Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky @ Cato Unbound
A response essay written by Eliezer Yudkowsky posted at Cato Unbound for the issue Brain, Belief, and Politics:
Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky suggests that the partial mutability of human traits is an auxiliary reason at best for Michael Shermer’s libertarianism. Take that fact away, and Shermer’s politics probably wouldn’t go with it. Yudkowsky says that his own small-l libertarian tendencies come from the long history of government incompetence, indifference, and outright malevolence. These, and not brain science, are the best reasons for libertarians to believe what they do.
Moreover, we make a logical error when we infer shares of causality from shares of observed variance; the relationship between nature and nurture is cooperative, not zero-sum. One thing, however, is clear: Human genetic variance is tiny, as indeed it must be for human beings all to constitute a single species. Environmental manipulation can only achieve so much in part because of this universal human inheritance.
The lead essay has been written by Michael Shermer:
Liberty and Science by Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer discusses scientific findings about belief formation. Beliefs, including political beliefs, are usually the result of automatic or intuitive moral judgments, not rational calculations. One cluster of those intuitions presumes that human nature is malleable; these usually produce a liberal politics. Another group of intuitions presumes that human nature is static; these tend to produce conservatism. But Shermer argues that humans really fall somewhere in between — malleable, within some important limits. He argues that this set of findings should produce a libertarian politics.
From the beginning of Eliezer’s piece
I think there’s an interesting congitive phenomenon going on here. If you tell the average Joe that you propose to deregulate some industry or activity, they easily call to mind the potential negative consequences—“they’ll just pollute as much as they want now” or “only the biggest companies will buy up the fishing quotas” etc. What the average Joe doesn’t think about are the potential negative effects of regulation—unintended consequences and regulatory capture for example. Regulatory capture is a sort of funny case because though the concept was invented by a Marxist (if memory serves), only economists and libertarians seem to think about it. When the average Joe does recognize these shortcomings, they virtually always get to designing a “better” law, agency, and/or policy. For evidence, I offer r/politics, though there’s an admittedly liberal slant there (relative to the population).
I’m not sure what is causing this bias or even how to categorize it, but it seems related to how most people respond to the broken window fallacy. Some effects are “seen” and others “unseen”, or rather more easily seen and less easily seen (which correspond to something like direct effects and indirect effects), and the average person is much better at anticipating “seen” effects. Something like this is going on in the political case—at least in terms of unintended consequences, but that’s not all of it. Regulatory capture occurs, in part, because people in the government are no more or less corrupt than people outside of the government. Most people are quick to suspect private companies of being corrupt, but never a new regulatory agency to reign in that private company. The solution to a government failure is always government. Rarely does the average Joe even ask the question “is the government even good at doing this sort of thing?” At least at the surface level, this looks nothing like “seen” and “unseen.” I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here, but I suspect figuring it out will help explain political preferences.
At the obvious risk of making this too political (in my defense, everyone else started it), I’m not sure “no one except us ever realizes how bad regulation is” is the real problem here.
In my metacontrarianism post I talked about how when someone discovers a counterintuitive idea that only smart people can understand, they can become very excited and use it as a membership test for the Secret Society Of Smart People, to the point where they enter a Happy Death Spiral and blow it out of all proportion.
(for example, it’s easy to think of ways modern Western civilization is better than primitive tribal civilization—more wealth, less prejudice, fewer tapeworms. There are also a few counterintuitive hard-to-understand ways primitive tribal civilizations are better than us—closer family bonds, more attuned to the natural world. And so many intellectuals focus on these to the exclusion of everything else and talk about how Western society is hopelessly corrupt and evil. Where they should be saying “Western civ is great, but not quite as great as the average person might think,” we instead get “Western civ is awful.” This passes unchallenged because the good things about Western civ like absence of tapeworms have become background noise to which everyone has adjusted. One interesting marker for this kind of behavior is that people still feel contrarian when they say it even though everyone who hears it agrees with them.)
I feel that some aspects of opposition to regulation might be this kind of behavior. There’s a large background of successful regulation (like banning lead and fluorinating water and not dumping trash on the streets and so on) that no one ever notices (unless they’ve just come back from a country that doesn’t have it!) There’s also some highly available examples of regulation that goes wrong. People feel like these must be hard to catch and so can start a death spiral around how intelligent they are to notice.
So my explanation for why so many people don’t understand that regulation is bad would be that this lack of understanding is not an actual phenomenon that exists in the real world. The US House of Representatives is currently dominated by a movement entirely based on eliminating as many regulations as possible as loudly as possible, and even their opponents pay lip service to the same ideas. This is another one of those cases where people say something everyone agrees with but still consider themselves “contrarian”, which as I mentioned above makes me suspicious of a signaling effort.
I think the problem is less that no one understands regulation can be bad, than that talking about how no one understands regulation can be bad is a powerful signal.
...which still leaves the question of why most people who assert that they hate regulation support most actual regulation (eg Ron Paul will never get elected). I can think of a few explanations. Most cynically, they back away from their signaling when it has consequences, the same way the anti-Western-civ people would never actually move to a primitive tribe. Less cynically, there may be a status quo bias in which they process “new” regulation differently from existing regulation (though that wouldn’t explain why people tend to support a lot of new regulation too). I think most plausibly it’s a difference between Near and Far mode reasoning—regulation in the abstract is Far, any specific law is Near—and neither mode is necessarily “better” than the other.
(I was carefully trying to not sound like “us vs. them.” Did that not come through?)
The only reason I think I partially disagree is that the reason many of the people who are against regulation are actually, well, against regulation, isn’t because they’ve thought about the potential negative consequences. They’ll cite things like freedom or a disdain communism, etc. And on the opposite political issues (e.g. military interventionism) they are more likely to be in favor of government heavy solutions.
With that being said, your point is duly noted. There are probably more people who are against regulation because they see potential negative consequences than my comment acknowledged.
In my view signalling a strong view for or against regulation suggests the need to properly think through the idea of contexts. The situation in which a regulation is applied is essential to determining its usefulness. For example; in my business we have had serious and expensive problems with substandard copper pipe imported from under-regulated manufacturers. Short term cost advantages turned into long term cost disadvantages. The difference at the initial construction end was less than $500.00. A re-pipe, in a condominium development costs between $50,000 and $100,000 per unit. In this case deregulation didn’t work. There are many counterexamples, the point I’m trying to make is that unless you are prepared to delve into the specifics the general case for/against regulation is not all that useful.
“most of the time you’ll end up doing more harm than good”,
its the most of the time assumption that I have the most difficulty with, what’s your base rate?
“and the next time won’t be much different from the last time.” seems like an arbitrary application of the planning fallacy, why is it any different if you do or you don’t?
These statements from Eliezer’s piece are empirically based (he says so in the piece). So the short answer is, that’s where the base rate comes from and that’s why this isn’t the planning fallacy. (You could challenge the empirics of course).
I’m not sure, I could do that. I work in a highly regulated business. Urban housing has a range of zoning and technical regulations 90% of which work 100% of the time. The other 10% seen like normal considerations, changes in fashion and legacy issues that are always being resolved. For me a general case for or against regulation wouldn’t map on to my experience of the world.
I haven’t actually heard the term “regulatory capture” before, but the concept of big businesses owning regulators is a pretty universal rallying cry of the left.
“Regulatory capture” does not mean “the concept of big businesses owning regulators”. It is, rather, a specific proposed explanation for why this takes place, and why it is likely to take place: namely, people working for and invested in a regulated industry have a greater interest in the outcome of regulation than other citizens do, and therefore are likely to expend more effort to influence the regulators.
Notably, regulatory capture does not explain “big business owning regulators” in terms of the members of either big business or regulatory agencies being unusually selfish, evil, or corrupt individuals. It predicts that you can’t fix regulation by installing more honest or virtuous regulators, because the problem is structural rather than personal.
Here’s an example:
I, as a human citizen who likes breathing air without radioactive soot in it, have an interest in shutting down coal-fired power plants. However, the magnitude of my interest in shutting them down is much less than the magnitude of a coal plant employee (especially a well-paid one who is also a shareholder!) in keeping that plant running. Coal soot slightly increases my chance of lung cancer … but shutting down coal plants puts those people out of a job, which is much worse for them than the delta in lung cancer probability is for me. Therefore, any given “coal person” can be expected to spend much more effort on influencing regulators than I will. And if influence is proportional to effort, this means the EPA will tend to favor the views of the coal people and not my views.
However, that said, regulatory capture is part of a broader theory in political economy called public choice theory. And public choice theory has been criticized as not being very predictive; of not having very much in the way of empirical success. Beware the mind-killers, especially when they agree with you!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory#Criticism
That’s not how I was using the term. I was using it as a label for a fact—that over time, the industry being regulated by an agency tends to eventually take over that agency. Public choice economics, whatever it’s limitations, is trying to explain this fact. Note that my usage is consistent with wikipedia (link in parent and grandparent):
(emphasis mine)
It usually goes without saying, but we assume for such examples that the aggregate harm done over all parties is higher than the aggregate good.
The problem here is that the expected utility of acting against coal plants is too small to be worth doing at all. That is, once we solve microtransactions (in practice, rather than in theory), this problem may be much more tractable.
The problem here is that the only institution that does have an interest in the long-term health of the entire population and does have the ability to overrule the interests of the coal plant owners—the state—is crippled under a liberal democracy because its members only have an interest in being re-elected.
Actually I think the state’s interest in the long-term health of the population isn’t really an enduring feature, its more of a plausibly useful strategy.
A state can reasonably defined as a local monopolist of violence, generally speaking its long term interest is basically to maintain that monopoly. There are imaginable scenarios where this involves hurting the long-term health of its entire population if say the result makes the population more docile or if they improve rent extraction that the state needs to maintain its monopoly ect.
Its even possible to imagine stable states that hurt the long-term health of their citizens so much that they die too fast for fertility to compensate, or rather infertility rates rise until they are sub replacement. Since its easy to import new workers (who may or may not be citizens). The obvious example of this seems to be places where the state relied on the slave owning class and the nature of the work produced by the slaves was so demanding it required constant new imports to maintain populations. A hypothetical (or so I hope) example would be a state using dietary and industrial regulations to ensure that the population as a whole was more docile than average due to hormonal and developmental changes while suffering greater infertility. The slow bleeding of citizens seem easy to replace with hard working first generation immigrants who might not be motivated to cause a fuss over any faults in the system because the system is overall much better than the one they came from.
I’m pretty sure public choice theory does not adopt the intentional stance with regards to institutions, and so does not assume that they have interests.
And yet I very rarely see progressives or socialists offer up any solution to that other than expanding the power of the regulators.
Well, there’s the obvious (though obvious != effective, of course) solution of making it even harder to get hired by a company that does work or the government after leaving a government job, and imposing stricter hiring rules on regulators. This is the idea behind rhetoric about “getting rid of the revolving door.”
Such a policy would require regulators to enforce, who would themselves be subject to regulatory capture.
The problem of regulatory capture has very little to do with regulatory-body agents and more to do with the governing body’s rules being set by the groups with the greatest interest in them: the groups governed.
“Regulatory capture” describes a state of affairs. If it just meant the basic incentives common to all regulation ever, it would be a useless term. And it causes harm not based on the basic incentives just sitting there, but based on a specific state of affairs existing. To prevent the harm, therefore, anything will do as long as it stops a harmful state of affairs from happening.
The thing is, there are methods of establishing regulatory bodies that do not create a governing body beholden to the entities regulated. Consider the Sierra Club, for example; they regulate environmental impact but don’t answer to the corporate interests they oversee/certify, but instead to their shareholders/members directly.
Remember that time someone gave the Sierra Club a bunch of money, explicitly so they would drop opposition to immigration from their platform, and they did?
Nope, they didn’t. The Sierra Club never, ever supported immigration restriction; the one time it came up on the ballot, it was voted down by a ratio of 3:2. (By, yes, the Club members in an election, not the Board of Directors.) Election results here.
From 1989 to 1996 the position was that immigration should be “stabilized”- i.e. reduced to the level where the entire US’s population does not grow. In 1996 the position was changed to neutrality; from 1998 to the present the club has been split on whether or not to oppose immigration (with the majority favoring neutrality).
I assume that any result that close was probably susceptible to being determined by who controlled the wording of the ballot question and the use of official resources in campaigning.
Apparently A was put on the ballot by gathering signatures, and then B was put on with wording designed to counter to it. Apparently the organization’s leadership largely supported B. Those are great advantages for B, and it didn’t even get more than 3⁄5 of the popular vote.
Who could vote for A instead of B, when B is a vote for “the empowerment and equity of women” and ”...address[ing] the root causes of migration by encouraging sustainability, economic security, health and nutrition, human rights and environmentally responsible consumption”?
Applause, applause.
Here
If the Sierra Club had the same impact as a national government’s environmental agency, there would probably be lobbyists for the Sierra Club too, and cushy jobs for ex-administrators.
Unlike a centralized agency if the Sierra Club fell to that sort of behavior its membership base would move on to other groups.
The same argument applies to political leadership under representative democracy—people could just vote for someone better, or, say, vote for someone who will reform the regulators. Political leaders take advantage of things like group identification, imperfect information, monopoly power, and advertising budgets to keep the status quo intact under pretty much all normal circumstances. These options are also available for business leaders.
Sure. There’s a few problems with applying the argument that way, though.
Regulatory bodies are not selected democratically.
Candidates (as done in the US) are very significantly vetted by non-democratic processes.
Once elected, until removed from office a vote is non-rescindable.
None of these three items are true of groups in competition with one another.
There’s no such thing as a perfect system anywhere, politically speaking. All we can do is attempt to mitigate the number of blatant problems and then work to maintain the standards of what we end up with. (Mitigate-then-suppress negative elements.)
While business leaders can do that sort of thing, it’s difficult for them to get away with it if there’s rigorous competition and strong disclosure. There are ways to achieve both of those items, but I haven’t mentioned them here because they’re only relevant if and only if we actually agree to investigate libertarian solution-spaces, as opposed to comparing ideal states of varying political agendas.
1) Indirect power over regulators is still power—if the consumers demand it, it will happen.
2) So are businesses. An equivalent in business would be the cost of entering the market that keeps small competitors out—this varies for different sectors, and is most visible in infrastructure-heavy businesses like water companies. Larger companies also get economies of scale that new ones can’t. The overall effect in both politics and business is a status quo bias.
3) This is a good point—I think the problem might be more about the time lags between promise, delivery, and evaluation. Some businesses do weakly exploit similar phenomena, but not nearly like politics. Still, a large private regulator would probably have more problems with this than current businesses. A similar, though weaker, effect might also be achieved in businesses by evading accurate evaluation, either through not releasing information, selective release of information, or just plain advertising.
I’m willing to discuss theoretical libertarian solutions, but if we just compare current government and business without solutions, I don’t see much reason why private regulators would be less corruptible than government ones. The remaining libertarian position is then that solutions to these problems would be much more effective for businesses than for governments.
The question isn’t of capacity but of magnitude of signal.
Are you aware of just how many different regulations there are which create the effect of mitigating the presence of smaller businesses? Just one example; each and every employee costs a small business (under 50 people) something like 25-40% more (in the US) than it does a large corporation (over 1,000) in regulatory-burden-per-employee. There are also a number of diseconomies of scale which our current government scheme protects larger corporations from. Also, it’s largely a myth that economies of scale can only be achieved by larger corporations. Smaller businesses that focus on providing a widely-distributed product to a number of companies can create the same effect. Case in point: managed systems administration services firms. Why pay your own full-time employee when you can pay a company to provide a suite of employees who each specialize in their field, and only pay for the hours you really use (and thus get greater expertise at a quarter the cost?) And then there’s payroll companies; all they do is provide payroll. Again, economies of scale in the hands of smaller businesses.
Which is why I included “strong disclosure” as a necessary element for a libertarian society. Personally I would see this done by a social campaign of vigorously restoring the belief in and appreciation for investigative journalism, and further by widely broadening the scope, scale, and definition of fraud-type crimes. (I would in fact make it a penalizable act to simply make a mistaken statement in a public venue, though I’d make it at most a misdemeanor whose penalty would be somehow tied to the monetary damages resultant to the statement, with a minimum of something like $20.00. This would breed a culture of desire for truthfulness. You can’t get around half-lies and the like—but you can impede them.)
Well, I’ll admit to having worded that poorly. I mainly meant that I didn’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole. :)
People always tie libertarian solutions to businesses. Even libertarians do this. I don’t think that’s a sufficiently valid/viable solutionspace. Nonprofits, voluntary social collectives, and the like all deserve their place. For example; I think it would be interesting to see a “single-payer” system (for healthcare provision) which actually was four or five such systems initially, with people permitted to create their own if they so chose ‘later on down the line’. -- but with one caveat: short of creating your own system, once you contract with one it’s for life as term of the contract, barring violation of contract by the payer. I would love to see a social order where competing government structures could mutually overlap the same geography. (There are limits to this; property rights have to be monolithic since there’s only one 777 S 7th Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona.)
Yes, but the left (and the much of the right) doesn’t usually have much foresight about this happening. They can think through the negative consequences of deregulation, but typically not regulation or re-regulation. If I wasn’t clear, that’s what I was talking about. They always seem to propose another regulatory solution to regulatory capture without thinking about how this solution will keep from being captured.
(Also, I’m talking about the general public, not the political intellectuals who are typically much more sophisticated.)
There’s nothing really funny here: regulatory capture is a theory of how the social democratic mixed economy etc is prone to certain sorts of institutional failure in accomplishing its goals, so of course the various sorts of people who don’t believe in that will find it appealing. Likewise, you’ll see both Marxists and libertarians readily endorse the idea that the purpose of most welfare provisions is to control and manage the destitute population, and so on. If only economists and libertarians seem to think about it, that’s probably because you know a lot more libertarians.
Yeah, you’re right. I was mainly getting at the fact that marxists are generally associated with the left and the left does seem to be in the group of people that don’t think about regulatory capture, but my language didn’t really convey that.
The impulse to regulate derives from the human tendency to live in hierarchical societies, such as monarchies. It’s been a long time since we developed governments other than monarchies, that work by assuming people are corrupt and constructing a system that makes it unlikely for anyone to be especially oppressed. But our instinct is always to forget that is how our government works, and think our problems can be solved by getting the right person as president, CEO, or whatever.
(Why has no one developed a democratic corporation?)
Exactly the same tendency makes us instinctively think that problems should be solved by having a (problem domain) king who solves them.
They’re called cooperatives.
other examples, Mondragon Corporation and many private companies have democratic decision policies
Yes, but you’ve merely labeled the tendency. You haven’t explained it. I can spin some plausible sounding evolutionary explanations, but what I’m really interested in is the level of cognitive science.
If I had to come up with a cognitive science explanation for pro-regulation, regardless of political considerations around whether regulation was good or bad, it would be that failures from too little regulation are obvious, direct, and heartrending (child dies of toxic unproven medicine) and failures from too much regulation are distributed and invisible (child dies of cancer, with no one knowing that a cure sits in a lab somewhere but it’s too expensive to license it).
This is because regulation, as a specific action taken to stop a problem, gets to optimize for fighting the most obvious, scary problems in the most direct way—whereas nonregulation, as a null action, doesn’t get to optimize for that at all.
This is the “seen and unseen” reasoning from my original comment, but something more seems to be going on with regulation. Why are people more quick to point out corruption in a corporation than in a government? Or am I just wrong about this fact? Maybe the seen and unseen reasoning explains the difference in this particular context and in other contexts there is no difference.
Right now, Virginia is regulating abortion clinics, making them meet hospital standards, in order to protect womens’ safety. Yet I don’t think there are any known cases of failures from too little regulation in Virginia abortion clinics. At least, I haven’t heard any brought up.
Abortion is not a good example to use here since it is often overregulated intentionally by politicians who oppose abortion and want to make abortions harder to get. There is no bias to explain because the policy fits their goal of restricting abortion.
Do you mean no cases of failure from too little regulation that couldn’t have been solved more cleverly by nonregulatory means, no cases of failure where the “solving” regulation didn’t have problems of its own, or just that you literally can’t think of any any cases ever of failures from too little regulation?
If you really mean the last, then avoiding modern-day issues so we don’t get into a fight, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, thalidomide babies, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill seem like go-to historical examples.
I mean that I haven’t heard anybody in the debate say, “Person X went to an abortion clinic in Virginia, and something bad happened that would have been prevented by these rules.” So the impulse to regulate isn’t due just to the easy availability of instances of under-regulation over instances of over-regulation.
Presumably “Person X went to an abortion clinic in Virginia, and an abortion happened” fits the bill for a lot of participants in that debate.
There was a pretty notorious case of a bad abortion clinic in Philadelphia: http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/21/philly-abortion-horrors-what-matters-is-how-and-not-when-an-abortion-is-done-says-expert/
Whether the proposed regulation could help prevent similar cases in VA, I have no idea, but if it means more oversight, you know, it seems plausible.
I am impressed that a political dialogue occurred without the throwing of epithets about the motives of the parties involved. I think I might have even… actually learned something. This feels very weird. :)
Cato Unbound is often quite good.
Really, any discussion where people agree on basic premises can be quite good, and any discussion where people don’t has a very difficult time being good. (Though I agree that Cato puts out quality work in general.)
This was popular on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2983884
From the article:
computer programming and science fiction and Bayesian statistics don’t have anything to do with the current spectrum of American political discourse as far as I can tell.
Also: he left out guns and abortion. In Texas the Libertarian Party is colloquially known as the guns and dope party. I have been to a couple of their events and I have never seen a participant who was obviously not Caucasian. I suspect you could get more cred in the party here wearing an SS death’s head ring than having a black girlfriend.
But I support guns and dope as much as any of them I am 99% positive.
Most libertarians I know of consider the Nazis to be on the opposite end of the political landscape from them, and so would look askance at someone displaying their regalia.
I think it is more useful to describe these as different clusters that use the “libertarian” label rather than as different elements of the libertarian movement, because there isn’t a unitary libertarian movement.
Telling someone that you are “a libertarian” doesn’t tell them very much, because there are so many distinct groups using that label.
Apologies for linking to a politics blog, but I think the point contained therein is actually rather anti-mindkilling, in the vein that politics isn’t about policy… The name that is most-closely associated with libertarianism in the minds of many Americans today is not really espousing views likely to lead to more liberty in the long run.
Anti-mindkilling?! You are linking to an article that represents nothing but a salvo in a bitter and long-standing ideological war. This is true regardless of whose position in this conflict (if anyone’s) one favors.
The element that I am suggesting is anti-mindkilling is the assertion that short-term partisan battles bear limited relationship to meaningful long-term social change, and that one can potentially recognize the degree to which tribalism obscures this by looking at political battles in a time and place sufficiently removed from one’s own.
I understand the argument you’re trying to make, but the problem is that “liberty” is not a term with a universally agreed-upon definition on which you could base uncontroversial assertions that something is “likely to lead to more liberty,” or even that a particular state of affairs involves more liberty. This word is first and foremost a strong applause light, not a precisely defined term that would enable us to consider any hypothetical states of the world X and Y and make an uncontroversial and universally accepted claim that X means greater liberty than Y.
In this case, there is an ideological dispute in which both sides would claim to be in favor of more liberty, however the disagreement is not just about what policies are likely to lead to more liberty in practice, but also about the very definition of “liberty” that one is supposed to be striving for. And you can’t support any side in this disagreement—at least not casually and without a very careful justification—without going way out into the mind-killing territory.
Ok, I better understand your objection now. I’m not sure that I see, however, why this objection wouldn’t apply equally well to Eliezer and Michael Shermer (or anyone else) using the term “libertarian” to describe their views. (I take “libertarian” to mean “in favor of more liberty,” more or less)
I have no idea what kind of libertarian Shermer is, but I know for sure that there are some kinds of libertarians who would take issue with the sort of libertarianism from Eliezer’s self-description. Promoting the “wrong” kind of libertarianism in front of people who belong to either kind is not at all unlikely to lead to bitter and mind-killing ideological disputes.
The important difference however is that Eliezer’s article presents his views in a reasonably non-confrontational way, whereas the article you linked is straight-out ideological warfare. The latter is much more likely to induce mind-killing.
I sense that I again did a poor job conveying something here, so let me try again. I am not arguing whether or not self-described libertarians of differing stripes would deny each other the libertarian label if they could—I’m well aware how bitter the disagreements between beltway “cosmotarians” and Mises types get.
Rather, what I am saying is that I think anyone of any political leaning has a valid objection to self-described libertarians using that moniker, because the label itself is an applause light (it’s not really functioning as one in the current US political context, but that is because it is already serving as a tribal marker).
It’s somewhat similar to the annoying tendency in the US to refer to politically active people with puritanical sexual mores as “values voters”, as if it were not the case that everyone believes their vote is an expression of their values.
I see what you mean. People don’t care much about etymology when it comes to ideological labels. Once a word becomes a standard designation for a party, ideology, or movement, few people ever stop to think where that name came from or what meanings it has otherwise. (Though of course there are bitter disputes if multiple groups lay claim to the same label as their primary identification.)
Also, ideological labels that are great applause lights for (practically) everyone lose this characterisic when they’re used as designatons for concrete political/ideological groups. (A mention of the Democratic Party, for example, is hardly an applause light for anyone except its most passionate partisans, even though the general meaning of this adjective is possibly the greatest universal applause ligth of all nowadays.)
Do you think this applies even more so to people using “liberal” as their moniker?
My understanding is that application of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” to politics dates to revolutionary France and has more to do with attitudes regarding the pace of social change.
It is full of stuff like: “People take the idea of women’s equality more seriously than they did 50 years ago, but not seriously enough.”
Now if someone was so sexist as to point out that females going to college substantially outnumber males despite underwhelming SAT scores, and that when one interviews female job candidates who graduated in STEM fields it looks suspiciously as if they were graduated on gender rather than ability, that doubtless would be called hate speech and flame bait, whereas saying we are “not taking women’s equality seriously enough” is not flamebait at all but what all intelligent right thinking people agree and no one could possibly question—and if someone was so insolent as to doubt it, he needs to be silenced.
And lo and behold, eight seconds after posting “and if someone was so insolent as to doubt it, he would be silenced” that post got voted down to minus three points.
You did not say “I doubt it.” You said that a doubter would be silenced. Try saying “I doubt it” here and see what happens.
Do not confuse levels.
It is characteristic of sam0345 (James A. Donald, I believe) to express his own views in the voice of an imaginary opponent who is outraged at them, with the implication that the imaginary opponent is a distillation of his actual interlocutors.
In the other venues where I have seen him post, it is a very effective technique for fanning flamewars.
The downvote reveals that the imaginary opponent is an accurate distillation. Had the comment been allowed to stand, would have looked silly, would have been self refuting. There is nothing as ludicrous as the martyr soliciting martyrdom, and no one martyring him, as for example Andres Serrano earnestly seeking death threats and failing to get them.
But I knew you lot would predictably respond.
It’s clear what the narrative in your own head is, but the narrative in mine when I see this sort of thing is that you’re wearing one of these t-shirts.
Pre-empting other people’s rejection is, always and everywhere, a low status action, an acknowledgement that everyone around you is higher in the pecking order. It may not feel like that when you’re doing it, but that’s what it is. Yes, it’s even lower status to not even get taken notice of when you ask to be pissed on, but getting pissed on is not much of a step up, especially if some of the people pissing agree with the rest of what you have to say.
The thing is, you do actually have sensible things to say, when you aren’t playing the “kick me, that’ll show everyone” card. Mencius Moldbug, with whom your views have a lot in common, and you have mentioned favourably, has also been mentioned favourably here. I don’t see him saying “kick me”, and neither do you on your own blog. But every time you enter a public forum you put on the “kick me” shirt, and the more you get kicked, the more you lap it up.
Why are you here, anyway? So far you have only exercised a few of your own hobbyhorses. They may be interesting and important matters, and not only to you, but you obviously aren’t here to refine the art of human rationality. (Have you ever read anything by Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example?) You’re here to talk politics and get a warm glow of validation from hostile reactions from this bunch of people you heard of who are so arrogant as to call themselves Less Wrong.
Trolls get downvoted even if they say “You jerkfaces can only prove you are not jerkfaces by not downvoting me.” (which is what you essentially did)
Yeah, you’re like an artist, craving the contempt of your contemporaries, because you think that proves you “edgy”. PHOEBE BUFFAY: “I would give anything to not be appreciated in my own time!”
No.
You are confusing levels. Practice not confusing levels.
-4 with the last point being me. So at least once it wasn’t downvoted for dissent or doubt, it was downvoted for the pitiful hero-martyr attitude of being silenced for your intellectual bravery. Before, you know, you were actually silenced at all.
That attitude reminded me of Mel Gibson in South Park “Torture you?” “So you do intend to torture me! Well, go ahead!”
People are unreliable judges of their own motivations. Someone, however, who can reliably predict another person’s behavior is likely a reliable judge of that other person’s motivation.
Ah, you reliably predicted a single bit of behaviour (upvoted or downvoted), and from this you extrapolate a complete motivation?
Here’s how it looks to me, when I look through your entire history of posting in LessWrong: You are consistently downvoted for your attitude, not for the claims you make. In many places you say essentially the same thing as here, but you’re only downvoted only you are acting like a rude jerk or when you play pity games.
You are using the word “likely” in a manner that is inconsistent with the probability calculus.
Often times, multiple people will reliably predict that a comment will be downvoted, though each attributes a different motivation to the downvotes. They can’t all be “likely a reliable judge” of that motivation. The respective probabilities of their being correct have to sum to less than one, so all but one (at most) is probably wrong.
I don’t have any hard data for that assertion. It is just the general vibe of the environment.
Have you ever been to a gun show?
Not yet, no. (I did attend a talk given by John Lott at their Austin headquarters, though.)
They are characteristics of the empirical cluster of people whose political stances Eliezer was describing.
Which is ironic because the “open borders” movement really only exists amongst Libertarians. I’m aware that there is a strong xenophobic movement in Tea Party / Lib folks.
I’m in AZ, by the way. Home of SB1070.
Open borders is also a movement among international socialsts.
Fair enough. I’ll admit to at least the possibility of some confirmation bias or observer effect or the sort here: While I do go out of my way to avoid echo-chamber silliness I’ve never heard (here in the US) of the open border movement outside of libertarian circles.
I wouldn’t fault you for not having heard of it; most liberals aren’t far enough left/don’t put enough thought into the specific issue of immigration to have such a policy; and while I’d imagine that the “international” part of international socialism is where the idea comes from I’d be pretty surprised if less than 80% of US citizens holding such beliefs identified as libertarians. I simply run in different circles.
There are several distinct clusters of very different kinds of people who call themselves libertarians or are likely to be identified as such by the mainstream. Although there is some occasional overlap, they typically don’t like each other at all. Two major sharply opposed clusters are the Beltway libertarians and the Mises Institute ones. There is also the techno-geek cluster, which has some overlap with the Beltway one and much less with the Mises one, the gun-show netherworld cluster (nowadays largely faded), and a large assortment of independent crackpots. (There are of course also the Randians, but they are apt to perceive the L-word as a gross insult.)
The U.S. Libertarian Party, from what I’ve observed, is rather loose and decentralized and isn’t limited to any particulat cluster, though unsurprisingly it tends to draw disproportionately from the crackpot elements.
Right.
Dancing with crackpots is so complicated that the Ockham dude might advise us to ignore them completely. I don’t think I will be attending any more Libertarian Party events for a long foreseeable future time interval.