I think the issue here is that to you progressivism is a set of very specific ideals whereas to me it is a set of general-purpose political tactics. We could argue it around in circles forever, so why not cut to the meat of the issue; what would we expect the progressive response to be like if each of us were right?
Situation A: Three nationalist groups representing their country’s majority begin systemic campaigns of genocide against minority groups whom they resent for their higher social standing and perceived foreignness (in reality, both have lived there for centuries). The German NSDAP targets the Ashkenazim, the Vietnamese Viet Minh targets the Hoa, and the Hutu Akazu targets the Tutsi. What do we expect the modern sensible progressive to feel?
If this is a simple question of morality, we could expect that each case would merit strong condemnation and the failure to prevent them as an unforgivable tragedy. If on the other hand Progressivism is simple political expedience, we expect our answers to break along purely practical lines; the NSDAP was a rival and is thus condemned as strongly as possible, the Viet Minh are even now an ally and thus their actions are completely ignored, and the Akazu are of no consequence whatsoever and are thus thought of only within the context of expanding the power of allied NGOs.
Situation B:Two men lead attacks on US Federal Government buildings in an attempt to spark a race war which they believed was divinely ordained, failed, and were subsequently executed. John Brown attacked the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, while Timothy McVeigh attacked the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In both cases innocents were killed as a result of the attacks, and in both cases their actions hurt their cause in the public mind and encouraged the expansion of paramilitary police forces designed to prevent similar future strikes.
If this is a question of humanitarian ideals, you might expect that both would be repudiated for their actions; even if we hate slavery, surely a student of history should recognize that slave revolts tend to involve mass murder even when successful which means that regardless of the validity of their complaints, both were attempting to start a genocidal war. Of course, from the point of view of political expediency there is no conflict whatsoever; the neofascist terrorist is a threat and thus irredeemably evil while the radical abolitionist terrorist is a predecessor and thus an inspiring heroic figure.
Situation C:Two governments of modern first-world nations have made the deliberate descision to deny life-saving care from those seeking it for a practical purpose. The US government’s Tuskegee Syphilus Experiment has denied 400 black men access to syphilus treatment so that the army can gather data on how best to treat STIs (a major readiness issue in any military), while the UK government’s Liverpool Care Pathway has dehydrated and neglected 10,000(!) “dying” patients to make room for patients with better QALY returns.
If this was a case of values, we should expect universal condemnation; the TSE was nothing short of a racist massacre while the LCP crossed the line into actual mass murder. On the other hand, the US Army is a traditionally right-wing institution while the NHS is a monument to Social Democrat ideology; it would be surprising if the TSE didn’t result in public shaming and calls for new boards of well-paid ethicists (read: academics) in every hospital while the LCP is met with calls for increased funding to the very organizaion which enacted it.
Obviously this isn’t a perfect test of the principle; it’s not particularly sporting of me to pick examples with perfect hindsight and I do apologize for that. As a rational intelligent person I know you’re more than capable of stepping outside your philosophy and asking why it happens to have grown into the shape it’s in, and who it’s ultimately helping. As long as you’ve done that, as far as I’m concerned we don’t disagree on anything substantive.
(Also I was hoping for your opinion on whether my explanation of the “governmental entropy” made any sense. I guess putting it in the middle of a text wall was a poor idea lol.)
I think the issue here is that to you progressivism is a set of very specific ideals whereas to me it is a set of general-purpose political tactics.
Judging by the examples you give, the tactic you’re attributing to progressivism is basically harsh condemnation (and often forceful suppression) of purported “human rights abuse” when the perpetrators are ideological enemies, but quiet tolerance (and sometimes even approval) of the same actions when they are perpetrated by allies or by people/groups who do not fit the “bad guy” role in the standard progressive narrative. Is this pretty much what you intended to convey, or am I missing something important?
If I’m not, then I don’t see why you tie this behavior to progressivism in particular. It seems like a pretty universal human failure mode when it comes to politics. Of course, the specifics of the rhetoric employed will differ, but I’m sure I can come up with examples similar to yours that apply to conservatives, or indeed to pretty much any faction influential enough to command widespread popular allegiance and non-negligible political clout. Do you think progressives are disproportionately guilty of this kind of hypocrisy, or that this hypocrisy is more central to the success of progressivism than that of other ideologies? Or are you just using the term “progressive” in a much more encompassing sense than its usual meaning in American political discourse?
I’ve also got to say that I don’t find your three examples of progressive hypocrisy all that compelling (even though I don’t deny the existence of this sort of hypocrisy among progressives—I just think you’re wrong about degree).
On situation A: The claim that progressives completely ignored Vietnamese ethnic cleansing is false. The push for a more inclusive refugee policy in America in the wake of mass Vietnamese displacement (culminating in the Refugee Act of 1980) was spearheaded by progressives in the Congress (like Ted Kennedy) and backed by labor unions. The UNHCR (which I’m assuming Moldbug regards as a tentacle of the progressive kraken) played a major role in drawing attention to the plight of the boat people. It’s true that the Viet Minh’s oppression of ethnic Chinese doesn’t get condemned as vociferously or routinely as the Nazi oppression of Jews, but I don’t buy that this is solely or even primarily attributable to the preservation of the progressive Grand Narrative. One relevant observation is that as bad as the Viet Minh’s treatment of the Ethnic Chinese was, the Nazi treatment of Jews was considerably worse.
As for the Rwandan genocide, once again your characterization of the progressive response doesn’t seem apt. While it is true that America did basically nothing to stem the genocide while it was in progress, some of the harshest criticism of this American inactivity has come from progressive academics (Samantha Power is a prominent example). Also, I don’t think condemnation of the Akazu has been lacking at all. In fact, the impression I get is that Rwanda is the go-to example for modern (post WWII) genocide.
On situation B: I concede that a lot of contemporary discussion of John Brown is unjustifiably reverential, and I don’t consider him particularly heroic. But I do think the difference in motivation between McVeigh and him is very relevant to our evaluation of their respective actions. Also, you seem to take for granted that the Haitian revolution was, on the whole, a bad thing. If not, your claim that Brown should have been dissuaded from starting a slave rebellion by the example of Haiti would make no sense. And I disagree that the Haitian revolution was on the whole a bad thing, despite the considerable loss of life involved. Perhaps this is another instance of progressive double standards, but you’ll have to make that case for me. As it stands, the argument “Haiti’s slave rebellion had horrible results, so John Brown should have expected his rebellion to have horrible results, so he should be treated as someone trying to bring about horrible results” is not very convincing to me, for a number of reasons.
On situation C: I just straight-up reject your characterization of the LCP as “mass murder”. While there have been reports of some patients on the LCP being dehydrated and neglected by hospital staff, the numbers do not remotely approach 10,000. That’s about the total number of people on the pathway, and there is no evidence I’m aware of that more than a small fraction faced systematic mistreatment (in contravention of the actual guidelines for the LCP, I should note). There is also evidence that a number of people on the pathway received exemplary end-of-life care.
And again, your characterization of the progressive response is pretty tendentious. I guess it’s technically true that there are “calls for increased funding to the very organization which enacted” the LCP, but progressives also support increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, the very organization which enacted the Tuskegee experiment (gasp!). So no hypocrisy there, then. I find neither demand particularly scandalous, since both organizations do a lot of other good stuff that warrants increased funding. As for the specific abuses of the LCP—while they are much less common than you claim, they are troubling, and as far as I can tell, there has been no significant progressive opposition to the Neuberger review’s recommendation that the LCP be phased out and replaced with something that can be more effectively enforced. I’m not British though, so I may be wrong about this.
Now, it is quite possible that I have to some extent been duped by progressive myth-making in my conception of these situations. If so, I’d appreciate evidence indicating where my beliefs are false.
I concede that a lot of contemporary discussion of John Brown is unjustifiably reverential, and I don’t consider him particularly heroic.
I consider him extremely heroic. Not ultrarational, but there were people suffering in the darkness and crying out for help, a lot of people saying “Later”, and John Brown saying “Fuck this, let’s just do it.” If there’s a historical consensus that the Civil War could have been avoided, I have not encountered it; and that being so, might as well have the Civil War sooner rather than later.
If there’s a historical consensus that the Civil War could have been avoided, I have not encountered it
Here’s an argument. Basically, Lincoln could have acted early to keep half of the South, and a confederacy of just seven coastal states primarily dependent on the global cotton market could have been waited out, or brought to heel quickly.
If I recall my past opinions correctly, I said at the time that while such wars were the only way to free certain countries, I did not trust the competence of the current administration to prosecute it and was strongly against the way in which it was carried out in defiance of international law.
I would say in retrospect that the resulting disaster would have been 2⁄3 of the way to my reasonable upper bound for disastrousness, but the full degree to which e.g. the Bush Defense department was ignoring the Bush State department was surprising and would not become known until years later. I have since adjusted my political cynicism upward, and continue to argue with various community-members about whether the US government can be expected to execute elaborate correct actions based on amazingly accurate theories about AI which they got from university professors (answer: no).
For one thing, it worked. But I wasn’t there at the time, not to mention not being born at the time, so it’s hard to argue about what I would have said about the Civil War.
For certain values of “worked”. Slavery was abolished, similarly Saddam is no longer in power and Iraq is certainly much closer to democracy (at least by Arab standards). Also in both cases the occupation (called “reconstruction” after the civil war) met with heavy resistance and was ultimately discontinued for political reasons. Ultimately Jim Crow was instituted. It is notable that for roughly a century afterwards the civil war was regarded as a tragic mistake.
If there’s a historical consensus that the Civil War could have been avoided, I have not encountered it; and that being so, might as well have the Civil War sooner rather than later.
Well, no way to avoid it other than letting the Confederacy secede. Oh what am I saying; sure if we did that we might saved a few hundred thousand lives but we’d be letting the evil of slavery continue, and that’s obviously such a great evil we can end the discussion right there. We don’t need a decision theory when we’ve got our trusty moral intuitions right?
But on the safe side why don’t we “shut up and multiply” for a second, see what our bargain bought us...
We paid 750,000 lives in the Civil War to free less than 4,000,000 slaves; in other words, the suffering of a lifetime of slavery is evidently worth 18.75% of the death of a free person in a horrific war. In other words, for the trade to come out equal a slave would be suffering more than a chemotherapy patient with recurring metastasized antibiotic-resistant breast cancer and sepsis. And even that weight is far too high; a slave could only expect to suffer for 20 years on average while a free man typically lived to 41, more than twice that value, not to mention that QALY weights are normed against a society with free pornography and twinkies rather than one with regular TB epidemics. So really terminal cancer is an absolute wonderland of fun compared to being in bondage! No wonder it was such a strong moral imperative to justify starting a preposterously bloody war over...
I concede defeat good sir, in the face of your flawless logic. I’m sorry ever to have doubted your well-considered opinion.
Depends on how long slavery would have lasted without the war. You don’t just free current slaves, you prevent future generations from ever being enslaved. I take that to be Yudkowsky’s point- the earlier the better, because the more slaves you prevent.
Edit: Actually, use your own numbers:
a slave could only expect to suffer for 20 years on average while a free man typically lived to 41
This implies converting someone from slave to free should increase their life by 20+ years, approximately half the life time of a free person. Just multiplying, using 1 free person dead = 41 years lost, one slave freed = 21 years gained, we pass a cost benefit test.
This implies converting someone from slave to free should increase their life by 20+ years, approximately half the life time of a free person. Just multiplying, using 1 free person dead = 41 years lost, one slave freed = 21 years gained, we pass a cost benefit test.
Not quite. The lower life expectancy due to slavery may be the result of early malnourishment, say, which manumission would not fix.
I’ve seen, but have not investigated, arguments that the civil war and emancipation of slavery led to lower life expectancy among former slaves, and those sorts of claims should be addressed in this calculation.
One historical note I was not aware of until several months back, which was covered in a few books on related subjects which I read at the time, was that for more than a decade after the Civil War, the standard of living and level of equality experienced by recently free blacks was actually quite high. The levels of prejudice which led to the passage of the Jim Crow laws were actually cultivated by deliberately targeted propaganda by upper class industrialists who feared the political threat of lower class white and black laborers acting together as a voting bloc.
(I was initially skeptical of this as a posited explanation for the levels of prejudice which came about in ensuing decades, since humans can easily be induced to turn on each other without any pragmatic incentives, but not only do writings from those who were alive at the time reflect a genuinely dramatic nosedive in the state of racial relations, but some of those who were involved in the propaganda efforts wrote with surprising frankness about their intentions.)
It’s questionable how predictable this turn of events could have been prior to the emancipation, but had it been avoided, the quality of life for free black Americans in ensuing decades might have been considerably higher, and for a decade or so after the war, their quality of life was likely rather higher than we might expect.
The levels of prejudice which led to the passage of the Jim Crow laws were actually cultivated by deliberately targeted propaganda by upper class industrialists who feared the political threat of lower class white and black laborers acting together as a voting bloc.
I think the argument I saw hinged on the strife that happened after emancipation, which is perhaps an argument for more Reconstruction rather than an argument against emancipation. But I don’t remember it well enough; perhaps someone else has seen something similar.
Sure, doing this calculation right would require a great deal more research. Certainly, my prior would be that freeing a slave would result in a longer life expectancy, but I would not expect the gap between slave and free to instantaneously close.
I just wanted to point out that the large slave/free life expectancy gap he was presenting can work against him- and as a result he wasn’t “shutting up and multiplying” correctly, which should undermine the weight of the sarcasm at the end of his post.
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
-- Abraham Lincoln
in other words, the suffering of a lifetime of slavery is evidently worth 18.75% of the death of a free person in a horrific war.
Leaving aside all moral considerations of collective responsibility and individual complicity… and switching to my rough model of preference utilitarianism, which I generally don’t use… this would sound like an incredible, unbelievably lucky bargain with this cruel universe at HALF a life for a freed slave. At 18,75% it appears perverse even to hesitate in this non-dilemma.
P.S.: instead of preference utilitarianism, I do find it much more comfortable to use broadly Christian virtue ethics for a snap moral decision. According to which… well, let’s just mention that even a Catholic like Chesterton could be unapologetic in his respect for the Jacobins. Never mind the Christian abolitionists of the day.
P.S.: instead of preference utilitarianism, I do find it much more comfortable to use broadly Christian virtue ethics for a snap moral decision. According to which… well, let’s just mention that even a Catholic like Chesterton could be unapologetic in his respect for the Jacobins. Never mind the Christian abolitionists of the day.
I’m unclear what this actually means, considering there are usually Christians on every side of moral conflicts.
Backing out a little… if I see two people about to shoot someone tied to a tree, on your view am I ever justified in shooting them both to save the tied-up person’s life? If so, what does it minimally take to justify that?
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not a utilitarian, I just don’t like hypocrisy.
But in my personal opinion? It’d depend on who’s tied to the tree and who’s shooting. I’d side with the people I value personally first; if they’re all strangers I probably would have to go with the most aesthetically pleasant side or just sit it out. This is assuming a consequence-free vacuum of course; IRL there would be legal/social concerns which would trump any initial preference, not to mention how utterly unfamiliar I am with firearms.
Ah, sorry. I thought you were arguing that the Civil War was a bad idea because it killed more people than it saved. My mistake, and thanks for answering my question.
But in my personal opinion? It’d depend on who’s tied to the tree and who’s shooting. I’d side with the people I value personally first; if they’re all strangers I probably would have to go with the most aesthetically pleasant side or just sit it out.
For clarification here, do you mean behavioral aesthetics such as which people are trying to tie someone to a tree and shoot them, visual aesthetics (which side is better looking,) or some combination or alternative?
A sort of a combo; aesthetics covers a lot of ground. Attractiveness, intelligence, how interesting/valuable their job is and how skilled they are in it, how cute they are (if they’re a kid or other small mammal), how well behaved they are, etc. It’s a lot easier to judge any given example than lay out hard and fast rules.
Judging by the examples you give, the tactic you’re attributing to progressivism is basically harsh condemnation (and often forceful suppression) of purported “human rights abuse” when the perpetrators are ideological enemies, but quiet tolerance (and sometimes even approval) of the same actions when they are perpetrated by allies or by people/groups who do not fit the “bad guy” role in the standard progressive narrative. Is this pretty much what you intended to convey, or am I missing something important?
More or less; it’s all about framing the debate in terms which push popular sentiment leftward. Whoever controls the null hypothesis gets to decide what the data means, and conservatives suck at statistics.
Now each of my examples is debatable; there are official Progressive answers to each dichotomy and they’re all designed to make sense to well educated intelligent people (no-one with any sense would call the Cathedral dim). But if you look at the pattern, not just here but anywhere you look, you see double-standards which invariably favor the political Left and Demotism in general. I can’t force you to see it, and I don’t begrudge it if you don’t, but it is there to see.
I took your explanation of “governmental entropy” to indicate a breakdown of heirarchy.
High order gov’t = clear lines of heirarchy, which you could draw in a simple diagram
low order gov’t = constant uncertainty about who’s in charge (with the resulting insecurity resulting in violence).
We could argue it around in circles forever, so why not cut to the meat of the issue; what would we expect the progressive response to be like if each of us were right
So this is good, but I’m still confused.
Your examples describe a government which acts in its own interests (rather than by moral ideals) and I accept that this is in fact the case for our government, that it acts not according to ideals but in self-interest.
What I don’t understand is why this is particular to progressive-ism, and not a general property of ideologically driven power structures. Or even power structures in general, for that matter—doesn’t Fnarg also act in his own interests, by strengthening his allies and weakening his enemies?
who it’s ultimately helping
Let’s take India and Pakistan, and observe their positions on the Israel-Palestine scenario. Pakistan strongly sides with Palestine, probably because Palestine is the Muslim state and Israel are the Western Imperialists. Polls show India to be the most pro-Israel country in the world: despite India’s strong anti-imperialist sentiment—here’s a short analysis that makes sense to me.
India was chosen as an example because while many major variables are different from Western nations, I know it possesses the equivalent of what we’ve been calling “The Cathedral” and its conservatives are similar as well. As you might expect, India’s leftists are more pro-muslim than the nation as a whole, and thus are less pro-Israel.
But I know that If a Muslim power started invading an indigenous Jewish population, left and right in India would be united in opposition. The alliance on the Right depends on the interests of the cultural in-group (which is why Pakistan supports Palestine and Indian conservatives supports not-Palestine), but the alliance of the Left doesn’t seem tied to any particular culture’s interest. Leftists from India to Europe to America tend to have greater support for Palestine.
So, once you subtract any moral variables, who does the leftist tend to help? One possibility is that they tend to help the underdog who wants to be autonomous from Fnargl. and thus cause the “underdog” to win. And if the underdog keeps winning, I suppose that this leads to chaos and constant revolutions.
if that’s the case, it brings my back to the one useful thing said I had gleaned from reactionary thought—“World-improvement-plots should follow the heuristic of minimizing destruction to existing societal infrastructure.”
That’s just what I came up with, though, I’m not sure actually sure whom you meant when you said “who it’s ultimately helping”. Did you just mean that it acts to strengthen itself? If so, why is this unusual for a major ideology? All rapidly spreading things… Islam, English speaking, etc… can boast the same.
the alliance on the Right depends on the interests of the cultural in-group (which is why Pakistan supports Palestine and Indian conservatives supports not-Palestine), but the alliance of the Left doesn’t seem tied to any particular culture’s interest.
That’s not exactly true; there is one particular culture which benefits very greatly from every Leftist alliance; the culture of Leftist intellectuals.
The Palestinians do not benefit from the “Peace Process” which keeps them in refugee camps, and neither does Israel or any of Israel’s Arab neighbors or even the United States which keeps the scam going. But it does provide an enormous amount of jobs for smart progressive kids working in the UN and other NGOs, juicy materials for journalists and political pundits, a great laboratory for PoliSci academics connected to the State Department to test their pet theories, and the crisis itself is an excellent propaganda tool for anyone to the left of Mussolini to use on any pet issue they might have.
In other words, the Cathedral itself profits, even if (especially if) everyone else is losing money. That’s not a healthy business model, in fact it’s almost criminal.
but doesn’t that just class “Leftist Intellectuals” as one among many groups who use power to serve their own interests, while outwardly appealing to high moral ideals?
What’s different here from all the other Fnargles who seize power? Why should I take any particular notice of this particular group of Fnargles who fall under the heading “Leftist Intellectuals”? Why is this Universe worse than the Universe that would result if there were no “leftist intellectuals”?
Are “leftist intellectuals” somehow meaner and more destructive than other Fnargles? Or is it simply that this brand of Fnargle is really, really good at re-directing power to itself?
Are “leftist intellectuals” somehow meaner and more destructive than other Fnargles? Or is it simply that this brand of Fnargle is really, really good at re-directing power to itself?
Yes and yes, and the reason for both is how they take power.
Nearly every ruler, and virtually every ruling class, in history has built their power by skimming off of the top; tithes are one of the oldest non-arbitrary forms of taxation, and the word literally means a ten percent cut. The incentive for the ruler is always to increase their personal profit by increasing the size of the pot he skims from, which means that as Machiavelli astutely pointed out a benevolent ruler and an amoral one will be indistinguishable.
The reason the modern situation is so bad is that the conditions where the Cathedral profits have nothing to do with how well it governs, and are in fact typically opposed. If Somalia stays a war zone for the next ten thousand years, that’s quadrillions of aid dollars which otherwise wouldn’t be spent.
Joseph Stieglitz, one of Bill Clinton’s top economic advisers,made a similar point about modern corporate mismanagement. When the shares are controlled by an individual or a small number of individuals everyone has an interest in making sure that the company is running efficiently; when the shares are too widely distributed speculation rules and the Board of Directors ends up calling the shots in their own interests. The result is bad service, poor profits and a bunch of wealthy Board members.
Okay, so I came into this considering the notion that attempts at reform frequently fail plausible. 2) I also came into this believing that there isn’t any good feedback mechanism to kill counterproductive charity, so it’s not a stretch to apply that to reform. 3) Also, perverse incentives can sometimes perpetuate dysfunctional things.
You’ve helped me to connect these dots and I am considering the notion that a system of perverse incentives is fueling a large amount of counterproductive reform, at least insofar as it comes to foreign policy. I don’t have the evidence to believe this is true yet, but it is a coherent notion that could well be true.
With regards to domestic policy (an area where I’ve got at least some evidence) I’m more skeptical. But then again, I take it the Cathedral does skim off the domestic pot, so maybe the effects cannot be observed domestically. I’m also not sure I understand the whole “the past was in many ways better” notion—I can’t think of many metrics by which this is true.
So...
1) Is this different from other forms of corrupt or inefficient charity? What is specific to the Left? Could this not apply to any group who were after a cause which was not related to their own direct profit?
2) Can it be fixed by requiring more transparency and data collection to ensure that interventions are, in fact, effective? (To force the benefit to the Cathedral to be tied to how well its actions produce the results it claims to produce)...basically, can we try to hold Cthulhu accountable?
After all, revolting against Cthulhu altogether will increase entropy, and for reasons obvious to both leftists and reactionaries that is undesirable. Transparency inducing reform seems to be something that everyone generally gets behind. If it is true that the tool of the Cathedral’s violence is reform, then reform seems to be the appropriate channel by which to modify it.
With regards to domestic policy (an area where I’ve got at least some evidence) I’m more skeptical. But then again, I take it the Cathedral does skim off the domestic pot, so maybe the effects cannot be observed domestically.
That’s actually something I hadn’t thought of. I guess my semi-conscious explanation for that was American “rugged individualism” but in retrospect that doesn’t make half as much sense.
I’m also not sure I understand the whole “the past was in many ways better” notion—I can’t think of many metrics by which this is true.
There are obvious areas of improvement, but I’m hard pressed to think of one which the Nazis or the Hapsburgs wouldn’t have provided if they had modern technology. It’s also not easy for me to speculate on the course of technological innovation in a monarchist or fascist world; that’s more of a job for authors like Harry Turtledove. So in most of the obvious cases like life expectancy I think we can call it a wash.
In other places, we can see problems which only exist as a result of progressive ideology. The state of Africa, South America and much of Asia can be laid entirely at the feet of naive decolonization and parasitic clientism; even accounting for technology, much of the world’s peoples likely led better lives as subjects of a foreign crown than they do under their “independent” nations. The mess we’ve made of the domestic economy, not to mention the world one, shouldn’t be too much of a leap to ascribe to mismanagement. And even domestically, “liberated” women and “tolerated” minorities are consistently polled as being decreasingly happy over time, almost as if our progressive policies of equality were thrusting them into arenas they were fundamentally not fit to compete in.
The current dysgenic population shift is more ambiguous; I’d like to think that a Reactionary government could preserve or increase the value of our national stock, but there are also purely technological factors like the ease of birth control which are less amenable to regulation. Also ambiguous is Moldbug’s democratic crime wave theory; his numbers show an order-of-magnitude increase in the murder rate over the last few hundred years, but the 18th century wasn’t known for meticulous record keeping so that might be illusory. Yvain has some interesting posts calling the whole “Victorians were healthier!” meme into question at SlateStarCodex, so that theory has some holes also.
But to be honest I’m not that attached to the idea; it’s interesting and more plausible than not, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it was wrong either.
1) Is this different from other forms of corrupt or inefficient charity? What is specific to the Left? Could this not apply to any group who were after a cause which was not related to their own direct profit?
2) Can it be fixed by requiring more transparency and data collection to ensure that interventions are, in fact, effective? (To force the benefit to the Cathedral to be tied to how well its actions produce the results it claims to produce)...basically, can we try to hold Cthulhu accountable?
It is the prototype of corrupt charity, and that is why it is specific to the Left. A Reactionary government is not a charity; it is a business, and like any good business it never confuses its employees and customers with its shareholders (although compensation in store discounts or non-voting stock options is perfectly acceptable). When you try to run a government like a charity you are asking for trouble.
That’s actually a simple fix, if one which is not particularly likely to be proposed. Anoint the Dean of the Harvard Law School as the Supreme Justice of the American Empire and give him power of appointment over the Federal Bureaucracy, name the Editor of the NY Times the Pontifex Maximus of the Church of Progress and have a synod to lay out the canon of responsible journalism, and let Jesse Jackson and his ilk reign as suzerain princes of their tribes. They wouldn’t go Reactionary overnight, we might still have a Great Leap Forwards to deal with, but if Deng could pull China out of Maoism in one generation I’d give us even money on being a properly governed state within the decade.
After all, revolting against Cthulhu altogether will increase entropy, and for reasons obvious to both leftists and reactionaries that is undesirable.
Freezing a liquid (or, God forbid, depositing a gas) is hard work, and the entropy does end up increasing globally, but you can do it. I think our present situation is the result of a reversible reaction, and if it is we just need the right catalysts or raw power to push it back to completion in the other direction. At least that’s my hope anyway.
Edit: Wow, I really just mixed up sublimation and deposition… must be bedtime.
I actually have seen that. Check out those graphs—there’s a difference between statistical significance and differences of magnitudes that actually matter. But lets suppose for a moment that the differences were of a magnitude large enough to influence policy:.
...”this makes me happier” and “I prefer this” are not the same thing. Feminist action might well have shifted happiness from women to men as a result of shifting work load from men to women, but I’m not sure why a more equitable labor and happiness distribution is a bad thing? Unless you’re suggesting that it was a net loss.
“tolerated” minorities / disgenic
I haven’t seen the former...could it be attributable to the recession and wealth inequality? The latter is too large of a discussion to have.
I suppose arguing over the facts of these matters will derail somewhat. Back to the theoretical stuff...
When you try to run a government like a charity you are asking for trouble.
So if I understand, this can be paraphrased as, “a government that is designed for the purpose of benefiting its people is likely to be worse than a government designed to exploit its people because the former has no concrete incentive”.
If so, I still don’t see why the solution isn’t transparency and data collection, to give the government an incentive to make reality come out the way that the government claims it should. If the numbers come out wrong, the ruler loses power.
Anoint
wait, not so fast
1) Doesn’t that constitute a revolution and destruction of all existing power structures? Seems rather un-reactionary. My “transparency” solution was an attempt to work within the system, not to topple it.
2) You convinced me that it is possible that power structures designed to be non-exploitative tend to end up falling prey to perverse incentives that fuel a large amount of counterproductive action which benefits no one.
a) That’s not the same as making a convincing case for the “order-chaos” thesis, where centralized power is superior to complex systems of distributed power. Thus far, I’d rather live in a random liberal democracy than a random totalitarian state, Why do you believe that a self interested and exploitative centralized power is superior to a self-interested and exploitative network made up of multiple distributed systems of power?
b) Your solution didn’t even stipulate that our rulers must act in self interest. They’d still have to appease the populace. It didn’t hand them any real power. Wouldn’t a better solution (what I think maximizes Order and Self Interested Rulers, not what I think best maximizes utility) be to hand over all our weapons and military power to China and tell them to rule us as they see fit? Or, if we really had faith in this concept that even Fnargl would be superior, wouldn’t North Korea suffice?
I’m not sure why a more equitable labor distribution is a bad thing?
If me and the eminent Professor Hawking found ourselves sharing an apartment, it would be insane to distribute the labor equally between us. Comparative advantage tells us that he should use his enormously powerful mind and reputation pay a much higher share of the rent while I can use my young and increasingly muscular body to do any household chores which need doing. This turned into a slash-fic way too fast, but you get my drift here; men and women need to pursue tasks which complement their natural advantages.
This doesn’t mean women should be barefoot and pregnant, there is plenty of room in the world for exceptional women and men to take each other’s roles, but it does mean that in general the distribution will more closely resemble traditional societies.
The latter is too large of a discussion to have.
I understand why avoiding it is wise, but it’s not a particularly large discussion. The facts are pretty damning; the least capable elements of society are fast outbreeding the most capable, and immigration is not helping matters. The only solutions which come to mind are either very ugly or rely on the rapid maturation and implementation of technology which the Left strongly opposes.
So if I understand, this can be paraphrased as, “a government that is designed for the purpose of benefiting its people is likely to be worse than a government designed to exploit its people because the former has no concrete incentive”.
Yup. If you want a game theoretic argument look at Stiglitz’s work on the theory of information asymmetry in firms. [Edit: initial link was to overly-technical and not particularly demonstrative article; I’ll look for a better one but his books might have to be sufficient]. He doesn’t make the political connection, but it’s a trivial one.
Hopefully this will also make the “widely distributed voting shares = bad management” point clearer as well.
(Note: I’ve read his conclusions in his book ‘Whither Socialism?’ but not the research behind them. In either case I’m not an economist or a game theory expert.)
b) Your solution didn’t even stipulate that our rulers must act in self interest. It didn’t hand them any real power. Wouldn’t a better solution (to maximize Order and Self Interested Rulers, not to maximize utility) be to hand over all our weapons and military power to China and tell them to rule us as they see fit? Or, if we really had faith in this concept, wouldn’t North Korea suffice?
I gave Dean Minow total control of the executive branch (a power Presidents have lacked for the better part of the century) and the ability to arbitrarily re-interpret the Constitution currently reserved for the Supreme Court. Considering we’re taking about the mammoth USG here, that’s more power in her hands than I can easily imagine. But of course she’d be far from my first pick for the job, just better than the current state of affairs.
China is a half-way decent choice, definitely better than the Harvard Dynasty, but still not really ideal. The Communist Party rules as a sort of semi-meritocratic natural aristocracy, very much like the old Eunuchs did really, but there is no dynastic Emperor to balance the equation. Each individual Party member is both a state employee and a shareholder in the People’s Republic of China; while mild compared to the Western welfare state, graft and patronage within the Party is severe. Furthermore, any ambitious young Commie could eventually climb their way up and replace the Premier himself, which means the leadership will always be insecure and tempted towards purges as a means of stabilizing their positions.
North Korea on the other hand is a communist dictatorship out of time; even in it’s relationship to the US it mirrors the USSR. We prop them up with food aid and timely blackmail payments while sympathetic liberal elements in the US systematically oppose both a definitive conclusion to the (ongoing) Korean War and any attempt to sever our economic umbilical cord with them. Even their legitimacy depends on our support; without the constant threat of an American invasion which will never come the Kims couldn’t possibly hope to keep their sustaining isolationism alive. They are an obsolete form of Leftist government but leftist nonetheless.
Ideally we’d want someone more like the Saudi Royals or any of the UAE’s Emirs; capable established dynasties with existing ties into the US political structure and a traditionalist-yet-irreligious worldview. They wouldn’t be able to rule directly, they’re too foreign for one thing, but if the House of Windsor could rule India for three centuries the House of Saud could probably manage the continental US as a suzerainty for a while.
If me and the eminent Professor Hawking found ourselves sharing an apartment, it would be insane to distribute the labor equally between us. Comparative advantage tells us that he should use his enormously powerful mind and reputation pay a much higher share of the rent while I can use my young and increasingly muscular body to do any household chores which need doing. This turned into a slash-fic way too fast, but you get my drift here; men and women need to pursue tasks which complement their natural advantages.
By “equitable” I’d mean that we each start out with half of the pie; it doesn’t stop being equitable if I like crust and dislike filling and you like filling and dislike crust so we mutually agree to trade my share of filling for your share of crust (i.e. this or a quick-and-dirty informal approximation thereof).
This doesn’t mean women should be barefoot and pregnant, there is plenty of room in the world for exceptional women and men to take each other’s roles, but it does mean that in general the distribution will more closely resemble traditional societies.
What do you mean by “exceptional”, 20% or 0.1%?
Note also that, given larger IQ variance among men than among women, the Flynn effect means that the fraction of people above a given IQ threshold who are male has decreased with time; technological advances mean that low-IQ labour has become less useful; and anyway IQ overweighs visuospatial intelligence compared to its importance today inflating male scores (and deflating Jewish scores). Fun fact: 59.4% of the people who graduated at my university in 2012 were female.
I understand why avoiding it is wise, but it’s not a particularly large discussion. The facts are pretty damning; the least capable elements of society are fast outbreeding the most capable, and immigration is not helping matters. The only solutions which come to mind are either very ugly or rely on the rapid maturation and implementation of technology which the Left strongly opposes.
I suppose there are differences among different parts of the present-day western world with respect to that: if I understand correctly what kind of technology you’re talking about, where I come from it’s the Catholic right that’s opposing it.
By “equitable” I’d mean that we each start out with half of the pie; it doesn’t stop being equitable if I like crust and dislike filling and you like filling and dislike crust so we mutually agree to trade my share of filling for your share of crust (i.e. this or a quick-and-dirty informal approximation thereof).
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works. You can’t build a society on the basis of atomized individuals constantly negotiating out every interaction on an ad-hoc basis; that’s just not a stable or realistic foundation. It leads to a culture of divorce and single-parents, generations of unsocialized children and ultimately societal collapse; we’ve seen the same pattern play out in the black community already.
Start with a strong tradition which works well in the aggregate, make that the standard, then we can talk about shifting the details around in any given family.
What do you mean by “exceptional”, 20% or 0.1%?
Closer to 20% would be my guess; women only lag men by about 5 points overall and a lot of that is the aforementioned spatial reasoning. I’d say something akin to the Asian-White proportions would be a good baseline expectation given that the magnitude of difference is similar, with more women at the top levels due to their wide variance.
Of course, the actual representation in the work force might still come in under our expectations; pregnancy and even menstruation are serious problems for women trying to compete with men, even with modern hormonal birth control which mediates the effects of both, and as studies have shown women tend to be happier as homemakers than breadwinners
Fun fact: 59.4% of the people who graduated at my university in 2012 were female.
On the other hand, the university I went to was a top-tier engineering school with about 20% women and more Asians than Whites by a long shot (and most of us ‘whites’ were at least a quarter if not fully Jewish). Was my school suffering from unfair “boy’s club” discrimination against women or was yours caving to the constant push for “better representation” of women in academia?
That’s why I prefer to look at scientific measures like IQ scores and market-based indicators like wages earned than university admissions. Uni is supposed to prepare us for the job market and separate the wheat from the chaff anyhow; the numbers ought to all roughly match up if it’s working properly.
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works. You can’t build a society on the basis of atomized individuals constantly negotiating out every interaction on an ad-hoc basis; that’s just not a stable or realistic foundation. It leads to a culture of divorce and single-parents, generations of unsocialized children and ultimately societal collapse; we’ve seen the same pattern play out in the black community already.
And yet Northern European societies, which have very low gender inequality, haven’t collapsed yet. So maybe the reason why the black community (ITYM the one in the US) has is probably a different one. (EDIT: Oh, look at this too.)
(Also, how comes people can ever get along with roommates of the same sex, where there’s no Schelling point as to who should do which chores?)
I’d be surprised if no-one had used that as an argument against gay marriages and adoptions.
(Here too, ‘how comes the Netherlands have had same-sex marriages and adoptions for 12 years and the sky there hasn’t fallen yet?’ sounds like a valid counterargument.)
Oh, they do all the time. And yet, as you say, it turns out that society never quite collapses when we ignore those dire predictions. Which of course doesn’t stop the kinds of people who believe such things from believing that this time it certainly will.
Is there some easily communicable message here for doomsayers that stands a decent chance of kick-starting the “Oy, was I mistaken!” part of their brains into gear?
I’d be more inclined to discard the category “doomsayers” and instead categorize people, not by the behavior, but by the intent… different people doomsay for importantly different reasons, and not all people motivated by each of those reasons necessarily actually doomsay (as opposed to, for example, feeling vaguely anxious all the time, or expressing outrage about things, or framing themselves as more clever and rational than I am, or something else), and different strategies are optimal for each (and highly differentially so… what works for someone who’s just scared and ignorant is actively a mistake for someone who wants to control my behavior for their own benefit, and vice-versa)
But even with that revision, I think in most cases we care about it’s not easy (because the easy cases tend to get corrected often enough that we care about them less, because only really bad thinkers fall for them). The cognitive biases and incentive structures that encourage believing messages like “issue de jure is causing the negative stuff I experience!” aren’t sound-byte-resolvable.
That said, what I try to do, both for others and for myself when I find myself veering towards this kind of crazy, is start by framing myself as a non-enemy and approaching people with compassion. Often that seems to damp down the worst excesses of fear/hostility, and sometimes it prevents outrage from having anything to latch on to without looking silly. It doesn’t work reliably, though, and sometimes it fails disaterously, and at best all it does is create a space where a different message can be received ungarbled… which is necessary, but not sufficient.
If your house is infested with termites that doesn’t mean it’ll explode the next day in a cartoon cloud of sawdust; it takes years for the full scope of the damage to become apparent, and even then it might still be livable for a while after it’s clear that it can’t be saved.
Look at the predictions of the people opposing the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even the people opposing women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, and you’ll see they were more-or-less right on the money. The American family has dissolved, the birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate, promiscuity and deviant sexual behaviors are rampant, and women are less happy in their new masculine roles while men are being forced to become more effeminate. All this in less than a century, a half-century really, which is pretty damn impressive a timescale for a civilization to fall when you look at it in historical time.
When you see the walls buckling and the floors start giving way under you, it’s time to get out of the house. It might not collapse this month, or even this year, but it’s not a stable place to live.
Look at the predictions of the people opposing the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even the people opposing women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, and you’ll see they were more-or-less right on the money.
Not if you focus on the details- the families that most reflect (for lack of a better term) 1950s values are more likely to divorce,have kids out of wedlock,etc. There is a broad pattern outline that loosely matches with your theory, but when you apply it on a micro scale, it fails.
Well, I certainly agree that if differential predictions of specific societal changes due to the sexual revolution and/or woman’s suffrage are accurate, that should increase my confidence in other similar predictions with longer time-windows, including predictions of eventual societal collapse.
The American family has dissolved, the birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate, promiscuity and deviant sexual behaviors are rampant, and women are less happy in their new masculine roles while men are being forced to become more effeminate.
Wow, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone saying this with a straight face.
Wow, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone saying this with a straight face.
You don’t listen to conservative talk radio. The “top three” headline issues on Focal Point yesterday were 1) gay marriage, 2) transgendered rights, and 3) female dissatisfaction with the consequences of the sexual revolution.
I guess I imagine that LW regulars are less ideologically motivated that this. But, with Multiheaded on one end and Konkvistador on the other, I should have known better.
Really? I find it easy… not just with a straight face, but while leaning forward in their seats and looking me straight in the eyes while making emphatic hand gestures.
Admittedly, I also anticipate as part of the same cluster being told that the solution is for everyone to truly accept the love of Christ into our hearts, which I expect to be less common on LW.
You want to actually engage with any of those points, rather than just smirking and shaking your head?
Remind me; what are our divorce rates like and how many kids are currently raised by a single parent or in foster care these days? Which populations are expanding and which are disappearing (I always get the progressive whites and the traditional hispanics confused)? How old is the average age of someones first sexual encounter, how many lifetime partners do they have, and what is their lifetime risk of contracting an STI? When women are polled on how happy they are is it working women or housewives who come out ahead, and are modern women polled as more or less happy than their ancestors? Has the average male’s testosterone level increased or decreased over the last few decades?
I would link you to the answers myself, but I have this mysterious feeling they’d just get dismissed out of hand if they came from me. So take an hour off some time when you’re not that busy, look at the numbers for yourself and maybe you’ll see why I don’t find the idea as laughable as you do.
Let us suppose for the sake of comity that if we compare today’s statistics to those prior to the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even to those prior to women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, we find that:
divorce rates are higher now
more children are raised by single parents now
more children are in foster care now
some populations expanded and others shrank
average age of first sexual encounter is lower now
number of lifetime partners is higher now
lifetime risk of contracting an STI is higher now
working women now report being less happy than housewives
women now report being less happy than women then reported
average male testosterone level has declined
Is it your position that discovering this should convince me that society is collapsing, and has been doing so since 1960/1900?
My rule is to not engage into specific arguments with anyone with clear signs of motivated cognition, since it is almost invariably futile, as their true objections are not in the arguments they put forward. I tend to try to figure out why it is important for someone in this state to believe what they believe. For example, it is pointless to discuss metallurgy with a 911 truther or a certain purported perpetual motion contraption with a free-energy crank.
Here are the signs of your motivated cognition: you use negative connotation-charged descriptions of purported trends and behaviors:
“promiscuity” instead of, say, “reduced incidence and duration of exclusive committed relationships”,
“deviant sexual behaviors” instead of, say, “widening spectrum of sexual norm”,
presuming that “roles” are inherently masculine or feminine,
Clearly you have your reasons for passing judgment, whether consciously or not, and these reasons have to be elucidated before one can have a fruitful discussion on the effects of evolving sexual norms on the American society.
“promiscuity” instead of, say, “reduced incidence and duration of exclusive committed relationships”,
I think “using one word instead of eight” is not very good evidence of motivated cognition. Maybe if Moss had said “sluttishness” instead you would have a point.
The first question is that I don’t see why many of the things you listed are bad.
Why is a high divorce rate bad? Why a lower age of the first sexual encounter (compared to what, by the way?) is bad? Why having many lifetime partners is bad?
The second question is how do you distinguish correlation and causation—I’m looking at the male testosterone level.
Doesn’t work. There are a lot of different countries that have made the same changes. So if there were a survivorship bias one would still see the collapse and chaos in neighboring areas.
Case 1: Someone tells me I will die tomorrow. Case 2: As above, but preceded by 99 people on 99 different days telling me I will die the next day, and I don’t.
Assuming everything else is constant, on your account do I have more evidence for my death tomorrow in case 1, or case 2?
If you insist on oblique evocative responses in lieu of answering questions, I suppose my reply is “I stopped going to church but I haven’t gone to hell. My priest’s warnings must have been lies.” But honestly, I prefer the more boring conversational method of actually answering questions.
I suppose my reply is “I stopped going to church but I haven’t gone to hell. My priest’s warnings must have been lies.”
That doesn’t seem to follow. The priest never predicted that you would go to hell prior to your death. The priest’s prediction has not been falsified. (The fact that it never can be by a live person is a whole separate issue.)
I don’t know what you’re analog of someone telling you that you will die tomorrow is supposed to be. In the topic under discussion the warnings are much more similar to the warnings issued about smoking than saying “if you do this, you die tomorrow”.
And yet Northern European societies, which have very low gender inequality, haven’t collapsed yet.
No, you’re absolutely right they haven’t collapsed yet. Even though their native populations have fallen under the replacement rate and are rapidly aging, they can still function more-or-less by importing huge numbers of cheap foreign immigrants and ignoring any shenanigans they get up to. Even though their cultures and social structures have largely been dismantled, their enormous tax rates and the free military security provided by the US means their welfare states can afford to fill those functions (with varying degrees of success). Even though their economies are growing at the rate of lichen, they’re still big enough (and the rest of the world small enough) that the EU’s protectionist policies can keep them out of the red.
But patches don’t hold forever; you can already see the cracks. It’s only been a little over a half-century and democratic Europe is already seeing a stagnation most empires have to last for centuries to attain. They might well outlast me personally, that’s entirely possible even given my family’s longevity, but I’d bet good money no modern European welfare state makes it to 2099.
(EDIT: Oh, look at this too.)
To be honest, these statistics don’t really impress me much; a fertility rate of 1.8 or 1.6 is better than the European average, but both are tragically low in a country where resources are as abundant as they are in a modern 1st world nation. And the divorce rates, while better than ours certainly, are still absolutely pathetically sad compared to any society which practices arranged marriage.
If you can’t even beat the replacement rate in terms of fertility and 40-50% of marriages fail so spectacularly the courts need to be involved, those are not numbers to be proud of. It is an indictment of the state of the world that this is the best our modern societies can do.
(Also, how comes people can ever get along with roommates of the same sex, where there’s no Schelling point as to who should do which chores?)
To be honest, we don’t. Or at least we don’t get along on the same timescale as a successful marriage. I’ve never had a roommate last longer than two years, much less the decades you need just to raise 3+ kids.
Actually, now that you mention it, people in modern marriages do look more like roomies than spouses. 50% leaving in the first five years actually sounds pretty optimistic for roommates; people that reliable I might actually want to rent to. Of course, you’d be nuts to actually sell them a house unless they paid upfront… you’re just not going to see that 30 year mortgage paid off.
Even though their cultures and social structures have largely been dismantled...
Oh really? I’ve been to Scandinavia recently. And while the center of Stockholm got to be a less than entirely pleasant place (not Gamla Stan, of course, one has to provide for the tourists), Oslo is noticeably better and once you get out of capital cities into small towns and the country, the “cultures and social structures” look entirely intact to me.
You also forgot that Norway has oil. Lots of oil and not too many people. The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is about $730Bn in size and is the largest stock owner in Europe.
and once you get out of capital cities into small towns and the country, the “cultures and social structures” look entirely intact to me
Indeed, I’d be curious whether the downward trends reactionaries point out would still apply when you control for the size of settlements people live in (i.e., comparing people in towns of 10,000 inhabitants today with people in towns of 10,000 inhabitants in the past).
That’s why I prefer to look at scientific measures like IQ scores and market-based indicators like wages earned than university admissions. Uni is supposed to prepare us for the job market and separate the wheat from the chaff anyhow; the numbers ought to all roughly match up if it’s working properly.
Wages earned are a rather poor proxy for cognitive ability, or for that matter for productivity, since people in different careers can capture markedly different amounts of the value they create. For instance, a person working in the financial sector may have the opportunity to capture a very high proportion, whereas a person working as a public school teacher who performs way above the norm and produces tremendous long term value in increased productivity of their students will not capture any of that value.
Using wages-earned as a proxy to compare output between groups is only useful if we can assume that both groups are on average working in positions where they capture an equal proportion of the value they produce, something which is very much an unsafe assumption in this case.
(This is of course setting aside the issue of whether there are existing biases in our population which affect wages earned between groups given equal quality workers.)
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works
To paraphrase Lenin, “Works for whom? To achieve what?” Cui prodest in any particular social arrangement? My personal go-to default hypothesis is that it’s always the side that can harness greater bargaining power through having more overall control of resources. Apply to workplace/labor relations, families, tribal clashes etc.
(Citation! Citation! A very favourable review—by Satoshi Kanazawa of all people—of a book on the game-theoretical causes and consequences of power inequalities.)
To paraphrase Lenin, “Works for whom? To achieve what?”
Society is not a zero sum game. Would you really prefer a situation where, to paraphrase Stalin, “the shortage is distributed equally among the peasants”?
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works.
But what works for someone needn’t be what works for someone else! (Non-sexuality-related cognitive differences among each gender are comparable to or smaller than those between the two genders; sure, physical differences are larger, but in how many of today’s jobs are they relevant?) And what works in a society needn’t be what works in a different society. (Another example besides those I already mentioned is that stuff like the washing machine have reduced the time and effort it takes to do housework.)
You can’t build a society on the basis of atomized individuals constantly negotiating out every interaction on an ad-hoc basis;
That needn’t be explicit negotiation the way the author of that post and her husband do; just acknowledge that if I’m better at A and you’re better at B then I should do A and you should do B regardless of who has a chromosome Y. (Maybe the pie was too abstract a metaphor.)
Start with a strong tradition which works well in the aggregate, make that the standard, then we can talk about shifting the details around in any given family.
If you put it that way, I may agree denotationally, but the amount of shifting that there should be is probably at least an order of magnitude larger than there was in early-20th-century Europe, and the amount of social (and institutional) pressure against it a couple orders of magnitude less. I don’t think a world where people hindered Emmy Noether solely because of her gender is an ideal world.
and as studies have shown women tend to be happier as homemakers than breadwinners
First, “tend to be” != “always or almost always are”, and second, probably plenty of men would too if they had a chance.
On the other hand, the university I went to was a top-tier engineering school with about 20% women and more Asians than Whites by a long shot (and most of us ‘whites’ were at least a quarter if not fully Jewish).
Well… You can see a breakdown by faculties (in the European sense, i.e. what would be called colleges or schools in North America) in the link. Most engineers are male here too. Now, I’ll concede that the faculties with the largest fraction of female graduates are largely influenced by Cthulhu, but the mine isn’t (if anything, it’s influenced by anti-Cthulhu) and still 42.7% of the graduates there are female.
If you put it that way, I may ) and still 42.7% of the graduates there are female.
I think there was a formatting issue here and would like the read what you had originally planned to write, as your comments are invariably interesting.
Dammit! Couldn’t Markdown just spit out the stuff it doesn’t understand unchanged, rather than deleting it altogether? (And couldn’t I look at my comments after submitting them for stuff like that?)
I definitely sympathize; trying for coherent formatting online is hard enough even when it’s just an issue of uncooperative html tags.
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
On the exact numbers of women graduates, I’m not too attached to any one figure as an ideal given how wonky the male-female gap gets at the right ends of the curves and how different the score breakdowns look. The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills? You need to know the exact numbers to see what the exact difference ought to be, but it’s unreasonable not to expect one at all.
upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide
There are more normal (i.e. less Brave New World-reminiscent) ways to make it easier for people with a career to have kids (though of course the future needn’t be normal) -- paid maternity leaves exist pretty much everywhere in the world except the US and so do paternity leaves in a few countries, France has a 35-hour working week and the sky hasn’t fallen there, etc.
while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability
Before solving this problem, shouldn’t you ask who is doing the forcing? It’s not like being a stay-at-home mum is illegal, so why are they working outside the home for money if they’re less happy that way? Once you answer this question, then you can think of possible solutions. (The reason for poor people may be different from that for rich people, and the solutions that would most help the former may be quite different from the ones you’ve thought of so far.)
The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills?
On the other hand, on fields that require average-or-higher (but not necessarily extreme) cognitive skills other than spatial ones, we would expect inequality the other way (and in some cases that’s what we already see, most school teachers being female); do we really want most of those people to stay at home because of social norms that developed long ago, when said cognitive skills were less important than today and manual labour more so?
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
Putting aside the question of aptitude, this sounds likely to be dysgenic given that increasing educational attainment in women tends to decrease birthrate. Plus, “increased societal stability” in this case also amounts to decreased class mobility in cases of exceptional aptitude.
name the Editor of the NY Times the Pontifex Maximus of the Church of Progress and have a synod to lay out the canon of responsible journalism
Oh, hahahahahaha, if that ever happened in some wacky weird moldbuggy universe… that’d be like Vatican trying to grab supreme jurisdiction over all Christian denominations by proclaiming the Pope to be the spiritual heir of Martin Luther and “interpreting” Luther’s theses to show how all modern-day Protestants need to forget about their minor disagreements and follow the RCC.
Which is to say… you do realize that the vast majority of serious leftists—including American leftists, and I mean people who self-identify as socialists, left-libertarians, anarchists, etc—have nothing but scorn and contempt towards the NYT? In the left-wing interpretation of the “Cathederal”, the NYT is not an active weapon of the Big Bad System like in yours, but it is nonetheless viewed as a symbol of moral bankrupcy, insidious propaganda and serving as the mouthpiece of the neoliberal elite. In short, it is not a case of the NYT being not progressive enough for a few of the most zealous commies; in their (our) interpretation, it is unambiguiously an anti-Left force.
You know it’s funny; I sort of used to be that person.
I read the Nation every month, laughed sincerely with every Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon. I went to every Michael Moore movie punctually the day after opening weekend (I never liked crowds). I listened to Air America from the literal first day they started broadcasting in my town, watched the Rachel Maddow show religiously. I marched against the Iraq War in 2003, cried when Kerry lost in 2004, and I’ve never used a drug in my life which felt like seeing Obama elected in 2008. My senior superlative? Most politically active. True. Fucking. Story.
You know what changed?
I woke up.
The world today is a mess, and every time I wrote the DNC a check or marched for some Social Justice cause or kicked someone under the table for talking during a day of silence I was doing my part to make that mess worse. So I stopped. It’s that easy.
I think you could stop too, if you wanted to. I don’t expect it, but please just look around and ask yourself honestly if we can really keep going the way we have.
I can understand the appeal of “I used to believe what you do now, but then I saw the light” arguments, but I’d rather not see this sort of thing replace a discussion of actual reasons for one’s changes in belief. It reduces the exchange of useful information, and it signals an unhelpful level of condescension.
Have you read a single damn word of my above comment?
The world today is a mess, and every time I wrote the DNC a check or marched for some Social Justice cause or kicked someone under the table for talking during a day of silence I was doing my part to make that mess worse. So I stopped. It’s that easy.
I’m getting full-on Poe’s Law vibes from this. Do you really, truly feel like the world revolves around your skinny first-world bourgeois STEM dudebro ass? That conversion from a very boring and milquetoast American white liberal to a wannabe fascist has been some ethical and philosophical triumph of yours? Man, oh man.
And even domestically, “liberated” women and “tolerated” minorities are consistently polled as being decreasingly happy over time, almost as if our progressive policies of equality were thrusting them into arenas they were fundamentally not fit to compete in.
Way too sick of this shit on LW. And as usual, it’s by straight white middle-class dudebro who hypocritically preaches about the danger of epistemic corruption in evaluating society while connected to it.
Check your fucking privilege and let people from the groups you bring up do some talking for themselves.
Asking people who are obviously not part of the social justice movement to check their privilege does not work, asking people who are is generally unecessary if they are any good at it. There might be a way to convince people to stop writing crap like this here, that won’t work.
I know, I know. If I was writing this with any actual goal-oriented hope for positive change on LW, I would’ve tried to bridge the inferential distance. But hell, I’m just a miserable and depressed cranky guy. Not even in gender studies. Sigh.
You know part of why I’ve been posting such low quality, counter-productive (passive)-aggressive remarks recently? I still remember that buzz, that breathtaking feeling of half-delight and half-awe when I discovered the LW community and read the Sequences two years ago. Here are some of the most insightful, kickass people I could realistically talk to and learn together with, it said. And now noticing all the terrifying, fascist-leaning political undercurrents that pervade the community, I feel zero joy at the thought of just averting my eyes and staying for the “Awesome Rational Shoes” stuff and smart conversation.
Don’t get me wrong, Eliezer on his own is still just as ultra-badass as ever. But the honeymoon is definitely over for me.
I would like to apologize that the discussion that I started has upset you. I feel partly responsible that you are upset and I’d like to remedy this.
I think that what you are feeling is part of the halo effect. When we see people who have some qualities we like (Understanding of logic, need for cognition, precise and methodical thought) we assume that they will also have other qualities we like and share our other values. So when someone within that doesn’t share them, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
It’s also a reminder that your other views don’t automatically come with the intelligence-rationality package. This reminder is good for your overall rationality. It forces you not to fall back on the “anyone who isn’t an idiot can see that I am right” defense.
But keep in mind Re: sore thumbs: In a rationalist community, Disagreement is salient, Agreement is silent.. Why was I even interested in Moldbug in the first place? Because he disagrees with me!
And now noticing all the terrifying, fascist-leaning political undercurrents that pervade the community
I show you this out to demonstrate the strong, silent agreement of social values on Lesswrong forums. We just don’t feel the need to talk about it, because all our opinions are assumed by default. The “undercurrents” that concern you are feeling distressed about are an overwhelming minority. They get attention because they disagree, and therefore they are interesting.
After you’ve finished with the “learning” phase, areas of disagreement mark the places worth watching, because that’s where you are likely to be wrong. That’s why in rationalist culture, the minority-view-holding-contrarian is always correspondingly louder. I’d argue that this is, on the whole, a good thing (coordination problems pointed out by E.Y. notwithstanding). This is the reason that despite my disagreement (which has emotional components aplenty—I know what it is like to be the target of racial discrimination) I am willing to really try considering such views dispassionately and on their own merits, making effort to put myself aside.
I hope that this makes you feel better about the whole thing.
You know part of why I’ve been posting such low quality, counter-productive (passive)-aggressive remarks recently?
I am puzzled. I understand your desire to vent, and there are places to vent about this forum, like the relevant subreddit. But here people are expected to at least make an attempt at practicing rationality, even if faced with mixed success. Why post something here you know is irrational? Is the dubious satisfaction of telling me or someone else “wrong on the internet” off really worth it?
Here are some of the most insightful, kickass people I could realistically talk to and learn together with, it said. And now noticing all the terrifying, fascist-leaning political undercurrents that pervade the community,
So you’ve discovered a community of extremely rational people and some of their conclusions make you highly uncomfortable. How is this surprising? This is probably how a lot of theists feel while deconverting.
The worst thing is… my crap doesn’t just mildly degrade the “overall” signal to noise ratio (I disagree that this could be a coherent metric, especially in arguments directly related to actually existing socieies) - it outright hurts the (ever-precarious) position of “my” side, and doesn’t even encourage my allies on any problematic topic to put forward a better denouncement of “hostile” content here. Yet silence and aquiescence feel even more humiliating to me than making a fool of myself on LW.
Yet silence and aquiescence feel even more humiliating to me than making a fool of myself on LW.
I recommend developing emotional self-control to the point that you can put your political goals above your personal emotional satisfaction, or alternatively realizing that your terminal goals appear to be emotional, not political, and you can adjust your political goals to make your emotional goals easier to satisfy.
How about I “poll” you about your current happiness, check your body language and such, then kidnap you, screw with your mind through typical abuser tactics, then pump you full of heroin and repeat the “poll”?
Check your fucking privilege and let people from the gruops you bring up do some talking for themselves.
Like… Ann Coulter, suffrage pessimist?
It’s not obvious to me that one needs to be of a group to comment about that group, and when it comes to statistical statements the collector of the statistics seems entirely irrelevant. “Check your fucking privilege” is not a helpful addition to the conversation, whereas Ishaan’s “I’ve seen the data, and it isn’t that significant” is.
Well, you’re going to find literally hundreds of women with outspoken feminist ideas to one outspoken Ann Coulter, so… Okay, let’s be generous and say that she and Andrea Dworkin, a fierce critic of anti-feminist women, cancel each other out. Then you’re still going to get far more women with explicitly and implicitly feminist aliefs. Even when they self-identify as “conservative” for cultural or political reasons, have a negative perception of feminist activism, etc. The public image of “feminism” might not be so great, but women by and large seem to genuinely stand behind feminist convictions Could it be because most women recognize women’s social and economic self-interest better than most men?
It’s not obvious to me that one needs to be of a group to comment about that group
Making certain types of comments from certain socioeconomic positions relative to the group in question is a huge, terrible epistemic hazard, which is so for pretty much the same reasons as the generally corrupting nature of power.
Your examples describe a government which acts in its own interests (rather than by moral ideals )
That’s one way to look at it, but this is more about the actual responses of progressives themselves and I tried to phrase it that way (I.E. “What do we expect the modern sensible progressive to feel?”).
What do you think about the Viet Minh’s genocide against the Hoa? What do you even know about them? Is it anything at all like what you feel about the Holocaust?
What do you feel when you think about John Brown? Do you think about him? Is it at all like your mental image of Timmy McVeigh?
What’s your response to the Liverpool Care Pathway? Is that even on your radar? How about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, I’m sure you’ve got a strong feeling about that one?
There is a pattern here; supposed moral concerns do not accurately predict how progressives, ordinary progressives not politicians remember, react to most issues. There are patterns of thought and behavior here and elsewhere which simply do not make sense except in the context of systematically eliminating non-aligned bases of power and expanding aligned ones. This is the absolute essence of the issue.
Me, personally? My domain is biology, and am aware that my political opinions on most issues aren’t to be taken any more seriously than the average undergraduate’s opinions. I suppose that makes me the “average progressive”, so maybe that’s a good thing:
Truthfully, none of those are on my radar, and I know nothing about the Holocaust beyond what I learned in school. As far as I’m concerned it’s just one among many terrible genocides, and one that presently gets more attention than the others because it was committed against a group who currently inhabits Western nations. Slavery of African Americans is similar—one among many terrible atrocities which happen to get more attention because the group they were committed against lives among us.
The American public (which includes me) ignores the Hoa because we never see the Hoa and have no clue who they are. I’ve never met a Hoa. There’s no Hoa organizations fighting for increased awareness. If awareness existed, people would care...but it doesn’t, so they don’t. This is what is meant by liberals when we say “privilege”—African Americans and Jews living in the West, as a group, have more privilege than the Hoa of Vietnam. The source of the privilege is that they were born in a Western nation.
The US Government, like most Powers, frequently supports shady, unethical groups in pursuit of its own interests. Saddam Hussein comes to mind as an example of supporting a seedy dictator which came to bite the US in the butt later. It is irrelevant that the Viet Minh and Saddam Hussein are on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum—they were both chosen on “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic, to support the United State’s interests at the time.
I never heard of Timmy McVeigh.before today. His wikipedia page doesn’t match your description—it does not mention any “divinely ordained race war”. Do I have the wrong McVeigh?
I learned about John Brown in school, he was mentioned alongside Nat Turner. I understand John Browns emotions of righteous fury. However, he was stupid to attempt such a war. Violence is only rational when the other side will see your power and back down—an all-out fight where one party (the slaves, in this case) are required to put in all their resources will result in slaughter on one or both sides. Even under the premise that you only care about your group and not the other group, a all-out war is an irrational decision. If you intrinsically value human life, the decision is even more irrational. The same applies to McVeigh. If Brown could have actually won—if he had sufficient power to force the other side to negotiate terms rather than all out slaughter, i might have supported it.
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment / Liverpool QALYs: A sacred value against a secular one. You’ve heard the moral dilemma where you kill 1 healthy patient and take the heart, lung, liver, etc to save 5 people? The utilitarian response seems to say “yes”, and most people’s hearts (including mine) say “no”. In practice, I go with the sacred answer, and the excuse I make is that we need to be able to trust doctors enough to go to hospitals without fear of being killed. In the true, externality-free hypothetical, I confess to being confused.
However, I know that the logic of the Syplillis Experiment was “black people are less important so lets test it on them” and the logic of the Liverpool folks was “Let’s maximize QALY’s”. The latter illicits my sympathies, the former does not. The Liverpool was not on my radar until this conversation, and I remain unsure about what to think of it.
You know, one of the things I keep forgetting is how reasonable people tend to be over here. My flinch-instinct is still very much tuned to other corners of the internet.
Basically, everything you’ve said is consistent and reasonable and utterly dissimilar to most of the progressive stuff I’ve ever seen. My sociology prof’s lectures, articles I read on Jstor, friends/family back home in my yellow dog democrat hometown, the feminist / progressive christian blogs I lurk on, politicians I follow (and often vote for. My options are bad in that sense.). Its obviously the same general pedigree, but a different breed. I’m not particularly sure what to make of it.
I never heard of Timmy McVeigh.before today. His wikipedia page doesn’t match your description—it does not mention any “divinely ordained race war”. Do I have the wrong McVeigh?
You have to scroll a bit; his whole plan was based on a white-supremacist novel called The Turner Diaries. It’s pretty much Battlefield Earth with Psychiatry find-and-replaced with Judaism, even down to the “nuke ’em all” ending. I’ve never read it myself but it’s supposedly very popular in those circles.
Situation B: Two men lead attacks on US Federal Government buildings in an attempt to spark a race war which they believed was divinely ordained, failed, and were subsequently executed. John Brown attacked the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, while Timothy McVeigh attacked the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In both cases innocents were killed as a result of the attacks, and in both cases their actions hurt their cause in the public mind and encouraged the expansion of paramilitary police forces designed to prevent similar future strikes.
If this is a question of humanitarian ideals, you might expect that both would be repudiated for their actions; even if we hate slavery, surely a student of history should recognize that slave revolts tend to involve mass murder even when successful which means that regardless of the validity of their complaints, both were attempting to start a genocidal war. Of course, from the point of view of political expediency there is no conflict whatsoever; the neofascist terrorist is a threat and thus irredeemably evil while the radical abolitionist terrorist is a predecessor and thus an inspiring heroic figure.
One of those is a war to stop something which is actually bad. The other isn’t. That’s not a trivial distinction.
I think the issue here is that to you progressivism is a set of very specific ideals whereas to me it is a set of general-purpose political tactics. We could argue it around in circles forever, so why not cut to the meat of the issue; what would we expect the progressive response to be like if each of us were right?
Situation A: Three nationalist groups representing their country’s majority begin systemic campaigns of genocide against minority groups whom they resent for their higher social standing and perceived foreignness (in reality, both have lived there for centuries). The German NSDAP targets the Ashkenazim, the Vietnamese Viet Minh targets the Hoa, and the Hutu Akazu targets the Tutsi. What do we expect the modern sensible progressive to feel?
If this is a simple question of morality, we could expect that each case would merit strong condemnation and the failure to prevent them as an unforgivable tragedy. If on the other hand Progressivism is simple political expedience, we expect our answers to break along purely practical lines; the NSDAP was a rival and is thus condemned as strongly as possible, the Viet Minh are even now an ally and thus their actions are completely ignored, and the Akazu are of no consequence whatsoever and are thus thought of only within the context of expanding the power of allied NGOs.
Situation B: Two men lead attacks on US Federal Government buildings in an attempt to spark a race war which they believed was divinely ordained, failed, and were subsequently executed. John Brown attacked the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, while Timothy McVeigh attacked the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In both cases innocents were killed as a result of the attacks, and in both cases their actions hurt their cause in the public mind and encouraged the expansion of paramilitary police forces designed to prevent similar future strikes.
If this is a question of humanitarian ideals, you might expect that both would be repudiated for their actions; even if we hate slavery, surely a student of history should recognize that slave revolts tend to involve mass murder even when successful which means that regardless of the validity of their complaints, both were attempting to start a genocidal war. Of course, from the point of view of political expediency there is no conflict whatsoever; the neofascist terrorist is a threat and thus irredeemably evil while the radical abolitionist terrorist is a predecessor and thus an inspiring heroic figure.
Situation C: Two governments of modern first-world nations have made the deliberate descision to deny life-saving care from those seeking it for a practical purpose. The US government’s Tuskegee Syphilus Experiment has denied 400 black men access to syphilus treatment so that the army can gather data on how best to treat STIs (a major readiness issue in any military), while the UK government’s Liverpool Care Pathway has dehydrated and neglected 10,000(!) “dying” patients to make room for patients with better QALY returns.
If this was a case of values, we should expect universal condemnation; the TSE was nothing short of a racist massacre while the LCP crossed the line into actual mass murder. On the other hand, the US Army is a traditionally right-wing institution while the NHS is a monument to Social Democrat ideology; it would be surprising if the TSE didn’t result in public shaming and calls for new boards of well-paid ethicists (read: academics) in every hospital while the LCP is met with calls for increased funding to the very organizaion which enacted it.
Obviously this isn’t a perfect test of the principle; it’s not particularly sporting of me to pick examples with perfect hindsight and I do apologize for that. As a rational intelligent person I know you’re more than capable of stepping outside your philosophy and asking why it happens to have grown into the shape it’s in, and who it’s ultimately helping. As long as you’ve done that, as far as I’m concerned we don’t disagree on anything substantive.
(Also I was hoping for your opinion on whether my explanation of the “governmental entropy” made any sense. I guess putting it in the middle of a text wall was a poor idea lol.)
Judging by the examples you give, the tactic you’re attributing to progressivism is basically harsh condemnation (and often forceful suppression) of purported “human rights abuse” when the perpetrators are ideological enemies, but quiet tolerance (and sometimes even approval) of the same actions when they are perpetrated by allies or by people/groups who do not fit the “bad guy” role in the standard progressive narrative. Is this pretty much what you intended to convey, or am I missing something important?
If I’m not, then I don’t see why you tie this behavior to progressivism in particular. It seems like a pretty universal human failure mode when it comes to politics. Of course, the specifics of the rhetoric employed will differ, but I’m sure I can come up with examples similar to yours that apply to conservatives, or indeed to pretty much any faction influential enough to command widespread popular allegiance and non-negligible political clout. Do you think progressives are disproportionately guilty of this kind of hypocrisy, or that this hypocrisy is more central to the success of progressivism than that of other ideologies? Or are you just using the term “progressive” in a much more encompassing sense than its usual meaning in American political discourse?
I’ve also got to say that I don’t find your three examples of progressive hypocrisy all that compelling (even though I don’t deny the existence of this sort of hypocrisy among progressives—I just think you’re wrong about degree).
On situation A: The claim that progressives completely ignored Vietnamese ethnic cleansing is false. The push for a more inclusive refugee policy in America in the wake of mass Vietnamese displacement (culminating in the Refugee Act of 1980) was spearheaded by progressives in the Congress (like Ted Kennedy) and backed by labor unions. The UNHCR (which I’m assuming Moldbug regards as a tentacle of the progressive kraken) played a major role in drawing attention to the plight of the boat people. It’s true that the Viet Minh’s oppression of ethnic Chinese doesn’t get condemned as vociferously or routinely as the Nazi oppression of Jews, but I don’t buy that this is solely or even primarily attributable to the preservation of the progressive Grand Narrative. One relevant observation is that as bad as the Viet Minh’s treatment of the Ethnic Chinese was, the Nazi treatment of Jews was considerably worse.
As for the Rwandan genocide, once again your characterization of the progressive response doesn’t seem apt. While it is true that America did basically nothing to stem the genocide while it was in progress, some of the harshest criticism of this American inactivity has come from progressive academics (Samantha Power is a prominent example). Also, I don’t think condemnation of the Akazu has been lacking at all. In fact, the impression I get is that Rwanda is the go-to example for modern (post WWII) genocide.
On situation B: I concede that a lot of contemporary discussion of John Brown is unjustifiably reverential, and I don’t consider him particularly heroic. But I do think the difference in motivation between McVeigh and him is very relevant to our evaluation of their respective actions. Also, you seem to take for granted that the Haitian revolution was, on the whole, a bad thing. If not, your claim that Brown should have been dissuaded from starting a slave rebellion by the example of Haiti would make no sense. And I disagree that the Haitian revolution was on the whole a bad thing, despite the considerable loss of life involved. Perhaps this is another instance of progressive double standards, but you’ll have to make that case for me. As it stands, the argument “Haiti’s slave rebellion had horrible results, so John Brown should have expected his rebellion to have horrible results, so he should be treated as someone trying to bring about horrible results” is not very convincing to me, for a number of reasons.
On situation C: I just straight-up reject your characterization of the LCP as “mass murder”. While there have been reports of some patients on the LCP being dehydrated and neglected by hospital staff, the numbers do not remotely approach 10,000. That’s about the total number of people on the pathway, and there is no evidence I’m aware of that more than a small fraction faced systematic mistreatment (in contravention of the actual guidelines for the LCP, I should note). There is also evidence that a number of people on the pathway received exemplary end-of-life care.
And again, your characterization of the progressive response is pretty tendentious. I guess it’s technically true that there are “calls for increased funding to the very organization which enacted” the LCP, but progressives also support increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, the very organization which enacted the Tuskegee experiment (gasp!). So no hypocrisy there, then. I find neither demand particularly scandalous, since both organizations do a lot of other good stuff that warrants increased funding. As for the specific abuses of the LCP—while they are much less common than you claim, they are troubling, and as far as I can tell, there has been no significant progressive opposition to the Neuberger review’s recommendation that the LCP be phased out and replaced with something that can be more effectively enforced. I’m not British though, so I may be wrong about this.
Now, it is quite possible that I have to some extent been duped by progressive myth-making in my conception of these situations. If so, I’d appreciate evidence indicating where my beliefs are false.
I consider him extremely heroic. Not ultrarational, but there were people suffering in the darkness and crying out for help, a lot of people saying “Later”, and John Brown saying “Fuck this, let’s just do it.” If there’s a historical consensus that the Civil War could have been avoided, I have not encountered it; and that being so, might as well have the Civil War sooner rather than later.
Here’s an argument. Basically, Lincoln could have acted early to keep half of the South, and a confederacy of just seven coastal states primarily dependent on the global cotton market could have been waited out, or brought to heel quickly.
To bring this to contemporary examples, do you support Operation Iraqi Freedom?
If I recall my past opinions correctly, I said at the time that while such wars were the only way to free certain countries, I did not trust the competence of the current administration to prosecute it and was strongly against the way in which it was carried out in defiance of international law.
I would say in retrospect that the resulting disaster would have been 2⁄3 of the way to my reasonable upper bound for disastrousness, but the full degree to which e.g. the Bush Defense department was ignoring the Bush State department was surprising and would not become known until years later. I have since adjusted my political cynicism upward, and continue to argue with various community-members about whether the US government can be expected to execute elaborate correct actions based on amazingly accurate theories about AI which they got from university professors (answer: no).
Why doesn’t the same logic apply to the Civil War?
For one thing, it worked. But I wasn’t there at the time, not to mention not being born at the time, so it’s hard to argue about what I would have said about the Civil War.
For certain values of “worked”. Slavery was abolished, similarly Saddam is no longer in power and Iraq is certainly much closer to democracy (at least by Arab standards). Also in both cases the occupation (called “reconstruction” after the civil war) met with heavy resistance and was ultimately discontinued for political reasons. Ultimately Jim Crow was instituted. It is notable that for roughly a century afterwards the civil war was regarded as a tragic mistake.
Well, no way to avoid it other than letting the Confederacy secede. Oh what am I saying; sure if we did that we might saved a few hundred thousand lives but we’d be letting the evil of slavery continue, and that’s obviously such a great evil we can end the discussion right there. We don’t need a decision theory when we’ve got our trusty moral intuitions right?
But on the safe side why don’t we “shut up and multiply” for a second, see what our bargain bought us...
We paid 750,000 lives in the Civil War to free less than 4,000,000 slaves; in other words, the suffering of a lifetime of slavery is evidently worth 18.75% of the death of a free person in a horrific war. In other words, for the trade to come out equal a slave would be suffering more than a chemotherapy patient with recurring metastasized antibiotic-resistant breast cancer and sepsis. And even that weight is far too high; a slave could only expect to suffer for 20 years on average while a free man typically lived to 41, more than twice that value, not to mention that QALY weights are normed against a society with free pornography and twinkies rather than one with regular TB epidemics. So really terminal cancer is an absolute wonderland of fun compared to being in bondage! No wonder it was such a strong moral imperative to justify starting a preposterously bloody war over...
I concede defeat good sir, in the face of your flawless logic. I’m sorry ever to have doubted your well-considered opinion.
Depends on how long slavery would have lasted without the war. You don’t just free current slaves, you prevent future generations from ever being enslaved. I take that to be Yudkowsky’s point- the earlier the better, because the more slaves you prevent.
Edit: Actually, use your own numbers:
This implies converting someone from slave to free should increase their life by 20+ years, approximately half the life time of a free person. Just multiplying, using 1 free person dead = 41 years lost, one slave freed = 21 years gained, we pass a cost benefit test.
Not quite. The lower life expectancy due to slavery may be the result of early malnourishment, say, which manumission would not fix.
I’ve seen, but have not investigated, arguments that the civil war and emancipation of slavery led to lower life expectancy among former slaves, and those sorts of claims should be addressed in this calculation.
One historical note I was not aware of until several months back, which was covered in a few books on related subjects which I read at the time, was that for more than a decade after the Civil War, the standard of living and level of equality experienced by recently free blacks was actually quite high. The levels of prejudice which led to the passage of the Jim Crow laws were actually cultivated by deliberately targeted propaganda by upper class industrialists who feared the political threat of lower class white and black laborers acting together as a voting bloc.
(I was initially skeptical of this as a posited explanation for the levels of prejudice which came about in ensuing decades, since humans can easily be induced to turn on each other without any pragmatic incentives, but not only do writings from those who were alive at the time reflect a genuinely dramatic nosedive in the state of racial relations, but some of those who were involved in the propaganda efforts wrote with surprising frankness about their intentions.)
It’s questionable how predictable this turn of events could have been prior to the emancipation, but had it been avoided, the quality of life for free black Americans in ensuing decades might have been considerably higher, and for a decade or so after the war, their quality of life was likely rather higher than we might expect.
I think the argument I saw hinged on the strife that happened after emancipation, which is perhaps an argument for more Reconstruction rather than an argument against emancipation. But I don’t remember it well enough; perhaps someone else has seen something similar.
Sure, doing this calculation right would require a great deal more research. Certainly, my prior would be that freeing a slave would result in a longer life expectancy, but I would not expect the gap between slave and free to instantaneously close.
I just wanted to point out that the large slave/free life expectancy gap he was presenting can work against him- and as a result he wasn’t “shutting up and multiplying” correctly, which should undermine the weight of the sarcasm at the end of his post.
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Leaving aside all moral considerations of collective responsibility and individual complicity… and switching to my rough model of preference utilitarianism, which I generally don’t use… this would sound like an incredible, unbelievably lucky bargain with this cruel universe at HALF a life for a freed slave. At 18,75% it appears perverse even to hesitate in this non-dilemma.
P.S.: instead of preference utilitarianism, I do find it much more comfortable to use broadly Christian virtue ethics for a snap moral decision. According to which… well, let’s just mention that even a Catholic like Chesterton could be unapologetic in his respect for the Jacobins. Never mind the Christian abolitionists of the day.
I’m unclear what this actually means, considering there are usually Christians on every side of moral conflicts.
Backing out a little… if I see two people about to shoot someone tied to a tree, on your view am I ever justified in shooting them both to save the tied-up person’s life? If so, what does it minimally take to justify that?
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not a utilitarian, I just don’t like hypocrisy.
But in my personal opinion? It’d depend on who’s tied to the tree and who’s shooting. I’d side with the people I value personally first; if they’re all strangers I probably would have to go with the most aesthetically pleasant side or just sit it out. This is assuming a consequence-free vacuum of course; IRL there would be legal/social concerns which would trump any initial preference, not to mention how utterly unfamiliar I am with firearms.
Ah, sorry. I thought you were arguing that the Civil War was a bad idea because it killed more people than it saved. My mistake, and thanks for answering my question.
For clarification here, do you mean behavioral aesthetics such as which people are trying to tie someone to a tree and shoot them, visual aesthetics (which side is better looking,) or some combination or alternative?
A sort of a combo; aesthetics covers a lot of ground. Attractiveness, intelligence, how interesting/valuable their job is and how skilled they are in it, how cute they are (if they’re a kid or other small mammal), how well behaved they are, etc. It’s a lot easier to judge any given example than lay out hard and fast rules.
More or less; it’s all about framing the debate in terms which push popular sentiment leftward. Whoever controls the null hypothesis gets to decide what the data means, and conservatives suck at statistics.
Now each of my examples is debatable; there are official Progressive answers to each dichotomy and they’re all designed to make sense to well educated intelligent people (no-one with any sense would call the Cathedral dim). But if you look at the pattern, not just here but anywhere you look, you see double-standards which invariably favor the political Left and Demotism in general. I can’t force you to see it, and I don’t begrudge it if you don’t, but it is there to see.
I took your explanation of “governmental entropy” to indicate a breakdown of heirarchy.
High order gov’t = clear lines of heirarchy, which you could draw in a simple diagram
low order gov’t = constant uncertainty about who’s in charge (with the resulting insecurity resulting in violence).
So this is good, but I’m still confused.
Your examples describe a government which acts in its own interests (rather than by moral ideals) and I accept that this is in fact the case for our government, that it acts not according to ideals but in self-interest.
What I don’t understand is why this is particular to progressive-ism, and not a general property of ideologically driven power structures. Or even power structures in general, for that matter—doesn’t Fnarg also act in his own interests, by strengthening his allies and weakening his enemies?
Let’s take India and Pakistan, and observe their positions on the Israel-Palestine scenario. Pakistan strongly sides with Palestine, probably because Palestine is the Muslim state and Israel are the Western Imperialists. Polls show India to be the most pro-Israel country in the world: despite India’s strong anti-imperialist sentiment—here’s a short analysis that makes sense to me.
India was chosen as an example because while many major variables are different from Western nations, I know it possesses the equivalent of what we’ve been calling “The Cathedral” and its conservatives are similar as well. As you might expect, India’s leftists are more pro-muslim than the nation as a whole, and thus are less pro-Israel.
But I know that If a Muslim power started invading an indigenous Jewish population, left and right in India would be united in opposition. The alliance on the Right depends on the interests of the cultural in-group (which is why Pakistan supports Palestine and Indian conservatives supports not-Palestine), but the alliance of the Left doesn’t seem tied to any particular culture’s interest. Leftists from India to Europe to America tend to have greater support for Palestine.
So, once you subtract any moral variables, who does the leftist tend to help? One possibility is that they tend to help the underdog who wants to be autonomous from Fnargl. and thus cause the “underdog” to win. And if the underdog keeps winning, I suppose that this leads to chaos and constant revolutions.
if that’s the case, it brings my back to the one useful thing said I had gleaned from reactionary thought—“World-improvement-plots should follow the heuristic of minimizing destruction to existing societal infrastructure.”
That’s just what I came up with, though, I’m not sure actually sure whom you meant when you said “who it’s ultimately helping”. Did you just mean that it acts to strengthen itself? If so, why is this unusual for a major ideology? All rapidly spreading things… Islam, English speaking, etc… can boast the same.
That’s not exactly true; there is one particular culture which benefits very greatly from every Leftist alliance; the culture of Leftist intellectuals.
The Palestinians do not benefit from the “Peace Process” which keeps them in refugee camps, and neither does Israel or any of Israel’s Arab neighbors or even the United States which keeps the scam going. But it does provide an enormous amount of jobs for smart progressive kids working in the UN and other NGOs, juicy materials for journalists and political pundits, a great laboratory for PoliSci academics connected to the State Department to test their pet theories, and the crisis itself is an excellent propaganda tool for anyone to the left of Mussolini to use on any pet issue they might have.
In other words, the Cathedral itself profits, even if (especially if) everyone else is losing money. That’s not a healthy business model, in fact it’s almost criminal.
but doesn’t that just class “Leftist Intellectuals” as one among many groups who use power to serve their own interests, while outwardly appealing to high moral ideals?
What’s different here from all the other Fnargles who seize power? Why should I take any particular notice of this particular group of Fnargles who fall under the heading “Leftist Intellectuals”? Why is this Universe worse than the Universe that would result if there were no “leftist intellectuals”?
Are “leftist intellectuals” somehow meaner and more destructive than other Fnargles? Or is it simply that this brand of Fnargle is really, really good at re-directing power to itself?
Yes and yes, and the reason for both is how they take power.
Nearly every ruler, and virtually every ruling class, in history has built their power by skimming off of the top; tithes are one of the oldest non-arbitrary forms of taxation, and the word literally means a ten percent cut. The incentive for the ruler is always to increase their personal profit by increasing the size of the pot he skims from, which means that as Machiavelli astutely pointed out a benevolent ruler and an amoral one will be indistinguishable.
The reason the modern situation is so bad is that the conditions where the Cathedral profits have nothing to do with how well it governs, and are in fact typically opposed. If Somalia stays a war zone for the next ten thousand years, that’s quadrillions of aid dollars which otherwise wouldn’t be spent.
Joseph Stieglitz, one of Bill Clinton’s top economic advisers,made a similar point about modern corporate mismanagement. When the shares are controlled by an individual or a small number of individuals everyone has an interest in making sure that the company is running efficiently; when the shares are too widely distributed speculation rules and the Board of Directors ends up calling the shots in their own interests. The result is bad service, poor profits and a bunch of wealthy Board members.
Okay, so I came into this considering the notion that attempts at reform frequently fail plausible. 2) I also came into this believing that there isn’t any good feedback mechanism to kill counterproductive charity, so it’s not a stretch to apply that to reform. 3) Also, perverse incentives can sometimes perpetuate dysfunctional things.
You’ve helped me to connect these dots and I am considering the notion that a system of perverse incentives is fueling a large amount of counterproductive reform, at least insofar as it comes to foreign policy. I don’t have the evidence to believe this is true yet, but it is a coherent notion that could well be true.
With regards to domestic policy (an area where I’ve got at least some evidence) I’m more skeptical. But then again, I take it the Cathedral does skim off the domestic pot, so maybe the effects cannot be observed domestically. I’m also not sure I understand the whole “the past was in many ways better” notion—I can’t think of many metrics by which this is true.
So...
1) Is this different from other forms of corrupt or inefficient charity? What is specific to the Left? Could this not apply to any group who were after a cause which was not related to their own direct profit?
2) Can it be fixed by requiring more transparency and data collection to ensure that interventions are, in fact, effective? (To force the benefit to the Cathedral to be tied to how well its actions produce the results it claims to produce)...basically, can we try to hold Cthulhu accountable?
After all, revolting against Cthulhu altogether will increase entropy, and for reasons obvious to both leftists and reactionaries that is undesirable. Transparency inducing reform seems to be something that everyone generally gets behind. If it is true that the tool of the Cathedral’s violence is reform, then reform seems to be the appropriate channel by which to modify it.
That’s actually something I hadn’t thought of. I guess my semi-conscious explanation for that was American “rugged individualism” but in retrospect that doesn’t make half as much sense.
There are obvious areas of improvement, but I’m hard pressed to think of one which the Nazis or the Hapsburgs wouldn’t have provided if they had modern technology. It’s also not easy for me to speculate on the course of technological innovation in a monarchist or fascist world; that’s more of a job for authors like Harry Turtledove. So in most of the obvious cases like life expectancy I think we can call it a wash.
In other places, we can see problems which only exist as a result of progressive ideology. The state of Africa, South America and much of Asia can be laid entirely at the feet of naive decolonization and parasitic clientism; even accounting for technology, much of the world’s peoples likely led better lives as subjects of a foreign crown than they do under their “independent” nations. The mess we’ve made of the domestic economy, not to mention the world one, shouldn’t be too much of a leap to ascribe to mismanagement. And even domestically, “liberated” women and “tolerated” minorities are consistently polled as being decreasingly happy over time, almost as if our progressive policies of equality were thrusting them into arenas they were fundamentally not fit to compete in.
The current dysgenic population shift is more ambiguous; I’d like to think that a Reactionary government could preserve or increase the value of our national stock, but there are also purely technological factors like the ease of birth control which are less amenable to regulation. Also ambiguous is Moldbug’s democratic crime wave theory; his numbers show an order-of-magnitude increase in the murder rate over the last few hundred years, but the 18th century wasn’t known for meticulous record keeping so that might be illusory. Yvain has some interesting posts calling the whole “Victorians were healthier!” meme into question at SlateStarCodex, so that theory has some holes also.
But to be honest I’m not that attached to the idea; it’s interesting and more plausible than not, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it was wrong either.
It is the prototype of corrupt charity, and that is why it is specific to the Left. A Reactionary government is not a charity; it is a business, and like any good business it never confuses its employees and customers with its shareholders (although compensation in store discounts or non-voting stock options is perfectly acceptable). When you try to run a government like a charity you are asking for trouble.
That’s actually a simple fix, if one which is not particularly likely to be proposed. Anoint the Dean of the Harvard Law School as the Supreme Justice of the American Empire and give him power of appointment over the Federal Bureaucracy, name the Editor of the NY Times the Pontifex Maximus of the Church of Progress and have a synod to lay out the canon of responsible journalism, and let Jesse Jackson and his ilk reign as suzerain princes of their tribes. They wouldn’t go Reactionary overnight, we might still have a Great Leap Forwards to deal with, but if Deng could pull China out of Maoism in one generation I’d give us even money on being a properly governed state within the decade.
Freezing a liquid (or, God forbid, depositing a gas) is hard work, and the entropy does end up increasing globally, but you can do it. I think our present situation is the result of a reversible reaction, and if it is we just need the right catalysts or raw power to push it back to completion in the other direction. At least that’s my hope anyway.
Edit: Wow, I really just mixed up sublimation and deposition… must be bedtime.
I actually have seen that. Check out those graphs—there’s a difference between statistical significance and differences of magnitudes that actually matter. But lets suppose for a moment that the differences were of a magnitude large enough to influence policy:.
...”this makes me happier” and “I prefer this” are not the same thing. Feminist action might well have shifted happiness from women to men as a result of shifting work load from men to women, but I’m not sure why a more equitable labor and happiness distribution is a bad thing? Unless you’re suggesting that it was a net loss.
I haven’t seen the former...could it be attributable to the recession and wealth inequality? The latter is too large of a discussion to have.
I suppose arguing over the facts of these matters will derail somewhat. Back to the theoretical stuff...
So if I understand, this can be paraphrased as, “a government that is designed for the purpose of benefiting its people is likely to be worse than a government designed to exploit its people because the former has no concrete incentive”.
If so, I still don’t see why the solution isn’t transparency and data collection, to give the government an incentive to make reality come out the way that the government claims it should. If the numbers come out wrong, the ruler loses power.
wait, not so fast
1) Doesn’t that constitute a revolution and destruction of all existing power structures? Seems rather un-reactionary. My “transparency” solution was an attempt to work within the system, not to topple it.
2) You convinced me that it is possible that power structures designed to be non-exploitative tend to end up falling prey to perverse incentives that fuel a large amount of counterproductive action which benefits no one.
a) That’s not the same as making a convincing case for the “order-chaos” thesis, where centralized power is superior to complex systems of distributed power. Thus far, I’d rather live in a random liberal democracy than a random totalitarian state, Why do you believe that a self interested and exploitative centralized power is superior to a self-interested and exploitative network made up of multiple distributed systems of power?
b) Your solution didn’t even stipulate that our rulers must act in self interest. They’d still have to appease the populace. It didn’t hand them any real power. Wouldn’t a better solution (what I think maximizes Order and Self Interested Rulers, not what I think best maximizes utility) be to hand over all our weapons and military power to China and tell them to rule us as they see fit? Or, if we really had faith in this concept that even Fnargl would be superior, wouldn’t North Korea suffice?
If me and the eminent Professor Hawking found ourselves sharing an apartment, it would be insane to distribute the labor equally between us. Comparative advantage tells us that he should use his enormously powerful mind and reputation pay a much higher share of the rent while I can use my young and increasingly muscular body to do any household chores which need doing. This turned into a slash-fic way too fast, but you get my drift here; men and women need to pursue tasks which complement their natural advantages.
This doesn’t mean women should be barefoot and pregnant, there is plenty of room in the world for exceptional women and men to take each other’s roles, but it does mean that in general the distribution will more closely resemble traditional societies.
I understand why avoiding it is wise, but it’s not a particularly large discussion. The facts are pretty damning; the least capable elements of society are fast outbreeding the most capable, and immigration is not helping matters. The only solutions which come to mind are either very ugly or rely on the rapid maturation and implementation of technology which the Left strongly opposes.
Yup. If you want a game theoretic argument look at Stiglitz’s work on the theory of information asymmetry in firms. [Edit: initial link was to overly-technical and not particularly demonstrative article; I’ll look for a better one but his books might have to be sufficient]. He doesn’t make the political connection, but it’s a trivial one.
Hopefully this will also make the “widely distributed voting shares = bad management” point clearer as well.
(Note: I’ve read his conclusions in his book ‘Whither Socialism?’ but not the research behind them. In either case I’m not an economist or a game theory expert.)
I gave Dean Minow total control of the executive branch (a power Presidents have lacked for the better part of the century) and the ability to arbitrarily re-interpret the Constitution currently reserved for the Supreme Court. Considering we’re taking about the mammoth USG here, that’s more power in her hands than I can easily imagine. But of course she’d be far from my first pick for the job, just better than the current state of affairs.
China is a half-way decent choice, definitely better than the Harvard Dynasty, but still not really ideal. The Communist Party rules as a sort of semi-meritocratic natural aristocracy, very much like the old Eunuchs did really, but there is no dynastic Emperor to balance the equation. Each individual Party member is both a state employee and a shareholder in the People’s Republic of China; while mild compared to the Western welfare state, graft and patronage within the Party is severe. Furthermore, any ambitious young Commie could eventually climb their way up and replace the Premier himself, which means the leadership will always be insecure and tempted towards purges as a means of stabilizing their positions.
North Korea on the other hand is a communist dictatorship out of time; even in it’s relationship to the US it mirrors the USSR. We prop them up with food aid and timely blackmail payments while sympathetic liberal elements in the US systematically oppose both a definitive conclusion to the (ongoing) Korean War and any attempt to sever our economic umbilical cord with them. Even their legitimacy depends on our support; without the constant threat of an American invasion which will never come the Kims couldn’t possibly hope to keep their sustaining isolationism alive. They are an obsolete form of Leftist government but leftist nonetheless.
Ideally we’d want someone more like the Saudi Royals or any of the UAE’s Emirs; capable established dynasties with existing ties into the US political structure and a traditionalist-yet-irreligious worldview. They wouldn’t be able to rule directly, they’re too foreign for one thing, but if the House of Windsor could rule India for three centuries the House of Saud could probably manage the continental US as a suzerainty for a while.
By “equitable” I’d mean that we each start out with half of the pie; it doesn’t stop being equitable if I like crust and dislike filling and you like filling and dislike crust so we mutually agree to trade my share of filling for your share of crust (i.e. this or a quick-and-dirty informal approximation thereof).
What do you mean by “exceptional”, 20% or 0.1%?
Note also that, given larger IQ variance among men than among women, the Flynn effect means that the fraction of people above a given IQ threshold who are male has decreased with time; technological advances mean that low-IQ labour has become less useful; and anyway IQ overweighs visuospatial intelligence compared to its importance today inflating male scores (and deflating Jewish scores). Fun fact: 59.4% of the people who graduated at my university in 2012 were female.
I suppose there are differences among different parts of the present-day western world with respect to that: if I understand correctly what kind of technology you’re talking about, where I come from it’s the Catholic right that’s opposing it.
Dividing work in a family not about what people like, or about what’s equal, it’s about what works. You can’t build a society on the basis of atomized individuals constantly negotiating out every interaction on an ad-hoc basis; that’s just not a stable or realistic foundation. It leads to a culture of divorce and single-parents, generations of unsocialized children and ultimately societal collapse; we’ve seen the same pattern play out in the black community already.
Start with a strong tradition which works well in the aggregate, make that the standard, then we can talk about shifting the details around in any given family.
Closer to 20% would be my guess; women only lag men by about 5 points overall and a lot of that is the aforementioned spatial reasoning. I’d say something akin to the Asian-White proportions would be a good baseline expectation given that the magnitude of difference is similar, with more women at the top levels due to their wide variance.
Of course, the actual representation in the work force might still come in under our expectations; pregnancy and even menstruation are serious problems for women trying to compete with men, even with modern hormonal birth control which mediates the effects of both, and as studies have shown women tend to be happier as homemakers than breadwinners
On the other hand, the university I went to was a top-tier engineering school with about 20% women and more Asians than Whites by a long shot (and most of us ‘whites’ were at least a quarter if not fully Jewish). Was my school suffering from unfair “boy’s club” discrimination against women or was yours caving to the constant push for “better representation” of women in academia?
That’s why I prefer to look at scientific measures like IQ scores and market-based indicators like wages earned than university admissions. Uni is supposed to prepare us for the job market and separate the wheat from the chaff anyhow; the numbers ought to all roughly match up if it’s working properly.
And yet Northern European societies, which have very low gender inequality, haven’t collapsed yet. So maybe the reason why the black community (ITYM the one in the US) has is probably a different one. (EDIT: Oh, look at this too.)
(Also, how comes people can ever get along with roommates of the same sex, where there’s no Schelling point as to who should do which chores?)
...let alone spouses and co-parents of the same sex, where there’s frequently more at stake than dirty dishes.
I’d be surprised if no-one had used that as an argument against gay marriages and adoptions.
(Here too, ‘how comes the Netherlands have had same-sex marriages and adoptions for 12 years and the sky there hasn’t fallen yet?’ sounds like a valid counterargument.)
Oh, they do all the time.
And yet, as you say, it turns out that society never quite collapses when we ignore those dire predictions.
Which of course doesn’t stop the kinds of people who believe such things from believing that this time it certainly will.
Is there some easily communicable message here for doomsayers that stands a decent chance of kick-starting the “Oy, was I mistaken!” part of their brains into gear?
I think that’s a little bit of a wrong question.
I’d be more inclined to discard the category “doomsayers” and instead categorize people, not by the behavior, but by the intent… different people doomsay for importantly different reasons, and not all people motivated by each of those reasons necessarily actually doomsay (as opposed to, for example, feeling vaguely anxious all the time, or expressing outrage about things, or framing themselves as more clever and rational than I am, or something else), and different strategies are optimal for each (and highly differentially so… what works for someone who’s just scared and ignorant is actively a mistake for someone who wants to control my behavior for their own benefit, and vice-versa)
But even with that revision, I think in most cases we care about it’s not easy (because the easy cases tend to get corrected often enough that we care about them less, because only really bad thinkers fall for them). The cognitive biases and incentive structures that encourage believing messages like “issue de jure is causing the negative stuff I experience!” aren’t sound-byte-resolvable.
That said, what I try to do, both for others and for myself when I find myself veering towards this kind of crazy, is start by framing myself as a non-enemy and approaching people with compassion. Often that seems to damp down the worst excesses of fear/hostility, and sometimes it prevents outrage from having anything to latch on to without looking silly. It doesn’t work reliably, though, and sometimes it fails disaterously, and at best all it does is create a space where a different message can be received ungarbled… which is necessary, but not sufficient.
(And yes, it was intentional.)
If your house is infested with termites that doesn’t mean it’ll explode the next day in a cartoon cloud of sawdust; it takes years for the full scope of the damage to become apparent, and even then it might still be livable for a while after it’s clear that it can’t be saved.
Look at the predictions of the people opposing the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even the people opposing women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, and you’ll see they were more-or-less right on the money. The American family has dissolved, the birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate, promiscuity and deviant sexual behaviors are rampant, and women are less happy in their new masculine roles while men are being forced to become more effeminate. All this in less than a century, a half-century really, which is pretty damn impressive a timescale for a civilization to fall when you look at it in historical time.
When you see the walls buckling and the floors start giving way under you, it’s time to get out of the house. It might not collapse this month, or even this year, but it’s not a stable place to live.
Not if you focus on the details- the families that most reflect (for lack of a better term) 1950s values are more likely to divorce,have kids out of wedlock,etc. There is a broad pattern outline that loosely matches with your theory, but when you apply it on a micro scale, it fails.
Well, I certainly agree that if differential predictions of specific societal changes due to the sexual revolution and/or woman’s suffrage are accurate, that should increase my confidence in other similar predictions with longer time-windows, including predictions of eventual societal collapse.
Wow, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone saying this with a straight face.
You don’t listen to conservative talk radio. The “top three” headline issues on Focal Point yesterday were 1) gay marriage, 2) transgendered rights, and 3) female dissatisfaction with the consequences of the sexual revolution.
I guess I imagine that LW regulars are less ideologically motivated that this. But, with Multiheaded on one end and Konkvistador on the other, I should have known better.
That’s a good thing, right? :-D
Really? I find it easy… not just with a straight face, but while leaning forward in their seats and looking me straight in the eyes while making emphatic hand gestures.
Admittedly, I also anticipate as part of the same cluster being told that the solution is for everyone to truly accept the love of Christ into our hearts, which I expect to be less common on LW.
You want to actually engage with any of those points, rather than just smirking and shaking your head?
Remind me; what are our divorce rates like and how many kids are currently raised by a single parent or in foster care these days? Which populations are expanding and which are disappearing (I always get the progressive whites and the traditional hispanics confused)? How old is the average age of someones first sexual encounter, how many lifetime partners do they have, and what is their lifetime risk of contracting an STI? When women are polled on how happy they are is it working women or housewives who come out ahead, and are modern women polled as more or less happy than their ancestors? Has the average male’s testosterone level increased or decreased over the last few decades?
I would link you to the answers myself, but I have this mysterious feeling they’d just get dismissed out of hand if they came from me. So take an hour off some time when you’re not that busy, look at the numbers for yourself and maybe you’ll see why I don’t find the idea as laughable as you do.
Let us suppose for the sake of comity that if we compare today’s statistics to those prior to the sexual revolution in the 1960s, or hell even to those prior to women’s suffrage in the early 1900s, we find that:
divorce rates are higher now
more children are raised by single parents now
more children are in foster care now
some populations expanded and others shrank
average age of first sexual encounter is lower now
number of lifetime partners is higher now
lifetime risk of contracting an STI is higher now
working women now report being less happy than housewives
women now report being less happy than women then reported
average male testosterone level has declined
Is it your position that discovering this should convince me that society is collapsing, and has been doing so since 1960/1900?
My rule is to not engage into specific arguments with anyone with clear signs of motivated cognition, since it is almost invariably futile, as their true objections are not in the arguments they put forward. I tend to try to figure out why it is important for someone in this state to believe what they believe. For example, it is pointless to discuss metallurgy with a 911 truther or a certain purported perpetual motion contraption with a free-energy crank.
Here are the signs of your motivated cognition: you use negative connotation-charged descriptions of purported trends and behaviors:
“promiscuity” instead of, say, “reduced incidence and duration of exclusive committed relationships”,
“deviant sexual behaviors” instead of, say, “widening spectrum of sexual norm”,
presuming that “roles” are inherently masculine or feminine,
“effeminate” instead of, say, “less gender-normative”.
Clearly you have your reasons for passing judgment, whether consciously or not, and these reasons have to be elucidated before one can have a fruitful discussion on the effects of evolving sexual norms on the American society.
I think “using one word instead of eight” is not very good evidence of motivated cognition. Maybe if Moss had said “sluttishness” instead you would have a point.
The first question is that I don’t see why many of the things you listed are bad.
Why is a high divorce rate bad? Why a lower age of the first sexual encounter (compared to what, by the way?) is bad? Why having many lifetime partners is bad?
The second question is how do you distinguish correlation and causation—I’m looking at the male testosterone level.
As an aside, are you aware of Yvain’s Anti-Reactionary FAQ?
But… but… but… the sluts engage in sex other than for procreation!!!eleven! Clearly the society is doomed!! RUN!!!!!
Classic case of survival/anthropic bias.
Doesn’t work. There are a lot of different countries that have made the same changes. So if there were a survivorship bias one would still see the collapse and chaos in neighboring areas.
Case 1: Someone tells me I will die tomorrow.
Case 2: As above, but preceded by 99 people on 99 different days telling me I will die the next day, and I don’t.
Assuming everything else is constant, on your account do I have more evidence for my death tomorrow in case 1, or case 2?
“I stopped working out and started smoking but I’m still alive. The health warnings must have been lies.”
If you insist on oblique evocative responses in lieu of answering questions, I suppose my reply is “I stopped going to church but I haven’t gone to hell. My priest’s warnings must have been lies.” But honestly, I prefer the more boring conversational method of actually answering questions.
That doesn’t seem to follow. The priest never predicted that you would go to hell prior to your death. The priest’s prediction has not been falsified. (The fact that it never can be by a live person is a whole separate issue.)
Sorry, I thought my point was clear.
I don’t know what you’re analog of someone telling you that you will die tomorrow is supposed to be. In the topic under discussion the warnings are much more similar to the warnings issued about smoking than saying “if you do this, you die tomorrow”.
No, you’re absolutely right they haven’t collapsed yet. Even though their native populations have fallen under the replacement rate and are rapidly aging, they can still function more-or-less by importing huge numbers of cheap foreign immigrants and ignoring any shenanigans they get up to. Even though their cultures and social structures have largely been dismantled, their enormous tax rates and the free military security provided by the US means their welfare states can afford to fill those functions (with varying degrees of success). Even though their economies are growing at the rate of lichen, they’re still big enough (and the rest of the world small enough) that the EU’s protectionist policies can keep them out of the red.
But patches don’t hold forever; you can already see the cracks. It’s only been a little over a half-century and democratic Europe is already seeing a stagnation most empires have to last for centuries to attain. They might well outlast me personally, that’s entirely possible even given my family’s longevity, but I’d bet good money no modern European welfare state makes it to 2099.
To be honest, these statistics don’t really impress me much; a fertility rate of 1.8 or 1.6 is better than the European average, but both are tragically low in a country where resources are as abundant as they are in a modern 1st world nation. And the divorce rates, while better than ours certainly, are still absolutely pathetically sad compared to any society which practices arranged marriage.
If you can’t even beat the replacement rate in terms of fertility and 40-50% of marriages fail so spectacularly the courts need to be involved, those are not numbers to be proud of. It is an indictment of the state of the world that this is the best our modern societies can do.
To be honest, we don’t. Or at least we don’t get along on the same timescale as a successful marriage. I’ve never had a roommate last longer than two years, much less the decades you need just to raise 3+ kids.
Actually, now that you mention it, people in modern marriages do look more like roomies than spouses. 50% leaving in the first five years actually sounds pretty optimistic for roommates; people that reliable I might actually want to rent to. Of course, you’d be nuts to actually sell them a house unless they paid upfront… you’re just not going to see that 30 year mortgage paid off.
Oh really? I’ve been to Scandinavia recently. And while the center of Stockholm got to be a less than entirely pleasant place (not Gamla Stan, of course, one has to provide for the tourists), Oslo is noticeably better and once you get out of capital cities into small towns and the country, the “cultures and social structures” look entirely intact to me.
You also forgot that Norway has oil. Lots of oil and not too many people. The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is about $730Bn in size and is the largest stock owner in Europe.
Indeed, I’d be curious whether the downward trends reactionaries point out would still apply when you control for the size of settlements people live in (i.e., comparing people in towns of 10,000 inhabitants today with people in towns of 10,000 inhabitants in the past).
Wages earned are a rather poor proxy for cognitive ability, or for that matter for productivity, since people in different careers can capture markedly different amounts of the value they create. For instance, a person working in the financial sector may have the opportunity to capture a very high proportion, whereas a person working as a public school teacher who performs way above the norm and produces tremendous long term value in increased productivity of their students will not capture any of that value.
Using wages-earned as a proxy to compare output between groups is only useful if we can assume that both groups are on average working in positions where they capture an equal proportion of the value they produce, something which is very much an unsafe assumption in this case.
(This is of course setting aside the issue of whether there are existing biases in our population which affect wages earned between groups given equal quality workers.)
To paraphrase Lenin, “Works for whom? To achieve what?” Cui prodest in any particular social arrangement? My personal go-to default hypothesis is that it’s always the side that can harness greater bargaining power through having more overall control of resources. Apply to workplace/labor relations, families, tribal clashes etc.
(Citation! Citation! A very favourable review—by Satoshi Kanazawa of all people—of a book on the game-theoretical causes and consequences of power inequalities.)
Society is not a zero sum game. Would you really prefer a situation where, to paraphrase Stalin, “the shortage is distributed equally among the peasants”?
But what works for someone needn’t be what works for someone else! (Non-sexuality-related cognitive differences among each gender are comparable to or smaller than those between the two genders; sure, physical differences are larger, but in how many of today’s jobs are they relevant?) And what works in a society needn’t be what works in a different society. (Another example besides those I already mentioned is that stuff like the washing machine have reduced the time and effort it takes to do housework.)
That needn’t be explicit negotiation the way the author of that post and her husband do; just acknowledge that if I’m better at A and you’re better at B then I should do A and you should do B regardless of who has a chromosome Y. (Maybe the pie was too abstract a metaphor.)
If you put it that way, I may agree denotationally, but the amount of shifting that there should be is probably at least an order of magnitude larger than there was in early-20th-century Europe, and the amount of social (and institutional) pressure against it a couple orders of magnitude less. I don’t think a world where people hindered Emmy Noether solely because of her gender is an ideal world.
First, “tend to be” != “always or almost always are”, and second, probably plenty of men would too if they had a chance.
Well… You can see a breakdown by faculties (in the European sense, i.e. what would be called colleges or schools in North America) in the link. Most engineers are male here too. Now, I’ll concede that the faculties with the largest fraction of female graduates are largely influenced by Cthulhu, but the mine isn’t (if anything, it’s influenced by anti-Cthulhu) and still 42.7% of the graduates there are female.
I think there was a formatting issue here and would like the read what you had originally planned to write, as your comments are invariably interesting.
Fixed.
Dammit! Couldn’t Markdown just spit out the stuff it doesn’t understand unchanged, rather than deleting it altogether? (And couldn’t I look at my comments after submitting them for stuff like that?)
I definitely sympathize; trying for coherent formatting online is hard enough even when it’s just an issue of uncooperative html tags.
As to your points, I’d agree that a hard reset to 1700, or even 1900, on gender would do more harm than good and that we would need to be careful to create norms which don’t waste our human capital. Perhaps a natural solution would be class-based gender norms; upper class women have more to gain from academic education and could use surrogates to keep up a birth rate without committing career suicide, while lower class women would be happier without being forced into the workplace and would contribute to societal stability. That way we don’t have to worry about losing future Rosalind Franklins / Marie Curies without utterly fracturing our society to do it.
On the exact numbers of women graduates, I’m not too attached to any one figure as an ideal given how wonky the male-female gap gets at the right ends of the curves and how different the score breakdowns look. The main thrust is this; if there is a .33sd gap in general, and a 1sd gap on spatial relations specifically, and men have wider variance at the edges, then why should we expect anything but inequality in fields which rely on exceptionally high IQ and solid spatial reasoning skills? You need to know the exact numbers to see what the exact difference ought to be, but it’s unreasonable not to expect one at all.
There are more normal (i.e. less Brave New World-reminiscent) ways to make it easier for people with a career to have kids (though of course the future needn’t be normal) -- paid maternity leaves exist pretty much everywhere in the world except the US and so do paternity leaves in a few countries, France has a 35-hour working week and the sky hasn’t fallen there, etc.
Before solving this problem, shouldn’t you ask who is doing the forcing? It’s not like being a stay-at-home mum is illegal, so why are they working outside the home for money if they’re less happy that way? Once you answer this question, then you can think of possible solutions. (The reason for poor people may be different from that for rich people, and the solutions that would most help the former may be quite different from the ones you’ve thought of so far.)
On the other hand, on fields that require average-or-higher (but not necessarily extreme) cognitive skills other than spatial ones, we would expect inequality the other way (and in some cases that’s what we already see, most school teachers being female); do we really want most of those people to stay at home because of social norms that developed long ago, when said cognitive skills were less important than today and manual labour more so?
Putting aside the question of aptitude, this sounds likely to be dysgenic given that increasing educational attainment in women tends to decrease birthrate. Plus, “increased societal stability” in this case also amounts to decreased class mobility in cases of exceptional aptitude.
Are you using “upper class” to mean “high IQ” and “lower class” to mean “low IQ”? Because that’s not what it usually means...
Oh, hahahahahaha, if that ever happened in some wacky weird moldbuggy universe… that’d be like Vatican trying to grab supreme jurisdiction over all Christian denominations by proclaiming the Pope to be the spiritual heir of Martin Luther and “interpreting” Luther’s theses to show how all modern-day Protestants need to forget about their minor disagreements and follow the RCC.
Which is to say… you do realize that the vast majority of serious leftists—including American leftists, and I mean people who self-identify as socialists, left-libertarians, anarchists, etc—have nothing but scorn and contempt towards the NYT? In the left-wing interpretation of the “Cathederal”, the NYT is not an active weapon of the Big Bad System like in yours, but it is nonetheless viewed as a symbol of moral bankrupcy, insidious propaganda and serving as the mouthpiece of the neoliberal elite. In short, it is not a case of the NYT being not progressive enough for a few of the most zealous commies; in their (our) interpretation, it is unambiguiously an anti-Left force.
You know it’s funny; I sort of used to be that person.
I read the Nation every month, laughed sincerely with every Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon. I went to every Michael Moore movie punctually the day after opening weekend (I never liked crowds). I listened to Air America from the literal first day they started broadcasting in my town, watched the Rachel Maddow show religiously. I marched against the Iraq War in 2003, cried when Kerry lost in 2004, and I’ve never used a drug in my life which felt like seeing Obama elected in 2008. My senior superlative? Most politically active. True. Fucking. Story.
You know what changed?
I woke up.
The world today is a mess, and every time I wrote the DNC a check or marched for some Social Justice cause or kicked someone under the table for talking during a day of silence I was doing my part to make that mess worse. So I stopped. It’s that easy.
I think you could stop too, if you wanted to. I don’t expect it, but please just look around and ask yourself honestly if we can really keep going the way we have.
I can understand the appeal of “I used to believe what you do now, but then I saw the light” arguments, but I’d rather not see this sort of thing replace a discussion of actual reasons for one’s changes in belief. It reduces the exchange of useful information, and it signals an unhelpful level of condescension.
...Michael Moore?
...Rachel Maddow?
Have you read a single damn word of my above comment?
I’m getting full-on Poe’s Law vibes from this. Do you really, truly feel like the world revolves around your skinny first-world bourgeois STEM dudebro ass? That conversion from a very boring and milquetoast American white liberal to a wannabe fascist has been some ethical and philosophical triumph of yours? Man, oh man.
Way too sick of this shit on LW. And as usual, it’s by straight white middle-class dudebro who hypocritically preaches about the danger of epistemic corruption in evaluating society while connected to it.
Check your fucking privilege and let people from the groups you bring up do some talking for themselves.
Asking people who are obviously not part of the social justice movement to check their privilege does not work, asking people who are is generally unecessary if they are any good at it. There might be a way to convince people to stop writing crap like this here, that won’t work.
I know, I know. If I was writing this with any actual goal-oriented hope for positive change on LW, I would’ve tried to bridge the inferential distance. But hell, I’m just a miserable and depressed cranky guy. Not even in gender studies. Sigh.
You know part of why I’ve been posting such low quality, counter-productive (passive)-aggressive remarks recently? I still remember that buzz, that breathtaking feeling of half-delight and half-awe when I discovered the LW community and read the Sequences two years ago. Here are some of the most insightful, kickass people I could realistically talk to and learn together with, it said. And now noticing all the terrifying, fascist-leaning political undercurrents that pervade the community, I feel zero joy at the thought of just averting my eyes and staying for the “Awesome Rational Shoes” stuff and smart conversation.
Don’t get me wrong, Eliezer on his own is still just as ultra-badass as ever. But the honeymoon is definitely over for me.
I would like to apologize that the discussion that I started has upset you. I feel partly responsible that you are upset and I’d like to remedy this.
I think that what you are feeling is part of the halo effect. When we see people who have some qualities we like (Understanding of logic, need for cognition, precise and methodical thought) we assume that they will also have other qualities we like and share our other values. So when someone within that doesn’t share them, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
It’s also a reminder that your other views don’t automatically come with the intelligence-rationality package. This reminder is good for your overall rationality. It forces you not to fall back on the “anyone who isn’t an idiot can see that I am right” defense.
But keep in mind Re: sore thumbs: In a rationalist community, Disagreement is salient, Agreement is silent.. Why was I even interested in Moldbug in the first place? Because he disagrees with me!
This is from the Lesswrong 2012 survey:
POLITICS:
Liberal: 427, 36%
Libertarian: 359, 30.3%
Socialist: 326, 27.5%
Conservative: 35, 3%
Communist: 8, 0.7%
No answer: 30, 2.5%
ALTERNATIVE POLITICS QUESTION:
Progressive: 429, 36.3%
Libertarian: 278, 23.5%
Reactionary: 30, 2.5%
Conservative: 24, 2%
Communist: 22, 1.9%
Other: 156, 13.2%
ALTERNATIVE ALTERNATIVE POLITICS QUESTION:
Left-Libertarian: 102, 8.6%
Progressive: 98, 8.3%
Libertarian: 91, 7.7%
Pragmatist: 85, 7.2%
Social Democrat: 80, 6.8%
Socialist: 66, 5.6%
Anarchist: 50, 4.1%
Futarchist: 29, 2.5%
Moderate: 18, 1.5%
Moldbuggian: 19, 1.6%
Objectivist: 11, 0.9%
I show you this out to demonstrate the strong, silent agreement of social values on Lesswrong forums. We just don’t feel the need to talk about it, because all our opinions are assumed by default. The “undercurrents” that concern you are feeling distressed about are an overwhelming minority. They get attention because they disagree, and therefore they are interesting.
After you’ve finished with the “learning” phase, areas of disagreement mark the places worth watching, because that’s where you are likely to be wrong. That’s why in rationalist culture, the minority-view-holding-contrarian is always correspondingly louder. I’d argue that this is, on the whole, a good thing (coordination problems pointed out by E.Y. notwithstanding). This is the reason that despite my disagreement (which has emotional components aplenty—I know what it is like to be the target of racial discrimination) I am willing to really try considering such views dispassionately and on their own merits, making effort to put myself aside.
I hope that this makes you feel better about the whole thing.
I am puzzled. I understand your desire to vent, and there are places to vent about this forum, like the relevant subreddit. But here people are expected to at least make an attempt at practicing rationality, even if faced with mixed success. Why post something here you know is irrational? Is the dubious satisfaction of telling me or someone else “wrong on the internet” off really worth it?
So you’ve discovered a community of extremely rational people and some of their conclusions make you highly uncomfortable. How is this surprising? This is probably how a lot of theists feel while deconverting.
The worst thing is… my crap doesn’t just mildly degrade the “overall” signal to noise ratio (I disagree that this could be a coherent metric, especially in arguments directly related to actually existing socieies) - it outright hurts the (ever-precarious) position of “my” side, and doesn’t even encourage my allies on any problematic topic to put forward a better denouncement of “hostile” content here. Yet silence and aquiescence feel even more humiliating to me than making a fool of myself on LW.
I recommend developing emotional self-control to the point that you can put your political goals above your personal emotional satisfaction, or alternatively realizing that your terminal goals appear to be emotional, not political, and you can adjust your political goals to make your emotional goals easier to satisfy.
So you mean… I could really use another drink right now? Yeah, sure, that’s what I was thinking too! Can’t hurt...
That sounds like the opposite of emotional self-control.
Oh, you mean, like… do some cough syrup? Nah, that stuff is good, but I decided I need a tolerance break from it.
giggles stupidly
Looking the text you’re quoting: ”...are consistently polled as being decreasingly happy over time”. That’s them talking, right?
How about I “poll” you about your current happiness, check your body language and such, then kidnap you, screw with your mind through typical abuser tactics, then pump you full of heroin and repeat the “poll”?
Like… Ann Coulter, suffrage pessimist?
It’s not obvious to me that one needs to be of a group to comment about that group, and when it comes to statistical statements the collector of the statistics seems entirely irrelevant. “Check your fucking privilege” is not a helpful addition to the conversation, whereas Ishaan’s “I’ve seen the data, and it isn’t that significant” is.
Well, you’re going to find literally hundreds of women with outspoken feminist ideas to one outspoken Ann Coulter, so… Okay, let’s be generous and say that she and Andrea Dworkin, a fierce critic of anti-feminist women, cancel each other out. Then you’re still going to get far more women with explicitly and implicitly feminist aliefs. Even when they self-identify as “conservative” for cultural or political reasons, have a negative perception of feminist activism, etc. The public image of “feminism” might not be so great, but women by and large seem to genuinely stand behind feminist convictions Could it be because most women recognize women’s social and economic self-interest better than most men?
Making certain types of comments from certain socioeconomic positions relative to the group in question is a huge, terrible epistemic hazard, which is so for pretty much the same reasons as the generally corrupting nature of power.
That’s one way to look at it, but this is more about the actual responses of progressives themselves and I tried to phrase it that way (I.E. “What do we expect the modern sensible progressive to feel?”).
What do you think about the Viet Minh’s genocide against the Hoa? What do you even know about them? Is it anything at all like what you feel about the Holocaust?
What do you feel when you think about John Brown? Do you think about him? Is it at all like your mental image of Timmy McVeigh?
What’s your response to the Liverpool Care Pathway? Is that even on your radar? How about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, I’m sure you’ve got a strong feeling about that one?
There is a pattern here; supposed moral concerns do not accurately predict how progressives, ordinary progressives not politicians remember, react to most issues. There are patterns of thought and behavior here and elsewhere which simply do not make sense except in the context of systematically eliminating non-aligned bases of power and expanding aligned ones. This is the absolute essence of the issue.
Me, personally? My domain is biology, and am aware that my political opinions on most issues aren’t to be taken any more seriously than the average undergraduate’s opinions. I suppose that makes me the “average progressive”, so maybe that’s a good thing:
Truthfully, none of those are on my radar, and I know nothing about the Holocaust beyond what I learned in school. As far as I’m concerned it’s just one among many terrible genocides, and one that presently gets more attention than the others because it was committed against a group who currently inhabits Western nations. Slavery of African Americans is similar—one among many terrible atrocities which happen to get more attention because the group they were committed against lives among us.
The American public (which includes me) ignores the Hoa because we never see the Hoa and have no clue who they are. I’ve never met a Hoa. There’s no Hoa organizations fighting for increased awareness. If awareness existed, people would care...but it doesn’t, so they don’t. This is what is meant by liberals when we say “privilege”—African Americans and Jews living in the West, as a group, have more privilege than the Hoa of Vietnam. The source of the privilege is that they were born in a Western nation.
The US Government, like most Powers, frequently supports shady, unethical groups in pursuit of its own interests. Saddam Hussein comes to mind as an example of supporting a seedy dictator which came to bite the US in the butt later. It is irrelevant that the Viet Minh and Saddam Hussein are on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum—they were both chosen on “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic, to support the United State’s interests at the time.
I never heard of Timmy McVeigh.before today. His wikipedia page doesn’t match your description—it does not mention any “divinely ordained race war”. Do I have the wrong McVeigh?
I learned about John Brown in school, he was mentioned alongside Nat Turner. I understand John Browns emotions of righteous fury. However, he was stupid to attempt such a war. Violence is only rational when the other side will see your power and back down—an all-out fight where one party (the slaves, in this case) are required to put in all their resources will result in slaughter on one or both sides. Even under the premise that you only care about your group and not the other group, a all-out war is an irrational decision. If you intrinsically value human life, the decision is even more irrational. The same applies to McVeigh. If Brown could have actually won—if he had sufficient power to force the other side to negotiate terms rather than all out slaughter, i might have supported it.
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment / Liverpool QALYs: A sacred value against a secular one. You’ve heard the moral dilemma where you kill 1 healthy patient and take the heart, lung, liver, etc to save 5 people? The utilitarian response seems to say “yes”, and most people’s hearts (including mine) say “no”. In practice, I go with the sacred answer, and the excuse I make is that we need to be able to trust doctors enough to go to hospitals without fear of being killed. In the true, externality-free hypothetical, I confess to being confused.
However, I know that the logic of the Syplillis Experiment was “black people are less important so lets test it on them” and the logic of the Liverpool folks was “Let’s maximize QALY’s”. The latter illicits my sympathies, the former does not. The Liverpool was not on my radar until this conversation, and I remain unsure about what to think of it.
You know, one of the things I keep forgetting is how reasonable people tend to be over here. My flinch-instinct is still very much tuned to other corners of the internet.
Basically, everything you’ve said is consistent and reasonable and utterly dissimilar to most of the progressive stuff I’ve ever seen. My sociology prof’s lectures, articles I read on Jstor, friends/family back home in my yellow dog democrat hometown, the feminist / progressive christian blogs I lurk on, politicians I follow (and often vote for. My options are bad in that sense.). Its obviously the same general pedigree, but a different breed. I’m not particularly sure what to make of it.
You have to scroll a bit; his whole plan was based on a white-supremacist novel called The Turner Diaries. It’s pretty much Battlefield Earth with Psychiatry find-and-replaced with Judaism, even down to the “nuke ’em all” ending. I’ve never read it myself but it’s supposedly very popular in those circles.
One of those is a war to stop something which is actually bad. The other isn’t. That’s not a trivial distinction.