If a right wing fascist is admired here then I am probably in the wrong place. Equally, if the former is true then the rule “People are right in inverse proportion to their own confidence in their rightness” goes a long way to explaining why.
If a right wing fascist is admired here then I am probably in the wrong place.
Speaking as someone who really dislikes Moldbug’s viewpoints, it requires a very non-standard notion “fascist” to describe him that way. He has his own ideas for a model government which doesn’t look much like historical fascism or even any other sort of dictatorship. “right-wing” is probably somewhat more accurate.
Moreover, it may help if you haven’t to read politics is the mind-killer. Disagreement about politics with people (in this case a vocal minority of people here) doesn’t make what they have to say automatically bad or wrong. And if anything, it can be useful rationality practice to listen to political ideas one disagrees with or even find morally repugnant. Having ideas that challenge one’s status quo beliefs is a useful thing (in fact from reading this thread it sounds like some of the supporters of Moldbug here don’t agree with him at all but think he has interesting things to say).
Well fascist is roughly equivalent to authoritarian which is the fancy schmancy new term term for right wing reactionary. Which seems to me to be in the ball park for an Austrian school kook royalist and self described right winger who thinks libertarians are far too liberal for his tastes.
“Disagreement about politics with people doesn’t make what they have to say automatically bad or wrong.”
Strictly true but in generally false. I think a person’s politics is a good indicator of how rational they are. Current research bears me out that authoritarians are more susceptible to motivated reasoning (the current term of art for confirmation bias). Chris Mooney makes an excellent case that epistemic closure is more prominent among conservatives than it is among liberals. Climate change denial, free market fundamentalism, and a broad assortment of conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions are rampant on the far right today. The left is relatively free of such hysteria.
While I agree that it is best if one has opponents to push back against I also think there are limits. “We should murder kittens live on TV” does not rise to the level of an honorable opponent any more than “We should have an aristocracy and let them do what ever they want” does.
I don’t think a royalist follower of von Mises has anything interesting to say. Those who would admire such even less so.
Well fascist is roughly equivalent to authoritarian which is the fancy schmancy new term term for right wing reactionary
That’s a reasonable description of the word’s use as a slur—though I might go further and say that in that context “fascist” means simply “bad”—but in political science parlance it has a much narrower, though not entirely consistent, meaning. (I’ve actually heard some dispute over whether the Nazis properly count as fascist or are better given their own weird little category, although this is a somewhat fringey/pedantic distinction.) Right-wing authoritarians have been around as long as “right-wing” was a politically meaningful word, but the post-socialist totalitarian governments that started cropping up in the Great Depression are much more tightly clustered, politically speaking.
Moldbug pretty clearly doesn’t fall within that cluster of ideologies. He’s probably closest to Franco’s, but there are still significant gaps, and in any case Franco was always a bit of an odd duck as far as the European political landscape was concerned.
“That’s a reasonable description of the word’s use as a slur”
There are 13 million voices crying from the grave that justify it’s use as a slur.
In Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican Brain” he makes a good case based on recent studies for why we should think of the totalitarianism of the former USSR as a right wing phenomenon. The reason why hinges on how “conservative” is defined in the social sciences. Conservative for the purposes of these studies means “resistant to change”. Liberal means “novelty seeking”. So what you have in human personalities are those who seek to minimize change and those who seek to maximize it.
Thus in the former USSR or Maoist China or the French Revolution you have the initial radical change to society. Conservative personalities then acclimate themselves to the resulting bureaucracy and seek to freeze it in place. Then, being authoritarians, they accumulate power and use it as authoritarians always do. To exterminate their opposition. In the past debates on this issue were based in political philosophy. I, along with Chris, am claiming to give it a more solid footing in cognitive science.
So… the totalitarianism of the USSR was a right wing phenomenon despite the socialist economic model it followed. Stalin was a wing nut. Generalissimo Franco was cut from the same mold and also guilty of his own mass murder and genocide.
I don’t believe in extending tolerance to such people or those who emulate them or in seeing them as “interesting” because they have come up with some variation of their authoritarian ideology. They should be called out and forced to give account for themselves. Liberal personalities seeing a novel twist on authoritarianism might find that attractive. “Oh look! Here is something different. How interesting.” That’s fine as far as it goes but just as the authoritarian personality should never be allowed free rein so also the liberal personality should not allow his/her self to be distracted by bright shiny objects. Perhaps it is true that Moldbug was able to polish the bright shiny turd that is Franco’s fascism. Whoopie.
In Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican Brain” he makes a good case based on recent studies for why we should think of the totalitarianism of the former USSR as a right wing phenomenon. [...] Conservative personalities then acclimate themselves to the resulting bureaucracy and seek to freeze it in place. Then, being authoritarians, they accumulate power and use it as authoritarians always do.
It’d be hard for me to overstate my skepticism for the genre of popular political science books charging that their authors’ enemies are innately evil. I haven’t read Mooney’s book, though I have read quite a few articles with a similar thesis; if you’re presenting his analysis accurately, though, it seems pretty tortured.
Mao was central to his revolution from its inception, and if you’ve read anything of his it’s obvious that he was a true believer. The democides he’s been charged with may have worked as consolidations of power, but they certainly weren’t attempts to minimize social or political change; indeed, most of the deaths during the Great Leap Forward can be laid at the feet of novel but poorly implemented agricultural organization. (This may also be true for the Holodomor and other instances of mass famine in the Soviet Union.) Stalin’s a more ambiguous case; many of his worst excesses do seem to have served a personal power grab, and he was a relatively minor figure within Lenin’s initial party organization, but if anything he seems too ambitious to be branded a Marxist conservative. His purges don’t fit well with a desire to safeguard the Leninist bureaucracy; on the contrary, they pretty much destroyed it. He was of course an authoritarian in the sense of seeking to maximize personal and state power, but the “Marxist conservative” label seems to fit Khrushchev and others of his generation much better.
In any case, if we’re using “liberal” and “conservative” strictly to gauge desire for social change, then by the same token we have to decouple it from authoritarianism or adherence to positions generally thought of as right-wing. Indeed, in this narrow sense Hitler, Mussolini, and others (though perhaps not Franco) might be considered liberals: fascist (in the grandparent’s sense) ideology is quite big on cultural traditionalism, but even more central is its concept of social transformation based on extreme nationalism, shared political goals, and economic corporatism. The nostalgia in its rhetoric has to be understood in that context (and, in Hitler’s case, in the context of a sense of national humiliation following WWI).
“It’d be hard for me to overstate my skepticism for the genre of popular political science books charging that their authors’ enemies are innately evil. I haven’t read Mooney’s book”
It is obvious you have not read it because he makes no such claim nor have I. In fact he ends the book with a new found respect for conservatives. Loyalty, personal responsibility, being willing to set aside one’s own desires for the good of the group are all admirable qualities. I myself do not despise conservatives in themselves. I do despise the hucksters and grifters who promote pseudoscience and conspiracy theories in order to enrich themselves. Those people find a significant percentage of the population are easily manipulated by preying on their fears and prejudices. That percentage is over represented by conservative personality types and people with that kind of temperament tend to find political conservatism more to their liking. I have met Democrats with conservative personalities but not many. Civil Rights legislation in the 60′s was passed primarily by Republicans with liberal personalities. The reactionary types were in the Democratic Party
Conservatives are not innately evil. No one is. All people are susceptible to certain cognitive biases. Some people more than others. Some other people have found they can manipulate them to their advantage. It is easy to do, you trigger the fear response, as a result one’s rational centers literally shut down and areas of the brain associated with survival are activated.
“if we’re using “liberal” and “conservative” strictly to gauge desire for social change”
No, that’s not how it is used. Conservative means “resistant to change” and Liberal means “novelty seeking”. Political conservatives need not all be authoritarians but virtually all authoritarians would self select for conservative political organizations.
“Indeed, in this narrow sense Hitler, Mussolini, and others (though perhaps not Franco) might be considered liberals”
That’s absurd. Liberalism is not defined as a desire for social change. The authoritarian or conservative mindset would also seek social change because they wish to return to what they perceive as a traditional model for society.
Conservative means “resistant to change” and Liberal means “novelty seeking”.
That may be one notion of what those words mean, but they aren’t what people mean when they discuss their political ramifications. For example, how do attitudes towards abortion and free markets fall into this setting?
Political alignments are to a large effect due to historical consequences, not due to any simple coherent philosophical positions.
No, that’s not how it is used. Conservative means “resistant to change” and Liberal means “novelty seeking”. Political conservatives need not all be authoritarians but virtually all authoritarians would self select for conservative political organizations.
Once they have power, yes. In order to seize power, they need to appeal to “novelty seeking” liberals in order to destroy the existing order, especially all those annoying checks and balances designed to keep any one person from acquiring power.
Liberal means “novelty seeking”. So what you have in human personalities are those who seek to minimize change and those who seek to maximize it.
You might be interested in thesetwo articles. Note that Moldbug’s writing is cited as an example of insight porn in the comments.
The “Dark Enlightenment” crowd differs from the Conservative crowd in that the former are more likely to be maladapted people wanting radical change in society and novelty in their ideas while the latter are well adjusted people who dislike change since it is cognitively expensive to deal with. Here is a left wing take on the difference. I think this is a key problem of his readers since it biases them towards such ideas (this includes me naturally). Arguably Marxism had a boosted appeal in the middle of the 20th century among Western intellectual elites because of similar reasons.
Moldbug himself probably only enjoys demolishing Universalism as much as he does because his grandparents where Communists, parents where Liberals and he moved in the university crowd in California, so the ideas he comes up with and the material he seeks out differ radically from what he was immersed in as a child, teenager and probably even now.
I think a person’s politics is a good indicator of how rational they are. Current research bears me out that authoritarians are more susceptible to motivated reasoning (the current term of art for confirmation bias). Chris Mooney makes an excellent case that epistemic closure is more prominent among conservatives than it is among liberals. Climate change denial, free market fundamentalism, and a broad assortment of conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions are rampant on the far right today. The left is relatively free of such hysteria.
So, I agree with this at a very weak level. The question is how good an indicator is this? For example, I know a very successful mathematician who has extreme right-wing politics, and another who has extreme left-wing politics. I know a linguist who is a monarchist. The fact is that humans can be highly rational in one area while extremely irrational in another. Look for example at how much of the left has extreme anti-nuclear power, anti-GMO and pro-alt med views that have little connection to evidence. The degree to which the left is “relatively free” has the word “relative” doing a lot of work in that sentence. Moreover, Moldbug’s views don’t fit into a standard notion of far-right.
Another issue to point out is that the studies which show a difference between left-wing and right-wing cognition are to a large extent limited: The differences in populations are quite small. Moreover, by other metrics, conservatives have more science knowledge than liberals on average. In fact, the GSS data strongly suggests that in general the most stupid, ignorant people are actually the political moderates. They have lower average vocab, and on average perform more poorly at answering basic science questions.
I don’t think a royalist follower of von Mises has anything interesting to say. Those who would admire such even less so.
So I’m deeply confused by this statement. You seem to be asserting that “Person X who says A will be extremely unlikely to have anything useful to say.” And asserting that “If Person Y thinks that Person X has interesting things to say about B despite X’s declaration of A, that makes the person Y even less likely to have useful things to say?” I’m curious, if we had a Person Z who pointed out that Y had interesting thing to say about issue C, would Z become even further less useful to listen to?
“The fact is that humans can be highly rational in one area while extremely irrational in another.”
Really? How do you know that? Why shouldn’t it be true that someone who is deeply wrong about one thing would not also be wrong about another? Your counter argument is a common fallacy. I am referring to studies in which a population is tested for whatever it is the study is looking for. You, like so many others these days, counter by saying: “I knew this one guy, he wasn’t like that so your study must be wrong.” You are correct that global warming is true regardless of the politics of the person. However the reverse is not true. The politics one has are strong indicators of how likely it is one holds beliefs that are not true.
There is in fact what is called the “smart idiot” effect. Conservatives who are better educated tend to be MORE wrong than their less educated base because they have more resources to bring to bear in rationalizing their fears. This is all about fear you know. Certain people react very fearfully to change. Like changing ideas about marriage for example. They then marshal their intellectual abilities to defend their emotional priors. The fact they can do so eloquently changes nothing.
--
“Moreover, by other metrics, conservatives have more science knowledge than liberals on average.”
So in responding to scientific studies that show differences between how authoritarians and liberals process data you cite… what? a blog? I am guessing that the blog you consider most relevant is that of Razib Kahn.
Razib poses the question “are conservatives more scientifically literate than liberals?” Well that is a different question isn’t it? Furthermore the questions in his database search do not test for scientific literacy. They test for conformity. Which I am more than willing to admit conservatives would perform better at. If I repeat the social norm that astrology is unscientific do I have “more science knowledge” than someone who does not? Or am I simply aping the values of my tribe and signaling I am a beta male in good standing?
Liberals would predictably adopt scientific ideas outside the norm because they are interested in them and it is exciting to explore the new or odd for it’s own rewards. Just as for a conservative it is comforting to reaffirm consensus beliefs. Both personalities are rewarded for their behavior. One for seeking out the new, the other for conformity to authority. Both are necessary for any healthy society. However, conservative personalities have a greater need for epistemic closure and are therefore more susceptible to a self validating reality bubble.
Which is what we see today on the right in the US.
--
“In fact, the GSS data strongly suggests that in general the most stupid, ignorant people are actually the political moderates.”
As Razib himself says “The Audacious Epigone did not control for background variables.”
--
“You seem to be asserting that “Person X who says A will be extremely unlikely to have anything useful to say.” And asserting that “If Person Y thinks that Person X has interesting things to say about B despite X’s declaration of A, that makes the person Y even less likely to have useful things to say?”″
Because the acolyte is always less than the master.
I prefer to cut Gordian knots rather than spend my days trying to untie them. So if it is true that Moldbug is a royalist and admires the fascist dictator Generalissimo Franco (who is still dead) then he is low on my stack of “people I should give a shit about”. Any followers even less so because they can’t even be original about who’s boots they should lick.
Ezra Pound was a great poet and likewise a fascist and admirer of Spain’s Franco. But poetry is art and while I might be able to set aside my political opinions to make room for Pound I would not consider anything he said outside of that to be of great value. There have been many artists who held political views I find repugnant and there have been many of history’s monsters who created artifacts of great beauty. The Samurai lords of feudal Japan created works of great beauty by night and literally hacked their peasants into bits by day. But art is one thing about which it is impossible to have “wrong” opinions about.
I have to have a filter. If I do not have one I will spend all my time pursuing false trails and diving into rabbit holes that go nowhere. So… in my first reply in this thread I clicked on the first link to Molbug’s pretentious twaddle on how he was going to teach people “true” economic theory. It was very kind of him in my view to make it clear from the beginning that he had no interest at all in economics as a science. So… someone who makes a thought error that bad, who thinks you can dictate what is true about economics, how likely is it that such a person would make the same thinking error in other disciplines? I think the odds are quite good. I did read a bit more before I closed the tab and he does seem to have a way with words. So.… there’s that… I guess.
If one wishes to understand a topic my advice is to go to any University bookstore and get an undergraduate textbook and read it. The odds are it is likely to be… wait for it… less wrong than some crank on the internet who thinks the academic world is conspiring against him. PLOP! Into the dustbin of history they go.
In economics that book will be Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw. It WON’T be some crackpot libertarian theory or the latest dribblings from the Austrian school. Why? Because Utopian systems are not about describing what is (and therefore they cannot be about what could be). They are about creating a bubble to insulate oneself from the big bad world. Yes yes it is harsh, reality is truly frightening. It may well be that we have set into motion events that will lead to our extinction. When I was young it was the threat of nuclear war. Today it is the possibility of a global extinction event due to climate change. Perhaps tomorrow it will be a killer asteroid. But denial and retreat are not solutions.
Really? How do you know that? Why shouldn’t it be true that someone who is deeply wrong about one thing would not also be wrong about another? Your counter argument is a common fallacy.
You should read the material linked to from this LW wiki article on Compartmentalization.
My other reply got very long and this matter was essentially tangential so I’ve broken this off into a separate comment.
Furthermore the questions in his database search do not test for scientific literacy. They test for conformity. Which I am more than willing to admit conservatives would perform better at. If I repeat the social norm that astrology is unscientific do I have “more science knowledge” than someone who does not?
This seems to be more about word games than anything else. If someone believes that the Earth is round but they don’t know why that’s commonly accepted, they have a fact about the universe, and one that if they think hard enough about it, one that probably pays rent. That they got to that result by “conformity” is both not obviously testable, and isn’t relevant in this context. Understanding that astrology doesn’t work is a perfect example of scientific knowledge. Moreover, I’m not completely sure what you mean by conformity. For example, I’ve never personally tested whether astrology works or not. Is it conformity to accept the broad set of scientific papers showing that it doesn’t work?
By the way, you can quote on less wrong by putting a “>” at the beginning of a paragraph. So if I write “> this” I get:
this
Moving on:
“The fact is that humans can be highly rational in one area while extremely irrational in another.”
Really? How do you know that? Why shouldn’t it be true that someone who is deeply wrong about one thing would not also be wrong about another? Your counter argument is a common fallacy. I am referring to studies in which a population is tested for whatever it is the study is looking for. You, like so many others these days, counter by saying: “I knew this one guy, he wasn’t like that so your study must be wrong
No. That’s not the argument being made here. The argument being made is twofold: 1) Exceptions exist (which doesn’t contradict the statistical claim) and 2) The statistics are actually weak effects. But if you prefer, consider the following situation: In many parliamentary systems one has a wide variety of different political parties. Israel for example has 14 parties with representation in the Knesset. Almost any two parties agree on at least one issue, and disagree on a variety of issues. That means that if a party is correct about all issues, then there have to be a large number (or even a majority) of people who are correct about that issue but wrong on many other issues. Even in a system like the US, people have a variety of different views and don’t fall into two strict camps in many ways (here again is somewhere where the GSS data is worth looking at), so the claim that people are across the board irrational or rational just doesn’t make sense.
There is in fact what is called the “smart idiot” effect. Conservatives who are better educated tend to be MORE wrong than their less educated base because they have more resources to bring to bear in rationalizing their fears.
Sure, this is likely the cause of some of what is going on here, especially in regards to global warming. Moreover, more educated people are more likely to know what their own tribe is generally expected to believe and adjust their views accordingly.
“Moreover, by other metrics, conservatives have more science knowledge than liberals on average.”
So in responding to scientific studies that show differences between how authoritarians and liberals process data you cite… what? a blog? I am guessing that the blog you consider most relevant is that of Razib Kahn.
I’m citing GSS data which happens to be discussed in more detail at a certain set of blogs. Note that the GSS data is freely availalble so you can easily verify the claims yourself. Note also that phrasing this question as “authoritarian” v. “liberal” is even more misleading than your earlier statement about authoritaianism. The data in question is explicitly about self-identification as liberal or conservative, not about any metric of authoritarianism. Indeed, many viewpoints that are classically seen as “conservative” or “right-wing” are anti-authoritarian. For example, free market economics is a right-wing viewpoint.
“In fact, the GSS data strongly suggests that in general the most stupid, ignorant people are actually the political moderates.”
As Razib himself says “The Audacious Epigone did not control for background variables.”
Yes, and there are actually fascinating things that occur when you try to. If you control in the GSS for income and education for example then self-identified liberals outperform self-identified conservatives. But that’s not terribly relevant: the question here is given someone’s political orientation, what should you expect about their knowledge level and accuracy of world view across politics and other issues? The underlying causal issues are an interesting side-issue but don’t touch on the basic question.
“You seem to be asserting that “Person X who says A will be extremely unlikely to have anything useful to say.” And asserting that “If Person Y thinks that Person X has interesting things to say about B despite X’s declaration of A, that makes the person Y even less likely to have useful things to say?”″
Because the acolyte is always less than the master.
That doesn’t make any sense. You are essentially claiming that someone who says “That guy over there may be wrong about a lot of things but he may have a handful of valid points” is more wrong than the person believes all the wrong points. Essentially, this claim amounts to saying that being open to a possibility of a diamond in the coal is more irrational than thinking the coals are all diamonds. Do you see the problem?
I have to have a filter.
Sure, I think reading Moldbug is generally a waste of time and wouldn’t recommend people to read him. But that’s not the issue that we’re discussing. Scroll back up a bit. The issue that started this subthread was the claim that some people on LW thinking that Moldbug might be worth paying attention to meant that there was something deeply wrong with Less Wrong as a whole. That’s the context that’s relevant here (and in that context most of the rest of your comment isn’t germane).
Let me get this straight, you’re accusing LessWrong of group think because we’re willing to listen to fringe viewpoints and take them seriously if they seem to merit it?
If a right wing fascist is admired here then I am probably in the wrong place. Equally, if the former is true then the rule “People are right in inverse proportion to their own confidence in their rightness” goes a long way to explaining why.
I love the smell of group think.
Speaking as someone who really dislikes Moldbug’s viewpoints, it requires a very non-standard notion “fascist” to describe him that way. He has his own ideas for a model government which doesn’t look much like historical fascism or even any other sort of dictatorship. “right-wing” is probably somewhat more accurate.
Moreover, it may help if you haven’t to read politics is the mind-killer. Disagreement about politics with people (in this case a vocal minority of people here) doesn’t make what they have to say automatically bad or wrong. And if anything, it can be useful rationality practice to listen to political ideas one disagrees with or even find morally repugnant. Having ideas that challenge one’s status quo beliefs is a useful thing (in fact from reading this thread it sounds like some of the supporters of Moldbug here don’t agree with him at all but think he has interesting things to say).
Well fascist is roughly equivalent to authoritarian which is the fancy schmancy new term term for right wing reactionary. Which seems to me to be in the ball park for an Austrian school kook royalist and self described right winger who thinks libertarians are far too liberal for his tastes.
“Disagreement about politics with people doesn’t make what they have to say automatically bad or wrong.”
Strictly true but in generally false. I think a person’s politics is a good indicator of how rational they are. Current research bears me out that authoritarians are more susceptible to motivated reasoning (the current term of art for confirmation bias). Chris Mooney makes an excellent case that epistemic closure is more prominent among conservatives than it is among liberals. Climate change denial, free market fundamentalism, and a broad assortment of conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions are rampant on the far right today. The left is relatively free of such hysteria.
While I agree that it is best if one has opponents to push back against I also think there are limits. “We should murder kittens live on TV” does not rise to the level of an honorable opponent any more than “We should have an aristocracy and let them do what ever they want” does.
I don’t think a royalist follower of von Mises has anything interesting to say. Those who would admire such even less so.
You seem to be using nearly all the words in this sentence as mere boo lights.
That’s a reasonable description of the word’s use as a slur—though I might go further and say that in that context “fascist” means simply “bad”—but in political science parlance it has a much narrower, though not entirely consistent, meaning. (I’ve actually heard some dispute over whether the Nazis properly count as fascist or are better given their own weird little category, although this is a somewhat fringey/pedantic distinction.) Right-wing authoritarians have been around as long as “right-wing” was a politically meaningful word, but the post-socialist totalitarian governments that started cropping up in the Great Depression are much more tightly clustered, politically speaking.
Moldbug pretty clearly doesn’t fall within that cluster of ideologies. He’s probably closest to Franco’s, but there are still significant gaps, and in any case Franco was always a bit of an odd duck as far as the European political landscape was concerned.
“That’s a reasonable description of the word’s use as a slur”
There are 13 million voices crying from the grave that justify it’s use as a slur.
In Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican Brain” he makes a good case based on recent studies for why we should think of the totalitarianism of the former USSR as a right wing phenomenon. The reason why hinges on how “conservative” is defined in the social sciences. Conservative for the purposes of these studies means “resistant to change”. Liberal means “novelty seeking”. So what you have in human personalities are those who seek to minimize change and those who seek to maximize it.
Thus in the former USSR or Maoist China or the French Revolution you have the initial radical change to society. Conservative personalities then acclimate themselves to the resulting bureaucracy and seek to freeze it in place. Then, being authoritarians, they accumulate power and use it as authoritarians always do. To exterminate their opposition. In the past debates on this issue were based in political philosophy. I, along with Chris, am claiming to give it a more solid footing in cognitive science.
So… the totalitarianism of the USSR was a right wing phenomenon despite the socialist economic model it followed. Stalin was a wing nut. Generalissimo Franco was cut from the same mold and also guilty of his own mass murder and genocide.
I don’t believe in extending tolerance to such people or those who emulate them or in seeing them as “interesting” because they have come up with some variation of their authoritarian ideology. They should be called out and forced to give account for themselves. Liberal personalities seeing a novel twist on authoritarianism might find that attractive. “Oh look! Here is something different. How interesting.” That’s fine as far as it goes but just as the authoritarian personality should never be allowed free rein so also the liberal personality should not allow his/her self to be distracted by bright shiny objects. Perhaps it is true that Moldbug was able to polish the bright shiny turd that is Franco’s fascism. Whoopie.
It’d be hard for me to overstate my skepticism for the genre of popular political science books charging that their authors’ enemies are innately evil. I haven’t read Mooney’s book, though I have read quite a few articles with a similar thesis; if you’re presenting his analysis accurately, though, it seems pretty tortured.
Mao was central to his revolution from its inception, and if you’ve read anything of his it’s obvious that he was a true believer. The democides he’s been charged with may have worked as consolidations of power, but they certainly weren’t attempts to minimize social or political change; indeed, most of the deaths during the Great Leap Forward can be laid at the feet of novel but poorly implemented agricultural organization. (This may also be true for the Holodomor and other instances of mass famine in the Soviet Union.) Stalin’s a more ambiguous case; many of his worst excesses do seem to have served a personal power grab, and he was a relatively minor figure within Lenin’s initial party organization, but if anything he seems too ambitious to be branded a Marxist conservative. His purges don’t fit well with a desire to safeguard the Leninist bureaucracy; on the contrary, they pretty much destroyed it. He was of course an authoritarian in the sense of seeking to maximize personal and state power, but the “Marxist conservative” label seems to fit Khrushchev and others of his generation much better.
In any case, if we’re using “liberal” and “conservative” strictly to gauge desire for social change, then by the same token we have to decouple it from authoritarianism or adherence to positions generally thought of as right-wing. Indeed, in this narrow sense Hitler, Mussolini, and others (though perhaps not Franco) might be considered liberals: fascist (in the grandparent’s sense) ideology is quite big on cultural traditionalism, but even more central is its concept of social transformation based on extreme nationalism, shared political goals, and economic corporatism. The nostalgia in its rhetoric has to be understood in that context (and, in Hitler’s case, in the context of a sense of national humiliation following WWI).
“It’d be hard for me to overstate my skepticism for the genre of popular political science books charging that their authors’ enemies are innately evil. I haven’t read Mooney’s book”
It is obvious you have not read it because he makes no such claim nor have I. In fact he ends the book with a new found respect for conservatives. Loyalty, personal responsibility, being willing to set aside one’s own desires for the good of the group are all admirable qualities. I myself do not despise conservatives in themselves. I do despise the hucksters and grifters who promote pseudoscience and conspiracy theories in order to enrich themselves. Those people find a significant percentage of the population are easily manipulated by preying on their fears and prejudices. That percentage is over represented by conservative personality types and people with that kind of temperament tend to find political conservatism more to their liking. I have met Democrats with conservative personalities but not many. Civil Rights legislation in the 60′s was passed primarily by Republicans with liberal personalities. The reactionary types were in the Democratic Party
Conservatives are not innately evil. No one is. All people are susceptible to certain cognitive biases. Some people more than others. Some other people have found they can manipulate them to their advantage. It is easy to do, you trigger the fear response, as a result one’s rational centers literally shut down and areas of the brain associated with survival are activated.
“if we’re using “liberal” and “conservative” strictly to gauge desire for social change”
No, that’s not how it is used. Conservative means “resistant to change” and Liberal means “novelty seeking”. Political conservatives need not all be authoritarians but virtually all authoritarians would self select for conservative political organizations.
“Indeed, in this narrow sense Hitler, Mussolini, and others (though perhaps not Franco) might be considered liberals”
That’s absurd. Liberalism is not defined as a desire for social change. The authoritarian or conservative mindset would also seek social change because they wish to return to what they perceive as a traditional model for society.
That may be one notion of what those words mean, but they aren’t what people mean when they discuss their political ramifications. For example, how do attitudes towards abortion and free markets fall into this setting?
Political alignments are to a large effect due to historical consequences, not due to any simple coherent philosophical positions.
Once they have power, yes. In order to seize power, they need to appeal to “novelty seeking” liberals in order to destroy the existing order, especially all those annoying checks and balances designed to keep any one person from acquiring power.
You might be interested in these two articles. Note that Moldbug’s writing is cited as an example of insight porn in the comments.
The “Dark Enlightenment” crowd differs from the Conservative crowd in that the former are more likely to be maladapted people wanting radical change in society and novelty in their ideas while the latter are well adjusted people who dislike change since it is cognitively expensive to deal with. Here is a left wing take on the difference. I think this is a key problem of his readers since it biases them towards such ideas (this includes me naturally). Arguably Marxism had a boosted appeal in the middle of the 20th century among Western intellectual elites because of similar reasons.
Moldbug himself probably only enjoys demolishing Universalism as much as he does because his grandparents where Communists, parents where Liberals and he moved in the university crowd in California, so the ideas he comes up with and the material he seeks out differ radically from what he was immersed in as a child, teenager and probably even now.
So, I agree with this at a very weak level. The question is how good an indicator is this? For example, I know a very successful mathematician who has extreme right-wing politics, and another who has extreme left-wing politics. I know a linguist who is a monarchist. The fact is that humans can be highly rational in one area while extremely irrational in another. Look for example at how much of the left has extreme anti-nuclear power, anti-GMO and pro-alt med views that have little connection to evidence. The degree to which the left is “relatively free” has the word “relative” doing a lot of work in that sentence. Moreover, Moldbug’s views don’t fit into a standard notion of far-right.
Another issue to point out is that the studies which show a difference between left-wing and right-wing cognition are to a large extent limited: The differences in populations are quite small. Moreover, by other metrics, conservatives have more science knowledge than liberals on average. In fact, the GSS data strongly suggests that in general the most stupid, ignorant people are actually the political moderates. They have lower average vocab, and on average perform more poorly at answering basic science questions.
So I’m deeply confused by this statement. You seem to be asserting that “Person X who says A will be extremely unlikely to have anything useful to say.” And asserting that “If Person Y thinks that Person X has interesting things to say about B despite X’s declaration of A, that makes the person Y even less likely to have useful things to say?” I’m curious, if we had a Person Z who pointed out that Y had interesting thing to say about issue C, would Z become even further less useful to listen to?
“The fact is that humans can be highly rational in one area while extremely irrational in another.”
Really? How do you know that? Why shouldn’t it be true that someone who is deeply wrong about one thing would not also be wrong about another? Your counter argument is a common fallacy. I am referring to studies in which a population is tested for whatever it is the study is looking for. You, like so many others these days, counter by saying: “I knew this one guy, he wasn’t like that so your study must be wrong.” You are correct that global warming is true regardless of the politics of the person. However the reverse is not true. The politics one has are strong indicators of how likely it is one holds beliefs that are not true.
There is in fact what is called the “smart idiot” effect. Conservatives who are better educated tend to be MORE wrong than their less educated base because they have more resources to bring to bear in rationalizing their fears. This is all about fear you know. Certain people react very fearfully to change. Like changing ideas about marriage for example. They then marshal their intellectual abilities to defend their emotional priors. The fact they can do so eloquently changes nothing.
--
“Moreover, by other metrics, conservatives have more science knowledge than liberals on average.”
So in responding to scientific studies that show differences between how authoritarians and liberals process data you cite… what? a blog? I am guessing that the blog you consider most relevant is that of Razib Kahn.
Razib poses the question “are conservatives more scientifically literate than liberals?” Well that is a different question isn’t it? Furthermore the questions in his database search do not test for scientific literacy. They test for conformity. Which I am more than willing to admit conservatives would perform better at. If I repeat the social norm that astrology is unscientific do I have “more science knowledge” than someone who does not? Or am I simply aping the values of my tribe and signaling I am a beta male in good standing?
Liberals would predictably adopt scientific ideas outside the norm because they are interested in them and it is exciting to explore the new or odd for it’s own rewards. Just as for a conservative it is comforting to reaffirm consensus beliefs. Both personalities are rewarded for their behavior. One for seeking out the new, the other for conformity to authority. Both are necessary for any healthy society. However, conservative personalities have a greater need for epistemic closure and are therefore more susceptible to a self validating reality bubble.
Which is what we see today on the right in the US.
--
“In fact, the GSS data strongly suggests that in general the most stupid, ignorant people are actually the political moderates.”
As Razib himself says “The Audacious Epigone did not control for background variables.”
--
“You seem to be asserting that “Person X who says A will be extremely unlikely to have anything useful to say.” And asserting that “If Person Y thinks that Person X has interesting things to say about B despite X’s declaration of A, that makes the person Y even less likely to have useful things to say?”″
Because the acolyte is always less than the master.
I prefer to cut Gordian knots rather than spend my days trying to untie them. So if it is true that Moldbug is a royalist and admires the fascist dictator Generalissimo Franco (who is still dead) then he is low on my stack of “people I should give a shit about”. Any followers even less so because they can’t even be original about who’s boots they should lick.
Ezra Pound was a great poet and likewise a fascist and admirer of Spain’s Franco. But poetry is art and while I might be able to set aside my political opinions to make room for Pound I would not consider anything he said outside of that to be of great value. There have been many artists who held political views I find repugnant and there have been many of history’s monsters who created artifacts of great beauty. The Samurai lords of feudal Japan created works of great beauty by night and literally hacked their peasants into bits by day. But art is one thing about which it is impossible to have “wrong” opinions about.
I have to have a filter. If I do not have one I will spend all my time pursuing false trails and diving into rabbit holes that go nowhere. So… in my first reply in this thread I clicked on the first link to Molbug’s pretentious twaddle on how he was going to teach people “true” economic theory. It was very kind of him in my view to make it clear from the beginning that he had no interest at all in economics as a science. So… someone who makes a thought error that bad, who thinks you can dictate what is true about economics, how likely is it that such a person would make the same thinking error in other disciplines? I think the odds are quite good. I did read a bit more before I closed the tab and he does seem to have a way with words. So.… there’s that… I guess.
If one wishes to understand a topic my advice is to go to any University bookstore and get an undergraduate textbook and read it. The odds are it is likely to be… wait for it… less wrong than some crank on the internet who thinks the academic world is conspiring against him. PLOP! Into the dustbin of history they go.
In economics that book will be Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw. It WON’T be some crackpot libertarian theory or the latest dribblings from the Austrian school. Why? Because Utopian systems are not about describing what is (and therefore they cannot be about what could be). They are about creating a bubble to insulate oneself from the big bad world. Yes yes it is harsh, reality is truly frightening. It may well be that we have set into motion events that will lead to our extinction. When I was young it was the threat of nuclear war. Today it is the possibility of a global extinction event due to climate change. Perhaps tomorrow it will be a killer asteroid. But denial and retreat are not solutions.
You should read the material linked to from this LW wiki article on Compartmentalization.
My other reply got very long and this matter was essentially tangential so I’ve broken this off into a separate comment.
This seems to be more about word games than anything else. If someone believes that the Earth is round but they don’t know why that’s commonly accepted, they have a fact about the universe, and one that if they think hard enough about it, one that probably pays rent. That they got to that result by “conformity” is both not obviously testable, and isn’t relevant in this context. Understanding that astrology doesn’t work is a perfect example of scientific knowledge. Moreover, I’m not completely sure what you mean by conformity. For example, I’ve never personally tested whether astrology works or not. Is it conformity to accept the broad set of scientific papers showing that it doesn’t work?
By the way, you can quote on less wrong by putting a “>” at the beginning of a paragraph. So if I write “> this” I get:
Moving on:
No. That’s not the argument being made here. The argument being made is twofold: 1) Exceptions exist (which doesn’t contradict the statistical claim) and 2) The statistics are actually weak effects. But if you prefer, consider the following situation: In many parliamentary systems one has a wide variety of different political parties. Israel for example has 14 parties with representation in the Knesset. Almost any two parties agree on at least one issue, and disagree on a variety of issues. That means that if a party is correct about all issues, then there have to be a large number (or even a majority) of people who are correct about that issue but wrong on many other issues. Even in a system like the US, people have a variety of different views and don’t fall into two strict camps in many ways (here again is somewhere where the GSS data is worth looking at), so the claim that people are across the board irrational or rational just doesn’t make sense.
Sure, this is likely the cause of some of what is going on here, especially in regards to global warming. Moreover, more educated people are more likely to know what their own tribe is generally expected to believe and adjust their views accordingly.
I’m citing GSS data which happens to be discussed in more detail at a certain set of blogs. Note that the GSS data is freely availalble so you can easily verify the claims yourself. Note also that phrasing this question as “authoritarian” v. “liberal” is even more misleading than your earlier statement about authoritaianism. The data in question is explicitly about self-identification as liberal or conservative, not about any metric of authoritarianism. Indeed, many viewpoints that are classically seen as “conservative” or “right-wing” are anti-authoritarian. For example, free market economics is a right-wing viewpoint.
Yes, and there are actually fascinating things that occur when you try to. If you control in the GSS for income and education for example then self-identified liberals outperform self-identified conservatives. But that’s not terribly relevant: the question here is given someone’s political orientation, what should you expect about their knowledge level and accuracy of world view across politics and other issues? The underlying causal issues are an interesting side-issue but don’t touch on the basic question.
That doesn’t make any sense. You are essentially claiming that someone who says “That guy over there may be wrong about a lot of things but he may have a handful of valid points” is more wrong than the person believes all the wrong points. Essentially, this claim amounts to saying that being open to a possibility of a diamond in the coal is more irrational than thinking the coals are all diamonds. Do you see the problem?
Sure, I think reading Moldbug is generally a waste of time and wouldn’t recommend people to read him. But that’s not the issue that we’re discussing. Scroll back up a bit. The issue that started this subthread was the claim that some people on LW thinking that Moldbug might be worth paying attention to meant that there was something deeply wrong with Less Wrong as a whole. That’s the context that’s relevant here (and in that context most of the rest of your comment isn’t germane).
Let me get this straight, you’re accusing LessWrong of group think because we’re willing to listen to fringe viewpoints and take them seriously if they seem to merit it?