shaming can be effective at changing public positions (and less effective, but still effective, at changing private ones), but I don’t think it has much to do with whether either the old or the new position is thoroughly reasoned. It is a tool to impose a predetermined dogma, not a way to find truth. I would not be confident that this process expels, rather than introduces, flawed memes.
Fare well, and better luck commenting on other topics.
The basic question of how and how far one should go to address a perceived wrong is a real one, and well worth discussion.
(There’s a separate but related discussion about what should be perceived as wrong, of course).
This may be your impression, but I think you’d have a hard time supporting that. This reminded me of people thinking violence is up when in fact it declined dramatically.
(and insert standard objection here re:GG)
@Cauê
Scary because I agree in abstract with most of the concerns expressed here by other posters (thought not in their estimates of probability). I don’t know that you’ll trust me on this but I called myself a libertarian for a very long chunk of my life, I moved to “crazy liberal” when I was convinced that the level of harm inflicted by the status quo was far exceeding the good brought about by those ideals.
I already am on the wrong side of these arguments in several places for thinking that the Indiana pizza place was just kind of harmlessly ignorant.
@undefined in this scope:
I have observed this kind of behavior multiple times. It seem to me that there is a certain thought pattern, lets call it reactionary although that might not really be correct, that underlies people on the edge of any ideology.
It seems like that thought pattern is actually more determinant of the actions/ideas of those who fall into it than the actual ideology. I think this can be seen in how far left and far right tend to fall into the same tests of ideological purity, so you see dictatorships on the left and the right that tend to end up with states that are exceedingly similar in character.
I’m not sure if that rings any bells for you, or if it even could, given that I am attempting to characterize your mental state in a less than flattering manner.
@Mark Atwood:
Allow me to suggest that your comments seem exceedingly disingenuous. “Please continue talking so everyone can see how horrible you really are” is not actually an invitation to discourse.
If that is wasn’t what you meant, it is how your comment reads.
@HeelBearCub
No offense taken, its an accurate assessment. My actions being moral is predicated on being able to reason them out well enough to counteract that. (Really folks, I do understand Schelling Fences and I’m not going to endorse killing anyone for their beliefs).
Which is also why the “crazy gray” around here is interesting and why I’m curious how neoreactionaries form (since it seems likely to be a failure mode of the same mental system).
Lots of people convert from one ideology to another. It doesn’t make them an expert on the old ideology, or prove that the old ideology was wrong.
If the person is thoughtful, switching ideologies makes them more skeptical about the new ideology.
If the person is not thoughtful, then they consider themselves to have had A Conversion Experience and then can easily throw out all the old stuff and ignore anyone who believes the old stuff.
Well, congratulations on avoiding the descent into absolute psychotic evil that a lot (by volume) of Blues have gotten sucked into.
I spent a semester of college in Massachusetts. That’s where I found out that there are a lot of people who’d kill me and most of my family if they were given the chance. And thought it was totally reasonable and acceptable to say as much. (The things that are associated with Tumblr these days existed long before it. And mostly came from academia.)
What I’ve been seeing since then is that no one has learned the right lessons from the 20th century. Meta is hard, I guess.
@Mark Atwood:
Man, how could I not want to post here with implications like that running around? I sure do love the implication that I’m in favour of ruthless genocide because I think that government-funded public services are superior to private services in some sectors! And I guess I should stop the charade and make it clear that I understand exactly how the regulations I’m in favour of lead inexorably to burning everyone right of me on a stake! Believing that a functioning welfare system (ideally basic income) is a moral imperative was clearly just a cover for my desire to chain all capitalists to mighty engines, that they might toil until they die.
Am I missing some context here, or something ? “undefined in this scope” says,
What is so frightening about this statement ? Isn’t this a pretty basic belief, that any activist, for any political position, surely holds ? A person who is ok with status quo and has no desire to change it would presumably find political arguments pretty pointless, and would decline to participate in them… right ?
Wanting to change things does not, in and of itself, make you a crazy liberal (or conservative) fanatic bent on world domination, it just makes you a politically active person.
EDIT: I should add that I totally disagree with “undefined in this scope”‘s views, but the mere desire to change things in and of itself is, IMO, unobjectionable.
Pretty sure the reactions are more about undefined’s other contributions, especially the exchange in this thread.
I did some soul searching by rereading what the actual left said about Eich’s resignation and I think the flaw in Mark’s post here is that he says “remind people how crazy the left is” which he means (intentionally or otherwise) “remind my ingroup why our outgroup is nuts”. I don’t think he’s even getting that because I mostly seem to have reminded them how to summon a mental image of their favorite straw-liberal.
Which makes for great ingroup signaling, but outside that you look totally intransigent and hopelessly incompatible with society.
When I decided to get into this thread it wasn’t because I thought I would convince anyone to change their moral principles, but because there seems to be a total lack of understanding of what motivated their outgroup. But in reality it seems to be primarily willful ignorance and there’s no amount of talking on my part that will change that.
I thought it was pretty clear in the context that “remind my ingroup why our outgroup is nuts” was a paraphrase.
@Mark
> Even as a paraphrase, your made up quote is incorrect.
Well, it’s outside the edit window so the best I can do is a sincere apology for the confusion.
It was intended as a paraphrase, and I stand by it’s accuracy in that form unless you genuine believe advocating the methods you accuse me of is a “sane” position. In which case we’ll just have to be mutually horrified at the idea of either of our straw men gaining significant political power.
@Mark Atwood:
Yes, please do keep posting so that everyone can see that would rather engage with straw-men than actual argument.
Sorry to everyone else, that was a sort jerky thing to post. I hope the point was clear.
“Please, do continue to engage here, so that everyone else can get a clearer and clearer understanding of the blue’s desired endstate, and a clearer and clearer understanding of the means the blues are willing to employ to get there.”
I think the rightists who post here would like to think that “undefined” is representative of liberals–that would make it easy to write us off.
@undefined in this scope – “Yes (did I not mentioned that these are scary times?), but the current approach to “where does this end” seems very much to be “we’ll know it when we see it”.”
So “we know it when we see it” is the targeting system, right? There’s a pattern in each member’s mind, and they match people and events in the world around them to that pattern, and if the match isn’t good enough, then the outrage kicks in, right? The problem, as I see it, is that the pattern is fairly malleable, and the visual input is heavily edited by the movement itself. Change the pattern, change the input image, and you can generate or suppress outrage more or less on demand. Actual lies usually aren’t necessary; it can be done with spin. Movements beget leaders, and leaders have a vested interest in keeping the movement going. It seems like a system pretty much tailor-made to grant overwhelming power to gigantic assholes.
“A lot of people who thought that “live and let live” was working just fine were shocked by the past ~year of police brutality, GGate, etc. and they’re looking for something more proactive than cordial debate.”
I would put forward that many of those instances are excellent examples of the visual input being tampered with. It’s a positive feedback loop. I mean, last fall, we had multiple high-profile accusations of rape/sexual assault, and a broad push for change in rules and institutions to combat “misogyny”, and then a bunch of them turned out to be fabricated. Then we were told that the fabrications didn’t matter, and we still needed sweeping social changes that give more power to the movement, because anything else would be letting the misogynists win. Ambition doesn’t have a satiation point.
“So pick any imaginary viewpoint, if you held a survey would 40% of America say “yes that’s racist”? ”
The movement is actively working to alter public opinion on what is and isn’t racism/sexism/etc. The more they succeed, the more power they have. The more power they have, the more effectively they can shift and/or control the definition. Again, positive feedback loop.
I mean, you mentioned that you realize this is dangerous and morally fraught territory. But everything about this is self-perpetuating and -aggrandizing. And you expect or at least hope for a positive outcome, and that sorta baffles me.
…You mentioned somewhere in this mess that you used to be fairly libertarian, and somewhat recently became distressed enough about the state of our society to switch to “crazy blue”, as I think you described it. If you don’t mind telling the story, how did that happen? What prompted the switch? Assuming you haven’t been driven off?
I think you guys have to consider the possibility that undefined in this scope is a right-wing guy pretending to have left-wing opinions. “They want to eradicate us” is a fear or fantasy held by many people on either side of many issues. “I want to eradicate them” is much less common, and most people are sorry to have allies who will say it loud and proud.
I would deny your first point and agree with your second; however:
> “I want to eradicate them”
There seems to be an inability on this forum to separate “I want to remove racist ideals from the public sphere” from “I want to physically maim and murder the racists”. I wouldn’t be on this path if I thought the former required the latter.
I don’t believe you! But of course I can’t be sure, the world contains all kinds.
“There seems to be an inability…” It’s not always an inability. Misunderstanding can be a rhetorical tactic. One way to limit the effectiveness of this tactic, is to use empathy when you express your ideas.
It’s even better to use empathy when you formulate your ideas — but that advice is irrelevant if your ideas are phony, like I’m accusing.
That would seem to cut both ways in your comment; but since I am apparently a walking Poe’s law violation here I will have to bow out.
“There seems to be an inability…” It’s not always an inability. Misunderstanding can be a rhetorical tactic.
“There seems to be an inability…” — is a way to be polite, and politeness is one of the standards here. That’s a nicer phrase than “Does EVERYBODY here do X?” “Is there anyone here who can X” … etc etc.
Almost nobody wants to physically murder and maim the enemy, at least at the start. That’s, well, the Final Solution. Plan A is pretty much always for the enemy to admit their wrongness or at least weakness, surrender, and agree to live according to the conqueror’s rules. Maybe the leaders will have to go to prison for a while, but everyone else can just quietly recant and submit, nobody has to be maimed or killed.
Undefined and his kin, almost certainly imagine they can achieve this through organized ostracism, social harassment, and democratic political activism. It’s when they find that this won’t actually make all the racists shut up and go away, that we get to see what their Plan B, and ultimately their final solution, look like.
It is at best catastrophically uncharitable to assert that someone has a final solution in mind. Don’t do that.
“It is at best catastrophically uncharitable to assert that someone has a final solution in mind. Don’t do that.”
Which is why I am glad that he doesn’t. (Or at least didn’t.)
I think part of the problem is that what gets defined as “racism” gets defined down to finer and finer grains, so that heated and violent arguments about “Hispanic” versus “Latin@” versus “Spanish” and what exact shade of ‘brown’ is meant and how racist you are for even asking the difference take place.
I agree racism is a problem. I disagree that questioning one person’s doctrinaire diktat about a particular point is racism.
I’ve learned to take this kind of suspicion seriously (“this doesn’t look like one of us, it looks like someone failing an Ideological Turing Test”). But their 10:42:00 comment suggests that it’s not necessary to say undefined is “pretending” to remark that they don’t look representative of the left.
Is it really unexpected that a forum that mostly composed of the fringe of the grey would attract a fringe of the blue? But as pointed out by Anonymous Umberlla, charitable engagement here seems to be impossible so I will have to bow out.
“Mostly composed of the fringe of the gray”? Christ. You admit qualms about tarring and feathering one racist and suddenly everyone thinks you’re harboring Nazis under the floorboards.
I didn’t intend fringe as a euphemism for bigot/racist, there’s a wide variety of non-mainstream positions espoused but they are pretty overwhelmingly grey.
(And it’s not like they bother to get under the floorboards, it’s more that Scott throws a rug over them in the open threads.)
It’s not “gray” I’m objecting to so much as “fringe”. From where I’m standing, the bulk of the commentariat looks mainstream Gray; its tolerance for occasional fringe specimens does not imply that they’re well represented. At this point I think there are more leftists complaining about them.
And even that tolerance has limits; witness what happened to Jim. Not that I disagree with that choice; I’m willing to hear just about anyone out as long as they’re polite about it, but Jim really, really wasn’t.
(The Godwin annoys me too, but I guess I brought that down on myself.)
Somebody remind me again what all these colours mean. It’s hard enough for my poor agéd brain to remember that Red and Blue in the American context are something not exactly mapping onto the opposite of what Red and Blue are over this side of the pond.
Orange and Green I understand.
Grey/gray and violet confuse me, so imagine how tangled I get trying to work out what a red-tinged blue fringe with a gray fringe represents 🙂
Increasingly they seem to be used to mean “right-wing”, “left-wing”, and “anime perverts with weird political views” respectively, but that’s probably a corruption.
My take on it is that Scott originally meant “red tribe” to mean the religious, rural, lower-middle to middle-class core of the American Right, “blue tribe” to mean the American Left’s agnostic, educated, urban and suburban core (“urban” here meaning geographically, not a euphemism for “black”), and “gray” to mean the emerging cultural clusters coming out of the Internet. Cultures, in other words, not political views as such, although they tend to be tightly correlated.
That doesn’t remotely cover all the important blocs in the States, but Red and Blue are probably the most important ones.
Yes, I’m always vaguely amused that it’s the Red Tribe that is traditionally well-known for worrying about the Red Menace.
Red tribe/Blue tribe should be understood as primarily a matter of regional culture, with the actual political affiliations secondary. Blue territory is coastal, Red territory is rural, Grey territory is virtual with a couple meatspace colonies on the West coast.
A decent way of summing up the difference between the two models –though it might be useless if you haven’t actually lived in the relevant regions– would be that the political Red Tribe is headquartered in Austin, Texas, while the cultural Red Tribe is headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska. (Though both Blues are in New York.)
Frankly, I was starting to think the same thing. I’m no blue, but this matched my darkest caricatures of SJWs a little too well.
I’m fairly certain that calling people double agents is somewhat taboo if you want to engage in productive debate. I’m not getting that vibe off of undefined and it most certainly seems to a net negative to enable that sort of tactic even if it occasionally would catch a real crook.
To be honest, he/she is far too apologetic, polite and straightforward to be a strawman. I mean, if I were to make a strawman, I wouldn’t try to make this helpful.
@Held in Escrow
In this case, the person is either:
1. Someone who has declared “total war” against my ilk.
2. Some who is part of my ilk, but a liar.
Either way, we’re already past the point of productive debate. And, though I’m not extending charity to the individual in this case, I think doing so is actually being more charitable to the blue team in general.
If this is where the “culture war” framing device is going to take us, we might as well drop it.
Yes, that’s me, and nice to see you again.
I don’t think the state of the SF community is as generally or universally bad as you describe. The local cons I have attended lately have been mostly apolitical or politically diverse, and I’m still reading a lot of perfectly good professionally-published works from NYC-based houses not named after a misspelled legume. The points of attack have become increasingly obvious, especially the past two years, and now take the appearance of enemy beachheads. But a beachhead is the beginning of an invasion; there’s still a good ways to go before we’re down to La Resistance making a last stand from their redoubt in the Carolina Piedmont.
Similarly, I don’t think undefined truly speaks for an overwhelming consensus of liberal Americans. He represents an emergent strain that could, but has not yet, become dominant.
And, @anonymous umbrella below, I’m pretty sure he’s the real thing. Most of his early posts here were too subtle and too reasonable to be plausible sockpuppetry. It was only when we poked at some of the rougher spots and asked “wait, that’s a bit much there, did you really mean that?”, that the true form emerged. Sockpuppets don’t wait to be evoked like that.
I think I know the online community you’re referencing as well. (I used my full name there, though LHN was in my sig file.) I remember beginning to lose patience with it when a comment of mine was read as racist by a prominent participant in a way that was pretty much the opposite of the principle of charity, and made me feel as if nearly two decades of participation hadn’t so much as gotten me the benefit of the doubt.
Agreed that SF cons vary a lot, and there’s a lot of variation even within them. But the blacklisting and disinviting of guests are depressing, as are the endless cycle of kerfuffles and the current Hugo polarization. (On which I don’t feel terribly comfortable in either camp, and don’t really want to spend my free time marching in a civil war in any case. But of course that leaves the field occupied primarily by those who do.)
Really, I’d just like someplace to talk about SF– online or in person– without having to bite my tongue re politics, especially now that heterodox opinions increasingly feel as if they carry the risk of ostracism. That seemed easier to find 20+ years ago than it does now– political arguments were hardly absent, but they were secondary to the shared interest.
(Or maybe that’s just rose-colored glasses looking at youth.)
Would this be the forum that begat John M. Ford’s Romeo and Juliet Infernokrusher sonnet, way back in the day?
If it is, then I’m the one who’s misinterpreting. (Though that forum had some overlapping participants with the one I was thinking of.)
In any case, I hadn’t seen that before googling, and previously unseen work by Ford, who died way too young, is always welcome.
As some evidence that the situation in SF isn’t that bad, the recent Baycon had a pretty clear leftish slant–but I was put on a variety of panels, including one on climate, surely by people who had some idea of my views.
Europe has a network of countries that no longer require passports to cross borders within the network. I don’t remember reading anything to suggest Europe’s GDP doubled or went down 25% or diverged from countries outside the network.
Both sides of the open border argument wildly over estimate the impacts. Even with powerful incentives to move like Detroit and post-Katrina New Orleans and no barriers to better places to live, most people won’t move.
Even in Italy, Turkey and Jordan where refugees arrive daily, allowing the refugees to work is basically going to offset GDP impacts. Long term for these countries open borders could reduce costs and allow more refugees to pass through to other countries which also disperses the impact.
Doubling GDP or reducing it by 25% are estimates that should be attached to space aliens or followed by the phrase “over several decades.”
I agree that we should view claims of doubling GDP with scepticism, but you are wrong to suggest that Europe’s GDP not doubling is a strong argument against the doubling claim. Most of the benefit from open borders come from migration from very poor countries to very rich countries. All we have in Europe is open borders between very rich and moderately rich countries, hence we should only expect modest gains.
It looks like Scott is in the new again over at Slate.
Of course, it’s due to the recent Moldbug banhammer from Strange Loop.
Well, hurrah for Slate, and hurrah for David Auerbach! It’s really good to see someone who knows what liberalism actually is, lives by it, and is prepared to call the illiberal strains of leftist thought what they are.
More like this, please.
I get a weird feeling from Auerbach, and this article is a good example. It includes several unnecessary insults, but I think they’re there mainly so his articles have a chance to actually be read by the left.
Yeah, I get a little tired of all the signaling insults required when defending a person with heterodox viewpoints. Still, glad he wrote it.
On a similar note, I get tired of all the political jabs many blue tribe authors seem to insert when writing about unrelated topics. Not sure if it’s signalling to their audience or just because one feels one’s world view is so self-evident that it can be comfortably inserted everywhere. It doesn’t seem that red tribers are as “liberal” with the unrelated insults in their writing, though that may be because I’m more red and/or because I paradoxically read more stuff written by mainstreamish blues than by mainstreamish reds.
I think reds are also more aware that some people think they are evil. Being blue means never having to worry about ethically-tinged insults. Until someone bluer comes along.
This article (the Vox one below, not Auerbach’s, which is much better) made me think of this, even though it doesn’t include insults, so much as constant digressions into liberal pet causes which dilute the impact of the message, which, I think is supposed to be that “professors with tenure need to speak up and challenge their students.”
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8753721/college-professor-fear
But that message gets so buried in statements about *what* professors speaking up need to say that I find the article greatly diminished in its persuasive power and clarity, at least to me as a reddish-grey reader.
I grew up in dittohead country. Trust me, they totally are.
Though I suppose talk radio is not writing, as such.
Well, I certainly expect Rush Limbaugh to throw in lots of insults about liberals, but he’s talking about politics specifically. I more meant political jabs thrown in as asides. Those may also be as prevalent, though I’m a bit hard pressed to think of where. I expect them on things like “theblaze,” but that is, again, explicitly political.
It is true, as I said, however, that I tend to avoid mainstream red outlets. I read extreme reddish gray libertarian outlets because that’s where my own views lie, and I unavoidably read mainstreamish blue outlets because, well, it’s the New York Times, but I rarely have occasion to read more mainstreamish red opinion, and when I do I tend to think “ick.”
Maybe “the average red tribe member” is the biggest lacuna in the worldview of academic/intelligentsia types today. Like, Bernie Sanders is probably ideologically farther from me than Rick Santorum, but it’s harder for me to comprehend voting for Rick Santorum than Bernie Sanders.
” Maybe “the average red tribe member” is the biggest lacuna “…….on SSC.
This is the whole truth about this place.
Its a place where the most powerful political force in american society, in american history, has been vanished.
Grover Norquist. Newt Gingrich. Roger Ailes. Karl Rove. Hannity. Limbaugh. Foster Friess. Ken Langone. Dick Armey. Fucking Sheldon fucking Adelson. AFP. AEI. ALEC. The NRA. The Heritage Institute. Heartland Institute. Center for Consumer Freedom!!!!….
If you only came here you’d never know these vocabulary words or their referents. Transpacific Partnership or Gamergate?
What’s the diversion all about, libertarians?
There is some motivation to pretend y’all aren’t running the show. Embrace your monoculture. You won the world!
To be fair, not all of us are American.
EDIT: To clarify. Since many of us are not super familiar with American politics, discussions tend to go towards the common ground, which is the internet, where the left is King and identity politics is something people care deeply about and can be used to wield “power”.
Indeed. For a start there’s me, I’m British, and left wing by British standards at that. I tend to prefer “centre-left”, as, well, I’m I slightly old-fashioned liberal who doesn’t subscribe to some of the more alarming SJ ideas, practises and norms.
Monoculture? I’m not seeing it. There’s no way that, for example, ESR and I can be described as a monoculture.
@Gene Marsh:
context:I am well on the left side of things, not just here, but broadly in America. Which I only state so you understand where I am coming from.
Stating something this way is not helpful here. Attempting to boost your argument by simply using emotional words generally makes your argument less persuasive, rather than more.
Broadly though, I agree with the argument.
@Whatever Happened To Anonymous:
But a) you aren’t constraining your conclusions to the domain from which you draw all your empirical data. And b) you aren’t likely even going to the places on the internet where the American right (broadly) spends its time.
@onyomi:
Allow me to suggest that these only bother (you) if they hit (you), there you don’t notice them if you don’t find them objectionable. I’m sure there is a cognitive bias to cite here, just can’t think of it at the moment.
Gene, I don’t know any of these words. I vaguely recognise Rove and Gingrich as American politicians of the Republican Party. I have an idea Limbaugh is a radio show host.
The rest of it? Could you tell me, off the top of your head, what the ICA, the FCA, Macra, Enda feckin’ Kenny, Joan Burton, IBEC, SIPTU and NAMA refer to?
>But a) you aren’t constraining your conclusions to the domain from which you draw all your empirical data.
Can you clarify what you mean here?
> b) you aren’t likely even going to the places on the internet where the American right (broadly) spends its time.
… Their facebook profiles?
@Heelbearcub
“Allow me to suggest that these only bother (you) if they hit (you), there you don’t notice them if you don’t find them objectionable. I’m sure there is a cognitive bias to cite here, just can’t think of it at the moment.”
No offense, but this is pretty obvious, and something I’m already taking into account.
@onyomi:
I regard these two statements as not compatible with each other. Red-tribe has the religious right as a firm, solid, reliable part of its base. You are saying that many members of blue-tribe aren’t aware that people in red-tribe think they are evil? Red-tribe has people in leadership positions who are perfectly willing to call people in blue tribe evil. As in elected to the US House of Representatives or the US Senate
I’m not saying this doesn’t exist in Blue tribe, but the idea that it is vastly over-represented in Blue tribe and only marginally represented in Red tribe doesn’t track with what I see of Red tribe.
Different people sometimes care about different things. Some of them are better represented on the Internet than others. This does not constitute a “diversion’.
@Whatever Happened To Anonymous:
My contention is that you are drawing broad conclusions about “the left” and “the right” (and those groups in America, I presume) based on what you are seeing on the internet based on the self-selected portion of the internet that you frequent.
>My contention is that you are drawing broad conclusions about “the left” and “the right” (and those groups in America, I presume) based on what you are seeing on the internet based on the self-selected portion of the internet that you frequent.
I’d say that’s fair, as long we (as in, you and me), are using “you” (and “we”, respectively) generally, rather than specifically.
There is some motivation to pretend y’all aren’t running the show. Embrace your monoculture.
Speaking only of forums somewhat like ssc, I’m not going to check which side this comment came from, because it could have come from either side. People who are used to ‘if you are not with us, you’re against us’ may see any neutral comment as supporting their enemy, and feel out-numbered.
“People who are used to ‘if you are not with us, you’re against us’ may see any neutral comment as supporting their enemy, and feel out-numbered.”
That’s part of it. But the other part is that if you are fairly far out on either tail of a distribution, you naturally tend to lump everyone between your position and the other tail as the opposition—and they do indeed outnumber you.
From a serious libertarian point of view, entirely replacing the public school system with vouchers is the moderate reform, eliminating government involvement in schooling entirely the hard core position. The former position might be supported by a few percent of the electorate, the latter, I would guess, by less than one percent.
Red-tribe has the religious right as a firm, solid, reliable part of its base.
The Religious Right is not a solid monolith, nor is it immune from fracturing; that piece from back in 2009 is fairly well supported by what is going on today. Statistically the Evangelicals are getting older and not replacing their members at the same rate as the general population. The “mainline” churches are trending more liberal, and there is indeed such a thing as the Religious Left; The Episcopal Church may be tiny in numbers relative to the entire American population but it has long regarded itself as having a voice and influence and leadership role much greater than its numerical base warrants, and it is very much on the progressive side. If Blue Tribe America is indissolubly wedded to, for example, the idea of “pro-choice”, the Religious Coalition For Reproductive Choice is right there beside them. The Executive Director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is a minister of the United Church of Christ, the Rev. Barry Lynn, and they are as eager as anyone to keep creationism out of schools (for one topic).
@Deiseach:
I think I broadly agree with what you are saying. Well, except that I would not describe the Religious Right as “fracturing”. You also point out that they are shrinking due to demographic trends, but I see no evidence that existing members of the religious right are splitting off and joining the progressive religious left.
But I don’t know what that has to do with whether or not members of blue tribe a) believe they are hated by members of red tribe, and b) are justified in that belief.
In that vein, the first article you linked is instructive. Right at the beginning the author points out: “1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism.” The rhetoric around that culture war coming from the religious right has largely been thin or unmasked hatred. The RR believes that blue-tribe is beholden to agents of evil, to be purged from the earth if they do not repent.
@HeelBearCub
As a US liberal some of whose best friends are RRR, I mostly hear “Hate the sin but love the sinner.” On both sides, whether disagreement or opposition or oppression, etc, can be called ‘hating the person’ depends on who is doing the calling, how seriously, how big zis vocabulary is, and how many syllables zie expects zis audience to stand for.
I really like Auerbach; he’s a dedicated lefty who is upset with how much of the left acts, but is also a good enough writer that he can make all the appropriate noises to get them to listen to him. I think his piece on online leftism is worthy flogging a bit: http://theamericanreader.com/jenesuispasliberal-entering-the-quagmire-of-online-leftism/
It’s something I value in an author; being able to talk in the language of a community well enough that you can get them to agree to at least hear out an idea which, on its face, is completely taboo.
@houseboatonstyx:
I’m familiar with that. But I think that usually applies when they have managed to think of the sinner as an actual person. And of course there are plenty of RRs who endorse the kind of actions that lead to, say, Nigeria passing a law recently that calls for capital punishment for homosexual acts.
And then there is the fact that they maintain that the various acts and positions that blue tribes holds are evil. Hate the sin, love the sinner is all well and good, but punish the sin is where the rubber meets the road.
The question isn’t, how reasonable are many RRs, but rather, is there enough accepted, mainstream RRs whose rhetoric and actions are generally accepted by red-tribe that a blue member could fairly conclude that there are plenty of red-tribe members who hate blue tribe.
Do I have to go go dig around Right Wing Watch to find some of the almost infinite examples of red tribe inviting me to rhetorically suck on the barrel of their gun?
This is all in the context of onyomi claiming that blue-tribe expresses their hate for for red-tribe more, which is demonstrably not true.
It might be possible to get some kind of measurement by making a list of expressions that you think show ‘hate’, then searching for them in a large sample of texts from both sides.
Then show the top scoring texts to volunteers from both sides and let each volunteer remove from the list any instances that are “not true hate” or are metaphorical, etc. Score the texts again. Of the highest scorers, you can eliminate any text that you consider not truly mainstream/accepted.
Then sort the texts into Red and Blue, and score again. Now you have a Red Number and a Blue number you can compare, with computers and volunteers doing most of the work and providing some objectivity, and giving you shorter and shorter lists to read.
(Letting the volunteers also at an early stage dismiss any texts that come from sources they consider non-mainstream, would make less work for them, but might have some disadvantages for the examiner.)
Sure.
But it’s completely missing my point.
I’m not trying to claim superiority of blue tribe rhetoric, merely refute the claim that red-tribe is so lacking in its employ of hateful rhetoric that one will hardly ever see it.
The examples of red-tribe employing hateful rhetoric are legion. This is sufficient to disprove onyomi.
Je suis Moldbug.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/11/msnbc_panel_on_seinfelds_pc_comments_hes_a_billionaire_i_dont_feel_sorry_for_him_if_people_dont_laugh_at_his_jokes.html
This kind of thing is getting more and more prevalent, and, imo, is a very bad trend: “don’t feel sorry for him! he’s rich!” “oh, boo hoo, poor mr. billionaire has a complaint! well screw him, he’s rich!” And this applies even when said billionaire is not so much complaining about his own life, but about a development in the culture.
The subtle and I’m sure, not consciously intended message is: your opinions are valid in proportion to how oppressed you and/or your group are, and vice-versa.
For what it’s worth, I don’t feel sorry for any of you or any of them, oppressed or not. If you live in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Western Europe, in 2015, and can’t find a decently happy life with fulfilling things to do, try harder.
But with Seinfeld specifically, whether or not someone feels sorry for him seems beside the point. The point is too many college campuses have jumped the shark, though it does somewhat reek of “kids these days” bullshit we hear every time a generation gets old.
It’s not really about who does and doesn’t deserve sympathy, though I agree the third world poor are much more deserving of it than just about anyone in the US, it’s more the very framing in terms of sympathy: if you have a complaint about how the culture is developing then that is automatically read as a complaint about your own life, and therefore, to be evaluated as part of a wholistic evaluation of your life circumstances.
This “wholistic” evaluation of an argument is precisely the problem. “The personal is political” means there’s no room for discussion of abstract ideas.
Yes, very true and that’s horribly annoying. Seinfeld’s point, and anyone else’s point, should stand or fall on its own merits.
Via Hacker News, something Scott is sure to be interested in:
Fermented foods, neuroticism, and social anxiety: An interaction model.
Next comes an interventional study, I hope.
[comment deleted by poster for pointlessness]
Probably too late now, but in future, if you blank your comment while editing it, SSC will delete it entirely.
Scott, have you seen this yet? What your thoughts?
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment