It seems reasonable to suppose that since rationalizing people ruins their value as political pawns, there might be some effort to keep people from learning those things which do so, but I don’t know of any examples of that, so I really couldn’t say
To me this sentence feels bad. It feels like it comes from the kind of people who invent wrong conspiracy theories.
In the German Chaos Computer Congress (CCC) I found people who are actually can reason well about hidden political information. Andy Müller-Maghun spoke in 2007 about how the NSA has access to the German internet long before the Snowden revelations and was right about that. At the time I spoked to someone doing parliamentary supervision of the intelligence service of the city of Berlin (Verfassungsschutz) and that person was relatively certain that this wasn’t the case.
The CCC does a really good job at keeping wrong conspiracy theories from their stage. The mindset that comes with that is to focus on actual facts while being skeptic instead of doing pattern matching. High IQ people are good at finding patterns that don’t exist when they try to do pattern matching.
You also seem to do a poor job at applying your own principles by using a phrase like “political pawns” here. Nobody in power is going to get up in the morning in a Western democracy and think about how to change the education system in a way to turn people into political pawns. On the other hand, a person might think about how to transform the education system in a way that it produces more trustworthy signals for employers to know which prospective employees will do the job well.
The desire for employers having trustworthy signals then lead to the push for standardized testing. If you grade political education by standardized testing you need tests that have standardized answers that the student has to guess instead of giving the teacher the ability to grade original thinking well. You could pattern much “turning people into pawns” to this but that’s not going to give you a good understanding of the complexities involved in the decisions around No Child Left Behind and similar efforts in other countries. To do that you actually need to study those issues in detail instead of trying to project dynamics onto them based on the kind of reasoning that lead to this post.
As for conspiracy theories, you may well be right. My first thought is that rationalists don’t make up a strong enough faction, nor do they “infect” others enough to be worth paying attention to. It’s also possible that, practically speaking, you don’t turn a lot of normal order-following people into rationalists, you only turn nerds into rationalists, which is hardly a loss worth noticing.
Speculation aside, as I said, I have no reason to think this is happening; I mention a prediction that this whole system would make (or, at least, what might superficially seem like an appropriate prediction) as a way of clarifying it, by addressing it from another angle.
Hacker culture and the CCC don’t use the rationalist label, but they represent what nerds who think well about politics can do. Julian Assange (who I heard to times speaking at the CCC) makes enough of a slash to be worthy paying attention to.
Good players in general are trying strengthen political coalitions in the form of political parties, special interest groups, political movements, etc. So, there’s a natural push to grow each of these groups, that is, to fill them with people who will receive orders and carry them out in the form of reciting the groups talking points.
Then, the talkings come top-down, and are designed to use those groups, and the order-following, talking points-reciting pawns that make them up as vehicles to carry their vision, ie, the perception of the world that is warped to benefit them in some way.
As such, I wasn’t really thinking about how to make humans into adults that follow the “orders” of their tribe; it’s my impression that human are naturally tribe’s-order-followers, so, no need to make the schools produce them or anything like that. The effort is focused on getting those humans into your tribe rather than into one of your competitors.
The problem is that your argument seems to be theoretical in nature instead based on the empiric observations of the actors in question.
I have knowledge about how politics works where I live that comes from in person conversations and my knowledge of what I know about US politics comes from reading about it but I find it unlikely that even US politics is going to work the way you present it to work.
It seems like you equate the skill to convince a friend that to repeat Democratic or Republican talking points as being about political coalition building in the sense you need to become a politician. It isn’t. The way most people interact with politics is like watching football. They are fans or one party but they aren’t politically active. When you get to people who are actually politically active they have a lot of other concerns. They have personal stakes and there career depend on it. They also know a lot more boring details about the actual issues that are involved.
I’m not quite sure how I’ve managed to give this impression. The rank-and-file, order-repeating members of most coalitions don’t necessarily have any skills at all. Naturally, some do; some are personable and charming and creative and so on, but that’s not my point at all. Their ability to get others to join their coalition is probably just about being good representatives of their coalition, seeming nice and powerful, while also offering status to joining members, I suppose. I think of them them as completely different from the people who decide what talking points they want the group to adopt and why, who are also probably more aware of PR needs and stuff. Those are the people who actually have to know how politics works, while most people just need to know how social interaction works and then repeat what they’re told to.
Thank you for the link; I’ll check it out. Writing about this stuff has garnered a great many fascinating links :)
To me this sentence feels bad. It feels like it comes from the kind of people who invent wrong conspiracy theories.
In the German Chaos Computer Congress (CCC) I found people who are actually can reason well about hidden political information. Andy Müller-Maghun spoke in 2007 about how the NSA has access to the German internet long before the Snowden revelations and was right about that. At the time I spoked to someone doing parliamentary supervision of the intelligence service of the city of Berlin (Verfassungsschutz) and that person was relatively certain that this wasn’t the case.
The CCC does a really good job at keeping wrong conspiracy theories from their stage. The mindset that comes with that is to focus on actual facts while being skeptic instead of doing pattern matching. High IQ people are good at finding patterns that don’t exist when they try to do pattern matching.
You also seem to do a poor job at applying your own principles by using a phrase like “political pawns” here. Nobody in power is going to get up in the morning in a Western democracy and think about how to change the education system in a way to turn people into political pawns. On the other hand, a person might think about how to transform the education system in a way that it produces more trustworthy signals for employers to know which prospective employees will do the job well.
The desire for employers having trustworthy signals then lead to the push for standardized testing. If you grade political education by standardized testing you need tests that have standardized answers that the student has to guess instead of giving the teacher the ability to grade original thinking well. You could pattern much “turning people into pawns” to this but that’s not going to give you a good understanding of the complexities involved in the decisions around No Child Left Behind and similar efforts in other countries. To do that you actually need to study those issues in detail instead of trying to project dynamics onto them based on the kind of reasoning that lead to this post.
As for conspiracy theories, you may well be right. My first thought is that rationalists don’t make up a strong enough faction, nor do they “infect” others enough to be worth paying attention to. It’s also possible that, practically speaking, you don’t turn a lot of normal order-following people into rationalists, you only turn nerds into rationalists, which is hardly a loss worth noticing.
Speculation aside, as I said, I have no reason to think this is happening; I mention a prediction that this whole system would make (or, at least, what might superficially seem like an appropriate prediction) as a way of clarifying it, by addressing it from another angle.
Hacker culture and the CCC don’t use the rationalist label, but they represent what nerds who think well about politics can do. Julian Assange (who I heard to times speaking at the CCC) makes enough of a slash to be worthy paying attention to.
I probably should have been clearer.
Good players in general are trying strengthen political coalitions in the form of political parties, special interest groups, political movements, etc. So, there’s a natural push to grow each of these groups, that is, to fill them with people who will receive orders and carry them out in the form of reciting the groups talking points.
Then, the talkings come top-down, and are designed to use those groups, and the order-following, talking points-reciting pawns that make them up as vehicles to carry their vision, ie, the perception of the world that is warped to benefit them in some way.
As such, I wasn’t really thinking about how to make humans into adults that follow the “orders” of their tribe; it’s my impression that human are naturally tribe’s-order-followers, so, no need to make the schools produce them or anything like that. The effort is focused on getting those humans into your tribe rather than into one of your competitors.
The problem is that your argument seems to be theoretical in nature instead based on the empiric observations of the actors in question.
I have knowledge about how politics works where I live that comes from in person conversations and my knowledge of what I know about US politics comes from reading about it but I find it unlikely that even US politics is going to work the way you present it to work.
It seems like you equate the skill to convince a friend that to repeat Democratic or Republican talking points as being about political coalition building in the sense you need to become a politician. It isn’t. The way most people interact with politics is like watching football. They are fans or one party but they aren’t politically active. When you get to people who are actually politically active they have a lot of other concerns. They have personal stakes and there career depend on it. They also know a lot more boring details about the actual issues that are involved.
If you want a post on coalition building Raemon wrote based on his own experience https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/mL7PJKu3NEkHLZ9vP/melting-gold-and-organizational-capacity . The post doesn’t advocate getting blind followers to recite talking points but shows a lot more practical concerns in getting people involved.
I’m not quite sure how I’ve managed to give this impression. The rank-and-file, order-repeating members of most coalitions don’t necessarily have any skills at all. Naturally, some do; some are personable and charming and creative and so on, but that’s not my point at all. Their ability to get others to join their coalition is probably just about being good representatives of their coalition, seeming nice and powerful, while also offering status to joining members, I suppose. I think of them them as completely different from the people who decide what talking points they want the group to adopt and why, who are also probably more aware of PR needs and stuff. Those are the people who actually have to know how politics works, while most people just need to know how social interaction works and then repeat what they’re told to.
Thank you for the link; I’ll check it out. Writing about this stuff has garnered a great many fascinating links :)