Jacobite – which is apparently still a real magazine and not a one-off gag making fun of Jacobin – summarizes their article Under-Theorizing Government as “You’ll never hear the terms ‘principal-agent problem,’ ‘rent-seeking,’ or ‘aligning incentives’ from socialists. That’s because they expect ideology to solve all practical considerations of governance.”
There have been some really weird and poorly-informed socialist critiques of public choice theory lately, and this article generalizes from those to a claim that Marxists just don’t like considering the hard technical question of how to design a good government. This would explain why their own governments so often fail. Also why, whenever existing governments are bad, Marxists immediately jump to the conclusion that they must be run by evil people who want them to be bad on purpose.
In trying to think of how a Marxist might respond to this attack, I thought of commenter no_bear_so_low’s conflict vs. mistake dichotomy (itself related to the three perspectives of sociology). To massively oversimplify:
Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.
Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.
Mistake theorists view debate as essential. We all bring different forms of expertise to the table, and once we all understand the whole situation, we can use wisdom-of-crowds to converge on the treatment plan that best fits the need of our mutual patient, the State. Who wins on any particular issue is less important creating an environment where truth can generally prevail over the long term.
Conflict theorists view debate as having a minor clarifying role at best. You can “debate” with your boss over whether or not you get a raise, but only with the shared understanding that you’re naturally on opposite sides, and the “winner” will be based less on objective moral principles than on how much power each of you has. If your boss appeals too many times to objective moral principles, he’s probably offering you a crappy deal.
Mistake theorists treat different sides as symmetrical. There’s the side that wants to increase the interest rate, and the side that wants to decrease it. Both sides have about the same number of people. Both sides include some trustworthy experts and some loudmouth trolls. Both sides are equally motivated by trying to get a good economy. The only interesting difference is which one turns out (after all the statistics have been double-checked and all the relevant points have been debated) to be right about the matter at hand.
Conflict theorists treat the asymmetry of sides as their first and most important principle. The Elites are few in number, but have lots of money and influence. The People are many but poor – yet their spirit is indomitable and their hearts are true. The Elites’ strategy will always be to sow dissent and confusion; the People’s strategy must be to remain united. Politics is won or lost by how well each side plays its respective hand.
Mistake theorists love worrying about the complicated and paradoxical effects of social engineering. Did you know that anti-drug programs in school actually increase drug use? Did you know that many studies find raising the minimum wage hurts the poor? Did you know that executing criminals actually costs more money than imprisoning them for life? This is why we can’t trust our intuitions about policy, and we need to have lots of research and debate, and eventually trust what the scientific authorities tell us.
Conflict theorists think this is more often a convenient excuse than a real problem. The Elites get giant yachts, and the People are starving to death on the streets. And as soon as somebody says that maybe we should take a little bit of the Elites’ money to feed the People, some Elite shill comes around with a glossy PowerPoint presentation explaining why actually this would cause the Yellowstone supervolcano to erupt and kill everybody. And just enough People believe this that nobody ever gets around to achieving economic justice, and the Elites buy even bigger yachts, and the People keep starving.
Mistake theorists think you can save the world by increasing intelligence. You make technocrats smart enough to determine the best policy. You make politicians smart enough to choose the right technocrats and implement their advice effectively. And you make voters smart enough to recognize the smartest politicians and sweep them into office.
Conflict theorists think you can save the world by increasing passion. The rich and powerful win because they already work together effectively; the poor and powerless will win only once they unite and stand up for themselves. You want activists tirelessly informing everybody of the important causes that they need to fight for. You want community organizers forming labor unions or youth groups. You want protesters ready on short notice whenever the enemy tries to pull a fast one. And you want voters show up every time, and who know which candidates are really fighting for the people vs. just astroturfed shills.
For a mistake theorist, passion is inadequate or even suspect. Wrong people can be just as loud as right people, sometimes louder. If two doctors are debating the right diagnosis in a difficult case, and the patient’s crazy aunt hires someone to shout “IT’S LUPUS!” really loud in front of their office all day, that’s not exactly helping matters. If a group of pro-lupus protesters block the entry to the hospital and refuse to let any of the staff in until the doctors agree to diagnose lupus, that’s a disaster. All that passion does is use pressure or even threats to introduce bias into the important work of debate and analysis.
For a conflict theorist, intelligence is inadequate or even suspect. It doesn’t take a supergenius to know that poor farm laborers working twelve hour days in the scorching heat deserve more than a $9/hour minimum wage when the CEO makes $9 million. The supergenius is the guy with the PowerPoint presentation saying this will make the Yellowstone supervolcano erupt.
Mistake theorists think that free speech and open debate are vital, the most important things. Imagine if your doctor said you needed a medication from Pfizer – but later you learned that Pfizer owned the hospital, and fired doctors who prescribed other companies’ drugs, and that the local medical school refused to teach anything about non-Pfizer medications, and studies claiming Pfizer medications had side effects were ruthlessly suppressed. It would be a total farce, and you’d get out of that hospital as soon as possible into one that allowed all viewpoints.
Conflict theorists think of free speech and open debate about the same way a 1950s Bircher would treat avowed Soviet agents coming into neighborhoods and trying to convince people of the merits of Communism. Or the way the average infantryman would think of enemy planes dropping pamphlets saying “YOU CANNOT WIN, SURRENDER NOW”. Anybody who says it’s good to let the enemy walk in and promote enemy ideas is probably an enemy agent.
Mistake theorists think it’s silly to complain about George Soros, or the Koch brothers. The important thing is to evaluate the arguments; it doesn’t matter who developed them.
Conflict theorists think that stopping George Soros / the Koch brothers is the most important thing in the world. Also, they’re going to send me angry messages saying I’m totally unfair to equate righteous crusaders for the People like George Soros / the Koch brothers with evil selfish arch-Elites like the Koch brothers / George Soros.
Mistake theorists think racism is a cognitive bias. White racists have mistakenly inferred that black people are dumber or more criminal. Mistake theorists find narratives about racism useful because they’re a sort of ur-mistake that helps explain how people could make otherwise inexplicable mistakes, like electing Donald Trump or opposing [preferred policy].
Conflict theorists think racism is a conflict between races. White racists aren’t suffering from a cognitive bias, and they’re not mistaken about anything: they’re correct that white supremacy puts them on top, and hoping to stay there. Conflict theorists find narratives about racism useful because they help explain otherwise inexplicable alliances, like why working-class white people have allied with rich white capitalists.
When mistake theorists criticize democracy, it’s because it gives too much power to the average person – who isn’t very smart, and who tends to do things like vote against carbon taxes because they don’t believe in global warming. They fantasize about a technocracy in which informed experts can pursue policy insulated from the vagaries of the electorate.
When conflict theorists criticize democracy, it’s because it doesn’t give enough power to the average person – special interests can buy elections, or convince representatives to betray campaign promises in exchange for cash. They fantasize about a Revolution in which their side rises up, destroys the power of the other side, and wins once and for all.
Mistake theorists think a Revolution is stupid. After the proletariat (or the True Patriotic Americans, or whoever) have seized power, they’re still faced with the same set of policy problems we have today, and no additional options. Communism is intellectually bankrupt since it has no good policy prescriptions for a communist state. If it did have good policy prescriptions for a communist state, we could test and implement those policies now, without a revolution. Karl Marx could have saved everyone a lot of trouble by being Bernie Sanders instead.
Conflict theorists think a technocracy is stupid. Whatever the right policy package is, the powerful will never let anyone implement it. Either they’ll bribe the technocrats to parrot their own preferences, or they’ll prevent their recommendations from carrying any force. The only way around this is to organize the powerless to defeat the powerful by force – after which a technocracy will be unnecessary. Bernie Sanders could have saved himself a lot of trouble by realizing everything was rigged against him from the start and becoming Karl Marx.
Mistake theorists naturally think conflict theorists are making a mistake. On the object level, they’re not smart enough to realize that new trade deals are for the good of all, or that smashing the state would actually lead to mass famine and disaster. But on the more fundamental level, the conflict theorists don’t understand the Principle of Charity, or Hanlon’s Razor of “never attribute to malice what can be better explained by stupidity”. They’re stuck at some kind of troglodyte first-square-of-the-glowing-brain-meme level where they think forming mobs and smashing things can solve incredibly complicated social engineering problems. The correct response is to teach them Philosophy 101.
(This is the Jacobite article above. It accuses Marxists of just not understanding the relevant theories. It’s saying that there’s all this great academic work about how to design a government, and Marxists are too stupid to look into it. It’s so easy to picture one doctor savaging another: “Did you even bother to study Ingerstein’s latest paper on neuroimmunology before you inflicted your idiotic opinions about this case on us?”)
Conflict theorists naturally think mistake theorists are the enemy in their conflict. On the object level, maybe they’re directly working for the Koch Brothers or the American Enterprise Institute or whoever. But on the more fundamental level, they’ve become part of a class that’s more interested in protecting its own privileges than in helping the poor or working for the good of all. The best that can be said about the best of them is that they’re trying to protect their own neutrality, unaware that in the struggle between the powerful and the powerless neutrality always favors the powerful. The correct response is to crush them.
What would the conflict theorist argument against the Jacobite piece look like? Take a second to actually think about this. Is it similar to what I’m writing right now – an explanation of conflict vs. mistake theory, and a defense of how conflict theory actually describes the world better than mistake theory does?
No. It’s the Baffler’s article saying that public choice theory is racist, and if you believe it you’re a white supremacist. If this wasn’t your guess, you still don’t understand that conflict theorists aren’t mistake theorists who just have a different theory about what the mistake is. They’re not going to respond to your criticism by politely explaining why you’re incorrect.
Is this uncharitable? I’m not sure. There’s a meta-level problem in trying to understand the position “don’t try to understand other positions and engage with them on their own terms” and engage with it on its own terms. If you succeed, you’ve failed, and if you fail, you’ve succeeded. I am pretty sure it would be wrong to “steelman” conflict theory into a nice cooperative explanation of how we all need to join together, realize that conflict theory is objectively the correct way to think, and then use this insight to help cure our mutual patient, the State.
So if this model has any explanatory power, what do we do with it?
Consider a further distinction between easy and hard mistake theorists. Easy mistake theorists think that all our problems come from very stupid people making very simple mistakes; dumb people deny the evidence about global warming; smart people don’t. Hard mistake theorists think that the questions involved are really complicated and require more evidence than we’ve been able to collect so far – the weird morass of conflicting minimum wage studies is a good example here. Obviously some questions are easier than others, but the disposition to view questions as hard or easy in general seems to separate into different people and schools of thought.
(Maybe there’s a further distinction between easy and hard conflict theorists. Easy conflict theorists think that all our problems come from cartoon-villain caricatures wanting very evil things; bad people want to kill brown people and steal their oil, good people want world peace and tolerance. Hard conflict theorists think that our problems come from clashes between differing but comprehensible worldviews – for example, people who want to lift people out of poverty through spreading modern efficient egalitarian industrial civilization, versus people who want to preserve traditional cultures with all their thorns and prickles. Obviously some moral conflicts are more black-and-white than others, but again, some people seem more inclined than others to use one of these models.)
This blog has formerly been Hard Mistake Theory Central, except that I think I previously treated conflict theorists as making an Easy Mistake. I think I was really doing the “I guess you don’t understand Philosophy 101 and realize everyone has to be charitable to each other” thing. This was wrong of me. I don’t know how excusable it was and I’m interested in seeing how many comments here are “This is super obvious” vs. “I never thought about this consciously and I think I’ve just been misunderstanding other people as behaving inexplicably badly my whole life”. But people have previously noticed that this blog is good at attracting representation from all across the political spectrum except Marxists. Maybe that’s related to treating every position except theirs with respect, and appreciating conflict theory better would fix that. I don’t know. It could be worth a shot.
Right now I think conflict theory is probably a less helpful way of viewing the world in general than mistake theory. But obviously both can be true in parts and reality can be way more complicated than either. Maybe some future posts on this, which would have to explore issues like normative vs. descriptive, where tribalism fits in here, and “the myth of the rational voter”. But overall I’m less sure of myself than before and think this deserves more treatment as a hard case that needs to be argued in more specific situations. Certainly “everyone in government is already a good person, and just has to be convinced of the right facts” is looking less plausible these days. At the very least, if I want to convince other people to my position here, I actually have to convince them – instead of using the classic Easy Mistake Theorist tactic of “smh that people still believe this stuff in the Year Of Our Lord 2018” repeated over and over again.
I for one think this is a great change, and a brilliant post. Absolutely, less time delightedly exploring still more abstruse mistake-theory-legible problems (although these are fun and the theory that total unity is possible feels good) in favor of more time spent on projects such as, “which candidates are really fighting for the people vs. just astroturfed shills” … hear hear!
Goddamnit.
@nornagest
Uh… are you agreeing that mistake-theory-legible problems are not the main problems, and find that to be good cause to curse the heavens? Or did I draw a “goddamnit” by saying something stupid at the top of the comment thread?
I think “which candidates are really fighting for the people vs. just astroturfed shills” is not only the wrong question to be asking but also emblematic of one of the biggest problems out there, and I’m also a little bit afraid that you’re right, possible sarcasm or no, and we will be seeing more of that sort of question around here in the future. Either would merit a “goddamnit”, but I was thinking mainly of the latter when I wrote that.
Ah. Now I don’t like my comment either; I seem to have sounded really uncharitable. I think charity is a key tool for, er, The People. I mean, there really are a small set who are intentionally sowing confusion, and the way to beat them is to use the principle of charity and other mistake-view tools to each develop our own understanding of “easy” mistakes, and even some “hard” mistakes, and also of how to distinguish trolls and sophists from rubes and confused types (as much as we can)… and then sometimes you can catch someone being a troll or a sophist in how they discuss a mistake-type problem, and act appropriately. And when you do that in public, and people see you patiently correcting the honestly mistaken, while starving trolls and calling out sophists, that potentially comes with renown. There are small differences in temperament (perhaps especially when measured across people who have both motive and opportunity and the ability to rationalize their behavior, and people who don’t) but people are damn similar at bottom. Really smart, well-informed people with energy need to spend a little less time on enjoying the respect of other really smart, well-informed people and a little more time outside their comfort zones, in the messy places where it takes a bit of work, and even then you can’t quite perfectly tell who is a troll and who is a sophist.
I’m absolutely not calling for more mindless purity tests. I disapprove of anyone still litigating Bernie vs Hillary, although both candidates failed some purity tests, yada yada. Rather, folks on the purity test side of things need to remember that there *will* be good-hearted, learned individuals who have mistaken views about how to solve mistake-type problems, and who are easily brought back onto the right team. Or only brought back onto the right team with difficulty.
Politics is still a *hard* problem.
Citation needed.
On both sides of most issues.
I am open to the idea of carefully and systematically examining which candidates are shills and which “care about the people”… But I fear that any such analysis would end up simply dividing candidates along tribal lines… Or in other words, I think correctly detecting which politicians really Care is difficult, and people trying to do so will make mistakes.
It may work better if you look mostly for the shills on your own side. Although that still runs into the problem that “your own side” may not be well defined.
Uh, yeah. I think somewhere I ran across the idea that about 9/10ths of one’s time should be spent at the object level (here, the “mistake” level) and about 1/10th at the meta-level (the “which people are actively helping address mistakes, and how much” level–with about 2/3rds of that focused on *oneself* and one’s closest relationships, since that’s where a betrayal would cut deepest.)
It seems to me that if you view governance as trivial or not worth trying to solve, you are, in fact, making an Easy Mistake. Obviously it’s still difficult to know what the right thing to do is when all the experts are potentially biased or self-interested, and in that respect conflict theory is worth engaging with and learning from, but if Marxists have anything to teach us, it’s only to the extent that they treat governance as a serious problem, too.
But since you asked, yes, I think you erred in not engaging more seriously with conflict theory. Having it written up like this is useful, but the basic problem of “what if the leftists are right, and the supposed experts are biased and corrupt, and the ostensibly technical arguments for leftist-disfavored solutions are really just cover for seizing a bigger piece of the pie” did occur to me on a number of occasions, and the absence of that perspective was a problem with your posts on topics where this is relevant, like minimum wage.
(This is not to say there aren’t any errors in your framing in this post. There probably are, since it’s a grand sweeping narrative theory of politics. But I’m not smart enough to spot them.)
Well… you’re probably not the person I need to say this to, but it’s been bugging me lately, so here goes:
I think there’s a common political attitude, probably having to do with teleology or intent, that strikes me as basically voodoo-ish.
Say there’s a new minimun wage law, and the Evil Plutocrats are unhappy because it’s getting in the way of their ability to bleed the People dry. They fund a think tank of elite scientists who argue that this will cause Yellowstone to erupt, for complicated sciency reasons. The People, noticing that the Plotucrats are chuckling and rubbing their hands together, feel pretty comfortable disregarding the argument.
And then Yellowstone erupts and thousands die.
The OP touches on this, but it bears underlining: Evil Plutocrats aren’t magic. Evil people in general aren’t magic. Reversed stupidity is- say it with me- not intelligence.
If corrupt, evil people make an argument while chuckling and rubbing their hands with glee and thinking ‘Ha, now I shall swindle these suckers,’ the chuckling and hand-rubbing and evil thoughts don’t leak into reality and make it be the other way around.
I think a lot of people feel like it’s unfair, profane, just *wrong* for evil people arguing in bad faith ever to be right about anything. But the universe doesn’t actually much care what we think is fair or not.
When you hear the words “just cover for seizing a bigger piece of the pie,” your conjunction-detector should emit a loud screeching noise, because the first of those words encodes a whole separate assertion that needs a whole separate argument to justify it than the rest of the quote.
(I know this is old-hat for a lot of the people here, and I apologize for the sermon, but it feels like it needs to be said every so often.)
(I’m tempted to go write a science-fiction story about a Superintelligence with this worldview, trying to carefully manipulate its enemies into lying to it about things it wants not to be true.)
A very good point – the object-level arguments should screen off the intentions of the person who made them. The problem is that for most social problems there is ample (weak) evidence both for and against new policies, and then the situation is not so clear.
Have a real-world example: Nazis discovered the connection between smaoking and lung cancer.
> Have a real-world example: Nazis discovered the connection between smaoking and lung cancer.
I particularly like this example because the Nazis did not just happen upon the right answer. They had already decided that they did not like smoking and wanted to stamp it out based on reasons that were, at least in some ways, selfish. Then, because of this, they went on fishing expeditions looking for ways tobacco is bad. This is not seeking for the truth; had they found that tobacco is good for you, the research would not have been published.
While doing that, they stumbled upon the real reason why you should not smoke. This is why “they are really evil and only pushing their selfish personal agenda” is never an argument against a position. Even if true, that might just mean that they went looking for reasons to push the position and actually found something real.
Motivated reasoning can sometimes produce the correct result. There are still good reasons to be wary of motivated reasoning and not to simply ignore the fact that it is motivated when analyzing it.
@Nancy
That’s pretty much the best example I could have asked for.
Thanks so much. I’m going to find so many uses for this.
That was a bit annoying. I used to cite early anti-tobacco people as evidence that “uptight people were right in the first place” until I found they included Nazis … which turned them into an example on the other side.
@Tuna-Fish
The Nazi belief system itself is a pretty great example of “evil means wrong” thinking in the other direction. They believed that the Jews were evil, so therefore “Jewish Science” must be ignored, resulting in Nazi Germany losing out completely on the atom bomb when it otherwise might have beaten the Americans to the punch. We should be thankful they weren’t more rational.
@Forward Synthesis
the germans didn’t have the wealth to develop the bomb as fast as the US did and and wage the war at the same time. the estimates heisenberg put forward for what it would cost and how long it would take are very stark, and given what the US spent on the effort, not far off.
You should know better than this. The US got the bomb in pretty much the most expensive way possible. The Germans might have chosen to do the same, but that’s because they were the Germans, and they’d never take cheap, simple, and quick over massive and complicated. The German bomb program was a joke. The Japanese were ahead of them because of how badly they’d screwed it up.
That said, Forward Synthesis isn’t exactly right on this, either. They abandoned it because they didn’t think they could make it work, which was true given the program they had.
@bean
The US chose to get the bomb in every way possible, because they had the budget to do it and they weren’t sure which way would work best. The german effort would have been more focused out of necessity, but that also means that they might have chosen wrong. I forget which methods that Heisenberg wanted to pursue, but the method that the US eventually settled on wasn’t the one that the best experts thought would work at first.
Hence “most expensive way possible”.
The British got it mostly right from the start. I was pointing out that saying that Heisenberg’s estimate was the same as the Manhattan Project was not an accurate estimate of how much it would actually have cost the Germans to get the bomb if they’d had someone competent in charge. Heisenberg may have been a great physicist, but the US was smart enough to put Leslie Groves, not a physicist of any sort, in charge of ours.
@Forward Synthesis
Germans most likely failed to make an atom bomb because they decided to use heavy water moderators instead of graphite moderators. The ideological explanation is a myth. There were some good reasons for this decision a priori but it completely derailed them.
We need a maxim for this. Something like “Nasty people are not less likely to be right than nice people”.
Startup idea: hire people to be nasty online in support of a disfavored cause. Although that’s hardly a new idea…
That maxim isn’t true. It’s certainly possible that someone arguing in bad faith can be right, but on a Bayseian level, arguing in bad faith is evidence against being correct.
“Intentions are only weak evidence”
Being nasty isn’t the same thing as arguing in bad faith (unless I misunderstand what bad faith means).
But you proposed the maxim in response to someone who referred to bad faith.
I was focusing more on the “evil people” part, but you’re right.
That’s true, but most people, including most quite well educated people are not equipped to follow the complicating sciency reasons. And even of those that are equipped in principle most don’t have the time and interest.
If you can’t trust experts bearing fancy titles and sciency explanations because either they’ve been directly subverted by oodles a cash from mustache twirling plutocrats or because complicated incentive structures have been put into the place or arisen naturally that bias things in a particular direction even with the scientists themselves all acting in good faith, then this is a huge problem regardless of whether or not it is possible in principle for someone to come along, do a deep dive literature review, seek out the raw datasets, and independently examine the evidence.
Similarly in journalism, I’m reminded of a time Noam Chomsky was being interviewed by someone from Sky News on the topic of media bias/propaganda, and the interviewer asked Chomsky if Noam thought he, the interviewer, was intentionally lying in his reports. And Chomsky responded “you wouldn’t be sitting in the chair you’re sitting in right now if you didn’t hold the opinions you do.”
Conrad:
Yes, this is IMO the strength of a conflict-theory approach to understanding the world. It appears on the right, as well, in some of the critiques of AGW that basically make the same point–if you didn’t basically accept the model of human-caused climate change by CO2 emissions, there are a thousand reasons you’d have ended up in another field by now (you think these complicated climate models are a waste of time, your views make you an outcast in your community, you can’t find anyone but coal companies to fund your research, it’s twice as hard to get your papers published because they go against the overwhelming beliefs of your scientific community, etc.)
I’m not sure I see why that’s a point in favor of the conflict theory worldview. It sounds very much like a hard mistake frame — we want to have this scientific apparatus that tells us true things about the world, but it turns out that when we try to set up systems to do that incentives and human nature comes in and distorts the outputs away from pure truth uncovering.
Because if you look at this through the pure mistake frame, you’ll see a lot of people all inexplicably happening to make mistakes in the same direction. If you look at it in the conflict frame[1], you’ll see self-interested actors making a “mistake” that supports their prior beliefs and their position in the world.
This makes me think a bit of Scott’s figure/ground inversion thing. (Government is a collective operation to provide services and enforce laws that happens to have some rent-seeking and empire building happening vs government is a rent-seeking and empire-building operation that happens to provide some services and enforce some laws sometimes.) Both frames are partly right, and it’s useful to be able to flip back and forth between them.
[1] I may not be thinking of this frame in the same way as Scott. I’m thinking of the conflict and mistake frames as a way to understand the world, and here we have a case where peoples’ prior ideological commitments and personal/institutional interests may be driving their arguments and findings. That’s different from the “let’s talk about our differences” vs “let’s destroy the heretics with fire until there’s no more heresy” strategy.
That’s not the understanding I came away with.
I don’t think it needs to be inexplicable for a mistake framework to fit it quite well. A system can in principle be robust against stupid, greedy, and evil people. If the system in question isn’t then someone made a mistake and the system should be fixed. This can be an easy problem or a very hard problem.
On the conflict side, it’s not that the system that needs to be fixed to be robust against the stupid, greedy, and evil — but rather it’s the stupid, greedy, and evil people themselves that are the irreducibly problem. Instead of trying to fix the system, we need to go out and kill/subjugate the stupid, greedy, and evil people and then everything will be great without any need for complicated systems.
The way it looks to me: If you think that the mistake-theorists proposing ideas and arguments are mainly just saying what serves their interests/ideology/employers, then I think you’re a lot less likely to think that a mistake-theorist approach to resolving our problems is going to bear fruit. Instead, it will just be a matter of the powerful people determining which theories get a hearing and which ones are suppressed or defunded or no-platformed.
It’s also true that less greedy, less stupid, less evil people need less complex systems to manage their interactions. You don’t need a “no pooping in the pool” sign at the community pool until some asshole starts pooping in the pool.
@Conrad
That might work as long as people have strongly similar preferences, outlooks, and neurological makeups. Then they can just anticipate each other’s preferences and apply the Golden Rule.
With differing people, things get complicated fast even if all are sincere and altruistic. Combinatorial explosion is a harsh mistress.
@Jack
I’m pretty sure you just walked into a trap.
@albatross11
I guess I see what you are saying about “how the world works” vs “how we can solve problems”. I was was trying the second as primary in terms of taxonomy.
@Brad
??
While I didn’t actually intend it that way (I meant what I said, more moral people need less government), Brad’s right it’s also an argument against multiculturalism and for homogenous societies. With multiple cultures you need more written rules to cover interactions between cultures than you would within a monoculture.
I think there is a very general principle there somewhere–to the extent we all agree on the basic rules and there are informal social enforcement mechanisms that work passably well (even if they’re just glares and offended looks and an occasional cold shoulder), we only need actual laws/rules (with the police or the HR department or the principal getting involved) for rare, exceptional cases. When we don’t all agree on the basic rules, or when we do but social enforcement mechanisms don’t work, then we end up needing a lot more overt enforcement mechanisms.
In some workplaces, it wouldn’t matter if you removed any management/HR rules about, say, not pinning up Playboy centerfolds in your workspace–anyone who did that would get so much social pressure that they’d very quickly take it down, or their coworkers would do so with as much rudeness as needed to get the message across. Only the most utterly clueless or trying-to-give-offense people would persist in such activities enough that the boss needed to get involved.
In other workplaces, either the overwhelming consensus or the willingness to use social enforcement mechanisms don’t exist, and if the boss doesn’t want Playboy centerfolds hung up in the workspace, he has to make it a formal policy and come down on people who violate it.
Where we have shared values + social enforcement mechanisms (which is partly about people having confidence in their shared values and willingness to push back on people violating them), we can get away with fewer police and courts. That’s not always a win–sometimes, social pressure can be pretty damned oppressive, and clear written rules are better. But I suspect it’s a win 90+% of the time to have things handled informally.
More even than this. If rationality is systematized winning, then we should expect winners to be more rational. We should expect the ideas of those with a track record of success to be more predictive of reality than those with a track record of failure. In a conflict of the Rich and Elite versus the Poor Masses, we should expect the masses to have less insight into the fact of the matter.
This is especially true when one side’s argument is emotionally satisfying and the other’s is not. True things which conform to basic human emotional biases tend to not be debated in the first place. False things which conform to them tend to be retained for some time even after the accumulated evidence indicates that they ought to be discarded. Pessimists will tend to have more accurate worldviews than optimists.
Winners are more rational in the sense that the things they do are rational ways of meeting their goals. That doesn’t make their arguments rational.
Someone who wants your house, tells lies to your boss, gets you fired, and buys your house for cheap when you go bankrupt and need to sell it is being rational–he just won. But he isn’t arguing rationally.
I am so sorry I just hit the “report” button on this by accident; please forgive.
Someone who successfully pulls off a predatory scheme should, all things being equal, be expected to have a more accurate map of the world than someone who fails to pull off a similarly predatory scheme.
It is only by believing that one side of a debate is systematically more predatory that one can conclude that the more powerful and wealthy side is no more likely to have accurate beliefs. This is, of course, what the typical conflict theorist thinks, but the system of inferences is clearly circular.
What beliefs the person who pulled of the scheme has, and what beliefs they claim to have, may diverge.
That being said, I think you’re dead on about the rest of it. And there’s maybe a (weak) feedback loop, where it’s easier to be rational in the first place if you’re not overly poor and miserable.
There’s maybe a larger pattern where it’s easier to do things if you’re relatively privileged, because you don’t have the disadvantages and distractions disadvantaged people do. And ‘do things’ includes things like ‘educate yourself’ and ‘learn to think clearly’ and maybe even ‘cultivate tolerance and compassion’- if you have less to be angry about, you might end up being less angry in general.
Which produces a dynamic that really strongly violates ‘just-world’ thinking and common memetic defenses against ‘just-world’ thinking, where privileged people *are* likely to be better according to some metrics, but due to causes beyond their control. If you mention this in public, there’s a chance the left will round it off to “Poor people are subhuman and deserve what they get” and the right will round it off to “Poor people aren’t responsible for anything they do, and no matter how good rich people are none of it counts”.
I’m not sure how strong this dynamic is- it’s easy to come up with counter-dynamics that would funge against it- but it’s the sort of thing that might explain some of our current social troubles.
And it’s really complicated, so I’m emphatically not taking any moral or policy stance here.
He may be expected to have a more accurate map in his head, but you don’t care so much about what’s in his head as you do about the arguments he is making. Predatory schemes may not involve arguments at all, or if they do, poor ones.
Well since wealth makes people more narcissistic and less compassionate we end up with a lot of rich people who think they popped out of an Horatio Alger novel and look at everyone who hasn’t pulled themselves up by their bootstraps with distain.
Which is why we have billionaires who think adding a work requirement to medicare will somehow magically make poor sick people able to hold down a job rather than just spiral down and out of control. Really, it’s their insufficient work ethic that is the problem; not the lack of jobs that pay a decent wage, the internalised feelings of uselessness for not being able to provide for yourself, or any other barriers to employment like a criminal record or even a hole in your resume because of an illness.
Thousands of people will die because of this and it is either because rich people are rationally greedy and don’t want to pay more taxes or that they are so far removed from the problems of people in poverty that they rely on bogus ideas of why some people are successful and others aren’t. Making them much less rational about how the programs they are operating work.
Disagreed. Our schemer should be expected to have a map better suited to predatory schemes, ie a more specialized map. That map is not more likely to be more correct than their target’s map in a meaningful way; it’s just more useful for the schemer’s purpose than we should expect their target’s map to be for blocking the schemer. This is to be expected; “avoid predatory schemes” is not likely to be as high a priority for a random person as “predatorily scheme” is for a predatory schemer, so the predatory schemer will dedicate more resources to their domain-specific tools.
The separation of people from reality in economics or politics is a mistake. You cannot run a massive minimum wage experiment under the assumption that it can be reversed by reducing or removing the minimum wage later if the experiment showed an undesirable outcome. It is entirely plausible that raising the minimum wage for a period, and then reducing it could lead to the worst outcome of the five generic states (holding flat, lowering it, raising it, raising it then lowering, lowering it then raising it), because these actions can effect reality. No they won’t cause a super-volcano to erupt, but they might actually cause the framework that we need to make measurements to shift.
@Jiro
Yup, Yudkowsky’s whole thing about the clever arguer. I’m not arguing that motivated reasoning isn’t a poor tool for finding truth, or that people don’t engage in dishonesty.
But I think there’s a strain of thought that goes pretty far beyond that.
I saw a TV show a couple of years ago- it’s been awhile, so my memory may be fuzzy. People in a small town were getting sick, and they thought a local corporation might be polluting the water supply. They didn’t really do any testing- either Official Scientific testing or LessWrong-style rationality testing, and no time was spent considering other environmental explanations (or psych explanations- the systems were kind of vague). It was just obvious that EvilCorp was doing it, because when they went to the media, EvilCorp tried to shut them up just like they would if they were guilty.
And no one noticed that, no, corporations don’t like it when you say bad things about them even when those things are false.
I think there’s a certain mentality where all self-interested discourse is untrustworthy, and all untrustworthy things are false. Or where, as long as the people on the other side are bad, you can be sure the people on your side are good, and virtue-goodness necessarily implies good consequences and vice-versa. And all of this looks kind of silly written out, but I worry that it doesn’t feel silly when people encounter it in the wild.
Your TV show probably wasn’t Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People, but it sure sounds similar.
But isn’t the tannery actually responsible in An Enemy of the People? It’s true that it’s likely whoever wrote this TV show was familiar with the play, of course, but it sounds like the show is different? If Lecter remembers it right, that is. I certainly have no idea what show he’s talking about.
I read parent comment as saying that the show itself portrayed EvilCorp as obviously guilty.
I think one of the reasons people focus on the “just a cover up” part, and deny that maybe there can be something real beyond the power grab, is because they often cannot comprehend the supposed real reason at all. Discussing the actual thing often requires a level of understanding and dedication above the ability of many people, while discussing the motives behind the thing is quite accessible to everyone of normal inteligence.
For example, you need a lot of knowledge and dedication to meaningfully discuss the risks of AI explosion. In fact, if you don’t already have quite a lot of knowledge, you can barely understand what the AI-concerned people are concerned about. On the other hand, you need much less knowledge to discuss the motivations AI researchers may have to swindle the public. And if one ends up hearing all this discussion without getting anything about the content, one’s mind will tend to drift to the only part of the discussion they can follow: the motives.
I think a lot of the derailing we see on discussions of evolution, climate change, and economy boils down to this. The public is exposed to things they don’t understand at all, and they try to concoct a reason to why some people are so invested in things that sound like gibberish.
(full disclosure: I know jack squat about AI. And I often feel like it’s a swindle. Sorry guys, I can’t avoid. Just like I know my evangelical Christian acquitances can’t avoid feeling like evolution is a swindle)
It’s also the case that if something looks like a swindle to you, it will look like one to other people, including to swindlers, so if it starts getting some traction as a meme, swindlers, who are very numerous compared to researchers in unpopular fields will perk up their ears and say “Hey, this is the hot new swindle!” at which point, while “AI” may not imply a swindle when discussed by people who were “talking about it before it was cool” it will still imply a swindle when said by anyone who joined after the bubble began.
This seems very smart to me. I encounter no end of frustration with people’s preoccupation with motives, and sometimes fly off the handle a bit on climate change especially, but also sometimes other things, when motives are all people tend to talk about.
Ah, but consider: “what if the rightists are right, and the supposed experts are biased and corrupt, and the ostensibly technical arguments for rightist-disfavored solutions are really just cover for seizing a bigger piece of the pie”
Depending on the flavor of rightist, they are sometimes right. Also sometimes they are right but I don’t care about their complaint. For instance white nationalists are right that “white” people are going to become almost non-existent in America in a few generations for a lot of reasons. They are wrong that its about white genocide though. But I’m not necessarily sure that its a huge problem. I mean wealthy capitalists will still be wealthy capitalists even when their poor white stooges are gone.
If you believe that “white culture” is the underpinning of Western common-law civilization and freedom though, you can be concerned even without being some kind of tiki-torch stereotypical white supremacist. Wealthy capitalists in totalitarian China are also getting rich. Wealthy capitalists in Islamic Saudi Arabia are getting rich. In this sense I think the leftists are correct–we do live in a white supremacist culture. I also agree that to achieve their goals (destruction of Western civilization) we need to dismantle white supremacy. It’s important to note these Marxists are playing motte and bailey with the term white supremacy. Of COURSE racism is bad and we should judge people as individuals. But deep down they believe whiteness is irredeemable and a form of original sin.
That doesn’t have to be what it’s cover for.
Consider global warming. I think a lot of the alarmist arguments are wrong and some of them dishonest. But in most cases, as I interpret it, the motivation isn’t seizing a bigger piece of the pie in any ordinary sense. It’s providing arguments for things those people are in favor of for other reasons–and in most cases believe almost everyone should be in favor of. As per a cartoon that is popular with the same people whose arguments it is a reason to discount.
An even better example would be nuclear winter. As I interpret that, it was a PR project with scientific cover, a conclusion announced with great fanfare before the relevant scientific papers had been published, hence well before there had been an opportunity for them to be critiqued.
But it was a PR project with the defensible purpose of preventing nuclear war, making the pie bigger not seizing a larger part of it.
The fact that
global coolingglobal warmingclimate change necessitates One-World-Government doesn’t raise any alarm bells for you? Have you considered that cartoon to be a strawman argument against climate change skeptics?I believe in global warming. I am also deeply, deeply skeptical about political schemes to address it, such as the Paris Climate Accords.
climate change necessitates One-World-Government
Strong words are usually wrong words. Please justify this statement, or at least define one-world-government.
C’mon – you’ve already concluded that the men behind this were dishonest and not acting as scientists – finish it off. They weren’t concerned with preventing nuclear war – they were part of the “nuclear disarmament” movement – itself a euphemism for the “surrender to the Soviet Union” movement.
In reality the risk of nuclear war dropped massively as a result of the exact opposite policy – one of aggressive confrontation with the USSR which caused them to fold. American disarmament would – at best – have massively increased the chance of a nuclear conflict because the USSR would likely have persisted. At worst the US capitulates in some way and everyone in the world lives under communism and there’s no alternative system to demonstrate how bad it really is.
@gazeboist:
It wasn’t my claim, but there is a sense in which it is true. The people arguing that climate change is a terrible risk don’t mostly argue for one world government. But the logic of their position does imply a case for it.
One problem with slowing climate change by reducing CO2 output in the present world is that doing so is a public good not only at the individual level but at the level of states. If England uses expensive renewable power instead of cheap fossil fuel, it pays all the cost and the benefit of slower warming is shared around the world, so England gets only a tiny fraction of it. Unless that tiny fraction of the benefit is greater than all of the cost, it doesn’t pay England to do it.
That problem can be reduced by international agreements, but there are a lot of countries and it is in the interest of each, if it can, to free ride on the efforts of others. So that makes it a problem which would be easier to solve if there were a one world government.
There are lots of disadvantages to a one world government, of course. And as it happens I don’t think there is good reason to expect climate change to have terrible effects. But if the more extreme claims were true, if climate change threatened the survival of the human race, it would be a serious argument for one world government.
I’m really surprised to hear you say this, David! This free-rider argument is basically the argument that everybody gives as to why there should be governments at all, and you don't buy it for that, so what's so special about climate change that now you would take the argument seriously?
It’s a legitimate argument for government. It’s just that there are stronger arguments against. Similarly in this case.
Market failure is real. There are situations where laissez-faire predictably produces worse outcomes than would be produced by a benevolent, all knowing and all powerful dictator. But the real alternative is not that, it’s a political mechanism where the kind of situation that causes market failure is the rule instead of the exception.
If there is a situation where market failure under laissez-faire is not merely inconvenient but catastrophic, then government, for all its problems, might be better–that’s the possibility I discussed in the context of national defense in Machinery. It might be the situation at a world level if global warming really was an extinction level threat.
I think I’m very close to your perspective here, that the main problem with this article is the strawmanning of conflict theory.
> conflict theorists aren’t mistake theorists who just have a different theory about what the mistake is
I’m not sure this is right. There probably are conflict theorist activists who fit the picture in this article, but I think that serious Marxists, especially Marxist academics, absolutely are mistake theorists, but their theory is that the bourgeois liberal theory of governance is mistaken, and that the bourgeois theory that capitalist political economy is still the best available system is also mistaken.
And further: a Marxist would say that the conflict between classes is a *structural* product of material conditions. Capitalists do not need to be bad people with bad intentions for them to be in class conflict with workers. A capitalist may sincerely believe capitalist ideology, and believe that everything they do is for the good of humanity. This belief is a *mistake*.
Finally, I’d say that Marxists do not think that governance is simple or solved. But they do think that there are serious issues that cannot be resolved as long as the bourgeoisie control the political process, and that therefore revolution is required prior to working on the remaining problems.
[Note: I am not really a Marxist, though I do count Marxist writers among my influences. I’m a libertarian socialist steelmanning Marxism here.]
One other thing to add: Any theory of politics or society that doesn’t incorporate some notion that there are groups with different interests and beliefs who are in conflict with one another will not describe reality very well.
In reality, we have interest groups with conflicts based on their interests, and conflicts on values that often split along culture-war lines, and also genuine disagreements about what policies would be best for reaching our shared goals.
This isn’t steel-manning Marxism, this is weak-manning or straw-manning mistake theory.
interesting. The relevant Marx quote here is “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their being that determines their consciousness.”*
I have met academics calling themselves marxists on the grounds of accepting that premise and have so far done well enough predicting ideology in academics by that rule. That does not necessarily imply to them that capitalist (?) classical economic theory is wrong, nor does it imply that revolution is required (see: social democrats**).
What it does mean is that to solve social problems, like governance, as a marxist you stress the material side of a matter, rather than the ideas being discussed. So to a marxist it is obvious that you have to redistribute power and wealth (the being) to solve complicated issues like racism.
From there then the discussion is who is a victim of the structure one is morally inclined to help, what to redistribute, from where/whom to get it and by what means.
That looks very much like conflict theory there. It invites the answer:
just because the system disfavors group XYZ, you have not neither proven the system overall to be bad, nor a better idea, nor how to get there. Those are hard issues and probably the reason i dont see many marxists not makeing simple mistakes in politics. As soon as you take those seriously you are on common mistake-theory-grounds with non-marxists and can even start to discuss the premise.
My classification of the marxist position is obviously broader than prosthetic concience’s and i think this is probably due to “marxism” spanning a wide range of meanings.
* the being – german:sein – is translated as social being in the first translation i googled. that says something about anglophone marxism right there.
** one distinction i make is marxist politics vs marxist philosophy. I think i outlined a marxist philosophy, while marxist politics would be narrower and accepting marx’ political ideas about classes, revolution etc. That is obviously totally different from any democratic interpretation.
I don’t know about Marxists in general (I don’t think there’s all that much they universally agree on), but I think Scott made a pretty strong case in his linked post that Karl Marx himself viewed governance as not worth trying to solve, in a stronger sense than merely “whatever solution we come up with can’t be implemented until after the revolution”. And I think this is an Easy Mistake.
Marx was not interested in “solving governance” because he did not believe that there was such a thing as “governance” in the abstract that could be abstractly optimized at any time in any situation for some universal set of human preferences. As Marx saw it, different groups in society inevitably had conflicting interests. This is not due to their virtues or lack thereof. It’s not because they are disagreeable people. It is simply baked into their social roles. Those conflicting interests exist whether they take notice of them or not. But Marx thought that, on average, people would be aware of these conflicting interests, and they would want government to do different things.
So, you could design a government to optimally serve the interests of a feudal aristocracy in a particular historical situation (what “optimal” means will depend on the situation–Marx always paid attention to historical context), or a government to optimally serve the interests of a capitalist class in a particular historical situation, or a government to optimally serve the interests of a peasantry in a particular historical situation, or a government to optimally serve a proletariat in a particular historical situation. To Marx, these would all be different tasks, requiring different templates.
There are few, if any, universal principles. It might suit a feudal aristocracy’s interests to have an absolute monarchy in one situation, but an elective monarchy (like in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) in another. It might suit a capitalist class to have a Bonapartist dictatorship in one historical situation, or a liberal democracy in another. It just depends on a lot of factors.
Yes, specifics of social context are important and there’s no universally applicable solution to the problems of governance. None of this negates the fact that if you’re going to overthrow the government, you’d better have a concrete plan for solving the problems that government solves, or else things are going to completely predictably go really far downhill, really fast.
If revolution is required before we can even talk about real-world, grown-up problems, what business do Marxists have with (flailing) attempts to pick apart public choice theory?
The criticism of public choice in the three articles referenced by the Jacobite article is that public choice theory is wrong today. These articles are fairly representative of the left-wing take on public choice theory. There’s never a contention that public choice will be wrong after the revolution; the contention is that its assessment of governance in a capitalist society is wrong with regard to capitalist society.
So which is it? Can technical questions of governance be addressed by Marxists in a pre-revolution bourgeois society or can’t they? Because (quasi-)Marxists are taking concrete a position right now that public choice theory is mistaken in its attempt to describe the optimization of bourgeois governance. So this looks like pure motte-and-bailey:
There’s a second motte-and-bailey here.
Alice can be consistent and hold the position that public choice theory is bad because it cements capitalist society and inhibits the revolution/transition into a non-capitalist state. But that has nothing to do with technical claims! Public choice theory is either mistaken about its claims or it is not, and this doesn’t change based on whether you think that communism is good or not.
It seems like every attempt to engage with Marxists on the serious questions of making governments operate well ends up being a circular intellectual retreat. Other explanations (in this reply-thread) point in this same direction:
Well shucks, I guess we have to pack up and go home. We don’t have to examine the differences between the states of Norway and Zimbabwe because governance doesn’t exist. Public choice theory pwned again?
As far as I can tell, Public Choice is Right Marxism, so this is a particularly clear example of Marxists asking “Who Whom”, e.g. being conflict theorists.
@Michael Arc
That’s a bold claim. At its core, public choice theory is the belief that people who work for the government aren’t selfless. How on earth is that akin to marxism? Because if you’re trying to gin up some connection based on class interests, that’s gross abuse of the language.
This paragraph gives the reader +5 to all attempts to take Marxists seriously. Or at least, it gave me a place to stand that makes it easier to understand what Marxists are saying, and not mistake it for “Capitalists are evil.”
Firstly, we should probably at least glance at the right-wing conflict theorists, too.
E.g. “Democrats don’t really want to ‘increase diversity’ and ‘improve the economy through immigration’, they want to increase population demographics that consistently vote Democrat”. I don’t believe this, but it’s certainly an alarming idea.
Secondly, conflict theorists are definitely sometimes right. E.g. the whole nicotine industry influencing research on cigarettes and cancer thing. Perhaps the war in Iraq, I’m not sure how clear-cut a scam that’s considered nowadays.
I think paying attention to what the conflict theorists of the right are saying is important to understand what is going on in the world. In addition to declaring that Democrats want more Democratic voters, they also believe that Democrats and moderate Republicans favor immigration because they want low-skilled labor for their fat corporate donors.
Why can’t they want both?
It’s definitely true that there are groups with fundamentally competing interests. one of the failure modes for mistakists fail is forgetting this.
There are a lot of different Democrats. It’s really a question of what percentage that applies to, rather than whether it applies at all.
There’s also a much weaker version, which posits that in the counterfactual world where immigrants overwhelmingly vote Republican, the Democratic bloc would find a reason to oppose immigration, or at least be less enthusiastic about it.
Then the leftist Conflict Theorists should be able to capture most of the Mistake Theorists with a slam-dunk argument showing where the mistakes are in the technical arguments being deployed against them.
Oh, if only there were some institution filled with technical expertise but not in the employ of the Evil Right.
I don’t think this works. At least, it probably wouldn’t convince me.
Somebody upthread mentioned that conflict theorists will occasionally dismiss technical arguments on polarized issues, on the grounds that they can’t understand them but can understand what would motivate people to make them if they were false. But you can actually go further than that. I occasionally find myself unwilling to put much stock in such arguments even when I do understand them, because I don’t trust that there isn’t a hole in the argument that I simply wasn’t smart enough to catch.
Re treating governance as an easy problem, its not necessary to go to the meta level of governance structures, but to see that there are lots of policies that are broadly supported by experts, and in some cases the majority of the population, that don’t get implemented. Solving the deep hard problems isnt a priority while you still can’t implement the known solutions to easier ones.
To take a few well known American examples: Both experts and the majority of the population want tighter gun laws. Same for immigration reform, tighter campaign spending laws, etc.
So its not unreasonable for someone to conclude that the underlying problem with the system is not that we don’t have solutions, but the people in charge are unwilling to implement them, so we should change who is in charge.
I reject the notion that we already know what the optimal gun policies are. Many of the ideas in that article (like banning sales to people on watchlists, which have been managed quite poorly by the TSA, or with medical diagnoses) strike me as extremely questionable. Maybe the NYT found some pool of “experts” such that within it there’s expert consensus, but I don’t trust those “experts” to actually be right. See also Scott’s analyses of the issue, which are very far from coming down firmly on the side of gun control.
Immigration and campaign finance seem to be in the same state.
The issue isn’t whether you and I are personally convinced about the gun control issue but whether it’s reasonable for someone to get the impression there’s a public and expert majority on the side of tighter gun controls and then conclude that some non-democratic or non-benevolent force is stopping tighter gun control from happening.
Or perhaps that a non-democratic or non-benevolent force is influencing public opinion in favor of tighter gun control.
This worries me: mistake theorists converting to conflict theorists because they conclude that conflict theory is the only explanation for certain powerful people and their brainwashed constituents to keep opposing obviously good ideas. But often the empirical case and social consensus aren’t nearly as strong as they imagine.
It’s reasonable to get that impression, but it’s not an accurate impression. As a moderate member of the right-wing political coalition, I am okay with some marginally increased gun control regulations.
Other members of my coalition are really, REALLY opposed to this. The price of keeping them in this coalition is dialing back what gun control policies I support.
This is a totally acceptable trade-off to me, because I don’t think gun control is a big deal, especially in comparison to tax and regulatory policy.
So even if I end up in the 80% of people who want tougher gun control, there is a democratic force making sure gun control doesn’t happen.
This falls in with “mistake theory.”
The perfect is enemy of the good; the optimal gun control policy is unknowable, but you have to admit that almost all proposals would be better than the disaster of the current gun policy in the US.
At the very least, banning semiautomatic weapons should be the start.
I “have to admit” no such thing.
In what way is current gun policy a disaster in the US? For the size of our nation and the size of our individual arsenals, the US is a remarkably peaceful place.
@JPNunez:
I am very, very worried about what’ll happen when we try to enforce this. With the cops and public servants we have now, with the legal culture we have now, with the way the War on Drugs and Prohibition turned out.
Like, if we *sensibly* banned automatic weapons so people couldn’t buy them openly, then shrugged and accepted that we can’t stop all sales or ownership, that would be better than this. You can 3-D Print guns these days, so we’d still probably end up with a fair number of mass shootings, but there’d probably be fewer.
But I remember Scott saying on his old blog how more people drowned in swimming pools than fell to mass shootings, so I kind of suspect the anti-gun movement isn’t entirely actuated by carefully studying the statistics. I think at least part of this is about screwing over the Red Tribe, and the Red Tribe *know* that, so I don’t think banning guns is a good way to reduce ‘gun culture’.
Which leaves us with a state where lots of people still have guns, we still have enough mass shootings to fuel outrage cycles, and the police are trying to enforce a (structurally) victimless crime, with all the psychological effects arising from that situation- except this time, the people they’re trying to catch are, by definition, armed.
I don’t know if that would get us fewer deaths, but I don’t think it would be good for civil liberties. Or for Red-Blue cultural tensions.
But automatic weapons are effectively banned. You can’t buy any full auto weapon made after 1986.
This is the other problem with public opinion on firearms regulation: an awful lot of the public is very uninformed about firearms. It’s sort of like an inverse technocracy where the ones most in favor of regulation have the least expertise. Contrast with say climate change regulations, where the experts are the ones in favor of regulation.
@ JPNunez
I strongly suspect you do not understand what semiautomatic means in this context. But if you think you do, please explain what it is about semiautomatic weapons that you think makes banning a high priority.
Why that? Banning semiautomatic weapons would make hunting, varmint shooting, and self-defense a little harder. It would also make mass shootings a little harder. But mass shootings are a tiny fraction of the murder rate–they just get a lot of attention because they are dramatic, hence newsworthy. And I don’t think the effect would be all that large on any of those things.
I can’t tell if, as another commenter seems to think, you don’t know what semiautomatic weapons are or if there is an argument against them that I am missing.
Technically true, but the “technically” there elides a lot of complexity. You can 3D print most of an inaccurate single-shot weapon that might blow up when you try to fire it if you had the printer set up wrong (might need to add some off-the-shelf springs or firing pins, I’m not sure), or you can 3D print a receiver (the serial-numbered part, so legally the firearm) for some types of weapon and fill in the rest with aftermarket parts, but both are a lot of work and neither adds much value. It is not currently practical to use 3D printing as an end-run around “assault weapon” bans — which have nothing to do with automatic weapons, but that’s another conversation.
Cheap, commodified CNC milling machines, on the other hand…
But they don’t have the shiny (except sometimes literally), so nobody talks about those.
@David Friedman
They originally talked about banning automatic weapons and how easy they were to buy in any gun store.
I see they’ve tried to stealth-edit their post after being called out.
There is one aspect of American gun law that I find maddenly insane.
My State of Resident has issued me several kinds of licenses. One is an Operators License for a vehicle. Another is a Marriage License, acquired in the past year.
And a third license is called a Concealed Pistol License.
This third license is the one that I cannot guarantee will be honored by all the other States in the Union. Each State that does honor the license has their own welter of laws that apply to how/when/where I can use the License to legally carry a firearm.
I find this to be insane.
I’ve had the Concealed Pistol License–and carried a concealed firearm–for more than a decade. In that time, I’ve had exactly zero violent encounters. I haven’t even had any stare-downs with people who were threatening me.
Some twenty or thirty times, I stepped into a legal gray-zone by walking into a building while carrying a concealed weapon. Sometimes, I wasn’t aware of whether the Law was worded precisely enough to tell me whether I was allowed to bring a firearm inside. Sometimes, I realized that a not-easy-to-see-sign near the entry requested that people not bring “weapons” into the building.
Again, I find this to be insane.
In all those cases, I was able to leave without being detected. And without causing any harm to the denizens of the building.
And I gained the knowledge that it’s very hard to deter a person with a concealed gun from walking into a building. Unless there is a metal-detector-manned-by-a-guard at the door.
I also learned that it is much harder to deter a person with a concealed weapon from walking down a sidewalk, entering a park, or strolling along a line of storefronts.
I find laws banning guns at bars (or sporting centers, or shopping malls) to be insane. Unless the people who support those laws are also willing to support metal-detectors-plus-law-enforcement at every such building.
@Nornagest:
Did not know that. Mea culpa.
I read a (kind of panicked) article about it a few years ago, did enough fact-checking to verify it wasn’t completely full of shit, and assumed its projections regarding technological progress were basically sound, since I couldn’t think of any reason they wouldn’t be.
My only excuse is that I was young, still believed the media was mostly accurate, and failed to reevaluate the cached thoughts from back then before posting.
On an emotional level, the idea of giving the government an excuse to do to the Internet what the did to the Fourth Amendment still makes me break out in hives- but my estimate for how likely this is was heavily influenced by the technical feasibility of 3-D guns, so it should be much lower now.
Republicans and the NRA have been discussing concealed carry reciprocity legislation for some time now. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet with the Republican congress. It seems silly, though. If my red state has to recognize your blue state’s gay marriage license, your blue state should have to recognize my red state gun license. Marriage, gay or otherwise, is not a specifically guaranteed right in the Constitution, whereas the right to bear arms is.
With regards to 3D printing of guns, Nornagest and John are right. It’s not practical (currently), but who cares? Guns are very simple tools and anyone with a basic machine shop can make one. If you look around gun forums there are lots of hobbyists who make their own guns. This is perfectly legal. It’s only illegal to sell a gun without the proper licensing.
@S_J
Heartily seconded on the ridiculousness of the lack of concealed carry reciprocity, both from a legal standpoint (IMHO, it violates both the 2nd and 14th amendments, though admittedly there’s room for debate on those) and, more importantly, from a functional one. I’m currently stationed right on the border between California and Arizona; if I miss one stop on the highway, either because an exit is closed for construction, or because it’s just faster to get some places by getting off on the California side and crossing back over on the backroads, I’m technically a criminal. And before that I was stationed in San Diego, so despite being required to complete use of force training and qualify with a pistol at least annually, it was completely impossible for me to carry legally, unless I felt like donating thousands of dollars to the Sheriff’s re-election campaign.
More to the point, I just can’t fathom what anyone expects it to actually accomplish. As you said, it’s practically impossible to enforce in most places, so it’s not going to stop anyone with the intent to do harm, and your chances of being caught are so low as to make its effects as a deterrent negligible. Making guns harder to acquire in the first place might make it slightly harder for people to use guns to commit crimes, but literally the only people who restrictions on concealed carry will stop from carrying are the most scrupulous and law-abiding people out there, and those are precisely the people we most want carrying.
Even worse, as we all know, most guns used in crime are stolen. But where are the vast majority of stolen guns stolen from? Out of peoples’ cars. And why do people leave guns in their cars? Because they’re not legally allowed to carry them in whatever building they just drove their car to. If you really want to get guns off the street, it seems to me that the last thing you should be doing is incentivizing people to leave guns in their cars.
I can totally understand (if not agree with) the arguments in favor of banning, or at least restricting the ownership of guns in the first place. You’re (at least in theory) reducing the total number of an item in circulation. But if the guns are already THERE, the only thing that restricting concealed carry accomplishes is making everyone less safe.
(Well, at least from a mistake theory perspective, just to keep this thread on topic. :op )
I do need to disagree with you on one front, though; banning the carry of guns in bars is at least reasonably sensible. Well, more to the point, restrictions on drinking and carrying are sensible. Banning concealed carry in bars still runs into the “how the hell to enforce it” problem as banning concealed carry in general, but at the very least it also acts as a roundabout deterrent to drinking and carrying. (i.e. in the case of a DD who gets pressured into having JUUUUUUUST one drink…) I’d still prefer laws that only ban drinking and carrying, but I can’t complain too much about states that ban it in bars.
@Conrad Honcho
The reciprocity bill passed in the House, but stalled in the Senate.
They’d need to eliminate the filibuster if they wanted to pass it, and I don’t think anyone in Washington actually cares about gun rights enough to go that far just to get reciprocity, as long as they can still expect to count on votes from the people who do. Additionally, due to the current polarized climate, the Democrats have been hesitant to agree to attach the reciprocity bill to any other bill that they might be more amenable to, like banning bump stocks or the Fix NICS bill, and because of the “WHAT PART OF ‘SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED’ DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?!?!?” crowd, the Republicans haven’t been willing to push to attach any kind of new gun regulation, whatsoever, to the reciprocity bill in the first place. So it’s likely to remain stalled indefinitely.
> Both experts and the majority of the population want tighter gun laws.
“Our expert survey asked dozens of social scientists, lawyers and public health officials how effective each of 29 policies would be in reducing firearm homicide deaths,”
So basically they decided who the experts were, and who *weren’t* the experts. Given the NY Times history in both the “Gun Control” debate and to trustworthiness in regards to activism, why would you trust them at all?
This expands to the broader point, and is why we have such a YUGE problem with policy debates.
The problem with is that you have to trust the people who anoint the “experts” as “experts”. When you are trusting an organization with a long history of being biased towards one position or another to pick “experts”, then you push people from “Mistake” to “Conflict” because you appear (appear) to be operating in that mode yourself.
If you trust the NY Times and other similarly…oriented “news” organizations[1], then it is not unreasonable to conclude that the people who run the system are unwilling to implement them.
But if your sources of news are all singing from the same hymn, but reality isn’t lining up, maybe there’s a different problem.
If your news sources are more diverse, and you dig deeper you find out that things aren’t as cut and dried as a single news article or 30 second evening news clip can contain.
It’s very hard for me to discuss this generally because while I may not technically be an expert in this field, it’s only a lack of credentials–not knowledge. I have held instructor certifications for rifles and pistols, and for using them for self defense. I’ve spent 10s of thousands of dollars on my own training. I know generally the federal laws in this area, and the state laws of any state I am living in at the time, I have kept up to date (and occasionally refresh that knowledge) on the statistics etc. Hell, I used to be a activist in the area.
I also work very hard to counter the Gell-Mann amnesia effect[2]. So when I see “experts” advocating positions that I know are *utterly useless* at achieving their stated goals[3] and these experts–and their positions–are being pushed hard across multiple media fronts I not only discount anything along those lines in that media, I also start to question their veracity *across subjects*.
If they’re going to flat out lie to me about Gun Control, why are they going to tell me the truth about Immigration or anything else contentious and political?
There are very, very rich people in this country on all colors of the political spectrum who feel very passionate about issues, or know a lot about them, or maybe just want to get richer off them, or maybe their angry at their mothers for not loving them enough and want to destroy the world over it. Whatever, but they and their money are part of the process too.
So yeah, on the surface it’s reasonable for some to conclude that the underlying problem with the system is not that we don’t have solutions, but that the people in charge are unwilling to implement them.
But that’s a shallow analysis. The deeper analysis is that on most of the issues facing us today are hard problems.
Another moderately contentious example–simplistic uni-variant analysis shows that women make 73 cents for every dollar men make. This is a YUGE problem says the Feminists and the Left. Multi-variant analysis closes this gap to what, somewhere around 93 to 97 cents on the dollar depending on the analysis and who you trust (there we go again). Breaking it out we also find out things like “Single professional women make more than Single Professional Men” (or used to, I don’t know if that’s changed in the last 15 years) and other things that suggest more than just “bias” is going on.
But we have Policy Wonks in D.C. proposing equal wage laws at the federal level, and Republicans being made fun of when they suggest that we don’t need another law like that since we’ve had one since 1963.
Laws against (flipping back here) mentally ill people buying firearms? Already federal law. Violent Criminals buying firearms? We’ve gone one better–NO felons can buy firearms legally, and certain violent misdemeanor violations. So there’s at least two solutions that are already law that the “Experts” think we need. If you don’t know your proposal is already law, then how the hell are you an expert? We already have *required* background checks for buying firearms from someone in the business of legally selling firearms.
You know the one thing that lowers violence that *none* of the “Experts” is suggesting? If you get convicted of a violent crime you are locked up until you’re 30. Go dig through the statistics, I think you’ll find that if you take people who have a record of violence between 14 and 18, and lock them up[4] until their 30 the rate of recidivism goes way down. Of course the side effect of that is that prosecutors looking for a “win” will let them plead to a lesser/non-violent crime (one of the reasons we’ve got so many people in prison for “possession” right now that they pled a trafficking or weapons violation down).
[1] https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/332494589934047234, https://twitter.com/jtLOL/status/501493192953319424
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
[3] Banning “Assault weapons” would, 99% of the years have no measurable impact on crime or rates of violence. Less than 450 murders (out of roughly 16k) are committed with a rifle, and most of those aren’t “assault weapons” by legal definition. “Assault weapons” are generally defined in such a way as to refer to cosmetic features rather than functional features. Likewise “High Capacity Magazines”–in all but one mass shootings I am familiar with, the rate of fire is such that a 7 or 10 round magazine could have been used almost as efficiently as a 15 or 30 round.
[4] I would also suggest significant reform of the prison system in the US such that prisoners have a reasonable chance at job training, but this is a complex and difficult problem.
I am not sure what “experts” in immigration reform would be testifying to, exactly. My impression is that the evidence really does indicate that low-skilled immigration depresses low-skilled wages to some extent, and that immigration does lower “social trust.” But most of what I would call the educated, expert class favor more immigration *anyway* because they put a high value on the well-being of the immigrants, who are much better off if they’re allowed to live where they want.
That’s surely one reason. But conventional economic analysis also suggests that more immigration provides net benefits to those already here, although not necessarily to all people already here.
You’re right–that is a better description of the expert consensus. I see a lot of parallels between what anti-immigration populists say about immigration and what lefter people say about things which are good for the economy, GDP, businesses overall but which are nonetheless bad because of the effect on “inequality” or some specific group x.
Part of the problem with using a phrase like “immigration reform” is that it can mean anything to anyone, so it is meaningless. I want immigration reform: deport illegals, reduce legal immigration, end birthright citizenship and chain migration and move to a skills-based model for who gets to come in. Endless reforms! But I’m betting that’s not what you think “immigration reform” is…
Governance is trivial.
It’s as simple as switching from;
A Democracy rooted in conflict theory in the form of Plurality voting.
to
A Democracy rooted in mistake theory in the form of Score voting.
Doing it is as simple as changing the ballot from “mark one” to “score each” and optimal governance would auto-resolve.
How does this solve the problem of rational ignorance? The public good problem in political action that leads to legislation designed to transfer from dispersed to concentrated interest groups even if the net effect is negative?
How are you going to get around strategic voting? If you have two candidates, the rational move is to score your prefered candidate at 100% and their opponent at 0. This is less of a problem with more candidates, but remains an issue.
Also, democracy is always limited by the knowledge and intelligence of the voters. Any system of counting votes is still vulnerable to the people’s mistakes.
The worst case scenario for score voting – universal strategic voting in which voters only assign 100% to their single preferred candidate, and 0% to all others – is that it degenerates into the system we already have: One Person, One Vote. I don’t see the creation of massive potential utility gains as a problem that we have to “get around” just because its lower bound is the same as what we are currently stuck with.
The problem with our One Vote system is that it entrenches two parties in power, and narrows the expression of voters’ political will to whatever those parties choose to offer – leading, in our latest election, to the two least-liked pair of candidates ever. In a score voting system, we wouldn’t be stuck with those shitty options, and we wouldn’t have had to hold our noses and vote for whichever we perceived as the lesser evil. If Hillary and Donald were somehow still seen as the front runners in that hypothetical campaign, people could still vote strategically by giving either of them 100% and the other 0% – but they could also give Bernie 100%, or Rand Paul, or whoever they actually liked and genuinely most agreed with. And we would start to see what the real range of political opinion is, and candidates could begin to build new coalitions of previously under-represented constituents. And massive power to control the collective Overton window would no longer be given to small groups of party insiders for no good reason.
This is a really interesting post that I think crystallizes a number of similar dynamics for me.
I’ve thought for a while that there’s two definitions of “racism” in use: colloquial, in the sense of treating people differently on the basis of race, and academic, in the sense of structural, privilege + power. And what I found so frustrating about this dynamic wasn’t just that different people were using different definitions, but that the colloquial definition was academically racist, because it ignores and perpetuates power dynamics, and the academic definition is colloquially racist because it’s says, for instance, that black people can’t be racist. I think this might be a case of mistake vs. conflict theory. To confirm this, I’d need to find out more about how the more Klansman sort of conflict theorist person views racism, but I’d guess that would bear this theory out.
This also reminds me a little of the Cactus Person story, but I may be overmatching there. I’ll think about that comparison more in the morning.
It’s kind of similar in that both present a sharp dichotomy between perspectives, with one being skeptical and analytic and the other being more like Dumbledore in HPMOR- seeing the world as comprised of emotionally satisfying narratives. If you wanted, you could pattern-match this to the empathizer-systematizer scale, C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’, the left-brain/right-brain distinction, and pretty much any model that splits the world between logic and feeling.
Which is ‘better’ depends on how the world really is, both in general and in the domain you happen to be focused on.
My personal narrative, at this point, is something like ‘mistake theorists are Humanities People who’ve stumbled into a complicated, systemic-type domain, and are trying to force it to fit their narratives/prejudices’. But I should be skeptical of this, because the underlying reality is probably a complicated, systemic-type place, and I shouldn’t try to force it to fit my narrative/prejudices.
EDIT: I’m emphatically not against Humanities People in general- their approach is perfect for literary analysis, creative work, and all the spheres of human activity where emotion and narrative work really well. Many of them are genuinely lovely people, and do good work. They’re just uniquely ill-matched to this specific category of problem.
Do you mean to say “mistake theorists” in the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph, or did you mean “conflict theorists”? If you meant what you said, explain?
Yeah, that’s a typo. Was so busy trying to remember which uses were capitalized, I mixed up the categories.
Off topic, but can I just say I really love your work? Without geeking out too much that you’re talking to me, because that would be awkward, but you’re kind of incredibly inspiring.
So
But not all conflict theorists are easy conflict theorists. You can have an anylysis in terms of conflict that doesn’t contain the easy answer that one of the conflicting sides is 100% correct.
@TheAncientGeek:
I feel like there’s a distinction between ‘people who are conflict theorists’ and ‘people who think conflict is part of the picture’.
If you’re a hard conflict theorist, you think the other side has an understandable perspective that motivates its actions, but most of your energy is still going into fighting the people who have the wrong answers instead of trying to find the right ones.
(The way I read it) hard mistake theorists can have a fully fleshed-out, non-cartoon version of their opponents, but they still think their opponents are ‘The Problem’ and not ‘Problem #46, Incentive Tier’.
That’s interesting, because I took the opposite conclusion. That Conflict types were the ones most likely to say their opponents are ‘The Problem’ and need to be gotten rid of, and Mistake types were most likely to say “We’re all reasonable people here, just need to figure out how to point that reasoning in the right direction (ie incentives, checks & balances)”
@mdet:
Arrgh, I keep mixing up the words. Pretty much what you said.
My guess (honestly) is that some part of my mental auto-processing software thinks conflict theorists are making a mistake, so it keeps autocorrecting their designation to ‘mistake theorist’ without me noticing.
I get how ironic this is in context, and I do not endorse it, but it explains why I made the same stupid typo twice in the same thread.
Not all conflict theorists are “Humanities People”. I brought up the “conflict vs mistake” idea with one of my coworkers today. He’s a college-educated programmer (nowhere near the Silicon Valley level though) with blue-collar sensibilities who is conservative and very pro-Trump, and he emphatically agreed with the Conflict side, taking the position that society is rigged by the wealthy elites / establishment who are either (in the case of the media & academia) pushing a Leftist agenda or (in the case of the Republican establishment) are too weak / self-serving / incompetent to offer the first group any pushback. Only solution is to kick them all out and put people with some common sense in charge.
I don’t know of any answer to how people end up as Mistake vs Conflict people, since I’ve seen both types on all sides and from all backgrounds
And I know some (literal) Humanities People at college who really don’t strike me as conflict theorists.
I didn’t exactly mean this as a metaphor, originally, but it’s pretty clearly not literally true. I do think there’s a connection, though, even if I’m having trouble formulating exactly what it is. Something to do with partially overlapping clusters in peoplespace, maybe? But that still feels a little hand-wavy.
I see what you’re after, and I can’t get it quite to work either.
I think conflict theorist versus mistake theorists is a horseshoe model, and the Two Cultures is a straight binary, so they can’t really line up.
My own personal narrative is that the Conflict theory people are like the dog that finally caught the truck. They worked really, really hard, for a really, really long time, to make everything reduce to a no-quarter brawl between groups for gain– and now they’ve finally got their wish, and are finding out what it’s really like to have powerful interest groups to gang up on you, stab you in the back at every turn, and count “making you lose” as a primary goal.
@Janet
I have a subagent that thinks this is really funny.
And a second subagent that’s horrified at the first subagent because we are Not The Kind Of Person who takes pleasure in bad things happening to the Outgroup- we’re a Nice, Cooperative Person!
And a third subagent who sort of sniffs dismissively at the second subagent, because we are Not The Kind Of Person who lies to ourself about what kind of person we are.
And a fourth subagent who’s honestly unhappy at the thought of the conflict theory people suffering, but, when questioned, admits that it’s partly reacting to the ‘dog’ analogy and it really likes dogs, and anyway people in pain aren’t always safe to be around.
And a fifth subagent who thinks this is all a little artificial and performative and possibly signaling, and we probably shouldn’t be calling these ‘subagents’ when they’re more ‘inner voices’ or ‘feelings’.
I think this is progress, but I’m not sure how to feel about it yet. Or, I guess, which feelings to endorse.
This is only barely related to your comment, but I really dislike the Humanities/Science(?) distinction because I feel like it just doesn’t hold up very well when you try to apply it to actual people. Whatever happened to being well rounded and having multiple interests? For instance I’m a computer science and art history double major and I don’t feel like I’m using wildly different skills or parts of my brain when I engage with each subject. I just think it is impossible to say that “Humanities people” are even a definable group that all approach problems using emotion and narrative.
I agree that these are the two most common, but given where we are it is fair to mention a third–the one from Against Murderism
Under that definition, Scott would exclude a lot of people that the colloquial definition people would definitely say are racist (see part IV). And at least in certain parts of the internet that type of definition is gaining ground. It basically holds that almost no one is racist and indeed that it is pretty close to a meaningless slur that ought to be retired.
So the spectrum goes from certain academics that think that everyone is racist because that just means living in a society that embodies structural racism; through the colloquial definition where everyone might be a little racist, most people aren’t a lot racist, but there’s a non-trivial minority that are; through almost no one is racist because you’d need to be totally irrational on the subject but not sub-clinically (or clinically) mentally ill.
Re: two uses of racism, I think we need new terms with less divergent connotations. Instead of “colloquial (or personal) racism” and “academic (or institutional) racism” how about something like “prejudice” and “discrimination”?
(Not sure how this ties into mistake/conflict theory, though, except that I tend to see the righty we-are-all-anti-racist(prejudiced) folks and the lefty minorities-are-all-super-hurt-by-racism(discrimination) folks as caught up in conflict theory while I’m more concerned about both recognizing our progress in fixing mistakes and recognizing the mistakes that remain to be fixed…)
Mistake theories are best suited to the task of avoiding negative-sum conflicts. Conflict theories are best suited to the task of winning zero-sum conflicts. The “easy” half of your easy/hard split appears to be the people in the zero-sum meta-conflict of which framing should dominate who argue that the opposing position doesn’t describe a real circumstance.
I experience this fact acutely when I play conflict-driven games. I mostly play chess as a cooperative effort to have a “great game”, even to the point of trading colors with my opponent if we become mismatched. I usually don’t enjoy games like Diplomacy or Risk, because they’re too zero sum and there’s not much about them (especially Risk) that feels like learning or like a beautiful game. But I think it’s a great mental exercise for mistake-lens people to play these games, and really attend to what is different about them than (say) DnD. And to how some people playing these games get more uncomfortable, whereas other, typically disengaged people, suddenly come alive into a flow state.
The mistake-type and conflict-type attitudes aren’t, IMHO, fundamental. (at least not normally)
Rather, they’re products of ecology. When people feel they’re playing Risk, Chess ( in a one-off game for high stakes against an uncharitable opponent), or Diplomacy, they develop their conflict lens. When they play DnD or play chess against the same opponent many times, both aiming to improve their games… they develop their cooperative lens.
Creating an ecology where being a candidate for office more resembles DnD than Diplomacy is a *hard* problem. There’s room for help from all willing hands.
ooooh so what does it mean that the Russians are playing chess while the Americans are playing poker?
We’re not.
We’re either playing Checkers, or Whack-a-mole.
Diplomacy is an interesting example, because while the ultimate goal is zero-sum and conflict-type, much negotiation is aimed at convincing the other players using mistake-type reasoning. It’s me as England convincing France that we have a win-win solution to crush Germany.
Business litigation is a fascinating real-world example–the parties want to achieve a positive solution through a negative-sum process. Parties that view a dispute on purely business terms use discovery primarily to discover what the true likelihood of victory is and then settle around the appropriate number. Parties that bring personal vendettas into cases view litigation as a negative-sum, winner take all game, and avoid settling. Good lawyers have to freely switch between attitudes throughout the case.
If there is conflict in the territory, which you can’t do anything about, mistake theory isn’t much good at all.
I feel like the words ‘which you can’t do anything about’ are doing a lot of work here.
Often, in the real world, people find there’s a mountain or something in an inconvenient place, and for awhile they have to make allowances for it. In the long term, though, we’ve had a lot of success tunneling under it. Or installing ski lifts or treadmills to make surmounting it easier. Or setting up shop somewhere else.
If you’re motivated to avoid conflict, that’s a technical problem we can work out how to solve. Or not. But our record for solving technical problems that seemed impossible is pretty impressive.
I don’t think short-term long-term considerations should be trivialized, policies need to be decided on in a reasonable timescale and our record for predicting when we’ll actually solve any given problem is less impressive.
So, sure, focus on mitigating conflict but you still need to devote some resources to managing it in the meanwhile.
EDIT: I reread the list of authoritative pronouncements I linked earlier, and the one about trains stood out to me so I googled it. That one’s apocryphal (the one purportedly from Martin van Buren). I googled a couple of the others and they seem to be genuine, though.
I still think the list as a gestalt points to something true and important, but at least one of the more extreme examples is fabricated, so, y’know, ignore that one.
Sorry.
Several of them are still “True” though.
We don’t have space travel–we have the ability to put someone up there and get them back safely most of the time, but not really “travel”.
@Alruane:
That makes sense- and explains why we still see both styles instead of one being predominant. Incorporating it into my model. Thanks.
I am a mistake theorist (like I suspect a lot of the regulars here are). I tend toward Hard Mistake Theory, but dabble in Easy Mistake Theory as well. The thing that most frequently pushes me toward Conflict Theory is the gnawing suspicion that people I encounter are not looking for an answer, that they’re not even trying to be rational, that they’re simply indulging their emotional narratives without even thinking things through.
Basically, that they’re conflict theorists.
tl;dr: Mistake Theory is almost always correct, except when it comes to describing Conflict Theorists, who are moral mutants and hate goodness for no reason.
Is this meant to be ironic? I genuinely can’t tell anymore
Definitely ironic, in the sense of looking back at my own thought processes with bemusement and a little distaste, and wondering how much effort I should put into changing them.
“Moral mutants” is
Yudkowsky’s phrase– meant to be a reference to Yudkowsky’s Are Your Enemies Innately Evil (which conforms to Betteridge’s Law). Scott uses the phrase in this article, in a way that underscores its absurdity.The comment section here is often so bizarre its hard to tell.
Ironically I was going to post that link in my reply when i was unsure if you were serious, but i didnt notice the symmetry of the phrase
Neat!
It’s a really good article.
I like the weirdness- it’s kind of bracing. The absurdity heuristic really doesn’t work very well here.
Was nice talking to you :).
https://youtu.be/udJw-CzX7sA (10 seconds, just for amusement)
FTFY.
Ouch.
To be fair, those criteria don’t technically conflict. (For certain values of ‘technically’ arguably being a ‘mutant’ implies being at least a little odd, outside biology departments anyway.)
Any tips for routing around them?
I think that when it comes to politics people instinctively resort to moralistic tribalism. Routing around that tribalism is the hard problem that the mistake theorists really need to solve.
I hope this isn’t true, because if it is, then I don’t think I like the vast bulk of humanity very much and am less concerned about what happens to them. If conflict theory is an intractable part of human nature, and all we have is team vs team with flexible facts to fit the convenient narratives needed to “win”, then it doesn’t seem like there’s any point in even trying to make a better world. Actually, it’s the kind of feeling that if I wasn’t cursed with average intelligence and ability would make me legitimately consider becoming a supervillain.
I wonder if mistake theory isn’t more attractive to cognitive minorities, since it allows them an escape from having to join one of the inevitable two big teams, when neither one fits their cognitive profile, and are tailored for two different types of normals. People who have no tribe to begin with other than their friends and local relations aren’t going to want everything to devolve into abstract ideological tribes where reality becomes relative to achieving the distant and messianic end goals of the group.
I saw a Twitter post a few months ago from either @ClarkHat or somebody he retweeted that said something like:
“My preferences for governmental system, in rank order:
1. A limited, federal republic with almost no government interference in day to day business.
2. A strong central government that controls almost all aspects of our daily lives with my team in charge.”
I sometimes think that at least part of the rise of the “alt-right” is a big chunk of America starting to believe (rightly or wrongly) that another big chunk of America is doing everything they can to crush them and their way of life, and deciding to fight back on that other chunk’s terms.
Also see the posts on Status 451 about what right-wingers need to learn from the left (tl;dr: having power is more important than convincing people that your ideas are correct): https://status451.com/2017/11/11/radical-book-club-what-righties-can-do/
Actually, I love this quote from the article since it seems very related to this topic of Mistake vs. Conflict:
“The legendary biographer Robert Caro mentioned once that he had heard college professors talk very convincingly about how the paths for freeways in New York City were chosen. The professors listed variables, and considerations, and trade-offs, and they talked very knowledgeably and nothing they said was worth a damn because the paths for freeways in New York City were chosen for one reason and one reason only: a freeway was where it was because Robert Moses wanted to build the freeway there. Considerations meant nothing next to power.”
That quote is annoying as hell. It’s not like Moses just randomly picked them out of a hat.
It’s even worse – Moses didn’t even pick them. The Regional Plan Association (which was basically a tool of the Rockefellers) laid out where the highways were to go long before Moses came on the scene. Moses was the Rockefeller’s hired muscle to get it done, and when he stopped doing what they told him to he was slapped down.
Does that make me a conflict theorist?
(See “The Assassination of New York City” by Robert Fitch for the details of, well, see it’s title…)
Good description.
I think there’s a third axis, that measures social trust. Conflict theorists ignore it because they assume zero social trust, and mistake theorists ignore it because they assume total social trust. But there’s also room for considering social trust as a variable, and deciding your approach to an issue based on where exactly you think it is now, or on how the issue would affect trust.
This doesn’t sound right. Mistake theorists routinely treat the absence of social trust as a problem that needs to be worked around.
Yes, but from the same outside-view that leads them to consider conflict theorists as making a basic mistake. It sees it from the outside, but doesn’t go into the inside view mode.
Here’s one of my go-to links for pointing at lack-of-trust as a problem to be worked-around…
About once every two years I seem to be posting this game-theory link to my facebook wall… http://ncase.me/trust//
Highly recommended.
Nifty game theory lesson. And the music reminds me of Toady’s noodling in Dwarf Fortress.
I love that link, and also send it to absolutely anyone who will listen.
I often use it as an argument for why small churches (ideally with a sense of humor about their doctrines) are so valuable. Even if the larger world goes nutso defect-defect on you, a small church can keep everybody singing on Sundays, and generously supporting all with each’s relative specialties. I never trusted a mechanic, a dentist, or a lawyer so well as when said professional was doing work for someone who taught Sunday school or otherwise attended church at the same place as the professional’s kids. Particularly for kids, for whom the sense that there’s a high-functioning haka–a place where everybody moves in step, for everyone’s benefit–and extra-particularly for kids with only one parent… well, small churches can be *great* at giving small kids a place to belong that’s loving and sacred, when the parents aren’t in a position to supply that at home.
What’s the best church for community with a sense of humor and not too much oppressive stuff? I’ve heard good things about Mormons but also that they can be pretty strict (and being gay in a Mormon area is apparently terrible). Maybe reform Jews are better, but Jews are argumentative at the best of times and have a tendency to have a high ritual to community ratio.
Finally got the time to do it. It’s so great, thank you.
Glad you liked it!
I don’t have much more to say besides “small, sense of humor” as my suggestions for finding a church. Actually, another thing to look for might be independence from national political trends–e.g., the fact that Utah goes its own way politically (or seems to, lately) is a strong positive for the LDS church.
I agree that a major trade-off to religious community can be the strictness of the restraints / exclusions they enforce. Particularly for women (expected to sacrifice their careers to have kids and be at home) and the whole range of sexually non-vanila people out there, from gays and lesbians to master/slave and bdsm, to poly communities. Religion kinda functions like a canal for flowing through life. It really saves a lot of time and effort–a veritable lifesaver!–if the canal goes your way, but otherwise, very much less so.
The best thing about small churches with leadership with a sense of humor is that the leadership can keep track of everyone’s differences, and find ways to accommodate or dig side-canals as needed, while still keeping the main canal clear and flowing. Maybe you’d enjoy the story “On Mars, Do we have a Rabbi!” I think I first saw that linked to here on SSC, not sure who shared it.
Zero social trust in the far-away “real world”, total social trust among people discussing solutions?
A good example of this is how people treat internal vs. international politics. Members of one common polity who all gain from the collective good of that group can treat eachother as well meaning but mistaken collaborators. But in a situation where your goals honestly don’t match, and what i good for country A might be bad for country B you need to act like competitiors
+1
Some conflicts are genuinely zero-sum. If I’m 100% pro-life and you’re 100% pro-choice, then we’re probably not going to come to agree–one of us will win and get their policy imposed on the other, or maybe we’ll end up in some middle-ground where we both think we’re having evil policies imposed on us (like if you allow abortions up to halfway through the pregnancy and then forbid them.) But anything I count as a win, you’ll count as a loss, so compromise isn’t really on the table.
But most conflicts aren’t zero-sum. If you only want things to go better for women in our society, and I only want things to go better for men in our society, there are zero-sum conflicts that can come out of that, but most things we can do to make society work better will make both women and men better off. When we’re talking about child support arrangements, maybe we’re stuck in a conflict-only situation, but when we’re talking about tax or trade policy, probably we can come to some compromise that makes both men and women better off.
Alright, now my brain is stuck trying to think up a non-zero sum solution to this. Here’s where I’m at so far:
Scenario 1: Pro life (PL) person gets unwantedly pregnant, does not get abortion
Pro-Choice (PC) is unaffected, given that they don’t care what the PL does.
Net effect in terms of overall happiness: PL + 0, PC + 0
Scenario 2: PL gets unwantedly pregnant, gets an abortion
No one is happy here: PC -1, PL -1
Scenario 3: PC gets unwantedly pregnant, is unable to get an abortion due to regulation imposed by PL
Net effect is PL + 0, PC -1
Scenario 4: PC gets unwantedly pregnant, is able to get an abortion
Net effect: PL -1 , PC + 0
In this case, the only inciting factor to decreasing overall happiness is when PC gets pregnant. As such, rational actors from both camps could realize that their net happiness is increased if they minimize the number of times that PC gets pregnant. Therefore a non-zero sum solution would be to try and reduce the number of times that happens (via sex ed, access to contraceptives, etc)
This doesn’t describe reality. So let’s go back to the scenarios. I think my error was in scenario 1. It might look more like this
Scenario 1b: Pro life (PL) person gets unwantedly pregnant, does not get abortion.
Let’s now assume that PL being pregnant, even though it is unwanted, increases the net happiness in that tribe.
Net effect in terms of overall happiness: PL + 1, PC + 0
This immediately removes PL’s incentive to reduce the overall pregnancy rate, since they’re cutting themselves off from the increase in happiness from scenario 1. In this paradigm, you would now have them doing very little to combat unwanted pregnancy (since it might successfully combat the pregnancy’s they want to happen) and instead focusing entirely on preventing PC from being able to get an abortion… but that can’t be right.
The closest thing to non-zero-sum policies I can think of is that if both sides agree that unwanted pregnancies are bad regardless of what happens to them, maybe they can both agree on trying to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies.
In my experience, Pro-Life and Pro-Choice DO agree that decreasing unwanted pregnancies is one solution to the problem of abortion, but PC says “The solution is more contraception so that casual sex doesn’t lead to unwanted pregnancy” and PL says “The solution is less casual sex and, to the extent that contraception greatly normalizes / incentivizes casual sex, less contraception”.
If the people with whom you are having a a discussion about some
intractabledifficult problem *consistently* have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to follow through with their agreements, is that zero social trust, negative social trust, or do I fundamentally misunderstand the word?Probably zero. Negative trust would describe a scenario where someone will go out of their way to screw you over against their own interest (like if Jerry stopped Newman from getting a postal route in Hawaii even though it’d mean Newman stays near him).
But even negative trust creates reliability, since it makes the person you’re dealing with more predictable. And it could also lead to social trust, if negative social trust is the product of someone disliking you for a specific reason (since you’d want to avoid making people dislike you).
What if you’re a mistake theorist who’s started noticing all the conflict theorists hanging around and sharpening their knives, and believes in self-defense?
That’s an essentially conflict-theoretic perspective.
Maybe you can be different things on different levels of meta?
I feel like there’s a perfectly coherent position that kind of merges the two. Something like: ‘Our problem, that we need to solve, is that other people have mistakenly adopted this conflict-type perspective. This is essentially a mind-virus that places them beyond reason, so we can’t really debate with them. But it’s not their fault they’re like this, and those of us who are uninfected should work together to find a cure!’
That still seems like an essentially mistake-theoretic perspective, but one that’s very prepared to treat conflict-theorists as the enemy in a functional sense.
This might go to what Scott was talking about on the Political Spectrum Quiz; maybe some mistake theorists are conflict theorists one meta-level up.
Isn’t that basically the reason for Marxist Democratic Centralism? People who are vetted Cadre can be trusted to discuss using Mistake theory. Comrade Luxembourg is simply mistaken about the role of the Vanguard party.
Outside this, everyone is a Capitalist Running Dog, bound into conflict by class dialectic, and Conflict Theory prevails.
In that it divides the world into “us folks” and “those fuckers”? Yeah, I guess. But the point I’m trying to make is that if you have any concept of “those fuckers” at all, who you bucket into it depends just as much on your model of their motivations as on your grand unifying theory of politics. And that depends to some extent on the other theories of politics in the wild.
Right. Well, with your left hand you work on evangelizing the principle of charity and on getting those conflict-types to notice that positive sum interactions are possible, and to get mistake-type people to help you with this evangelism type work… and with your left hand you dig a bomb shelter, keep a list of people you think are substantially more conflict-type than you (and keep them away from things like your values, while you keep a close eye on which of their tactics are so obviously paying off that you can’t afford not to play along).
It’s an ecology. If it pays to be conflict type, we’re going to see more of that.
I think you are getting quite close to re inventing the Overton window there.
But this ecology is more like a prisoner’s dilemma – positive sums when all sides cooperate (choose mistake). advantage to conflict types when they do their thing and the other side is trying to cooperate ineffectively but when both defect(choose conflict) it’s more of a gamble as to who has the bigger bomb(shelter) and what is the costs/spoils ratio so maybe not prisoner dilemma.
But if my analog holds, then we’d expect hybrid types like tit-for-tatters to dominate.
Also, the ecology is multi layered. Each person is part of a group that chooses conflict or debate with other groups, for the group to be stronger and survive conflicts all members need to be strict debaters within the groups. So now you’d expect most interactions in the ecology to be mistake-type.
“But if my analog holds, then we’d expect hybrid types like tit-for-tatters to dominate.”
The problem is that it’s a tragedy of the commons, not prisoner’s dilemma. It’s very difficult for one agent, or even a small collection of cooperating agents, to shift the behavior of the entire population.
There’s no commons here, no pool of shared resources that you’re burning, only the strategies of other players. Scaling and coordination problems make it more complicated than a pure PD, but I think PD is still a better analogy — at least for the case where you’re only trying to determine your own strategy — than the tragedy of the commons.
Tit-for-tat does seem like a generally good approach.
It’s multipolar, though, and it only takes one Defectbot to throw all the tit-for-tatters into full Defect mode.
Hey look, it’sBill the Galactic hero (sorry, you’re using two left hands, so I hadda…)
That left hand is doing a lot of work!
But what if you don’t have two left hands?
(Or what if you made a typo and intended to reference a right hand?)
Yep. Shoulda said “right” in one of those two places where I wrote “left.” Glad you all rightly pointed that out. Otherwise, so many people would have been left directionless.
Then you have a map that doesn’t match the territory.
Care to justify that statement?
The knives have been out for a good hundred years at least. I do feel there was a marked shift towards conflict theory in 2014-2016, but I hope it will turn out to be temporary. That is not to say that conflict theory is wrong, but it would be bad if it became dominant.
You mean we have had a hundred years of conflict theory, or left-driven conflict theory. Scott nods towards right-driven conflict theory as well. The original reactionaries had a theory that the populace should be prevented from overturning the established order.
And conflict, if not conflict theory, has been around forever. How else did we end up with adversarial political systems, where opposing parties face each other in debating chambers like armies?
Time? Maybe democracies naturally merge into two parties, and those parties become more and more polarised, and people who use nasty tactics outcompete those who are honest and charitable. It could just be good old Moloch up to his tricks again.
Please read a few 19-20 c. history of Europe books, y’all.
No idea, but I definitely notice and am worried by all the knife sharpening too. :-/
Without having read further, and realizing that it doesn’t contradict what you say, I want to note here for the record that I first learnt about public choice theory from a Marxist. (I mean some kind of Old Left holdout, a Stalinist or Trotskyist, I never figured out exactly where he lay.) I have some books on it that I got from him and haven’t read. (He was also into linear programming, by the way.)
I mentioned this in another comment, but Old Left are essentially Mistake theorists internally, and Conflict Theorists externally. This is mostly because when the far Left attempts to Mistake theory the government (“Hey King Louis, you know what would really help the average person do better in our society? If we took the means of production from the rich and distributed it to them so they had a collective stake in society and production.”) they are quickly taught the nature of Conflict Theory.
I never thought about this consciously and I think it is an *enormously* useful concept.
Like, easily top 5 among the posts of this blog in terms of making me go “So much makes sense now that didn’t 30 minutes ago.” And that is not light praise.
FWIW, I am a dyed-in-the-wool mistake theorist (I echo Lecter’s suspicion that this blog’s regular readers will be mostly the same). I believe most of my family is as well (my parents are both veterinarians, which I doubt is a coincidence).
I am in the process of sending this to about eight people, most with some personalized variation of “Remember [that half-articulated idea I tried to explain last week/that fight we had a month ago/that “why is the world the way it is” conversation from some point last year]? Reading this made it click for the first time.”
Ya done good, Scott.
“FWIW, I am a dyed-in-the-wool mistake theorist”
I think there’s an important distinction between “mistake theorist” and “never thought about it and assumed mistake theory was the only game in town”.
I would urge people to think about which one they actually are. I doubt doing so will change many people’s minds but it might be edifying.
I have a friend who is clearly conflict, and I realize now I was dimly aware of this axis, and that I’ve been trying to convince him in arguments using the mistake approach for years until I gave up because I realized he just resets. It’s useful to have this crystalized in such a concise form. Of course my first impulse is to just explain this axis to him (We are otherwise politically on the same side but frequently disagree, now it’s clear why) but of course that’s just not going to work.
I guess it’s just abortions for some and little american flags for others?
Do you realize that you also have things to learn from him?
Hmm, I had a long reflection about that and… in many aspects of life I would ask for his counsel, but politically he’s as naive as a child. This may be a prejudice on my part, but it’s a very strong one I cannot consciously break. I’d as soon take medical advice from Deepak Chopra
You know, I’d bet if I asked your acquaintance, he’d say that you are smart in many ways, but politically as naive as a child, and he’d as soon take medical advice from Doctor Who. 🙂
> “never thought about it and assumed mistake theory was the only game in town”.
I guess you could call it “mistake-theorist-by-default”.
I think you can be one way on some issues and the other on some issues.
For example I am definitely in the “Conflict Theorist” camp on Gun Control, but I am a Mistake Theorist on violence abatement and crime reduction.
I never thought about it until I read your 2018 survey, and the questions about ‘political disagreement’ – which whose offered answers largely seemed to be variants of ‘who is making the mistake, and why?’. I couldn’t answer; the choices seemed to _presuppose_ a mistake-theorist view of the world. I think there was also an option to say the opponents are evil, but the very fact that this was the main counter-option to ‘mistake’ seemed to reinforce my complaint; only a mistake-theorist would see that as covering the ‘non-mistake’ options.
I wouldn’t describe myself at all as a conflict-theory person, based on your description.
But I’m most certainly not a mistake-theorist which, as you describe it, seems factually wrong and (to me) somewhat morally repugnant. So I don’t really think the dichotomy is really right or even a very useful tool.
I’m probably failing the ITT here, but:
If you can, would you mind elaborating on the ‘morally repugnant’ part? I can come up with stories for why you might feel that way, but none of them have the ring of truth.
Maybe that was a tad too strong, but it certainly makes me very uncomfortable. As I read Scott – the analogies about finding the best treatment for societies disease, the “best policy”, “saving the world”, everyone wanting “a good economy” and only differing on the means … and then the actual definitions of soft and hard mistake-theorists, one thing jumps out:
I not see _anything_ he says, not one word, suggesting mistake theorists acknowledge different utility functions and values. But there’s no best policy, best economy, and ‘saving the world’ means (if anything) as many things as there are people. For most interesting societal questions, the (singular) truth is not out there, and IMO you are making a mistake (!) if you take it as axiomatic that it is.
So mistake theorists are either wrong(*), or – and this is the creepy part – they think there _is_ a right set of Values and people who disagree have the wrong ones (but we can solve this with the right education I suppose). I’d not want to live in a society where this is conventional wisdom.
(*) We could really soften things a lot. Something like: political disagreement is generally really messy, but some people have a tendency to attribute a somewhat larger role to disagreements over matters of objective fact (mistakes) than others do, and this tendency influences their politics somewhat in such-and-such ways. But now (a) it’s a bit boring, and (b) even if I had somewhat more of this tendency than average, nothing but trouble is gained by saying (as people are here) “I’m a mistake theorist.”
@alef:
Thanks, this helps a lot. I get where you’re coming from now.
I think I was reading it with the word “best” in heavy, not-actually-visible quotation marks. Which makes it a lot less creepy, but may not have been the most accurate reading.
I’ve also got a pretty strong allergy to people trying to impose their personal values on others, especially by force. This isn’t necessarily consistent, since it involves trying to impose my values about other people trying to impose their values, but it doesn’t mesh well with the Knight Templar memes.
Metaethically I’m somewhere in the emotivist/error theorist neighborhood, which a lot of people (understandably) find creepy, but probably for the opposite reasons as the ones you express. I’m not sure how much it influences my object-level ethical intuitions, though, which are mostly vanilla enlightenment-liberal. I like consent a lot, and tend to gravitate toward utilitarianism in dubious situations out of a feeling that it produces less horrifying failure modes (although a lot of people would vehemently disagree with this, and my own feelings about it are far from resolved.)
I arguably have a bit of a blind-spot where Scott’s concerned- finding this blog was kind of a turning point for me, so I have enough good feeling and gratitude associated with him that it’s harder to see him as a sinister Brave-New-World type, even though when I slow down I can kind of see the parallels. I think he genuinely means well, and my primate brain attaches enormous significance to this fact before I really get a chance to weigh in.
Thanks again for responding- I was genuinely puzzled, and now I’m much less so, and that’s always a thing to celebrate.
🙂
> I think I was reading it with the word “best” in heavy, not-actually-visible quotation marks. Which makes it a lot less creepy, but may not have been the most accurate reading.
Thanks for engaging, and your thoughtful comments. I see that you can fudge the reading of ‘best’, but to the extent you allow some slop, you weaken the coherence the mistake-oriented point of view. If Scott had made some noticeable nod, any at all, towards the value-difference issue, I’d find the ‘mistake-theory’ view so much less interesting, but also less objectionable, and would not have commented. But he didn’t, and the “there is a best”, “there is a truth”, simply pervades his writing on this and IMO it stretches the principle of charity (and makes nonsense of his position) to suppose he isn’t really thinking that.
Scott gives one very concrete example, which has the virtue of not being a lightening rod for high emotion. He suggests, under MT, people might differ about their preferred interest rate policy, but they all want a ‘good economy’ and so the only question is who is actually getting it right. But suppose, at next financial crisis, the entire world takes Paul Krugman’s preferences on this as gospel, and let’s go further and say Krugman is actually perfectly correct as to to what will cause what and how to keep the economy as good (as he sees it) as can be done. So what is left, part from evil people who only seek conflict?
Well, there will be (e.g.) those who think transferring spending power from retirees with a hard-earned nest-egg (and appropriately for their age, conservative investments) to the young and poorer (and freer spending, and bolder)(*) – is morally questionable, and would trade off a bit of society-wide ‘economic goodness by any of the standard measures’ to respect this concern and (in their view) unfairness and (in their view) long-term incentive problems.
So no, interest rate policy differences are NOT going to be resolved – maybe lessened, but no more – by a mistake-oriented analysis. That’s simply not all that is going on.
(*) Which is part of what the Keyensian low interest rate/higher-inflation policy does, and certainly plays a part (I guess large part, but that’s very debatable) in why this policy ‘works’ in the first place.
I think I agree with you on this. I wouldn’t say I’m either type of theorist. I don’t think morality is real except in a consensus sense, so I think a lot of human conflict and argument is not to discover what’s moral or what’s the “correct” course of action but to define what’s moral by winning whether by winning an argument or a war. I may have particular preferences here and only be willing to be in a coalition with certain people, but I don’t think it’s quite the same viewpoint as thinking those I disagree with are evil.
Of course, mistakes will be made left and right almost regardless of my moral viewpoint, but I’m not sure those are a more significant cause of problems than fundamental disagreements with no empirical grounding.
My first reading of this article, I thought that I was a mistake theorist. After rereading the article and most of the comments, I’m beginning to think that I’m probably some sort of weak conflict theorist. I believe that most issues are based on mistakes, not conflict, and that structural problems are at the root of many political issues rather than “just need to elect the right people”. On the other hand, I think that there are concrete differences between individuals (I’m not sure whether to term them preferences or aesthetics or core values) that are not compatible with each other. If my preference is a society like Star Wars where everyone walks around with lightsabers and blasters, how can that coexist with someone whose preference is an unarmed society?
In one of the Open Threads a week or two back, someone asked about how the “politically correct” Overton Window thought of Libertarians (harmless or threat?), and my input into the convo was that, regardless of political leanings, people who view politics as [what I called “technocratic” but which Scott is calling “mistake”] tend to handle disagreement much better than people who view politics as [what I called “existential” but which Scott is calling “conflict”], who may consider dissent to be a mark of The Enemy.
I also think this might be my new favorite post, not because it’s an amazing new insight (other posts have felt more profound), but because I think it’s a good summation of why I read here: to avoid the conflict-perspective in favor of the mistake-perspective.
In other news, I think that, after being a reader for a year+, I’m finally becoming a commenter. Huh.
Welcome!
It took me about that long, too. There’s so much to absorb, it can be a little overwhelming, and I’m never sure I’m not just telling people things they already know (some of the commenters here are scary-smart.). But so far it’s going really well.
I’m not qualified to speak for others, but I welcome your company.
I think some misunderstanding of Marxism is suggested by the fact that you attribute such a moralistic attitude to “conflict theorists”, one which sees class conflicts in terms of villainous capitalists behaving in immoral ways towards the the noble and heroic working class. No doubt some socialists, even many who call themselves Marxists, do frame things in such moral terms, but Marx himself was strongly opposed to this sort of moralism, and frequently derided other socialists who framed class conflict in this way. See https://books.google.com/books?id=ieixAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PR1&pg=PA82 for more discussion of Marx’s rejection of moral arguments for socialism.
Marx’s attitude, as I understand it, was that ideology is heavily influenced by the “material conditions” of a society, so it’s mostly futile to try to change people’s ideological beliefs about the way society ought to work via moral exhortation, any actual mass change in attitudes will happen due mostly to changes in those material conditions (such as his prediction that ever-increasing automation would cause a “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” eventually leading to a major crisis for capitalism, an idea I think makes some sense if you consider the limit case of self-replicating machines, where if multiple competing sellers have such machines, market competition would be expected to drive the prices of the machines down to barely more than the cost of materials and energy needed for them to replicate a new copy, so profits from selling them would become negligible). In modern terms you could describe it as a view that people’s economic circumstances exert a strong selection pressure on which memes are most popular in the society…as Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. Vivek Chibber had a good, if a little overlong, essay on this at https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no1/cultural-turn-vivek-chibber
Yes, this needs to be emphasized. The sort of conflict theory that Scott was describing is the sort of thing that I would expect to hear out of the mouth of some right-wing populist…especially the part about blaming the George Soroses of the world for problems. That sort of emotional, moralistic, paranoid scapegoating is very un-Marxist. (And if this sounds like a “No-True-Scotsman” defense, then I’ll admit that many self-styled Marxists will sometimes resort to this sort of thinking…but I still think we would benefit from having a vocabulary term for “unemotional, non-moralistic descriptions of inherent conflicts of interest within capitalism,” and if Marxism as it is practiced no longer fits that bill, then we need a new term.
Likewise with the complaints about “corporate greed” that we heard coming out of Occupy Wall Street. That’s just cheap, unsophisticated populism. Marx would not chide capitalists for maximizing profit. That’s what they are supposed to do! If moral chiding could actually work, then Marx would have just proposed that instead. It would have been a hell of a lot simpler than proposing a social revolution to restructure the very fabric of daily life!
Likewise, Marx’s theory of exploitation is often misunderstood in a very vulgar way. Most importantly, Marx did not think that exploitation took place in the realm of exchange. When workers sell their labor-power to capitalists for wages, neither is systematically cheating the other. They each receive their due worth. (Sure, the occasional worker might be underpaid for her labor-power, but the occasional worker might also be overpaid for her labor-power).
For Marx, exploitation took place in the realm of production, and is a description of a purely objective phenomenon. Marx’s theory of exploitation was simply an assertion that workers, in the average case, add more to the final sale price of the commodity than they are paid. Now, one would still argue that this was right and proper, or wrong and improper, and certainly Marx argued that this arrangement was not in the interests of workers (that sort of descriptive claim about the interests of workers is the closest you’ll be able to come to locating normative judgments in Marx’s writings). Juridicially, though, Marx was ever clear to point out that neither workers nor capitalists were cheating each other.
Now, on the other hand, if workers were selling the commodities that they produced, and capitalists systematically bought them for less than their sale prices and then resold them for a profit, then there would be unequal exchange. And indeed, Marx notes that this is how very early primitive capital accumulation often happened in the late middle ages, and why (coincidentally, Jewish) pawn-brokers who preyed upon desperate artisans and peasants by buying low and selling high (while not even providing useful transportation services, as merchants-proper did) were so hated. But as a rule, under modern capitalism workers do not sell the commodities that they produce. They merely sell their ability to labor, and they are fully paid for that.
Nitpick: proposing such a revolution is eminently simple. Often fun. Not very difficult. If done correctly, not risky or emotionally taxing.
Figuring out how such a revolution should work, however, is a mindbogglingly complicated and difficult thing to do, and I do not envy the poor sap who takes it upon erself to do so. Particularly if one wants the revolution to actually happen, and particularly particularly if one cares about what happens afterward.
I’m not clear on exactly how much of this work Marx actually did- according to Scott’s reading of Singer, post-revolution planning wasn’t a big concern for him, but that’s obviously only one small part of the total work.
‘Exploitation’ in Marxism is a bait and switch- bait with ‘exploitation’ just meaning useful. Then switch to the connotations of ‘I’m exploited’ and ‘you’re just using me!’
Do you think Marx himself is guilty of this bait-and-switch, or are you just accusing some of his followers (perhaps those with a less intellectually sophisticated understanding of his ideas) of this? Marx would have defined exploitation in terms of the amount of “surplus value” employers are getting from their employees–at http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/deville/1883/peoples-marx/ch09.htm you can find the quote “The rate of surplus-labor is, consequently, the exact expression of the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist” (for the purposes of discussing whether Marx was guilty of any bait-and-switch we can leave aside the question of whether the labor theory of value and the notion of surplus value actually make sense–I’m not sure it does, but if anyone’s interested I talked a little about my best attempt to make sense of it in terms of an equilibrium model at https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/7klon1/whats_a_legitimate_argument_against_the_labour/drfvix0/ ). When I was reading up on Marx’s dismissal of moralistic arguments against capitalism, one source I found was his “notes on Adolph Wagner” at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm , where Wagner tried to do exactly the sort of bait-and-switch you describe–switching from Marx’s technical notion of capitalists extracting surplus value from workers to a moralistic notion that the capitalists were “robbing” the workers of surplus value. Marx was completely dismissive of this tact, denying the validity of any ahistorical moral sense in which the capitalist was doing anything wrong or unjust:
and a little later:
What would Marx’s prescription be then? Let capitalism run its course and then……..
The issue with what I will call a “soft” reading of Marxism is that he is mostly just describing industrial capitalism, it isn’t advocating for anything (expect perhaps legal recognition of unions) once people are emancipated from the land. It isn’t a moral, political or economic philosophy because it advocates nothing.
Bertrand Russell said of Marx:
and
(source is online, but I also have a physical copy somewhere).
I had to read him for class last year, and this really matched my impression, even after correcting for hindsight bias. Marx was a little less vitriolic than I’d imagined, but considerably more prone to stupid mistakes we’d just sort of glide over without discussing. And the mistakes all seemed to point one way.
I haven’t studied Marx enough to have a lot of confidence that I’m not missing something important. With that disclaimer: when Marx says he’s not trying to appeal to moral feelings, my current inclination is to treat this statement as bearing approximately the same resemblance to reality as Donald Trump saying “I love Mexicans!”
Bertrand Russell is selling Marx short here. Marx arrived at his theory of value through a lifetime of study of classical political economy. Marx’s theory directly descends from Adam Smith’s labor theory of value, especially as it was developed further by David Ricardo. It was not some populist slogan thought up on the cheap.
You are viewing Marx through a vulgar lens if that is all you got out of Marx’s quote above.
Marx never hesitated to congratulate capitalism on its achievements. Yes, capitalism is historically, contingently useful for building up surplus value and enhancing the productivity of labor. That’s not bait and switch. It’s just something a little more complicated than “boo! capitalism bad! socialism good!” or whatever else Marxist populists are arguing nowadays.
One of the biggest questions among Marxists has always been, “How long do we have to let capitalism run its course?” The Mensheviks, for example, thought that capitalism needed MUCH more time in Russia. Although I don’t hear it that often, one could make a Marxist case for allowing capitalism to run its course for quite a bit longer. Did it not give us The Internet? What other treasures might this golden goose provide?
If capitalism can continue to deliver widely-shared increases in living standards, then those in favor of capitalism have nothing to fear. It will be an immortal social system. Marx’s prime concern about capitalism was not that he had a bleeding heart for workers. It was Marx’s perception that capitalism constantly threw avoidable barriers in front of itself, that it fettered its own development, and that a time would come when capitalism would fall far short of taking advantage of the full physical limit of production and bringing people the full maximum limit of human freedom possible at a given technological level. Means of production, workers, and innovations would sit idle and un-implemented due to unprofitability.
Yes, machines, human laborers, and innovations would be potentially useful but unprofitable. That is because Marx argued that it was not the subjective usefulness of commodities that determined their prices, but instead their socially-necessary labor times. (Note: this is a purely descriptive claim). So, for example, a benevolent AGI would be highly useful and possibly profitable in a physical sense of producing useful wealth but monetarily unprofitable because all prices would drop to zero.
Marx never denied that machines produce use-values just as much, if not more than, humans do. What makes humans unique is that they produce value—i.e. their labor gives useful things prices. No human labor, no sale price.
@citizencokane:
Um, the person you’re quoting isn’t me, but I was the one who posted the Russell quotes. Just so we’re clear.
My understanding of all this is incomplete, and I have a firm policy of not pretending to understand things I couldn’t explain to someone like my mother (e.g. fairly smart, no major cultural or language barriers, etc.).
Also, Russell wasn’t perfect. So I may be merely repeating bad arguments. But my model of him doesn’ predict him pulling things out of thin air or Eulering people, so my prior is that he probably has a point.
Russell also says
This doesn’t read like a vacuous criticism to me, at a first glance. It has big words in it, and I know what some of them mean and I can see how they might be relevant. I think I’ve got a sort of general picture of what he’s saying, although IANAE and if David Friedman or someone wants to clarify, I’d appreciate it.
@Do you think Marx himself is guilty of this bait-and-switch-
Yes, habitually. ‘State of Siege’ is a brilliant and accurate essay, and anyone who’s read the 42 volumes of Marx-Engels letters and checked out all the allusions is intelligent and educated, but Marx did like this bait and switch.
No, it did not give us the Internet, which was a product of the military/academic/industrial research complex. Capitalism gave us Compuserve and AOL.
@citizencokane
I can see what Marx is getting at if he thinks that machinery supplanting workers (Marx called this the “organic composition of capital”) will lead to a decline in profit, but talking about “value” is a really weird way of putting it. The nearest I can get to making sense of Marx is that if workers do less and less work then they wouldn’t be paid enough to buy the products that are being produced, increasingly by using “dead labor” (or capital), so capitalism would reach a limit and/or crash catastrophically.
The problem here is that this has nothing to do with labor giving things prices. What’s going on here is the transformation of wages into prices, and purchasing power can be totally disconnected from wages as a product of labor, as we all know living in Western states with social programs and welfare handouts.
The problem with Marx is that he might not have been making moral claims inside of his economic works like Das Kapital, but he clearly was outside of them, and it’s pretty clear that Marx was a political activist. His position didn’t end at simply saying “wage labor is ultimately self-detonating”, but in adding “…and therefore communism”. It’s the “therefore communism” bit that is unjustified and resembles magical thinking in his belief in a post-scarcity directly democratic system in which private property is abolished. The two can’t easily be untangled, because Marx saw communism as a necessarily inevitable outcome of the economic process he described (besides the “common ruin of the contending classes”), when it’s trivial by converting Marx’s statement about labor to one about wages to show that other outcomes are possible. Did Marx even consider the possibility of nationalized wages AKA a basic income, for example? Capitalism could easily keep the profit cycle under such a scenario. Private property and the market being abolished isn’t a foregone conclusion of the end of human labor.
@Forward Synthesis:
That’s an issue Marx considered as a source of periodic capitalist crises, but it isn’t really his main argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall due to automation, so your suggestion of a basic income wouldn’t really solve the problem of decreasing profits according to his analysis. I think the main weakness of his argument is that he assumes capitalist profits are always based on capitalists selling physical goods made using means of production that they own, whereas in the modern world a lot of companies can use intellectual property laws to make money even while they outsource production to other companies, or produce informational goods like software.
But if you assume a hypothetical economy with no intellectual property laws, I think it does make sense to say profits would tend to approach zero as the amount of human labor went to zero too, even if some policy like a basic income allowed there to be plenty of buyers for mass-produced goods. Marx would argue this in terms of the labor theory of value, which I think is most sensibly seen as a statement about what the prices would be in the equilibrium state of an idealized economy where any worker can train to do any production job, and workers always try to find the jobs with the highest hourly rate (this of course doesn’t describe reality exactly, but it may have use as an approximation to reality, much like the simplified equilibrium models in neoclassical economics). But I think there’s a good argument for automation decreasing profits which doesn’t depend on the labor theory of value, just based on considering the limit case where 100% of the physical labor in mass production can be done by machines. In this case, some sufficiently large set of machines and parts would be self-replicating (if provided the necessary raw materials and energy)–every machine or part can be replicated using other machines/parts in the set.
So consider a compact self-replicating machine, like a 3D printer with robot arms that can print and assemble all the parts needed to make a duplicate of itself, given raw materials and energy. In this case, if you own one of these, the production cost for you to get another is no more than the raw materials and energy that go into making one. This means that if many different people own these 3D printers and are trying to sell them, and buyers know one seller’s 3D printer is as good as any other’s and so just opt for whichever one they see on the market with the lowest price, then the prices on these 3D printers will soon get driven down to a price only negligibly different from the cost of raw materials and energy that go into each one–profits for the sellers will be negligible, in other words.
Likewise, suppose a seller wants to sell some other good that can be made by such a 3D printer, a “widget” in econo-speak. If a single 3D printer can turn out 1000 widgets before wearing out and needing to be replaced, then the owner can turn out endless widgets with the production cost per widget being only (cost of raw materials and energy going into one widget) + (cost of raw materials and energy needed to make a new 3D printer, divided by 1000). And again, if many sellers are trying to sell these widgets–no artificial monopolies created by intellectual property laws–the market price of a widget would tend to be driven down to this amount, and so profits would become negligible even if plenty of people were buying them.
The same basic argument should apply even if the self-replicating set of machines is much less compact, like a huge factory complex. As long as there is genuine market competition, with multiple capitalist firms owning such self-replicating factory complexes, then for generic goods whose profits today don’t depend on intellectual property–forks, say–it the profits should get driven down to next to nothing, because the price for such goods is driven down to raw materials and energy plus some extra cost (probably much smaller) for occasional replication of the machines used in production as older ones need to be replaced.
Even if the possibility of making money from intellectual property allows a way out of the conclusion that automation would destroy capitalist profits completely, I think this at least suggests it’s likely the system is in for something like a phase transition, as there will no longer be situations where it’s more profitable for companies to own the production facilities as opposed to just outsourcing all the production (like what Apple does with hiring FoxConn to produce all its iPhones). In this case it seems plausible to me that national or local governments would use some tax money to create their own self-replicating production facilities (or buy up existing private ones for cheap), the cost being much lower than today given that all the machines would cost little more than the raw materials and energy that went into them, which could themselves be cheaper if automated mining equipment, solar panels etc. were also much cheaper. In this case, private businesses might increasingly go in the direction of just outsourcing all their production to such publicly-owned production facilities. So even if this wouldn’t involve any revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, the case that automation will lead to decreasing profits from production and that this is likely to culminate in some kind of public ownership of the “means of production” still seems pretty good to me.
@Forward Synthesis, I think you are attributing to Marx what many Marxists would call an “underconsumptionist” critique of capitalism—the argument that capitalism suffers dysfunctions because workers do not earn enough to buy back what they produce.
While that line of thinking has always had a respectable following in Marxist circles, it is by no means the only interpretation of crises, or even the most popular. (Nor is it my personally favored interpretation). For more information on this topic, I suggest starting here with the Critique of Crisis Theory blog.
@hypnosifl
I’ve considered these things before at length. I guess it depends on what you count as “capitalism”. Small profits are still profits after all, even if they are more widely spread. The cost of raw materials and energy are still going to exist as you note. We might see a much more perfect market with fewer monopolies. Another cost to note along with raw materials and energy is land, because if I have more land than you, then I can make more stuff, and bigger stuff (and parts for other things) than you can because I have more storage space.
Also, it seems unlikely to me that this would lead to the abolition of private property, since private property is a useful form of state granted title that people would especially want to apply to their means of production if things like 3D printers and personal robots become really advanced. That seems to moreso involve everyone becoming petit bourgeois and/or artisans than it does everyone becoming proletarian in a fully socialized system. It brings to mind more the notion of distributism than socialism, since it would be necessary to retain private property title under such a scenario.
Now other systems have had private property besides capitalism (every system between it and “primitive communism” according to Marx), but I think so long as the possibility for even small profits remains there will still be capitalism. It’s just that superprofits will be impossible. Another factor to add on besides land and space, is the rarity of certain materials. If some company owns an asteroid mining facility then they control a large supply of metals that are rarer on Earth. The 3D printers will still need processed powder to produce anything.
Sure, but “some kind of public ownership of the means of production” isn’t sufficient to be communism if there’s still the state and private property rights. We have “some kind of public ownership of the means of production” now providing you consider control of some services by representative democratic states to be “public ownership” in any meaningful sense. One of my philosophical problems with the idea of communism (vs the economic Marxist analysis which makes sense) is that I find the idea of “public ownership” to be a lie at best. I believe in an iron law of hierarchy. If you have the state control everything, democracy isn’t enough to prevent the fixation of some kind of bureaucratic class, and then you just have something like state capitalism.
So I think there’s lots of room for things that aren’t at all a stateless (impossible), classless(meaningless), moneyless(would still be useful even under full automation), private propertyless (would be even more useful under full automation since it applies to more people) society that is of a global scale (national, cultural, and numeric prejudices would still exist), even if capitalism as we understand it today comes to an end. Marx was right about there being contradictions to wage labor, but I don’t think these things are insurmountable for capitalist profit (even if we have smaller profits shared by far more “businesses”), and even if they are, it doesn’t follow that the end of capitalism means communism, since profit could fall while the state and private property are retained for other reasons.
So I can perhaps be convinced of Marxist economics, and perhaps that the end of capitalism is possible, but I don’t communism is a coherent or possible idea itself, and I don’t think the state and its private property laws are going to stop existing even if they change form.
@citizencokane
I’ll check that link out. I believe the underconsumptionist theory of crisis because I came to it independently. It follows from the end of human labor that if you don’t have some kind of government welfare system to keep money cycling, the economy would crash, because workers would have no wages to spend. Of course, since basic income is already being widely discussed by the powers that be, I think that issue is already solved. There would have to be a different reason for a titanic ending to capitalism (vs a slow whittling away of profits due to a greater number of producers and costs going down to raw material, energy, and land costs).
This is because “Marxism” without the revolution is just unsophisticated capitalism, stripping individual wants down to a base level and reasoning from there.
The thing is, it makes no sense for privileged people to be leftist amoral conflict theorists–if there’s no right or wrong, just people fighting for their own interests, then you should fight to defend your privilege.
Another aspect of Marxism is that class interests are more significant than anything else. So even if you have white privilege, male privilege, or whatever (even class privilege in an SES sense of class rather than in a Marxist sense), then as long as you make your living from selling your labour power rather than from capital that you own, then it is in your interest to make common cause with all of the more oppressed people in your class and be a leftist.
Marxist entrepreneurs, on the other hand, now those are useful idiots (ironically suffering from a false consciousness).
A privileged person might not define self-interest solely in terms of the amount of material goods they can amass, though–for example they might value ideas and art, and thus prefer a situation where far more people were free to develop their talents in these areas. Also, even if a conflict theorist is “amoral” in the sense of not seeing the conflicts in moral terms where one side of the conflict is “bad” and the other “good”, they may still be moral in other ways, like the utilitarian desire to maximize everyone’s happiness (which can be applied to beings we don’t see as morally blameworthy or praiseworthy, like animals–would anyone deny that there is some genuine conflict of interest between predators and prey, for example?), or a Buddhist who sees all harmful actions as due to “ignorance” but still feels compassion for all sentient beings. I also read an interesting piece at https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/brenkert.htm which argues that although Marx rejected arguments for socialism based on moral duties or other rules, he did have a kind of virtue ethics where he certain human qualities tend to be seen as good ones in all eras (this could include not just moral qualities such as kindness but also non-moral types of ‘virtue’ like creativity or thoughtfulness), and he thought that socialism would be most conducive to developing these qualities in people.
I have not read Marx, so I can’t vouch that myself (and I’ll disclose I have a strong bias against him); but I’ll notice this seems to be a common problem of every intellectual tradition. The Founders and the High Philosophers are often more careful and better thinkers than the Followers who spread the word and the hacks that profit from it. Given that the tradition’s thought is also made by these less careful thinkers, the whole sect becomes distanced from the founder’s ideal, usually for the worse.
As I read somewhere else, this happens in three generations:
First generation aka The Founders: “Though it may be counterintuitive, our studies show that one cannot talk meaningfully of X without taking Y in consideration, and we propose the main driver of Y is .Z”
Second generation aka The Preachers: “The founders proved that Z causes Y and Y causes X.”
Third generation aka The Hacks: “The Preachers said that X doesn’t matter because Z causes Y.”
Fuck that shit. We need to crush those fuckers who believe in conflict theory since they are the enemy.
—
Ok, I said it that way because I thought it was funny but in a very real way I do believe that conflict theory is like a conspiracy theory with a self-reinforcing worldview that is resistant to any debate or evidence so no matter how well intentioned they are the only option left is to crush them.
What I’ve found works better than “crush them” is to admit of layers in most of our thinking. Libertarians, existentialists, Nietzsche–they’re all a little bit right that there’s something *personal* about power, and a way in which the single, simple thing that can “go right” is for a person to start using their personal power to their own benefit, which is something very similar to “develop a self.” Small children in a restaurant don’t just defer to what their parents order for them–they don’t actually have preferences yet, or an ability to be disappointed if they don’t get what they want. Having preferences, and a strong will to satisfy them, is an advancement… and will create conflict. Of course the shepherd will try to convince the sheep that what’s in his interest is also in theirs… but it won’t always be true. But parents do not generally find it necessary to crush their children, nor shepherds to crush sheep. We can *mostly* get along.
I think it depends on whether we’re talking about people who are just, like, intuitively more conflict-theoretic, versus those who have seriously gone all-in on it and accept it entirely. The former you can hope to teach a better way. (This also applies perhaps to those who espouse it but haven’t really accepted it.)
The true hardcore conflict-theorists though… I mean, you can’t really have useful debates with people who don’t believe in useful debate… or honesty… or even truth (a lot of these conflict theorists are anti-realists). So, y’know…
But, it’s worth noting that there’s more to “conflict theory” than just a descriptive theory that disagreements are conflicts. Which is after all true in some cases — not just in the ironic case of dealing with conflict theorists, but also, as has been mentioned, things like copyright law. But that doesn’t mean one should be a “conflict theorist” about such cases! Scott breaks it down here as if it’s fundamentally this one disagreement between the two points of view, but really there’s a number of disagreements — we’re looking at two clusters here — and one of those is the fact that conflict theorists just don’t really worry about mistakes, like, at all. They don’t seem to consider it important to put systems in place to keep one aligned with reality; they seem to think that if they win the conflict the right things will happen automatically.
So even where the “this disagreement is a conflict” aspect is true, you still don’t want to be a conflict theorist, it still contains a lot of wrongness. Which is to say, we can fight — but we can fight like mistake theorists.
Agree that there’s a spectrum, and not everyone is ‘all in’.
Also, this:
I’ve noticed that this is one of the heuristics my lizard brain tends to use to decide if it considers someone an ally or not. I think it’s one of those divisions between people that actually accounts for a lot of the observed differences in outlook.
(Another one is whether people are trying to ‘push in a direction’ or ‘hit a target’- which I think is very tied to whether they’re interested in binding their outlook to the truth. I have you to thank for this conceptualization, which I’ve introduced to various family members, so it seemed as good a time as any to say thanks.)
Oh, well, glad you’ve found it a helpful distinction! 🙂
Or Guerilla theorists that treat politics as an armed struggle by individuals against the state, forever fighting to determine whether the State should release its control. Sometimes there is no ‘us’ only ‘me, and possibly a few fellow travellers’.
So yah, I used the term “crush them” because it was amusing in light of the article not because I actually want to murder them….merely somehow use means other than rational persuasion to ensure they don’t get to choices for polities I’m a member of.
You should read about Academic Choice Theory.
Help, I tried to go a meta-level up by making fun of this and writing about Blogger Choice Theory, but I just ended up turning into Robin Hanson. Now I’m sitting in an office in George Mason University in a 50-something year old man’s body and I have no idea how to get home.
This is especially concerning because Robin Hanson is currently in Davos.
Could be worse. Could be a giant centipede.
Is this a reference to something?
My first thoughts are the old Buddhist claim (possibly apocryphal?) that those who enjoy frightening others will be reborn as centipedes, and the litany of “It could be worst- at least we’re not (graphic nightmarish scenario)” in Fight Club.
The most salient difference between Scott and Robin Hanson is that reading Scott doesn’t make me want to slit my f@cking wrists. If everything is signalling, I desire to believe everything is signalling, but I honestly don’t know how to live in that world.
>I honestly don’t know how to live in that world.
We already are, and it’s doable. Actually I think this point is touched upon in the Elephant In The Brain book.
Metamorphosis, perhaps?
The Screwtape Letters.
I’m pretty sure I read this when it was first posted, but thanks for reminding me of it.
I think its a dangerous temptation to diagnose people who disagree as ignorant, as the Jacobite article does. The evidence that people are ignorant of the questions seems to be that they don’t focus on the particular subjects and buzzwords the author thinks are serious policy.
To make an analogy from the other direction, a fundamentalist christian could diagnose others as ignorant because they don’t talk about moral degradation of society and undermining of traditional family values in any serious way, which are obviously the most important issues.
The underlying problem for both i think is failing to appreciate how deeply different the other sides worldview is. Secular politicians aren’t ignorantly ignoring moral degradation, they genuinely believe it isn’t a real thing, or they consider it much less important than say the economy. The far left doesn’t just ignore technical questions out of ignorance but thinks they are less important than changing other aspects of the system, chiefly who has power.
It doesn’t matter whether you know what the cure is for the patients disease, if you don’t have the money for medicine, or a doctor to perform the operation. So, to stretch the analogy slightly, we are not dealing with one patients complex illness, but we have thousands of patients dying from easily preventable diseases, but we don’t have basic antibiotics to save them. In that circumstance getting the antibiotics as quickly as possible should be the priority.
Important correction from my experience as a friend of some very religious people:
“a fundamentalist christian could diagnose others as ignorant because” they don’t know that God exists and all morality derives from him, it would be hard to treat anyone who denies something as basic as the existence of God as anything but ignorant.
Moral degradation can still be debated, the problem of our children’s souls being sent to hell is just straight out of the secular politician’s Overton window
If we don’t know better than people who disagree with us, what exactly is our grounds for disagreeing with them?
One way to frame this might be:
Conflict theorist: The problem here is that evil people are causing problems.
Mistake theorist: The problem here is that the world is broken and too complicated to easily fix.
To which, one might respond: Is there any reason to think there’s only one problem here?
I’m not sure I believe in evil, but I believe in stupid, crazy, and incorrigible.
I think ‘evil’ isn’t really a useful term. At best, it’s severely nonspecific, and carries peak cultural baggage.
(‘Crazy’ has some of the same problems, but I think I know what you mean.)
Have you seen the Zetas and other Mexican drug cartels that skin children alive? Is that stupid, crazy, incorrigible, or something else?
Not having met any of them, it’s hard to be sure. I’d bet on ‘crazy’, which is admittedly not as specific as you might like.
Some measure of ‘stupid’ and ‘ignorant’ is also on the table- if one truly wishes, it’s not hard to reduce lack of empathy to these.
If you’re looking for an expression of disapproval, I’ll oblige: skinning children alive is a bad bad thing to do* according to my utility function.
*In most situations. As with anything else, we can probably think of exceptions, but in this case I don’t anticipate them carrying much practical relevance.
Is there a particular reasons “evil” isn’t on your list?
Presumably because it’s not on mine.
The less snappy but more accurate way of putting at it would be that “evil” is a descriptive class but not a prescriptive one. It makes sense to me to say that Pol Pot was evil because he had a third of his country killed; it does not make sense to say that Pol Pot had a third of his country killed because he was evil.
Well of course. Unless evil is a thing in itself rather than the absence of a thing (good), it makes no sense to say so-and-so did X because he’s evil. Rather we have to ask “What inspired the behavior that caused so much privation of good?”
I like this framing.
A counter-response would be that they are both phrasing the same problem differently. Something like – Evil(differently-valuing) people having power is too complicated complicated to easily fix, this is possibly the fault of said people having broken the world.
Meh, ended up too much conflicty instead of a 50-50 split…
Maybe the counter-response would be that since you can specify each of these problems in the terms of the other you need some additional evidence that they exist independently.
Because of the complexity of the world it is easy for evil people to gain power and hard for good people to be effective enough to retain power.
If you find someone in power, odds are they are some variety of small-e evil, but odds are also that replacing them won’t improve things on net.
(epistemic status: floating a theory)
I buy it.
Actually, it seems so obviously true that it kind of feels like I’ve always believed it.
Take out the “evil” and “good”: In order to get to the top levels of power, whether that’s political or corporate power, your overriding priority has to be the acquisition and preservation of power, because if it’s not, at some stage you’ll be swept aside by one of the people who made it their top priority. If you make it into the top ranks, whatever your goals and politics are in theory, you’re already compromised.
+1
Achieving almost any difficult goal means that you tend to have to trade off other values for that one, make compromises, etc.
Reaching the top levels of political power in the US is a pretty demanding goal, so you can expect that the people who get there have had to compromise a lot of their other values to get there. And the specific nature of what you have to do to get to the top levels of political power in the US tends toward requiring you to be willing to compromise a lot of your personal principles, align yourself with repugnant people whose support you need, kiss up to unappealing potential donors, take positions you don’t really agree with because they’re popular among the voters you need, promise support for programs you think are probably a bad idea to get votes, etc. You can refrain from some of these things, some of the time and still be successful. But I think it’s quite hard to end up in the white house or in a leadership position in Congress if you aren’t willing to do those things most of the time.
This doesn’t require evil, exactly (though politicians often do pretty evil things to get or keep power), but it certainly rewards being someone with pretty flexible principles and morality.
That’s begging the question.
The point of setting up a system of governance is to put in selective pressures that hamper the rise of amoral careerists. Saying that amoral careerists will rise to the top because they can better leverage Goodheart’s law is assuming that it’s an unsolvable problem.
Sounds like the chapter in The Road to Serfdom on “Why The Worst Get on Top.”
The point is to design your government so the worst don’t get to the top – that’s Carlyle’s entire formulation of governance.
It’s Marx’s also but Marx claimed that there’s an easy way to identify the men who are not the worst – they’re the intellectuals who speak for the workers. This has been empirically disproven.
I just want to take a moment to say that “people having power is too complicated complicated to easily fix” was a lot easier for me to notice than “Paris in the the spring”.
First off, I think Scott’s post is a good post that seems to make good points and takes steps on the path to true knowledge.
But, as I read it I kept thinking about Indian wise men describing th elephant. Or rather, I pictured two amateur carpenters arguing about how wood is joined together, one being a “nail” theorist and the other a “screw” theorist.
Now obviously, you build using wood or nails, but structures out in the real world are not built exclusively using one or the other.
This seems to me to be a recurring failure of thinking on Scott’s part, honestly. The tendency to naturally think in binary terms (even while knowing this is incorrect).
That’s not a fair framing, of course. A fair framing would be that conflict theorists believe evil people cause problems and mistake theorists believe that dumb and crazy people cause problems.
Those are both conflict theory positions as I read it.
No, as I read it, that’s precisely not how Scott is describing it.
I’m naturally inclined to think that there are elites who want to hold on to their power *and* that everyone (elites and otherwise) makes mistakes. Easy mistake theory and easy conflict theory are pretty much incompatible, but why not both hard mistake theory and hard conflict theory?
I think that because mistake theory suggests the problem is coordination and the solution is compromise, while conflict theory suggests the problem is malice and the solution is winning, the two are made mutually exclusive in the case of any given actor.
Maybe I believe that Scott is wrong about psychiatry but is motivated deep down by the desire to help, while a theoretical Dr Maison is wrong about psychiatry because he is motivated by the desire to earn money and defang the revolution by medicalising poverty. Is there any belief I could hold where Scott was wrong for both reasons equally, or would I always choose one above the other when deciding how to act?
A lot of social and political action comes down to talking. Saying what we believe, trying to influence what other believe.
So even if you think one factor dominant over another, there’s often good reason to acknowledge and address both.
Maybe in the case of a given actor on a given issue, you have to choose one or the other.[^1] But not as overall philosophies. There are a few conflicting Dr Maisons (even more in politics than in psychiatry), but also lots of mistaken Dr Alexanders.
[^1]: Although the most frustrating issues are those where someone is both incompetent and nefarious in such a way that the honest mistakes and the evil intentions make things worse together than either would alone. A lot of foreign policy issues seem like this to me, from the perspective of world leaders. But if you’re going to insist that I decide which reason is more prominent, then even these issues will fall one way or the other.
Yes, but do you think that “they’re trying to hold on to their power” is the only reason an elite would ever advance an argument defending their status, for whatever given value of ‘elite’? I think that’s the difference. I keep thinking of examples but they all trigger fights – no doubt people here can all think of examples of specific methods of combating unfairness that would be counterproductive, or involve a cure worse than the disease.
Not the only reason, but one reason, certainly. If you're going to define the terms so that mistake theory is the normal thing and you're only a conflict theorist if you believe that this is the only reason, then of course I'm a mistake theorist, but then that’s not saying much.
Let’s complete the four by four.
Hard mistake theory, hard conflict theory, easy conflict theory, and just enough easy mistake theory to create plausible deniability for the hard conflict theorists to undermine the hard mistake theorists.
I think this is a really useful axis of distinction, and not one I’ve seen articulated well before. I also think your articulation of it (with respect to conflict theory, at least) is still largely in Easy Mistake land, though, because the the conflict theorist you describe sounds like an anti-rational boogeyman. I think a tendency toward conflict theory can come from historic abuse at the hands of people who preach things that sounds a lot like mistake theory (even if they aren’t actually adopting it in good faith). As a paradigm for policy development, it seems like mistake theory heavily favors the status quo until deliberation/research suggests an alternative; if that deliberation takes a long time and the status quo seems harmful to you, it’s awfully hard to distinguish from malicious actors hiding behind a facade of careful consideration, which isn’t without precedent.
I think the thrust of my thought on this is that a person can be on board with the principles of mistake theory but not trust other people who claim to be mistake theorists to play fair ball, and accordingly adopt behaviors that look a lot like conflict theory. (The more I articulate this, the more convinced I am that this is likely happening both on the left and right, though I’m not certain they have equal cause for it.)
That aside, though, this is yet another obviously insightful sketch of a concept I wouldn’t have gotten a lasso around on my own, so thank you for that, Scott.
Which you shouldn’t- it seems almost tautological that, at any given moment, there are at least some bad actors in play. If someone repeatedly makes reasonable-sounding arguments that, on closer inspection, turn out to be bullshit, it eventually stops being worth your time to listen to them.
To some extent, this is justified… but the fact that other people aren’t acting in good faith to solve problems doesn’t mean the problems will solve themselves. There’s a vast, yawning abyss between ‘I am sure that you are wrong about X’ and ‘I know how to fix X’, even ignoring the fact that it’s possible to be both dishonest and right.
I suspect it’s different for different people. I’m attending a very left-leaning college right now, so most of the idiots, trolls and fanatics I happen to run into are of the SJ type. My sister is a teacher at a public high school in a different part of the state, and has an analogous experience with people on the right.
This certainly isn’t to say the total cumulative would balance, if you could somehow aggregate it- just that individual perspectives can differ quite widely for purely situational reasons, even before you factor in bias/subjectivity/framing effects.
The thing of it is, to me the mistake theorist Scott describes ALSO sounds wildly wrong. At least, public choice theory as I (very much a layman) understand it is nearly 100% opposed to the idea that “all you need are really smart technocrats.” Public choice theory stands against the idea that the government can just magically solve problems. Government is composed of people who 1) cannot possibly have enough information to always make “correct” decisions and 2) are just as self-interested as everyone else.
These days “really smart technocrats” usually means technocrats who decide to create a prediction markets and use those to make correct decisions, it speaks to the intuition that these are all technical problems that can at lest theoretically have technical solutions.
Would like to upvote, turn into an article, and turn into a book!
This is THE KEY THING that SJWs are basically about condemning the Privileged for not recognizing adequately.
To go up a meta level, maybe conflict theorists are mistake theorists who have applied the same methodology to “how do we get our ideas implemented” and decided based on the empirical evidence that emotional appeals and group action are more effective than policy analysis
To go sideways a meta level, maybe mistake theorists are conflict theorists who have applied the same methodology to “how do we avoid taking heavy mutual casualties during internal ideological conflicts” and decided that it makes strategic sense to participate only in limited verbal skirmishes, except where overwhelming force can be coordinated against especially hated/dangerous foes.
Amazing post, and definitely something I had never explicitly considered before. In fact, I made an account just to comment on this.
That being said, I think some of these opposing viewpoints are nothing more than false dichotomies. People like having power and coming up with policy is hard. A true Mistake Theorist is naive in (implicitly) assuming that all politicians/policy-makers/voters are working towards the common goal of [your utility function], and a true Conflict Theorist is naively throwing out Pareto improvements on the basis that power grabbing has to be zero-sum.
I think it might be healthy to consider these viewpoints from a Consequentialist stance. Under which conditions will being a Conflict Theorist lead to better outcomes (I think this is when a policy with huge negative impact is being proposed/implemented and all your effort and political capital has to go to fighting this) and under which conditions will being a Mistake Theorist lead to better outcomes (I think this is when it is not clear which policy leads to the best outcomes)? And isn’t switching between the two depending on the situation simply less naive than either one?
Keep in mind that the hottest newest evidence on policy has to factor into your long-term strategy for making policy somehow. On each individual issue it might be worth going full Conflict Theorist until the situation of the People has been improved, but in the back of your mind you should keep track of which evidence would convince you that you are wrong.
True in theory, but in practice, given cognitive limitations and the need to compete with specialists, any given person is likely to benefit from specialization.
I never thought about this consciously and I think it’s a useful concept. Three comments:
This exposition makes me more sympathetic to conflict theory, but only on the specific issues where conflict theorists are clearly on to something. The three that spring to mind are global warming, redistribution towards the poorest, and making people less racist and sexist. However, it doesn’t seem like conflict theorists have particularly good tools for distinguishing these cases from ones which push at all the same group identity levers (respectively: opposition to GMOs/nuclear power, massive minimum wages increases/other policies which harm the economy overall, making people deny sex differences or the existence of gender). Perhaps having conflict theorists who scaremonger about GMOs is the price we need to pay in order to have people who actually take large-scale action against global warming; that may well be worth it. But on the other hand, you don’t want conflict theorists who are able to take actions at too large a scale, because they have no solution to the problem of their actions creating a system where there are new elites and new power structures. To get a system that avoids that, it feels like your best bet is to create slow cultural change, Scandenavia-style.
Secondly, if “everyone in government is already a good person, and just has to be convinced of the right facts” is false, that doesn’t necessarily imply “everyone in the government is a bad person”, but could instead imply “everyone in government is incapable of changing their minds”. Maybe the reason for that is their deep mistrust of the other side. Then we need to figure out whether people who deeply mistrust the other side, but are wrong, are Actually Bad People. The left-wing are too inclined to say yes, but the readers of this blog (let’s call it the Slate Star position; is there a better term?) are probably too inclined to say no. The left-wing are correct that the best way to deal with these people is by treating them like Actually Bad People (i.e. fighting back), but the Slate Star position is probably correct that the best way to prevent another generation of people like them is to treat them like Actually Good (but misguided) People.
Thirdly, it sounds like the people who hate EA most are probably conflict theorists, and the people who like EA most are probably mistake theorists.
[ten minutes of screaming]
Wow. All I got was a “Goddamnit.”
Yeah, so I thought I might get this reaction, and should probably clarify. I don’t mean that all the solutions that conflict theorists propose in those three domains are good ideas. Rather, I mean that there are *some* solutions which they propose in these areas which would be good ideas, and they have correctly identified that the main opposition to these has come from powerful interest groups who don’t want to lose out.
Solutions I’m thinking of are, respectively: subsidies for renewable energy/taxes on pollution; spending money on better homeless shelters and soup kitchens; getting rid of Jim Crow laws and making outright discrimination illegal. All of these seem to me to have significant positive utility, and were/are opposed for no particularly good reasons. Do you disagree?
I think cost of goods directly relates to energy spent in their construction, so if your renewables don’t make economic sense without subsidies then they’re probably not worth deploying. I’m strongly pro nuclear energy, and I find that many of the arguments against nuclear are profoundly conflict theorist in nature.
Interesting test case.
Are you simply making the _mistake_ of confusing emissions with energy consumption. Or are you simply aiming an argument in the direction of the other side in the knowledge that, even if many people will spot the flaw, some won’t, so it is still a net win to say the wrong thing?
Huh. Don’t know where it fits in this framework, but your comment makes me think of an attitude that I’d paraphrase as “This is the biggest crisis ever, so you should compromise. (Of course I don’t have to compromise.)” Think of the way H. Clinton tried to get libertarian and/or socialist votes, or how most vocal anti-global-warming also steadfastly oppose nuclear power…
1soru1, I’m predicating that fiat currency can be used as an acceptable stand-in for energy use. On that basis, if the currency cost of deploying a solar panel isn’t less than the expected currency return from deploying that solar panel, it’s not worth doing regardless of how many emissions were created in the process since it would be a net energy loss.
The obvious issue with this theory is that fossil fuel emissions externalize costs, so the stated price for fossil fuel power doesn’t accurately track with actual costs, and sufficiently cheap oil would prevent renewables from coming online while still polluting the hell out of everything. But it’s somewhere to start.
So you are quite aware that what you stated was wrong (i.e. ‘obvious issue with this theory’), but you said it anyway.
Can you reach back and reconstruct your state of mind when you said it? Was it temporarily forgetting that issue, or deliberate engaging in a conflict between sides?
@1soru1:
I don’t think articulating an argument compels one to reiterate all possible counterarguments, if only because they tend to be so numerous in almost all cases. Discussion invariably contains gaps, and we don’t have the resources to explore all of them. ‘All models are wrong’. But not, of course, equally.
I can’t say I exactly understand the point in dispute, here, so maybe this was a particularly blatant example. (I
halfunderstand it- I could bullshit my way through an essay question about it and come away with a decent grade- but I don’t have a good framework for the exact degree of tie-in between monetary costs and energy costs, or the limits of potential externality issues.)For what it’s worth, though, I wouldn’t have parsed ‘I think X directly relates to Y’ as an assertion of fact that X and Y had an inelastic unvarying 1:1 relationship.
all-externalizations-included cost accounting of the sort the ExternE project did imply very strongly that the only energy sources worth using are dams and reactors.
Wind is acceptable if you have enough dams to smooth supply, and nothing else is remotely economic.
Coal in particular is terrifyingly expensive, you just mostly pay for it at the doctor or the mortuary.
I think the cost of goods more strongly relates to the labor spent in their construction than the energy, and to the extent that it includes energy it is because of the labor spent obtaining energy. It is quite likely that the cheaper good is cheaper because it traded the labor of one coal miner against that of two master craftsmen and said, “burn the coal to brute-force this one”.
My dad used to say that you could do anything if you had enough people and energy. (He’s an engineer. To engineers, energy matters). I would add time. The three main contributors to value are people, energy, and time, or the interaction between the three.
… haven’t we already done that? I mean, I admit that I don’t know exactly what Jim Crow laws are, but I’ve always heard them brought up as an example of “bad thing that we used to have but that we thankfully got rid of.”
Jim Crow laws were laws in the South that made discrimination against blacks mandatory. They are indeed no longer a thing.
Also, it’s important to note that “mandatory” part, because there seems to be a group that says “if we got rid of nondiscrimination laws, it’d be just like Jim Crow again”. Unless you think every restaurant owner is chomping at the bit to break out their “whites” and “coloreds” signs, removing laws that make something forbidden will not have the same effect as making it mandatory.
Warming is, on the whole, good when you are cold and bad when you are hot. So if it’s a straight conflict theory fight, with each group supporting its own interest, Canada and the Scandinavian countries should be anti-AGW, the U.S. and China about neutral, India and other warm countries pro-AGW, where “pro-AGW” means “believing that warming is a very serious problem which something must be done about.”
That’s not the pattern I see. It looks more like poor countries being pro-AGW mostly in the belief that they can use the argument to get money from rich countries, everyone else dividing on ideological rather than self-interest lines.
My thought is that your statement “on the whole, good when you are cold and bad when you are hot” is so far wrong that everything else has to be mostly not-even-wrong. Knowing who AGW is bad for means knowing about climate variability, storm intensity, rainfall patterns, refugee flows, ocean acidification, clathrate gun hypotheses… it’s not about “on the whole, good when you are cold and bad when you are hot.”
Also, things are mostly not good or bad for whole countries; they’re good or bad for individuals and interest groups. Don’t ask what’s good for “the U.S.”; ask what’s good for the professionals who benefit from high energy levels on red team or blue team, or what’s good for middle class folks who care about (un)employment, or what’s good for the investor class as a set, or for specific billionaires with investments in (say) coal, natural gas, or solar. Goldman Sachs has climate change science specialists on payroll, and is buying water rights in target areas. Or look at how much it did for the Sierra Club to get a huge injection of cash from big natural gas to go after coal, and ask if it did as much to help climate action as a cause as it did to give natural gas a boost over coal.
Here’s an example of how my view explains other’s AGW politics. Say you are a ruling elite in a petrol-rich state, like Russia, where something like a trillion dollars (that’s the order of magnitude, anyway) worth of fossil fuels that are somewhat marginal (below permafrost, or coal and hence quite dirty, or very far from consumers and requiring big new pipelines) are still below ground. Policies that tend to make it uneconomic if you try to drill up and sell these marginally-profitable fossil fuels… you hate those policies. So do all the folks who work for you–your lawyers, business hacks, security guards–everyone who traces their well-being to your largesse will also want the oil to flow. Some people with a little cleverness see how much you are likely to hate those, and build whole careers anticipating the largesse that will flow from you if you see them as solving this problem for them… by any acceptable means. (THE SPICE MUST FLOW!) So, in Russia we’d expect that Putin and the others who seem to view the country as their personal fiefdom these days… they probably don’t really want people to think climate change is real.
Now do that again across a lot of other places where agendas can form. (Again, the U.S. isn’t a thinking thing, don’t try to find what “The US” wants. Find what David Koch wants, or what a 22-year-old climate activist wants, such as a 20-something-year-old buddy of mine who did a 40-day vitamins-only fast to protest climate inaction… etc. Notice that it’s no more profitable, in dollar terms, (and arguably a *lot* less so) to be a pro-AGW mainstream scientist than to just take a payout and go work for Heartland or etc. Climate change is very complicated to understand, but there’s a very, very serious collective action problem at the bottom of it. In whose personal interest is it to be the chap who tells Vladimir Putin that climate change is so bad that he should stop all his elite cronies from doing what they might otherwise do to ensure they don’t have to write off $1 trillion?
The name Alexander Litvinenko springs to mind for some reason… can’t seem to think of why.
If you want to know the object-level facts of climate change–to decide what *you* think–look for the single person, or small set of them, that are most incentivized to tell only the robust truth (i.e. only the stuff that they can defend against claims that they’ve lied). I’d say if you get a graduate student in a physical sciences program to tell you about the atmospheric and oceanic effects–the direct temperature and pH changes–and then get an ecologist grad student or two to tell you what they can say with some confidence is threatened by that (e.g. is ocean acidification bad for some people more than others, and if so, who?), then you are well on your way. I don’t think you’ll end up with “on the whole, good when you are cold and bad when you are hot.”
Instead, it’s more like “AGW… quite bad. On balance, not worth caring about if you are rich and powerful and don’t care about the future, since you’d have to spend down/use up your power or money to do anything. But since, if you are rich and powerful and prone to shooting the messenger, it’s not that important if you care about the future anyway, because you won’t know it’s bad, because no messenger smart enough to persuade you is stupid enough to try. If you aren’t rich, powerful, or you do care about the future, it’s pretty bad. How bad depends a lot–there’s some uncertainty on how much, at this point–on whether anything is done, and how much, and how soon.”
In principle, conflict theory is easily separable from political Manicheanism. In practice, it usually requires a crowbar.
> The three that spring to mind are global warming, redistribution towards the poorest, and making people less racist and sexist
Uh, the first one sure, but wouldn’t economic redistribution as well as identity politics be almost the archetypical complex mistake-problems that need careful analysis, but that people (well conflict-types) typically love to treat as easily solvable if the other side would just admit they’re evil bastards and go stand in a corner?
I should have been more careful with my phrasing. There are definitely lots of problems which mean that redistribution and identity politics don’t have easy solutions. However, the last century or two of progress in combating racism and sexism have been mostly conflicts against people who didn’t think the interests of minorities were very important. We’re now reaching a time when the gains are a lot more marginal, and therefore maybe mistake theory is a better lens.
Same with redistribution: pumping more money into somewhat dyfunctional modern welfare systems probably should be analysed with mistake theory, but setting up a basic safety net in the first place was very much a conflict-based struggle.
Possibly the clearest conflict-theoretic examples today are international borders, which very effectively preserve the interests of citizens of wealthy countries.
Also, at the risk of flattering myself overmuch, I suspect that an increased appreciation of conflict theory (or rather, an increased wariness of overly-trusting forms of mistake theory) is a common thread among many of my moderate-but-unpopular-among-rationalists political views. These include:
• The median voter should have more influence over government. (By median I mean in terms of power, status, wealth, etc., not in terms of ideology like in the median voter theorem.) In particular, mechanisms designed to limit voters’ influence (like the Supreme Court and superdelegates) are dangerous, and direct democracy (or some smarter variant like liquid democracy) is probably good on the margin.
• A Pigovian wealth tax might be a good idea.
• The ability of arbitrary fringe groups to get their message out via platforms like Facebook is basically a positive development, and everyone screaming about how Mark Zuckerberg is morally culpable for the outcome of the 2016 election needs to calm down and go read Douglas Adams’s 1999 essay which anticipated this whole controversy.
With respect to democracy in particular, I’ve heard a fair number of rationalists explicitly state that they don’t view corruption (which technocracy and other undemocratic systems naturally facilitate) as a serious problem, and that instead of worrying about it we should worry about voters making dumb and destructive choices. And yes, the most recent United States presidential election was evidence in favor of this proposition. But I still see plenty of problems caused by corruption, and I suspect that if the typical rationalist lived under a regime less favorable to people like themselves, they’d feel differently.
(Incidentally, I am confused about the idea that public choice theory is a mistake-theory thing. The triumph of concentrated interests over diffuse ones is a central insight of public choice theory, and that insight is the major reason why I fear corruption and want more democracy on the margin. And it plays nicely into conflict theory; everyone agrees that of course concentrated interests are going to fight kicking and screaming against anything that reduces their relative influence.)
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. But since this is slatestarcodex, do we have any evidence that increased democracy reduces corruption (etc), or are we just engaging in wishful thinking?
Also, your DNA link is broken.
I wouldn’t call it “wishful thinking” so much as a 101-level spherical-cow argument. To the extent that voters influence policy, those policies have to match those voters’ interests. To the extent that people and groups not accountable to voters influence policy, they can steer towards policies that benefit themselves at the expense of voters (which is what I mean by “corruption”). And indeed there are many examples of this in practice.
We do need more empirical tests of these kinds of questions, though. The spherical-cow factor doesn’t always dominate.
The link worked when I posted it, and Google gives the same URL as the top result. It must have literally just gone down. Wayback Machine link.
Are you pulling this from the kind of arguments/research of The Dictator’s Handbook? Because if not you should definitely consider doing so! Those authors note that in various fields, whether we’re talking government, corporations, or sports, needing to have a broader base of support decreases corruption. The simplified version of that argument is that the more people you need to have supporting you to hold power, the more you need to provide public goods that make everyone better off rather than private goods benefiting a few.
Haven’t read The Dictator’s Handbook; the above argument wasn’t meant to be anything more than the bog-standard pro-democracy argument that you learn in kindergarten.
Update: It’s back up.
And back down, or at any rate not up for me. I suppose that the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is to blame.
>The ability of arbitrary fringe groups to get their message out via platforms like Facebook is basically a positive development
I thought rationalists were on board with this position.
There was a big media narrative that conservatives were hearing political information from their friends and other sources from their filter bubble, instead of from authoritative sources, and this was why they believed in crazy things like Pizzagate, leading to Trump’s election victory. Most educated people I know are in agreement with this. I’m not so sure about rationalists, but there’s definitely a major anti-Facebook movement going on in the rationalsphere right now.
I’m pretty sure we’ve moved on from that because it was too easy to justifiably call the “authoritative” sources that-thing-we-can’t-say. Now the line is that Facebook is bad because Russians can buy ads on it.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m pretty down on FB because it seems to me to be having a bad effect on public discussions, and also because I feel like it often has a bad effect on me and people in my social circle. It’s not a matter of whether Russia has bought some Facebook ads or Zuckerberg is a good guy or a bad guy or anything–it just looks like it’s making the world worse in many ways even as in others (like helping people keep in touch with far-flung friends and family) it makes the world better.
I found your 3rd para confusing. Maybe I’m just mindkilled by recent politics*, but my instinct is that the association b/t technocratic vs. democratic and corrupt vs. uncorrupt is nearly backward. There are a million technocratic diagnoses and solutions to various kinds of corruption, which go routinely ignored not because serious, well-intentioned people disagree on the prescription, but because beneficiaries of corrupt bargains are central enough members of political coalitions to protect their privileged position. The more a political system is subject at detailed junctures to democratic processes vs. technocratic decision-making, the more opportunities for interests to maintain corrupt bargains. See, for example, local land-use decision-making favoring incumbents, vs. the increasingly broad push for zoning liberalization coming from technocratic institutions and seeing support only at the state or federal levels.
* ’16 I saw not as dumb vs. corrupt, but as dumb and corrupt vs. merely corrupt–but on the Hansonian view maybe really just reflects corrupt-in-a-way-that-disfavors-me vs. corrupt-in-a-way-that-favors-me.
I think the housing crisis is mostly caused by voters voting in support of their own interests. Normally this is good. The reason it’s bad this time is because a lot of morally relevant people (those who’d like to immigrate but can’t) don’t get a vote. So in a sense, the solution is more democracy. (Which is sort of what’s happening at the state level.)
More generally, the problem with technocracy as a solution to corruption is that, if the technocrats themselves are corrupt, then you’re screwed. If they have control over the broad future direction of things, then this could plausibly be worse than smaller-scale forms of corruption that we tolerate because it’s part of a system that prevents voters’ interests from being steamrollered too badly.
A point in favour of mistake theory in the case of the US election – in many other countries, with the same distribution of votes, Donald Trump would not have been selected as president.
And in those countries, some other distribution of votes would lead to equally perverse outcomes, contrary to the will of a majority of the population. Arrow’s Theorem is totally a thing, and it is a thing you need to account for to avoid making mistakes in this area.
The lack of a perfect solution does not imply that all real solutions are equally bad.
Obviously, because your clear implication was that the US solution was exceptionally bad. But if the extent of your argument is that a solution is exceptionally bad because look at this one single failure in a marginal case, then that does look like you are arguing for the existence of a perfect solution that never fails.
Also, your initial statement was weak on the facts. There are not “many” countries, and may not be any country, in which a 48/46/3/1/1 popular vote split results immediately in the candidate with 48% being appointed head of government. Whether Donald Trump would have been selected as president/prime minister/whatever depends on second-choice preferences that are not recorded on US ballots and about which you cannot make confident assertions.
With different election rules, the campaigns would have been different. Whether intentionally or not, Trump traded millions of worthless votes in California and New York for thousands of critical votes in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Campaigns don’t move that many votes. It’s plausible that different campaigning would have lost Trump Michigan and Wisconsin, and mayybe won him New Hampshire (though probably not Pennsylvania or Florida), since they were only a few thousand votes margin. The popular vote gap was way to big for campaigning to shift.
Anything that reduces benefits to that particular interest group. Preventing something that reduces benefits to concentrated interest groups in general probably not, since the collection of all concentrated interest groups is itself a diffuse interest group.
For your previous point, note that interest groups are not people. The logic of public choice implies that governments will give benefits to the concentrated interest group I am a member of at the cost of the diffuse interest groups I am a member of, and I am a member of both. That’s why it might be true both that I would lose as a stockholder in a steel company from a shift to free trade but benefit overall from that same shift.
Hence the free trade vs protection argument may be a conflict issue from the standpoint of interest groups but a mistake issue from the standpoint of the individuals who compose them.
Yeah, to be clear, “that particular interest group” was what I meant.
The only way for the average individual to benefit from policies favoring concentrated interest groups over diffuse ones, is if those policies are net positive. Maybe some forms of welfare are like this, but the more typical example is a group being awarded the right to extract rents in a way that’s economically inefficient. Even if everyone is a member of some concentrated interest group that benefits from some such policy, they all still lose. (The real world, of course, is inegalitarian, so some people are net beneficiaries and most people aren’t.)
Both sides sound like caricatures.
I feel like the situation in the realm of policy is no different from what we see in the realm of truth. Radical rationalism ultimately hits a limit because you cannot conjure truth our of pure reason, at some point you need to build upon undemonstrated axioms (and if you think you don’t, you’re probably not noticing your assumptions). Likewise, in policy you ultimately run into competing interests that cannot be explained away or reconciled.
The conflict theorist is like the fundamentalist zealot, and the mistake theorist is like the fedora atheist. Both extremes are bad. However, in general our world still needs more rationality than zealotry, so I invite you to keep the current course.
I see your point, and I think I’m reasonably good at not making the mistakes you describe, but I still identified extremely hard with the mistake theory side and against the conflict theory side of that dichotomy (inset standard caveats here). I don’t think it’s that caricatural.
Seeing this comment section, I think I’m being pretty representative here.
By “ultimately” do you mean ultimately in all issues, or only that there will be at least one issue where this happens?
Suppose my view of the effects of minimum wage is correct. Then most of its supporters, who support it in order to help the poor, are making a mistake. Some supporters, workers in or stockholders of firms that use skilled labor but compete with firms that use less skilled labor (the northern textile industry supporting the minimum wage to handicap their southern competitors), are not making a mistake, but they don’t have enough political power to get what they want without the help of their benevolent and mistaken allies. Have we ultimately run into competing interests?
I mixed up two different things for the sake of brevity. I think we can say that ultimately we always run into some interests or goals that cannot be further reduced or proven right (they are similar to axioms); furthermore, in a non-negligible number of cases (but not in all cases, as you point out) the interests we run into are in conflict.
Wouldn’t this theory predict that you’d have an audience lacking both left-wing conflict-theorists and right-wing conflict-theorists? But you’ve had far less trouble attracting representation from people who think the primary driving conflict is Western Civilization vs Barbaric Degenerates, although that is definitely still a conflict-based narrative.
Still, as you say. It could be worth a shot. Hypotheses are there to be tested.
The people bemoaning civilizational degeneracy have been treated with more respect here than they would’ve been in virtually any other ideologically-neutral intellectual space.
I will grant that the… Raumgeist? of this ostensibly-neutral place casts hostility leftwards more easily than rightwards, but even so, I don’t think it’s enough to explain the discrepancy. Adding what should be a symmetric effect from lack of conflict-theoretical consideration wouldn’t increase the asymmetry of the outcome.
Hmm, but maybe addition is the wrong metaphor. Perhaps feeling like people aren’t listening to your message or speaking a discursive language you can understand is multiplicatively more unpleasant than merely one or the other.
I would have said the people here were unusually good at this. Maybe I’m misunderstanding?
Sorry, that should really be “nor.” That is, the hypothetical Marxist might feel that they’re being attacked as an Outgrouper, and that the local population are talking in the weird way that ‘mistake theorists’ do, thereby seeming like shills for Wall Street.
I don’t know if hostility, but there are a couple of blog entries that would naturally attract some of the more right-wing conflict-oriented people.
To which the response started:
Alternatively, other “ideologically-neutral intellectual spaces” qualify their neutrality by the principle that there is no enemy to the left, that people to their right are evil, people to their left at worst mistaken. It’s the relative openness to right wing conflict types that’s at issue, after all.
That’s probably true, and I think they’re correct to think that way. As a libertarian, I find myself often agreeing with left-liberals on ends, but not always on means (i.e. I agree with liberal terminal values like “improving quality of life for everyone” and “ending discrimination based on immutable traits like race and gender”, but I also believe that a lot of left-liberal policies are at best ineffective and at worst counter-productive at achieving such goals). Conversely, I find myself completely disagreeing with conservatives on ends, while sometimes agreeing with them on means (i.e. even when I agree with conservative policies, I feel like conservatives are promoting those polices for all the wrong reasons; for instance, I oppose the minimum wage because it hurts the poor, whereas they seem to oppose the minimum wage because they either don’t care about the poor or actively believe that poor people deserve to remain in poverty).
Effectively, I tend to apply conflict theory when dealing with people to my right and mistake theory when dealing with people to my left (with some exceptions, like authoritarian far-leftists, who I definitely see as the enemy just as much as conservatives and far-rightists).
I oppose the minimum wage because it hurts the poor, whereas they seem to oppose the minimum wage because they either don’t care about the poor or actively believe that poor people deserve to remain in poverty).
I have literally *never* met anyone on the right (and I have spent my life among them) who “didn’t care about the poor” or who “actively believe[d] that poor people deserve to remain in poverty.”
I have met people whose concern for the impoverished was of a different shape than mine, or a different degree, and I have met people who defined poverty and poor differently than I. I have met people who believe that actions have consequences and that it is a predictable (and sad) consequence of spending money on booze, smokes, gambling, and cheap frills that one has less for other things, and that people who exert themselves at school and at work get more and better raises than those who don’t. Even those who viewed the conditions of poverty as capable of teaching the value of hard work and thrift when all the nagging in the world would not very rarely saw an issue with other people gifting the poor with their own money – just so long as it stopped with the handout coming from their own pocket, and not dipping into others.
keranih: Someone who believes that poor people are poor because they didn’t work hard enough, or because they wasted all their money on vices, is basically saying that poor people deserve to be poor. Those reasons might be true for some individual poor people, and I’m not against calling out individuals who genuinely have made bad life decisions, but if you assume that *most* poor people are just poor because they’ve made bad choices, that’s ignorant at best and downright elitist at worst. And yes, I actually have seen plenty of conservatives denounce voluntary charity towards people or groups they feel are “undeserving” of help, to the point of criticizing companies that choose to pay living wages to entry-level employees (admittedly, some of that criticism might be rooted in opposition to what they perceive as corporate virtue signaling).
Case in point, libertarians* will usually argue against the minimum wage by pointing out that it leads to lower employment rates and ultimately hurts poor people in the long run, or that it’s unfair to small business owners who can’t afford to pay their employees so much. Conservatives will usually argue against the minimum wage by saying that baristas don’t deserve to be making $15/hour just for making coffee, often with the implication that minimum wage workers are stupid and/or lazy. There is a sense in which it’s true that baristas don’t “deserve” to be making as much as people with jobs that require more education/training or involve greater labor/risks (e.g. construction workers, firefighters, neurosurgeons), but that’s self-evident to the point where it’s basically a strawman (it’s not like anyone is proposing that baristas *should* make as much as neurosurgeons), and there’s no reason to assign a moral judgment to that argument rather than a purely economic argument.
*At least the libertarians I know, who (like me) mostly tend to be Blue Tribe libertarians with Blue Tribe values, even if they support traditionally ‘right-wing’ fiscal policies for pragmatic reasons.
It’s elitist, but it’s only ignorant if it’s false.
They are proposing that baristas make as much as garbagemen or construction workers, however. And the arguments _for_ minimum wage tend to have a moral component, so it’s no surprise the arguments against them do as well.
Lady Jane-
But you’re stopping in the middle.
I believe that for the most part, a poor person is poor because they didn’t care enough about not being poor.
But that doesn’t mean I want him to be poor. Nor does it mean that, because of my outrage at how he has mismanaged and wasted his life, I would be at all inclined to take steps to make his plight even worse.
My disagreement with various sorts of bleeding hearts lies in what kinds of policies might possibly improve the situation of such a person. Welfare evidently doesn’t, usually — it just kicks down the road the point where the person faces facts and finally takes steps to improve himself. Minimum wage doesn’t, usually — it just makes it illegal to hire the poor slob who has never bothered to learn more lucrative skills, or to take a discounted chance on a person whose record suggests that he might or might not show up sober on any given day.
We are no longer allowed to make a distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor; it’s an insult to the latter, or something. But, which the cases close to the boundary are always hard, surely it is still a distinction that makes sense, and should matter to us?
Strawman, I think. Anybody with the slightest economic sense knows that baristas making $15/hour deserve $15/hour to the same extent anybody else deserves what they are getting paid — somebody is willing to pay it without coercion.
The objection to minimum-wage laws is that it leaves completely out in the cold anybody who deserves (by virtue of what added value they can deliver) $14/hour, because it is illegal to hire them for what they deserve.
Someone who believes that poor people are poor because they didn’t work hard enough, or because they wasted all their money on vices, is basically saying that poor people deserve to be poor.
@ LadyJane – I don’t know how exactly to explain to you that NO, that is NOT “basically” what is being said.
What is being said is that consequences exist. In the case of people who spend more than they bring in, those people do not have money. They are poor. This is a consequence of the equation above.
To say “deserve” is to imply “not deserve” – so that the greater expense and less income somehow re-arranged itself for those of virtue and and only those of vice were bound by mathmatics.
Those reasons might be true for some individual poor people, and I’m not against calling out individuals who genuinely have made bad life decisions, but if you assume that *most* poor people are just poor because they’ve made bad choices, that’s ignorant at best and downright elitist at worst.
Neither ignant or eleist – it’s the result of having been among, and lived among, so many in that state. Many of us come to our senses and get out of it. Others continue to compound previous bad mistakes with others.
(admittedly, some of that criticism might be rooted in opposition to what they perceive as corporate virtue signaling).
See? Even your example of “bad” conservatives badmouthing charity has its root in something other than dislike of the poor.
Conservatives will usually argue against the minimum wage by saying that baristas don’t deserve to be making $15/hour just for making coffee, often with the implication that minimum wage workers are stupid and/or lazy.
They don’t deserve to be making more than minimum wage based on the worth of their labor. Not because of their *human* worth, but because pulling coffee and accurately dispensing change via pushing the auto change button is hardly a rare skill.
There is a sense in which it’s true that baristas don’t “deserve” to be making as much as people with jobs that require more education/training or involve greater labor/risks (e.g. construction workers, firefighters, neurosurgeons), but that’s self-evident to the point where it’s basically a strawman
It is not self-evident enough, as there are still plenty of people who feel that artists shouldn’t be starving and that PhD graduates “deserve” jobs of X quality and that the term “living wage” even exists in the much-manipulated form that it does.
(Look up “living wage” for your area. Then go look and see what expenses it’s supposed to cover for a single wage earner supporting one non-working adult and two kids. Then ask yourself why childcare is on the list as a necessary, typical expense.)
and there’s no reason to assign a moral judgment to that argument rather than a purely economic argument.
There is no reason to say that *any* worker has any moral right to any set level of monetary compensation. (Aside from what has been agreed upon by that worker and his employer.) Yet this is an argument made all the time by the left. “They deserve better!” No, actually, “they” don’t.
Would they (and their families, if they are supporting any) be better off with a higher wage? Almost assuredly, but that’s math again. Does every human have worth regardless of how much or how little they can produce in a day? Absolutely, but that’s in the eye of God, not the market. Does every human have worth regardless of whether they are smart or stupid, a liar or honest, lazy or hard working, crippled or whole? Absolutely, but again, that’s the eye of God – which does not use income as a metric (at least not in my denomination.)
(I would caution you against the hasty assertion that it is typical of the Left to see humans as God does.)
Could you point at conservatives actually making that argument? I don’t read National Review or similar sources so might have missed it, but it sounds more like what critics of conservatives would imagine they are saying.
There is no reason to say that *any* worker has any moral right to any set level of monetary compensation. (Aside from what has been agreed upon by that worker and his employer.) Yet this is an argument made all the time by the left. “They deserve better!” No, actually, “they” don’t.
I agree with you! Fundamentally, no one has any *right* to anything except to be left alone (i.e. the right to not be subject to violence, coercion, or fraud), and other rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion are just extensions of that basic principle. But as both a political science and a classical liberal, I have a fairly strict definition of what exactly a ‘right’ entails. So yes, there’s a sense in which a barista doesn’t deserve to make a living wage, but it’s the same sense in which no one deserves anything other than to NOT be the victim of a crime. By that logic, a neurosurgeon doesn’t intrinsically deserve to be making $100,000+ a year any more than the barista deserves to be making $15/hour; they both ‘deserve’ whatever the market decides their labor is worth.
As The Nybbler pointed out, left-liberals tend to make moral arguments for why people deserve to be making at least $15/hour, while conservatives tend to make moral arguments for why some of those people don’t deserve to be making $15/hour. But I reject both of those arguments in favor of my own pragmatic utilitarian views. There’s no real objective way to determine what people ‘deserve’ because different people have different values, and you’ll just drive yourself insane if you try to figure it out. Instead of focusing on what people deserve, we should be focusing on what works best for everyone.
See? Even your example of “bad” conservatives badmouthing charity has its root in something other than dislike of the poor.
Honestly, if that is the case, that just makes them even worse in my view. If they’re badmouthing charity because they genuinely don’t think the recipients deserve it, or because they think it’ll make the recipients weak and dependent or some such nonsense, then at least they’re being morally and intellectually honest, even if I strongly disagree with their worldview and value system. If they’re badmouthing charity just because they see it as virtue signalling, that means they’re willing to throw desperate people under the bus just to prevent the ‘other side’ from scoring a few political points, and that’s totally, irredeemably, unjustifiably evil to me.
It’s bad for the left to use disenfranchised people as political footballs. It’s much worse for the right to shoot down those disenfranchised people just to keep the left from scoring a goal.
DavidFriedman: It’s not something you’ll see in a lot of respectable conservative publications, or even publications like Fox News and National Review that try to maintain some veneer of respectability. It’s what you’ll see in the comments sections of Facebook posts and Yahoo News articles, on conservative subreddits and alt-right image boards, on inflammatory media outlets like Breitbart that don’t even pretend to be neutral or credible. It’s what you’ll hear radical Red Tribe conservative populists scream about, and what you’ll hear moderate Blue Tribe conservative elitists whisper about in their dining rooms when no one else is listening.
And yes, that’s all anecdotal evidence. Maybe you don’t believe me, or just don’t think that my personal experiences are representative of the American conservatism as a whole. But I’m going by what I’ve seen and heard firsthand.
Exactly, it’s the neutral vs conservative thing again. The mainstream media isn’t really a hotbed of Marxism, as some people like to think, but at least Marxists are free to join in the comment section without getting banned for expressing their views. So for the right-wing equivalent to comment outside their own ideological bubble, they pretty much have to come here.
Hypothesis: Blogs attract (angry?) comments from conflict theorists opposed to the viewpoints expressed in the blog, even if the blog mostly makes mistake theoretic arguments. More expansively, it may well be that mistake theorists will only comment on the blogs of other mistake theorists (regardless of viewpoint) while conflict theorists prefer to comment on the blogs of people with opposing viewpoints (regardless of theory).
As a result, a mistake theoretic blog would (according to this hypothesis) attract every demographic -except- for conflict theorists aligned with the blog’s overall goals; while a conflict theoretic blog will attract conflict theorists of both sides and very few mistake theorists of either kind.
Are you claiming there aren’t any Marxists here because the blog is Marxist? (or overall Marxist-aligned).
If so I think we can discard said Hypothesis safely.
More that Marxists do not regard SSC as ‘the enemy’ in any appreciable way.
Plausibly SSC and Marxists share a technocratic ideal rather than the racialist/culturist ideal of the Alt Right?
Maybe not my most charitable interpretation, but I think Right-wing conflict theorists stay here because it’s one of the few cosmopolitan comment sessions where they don’t get banned, and Left-wing conflict theorists avoid this place precisely because the Righ-wingers are allowed to stay.
(They see Right-wingers around, and conclude the blog is a Right-wing fortress; they choose to move because they have other cosmopolitan blogs to voice their opinions with more peer support)
Hey, I even saw one of them saying something like this!
Two points: What struck me in your post was that the examples you gave for conflict theories all came from the Marxist perspective. While (cultural) Marxists may be the most obvious, unabashed conflict theorists these days, the behavior of the American right wing looks like they have their fair share of conflict theorists, and Republican tax and health care policy often smells more of an undeclared class warfare than of careful consideration of the pros and cons.
Which brings me to the seconds point: this looks not like a fundamental question of what the world is really like, and more like a multi-player game theory problem, in particular a multi-player prisoner’s dilemma. It’s all fine and dandy – in fact, it’s probably the most constructive, helpful thing to do – to play “mistake theory” if everyone else is playing the same game, but if you have a sufficiently strong faction playing “conflict theory” (refusing to compromise, because everyone else is the devil), they have more success than they should. “Conflict theory” is like a bad Nash equilibrium, a self-fulfilling prophecy – if everyone behaves according to the diagnosis “It’s power-hungry, uncompromising people on the other side who cause the problem”, there will be no lack of power-hungry, uncompromising people on all sides, causing all sorts of problems.
The first part of this is more or less what I wanted to say; Conflict Theory is basically how we wound up with Trump.
We basically wound up with Trump because Clinton got caught when she stole the primary from Bernie. On that note, this is a socialist Presidential candidate’s best chance ever in America. It’s like if Wilson got caught stealing the primary from Debs and used his remaining clout to make the D party make fools of themselves covering for him. People in 2020 will have a choice between voting for D party fools and crooks who get caught, voting for Trump, and voting for a socialist.
Or a Libertarian. Or a Green.
I don’t think the two main parties stay in power mostly because everyone likes them more than the alternatives. I think they stay in power because they’re pretty effective Schelling Points, and there are a lot of alternatives.
Right, Clinton got caught stealing the primary, which made certain groups realize she was in Conflict with them rather than just making Mistakes.
Better than 90% of American voters today, do not acknowledge the existence of choices other than voting for the guy with the (D) after their name and voting for the guy with the (R) after their name. If that changes in 2020, it will be because Trump soured some of the (R) crowd on that approach, but for the same reason team (D) will be even more convinced that “wasting” their votes on a third party is an intolerable risk.
The #NeverTrump former Republicans are not going to even consider voting for a socialist, so the only way that a socialist candidate has a better chance this year than last is if the socialist actually captures the Democratic party nomination. How likely do you really think that is?
Not hugely likely, but not beyond the realms of possibility. It was a reasonably close race between Sanders and Clinton by the end – the gap was significant but not necessarily insurmountable, so a socialist candidate could potentially take it if they played their cards right and their opponents weren’t incredibly strong.
I think it’s at least plausible, if not necessarily *likely*.
TBH people thinking it’s not going to happen is probably one of the factors that helps make it possible. People outside the party concentrate smears etc. on the person they see as a serious contender and so advantage the underdog; candidates themselves do the same, and it potentially lets the left-field candidate sneak in. That’s kind of what happened with Jeremy Corbyn and the UK Labour leadership elections – people endorsed him as an outside candidate to ‘open up the debate’, and once he was on the ballot he’d mobilized enough popular support to swing it before anyone was really taking him seriously as a threat. And now he’s got the position and got that popular support, he’s proven very difficult to oust.
It’s possible Sanders has entirely blown the US socialists’ chance to manage the same trick by getting as far as he did and thereby calling everyone’s attention to the possibility, but it’s also possible that the amount of vitriol thrown at Clinton during and since the campaign will have had the effect of pushing enough people towards Sanders and by extension the left of the party after the fact to make a difference next time. Especially if the most left-wing candidates are still not considered serious contenders worth actively countering by the rest of the party, and are allowed to get a good run-up.
The Democrats can basically either swing right and hope to capture the #NeverTrump vote, or swing left and hope to catch enough think-the-Dems-are-too-rightwing voters to score them an overall win once the Republicans are weakened by losing #NeverTrump folk to the Libertarians or to straight-up ballot-spoiling (is that a thing in the US?). From the limited amount I know about the situation, both of those sound like at least semi-plausable options.
Sanders had a major issue reaching minority voters, any socialist running is going to have to address this issue without driving middle of the road voters away.
For a second i did a double take and wondered if this was sarcasm or tinfoil hattery, and i was really hoping it would the former. Imagine my disappointment on reading the rest of the post and finding that you are dead serious.
Clinton won because more Democratic primary voters wanted Clinton. This is confirmed by the polls, which largely tracked with Clinton and Sander’s actual performance in the primaries. Unless the Clinton campaigned managed to somehow sabotage both the vote and the polls without anybody noticing, they did not steal the primary.
As far as i can tell, the only evidence of the Clinton campaign doing anything like stealing the primary are emails showing DNC antipathy toward Sanders. This amounts to… what precisely? Psychic anti-Bernie rays? There is no evidence that this materially swung the election from Sanders to Clinton, or indeed that the DNC even tried to do such a thing. This whole narrative stands on nothing more than bad vibes.
Maybe the real reason we wound up with Trump because Sanders damaged the party front runner by refusing to concede when it was obvious he’s already lost. This is not something i really believe, but it sure as hell sounds more way more plausible than, “Clinton stole the primary!”
I’d bet five coin tosses in a row Clinton stole the primary. Could use a new tin foil hat, this one’s not working.
She didn’t steal the primary from Sanders, though. She maneuvered to exclude all other serious contenders beforehand. And of course she stole the Republican primary for Trump. (OK, that overstates the case by a lot, but search for [pied paper candidate])
Nope, totally stole the primary. She pulled the sleazy political hacks of “being more electable,” “bothering to invest in party relationships before hand,” “having policy positions that didn’t alienate non-socialists.”
(sarcasm over)
It is super sketchy to say that a policy email outlining a policy whereby the dems would try to force the republicans further right during the primary than would be acceptable in a general election is “stealing the primary for Trump.”
If you remember 2015 and 2016, you’ll recall that that pretty much every talking head was saying this same thing, and that in the months and weeks before the republican convention, the biggest fear on the left was that an establishment republican would manage to coopt the process and install Rubio or Cruz as the candidate instead of the (at the time) clearly unelectable Trump.
I think there’s probably something to the idea that the Clinton’s were privately avoiding harm to the Trump campaign, and even significantly supporting it as their perceived least-electable opponent. There was a headline that Trump had received a phone call from Bill Clinton, encouraging him to run. Now, looking back for good reporting… Google gives me this link. Anyway, immediately after seeing some reporting on this story, (so, around August 2015), and straight through until Trump’s election, I was joking/soap-boxing privately, with friends that Hillary and Bill would live to regret 2015 as the worst mistake of their lives, when (in the supposed service of the greater good) they lent their influence to get the most repugnant person available to run for the presidency as an R, and to get that person the nomination, and then saw that person use the momentum from that win, and Hillary’s own history of dancing-with-devils-for-the-greater-good to defeat Hillary in the general and completely undo any sense the Clinton’s had that their net effect on history is positive. They sowed early support of an ethically monstrous narcissist, and, as the saying goes, as you sow, so shall ye reap. And now the joke’s on me, because while I was joking in a “joking but actually really serious” kind of way, my friends never seemed to get the “but actually really serious” half.
* I consider electoral politics something similar to war by other means, with religion and charity and compassion and institutions and etc., being the reason it thankfully isn’t conducted with actual violence [well, mostly not, in many countries, including the U.S., where I and my family and friends mostly live]. Consequently I can’t say “steal” and really mean the connotation–politics is rough and tumble. If it wasn’t violent or illegal, and you had a sincere and ethically-defensible belief that the compromises of principle that were involved were on-net good for the arc of history, good on you for doing it. That’s all that’s available to even the very best of us. The question of how to draw lines around what’s “ethically defensible” is, like most of politics, a hard problem.
So you say that Clinton got “caught when she stole the primary”, as if this was some incontrovertible fact. When i point out that you have no evidence of this assertion beyond DNC favouritism and the general sleaziness of the Clintons, you have the gall go go and say that you’re putting 97% odds on Clintons stealing the primary. Fine, you believe what you want to believe, i just want to make it abundantly clear here that you’ve got no rational basis for that belief. You might as well as claim the Trump got the Russians to steal the 2016 election for him, and Jeb Bush stole the 2000 election for his brother. Oh and George Bush did 9/11, the moon landing was staged, and LBJ put a second gunman on the grassy knoll.
I understand you to be saying both that it’s crazy to think Julian Assange was right and Clinton stole the primary, and that the Russia investigation against Trump is crazy. I think you are wrong about the first part.
I don’t think Assange’s allegations against the DNC and the Clintons are crazy. I don’t think Donna Brazile was talking about psychic anti-Bernie rays. I don’t trust the Washington Post to honestly report the Iowa coin tosses, or the rest of the election. I think the Clintons took a half-billion dollar bribe from Microsoft’s competitors to sic the Justice Department on Microsoft, founding the billion dollar slush foundation that bankrolls Hillary Clinton’s career. I think she is a habitual conspirator.
I could easily imagine Trump beginning his political career taking a massive bribe, and going on as he began. I could easily imagine Hillary Clinton starting out as slumlord, moving on to carriage trade real estate, casinos, Mr America contestants waking alone on some cold hillside, poor bare forked things, shrivelled by a night of shame with the judge of the contest. Except she’d need some executive ability.
I think it’s odd of you to claim only obvious lunatics believe people of bad character steal high office. Creepy, sure. Crazy, no.
It is not in question that people of bad character attempt to steal high office, nor in question that the Clintons are shady, sleazy, and corrupt. The problem is that there is no evidence that the election was in fact stolen. First you have to establish that fact, then you can start pointing fingers at who did it. Right now, all you’ve got is that you didn’t like the result. That’s the crazy part, that you are asserting a crime happened and the Clintons did it based on nothing more than bad vibes.
Are they? The sheer amount of partisan investigation on them has revealed basically nothing concrete, and the vague insinuations it has revealed are exactly the sort of thing you’d get when investigating an honest person to this intensity.
@shakeddown:
Have you looked at the details of the cattle futures case? It was a long time ago and the amount involved, about a hundred thousand dollars, is small change by modern standards. But it’s hard to see any plausible interpretation of what happened other than a bribe to Bill Clinton disguised as speculative profits to his wife, arranged by a broker playing games with records of which trade was for which customer.
@shakeddown
DavidFriedman makes a good point, here is the study that shows how staggeringly unlikely it was that clinton got her money legitimately.
On top of that, you have her blatant violation of security laws in hosting almost all senior state department business on her personal servers. A US navy sailor is currently going to jail for having a couple of pictures on his phone, clinton had tens of thousands of emails on her servers, hundreds of them with classified material, and that’s just what we know about in the tens of thousands of emails she didn’t delete despite them being under subpoena. That brazen obstruction of justice on top of the violations we know about.
@That’s the crazy part, you are asserting a crime happened and the Clintons did it based on nothing more than bad vibes.
‘I won Trump the election, obviously,’ says Julian Assange. Hillary Clinton blames Wikileaks for losing the election. Assange is a smart loose cannon.
@all you’ve got is that you didn’t like the result.
All I’ve got is Wikileaks and Donna Brazile. I wouldn’t have minded Sanders or Clinton winning the primary.
Donna Brazile’s claim is that the Clinton campaign was bankrolling the DNC. The emails released by Wikileaks could be interpreted as evidence of the DNC effectively being an arm of the Clinton campaign. Both of these things are corrupt, but neither amounts to Clinton stealing the primary. Sanders was still able to reach the voters and get his message out. His problem is they didn’t like it as much as Clinton’s, and a completely impartial DNC would not have changed this. Contrast this with the GOP’s anti-Trump bias doing nothing to keep him from winning the primary because he did have the voters.
@Both of these things are corrupt, but neither amounts to stealing the primary-
So all your foofraw about tinfoil hattery, no rational basis, etc is over the difference between ‘bought the ref’ and ‘stole the contest’.
I think Clinton would have won the primary without suborning the judges, and I think she bent the judges and lost the general election because she got caught. That’s what Julian Assange says happened. Hillary Clinton says it only looks like that’s what happened because vast right wing conspiracy. Perhaps you’d say they are both tinfoil-hat loonies with no rational basis to speak. Simpler to assume that a politician whose career is based on a half-billion dollar bribe to suborn the Justice Department is telling another lie.
She didn’t suborn the ref, she suborned the sports association. There is a huge gulf between the NFL pulling for your team and your team stealing the Super Bowl. The polls show Democrat voters wanted Clinton, they got Clinton, nothing was stolen.
As for why Clinton lost the election, the answer is basically bad luck. Electoral College only victories are black swan events, you can’t plan for them. Nobody likes that narrative though, because people don’t like admitting that sometimes their lives are at the mercy of cosmic dice. About the only lesson to be drawn from 2016 by the Democrats is that alienating the rural white vote is risky due to population distribution. They can still win if they do it, but the EC margins become narrow enough to be susceptible to bad rolls.
@She didn’t suborn the ref, she suborned the sports association-
Hah-hmmm.
@As for why Clinton lost the election, the answer is basically bad luck-
With you there. I thought she’d win. Easy to overthink luck.
Still, I like my Wilson/Debs analogy a lot better than I bet you like ‘She didn’t suborn the ref, she suborned the sports association’ much less ‘the polls show’. Polling is an unbiased science now? And if I was a D party socialist candidate I’d be going for it.
Properly weighted aggregated polling seems to have a fairly low margin of error when compared to real world results, which i think makes it accurate enough to draw real world conclusions.
How do you define success? If the other side is right in its mistake theory, then the policies the conflict theory faction is pushing are bad for it as well as for others.
Exactly. I believe in mistake theory, but my opponent believes in conflict theory so I have to deal with them in conflict terms. I can’t convince them, I just have to out-compete them.
I never thought about this consciously like this and I think it’s a useful concept. I was already aware that many people care more about ideology than policy.
I think I’d consider myself a hard conflict theorist, in a way. I’d prefer to concern myself with mistake theory, but policy details are not as relevant as fixing the main ideology. E.g., I don’t think there is much value in discussing the pros&cons of increasing minimum wage if we can’t agree whether we want to help poor people in the first place.
Or to put it differently: the mistake theorists can only begin their work when the conflict theorists are done.
Everyone agrees that helping poor people is a good thing–the bottom half of the income distribution pays close to zero federal income tax and the Republican tax bill did not change that. People disagree about what policies help the poor and about how much they want to help the poor, what cost in other things they are in favor of they are willing to pay.
I’m a big believer in conflict theory as a descriptive theory of politics. I think you’re selling it a little short in this post by overemphasizing Marxist theory when it’s not strictly necessary.
Let’s pick a relatively clean example: the continuing copyright extensions to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. If you try to understand the extensions through mistake theory you’re going to get very very confused, because the arguments will seem obviously nonsensical. However, if you use conflict theory and assume that Disney is wielding power over Congress, everything makes sense and you’ll accurately guess what will happen the next time copyright extension comes up.
Another example: American Slavery. The intellectual and moral arguments against slavery were well developed at the time of the revolution, but it took almost a century for slavery to actually be abolished. All the evil and stupid arguments for slavery were downstream of the massive power slaveholders had, and their strong interest in maintaining that power. The only way to resolve the problem was to reduce the power of the slaveholders in the traditional way, by killing most of their young men and conquering their territory. The democracy was a ritualized alternative to the bloodshed, but the same fundamental power underlies them both. If you’re trying to make predictions about the world, the troops matter much more than the arguments.
So yes, I think for most political issues, both “sides” correctly understand that they will benefit from winning and the other side will lose from losing. This can be complicated by complex alliances and radically different moral values, but eventually if you dig deep you’ll find where the “winners” actually win. The Marxist version combines this knowledge with the idea that a specific alliance (the working class) and a specific interest (full value of the work produced) but you don’t need that to understand the idea and make accurate predictions.
I don’t know if you have seen, but copyright will probably not be extended again the near future. Mostly because the anti-copyright side is now much stronger politically than it was in 1998. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-its-not-planning-another-copyright-extension-push/
That seems to support a conflict theory way of looking at the issue. It’s not that the arguments against a copyright extension have gotten better, it’s that the opponents of a copyright extension have gotten stronger.
I’ve seen this mentioned in the news, but I still don’t understand why. Just how far in advance do you think you can predict American politics? The first time that not extending copyrights in the U. S. would have significant effects will be in 2023, which is five years from now, and definitely after the next presidential election. And that’s not even a hard deadline, because it has happened at least once that U. S. copyright law was modified in such a way that some works whose copyright protection has previously expired in the U. S. became protected again (in 1994, see “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay_Round_Agreements_Act”).
> The only way to resolve the problem was to reduce the power of the slaveholders in the traditional way, by killing most of their young men and conquering their territory.
Note that that was only necessary precisely because the slaveholders consciously defined themselves as such and interpreted any argument attempting to find a mistake in their presentation of the rationality or theology of the case as an attack.
Most countries were able to get away with abolition via compensation because both sides were still operating in mistake mode.
I wish I had the time to answer this with a thousand words, but I’ll just say this:
There’s a thousand caveats to that, where I could point out that people should use both theories to become a true Gray Jedi of political theory, but I think that wouldn’t address your point.
I think both a Pure Mistake Theorist and a Pure Conflict Theorist will (probably, I don’t know the specifics) look at the “Disney meddles with public domain” issue and say “Disney is defecting in the cosmic Prisoner’s Dilemma”.
The fundamental difference isn’t that Mistake Theory says “We should always cooperate no matter what”. It’s more subtle and nuanced than that, where Conflict Theory focuses more on the conflict part, finding targets, gathering troops, while mistake theory focuses more on making defecting hard and cooperating easier, making honest mistakes harder, etc.
An example is the Net Neutrality debate. We all want cheaper, faster internet. Some people think that, since ISPs want to make more money, the way to go is to do make it illegal for them to make certain things more expensive. I think this inefficient and/or counter-productive, and the way to go would be to do what France did and go for aggressive local-loop unbundling, to encourage competition. No specific ISP would be punished or forbidden to do things, and people wouldn’t have to rely on ISPs somehow not being evil, but market rules would lower the prices nonetheless (again, see the French market for details).
This sounds like a prediction. If Steamboat Willie enters the public domain, will you consider that evidence against your current model? Or just evidence that Disney wasn’t as strong as you thought?
Put another way: give your current model, how weak would Disney’s influence have to be to produce this result, and how (else) could we gauge this?
Even the Civil War isn’t that clear a case. The war imposed enormous costs on both sides. If the outcome had been accurately predicted by both sides they could have saved a lot of blood and treasure, all been better off, with some compromise, perhaps along the lines of what was done in the British West Indies.
So the decision of the Confederate states to go to war was, ex post, a mistake, as was the failure of the Union to offer them more attractive terms for abolition.
Under the 1909 act, the copyright would have expired in 1984. The 1976 act extended protection for Mickey but it did so as a result of bringing U.S. practice into alignment with European practice. The Sonny Bono copyright term extension act of 1998 was the first change in the law that one could plausibly describe as designed to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain.
Also, so far, the last.
How could the Union have offered more attractive terms, when the South seceded before any terms were given? The Civil War happened because the South did not even want to discuss the matter, and on realizing it could no longer be avoided, they chose to draw blades rather than come to the table.
It seams to me they both have a nugget of truth to them. I don’t think that the Koch bros or George Soros go home at night curling their mustache while petting a white cat while thinking about how they can get more rich and powerful. I think they developed a world view based on their own life experiences and think that that gives them some kind of special insight on how to run the economy and that their donations are purely altruistic to help people. I’m also 100% sure that is the worst possible thing they could be spending money on.
As for the happy technocrats that just want the best policy; I’m sure that is why during the ACA fight we had a long discussion about how single payer works twice as well for half the cost in every other country….. Oh, wait nobody even mentioned it because our right wing president Obama just pulled something off the shelf at heritage and then dangled a public option before pulling that back.
Technocrats like Obama who designed programs to use poor home owners to ‘Foam the Runway’ for the big banks.
Oh, wait. They probably weren’t very good technocrats anyways since Obama let Citibank staff his cabinet just after they crashed the economy.
IMO technocrats fall into the “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” category.
I remember someone on a Magic: The Gathering discussion who said roughly “If your personality can be summarized with a set of colors on the Personality Color Wheel, then you suck and your personality is really boring and flat”.
The same applies here. Nobody (worth talking to) is only ever on one side of any given axis.
U.S. health care is indeed unusually expensive buy the alternatives don’t work twice as well–on measures of quality of health care the U.S. does reasonably well. .
And single payer doesn’t describe health care in every other country. Other countries have a range of policies involving various mixes of public and private provision.
I’ll cop to being slightly hyperbolic, but every other major country has universal coverage at a much more affordable rate, which plenty of people just short hand to single payer. We are the only industrialized country that doesn’t treat health care as a human right. The result being people put off going to the doctor because they can’t afford it turning an easy preventable case into a costly corrective procedure. It is absolutely insane the way we do it and it is 100% due to technocrats willful ignorance on the subject because they, or whichever party they are propagandizing for, are being funded by insurance and pharma companies who want to maintain their profits. Then our famously free press does it’s best job to present each party’s propaganda ignoring the obvious solution from the rest of the world. Because the elites in this country have nothing but disdain for the rest of us and are quite content to see differences of 10 to 15 years in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest.
The obvious question is what happens when we control that number for the various risks that low-income people have. I believe that smoking, alcoholism and obesity are all inversely correlated with income. So, how much of the reduced life span among our low-income population is down to those, and how much is because they’re being denied life-saving treatment by heartless elites?
In the UK (with the NHS) rich men live 8.2 years longer than poor ones. So 15-8.2 =6.8 years by not having single payer.
For women it’s 5.8 so 10-5.8 =4.2 Years less for not having single payer.
That’s some extremely sketchy math. At minimum you’d need to make sure that the non-institutional risk factors for poverty are constant between the two countries before you can make that kind of comparison.
Is it a perfect comparison? no. Is it good enough to make the point that the lack of universal coverage in this country is killing poor people? Absolutely.
I suspect you underestimate how good your comparison has to be to convince people who aren’t already convinced.
It seems clear to me that some political problems are mistakes and some are conflicts. The issue here is really about the meta-level: when theorists disagree about which problems are mistakes and which are conflicts, are those disagreements themselves mistakes or conflicts? It seems to me that either disagreements about theory are mistakes, or we’re doomed to epistemological nihilism in which “truth”, “science”, etc are nothing more than rhetorical weapons. If being a Marxist means having a conflict theory of political *theory*, as opposed to just a conflict theory of politics, then perhaps Marxists are scarce here simply because they deny the relevance of the conversation you’re trying to have. Such meta-Marxists can’t be reasoned with because they reject reason itself. Whether that rejection is a mistake or a conflict may be left as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, I agree. There are a lot of conflicts, and some groups have different interests.
I am an Israeli, and there are a lot of examples of conflicts in the Israeli context – Jew/Arab is the main one, where a large group of Israeli Arabs have conflicted national Identity.
But not only that – the religious settler movement also have very different interests from main Jewish society, and would spend lots of resources to achieve ends that are not in line with what most people believe.
Or the Ultra-Orthodox society, which want to keep state support for religious practices and their own group.
I think treating society as homogeneous leads to mistake theorists, but when different groups arise, conflict theorists come to the fore.
There are also the demonstrably true facts that:
a. People tend to find mistake-theory type arguments that align with their interests or beliefs a lot more convincing than ones that contradict their interests or beliefs.
b. People with strong beliefs/interests on one side of an issue often fund the thinkers/writers/researchers who are arguing their side of the mistake-theory debate. Sometimes this just means finding sympathetic people and giving them money; other times it’s more like intellectual hired guns.
c. Powerful people can and do get some mistake-theory-type arguments excluded from the public sphere. (Think of someone like Charles Murray, who’s operating almost entirely in the realm of mistake theory.)
All of these are things that play very well with a smart conflict theorist’s worldview–sure, sometimes there are genuine differences of opinion about the best policies, but those conflicts routinely have powerful interests putting a heavy thumb on the scales to make sure the outcomes of the debates favor their interests.
Mistake theorist: there can be multiple reasons that …
Conflict theorist interrupts: MANSPLAINER!
I don’t know if I approve of this*, but it made me laugh.
*Literally.
Conflict Theorists are gonna give us flak for this…
(OK, I laughed too)
It seems like the best argument for conflict theory is other conflict theorists. You don’t have to look too close at the rhetoric of Donald Trump to see that him and his supporters view the world from a zero sum conflict theory standpoint. So how do you respond to that? They aren’t going to be any more receptive to how they might be mistaken than the Marxists are. Rather you need to rely on building a mobilized opposition, and work to divide his base if you wish to successfully oppose any of his aims.
Put another way, perhaps even if one is inclined more towards the mistake theorist world view it can be necessary to adopt the conflict theorist one for dealing with other conflict theorists? Are they even separate world views, or just a reflection of ones level of social trust? I would think the appropriate level of social trust is one proportionate to the degree of social trustworthiness.
By the way were you thinking of another way to frame the post-modernism post when you wrote this? It would seem like, by your definition anyway, the post-modernist view would correspond with the conflict theorist one, just seen from a different angle.
It’s a little more complex than that.
Mistake/conflict is an important dichotomy and identifies two orthogonal vectors in idea-space.
The problem facing someone who looks at the world purely in terms of conflict is that if they want to win and acquire power, they do need to engage with the world as it is and not how they wish it were.
The problem facing someone who looks at the world purely in terms of mistakes is that boy! do your ideological opponents often make mistakes that benefit themselves personally! Isn’t it funny how that works out?
Seen this way, Donald Trump and ‘Trumpism’ is more of a synthesis of the conflict/mistake thesis/antithesis. It is a combination of the low-tax, low-regulation policies that have always been advocated by the intellectual Right with “lock her up” and “drain the swamp” and “you have to go back.” The kind of us-and-them fighting-talk that hasn’t been seen at the forefront of the Right for a *long* time.
I have noticed this. It does not appear to be exclusive to my ideological opponents.
It’s still useful to target the mistakes, though, even if people are self-deceiving. Your enemies depend on the lies they tell themselves. Every piece of muddled thinking is a strategic weakness.
Yudkowsky alluded about this here. (I am a fan of the school that says you can quote someone approvingly without that suggesting you actually like them. That being said, I do actually like Yudkowsky. Quite a lot, actually.)
My point is that mistake theorists don’t realise that sometimes the people who disagree with them are not self-deceiving. Not really. They say they believe in the invisible dragon, they believe that they believe in the invisible dragon, but all their predictions about reality are as if they did not really believe this.
They act as if they believe in the invisible dragon when that belief benefits them, and not when it doesn’t, but if you ask them if they believe in the invisible dragon they will say “oh of course I believe in the invisible dragon.”
While we’re quoting people we don’t necessarily approve of, proto-alt-right Lawrence Auster coined the phrase “unprincipled exception” to describe this behaviour on the Left.
Edit: I also see Scott has used this phrase.
Good point.
I
alwaysoften forget about belief-in-belief. I need to watch for that blind spot.I had the same thought after reading it. There appears to be a lot of melding between the conflict and the mistake paradigm. In particular I’m thinking about Communist Russia and FDR and the new deal. In both cases they figured if you were just smart enough you could fix the state with technocrats, but in both cases they had a fairly conflict driven ideology.
Except there is no rigorous reason to believe that The Neal Deal fixed anything, and Communist Russia sure as shit didn’t.
No one is saying the melding worked. Just that it was an example of the melding of the two theories.
Hmm.. where have I seen this before? Oh right:
I’ve seen this before:
So… is that a good thing or a bad thing?
They eat babies so the whole discussion is pointless; peace or war, their regular life cycle is way more bloodier than their conflicts.
I’ve read the story (and it was pretty good).
I meant, if I’m a mistake theorist, does the quote imply that I should be
a. Wrestling with my previously-unconscious bias that predisposes me to see conflict theorists as the enemy
or
b. Wrestling with my previously-held heuristic that seeing people as the enemy is unproductive at best and disastrous at worst?
Is it possible that current Trump supporters (and Trump himself) started as mistake theorists on illegal immigration, and after 30 years of making coherent arguments against lax enforcement of immigration laws on moral, practical, and economic grounds realized they were not dealing with mistake theorists in an illegal immigration debate, but with conflict theorists in a demographic war, and responded?
Which came first, “open borders” and “no person is illegal” or “you have to go back?”
To the extent that it is possible to evaluate where mistake theorists stand by looking at expert opinion, the majority of evidence seems to fall on the pro-immigration side. Vox has a good summary. (In particular, I would draw your attention to the “Immigration-skeptical experts are rare and eccentric” section — but read the whole thing.) Noah Smith has a bunch of links in this Twitter thread.
If Trump supporters were disillusioned mistake theorists, I would expect them to have engaged with these arguments and come up with satisfactory replies. Where is the evidence of that engagement? I agree that there are conflict theorists on both sides of the immigration debate, but as far as I can tell the mistake theorists are heavily clustered on one side.
Click on lengthy Vox article. Control-F “illegal.” Two matches. Hmmmm….
I too believe in totally eliminating almost all illegal immigration … by legalizing it.
There are some synonyms for ‘illegal’ also used.
jhertzlinger, should they be given the vote? Why would you want people from a completely different culture, with a completely different understanding of civics from typical Americans to have political power alongside you?
Would your answer to this question change if the illegals were evangelical Christians highly likely to vote for Republicans, instead of impoverished minorities highly likely to vote for Democrats?
I’d rather have Mexicans voting in California than the current crop of Californians.
http://hertzlinger.blogspot.com/2016/01/two-borders.html
BTW, I am not any kind of leftist. If anything, I would prefer the votes of evangelical Christians.
The article was a glorified listicle that didn’t steelman any of the arguments for keeping our border with Mexico porous. It didn’t address the fact that poor immigrants consume more in taxpayer benefits than they provide. Let’s step outside the US. Take a look at the Somalian unemployment rate in Sweden. Last I checked it was somewhere above
90%75%. While I am sure the Somalians themselves are better off, do you think the Somalians are a net benefit for the native Swedes economically?It would be a “net benefit to happiness” if I let homeless people sleep in my home, but I’m not going to do it. It would drastically change the culture of my home and incur social and economic costs for me. Trump’s approach to immigration is this attitude at a nation-level. Is immigration a privilege which we grant to those we deem worthy, or a right to those who twist the door handle and make themselves comfortable?
EDIT: To further elaborate because I cannot reply to the two intelligent responses below. I used the Swedish example to point out that “economic benefit” seems to be more of a Motte-and-Bailey argument than a core argument. In other words, if these illegal immigrants were not a net economic benefit, the response on the Left would be the same. To the extent there is an economic benefit from these illegal immigrants, I believe that is why the moderate Republicans in Congress steadfastly refuse to enforce immigration laws even when they are elected to do so.
I believe Trumpism’s argument against illegal immigration is a triad and one of the principle reasons he won the primary and was elected in the first place, and not addressed well in the Vox article: 1) it harms those at the bottom of the American economic ladder the most, by putting them in direct competition with illegal immigrant labor willing to work for less, 2) immigration without assimilation will balkanize and weaken the United States as a whole, and 3) the rate of immigration (legal + illegal) is very, very high compared to other countries and the consequences are unknown. So let’s enforce the laws on the books while we still can until we figure out just what those consequences are.
First, it’s not 90%, though the unemployment rate for Somalis in Sweden is pretty shocking. But how is it relevant to how porous the Mexican border with the U.S. should be? The unemployment rate of Mexicans in the US is barely higher than the total unemployment rate, so it would appear that either Mexicans and Somalis are different, or the US and Sweden are different, or perhaps both.
The issue here is that the model treating your nation as your house, entails treating other people’s houses as part of your house.
The debate is not over whether immigrants are allowed to live in your house, but whether they’re allowed to be invited into other peoples’ houses, or sold houses, or sold land, by those other people.
If the answer is yes, those people get control of their own property. If the answer is no, their property is getting controlled by other people, who presume they own it because it’s in the country they live in.
I can see it as being reasonable to not want consequentialism used to tell you who to let in your house, but it seems reasonable for it to tell you that you’re not allowed to control other people’s houses.
Answer to first question: No.
Blaming problems on newcomers appears to be one of the commonest failure modes in human thinking. This applies to opponents of relaxed zoning laws, opponents of gentrification, and opponents of colonialism. Maybe it also applies here.
In a related story, I’ve become more reluctant to blame Trump on Democrats newly converted to conservatism.
So would the Native Americans have been wrong to blame the Settlers for their problems? Or those that were brutally colonized wrong to blame the colonialists? Please elaborate.
Maybe we can resume this discussion at the next open thread.
Registered to say that I’m definitely in the “Hard Conflict Theory” classification, and it always seemed obvious to me.
I come here for Scott’s posts, which are usually extremely high-quality though with certain blind spots sometimes, but sure, everybody has them. The ability to make what would normally be rather dry medical literature into an extraordinarily engaging read is really an amazing talent and so I read pretty much every main post that comes up.
Sometimes, I read the comments, which, you know, is something you should never do, but hey, he moderates the blog and people are generally very civil! I don’t read them a lot, though, so I might not have gotten the best read. Still, in the past I just always found it a little weird that the readers and commenters of this blog would talk about incentive structures, but didn’t seem to apply that logic to the way they apply to power and wealth in our current, real-life society, and…I really *did* attribute it to “These people are closer in the hierarchy towards the rich and powerful, and are therefore incentivized to be opposed to any radical changes to the status quo.” Not in a malice sense, in a more “Job depends on it and therefore won’t question it” sense, but, heh, I felt that it was there. That might be a little mean to y’all here in the comments, but it’s sort of an important point, right? Because y’all seem to make such a big deal of how smart, and how well-considered you try to be, and all that, and I’m in the column of “This is super obvious, and furthermore, anybody who is posting here, where High IQ is regularly mentioned as being both a real fact and a point of pride who doesn’t see it must be lying, which makes them either silently complicit, or an enemy.”
That makes me sound a lot more aggressive than I am in person! But it has been something I’ve thought of when reading the comments. And…while I appreciate that some of the folks here might really just be people who assume good faith all the time, the post hasn’t really disabused me of the feeling that many people, here and elsewhere, are more intentional about that. I don’t know if that’s both necessary and true, so, ya know, this can be my one and only post on here if you’d like.
I’m getting the feeling that the commentariat is dismissing conflict theory a bit rashly because it sounds like a vindication of those mean SJW bullies.
A lot of people are conflating descrptive conflict theory — “interests conflict, and conflicts of interest drive many things” — and normative conflict theory — “My Side Must WIn!!”
Oh, that makes sense, nicely spotted.
Yes, thank you, I can’t tell which one Scott wants to talk about.
That’s exactly what struck me as wrong about this post. With a more neutral description of conflict theory, there doesnt really turn out to be much of a dichotomy. It’s trivially easy to be both a conflict theorist and a mistake theorist.
There’s also gene’s eye normative conflict theory. “I must win by being as close as possible to the center of the winning side. Since everyone will race to the bottom and all information about past defection and cooperation behavior will be erased, the winning side will be the largest recognizable kin group or the most numerous green-beard. If I’m able to defect freely without record being kept from close to the center of the winning side, I can put many copies of my genes into the gene pool and even if future generations are much smaller than the present generation due to population collapse due to inability to coordinate action on a large scale my fitness can be high.
We can predict that genes for implicitly holding this theory, in contexts where conflict theory seems like a good description of the situation, will have risen in fitness in many times and places.
It’s also a vindication of Trump’s approach to those same mean SJW bullies. Both Trump and SJWs are looked on rather poorly here, but I have to admit Trump’s approach seems to be fighting them more effectively than careful rhetoric ever has.
He makes a lot of them unhappy. I’m guessing others are thrilled with him.
(Speaking of ‘SJW Bullies’ which != SJ people in general, because, conjunction if nothing else).
Unless I’ve missed something, Trump hasn’t done anything to take the wind out of their sails, though. Kind of the opposite. This does not seem like a good thing.
I just wanted to say I really like that you are sharing this.
I’d like to hear more about this, if you’d care to elaborate.
The point is your political philosophy is DANGEROUS to me. Scott is way way way too kind to Marxism in this piece. And your providing an example of it.
You state directly that anyone not agreeing with you is complicit with the bourgeoisie, and therefore an enemy. You understand how aggressive this makes you sound. That’s because the Conflict Theory leaves only one “solution” for fixing that problem, which is destroying your enemy!
This is why Communism killed 100 million people in the 20th century!!!
I vehemently disagree with the idea that this blog should be “more fair” to Marxists. If anything its been too kind.
Marxist theory is utter complete deadly bullshit. Its final solution is always mass murder. It can’t escape from that solution or come up with any other solution.
My vote is to discard it completely. If Conflict Theory wants to be taken seriously, the idea that “anybody who is posting here, where High IQ is regularly mentioned as being both a real fact and a point of pride who doesn’t see it must be lying, which makes them either silently complicit, or an enemy.” MUST be taken off the table!
Because if we’re talking about good governance and your solution is to kill/imprison/subjugate everyone who disagrees with you about what good governance is, you need to step aside and let the adults govern.
>Sometimes, I read the comments, which, you know, is something you should never do
I really strongly disagree with this sentiment. You should always read the comments for an article because they will (usually) give a rebuttal to it. Yes that rebuttal has a good chance of being passionate, polemic, and/or profane, but it will usually point out at least some weaknesses in the author’s points. In fact, there seems to be a pattern that writers who say comments are terrible or close comment sections tend to also be ones that write outrage bait with bad epistemiology.
I guess there is no way of saying what you are trying to say without sounding rude; in my opinion, you did a good job and didn’t sound obnoxious at all.
Maybe it will sound like I’m trying to play gotcha, but here I go:
You should be more specific. What is it that folks here are failing to discuss in terms of incetive stgructures, and why is it a problem? Bear in mind that this blog can’t cover every possible topic, and that any many of these social topics are complicated and may lead people operating under the same Mistake Theory paradigm to different conclusions.
.
Somewhat paradoxically, looks like you have a higher opinion of us than most of the commenters themselves do. The general IQ and compassion may be high here, but we are not immune to error and to disinformation. Even the smartest philosophers among the Greeks believed in things latter proved wrong. Maybe we really don’t get what is obvious to you because of different info, background, education, etc.
Most, if not all, of the “incentive problems” that are ascribed to the state can also be ascribed to private property. This is even more so, in a world where private ownership becomes the highest entity in the social hierarchy.
The Jacobite blog post is pretty blatant in this mistake. It’s not that the initial Jacobin post was ignoring the principal agent problem (go back and read it if you don’t believe me!), its that it was arguing that shifting the balance of power from the state to property doesn’t solve the problem. The Jacobite mistook (?) this as saying the Leftist was uninterested in the problem, going on to declare Marxists as “uninterested in theory”.
except they are orders of magnitude smaller, because the institutions in question are orders of magnitude smaller, and unlike with the state, the people who let them fester suffer direct, personal loss, not generalized societal loss, so the problem is more visible and the people creating it have more incentive to fix it.
This looks like the brewing of a bad dichotomy, but I’m not sure what you mean enough to critique it.
One reason property holdings remain small is that the highest level of social authority, and the one responsible for defense, is the state. If you took that position away, I don’t think private property holdings would remain small for long, as they would begin to fill that role.
And anyway, its not size that matters so much, as whether the power is autocratic or democratic. Say what you will about democracy’s bad incentives- autocracy is worse, and has a bloodier history to prove it.
Competitive dictatorship, which is how we run hotels and restaurants, on the other hand, has much better incentives. I have no vote on what is on the menu in your restaurant, an absolute vote on which restaurant I eat at.
Is that what you mean by autocracy? It’s the main control mechanism under private property.
@Guy in TN:
I wrote a few paragraphs suggesting that families with children tend to be (very small) autocracies, and most people don’t mind them much, but rereading it it seemed needlessly snarky.
I agree that we want to avoid violence- violence is bad. And I’m not actually a fan of autocracy (between you and me, I honestly have my doubts about the way we treat children).
But I think most people do actually have an intuition that size is pretty important. I’d rather be metaphorically enslaved by a corporation I could leave if I ever really really wanted to than literally enslaved by a government where the only hope of release was death.
Informally, I have the sense that both the government and the market are large, clunky machines that sometimes break down or go haywire in ways that result in enormous human cost. There are certainly a lot of ways in which they mirror each other. But my current sense is that corporate breakdown is ‘safer’- not in the sense that it doesn’t matter, but in terms of scale.
The Financial Crisis was bad.
The Holocaust was worse.
King Leopold II’s reign in the Congo was pretty terrible, and I’ve heard some people blame capitalism for that, but I feel like it’s not a coincidence that we’re talking about a King with a government to sic on people who resist, so I’m reluctant to pin that one entirely on the market.
But the history I know is only a tiny fraction of the history there is. Can you give me an example of holocaust-level failure resulting from a haywire market? Not a case where a market failed to save people, but one where it actually killed them?
@DavidFriedman
It’s the same problem we discussed a few weeks ago. Looking at the relative non-violence of, say, the government of a random county in Michigan, and thinking that if we just vest the highest level of power with these folks, world peace would be assured.
Yes, private property is an example of autocratic control, at least in theory. In practice, it is tempered by the higher, democratic control of state power. It works okay when it is controlled like this; its our current status quo. But changing to a system of absolute, undemocratic authority would be very different from the current system.
Not unrelated: Have you thought about the reason that actually-existing rights enforcement agencies choose not to cooperate with each other? It seems to be that once you are at the top, you lose your incentive to be competitive.
@Jack Letcher
Your family argument isn’t bad, honestly. In a scenario with a sharp divergence in mental capacities (such as parent/toddler), an autocratic situation is better than a democratic, at least to a certain point.
You won’t get any disagreement from me here: the failure or malevolence of corporations doesn’t hold a candle to the failures or malevolence of states, and its because of scale. If you change the scale of an entity, which includes not just its physical size, but the power it exerts, then you change its influence. There are no examples of private entities bombing cities, because they are not at the top of the social hierarchy in our system. There are also no examples of country governments bombing cities, despite these government being democratically controlled, non-market entities.
This is why arguments along the lines of “Look at all the bad things the state has done, let’s decrease its size, and in turn increase the size of private power, which up to this point hasn’t had failures at such a large scale” make no sense to me. Replacing the authority of the state with the authority of private property drastically increases the power of property, which increases its influence on world events.
Maybe to limit fallout from failure, we should have geographically smaller states? It’s a question worth examining, at least.
Right. Governments actually are property owners, are solely property owners (all of their powers derive from their ownership), and in the theoretical libertarian sense of property (allodial title) they are actually the only property owners.
The Norman Conquest reduced all allods in England to fiefs, and the state, or the crown, was the sole owner of England from that point. The crown charters that created the colonies never granted allodial title to “owners” since then, and the American Revolution did not alter their status — it merely gave them a vote in the organization that had become the new single allod.
Fee simple estates, colloquially known as “property,” are subsidiary agreements with the owner (allod) — the self-styled “owner” in the context of a modern state is a mere tenant. That is why he is not as dangerous as a government (i.e., true owner, allod) — though he can still be dangerous, insofar as the allod delegates to him the power to be dangerous.
Yes, I've often thought that, from the deontological perspective that motivates anarchocapitalism, we already live in an anarchocapitalist world, one in which all habitable land (and most of the unhabitable land and even much of the sea) is the property of one of about 200 corporations (mostly nonprofits, mostly run on some more or less democratic membership model). That this isn't what anarchocapitalists really want shows the incoherence of their philosophy (or so I like to think), and the same thing goes for some on the antiauthoritarian left who think that member-run nonprofits are the perfect organizational model.
That said, it doesn't really argue against David Friedman's reasons for anarchocapitalism, which are pragmatic and consequentialist. Presumably (and hopefully he'll correct me if I'm wrong), he'd argue that it's a good idea for all of these organizations to run internally on a libertarian basis (and probably break apart due to diseconomies of scale, and with the successor organizations being less bound to obsolete membership criteria like geography), and perhaps the same at every level of organization, but that it would only make things worse if some higher authority had the power to compel this. And speaking of authority in the family, David is also known for having raised his children in a non-authoritarian way, so at least he's no hypocrite!
As an anarchist (a left-anarchist, not just an anarchocapitalist), I don’t accept the legitimacy of any authority, whether family, corporation, or state. But it also seems clear that in practice, size usually makes things worse (although I do appreciate the help that large organizations sometimes provide in limiting the authority of their smaller subsidiaries). This makes my short-term economic policy preferences unusually right-wing for a left-anarchist.
@Toby Bartels
It’s funny, I’ve got it flipped from the way you see it: I think the standard deontological Rothbardian has a good case that we don’t live in a system that conforms to his values. Since the homestead principle isn’t incorporated into our legal property system, our system of property is built on a foundation of lies (to him).
In contrast, I think the “competing legal systems” style of ancap should focus on explaining why we aren’t currently living in the results of their desired system having already been brought into fruition. I mean, there are Rights Enforcement Agencies who (for the right price) will do your bidding. We just call them the “police”, the “military”, or the “mob” instead.
@Toby Bartels, @DavidFriedman
It does argue against what DavidFriedman is saying in this thread, specifically:
Because these hotels and restaurants are absolutely subject to our vote. That is why they cannot discriminate or segregate clientele on the basis of race. That is why they cannot pay a chambermaid less than the minimum wage (and why she can collect the difference by force if they do). They cannot serve as an example of autocracy, because their position is inferior to that of the actual owner (the state) who imposes on them these obligations (among many others… such as fire safety, food safety, etc.).
It is no defense of autocratic power for hotels, as contrasted with the autocratic power of the state, to say that hotels use their power to benefit society when they are given exactly as much power as the state deliberately chooses to give them.
(All this is just to reiterate the point originally made by Guy in TN.)
@ Guy in TN :
It is built on lies, since it lies about what is and isn't property. But the main result of that is confusion and irony, not economic injustice. If your reference to homesteading is because the governments claim huge tracts of virgin land, then I agree that you have a point, although I still doubt that it would have much effect on contemporary economics or politics if those were treated as international waters, as long as the state got to keep the valuable land being used for grazing and mining.
Of course, the way that the land was acquired in the first place was quite unjust. But ultimately, that’s true for almost any property whatsoever! I’ve seen right-libertarians argue that Coase's Theorem means that we don't need to worry about correcting past injustices as long as we start being libertarian from now on. So a deontological anarchocapitalist who accepts that argument should have very little to complain about, whereas one who rejects it should also be clamoring for slave reparations, renegotiating treaties with the Lakota, and maybe even (considering the name of the magazine whose article began this discussion) returning Great Britain and Ireland to the Stuarts. I don't know of any anarchocapitalists that take such positions, but if there are any, then I would like to meet them!
Any individual commenter knows that his comments have essentially no effect on the overall structure of the society. Insofar as we have a selfish interest it isn’t in comments that maintain a status quo we like, it’s in comments that make us seem smart, or interesting, or in other ways get us status here and, if we comment under our real names, elsewhere.
To make your argument work, you need something more like “we benefit from the status quo, we will feel guilty if we believe the status quo is radically unjust in our favor, we don’t like feeling guilty, so we have an incentive to believe that the status quo is about right.”
Most commenters here, left right or libertarian, don’t seem to believe the status quo is about right, although they differ in what is wrong with it. But I can’t think of any who appear to believe not only that it is wrong but that it is wrong in ways which largely benefit them.
This is the explicit belief of one group which is mostly absent here –SJWs, or at least SJWs who are white or male. It’s also true of wealthy Marxists, though only implicitly so, so they may believe otherwise.
Well, we probably just spill our brains most of the time — brains that are filled with beliefs for reasons having nothing to do with the effects of the immediate conversation here. We will naturally make our speech here consistent with our existing beliefs.
Feelings don’t have to enter into it at all. And certainly not feelings of guilt. Maybe conformity to power is mediated by emotion somehow (I guess most everything is somehow) but it’s more relevant to look at the social structure as the ultimate cause (if it is).
Consider someone who is an active duty service member in the US Army. This person has an incentive to believe, one way or another, in what the US Army is basically doing overall. Either (ideally) belief in the immediate mission, or else a more complex belief about why the mission itself doesn’t define the institution. Such beliefs will make it easier for him to perform his job, to fit in socially with his peers, and to relate to his superiors. (Attached feelings may be: enthusiasm, pride, affection and respect for peers and superiors, admiration for celebrated heroes and top leaders.)
If he comments here, he’s going to express those exact same beliefs, even though the incentive he has to believe them has nothing to do with influencing people here (or really with influencing anyone anywhere).
(He does have an incentive to put these beliefs forward to every person he meets socially in order to find out if there is any future social compatibility. Furthermore there is an incentive to put forward one’s self-image in social contexts that are not likely to develop into relationships because you gain information about how others respond to your projection of your self. Also, you just get some simple practice performing your self. You satisfy the expectations of others that you would put your self forward, which allows you to gain whatever social benefits they would confer upon you. None of this stuff is ordinarily conscious though, it is just natural social behavior.)
I’m just trying to put forward an account of what is likely really going on when people conform to the ideologies of the powerful. The whole business about “we will feel guilty if we believe the status quo is radically unjust in our favor” seems to be very detached from any actual understanding of human psychology. I think you just had this model where you needed an incentive and inserted “feelings” by default. The actual psychology of it is a bit more complicated and indirect.
Of course the US Army has one set of beliefs that it’s helpful to believe; Silicon Valley startups, big corporations, universities, churches, etc., have different sets. All of one’s connections to institutions and to society pull on one’s beliefs.
Oh, hey, there’s…a lot of replies to this.
I skimmed most of them, and read some! Unfortunately I don’t have either the spare time, or effort available to actually engage with the folks here (evident in that now it’s like, near two days after I wrote that and there’s a ten paragraph conversation I haven’t read), so I apologize that I’m basically dropping that up there and more or less disappearing. If Scott hadn’t more or less asked for feedback on that I wouldn’t have normally commented.
I do appreciate that there’s only one person freaking out and accusing me of wanting to murder him. Philosophy aside y’all seem very civil, and that’s genuine compliment.
Most folk here, like most folk everywhere, don’t really know how to think rigorously about situations where good faith can’t be assumed, so rather than giving up rigor, like everybody else, they either give up rigor or they give up good faith.
I have been trying for a long time to point to a third way, to advocate the extremely difficult path from initially assuming good faith and trying to think rigorously to assuming a mix of good and bad faith where bad faith preys on the principle of charity using distraction, disinformation, reflexive control, corruption, manipulation, fear, shame and evolutionary game theory.
It’s important that people understand that the toxoplasma of rage, e.g. bad faith, can be evolutionarily fit at the expense of its hosts.
That is a great analysis. And a corrollary of the mistake theory/conflict theory immediately sprang to my mind.
Mistake theory is a great tool for people whose main strength is their intelligence. It’s an intellectual strategy.
Conflict theory is a great tool for people whose main strength is their strength of will. It’s an emotional strategy.
You can clearly see this coming out in the two sides of the argument – the Jacobite article actually bothers to explain what public choice theory IS, on the grounds that if you’re making an intellectual argument it’s fairly key that people actually understand what you’re talking about. The people who wrote the Baffler argument don’t appear to care very much if their audience is – well – baffled. ‘Take it from us, these public choice people are just Bad And Wrong, and you know this because we’re the Good Guys and we’re telling you.’ It looks a little like an intellectual argument (because it’s written down at all in the first place) but its primary purpose is to stir up emotions.
Avoiding mistake theory arguments is rational for a conflict theorist, because the more intellectually skilled mistake theorists might be able to persuade them they’re wrong even if they’re not, using their uber rhetorical skills.
Avoiding conflict theory conflicts is rational for a mistake theorist, because after sufficient yelling and handwaving they’re likely to run out of emotional juice and just agree to whatever the conflict theorist wants in order to keep the peace.
Mistake theorists would probably like to think that they can educate conflict theorists into being mistake theorists instead, but my analysis above still holds, since even if the general level of smarts in the population is high, somebody has to be in the bottom 50 percent, and it’s in these people’s interests to move a dispute onto a ground that they have more of an advantage in.
I don’t know what people who are both dumb AND weak-willed do in this situation.
Go hide under the bed?
Or maybe just not talk about politics at all.
I think this model makes a lot of sense. Of note: if Conflict Theory attracts people who are intellectually disadvantaged, that probably doesn’t just mean dumb people. I imagine are a lot of people with perfectly good intellectual ability who still find themselves mysteriously loosing arguments even when they Know They Are Right. If your identity gets tangled up with a bad model, rational debate may be somewhat hazardous for you even if your intellectual abilities are generally good.
Conversely, if your identity gets tangled up with a good model, you can punch above your weight-class in rational debate
People who are both dumb and weak-willed, or who recognize there is a risk they may run up against someone smarter or stronger willed than themselves, well, those people can join teams. Plus, other people are joining teams too, so even the smartest/toughest has to do that also, just to keep up. For some contests there may be a natural ceiling to effective team size, and for some contests that size may be very close to “one” for practical purposes. Even so, nearly nobody has a strong enough signal as to how smart/strong willed other people are to feel too confident that they’re sufficiently outside the mean to be the smartest/most willful of all 7 billion people on the planet, or even of all the 100k or so folks they might cross paths with in their life, particularly given there are incentives for people who are/are not extremely strong or extremely smart to disguise the fact. So everybody will at least kinda try to have a team for basically everything important.
… Which in turn means that if you convince someone to treat your arguments as something other than soldiers, you’ve convinced them you and they are on the same team, at least provisionally, at some level. And if you’re smarter or stronger-willed than they, and empathize with them (or appear to), perhaps they’ll experience that as “charisma” because everyone really wants to be on teams that are smart and strong willed.
Also, team memberships (religion, red-team/blue-team, something-something-gender-mumble-cough) with major alignment-type feelings can be expected to have systematic reach into one’s whole world view, and changing these “highest-order” alignments is the sort of thing that would completely destabilize nearly all one’s other team-memberships / relationships, much the way that falling in love tends to do.
Some people might try to avoid even being open to having beliefs at all on these highest-level areas, and take a strategy of “but not very serious about it” toward these highest-order alignments, and mostly aim to get through life as sports fans and sushi lovers, rather than as materialists-and-very-serious-about-it, or as be-fruitful-and-multiply-Christians-and-very-serious-about-it, or etc.
… and also means that institutions like “marriage” and “gender roles” might be a way to help people get through life without big zero-sum or even negative-sum power struggles. Which might be why, although I’m not a reactionary, I’m now going to point at SSC’s planet-sized-reactionary-ideas injection post, because I think what reaction is really about (and maybe exclusively about, although I definitely don’t understand most of it) is rejecting the kind of team-building from which revolutions are made.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
(I should also point at this one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/, and this response-to-the-response making the point that reaction is about rejecting revolution-style-team-building… https://nickbsteves.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/shots-across-the-bow/)
Which also might be why, symptoms of everyone becoming unsure about their basic alignments (and the alignments of everyone else) can result in lots of shallow people who are emphatically “on the team” and eager to celebrate the team’s strengths, and there you go fascism after hyperinflation.
Jeez I’m making no sense. Can anyone help me make sense of this jumble?
I got some of it. People are forming alliances to compensate for their individual weaknesses, letting them compete with other people for (I’m guessing power or status).
There are maybe different kinds of teams, and some social institutions (like marriage) also function to help build teams in the game.
The heart of Re@ction is maybe rejecting the sort of patchwork/identpol teams that tend to upset the social order.
Sometimes the signals about who’s on which team get scrambled, and everyone rushes to identify themselves either with their pre-existing teams or big powerful teams.
Team membership ties into worldview, which ties into self-perception, so things that mess with worldview and self-perception too drastically can strongly interfere with team-identification.
How’d I do?
It makes a lot of sense. And thinking of teams be the way we compensate for our own weaknesses also might help explain the growing hyperpartisanship over the last decade, in that the more we’re exposed to larger and larger numbers of people who oppose our opinions, the more we feel the need to build and maintain strong and unified teams to help us put forward our agenda, and to police those teams to ensure that everyone’s on board with every issue.
So, if I’m primarily concerned with, say, global warming, a deal where all the feminists, all the gay-rights activists, and all the ethnic minorities get on board with opposing global warming, in return for me policing my fellow environmentalists to make sure they all support feminism, gay rights and minority rights, might be very much worth my while.
If I were confident that I was often likely to be the smartest or most strong-willed person in the room, I could reject that deal and make up my own mind about feminism, gay rights, and minorities, or ignore them all completely in favour of focusing on environmental issues all the time. But the more we’re exposed to ever-increasing numbers of people in online spaces, the less likely it is that we won’t come across at least someone with better arguments or more passion than us. So more and more people feel the need for a strong unified team at their back.
@ Jack Lecter:
Yep. Exactly. Especially the bit about how when signals get scrambled, everyone has to rush. I can point at well-respected men who briefly and clumsily fell into “rush” mode during peak MeToo. It wasn’t supposed to be about men generally, but some older gents of my acquaintance missed that somehow, and got very defensive about manhood, with predictable toxoplasmosis style blow-ups.
@ Embry: Yep. Maybe even more than lots of people coming across lots of other people online, it’s lots of people having no friends other than the near strangers they hang out with online, or not even that. The “bowling alone” phenomenon comes to mind. And it’s not so much that most members of blue team or red team have concrete policy goals themselves, for which they extract concessions, as that they have concrete insecurities paved under by specific team identifications (e.g. “I’m of no value to anyone” is paved beneath “I’m a member of team do-something-about-the-climate.”) and sometimes end up doing other things (say, speaking in favor of minority protections) as part of getting to preserve their sense of membership on the team they care about.
So new question, then. Does this possibly relate to cost disease? Are things are more expensive all the time because people are all the time becoming more reliant on mistake theory? Or because people are all the time becoming more reliant on conflict theory? Or because the mistake-theory people and the conflict-theory people are increasingly unable to communicate or compromise with each other at all?
One piece of (weak) evidence in favor of conflict theory: It’s easy to imagine The-Elephant-in-the-Brain-style claims that “[system] is really about [Conflict Theory category], not [Mistake Theory category]”. For example, “Education is really about social class, not teaching people things.” On the other hand, when I try to generate plausible claims of the reverse form (“[system] is really about [Mistake Theory category], not [Conflict Theory category]”) I come up empty.
I don’t know why that would be, if it’s accurate. My impression is that Mistake Theory explanations make better rationalizations and Conflict Theory explanations are more likely to need rationalizing, but I don’t have the terminology to explain why.
Hmm.
Maybe Hansonian conflict theory requires imagining one hidden motive, where Hansonian mistake theory works better if people make multiple mistakes?
Paranoia doesn’t really have to be taught- it wouldn’t surprise me if we had some dedicated hardware designed to detect the workings of hostile agency. On the other hand, the idea that other people are making mistakes that seem rational and/invisible from their perspectives but which you can detect is famously counterintuitive. The research on hindsight bias (imo) suggests it can be hard to empathize with someone else’s errors because once you can see the mistakes you automatically correct for them, the same way your top-down system imposes order on bottom-up data.
Alternative explanation: mistake theory is always right. Therefore only conflict theory explanations need rationalization. The latter set is actually empty, because nothing is described by conflict theory in the first place. (The somewhat more charitable version of this is that when mistake theory is right, it is *obviously* right, so conflict theory rarely gets misapplied to it.)
On the other hand, I really think that sexism is a mistake theory issue that’s consistently presented as a conflict theory issue. I mean, just look at how much feminist rhetoric talks about how men and/or society “hate women”. This is obviously false in the general case, and yet somehow it has become a dominant narrative.
Claims about systems, sure. “This impersonal system is actually driven by personal conflict” has the form of a potentially interesting argument, whereas “this impersonal system is just a system” sounds empty.
The alternatives on the other side would be claims about people, in situations that initially look like conflicts. “Peer reviewers aren’t trying to humiliate you, they’re making sure your work stands up to scrutiny, because that’s how we know what to believe.”
The trick is: find a conflict theorist for whom you are on the side of righteousness on the object level, and then attempt to understand their position “the two of us should not try to engage with our common Mistaken Enemy”.
Perhaps it seems like this would be impossible, because:
But you’re overapplying the conflict/mistake analogy here. Mistakists can consistently think that literally anyone who disagrees with them is making a mistake, and the result will be interesting discussions. Conflictists, if they want to win the conflict, need to form alliances; the more competent ones will listen to you if you seem to share their main values and/or goals.
Theres the rub.
Mistake theorists think everyone who doesn’t agree with them is making a mistake and will try to convince them of it.
Conflict theorists think everyone who doesn’t agree with them is they enemy and will try to eliminate them.
It’s pretty easy to figure out which set of theorists in this case is far more dangerous than the other….
I’m a mistake theorist with conflict-theorist friends; empirically, they do not think I’m the enemy, nor have they shown any interest in eliminating me.
Hmm, I maybe should taboo Scott’s terms for clarity. I’m a person who thinks politics is, or at least should be, mostly a question of figuring out what policies would actually benefit people, which can be difficult and lead to counterintuitive results. I have friends who think politics is mostly a question of uniting to defeat the Bad People who are doing bad things. We all recognize that well-intentioned policies with bad consequences are a thing, and that bad actors are a thing; we just have different emphases. Although we disagree about many things, my friends don’t automatically consider me one of the Bad People.
Nice work. This is a good way of explaining that our relative emphases, conflict versus mistake, don’t determine which team we play for. Rather, they determine which tactics we emphasize.
However, certain goals preclude certain tactics. If my goal is for there to eventually be a sufficiently large coalition of people who all put the effort in to build pressure for action on climate change for the coalition to broadly succeed in forcing powerful special interests to leave trillions of dollars of fossil fuels in the ground… With all that that would entail to be successful on a global scale, particularly the *clarity of resolve* that would be required for the coalition to persevere, there may be certain kinds of tactics I simply cannot permit to my team members. (Deliberately sowing confusion is a good example. Violence is another. Anarchists aren’t generally welcome in the act-on-climate tent. Certainly the aren’t welcome as spokespeople.)
Theory:
Coexistence between mistake theorists and conflict theorists is possible because at some level, M-theory and C-theory are solutions to different problems. M theory is an attempt to solve interpersonal problems within a shared Overton Window; C theory is an attempt to solve interpersonal problems when there is no shared Overton Window. In the first case, the M-theorist can take for granted that both she and her opponent have identical (or similar) conceptions of the “truth” or “good” against which the M-theorist is comparing her opponent’s position. The M-theorist’s arguments gain legitimacy by appealing to that shared set of values/intuitions/norms/etcetera. However, when there is no such shared set, appealing to some “objective” standard confers no legitimacy, and is as likely to confuse the issue as enlighten. In those circumstances, the C-theorist has the advantage. He avoids engaging with his opponent’s ideas – they don’t even have all that much of a common framework within which to compare them, and constructing one would be contentious, difficult, and draining – and skips straight to removing his opponent from the debate. Not only is this more effective when there is no shared Overton Window, but, if successfully executed, has the salutary effect of *creating* an Overton Window within which everyone on the C-theorist’s side can happily trundle about in M-theory mode.
Hm. @Schmendrick… I don’t think the overton window concept aligns with mistake-lens / conflict-lens so neatly.
Let’s use an example of a house party in the U.S., where a football game is currently playing, but the home-owners have been called away, and now the guests can do whatever they want with the TV.
Overton windows are about hypothesis space for not sounding crazy or hostile. At our house party, you can say “I’m not that into football”, and you might get people to agree to change the channel, and you will have stayed inside the overton window. You could say, “people who are into football just like seeing black men smash their brains out for money, and literally every football fan deserves to experience a game’s worth of getting hit by offensive linemen” and then change the channel yourself, and glare at the first person who voices a protest. I think it’s safe to say at most U.S. parties with a football game playing, that’d be well outside the overton window.
But now ask, at this party, is your view that everyone comes with a different, pre-baked and effectively unchangeable preference for what to watch at house parties (conflict theory) or do you think the people whose preferences differ from yours are probably mistaken, or else have information that shows *you* are mistaken about what is best to watch (mistake theory)? In the conflict-theory situation, while you may use words as tools, or even as soldiers (e.g. including identifying allies and building rapport with them, and verbally attacking enemies and sowing mistrust and confusion among them), you aren’t trying to learn anything about the merits of watching football, nor trying to get anyone else to learn anything about the merits of football. In the mistake situation, discussion could be effective at changing people’s preferences and building consensus, and the best use of your time might be to find the person who disagrees with you *most* and focus on making sense of their opinion. In the conflict situation, particularly if you don’t favor the status quo, waiting for consensus to emerge from discussion with those who most disagree with you is a recipe for *disaster*–just take action, and build allegiances where you can.
So here’s where your model seems to break down. All the people at the party have the *same* overton window, or very nearly (some of them might accidentally say something gauche, or deliberately be offensively ‘contrarian’, but my point is mostly everyone knows how to be polite). And if one of them says something outside the overton window, it may be a mistake-theory effort to shift the overton window to include the true answer, or it may be a conflict-theory effort to explode reasoned debate entirely.
I think it is more of a case by case type of situation, then a this or that case.
I mean, sometime politics is a mistake theory – like when setting the interest rates.
Sometime it is a conflict – like when deciding on abortions pro-choice/pro-life.
If you actually believe abortions are murder, it won’t convince you that it is lowers crime.
And, by the same logic, you won’t be okay ‘killing babies’ even if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest-rape. But some people are.
I can’t say I fully understand what goes through people’s heads here, but I don’t think it’s entirely immune to cost-benefit analysis.
Scott wrote about this here, but I can’t say he managed to totally dissolve my confusion on the matter.
It’s a contradiction of principles, yes, but not everyone is good at being consistent. I think the line of thought goes “Being a rape victim is awful, so I’m more willing to go along with what she thinks will reduce that awfulness.” Sympathy overrides principle.The higher-level rationalization is that this is an extremely exceptional case (which is true–a tiny fraction of abortions are the result of rape), and exceptional cases are exactly what exceptions are for.
Again, it’s not consistent with the “life begins at conception” theory of abortions, and it’s worth noting that there are a number of people who hold this position who don’t make a rape exception. But it’s also worth noting that abortion is already a hard problem that involves tradeoffs of sacred values (life vs liberty), and it’s not surprising that people break on principles when you make the situation even harder.
Or perhaps in extra simplified form, “Force woman to have pregnancy = bad ; Kill baby = Bad; Bad > bad; being rape victim = bad; Bad > bad + bad? Result unclear”
@eyeballfrog: I’m not criticizing them for this- just expressing confusion.
I intuitively understand having principles you think you should live up to and failing through weakness of will, or realizing your principles didn’t say what you thought they said, or having a hard time putting into words exactly what your principles are.
There’s something else going on here that definitely happens, is definitely normal, and seems more intellectually mysterious. As is often the case when you have a common occurrence which people can’t really explain, asking about it tends to elicit repeated claims that the occurrence does in fact happen (this isn’t what you were doing, but it’s happened enough times by now that I kind of expect it going in.)
I’m not saying I don’t do this (it’s hard to catch yourself, but probabilistically I doubt I’m immune to the effect), and I’m not saying people who do this are bad, and I’m not asking if people really do this. But I’d like to understand exactly how we’re pulling this off- are we somehow forgetting we had the principle in the first place? Dissociating from the event so it doesn’t trigger the subroutine that cares about the principle? Is it a communication issue, where the real principle was never exactly what people said it was, and it always had this exception built in but it just never came up before?
For that matter, I ought to ask- what’s a principle? I feel like I understand the word intuitively, but maybe I’m subtly misinterpreting it?
I remember being just extraordinarily grateful to Scott for writing that post. It’s one of the first posts of his that I read, and it was a couple years old when I found it, so I didn’t comment. But at the time I wanted to say, “Yes! Thank you! Feel free to think I’m completely wrong and should totally be a consequentialist, but thank you for believing that I’m not lying or being inconsistent. You’re the only person I’ve ever found who understands.”
@JustToSay: I’m sorry to bring it up- I don’t want to make you feel bad.
FWIW, I don’t think you’re lying. That’s something I would understand, and realistically I’d probably be a jerk about it, but I wouldn’t be asking questions or expressing confusion.
I can’t say I understand, but I’m not trying to round you off to something I can.
In retrospect, this topic turned out to be a little more trigger-y than I’d thought through. Apologies.
If you think of abortion as war, some people might think of abortion in case of rape as a just war.
Seems like a fair description of normie politics. Not so much anything out of the beaten path, like Death Eaterism, which seems orthogonal to the dichotomy.
Moldbug’s tone, at least in the early essays, is very mistake-theoretic: you, the reader, have some misconceptions which he’s going to clear up for you. It’s condescending and kind of bitter, but a long way from entreaties to cleanse with fire and sword.
His proposed solutions, likewise, are technical, engineering-oriented things (which would not work, but that’s not the point).
The conspiritorial aspects of his work- Cthulhu, the Cathedral, etc- are proposed explicitly to explain the fact that (he thinks) his opponents as acting in good faith, yet doing bad things in a way that appears nonrandom.
I don’t know how representative he is of Death Eater culture generally (with which I am not involved), but there’s certainly a case to be made that, despite his radical policy prescriptions and generally caustic tone, he’s a mistake theorist at heart.
Honestly, I think this is exactly the difference between the elitist anti-activism EnArEcks lot, and the populist (and much more popular) alt-right. Both are extremist in their solutions and way off from the mainstream right, but EnArEcks (or just “Formalism” as Moldbug puts it) is mistake theoretic, whereas the alt-right is conflict theory based. This is reflected in the alt-right’s resort to the classic nazi bogeyman of the eternal Jew.
Moldbug wrote a piece titled “Why I am not a white nationalist”, and I don’t remember it because it’s been years, but you could possibly boil that down to “Because they are irrational conflict theorists who can’t solve any problems” from what I recall.
But Moldbug would take 1000 times as many words to say it. :–)
Yeah, Moldbuggery is fundamentally mistake-theoretic. It’s just that the central mistake it likes to harp on — roughly, that the political aspect of the Enlightenment was a bad deal and should never have happened — is so huge and so alien to modern perspectives that it tends to break most people’s mental taxonomies.
Some other strains of Death Eater strike me as more conflict-theoretic, though.
I’ve had similar thoughts- at least, that some of the other people I’ve heard identify as Death Eaters don’t seem to belong in the same category as Moldbug at all; some of them have really different styles of engagement. And some of them are doing the “let’s talk this through rationally” thing, and some really, really aren’t. And that seems like kind of an important distinction.
The complication that this piece misses is that it is about Public Choice Theory, which, while generally falling under the technocratic “mistake theory” umbrella, is specifically a theory about conflicts.
So that there is more of an asymmetry in this case: the mistake theorists are acknowledging the existence of conflicts, and attempting to reason about them; the conflict theorists are dismissing the possibility of making a mistake.
This is a very important point! I already said this in another comment, but, let me restate it here: There’s more to “conflict theory” than just a descriptive theory that disagreements are conflicts. Which is after all true in some cases. But that doesn’t mean one should be a “conflict theorist” about such cases! Scott breaks it down here as if it’s fundamentally this one disagreement between the two points of view, but really there’s a number of disagreements — we’re looking at two clusters here — and one of those is the fact that conflict theorists just don’t really worry about mistakes, like, at all.
Or, in short, even where things are conflicts, conflict theory still contains lots of badness, and taking a conflict theory point of view is still the wrong thing to do.
Right, there’s a related but separate dichotomy about how to handle things that we all agree are pretty much zero-sum conflicts. On the one hand there is “treat each party as having legitimate interest and try to cut a deal, i.e. compromise” and on the other hand there is “the enemy is fundamentally wrong/evil and we will win by outright conquest”.
Each has its place, but some are more willing to go the second route right away. I tend to think that the best way to handle things, and what should be the social norm, is basically to bend over backwards to recognize that almost everyone has some sort of legitimate point, even if it’s one you don’t find particularly important or valid.
Apologies, but if that’s a debate that exists it’s because people don’t understand what “zero-sum” means. In an actual zero-sum situation, fighting to the death is the correct solution. But that’s because zero-sum (more generally, constant-sum, more generally, no outcomes Pareto comparable) is actually a very restrictive condition, and things that people call zero-sum generally aren’t. Actual literal wars are very much not constant-sum; that’s why it’s possible for people to surrender and to accept surrender, for instance. If you are in a situation where any sort of negotiation or compromise makes sense, it’s not constant-sum — because no compromise will be accepted unless both parties find it to be better for them than fighting, and in a constant-sum situation no option is a Pareto improvement over any other (to the parties involved).
My suspicion therefore is that the concept you are trying to get across here when you say “zero-sum” is not actually the property of being zero-sum, and you should find a better label for it.
I get your point, there’s a “minimal” and a “maximal” sense of zero-sumness.
Two people sharing a pile of money is zero-sum in the minimal sense: what I get you don’t get. But it isn’t in a maximal sense, if we fight over it instead of making a deal peacefully it imposes extra costs (concrete costs, opportunity costs in terms of a ruined relationship, and the moral cost of screwing over another person) on us both.
What you’re saying is that if something is zero-sum in the maximal sense then it doesn’t make sense to compromise at all. Sure, I agree. I also doubt such maximal zero-sum issues are all that common.
Indeed, the most characteristic belief of public-choice theorists is that if you have “a technocracy in which informed experts can pursue policy insulated from the vagaries of the electorate”, the policies they will pursue are the ones that most benefit the informed experts.
I feel that the dichotomy is false because those groups aim for the different places in the “food chain” so to speak.
Mistake theorists want to be technocrats on the payroll of politicians/elites (which are willing to govern rationally of course) while conflict theorists want to be those politicians/elites themselves.
That’s why there is so little attention to governance from the conflict side.
And that’s why since elites are more keen to preserve their status than to govern rationally, technocrats are limited in what they can do and thus are seen as to be supporting status quo.
Why, then, do technocrats typically aim for positions that are intentionally insulated from politics? The central example of arch-technocrats, after all, is the academic economist with tenure! I would say that the goal of most mistake-theorist types (at least, those who don’t just want to shout in the wilderness) is to constrain the set of options that a rotating cast of politicians/elites have at hand–take the terrible ones off the table, put good ones on the table, and try to steer the conversation towards less-mistaken options.
My impression (as someone on the mistake-theory/technocrat side of the equation by both inclination and training) is that the median technocrat supports a package of policies that deviate from the status quo by more than the median politician, while working within the reality that tweaks on the margin are what’s realistically on the menu 99% of the time.
Exactly, technocrats do tweaks on the margin, conflict types don’t feel the difference so their assumption is that you can’t fix the system by “technocrating”, only by radical displacement of elites.
Personally I tend to switch back and forth between the two approaches based on the particulars of the problem at hand.
Clearly there are problems, like measles outbreaks in the US due to anti-vaccers, that would go away if some set of people were just a bit smarter and/or a bit better-informed. It’s really not clear to me how conflict theory could possibly account for something like anti-vaccine sentiment given that there do not appear to be any stakes involved in terms of power, wealth, or status that would rationally motivate someone to adopt the theory that vaccines cause autism.
Equally clearly, when rich individuals or corporations violate ethics and/or laws to increase their own wealth or power, they do not believe that they are working towards the best interests of society as a whole, while being mistaken about how to pursue those interests. Instead they have surveyed the options and decided to violate social, legal, and/or moral norms because they perceive an advantage for themselves in doing so. I find it hard to imagine some piece of information or some level of intelligence that would cause them not to try to take advantage of the system and their positions in it.
Societies establish schools and universities to address problems of the first type, and courts and police to address problems of the second type. But actually I think that most problems are mixed.
Take problems of tribal epistemology. Do they exist because, lacking adequate rationalist training, people default to believing what their friends and neighbors believe? Or do they exist because most people quite rationally perceive that it is in their interests to pursue status within their own group and they do this by adopting group beliefs? Both. That’s why the problem is so intractable. That’s also why politics includes both social/emotional coalition building and debate about optimal solutions/public information campaigns.
+1
I think all these things are involved at some level when you’re talking about conspiracy theories, because the people shameless enough to espouse them can rise to levels of minor celebrity they would’ve been incapable of had they stayed in the mainstream. Andrew Wakefield might be disgraced to the broader scientific community, but he still gets feted and paid for speeches and asked his opinion by enough of a subset of laymen that I imagine he’s probably pretty internally satisfied with his life. Go up a level to the promoters (your Alex Joneses or Kevin Trudeaus) and you can build a media empire and become a household name simply by acting as an amplifier for the always-hot topic of What They Don’t Want You To Know.
That might explain someone promoting anti-vaccine sentiment but it doesn’t really explain someone adopting anti-vaccine sentiment.
We don’t need them to be altruistically working for the benefit of society as a whole, nor do we need to adopt Conflict Theory to claw back “our” wealth from “those” selfish rich bastards. We’ve got over two hundred years of theory and experience on how to channel their greed (and ours) towards the common good, and we know that this almost always leads to better outcomes for just about everyone than does any of the alternatives.
Part of this process does involve laws against e.g. dumping toxic waste in the local water supply, and a thousand other things. If corporations are disobeying those laws, and if this poses a serious problem, then you have clearly made A Mistake. Passing laws that won’t be enforced or obeyed is a classic Mistake. A Mistake theorist can learn from that and try something different. A Conflict theorist can basically only say “Those bastards! Clearly we need more and harsher laws!”, and doubling down on something that didn’t work the last time is likely just going to be another Mistake.
But there’s still a conflict between the lawbreakers and the lawmakers. You’re just abstracting away from the conflict by choosing to consider it as the result of a mistake in the conflict-handling system rather than as a primary motivating force in political economy; but of course the conflict between those who put their personal interests ahead of the group and those who follow group norms predates capitalism by all of human history minus 200 years, so the conflict must be considered primary and the system is just a way of handling that conflict.
Conflict theorists aren’t irrational slavering monsters. They’re capable of saying “here is a conflict, now I wonder what the most rational way to deal with it is.” Violent vs. non-violent protest is a tactical argument that often takes place wholly within conflict-theorist groups. Incrementalism vs. revolution is a strategic debate that conflict theorists often fall into. For those who view political economy as a conflict between rich and poor, very few people are actually saying “let’s just storm the mansions and eat the rich.” Most of us just want to charge them a higher marginal tax rate and use the proceeds to pay for a first-world health care system.
Mistake theory says “if our arguments are strong enough we can convince them to pay more taxes through logic and reason alone.” Conflict theory says, “no, we’re basically just going to have to have the government take some of their money away – using the threat of force, as is the nature of government – and redistribute it.” I think that if you view the historical record you will find that the number of times the rich have voluntarily paid more taxes pales in comparison with the number of times they’ve used loopholes, or even broken the law, to stash their money where the government can’t get it.
Actually, any law at all, if backed by the force of the government, is an exercise in conflict theory. By passing a law, by definition you’re saying “this is something not everyone would agree to do voluntarily no matter how good our arguments are.”
If the State passes a 55-mph speed limit but doesn’t flood the streets with highway patrolmen, and the People nigh-universally drive 70 mph while packing radar detectors, does that represent a fundamental Conflict between the State and the People, or did the state just make a Mistake?
There’s no conflict involved in breaking a law that isn’t being enforced, because it takes two to make a fight. There’s only token conflict in breaking a law that is seeing only token enforcement, and if we’re going to try to make a Conflict vs Mistake distinction, it shouldn’t be over tokens.
This isn’t the conflict you are looking for. Not if you are invoking (first-world) rich people and corporations.
Rich people and corporations, for the most part, follow rich-people group norms. It is in their personal interest to follow rich-people group norms because rich-people group norms are engineered to benefit rich people. Poor people do exactly the same thing w/re poor-people group norms. And the norms that encompass rich and poor alike, most rich people and most poor people generally do follow them.
But poor people declaring a norm for rich and poor alike, doesn’t make it a group norm for the group of rich people. Not even if the poor people are a majority in a democratic society who pass it into law, if they do so without buy-in from the rich community and offer only token enforcement. You don’t get to accuse people of violating group norms for their quietly dissenting from your token gestures. And you’ll rarely see rich people or corporations violating the laws that are being seriously enforced.
Neither? The idea of conflict presumes two groups with opposed interests with the State forming the battleground or the object of contestation between those two groups. Presumably in the case of speed limits it’s “concerned citizens who want people to drive safely” vs. “hurried citizens who want to get where they’re going faster”, with the values in conflict being safety vs. efficiency.
The idea of a “mistake” presumes two groups of people with the same objective, about which one group has more correct information than the other group. Again, the State is merely the organization that carries out whatever the current resolution of the debate happens to be. Mistake theorists are the ones arguing that actually, lower speed limits are more efficient or actually, higher speed limits save lives (I do not endorse or deny either of these arguments, because IANAE) to try to win over the other side.
A conflict is not necessarily a fight. We’re talking about conflict of interests here, like between “safety” and “efficiency.” Someone who drives at an unsafe speed is equally unsafe regardless of what the law is or whether it is enforced or not. Therefore they are “in conflict” with people who perceive their interests to require that others drive slowly/safely.
I don’t think that a group of people, no matter their resources, get to just secede from society and establish their own norms. But it’s immaterial to my point. If rich people and non-rich people are counted as being in the same society, then when the rich don’t act for the benefit of society then other members of society have an interest in stripping them of their wealth and power and redistributing it among people who do act for the benefit of society. On the other hand if rich people are in a whole different society from non-rich people, then non-rich people have an interest in conquering the society of the rich in order to strip them of their wealth and power and redistribute it among people who act for the benefit of society. It’s exactly the same conflict, you’re just analyzing it slightly differently.
Do all societies have an interest in conquering all other societies? Do you see your society as having such an interest? Because other societies have Stuff, and it would be in the selfish interest of your society to take their Stuff and distribute it amongst yourselves.
I think it is a classical Easy Mistake to see other societies only in terms of the Stuff you could take from them and the Conflict that this would generate. But if that’s your take, if it’s always “Look, that other society has Stuff, therefore we are in Conflict because we want to take their Stuff, and that’s no Mistake!”, then that’s a degenerate framing of the potentially useful Conflict vs. Mistake distinction Scott is trying to make.
And if you throw in,
counting even the “conflicts” nobody is bothering to fight over, then yeah, you’re just trying to reshape everything into a conflict, Us against Them.
Some of us, aren’t. That’s the distinction.
No, but clearly large, relatively poor societies have an interest in conquering tiny, ludicrously wealthy societies with no standing army that occupy the same geographical location.
Considering I led with an example of a situation that was not a conflict, this seems like a particularly ill-placed strawman you’re arguing against. I am not “trying” to “reshape” anything into a conflict. I have presented the argument that conflict theory explains why wealthy people evade taxes. Perhaps you would care to present an argument that wealthy people are evading taxes because they just don’t know they’re supposed to pay taxes? Or perhaps they are making some other mistake I haven’t thought of? Or perhaps I am the one who is mistaken, and tax evasion by the wealthy is actually a net social good?
It is obvious to me on its face that rich people who evade taxes to increase their wealth and corporations which break laws to increase their profits do so because of a moral failing rather than an intellectual failing. When the public debates tax policy and the government implements it, many of the people involved are thinking “I’m trying to do the best thing for my country by setting up an appropriate taxation system.” No wealthy person thinks “I’m trying to do the best thing for my country by illegally hiding all of my assets in overseas shell corporations” or whatever. Instead they think “I’m trying to do the best for myself and my family” or “I earned this money fair and square” or “f**k poor people, let all the moochers and the looters die in a fire for all I care” or whatever rich people think. It’s not the same interest pursued by different means; it’s incompatible interests. Hence, conflict theory.
I am guessing that you mean “avoid” not “evade”–take advantage of legal loopholes rather than doing things that are illegal. But either way, what is the moral theory which makes you view rich people who do things (legal or illegal) to hold down their taxes as morally wrong?
Are you assuming that morality is defined by legality–that right and wrong are made by act of Congress? If so, why? Alternatively, is it your view that the existing tax system is inherently just, hence it is wrong to try to pay less than it prescribes? If so, again why?
I used “evade” deliberately because I think there’s a stronger argument that breaking the law to avoid paying taxes is immoral/unethical than that taking advantage of legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes is immoral/unethical.
I don’t believe that moral theory determines peoples’ moral views, so I’d say there is no answer to this question. My alternative proposal is that people render moral judgments on individual questions or situations, then aggregate these into moral views or opinions (such as “murder is wrong” or “people should pay their fair share”) and that moral theories or frameworks are post hoc attempts to explain/rationalize their moral views. Mistake theorists may even try to change people’s minds with reference to moral theories, although I’m not sure I have ever seen this actually work in practice. I think the only way to change people’s moral views is to expose them to numerous situations in which they are prompted to render moral judgments that, upon reflection, turn out to support a moral view different from the one they thought they had. This is why, for example, it’s very hard to get someone to think that it’s okay to be gay by arguing with them on the basis of moral theory, but not so hard if you get them to meet or observe a number of gay people, each of whom they morally judge to be okay.
That being said, it is my moral judgment that a wealthy member of society should give a significant portion of their wealth back to the society in which they live. Obviously if a person gives so much money to charity that their deductions bring their tax burden down to zero, I wouldn’t have a moral objection (this technically “avoids” paying taxes but is not tax evasion). It’s not taxes per se that I think are moral.
However, if I had to put a lower limit on someone’s ethical obligation to give back to society, that limit would be set at that person’s legal tax burden. That amount is the consensus view on what government needs from each person to be able to provide basic public services like infrastructure, education, security, and some amount of social welfare. If a libertarian society finds a way to provide good education without any government action, maybe that tax burden will be lower. I haven’t seen any empirical evidence that this could happen, but if it did I’d be open to it (I say this as someone who works at a private school). Similarly if a technocrat finds a cheaper way to, for example, conduct the Census, or administer VA benefits, or whatever, then I’m entirely comfortable lowering everyone’s tax burden proportionately. But I think it’s obviously inadequate to ask each person to pay only what they’d need to pay in an ideal world governed by perfect technocrats and organized according to perfect libertarian principles. Instead each person should pay what we actually need, right now, to run our society. And given the current state of affairs (inadequate healthcare, food, and housing for millions of Americans) I’d say that the tax burden is actually quite a bit lower than it morally ought to be; but given my knowledge of human behavior I wouldn’t expect anyone to voluntarily pay more taxes than they are asked to pay.
Finally, I sympathize with the view that actually paying taxes is immoral because the government is going to use some of that money to do [thing I think is immoral]. Given that wealthy people have a) a disproportionate influence on policy and b) a disproportionate ability to just exit a society they think is being run immorally, I think that this excuse is much less morally exonerating the more money someone has.
Short of some very difficult and creative accounting, there is no way that most rich people can avoid paying a significant portion of their income in taxes, quite aside from other things they do to benefit the society they live in. Despite lots of rhetoric to the contrary, the federal income tax system is progressive–richer people pay a larger fraction of their income than poorer people.
That’s the part I find puzzling. The tax burden is the outcome of a political process in which lots of different people are trying to get outcomes they want. Some of those people want the government to spend money making food more expensive or jailing people who use drugs or subsidizing what those people are doing. Most of them would prefer that someone else pay for those things, and do what they can to get that result. It isn’t a consensus view and I don’t see where it gets any moral weight from.
But suppose it was. Suppose we took a vote on the total budget and the pattern of taxes and somehow discovered that, in some sense, 51% of the people supported a particular result. Why is that morally binding on me? Doesn’t your argument depend on what is actually necessary to do the things you think government should do, not on what some other people think is necessary? If so, shouldn’t you base your view of the subject on what you believe is true, not on what others believe is true?
I’m missing the “neutral conflict theorist” point of view here. I think “different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites” or to enrich a different elite.
I also think that most people make the mistake of thinking they can stay on top of shifting alliances in these conflicts, but most are in fact to stupid to actually pull it off and are thrown under the bus after the revolution.
This was a very interesting post. I find it especially interesting as somebody whose roots are very much in conflict theory but who has been sympathising more and more with mistake theory with time (partly as a result of reading this blog).
I need to mull this over more, but initial thoughts: I think we need to find the Mistakes and fix them. The way to do this is to use all the tools in the Mistake theorists’ toolbox. But there is a Conflict, which we need to be aware of. There are some people who are fighting for their own material interests, not trying to solve the great Puzzle.
To make this explicit: I think the Question is how to make life better for people. It seems to be more important to help people who are struggling than to help people who are already doing fine. Given the shape of the wealth curve, this is a motivation for redistribution. But some redistribution measures will be mistakes and others will not (EDIT: or perhaps they’re all mistakes). That is, some will actually make things worse for everybody and some will make things better for everybody. This question needs to be answered using the tools of Mistake theorists. We need studies. We need debate. We need new ideas that might achieve the same aims as the old ideas but with fewer drawbacks.
But there *is* a conflict going on. There are some people who are acting in their material interests and not in the aforementioned goal of “making life better for people”. So some poor people will favour redistribution measures that do more harm to society than good because they help “me” and some rich people will oppose redistribution measures that do more good than harm to society because they hurt “me”. And then it gets complicated further because you will have some people making mistakes, so you will get some poor people who favour a redistribution measure that even makes “me” less well-off, but it sounds like it’ll make “me” better off. The libertarians would probably say this is most redistribution measures.
I think the way society has evolved has been through conflict, but the conflict isn’t between “us”, the good and virtuous and “them”, the evil and dangerous. Or at least, not always. The conflicts that drive society are just between “me and people who share my interests” and “them with interests that are opposed to mine”. Maybe it *feels* like you’re fighting evil, but what it really is is a political struggle.
I think this is the important distinction. If you ask “what’s the best way to shape society?” then the answer is all the tools of Mistake theory, but if you ask “why is society the way it is?” then I think Conflict theory does most of the work. We didn’t get to be where we are by loads of powerful philosophers trying to figure out how best to do things and doing it; we got here by a political struggle arising out of the conflicts of interest between different classes.
Wouldn’t it be cool if “people who are acting in their material interests ” actually “made life better for people”.
Capitalism says Hi!!!!
To really hammer the point home.
Capitalism: Pulled 2 billion people out of poverty in the last century…
Marxism: Killed 100 million people in the last century…
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. Marx was one of the most vocal believers in the power of capitalism to increase productivity and prosperity.
And attributing deaths to economic systems and political philosophies is kind of dumb. Like, how many people has “capitalism” killed? What does that question even mean?
(If you were being sarcastic and I just massively missed the point then I apologise!)
It’s very hard to attribute deaths to ideologies or systems – and usually degenerates into cherry picking so you can say “the other guy’s system has killed 200 million people!” or whatever. Usually the math is very dubious, a lot of context is missing (is the decline in starvation worldwide due to capitalism, to communism, to general technological improvement? Is an uptick in starvation somewhere due to capitalism, to communism, to bad luck?)
However, you can far more reasonably attribute deaths to individual leaders or groups of leaders. Take Snyder – he puts Hitler at around 12 million, Stalin at about 10 million. (I’ve seen anti-communists accuse Snyder of counting very low, and communists say that Snyder can’t be trusted because if he was trustworthy, ie a communist, he would just ignore anything Ukrainians have ever said about anything).
The supposed death toll of communism presented by some anti-communists is unbelievably high (ends up looking closer to 40 million than 100), but communists who come up with claims that capitalism has killed such-and-such a number of people depend on claiming that every potentially-preventable death from disease and famine outside of communist territory is capitalism’s fault (as though those things didn’t happen before capitalism came into the world). I remember there was one commenter here who claimed that the Soviet famine in the early 30s was because of capitalism, which seems a wee bit odd.
However, a system the leaders of which more commonly cause mass deaths, is maybe worth looking a bit askance at, and communism has that problem more than capitalism.
When you say 100 million is ‘unbelievably high’ do you mean the evidence makes such a claim look ridiculous or that it is unbelievable that 100 million people could have died under communism?
That the evidence is a bit dubious for 100m and that the people who come up with numbers that high were as much or more propagandists during the Cold War as they were impartial academics.
Getting to 100m involves a high count for Stalin, very high counts for starvation under Mao, counting famine and disease during the 1918-21 civil war (bad shit was going to happen in Russia no matter what following a disastrous war and the collapse of the government) the same as the basically manmade famine in the early 30s (which was due to collectivization and attempts to root out an imaginary Ukrainian conspiracy), etc.
@dndrsn
This is as true as the statement that the people who came up with the 12 million deaths in the holocaust were as much anti-fascist propagandists as they were impartial academics. It’s not false, and they were trying to castigate an ideological system that they found abhorrent, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong. Their figures for the USSR have been largely confirmed by post-USSR research, and god only knows knows how many people starved to death under Mao. 100 million is a nice round figure that, if not precisely correct, is not far off.
@cassander
But the 12m number for Hitler is a low count (it elides the issue of how to divide blame for war deaths) and it isn’t based on post-war inflated commie numbers. It’s not the highest # you could lay at Hitler’s door.
If you take a higher count for Mao, meanwhile (modern Maoists, in my experience, will if you poke them hard enough admit to about 15 million dead; a lot of the more credible estimates sit in the ~30m range) you get to 50m, maybe 60m, but both are closer to 40m than 100m.
@dndrsn
WW2 starts when Nazis and Communists invade Poland so if we’re going to start assign blame for war deaths, the communist toll is going to rise.
Neither is 10-20 million for the USSR. the holocaust figures are quite reliable because german was militarily occupied after the war, and so we could use their documents to measure what they did. The communist scholars in the cold war did not have that benefit, they had to estimate, and the reputable among them were not far off.
If you assume mao got 30 instead of 60, you’re looking more at ~70 million deaths instead of 100, still far more than any other idea in history, still and unspeakably horrific. And the higher numbers for Mao are not implausible.
@cassander
However, western scholars didn’t have access to the places where the vast, vast majority of the Nazi deaths took place. After the USSR fell, estimates tended to fall a bit too, due to better archival access. Also, the Soviets blamed some stuff they did (like Katyn) on the Germans, although these tended to be pretty small numbers (Katyn was 22k, for example) compared to the German mass killings.
With regard to Mao, I just think that he’s more debatable than Stalin, and the death toll that can be laid at his door involves less intentionality. It’s also easier to make the argument that, despite the human cost, in the end the net effect was positive: he took China from a subsistence economy that had just gone through a brutal occupation, and turned it into a feared world power. In comparison, Stalin’s actions played a role in the USSR almost losing the war in 1941.
In any case, regardless of my numbers, my point is that there’s a difference between “this idea killed people” and “this idea enabled awful people to get into power” – personally, I think that the problem is not communism, but revolutionary communism. The vanguard party is a dreadful concept, because the vanguard never hands over power, and the concept of a revolution led by a small cadre leads to dictatorships, and that’s how you get Stalin or Pol Pot or whoever. It should be noted also that the death toll that can be laid at capitalism’s door also involves dictators, in the form of western governments working to overthrow any democratically-elected governments they thought were too left-wing, and replacing them with right-wing dictators.
Shouldn’t WW2 be counted as starting either when Japan invades China (starting the first of the continental wars of the era), or when Germany declares war on the US (linking the two continental wars into a true World War)?
But acknowledging that China was a party to WW2 makes the accounting rather tricky here, because you’ve got a three-way conflict with megadeaths that need to be apportioned to the Communists, the Nationalists, and the Japanese.
It’s rather difficult even to define a starting point for the Chinese theater of WWII. 1937, when the Japanese invaded China proper? 1931, when they invaded Manchuria? 1928, when the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party (previously allies) kicked off the main phase of the Chinese Civil War? 1912, when the Qing Dynasty was overthrown? There was fighting throughout.
There was I believe an official armistice in Manchuria in 1932, making 1937 the start of something new. And there’s always some group of hotheads waving guns around somewhere in the world, so either there’s World War Always (4004 BC – Armageddon), or local insurgencies don’t count as part of a World War.
This went a little above the level of local insurgencies. The amount of shooting varied, but between 1912 and 1928 there was essentially no central authority over most of China, and after that the KMT and the CCP were busy tearing each other to shreds. It’s probably most comparable to the Second Congo War in terms of other 20th century conflicts.
1937 is as good a starting point as any, though.
@dndnrsn
Unfortunately we’ve reached the recursion limit and I’m a little late to the party – but this comment is responding to your first one.
I think this is a very reasonable take on it. There have definitely been disproportionately many preventable deaths (including murders, mass-murders and some but not all famines) under self-described communist leaders than under non-communist ones in the 20th century. I agree that this should cause alarm bells and one should be very careful indeed of supporting communism or Marxism or whatever unless one can say in what ways one differs from those that have gone before and done terrible things.
I think it’s possible to do this. I think the terrible things done by self-described communists and Marxists are not a direct result of their believing in communism/Marxism. (Although I acknowledge my biases in this…)
@dndrsn
No, but they had access to the guys that sent those people to poland to die, and they didn’t come back,
When you take peasants seed grain, and they starve, you are murdering them every bit as much as if you ordered them shot. When you increase grain exports in the face of famine in order to post impressive export figures for propaganda purposes, you’re murdering people.
No he didn’t. China was still a subsistence economy when mao died. It had nukes, but it was still poorer than sub-saharan africa.
There is no other kind. And frankly, an idea that only attracts awful people to it is just as bad as an inherently awful idea.
the toll of such deaths that can be laid at capitalism’s door is multiple orders of magnitude smaller. the worst white terror was the indonesian, which killed a few hundred thousand people, more than every other white terror put together.
@fion
What you are saying is about as plausible as saying that the holocaust wasn’t a result of naziism. The marxists said they were going to liquidate their class enemies, and they did, or tried to. There is a direct, clear line from words to action.
@Cassander
-I think you’re missing something from your first bit.
-how do you value an attempt at accelerated industrialization vs the lives of peasants? Would a leader be justified in saying “well, lots of peasants will die if we do this, but we need to build up a military base ASAP; lots of peasants died when the Japanese were around here too”?
-“having nukes” goes more hand in hand with “feared power” than “high standard of living”.
-I didn’t say communism only attracted awful people. The vanguard party idea, which is horribly flawed, leads to dictators who never hand power over to the proletariat. Dictators are far more likely to do awful shit (in their home countries, at least).
@dndrson
-I think you’re missing something from your first bit.
It doesn’t matter how I value it, because Mao didn’t achieve a meaningful amount of accelerated industrialization.
The results of communist regimes were universally terrible, with no exceptions. And Communism did not just produce run of the mill dictators, it produced several people who might claim the title of the worst dictators in all of history, in pretty very narrow span of years. There are only two possibilities, either there is something awful about the ideology, or the ideology only attracts awful people. You’ve denied the former, which leaves only the latter. Frankly, I don’t care which is more accurate, I suspect it’s both, but either way, the results are awful and no one espousing the ideology should be allowed to be to dog catcher, much less trusted with another country to ruin.
In the case of Mao, the largest number of his victims were almost certainly the peasants who died in the famine during the Great Leap Forward. Peasants were not his class enemies. Unlike the Ukraine famine, which was arguably deliberate, that was an unintentional result of a different bad policy.
I don’t think we will ever know for certain whether Mao realized that millions of people were starving and decided to keep exporting food anyway or whether he was fooled by the false information that the incentive structure he had set up generated and really believed that agricultural output was high enough to permit exports without creating famine.
it wasn’t just a famine, it was a famine combined with requisitions and export of grains. And while peasants were not mao’s class enemies, “rich peasants” definitely were, and that was always who he insisted he was going after.
Frank Dikötter presents compelling evidence that he did know. he might not have known the sheer scale, but he knew that huge numbers were dying.
The majority of deaths in the Ukraine famine were peasants and not the ‘undesirable’ classes, but the famine was caused at least in large part by class warfare against the more productive peasants. We don’t know if Mao intentionally created the famine, but it doesn’t particularly matter, engaging in class warfare caused it. He couldn’t end the famine without repudiating (in action at least) Communism.
Wasn’t China recognized as a world power immediately at the end of the war? The ROC was one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.
He kept the world’s most populous country dirt poor when other countries were getting rich.
One striking statistic: From Mao’s death to 2010, the per capita real GNP of China went up twenty fold.
Certainly. There has been an enormous increase in the Chinese standard of living due to capitalist-ish reforms. Deng Xiaopeng can be credited with initiating some huge increases in real standard of living. But that’s not the same thing as the change of role on the international stage that happened under Mao.
EDIT: And, what countries comparable to China were getting rich at the same time, by adopting free-market reforms?
China’s change in role happened because its civil war ended, but since mao was responsible for one side of that civil war, you can’t exactly give him credit for ending it. he could have just surrendered decades earlier. Had chiang won, china would have undergone a similar shift in geo-political importance.
Depends what you mean by comparable to. The only country with a comparable population was India, and it was running with five year plans and exchange controls and the permit raj.
Countries that were poorer than China in terms of natural resources, most easily measured in population density, would include Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and, except that it wasn’t a country, Hong Kong. All of which did spectacularly better than China with, compared to China, relatively free market policies.
You’re assuming that there’s one, clear, obvious description of “the best”, and that this is knowable equally by everyone. But it isn’t true, and the more fundamental differences there are between the members of the populace (i.e. how “diverse” it is, in ways that matter) the more points of conflict there will be over things that matter. You’re assuming that all right-thinking people are, deep down, just like you and merely need to have the facts explained to them patiently.
One group thinks “the best” schools teach evolution as undisputed fact; another group thinks it “best” if the theory is not brought up at all, or brought up as a controversial opinion perhaps. There’s no “mistake theory” answer to the “best” way to shape the schools in this situation, because the two groups don’t share the same desire for outcomes. The US solution was originally to minimize what the government tried to do– you can’t have a governance conflict over the schools if the government isn’t setting the curriculum– but we can’t seem to agree to go back to that modus vivendi. The European nationalist solution was to break the polities down to reasonably homogenous ethnic groups– everyone spoke the same language, worshiped the same way, sang the same songs to their kids, had the same view of history, etc., and so didn’t likely have a lot of fundamental conflicts– which required either the borders to move to the people, or the people to move to the borders, of course. Temporarily very cruel to Greeks in Turkey and vice versa, et cetera, but it did result in a low-violence end state… and is kind of coming apart at the seams now as migration leads these tacit understandings coming apart. I don’t know of a third answer.
Isn’t that disagreement based on a disagreement about facts for which mistake theory is relevant? If evolution is false, as presumably many opponent believe, then almost everyone should be against teaching it. If it is true, almost everyone for.
Of course, there might be people who believe that even if evolution is false, teaching it is a good way of undermining religion. And there might be people who believe that even if it is true, teaching it is bad because it undermines religion. But even there, the disagreement hinges in part on beliefs about religion–whether it is true and whether believing in it, true or false, has good or bad consequences.
Not exactly, although I see I wasn’t clear about the problem in my comment. Let me try to explain.
Evolution in schools is a specific example of a larger problem. I’m pretty sure everybody wants “the truth” taught in schools. But if it was as simple as just, lay the facts out on the table, this would have been over 100 years ago (if not longer). The problem is, we don’t agree on the ultimate goal of our lives (and our society), nor on the relative weights to give to various sources of authority, nor on how to balance benefits and drawbacks– just to name a few!
So, for evolution. My experience is, the vast majority of the populace doesn’t actually understand the details of evolution. I doubt I’ll get much argument in this crowd about anti-evolutionists not understanding; but I’m always struck by how confused pro-evolutionists can be. For example, they claim that evolution “says” such and such (exactly as creationists say the Bible “says” something). Or they make a moral claim based on evolution, although evolution has no more moral content than F=ma. Or they demand it as unquestionable truth in every living organism– except humans, where it has no role whatsoever, especially with respect to sexual dimorphism. Or they insert a ritual obeisance to evolution in the middle of some totally unrelated conversation (although I’ve noticed that this role has been replaced by the ritual obeisance to AGW, in recent years).
So… something is going on under the surface here. I identify several causes:
1) The vast majority of the populace actually don’t have a grasp of the mathematics and biology behind evolution. They’re “outsourcing” their judgment to authorities they trust– as, in fact, we all have to do for much of our lives. (I can’t independently verify any but a tiny handful of the important things in my life– the efficacy and safety of medical care, my employer’s accounting and tax status, political events I don’t personally witness, etc.) It’s hard-to-impossible to come to a unified agreement on who are the most reliable authorities– and part of the problem is that everybody agreeing to trust the same authorities can enable some truly horrific problems.
2) But that’s not all! A fact is literally a “factum”, something that is constructed in the mind of the thinker, and that process depends on our internal metaphysics and philosophy. We don’t agree on those either. The evangelical finds his experience of the working of the Spirit in his heart and soul to be the single most important “fact” about the universe; but the materialist doesn’t accept this as reality at all!
3) We’re still not done! There’s the question of overall goals, and how to balance competing goods against each other, or how to resolve asymmetric rewards (good for me, bad for you). In schools, this might show up as things like: how much deference should the school show to the parents’ authority over their children? How much “general” education, versus vocational education, should be targeted? Should the schools teach ethics at all (and is that even practically possible)? Or maybe a “minimum set” of ethics, such as “sportsmanship”, “academic ethics/honor code”, “citizenship”, etc. (and what would those be)? Is academic tracking a good thing, because it allows smart kids to achieve more, or is it a bad thing, because it short-sheets kids who are already facing a challenging situation? And on, and on.
Given all of this, it’s not surprising that we end up with a chronic jam when we try to “reason” with each other over these hot topics, if we don’t already start out at a high level of agreement on our worldview, goals, values, etc. and a general agreement on the trustworthiness of various authorities or data sources. The “melting pot” or “assimilation” concept is, effectively, imposing a minimum set of philosophy, metaphysics, and shared facts on the populace sufficient to support the level of government intrusion into their lives. Less intrusion = less need for imposition, and I’m in favor of it. But it’s not going to “just happen”… even if you talk real slow to those morons over there about Daaaarrrrrwiiiiinnnnnn….
I agree with your general point, and have made the same argument in the past with regard to both evolution and AGW. Almost everyone is working on second hand information, so it depends what sources you trust.
Incidentally, not only does almost nobody on either side understand evolution, almost nobody on either side of the AGW dispute understands the greenhouse effect. For some evidence … .
No I’m not. Finding “the best” is in two parts: choosing a question and finding the answer to that question. My question is an essentially utilitarian one: “how do we make life better for people?” For people who disagree with my question, we’re never going to agree on the answer.
The more interesting case is where people broadly agree that the question is the right one but disagree on the answer. But there’s no surprises that we disagree on the answer, because it’s an incredibly hard question! We need to debate and experiment and hopefully limp towards some kind of common answer. It’s not clear nor obvious.
Don’t we all wish… but no. I’m an engineer. Defining what “the best” means, what measurements to take and how to cope with noise and error, and in fact whether we should be even aiming for “the best” at all (vs. the “good enough, and iterate as needed”)– is the single most important part of the project, even if it’s a $5 widget. Not getting everyone on the same page at the beginning for these types of questions is the #1 cause of failure in R&D. And object design is very simple compared to the “big” societal questions we’re talking about.
I recently had a friend of mine very vigorously argue US immigration policy from the perspective of “What Would Jesus Do?” But to an atheist, WWJD isn’t even a thing, let alone the most important benchmark of the rightness (or righteousness) of the policy. My friend was sincerely trying to answer the question, how do we make life better for people? But “better”, to her, is inextricable from the image of Jesus separating the sheep from the goats at the final judgment, and herself really needing to go to the right, with the sheep. Atheists… have probably ground another layer of tooth enamel off already. But they’ll come up with a different definition of “better”, which may very well be morally disgusting to my friend (who will, of course, then see them as actively seeking to maximize the vileness of the situation).
Also, who are “the people” to be bettered? Americans? Every human currently alive? Future generations? Poor people? Me and my family only? How would you measure it? And how do you rank choices which help some, hurt others (i.e. all decisions, more or less)? There’s no SI unit for these things, there’s no objective measurement. It’s a category error to think you can treat this as a math problem, when it’s Calvinball game.
I think we’re speaking slightly at cross-purposes. I think we agree that there are two problems and that they’re of different classes: one is defining “the best”, deciding the objectives, asking the “question”, whatever; the other is computing “the best” based on our definition, meeting the objectives and answering the “question”
We also agree, I think, that the tools you need to approach both sides of the problem are different ones.
I was interested to hear your opinion that the first part (defining objectives) is the biggest cause of problems in R&D.
But what I wanted to emphasise is that for big societal questions, the second part (meeting objectives) is so incredibly hard that even if you manage to agree entirely with somebody’s “questions” (and I accept that this is very far from trivial) then you’ll still be likely to disagree on answers.
Hanson’s “Elephant in the Brain” touches on this ambiguity. We make a lot of mistakes, but many of those “mistakes” happen to help our coalition in whatever conflict we’re in.
Count me in the “this is obvious” camp – although I wouldn’t phrase it so dismissively, this is probably the best description of it I’ve ever seen. I find it such a great source of frustration because it, by itself, is more responsible for the sad state of public debate than anything else.
It’s uniquely hard to deal with because not only do the parties misunderstand each other’s communications, they disagree fundamentally about the reasons they’re even talking.
Disclosure: On an emotional level, I hate “conflict theorists”. My id thinks the dichotomy described isn’t so much any old way to categorize people as the very difference between Good and Evil.
But that doesn’t mean they are wrong. As in, not totally wrong on a factual level.
Mistake theory vs. conflict theory seems a textbook case of two complementary (but believed to be substitutes) partial narratives, two different stories you can tell about the same phenomenon by focusing on different aspects and connecting the dots differently (like drawing two different and partially overlapping constellations in the night sky).
It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that examples of both exist: there are certainly zero-sum conflicts, but also plenty of problems that are failures of rationality and system design.
The question is which one of the two narratives you prefer, because even if you on some level understand that both of them have valid points it’s still incredibly hard to keep both in mind at the same time. They sort of interfere with each other. It feels like a contradiction even if it isn’t one, strictly speaking. Therefore you’ll resolve the cognitive dissonance by having one of them represent the “fundamental truth” and the other as a “corrective” to account for the noise that doesn’t quite fit*.
While some subscribe to only one narrative, most admit that correctives exist when not in the heat of battle. The important difference is which one you’ll put first, as that will determine how you act most of the time, whenever nuance and charity is less than maximal.
That in turn depends on where in time, space and context you’re situated (and what your personal characteristics are). In other words, depending on what parts of reality you come on contact with and how you interpret them, you’ll put one or the other first**.
What I’m saying is that it’s not necessarily degree of truth or validity that makes mistake theory better than conflict theory (because I do think it is). Truth and validity for something this vague is going to be heavily dependent on local conditions and personal interpretations.
No, what makes mistake theory “better” is consequences. When we act as though mistake theory is true, things tend to get better. When we don’t consider naked power plays acceptable it becomes more difficult to pull them off. When we expect civil servants not to be corrupt it becomes easier to shame them when they are (and the corrupt are less drawn to civil service). When we expect people to be charitable and rational in debate it raises the costs of not being so. The price is eternal vigilance etc. etc.
Ideologies do kind of reshape the world in their image – to the extent that it’s possible – which is why the “best” ideologies are practical but not cynical, optimistic but not utopian. Historically, when conflict theory gets to define the way politics is done, things turn to shit (or Mountains of Skulls).
To be plain: cooperation is better than defection, and going around saying “hey there is lots of defecting going on, therefore I’m going to defect and so should everyone else on my side” is antisocial behavior that amounts to a deliberate destruction of social capital (the good response is to try to change things so defecting gets comparatively harder and less profitable).
But I have to admit that it is a rational course of action if you believe that your enemy is already defecting all the time and won’t ever change. There really is no reasoning with someone who believes that. Sometimes that’s even right, and it often was in premodern times. But it’s rarely the case in modern democracies, and if you truly believe that there is no positive-sum processes to nurture and develop, they you are probably under the spell of a destructive ideology.
*I wrote this model down first in a comment here about a year ago and fleshed it out in an article last month and I’ve been sort of stuck on applying it to everything since then.
**I might be way off here, but I wonder if not academics and politicians could be more prone to conflict theory than businesspeople because their everyday experience is less characterzed by positive-sum exchanges. Idk.
Very well said!
Addendum
Reading through the other comments made me think that there really are two separate dichotomies here, not just one, and that I was a little confused about which one the original post was talking about. If “mistake theory” means to believe that policy questions have a correct answer then I’m not one of those, not emotionally and not rationally. It’s obvious that that isn’t the case. We also can’t and shouldn’t act as if that was true.
The other dichotomy (where my id really does hate the other side, ironically) is between two kinds of preferred conflict resolution. “Mistake theorists” are right that some conflicts can be resolved by making everybody better informed, but this is far from all cases. Often people do have different values and then the relevant issue becomes how to resolve these conflicts. One of them is to treat a conflict as a war where the other side should be defeated, the other is to treat it as a business negotiation and compromise. The second, however, requires that you see the other side as basically legitimate. And this, I think, has something to do with “mistake theory”. Not like thinking that the other side is mistaken and not evil. Neither of the two, because both of them presupposes that there is a right/good side and that you’re on it. Instead it requires recognizing that they have a different viewpoint and set of values that you might not even understand because it isn’t expressible in familiar terms. You need to have a similarly open, charitable and inquisitive attitude to values as a mistake theorist does about facts to be able to empathize with an alien other party in a conflict-theoretical situation. This in order to achieve an amicable solution that builds long term social capital.
Basically, there is a certain moral humility that accepts the conflict theory as broadly true but approaches it with a mistake theorist’s rationality and openness. What truly bad is to refuse to engage with a viewpoint before you can understand it well enough to empathize with why it makes sense to the person that holds it. Then of course you can disagree, and forcefully. Even fight.
+1, and ‘practical but not cynical, optimistic but not utopian’ is where I thought Scott was going in Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons, which I was reading as an argument for mistake over conflict for as long as you can manage it:
(As in, I think I was reading that bit specifically as a reply to someone like Mike Travers at Omniorthogonal, who is always pointing out that rationalists ignore the conflict side, saying no, really, I’m going with mistake for a reason. But maybe that was all in my head.)
Following on whateverfor‘s observations, I think “conflict theory” is often upstream of “mistake theory” . Conflict theory is treated very skeptically here, but viewing political disagreements through this lens does not seem to lead to less accurate predictions about the world.
I think a stronger version of conflict theory recognizes that antagonistic interests exist, and that uncompromising and irrational players often have an advantage in negotiations. Conflict theorists also appear to expect most people to leverage power asymmetries in their favor as a first step, and rationalize afterward. Rational players might be expected to adopt an uncompromising (“irrational”, “emotional”) stance at certain points in the space describing their relative power vs. relative interest in an issue (I would replace “evil” with “interested” to describe the opposition of the focal group – I don’t think assigning particular character traits to the outgroup is a necessary part of conflict theory).
I am influenced by the book The Dictator’s Handbook, where the authors demonstrate that some seemingly wicked problems can be ameliorated by changing the power distributions within society, moving the problem from the conflict to the mistake space (to adapt the book’s ideas to the framework we are discussing here).
I’d expect that you would find a lot of “conflict” types among the politically naive, but also among those interested in political or social meta-structures.
What would the conflict theorist argument against the Jacobite piece look like? Take a second to actually think about this. Is it similar to what I’m writing right now – an explanation of conflict vs. mistake theory, and a defense of how conflict theory actually describes the world better than mistake theory does? […] No. It’s the Baffler’s article saying that public choice theory is racist, and if you believe it you’re a white supremacist.
The Jacobite article was written partially in response to the Baffler and Jacobin articles; the Jacobin article was a review of The Captured Economy. Because of this chronology, I’m not sure imagining the Baffler article as a response rather than a precedent is a good representative of conflict theory thinking. Both the Jacobite and Baffler pieces are shot through with hard and degenerate conflict theory thinking, although I agree with Jacobite article and the thesis of The Captured Economy on the underlying issue. The thesis argued by The Captured Economy – the originator of this chain of pieces – fits well with hard conflict theory.
I think the danger of misunderstanding or weak-manning conflict theory is that it leads to an equilibrium where normative-degenerate conflict theory is the dominant strategy for everyone. This is a real “A Man for All Seasons”-style dilemma.
This if definitely an important point. Thoughts:
* Neither side is 100% right here. Both mistake and conflict theorists are right and reality is a combination. I know it sounds bland.
* Trumpism / alt-right is is very conflict theory, just like Marxism. You touched on this, but it’s worth emphasizing. This is not a left-vs-right issue. Mainstream economists, centrist Democrats and libertarians (excluding some extremes) are mistake theorists.
* Scott says this blog has been pure mistake theory. That may be sort of true for Scotts posts, but the comment section has lots of conflict theory. As a random example, some time ago a commenter said he wanted to run for a local elected office, hoping to use rationalist thinking to run things well. The replies basically scolded him for thinking someone like him has any right to represent average Americans.
I would agree that alt-right is conflict theory based, but you’re wrong about Trumpism.
Trump is always dealing, he’s never working a zero sum game. But he often hides this dealmaking with a front of conflict. The conflict front is to put the adversaries he needs to make deals with off balance to increase his chances of a better deal.
The media is failing to understand this, and you can see their confusion in their response to Trump.
This doesn’t seem right to me. I think there is some descriptive validity to the idea that Trump’s personality creates conflict, disruption, and uncertainty. Sometimes this uncertainty can yield results. But that is different than saying he acts with intention in pursuit of a long-term strategic goal (at least in this phase of his life, where he has transitioned from being a businessman to being a professional celebrity with some business interests). His interest now is purely image and ego-management, hence his addiction to the cable news cycle and spin wars. Unless his strategic thinking is so deep that he is method-acting as an unstable narcissist in his private life.
How do you reconcile this with his tremendous success in business (the Trump empire), media (The Apprentice), and politics (The Presidency itself)? If he wasn’t engaged with reality at its basest level, but rather lurching around in a random narcissistic-walk, it seems unfathomable that he could defeat so many absolutely-formidable opponents in so many arenas. There are lots of narcissists out there, I don’t think someone’s level of narcissism has much to do with their grasp on reality, mistake-theory, and conflict-theory.
This has reminded me of something I began to realise around Terry Pratchett’s death, which is that most of my philosophical instincts (rather than learned specifics) seem to come from Pterry’s work. And a significant portion of that work is spend examining, very gently and without ramming it down the (assumed child or adolescent) reader’s throat, exactly this idea; that there are people who see the world as being in permanent conflict between “Good” and “Bad”, and people who see it as a mass of arguments over object and meta level issues, and that to a limited degree both are correct but that the truth is that the world is a mass of arguments shot through with good people and total shits and everything in-between.
So reading this wasn’t a particularly big surprise. I think if I have to point to the source of a lot of my own confusion about Conflict Theory vs Mistake Theory, it’s that the basis of the Conflict is capable of changing with astonishing rapidity and that my own understanding (and that of others) of what the Conflict end of the debate are doing can get left behind extremely fast. Looked at from that angle, the perceived insanity of the culture wars can be read as a sustained mistake (of course) about what exactly the self-identified “enemy” were engaging in a conflict about. SJWs and Alt-Righters make a whole lot more sense when seen through the same lens as the grand conflicts of previous generations. Turns out “arguments are soldiers” has even more potency when half or more of your society thinks it’s at war.
An example of a quintessential Terry Pratchett “conflict” and “mistake” characters, take Rincewind and Twoflower, from The Color of Magic (his first discworld book) and The Light Fantastic (his second?).
To begin with, they completely talk past each other, and have no respect for each other’s ideas. “Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant ‘idiot’.”
Eventually, forced into close proximity for long enough, Rincewind develops an appreciation for how Twoflower’s general sense that anything bad or even out of place can be solved if we all just talk about this like adults–that general sense generates a kind of positive force field for Twoflower, where people just seem to get along when he’s around. Twoflower also develops a sort of appreciation for Rincewind’s much better ability to sniff out and avoid situations of dangerous conflict (and frankly, Rincewind is always afraid of something), to the point where Twoflower knows that a situation that genuinely *doesn’t* scare Rincewind is probably the safest place to be, even if he doesn’t know why.
Only stupid people aren’t conflict theorists because it would be a really stupid mistake to be otherwise. There are really few people who are not conflict theorists. They just disagree about who is being the most dishonest and the correct strategic response to it. The shouty-dick-people happen to be the people with my least favourite strategic response (currently at least). However, their strategy is in large part because a) they know deep down that they can’t win the intellectual argument; and b) their claimed goals are not their real goals. I have a conflict theory for them, I bet most people reading this article do too.
I really think this article weak mans the left and socialism by effectively equating it with the shouty-dick-people. It opens up with examples of conflict theory as the things that conflict theorists ignore:
“You’ll never hear the terms ‘principal-agent problem,’ ‘rent-seeking,’ or ‘aligning incentives’ from socialists.”
Yet the conflict theorists are conflict theorists for exactly these reasons. They are distrustful of politicians in a capitalist society because they believe there is a principle agent problem. They see academics as seeking rents, getting paid for their consent to the status quo. They absolutely think that the incentives of capitalists are not well aligned with the incentives of the workers. They are explicit about this.
Conflict theorists believe are mistake theorists about changing society. They believe it is hard and that it is a mistake to think that we can rely on capitalist funded institutions to provide the answers to how we ought to improve the workers’ lot. They think it is a ludicrous mistake to believe research is not laced with the propaganda and interests of those funding it. And if you talk with any of the many many socialists I know, this is exactly the answer they will give you. They won’t tell you to shut up and stop being a racist. They will tell you that you are making a mistake. They will try to explain your mistake to you.
I mean come on, we are talking about people like Chris Dillow, Ken Macleod, Charlie Stross, John Roemer, Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert, Ursula Le Guin (RIP), Jerry Cohen, and so on. These are not people who shy away from engaging intellectually with the arguments of those supporting capitalism. In no way are these people comparable to the shouty-dick-people.
Yet these people are definitely conflict theorists 1) they believe that we have to be suspect of the motives behind the information that people provide; 2) they believe we have to be suspect of people deceiving themselves in their own interest; 3) They believe that we need to struggle if you want the narrative that serves our interests to be heard over the narrative of others; 4) they seriously underestimate (IMHO) the difficulty of making society work even moderately well.
Now of course, you might just say that they are not real conflict theorists because they are not shouty-dick-people. However, if that’s the case I don’t know why we want to introduce a new term like conflict theorists when we already have the perfectly good descriptor of shouty-dick-people.
What you're missing is that in modern discourse (so not always on this blog, but too often even here), ‘socialist’ means ‹person who advocates a state intervention that I disagree with›, ‘Marxist’ means ‹out-of-touch academic postmodern theorist›, and ‘leftist’ means ‹person who posted something stupid on social media›. None of the people that you mention qualifies.
On a more serious note:
:–( I missed that news.
How do people with that viewpoint explain the observation that the universities, especially the elite universities, are the most solidly left-wing part of the society, at least in the U.S.?
They consent to the liberal status quo, which is different from the left-wing thought.
I think most people are not really one or the other, but apply them in different situations; and the most common way to do so is to be a Mistake Theorist when it comes to your erstwhile allies, while being a Conflict Theorist when it comes to your enemies. For example, this is how a normal progressive (at least, normal by the standards of my own experience in progressive circles) usually views a Communist, as opposed to a Trumpist.
Why not both?
We are making lots of mistakes in policy because both political and economic elites benefit from these ‘mistakes’. In addition the problems are themselves hard so collective action on pushing for the best policy is difficult.
Take marijuana legislation in the UK. Our government threw out their own experts recommendations.
Why? Because the politicians are ideologically opposed to recreational drugs (mistake), because alcohol companies donate to their party (conflict) or because their voting base will be outraged if they seem to be ‘soft on crime’ and the alcohol companies buy adverts in the newspapers that inform this outrage (mistake & conflict).
But politicians can be motivated by all of the above. So both mistake and conflict theory can be correct.
Also to add that anyone who thinks that the Left doesn’t use the phrase “rent-seeking” hasn’t been around UK politics for the last 20 years.
I would like to quote Thomas Hobbes here, demonstrating a hardcore Conflict perspective.
“For I doubt not but, if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, ‘that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square,’ that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Also – part-time Marxist here. Marx was definitely not just a conflict theorist and Marxism includes a large current of mistake theory. Marx did a ton of work on economic theory which was aimed at rationally arguing that a better understanding of economic processes would reveal the injustice in the exploitation of labor by capitalists. Marx’s “Capital” is not exactly a polemic designed to arouse the passions. Marx clearly thought that an enhanced understanding of capitalism and of the material conditions that it produced would induce social change, even if the process of that change would inevitably take the form of class struggle.
Later Marxists further developed the mistake-theory side of Marxism especially in response to the failure of communism to result in a workers’ utopia. For example, Marxism accounts for the fact that the working classes do not unite, rise up, and seize the means of production once and for all by noting that ideology and false consciousness – i.e. two mistakes – prevent proletarian solidarity.
This clicks for me, I grew up seeing something similar but I always thought in terms of different labels.
I’m very much on the mistake side when it comes to automatic ways of thinking, so much so that people scold me for assuming that those around me are simply mistaken when they’re genuinely malicious.
Some of the comments are going “well, if you slit the world up into groups then that’s just conflict-view” but I’d argue against that. I wouldn’t have labeled it conflict vs mistake, rather science-type vs religious-type.
Growing up there were quite obviously a lot of people who were quite fundamentally disinterested in what’s actually true/false and in whether numbers add up or whether there’s evidence certain events actually physically happened. There’s, quite verifiably, a large fraction of the population who quite literally believe that the world is locked in a literal struggle between good and evil with a literal glowing ball of goodness on one side and a literal glowing ball of evil and badness on the other. Because they’ll outright tell you this to your face. You’d have to be pretty hard headed to ignore what they’re saying very straightforwardly and assume they actually see the world the same way you do.
And of course there’s lots of different groups who all disagree about what things are on the glowing good balls side and which are on the blood red evil glowing balls side.
Then you come across people who’ve rejected the idea of the gods and daemons but are now absolutely certain that the world is locked in a struggle between a ephemeral glowing ball of goodness [their ideology] and some insidious, malicious ephemeral glowing ball of evil.[anyone who opposes them]
I don’t see these groups as evil or bad. They’re pretty much orthogonal. But I have to remember that they fundamentally don’t care about numbers, physical reality and true vs false. They’ve mostly already decided and if it turns out that something they’ve consigned to the malicious red glowing orbs side of the field is likely physically/factually true and I’m foolish enough to be the messenger telling them this then they’ll decide I’m on the side of the Malicious Glowing Ball of Evil. (MGBoE) Pretty much like I have to remember that if I get between a cow and her calf or a mother bear and her cubs she might freak out and murder me. That doesn’t make the cow evil.
They follow the same patterns, typically involving holistic views where anything bad or which goes against their morality code strengthens/empowers/etc the MGBoE while following their morality codes will strengthen/empower the Glowing Ball of Goodness (GBoG). Because literally everything is viewed as part of the same conflict heretics doing the wrong things with their genitals are viewed as part of the reason for hurricanes and manspreadding in LA is part of why girls get sold into sex slavery in Thailand.
I strongly suspect that I’m gradually putting myself into more and more of a bubble of mistake theory worldview people. It manifests in the type of fiction I like. Mistake theory authors tend to write stories where, once the solution to The Problem is found it becomes a matter of implementing it.
Idiocracy is a very mistake-theory worldview story. The nightmare world is one where everyone has literally lost the ability to solve their problems but there’s no shadowy evil cabal or force causing the problem. Most people are idiots but they’re mostly extremely nice idiots who mean well. Once the solution is identified it just becomes a matter of convincing people who then unite to solve it, even the president steps down when he realises there’s someone better able to do his job.
it also manifests in the way problems are solved in fiction: Mistake-worldview, someone has to figure it out and work hard to solve it. Conflict: once the hero Believes Hard Enough with their friends united behind them and any judus is rooted out the villain will be defeated.
I’ve always thought of this as the judging vs. perceiving difference in the Myers-Briggs types.
But honestly, neither one is complete. There’s not much point in publishing the perfect solution to all our problems in Journal of Policies That Will Never Be Implemented. On the other hand, there have been plenty of situations where the revolutionaries won and then millions starved (Mao’s Cultural Revolution comes to mind) because running a civilization is actually kind of complex.
To nitpick, no one (or very few people) starved during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of people didn’t die (or at least not of non-natural causes), it was more on the order of tens of thousands. You’re thinking of the Great Leap Forward.
I didn’t read through this yet but just to respond to this:
Counter-example: http://mattbruenig.com
Also his organization: https://peoplespolicyproject.org/
I really appreciate this post.
I wrote my masters thesis a while back about different kinds of writing “from persecution”, i.e. writing about the conflict between you and The Man or whatever. The two archetypal modes I discussed I called “complaint” and “refusal”. Complaint would stress common ground, i.e. “We have a disagreement but we can potentially solve it if I lay out my perspective and you respond.” Meanwhile refusal would stress difference rather than commonality, i.e. “We are never going to see eye-to-eye on this, and my act of writing is more about self-expression than any submissive attempt to convince you.” I think these concepts map pretty reasonably onto mistake theory and conflict theory respectively.
I bring it up because I find the “hard mistake” position compelling too, but am also conflicted. Because in my thesis, I was writing about these very personal perspectives which, while politically charged, were not exactly political utterances. And what I found was that in that context, speaking the language of your (perceived) persecutor makes it feel like they have automatically won. Breaking away from that, doing something deliberately less comprehensible to them, is self-affirming on some level.
So on a meta-level, I understand trying to be generous to others, recognise that they’re probably mistaken rather than malicious, etc. But I think a way to see the conflict perspective on things is to look at it from a more individual point of view. Of course I view the government/racists/communists/my dad as The Enemy; they did x! I think part of the deciding issue here is whether or not you tend to view politics as part of your personal identity.
+1
My psychotherapist-like instinct in all these cases is to bring the implicit difference/conflict to the surface and make it explicit. Like “I don’t talk to you in your terms because I don’t find your ideology that gives meaning to those terms legitimate”. That’s at least something that can be addressed. By going up meta-levels until we find common ground, or at least mutual understanding, we could potentially defuse many conflicts and start working on solutions/compromises.
However, as a general rule, addressing your interlocutor as a human being with whom you actually want to talk is not negotiable.
Btw: can I see your thesis?
Yeah, I struggle to separate what I find permissible or admirable on a personal level from what I would think about the same behaviour on a political level. Like even just with trivial stuff; aesthetic militancy and strong, uncharitable opinions on e.g. art and media can draw me in on a personal level, but on the level of theory and politics, this kind of thinking is poison. Odd to think about.
And sure you can. It’s a literature thesis and somewhat pomo, be forewarned.
Same about the art and media thing. I’ll have a look at the thesis, it sounds interesting and I’m up to at least medium pomo-tolerance by now.
This is a questions of approach to a specific debate or discussion as opposed to an innate property of an individual.
If you think someone on the other side is a conflict theorist then that simply means you have no effective grounds for communication on this topic.
It generally takes someone who believes almost the same as you for you to have a mistake based discussion, otherwise you will quickly fall to conflict based discussion as you don’t have enough common perspective.. so are at conflict. This seems like a natural behaviour to stop us wasting our time and mental effort.. not to mention it protects against insanity becoming contagious.
It is a tale of the degeneration of debate as opposed to a particular group of peoples debating style.
IMHO.. if you find yourself frustrated by conflict based people “on the other side” then you need to find friends of your own that disagree with you on this topic and discuss it with them instead, those are the only people you have any hope of influencing (those you can have mistake based discussion with).
Maybe one thing we could do better is analysing who is having conflict based discussion and who is having mistake based discussion – this graph would represent a scale of opinion on a given topic. while that would be cool and interesting enough you could also see breaks in the chain and reason on that.. e.g. (warning over simplification of red hot topic coming) *maybe* the people having mistake based discussion on the climate change denial side of the debate have no link the mistake based discussion on the climate change believer side.. and maybe you can find a personal motive for all on the denial side (within the mistake based bubble on that side).. but not on the believing side.. therefore you can reason that you are going to ignore the deniers as they have ulterior motive that cannot find common ground with anyone who doesn’t have something to loose/gain personally.
(note this is written from the perspective of me knowing what i am talking about for brevity.. in reality i have no idea)
First : thank you for this post, it makes me see lot of conflicting views way more clearily.
I think you make a mistake in seeing mistake vs conflict as rational vs emotional though ; to me is it more technocrat vs politics, or global optimum vs Pareto front.
When you are a mistake theorist you believe there is The Best Solution somewhere ; even if this solution is hard to find, if it materialized by magic, everyone would recognize it as The Best because there is a universal, unequivocal way to measure and compare solutions.
When you are a conflict theorist you believe that it is very rare to find a solution that is better than another one in every single aspect. That depending on the measure you use (i.e., the values that matter to you), the order can change. That to improve in an area means to have it worst in another. That you have to make trade-offs.
I feel uncomfortable with the examples given for conflict-thoery vs. mistake-theory, it givevs the impression the first is marxist & blue tribe whereas the second is red & grey tribe.
The post may have started off from trying to explain a hypothetical marxist’s point of view but it bears keeping in mind that for any non-marxist conflict need not be restricted to class. Lifting this restriction it makes things a bit less forced and allows as to apply conflict theory to traditional difference of opinion like religious-atheist or plain old cultural them-us.
I subscribe to the view that democracy is a non-violent method to manage power struggles (I think this has a name, but I forgot it).
If a person really wants more x they can go to the voting booth and hope to effect the election results or become and activist to effect policy, if someone with money and power wants more y they can pay for an ad campaign, donate to a candidate expecting some payoff or straight-out bribe officials without resorting to private armies, sessions or coups.
This sounds much more like conflict-theory but the thing with power struggles is that they usually aren’t a battle-royale, there are groups united around a common goal and alliances of groups with overlapping values and within each group and alliance some policy-deciding mechanism needs to be found, and in any such mechanism mistake-theory will dominate.
According to my view conflict theory and mistake theory are not so much competing models to explain the same situation but different strategies that are used according to the goal. where most political groups have both types and even the same people exhibiting multiple behaviors. Imagine a group composed of only conflict-theorists, how would they approach internal conflicts? by splintering into hundreds of subgroups or a dictatorship forcing the one-true-variant down on all.
Imagine a group capable only of mistake-theory, I don’t see a quick way in which they self-destruct. But any real difference of values between members would result in endless “debate” which can never be settled because their model doesn’t include this possibility. Perhaps less absurdly, I would expect them to lose ground often because they treat opponents(people with different values and goals) and foolish allies when they are neither one or the other.
>I feel uncomfortable with the examples given for conflict-thoery vs. mistake-theory, it givevs the impression the first is marxist & blue tribe whereas the second is red & grey tribe.
Vox Day makes a great example of a right-wing conflict theorist.
Conflict theory rang pretty true for me here, right up until it didn’t, when the way to save the world was increasing passion. From then on, mistake theory sounded better. I think a large number of Yellowstone supervolcano presentations are actually just convenient obfuscations, rather than pure exertions of intelligence aimed at hard problems. An intelligent People might see through some of those presentations and organize like the majority they are, but without ‘forming mobs and smashing things’.
It seems like the way to engage conflict theory is to declare that conflict theorists are horrible people who are trying to make things worse. Saying they are wrong rather than evil is just taking a mistake theorist perspective.
Scott mostly talks in terms of leftist conflict theorists, with an occasional nod to the existence of libertarians, when clearly the problem is that conflict theorists are right wing shills. The American right has a long tradition of arguing against experts, professors, “elites,” climate scientists, etc. Even if you are making a conflict argument from the left, you are supporting the frame of the people who are saying that reasoned argument is just something effete elites use to help the gays undermine right-thinking society. Conflict theory is a tool of the oppressors.
Am I doing it right?
…isn’t public choice a form of conflict theory though? I’m not sure you’re cleaving at the joints here…
I also don’t know how well Marxists fit into this. Keep in mind actual Marxists are hardcore materialists. Marx’s explanations of the relation between capital and governance for example would be “mistake theory” under this classification. They have absolutely no interest in cultural or moralistic nonsense.
Let me offer an unifying theory:
There are two different process going on. One from policies to consequences and another one from consequences to a measure of “goodness” — how much those consequences fit preferences.
Mistake theorist care deeply about the first process. They want to correctly predict how the policies map to the consequences. They are trying to create an accurate predictive model of reality. So they welcome different points of view, they seek the expertise and intelligence. They (correctly) think that having an accurate policy model is hugely important for any given preference.
Conflict theorist (correctly) point out that the process from policies to consequences is not that important and that preferences are the driving force behind policy. They point out that the intentions behind laws are often different from what lawmakers publicly claim. They point out that the preferences driving policy should be a reflection of the People’s, but than more often than not they mirror the Elite’s. They point out that individual preferences are not really subject to debate. They point out that debating policy details cedes the point of what the preferences should be. They want to stop others from speaking because the preferences of different groups are naturally in opposition.
Conflict and mistake theorist are debating the same thing, the path from policies to “goodness”, but they are having two different conversations. The thing is that they are both right. A simple analogy would be to say that mistake theorist are trying to design the best bus, while conflict theorist are saying that it doesn’t matter how good the bus is; if the driver wants to go to Florida we are going to Florida, better to just change the driver.
Tribalism comes in the theory because most people care very little about most outcomes. Most people are just not that invested on whether gays can marry or not, for example. But most people care very much about belonging, so their preferences are a reflection of what they believe are the preferences of other people in their communities (sports, religion, neighborhood, etc). A few people care very deeply about some outcomes and they are very loud about, so it seems to others like this is the preferred outcome of the whole community and other people adopt it.
I think that was a valiant attempt, but I don’t think that it’s going to charm too many Marxists. There is still a heavy undertone of “they are hatefilled fanatics who refuse to acknowledge that my brain is much bigger than theirs.” :p I do have to assign bonus points for the “expert comes running with PowerPoint presentation about how the Yellowstone supervolcano is going to explode if we don’t kick some more puppies” visual, though, because, yeah, whether it’s true or not that is in fact what it feels like a lot of the time.
For the record, I think I subscribe to an even-more-cynical version of conflict theory. I don’t believe that people deceitfully profess to believe whatever serves their self-interest. I don’t even believe that people genuinely convince themselves of whatever serves their self-interest. I believe that people genuinely convince themselves of whatever seems the most cool to them.
There is a self-serving bias in that, because a lot of people do think it’d be really cool if they were the best sort of people in the world, but almost as many people seem to go in the opposite direction and decide that it would be really cool if there were some other group of people who were better, smarter and more moral than themselves that they could heroically martyr themselves to support. People are diverse in their estimations of coolness.
So if I understand correctly, you’re saying that reason we don’t have Marxists here is because Marxists are the ur-Conflict-Theorists, and around here is Mistake Theory Central?
It seems to me more like pretty much everyone, or at least everyone who argues on Facebook and Twitter, is pretty far into the territory of viewing their opponents as not just mistaken but evil.
Aaaaand I’m already buried between dozens of “I’m a [conflict / mistake] theorist and everyone who isn’t sucks because…” posts. Damn. (just kidding, guys, I love you all)
Re: “How useful is this?”, I think these kind of articles are very useful to me even if they describe ideas I’m already aware of, because they help me index things. Not only do I know X, I know that X is important and how to judge things based on X, if that makes sense.
Also, if I ever write Star Wars fanfiction, it will feature Conflict Theory vs Mistake Theory, like, super super super heavily.
Star wars is pretty much already like that. The two “theories” map onto the light side and dark side pretty cleanly in the way the jedi are supposed to keep their cool at all times and not have personal attachments or interests while the sith ethos is more “let the hate flow through you… *use* your anger [to become more powerful and achieve your goal of beating your enemies]”.
No, that’s not what I meant. There are a ton of things you can map onto Star War’s Light Side / Dark Side, but I think that if anything the “conflict theory” is closer to Imperial ideology (everything’s not so great right now, but they would get better if we could get rid of the criminals / traitors / rebels / incompetent); even then it’s stretching it a little.
I meant more in the context of the original trilogy. The show The Clone Wars had a few episodes about people trying to sue for peace from both sides, but they were rather weak and most episodes showed the Separatists as a faceless, rampaging, enslaving evil army.
This seems to relate to a couple of questions on the recent survey- about whether your opponents are mistaken versus evil, and so on. Has anyone looked at how the results correlate with political views?
I just realized that in your last links post you had an article from Jacobite, not Jacobin. Now I feel stupid.
Maybe you can expand Mistake Theory to include the idea that not everyone will be moved by Good Arguments, and that there are people who are acting in bad faith, or at least in closed self interest, and who won’t be moved.
I also think that you need to be way too naive to think that you can convince racists to leave racism behind with a Good Argument.
I like the “mistake theory” vs “conflict theory” distinction, it elegantly differentiates between two different kinds of ways of thinking about political issues. However, your description of the “conflict theory” part is a bit of a caricature: I think I get what conflict theorists are pointing to, and your descriptions of it make it seem like you don’t.
It is as if you believed that someone’s personal interests have no role in how they interpret the world around them. For example, internet companies nowadays say that ending net neutrality will not hamper innovation; the matter of whether that statement is true or false may well be a difficult matter, and a “mistake theorist” might say that this statement by internet companies is (or is not) a mistake. But it would be immediately clear to any conflict theorist that the reason internet companies say so is not because they are merely “trying to get it right”; it is not that they “looked at empirical data and realized that it was likely to be so”; the real reason why internet companies take this position is because it is in their own economical interest. Now it might happen that their position is actually correct, or it might happen that it is not, but that is besides the point — which point? — the point that a conflict theorist is trying to make in this situation. The conflict theorist is trying to point out that the internet company has an interest at stake, and that this is likely to bias its view of what’s true and false.
Hence internet companies say net neutrality is unnecessary and tobacco companies said tobacco is healthy.
Or for the same mechanism in psychology, people are usually able to interpret their own actions and intentions in a way that preserves the belief that they “are good people at heart”, powerful people have some self-narrative justifying why they deserve their power, likewise for rich people why they deserve their money.
Confict theory, at its core, is pointing out this: “self-interest leads to inescapable bias.” This bias is not a “mistake”, because it is not the result of trying to find the truth and failing, but rather it is the result of trying to interpret the world in a certain, self-serving way.
Whether the world really is or is not that way is besides the point which conflict theory is trying to make. That is not to say that’s not important, it really is of course we want to understand what’s a mistake and what is not a mistake. But if KFC is promoting a study saying that “chicken have no emotions”, then maybe the important thing is *not* to evaluate the arguments; how do we measure if a chicken is sad? what studies have been carried out measuring chicken-sadness under various conditions? etc; no, focusing on whether KFC is making a mistake or not, in this case, is a complete waste of time; what *really* matters, what really gives you the most accurate information about that statement, is who said it.
And mistake theory as you described it, for all its merits which of course it has, seems to completely ignore this fundamental thing.
Bruno Loff‘s description of conflict theory is definitely part of my own understanding of the idea.
The mistake/conflict axis has popped up in public discussions fairly regularly, e.g. in the trope “X: evil or misguided?”, where X can be any entity ranging from The Fed to a comic book supervillain. My impression is that most people feel comfortable to attributing some positions to malice or extreme self-interest (Apocalypse/tobacco), and others to poor goal alignment or bad data (Magneto/The Fed), and responding accordingly (call in Magneto and the Phoenix force/encourage the Fed to re-evaluate the Phillips curve). Pure conflict or mistake theorists seem rare on the ground.
To be clear, mistake theory is CERTAINLY “a better way of understanding the world.” But it NOT necessarily a more effective political force.
This dichotomy is becoming much more relevant as cultural Marxism spread on campuses, and as the nationalist right wing begins to adopt the conflict filter as well to fight it.
Great post. I recently heard a podcast where I thought Brian Leiter came close to explaining a Marxist perspective in language that mistake-theorists could understand. The conflict-theorist steelman is that it’s clear that all of these rational theories haven’t made things better, and in fact might be making them worse. To take the hospital metaphor, it’s like you’re in a sinister, bleak hospital in some tin-pot dictatorship, with a case of the flu. Every day the doctors show up, argue, and inject you with some different kind of glowing liquid (without changing the needle). When you argue with them, they just smile condescendingly and say, “Haven’t you read Ingerstein’s latest theory on miasmic ether?” You’ll get nowhere by debating them; all you need is to get out.
The hospital metaphor is not very reassuring if you’ve had bad experiences with hospitals and doctors and consultants. I think nearly everyone has a story about “the doctors wouldn’t listen and this happened”.
It’s never lupus – until it is.
Can “In Favor of Niceness Community and Civilization” be renamed to “Against Conflict Theory” or am I missing the point?
The more I read the comments the more I feel there’s an interaction between the ideas in this post and that one but I’m not sure what it is. Is “In Favor…” a prime example of treating conflict theorists as making an Easy Mistake?
These posts are certainly related, and quite in the way you suggest, but I think that different people have joined the “conflict” side for different reasons.
For some of them, it’s the only side they know. The usual way to convert someone into your Conflict Team is to convince them that the enemy is also a Conflict Team, and joining your team is their only chance to survive. “Peace is not an option, and whenever you hear someone from the enemy side offering peace, it’s just them trying to trick you; do not listen to their evil lies, and keep shooting, soldier!”
For such people, meeting someone with a genuinely Mistake Mindset could be a profoundly enlightening experience. As long as they would allow themselves to consider the option that the other person may actually be honestly describing how they see the world, instead of cleverly manipulating them. It is not dissimilar to the experience of leaving a cult, when you realize that the people out there are actually not the worshipers of Satan your leaders taught you about, but some of them are genuinely nice people, and either way for most of them trying to destroy you or your former group is actually not on their list of priorities.
Then they are also people who have an aesthetical preference for conflict, and their reaction to reading Scott is probably something like: “LOL, this nerd is bringing a nonviolent communication textbook to the gun fight; this is going to be so much fun!”
It looks like you beat me to this observation, but yeah, I said very much the same thing in my comment down below.
I definitely think there’s room for both theories to be descriptive pictures of the political world, much as there’s room for quantum mechanics and gravity to both be descriptive pictures.
Someone about a hundred comments ago remarked that there’s an axis on the N-dimensional “Real Political Compass” for social trust. And that conflict theorists tend to have about zero social trust, while mistake theorists tend to have about all the social trust. I think they were onto something. In particular, I think that whether a given political situation is *most accurately described* by high or low social trust governs whether conflict theory or mistake theory is most likely to resolve the issue.
…
Social trust is actually pretty high when it comes to babies. Almost everyone agrees that taking care of babies is pretty important, and is willing to devote resources to babies. Some are more willing than others, but the position “deliberately hurt babies” is terribly unpopular.
And consequently, mistake theory is a much more accurate description of the politics of abortion than conflict theory. (Almost) nobody wants to kill babies, but there are strongly divided opinions on whether a fetus qualifies as a baby. (Almost) nobody *literally* wants to subjugate sexually active women by forcing them to have more babies, but there are strongly divided opinions on the relationship between sexuality and personal responsibility and the ethics of bringing life into the world and so on.
So the conflict theorists shouting “baby-killer!” and “woman-hater!” at each other are basically wasting everyone’s time.
…
At least in the US, social trust is low when it comes to welfare and programs of the general pattern of “give free stuff to the poor.” There are two antithetical viewpoints on this that are *both* widely held. People on one side are mostly convinced the rich are just hoarding everything out of spite, while people on the other side are mostly convinced that the poor would just waste anything given to them and that it’s not worth the sacrifices required to give it out in the first place.
And consequently, conflict theory is a much more effective way to explain what we see happening to the American welfare system. People who would directly benefit from welfare themselves are voting against it because they ascribe to the anti-welfare side, and view the pro-welfare side as the enemy.
Leaping into the room and saying “HANG ON! I’VE CALCULATED THE OPTIMAL DISTRIBUTION OF WELFARE!” is laudable but kind of pointless right now, because the lack of social trust has firmly locked the debate into conflict-theoretic terms.
There was a time, a time of higher social trust, when our welfare system *was* largely designed based on mistake-theory lines. Namely, the Johnson administration. Ever since the Reagan era, it’s been conflict theory all the way, because the social trust that says “poor people are decent but unlucky, and rich people want what’s best for everyone” got sucked out of the room.
…
What makes this extraordinarily complicated is the intersectional aspects. What happens when a high social trust issue like “take care of babies” runs into a low social trust issue like “give free stuff to the poor?” Well, a lot of people get very confused when that happens, and you see weird results. Chaos, in the common and possibly the mathematical sense.
Have you got mistake theory and conflict theory mixed up? In the abortion example, people disagree on values questions related to the nature of personhood, bodily autonomy, etc.; there are fundamental values in conflict. In the welfare example, the pro-welfarists believe that the anti-welfarists are mistaken that welfare costs too much and doesn’t really make poor people’s lives better.
I think my argument is more that on issues where social trust is low, there really are objectively existent conflicts of interest. And that these conflicts of interest mean that conflict theory actually is an objectively better model for what is going on, relative to areas in which social trust is high and conflicts of interest are low.
The part about conflicts of interest is actually a LOT more important, now that I think about it. My earlier post was muddled at best on this point, so as noted, I’d like to correct/retract/adapt my position on that a bit. Something like…
Where conflicts of interest objectively exist, conflict theory is likely to be objectively more effective at modeling outcomes, as opposed to its performance where there are no such conflicts of interest.
Note that a conflict of philosophy is not the same as a conflict of interest. Conflicts of philosophy are much better handled with mistake-theoretic tools, but conflicts of interest cannot be resolved in that way.
When dealing with an issue where there is no real conflict of interest, conflict theory is a way of wasting everyone’s time.
When dealing with an issue where there IS a conflict of interest, where there really are two sides and both of them have reasons to want the other taken down a notch or ground down a bit harder or something in between… Well, mistake theory may prescribe an optimal solution to the problem, but it won’t predict what actually happens when you try to implement it. Namely, that one or both sides will immediately start subverting the hell out of your elegant solution.
This happens predictably, precisely because they still have a vested interest in tilting the playing field their way, and “can’t we all just get along” isn’t actually the optimal solution in the eyes of one or more of the factions involved.
One of the most unfortunate things about party politics is that ALL issues, or nearly all, become proxies for a fundamental conflict of interest: namely, whether the Donkey Party or Elephant Party gets to rule the roost. Which is precisely why mistake theorists spend so much time banging their/our heads against walls, because even issues that really, really should be low-conflict… aren’t, because the parties start using them for ammo.
I thought that it was a great illustration precisely because it at first seems backward.
A number of comments have pointed towards what I think is an important distinction between descriptive and prescriptive theories. I’m partly just re-wording what some of them have said, but…
I think that the genius of the American founding fathers (among many others) was to recognize that the primary problem they had to solve was conflict. That is, there are different groups with different amounts of power, and their primary motivation is always going to be to use this power to their advantage, and thus a descriptive conflict theory is simply _correct_. The problem of politics, essentially, is dealing with this fact about the world. Thus mistake theorists who are interested in actually making the world a better place (like the founding fathers) need to directly tackle conflict theory. And even if you’re a mistake theorist on a meta level, you’re going to end up being a kind of conflict theorist on many practical levels.
A further wrinkle to this, is that it is possible (indeed extremely common) for different groups to have diametrically-opposed goals that are morally/factually/whateverly justified. This is the fundamental insight of tragedy: not all goods are commensurable. Group A wants X for good reasons that any neutral observer would judge as valid. Group B wants Y for equally good reasons. X and Y are completely incompatible, neither A nor B is more obviously wrong/evil/whatever. I suppose this is simply to say that some problems don’t have a right answer, but this is a huge problem for the mistake theorist, because _what the hell do you do?_ From the perspective of the (prescriptive) conflict theorist, the answer is easy: you support whichever side you’re on.
I don’t think any of this invalidates the post or other comments. The world is complicated.
I am with those who see this post as very useful, and thank you for it.
Regarding the future direction of the blog, and whether it is appropriate to give more weight to complex Conflict theories…
1) Scott, honey, you weren’t all *that* mistake oriented. Highly mistake oriented, yes, but you have some tribal blind spots that one could drive a truck through.
2) I question the utility of attempting to incorporate conflict narratives (procedures? algorithms?) into mistake systems, given the high unlikelihood that conflict-oriented people will try to utilize mistake problem solving practices.
3) Agree about 100% with everyone who thinks this is a spectrum, not an either or. In particular, and speaking only for people that I myself have met in real life stressful situations – people who are tired, wet and hungry are strongly pre-disposed to Conflict mindsets. Getting people rested and relaxed is key to optimally engaging both charity and rationality. I do think that many people in (or disposed to) Conflict mindsets use poverty and stress as justification for using that pathway, and in many cases, esp in the West, this is figleaf bs for doing the demonizing and agitation that they were planning on doing anyway. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be made easier to use mistake mindsets by changing the environment.
Where in this taxonomy do we fit the position that the solutions to our problems lie outside of the political process? At what point in life were each of you convinced to use primarily political means to get the things you want?
Since you asked… the first one. Not to knock the post though, it’s an interesting treatment.
Throughout this post you’re apparently conflating the “theorist” dichotomy with the political dichotomy. That is a mistake. (Probably you won’t understand why, since it serves your political interests to make precisely that mistake. Just kidding.)
Neither a political position, nor an individual person, can be a “mistake theorist” or “conflict theorist” in any pure way. There might be a bias in favor of one theorism or the other, but you will always find both theorisms on both sides, and within the same person.
Self-Serving Bias comes to mind. Why the licensing requirements on hairdressers? The right/libertarian position, when opposing such regulation, is not typically that these are just honest mistakes. Instead, entrenched interests are being served, against the interests of competitors.
On the other hand, the general public (as opposed to those entrenched interests) is supposed to be making the mistake of not “seeing the angles.” That’s what a conflict theory is always saying (possibly substituting another group for “the general public”). Conflict theory always inherently embeds that much of a mistake theory. (In Marxist writing you have “false consciousness.”)
(By the way, Marx wrote an entire book to refute Proudhon’s ideas — after Proudhon did the same to Marx’s. I didn’t read the whole thing but I looked at parts of it. These guys definitely saw each other as on the same side, but mistaken.)
Mistake-vs.-conflict explanations of disagreement are not limited to political disagreements.
Religious disagreements: are [redacted]ists accidentally worshipping a false god, or are they evil devil-worshippers deliberately bent on corrupting youth, or are they running a scam to collect money from the gullible? Two out of three of these are conflict theories. Many people hold to a conflict theory about certain religious leaders, prophets, saints, miracle-workers, etc., while holding to a mistake theory about their followers. (Arguably the idea that people protect their ego and/or social status by staying in the religion is another conflict theory.)
Disagreements in the context of sales: is this guy honestly mistaken about the beans being magic?
That last one is crude, but insert your own example of a salesman who has truly made himself believe in the incredible value to you of the product he just happens to be selling.
You may also come to believe that your opponents are mistaken about optimal policy, but also are unconvincable or so dangerous that the only reasonable approach to dealing with them is to hammer them, deny them platforms, get them fired, ship them to camps in Siberia, etc.
I’ve been undergoing a similar transition in thought, likely triggered by the same events. I’m struggling to reconcile the competing lenses.
In our current political reality, anything that is not desirable to Republican elites will be argued against as if it were simply a technical “Mistake.” No matter how many times they’re out-argued, they continue arguing on a technical basis. “Tax cuts to the rich increase jobs and wealth for everyone” and “Climate change isn’t being caused by human action” are probably the two most glaring examples of trash arguments that should sink under the weight of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but they may never go away. And it seems that more and more political arguments are increasingly in this camp, emboldened by the persistence of these incorrect assertions.
Politicians/elites are blatantly arguing in bad faith at least some of the time. They won’t be convinced by any argument or evidence, no matter how damning. They are getting away with this because outside of hard science, nothing can be “proven” and they will surface any doubt in an argument and simply magnify it. At some level, it’s a social hardship that owes to epistemology and the limits of our knowing.
Of course there are still difficult technical questions of governance as well. Policy making is not easy. But at this point, it’s extremely difficult to distinguish between arguing against “mistakes” and arguing against something that is simply inconvenient to the arguer. On the surface they generally look the same – like a person in a suit making a technical argument. The trash arguments are poisoning the well, making it impossible to share a space for discussing the truly difficult questions with those who disagree.
We live in an era of noise, and we are in desperate need of better filters. How do we detect an argument made in bad faith? How do we respond once we know an argument can’t be won? I don’t think we have good answers to either question.
“Socialists don’t complain about rent-seeking” is so stupid you could have stopped reading there, Scott.
Points I’ll make:
1. Real Marxism is an empirical, fact-based, rationalist philosophy. It is the science of history.
2. Marxism is an anti-statist philosophy and communism a program for dismantling the state, among other things.
3. Marxism does not assume the immorality of individual actors; it presumes that the morality of individual actors is irrelevant in the face of structural forces.
Those points are absolutely essential to our conception of a post-capitalist state.
With regard to 1 and 3, I think it’s useful to make a distinction between (to use Scott’s medical metaphor) diagnosis and treatment. I think Marxism diagnoses problems, as you say, in a very measured, scientific tone that doesn’t concern itself much with individual morality. But I think that tone naturally completely shifts when you’re talking about Marxism’s actual prescriptions, which are by necessity romantic and grand and conflict-based, owing to the scale of the ambitions involved.
I think maybe it would be fairer to characterise Marxist theory as mistake-based on the diagnostic level, and conflict-based on the prescriptive level.
Real Marxism has never been tried!
Real Marxism would be an empirical, fact-based, rationalist philosophy.
There we go.
It is the science of history.
And the ghost of Eric Hobsbawm arises from his grave (I think he was a good historian despite, not because of, being a Marxist).
The only “science” of history is “Dumb things humans have done, to themselves and each other, and insist on keeping on doing”. Lots of political philosophies have considered themselves the True Science of History, we’re still arguing over the Whig interpretation for one!
Real Marxism reads a bit like a True Scotsman. Or like being a Real Christian. Every self-styled Marxist is sure he can shed other self-styled Marxists as being not true Marxists when they say something objectionable. They accomplish this by arbitrarily choosing which Marx successors to disown and which of Marx’s writings to consider “central”.
Pay attention to context! It’s not “other self-styled Marxists” whose idea of Marxism is being rejected — instead it’s opponents of Marxism who write for an apparently far-right-wing magazine named “Jacobite.”
This is pretty standard. Marxists aren’t generally arguing among themselves about who is the “true Marxist” or about “which of Marx’s writings are central.” (Where are you even seeing that?) It’s always Marxists arguing with conservatives, neo-liberals, etc., who ostensibly haven’t actually read any single text by Marx (would never cite one, etc.).
At any rate that’s what it is here.
It sure seems like the disagreements between supporters of 20th Century “actually existing socialism” and the libertarian or left Marxists can be described this way.
@Forward Synthesis, that kind of disagreement has nothing to do with “shed[ding] other self-styled Marxists as being not true Marxists when they say something objectionable.”
When something is identified as “the real” it means as opposed to some fake purported version. In the context of this conversation it’s real Marxism”as opposed to a purported Marxism created by the critics of Marxism. Not a purported version created by some opposing faction of self-proclaimed Marxists.
This is just a matter of reading comprehension here: whose purported version of Marxism is being disclaimed?
When I examine this essay from my Full-Rothbard-sprinkled-with-Essense-of-Nozick, minimum-state viewpoint, a third position appears. Mistake theorists seem to be arguing with each other about who will get to consume the choicest cuts of my flesh when I’m carved up by the state. When they argue about whether to raise or lower interest rates, I ask why they think they should be interfering with interest rates in the first place. Should I complain about Soros or the Koch brothers? How about neither? If there’s no state apparatus of compulsion for them to co-opt, then you don’t need to pick a side.
Does this make me a Conflict Theorist who wants to burn the forking state to the ground, or am I just another doctor “arguing over the best diagnosis and cure”? I’m ambivalent on this question.
Public policy is hard. The state will always make the wrong choice for _some_ of its subjects (citizens? members?). If you find yourself arguing about “who wins on any particular issue”, then you have already decided that you get to pick winners and losers.
I can imagine a gaggle of Marxists Mistake Theorists sitting around their samovars discussing dialectical materialism while their agents provocateurs rouse the proletarian rabble (Conflict Theorists). But in the end they’re all just a bunch of Commies.
Fascinating post about the difference between the mistake and conflict theorists. This is one of those things that is perfectly obvious once pointed out, but until then is really easy to miss. I just have two small quibbles- first, the post appears to view conflict theorists primarily from the Marxist POV, and that slightly undermines the horseshoe point made at the start. That is, the alt-right don’t really view it as Elites vs the People, or at least not without significant qualifications as to who belongs to the people. Their outgroup is likely quite different from the class-based outgroup of the Marxists, and is more focused on national/racial/cultural conflicts. Another way of putting this might be that Marxists view politics as a conflict for power between the powerful (rich) and the powerless (the People), while the far-right view politics as a conflict for power between national/racial/cultural/other groups.
The other more important point is that I tried to think which group I fell into as someone with libertarian leanings, and realised I didn’t think either was a correct or appropriate way to approach politics (though I feel a complicated version of the conflict theory was probably a more accurate description of politics as it exists). Both accept utilitarianism as their starting point- mistake theorists think that the end goal should be to benefit society at large, while conflict theorists think the end goal should be to crush the enemy.
Libertarians (or “rights-theorists” to use analogous terminology) on the other hand generally consider that the end goal of politics (and possibly the only legitimate goal of the government) should be to protect individual (almost always negative) rights. Within a perfectly libertarian framework, all debates will be mistake-debates, because by definition, negative rights do not overlap. The only disagreement will be to what properly counts as a right, and how to best protect and enforce it.
But within actual society, obviously the debate is deeper. Both mistake theorists and conflict theorists start with a mistaken premise (from a libertarian perspective), and at least a significant portion of them are incentivised to do by their own wellbeing and thus probably have irreconcilable differences of interests from rights theorists. Rights theorists recognise the danger of politics being fought as a war between multiple competing interest groups such that the most powerful tyrannizes the rest, but also reject the idea that there is a fundamentally good result for everyone that can justify treating individual rights and people as means and sacrificing them at the altar of the public welfare. This is an important alternative perspective that is lacking in this “mistake-conflict” dichotomy
I guess I’ve come around to the Hard Conflict Theory position. I used to be a condescendingly smug Mistake Theorist like many liberals who thought the conservatives were just too stupid to understand how the policies they supported would lead to bad outcomes.
I’ve grown to realize that many of my political opponents just don’t value the same things I value and I think this is a far more charitable view. Unfortunately, our political language doesn’t really allow us to talk about the fact that we have different values. All Americans are supposed to want the same things. We’re supposed to want to take risks and pursue the American dream. We’re supposed to be opposed to fixed hierarchies and want equality of opportunity. Our fundamental rights are supposed to trump any other consideration. There is one set of public values which it’s assumed we all agree on and we just differ in our assessment of the world and maybe priorities among the values.
In reality the things all sides value frequently are unspeakable in our political discourse, so instead we have to believe fantastical things about the world so our different values and the single set of public values are compatible. So all sides end up thinking the other sides are some combination of stupid and evil, when really we just value very different things which are likely incompatible in the world as it is. If we accept we value different things and get to negotiating based on relative power a tolerable solution to make our diverse nation work, we’d be better off.
Are any of your values unspeakable, or is it only the other side’s values? Does it seem likely that your opponents would agree, in their heart of hearts?
To be clear, by unspeakable I mean that it would be impossible for a mainstream politician to express them without being rapidly attacked and condemned by the media and not that no one expresses them ever.
There are views that I hold that I don’t think a politician could express.
I think many of my opponents would in their heart of hearts would admit that they value stability and preserving the existing social order in a way that isn’t acceptable to voice in mainstream political discourse. I think this was a major driver of support for Trump as a significant chunk of the base of the Republican party found in him someone who would express that and created a space for them to express it.
Fair enough.
By your definition, I think there are a fair number of sentiments that are at least somewhere close to unspeakable which make for great gaffes when some politician says one of them and gets quoted. Perhaps Hillary’s “deplorables” comment would be an example. Trump doesn’t really seem to have anything he considers unspeakable, though a good example from recent headlines is referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and much of sub-Saharan Africa as shitholes–it’s the sort of thing that’s both impolite and offensive to a notable subset of voters, and is also a commonplace belief among many people in your coalition.
But what if we disagree on what our fundamental rights are? Some believe they have a right to free speech, even if it’s offensive. Others believe they have a right to not be offended (or perhaps they would phrase it as “living free from hate, and that hate speech is not free speech”). Some believe in open borders, that one should be able to enter any nation they want and participate in its community, and others believe their community has a right to decide who is and is not allowed to join it, and under what circumstances.
These issues can be resolved through mistake theory. We can debate which rights exist and to what extent, and even make compromises between them. Or we can just fight about them.
Of course we disagree on our fundamental rights, that’s what I’m saying. It’s just in the mainstream political discourse we won’t admit that. So instead we come up with rationalizations why restricting hate speech promotes free speech or helping some groups in the name of equality ends up hurting them.
Unless, I just missed the press release on the discovery of absolutely correct theory of morality, mistake theory can’t help you. If I value A and you value not A, neither of us is making a mistake when we disagree on a policy that promotes A. Maybe you can show that I made a mistake in deciding to value A from some more basic set of principles, but in general that’s not the case. Hopefully, we can agree on a political system which can handle the conflict and produce an overall acceptable outcome when considered across many issues and cost of violence.
Or we can acknowledge that you value A and I value not A, and I value B and you value not B, and we can make a deal where you get some A and I get some B. But that’s not what happens. What happens is screaming fights about how A/not B is [good|evil] and B/not A is [evil|good]. The recognition that people have different legitimate interests and value functions is rapidly vanishing from American politics.
True, but those screaming matches aren’t dramatically improved if they’re about A/not B is [smart|stupid] and B/not A is [stupid|smart]. The conflict is real and pretending it’s just a matter of people making some honest mistakes doesn’t help in any way I can see. I think people find smug know-it-alls who think they’re stupid even worse than someone calling them evil.
My interpretation on Scott’s take on Mistake theory is that it tends not to recognize (or at least downplay) different legitimate interests. When there is a disagreement the default attitude of Mistake theory is that at least one of the positions must be objectively false, and finding out the true position is akin to investigating a scientific question.
Your recognition that different people may have fundamentally different but nevertheless legitimate interests is what Scott calls Hard Conflict theory, but he’s skeptical that it even exists.
Just to make sure I understand,
Easy Conflict Theory: one side is good and one side is evil.
Hard Conflict Theory: each side is legitimately self-interested and whether solutions to the problem are good or evil is up for debate.
I don’t see why anyone would doubt the existence of HCT. Consider tribe A on the east bank of the lake and tribe B on the west bank of the lake. Both subsist on fish. The lake can only provide enough fish to feed one tribe. Tribe A wants the fish from the lake, and tribe B wants fish from the lake.
Which tribe is good and which tribe is evil? Well, it looks like each tribe is self-interested and neither particularly good nor evil. There are solutions to the problem, like one tribe killing the other, that are probably evil, or one can try to work out a mutually beneficial solution to the problem, like sharing the fish in the lake while diversifying into alternative food supplies like hunting or farming.
HCT certainly exists. I’d say the real challenge is when you have several groups viewing the same problem as HCT, ECT, HMT, and EMT. Look at the immigration debate.
ECT: “Diversity is our strength” vs “White genocide!”
HCT: “Open borders and free travel are human rights” vs “people have a right to control who is and is not welcomed into their community.”
EMT: “Think of all the great new restaurants!” vs “they’re bringing crime, they’re bringing drugs, their rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”
HMT: “Immigrants are a net economic benefit to our economy” vs “merit-based immigration, and you have to come LEGALLY.”
And anyone on any side of the issue can sort themselves into different categories, at different times, against similarly flexible opponents.
@Conrad Honcho
I think that Hard Conflict Theory is: both sides are looking out for their own interests, but not the interests of others, so we need to balance out the power.
How can you possibly accomplish this? It’s not like rights exist in the same sense that physical objects exist, they only exist as social conventions. Unless you are a moral realist, of course, but then you are not going to persuade someone who does not share your world view.
In order to make compromises you have to agree that the other party has a legitimate claim. If you believe that the other party is just mistaken, then making a compromise is going to be difficult, at least you are going to approach them from a position of perceived superiority, and probably you will be unwilling to compromise a lot because you’ll believe that the truth is on your side. You may be tempted to believe that the other party is just too stupid and therefore, paradoxically, violence is indeed the only solution.
On the other hand, recognizing that irreconcilable conflict exists is the first step in entering the mindset of negotiation. Sometimes negotiation fails and fighting ensues, but this does not imply that adopting a conflict mindset necessarily means behaving like thugs.
Okay, change “exist” to “are valid” or “should be respected.” You said yourself they’re social conventions. Social conventions are decided…socially. Which means they’re up for debate.
But this debate is more akin to a bargain rather than a discussion over, say, the value of the speed of light.
Yes, and I agree with that. What’s the point of contention?
See my other reply.
Indeed. Note for instance how the so called “hate speech” is demonized, or even criminalized in some countries.
Even if “hate speech” was indeed an expression of hate, it’s peculiar that expressing hate in public is considered taboo.
It would be fun to A-B test how adding this affects the number of angry messages you receive. If you got statistically significant results, it would also be a service to the entire internet. Though you’d probably need to get a lot of angry messages to achieve significance.
Once again: It’s hard only directing advice to people who need it. Rationalists, or at least Internet rationalists, are heavily into mistake theory, and while it may be a good idea for some people to ease up on their use of conflict theory, some people have eased up on it too much.Something to remember when criticizing people who haven’t eased up on it enough.
To use this framework, it seems that this can be taken one level higher. Conflict theory works really well if you see something as win/lose while mistake theory works well if you have a win/win model. For example, if you view wealth as a zero-sum game, you will naturally approach it from a conflict theory perspective. But if you view it as something which can be grown, then mistake theory makes sense.
With the exception of economic policy (and possibly some immigration policy), almost everything is zero-sum. Abortion, gun rights, free speech, etc., are all win/lose. We can’t both live under a common set of rules where you are allowed to swear in public and in which I can be assured of no profanity in my presence.
At the same time, any particular issue is going to lead to a challenge in identifying whether something is zero-sum or win-win. That argument is one which follows the mistake model. But people who are mistaken about this will view it as zero-sum and require conflict model approaches and view the mistake model people as trying to be sneaky by getting them to drop their weapons.
I dislike how this essay excludes other views. I do think world’s governments need better policy, but I don’t see it as having anything to do with intelligence. To me, the shortage that’s preventing better policy is a shortage of wisdom/experience/knowledge. The level of intelligence is irrelevant. Policy that’s too clever would necessarily be fragile due to excess complexity.
I’d argue that that’s hollywood stereotype “intelligence” rather than practical intelligence aka smartness aka the heightened ability to simply make good choices, learn and understand things.
Simplicity and durability in design can be a hallmark of exceptionally capable and smart engineers and programmers. Anyone can build something where they just keep adding complexity until it’s too complex and fragile to maintain.
However I would agree with you somewhat: some problems aren’t solved by everyone involved being just being smarter. Lots of problems are down to interactions between networks of people and if you add 50 IQ points to every participant it just makes it even harder for anyone to untangle the mess of perverse incentives that the group will build around themselves.
Just an aside: I think the claim that ‘public-choice’ is something only for the right comes from a Guardianista/European left-wing view that views government/welfare state as left and any criticisms of it as right. The association of economics with “rational choice” views of the world didn’t help and the whole Nancy Maclean debacle makes it more depressing.
There was (and is?) a well respected line of philosophers and theorists who basically were left-wing public choicers like the analytical marxists Jon Elster, John Roemer, G. A. Cohen and Adam Przeworski. Even the idea of a military-industrial complex, which is a pretty big left-wing meme, is a public choice argument.
Yeah I came here to say this. Egalitarian Perspectives is a good place to start that has been used in classes I’ve TAed for (https://books.google.com/books/about/Egalitarian_Perspectives.html?id=FH-iGlHzr6AC). There’s a gulf between The Baffler and certain strains of Marxism in academia.
It sounds really weird to call that an “European” view, since it sounds… well, mostly just an American right-wing caricature of *any* leftist views. There were a plenty of European leftists who were and are critical of the welfare state from a variety of perspectives.
I think it’s analytic/continental strains more generally. Analytic Marxists are often engaged with Rawls.
I don’t think the dichotomy of mistake vs conflict theories fits me well at all. After contemplation, it seems that I’m a system theorist. The world isn’t primarily the way it is because some people dominating others or because of large amount of false beliefs that people have. Most people spend most of their time on autopilot. Their beliefs and their place in society is at best of secondary importance. What drives society are the systems that have been put in place that require enormous effort to alter or reverse.
Or perhaps the systems arise out of humans acting mostly on autopilot.
(Count me as someone who is deeply impressed with this non obvious theory)
One concern I have with your conclusion is the idea that the two theories are incompatible. But a mistake theorist can easily appreciate the fundamental premise made by the conflict theorist. Good arguments are only correlated with the truth. For that end, if you have 5,000 smart people working for Koch/Soros to produce Good Arguments for Evil Purpose, it will be mistaken to attempt to evaluate the arguments on their own merits without realizing that much less intensity of effort went to producing Good Arguments for Good Purpose. True, if you were infinitely confident in your ability to judge the merits of an argument, that shouldn’t matter; but most of us are not, and so contextual information on the investment in Good Arguments is helpful.
I just found Jacobite a couple days ago. Related is Alice Maz whose article you mentioned in links, which brought up the Splain it to Me article. It deals with a similar thing. Fact based information sharing with merit is the communication style of one group – in this case the mistake theorists. Social value, signaling, social status gaming, and communication of emotion states is the communication style of another group – the conflict theorists. To them, sharing information is often viewed as either trying put down the conflict theorist (playing the conflict by putting down their knowledge) or not respecting their perspective. This model fits. Communication is a tricky thing. It requires the listener to play the same game as the communicator otherwise it’s a misunderstanding. I hope this adds to this discussion. Here’s the link:
https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/
I really liked this post, these are some really interesting observations. I used to be a daily reader of your blog, but stopped for reasons I’ll explain below. I wouldn’t call myself a Marxist or a socialist but I’m certainly further left than most of your audience, I think. Hard Mistake Theorist probably describes me best, although I’d hesitate to label myself that way. I do agree with a lot of what you write here generally, and find your opinions and observations insightful.
The reason I stopped following you regularly, however, probably puts me into the conflict theory camp. To put it bluntly, I observed that your comments section includes quite a good many racists, misogynists, and other “deplorables”, and you seem to have absolutely no problem with this. This was back before the 2016 election, and the events since then have only strengthened by skepticism toward the mistake theory model. My biggest problem with this model is that aside from the fact that our knowledge of the world is always going to be unreliable and incomplete (and this goes especially so for knowledge of any contemporary sociopolitical situation), but, and I thank you for giving me the terminology to describe this, it disregards conflict as something essential to all human interaction.
Even the “easy conflict theory” brings up some points that seem pretty indisputable. The holocaust happened because evil people were allowed a seat at the table, not because somebody made a mistake. History is full of people who, had their contemporaries seen them for what they were, would and should have been crushed under foot at the earliest convenience. The most simple and compelling argument for conflict theory is that if you think you know who these people are, you should waste no time in destroying them through whatever means is appropriate.
But even beyond the idea of good vs evil, I think there’s something to be said for conflict theorists having a better picture of how the world actually works. Unless you are going to have an undemocratic state where one group makes all the decisions (which is an absolute guarantee of eventual conflict), you are going to have people with different interests wanting different things and presenting what is in many cases compelling evidence for why their interest represents what is best for everything. You can talk about doing your best to methodologically evaluate each option, but you can’t eliminate conflict. It is real and ever present, and I think most mistake theorists will agree with this. On the other hand, the central sticking point for conflict theorists toward mistake theory boils down to the idea that the greater good can be objectively evaluated and reasoned about. This is an idea that many would argue does not reflect reality, and/or is not relevant in many sociopolitical matters.
The modern era was shaped through conflict. If you look at the past 400 years, you’ll see that the rise of democracy and civil liberty, the decline of monarchy and the nobility, the rise of capitalist industry and the resulting (and continuing) shift toward labor rights, the establishment of nations and national borders, the establishment of currencies, the development of global trade, the rise and establishment of limits on militarism, the decline and/or rise of religious institutions, plus our systems of laws, economies, and public institutions, were all shaped and/or resolved through conflict. Even the history of modern science and technology is rife with conflict that was based more on competing personal, tribal, or national interests than on objective and reasoned decision-making. The world of today is most certainly a better place than it was 400 years ago, and conflict is what got us there. (As an aside, I’d point out that many of the “deplorables” I mentioned above are people who would disagree that the world is a better place than it was 400 years ago.)
So conflict theorists have a view of the world that is backed by something tangible, while the mistake theorist’s model is largely theoretical. People who see that the world got to be the way it is through conflict and struggle are going to be leery of anyone who says “If we can put our subjective views of the world aside and thoroughly evaluate the facts, we will come up with the optimal solution to our problems,” because that is a pretty big if. So while I find myself agreeing with a lot of what the mistake theorists have to say, the conflict theorists are pretty difficult for me to dismiss.
Without trying to speak for our host, I think a key piece of the zeitgeist here is a suspicion of empowering anyone to crush people underfoot. History also provides plenty of examples of those empowered to crush the evildoers running out of evildoers and, instead of wrapping up their crushing operation, miraculously find new classes of evildoers, including the original proponents of crushing people! I cautiously agree that conflict is ever-present, but hewing too hard towards either crushing OR accommodating other factions can lead to terrible results… which starts to look like a mistake-theory frame, yes?
(I also think you’re badly failing the ideological Turing Test if you believe that the “deplorables” believe the world today is worse than in 1618, and would welcome anyone who can provide some data on this. I mean, as strong as nostalgia is among some segments of the right, the farthest back you hear any fond reminiscences of regularly is the 1950s. Plenty of right/libertarian types might say the New Deal is when it all went wrong, but even then I think most would take living in the 50s over the 20s or earlier.)
It did get me to look up the year in Wikipedia. As of this fall, it will have been 400 years since the start of the Thirty Years War.
Sorry, the use of the term “deplorables” conflated the alt-right with the people who think the world should be divided into for-profit kingdoms, and that was not my intent. I was thinking less alt-right and more the contemporary equivalent of Metternich, who would have been all too happy to drag the world back to the glory days of the 17th century. (Metternich was an interesting guy and relevant to our discussion because he hated democracy, republicanism, and socialism, but thought very carefully about the best way to wield political power and was more than happy to accommodate multiple points of view. He ended up being ousted from power by people who wanted to destroy the monarchy.)
As to your main point, I agree that there’s a careful distinction to be made in where to crush vs accommodate. But, I disagree that this points to a mistake theory frame, because I think the act of choosing sides always involves subjective judgements that cannot be rationally defended.
Nice coincidence with the Thirty Years War! 400 years was just a round number I made up. I originally started with 300, but wanted to be sure to include the Thirty Years War and English Civil War.
I’m curious as to why you think he should have a problem with it–and more, why you do. Whether from a conflict or a mistake standpoint, isn’t it valuable to understand your opponents? If other people have different values than you do, understanding those values should make it easier for you to fight them–to know where they are likely to give in easily, where to make a stand, what arguments and rhetoric they will use to rally their troops and attract allies and how best to counter it. From the mistake point of view the argument is even easier. Either you or they are making a mistake and you are more likely to figure out which by talking with them than by ignoring them.
Short answer: platforms are sources of power. Bully pulpits can be used to bully. If I create a platform, I can be judged by the use to which I put it.
From a mistake standpoint, many people who are racist, misogynist, or otherwise “deplorable” are worth talking to. We can just reason with people who have the (mistaken) belief that (for a hopefully nonthreatening example) short people are stupider than everyone else, and we should reduce the number of short people allowed to immigrate. Reasoning could allow us to understand their thinking and potentially cure the mistake, or at least grow our understanding of the world by learning how people even come to be so weirdly mistaken. Nice.
But, if we put on our Conflict-lenses for a minute, we can detect a kind of people that we couldn’t see when we were wearing Mistake-lenses. This set of people–let’s call them C-types–they also like talking about how short people are stupid, and proposing policies based on that idea. However, C-type people who aren’t interested in whether or not short people are actually stupid. C-types are interested in operating with impunity to belittle, harass, or even persecute short people and thereby enjoy a) the immediate rush of feeling they’ve attacked someone successfully; b) the perks of the status that comes with displays of the power to harass/persecute with impunity; c) the benefit of having fewer people at their relative “rung” on the status tree, since the persecuted themselves will lose status; and d) the direct fruits of that persecution, such as all the stuff the tall people could take from the short people if the short people were put in camps. To C-type people, whether or not short people are less smart isn’t the point. It’s whether they’re weak enough that we can bully them for fun and profit.
There is no point trying to reason with C people when they are being bullies, and the line for being a bully is one that, unless we are vigilant, the bully and the bullied are more sensitive to than everyone else until after the bully has become one of the most popular kids in class by building status via bullying. Part of why “Against Dog Whistles” was so brilliant is that it’s really unwise to coach people to feel bullied too easily–that makes bully’s game easier. Instead, coach people who *aren’t* targeted by bullies to be better at noticing, but help people who are likely targets to to develop a thick skin, so the bully can’t bully them under-the-radar, but instead must resort to something everyone notices as an attempt at bullying.
It’s a pedantic point and you might already be aware of it, but the “bully” in that phrase is obsolete slang — it means “great”, “excellent”, or even “awesome”, not “perpetrator of hazing or abuse”.
Ah. I knew FDR used to say “Bully” to more or less mean “Righto” or “yeehaw.” I didn’t really intend to link bully pulpits to bullies through the words. I’m interested in real-world deployment of power to harm or benefit… mostly.
I do enjoy puns and factoids. Thanks for the tidbit.
“Bully pulpit” was Theodore Roosevelt, not FDR.
yodelyak:
One reason to be careful about bashing people with deplorable beliefs is because they might actually know something you don’t, or be raising a valid or worthy-of-consideration point. As long as you start with the assumption that they must be wrong by definition, you can justify seeing them in pure conflict terms, but you have also immunized yourself from ever learning anything from them. That’s fine as long as you’re 100% certain you are right about everything, but otherwise….
If you are engaging your reasoned argument muscle to interact with someone who is trying to bully you, you are doing it wrong.
I’m pretty sure the same holds for some journalist/politician interactions and probably lots of other places too. Likewise with federal prosecutors and people they have asked to come in for an opportunity to “explain” something (Read: help us convict you).
So to sum up: There exist relationships where efforts to present the relationship as cooperative are themselves honey on the trap. Discerning these situations, and approaching them appropriately, is important.
Scott, if you are reading or care about my opinion, I like the comment policy here very much.
The Virgin Radical vs The Chad Centrist
I think it’s clear that people are rationally ignorant (i.e. ignorant because it’s not worthy to find out the facts) but I think it’s also clear that people are self-servingly ignorant. It’s hard to convince somebody of facts when they’re against their interest. So in essence, both theories can be simultaneously correct.
But even conflict theorists have the straightjacket of facts. They need to understand whether what they’re actually doing works. For instance, revolutions usually result in elites grabbing even more power and societies ending up even more authoritarian.
I’m not sure there’s a strong distinction between mistake and conflict theory. The tools of mistake theory mentioned in the first paragraph like principal-agent problems and aligning incentives all assume that actors in the system are primarily motivated by self-interest and not by rationally debating to figure out what the greater good is. Even though I generally agree with the prescriptions of what you describe as mistake theory (such as technocracy and approaching problems with a scientific mindset), the idea that everyone is just trying to achieve the greater good seems very naive (even in the doctor example, the doctors are all trying to cure the patient because it is their job and they are paid to do a good job).
Thinking about this more, it seems like we need to distinguish between conflict/mistake theory as a way of understanding the world and making predictions (where I think conflict theory is actually better at giving you correct predictions about a lot of real-world stuff), and conflict/mistake theory as a strategy for resolving differences (where conflict theory tends to lead to a war of all against all/endless purges, and mistake theory allows for actual dialog and learning to take place).
I think that you are strawmanning Conflict theory and painting it as the mirror opposite of Mistake theory, when in fact they aren’t necessarily incompatible.
First, conflict is not necessarily just between the Elites and the People. Conflict in politics exists between, say, urban vs rural (e.g. water rights), natives vs foreigners, young vs old (e.g. pensions, public debt), men vs women (e.g. child custody, parental surrender vs child support), established businesses vs disruptive tech companies (e.g. taxi drivers vs Uber and Lyft, brick-and-mortar shops vs Amazon), coal vs solar, and so on.
Every political issue, almost by definition, has sides with fundamentally different interests who stand to gain or to lose depending on which policy is enacted. Of course this does not mean that politics is a zero-sum game: mistakes that make everybody worse off can be made, and in fact since the system is very complex is unlikely that we are anywhere near a Pareto-optimal equilibrium, or even a Nash equilibrium, there is probably lots of room for improvement that could be tapped into if we were more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more rational. But at the same time we should not delude ourselves in thinking that intelligence, knowledge and rationality can make all conflict go away. At best, we could hope that they could make conflict more “civil”: debating and then voting instead of shooting each other in the streets, but civility itself is not a neutral value: if conflict reaches a certain level, it might be in your interest to take up arms.
Second, one can support or oppose a position on both Mistake theory and Conflict theory: for instance, I oppose the Social Justice ideology.
I can criticize it in good faith on many different Mistake theory angles: I believe that the SJWs make the epistemic mistake of ignoring average biological differences between groups as plausible explanations for the statistical differences in outcomes that they observe, I believe that running a society on meritocratic principles (or striving to it, as much as it is possible) yields a more efficient allocation of resources than applying various SJ policies such as affirmative action, “reverse” discrimination or reparations, I believe that free speech allows the best ideas to become widespread and the worst ideas to be criticized and be abandoned, I believe that due process prevents arbitrary abuses of power and increases the social capital by allowing people to trust each other as long as they play by well-defined rules.
But I’m also a straight white male who refuses to submit to a life as a second-class citizen, therefore the SJWs are my enemy and I’m theirs. I do not believe that hard-core SJWs could be convinced to accept my position by rational argument and evidence, and I can’t imagine me being convinced by SJ arguments. In fact, trying to argue with the SJWs without the cloak of anonymity could expose me to retaliation, therefore, as long as they seem to have the upper hand, it is strategically better for me to go “guerrilla”: smile and nod to their faces and then sabotage them when they can’t see me (mostly in the voting booth, as I’m not keen on “fighting fire with fire” methods, although I might become if their hostility further escalates).
Am I a Mistake theorist or a Conflict theorist?
From what you’ve said you are clearly approaching this issue from the standpoint of conflict theory. You’ve said you “can” criticize SJ ideology but that you don’t think there’s any point in doing so since neither you nor they are open to being convinced by the other side. Since I’m procrastinating from doing some unpleasant work I’m going to try and convince you that you’re wrong about SJ ideology. If after reading those you are less certain than before that you are locked in a zero-sum struggle with SJWs then perhaps you are a mistake theorist after all.
This is not an epistemic mistake; it is a tactical decision. Suppose there are statistical differences in outcomes that are partially determined by biological differences and partially determined by social systems and structures. Of the two causes, which one can we change more easily (given current technology)? Therefore SJWs rationally focus on the social causes until we’re sure they’ve been eliminated.
Example: dozens of studies over the last few decades have found evidence of hiring discrimination against blacks and Latinos in the US. Several studies specifically found that otherwise identical resumes which were “whitened” received more callbacks than resumes with black names (like Jamal or Leticia or whatever). Therefore many companies that care about social justice have adopted a policy of requiring anonymous resumes to be used to determine who gets an initial interview. This is a positive change that moves society towards a more meritocratic state! You should be for it. SJWs made it happen.
See above re: meritocracy. But look – anonymizing resumes can’t do all the work of eliminating bias and discrimination from the hiring process. Again, dozens of studies find racial bias throughout the hiring process. How can we correct for this bias other than by trying to use legal or social incentives to push in the other direction? Affirmative action is a blunt instrument but it’s better than just letting racists exclude qualified black and minority candidates from the job market. Plus stereotypes form a self-reinforcing cycle – if you don’t see a lot of black programmers you might assume blacks are bad at programming and this may impact decisions about admitting black candidates to computer science courses or programming interviews. Once there’s some relative parity in black-white representation in CS you can ease up on the affirmative action and see if the disparity reasserts itself or if it was an artifact of historical inequality of wealth and education.
Some SJWs are overzealous on this issue, but in general SJWs are not opposed to freedom of speech; they are instead committed to creating social norms that promote inclusiveness and encourage people who have historically been excluded from the discourse to share their ideas.
Forget social justice for a minute. Would you agree that Scott moderates this comment section not to stifle discussion, but to enable it? Don’t you think that the use of racial slurs or personal attacks derails discussions and takes the focus *away* from the merit of various ideas?
For the most part SJWs are interested in pointing out how certain language takes the discourse away from an open discussion of ideas and makes it about bullying the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society.
I don’t know of any SJWs who are opposed to due process. I’ve never heard them suggest that the world would be better if we could put people in jail without a trial. Maybe you could clarify or provide an example of this?
One test of whether your interpretation is correct is to see whether SJW’s are interested in evidence of whether the beliefs that motivate their polices are true. Consider affirmative action in college admissions. If what is going on is that admissions offices are biased against blacks and affirmative action reduces the effect of this bias, then the blacks admitted under affirmative action should do as well as the whites–better if the bias has only been partly compensated for.
I don’t think it’s a secret that what actually happens is the opposite. In the context of law schools, it’s an open secret that there is a tradeoff between “diversity,” meaning admission biased towards (mostly) blacks, and bar passage rate. I have less experience of undergraduate education, but my impression is that the same pattern holds–that black students admitted to a college who would not have been admitted if they were white do considerably less well in that college.
If I am right, and if your theory of SJW’s is right, SJW’s in law schools should be pushing for less affirmative action, not more. That’s not the pattern I observe.
For an example in the other direction … . When my sister went to Bolt (Berkeley Law School) about fifty years ago, the class was about ten percent women. One year, of the six top students (two in each of the three years), five were women. That’s evidence that either the application or the admissions process was biased against women, with the result that the women who applied and were accepted were, on average, better than the men. Currently, I believe, law school classes average more than half women. I don’t think the men do on average better than the women although I don’t actually know, so my guess is that women are, on average, a little better at learning law than men.
Tom Sowell has a rather depressing book which starts by running through cases where liberals proposed a policy on the claim it would do X, conservatives argued against it, the policy was enacted, and what happened was the opposite of X. His point was not mainly that it’s evidence liberal policies are mistaken–some such cases might be accidents. It was that liberals did not care, did not consider changing their beliefs on the basis of evidence, from which he reached a negative conclusion about the motives of liberals.
Liberals and SJW’s are not the same group, but the point is relevant to both. Do they act like people who care whether the beliefs their policies are based on are true and make an honest effort to look at the evidence, or do they act as though they want to hold those beliefs and are happy to ignore or talk away any evidence against them.
For a specific case, you write ” Several studies specifically found that otherwise identical resumes which were “whitened” received more callbacks than resumes with black names (like Jamal or Leticia or whatever). ”
I haven’t followed the literature but its been discussed here in the past, and my impression is that there have been serious critiques of that claim. “Several studies specifically found” is very weak evidence unless you also know how many studies failed to find. In a case like this, where at least some people doing studies know what result they want, the fact that some of them can get that result tells you very little. Do you know enough about that literature to have an opinion on its net implications–for instance whether it is picking up a bias by race or by class, since some names signal both–or do you only know that people you trust say it gives the result they want to believe?
It occurs to me that the reason I found the Sowell book depressing, sufficient so that I didn’t finish it, was that I am a mistake theorist and he was offering evidence that the people I was trying to persuade were conflict theorists, hence that I was wasting my time.
Are you sure that a person or group ignoring evidence that contradicts their beliefs is evidence for conflict theory? I don’t think mistake theory assumes or requires that everyone has perfect epistemology. If a mistake is caused by cognitive dissonance it’s still a mistake – it doesn’t place the person in eternal struggle with non-mistaken people.
If SJWs said “we don’t care about merit – all we care about is maximizing the number of African-Americans in law school”, then those who favor meritocracy would be in conflict with them. But instead SJWs are saying “we want college admissions to be fair” and then there’s a debate over a)what fairness means and b) whether a particular policy would produce fairness – and that debate takes place both within social justice circles and between SJWs and non-SJWs.
I do believe that there are some conflict-theorist SJWs who believe that whites and minorities simply have different interests and one group’s loss is another’s gain. I don’t believe they’re in the majority, however.
An alternative explanation for the apparent intransigence of SJWs on the issue of racial discrimination is that they quite rationally have very strong priors about racial discrimination given the history of racial discrimination in the US. In many cases they’ve been studying the issue for years from multiple perspectives and angles, and there’s no reason for a single piece of new data to cause them to reverse their general policy recommendations. Suppose law school affirmative action really does result in a lower pass rate for the bar exam – does that generalize to other fields? Is it a consistent effect over time? Does class matter? Does it vary by state? Does it vary by ancestry? Does it have any impact on the job market?
And while intellectual curiosity might prompt someone to ask these questions, unless you are talking to an actual social scientist a rational response would be “that’s nice, get back to me when you have peer-reviewed data showing that this is a significant effect that is widespread, non-domain-specific, and persistent over time”. Or to put it simply, “yeah, I’m not convinced.” Which might count as ‘ignoring evidence’, but hardly implies that the person in question is a conflict theorist.
I think I do, but I could be wrong.
I can’t speak to publication bias but this meta-analysis claims to have assessed “every available” study on hiring bias and found that the effects have been persistent over time since 1989 (although declining slightly for Latinos).
Personally, I think that there is still some bias against African Americans in hiring and I’m not sure if there is bias in college admissions. I also think that there are structural social and economic factors that disproportionately disadvantage African Americans. But I also think that rather than try to fix this through messing around with downstream effects like university admissions and job interviews, it would be better to just redistribute resources – for example, though a Universal Basic Income – so that a) you’re directly addressing the core socio-economic factors that disadvantage African Americans, and b) you’re lowering the stakes so that survival doesn’t depend on that job interview. But I think I’m veering off topic now…
It’s not evidence that conflict theory is true. It’s evidence that that person or group believes in conflict theory–sees the issue not as finding out what is true but as winning a fight.
Except that this “debate” takes the form of the SJWs rioting and trying to twist your neck for inviting a social scientist who engages in wrongthink.
This, and numerous other incidents like this, is the reason why I believe that hard-core SJWs can’t be reasoned with, and therefore it is strategically better to consider them as enemies to be crushed, as they do consider me.
Law schools were mentioned. A law school professor offered arguments that affirmative action in California resulted in fewer black lawyers, not more, because blacks who would have done fine at a mid level law school were accepted at a top level law school where all the other students were smarter than they were, learned little, and didn’t make it through the bar.
He wanted to get the Bar Test people to provide him data with which to further test his claim. His critics opposed his attempts to get the data.
That, at least, is the account I heard–I haven’t looked into it closely enough to be certain it is true, but I have not seen any serious rebuttal. I asked a (left wing) colleague to point me at a good article refuting the argument, she gave me a reference, I read it, and it consisted almost entirely of variants of “he is a racist.”
That is at least some evidence that some of those supporting affirmative action in law schools did not have their claimed motives–did not want to know, or at least did not want others to know, whether the policies they supported had good or bad effects.
@vV_Vv
But isn’t that the pattern with most political or ideological groups? Religions typically have a small group of fundamentalists who are not open to reason or changing their minds, surrounded by a much larger group of people who adhere to the religion generally but can be persuaded that their religion is sometimes wrong on particulars, and even people who could potentially be converted or become apostates.
“SJW” is kind of a pejorative for hardcore fundamentalist type liberal activists, but a lot of people who get called SJWs aren’t ideologues and wouldn’t even self-identify as an “SJW”. Absent empirical evidence that something is special about the distribution of fundamentalists vs. followers in social justice activist circles, I would think that applying mistake theory would have the potential to convince at least some people, whereas applying conflict theory would be more likely to radicalize more people towards hard-core status. Strategically I think mistake theory is better in this case.
@DavidFriedman
Is it? Suppose we take their claims at face value – they really believe that “he is a racist” is a valid argument against providing this researcher with data on the racial breakdown of Bar results. What would it take for this claim to be true, or at least reasonable?
We know that researchers sometimes find results through statistical methods that are less than rigorous, and that it is often possible for a motivated researcher to find some effect somewhere in their data to support something like the claim they are trying to prove. We know that the media
sometimestypically reports these results as though they were the gospel truth, often not waiting for peer review, and never waiting for replication. We know that media retractions for bad science reporting are virtually non-existent and if they do come out they rarely generate as much coverage as the initial claims. We know that the public is full of people who lack the appropriate cognitive tools to properly evaluate media claims (and see the Gell-Mann amnesia effect someone mentioned upthread). We know that public opinion may impact public policy on affirmative action.So isn’t “we don’t want to provide a scientist with evidence to debunk our claims” very different from “we don’t want to provide a racist with ammunition to conduct a spurious public relations campaign against a good policy that is in a precarious political position”?
I think there are probably some people – on nearly any issue of real controversy – who really would prefer to actively suppress efforts to find the truth because they are locked in conflict theory mode. But I think that for most people, on most issues, if it looks like someone is acting in bad faith – like a racist professor – they will go to conflict theory mode, and if it looks like someone is acting in good faith, they will go to mistake theory mode. I think that fact has more explanatory power than “liberals don’t care about truth.”
@panoptical
Social Justice tends to turn its followers into fanatics. If you don’t accept the complete closure of the belief system, where every argument against it merely demonstrates its truth (and the evil of the arguer), it cannot hold up.
@panoptical:
I don’t find your interpretation convincing. People can make bad arguments without data. Producing more real data makes it harder to make convincing bad arguments, easier to make convincing good arguments.
And the “he is a racist” article wasn’t about whether he should get the data, it was about whether the argument he made about the effect of affirmative action was true. If the only response is “he’s a racist,” that means that at least that author has no actual arguments to offer in response to his. It’s possible that someone else does, but this was what I was pointed at by someone on the same side as the author.
At a considerable digression, some of my reaction to things like this comes from a first hand experience about fifty years ago, where professional academics I was briefly working with refused to include in what was supposed to be a fact book on an important set of issues a fact that they agreed was true and agreed was important–because it was evidence against the conclusion they wanted readers to get. I sometimes describe that as my loss of innocence–the discovery that intelligent people I liked were willing to be deliberately dishonest in their professional work for political reasons.
Which is why I am not willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when it requires as big a stretch as I think your argument does.
I provided more details in an old blog post.
Yes, but fundamentalist Christians, Buddhists, Libertarians, Conservatives, etc. in general don’t try to get you fired or physically assault you if you say something they don’t like.
The only modern ideology whose adherents have behaviors comparable, and in fact worse than SJWs is Islamic Salafi jihadism. Not all Muslims are jihadists, of course, just like not all liberals are SJWs, but these fanatical movements cause lots of problems by aggressively antagonizing both outsiders and also moderates within their own broad ideological group for not being fanatical enough.
How do we deal with Salafi jihadists? Do we try to talk them into behaving like civilized people or do we bomb the hell out of them? The SJWs aren’t as bad as the jihadists, for now, so bombing them would be excessive, but they are still much more dangerous and uncivilized than any other political group in the West, hence they should be dealt accordingly.
I think that there is still value in arguing against the SJ ideology from a Mistake theory perspective, as this may persuade the fence-sitters and the uninformed, but I think that hard-core SJWs can’t be convinced by these kind of arguments.
I think that they are mostly composed of people who will take any extremist position that they perceive as conductive of them achieving social dominance. In another context they would have been fundamentalist Christians or Islamic terrorists. They don’t listen to reason, they only understand strength. Therefore, the appropriate response is to become stronger than them and make impossible to achieve social dominance by being a SJW (or in general by engaging in anti-social political activity no matter the ideology).
No, the SJWs assume that all the observed differences in outcomes are due to social causes, and they demand corrective social action until their favoured groups become as successful as their disfavored group (straight white males + possibly straight Asian males). The SJWs never try to accurately assess the extend of biological vs social causes and measure the corrective action accordingly. And they never try to correct outcome disparity when their preferred groups are on top. Remember that time when the SJWs demanded for more white men in the NBA and more women in construction sites? Yeah, me neither.
The problem is that names like Jamal or Latisha (I think this was the spelling used in these studies) correlate with ghetto/gangsta culture much more than they correlate with race. Most African Americans have common Anglo-Saxon names.
I guess that Latinos are more likely to have Spanish names, so you could argue that they might be possibly discriminated because of their names, but then Nigerian immigrants usually have identifiably African names, and they still manage to do as well as White Americans.
No, you’re being revisionist. SJWs explicitly oppose color-blind policies, “If you don’t see race then you don’t see me” is one of their slogans.
I’m all for anonymous resumes when it is feasible to ask them, unfortunately for many high-level positions (e.g. manager, academic, senior engineer, etc.) the employer wants to consider the candidate’s past accomplishments which might not be really anonymizable, but this is not what they SJWs push for. The SJWs push for employers to take into account the candidate race and gender and give Blacks/Latinos/women/otherkin a bonus in order to correct an assumed discrimination that they never proved.
The same racists who don’t exclude Nigerian immigrants?
You may correctly infer that on average blacks are bad at programming, this does not stop you from hiring a black candidate with a good resume, since you understand that averages are statistical properties and you may assume that a good resume mostly screens off the population prior.
However, if affirmative action is common then you are surrounded by sub-par black programmers who are hired because of diversity, and you may assume that even a black candidate with a good resume is not as good as a white or Asian candidate with the same resume, because the black candidate probably already benefited from affirmative action.
Therefore, affirmative action actually makes racism rational.
The problem is that the disparity is ultimately caused by market forces reacting to largely fixed differences (biological factors or unknown environmental factors not amenable to intervention), therefore affirmative action is always being pushed back by the invisible hand trying to self-correct the market. For instance, if you use affirmative action to artificially increase the number of blacks enrolled in colleges, then they’ll drop out at an increased rate. If you artificially increase the number of women hired as programmers, then they’ll leave the industry at an increased rate. These self-corrections towards meritocracy however aren’t costless and there is still a loss of efficiency compared to using meritocratic policies in the first place.
Oh, that’s why they assault people with bike locks at free speech rallies, or or punch the “Nazi” and then brag about it for months, or demand software engineers who criticize diversity policies to be fired, or go to the UN to call for Internet censorship.
Because nothing “promotes inclusiveness and encourages people who have historically been excluded from the discourse to share their ideas” like physically attacking them.
SJWs reject the “innocent until proven guilty” standard of evidence and instead support a “guilty until proven innocent” standard (which they deceptively call “preponderance of evidence”) on anything related to sexual misconduct, which they apply in the #metoo movement and the college Kangaroo courts that they control. So far they haven’t been able to push it on the actual courts of law, but certainly not for lack of trying.
Here’s some analysis on how and why those results failed a replication. The upshot is that names don’t only suggest race, they also strongly suggest other attributes such as age and socioeconomic status. To verify the claim that black names are discriminated against you’d need to make some effort to ensure that the “black” names have similar non-race connotations as the “white” names. Thus far, to the degree that this has been done, the results haven’t panned out.
The old study which claimed to find anti-black bias had names like Jamal and Lakisha; the newer study which did not find anti-black bias had names like Darius, Malik, and Andre.
Excellent post.
One quibble: Mistake theorists can absolutely account for conflict theories. However, they usually must do this as a second- or nth-order effect. In fact, mistake theorists do, and they have. Of all things, Public Choice is exactly such a theory.
We’re all familiar with the rent-seeking, regulatory capture ideas of Public Choice, but often only at the base level. Over time, these activities result in accumulated benefits to those who have captured rents and/or state power. The people who are capturing these rents are hardly mustachioed villains (my bias as a Hard Hard Mistake Theorist, a la Hayek or Smith/Hume is showing), but they are remarkably skilled at rationalizing why they deserve and have earned such rents. (“I work really hard!” or “I worked hard to get here!” are common sentiments.) Over time, these accumulated rents result in an emergent Conflict Theory scenario.
Mancur Olson attributed the rapid post-War economic growth in Japan and Germany to their institutions being almost totally destroyed by World War II (and then subsequently rebuilt by mistake theorists). The prior institutions were swept away, the old elites were out of power, reduced in statute or in some cases imprisoned and the new institutional framework was created de novo without benefitting any particular group over another. Compare this with, say, the postbellum American South and the fact that elites were not effectively removed from power. They lost their slaves and suffered significant damage to their wealth, but the old elite structure stayed intact. They even formed roving bands of armed thugs such as the KKK who continued to impose their reign of terror. The South would not really grow for another 100 years, when the elites were forced to reform their institutions (although obviously debate rages on to this day about how effective those reforms were).
(If I were to make a hypothesis today, I’d say that the generally well-meaning but rent-capturing elites are centered around the legal profession itself.)
This discussion also strongly reminded me of Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.” He presents two dichotomous “visions” of the world: the “unconstrained” and the “constrained.” The “unconstrained” vision posits that for the entire history of civilization (i.e. since the Agricultural Revolution), bad institutions have enslaved certain groups for the benefit of others. As a consequence, only significant shocks to those institutions will allow human beings to be truly free as they were born to be. The unconstrained vision can be summarized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.” If only we could wipe out those bad institutions that are keeping some of us enslaved, we would unlock a natural state of abundance and happiness for everyone.
The constrained vision, however, sees limitations everywhere. Everyone lives in a time and under institutions that have been cobbled together over long periods, attempting to navigate the trade-offs that are required by such constraints. To the constrained vision, drastic change is not only likely to make mistakes, but potentially catastrophic. The constrained vision sees the natural state of the human condition not as one of abundance, but one of extremely painful scarcity and suffering. If any one thought could summarize the constrained vision, it might be James Madison: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
I’m not sure that mistake theorist:constrained vision::conflict theorist:unconstrained vision, but there seems to be significant overlap.
I don’t know, man. I haven’t read the comments yet and so apologize for any redundancy. But I think this juxtaposition really misses the boat insofar as what I think of as the opposite of what you call a “conflict” approach has nothing to do with any assumption of mistake. I just think the distinction is between those who view the issue as an intellectual question and those who think in terms of coalitions or personalities. Whether people who get it wrong do so because they are mistaken or because they are evil isn’t really even relevant to the question I’m interested in, which is simply what the correct answer is. Insights into that question are what I find valuable about this web site and I hope the site won’t be straying into the world of “conflict” analysis, which the way you describe it does not seem interested in offering contributions to that analysis and is primarily interested in what to do about an issue whose answer is assumed to be already known to the “good guys.” Fortunately I can’t imagine that will really happen much in practice. I certainly hope not, because it would diminish the value of the site for me.
This seems related to the SSC survey question about whether political disagreements are primarily caused by factual disagreements or values conflicts, and I am having the same problem, where I can’t answer because both are obviously true! They’re just true in different situations.
My instinct is to be more of a “mistake theorist”, and I often get annoyed at people for just not entertaining the hypothesis that there might be an honest factual disagreement in a given conflict. And in the circles I tend to find myself in, factual disagreement does seem to be doing most of the work.
But if I really think about whether *most people* who disagree with me politically have a factual disagreement or a values disagreement with me, especially if I think globally, I think there’s actually a *lot* of values disagreement? I guess it gets murky because like “gay people go to hell” is sort of a factual claim but usually people who make such a claim also attach moral value to it so I’m comfortable calling this largely a values disagreement.
It also is often the case that if you probe a disagreement that seems factual, you eventually arrive at a real moral difference that can’t be reconciled by fact-checking. (I guess the opposite thing can happen too.)
After writing this I’m also realizing that “conflict theory” as described here isn’t necessarily about values difference but rather about self-interest pointing in different directions for different people. But I think values are a large part of it too, so.
I see a problem with this theory. Does anyone actually identify as a conflict theorist? Or does everyone think that they’re a mistake theorist and those other jerks are conflict theorists?
“Conflict theory” doesn’t necessarily imply “I see the world as good people vs evil people and evil people need to be destroyed by whatever means necessary”. It sets forth that society consists of groups with fundamentally opposite interests, and a lot of the world today is the result of clashes between them: Class struggle. Morals don’t even enter into it.
Does anyone actually identify as a conflict theorist? Or does everyone think that they’re a mistake theorist and those other jerks are conflict theorists?
If we’re putting it as “technocrats versus you guys”, count me in with “you guys”, since the mistake theorists always seem to be imagining/hoping/acting from the starting position that they’re the ones coming up with the policies, so it’s always you doing stuff (in the name of Progress and A Better World) to me, but never me doing things to you. Hence the power struggle bit.
But I think there’s few people who are purely A and purely B, most will be a mix of “I think that’s a good principle but that other argument is also a good point and I don’t trust the Fat Cats/Welfare Spongers and…” in their views, just tilting slightly more to one side or the other if they have to make a decision (like in the polling booth).
Oh yes, I’ve spoken to people like this, who will privately admit to using end-justifies-the-means logic and call their own side’s footsoldiers ‘useful idiots’. Of course they don’t admit to this in public, but that’s because that wouldn’t be advantageous for their side.
I find this characterization somewhat curious. I think of a lot of people on my side that way, but I really think of myself more as a mistakist. I see the mistakists as at least as prone to ends justify the means logic as the conflictists, though they sell it as steely pragmatism not moral crusade. Not saying you’re wrong, I’m just intrigued by the discrepancy.
I would say yes? When SJWs shout down conservative speakers with “racist, sexist, anti-gay!” they’re not assuming their opponents are mistaken, but evil, and they’re in conflict with them. When the Daily Stormer publishes screeds about the “zionist occupied government” they’re not seeing a difference of opinion about how to make society better for both gentiles and Jews, they’re seeing a zero-sum conflict. Now, I think such people are a loud minority, but they exist.
Edited: It seems conflict orientation goes hand in hand with feelings of oppression, persecution, or unfairness. When I think of conflicted-oriented groups the examples I keep coming up with are powerless groups (or groups that feel powerless) railing against powerful (or perceived powerful) groups.
I think it’s a mistake (ha!) to identify mistake theory and conflict theory as merely two competing worldviews. Rather I think mistake theorists are working in a situation closer to the baseline, where there is little or no conflict, while conflict theorists are working under conditions of escalation.
So Doctors Alice and Bob decide, through a rational and objective approach, that the best course of action is to cut the liver out of Dr. Charlie and put it in the patient. Guess who’s about to become irrational?
Is he being irrational, or is he being rational and just has a different value function?
He’s certainly going to be hostile.
Part of what I see missing in Scott’s post is that conflict theorists believe that other people are like them, and mistake theorists do the same thing. So conflict theorists believe they are rationally pushing back against conflict theorists on the other side in what’s essentially a tug of war, meaning that the more visible conflict theorists are the more it empowers the ones on the other side.
That said, there are also bullies who simply enjoy punching people who don’t fight back, and those also tend to gravitate towards the conflict theorist groups.
That goes back to normative vs descriptive. Few people will identify themselves as normative c/ts, but if you ask “do you believe that the bottleneck isn’t understanding problems, it’s interests working against the greater good”, then you’ll get a lot of people saying yes.
I’m a conflict theorist. To be more exact I think conflict theory is more *sophisticated* than mistake theory; it deals with a wider class of disagreements. Mistake theory suffices in some contexts; I don’t think mistake theorists are jerks.
Here’s my model of an appropriate hard mistake theory conceptualizing conflict theory people: Dunbar’s number.
The human brain has a hard limit to just how much it can conceptualize. More intelligent people have a higher limit than lower intelligence people, but they still have a limit that is radically smaller than the amount of people in this country, much less the world. Mistake Theory and Conflict Theory people aren’t really organizing over philosophical beliefs, they’re organizing over tribal mechanisms. These mechanisms are there to help handle the reality of Dunbar’s number. Understanding that many people and that many problems is just too much, so we shrink the world to whatever philosophy helps us identify our tribe. It’s almost irrelevant which philosophy is more right than the other because they are both so inadequate to deal with the hugeness of the issue.
I’m defaulting to the Mega-Hard Mistake theory: our brains weren’t made for this.
What is with these internet magazines naming themselves after historically regressive political movements? Should I found Bolshevik or Fuedalist magazine?
I am honestly wondering whether Jacobite supports absolute monarchy and the Catholic church.
I am honestly wondering whether Jacobite supports absolute monarchy and the Catholic church.
Do they yearn for the return of the Blackbird? This will let us know their position on the matter! 😀
Verse of an Irish Jacobite poem turned into a song:
Marcach uasal uaibhreach óg,
Gas gan gruaim is suairce snódh,
Glac is luaimneach, luath i ngleo
Ag teascadh an tslua ‘s ag tuargain treon.
Noble, proud young horseman
Warrior unsaddened, of most pleasant countenance
A swift-moving hand, quick in a fight,
Slaying the enemy and smiting the strong.
I guess so, more or less, if they mean to call themselves Jacobites in the same sense that Mencius Moldbug called himself one. But the historical Jacobites gave that up long ago, holding on instead to the romantic notions of a lost cause that stir Deiseach's heart.
Actually, Jacobites never had to be Catholic. In Scotland, where the established church was (and is) Presbyterian, most of the Jacobites were Episcopalians, that is Anglicans! (The Episcopalian church in the USA also has Jacobite origins.) And while you pretty much had to believe that the Glorious Revolution was illegitimate to be a Jacobite, you didn't necessarily have to believe in absolute monarchy to come to that conclusion. (But there were probably never much in the way of Jacobite republicans.)
You could always name yourself after a genocidal political movement if you think that’s not edgy enough.
Why not “The National Socialists”? Just make sure you have some Hannah Kohen as your token Jewish co-host and you’re good.
I thought that you might have been joking about Hannah Cohen, but there she is.
Yep, she is even a descendant of refugees from the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the historical Young Turks.
Yeah, I always wondered about those guys.
Jacobite takes a generally word-we-can’t-say editorial line, so I think in this case the connection is intended.
This post shows some major intellectual growth, and I’m glad to see that you’re finally coming to understand where a lot of the people from outside neoliberal technocracy world are coming from.
I think that I actually hold both the “conflict theory” and “mistake theory” positions. Effective governance actually is a hard problem, but most politicians and economic elites only have a limited interest in solving it, and often actively work to suppress solutions which might decrease their wealth and power. To achieve broadly favorable outcomes, you need to both win a war and then solve a major intellectual problem. Winning the war is also actually difficult; victory requires strategy as well as enthusiasm.
Sure, plenty of revolutions shoot their way into power but then continue to shoot all the details people for being downers and obviously anti-revolutionary because they’re saying things that sound like what the anti-revolutionaries say (like “your economic plan doesn’t seem like it will actually work”). And a few years later the country has “peoples republic of” in it’s name and lots of people are dead.
Or mistake theory types briefly get into power, try to implement changes but swiftly have their faces murdered off by a coup at which point we get the first scenario.
Because power struggles are a reality but winning a power struggle doesn’t guarantee competence at practical matters beyond skill at winning power struggles.
Well, the United States was also created by a revolution started over rather irreconcilable differences about taxation and voting rights, but somehow it managed not to turn into a “People’s Republic of”.
Sure, it isn’t universal. Sometimes they restrain themselves and things work out.
re: American revolution I’d also argue that that was largely an already existing power structure with an already existing mix of people separating itself from the tiers above it.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you about the risks and failure modes that revolutions can bring with them. I’m the sort of socialist whose main short-term goal is achieving social democracy and increasing acceptance of the idea that property should be held in common so that we’ll be able to enact the policies that might help us to escape automation/AI-driven dystopia in the future. I would prefer to achieve that goal through the ballot box and nonviolent social movements. I get the sense that the modal Bernie Sanders supporter/DSA member probably holds a position that’s not too different from mine.
Note that a bridge from mistake theory to conflict theory as they relate to policy can be found in David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom. Friedman (who I hope will comment to correct me if I’m totally wrong here) specifically uses economics rather than morality to argue that government doesn’t and will never, in aggregate, help the poor due to the incentives which drive government decisions:
He then goes on to argue that Social Security’s payout structure illustrates this.
This matches Scott’s description of conflict theory:
Friedman and the average Marxist conflict theorist disagree on almost everything at the object level, but they do agree on a fundamental problem: that current systemic issues won’t be solved via technocratic solutions from within the system because of an overriding factor (incentive structure for Friedman, moral deficiencies for the conflict theorist) that makes stated policy goals and likely outcomes suspect. Friedman’s perspective is a bridge or perhaps a sight-seeing station for mistake theorists to look at conflict theory because it uses mistake-theory-dominated economics to make a conflict theory friendly argument.
Friedman’s solution to this problem is in some ways a meta-level mistake theorist one because it calls for changing governing bodies’ incentive structures (by removing any special rights they’re currently given and introducing competition) while assuming no change in governing official utility functions. The extreme conflict theorist instead assumes that there’s some group of people (evil people, plutocrats, Illuminati, etc.) who have utility functions with outputs monotonically increasing in relation to the evil-ness of the inputs and some other group (good people, the proletariat, etc.) with functions that vary inversely to that.
I have to play mistake theorist on this one though…
In the USA, lifetime incidence of adult poverty in the USA is over 50% of the population. (It’s worse for children.) The majority of USA citizens have a direct financial interest in the resources made available to the poor.
(Much like “the sick” if we are talking about healthcare. It’s a minority, and yet it’s everyone.)
I actually half-wrote an article about this for Less Wrong, so I can reasonably claim to be part of the “yep I knew this” group. Although, in my article I separated the five groups based on the Magic the Gathering colours and their distinct worldviews (it makes sense if you know MTG). What’s missing from this post is the idea that these are fundamentally different people: i.e. conflict theorists tend to be more aggressive, while mistake theorists tend to be quiet mild-mannered guys. So I think it’s a mistake to refer to it as “conflict theorists”, since it’s really not a matter of theory.
I have to admit to being rather surprised that you end by saying that you lend so much more credit to mistake theorists, since it seems to me that the conflict theorists have such a strong and obvious point: It’s very clearly true that it doesn’t matter what ideal solutions smart people come up with if they can’t get politicians to listen to them. Additionally, this ties into your post on the second world war and how some people (the Hermione Grangers of this world, as HPMOR put it) refuse to do evil even if everyone around them demands it of them.
In fact I regard this to be the paradox of democracy, which you have also written plenty about: “the key to good government is to convince the good guys to fight the bad guys who hate free speech and put the good guys in charge so they can fight for the rights of the bad guys who are acrively trying to destroy those rights.” I think it’s totally true that when it comes to fighting actual Nazis who actually want to destroy democracy, it actually is justified to use actual violence.
(Gandhi was wrong to advocate pacifism vs Hitler, which was also a Less Wrong post)
And also, as a final point, even though conflict theorists are prone to be more aggressive, I do think that it’s possible to teach people to be more thoughtful and reflective, and that this can help people to be less prone to seeing violence as the only answer. And so in that sense, I think the mistake theorists have a point.
tl;dr: The mistake theorists are right that the conflict theorists don’t think enough, and the conflict theorists are right that the mistake theorists don’t fight enough.
Anyway, thanks for writing this post Scott. It covers a lot of very important ground that clearly needed to be covered.
This seems like almost exactly the same mapping as naifs and cynics. I feel like your terminology is less loaded, which is nice, but I did want to mention that there’s a different terminology that’s used already in political science. One of the problems of our community is that we often use new and mutually incomprehensible terminology for concepts that already have names.
See also a more in depth look at how naifs/mistake theorists and cynics/conflict theorists approach elections.
And this is what puts me, even reluctantly*, on the side of the Conflict Theorists. What’s a “reasonable” policy? It could be one where, in order to sort out the economic woes of the state and get us back to a firm footing so progress can finally be made on intractable social problems, one-quarter of the population need to be euthanised.
The problem with technocrats is drawing up lovely shiny ideal solutions that will be imposed from the top down, and if you’re a good hard-working and lucky technocrat, you get to mingle with your fellows at Davos (going on right now) and never have to meet any of the grubby ordinary people who will be on the sharp end of those solutions, though possibly you may catch a glimpse of them through the window of your chauffeured car whisking you through the cordoned-off streets to the meetings and bunfights.
*I should be all for a magazine called Jacobite! I want free speech and cool, reasoned debate and looking at problems not from a “who gets the power” angle but “how can we fix what’s broken” angle! The problem is, the Jacobite Tradition in Ireland and Scotland is one of romantic glorious doomed failure, all that yucky emotionalism, that inadequate and suspect passion.
I’d argue that Technocrats who decide to go with euthanizing large fractions of the population are a similar failure mode to Conflict Theorists who decide the best solution to the Problem of the Other Side is to hand out guns and machetes and kill them all.
After all: Technocrat vs Conflict Theorist isn’t a good vs evil comparison.
If the person who ends up in charge is a Technocrat or Conflict Theorist, if they want to murder you either is bad news. Personally the idea that the technocrat is more likely to actually listen to arguments as to why genocide might not be a good idea pushes me the other way to yourself.
I hadn’t thought of this before, but I think this likely cleaves reality along the joints. Good post, thanks for writing.
Great, thoughtful, post. I haven’t commented in awhile and this motivated me to do it.
While I certainly fall more on the mistake theorist side, I do think conflict theorists get something fundamentally right about power relations. The part about “debating” your boss for a raise is instructive here. You can’t really debate your boss for a raise. You can try, but if he doesn’t want to (or if he is hamstrung by his more powerful corporate overlords giving him a paltry budget) no amount of logical argument can sway him.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is how the employer-employee relationship is the single most unequal relationship that most of us will enter into as an adult. And most peoples’ direct contact with The Powers That Be is mainly through their employers. So, who are the elites, really, other than your boss’ boss’ boss? Thus, the appeal of conflict theory. Substitute “corporations” for “elites” and you’ve got a lefty version of this; substitute “liberal establishment” for “elites” and you’ve got a righty version (or take your pick of various “elite” groups that both sides like to target in a conflict-theory way).
This is a simplistic way of looking at the world, to be sure. But it gets at a fundamental truth: your boss’ boss’ boss (and so on) really is far more powerful than you. S/he could ruin your life, and they probably wouldn’t even know it.
This is mostly just half-formed rambling, but I do wonder if a some synthesis or engagement here could be rooted in an acknowledgement of these power dynamics.
Interesting. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that lots of us seem to be on the mistake side, and also work in tech or engineering where employees are relatively well treated (and not because the union won concessions in zero-sum negotiations with management).
Yeah, I don’t work in tech or engineering, which I know is not the norm around here. I am pretty well-treated at my job, but I think I am more aware of the precariousness of these arrangements than the average SSC reader because my ability to quickly find another position where I am treated comparably well is highly uncertain.
(I’m using an inclusive definition of “employee treatment” here, so pay, benefits, working conditions, etc., all count.)
The relationship between the State and citizen is most unequal relationship any adult will have. Two words can exit your relationship with your boss, “I quit”. Even in a seemingly very unequal relationship between a submissive and a dominatrix, the relationship ends with the utterance of a safe word. The relationship between citizen and State is the hardest to exit, making the power wielded by the former over the latter the most unequal relationship on a dimension I think most important, the ability to say “No thanks, I think I’ll end this relationship”.
Self employment.
Sorry, not quite sure what you’re trying to say here.
I’m agreeing with you, if you think the employer/employee relationship is the most skewed power relationship then try for self employment.
In theory, you are correct about quitting your job. In practice, for most folks, you are not.
I think orangecat’s comment gets at this: there is a bit of a bias here towards thinking that leaving a job is a relatively trivial matter, because this blog’s readership is disproportionately drawn from a segment of the population for whom this is more-or-less true. It is not true for most people.
Here is some further reading on the matter that makes this case far better than I could, and in a more detailed way than simply referencing orangecat’s comment:
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/06/free-markets-need-equality.html
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertarianism-and-the-workplace/
(Yes, Stumbling and Mumbling and Crooked Timber are both leftist blogs. I happen to think this is something that leftists get mostly correct.)
I’ll use going to the bathroom as an example. It is not uncommon for workers in industry or retail to face restrictions on how frequently they can go to the bathroom, and for how much time. Imagine, for a moment, such a restriction trying to rear its’ head in a more egalitarian context. Let’s say you want to move in with a friend: the friend says sure, sounds great, but only if you agree to go to the bathroom no more than twice per 8 hours, and for no longer than five minutes at a time. Would you agree to that? Would anyone?
Yet, millions of people surrender control over their bodily functions literally every single day. Industries where such regulation is common have not collapsed; they do not face any shortages of workers, as far as I know. Surely, nearly all of these people would react with horror if their spouses or roommates or friends told them when and how to use the bathroom.
The key thing that you are overlooking is what happens after you say “I quit.” I’ve never tried to find a dominatrix, but I’d imagine it’s not so different from shopping for other services (if it a bit more raunchy). The labor market is not like that, for the most part. If you don’t believe me, there is a hell of a lot of economic literature on this very point.
Yes, saying “I quit” can extricate you from your job. But it does not extricate you from the need to have a job, unless you are independently wealthy (and even then, maybe not, because of social pressure). Equally important, it does not increase the number and/or quality of the jobs available to you. There are significant barriers to entry to finding a new job; there are even more significant barriers to entry to changing careers. These things are not insurmountable, but they are highly meaningful and relevant in peoples’ day-to-day lives. If they were not, people facing strict bathroom-use rules would just say “nope, I’ll use the bathroom whenever I’d like, thankyouverymuch,” and move on to the next place. This plainly does not happen en masse.
The reality is that the people for whom saying “no thanks, I think I’ll end this relationship” to their employer is a consistent, viable and frictionless enough option for it to be a meaningful marker of equality are a relatively privileged minority. For the rest of us, doing this entails a very high degree of risk at best, and impoverishment at worst. There is something coercive in this.
Note that I am not saying that there are not good reasons why it is thus. I’m just saying that a large power differential exists here, and conflict theorists have a point about that.
To your point about the state: again, theoretically, you’re right. You can’t really get away from the state. But functionally, I would argue that the employer relationship matters more, at least for people in modern, developed countries.
Theoretically? Just one fun example, the state can take your house and sell it to someone else to build a new house because you’re too poor and the new tenants will be richer and that’s economic growth baby! And then the new people who got the land where your house was can just leave it as an empty lot because “nevermind, not enough money in it for us”.
I think Neon’s point is that the Kelo situation is relatively rare, affects only a few people, but what he is describing is common and affects a lot of people, perhaps a majority of employed people.
It depends on whether there was a good reason. If you imagine either an emergency situation or a much poorer world with a lot of people sharing one bathroom, limiting how much time each person was entitled to use it might be something you were willing to accept. And if the deal was “I cook breakfast, you shovel the snow when it needs doing,” and the last three times it needed doing you just happened to be spending fifteen minutes in the bathroom when the snow had to be shoveled so I could get out to go to work and I had to shovel it myself, I would have a legitimate gripe.
I have never had a job with that restriction, but my guess is that it reflects either scarcity of bathroom availability or an employer who is buying time and wants to get what he is paying for.
The typical example people have in mind for a limited-bathroom-break job is assembly-line type factory work. Assembling electronics, processing chickens, anything along those lines. A problem with the usual analysis is that the people who bring up the issue have never done assembly-line work or thought carefully about how it works. So…
The productivity of an assembly line depends on the fact that everyone on the line is doing a different specialized task at the same time. There is no substitute for this – it is the essence of what the job is. If assembly-line workers could freely leave the line for a bathroom break whenever they want and take as long as they want with no consequences, whatever they are producing would be vastly more expensive to produce causing the company to lose business to other, less flexible firms, which in turn would likely cause the employer to go broke and fire all the workers.
I could explain why that is the case but as it’s tedious to do so, let me instead provide an easier-to-understand and more-amusing example of the exact same dynamic. My counterexample is:
A symphony orchestra.
A full symphony orchestra is a hundred specialized musicians on a stage. To perform a symphony they all have to be working at the same time, each doing their part to keep their collective effort going, for the entirety of a particular, say, 2-hour shift.
The lead violin can’t just get up and leave mid-concert to take a dump, because (a) nobody else can do their job quite as well as they can, (b) for them to be absent is detrimental to the work, (c) for them to leave and come back is disruptive to the other musicians – it could force other people to move, block line-of-sight to the conductor, cause people to lose their place on the page, and so on.
The only reasonable option here is for everybody to agree to poop *before* the show or hold it until *after* the show or plan other breaks *in advance* so as to not disrupt. This isn’t because employers are unreasonably demanding, it’s simply a fact of the universe that some tasks are done best by a group all working together, and a group can’t all work together while various parts of it are off in the bathroom.
(You could try to add understudies but the guy who understudies on timpani isn’t a great piccolo player so you’d need a hundred understudies, none of whom are quite as great and well-practiced as the people being replaced…and what if the understudies need to poop too? Do they get understudies as well? If you need to crowd an extra hundred musicians on the stage as spares the concert costs twice as much in salaries and extra chairs and they probably don’t all fit…I don’t really see a solution here. In practice, the solution is that some kinds of jobs are only for people who are capable of timing their bathroom breaks. People like that do exist; if you’re not one of them you should probably do something else for a living.)
Also – this is admittedly a bit nitpicky – I’d argue that you enter into your relationship with the state from the moment you are born, or at least when you start school. So, not in adulthood.
I think you’re making a mistake seeing only the Left as subscribing to the conflict theory. When you say “Conflict theorists think of free speech and open debate about the same way a 1950s Bircher would treat avowed Soviet agents coming into neighborhoods and trying to convince people of the merits of Communism,” that’s not an analogy, the 1950s Birchers were conflict theorists about politics, just with Communists instead of kulaks. Similarly with Nazis and the degenerates, or Infowars and the globalists, or Christians and the Devil, or that-word-that-it-seriously-annoys-me-I-can’t-say and the Cathedral. Or even SSCians and Moloch?
Anyway yeah, when Alex Jones said “there’s a war on for your mind”, that’s what he was talking about.
He specifically mentions that People who like the Koch brothers would be offended that the left would symmetrical to them, so I don”t think he’s making that mistake. He does, however, use marxism as his primary example of conflict theory, which I think is fair. But it’s true that if you compare democrats and republicans, republicans are much more on the conflict side.
(Funny anecdote: A marxist I talked to said he wished the democrats were more like Republicans, as Republicans are ‘much more successful’ in passing policies which will destroy America)
That’s the opposite of the perspective embodied in the claim that the left sees the right as evil, the right sees the left as stupid.
And also, the observation that Republican candidates promise to work for you, whereas the Democrat candidates promise to fight for you.
I think the “stupid party, evil party” routine has been applied in all possible ways.
I’ve only seen “stupid party” applied to the right, evil to the left, and I associate it mostly with the U.K., but the version I gave I’ve seen only the other way around and in the U.S. context.
I’m a leftist (and I guess a Marxist in the same sense I guess I’m a Darwinist despite knowing evolutionary theory has passed him by) fan of this blog. I’ve thought about this “conflict theory vs. mistake theory” dichotomy a lot, though I’ve been thinking of it as what distinguishes “leftists” from “liberals.”
I went through the list of “conflict theory says X, mistake theory says Y” nodding my head and hoping that you and everybody else reading it had the same impression as me -that both theories are important and valuable frameworks through which to view the world. There are definitely common interests that everybody in America shares, and there are definitely some pretty significant conflicts of interests as well.
The reason that I do identify as a leftist and sometimes feel like an evangelist for conflict theory is that I get the impression that most people don’t even have conflict theory in their mental framework. Leftists all understand what the “we’re all in this together” liberal viewpoint is, while even incredibly smart and on it liberals like yourself can go for a long time without even thinking about the “politics is the clash of interest groups with conflicts of interest” leftist viewpoint.
All leftists really dream of is for “people who work for a living rather than own things for a living” to recognize themselves as an interest group that includes a huge majority of the population and act accordingly. Or you might say “the working class needs to gain class consciousness.” This doesn’t mean some abandonment of reasoned debate or anything, just a conscious effort by the majority to organize society to function in their / our favor.
I think a lot of liberals (myself included) think the opposite: that we understand that both self-interest and uncertainty about the right answers are problems, and leftists think the right answers are always obvious to everyone and it’s just that some people push selfish bad answers instead.
I guess there’s some kind of illusion where both sides see a more sophisticated picture of themselves and a caricature of the other?
Also, you are free to choose representatives from both sides in a way that fits your preferred stereotype.
For example, you can imagine a calm professor trying to explain some statistical phenomenon, opposed by a screaming SJW mob that seems like they have just escaped from a psychiatric ward.
Or you can imagine a drunk redneck wearing a MAGA hat, yelling some sexual abuse at… uhm… a disabled black female professor of… whatever is considered the most high-status university topic these days among the left. (Obviously I am worse at finding a good analogy for opposing side.)
Anyway, the point is that you can make the sophisticated picture of themselves and a caricature of the other, and then go out there and actually find someone who fits the description.
It seems like you’re still not quite engaging with the leftist point though: it’s not them some people selfishly push bad answers and others virtuously push good answers, it’s that everyone tends to push answers that align with their interests. What’s usually pretty clear is who wins and loses from a policy. The “right” answer is only obvious if it’s clear which group’s interests are more important. This can apply to a wide variety of disputes between different social groups. What leftists like to focus on is that one of those social conflicts is between people who work for a living and people who own things for a living, and that those who work for a living are so much more numerous that it does seem pretty obviously “right” to support their interests over those of the owners.
There’s a kind of built in reason for this. People for whom the current system is working out pretty well tend to be:
a. In a position to have their voice heard (they have some influence, they’re articulate, they’re likely to have a platform from which they can be heard)
b. Pretty comfortable with the current system, since it’s working out for them. Even when they see significant problems with the current system, most of what they will see is stuff that works out for them.
It’s often the case that things that are big problems for people at the bottom are all but invisible to most of the society, and especially to the people with the most influence.
That’s where we disagree. For most policies, it is unclear–but people think it is clear.
Some current examples. People think it is clear that cutting corporate tax rates helps the rich, hurts the poor. That shows up in rhetoric about giving money to big (hence presumably rich) corporations–even from at least one economist who should know better. But corporations are not people, there is no reason to think a big corporation’s stockholders are richer than a small corporation’s stockholders, cutting taxes (on corporations or anyone else) changes the equilibrium determining prices and wages so that the actual effects are unclear, and it is at least arguable that the effect is to increase the capital stock, driving down the return on capital and up the return on labor, which would be exactly the opposite of what millions of people think the clear effect is.
On minimum wage, a large part of the argument is over whether it helps the poor or hurts them.
On global warming, on foreign policy, on trade policy, on immigration, it isn’t that everyone agrees “policy X hurts group A and helps group B.” On each of those, there are arguments that policy X helps most people and arguments that it hurts most people.
If you are sure your beliefs are right it’s easy to persuade yourself that the only reason anyone disagrees with your policy is that he wants the result you consider bad, hence he must consider it good.
Conflict theorists are right about certain things, such as “politics is war”. But they are completely wrong about who the Enemy is. THEY are the enemy. In their desperate struggle to empower the People against the Elites, they are waging political warfare to institute policies which will entrench the Elites and subjugate the People.
Mistake theorists are wrong in thinking that if they can just figure out what the right policies are, everything will be fine. They don’t understand that the Elites will not listen to their well-reasoned arguments, because those arguments don’t end with “… and so following these carefully-thought-out policies will ensure the Elites will continue their lives of wealth and power.”
Mistake theorists don’t recognize that warfare is needed. Conflict theorists don’t recognize which side in the war is which. Mistake theorists could explain to the conflict theorists which side they should be fighting for, but conflict theorists won’t listen to them.
Conflict theorists have their hearts in the right place. Mistake theorists have their heads in the right place. Both of them are pretty dumb, and humanity is doomed.
> It doesn’t take a supergenius to know that poor farm laborers working twelve hour days in the scorching heat deserve more than a $9/hour minimum wage when the CEO makes $9 million.
Nice mixing of units of measurements there. When you quote the CEO’s wage there, is it supposed to be measured per year, per month, or per week? Does the farm laborer get payed for 8 hours a day and 222 workdays per year? Or more like 240 workdays? I’ve no idea how this really works in America.
A quick estimation suggests it comes out to about $20k/yr. However, this suggests the median CEO pay isn’t as big as Scott says–only $700k/yr, which converts to about $350/hr$. (If Scott wants to keep his 9 theme, reducing it to $900K instead of $9M would be close enough.) So we can conclude that the ratio of CEO pay to farm worker pay is in generally in the double digits, but probably not triple digits.
> A quick estimation suggests it comes out to about $20k/yr.
Wait what? That would mean more than 40 hours per week and no holidays. Do farm laborers still work that much today?
They’re stipulated to be working 12 hour days, so unless they’re working 3 days a week…
Oh, it says twelve hour days in the quote. I’m dumb.
My guess, is almost all farm workers work significantly more than 40 hours a week. Farm work is brutal. Early factory hours probably didn’t appear as horrible at the time because what the fuck is leisure time when you need to wake up at 5 a.m. to milk the cows and then the hard manual labor continues until sunset at which point you have no light so you go to bed. Modern farm work might not be quite as terrible but it still sucks for most people.
From what I remember of the medieval studies classes I took way back when – presumably, medieval European subsistence farming has a lot in common with subsistence farming anywhere at any time – the peasant lifestyle is heavily restricted by natural processes, and alternates periods where everyone is working really hard with periods where there’s not much to do. By some calculations, medieval peasants had a lot of free time, at some times of the year at least.
On the units of measurement: the default unit of time in finance is a year. So income, GDP, interest rates— all of these are commonly stated with units that require an implicit ‘per year’.
As I see many others saying, I’m a mistake theorist who never really considered the dichotomy, and thought conflict theory was either an easy mistake or badly-phrased mistake theory. (That’s my poll answer, rest of comment not directly related)
This post doesn’t engage conflict theory on its own terms. Scott has, however, written before about conflict-theoretical epistemology from the inside:
I have no idea how you could describe libertarianism (not sort-of-libertarianishness) on this scale. I literally go around all the time saying “politics is violence” and that people are making mistakes when advocating new legislation about whether they really value a reduction in the target behavior more than they value not going around committing violence against each other. It’s like Iraq– mistaken AND a war.
Perhaps:
I care not if you
think them evil or stupid
I know they are both.
In my other comment, I framed consequentialist libertarianism as a bridge from mistake theory to conflict theory. Related to this, I think the two major libertarian schools of thought, consequentialist and deontological, map to mistake and conflict theory fairly well if we extend mistake theory a little bit.
If you believe in deontological libertarianism (you can substitute Objectivism or Non-aggression here and what I’m about to say still applies), you by definition believe that coercion is wrong. By that definition, anyone in the government who coerces you is wrong no matter how many policy papers they’ve written showing that their policy will produce positive utility. This distinction between coercers and freedom-loving people is similar to the distinction between the People and the Elites, except for the fact that this version of the People are vehemently opposed to the thing it would take to overthrow the Elites, the use of force. While I wouldn’t rule out the existence of revolutionary deontological libertarians entirely, this inherent contradiction may contribute to the popularity of exit schemes (Free State project, Seasteading Institute) in the die-hard libertarian community. This caveat aside, deontological libertarianism satisfies the “two groups, one of which is more right than the other” aspect of conflict theory well.
Consequentialist libertarians (David Friedman, really a consequentialist anarchist, is the one I’m most familiar with) argue society with proper incentives and competitive organizations will be stable and benefit people more on the whole than our current one. In that world, they hope and expect that people will make economically rational decisions to not go around coercing other people. This seems like a cousin of mistake theory of the “trust in systems” that Scott doesn’t explicitly mention but is worth highlighting. A stereotypical mistake theory solution to the “problem of governments” is to get enough smart people on both sides debating and they’ll converge towards an optimal solution. This modified mistake theory instead says, set up the right systems (markets) and people will naturally do things that result in optimal outcomes. Robin Hanson’s Futarchy also fits with this modified form of mistake theory.
I think there is a major weakness in the general discussion whereby politics is treated as either the whole of or as a defined subset of society. The steelman of conflict theories is that first you define the power structure, and then you work on the mistake theory portion of governing, but that ‘governing’ has wildly divergent meanings under different power structures. Libertarian/an-cap and communist theories are conflict theories, they view the current power structure as sub optimal, and they envision a different power structure. The major difference is that libertarians view the governance issue as a self governance issue, where individuals mostly govern themselves and that there is a modest to minimal portion of interactions that need to be governed by an organized state, whereas Communism/Marxism views the state as a tool to create the right kind of citizen that can then be self governing. The ‘intermediate’ step of the extreme left requires (or has resulted in for all attempts) massive state ‘governance’
which is what separates the two at a basic level.
The Jacobite article uses the phrase “public choice-espousing libertarians” as if libertarians are mistake level theorists, but this is only a reasonable description if you view the approach as “mistake analysis at the conflict level”.
For Marxists, the state is the executive committee of the ruling class. It is a tool for advancing the interests of the dominant social class, nothing more.
It is in every ruling class’s interest to mold its citizens in some way. Sometimes the ruling class can accomplish this on its own; sometimes it needs the state’s help.
For example, early capitalism needed wage workers—workers who NEEDED to sell their labor-power to survive. But in the Britain’s colonies all around the world, and in Britain itself for a time, capitalists ran into the problem that there were not enough of these desperate workers. Too many people worked for themselves, whether as yeomen farmers or self-employed artisans. They would never work for a wage, unless they got paid more than their resulting product was worth, in which case they would be exploiting the capitalist rather than vice-versa. So, what do you do? Acts of Enclosure, indentured servitude, slavery, head taxes. Nowadays the capitalist class does not need so much of the state’s help on this matter because the frontier is closed and the land is already owned by existing owners. Now it appears that circumstance itself forces workers into the wage relation.
Likewise, manufacturers in mid-1800s America needed American workers who were punctual and could follow directions and do mechanical tasks. Not people who were accustomed to being their own boss and following their own schedule. So the state mandated compulsory schooling.
If you think that the capitalist class, with the help of its state, does not mold people in its interests in the present, then you are quite naive.
As for the working class, of course it will also mold people according to its own interests when it is the ruling class. For example, an economy aiming to transition to superabundance (i.e. stateless, fully-automated gay space luxury communism) and free use cannot function if people purposefully destroy useful wealth. A socialist society would, of course, need to instill negative attitudes to such wanton waste. Likewise, I anticipate that a socialist society would want to mold its citizens to ignore zero-sum status games and to feel that this is the natural state of affairs, for if such an endless drive to conspicuously consume remains, then it would be very difficult to attain an objective level of superabundance. Superabundance can be achieved as soon as people are physically incapable of having enough time in the day to consume society’s wealth, which may very well be possible if that wealth consists of decent food, simple-ish tools, reasonable housing accommodations, electronic media, etc. But if everyone insists on flying around in a helicopter that is bigger than his neighbor’s, then superabundance would indeed be a pipedream. So, yes, socialist society will seek to dissuade us from obsessing over zero-sum status games, just as capitalist society tries to mold us into thinking and feeling that the opposite is the case and that the opposite is the natural, eternal prime obsession of all humankind.
Of course, superabundant gay space luxury communism will not have a ruling class or a state. So, if you are a libertarian who just chafes under any kind of social influence on your being, then there is hope for you yet!
Its always a bait and switch with Marx. Capitalism rose to power doing X, Y and Z, but to rise to power they needed P, Q and R, so they co opted the state to get more P, Q and R so they could do more X, Y and Z.
Somehow you can build a sewing factory, filled with newfangled machines, but can’t find any employees to sit still at them for long enough so then you co-opt the state with your ‘profits’ from these underutilized machines to make schools compulsory to make good workers.
Land owning farmers and artisans were functionally the middle class in these societies, they weren’t the masses that funneled into factories, and ‘capitalists’ didn’t need them. They had masses of willing labor moving in from rural areas.
Factory work produced more goods per hour of effort than an individual could on their own. Arguing that Marx was just following Smith and then making basic economic mistakes like this means you either don’t understand Marx, or that Marx didn’t understand economics.
I think that if you accept this dichotomy (and I do) you create the space for people who accept mistake theory to go back to being worried about Koch Brothers/George Soros/[insert wellspring of all bad public policy research/arguments here]. They provide the capacity for malicious actors to create a false-consensus around a topic, dropping what should be a hard-mistake idea down being regarded as an easy mistake.
If there are two social problems, one that is publically regarded as easy (from your referenced example: global warming, 99% of experts agree) and one where there appears to be honest disagreement in the research (again from you above, minimum wage) the one most mistake-oriented people are going to critically engage with is the complex one. Therefore the implicit goal of biased research is both to present whatever outcome you’ve been paid to advocate for and to do so in such a convincing manner that you “prove” your topic should be considered an easy-mistake subject.
When viewed from this lens I don’t think it’s dumb to worry about the source of an argument or research. I’m not worried about one glossy shill coming around with his Yellowstone PowerPoint, I’m worried about the 99 of them coming every year eventually morphing us into a culture where the Yellowstone Argument is taken as an Accepted Fact, one that any digression from is proof that you’re a very stupid person making a very simple mistake.
I’ll admit, this probably isn’t a stable system, and eventually enough free thinkers and trusted independents would be able to overcome the false orthodoxy, but in the meantime we’ve wasted everyone’s time attacking this false position instead of trying to solve real problems.
What’s funny about that paragraph is that from my point of view, your examples are both cases where the biased research has succeeded in doing exactly what you describe. The global warming debate has been pushed into “are global temperatures rising and is human action a large part of the cause,” where a very large majority of the experts agree, while avoiding the real question, which is “is a warmer globe much worse for humans,” where the arguments are much less clear. The minimum wage debate, on the other hand, is pushed away from the simple question “do demand curves for inputs slope down,” on which almost all economists agree, onto questions such as “does the unemployment rate go up when the minimum wage increases,” which is almost entirely irrelevant since minimum wage workers are only a tiny fraction of the labor force.
But I realize that my view of these subjects is not universally shared.
Yes, and my apologies for not using better examples. I sorta predicted it might be an issue and was originally was going to think up a few completely uncontroversial topics, but in the end wanted to stick with what the examples that Scott used in the parent post.
I’m not convinced that people are either Conflict theorists OR Mistake theorists. I think that each of these are tactics that most people employ depending on the situation. What you describe as conflict theory seems like an effective attack against your motte-and-bailey doctrine.
I have a habit of arguing with people that I agree with, it helps to spot any weak points. I’ve used both Mistake and Conflict in the same conversation. “We need to fund solar energy”…….”Solar panels have been around since 1876, they still can’t compete.”…….. “97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real”……”Of course they do, 97% of UFO researchers agree that UFOs are real”.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to argue the policy, other times it’s appropriate to argue the motive, and God grant me the wisdom to know the difference.
At a meta-level, you could look at this as a conflict-theory explanation (two theories clash!) of a mistake-theory worldview (how do we incorporate both ideas this into rational solutions?). But it’s all so black-and-white that it only reflects how a very small number of people think – and not all of the people you accuse, either.
Take public choice theorists, for example. You accuse them of being mistake theorists who ignore conflict theory entirely. Really? Here’s a perspective that starts out by saying, “many individuals and groups have their own self-interests or motivations; they will pursue those interests regardless of the publicly stated aim, or of the general public good; so we have to take that into account when we implement any government action”. Can you really accuse them of being ignorant of conflict theory?
I’m not saying public choice theory is a combination conflict/mistake mindset. I’m saying you spent an entire article contrasting two black and white worldviews, accused black of ignoring white, then made a brief nod to “I suppose there may be some slightly gray shades here”. Perhaps a more nuanced addendum is in order.
This is a good distinction, but we should be careful not to conflate mistake vs conflict with status-quo vs radicalism, because there are plenty of Mistake Radicals (I’m one). It’s also worth distinguishing between the “my enemies’ interests are mutually exclusive with mine” and “my enemies are evil” types of conflict theory, though arguably the latter isn’t necessarily conflict – evil could just be another mistake.
Mistake Theorists become Conflict Theorists in extremis: when their (personal or group) survival is threatened. (I don’t mean “when their philosophical viewpoint is threatened”.)
“There are no atheists in a foxhole”, or something like that.
In times of plenty, it’s easy to be a Mistake Theorist, and you also get to feel superior. Persecuted groups tend to be Conflict Theorists, and during hard times everyone feels persecuted.
I think the world view insight on the Mistake/Conflict axis is great! It clarifies a lot of discussions. Like a lot of things, it is easier to describe the Mistake/Conflict differences by pointing to people who are very strongly one side or the other of the divide. But it seems to me that lots of people are mixed in the approach they prefer (though I would tend to guess that more people are more conflict oriented). A good mistake analyst would want to know when ‘conflict’ is an important consideration, then act to reduce the conflict, which then lets them act well in the ‘mistake’ domain. A bad mistake analyst wants to function in the ‘mistake domain’ where they are comfortable, so will go out of their way to pretend that the ‘conflict’ stuff isn’t important.
I’m definitely on the ‘mistake’ analysis side, but now that I’m looking I’m pretty sure I’ve been a bad mistake analyst far more often than a good one.
The problem is understanding which domain is most important in which problem. I’m very ‘Mistake’ oriented, but I’m well aware of the fact that there are areas where ‘Conflict’ thinking more directly gets to the reality of the situation. If you’re a young black man growing up poor in the South and you can’t at least sometimes operate with the frame “I had better be careful around the police because SOME OF THEM WILL BE OUT TO GET ME NO MATTER WHAT I DO” then you are going to get seriously fucked over.
My problem with Marxists is that (to my mind) they dramatically overplay WHICH times the question of the ‘rich being out to get you’ is one of the more important parts of the equation. They think the answer to that is ‘every time’. They also dramatically underplay what kinds of people can be the villain in their ‘conflict’. They repeatedly act as if the person who thwarts the power of the rich can’t still fuck over the poor.
The reason Marxists have so much trouble is that in the ‘Mistake/Conflict’ axis, they are so far on the conflict side that they can’t function well where the ‘mistake’ axis comes to the fore. So their whole project is to reduce the power of their enemies. But they don’t know what to do when they’ve resolved into a time where ‘mistake’ is the important domain, so they are always making new enemies rather than deal with the design flaws that they don’t even see.
I’m not quite sure where Scott Alexander gets the idea that Marxists consider the descriptive problems of governance to be trivial. There is a vast literature and debate, historically and ongoing, about “What is to be done?” when Marxists take power. And though Marxists may not use the language of “principal-agent problems” or “incentives,” they are very much aware that these are issues.
I would also say that the typical Marxist attitudes towards most non-political workers is that they are simply mistaken. This charity will occasionally even be applied to outright Nazis. (August Bebel once called anti-Semitism “The Socialism of Fools,” which is to say, their heart is in the right place, but they have gravely misdiagnosed the root problem). It’s only the most educated and informed members of the ruling class and their lackeys that Marxists take a disparaging, conflictual attitude towards.
Marx did not simply label anyone who disagreed with him a purposeful enemy. For example, he had slight disagreements with Sismondi, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others of the classical economics school, but Marx did not label them “vulgar economists” since it appeared to Marx that they were approaching their questions without pre-conceived apologies for capitalism or other political agendas that they were looking for. Smith, Ricardo, etc. were mostly on the right track, but just mistaken about a couple of things. Whereas economists like Malthus appeared to Marx to be blatantly apologizing for the privileges of the landed aristocracy, and were intelligent enough that they ought to have consciously known how they were misleading people.
Thinking Marxist debates about what’s to be done show that Marxists take governance seriously is a hilarious example of not taking governance seriously. These debates are entirely scriptural, moral, or grand-strategic, not nuts-and-bolts.
Count me in at “this is obvious” camp.
One thing that’s wrong here, though, is the conflation of “conflict theorists” with revolutionaries. There absolutely have been a plenty of people who have 1. viewed politics as a struggle and 2. believed that while it’s important for them to personally to choose their own side, it’s also possible, at least for time being, to reach compromises with the other side. However, this still requires knowing what the sides are.
I would argue that the history of social democracy has been exactly this. There have been a plenty of people who have been hardcore supporters of their party and union, who wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise, who see the bosses and the bourgeois parties as an enemy that’s bound to conflict with them… and who then, time and time again, come to the bargaining table with the other side and strike out a compromise. Even the Communist parties would generally operate like this, at least in the Western countries. This is also the fundamental difference between social democracy and left-liberalism – though these days what passes for social democracy’s mostly just left-liberalism with a few historical trappings, anyhow.
To address some of your points:
Is medicine not a conflict waged against pathogens? Is science not a war against ignorance? Do mistake theorists never assert that their ideas should dominate policy direction, because their claims are true (empirically or otherwise) and their opponent’s claims are false?
Conversely, are engineering and science not applied to war?
It’s not clear to me based on your examples how reason is distinct from conflict. You seem to be suggesting that conflict theorists seek to eliminate opposing viewpoints, whereas mistake theorists value the existence of opposition (perhaps to foster competitive innovation), but the distinction falls apart when it comes time to actually select and implement policy. Opposing viewpoints can and do coexist in politics, but eventually a decision has to be made either way. Even if that decision were to abdicate civic responsibility and let private enterprise come up with a solution, at some point a supervisor will have to make the call. All but one choice must be eliminated in the end, and deciding not to act is still a choice.
You’ve just portrayed conflict theorists as attributing racism to the self-serving bias, specifically the need to distort reality to preserve one’s self-esteem. There’s nothing inherently contradictory in the position that racism is rooted in cognitive biases and manifested in structures of oppression.
You make the distinction between “intelligence” and “passion” here but your examples outline a distinction between styles of organization, where the mistake theorists organize across vertical hierarchies yet conflict theorists prefer horizontal collective action. Are you implying that conflict theorists, by eschewing trust in experts, don’t elect leaders, commission studies, or run education subcommittees?
Also, why do you portray intelligence and passion as mutually exclusive? In reality, political organizing usually involves working groups dedicated to specific policy areas. Experts use data-driven and experiential knowledge to form policy statements, ascertain the current field of candidates, and endorse candidates who support those policies. It’s passionate members who, not necessarily understanding the details, take to the streets to advocate these candidates to their communities. This is exactly how the DSA functions.
Passion can be a powerful force multiplier for intelligent policy. Why are you setting them in opposition to each other here?
If your enemy, due to their own cognitive biases (such as the bias blind spot), refuses to consider your position and not only undertakes measures to expand on their mistakes but consolidates their power to prevent anyone from stopping them, how should you respond? That is, if your blind grandpa is driving towards a cliff and locks the car doors, at what point do you become his enemy?
(maybe this is a dupe of someone else’s comment, sorry)
“Steelman all ideas, except for Marxism, which is obviously bad” has an obviously bad failure mode.
I mean, I think Marxism is incredibly and obviously bad, and it might turn out that we really do need to put it into the “don’t steelman this” box, but once we put one thing in the box, we’ll want to put more things into the box, because it’s easier than steelmanning. So we should do our homework and be really sure about why this one particularly bad idea doesn’t deserve steelmanning.
But don’t lots of people steelman Marxism? Like Marxists? And isn’t it still incredibly easy to argue against?
The steelman of Marxism is Stalin, he represented the ultimate in class distinction and power, and how awfully things can go in such a state.
When your steelman is an ice pick to the brain, I feel like steelmanning isn’t as helpful as I had thought. (I’m not disagreeing in this comment – I love the idea of Stalin as steelman and the joke of a literally steel steelman argument).
I will do my own steelman below.
For those who don’t speak Russian: “Stalin” literally means “steelman”.
(This is not a coincidence, because in Soviet Russia coincidence always is you.)
It’s not that marxism has a failure mode, it’s that marxism has been tried dozens of times and doesn’t appear to have a success mode. It’s turned into stalinism, or at least leninism, every single time, without exception.
What do you mean by saying that Marxism has turned into Leninism every time? Democratic Socialist parties founded by Marxists have run countries without turning into Leninism, but one might argue but they’re not Marxist anymore. On the other hand, revolutionary Marxist parties, as far as I can tell, were always Leninist before they took over a country. Some of the Latin American revolutions have been less explicitly ideological, but I haven’t found any that were Marxist before they were Leninist.
I think a lot of commenters are being far too charitable to Conflict Theory.
Mistake Theory doesn’t pretend that there are no conflicts or value disagreements – rather, it’s a way of understanding and solving them. Suppose we grant the Conflict Theorist his central point, but retain a mild curiosity. “OK, your opponents are evil mutants, but still, how do I know your ideas will actually work?” And we’re straight back in Mistake Theory territory!
To all the people claiming Conflict Theory is good in zero-sum games – what evidence do you have for that proposition? And how do you know any conflict is zero-sum, until you’ve properly explored the conflict space? How do you even know what your real interests are to be Conflicting about – couldn’t you be mistaken about that? It’s Mistake Theory all the way down! Press a Conflict Theorists and they quickly end up talking about false consciousness (a Mistake Theory if ever there was one).
Meanwhile, Public Choice theory and regulatory capture aren’t Conflict Theories, they are Mistake Theories. The problem is not that certain groups are arguing for their own self-interest – that’s absolutely fine. The problem is that concentrated interests get their way over diffuse ones more often than they should, because they can better co-ordinate to bamboozle regulators/politicians/the public, who find it too costly to evaluate their plausible-sounding but false claims. That’s classic Mistake Theory. Bootleggers and Baptists isn’t a story about how the Baptists are evil mutants who secretly want Al Capone to run Chicago, it’s about how concentrated interests can only be successful if they find ways to attract broad, well-intentioned support. Mistake Theory.
I think your point is purely one of word definition. For you, mistake theory is being rational and conflict theory is being something else, therefore mistake theory is correct by definition. If c/t is correct about its central thesis, then m/t would acknowledge this but argue about it rationally, hence being correct again.
If, on the other hand, you define being a c/t or m/t by where you think the biggest problems come from, well there you go. If you believe that private interests are the bottleneck for doing good rather than figuring out problems, there is your reason to prefer c/t.
If you believe that “private interests” are the bottleneck for doing good, you’re certainly a Conflict Theorist, but this is a Mistake. Fulfilling private interests is (approximately) what doing good is. The problem is not that your opponents have Interests, the problem is that sometimes the decision-making procedure favours some interests over others.
Real-life Conflict Theory looks like Cato the Elder saying “Carthago Delenda Est.” You will note that he did not say “Salting the earth in the Punic lands will be good for the environment and make Carthage great again.” And the latter, not the former, is the standard form of political argument in the Western world. So why, if it’s really a conflict, do your enemies make appeals to shared values and universal arguments? To take the example given above, Comcast don’t say “We should repeal net neutrality because it’s good for Comcast.” They say “We should repeal net neutrality because it’s good for America and the world.”
The reason should be immediately obvious – decision-making in Western countries is far too open for an appeal purely to Comcast’s (or Netflix’s) self-interest to work. Netflix vs Comcast is won by whoever can persuade the people with no obvious ox to be gored, and more direct leverage like lobbying only works if neither side wins that battle cleanly. So in terms of explaining and resolving real-world political disputes in Western countries, the question is not “Why can’t I persuade Comcast that net neutrality is actually good?” If it was just Comcast, there’d be no dispute! The overwhelming majority of net neutrality opponents have no vested interest in it, they have just fallen for the propaganda. Instead, the question is “How have Comcast managed to persuade so many people that net neutrality is bad, and how can I show them the light?” In other words, Mistake Theory.
(And of course in reality Comcast is correct that ending net neutrality is good for the world, and Netflix are the ones trying to subvert the public interest, which just re-emphasises why Mistake Theory is the right lens.)
This seems more-or-less correct, although misses the point that Marx does have a story about motivation other than “the people are Good and Pure” and “the elites are Bad Cackling Degenerates”. I think it could be summed up in the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The core Marxist idea is that people respond to incentives, but that the subtle interesting kind of incentives are basically negligible, and that vastly more important are the large overarching incentives of the group you belong to. And as capitalism dissolves everything into the market, eventually the only important social groupings become people who live off returns on invested capital — the bourgeoisie — and people who sell their labor — the proletariat. (this is just a paraphrase of chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto.) Conflicts within these groups due to different incentives exist but aren’t important.
Lenin really believed this, and massively underestimated the degree to which gain-seeking behavior by, say, workers self-governing individual factories would cause problems. Also all the Russian Marxists also acknowledged that the peasantry, while still being poor and oppressed, certainly did not have the same class interests as the proletariat, and then just sort of didn’t worry about it until suddenly it was a huge problem.
Trotsky was pretty clear-headed about much of this stuff and made correct predictions about it years in advance. His solution was basically just to impose a top-down military structure on everything, and discipline workers the same way the army disciplines soldiers. He gets a good reputation because he opposed Stalin, but arguably he laid the groundwork for totalitarianism.
Lenin’s solution was a “retreat” into more of a market economy, then he died. There were disputes between different factions, and by 1930 Stalin had won out, and took the tack that a lot of policy problems involving balancing competing incentives can be “solved” by slave labor and mass murder.
Your “conflict/mistake” dichotomy misses the target here, primarily for being too broad. Is it about worldview, or attitude, posturing, and rationality?
To steelman your position, perhaps “conflict/mistake” is useful as a spectrum of the significance that a person gives “conflict” in their worldview. But since the level of social conflict fluctuates throughout history, that puts the optimal conflict/mistake level as dependent on the current context. For example, in democratic-socialist countries, Leftists tend to be more mistake theorists, supporting small tweaks to the status quo. While in military dictatorships and feudal systems, Leftists tend to form revolutionary armies. But would you say they are “irrational” to do so? Self-interest manifests in strange ways, in desperate times.
Another problem with your dichotomy: When Marxists say “there is class conflict”, they are essentially saying “people are acting in their self interest, in a never-ending power struggle between self-interested groups”. Which sounds a lot like…Public Choice Theory.
The charge that Marxists are “unaware of incentives” is an extremely unusual one to lob at a group whose whole shtick is raising “class consciousness”, i.e., telling workers that their boss has an inherent incentive to screw them over, and they should rise up to take what they want.
>Also why, whenever existing governments are bad, Marxists immediately jump to the conclusion that they must be run by evil people who want them to be bad on purpose.
That’s complete bullshit. No Marxist, including myself has ever said anything of that sort. You just made that up there. I challenge you to find a Marxist who has said this or apologise for fabrication.
Someone should tell Scott about historical materialism. It’s strange that he, and the Jacobite article, would accuse Marxists of under theorizing, of all things.
It’s like:
Marxist: Your diagnosis of incentives is incomplete, and your solutions are counterproductive.
Jacobite: Hmm, you seem to have abandoned all theory and attempts at rationality. Time to write an essay explaining why logic is good.
Scott: *after reading article* Marxists appear to have abandoned rationality, should we try to engage with them anyway??? (and why don’t they like my blog?)
There’s also this
>Marxists just don’t like considering the hard technical question of how to design a good government.
Just ignore the rigorous debate among Leninists, Trotskyists, Left Coms, Syndicalists etc on how a socialist government would look while you are at it
Moderates know nothing about our theory or simply conveniantly ignore it.
How a government looks isn’t a hard technical question, how do you stop Stalinists from taking over while the Leninists and Trotskyists are arguing about the appropriate amount of violence that ensures the continuation of the state is the tough question, and the basic answer that Western cultures found is in the self limiting state.
>Stalinists from taking over while the Leninists and Trotskyists
Stalinists are Leninists. “Hard technical question” is open to interpretation, as it is both relative and vague.
Leninists would dispute that, though they might end up with a knife in their back before they finished their sentence. Stalinists would agree, pointing to the giant statue of the Leninist that hey erected as evidence, and lamenting the disappearance of their good friend the Trotskyist shortly after.
@Baconbits9
As a Leninist myself I assure you , no Leninist disputes that.
Nothing Stalin said contradicts Leninist theory.
The dispute is the things that Stalin did.
What Stalin did does not contradict the teachings of Leninism.
Socialist/communist theory (specifically Lenin/Trotysky/Stalin ‘teachings’) includes how to get into and maintain power for the purposes of perpetuating the revolution. The demonstration of the superiority of Stalin’s tactics create a gulf between the two verbal ideologies. If you are on here proclaiming to be a Leninist and saying there is no difference between the two you are directly advocating genocide.
I don’t think you actually know what Leninism is. Here is an overview of it. Stalin didnt disagree with all this. Also Stalin didnt do genocide.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leninism
@apollocarmb
Stalin only didn’t do genocide because the genocide convention was carefully written to include what hitler did, but not what stalin did.
So, how does Marxism solve principal-agent problems and rent-seeking?
The principal-agent problem wouldn’t really be a problem in socialist countries. Why would it be? Individual profit is irrelevant in socialist countries
I used to think the trope about socialism being impractical because it denies human nature was naive and kinda condescending, but you are doing a really good job of convincing me otherwise.
Why? Can you explain how?
Principal-agent problem is not limited to financial profit. The part of human nature that puts selfishness above communal interest is not limited to financial profit. It also includes “My department is authorized twenty headcount, yours is only five and none of them are hot secretaries”, and “The Boss puts you on hold to take my phone calls”, and “I have enough pull to get all of my nephews exempted from the draft, you can barely get your son transferred out of the infantry”, and a thousand other things. Including “My ideas for a Better World are implemented instead of yours, and they are implemented because they are Mine, not because they are Better”.
All of which adds up what people with lots of money use that money for, so you’ve gained approximately nothing by taking money and “profit” out of the equation. Almost nobody cares about money except as a means to an end, and agents in socialist countries can achieve virtually all of those ends without money.
Yes, exactly. Rent-seeking isn’t about “money” per se–it’s about things-people-want-ness.
@apollocarmb — I have a feeling this won’t lead anywhere good, but what the hell.
The principal-agent problem isn’t about money, it’s about value. It’s conventionally expressed in money because money is a convenient proxy for value in a system like ours, but it can show up in almost any context where one person acts on behalf of another, as long as the first can benefit themselves in some way as a result of that leverage. This happens constantly, from friends trying to set each other up romantically all the way up to politicians deciding where to site public works, and money does not need to change hands at any point for it to be a problem.
With this in mind, there are two ways I can make sense of your “individual profit is irrelevant” line: either you’re under the impression that every conflict of interests between individuals can be reduced to monetary profit, or you’re under the impression that in the True Socialist Future we’ll eliminate any form of subjective personal benefit. The former is naive, the latter is nightmarish, but both can fairly be described as ignorant of human nature.
@Nornagest:
I agree with you, broadly speaking, but I think I can soften the blow a bit. It is actually possible to build societies where every member works for the common good regardless of subjective personal benefit. Open Source projects are one example of this; small startups are another. True, in both cases the participants get something out of it (fame, or money); but their goal is to maximize the benefit for everyone involved, as opposed to enriching themselves (in terms of money, status, or whatever) at the expense of their fellow participants.
The problem is that such socialist/communist mini-societies can exist only as long as they are small. Communication complexity grows as O(N^2) with the number of participants; this means that, as the organization grows in size, it has to either develop some sort of hierarchical structure, or die by stagnation. Even if you somehow managed to avoid the hierarchy, at some point no individual member will be smart enough to understand the full status of the entire organization; this means that resource allocation becomes contested. And where you have contests, you get markets…
@Bugmaster I think you have created a pretty good description of why the principle-agent problem is a problem. When a society gets too big, principles have to delegate to agents. A socialist society without “profit” would still have this problem.
@Joyously:
Right, that’s why I said I’d only “soften the blow” a little, not eliminate it completely.
Google “Ben Noordhuis” or “Rod Vagg”.
@Norngast
Complete strawman.
I said it “wouldn’t really be a problem”not “wouldn’t be a problem”
Right, because that “really” totally invalidates my take. I have brought shame to my ideology. Crawling off to commit intellectual seppuku now.
The principal-agent problem wouldn’t really be a problem in socialist countries.
Isn’t it fortunate then that we have the example of actual socialist countries to take a look at and see if “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” ever applied?
Nobody with influence in The Party ever got a better apartment, access to imported goods, preferential treatment? There were no black markets, barter, “I’ll trade you this under-the-counter favour for you doing that off-the-books work for me”? Never, ever any “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” going on?
Though I suppose the argument there would be “Ah but those were not real socialist countries, Real Socialism is different!” I’ve had the same arguments over Real Capitalism, so I’m not trying to bash socialism, I’m just saying human nature wants stuff and status and the eternal conflict of ideals with ‘yeah but I don’t want to make sacrifices’ goes on – even within the Soul of Man Under Socialism.:
Those are not big problems at all. I did say “wouldn’t really be a problem” not “wouldn’t be a problem”
There's no private ownership of the means of production, but there's still private ownership of personal possessions. You still keep your toothbrush, and all that.
The actual response to your question, Anon, is:
1. Multiple *marxist* parties allowed. (Your party’s program has to adhere to the fundamentals of socialist society. No fascist or bourgeois parties allowed. But within these points, all parties and party factions should be tolerated). If one marxist party or solitary official is rent-seeking, they are immediately voted out by:
2. Instant recallability of all elected officials.
3. Multiple independent media outlets to expose such corruption. In other words, not state-run. But not run for profit either, of course, which would be just as bad. Instead, run by the various marxist parties or other workers’ organizations.
Note that it was not a foregone conclusion that the Soviet Union would turn into a one-party state. The RSFSR included a sizable proportion of Left-SRs until they launched an attempted coup in mid-1918 against the Bolsheviks over disagreements about Brest-Litovsk (The Left-SRs wanted to continue the fight against Germany and accused the Bolsheviks (unfairly) of being lackeys of German imperialism and abandoning the Ukraine to the tender mercies of the Germans in 1918…rather than just yielding to reality).
And contrary to what bourgeois historians would tell you, re-admittance of the Mensheviks and Right-SRs was not inconceivable if those forces had not actively sided with foreign and White Armies during the Civil War. Heck, the New Economic Policy is what they wanted all along! State control of the commanding heights + individual ownership and free trade for peasants and small businesses until capitalism matured further.
Plus, a socialist America would look very different from a socialist Russia, China, Vietnam, or other traditionalist, leader-worshipping, hampered-by-feudalism, poor society.
Funny how none of the actual marxist societies set up implemented those rules.
The fact that every other marxist state ended up that way seems to indicate that it was, if not foreordained, at least very likely.
Russia was richer in 1913 than france and germany were when marx was writing capital. It only looks backward in hindsight because capitalism has done so well since then.
Russia in 1913 had about 1/3 the per capita GDP of Germany(France was about 6/7 Germany in that stat). It had a larger total GDP but that’s not how anyone would measure “backwardness.”
Edit:misinterpreted statement.
@ragnarrahl
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Broadberry/EuroGDP2.pdf
Russia in 1913 had about 1/4 the GDP per capita of germany and half that of france in 1913. But it had the same GDP per capita that france had in 1870 and 3/4s that of germany in 1870, a few years after marx published capital and several after he started writing it. I stand by my original statement, if germany of 1870 was advanced enough for marx, so was russia of 1913.
I genuinely appreciate an attempt to answer this question.
However: if only Marxist political parties and media outlets are allowed, then someone has to decide what counts as a sufficiently Marxist political party or press outlet… And also which parties are “unfairly” accused by the other party of being lackeys to foreign imperialists, and which other parties actually *are* lackies of foreign imperialists and so must be crushed.
1.Who gets to decide what “the fundamentals of socialist society” are? Who decides that this guy, who claims to be a socialist, is fascist or bourgeious? What if they don’t put convenient markers like “democratic” or “national” before the socialist? Does it depend whether they call the killings they advocate “kulaks” or “Jews?”
2. Do not be ridiculous, comrades, the rumors that I have been validly “recalled” are lies and slander from an illegal fascist party.
3. If parties run media, the media is not independent of whoever is deciding which parties may legally exist. If worker’s organizations run the media, the media is not independent of anyone who decides which workers’ organizations are allowed to exist. (What makes it a worker’s organization? Having two people who do work? What kind of work counts? What if somebody says the workers are fascists?)
Who gets to decide in Germany in the present day if a party is too Nazi to be legally allowed? Who decides the fundamentals of American law? The Supreme Court. There would need to be a similar institution under socialism, backed by popular belief in the rule of law to make sure that it remains actually independent of whatever party happens to be in power at any moment.
And just because there are no hard-and-fast rules between “bourgeois party trying to undo the fundamentals of socialist society” and “socialist party that acknowledges the fundamentals of socialist society but wants it done slightly differently,” that doesn’t mean judges can’t make a judgment call and draw the line somewhere. Just like they do with deciding whether a party is sufficiently “Nazi” in modern Germany to be banned.
This faces the exact same problems in a Marxist society that it does in ours. Individual votes are worthless so people have no incentive to be knowledgeable, and concentrated benefits/diffuse costs tilt the table heavily in favor of the rent-seekers.
Late to the party, but:
The principal-agent problem does not go away when you replace the authority of the “state” with the authority of the “owner”. The principal-agent problem is unsolvable. No ideology gets around having an authority, even anarchists admit to allowing democratic rule.
It’s not something you *solve* it’s something you *improve.* An owner notices when his agent gets too deviant from his interests and has means to address it. Voters do not.
Why would that be the case? It seems that when the scope of your possible influence scales upward (e.g., voting on whether a country will go to war or not, vs. whether to paint a barn), your interest in participation rises with it.
I follow national politics much more closely than some random pointless committee I sit on.
Also, I forgot to point out the strong advantage democracy has, in being able to gauge more than a single person’s interests. Vesting all power in a single person exacerbates the principal-agent problem, by removing control other people have over what happens.
At least in a democracy, there are limits on how many people can be screwed.
@Guy in TN
That assumes that people’s interests are effectively transmuted into votes and pass into policy. In reality, we know that what people often vote for policies that don’t serve their interests in the long run.
Only if you believe your participation affects things.
If I decide to fire my agent–my attorney, say–it happens. If I decide to vote for one presidential candidate instead of another, the chance my preferred candidate wins goes up by something like one ten millionth.
@Guy in TN:
That’s too bad. You have much more influence on that committee than on national politics. Depending on the committee (I know that you said that it was pointless, but maybe you were exaggerating), it may well have more influence on your life than national politics does. Putting those differences together, it would have to be an extraordinarily pointless committee (or you would have to be an extremely influential person) for your participation in the committee to have less effect on your life than your participation in national politics.
My point is that there are two gradients, running in opposite directions here.
On one gradient, the one David Friedman mentioned, is that interest in participation decreases when your chances of influence diminish. In a decision that requires no vote you have maximum influence; a vote among ten other people less so; a vote among a million other people far less influence, and therefore should have minimal participation.
But, there is a counter-gradient to this. And interestingly, this counter gradient actually shows up in voter participation data. In elections that are deemed as having high importance, such as presidential elections and other national elections, people are more likely to take an interest than in local elections. This is despite having your vote diminished by the millions of others.
If David Friedman’s incentive problem was the only thing going on here, we would expect to see, say, local city council elections having greater voter engagement than national elections. But we don’t.
The obvious puzzle with my argument is why people bother to vote at all.
My answer starts with a different question: Why are sports teams linked to cities and universities? My answer is that part of what they are selling is the pleasure of partisanship–not just watching a game, but cheering for your side.
Every four years a game is played out across the country with the fate of the world at stake. You not only get to cheer for your team, you get to play on it, even if in a very minor role. Who could resist?
Unfortunately, the decision of which party to cheer for has little to do with which party will actually do a better job, so there is little incentive to do the hard work of getting a reliable answer to that question. Easier to just believe what your fellow partisans say.
Given high enough stakes, it’s not irrational for someone to spend ten minutes to exercise a 1/1,000,000 influence on major affairs. I like being able to do this, at least compared to any alternatives to democracy, in which I suspect my influence would be even less. To reiterate an earlier comment: as incomplete as democracy is at gauging everyone’s preferences before making a decision, at least its an attempt to do so, unlike in non-democratic decision making.
As a minor note, there’s also a feedback effect going on here. The thinking that “I have essentially no influence over the outcome of an election, therefore I should not vote”- If that position becomes adopted by a vast majority of the voters, it would no longer be true. Because then the handful of people who DID show up to vote, really would have a massive influence.
As others have pointed out, mistake theory is applicable if the object of dispute is zero-sum, such as social status. It may be the case that some people are more or less motivated by desire for social status (or some other zero-sum good), but it would be a mistake not to recognize that those more motivated are correctly relying on conflict-theory in their struggle for it.
On the other hand, I think even outside of the realm of status conflicts, there can be genuine incompatibilities between goals; that is, that even consciously agreeing on all facts, there can be genuinely incompatible values.
(As Schopenhauer said: “Others … are in the habit of teaching that religion and philosophy are really the same thing. Such a statement, however, appears to be true only in the sense in which Francis I is supposed to have said in a very conciliatory tone with reference to Charles V: ‘what my brother Charles wants is also what I want’, namely Milan.”)
One clear example is myself reading this blog – I enjoy reading and agree on the object level with almost everything written here, but I consider my values fundamentally incompatible with those expressed here. On the broadest level, I fundamentally ‘disagree’ with the ethic of utilitarianism, or that the minimization of suffering/maximization of utility/human flourishing of all people is desirable. I’ve found that I care about and want what’s best for, in decreasing order, 1) my family & friends 2) those who produce or have the potential to produce work I admire 3) those with whom I might profitably trade – and not at all about anyone else. Further, I have no higher preference by which I might want to care about everyone’s wellbeing equally/at all. Therefore, I wouldn’t support any attempt to help people who aren’t included in those three groups, even if I thought it would be very effective, since I would consider it simply a waste of effort and resources that could be better used elsewhere. So, such abstract conflicts of goals are at least possible, even if they don’t account for the majority of conflict-theory-inspired conflicts.
Most conflict theorists are making an Easy Mistake, usually in framing their conflict as zero-sum when it is not. Trying to solve this problem by explaining the mistake to them is a Hard Mistake, because it usually isn’t in anybody’s interest to admit they have ever made a mistake and there’s lots of effective tools for self-denial. You and I have been habitually making that mistake for a good long time. Thank you for so eloquently presenting all of this, and keep trying to fix the Hard Mistakes as best you can.
I think Scott is insufficiently charitable to the concept of steelmanning conflict theory (!!!) I think it’s useful, and here’s my steelman from conflict theory to mistake theory.
(1) Mistake theorists are correct in their premises, as far as they go. But there are some things that are so obvious (for example P) that:
(1.1) There is not point in me trying to engage with your arguments, except as anthropology. Phrase it as analogous to rational ignorance if it makes you feel better but (a) it’s a waste of my otherwise worthwhile time to spend it parsing your arguments or checking your sources for -P and (b) if you haven’t been convinced by all the other arguments you’ve heard for P, then you’re either evil, stupid, or subject to some kind of cognitive impairment, so what’s the point in me trying to convince you.
(1.2) Related to 1.1.b above, given that I’m sufficiently confident that I’m right and argument hasn’t convinced you so far, and given that the social cost of people believing -P is very likely to be high, it’s both more efficient and morally preferable that I take steps other than or in addition to arguing with you. Shaming you, isolating you, suppressing information that you can twist to increase support for -P are all observably more effective in some circumstances than debate, and this is one of those circumstances.
(1.3) Related to 1.1.(a) above, since P is fairly obvious, most arguments for -P are much more likely to be trickery, mendacity, or out and out mistakes than to be valuable updates to my knowledge. Particularly if I find at least some evidence for trickery or mendacity relating to a piece of evidence, such as being funded by the Koch Brothers, or having some grad student or autodidact someplace write a plausible criticism on the internet, I’m better off ignoring it.
Viewed this way, our hypothetical conflict theory person has a different prior – that either in this specific case or in most cases, the right answer is pretty obvious, and that that clarity justifies more action and less debate. If so, we would predict that eventually, conflict theory oriented people might adjust their priors and either switch to a conflict oriented belief in -P, withdraw from the question, or move towards mistake orientation. We’d predict that each successive failure of Marxism would cause some marginal number of Marxists to adjust their opinions to something else. I think that’s reasonably accurate.
I also don’t think it’s disrespectful. If it turns out that conflict-oriented thinkers are correct that it’s socially better to stigmatize people opposed to, e.g., interracial dating, than to debate them, then I think that’s something that mistake-oriented thinkers should address.
I think that whether people orient towards P (“this issue is fundamentally a conflict”) and -P (“there is no fundamental conflict here”) depends heavily on evidence, yes…
But the adjustment of priors doesn’t always point the same way.
For example, socialism started out as a fairly utopian thing, and became significantly more conflict-oriented as the 19th century dragged on. Was it all Marx’s fault? Um… I’m guessing no. Because that wasn’t the only thing happening. In 1848 Marx published the Communist Manifesto, but 1848 was also the year that a wave of mostly unsuccessful “Liberal Revolutions” swept across Europe, fighting for greater democracy and political equality in a society where the lower classes were still pretty far under an aristocratic bootheel. An aristocracy that the nouveau riche were already marrying into.
If you were a politically aware person in the 19th century who thought income equality and universal franchise were good things, you would tend to become increasingly aware that most of the power was, objectively, in the hands of people who did not agree with you on those issues. You would probably revise your priors on the issue of “achieving greater equality will/won’t require a revolution.” Even if you didn’t yourself wind up thinking revolution was necessary, you might be less certain that revolution was unnecessary.
Aaaand that’s the story of how the Enlightenment-era “generically pro-democracy” political philosophy of the late 18th and very early 19th centuries gradually split and shuffled around and a lot of them turned into Marxists and anarchists and so on.
They revised their priors in favor of conflict theory. Not because they just got zapped with a mind control ray or something, or because they were sitting around with no priors and randomly invented bad ones. But because in the context of their time and place, you could make a damn good argument for conflict theory accurately modeling the situation.
Insofar as the situation later changed, well, that’s another story.
This a thousand times. By 1848, absolute monarchy and aristocratic privilege had been intellectually discredited. No self-respecting person (outside of Russia, perhaps) could offer a rational defense of inherited privileges. Their only defense against giving up their privileges by then was, “But I don’ wanna! And I have the guns!”
I think Marx prematurely extrapolated this onto capitalism. The mounting popularity of French radicalism and German Social-Democracy, the fact that each socialist revolution crested at ever-higher achievements (socialist occupation of Paris for 3 days during the June Days of 1848 vs. several months during the Paris Commune) convinced Marx that the battle of ideas had already been won, and that the remaining opposition to socialist revolution was just being as obstinate as the feudal ancien regime was being.
It definitely wasn’t entirely marx’s fault, but marx did spend his entire life arguing for violent revolution and against any sort of peaceful transition to socialism, and trying to purge the socialist movement of the people who wanted political democracy.
To be fair, he also found some time to sponge off Engels and knock up a maid.
Ouch.
Thanks – this was very helpful. (I don’t have anything to contribute, except that I enjoyed reading it and think that you made me smarter, which I appreciate.)
I think this approach to settling social arguments makes sense, both logically and tactically. However, it has one flaw: it’s an epistemological black hole. Once I’ve decided that P is obviously true, and that everyone who believes !P is either irrevocably stupid or evil, I can no longer update my beliefs about P based on evidence. Any evidence I receive will ultimately originate from some person or group of people, and since I already know such people are stupid or evil, I can simply discard this evidence as insignificant.
Of course, it is still possible to update my beliefs based on evidence that I’ve collected personally, since I know that I personally am neither stupid nor evil. Unfortunately, nature places some extremely heavy limits on what one man can conceivably accomplish. If I wanted to test the acceleration of gravity, I could drop some cannonballs off of a leaning tower; but if I wanted to test global warming or universal basic income or whatever, I’d need to collect terabytes of data from the entire planet. Humans don’t live long enough to run those kinds of experiments solo.
Thanks. I tend to model the conflict oriented thinkers in my story as updating their beliefs more slowly on average than the mistake oriented thinkers, but not generally updating at a rate of 0, so I’m not quite as pessimistic.
If we model conflict oriented thinkers as having different priors about the value of evidence presented by the “other side” and/or the value of trying to convince the other side through reasoned evidence, then presumably the best ways to approach might be some kind of non-confrontational:
(a) appeals to personal experience, as you point out, and
(b) appeals to opinions of people they trust. I have a buddy who recently advanced a wok-ish theory in a chat, but updated when the women and POC on the list pushed back. Alternately, you can get some mileage with “Why do you think Ralph Nader is against abortion, Milton Friedman supported a guaranteed income,” etc.
Of course, your mileage even there might be limited, and you want to be as non-confrontational as possible so you don’t seem particularly evil/stupid, but I’m not such a pessimist as to say a “black hole.” Can we compromise on “substantial gravity well?” 🙂
Never ! I will never surrender ! Black hole, here I come ! 🙂
I will note three things.
1) I think the correct position is a blend of the two. There are issues on which there is honest disagreement and honest mistakes are made.
2) I think this post is highly uncharitable to conflict theory.
3) I think the reason it is uncharitable toward the conflict theory is that you are mistaken about the fact set and that the mistake likely arises from ignorance. If you were more knowledgeable about the mechanisms by which politics and public dialogue are funded and produced, you would probably have a different view. If you had studied the histories of various movements, how they changed overtime, how they were organized over time, and how the organizers responded to financial incentives over time, you would have a different option.
If you have avoided encountering the facts which cause people to find the conflict view more plausible, you don’t then get to chide that view. Your bias towards the mistake view is, I’ll charitably assume, an honest mistake.
Second-order meta-level reasoning aside, can you articulate a more charitable view of Conflict Theory ? Just like Scott, I’m largely ignorant of “the mechanisms by which politics and public dialogue are funded and produced”, so I am unable to do this myself.
As many people have pointed out, I think the boundary between mistake- and conflict-theory is hazy at best. Facts (at least, our internal weighing and representation of facts) and values have an interconnected and self-reinforcing relationship. On the level of an individual, I think the distinction between mistake- and conflict-theory matters a lot less than whether one is an ‘easy’ or a ‘hard’ theorist of either discipline. But I do think on a sociopolitical level, it is interesting to consider whether conflict- or mistake-theories have more power as diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic tools.
I’m currently somewhat on my way out so I haven’t yet read all top-level comments, and apologise if they’ve addressed this, but: If you were to show people this article, would there be any self-identified conflict theorists? If not, aren’t we running risk of making ‘mistake theorist’ an applause light here that doesn’t actually mean anything, and/or ‘conflict theorist’ as a sophisticated sounding label for grey tribe outgroup(s)? (The way you described ‘mistake theorist’ makes it sound like a description of grey tribe ideals with a bit of an effort to make it sound at least occasionally misguided.)
I’m highly sceptical of this dichotomy you’ve presented – and I admit I was at least initially a little alarmed that several of the comments I’ve skimmed seem to be embracing it as ‘obvious’. (This emotion hasn’t changed yet, but I assume it will – given there’s no particular reason for me to think this article in particular made anyone strongly less likely to be charitable, there’s no reason for me to be this concerned.)
For what it’s worth, I don’t identify with either camp as it’s been framed, and I (wrongly, apparently) would have guessed that others would peg themselves as somewhere on the sliding scale as well. To clarify a bit on my position: I don’t mistrust people, but I do mistrust systems, and I believe that the existing hierarchic system of democratic government doesn’t offer good incentives. I could try playing doctor with the system, but I’d rather see a different system designed from scratch (and tried in parallel). Refactor it, if you will.
There are certainly people that one does not need to be charitable towards, but you already captured this with “Both sides have about the same number of people. Both sides include some trustworthy experts and some loudmouth trolls.” Toxic people exist, yes, but this is is not unique to any ideology and no ideology that I know of is immune to this. Also, I believe we both have made the observation before that the more permissive your ideology is, the more likely it is to have toxic people in it, so there’s no particular reason to assume ideologies that often contain toxic people (e.g. libertarianism is occasionally accused of this, although of course not often by libertarians) is in itself conflict-oriented.
To me, that seems like a poor way to handle the topic.
I presume that ‘conflict theorists’ are ‘mistake theorists’ that were really badly burnt about a particular matter and have a visceral reaction to matters relating to the burning. I’ll take myself as an example (even though I fight against the behaviours and so probably don’t qualify as conflict theorist to you):
I struggle to be charitable toward the social justice movement because self-identified members of the social justice movement have once ganged up on me, and it takes some effort for me to view them as “the toxic people in the movement” as opposed to “the movement as a whole”. (I do manage decently, but it doesn’t change that I can tell I’m burnt.) I would almost certainly kneejerk-agree to ‘the social justice movement is the enemy’ before stopping myself by reminding myself of the points where I agree with them.
Similarly, the company I’ve worked for the past five years had its reputation gutted through local journalism for no objective reason, and I react strongly to topics centred around journalism as a result. Again, I would kneejerk-agree to something like ‘journalism is broken and evil’ before stopping myself by reminding myself of the benefits of journalism.
I could call the people involved in each of these messes ‘conflict theorists’ because they definitely weren’t interested in actual evidence either way, but in doing so, what would I gain? I’m really not sure. I already know that I don’t trust the individual people that did this. Do I think this is because they fundamentally view the world differently than I do, though? Not on the mistake/conflict axis, no. Possibly not at all, though I don’t feel qualified to make that far reaching a statement.
Especially on the internet, where we usually debate in some public manner, charity seems like the obvious way to handle things. I realise you’re not saying you want to get rid of charity – you’re interested in being charitable by acknowledging a different worldview. I don’t want to discourage that (the principle is nice), but it’s worth noting I think it’s more than ‘excusable’ that you discuss evidence and objective effects of ideas even in purported ‘conflict theory’ space.
(I might have missed the point of your article and muddied it with some of the comments – I apologise if this is what happened here.)
I’m an example of someone who will own up to being more or less on the conflict side. There are mistakes being made, sure, but a bigger problem is all the demons running around. To some extent it’s a matter of framing – is it the Blight that’s the problem or the mistake of the people who released it? But it makes predictions on questions like “will people intentionally hurt you just because they see that you can be hurt” and “will people understand if you just explain to them”, and I think it makes those predictions well.
@Neike Taika-Tessaro
Why don’t you mistrust people as well? It’s people that make the systems in the first place. They frequently make rather shitty systems within systems, like bullying people or being selfish.
Who actually has agency in your model?
I’ll take option 2, please.
In fact, I was reading this thinking “god, these conflict theorists are annoying and stupid” and then worrying about what that says about me.
One thing that seems to be getting lost in a number of places here, so I’ll just address it this once. Mistake Theory doesn’t require denying that Rich Plutocrats are genuinely trying to further enrich themselves at the expense of the poor and that the Poor are trying to
tear down the rich out of spiterighteously take back what is theirs. More broadly, it does not require denying that people will selfishly pursue their selfish interests to the detriment of others or of the whole of humanity, does not simplify to “if we are all rationalist altruists the right answer would be…”Mistake Theory would hold that in almost all real conflicts, the best outcome for everyone is a negotiated solution and that the relevant facts (including the balance of power between competing interest groups) makes the range of plausibly negotiated agreement reasonably narrow. So failing to sit down and quietly negotiate that agreement, instead escalating to pointless conflict, is usually a Mistake and often an Easy Mistake.
Figuring out what to do about people who persist in making that Easy Mistake, is the sort of problem that often leads to Hard Mistakes and sometimes to solutions that look like Easy Conflict.
How would we decide whether this is true of most real conflicts? Because I can see a fair number of real-world political and social conflicts that seem very hard to resolve with more information or better analysis–either they come down to values/morality, or they come down to genuine conflicts of interest.
Examples: Abortion policy, reparations for slavery, hate speech laws
But the first two of those examples have been stalemated long enough that anyone ought to be able to resolve them without difficulty. Regardless of your values, morality, or interests, abortion is going to be legal through at least the first trimester in the US and Western Europe, lots of people would prefer to add “but only in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s health”, but nobody is going to want to seriously enforce those. The descendants of slaves are not going to be getting reparations beyond some affirmative action, and we’re not going to keep even that up forever. We know the balance of power on those issues, it doesn’t allow decisive victories for Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, or Pro-Nehisi, and it is an Easy Mistake to make a big fuss over any of these no matter how strongly you feel about the underlying moral issue.
Except, cynically, as a means of building tribal loyalty that can be transferred to other battles (like hate speech laws, where there is some doubt and so might be worth fighting over).
ETA: Fighting a battle you cannot win means that the fight, not the victory, is the true objective. That is I think the essence of Conflict Theory.
John Schilling:
I am not convinced by your ideas about what issues are so hopelessly stalemated that everyone should just assume that’s how we’ll do things. Lots of values issues are stalemated for a long time, and then something changes and they’re not. Slavery is an obvious one–someone discussing this same issue in 1840 might have used slavery as an example of a stalemated issue where it’s hard to find much common ground between the sides. Or someone in 1950 might have seen communism/capitalism as an irreconcilable disagreement (either because of different values or because the other side is evidence-proof). And yet, both of those are pretty-much settled issues, now.
Consider the situation w.r.t. gay rights in 1990–it would have seemed plausible that this was an issue that was kind-of stalemated–there would continue to be laws on the books forbidding homosexuality that were basically never enforced, gays would be permitted to live their lives pretty normally as long as they kept it kinda quiet and didn’t expect benefits for being married or expect to adopt kids or anything, etc. That looked pretty stable, it was based on some values-differences as well as some mistake-theory kinds of arguments, but it turned out that the then-current stalemate wasn’t actually permanent.
Things change, but they rarely change in unpredictable and incomprehensible ways. Regardless of one’s belief in the morality of slavery, one can perfectly well study the economy of slavery – and it’s not a coincidence that so much of the propaganda of the antebellum slaveholders reads like the glorification of a valiant rear guard against the inevitable.
A mistake theorist can look at cotton production ca. 1860, US vs India vs Egypt, and say “yep, the slavery that was unassailable twenty years ago is going away sometime in the next twenty”, and start negotiating compensated emancipation. A conflict theorist, on either side, says “this means War!”. Or the mistake theorists might actually make a mistake, but that would look different than what we got.
And nothing about gay rights in 1990 looked like a stalemate. The timeline and the details were negotiable, not the basic outcome.
See, that’s an unfair comparison of the Easy Conflict Theory to Hard Mistake Theory.
Easy Mistake Theory is not amenable to compromises, at all. After all, that’s where you believe that you’ve got the objective truth and your opponent is dumb or crazy or – worst of all – an amoral populist exploiting the two other categories. (That’s how Western liberals currently view Putin.) Why would you compromise with a dumb crazy person? Do you want your solution based on half truth and half fantasies? Wouldn’t it be easier to exasperatedly explain them why they’re wrong *one more time*? Even if the easy mistake theorist ended up compromising, his dissatisfaction would immediately lead them to start undermining the compromise to get his objective fact-based worldview through, pissing off the other side.
Hard Conflict Theory is actually *more* amenable to compromises than Hard Mistake Theory, when the conditions are right – and they often have been. After all, Hard Mistake Theorists still have to go through an elaborate process of finding out why they have their disagreements and how to solve them objectively. Hard Conflict Theories simply note that the side A wants this and has this much power, side B wants this and has this much power, now let’s compromise (maybe both sides get some things they want, maybe they meet halfway on everything – unimportant here) and be done with it. Of course, they also know the compromise won’t last forever, but in the long run, we are all dead.
I think this is probably wrong.
It is a seductive way of thinking, as well, which makes it wrong in a dangerous kind of way. It frames everything in a Conflict-oriented way, written in a Mistake space; it is us Mistakes against those Conflicters. Which sort of suggests the flaw underpinning it
There is a “rightness” to it, in that some people lose all faith and trust in their opposition, such that no argument from their opposition can truly be heard. But we can frame that as a mistake about reality.
Likewise, postmodernism could be framed as a conflict-prone ideology, as conflict, as it is described here, is central to its approach to empiricism; the facts you see are themselves part of a narrative. But postmodernism, done right, corrects for mistakes, rather than adding to them. Conflict thinking is necessary to identify and deal with an entire class of mistakes – mistakes of misapplied faith.
The central article is wrong for two reasons; first, it treats people as possessing these qualities, where it could more accurately be said that people having varying faiths in varying institutions; a person might be conflict oriented in one matter and mistake oriented in another. And second, because it treats conflict as a distinct mode of thought from mistake.
They are the same, they just start with different priors on the reliability of information and arguments from specific sources.
This looks like terminology that will pollute rationalist debates without adding much informational content, honestly. I can certainly happily declare that all my opponents are just Conflict-prone fools who can’t listen to reason.
More likely, however, my arguments just aren’t as persuasive as I think they are. And it isn’t like I strive for perfect logic, I prefer an emotional hammer on occasion as well.
I just wanted to say that you managed to capture many of my concerns far better than I did in my comment – thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Yeah. This post is such a parody of the principle of charity I half expect Scott to make another post later today going “Gotcha! You all fell for an elaborate trap making you think in Conflict terms while feeling superior to those irrational Conflict people, and you should stop feeling so superior, it is just an aspect of human nature and not an innate quality of people”
Yeah, this seems about right to me. I think it is a big mistake to frame this as two separate types of people, instead of two semi-overlapping methods of engagement.
Are the people on the other side arguing and acting in good faith? That almost certainly depends on what issue we’re talking about, and who the people are on the other side. While it’s certainly plausible that some people or ideologies are more prone to one assumption over the other, it feels wrong to talk about “conflict theorists” and “mistake theorists” without specifying who we are theorizing about.
People will tend to assume “mistake” with their in-group, and “conflict” with their outgroup. As a result, the more you are in somebody’s outgroup, the more likely it is that they will look like a conflict theorist to you. That’s not an indelible aspect of their character: it’s just a reflection of the relation between the two of you.
Moreover, the whole idea of being on Team Mistake or Team Conflict is silly. Surely it depends on the situation. Conflict with who? To mangle a popular phrase in these parts: “If this person with whom I disagree can be bargained with in good faith, I desire to believe so. If this person with whom I disagree cannot be bargained with in good faith, I desire to believe so.”
I am open to the idea that there is value in talking about mistake-driven vs conflict-driven styles of interaction, but I fear that talking about Conflict Theorists and Mistake Theorists will shed more heat than light.
A much more specific and apt way of putting it, I think. Shifting focus to a style of argument, rather than a type of person, does resolve most of my issues with the post.
Nicely written, and a good concern, but I disagree.
I think the principle of charity and the recognition that adherence to said principle is unequally distributed are not incompatible ideas, but rather are conjoined twins. If reminding myself and others of the principle of charity is important, it’s also important to keep track of who has made the principle of charity such a habit it’s part of their character, and who has done rather the opposite.
I’d call it “explicably badly”. Your posting is the explanation. Mistake theorists are concerned with what is true and how to know it. Conflict theorists have burned out that part of their brains. Mistake theorists can think about conflicts, but conflict theorists cannot think about mistakes.
This reminds me of the first comment I made here last year. It was on the Civil War, and with this perspective, I can say that I was approaching that question from the Mistake Theory and not the Conflict Theory, while I see most approaches (either side) being Conflict Theory out in the real world. It also reminds me of a comment sub-thread from last year on an interaction I had with a woman with tattoos (which, BTW, I did follow up on.. and yeah, I am about the same level as a hairy bug in her mind.) This is an interesting point of view/reality filter.. I think I’ll have to do some studying on it.
Out of curiosity, has anyone sought out or found any correlation between mistake vs conflict and and personal ethics? I’d be curious to see if deontologists tend to be more mistake oriented or consequentialists being more conflict oriented.
BTW – as I read the examples you gave, I found I was about 70% mistake and 30% conflict, but internally would identify with the mistake theorist side.
Required reading: “In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You”, by Cosma Shalizi
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/
I enjoyed this link, thankyou.
I actually don’t know where I would put myself on the mistake-conflict axis. On the one hand, I think people are prone to think in categories of good and evil when it really doesn’t apply. On the other hand, I think everyone who believes people aren’t willing to hurt others for their own advantage are hopelessly naive.
Marx made at least a decent attempt at placing mistake theory-style arguments into his larger conflict theory argument with his notion of complex vs. simple labor in Das Kapital. It was a way of determining compensation in the new communist state. It’s based on a wrongheaded notion of the labor theory value – wherein a doctor is “objectively” 100 times more skilled than a brick layer (based on a mathematical formula, even) – but hey, it was something.
“Right now I think conflict theory is probably a less helpful way of viewing the world in general than mistake theory…”
At the very least Mistake Theorists are in conflict with Conflict Theorists. This is a problem.
Henry George took the mistake theorist route.
Karl Marx took the conflict theorist route.
Marxism won over Georgism and the world lost.
The term “merchants of doubt” sums up what Conflict People think of Mistake People.
One optics problem Mistake People have is that when they become sufficiently passionate about their cause – cognitive rather than moral error – they can appear to be indistinguishable from ideologues for the “other” side. You’re hectoring people for not seeing things your way, after all.
I am a mistake theorist, yet many of your descriptions of what mistake theorists believe don’t fit me at all–support for technocracy, for example. The implication of public choice theory, after all, is that the reason governments do the wrong thing is not that either the politicians or the voters are stupid. The voters are rationally ignorant. The politicians correctly believe that supporting a steel tariff will be politically profitable. The problem is that they are all acting rationally within a game where each person making the correct decisions for himself does not lead to the correct outcome for all–which is my definition of market failure.
One could argue that I really believe what you claim, just one level up. The people are stupidly supporting a game–allocating stuff via the political marketplace–that produces worse outcomes than a different game they could support–allocating stuff via the private marketplace. But that still isn’t stupid, because rational ignorance applies at that level as well.
I took Scott to be describing not what mistake theorists necessarily think but rather examples of how they might approach an issue. He assumes a generally leftist perspective throughout.
It might be interesting for a rightist or libertarian commenter to give some examples of how the taxonomy works on that side of the aisle. I’m pretty sure it still does — your writing strikes me as mistake-theoretic, for example, while Ayn Rand’s strikes me as conflict-theoretic.
“there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men”
–Ayn Rand.
At least from the little Objectivist corner in right libertarianism… it doesn’t really seem to work. There is no one evil, who is not also incorrect. There’s not really a parallel to the evil genius capitalist who fully understands the class conflict, which is what enables them to craft false consciousness so excellently in their workers. Not in the nonfiction writings anyway. In the fiction, there’s Ellsworth Toohey, Floyd Ferris, and Pavel Syerov, but these are each unique in their universes and I can’t recall reading anything she’s written about real people that suggested they were both evil and fully understood the issues. (Reportedly, she verbally said that about Nathaniel Branden, and expressed hope that this would result in his impotence for 50 years, but let’s not mix a lover’s quarrel with politics).
Don’t get me wrong, there’s no shortage of moral judgment in her work. It’s just that all the evil people are ALSO making mistakes, and the evil people would be pretty harmless if not for the mistakes made by large numbers of not-really-evil people. The conflicts and the mistakes are bound up with each other in the same theory.
I’ll admit that most of what I know about Objectivism comes from her fiction.
More thoughts:
a) This explains why the American Congress is set up so weird (with representatives for states/districts and nothing for the popular vote): It was set up on the basis of conflict theory, assuming states and local communities were natural enemies. A system with zero weight to the popular vote makes no sense from a mistake theory perspective, but makes sense from a conflict theory one (that also assume congressional districts/states are the natural way people break down into communities). People who like districting over popular vote based systems will usually justify it with “but a popular vote could allow the majority to oppress us”.
b) This also shows up in some libertarian arguments, like being pro gay marriage or pro choice because “it’s not hurting you [opposers], what do you care”. This is assuming the opposers are based on conflict theory, while opposers often think in terms of mistake theory (loss of social cohesion/baby’s lives).
One reason I support the Senate/electoral college system is that I personally trust my state government (more or less), and I feel that my state represents a reasonably distinct and meaningful community. A popular vote of the United States (or the world) might be a better way of enacting the shared goals my State-community has with the rest of the United States (or the world)… but we have un-shared goals as well.
I think “conflict theory” in this article just means Marxists, and not other groups that see politics as having a meaningful moral dimension.
When I look at hard libertarians like the Mises Institute guys, or even at other moralisitic groups like US Christian conservatives, I don’t see much “Your points are invalid because you’re on Team Evil” and I do see a lot of “You’re wrong because of X Y and Z” (i.e. substantive argument supplemented by moral suasion)
Jordan Peterson, for example, is clearly very willing to engage in prolonged and careful debate, but he also often has strong moralisitic claims.
Practically, this whole mistake vs conflict thing seems like a convenient way to bar non-utilitarian moral claims without good grounding for doing so, and to partially rehabilitate radical Marxists (in addition to simply being a false categorization of the world)
I agree, but are you then saying that when you look at Marxists, you do see ‘Team Evil’ and don’t see ‘wrong because’?
I notice I’ve been moving more and more into a conflict-related mindset as I get older, if only because the mistake-mindset people seem super condescending. It may seem like calling people “evil” is a good way to dead-end a conversation, but so is saying “you are obviously too stupid to ever understand the nuanced argument I’m trying to make,” and at least being evil is a sort of “power,” you know?
Its interesting to see you invoke philosophy as obviously trending towards a mistake-oriented mindset, when the only thing I learned from my philosophy undergrad degree is you can’t get an “is” from an “ought,” and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something. Seriously, you’re new friend https://samzdat.com/ has been writing a War and Peace-level tome for months now and it all seems to be circling back to this point (along with the point that people’s “seemingly irrational axiomatic stances yield more stable results that we could initially predict from the outside”).
One of the most illuminating conversations I had with a Libretarian went along the lines of “the free market is BS because look at the outcomes it trends towards,” to which he responded “we get those outcomes becomes those our are incentives, its not the market’s fault if we incentivize things in ways you find bad.” And if that’s not a statement with a whole host of conflict-oriented propositions hidden underneath it, I don’t know what is.
That being said, there’s probably a way to account for all conflict-oriented people in a mistake-oriented system, whereas I’m not sure it goes the other way. Isn’t this the liberal machine you so often praise? We built it recognize that one of the fundamental problems to solve was the incommensurability of different folk’s belief systems. I guess the hope is we can throw enough data at the problem that we will all suddenly see that our different moral systems are respective sides of the same coin but well…hopefully your imagined super-intelligent AI work that way (or else we are doomed), but I don’t think humans ever can.
I suspect the term “political correctness” encodes a mistake-theorist’s critique of conflict theory. Unpacked, it would go something like “those who insist on drawing battle lines against every heresy are making it very difficult to have a productive conversation”.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the term is associated with universities, where large numbers of young idealists (conflict theorists) inhabit institutions designed for dialogue (i.e. designed by and for mistake theorists).
Well… I think that Hard Conflicts might also be important.
It might be that Policy A can help alleviate Problem B … but some people think it conflicts with Fundamental Right C. Sometimes the people opposed to Policy A recognize that that might look obstructive so they back a symbolic useless action that does nothing but at least violates no rights. (The proponents of Policy A then react to that with ridicule.)
I can think of two issues with the above template on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
This model definitely has explanatory power, but the question is: when someone vehemently disagrees with you, how do you know whether he’s a Mistake Theorist or a Conflict Theorist ? Sure, if he flat out proclaims, “long-haired people are all spawn of Satan, you have long hair, therefore I will never listen to anything you say”, then we can be pretty sure he’s employing Conflict Theory. But few people are really that blatant about their beliefs. So, when someone says, “OMG, how can you possibly support policy X, don’t you know it’s evil ?!”, what do you do ?
That said, if the model is correct, then you have a problem:
You will never be able to convince Conflict Theorists of anything, because every single word you say just sounds like “SURRENDER NOW” to them. Your model implies that some social conflicts cannot ever be resolved, or even dampened, other than through violence. This is a pretty grim view, but I’m starting to believe it might be the correct one.
I think “how tell if someone is a Conflict or Mistake Theorist” is easier than you claim. “OMG, how can you support X??!” Is a naive Mistake Theorist. The conflict equivalent is “die, you scum, for supporting X.” As I understand it.
Well yes, but as I said in my post, I think the “die scum” response is a bit of an outlier. Some fraction of Conflict Theorists exhibit this behaviour, but not all of them do.
I have become more Conflict-Aware lately. In the last few years I’ve become wary of any class of people which can advocate purely for its own interests without raising societal alarm bells–including teachers, soldiers, firefighters..
I’m a scientist, which means I can argue “Society needs to give scientists more authority and money. My authority for saying this is that I am a scientist.” This bothers me. On the one hand I genuinely do believe that supporting basic research is one of the better/more efficient uses of government spending. On the other hand I want the government to give me money for all of my research projects. I think my research will probably end up helping society more than it wastes money, and I’m trying to steer it in a more society-helping direction… But then I would think that, wouldn’t I?
It’s a dilemma, because some problems actually require professional-level expertise. There’s no way to develop that level of expertise without both becoming enculturated in the status quo and developing an economic interest in the policy outcome.
I never thought about this consciously and I think I’ve just been misunderstanding other people as behaving inexplicably badly my whole life.
Late to the party as ever. The wrong-side-of-the-world penalty I pay…
I count myself as a Marxist, as someone who adores your blog, and as someone who primarily uses what you’ve deemed mistake theory as my lens on the world. It’s naive to expect that everyone else would or should have the same terminal values as I do, or that everyone should agree on the relative role of government in bringing those values about. So I don’t.
I don’t share the view of some of my comrades who celebrate death and misfortune upon the rich. I do share their desire to take power from the powerful, and create a world in which the weak have more power. I desire this independently of a desire to increase living standards/lifetimes/happiness over all, and I desire this for three reasons – the first is that I see high levels of inequality as an existential threat to society. The second is that I would not consider the current distribution fair, if I was to be incarnated into a human chosen at random. The third is that the more unequal society is, the less the ethical premise of capitalism (that it is right to reward those who fill market needs because they are equivalent to human needs and desires) is valid. Which I feel is important seeing as it is the dominant method by which we decide what gets done by the ensemble of human endeavour.
As regards the conflict view, yes many comrades use that. I see it as largely unhelpful, but I’m sympathetic to their situation. Marginalised people are often harmed or killed by inequality (medical, prison and law-enforcement, unsafe conditions of work or home life), so conflict is the reality that some of them face. I find it more productive to try and cooperate with my opposites who like cooperation than to fight against my opposites who do not. Hopefully the coalition of those willing to negotiate can improve conditions globally. Gather with those who share your terminal values. Gain power through that unity, and use that power in negotiation. Stay open to new information to best pursue your goals. I guess that’s the dream.
That’s a pretty good dream. I disagree with some of the object-level issues, but as you say that ought to be negotiable.
Say you could, with the wave of a button, reduce the income of whatever your definition of the rich is substantially, but without improving the quality of life of anyone else. The rich would just get somewhat less rich. Do you push the button? And if so, do you see how others might view that as nothing but wishing misfortune upon the rich?
No I don’t. I find it unlikely that doing so would have more benefit on the ‘society-being-more-horizontally-equal-has-value-for-risk-and-ethical-reasons’ side than the destruction of value that’s part of the premise.
I concede that there could exist some conditions in which I say yes to this question, were I sufficiently convinced that the values gained were more than the values lost. I would take some convincing. (perhaps poor people having more claim to the collective labour power results in higher investment in, I dunno, let’s say medicine, more lives are saved? I’m just wildly conjecturing here, I have no reason to think that example should be true)
I don’t understand the risk part. In the hypothesis, people are no more likely to get poor after you push the button than before, just less likely to get rich. Decreasing risk by reducing the probability of good outcomes isn’t a benefit.
By risk, I’m talking about the chance of disruption to society in the form of industrial action, riots, civil war, revolution etc. In general, a loss of willingness-to-cooperate as a society
Okay, I’ll bite: I would be very tempted to push the button.
Why? Because excessive accumulation of wealth grants disproportionate power to the wealthy. Consider the recent tax bill. Economists were ambivalent about it. It was unpopular with the public. The only group who unambiguously supported it were rich Republican donors. Republican politicians were clear about this during the process. (“My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'”) Charles Koch and his wife gave nearly $500K to Paul Ryan’s fundraising committee, two weeks after the bill passed. (This analysis estimates that the Koch brothers could be saving upwards of $1B/year under the new tax regime.)
And, hey, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad law. Being good for the Kochs doesn’t mean it’s bad for the country. But it also doesn’t guarantee that it is good for the country. Even if you think this bill is a net good, it seems very likely to me that it could have been better if the Republicans had been less constrained by the need to keep a relative handful of rich donors happy.
Democracy is the best system of government because it does the best job of aligning the interests of the government with the interests of the governed. When individual citizens have enough money to single-handedly sway the decisions of the government, that alignment is broken. Obviously the alignment was only approximate in the first place: this is hardly the only place where the theoretical promise of democracy breaks down. But if we can fix one problem, at relatively little cost, then that strikes me as a good thing.
Past a certain level of fuck-you money — which this delightful article estimates between $100M and $200M — you can buy anything that is realistically for sale, and extra money is mostly a status game. If we cap wealth at, say, $500M, what exactly do we lose, in exchange for a political system that does a better job of representing the interests of sub-millionaires?
In the real world, this would be an unenforceable nightmare of loopholes and evasion. But hey, you offered a magic waving button, and by god I am going to make the most of it.
You lose whatever benefits the wealth over that amount would have produced. Remember, the premise is that you don’t get to re-distribute this money, you just get to make the rich poorer. You are literally making the world a poorer, but more equal, place.
Also, I don’t think there’s any guarantee that your system gets better at representing sub-millionaires. I don’t see a lot of class solidarity at play among the modern american rich. For every Koch, you have Steyer, they seem to me to largely mirror the concerns of the upper middle class America.
This is an assumption you can only make if you’re assuming that what the rich donors want is bad. And frankly, on tax policy, I think the rich probably have opinions much closer to the academic consensus of optimum tax policy than everyone else, even if largely for selfish reasons.
Democracy, at best, aligns the interests of the government with the perceptions of the interests of the governed, which is not the same thing as their actual interests. And no, I am not arguing that the billionaires are wise stewards of the public good. I don’t think there are any wise stewards of the public good, and that there’s a lot of random noise at all levels.
And frankly, on tax policy, I think the rich probably have opinions much closer to the academic consensus of optimum tax policy than everyone else, even if largely for selfish reasons.
Well, a conflict theorist would cite Academic Choice Theory at you. Academics economists are shills and their consensus reflects an effort to curry favour with the rich.
Who would you prefer have disproportionate power? It’s got to be someone, or you get approximately no progress and insufficient ability to fix things as they break.
And that analysis is either dishonest or incompetent, since it implicitly assumes that cutting corporate taxes leaves corporate pre-tax income unchanged. I find it hard to imagine any plausible economic model for which that is true. It’s like calculating the effect of increased agricultural yield on farm profits over the past century on the assumption that output prices stayed the same, cost per acre stayed the same, while yield per acre went up several fold.
That’s not, by the way, to disagree with your basic point–that the wealth of the rich might harm other people through its effect on politics. It might. It might also help other people–with regard to any issue where the interest of the rich and the poor is the same but getting the right outcome is costly the rich function as a privileged minority, paying for a public good everyone gets because their share is enough to make doing so profitable.
I would gladly push the button, because in order for the button to do anything, I would need to disconnect it from whatever surface it is attached to and wave it around. :op
A legitimate point, and one that goes back to Marshall, who was a utilitarian and so saw the problem with differing marginal utilities of income. His response was that most issues don’t involve rich vs poor, they involve one mixed population (the inhabitants of Manchester vs the inhabitants of London–a better modern example would be steel companies plus employees vs consumers of goods that contain steel) of rich and poor, so generally the policy that maximized value measured in dollars would be about the same one that maximized value measured in utiles.
The obvious response is that some issues don’t have that characteristic–most obviously the individual level issue of who will get some consumer good or service. It’s tempting to respond, as I think you do, that the solution is to use the market to allocate while equalizing incomes. But it is hard to see how you can successfully do both, since the existence of mechanisms for political wealth transfer itself creates incentives and motivates action (my effort to receive transfers instead of giving them) which not only doesn’t equally weight everyone’s utility, it weights everyone else’s utility at zero.
That’s a very brief sketch of a possible rebuttal to what I take your policy to be.
Yeah, it’s a head scratcher all right. I don’t have a good answer for this currently.
I think that the conflict/mistake distinction is being vastly overblown here.
Scott is proposing some sort of fundamentally different personality type / rhetorical diachotomy between agents. I think these differences in behaviour can be explained in a much more proximate way, instead simply being answers of “Yes” or “No” to the question: “Do you believe that shills are amongst us RIGHT NOW”?
If I am in a discussion where my answer to that question is “No”, I will discuss in a mistake-theorist manner: belief that other participants are arguing in good faith, and personaly arguing in good faith, and sticking to truth-searching, and at least trying to be open to the possibility of changing my mind.
If I am in a discussion where my answer to that question is “Yes”, I will discuss in a conflict-theorist manner: having no genuine interest in the merits of suspect participant’s arguments, reading them only with an eye to finding errors / weak-man-able faultlines, and refusing to allow myself to change my mind even in the face of apparently convincing evidence because I strongly auspect that the evidence is the contaminated product of Yudkowsky’s Clever Arguer.
I would think that this is obvious. When Marxists / feminists / Nazis are in their safe-space forums, and are happy that everyone in the discussion is a like-minded Marxist / feminist / Nazi who genuinely shares their endgoal of a well-functioning communist / non-cis-hetero-patriachal/ white ethnostate society, they will have amongat themselves truth-seeking mistake-theoretical diacussions. It is only when they go out into enemy territory and find themselves surrounded by perfidious capitalist / misogynist / Judeobolshevik agents that they switch to conflict-theoretical mode.
Not to go all “just so” on you, but this is certainly how *I personally* act.
EDIT: I think the comments other people have made about different interest groups having different utility functions is sort of isomorphic to this argument. In the sense that the “shills walking amongst us” can be either paid-up Clever Arguers dissimulating for the perspective of their paymasters, or people committed to other utility functions who know that (since no-one is making a mistake, the alternate prescriptions are a consequence of different Final Objectives) truth-seeking debate is futile and the possible merits of debate come only from rhetorical victories.
This question is much harder to answer than you think. On the one hand, some (if not most) shills don’t even know they’re shills; this is the “false consciousness” or “internalized whatever” claim. On the other hand, a really clever shill would have the ability to blend in perfectly with his environment, exerting subtle influence as opposed to direct propaganda; this is the “conspiracy theory” claim.
That said, I believe that this statement is mostly correct:
Truth-seeking debates do have value in certain settings, e.g. scientific research or software debugging, but the size of that space is pretty close to epsilon.
On the topic of “really clever chamaeleon-like” shills: we’re perhaps getting into Chinese Room territory. Just because a shill doesn’t believe the arguments / counterevidence he is presenting, doesn’t make those arguments / counterevidence invalid. High-level bad-faith conflict-mode shilling asymptotically approaches high-level good-faith mistake-mode debate, because the shill has to look like he’s presenting good arguments, and the ever-more-rigorous scrutiny filters that the shill has to pass through in order to do so require his arguments to become ever-more coherent and evidence-backed.
Another space where it seems to have value is this blog, about which I am very happy!
This is a good post, and I’ve not thought about it in a named way before. I think it’s a good basis for building more complex models of situational conflict vs mistake dynamics with.
I’d put myself down as someone who is mostly mistake theorist when it comes to policy debates within people who argue about what is for the greater good of everyone in the world- counting surmountable bias as a kind of mistake. For example, I think the people who are against tax increases for increased redistribution because they think it is for the worse of everyone *are not* on the opposite side of a conflict to me; I think they’re mistaken.
But I think conflict theory has the better model when it comes to the gap between “us globalists” and deontologists who care most that the right people are rewarded or punished, or people who are interested in the good of a particular nation or particular ethnicity or of themselves selfishly, or Catholic integralists, or so on. For example, I think the people who are e.g. against tax increases for increased redistribution because redistribution is a deontologically evil theft *are* on the opposite side of a conflict to me.
And there are way, way more of these people than we give credit for, I think. A lot of people when pushed to clarify their ethical intuitions break utopian globalist in ultimate preferences, but a lot of them don’t.
I’m not sure that this is not just a mistake at the metaethical level, and I am pro continuing polite discourse on that metaethical level in hopes of that proving to be the case (the person who repeatedly talked people into quitting the KKK is a positive argument for “mistake theory is the ultimate truth”), but for the foreseeable future, people who disagree with me on what the goals of politics *are* are going to keep existing, and I think conflict theory accurately models the interactions between those groups for now.
This does not necessarily mean all problems are correctly resolved by all out war; I disagree with the position that anyone you compromise with/or make deals with is necessarily someone you view as differing from you only by a mistake. In fact, I’d argue the opposite; if they’re making a mistake, you can debate it and identify the correct answer instead of compromising, given time. Compromise as a means to mutually agree to minimise costs determined by relative power is a conflict management solution that occasionally gets broken out when mistake theory is too slow so you treat the situation as a conflict instead, I think.
But it does mean I think democracy for the foreseeable future is well-modeled as a room of 20 occasional elective cannibals debating what to have for lunch, and we need political norms that expect that some of them will be selfish enough to want to build a political coalition around eating a less politically connected person at the table, and will not be politely talked out of wanting to do so. Meaning I think there’s a need for normative structures that prevent that from happening.
Whereas a pure mistake theorist perspective doesn’t seem to see this as a concern; if it’s not ethically correct then we’ll talk them out of it before anyone gets eaten, it says. I think this gets at some of my disagreement with the more pure mistake theorists on political norms.
What I really see missing in this dual view of the understandings political ideology, is the, by and large, largest political outlook held by the (non)-voting public. To go along with the conflict and mistake theories, is the shit just happens theory.
This is the theory held by voters who think the whole of governance is riding the bucking bronco of chaos, and no amount of analytical (dare I say rational) thought can tie it down – shit just happens. Believers are usually overheard late night in pubs saying “They’re all the same anyway” about the seemingly ideologically diverse election, or “Last time I voted Cat party, I think I’ll give Dog a turn”. Believers of this theory also share a mistrust of institutions like conflict, but not due to the morally evil twisting facts, but because they’re probably all wrong anyway.
Its very easy to dismiss this sort of view as small minded, or ignorant, but shit just happens all over history and politics: most famously the WWI inciting action involving a botched assassination attempt missing a bomb, then a failed suicide by one assassin jumping into a hilariously 13cm deep river, and another assassin practically bumping into the target at a coffee shop. 5 years later 37 million people were dead, shit truly does happen.
Or, in the collapse of Lehman Brothers, known as the watershed moment of the entire financial crisis, which can be picked apart by conflict adherents as the moral failings of the executive Richard Fuld who was payed $40 million overall salary as it went under, or by mistake worshipers as the complex interplay of federal reserve policy, politics and law not allowing a bailout in time, or maybe Warren Buffet forgot to check his voicemail.
All this talk about how Marxists don’t frequent this blog and you go and make a post arguing for a Hegelian dialectic.
Yes, yes of course this blog has always been on the side of Thesis. And certainly we must always beware the great enemy Antithesis. But let’s end the essay by arguing that what we really need is Synthesis!
The professor in college who taught me what dialectical reasoning was warned the class that once we understood this, we’d see dialectics everywhere. And once again he was proven right.
This is an excellent post, Scott. I agree with you that this distinction of mistake-vs-conflict-theorists is real, and would go further and say that it roughly maps onto the neoliberal-vs-leftist dimension in the real world, although I agree that not making this explicit in your post was a good idea.
As someone who’s interacted with both conflict theorists and mistake theorists EXTENSIVELY in the past, I agree with you that you were largely making a mischaracterization of conflict theorists in the past, and it consequently limited the insightfulness of some of your analysis. I’m excited to see what happens next for SSC. For the record, I think is an incredibly common mistake. It was only after talking to and debating extremely smart leftists that I began to understand the quality of their predictive models.
I personally disagree with the broad leftist assumption that Upper Class=Bad, Lower Class=Good, which tints some of the more passionate leftist analysis. The true value of Marx is that if you say, “ok, imagine that all humans more or less follow their own wills and desires and don’t explicitly coordinate, BUT let’s examine this outcome through the lens of class politics and assume that the upper classes will subconsciously warp society to conform to their own values and material interests,” it’s a surprisingly useful lens with which to view the world.
I would classify Easy Conflict Theorists as the people who think that the person giving the PowerPoint presentation is consciously aware of exactly what she is doing. I would classify Hard Conflict Theorists as the people who think that the person giving the PowerPoint presentation truly believes everything they’re saying because of societal memes, ignorance, etc.
The first has an easy solution (“eat the rich.”) The second is extremely complicated and unlikely to be an easy problem to solve. I think that if your blog gave Hard Conflict Theorists a little more credit, it would be intellectually richer for it.
I disagree with the top comment about spending less time on abstract ideas, however. Abstract ideas are great! Cogent legible discussion of complicated abstract ideas are what makes SSC such a precious gem! I just want to see you broaden the scope of the abstract ideas you tackle and tease apart 🙂
Building on this – I want to say that Meditations on Moloch is one of the most powerfully leftist pieces of writing I’ve ever read, and that you’re absolutely right. Leftists would agree that capitalism fundamentally creates warped incentive structures that fail in important ways, like directing comparatively minuscule amounts of funding towards cancer and AI research in favor of directing resources towards a tenth Viagra analogue and Uber for Dogs.
The only thing leftists would add is that incentive structure is inevitably going to be warped so that the elites face incentives that mysteriously always end up with them maintaining a disproportionate amount of power. The poor, obviously, will inevitably end up facing different incentives, at which point the elites always seem to have a bunch of justifications for why that $9/hour worker is definitely necessary to prevent the whole thing from grinding to a halt.
That said, I agree with the thrust of your exchange with Nathan Robinson where you argued that huge governments will inevitably lead to bad warped incentives structures too. I can only offer my personal experience with hardcore leftists, of which I know a ton (at least 40 well enough to know their detailed views), and nearly all of them more or less agree and acknowledge that markets are valuable. In my experience, they mostly advocate a more communitarian-based approach somewhat similar to your ideas about archipelagos.
So “markets inevitably create incentives that go against the well-being of the populace, therefore we need to ensure the will of the people can exert stronger control over the direction of government (which is itself necessary to reign in capitalism’s excesses)” is a good argument. It’s frustrating that leftists make that particular version of the argument so infrequently. I suspect the reasons have to do with the reasons you mentioned in toxoplasma of rage about how modern discourse selects for the most controversial possible argument.
(It’s actually a meme among the left that when you’re surrounded by other leftists, you’re a harsh critic of every mistake past left-wing governments have made and demand extremely high standards for your reforms. But when you’re surrounded by non-leftists, you suddenly turn into a full-on Stalin apologist; surely you liberals all know that the USSR’s speed at industrializing some territories seems equivalently effective to Western efforts at colonization at the same time?)
But back to reality. We don’t live in the hypothetical world where we get to make our little archipelagos and form happy stable communities where we work together on solving humanity’s important problems. We live in the real world, where ridiculous amounts of money get diverted upwards so rich people can spend it on status games. And yes, leftists appreciate all of PowerPoint guy’s arguments about how actually those status games result in the money eventually trickling down anyway, so isn’t everyone better off? But they look at the guy getting paid $9/hour to work in blazing hot fields and they suspect that possibly the economy could be better optimized. Yes, Donatello Versace creates jobs. But what if we decide to make our hospital system by far the best in the world, and instead use some of the money we spend on ridiculous imperialist defense programs every year to build incredible hospitals? Those people working at Donatello Versace could just as easily be one of the, what, 80% of jobs at a hospital that isn’t actually being a doctor?
Mr. or Mrs. PowerPoint has excellent arguments about how, no, actually the market is an extremely finely tuned machine that responds perfectly to human desires and we definitely can’t direct any resources towards things that would benefit everyone equally, because Economics Reasons. If we mess with the same economy that produces Uber for Dogs, then surely everything will come crashing down. But fundamentally, leftists aren’t buying it. And I agree with them that, spelled out in those terms, it doesn’t seem especially convincing.
Those people working at Donatello Versace could just as easily be one of the, what, 80% of jobs at a hospital that isn’t actually being a doctor?
Trouble is, while the people working sewing the Versace garments probably don’t make huge wages, if they went to work as nurses, aides, cooks, porters, radiologists, etc. in hospitals, there would be the inevitable “You want how much an hour?” arguments over paying wages/salaries.
The public would probably agree that sure, the x-ray technician has A Qualification and should be paid a professional wage. But a nurse? For emptying bedpans they expect big money? And isn’t it a vocation anyway, they should be doing the job out of passion not for money! And if they give in grudgingly on nurses, they certainly don’t think the porters and cleaners should be paid high rates – it’s the perennial argument you see over the cost of child care – heck, we even had it on here: “so you got an official qualification as a childcare worker, big whoop, anyone can mind a kid, parents aren’t qualified, my mother minds her grandkids, why is it so expensive to pay a creche for professional childcare, the adults working there should be getting the same rates as a teenager working as a babysitter for pocket money”. (Nobody seems to have examined the apparent underlying attitude that childminding is not a Real Job, and so should not be paid accordingly; Real Jobs are when women put their kids in childcare so they can work outside the home in an office or other non-care work environment. Otherwise, the women could just stay at home taking care of their kids, and we certainly don’t regard stay-at-home moms as doing Real Work).
That’s where the mistake theory solution hits the conflict theory reality on the ground when you put it into practice.
Actually, a nurse also has A Qualification, at least in the United States. Actually, someone who cleans bedpans, if not a volunteer, probably isn't a real nurse, just a CNA (a nursing assistant). And yet, even they need certifications (which is what the ‘C’ stands for). As for the nurses themselves, well …
When I was involved in labour activism in the State of California a few years back, it didn't take long for me to notice that the California Nurses Association was one of the most powerful unions in the State. With several large and influential organizations dependent on their members' labour, a bottomless supply of public goodwill, and the protection from scabs that can comes from a severe shortage of qualified workers … you did not want to get on their bad side.
I basically agree with your comment; you just shouldn't have mentioned nurses like that. :–)
You position these in opposition or at least orthogonal to each other but I think that’s missing both how often they are layered and/or modal. Moreover, the Marxist portion of this essay is red herring carried forward from the Jacobite article and does it a disservice because it lends it a uniformity to any given actor’s approach.
Instead, a common split is people approaching policy issues as mistake theory when within-group and as conflict out-group. There’s distinct strategic reasons for this sort of behavior, especially within a winner takes all political system. Similarly there’s a strong history of making a public show of conflict theorizing while acting as a mistake theorist in private amongst politicians and activists alike and for similar reasons.
Precisely.
A given person is not a conflict theorist ot a mistake theorist. Rather, a given discussion is a conflict diacussion or a mistake discussion, depending on whether or not the participants share a utility function.
Finely put, thank you.
Lots of helpful elucidation in the comments as always. Count me among those who agree it’s important to make a distinction between descriptive theories based on observation, and normative theories based on how things “ought” to be.
I think, for example, that the “real world” largely operates on conflict theory. Mistake theory is a good way of solving problems in specific contexts (requiring preconditions of, say, reciprocal legitimacy, good faith, fair enforcement of rules and forbearance, like you would generally find in market competition between firms), but these conditions rarely apply in real world settings on political level, given the fact that politics is force i.e. “war by other means”. When you’re willing to use force to get your way, opposing interests will always seek to match or exceed that use of force as a countermeasure, if it’s available to them. There are exceptions, like non-violent resistance, that arguably employ a jiu jitsu like use of force instead of trying to match aggression.
The fact is, competing political or ideological movements are often a real threat to their opponents’ fundamental way of life. Even if moderates of opposing camps could theoretically find workable compromises, if they’re unable to contain the extremists of their side (as seems to be the case in modern western politics these days), negotiation is a non-starter – any concession to the opposing side ultimately empowers the extremists who want to crush you, trojan horse style. I think this explains the utter inflexibility of interest groups on many different issues – they rationally understand that voluntarily relinquishing power is a suckers bet in such a highly polarized environment of mutually exclusive value systems. No one is feeling particularly magnanimous.
I also think, along with most of the commentariat, that normative conflict theory is responsible for making the world a worse place wherever it becomes the dominant strategy – in the sense that extremism feeds itself by triggering counter-extremism and creates a positive feedback loop of escalation. This makes perfect sense from a game theory standpoint, yet we all know it breeds destruction and suffering, yada yada the tragedy of the human condition.
I do have a hypothesis on how mistake theory people can try to defuse conflict theory actors. You can make a much easier case for a truce between competing interests than you can for changing minds, reconsidering interests or abandoning ideologies. This was one of the strengths of the classical liberal argument – the constant zero-sum battle for the seat of power was a very suboptimal course of action for everyone IF what all sides truly cared about was living their own way of life in peace and freedom, and NOT just an overwhelming urge to conquer and convert nonconsenting 3rd parties.
This touches on Popper’s paradox of “intolerance for intolerance” – the grand compromise of Live and Let Live only works if that’s what everyone actually wants. If there are some interests for whom conquest and subjugation of other groups is a key operating principle, there is no rational response other than to eliminate them from the equation – which of course leads you back to square one.
Which is why I think the most important thing mistake theorists can do is make the case, wherever and whenever applicable, that political i.e. coercive mechanisms, which inevitably lead to an escalating cycles of conflict that everyone is rationally compelled to join, aren’t a reliable way to protect your interests in the first place. There are some antagonistic interdependencies, such as capital and labor, that are hard to disentangle in a way that would be mutually beneficial, but most issues have win/win conditions.
This only applies when there’s a relatively even balance of power, in which political conflict would probably result in costly stalemate or and endless see-saw of power changing hands for the sole purpose of undoing what the last guy did, and so on. I believe this happens to be the case in many examples of current political conflict, especially culture war issues.
Unfortunately, getting opposing sides of an issue to agree to Live and Let Live is a conditional proposition, predicated that you can make a credible case to each side that neither is powerful enough to destroy the other. If one side becomes convinced they have the power to eliminate a threat to their interests once and for all, extremists will pounce on the opportunity and everyone else will sit back and shake their head at all the unpleasantness with a quiet sense of relief and satisfaction.
All in all, the proposition of truce-making is a very underappreciated concept at the moment, the logical thread can be quite compelling, and it has the power to neutralize conflict-based orientations.
A Marxist reader of your blog reporting in!
I feel that this way of analyzing things is harmful (a charitable mistake) because ironically it conflict-theorizes the debate so that suspected conflict-theorists are automatically seen as beyond object-level discussion leaving you with no options but to act like one yourself.
I would question whether this distinction is even relevant to people and ideologies rather than to situations and debates. Many of the commentariat have identified themselves as mistake-theorists, but I have to wonder whether this is because they abstain from the sin of conflict-reasoning or because it bothers them when the outgroup does it. This is some conflict-theorizing on my part.
Also the willingness to discuss policy issues, aka the reformism vs. revolutionism axis, should not be conflated with this as one can go along it in a purely mistake-theorizing framework.
(Several other readers made comments like this above, but I wrote it before reading those and I might as well post it anyways.)
P. S. If you want to understand Marxists better I suggest reading Das Kapital, and I think reading your critique of it would be very interesting.
Is “conflict theorist” just another way of saying “someone who failed at rationalism”?
If conflict theorists truly believe everything is a moral conflict and disagreement is treason, is there any point to engaging with them?
I would contend in a symmetrical manner that anyone saying “I am a mistake theorist” is another way of saying “I don’t believe in the existance of shills”.
And the fact that shills objectively DO exist means that it is the avowed mistake theorist who fails at rationalism.
Well, technically, anyone who is permanently pre-committed to any specific worldview fails at rationalism.
I think everyone who isn’t a pre-pubescent child has some theory of mind for how other people behave. And having a theory of mind allows you to understand that sometimes other people may not be sincere, or they may do things for reasons other than what they say. Where mistake theorists differ is that we don’t pre-emptively decide that everyone we don’t agree with is acting in bad faith as part of some conspiracy.
The public loves conspiracy theories. They offer an easy explanation for every bad thing that happens. And when you believe in a conspiracy, you don’t have to take the blame for bad decisions that you made. For example, which is more pleasant to believe: that your country lost the war because other countries fought better and had more resources, or that your country lost because it was undermined by a Jewish conspiracy? That a famine killed millions of people in your country because Communism is terrible at allocating resources, or that an evil capitalist plot caused the famine? That your cow died because you’re not a great farmer, or that an evil witch (probably in league with the devil) cast a hex on you? The peasant mentality didn’t change when we gave them iPads.
This almost feels like an early birthday present. FINALLY!
“conflict theorists aren’t mistake theorists who just have a different theory about what the mistake is. They’re not going to respond to your criticism by politely explaining why you’re incorrect.”
Yep!!! But I am a mistake theorist who has a different theory about what the mistake is. Also, I think that the people making the mistake are the mistake theorists. The conflict theorists are not my side. I’m in favor of genuinely understanding their perspective, and of respecting what they are capable of, but ultimately, the goal is for the mistake theorists to learn to “perceive easy conflict theorists (the VAST majority of conflict theorists) as damage and route around it” (and eventually, actually repair the damage with psychological therapy that doesn’t assume one side or the other regarding conflict theory). As far as I can tell, if the mistake theorists in general knew about conflict theorists, and about smart ones, not just dumb ones, they would discover that they can make enormously more rapid progress than they have anticipated on their own.
Does Foucault make more sense to you now that you appreciate that he’s a conflict theorist? It’s really hard to have conflict theory friendly mental healthcare!
I generally operate under Mistake Theory, and I separately believe that Actual Evil is extremely rare. There are a few hypothetical positions I can think of that are Actually Evil, though. I’ve noticed that when I encounter Actual Evil in the wild, rarely though this does occur, I get extremely confused. This confusion is sufficiently strong that I can’t really grapple with or respond to the Actual Evil. I can hedge it out, I can make it so I don’t have to deal with it, but I can never satisfactorily render it a non-issue the way you can choose and implement a correct solution to something that falls under the domain of mistake theory.
Through the vast majority of this post, I was internally screaming “it’s not that simple!” And wanting to make the snarky reply of “Yes, but have you considered the possibility that social ills are the result of a complex interrelated network of people (both smart and stupid) whose goals are in conflict mutually making the world worse for each other, and people (both passionate and dispassionate) whose goals are universally beneficial but have chosen methods that don’t work? And, while intellect is required to find an effective method to achieve a goal, passion is necessary to determine what goals are even good in the first place?”
Then I got to the last paragraph. That said, I still found something very offensive about this post. And I think it can best be expressed as this:
While the final paragraph admits that things are probably more complicated than “conflict theorists are making a simple mistake” it doesn’t do anything to temper the fact that, through the entire rest of the post, you have implicitly painted all mistake theorists as being pro-capitalism, and all conflict theorists as being on pro-marxism.
Have you considered that the vast majority, if not 100%, of all issues under public discussion have mistake theorists and conflict theorists on both sides?
I personally consider myself to be mostly a mistake theorist, but events through my life have taught me that not all conflict comes from misunderstanding the problems.
I also consider myself mostly to be a marxist — I agree that capitalism has done a lot of good for the world (by comparison to prior systems), but it only functions well during growth conditions, and devolves more and more to rent-seeking as growth potential is consumed. I also believe that (in America) we are somewhere in the range of [approaching, well past] the point that capitalist activity has shifted to majority rent-seeking, and that the solution to this is to provide more (and more explicit) regulation to disincentivize rent-seeking behavior (e.g. making net neutrality a legal standard that ISPs must conform to), as well as analyzing to determine which regulations may incentivize rent-seeking, and removing those (e.g. removing the legal controls on pharmaceutical and recreational drugs), which, in combination, would move society more towards “freedom” on the social axis, and more towards “restriction” on the economic axis.
I also think that while market forces are a solution to finding a stable distribution of resources, that these distributions are by no means guaranteed to be optimized for delivery to highest value targets.
For instance, it would be a bad idea to replace public police forces with a market of competing security companies, because market forces incentivize a security company to ensure there is some amount of crime, so that people continue to hire them, and such a system would quickly devolve into protection rackets and gang wars.
Going off at a tangent, is Marxism trendy again nowadays or what? I’m seeing a (relative) lot of “I’m a Marxist” online, and arguments on Tumblr from Eastern Europeans reacting badly to pro-Real Communism Has Never Been Tried/I’m A Communist (generally student) posts with “I lived/my family lived under a Real Communist Regime in a Real Communist Country, stop fucking glorifying something of which you have no direct experience, it was shitty and your fantasy dreams of a workers’ paradise are nothing like the truth”.
I’m expecting the 70s all over again and the Maoists to make a re-appearance!
Sign me up for the “I’ve lived in a worker’s paradise, I sure hope it never comes again in my lifetime” club.
My apologies if these questions are insensitive, as I understand that conditions were and are terrible in those countries that had successful revolutions that claimed communist goals, but may I ask:
How much of what you saw/experienced would you say was attributable to the fact that democracy was lost, placing sole power in the hands of someone who was, charitably, ill-educated for policy making, and un-charitably, completely corrupt and power hungry?
Do you believe that retention of a democratic method of power distribution could or would be sufficient insulation to prevent a repetition of the tragedy you and your friends/family suffered?
If not, what problems did you witness that you believe are inherent to the economic system, or would at least need very, very strong protections to avoid?
Again, I apologize if these questions are distressing in any way, and completely understand if you would prefer not to answer, but I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to blame all of the historical failures of Marxism on the revolutionary movements’ failure to protect against the “charismatic strongman/manipulator” attack, and overeagerness to dismantle everything associated with the prior government/culture, rather than analyze whether or not any given aspect may have been beneficial, and I would appreciate an opportunity to temper this perspective with empirical data.
No problem, I will show you on the doll where Lenin had hurt me 🙂
To be fair, I was pretty young when I left the USSR, and the USSR of my day was pretty mild compared to the USSR of my parents and grandparents. However, comparing even this relatively mild oppressive country to a modern Western democracy is like comparing night and day.
The root problem was not that the person in charge was incompetent, or evil; but rather, that the entire socio-political system was set up in such a way that evil and/or incompetent people would rise to the top. Given the absence of a regular economy, the entire country ran on a quasi-feudal web of personal obligations and bureaucratic machinations. If you were in charge of something, even something as small as an apartment complex, you could demand favors from everyone below you. This meant that you could finagle access to basic necessities (such as bread) as well as luxuries (such as hot water), both for yourself and your family. Of course, the person above you in the hierarchy was always on the prowl for services, too, so you had to look out. Oh, and by the way, the only possible way to ascend the hierarchy was the Telvanni way: destroy someone above you and take his place. This kind of society is not super conducive to prosperity, to say the least.
Demonstrably, not on its own. You need a real economy to go with it; but more than that, you need some sort of a political will and a culture of enlightenment which is difficult (and most likely impossible) to achieve through social engineering. Without such things, people just turn around and vote for the next dictator, who promptly abolishes democracy and returns to the good old days.
I touched on this above; I just want to underscore the fact that socialism sets up really perverse incentives. Your official salary is almost worthless, and you get paid regardless of whether you do your job or not; so your job doesn’t really matter. What matters is the daily hustle: trying to wheel, deal, and steal enough supplies to keep yourself and your family alive through the winter. If you are one of the few lucky (or well-connected) souls who happen to be in charge of resource distribution, you’re pretty much golden, of course. Under this system, it is nearly impossible to build any kind of a long-term project or enterprise, because all of it will inevitably get stolen (or “officially” re-distributed) before it gets off the ground.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s a problem too; but IMO the systemic corruption is the much more serious issue. You can’t even really call it corruption, because if you don’t know how to play the system, you will literally starve to death, or end up in Siberia (e.g. because some friendly neighbour decided that he wants your apartment, so he reported you for not loving Lenin sufficiently hard). The word “corruption” implies some sort of an aberrant behavior motivated by personal greed, not the daily struggle for survival.
Have you read The Road to Serfdom? Part of the argument is that the link between socialism and autocracy is not accidental.
@DavidFriedman:
I haven’t read the whole book, so maybe you cover this already, but still: in the USSR, autocracy was a tricky thing. True, the General Secretary had absolute power, on paper. In practice, he had to always watch his back for the Politburo, who all had to watch each others’ backs. Ordinary people could not perceive their machinations directly, but they could feel the collateral effects.
In addition, I should add that the same perverse incentives that socialism sets up can be seen in other places where competition is nonexistent, and few if any external standards of performance apply. A large monopolistic corporation is basically a mini-socialist state (minus all the repressive violence, of course).
The most prominent people on the western are now in the 20-30 year old range, and most of them postdate the fall of the soviet union. This is probably sufficient to explain the resurgence of communism (especially Stalin-apologetic communism) as a professed philosophy.
I have no tolerance for apologists of Stalin, Mao, or Castro. These men were despots who co-opted movements for equality in order to seize absolute power and create states with something approaching the least-possible level of egalitarianism.
If there is any contribution they gave to the world, it was obviating the need not to give blind trust to anyone who claims to be on your side, by showing that false allies can be far more damaging to the cause than true opponents.
I do hope so. It’s been kind of boring being anti-communist for a while (well, since before I became one). It would be good to have actual communists to mock.
What if, this time, the commies take power here, and eastern europe is Galt’s Gulch?
M. Night Shyamalan level twist!! 🙂
A while back, I did find myself looking at the strange new geopolitics of the 21st century and wondering if I could rescript some of my old NATO vs Warsaw Pact wargames with the US as part of the new Warsaw Pact and Russia on NATO’s side.
And do you think that they ought to listen to those replies?
I’m not a Marxist, but I know that there are Marxist traditions that have always held that the Bolsheviks were doing it wrong, and that even under a Bolshevik/Marxist-Leninist understanding of the term, nobody in Eastern Europe (or anywhere else) has lived in a ‘communist’ society.
So if you belong to the anti-Bolshevik democratic-socialist Marxist tradition, whose ideas, when tried, have not destroyed any country; or even better, an anti-Bolshevik but still revolutionary Marxist tradition like Left Communism, whose ideas really have never been tried in any country; or for that matter one of the non-Marxist communist traditions; are you supposed to give up just because these other assholes, who didn’t do what you are trying to do and whom your intellectual forebears always said were not doing what you are trying to do, fucked up their shit?
Do you accept the argument that democracy is no good, because look at the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea? Even Moldbug wouldn’t put it that crudely.
I don’t mean to argue that democratic socialism is the way to go, or that the Left Communists would have known what they were doing, but that has to be argued on the object level. I’m not going to dismiss them just because of those other guys.
I sort of agree with this sentiment. It did seem to have very much a “Marxists are SSC’s Officially Designated Outgroup” subtext to it.
Why doesn’t your argument apply even more strongly to government provision of security? Prison guard unions lobby against legal changes that would reduce the number of prisoners. How can the police chief get his budget raised if there’s no crime? Isn’t it in his interest to support criminalizing victimless crimes in order to increase his status and income in the system? Civil forfeiture is only the most blatant example.
This is less true of private providers, because they are competing–to some degree customers can tell how good a job their provider is doing relative to others. The clearest case is where the security is linked to a particular customer–burglar alarms and the like. The fact that my neighbor got robbed is a reason for me to buy what my security company is selling but not a reason to buy what his security company is selling.
So, the theory goes, that government actors have different incentives than financial gain, and granting the state a monopoly on a power insulates them from market forces. And we can, in fact, see cases around the world where government actors operate contrary to profit motive, to benefit the public, in ways that are only enabled because of this insulation from market forces.
Obviously, however, there are cases where this theory breaks down, indicating that there are as-yet undetermined factors influencing the behavior we observe. Many in my camp would blame “the corrupting influence of capitalism” and while I think that the coexistence of private economy can account for some of this behavior, I think that ascribing all of this behavior to that factor is an easy mistake for a hard conflict theorist to make, and so I am suspicious of that conclusion.
These sorts of issues are why I don’t advocate for a complete, immediate, and revolutionary shift in policy, but a steady trickle of increased economic regulation so that we can reap the benefits of low hanging fruit without any given oversight becoming catastrophic.
How do you know that is what is happening? There are lots of cases where government actors claim to be doing that but aren’t–indeed, it’s the natural thing to claim if you are a government actor serving your own interest.
I am personally aware of people who factually receive life-long disability benefits. This is the result of a government program that operates directly contrary to profit motive.
Additionally, I am aware of multiple nations that maintain widespread inter-connected road and highway systems which are free to use even by non-citizens. While this is a significant force in enabling economic growth, and therefore indirectly increases tax revenue, they are not built/maintained in a way consistent with government profit being the sole, or even primary motive. Sidewalks are an even stronger evidence of this effect, because they have significantly less impact on the economy. And these projects are enabled because of the unique position government actors have with regards to determining the usage and allotment of lands.
Government military divisions, (and the US is perhaps the primary example of this), do maintain many high-cost research and development projects, and operate completely without regard to cost or income, because they have a government granted budget and monopoly that shields them from market forces. One could argue that this is grossly inefficient and an excellent argument against government control over this field, but one cannot argue that this isn’t an example of government actors operating contrary to profit motive.
In defense of the claim that:
You wrote:
Those outcomes are the result of actions by government actors. My question is how you know that those actions were contrary to the profit motive of those actors. A legislator who votes for laws providing long term disability may do so because he believes such laws are popular, so will get him reelected, which profits him. One who votes for a highway system might do so for similar reasons, or he might do so in exchange for bribes or campaign donations from construction companies who he helps get contracts to build highways.
If your point is merely that governments sometimes do things that would not happen on the market, I agree. But you put it in terms of how government actors operate, which is a statement about the motives of those actors, not about the consequences of their actions.
The central assumption of public choice theory is that government actors are rational in the same sense as market actors–tend to take the actions that best achieve their objectives. Are you disagreeing with that–saying that the behavior of government actors cannot be explained by the same behavioral assumptions as the behavior of market actors?
We are having a mismatch on the definition of actors. You are referring to individual persons, and I am referring to collectives of varying sizes, ranging from “an individual employee of ___ county department of health and human services” to “the DMV” to “the united states federal government.”
Similarly to how we may consider the entire corporation of Google as a single actor in the field of information technology simultaneously to considering an individual employee of Google as an actor in the field of information technology.
Therefore, whenever a government program exists that uses more tax money than it creates, it meets my definition of “a government actor acting contrary to profit motive.”
I admit that I am not yet well versed in public choice theory, and I can see many reasons why it would be useful to consider the motives of individual actors within the government, specifically, but the claim you are responding to is different from the claim I was intending to make.
Thank you. I was wondering if that was the problem.
Public choice theory doesn’t assume that the government as a whole, or some part of it, acts like a rational profit-maximizing individual. On the contrary, one implication of assuming that the individuals act that way is that the collective sometimes won’t.
Consider a simple example for the whole thing, government and voters together. Public choice theory implies that the interests of a concentrated interest group will have greater weight in political decisions than the interests of a dispersed group, so that it may be politically profitable to pass a steel tariff that benefits steel companies by ten billion dollars at a cost of twenty billion to consumers of steel and producers of export goods. Each individual, however, is a member of many interest groups, concentrated and dispersed–the steel executive flies on airplanes at a fare that is considerably higher than it would be if the airline companies were not using airline regulation to cartelize their industry (this example is now out of date due to deregulation but I’ll use it anyway). Add it up and you could have a situation where the total set of such transfers resulted in every single individual being worse off than if they were all abolished. So the whole system is not acting like a profit maximizing individual, but every single player within it is.
This general pattern is what we, or at least I, call market failure–a situation where individual rationality does not produce group rationality. One of my standard arguments against government is that, while market failure exists on both the private and the political markets, it is the exception on the former, the norm on the latter.
@DavidFriedman:
Isn’t market failure virtually guaranteed to occur in a completely unregulated market ? There are huge incentives for actors to ignore negative externalities, as well as set up monopolies; those actors who choose to plan for the long term will be out-competed in the short term.
@Bugmaster:
Some market failure is almost certain under any set of institutions I know of. But in an unregulated free market, actors typically bear the costs of what they do, since to get inputs they have to buy them at a price which represents either the cost to someone else of producing them or the value to the marginal alternative user. When they produce outputs they can sell them for a price that represents their marginal value.
Obviously there are exceptions, such as externalities and adverse selection. Monopoly probably isn’t a major one, since unless economies of scale run up to the size of the market it’s hard to maintain a monopoly without government assistance, and in most activities economies of scale max out long before that.
On the other hand, in the political market actors, whether voters, legislators, or bureaucrats, almost never bear any significant fraction of the cost of their actions or collect any significant fraction of the benefit produced, so there is no good reason to expect that things will happen if and only if benefits are larger than costs.
Market failure occurs when an actor doesn’t bear the net cost–cost minus benefit–of his action. The farther he is from doing so, the more costly the market failure is likely to be. That’s why I argue that market failure is the exception on the private market, the norm on the political market.
It does? Because a security company has costs (fighting crime) and revenue (subscribers), your assumption is that it is automatically more profitable to spend a bunch of money ensuring that there is crime and then fighting it than it is to push the crime rate down (or let it be what it is) and drop costs.
By your logic insurance companies would go around killing people (to make more people buy life insurance), injuring people (to make more people buy health insurance) and burning down houses and causing car accidents. Actually they have a double incentive, they should be out injuring people who hold policies from other companies as that increases the demand for health insurance and also puts a strain on competing insurers resources.
Strange how that doesn’t happen.
Is it possible that that doesn’t happen because state-empowered police forces provide a chilling effect?
Or perhaps simply because different types of work attract different types of personalities — insurance work is part of the financial industry, which typically attracts and retains people who are skilled with statistics. Police work (and gang thuggery) typically attract and retain people who excel at violence. Additionally when a job involves performing violence to begin with, other acts of violence have a lower barrier to entry (no additional training required, people looking for ways to make profit are already considering solutions in the domain.)
Of course, this would still be considered a suboptimal solution — the security companies would much prefer not to have to waste resources on creating an incentive to keep them hired. But who’s going to hire them when there’s no crime?
The scenario I describe, of protection rackets and gang wars has 100% been seen in history, though usually being a side-income stream to the main revenue source which was traffic of illegal recreational substances. (See: 1920’s Chicago)
But, of course, I also chose a very poor line of argument. The much better reason that we need publicly funded police forces is that those most in need of police work are people who have been victimized by crime, and therefore much less likely to have the resources required for hiring a private security corporation to aid in their restitution. Additionally, if only victims of crime are paying for these services, the cost of their employment becomes highly concentrated on a much smaller population segment, putting an undue or untenable financial burden on them, similar to what we see in a profit-driven healthcare system where only the sick or injured pay into the costs of maintenance.
Which is one of the reasons that, in a private system, people would buy protection in advance, before they or the company knows if they will be victims of crime. The same way people buy auto insurance today.
But people only buy auto insurance in advance because there are laws with severe penalties if you’re found to be operating a vehicle without current valid insurance.
If there isn’t some manner of requirement that all people maintain active crime insurance, you will have people who feel they are at less risk of crime, or more able to recover from crime (IE: those with the most resources) gaming the system and not purchasing any insurance, concentrating the cost burden on those at the highest risk/least able to afford a loss (mostly those with the least resources.) This is the effect that has been visible in US private health insurance markets for the past several decades, rendering the US healthcare system such a horrible and predatory mess.
If there is some manner of requirement that all people maintain active crime insurance, who enforces it? The same private companies who receive the insurance contracts? Just like in a protection racket?
That’s one reason, but hardly the only reason. People buy fire insurance despite the fact that there is no similar legal requirement.
Then those people will not be protected by the private rights enforcement agency, so will not be imposing costs on other people. Is your point that a private system won’t redistribute, won’t force some people to pay for the protection of others? That’s true. Similarly, a grocery store doesn’t make rich people pay for the groceries poor people buy. Is that an argument for nationalizing the grocery industry?
Are you assuming that crime protection is a public good–that if I produce it you get it whether or not you pay for it? Why? If I haven’t paid a rights enforcement agency to protect me they won’t do so.
There are lots of things wrong with the U.S. health system, but people choosing not to be insured because they don’t think they need insurance doesn’t make insurance more expensive for others–unless you assume the alternative is to force some people to pay more for their insurance than its actuarial cost in order to subsidize other people paying less.
No — I am only assuming that the crime protection services are subject to economies of scale, such that it is less expensive per-capita to service 10000 clients than 100. And therefore, if only 100 people subscribe to crime protection services, the protection company will charge more to each of their 100 subscribers than they would charge to each of their 10000 subscribers if they had 10000 subscribers.
This is what I am referring to when I say that the costs of the crime protection service would become concentrated on those who are most in need of protection (which I expect has a strong inverse correlation to ability to pay for such services). And therefore costs can best be managed by distributing those costs among the full populace.
Assuming that insurance companies are profit-driven, their average client must pay a price greater than their average actuarial cost. This is most likely achieved by charging all clients a subscription fee somewhat greater than actuarial cost. However, at least in healthcare, client resources are somewhat inversely correlated with actuarial cost, so any reduce in subscription costs for that segment of the populace is likely to result in a gain of clientele which more than offsets it. So, yes, I am assuming a system wherein people with lower actuarial costs pseudo-subsidize people with higher actuarial costs.
However, insurance companies are also function as purchasing blocs, which can negotiate prices with providers far more effectively than uninsured individuals. (And, indeed, the effectiveness increases with the percentage of buyers the insurance company represents.)
But it is more expensive to service (say) 200,000 clients than 100,000. If that isn’t the case at some level below the size of the entire market then rights protection is a natural monopoly, which creates all sorts of problems for the sort of system we are discussing.
The normal equilibrium for a competitive market is that each firm is at the size that minimizes average cost. So if equilibrium with 200 million clients is two thousand firms with 100,000 clients each (I’m assuming that’s the optimal scale for a firm in this industry) and half the potential clients opt out, you don’t get two thousand firms with 50,000 clients each, you get a thousand firms with 100,000 clients each.
Obviously there are lots of more complicated stories, with effects going in both directions. Reducing demand may lower costs because it lowers the demand for scarce specialized resources–people who are really good at right protection, for instance. But there is no general reason why some people choosing not to buy a good makes it more expensive for others.
In this particular case, I should say, your story strikes me as backwards. People are not buying rights protection primarily as insurance, although it serves that function as well. They are buying it to get their rights protected. Ideally the sign on your door that says “Client of Sure Death Incorporated–be warned” means that burglars stay away; you don’t get robbed and Sure Death doesn’t have to pay the cost of figuring out who robbed you, finding him, and getting him punished. Deterrence as a private good.
So I would expect richer people to buy more rights protection than poorer people, not less, just as with most other goods and services.
I don’t follow this. Insurance companies, absent regulation such as Obamacare, charge different rates to different customers based on their estimate of the actuarial cost of insuring them. Pulling low cost customers off the market doesn’t raise the charge to high cost customers–they were already paying a higher price reflecting the higher actuarial cost of insuring them.
Is your point as in the earlier quote–that fewer customers raise the administrative cost per customer? If so, the same response applies.
Yes. I don’t fully understand the (pre Obamacare) health insurance market. If it’s really insurance you would expect everyone to buy low cost high deductible policies, since you only want to insure against the rare high cost event. So presumably what the companies were selling was some combination of tax avoidance (for employer provided plans), expertise, bargaining services, and insurance.
It is usually a minor mistake to model firms as seeking maximum profit; in fact, it is usually cash flow that is being maximized. First, because in the principal-agent problem, the principals get the profit and the agents get to play with the cash flow to their own advantage. Second, because anybody who really just wants profit is going to be either a passive investor or run a boring hedge fund or the like; the people who found and run interesting firms are almost always seeking some more specific goal to which some of their cash flow can diverted without it ever becoming profit. Also, status tracks with cash flow more than it does profit.
Cash flow and profit usually correlate pretty closely, so the profit-maximization model won’t steer you too far astray. But if the question is “will the firm do this thing that reduces its revenue somewhat and its expenses more so, or the other thing that increases their revenue a little and their expenses a lot”, then the latter choice is the way to bet even if it reduces profit.
I recently observed in my country how debate what started as conflict theory turned into mistake theory and ended as conflict theory.
I live in Estonia. Couple of years ago left-wing coalition came into power and decided to implement comprehensive alcohol reform.
It started: drinking is bad, it is bad for your health, drunk driving is bad, drinking kills people and everyone who criticizes our reforms has to be evil (corporate shill) who loves killing people.
So comes comprehensive package: changes to tax law to push excise taxes up, restriction of advertising, sales bans, retail regulations, education efforts, social campaigns and many other measures.
Every corner was covered with experts and research. This expert says this, that expert says that. Here is research, there is a scientific paper, here is an opinion from a professional organization, there is a conference of health professionals, Police Chief says something(“Drunk driving is illegal!”), head of Doctors Association weighs in, expert from World Health Organization gives her opinion etc.
We are very calm and very rational, experts are discussing and scientists are researching and all in all: every expert in the world agrees with us, all the science is behind us. We have a perfect debate framed as mistake theory.
But when you start digging, you find something else. For instance, Ministry of Health is pushing new bill (let’s say, they want to ban alcohol advertising). Ministry says that they have super strong evidence of super strong effects. Okay, you look, where from Ministry of Health gets its knowledge? It turns out they are getting their info from National Health Institute (funded by Ministry of Health). So you read what National Health Institute is saying and discover that National Health Institute is talking strong effects (not super strong effects). Then you discover that National Health Institute relies upon World Health Organization papers and these WHO papers are talking about medium effects (not strong or super strong). Finally, you check what research is WHO referring, you dig it up and find that original research is done somewhere in Australia or Alabama and talks about tiny effects.
Every actor in this process may have good faith and exaggerates just a little bit, cherry picks data just a little bit, data mines just a little bit, but the result is that tiny effect turns into medium effect turns into strong effect turns into super strong effect turns into “All the science is behind us.”
Then you can discover other curiosities: you see that the Head of local WHO office is a former top bureaucrat of Ministry of Health, that National Health Institute is 100% funded by Ministry of Health, that the Head of Doctors Association is former Head of National Health Institute, that the Head of… etc. On surface level all corners are covered, all experts are lined up, but below the surface you wonder:” We are talking about the elasticity of alcohol prices here, so what is the relevance of Doctors Associations expert opinion (“Drinking is bad to your health.”) or Police Chief’s expert opinion (“Drunk driving causes accidents!”)?
At the end, if you point at these problems, the debate turns quickly back into conflict theory: you are evil who supports drunk driving and loves killing people. (And you are also stupid because all the science is behind us and you obviously hate science.)
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Very good, I found the distinction between mistake and conflict oriented perspectives enlightening, and will gladly add it to my conceptual toolbox.
One thing I felt missing in the original post is a discussion about who the “agents” under discussion are supposed to be. For example (used wholly as a hypothetical, some of my best friends are oil company execs, etc) it seems entirely plausible that the average oil company executive genuinely believes that stronger regulation on carbon emissions would cause more harm from decreasing economic growth than good from its environmental impact, and that he is really acting with the best interests of humanity at heart when promoting such views. Changing his mind about this would force him to sacrifice income, status and/or his sense of self worth, so he is probably biased not to, but could potentially be convinced given sufficiently good argument presented in such a way that he would not dismiss it as “hostile”, “crazy”, or similar without considering it. Here the mistake perspective seems entirely appropriate.
This might even be true for all, or the vast majority of high-ranking people in the oil industry considered as individuals, but the industry as a whole might nonetheless better be understood as striving to maximize revenue regardless of whether the resulting damages from exacerbated climate change outweighs the economic benefit to present or future humanity, and may indeed seem to be acting as if it “knows” this to be the case (by, say, attempting to discredit climate research in a way that would suggest it values something else above and beyond disinterested truth-seeking, or merely by being willing to pay more for insurance against extreme weather and natural disasters than would be commensurate with its professed views on the subject). Here a conflict oriented perspective might therefore give a more accurate, predictive model of the system’s behaviour. Of course, we should be careful about anthropomorphizing non-human systems – it wouldn’t make sense to ask what the oil industry thought about the force projection twist in the Last Jedi, or how it would fuck/marry/kill the solar/hydro/nuclear industries, but the idea that organizations or groups thereof can be usefully modelled as having some degree of intentional capacity over and beyond some simple aggregate of the intentionalites of its human members, is, I think, a fairly uncontroversial one, although the extent and nature of such collective intentionality in any given case is more disputable. Hence Marxism’s emphasis on class struggle rather than the struggles of individual workers/capitalists/etc (although Marxism clearly takes too strong, rigid, and simplistic a position here).
(I’m short on time, so my other thoughts have to wait, but I thought the impact of which agents one is modelling on which perspective seems more appropriate was worth mentioning)
I really enjoyed the post, the two worldviews are interesting. But as many people have noted, things are often not so clear-cut. I would like to point out some interesting connections.
I think of myself being a more conflict-theorist, probably being on the left. But in many cases, I look at the world as mistake-theorist, having quite liberal views. To me, it’s somehow related to the idea “expect the worst (conflict), hope for the best (mistake)”.
I am a big fan of direct democracy (which I see as a way to peacefully resolve innate conflict), and less of a fan of resolving politics through debate (which implicitly assumes the debaters are honest). To me, direct democracy is related to trust, as it is understood in computer security, for example. In computer security, trust is not given, it is earned and can be revoked at any time. You can only trust somebody who you don’t have to trust. In computer security, we assume worst intentions (conflict), not the best ones (mistake). And so I believe direct democracy is needed as a baseline, because the politicians are not to be trusted (principal agent problem).
Interestingly, people who work on computers are often mistake-theorists. I wonder why the pessimistic view of computers (where they naturally see conflict) doesn’t translate all that well into politics (where they naturally see mistake).
Where envy is the dominant motivation, rather than greed, conflict theory must hold true (at least in part) because there’s no way to make everybody happy. And envy is very powerful, and underappreciated in economics: http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-envy-dominates-greed.html
Maybe this mere observation makes me more of a conflict theorist than I’d like to think, but:
Seems to me that conflict theorists are like defectors in a prisoner’s dilemma. Their best outcome is attained by signalling hard that they are playing a mistake theory game while actually playing a conflict theory game (related to M&B). The best overall outcome is for all to play mistake theory game, but that, of course, requires a level of social capital we increasingly don’t have.
That is the impression this post left me with as well. It is framing the situation between Conflict and Mistake AS a Conflict.
When I noticed that, my response shifted from excitement over a novel way of approaching emotional versus logical argumentation to “Oh. This is just an argument that a bunch of people are defecting, and will always defect, and therefore, by implication, we should defect back.”
And if you have paid ANY attention to politics over the last ten years, that has been the running theme – “Those fuckers are defecting, it is time to defect back twice as hard!”
The results haven’t exactly been great, and at this point the arguments are just over who started defecting first, and therefore Responsible.
Fuck that shit.
Prisoner’s dilemma doesn’t explain it fully, though.
Let’s imagine an “easy conflict theorist” (from here on: ECT) and an “easy mistake theorist” (from here on: EMT) making a compromise on something. We’ll say it was something easy, though also something where they genuinely disagree – but they still come to some sort of an arrangement.
Neither is fully satisfied, of course, but they actually at first find that they are getting along better than before. However, both interpret it through their own frames. The EMT believes the compromise is still deficient, as it doesn’t match what he believes to be the objective truth, but it also shows the ECT has been willing to adjust their false worldview a bit to be closer to the truth. The ECT, meanwhile, grudgingly admits the EMT was not quite as bad as they were; they can make a compromise based on the interests of two conflicting parties, and the ECT can let their guard down a bit on this front and concentrate on other conflicts.
However, the compromise soon breaks down. The EMT believes that the “development” they believe has happened in ECT’s thinking shows the way to further development, and, far sooner the ECT would have thought possible, proposes a new compromise – between the old one and the EMT’s “objective truth”. The ECT blows a gasket – the EMT was just as evil as they first thought and even moreso, why else would they tear the compromise down just to slyly advance their own agenda? Meanwhile, the EMT is extremely disappointed – the ECT was just as dumb as they first thought and even moreso, as they’ve been given a chance to rethink their mistakes and they rejected it. The compromise breaks down and the two are even farther away from each other as at first.
This is an interesting and plausible dynamic, but I’m not sure two of Scott’s four conceivable types exist in real life.
Namely, I don’t know anyone who’s an “easy mistake theorist” or a “hard conflict theorist.” If you genuinely believe good, objectively correct answers are easy then smart people fighting tooth and nail against those solutions are likely evil rather than mistaken. If you genuinely believe correct answers are difficult to arrive at, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that people of good faith can disagree.
I am open to being disproven by real-life examples of such thinkers, however.
EMT is a liberal posting Facebook memes about Trump and the Republicans being morons. HCT is a weathered union rep with 40 years of experience in high-stakes labor market negotiations.
A genuine conflict theorist wouldn’t capitulate to the enemy.
Your conflict theorist wasn’t a conflict theorist until it became clear the opposing party wasn’t interested in an exchange of values – a compromise – but in overwriting the theorist’s values with their own bit by bit.
You can’t have a war mentality and cede land. The war mentality develops from the realization that each capitulation just results in another demand.
Which is to say – yes, there was definitely a defection there. The “mistake theorist” defected, by trying to change the terms of an agreeable deal after it was made, to benefit their own beliefs about reality.
And indeed is behaving more like a conflict theorist than a mistake theorist, in that they are treating the intellectual field as a war to be won. Sure, they are fighting with arguments, but their goal is still annilihation of their enemy, just by conversion.
As I’ve said elsewhere in these comments, it’s perfectly possible to view the world as an arena of struggles between different groups of people *and* to believe there can be compromises, as long as everyone is aware of their position and power. I would say this has, in fact, described much of the politics of the modern Western world, at least during the Cold War.
That isn’t “easy” conflict theory, however, and as others have pointed out, “hard” conflict theory is basically the same thing as mistake theory, except treating values as a type of fact about which one can be “mistaken”.
(Presuming you are correct invalidates mistake theory.)
Some hopefully optimistic thoughts:
1) If conflict theorists are mistaken about the outcomes of their actions, they may be worse off even if they gain a tactical advantage in debate. So if New York actually sinks under the sea, and and the Koch brothers don’t like that, then “winning” the conflict over global warming mediation didn’t really make them better off.* So maybe it’s in their interest to at least update their own ideas under a mistake framework, even if they use a conflict framework for debate. If so, maybe we mistake theorists can convince some of them that mistake oriented debate is more valuable than they currently think. (Or maybe we’ll learn that they’re right, which I would find pessimistic)
2) Conflict oriented debate isn’t always a winner. In US politics, the left often (but not always) loses with “the people vs the powerful.” It’s possible that voters don’t find that formulation helpful, or maybe the system just collapses, with conflict oriented voters assuming that political elites don’t have their interests at heart.
* For illustration purposes only. I have no useful information on either global warming, global warming mediation, or the Koch brothers’ ontological philosophies.
I’m a little surprised and sad that your conclusion at the end of this post is that you need to make more conflict-theorist arguments. I think one of the great strengths of this blog is that you are strongly mistake-theorist. Every other blog in the world is conflict theorist, and well, I think there’s a reason that this is literally the only blog I follow or care about.
I really like the dichotomy, except that it’s not a dichotomy: you can be both! You can believe that well-intentioned people often come up with massively wrong solutions through stupidity, while simultaneously believing that self-interested people often come up with solutions intended for their own benefit then package them as being for everyone’s benefit. You can believe that free, open, informed debate is an effective way to find the best solutions, while simultaneously believing that inequalities of power and wealth make it impossible for large-scale public debates to stay free, open, and informed. If you do, then your best strategy combines elements of both: be a mistake theorist about most of the people you talk to, but a conflict theorist about the system as a whole. The big game is rigged, but you can still find honest games on the sidelines.
(Sorry if someone’s already made this point somewhere in the previous 700 comments…)
Yeah, others have made this point, but I think that you made it particularly well.
Assuming objective morality, wouldn’t you say that being on the wrong side of a conflict (hoarding money as opposed to sharing it with everyone) would be a mistake? Something something veil of ignorance.
This also reminds of something I was thinking about recently, namely that the strategy described in All Debates are Bravery Debates, while maybe helpful or even unavoidable to some extent, may nonetheless have more serious drawbacks than are immediately obvious.
That is, I feel like so much of political discourse in recent (?) years has the flavor of “yeah, he may have exaggerated, but his heart was in the right place,” “yeah, he may not literally have said the racist thing we claim he did, but we know what he meant,” etc. etc. That is, everyone taking the liberty of saying what they think others are most in need of hearing (is there an alternative?), even if that misrepresents things on some “autistic” Platonic level of forms (related to “Dog Whistle-ism“?).
But of course everyone thinks he is uniquely fit to make those calls while everyone else (on the other sides)’s attempts to do so seem like pure deceitful conflict theory stratagems resulting in further breakdown of trust and increased need to rely on learned epistemic helplessness.
One other thought: this may engender a vicious cycle:
Educated elites notice that Joe Sixpack doesn’t support their obviously correct policy solutions. Since the answers are obvious, the only reason they can’t convince Joe Sixpack must be that other elites are feeding him malicious propaganda designed to keep them in power. Elite group one is therefore in conflict with elite group two, which can’t be mistaken, only evil.
But how to convince Joe Sixpack of the correct position when elites group two must be playing dirty (else how could they convince of him something against his self interest)? It can only be by playing dirty themselves: “I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the type of person I’m preaching to.”
Joe Sixpack eventually notices that at least one group of elites are lying to him and reacts by developing further epistemic helplesness (I can’t articulate why they’re wrong, but common sense tells me I can’t trust them). This attitude then becomes further evidence for the elites that Joe Sixpack is either incredibly dumb and not open to convincing through rational argument and/or that he is being heavily manipulated by sinister forces, eliciting a further move toward conflict theory strategy…
Marxists don’t just seem to believe that it takes no particular skill to set up good governmental institutions after the ‘right guys’ have all the power. I get the impression that their whole beef with ‘capitalists’ (or rather, more accurately, ‘entrepreneurs’) is based on the implicit belief that it takes no particular skill to set up a economic structure that transforms (less valuable) inputs into (more valuable) outputs. One big problem in the middle ages was that many people believed that merchants were crooks : because they sold things at higher prices than they bought them at, not seeing that merchants were performing valuable work (for example, seeking out locations where commodity x is in surplus and locations where commodity y is in short supply, and then transporting goods between those places; or buying in bulk/wholesale, and repackaging and selling to people who want small quantities, etc). The blindness of the Marxists to the value being added by the entrepreneur seems completely analogous.
It seems to me that setting up a company to transform the labor of x people with skill/ability of type 1 and y people with skills/ability type 2 … into high value output z; is directly equivalent to inventing a process or a machine that performs some useful work. You have the idea once, set it up, and forever afterwards, it takes much less work to accomplish that outcome. Now, who should reap the gains of all that saved work? I say the inventor/entrepreneur : at least for awhile anyway. 10 or 15 years maybe. First, to encourage the others, but, also just out of simple equity. It was his idea, his hard work, his willingness to risk his time and energy that made the whole advance possible. I would agree with Marxists that perhaps people are being exploited if the inventor/entrepreneur get to keep those gains FOREVER. But that doesn’t seem to happen in our society, even for the entrepreneur : those excess gains get competed away. But they get competed away through lower prices for the product, not higher prices for the labor inputs. I, personally, think that’s fair, since it benefits equally everyone who wants the product, but if my concern was ‘blue collar workers don’t get as big a piece of the pie as white collar workers’ that obviously wouldn’t address my concern.
I see a bunch of people standing around, can’t find any better job than minimum wage, some guy has a bright idea, hires them, makes a mint of money, and Marxists say the workers are being exploited. The only way I can see how anyone could honestly believe that would be if they think the guy who had the idea and set up the company wasn’t performing valuable work too. Or if the believe that the work he performed shouldn’t be compensated at a higher rate than manual labor.
But, then, it seems like Marxists come in two flavors : some marxists seem to believe that workers are being exploited by capitalists (or, in my alternate formulation, they believe that blue collar workers are being exploited by entrepreneurs). But, other marxists don’t seem to care about equity in the sense of ‘workers not getting the marginal product of their labor’, and instead simply advocate ‘poor people’ (regardless of whether they work or not) should have the same income as richer people (regardless of whether those people worked hard and earned their money or not).
So, I’d say, the first group of Marxists are simply mistaken : their definition of ‘work’ is too narrow; but the second group of Marxists is a completely different story : they are simply partisans ; they are engaging in the modern day equivalent of tribal politics (‘we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys! lets go raid the bad guys, and beat them up and then steal their stuff! )
Eh. My beliefs might be described as Marxist.
I think capitalism itself is exploitive. Not just of the workers, but the entrepreneurs, too.
On the one hand, it is an engine of recursive self-improvement. It might just be impossible to design something that does what it does, better.
On the other, the inputs to that engine are human beings, whose values and desires are coupled to capitalism via consumption; consumption is only a proxy for their values and desires, and a pretty lossy one at that.
Capitalism is abusive in the same way a slot machine, or many video games, are abusive. Variable rewards is part of it; another is that those variable rewards are tied to finding ways to increase other people’s consumption.
And you cannot rest, cannot stop improving; you can’t keep making flip phones when smart phones are what sells. All purposes are bent towards consumption. Anything that can be used to sell something gets used to sell something; anybody who fails to exploit every opportunity eventually gets outcompeted. There are no sacred cows, only hamburgers.
It is a horrific Molochian process which consumes everything, and turns everything into consumption.
It also happens to be very effective at meeting our needs and desires, at least where they involve consumption.
The terribleness of it isn’t that it isn’t effective. Anybody selling that is selling ideology. The terribleness of it is that it is effective.
You can keep making flip phones when smart phones are what sells, because people don’t buy Nothing But smart phones. I have a flip phone. Lots of people do.
Marxists have attacked self-exploitation by workaholic entrepreneurs and Stakhanovite workers for a long time, but the bait and switch between ‘exploitation’ as in ‘this is useful’ and ‘exploitation’ as in ‘this is Nothing But using me’ remains. ‘Nothing But’ arguments are never completely right, although they are never Nothing But Wrong. Marx himself used and abused Nothing But habitually.
Hope this was useful. Don’t mean to abuse your very proper disaproval of social evils.
Evolution ensures that at the lowest, most reductionist, level we’re all Conflict theorists. Because we’re life, and so in constant conflict with other life to acquire resources and spread our genes (and memes) throughout the population.
But in the process of Conflict, we form coalitions. At every level, from mitochondria in cells, to family, tribe, nation, and species. And on many dimensions – genetic, geographical, cultural, ideological, etc.
The idea that the only Conflict is between elites and masses is unspeakably naive.
Successful coalitions use Mistake theory to improve the working and success of our coalitions.
No it doesn’t.
If our ancestors (genetic and memetic) hadn’t done that (successfully), we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.
Nope.
First living organism, who/what is it competing against? It needs to figure out survival, reproduction and exploitation, the organism in the tidal pool that figures out photosynthesis first, or the one that can exploit the rocks/sand/whatever around it has a far greater reach than one that just learns how to dominate the tidal pool. A cell that cooperates with another cell has a greater reach than one that eats another cell, and so as we crawl out of that pool we end up a giant pool of cells ourselves. Two guys get in a fight, well each one of them is a conglomerate of 10s of TRILLIONS of cells working together (not even all of them human, as there are numerous species living symbiotically within our bodies).
At a fundamental level we are cooperating at a massively complex level that far outstrips any conflict level, it is so deeply ingrained in us that we literally call the collective action our “self”.
I completely agree. At the base, reductionist, level, we’re in Conflict.
But at all the higher levels, cooperation, coalitions (a method of cooperation), and civilization (a way of opting-out from much of the conflict) rule.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t Conflict deep down, and that it isn’t always a factor at some level.
We live in a world of scarcity, and always will. And status games are always zero sum (at least in one dimension).
We can, and do, cooperate to use the available resources more efficiently and to get access to more. Most of what we do –
almost all – is cooperation, and Mistake theory is critical to learning how to do that better, and there’s a lot of gains there yet to be made.
But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that deep down, there’s no Conflict. Because there always is.
At the base, reductionist level we are in cooperation, not conflict, we just don’t bother discussing that level because it is so ingrained that unless you are an immunologist or something similar it just never comes up. Society works at these levels as well, we don’t pay much notice to a guy stocking shelves, or producing the packaging, or changing the light bulbs, but we raise holy hell if our favorite brand of cereal gets discontinued (or at least we notice it). We are programmed to notice conflict because it is the aberration, the car accident gets rubbernecked and no one bats an eye to the fact that tens of thousands of cars are not getting in accidents.
This is my first time leaving a comment here, but it seems like a really appropriate place to mention Alon Levy’s excellent post from a couple years ago about how the “Sewer Socialist” mayors of Milwaukee (bona fide Marxists) basically turned into “sewer neo-liberals” because they were so focused on making the city function. He argues the same is true of the Social Democratic parties of Europe. This sort of socialism-turned-neo-liberal seems like a kind of ideology of governance that fits me and many of my friends pretty well.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/10/26/sewer-socialism-or-sewer-neo-liberalism/
I’ve more or less made it through the whole comment thread, although I confess to a good deal of skimming. Three points:
1. A lot of whether you believe in mistake theory or conflict theory depends on how many mistakes you think there are, which comes down to how badly you think existing systems work. If you believe that government decisions are very far from optimal, that FDA regulation has little positive effect on how good drugs are, a huge negative effect on what drugs are developed and how expensive they are, and believe it not only from observation (Peltzman’s old article, for instance) but as what you would expect from the incentive structure, then you see the main problem as persuading the 99.9% of people who are worse off as a result. If you think government decisions are close to optimal, on the other hand, then all that is left to change is how they weight payoffs to different people, which is a conflict issue.
For the same point on the other side of the political spectrum, some people on the left have argued that capitalism creates scarcity and if only we replaced it with socialism we would have a twenty hour work week with long vacations and abundance for all. From that standpoint, practically everyone would be better off with socialism and capitalism is just a mistake. This was the Abbie Hoffman position I argued against in Machinery.
2. Most of the discussion of conflict theory blurs together two rather different versions. In one, the conflict is basically over whether benefits go to me or you. We might have, in the abstract, identical value systems–I regard your preference that benefits go to you as just as rational, just as correct, as my preference that they go to me. It’s just that I’m me not you, so act for my benefit not yours.
In the other, the conflict is over fundamentally different value systems. I’m a natural rights libertarian, you are a utilitarian, he is an egalitarian. At one level it is a conflict as to which of our values gets satisfied. But at some level each of us believes the others are making a mistake in what values they hold.
3. In the context of a blog, a book, an argument, the question is not just what is true but also what is worth arguing about. If the reason you are for what I am against is pure conflict there is not a lot of point to reasoning with you, although I still might want to reason with my allies about how best to fight you. So in lots of contexts, such as this blog, it makes sense to focus on mistake theory issues rather than conflict theory issues.
Consider immigration. I don’t see any way of persuading someone who believes that the welfare of his fellow citizens should be much more heavily weighted in our decisions than the welfare of foreigners that he is wrong. But I might be able to persuade him that freer immigration is better for his fellow citizens. And if we focus on that argument, we may be able to agree on policies that would make it better for his fellow citizens even if he believes that under current circumstances it is not.
This is connected to my support for consequentialist libertarianism–as a form of argument. Deontological rights based libertarianism might be correct–I don’t claim to have a proof of what moral position is correct. But I don’t think anyone else has such a proof either, so persuading people that the government should be abolished because taxation is theft doesn’t look like a very appealing strategy. On the other hand, I observe that people’s values have a lot in common, I believe that the sort of society I support would be better, in terms of the values almost everyone now holds, than the alternatives, and we are much closer to having proofs in economics than in moral philosophy. So it makes sense to argue consequences rather than values.
Mike Huemer in Problem of Political Authority seems to take a Mistake Theorist approach to convincing people of the appeal of something like deontological rights based libertarianism and it’s an appealing strategy to me. People seem to broadly share certain common sense ethical intuitions, what’s right and wrong in interpersonal relationships, but then provide justifications for the State that upon careful examination violate these ethical intuitions. Many people don’t do this careful examination, and so an approach that systematically reviews arguments for the State, like social contract theory or rule by majority, and showing how the arguments violate common sense ethical intuitions, seems to be a promising approach to reaching at least some subset of the population: those making ethical mistakes rather than economic mistakes.
Note 1: Huemer argues for a strong NAP presumption, not absolutist ethics, so doesn’t argue quite for deontological rights based libertarianism.
Note 2: As consequences factor into people’s common sense ethical intuitions, he has to make the types of consequentialist arguments you see as a more sensible approach, in addition to the systematic ethical argument approach.
Mike Huemer has the same moral theory I do–intuitionism. The difference is that he’s more confident that it is correct than I am.
Mostly it’s just untrue. Conflict theorists are perfectly happy to explain why the “mistake” worldview is incorrect, and why the world is actually a bloody struggle of A against B. What else do you think all the manifestos and pamphlets and “What’s the Matter with Kansas” book tours are for – not to mention all the elaborate theorizing about consciousness-raising (and its cousin, false consciousness)?
“Politely explaining why you’re incorrect” about the nature of your political situation is more pithily known among us conflict theorists as “organizing”. Of course, you only organize among potential allies – but given a sufficiently expansive definition of “the People,” that’s almost everyone.
The issue is that these perspectives are absolutes, which make them mutually exclusive. That’s wrong, because SOMETIMES we can share goals but disagree on the information or methods for achieving those goals, and SOMETIMES we really have different goals which may or may not be incompatible with each other.
These are pretty similar to the different “basic” perspectives in negotiation theory: integrative vs. distributive bargaining. Integrative says you can work together to achieve more than you could by working against each other. It’s non-zero sum. Distributive says that there’s a fixed amount to go around, so different parties are in conflict over it. It’s zero-sum. Both, however, are simply different ways of thinking about dealing with people who disagree with you, there’s no reason to limit yourself to only ever using one.
So there’s nothing wrong with either way of looking at disagreement, but it’s a mistake to think you can’t use both. They’re both potentially valid, the mistake is to consider one absolutely true and one absolutely false.
I think that a clever conflict theorist would pretend to be a mistake theorist.
I don’t think the two are exclusive options. When I argue that the lack of public fianancing of elections leads the US congress to pass a lot of laws that aren’t in the interest of it’s citizenry I am at the same time making an argument about a mistake in the system as I’m making an argument about conflicts within factions.
Julian Assange is a prime example of a person who’s both. He started Wikileaks based on a graph-theory based argument he wrote up in LaTeX. There are many people like him in the Chaos Computer Club that are able to think very clearly about policy but who still think that political power matters a great deal.
A large part of this is clearly personality, ideology, intellectual habit… But I think you also have to take into account that most people take a Conflict approach where they feel sacred values are threatened or percieve the interlocutor as especially threatening and a more Mistake approach with friends.
I think the reading of who you’re talking to matters moire than their position here – though latter influences the former.
The biggest distinctions might be how wide your mistake circle is (here I suspect its big except for some sj stuff and some meta stuff about being in conflict with conflict theorists, whereas in some areas people want to purge enemies who are in indistinguishable from the outside) and also which mode you seek out/enjoy more. I hate online debates turning into slanging matches or sermons but am also aware that my ‘can we define terms and look closely at the evidence’ instincts irritate the hell out of some conflicters who want to share their common beliefs not nit-pick.
The political developments of the last few years have been surprising to me as well. I say the last few, as Brexit happened in 2016, but with so much Euroskepticism across Europe and the rise of a reactionary political camp in the United States in the couple years leading up to Trump’s election are what I’ve noticed as well since before 2016. The conflict-vs-mistake framing makes lots of sense to me. I lean toward being a mistake theorist myself, but some of my intuitions place me under some circumstances as a conflict theorist. I don’t know if most people tend towards mistake theory, but I imagine most people are averse enough to massive disruptive violence to stable social conditions they’re willing to give mistake theory the benefit of the doubt. What can cause a shift is if the worse living standards and life quality of a population stagnate or deteriorate, the less plausible it seems to them the State is making a mistake, and more likely they’re screwing over that population. If the economy is dramatically growing, especially on the backs of said population, the more unjust the population will feel their treatment under the State has been. Between this and worsening material conditions more of the population will feel justified in Revolution.
The last couple years have in my experience make it seem a higher proportion of the population in Western countries has switched from mistake theory to conflict theory than I would’ve anticipated. That may have been happening for a long time, but the virulence of mistake theory combined with other factors means a surprising proportion of the population in Western countries would favour Revolution. I’d guess they’re still a small minority, but my intuition is over time if left unchecked the equilibrium will tend towards revolutionary conflict theorists to converting more undecided citizens to their side than mistake theorists do for their own side. I’ve seen more people on social media and in general muse public events in the United States make it seem uncannily similar to politics in Germany in the lead-up to Hitler’s rise. While there are unusual similarities, like a greater frequency of riots and street fights occurring because of political ideology more much anything else, I’m not convinced the expected trajectory of the continued polarization of the United States or any other Western nation keeps looking like the rise of the Nazis. Repeated riots in only Berkeley, one city in one of the biggest and most populous countries on Earth, cannot be extrapolated to national doom. Hypothetically, we could construct a metric which would measure the rate of increasing political polarization in a polity such that two sides of a political divide increasingly held favourable attitudes towards revolution. I’m sure some pollster has statistical tools for that.
Anyway, if we had that rate of polarization occurring at present as was happening in Germany leading up to Hitler’s rise to power, it seems the alt-right or whoever the apparent deplorables are these days don’t represent expected outcomes thus far worse than the impact the Nazi party had on German politics by 1932. If what’s happened under the rise of Trump so far was as bad as a trajectory as Hitler was on in 1932, we should expect the American government to stop upholding literally every American’s civil liberties in the next year or two. I know Americans decry the erosion of their civil liberties post-9/11, but we’re taking for granted how much freedom of citizens we have in liberal democracies in 2018, or maybe how strong protections for them are, compared to 1930s Nazi Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany#Nazi_seizure_of_power
I’m not a lawyer or political historian, so I don’t know where “civil liberties” ends and “basic rights” begins, but the upholding of a civil society seems less of a priority than fundamental rights like the right to life or the right to any kind of political participation. The latter were stripped from Jewish Germans with the Nuremburg Laws, but the Nazis suspended civil liberties like freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as earlier in 1932. If that was happening in the United States today, as fake as Trump calls the news, he would already have legal recourse to shut it down, and last week’s Women’s Marches across the United States could’ve been broken up by mass militarized police action. That that’s not happening doesn’t mean the legal, political and cultural checks against a slide into authoritarianism or totalitarianism aren’t being eroded. It’s just that it’s not happening in (most?) liberal democracies where there’s more far-right representation in the last couple years at the rate as occurred in Nazi Germany. That that would happen so fast in the United States strikes me as ludicrous.
I’m not trying to comfort anyone with a ‘totalitarianism is creeping up on us slower than the worst historical incidences’ hypothesis, because that wouldn’t do much. But I don’t trust alarmists who want to activate and convert citizens of a country to revolutionary conflict theorists on false pretenses. That evidence undermining a narrative that Trump is Literally Hitler and that the U.S. is like 1930s Nazi Germany also undermines calls to revolution, relative to the plausibility of a peaceful resolution to a political crisis. That’s why pointing this out is important.
However, historical cases of a surge to tyranny or revolution in a prior seemingly stable society can become rapidly empowered in the span of several years. Studying history makes the power of the Nazis in Germany feel like a long time, especially because WWII feels like the most complicated event in history, but in total the Nazis were in power for a little over a dozen years. Hopefully statistical tools exist such that a political scientist or someone else could determine how and at what rate people are converting to something like revolutionary conflict theorists (e.g., revolutionary far-right/far-left), and what that might spell for the next few years of politics. I figure that’d be a place to start if one wanted to effectively mitigate the polarization of the United States or another Western country.
Probably to everyone who didn’t listen to Yuri Bezmenov in 1980s. Those who did are just watching the train wreck in slow motion.
These are all very good insights, and I’m not sure if I’ve heard them framed in exactly this way before, but it seems to me like you’ve mostly just reinvented concepts that you’ve already covered numerous times in this blog, such as tribalism and defecting in prisoner’s dilemmas.
Similarly, it also strikes me that “conflict theory” as you’re describing it is basically just you doing a slightly better job of steelmanning the exact same position you argued against in “In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization.” I suppose that’s a good thing as far as applying the principle of charity goes, but I also think the arguments you made in that post were pretty strong, and that trying to avoid the conflict mindset is the best policy in general. It’s absolutely true that arguments framed in a way that appeals to a conflict mindset will be more persuasive to people who tend to adopt that mindset, but I still think it’s for the best to frame arguments in a way that appeals to a mistake mindset, for all the reasons you describe there.
(Also, if you haven’t noticed, I think it’s better to describe them in terms of mindset, rather than theory; there’s nobody who knowingly and specifically subscribes to a conflict or mistake “theory,” and applies it to other subjects the way that someone who subscribes to, say, Marxist or Libertarian theory would, and thinking of them in terms of theories is exactly the sort of idea someone who tends toward a mistake mindset would think up. :op )
I don’t think there’s anyone who ONLY operates in a mistake mindset or a conflict mindset mode. For any person and any issue, there are some issues that they approach from more of a conflict mindset, and some they are able to take a step back from and look at from a mistake mindset. It’s true that framing certain things from a conflict mindset perspective can be more effective in the short term, I believe society works best the more we are able to approach things from a mistake mindset, so rather than specifically trying to frame things from a conflict mindset perspective, you should be trying to find the issues, or facets of issues, on which people on different sides of a conflict are able to approach from a mistake mindset, and focus your arguments on those.
(Also, didn’t “In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization” used to be on the Top Posts page? If your thinking on the issue has evolved to the point where you don’t think that’s a good argument anymore, I suppose this post makes more sense, but I still think it was a great essay which deserves to be up there.)
While reading through the comments I realized that I was mentally mapping conflict theory onto IR Realism and mistake theory onto IR Liberalism and letting those frameworks do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of interpreting conflict and mistake theory.
Briefly, Realism says that “world politics ultimately is always and necessarily a field of conflict among actors pursuing power” while Liberalism says that “With the proper institutions and diplomacy,…states can work together to maximize prosperity and minimize conflict”.
The upshot is that for people trying to understand conflict theory and its implications, there’s like a hundred years of literature on IR Realism analyzing basically every global political event of the current and last century.
I think this post is fundamentally wrong.
It conflates modes of operation with political beliefs and personality traits and pack them into two inevitably overgeneralized “theories”, portrayed as more or less symmetrical and fundamental ways to look at society.
The result is some kind of horseshoe theory, where “mistake theorists” are basically centrists and “conflict theorists” are left/right-wing radicals. The implication is maybe radicals are not that evil and/or stupid – just misunderstood (one could call that “mistake theory at its highest”, given the dichotomy is real).
I totally agree that there is some truth in it but this line of reasoning is overall misleading.
Let’s take the initial claims:
“Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. … Conflict theorists treat politics as war.”
Firstly, science, engineering and medicine are not, by any means, conflict-free. So it would be more precise to talk about cooperative vs. antagonistic approach to politics.
Nevertheless, “mistake theorists” (centrists, actually) look like naive and starry-eyed (or maybe hired to look this way by elites who want to keep the status quo) while “conflict theorists” (radicals, actually) look like seasoned “dog-eat-dog” types who saw shit and learned thing or two in life.
Until you look at their models of reality and propositions.
Centrists are endlessly trying to squeeze society between constraints posed by human nature, game theory, laws of economy, etc. in gradual search for local optimum.
The returns of this approach are pretty modest and somewhat uninspiring (especially when you was born in a stable prosperous society and didn’t see shit for real).
Educated centrists are perfectly aware about principal-agent problem, rent-seeking, IQ distribution, Moloch dynamics, Chesterton fence, etc. and this knowledge makes them pessimistic about the prospects of rapid social change.
Uneducated centrists just stick to the principle “if it more or less works, don’t touch it (a lot)”.
Radicals’ proposition is much, much brighter. It promise immense societal gains when (state|capitalism|patriarchy|globalism|elitism|imperialism|absolutism|authoritarianism|regulations|etc.) will be dismantled.
The details of ensuing kingdom of heaven are often pretty vague – and for the good reason.
Even now, despite thousands years of written history and 250 years of massive social experimentation we can’t really predict outcomes of radical policy/regime changes or reliably transfer even proven solutions between societies.
Moreover, we can’t even keep working mechanisms from deteriorating. Any radical social redesign, regardless of its plausibility, is doomed to remain in the fantasy realm until it succeeds.
On the other hand, societies are pretty robust, adaptive and self-healing. Millions lived (and had some fun and good memories) in Nazi Germany and Soviet Union under Stalin at the same time as other millions suffered and died in camps, famines and wars. And after that Germany gradually returned to sanity and even USSR thawed. Shock therapy in Eastern European countries after 1989 was radical and painful but pretty successful in the long rung.
So you really can just remove gross impediment and let society sort itself out afterwards, and impressive positive outcome from radical change is not that impossible.
Therefore radical proposals are not inherently dumb, unrealistic or ill-informed (although they frequently are), but they are always extremely risky and unsettling.
Also they are extremely attractive for those evangelist/entrepreneur types who favor high-risk/high-reward strategies. I think this is pretty obvious and my point is not profiling or mocking them
because almost every human being can choose high-risk/high-reward strategy in certain circumstances. Some people are just more prone to them because, you know, nature, nurture and stuff.
I want to focus on what you suppose to do if you chose to perpetrate such strategy.
First and foremost, you shut your inputs tight not letting in even tiniest bit of dissent opinion that will distract you or undermine your determination.
There are different ways to do this: brand dissent sources as liars, trolls, zealots, hidden enemies, idiots – or just dehumanize them any way you like.
You must stop treat them as peers to prevent your own mechanisms of social conformity from destroying your determination.
Second, to continuously keep yourself in agitated state you have to overestimate gains.
One way to do it is picture your future paradise – but this is a dangerous one because your allies can picture it in a conflicting ways and even yourself can stumble into discrepancies and generate pernicious doubts.
Much safer and more effective way is to picture current situation as grim and unbearable as possible.
Third, to avoid being overwhelmed, you have to concentrate on modest-sized chunk of the job. In our case its the most fun, emotionally rewarding and achievable part – the Revolution.
Overthrowing tyrannies can be tricky sometimes but it’s really, really easy compared to what comes next. But you don’t let this dreadful knowledge undermine your determination.
For the same reason you should concentrate attention on adversaries, not on possible fundamental problems with your idea: one can defeat foes but can’t defeat laws of the universe. Likewise, if your idea is rejected by publishers or investors, you still have some slim chances to fight and win, but when your product is rejected by market you are truly fucked. So if you really want to achieve something, you’d better bother yourself about the former, not the latter.
Most of the features Scott attributed to “conflict theorists” are manifestations of this exciting emotionally charged radical high-risk/high-reward mindset in political thinking.
It definitely can move masses and change the world, like it does in arts, literature, business, sexual harassment and other human endeavors.
But it is self-delusional “by design” and therefore useless for understanding what is going on, like, for real.
It’s just a set of mind tricks to take an unreasonably big risk, not some deep understanding of political conflicts or comprehensive worldview.
>The result is some kind of horseshoe theory, where “mistake theorists” are basically centrists and “conflict theorists” are left/right-wing radicals.
I don’t know about that. I know centerists who are primarily conflict theorists; they think that both Trump and far left radicals are fundamentally evil and destructive and that The People need to organize and fight and march and protest to win back power from both groups.
This isn’t a brilliant observation or anything, but right after I read this, I read an older article about the Google diversity memo controversy in NY Magazine and was surprised with a perfect example of the mindset of a “conflict theorist” in action:
“Ask just about any woman you know and she’d tell you all of this. And then she’d sigh. Because she shouldn’t have to. “Open discussion” of the memo’s ideas seems like a reasonable enough idea in the abstract until you understand what it would mean: An endless, Sisyphean task of re-explaining, over and over, to every new engineer who doesn’t get it, why diversity and equality is important to Google…
…To go through the emotional, and physical, labor of explaining the misguided memo would only be to validate it, and opens the door further for somebody else to raise the same “arguments” later. Women have more important work to do.”
The bad news about being a mistake theorist is that life is in fact one endless Sisyphean task of re-explaining, over and over, the basics of how you should approach thinking about problems.
I find this a really useful distinction to make. I don’t think the previous SSC approach is neccessarily bad, because a lot of mistake-types here probably felt like it was an eloquent form of their own frustrations experienced on a day-to-day basis – trying to explain to conflict-types on both sides that the world’s more complex than that. It’s really hard being a mistake-type when conflict thinking is in ascendancy, you basically become everybody’s enemy – and like Nornagest says its hard not to notice all the conflict-types sharpening their knives at the moment 🙁 I get particularly nervous because I used to be maybe 50% a conflict-type (as opposed to 90% mistake-type now), and because I no longer fit in with my former ‘camp’ I feel like there won’t be anyone with my back when the knives are drawn by one side or the other, but I’ll still have the label. At least SSC feels like a place where a few people are still willing to try to engage with the full complexity of reality.
I always liked the walled garden idea here, but it feels kind of incomplete when a lot of conversations are derailed by well-meaning conflict theorists on each side, who tend to be more polite than normal but still somewhat relentless. I wonder if this post is a missing piece of the puzzle – a place to politely discuss mistake-type problems without being derailed. A sort of garden of mistake-theories 🙂
Of course anyone who is 100% mistake theorist is probably very naieve, and it would be a mistake to put all mention of conflicting interests outside the garden’s Overton window. Interests don’t always align and you can’t always fix that through some clever solution. But it would be nice to have a walled garden that kept out the most extreme end of conflict derailment, long enough to at least discuss the complexity of things. Participants might reasonably be more conflict orientated outside that space.
Whether that’s invite only, time-controlled (LW style), or moderated behaviour / principle based (current SSC) I’m not sure, but it’s a garden I’d certainly like to be part of.
Hi, I saw the flak you were getting, and I thought I’d pop in to say yes this is a useful insight. I think I was very strongly Mistake Theorist a couple of decades ago and I’m very strongly Conflict Theorist now. What changed was watching politics, and in particular how policies were making life very significantly worse for the powerless in ways it was difficult to parse as just mistakes. (A good example is UK disability benefit, which requires you to jump through increasing numbers of hoops, including travelling to other cities for assessment, which is difficult if you have mobility problems and pain and cognitive issues and they’ve stopped your income, and including putting assessments in buildings which are inaccessible by wheelchair and then penalising wheelchair users for not turning up or being late or for turning up to the meeting anyway, thereby “demonstrating” that they don’t actually depend on the wheelchair, and on and on and on. If this stuff was a Mistake you would expect it to get fixed rather than escalate over decades.)
> this blog is good at attracting representation from all across the political spectrum except Marxists.
This has been the best trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever. 😉
This is one of my favorite posts.
It’s one of those situations where you don’t have quite the right words to make a mental model, and once they slide into place, you realize how much you were missing.
I talked about this article a bit in my video: https://youtu.be/rVvP_lBunAk
The channel has grown fairly large already, and I don’t want it to be an echo-chamber among the Alt-Right, so any new viewers are greatly appreciated ^_^
Beautiful! You’ve just given me language to explain something I’ve been groping towards; I got so excited that I created an account here just to say so.
FWIW, I think this is another case where both approaches are useful. Having names for them will hopefully make it easier to deal with derails where someone insists on only using one of the two frames.
It seems to me that you have failed the ideological Turing test here. Calling people racists is not the most sophisticated response to public choice theory that Marxists would be capable of – far from it. It’s not even obvious to me what is particularly Marxist about it (unless we’re using that term such a vague sense as to be almost meaningless). I don’t think it’s a particularly useful label for this discussion, given that there are almost no orthodox Marxists left in the world.
An essential aspect about modern leftist thought is the focus on the ideological, i.e. the link between everyday experiences and how those experiences are interpreted. A central tenet is that there is no non-ideological position. Therefore, a more sophisticated attack on public choice theory would be to point out that it is a repackaging of a number of (fairly naive) assumptions about human behavior into a set of policy prescriptions. One could trace the intellectual history of this idea and connect it to larger ideas (i.e. neoliberalism) and point out the function which these ideas serve to certain elements of society, and the effects they have had on others. Such critiques have in fact been made, e.g. in Jacobin.
Another point where I think you’re selling conflict theory short is that you seem to suggest there is no room for rational discussion within it. Note that in the above discussion, I have given away my ideological preferences, but that – if fully developed – it would contain a series of historical assertions which could be verified. Note moreover that it contains a series of conditional assertions (i.e. if you believe humans are rational actors, what consequences does that have for public policy) which can be debated irrespective of the truth value of the initial assumption.
I’m concerned that nobody’s representing anybody accurately! The articles critical of public choice theory don’t represent public choice theory accurately, nor does the Jacobite article that defends it, and the Jacobite article doesn't accurately represent those other articles that it's criticizing, nor does it represent Marxism any more accurately than Scott did. (At least Scott represented the Jacobite article accurately, as far as I can tell.)
I don’t think a doctor’s office is a good analogy for politics. Politics is as much about status competitions as anything, and status competition is a zero-sum game. There is no way any group of technocrats, however wise they may be, will be able to resolve that to the satisfaction of all parties. Impossible. Politics is nearly always about conflict, rarely about mistakes.
Marx’s mistake was to grossly oversimplify the field of combat.
A slight modification of the doctor’s office analogy makes it better: a couple of the doctors are on an ego trip and need to prove that their diagnosis is correct. Thus the relative status of the doctors comes into play. Of course that’s to the detriment of the patient, but that’s the way the world often works.
I think you’ve misrepresented conflict theory a bit in this article. You’ve confused the people that conflict frameworks study with what conflict theory actually is.
The kind of leftist radical that you’ve painted a picture of precisely the type of person that conflict theory believes mediates the political event that is being analysed under the framework and even though people may use conflict theory in that biased way, it does not represent the beliefs of the theory.
The main difference between conflict theory and mistake theory is that mistake theory assumes cooperation whereas conflict theory assumes competition. They can both be mixed and used to analyze the same events and there is no reason why a person cannot talk about the same events in two different frameworks and be correct.
Personally, it would make me feel great to believe mistake theory since it is much easier to resolve conflicts and have debates but it seems to me that there is more evidence to support conflict theory based on actual political events.
When have you ever heard a politician admit that a policy was a mistake while they were in office?
When have you ever seen an elected official asking for feedback for the other side or inviting them to sit down and hash out issues and come to an agreement?
Bush started the Iraq War, found none of the things that he claimed were there and achieved no objectives but still went out on an aircraft carrier and made a speech with the words “Mission Accomplished” written in huge letters behind him for the entire media to stare at. Does that sound like someone who thinks about mistakes? Hilary Clinton completely failed to give a straight answer about her emails for months even though it literally meant nothing simply because she didn’t want to lose her base. I could go on about examples of both sides abandoning any notion of basic human fallibility and blaming every negative occurance on the other party and demonstrating that most of politics is not supposed to be about trying to solve problems through discourse.
All conflict theory suggests is that the people that we laugh at and call “extremists” actually mediate the majority of political discourse not necessarily because of their number but because of their effect. It attempts to view its subjects as people who have no interests in doing anything other than being relatively self-interested and will reject, suggest or support policies mostly upon that basis. It makes no comment about “good” or “evil” (although some coopt and use it that way), only that people interests are not aligned no matter how much they might pretend they are. No politician would board a refugee in their own house or cut their own salaries in order to reduce government spending even if they believe that other people should do the same. This leads to conflict because people first and foremost are looking out for themselves and there can only be one “number one”.
That doesn’t feel intellectually satisfying because we want to believe that human beings can eventually all come together and love each other. That doesn’t mean that it’s false and I think it’s dangerous to ignore the evidence in favor of our desire to believe that humanity is actually really great.
Simple way to engage conflict theorists on their own terms: “If you insist on conflict theory, then I’m siding with the Elite”.
They already thought you were doing that, so you gain zero leverage. Even if they didn’t, it would be completely sensible for them to announce they don’t negotiate with blackmailers. So congratulations, your answer is neat, simple, and wrong.
Glad you are putting this in words; and very much agree with your conclusion. I dont know exactly what i thought filling in your latest survey, but when it came to questions like ‘political opponents are dumb vs political opponents are evil’ questions, I was really missing the ‘political opponents have different interests’ option, and I was thinking in retrospective language ‘jeez Scott is such a hardcore mistake theorist’.
That said, I do not really identify with the examples of conflict theorist given. For starters, I don’t identify as a marxist; but also they have a moral and fatalistic slant to them that does not resonate with me. People have different interests; or not perfectly aligned interest; but that does not mean they will be at eachothers throats in some hobbessian characteriture all the time. Its the way the world has always been, including the good things in it.
But I do think the the vast majority of political theories and debate are pure after the fact rationalisation. That said there are some interesting examples of the contrary. Im pretty sure the minimum wage is awful on average for the lower rungs of society. As I am pretty sure that ‘low human capital’ migration isn’t in the interest of the average voter.
There is an interesting spectrum here though; I suspect that people voting for open borders and buying houses in the least diverse neighbourhoods possible have some awareness of their virtue signalling ways; the marginal cost to them in voting the ‘correct’ way is negligible compared to the cost of being outed as a bad person. Yet the average voter in favor of the minimum wage truly does not oversee the consequences, I suspect. But if they did come to appreciate the mistake in the theory of their peers; would they risk challenging this gospel? Ridicule the causes that the heroes of their movement gave their lives for?
There is a spectrum of interpretations there; but regardless if people are stupid, virtue signalling, have different interests, or just want to see the world burn, I am generally skeptical of them changing their minds much through clever arguments.
Does the ‘conflict theorist’ take strike anyone as belonging to the same vein as libertarian ‘argumentation ethics’?
Good article.
Personally by nature I’m more a mistake theory person, but I have more and more become convinced that a significant group of people in our government today are simply not arguing in good faith, and that attempting to correct their mistakes is misguided because they already know the things they are saying are untrue, they just don’t care because they are just trying to consolidate power and resources for their faction
I’ve written a fairly extensive response trying to defend conflict theory from a non-Marxist/standard liberal perspective.
http://thinkingcomplete.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/in-defence-of-conflict-theory.html
It’s weird that you chose Soros and the Koch as opposing archetypes because there is barely any difference between them. They’re just slightly different shades of neoliberal. They’re both social liberals who want free trade and high, indiscriminate immigration. They’re both my enemies because their failings on immigration outweigh all their good work on everything else.
For some actual contrast how about Chomsky and Hoppe, or Tim Wise and Greg Johnson, or Marcuse and Molyneux.