Good comment, although as you can see I don’t share much of your feelings except cynicism and weariness. One thing, however: why have you said “right-wing traditionalist” instead of “right-wing authoritarian”?
To me, Moldbug looks so curious—and suspicious—partly because of his obscurantism/doublespeak about “traditionalism”, which I take to be something like Sam below always argues: cultural controls and policing against egalitarian memes, official propaganda of property-based relations (such as slavery, feudalism or patriarchy) strict and obsessively enforced gender dominance, etc, etc.
Of all those, he has argued for chattel slavery and yet against discrimination by sexuality—but as Sam would tell you, those are part of the same model of dominance! Screw “democracy” it’s boring anyway- what would you say about those?
One thing, however: why have you said “right-wing traditionalist” instead of “right-wing authoritarian”?
A right wing traditionalist is authoritarian, but not all right wing authoritarians are traditionalist. I was hoping you would have noticed by now that I while I think he is right about progressivism and power in American society I have my own disagreements with Moldbug. BTW Moldbug hasn’t argued for chattel slavery as much as pointed out that the modern educated person has only ever heard the straw man argument for chattel slavery.
So you want me to talk about traditionalism? I don’t know if I can do so with justice as my brain is thoroughly modern due to upbringing. But I will try with my broken mind to point to some traces left behind by the poorly understood institutions we have lost.
Patriarchy as existed in 1900 Britain was probably an incredibly good arrangement for most people involved. On utilitarian grounds I’m pretty sure moderate patriarchy wins out over the sexual marketplace of today. Before you dismiss this out of hand pause to consider that we have data showing men today are about as happy with their marriages as they where 50 years ago, but women are much unhappier. And far fewer people marry today. Let that sink in. So even wives that really want to marry today are more unhappy with their relationships than women who may not have wanted to get married that much but did so because of social pressures and lived under the alleged horror of 1950s relationship norms. I don’t know maybe married women are much much unhappier than unmarried women and its just marriage becoming (even more) broken and unmarried women are much happier? But if this is so, where is the evidence of this? I haven’t seen it.
In addition to this parents experience a much smaller drop in happiness after the birth of children if they are married (a proxy in the US for a stable relationship where the father takes care of the child together with the mother—I have no doubt the difference is smaller in Sweden where lots of people just remain in that kind of relationship unmarried). So how is abolishing moderate patriarchy working out when it comes to personal romantic and family happiness of average women?
And aren’t you someone that cares about economic inequality? Let us again look at the numbers. What happened to the relative position of working class and middle class families since the 1950s. If it wasn’t for technological progress they would be living materially much worse lives, de facto they need now two working parents to reach a relative position that one working parent could acheive before. And I don’t think you will have trouble seeing how the loss of status of the archetype of “honourable working man” resulted in loss of political power and weakened non-monetary incentives for work which contributed to the erosion of the middle class and the implosion of the lower class into the rapidly decivilizing underclass. Speaking of which how do men and women like the American inner city? You know the one with “strong single mothers” and thuggish boyfriends. Oh but that is caused by material poverty and racism and… but that doesn’t make sense if you think about it like at all. Since they where doing better on measures of social dysfunction when absolute material poverty and racism where much worse. I’m not arguing for material poverty and racism or that they made stuff better, but they probably can’t be blamed for the negative changes since the 1960s.
This has all been utilitarian arguing, once you get to virtue ethics moderate patriarchy gets really interesting, but enough about that. Its getting late here and I have other topics I’d like to touch. Humans have instincts to display fierce egalitarian norms. These are misfiring in the modern world. And I’m not speaking of the macro scale, I’m speaking of the micro interpersonal scale. We have the same social instincts as foragers, but none of the institutions of foragers to channel these instincts and we’ve just de-constructed the farmer institutions that evolved much more recently around them too. Re-emergent status games are more vicious. What feels like the cure, the mechanism that in forager tribes ensured equality and everyone being a productive member of the tribe, in fact make things worse.
And recall even in the ancient tribe man the sly rule bender found ways to have formal equality between tribe members but informal hierarchy. Explicit hierarchical society one that does not endorse egalitarian memes is one that removes much of this hypocrisy. We say we are all equal, but Ung decides most matters. We say the Louis is in charge, and Louis decides most matters. Which do you prefer? The non-neurotypical in me longs for a society where things do what they say on the label.
In addition consider the effects of status competition in a caste system being partitioned very clearly into several different status ladders. Can you see the space it leaves to developing healthy and adaptive norms unique to each profession? Can you see the psychological benefits?
And aren’t you someone that cares about economic inequality? Let us again look at the numbers. What happened to the relative position of working class and middle class families since the 1950s. If it wasn’t for technological progress they would be living materially much worse lives, de facto they need now two working parents to reach a relative position that one working parent could acheive before.
Are you claiming that the end of patriarchy caused an economic decline leading to middle- and working-class families being worse off to the point that both parents now have to work? Because if not, your argument is a non-sequitur–if the economy declined due to reasons unrelated to a less patriarchal structure, then patriarchy having persisted would have made families worse off.
Personally, I think it’s less a story of economic decline, and more a story of there being more consumer goods. Nowadays there are cell phones, expensive flatscreen TVs, tons of video game consoles/entertainment systems, and other things to spend money on, and people who don’t have those things feel materially pool–but in the 1950s, none of those things existed.
Are you claiming that the end of patriarchy caused an economic decline leading to middle- and working-class families being worse off to the point that both parents now have to work?
Yes I’m quite explicitly arguing it contributed to it. I said this to Multiheaded right after what you quoted.
And I don’t think you will have trouble seeing how the loss of status of the archetype of “honourable working man” resulted in loss of political power and weakened non-monetary incentives for work which contributed to the erosion of the middle class and the implosion of the lower class into the rapidly decivilizing underclass.
I guess the problem is that yes, I do have trouble seeing the “loss of status of the archetype of ‘honorable working man’” leading to an overall economic decline that means both parents have to work–why wouldn’t it be balanced out by the new archetype of the “independent working woman”?
I think I’m probably running into some belief bias here–I’m having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.
You’re probably right that it’s a bad idea for some men, though. Hell, I know some of those men–friends and friends’ boyfriends who are in their 20s and still live with their moms. I’m also not all that familiar, personally, with the “American inner city” that you talk about. And I have no idea how to evaluate the fact that women are apparently less happy with their marriages–but if someone did a study on it and showed a correlation, then something is going on there.
However, there’s no going back at this point (or, at least, I really think there shouldn’t be). Why not wait until society settles into this massive, unprecedented change and creates some new archetypes?
Sorry. I’m really trying to look at your point of view with fresh eyes. This doesn’t happen to me very often, that I have such a strong (and until now unnoticed) opinion on something that I can’t properly think about the opposite being true. It’s a somewhat unpleasant feeling, to be honest.
But gaaaaaah, I’m so entirely grateful that I don’t live in the 1950s! And that’s despite the fact that I’ve sometimes felt like arranged marriage would be just, well, convenient–the main reason I think it would be convenient is because it would be so much less time consuming, and give me more time to do whatever the hell I want with my spare time, as opposed to spending it dating, which I find tedious.
I think I’m probably running into some belief bias here–I’m having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.
I appreciate your effort to remain open to considering this. I know it is hard to overcome personal experiences when social data contradicts them. It is even harder to overcome opinions that something that is good for us is not good for society as whole, you don’t need to read Robin Hanson to see our brains aren’t built for that. One of the reasons I dislike the personal being the political is that when it does people get very very defensive about any choices they’ve made in their personal lives, even when you merely point out they don’t work out well for all people.
I’d like to discuss the role of loss of male status in connection to greater societal stratification more in either private correspondence or a separate discussion. I would ask we let that point rest for now so that it due to its controversial nature (and I’m less confident in the reasoning behind it anyway) doesn’t steal attention from other points.
But gaaaaaah, I’m so entirely grateful that I don’t live in the 1950s! And that’s despite the fact that I’ve sometimes felt like arranged marriage would be just, well, convenient–the main reason I think it would be convenient is because it would be so much less time consuming, and give me more time to do whatever the hell I want with my spare time, as opposed to spending it dating, which I find tedious.
The social science is pretty settled that people we can be with in happy relationships are relativey common. For those of us satisfied with the other person(s) in our lives like to pretend those are unprobable outcomes. They aren’t. Our actual selection process for partners also amounts to a pretty weak filter. The greater mystery is why we are so stuck signaling the traditional romantic narrative.
There is no strong utilitarian reason to implement those weak filters on the person itself if institutions can handle it better. You reap most of the benefits and you can get most of the good feelings of choice by picking between the three or four possible brides your family has suggested.
But gaaaaaah, I’m so entirely grateful that I don’t live in the 1950s!
But how much do you actually know about the 1950s? The cultural icon of “the 1950s” is not only not the territory it isn’t much of a good map either.
The social science is pretty settled that people we can be with in happy relationships are relativey common
Sources? In particular:
Why are divorce rates so high?
Why do people in this time and place expect to date around kind of a lot before finding someone they want to stay with? (Possibly they start out picky so no one works and then stop so many people do.)
Why am I attracted to only about a tenth of smart people in my age group enough to say yes if they asked me out, and only a couple percent enough to bother asking out myself? (Maybe it’s uncorrelated to long-term suitability?)
Why, when I tried dating anyone who asked me out just to see how doing things normally worked, was it invariably catastrophic? (Maybe because I was living a lie in the first place.)
I’m having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
Roissy would of course dismiss your self report as a shit test and the rationalization hamster running, but then you would say that your observations are more reliable than my and Roissy’s observations, because you are female and can see the truth from inside, whereas I can only see it from outside.
Downloading a girly cartoon romance at random, labelled as a romance and intended for a female audience, and skimming it: Princess is much younger than the prince, and has been given to the prince to seal a peace treaty: The deal was that she was supposed to marry the King, but the King took one look at her and unilaterally changed the deal, giving her to the Prince instead. Prince treats her like the small brat that she in fact is. Prince is a leader of men, commander of the army, and has slaughtered various people in princess’ immediate family. The deal is that her land conditionally surrenders to the prince’s King as a result of military defeat, but the prince has to marry her so that her people get representation and her royal lineage does not totally disappear. Story is that, like the King, he does not want to marry her, because she is a small brat and much hotter chicks keep trying to get his attention, and she homicidally hates him because he has with his own sword killed one of her beloved relatives, and his army under his direct command has killed most of her other relatives (hence the marriage)
Skipping over a zillion frames of the prince in manly poses experiencing deep emotions, thinking about deep emotions, and talking about deep emotions, to the end, they start to like each other just in time for the scheduled wedding,. Final scene is that he goes off to war again and realizes he misses her. He wears the sword with which he killed her beloved relatives in every frame except for a frame when they go to bed, including the frame where he realizes he misses her.
Well I did not check every frame, but every frame that I checked he is wearing that sword, except when they were in bed. As far as I could tell in my somewhat superficial reading, he never regrets or apologizes for killing off much of her family, and treats her as an idiot for making a fuss about it until she stops making a fuss about it.
My account of the story is probably not completely accurate, (aagh, I am drowning in estrogen) but it is close enough. Prince, Princess, sword, arranged marriage, and sword.
So, I would say that the intended readers of that romance rather like patriarchy, and I would not believe anything they said to the contrary.
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
I wouldn’t know. I don’t really read romance novels–I much prefer sci-fi and thrillers, of which there is more than enough to read. I’ve occasionally watched romantic comedy films–being dragged there by family members, usually–but a) I’ve never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe, and b) I wouldn’t go voluntarily anyway.
So you may be right that the ‘intended audience’ of that novel likes patriarchy, but I am obviously not the intended audience and I have no idea who they are.
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
a) I’ve never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe,
Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?
If so, I would say that would probably be seen by me, though not necessarily by you, as having a plot arch that was not merely similar, but for all practical purposes identical.
Much as all porns probably look indistinguishable to you, (naked girl moans a lot) all romances look identical to me.
All romances have a plot that corresponds to marriage as commanded by the New Testament, and endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century: Dangerous powerful high status male overwhelms weak frail low status female, but then falls gooey in love with her and only her.
And now we have a completely different system, and all the indications are that women do not like it, even though they said, and keep on saying, that the new system is what they want.
Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?
I’ve read Twilight and ended up seeing the films with family members. I liked the action scenes. I think I miss a lot of the romantic cues–to me it’s just characters looking at each other–and I think I skipped those sections in the books.
Dangerous powerful high status male overwhelms weak frail low status female, but then falls gooey in love with her and only her.
Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot. I expect that females in the past who chose, or just ended up with, low-status men with nice personalities got less resources for them and their children than women who were able to attract high-status men. Maybe having that instinct misfires now sometimes–there are plenty of men who are extremely nice and caring and make enough money at their low-status job to provide for a family. But I’m definitely not attracted to guys who come across as significantly lower status than me.
The confounding factor for me is that I’m non-neurotypical and I basically don’t experience physical attraction, definitely not at first glance–I can have a crush on people for their personality (or status) and I develop a solid bond of affection over time, and although I don’t generally like being touched, I can overcome this for specific people with enough repetition and conditioning. But relationships are time consuming, and guys tend to start whining about how I always prioritize other stuff (work, school, extracurriculars) over spending time with them, which drives me crazy because if I spend more time on those things, it’s because they are higher priorities for me. And I guess I’m physically attractive enough that I don’t have a ridiculously hard time finding guys who like me–in fact, I feel like it being too easy is a problem now and makes me less motivated to try to make my relationships work. So yeah...there’s a pretty high activation barrier for me to get into a relationship at all, and if the guy behaves in any way that sets off “low status behaviours” in my monkey brain (i.e. whining about how life is unfair to him, coming across as desperate, being unemployed, spending lots of time at unproductive activities like video games and generally seeming to have poor willpower, etc), it feels like I have no reason to push through the initially unpleasant-for-me phase of dating, because he wouldn’t be a good provider-for-children anyway.
Those are all reasons why I’m probably an outlier, as female go...although I think, when queried in imagine-if format, my brain still gives the usual answer to a lot of romance questions. (Would it be kind of cool to have an immortal vampire gooey in love with me? Well, yeah. But if he tried to nag me into being less of a workaholic or not biking alone in downtown late at night or stuff like that, it would still annoy me.)
Much as all porns probably look indistinguishable to you.
Probably–I’ve only seen 1 or 2 so I don’t actually know. I’m curious as to whether they seem varied to you.
Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot.
Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status. High status girls is not a major male wish fulfillment fantasy, whereas in romance, high status guys are as uniform as moaning in porn.. Even when the sex interest girl is a badass action girl with batman like athletic abilities, for example Yuffie the thief, she gets in trouble for stealing stuff, making her low status.
Further I doubt that there are what males would call action scenes in twilight because if there had been, males would have willingly watched it. What you are calling action scenes were probably status scenes involving violence and cruelty. I assume this because many, possibly most, romances have status scenes involving violence and cruelty. Love interest cruelty in romance is as predictable and repetitious as the girl moaning in porn. The point is not action, but to prove the love interest is potentially capable of cruelty and violence.
In an action scene, James Bond is in grave danger. In a romance cruelty scene, the love interest hurts someone really badly without the audience ever feeling the love interest to be in danger. The heroine is never in danger from the love interest, but the main point of the scene is that she could be. He is dangerous and badass. Hence the propensity of the prince to knock off relatives of the princess with that prominent and lovingly depicted sword.
In contrast, the main point of an action scene is that the hero is in danger. For example the henchman Jaws in “the spy who loved me” is way more badass than James Bond, so that the audience believes James Bond is in danger. No one is ever more badass than the romance love interest.
So yeah...there’s a pretty high activation barrier for me to get into a relationship at all
That is because all the available guys are roughly equal to you in status. So you don’t really want any of them. Not enough immortal vampires to go around. Hence Saint Paul’s policy that females should remain silent in church, wear a head covering, etc—harmless ways to make all females in church artificially lower status than all males in church, thus artificially making all males in church hot, thus making it possible to accomplish his directive: “let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” without the woman having to wait until they run out of eggs in their thirties, thereby causing their status in the sexual market place to drop like a stone until, at last, due to their lowered sexual market place status, they finally find that males are hot enough that they want to put out the necessary effort.
In order to ban hypergamy, Paul had to make females not want hypergamy.
Like Groucho Marx, you will only find them interesting when they start losing interest—hence the extremely low reproduction rate and high fertility clinic attendance rate of intelligent well educated women.
Observe the reasonably high rates of marriage near the age of maximum fertility among Mormons, Palestinians, and Amish.
That is because all the available guys are roughly equal to you in status. So you don’t really want any of them. Not enough immortal vampires to go around.
Well, maybe. But I think one of the serious confounding factors is that I don’t actually like sex and all the associated relationship crap. My friend, who does, has been in lots of relationships with guys who seemed low status to me (and yes, I had specifically that thought...most of them so far still live with their moms.) Granted, she’s a single mom who hasn’t finished her high school, and doesn’t give off the impression of intelligence when she speaks (apparently I do)–so perhaps her status is closer to theirs, and maybe she feels that it’s lower. So it’s possible for her to have a relationship where she doesn’t get along great with the guy, and sometimes doesn’t even like his personality that much, but the sex is awesome and that balances it out. Wouldn’t happen with me. The sex is something I put up with in order to make this weird alien beast happy, so that I can have the other parts of the relationship–I kind of like the whole living together, cooking together, “playing house” thing. And I want kids, and don’t want to be a single mom. Honestly, that’s probably the main reason I make any effort–I don’t get lonely per se being single. (Are you implying that my feelings will change and I suddenly will start to get massively lonely once I perceive that my status has dropped and I’m no longer desirable to males?)
I’m trying to think of times that I did perceive myself as lower status, i.e. high school. Hard to know if I remember correctly, but I had crushes on guys and a few girls. Same as now. If I fantasized at all, my fantasies didn’t include kissing or touching–should have been a clue-in, although at that point I was still expecting to be “normal” with respect to those things. I remember dating a guy at the end of high school who, physically, was considered much more relatively attractive than me, enough that people made comments about it to my friends–but I think he considered me similar or even higher status–I was much more independent, living on my own while he lived with his mom, working and paying my own tuition and rent, getting 90s in first-year university while he failed a couple of his first exams. And he was very aware of that and made comments about it. (In hindsight, that may have been a problem in that relationship, and may have contributed to why we broke up. Maybe I should have learned to play lower status in the sense of “act less smart”? Is that what most girls do?)
The sex is something I put up with in order to make this weird alien beast happy, so that I can have the other parts of the relationship–I kind of like the whole living together, cooking together, “playing house” thing. And I want kids, and don’t want to be a single mom.
You could date ace people and not have to make this tradeoff.
Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status.
What? That doesn’t seem true. Many of them are his near equals (but evil or at least rivals). Many are colleagues that are fairly high status. I mean, probably somewhat lower status than Bond. But he’s freaking James Bond. He’s the highest status person there is (in his universe). High standard to meet!
That doesn’t seem true. Many of them are his near equals (but evil or at least rivals).
Then why are they completely replaced from one film to the next? Whereas there are recurring male characters (and recurring female characters that Bond doesn’t sleep with).
I mean, probably somewhat lower status than Bond. But he’s freaking James Bond. He’s the highest status person there is (in his universe). High standard to meet!
Then why are they completely replaced from one film to the next?
Because people like to see romance (or, at least, sexual trysts) bloom. Stable ongoing relationships are sweet and all but just aren’t what we like to see. See what happens when any male and female leads on TV series get together...
I believe that’s Sam’s point.
That doesn’t seem right. Firstly because it isn’t what he said and secondly because assuming that was his point would hardly be generous to Sam… because it is a terrible (near irrelevant) point.
Ahahahaha! The fanatical, diehard, anti-modern anti-liberal guy… has played Final Fantasy 7 and was enough of a nerd to get the secret character! HahahahahaHA! Sorry, I just find this kinda hilarious for several reasons.
All romances have a plot that corresponds to marriage as commanded by the New Testament, and endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century: Dangerous powerful high status male overwhelms weak frail low status female, but then falls gooey in love with her and only her.
This is not quite the version endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century unless you replace “Dangerous powerful high status male” with “Dangerous but chivalrous powerful high status male”.
we have data showing men today are about as happy with their marriages as they where 50 years ago, but women are much unhappier.
For a utilitarian to take this seriously, you need to make the argument that happiness reports are a reliable indicator of utility possessed. As you note, there are strong reasons (many connected to technological advancement) to believe that practically any alive today has more utility than the average person in 1600 (or perhaps even 1800). So that’s some reason to distrust the assertion that happiness reports accurately report something that we should consider morally weighty.
Since they where doing better on measures of social dysfunction where absolute material poverty and racism where much worse. I’m not arguing for material poverty and racism and they may halp, but they probably can’t be blamed for the negative since the 1960s.
Pending data about minority marriage rates in the 1930s and before, I think my response is “agree denotatively, disagree connotatively.” Even without the gains from technological progress, it seems pretty clear to me that the average minority has more utility now than in 1930, even if the marriage rate is lower.
But the underlying issue is that I think that there are significant policy differences between the victorious community organizer and the losing business executive. There’s a definite partisan slant about things like basic research funding and food safety regulation—I may be mindkilled about this, but I think any reasonable cost-benefit analysis shows one side is more rational about those topics than the other.
Still, there’s always the possibility that I’m terribly mind-killed on this topic—causing me to overestimate the relative power of what I consider the saner parts of the political coalition of which I am a member. And the in-group / out-group smugness is terrible—deserving of being called out whether or not I’m in the in-group just this minute.
So that’s some reason to distrust the assertion that happiness reports accurately report something that we should consider morally weighty.
I thought we where Bayesians here? It certainly is evidence people are happy or unhappy. We generally consider people’s happiness or at least mental suffering to have moral weight.
Yes, that was a bit of loose language. I agree with you that self-reports are reasonable measures of mood—and that mood is entitled to some moral weight.
But Multi discussed some reasons to believe that reports of mood are pliable and unrepresentative.
My point was broader: There’s no particular reason to believe that positive mood is the same thing as, or even correlated with, utility. Utilitarians seek to maximize utility, not positive mood (infinite orgasms is not generally accepted as the utilitarian utopia).
Issues that you already know to poke holes in a simplistic model of “happniess”:
Stockholm Syndrome; enforced and coercive signaling games around happiness; wireheading; “forced orgasms” of various kinds; smiles painted on soul; internalized self-deception under social pressure not to betray unhappniess with the “virtuous” life; the structures of “Libidinal economy” and the assorted Freudo-Marxian stuff...
The family is the agent to which capitalist production delegates the psychological repression of the desires of the child.[41] Psychological repression is distinguished from social oppression insofar as it works unconsciously.[42] Through it, Deleuze and Guattari argue, parents transmit their angst and irrational fears to their child and bind the child’s sexual desires to feelings of shame and guilt.
Psychological repression is strongly linked with social oppression, which levers on it. It is thanks to psychological repression that individuals are transformed into docile servants of social repression who come to desire self-repression and who accept a miserable life as employees for capitalism.[43] A capitalist society needs a powerful tool to counteract the explosive force of desire, which has the potential to threaten its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy; the nuclear family is precisely the powerful tool able to counteract those forces.[44]
The action of the family not only performs a psychological repression of desire, but it disfigures it, giving rise to a consequent neurotic desire, the perversion of incestuous drives and desiring self-repression,[44] as also said by Foucault in the preface, loving power and desiring “the very thing that dominates and exploit us.”[45] The Oedipus complex arises from this double operation: “It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives.”
You can probably see my line of objection, ja? I think you haven’t given it as much serious consideration as I have given the far-right worldview, dude.
P.S. a quick google search also reveals that Alice Miller, a psychologist who survived Warsaw under the Nazis, has written a lot about abusive family structures from an anti-patriarchal/anti-authoritarian standpoint. Here is some anarchist (?) type ranting/blogging about the implications of Miller.
P.P.S. a paper that, in defense of Deleuze, criticizes Zizek’s critique and rejection of Anti-Oedipus.
Yes lots of other possibilities, I’m well aware of those. I wanted to emphasize it that the simple truth is, that when people say they are happy, you should take it as evidence they generally are happy or at least not suffering. I did this because if this isn’t pointed out people will avoid updating as much as they should using the possibility of different explanations as a rationalization.
Be honest, do you think you would feel the need to invoke or investigate those alternative possibilities to explain away greater self-reported happiness in nations with lower GINI coefficents? We apply different standards of discourse for different institutions without having good reason to do so.
Politics is motivated cognition all the way down my friend.
This depends not just on your definition of “happiness”, but also on your definition of “say” :) How many pre-Victorian narratives by women/queers are you able to name at all without digging into Google? Only Jane Austen… and Mary Shelley’s mom… and 1-2 others, I bet.
So, a lot of women might have, without having to worry their pretty little heads, “said” that they are happy through the testimony of their kind and caring husbands. Much like the Soviet people reported their happiness and contentment through their lawfully elected, not-at-all-rubberstamp representatives. Note that those second-hand assertions hardly ever mention sexual consent/rape or corporal punishment or other such things that we’re curious about when assessing marriage. So could you please provide me with some statistics for e.g. matrial rape in 1700s Britain, to support your likely claim that it was not a serious problem? I’d be (pleasantly!) surprised if you could.
(What I wouldn’t be surprised at is you quoting Three Worlds Collide about the space of possible attitudes to sexual consent. Well, as you can see sam0345 also has… interesting… views on consent. Isn’t this evidence of how terribly dangerous—not just promising—it might be for us to become less paranoid and more tolerant in regards to patriarchy?)
Oh man. Sorry, but this is getting to me. I expressed frustration about perceived evasiveness, and then you frustrate me further by avoiding to mention what I’ve explicitly listed above!
I’ve said a million times: in theory I’m ok with absolute decision-making power concentrated in one ruler’s hands, a succession mechanism can probably be figured out, etc, etc. When I’m talking about egalitarianism, I’m not specifically concerned with the interactions between a monarch and subjects!
Instead, I’d like to repeat:
...official propaganda of property-based relations (such as slavery, feudalism or patriarchy) strict and obsessively enforced gender dominance, etc, etc.
(let’s drop the issue of censorship for a moment. I’m assuming you’re against it and, like Moldbug, want “free speech” that simply can’t change anything power-wise due to the ruler(s)′ monopoly on force and weapons.)
Just give me a plain answer of some sort: what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like? Along which Schelling points should limits be placed on a father, a boss? A child, a mother, an employee, a customer, a partner? Ought there be universal limits at all, in your opinion? I think there damn well ought to be, and they should at least act as a rubber band on disproportionate personal power!
I expressed frustration about perceived evasiveness, and then you frustrate me further by avoiding to mention what I’ve explicitly listed above!
I shared a lot of my stance on patriarchy and other kinds of institutionalized inequality present in traditional society. I didn’t think I was being evasive. I mean you do realize that lots of readers here can’t imagine an argument for patriarchy or feudalism at all right? But I can see why it seemed that way to you since we discussed a lot of this material already.
...official propaganda of property-based relations (such as slavery, feudalism or patriarchy) strict and obsessively enforced gender dominance, etc, etc.
So you where among other things asking me about particular policies and institutions that uphold or purport to uphold say patriarchy or a caste system? Things like the inquisition perhaps? The old conservative question of “instead of what” comes up. Let me quote Roy Campbell on this:
“More people have been imprisoned for Liberty, humiliated and tortured for Equality, and slaughtered for Fraternity in this century, than for any less hypocritical motives, during the Middle Ages.”
He does not seem to be obviously wrong. Its incredible how often this happens when you try and actually read let alone take seriously social commentary written decades or centuries ago.
what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like?
Isn’t this something else? Ok no prob I’ll answer it.
I want workplace to be more forager and family to be more farmer. Nearly all of us are socialized to accept ridiculous amounts of workplace domination or what seems like workplace domination to our forager brains. We also get surprisingly little economic gain for this. Indeed I sometimes wonder whether us abandoning farmer values everywhere but in the workplace is a direct result of the rising demands of extreme-farmer-like behaviour in the workplace driven by signalling the market has been unable to correct (or has perhaps inflated?). The psychological toll was simply too large so we “loosed up” elsewhere to keep up with the workplace with bad results for our personal lives and mixed results for measured GDP.
In farmer family life children are treated as small adults with a unique duty to obey and eventually care for their parents. The parents have a responsibility to help their children fit in socially in their community (help them find a mate, an economic niche, make sure to maintain good relations with neighbours and relatives). The father holds greater formal power, while the wife holds great informal power. For neurotypical humans in farmer culture this is an arrangement that should in theory play to the psychological “feel good” triggers and talents of both. It also enables them to pair bond (preventing abandonment). It is a remarkably functional and stable institution considering it has had probably had merely 10 or 20 thousand years to form!
To give an example of dead legal Schelling points related to this, I think child custody should by default fall to the father.
I want workplace to be more forager and family to be more farmer. Nearly all of us are socialized to accept ridiculous amounts of workplace domination or what seems like workplace domination to our forager brains. We also get surprisingly little economic gain for this.
This is an industrial age phenomenon caused by industrial economies of scale.
I agree. It has impressive productivity gains in say 19th century factory work, but I think its gains are much smaller than usually assumed in say a white collar setting. I think the cost to the well-being of the workers might now that we in the West don’t starve any more outweigh the productivity gains. A good utilitarian counterargument can be made that we need every little bit of efficiency until we say cure aging or develop FAI.
It has impressive productivity gains in say 19th century factory work, but I think its gains are much smaller than usually assumed in say a white collar setting.
Heck, I’m not convinced the gains in the white collar setting outweigh the loses due to the resulting signaling games. Especially now that routine secretarial tasks can be done automatically.
Sorry, of course you’re not evasive. We have a communication and inferential distance problem, I’d say.
Nearly all of us are socialized to accept ridiculous amounts of workplace domination or what seems like workplace domination to our forager brains. We also get surprisingly little economic gain for this.
Hehehehehehe!… has it never occured to you that—the “workplace” as such being an industrial-age institution—the domination in it that you so dislike (and quite rightly!) might be the institutional descendant of earlier family-like, harshly hierarchical structures? Imagine the power that a master held over an apprentice in a medieval guild, or the domestic slaves of Ancient Greece.
patriarchy
Isn’t this something else?
Our definitions of patriarchy seem to be world apart. It feels to me as if the examples you cautiously list—“the father holds greater formal power”-with-caveats, or “child custody”—are, frankly, local and minor matters compared to the really systemic things!
Although the term patriarchy is loosely used to stand for ‘male domination’, as has been pointed out above, it more crucially means—as others have stated here: “The rule of The Father”. So patriarchy does not refer to a simple binary pattern of male power over women, but power exerted more complexly by age as well as gender, and by older men over women, children, and younger men. Some of these younger men may inherit and therefore have a stake in patriarchy’s continuing conventions. Others may rebel.… The patriarchal triangular relationship of a father, a mother and an inheriting eldest son frequently form the dynamic and emotional narratives of popular culture and are enacted performatively in rituals of courtship and marriage.[45] They provide conceptual models for organising power relations in spheres that have nothing to do with the family, for example, politics and business.
That’s the big, scary shit to me. (Before anyone thinks about it, my father is just fine, lol! But… you’ve read e.g. Kafka, right?)
Some related feminist blah-blah, please take a look:
The parents have a responsibility to help their children fit in socially in their community (help them find a mate, an economic niche, make sure to maintain good relations with neighbours and relatives).
Replace “The parents” with “The Great All-Benevolent Church”, or “The state social services”, and you’d be alarmed to say the least. Of course well-intentioned help and guidance are very nice… but who sets the guidelines for it, and how is the information about children’s extrapolated volition communicated in your society? In today’s families—humans being humans and all power corrupting most of them—we obviously see parents’ convenience and unexamined prejudgices advertised as “for the children’s own good”. Would there be less of that in your farmer society, or more?
P.S.: how “allowed” should, say, experiments with polyamory be? Socially, economically, legally?
Hehehehehehe!… has it never occured to you that—the “workplace” as such being an industrial-age institution—the domination in it that you so dislike (and quite rightly!) might be the institutional descendant of earlier family-like, harshly hierarchical structures? Imagine the power that a master held over an apprentice in a medieval guild, or the domestic slaves of Ancient Greece.
Well duh. Decaying institutional wisdom, the workplace is a hastily assembled modern construct from sawed up bits of older institutions banged together. If you set up a new institution the traditionalists will point out that of course it will suck. “New institution” also includes trying to use necromancy to resurrect one that has been completely demolished. Traditionalists are fucked because they are like archaeologists looking at preserved DNA in the gut of a mosquito trapped in amber thinking they can now build a working dinosaur out of cardboard cut outs.
We’ve had this conversation with regards to Christianity and its mainline descendant Progressivism. Best bet seems to be to try and figure out how to build a new institution building institution. Those are also know as religions. See Mormonism’s impressive functionality.
That’s the big, scary shit to me.
You can’t have patriarchy without the father having greater formal political and legal power than the rest of the family. The 1950s probably broke down partially because the father had informally greater political and legal power while formally having equal power which fucked shit up.
Replace “The parents” with “The Great All-Benevolent Church”, or “The state social services”
Remind me again which of these has had millions of years of data to hone their heuristics? Also which of these has the most obvious incentives for good outcomes for children themselves.
The 1950s probably broke down partially because the father had informally greater political and legal power while formally having equal power which fucked shit up.
That’s probably true (especially if we add parallels sentences that say something about “whites” in place of “fathers.”)
Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?
Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?
Made an argument for the viability of utilitarian pro-patriarchy position earlier, that you might have missed.
Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?
Well, firstly, there are all the fully general Burkean arguments. Not sure if those Burkean arguments can’t likewise apply to the more established aspects of the “modern” family, though—it often fails, but it works even more often. E.g. traditionalists complain—loudly—both about single motherhood and two working parents… yet the second innovation doesn’t seem to directly wreck anything.
I think Konkvistador’s point was that the disconnect between formal and informal rules meant that some change was going to happen. At that point, I’m not sure that Burkean arguments tells us anything about which way to jump.
But it’s possible that I’m misinterpreting Burkean reasoning, which I’ve always understood as saying “Don’t court change for its own sake.”
Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?
Because this egalitarian family does not seem to be working, or, indeed, even existing. The law proclaims equality, but instead of getting equality, gets family breakdown.
Find me a family where they equally share picking up the socks, and you will find a family where they do not share the main bed.
Egalitarian families suffer absolutely total dysfunction. Georgian era right, Victoria era wrong.
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
(Did not vote but) I expect it is because the author has a habit of hiding his nuggets of insight in behind the tone and presentation style of an insensitive ass.
And as a less tone-related complaint, sam0345 grossly overgeneralizes. (And if he’s the J that I think he is, I suspect he’s not much interested in being more nuanced, for much the same reason he’s not interested in consensus.)
Because, as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy’s writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! I didn’t downvote him originally, but now I’m going to. I’m not some tolerant liberal guy, and I’m absolutely not going to tolerate this.
as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy’s writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! … Im absolutely not going to tolerate this.
How then could the same facts be stated in a way that has acceptable “tone”?
How could one state in a tone that meets your approval that the socially conservative family structure that was the ideal endorsed by authority from the New Testament to the Georgian era worked and was good for everyone, and the new progressive emancipated family structure started not working in the Victorian era, and has been working less and less for everyone as it has become more and more progressive?
There’s a serious cause and effect issue here: we still have a lot of memes from the men-dominant era, but formally that era is gone. What does you data show beyond a failure to relinquish all the memes?
Plus, Sam is not advocating for the next Schelling point in gender relations (relative to where we are), or even the one after that. And he denies that there are multiple Schelling points.
Why is someone who denies the coherent of moral progress defending someone who thinks moral regress has been happening for ~400 years? If moral drift is all there is, moral regress is no more coherent that moral progress.
Why is someone who denies the coherent of moral progress defending someone who thinks moral regress has been happening for ~400 years? If moral drift is all there is, moral regress is no more coherent that moral progress.
Defending someone? I don’t recalling being in combat recently. I thought I was commenting on an argument not the author.
Arguments for moral progress and moral regress aren’t symetrical. If you have moral drift then naturally you will also have moral regress from the point of view of anyone who sticks to the older values.
Defending someone? I don’t recalling being in combat recently. I thought I was commenting on an argument not the author.
Seriously, WTF? The lesson of “Arguments aren’t soldiers” is not that meta-ethical or object-level moral debates shouldn’t happen. It’s that you shouldn’t back an argument just because you agree with the results.
I don’t think that this is the norm, and such an interpretation is very silly on a site that wants to discuss moral values. But deploying any version of the norms to criticize people attacking any particular position is those norms losing purpose.
Seriously, WTF? The lesson of “Arguments aren’t soldiers” is not that meta-ethical or object-level moral debates shouldn’t happen. It’s that you shouldn’t back an argument just because you agree with the results.
In the quoted part I was objecting to your language not the content. I disliked how you used “defending someone”. The second paragraph was where I thought I engaged your argument. I notice that I am confused. Most of your comment is flying over my head right now, can you please rephrase what you wanted to say with it?
Arguments for moral progress and moral regress aren’t symetrical. If you have moral drift then naturally you will also have moral regress from the point of view of anyone who sticks to the older values.
“From the point of view” elides the central issue. Either there are moral facts or there aren’t. If there are not moral facts, moral progress and regress are not well defined concepts. If there are moral facts, the concepts are well defined—although if one believes in conflicts in moral facts, then the concepts are much less impressive.
It’s very clear that Sam is a moral realist, sub-type value monist. For purposes of this discussion, I’m an anti-realist, sub-type error theorist. I thought you were an anti-realist, but your response here suggests you are a moral realist, sub-type value pluralist. If you are a value monist, then I don’t see how you advance your object level values by defending Sam’s different values.
I’m wasn’t trying to promote any value set in this branch of the conversation. I was trying to via discussion learn more about the arguments for egalitarian vs. non-egalitarian family arrangements.
I’ve written extensively on my current position on morality elsewhere. Like I said in the other comment I think we’re having a misunderstanding but I’m not sure where. I think its most plausible I’m missing some context.
As to moral regress, value drift seems to me obviously bad for any set of values that seeks to impact the world. I think we might mean different things by moral regress. It to me seemed the same thing as values changing from your own, which seemed an obviously bad thing from the perspective of nearly any set of morality because of instrumental reasons in the absence of the assumption of moral progress.
Edit: Oh now I get it!
“From the point of view” elides the central issue. Either there are moral facts or there aren’t. If there are not moral facts, moral progress and regress are not well defined concepts. If there are moral facts, the concepts are well defined—although if one believes in conflicts in moral facts, then the concepts are much less impressive.
Just had to read this with a cleared memory cache. I misused moral regress, not keeping with the terminology you established. Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse, just like most possible changes in our map of other parts of reality would be for the worse so would most possible changes in our understanding of morality. Thus all else being equal with these assumptions I think moral regress to be more likely than moral progress.
Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse
But if there are moral facts, there are external constraints on the viable changes to our understanding. If such external constraints don’t exist, what do the moral facts cause? And if they don’t cause anything, what does it mean to call them facts?
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
If there really are moral facts, shouldn’t a similar one-way ratchet exist?
You talked about things “from the point of view” of different object-level moral theories. There’s nothing particularly wrong with relativism as a meta-ethic, but it is an anti-realist meta-ethic.
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
But if you look earlier in history we see much clearer and common examples of technological and even scientific regress. See the loss of technology and science that occured with the decline of Roman civilization or the Greek dark age over a millenium earlier.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress. And even if it does count, that’s before the scientific method was well established, so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Regardless, possible constraints created by “moral facts” didn’t go away just because any particular government or society fell. The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress.
I didn’t talk about the fall of Rome but the decline of Roman civilization for a reason, it was a process that took centuries. Before it people could build things like the Antikythera mechanism afterwards they couldn’t for what seems to be at least a thousand years. Before it literacy was more widespread than afterwards. Even if we didn’t lose any scientific knowledge in the process, something I doubt because of the large number of lost works we know existed from references in the preserved ones, it certainly was known by fewer people.
The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
Wait what?
Of course moral beliefs in humans are affected by cricumstances! We have empirical evidence of this even in lab conditions. Changed economic circumstances seem to have am obviously big impact on social standards of morality as well.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible (unless we are assuing a created mind for this argument as well). Also human minds just get things plain wrong due to limtied resources too.
so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Why do you assume we are good at using the scientific method to discover moral truth? If moral realism was true, then looking at moral change in the past few centuries it looks much more like the changes in naturalist knowledge we saw before the scientific revolution than after it.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes. I think there’s no particular reason to think that the scientific method (or some moralistic equivalent) is available to “discover” moral truths. But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Anyway, we seen to be disagreeing on the meaning of the words “progress” and “regress.” To illustrate: Imagine a plantation manager, overseeing a huge plantation. Usually, the plantation grows enough food to give everyone on the plantation an adequate diet. The manager apply his moral theory and decides to actually feed everyone an adequate diet.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
You seem to be talking about moral regress1 and scientific regress1, while I am talking about moral and scientific regress2. I would argue that regress2 (and its counterpart, progress2) is the concept generally meant by ordinary usage. Further, regress2 is the more useful definition in a meta-ethics conversation, because regress1 is not usually evidence for or against moral realism.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
As an anti-realist, I take the position that “generating less utility than society could” is not a well formed assertion. But the moral realist does think the phrase is universally meaningful.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes.
A thought here: if you genuinely want to steel-man moral realism you need to look at various forms of “minimal” moral realism, which are consistent with moral subjectivism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism and the sub-section “Robust versus minimal moral realism”.
An example here could be a missionary confronting a New Guinea highlander just after a cannibal feast (assuming these really happened). The missionary says “Eating people in your cannibal feasts is wrong”. The highlander says “Eating people in our cannibal feasts is not wrong.” According to a minimal moral realist, one who embraces moral subjectivism, both of these may be true statements—they both correspond to moral facts—because the term “wrong” has a different meaning for the different speakers. Though their meanings clearly overlap e.g. they may both agree that eating people outside special feasts is “wrong” or that sex outside marriage is “wrong”.
Or, for an analogy, consider two normally-sighted people looking at a coloured wall. One says “The wall is orange”, the other says “The wall is not orange, it is red”. Both of these statements may be true—i.e. both correspond to colour facts—because the speakers put the boundary between orange and red in a slightly different place. They have slightly different (though overlapping) concepts of “red”.
It is very hard to refute versions of moral realism like this. You’d have to somehow show that no-one has a properly consistent concept of right and wrong, so that even within the cannibal’s own moral system he is talking self-contradictory nonsense. That’s going to be difficult.
But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Does he? We have quasi random movement in other kinds of maps of reality too. A Catholic moral realist can at the same time believe orthodox theologians have been making progress on understanding morality while the laity has on average morally regressed, just as a doctor can believe medicine is marching forward even if something like homeopathy gains popularity in the time period he lives in.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
Remember a moral realist is not obliged to consider morality personally adaptive. Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
There’s not a different outcome / decision. Without change, how can we say that there is progress or regress of any kind?
Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
Whatever. For the moral realist, the point is that there are real consequences—reduced wealth or lifespan or whatever—caused by immoral behavior. That feedback from objective reality creates strong pressure against moral regress2 - in the same way that failed predictions create strong pressure against scientific regress2.
Your discussion about elite knowledge vs. mass implementation is interesting, but is probably independent of whether moral facts are objective and universal. For purposes of this discussion, it’s probably easier to ignore the issue for the moment. Like ignoring the knock-on effects when discussing torture vs. dust-speck.
What does you data show beyond a failure to relinquish all the memes?
This is naturally the default explanation that our society uses for such results, it seems plausible but why are we so quick and so confident to jump to it as the explanation? Do I even need to point out that other explanations seem just as plausible?
For example the model of attraction build by the PUA community predicts this result. Also basic economics suggests that if the partners specialize in task they are more productive, maybe we aren’t seeing traditional marriage roles validated as much as economics. And why don’t more traditional couples suffer more from residual patriarchal memes? Shouldn’t the people in those relationship have even more of them than the society at large? Based on the evidence we are just as justified saying that they are happier because they have more patriarchal memes than the norm.
Wait am I just getting down voted for arguing for patriarchy as plausibly not evil? People not wearing their rationalist hats and voting based on the bottom line they wrote before thinking about the arguments they are evaluating is lame. Really lame.
I find it hilarious I didn’t have this problem when doing devil’s advocacy for infanticide or slavery.. but traditional marriage roles? Wowjustwowhowcanheargueforthat! Ewww! That’s like something an inbred redneck would say. Onward social justice, lets end the war on women!
I strongly disagree with a lot of your argument, but the level of downvoting here is still interesting. I suspect that this is happening for three reasons: 1) The belief in question is as you correctly note associated with some people who still exist and are pretty low status. 2) Unlike something like infanticide or slavery, there’s a perceived chance that this sort of thing might actually go back to being this way (see the existence of people mentioned in 1) and thus this feels to people like it is much closer to an actual political mindkilling issue. (Robin Hanson might say that infanticide is far but patriarchy is near.) 3) There’s been some problems in the past with a perception that there’s a cadre on LW of people who have essentially implied that women are of less moral worth than men (I can point to multiple threads where this occurred) and so people are downvoting either due to the association with those threads, or due to a perceived need to protect LW’s reputation.
It is possible that the arguments being made are simply weaker than those favoring infanticde and slavery, and they do seem to be somwhat weaker, but not so so much weaker as to explain by themselves the size of the downvotes.
Yes, everyone is downvoting you for stupid, non-rational reasons that you fully understand, and so you don’t need to consider the implicit rebuke or indeed think about this any further at all.
I think about this stuff quit a lot and generally seek out strong counterarguments. I dislike people down voting a comment I’m certain stands up to the level of discourse here while not exposing their own reasoning on the matter.
If you think I don’t have a good idea about the level of discourse here, well then people should have been down voting me much more aggressively over the past few years I’ve spent in this community, people seem to have generally liked my contributions.
My comment complaining over this might was in hindsight perhaps inappropriate and I’ve retracted it, however the reason I’m not as phased as I once was by down votes is because I think the quality of the LessWrong community is slowly degrading and only aggressive counter measures can stop it.
There’s a crowd that is mind-killed, disagrees with your general philosophy, and down-votes you basically at random when you articulate it—without regard for quality of a particular post or even if you are really trying to make controversial assertions?
Hey, metoo! :) But my crowd and your crowd don’t seem to agree very much. :( Maybe both sides should stop trying to silently suppress contrary views? Nah, that would never work.
Right, I didn’t mean to imply my situation was unique. I see exactly what you mean and I think we used to have less of that. It is one of the indicators of the lower quality of discussion I think I’m seeing.
1) My sense was that my side was more the victim of this than your side—in this community. (Insert obvious caveats about self-mindkilledness).
2) More importantly, I think the particular tactics you used in this thread were unlikely to be effective. The meta-level concerns about this community don’t fit in an object-level discussion of a particular topic. I forget if you are on the LW-more-inclusive or LW-more-exclusive camp, but I think this is a good analysis of the issue.
Why? There are mutually contradictory philosophical positions at play. Should Eliezer refuse to think of his anti-philosophical zombies position as a “side”?
I readily acknowledge the significant risk of identity entanglement (aka mind-killed). But other than that, what harm is there is acknowledging that certain positions are mutually exclusive?
SIAI needed to improve as an organization, so they brought in people who they thought could run a successful non-profit. What they got was a better non-profit plus the whole accompanying spectrum of philanthropy status divas, professional beggars and related hangers-on.
Most of the original thinkers have left, replaced by those who believe in thinking, but only for fashionable thoughts.
philanthropy status divas, professional beggars and related hangers-on
those who believe in thinking, but only for fashionable thoughts
Okay, so would you kindly point to some awful, worthless posts/comments by those awful, worthless people? And explain what makes them so awful and worthless? So that the right-thinking users can learn to avoid them?
Or, if you don’t have anything specific in mind, would you at least cease insulting the community?
Have not downvoted you (or anyone else) yet in this thread, but am downvoting this comment of yours now. Feel free to project whatever reasons you want onto me. They’ll probably be wrong.
Have not downvoted you (or anyone else) yet in this thread, but am downvoting this comment of yours now. Feel free to project whatever reasons you want onto me. They’ll probably be wrong.
I expect Konkvistador to be able to speculate a list of reasons that quickly exhausts all the acceptable reasons to make a publicly announced downvote. Indeed, he has already listed the most notable one. That being the case your prediction must imply either inaccurate insult of Konkvistador or that you are publicly announcing an undesirable motivation for your downvoting.
Okay, I confess: we have so little honest, trusted, hands-on information about old institutions, I just snap to assuming the worst about them even after adjusting for less decay.
You can’t have patriarchy without the father having greater formal political and legal power than the rest of the family.
OK, what if “the rest of the family” is somehow weak/timid/socially clueless/foreign/under-networked/from a disliked minority/whatever, and can’t bring informal/”soft” power to bear in a dispute with the father? Seen lots and lots of times in literature! Works with the wicked stepmother and the spineless father, too. I fear some kind of Stepford Wives shit, but replicated with Singaporean efficiency!
which of these has the most obvious incentives for good outcomes for children themselves
Obvious counterpoint. Unless it’s a TDT-using family (and we don’t see much practical TDT used in real life… besides the evolved pseudo-TDT of religious/Universalist ethics, that is), every family has incentives to have its children compete and beat other children in zero-sum games. A big church or a state have incentives to discourage zero-sum games for all children, and promote cooperation instead.
And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area—teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games. That was only the official intent, of course; policies to that intent might have been as inefficient as everything Soviet.
And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area—teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games.
I don’t think so.
Compare East Germans with West Germans. Started off the same race and same culture, yet socialism made them subhuman. Germany has all the problems in assimilating East Germans that a conservative would plausibly attribute to an inferior race with inherently inferior genetics, except that in this case the problems are obviously 100% caused by recent environmental differences.
Socialism did not make them good cooperators, it made them layabouts and criminals.
And, come to think of it, that is a good parallel to the social decay we have seen following state attempts to impose egalitarianism on the family.
Wait, what? So you’re OK with the hierarchy of a medieval guild or an Ancient Greek well-off household (meaning a household with 1-2 domestic slaves)? Because I’m categorically not. Those are basically examples of what power structures I’d like to avoid as much as the modern workplace!
How much do you know about medieval guilds? They are totally 13th century safety nets and trade unions.
You died leaving your widow and kids alone? Don’t worry others in your guild will chip in.
Your kids die, who takes care of you in your old age? Your apprentice.
Some outsider newb wants to economize your profession reducing the living standard and status of the workers in it compared to other professions? Fuck him he can’t do this profession in our town unless he signs up with us and does things our way.
Also your guild’s rules are controlled by a council of people who have spent the largest fraction of their life mastering your trade.
You’re an apprentice, but dad sold (contracted) you to a guy who doesn’t like you for some reason? Good luck ever getting his daughter’s hand to inherit his shit—hell, after you learn the trade, he might even fail you all the time at the (expensive and demanding) test of craftsmanship, and you’ll either be his bitch for life, or run away and live in poverty because of your debt and lack of recognition. Hell, God help you if you run away at all! (And, while you’re still a teenager, hope you enjoy how fists/kicks/belts feel, because you might be getting plenty of those.)
Can hardly talk about industry-related innovations. Good at rationality and optimizing production? Either make it all your trade secret as a master, in the privacy of your own workshop, or kiss your ass goodbye.
Do I even need to bring up comparably bad situations created by modern institutions? I mean we even have ones that are perfectly analogous. coughcrushingstudentdebtcough
The question is what results a institution typically produces and what would exist in their stead. Take a pro and con view of the guild and its various replacements today, subtract better technology increasing living standards, you may be surprised by the results.
Can the end of the guild system and technological progress be untangled like that? My limited understanding was that the guilds were major opponents of certain kinds of technological progress.
Yep, I would’ve mentioned it, but here, in our rather scholastic debate, I’m assuming the least convenient possible world for my values—one where technical progress either naturally forms a positive feedback loop with right-wing tyranny/oppression/whatever, or simply moves at a pre-industrial speed. Otherwise I’d just skip ahead & invoke the perspectives of transhumanity, the event horizon, etc.
Do I even need to bring up comparably bad situations created by modern institutions? I mean we even have ones that are perfectly analogous. coughcrushingstudentdebtcough
Quite so. I am fond of pointing out that an eighteen year old girl cannot commit herself to always be sexually available to one man and never to any other, in return for a promise of undying love and guaranteed life long support for her and her children, but can commit herself a gigantic debt that can never be expunged by bankruptcy in return for a credential of uncertain, and frequently negative, value.
Why not go one step further with the debt system, and allow people to pledge themselves into debt slavery? That would remove the feckless from circulation, and ensure that they had responsible supervision.
The supposition is that if someone goes into debt for a post graduate degree in English literature or a master of fine arts in advanced basket weaving, they are making a responsible decision, so should be allowed freedom of contract, but if someone goes into debt for food and stuff, they are making an irresponsible decision, so should not be allowed freedom of contract.
Seems to me the reverse supposition is wiser—that it is more desirable to allow the stupid to voluntarily choose to restrict their future freedom of action than it is to allow the smart. And I am also inclined to doubt that those who go into debt for a postgraduate degree in English literature are the cognitive elite.
Quite so. I am fond of pointing out that an eighteen year old girl cannot commit herself to always be sexually available to one man and never to any other, in return for a promise of undying love and guaranteed life long support for her and her children, but can commit herself a gigantic debt that can never be expunged by bankruptcy in return for a credential of uncertain, and frequently negative, value.
Just give me a plain answer of some sort: what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like?
Every long established functional family that I am aware of, where the couple remained married, the grown up children love and respect their parents, and so on and so forth, is quietly and furtively eighteenth century. Dad is the boss. When the kids were kids, Dad was the head of the family. The family was one person, and that person was Dad. Mum picked up the socks.
So, eighteenth century did it right, and it has all been social decay since Queen Victoria was crowned.
Show me a family where husband and wife fairly share the task of picking up the socks, and I will show you a family where dad sleeps on the couch and Mum’s lovers visit every week or so to use the main bed.
It is just not in women’s nature to have sex with their equals, so the egalitarian family just does not function. Legal measures to make it egalitarian invariably backfire and fail to have the desired effect. Maybe after some millenia of evolution, women will evolve the capability to have sex with their equals, but right now, does not work.
Thank you. Frankly, I feel that you’re being honest with yourself about the kind of tyranny you want, while Konkvistador clings to his rose glasses. I’d slash your tires, but you’re a worthy enemy.
Please take note people, I believe that this is the kind of social atmosphere that “neo-reaction” supports, whether its followers start out technocratic/utilitarian or not.
Good comment, although as you can see I don’t share much of your feelings except cynicism and weariness. One thing, however: why have you said “right-wing traditionalist” instead of “right-wing authoritarian”?
To me, Moldbug looks so curious—and suspicious—partly because of his obscurantism/doublespeak about “traditionalism”, which I take to be something like Sam below always argues: cultural controls and policing against egalitarian memes, official propaganda of property-based relations (such as slavery, feudalism or patriarchy) strict and obsessively enforced gender dominance, etc, etc.
Of all those, he has argued for chattel slavery and yet against discrimination by sexuality—but as Sam would tell you, those are part of the same model of dominance! Screw “democracy” it’s boring anyway- what would you say about those?
A right wing traditionalist is authoritarian, but not all right wing authoritarians are traditionalist. I was hoping you would have noticed by now that I while I think he is right about progressivism and power in American society I have my own disagreements with Moldbug. BTW Moldbug hasn’t argued for chattel slavery as much as pointed out that the modern educated person has only ever heard the straw man argument for chattel slavery.
So you want me to talk about traditionalism? I don’t know if I can do so with justice as my brain is thoroughly modern due to upbringing. But I will try with my broken mind to point to some traces left behind by the poorly understood institutions we have lost.
Patriarchy as existed in 1900 Britain was probably an incredibly good arrangement for most people involved. On utilitarian grounds I’m pretty sure moderate patriarchy wins out over the sexual marketplace of today. Before you dismiss this out of hand pause to consider that we have data showing men today are about as happy with their marriages as they where 50 years ago, but women are much unhappier. And far fewer people marry today. Let that sink in. So even wives that really want to marry today are more unhappy with their relationships than women who may not have wanted to get married that much but did so because of social pressures and lived under the alleged horror of 1950s relationship norms. I don’t know maybe married women are much much unhappier than unmarried women and its just marriage becoming (even more) broken and unmarried women are much happier? But if this is so, where is the evidence of this? I haven’t seen it.
In addition to this parents experience a much smaller drop in happiness after the birth of children if they are married (a proxy in the US for a stable relationship where the father takes care of the child together with the mother—I have no doubt the difference is smaller in Sweden where lots of people just remain in that kind of relationship unmarried). So how is abolishing moderate patriarchy working out when it comes to personal romantic and family happiness of average women?
And aren’t you someone that cares about economic inequality? Let us again look at the numbers. What happened to the relative position of working class and middle class families since the 1950s. If it wasn’t for technological progress they would be living materially much worse lives, de facto they need now two working parents to reach a relative position that one working parent could acheive before. And I don’t think you will have trouble seeing how the loss of status of the archetype of “honourable working man” resulted in loss of political power and weakened non-monetary incentives for work which contributed to the erosion of the middle class and the implosion of the lower class into the rapidly decivilizing underclass. Speaking of which how do men and women like the American inner city? You know the one with “strong single mothers” and thuggish boyfriends. Oh but that is caused by material poverty and racism and… but that doesn’t make sense if you think about it like at all. Since they where doing better on measures of social dysfunction when absolute material poverty and racism where much worse. I’m not arguing for material poverty and racism or that they made stuff better, but they probably can’t be blamed for the negative changes since the 1960s.
This has all been utilitarian arguing, once you get to virtue ethics moderate patriarchy gets really interesting, but enough about that. Its getting late here and I have other topics I’d like to touch. Humans have instincts to display fierce egalitarian norms. These are misfiring in the modern world. And I’m not speaking of the macro scale, I’m speaking of the micro interpersonal scale. We have the same social instincts as foragers, but none of the institutions of foragers to channel these instincts and we’ve just de-constructed the farmer institutions that evolved much more recently around them too. Re-emergent status games are more vicious. What feels like the cure, the mechanism that in forager tribes ensured equality and everyone being a productive member of the tribe, in fact make things worse.
And recall even in the ancient tribe man the sly rule bender found ways to have formal equality between tribe members but informal hierarchy. Explicit hierarchical society one that does not endorse egalitarian memes is one that removes much of this hypocrisy. We say we are all equal, but Ung decides most matters. We say the Louis is in charge, and Louis decides most matters. Which do you prefer? The non-neurotypical in me longs for a society where things do what they say on the label.
In addition consider the effects of status competition in a caste system being partitioned very clearly into several different status ladders. Can you see the space it leaves to developing healthy and adaptive norms unique to each profession? Can you see the psychological benefits?
Are you claiming that the end of patriarchy caused an economic decline leading to middle- and working-class families being worse off to the point that both parents now have to work? Because if not, your argument is a non-sequitur–if the economy declined due to reasons unrelated to a less patriarchal structure, then patriarchy having persisted would have made families worse off.
Personally, I think it’s less a story of economic decline, and more a story of there being more consumer goods. Nowadays there are cell phones, expensive flatscreen TVs, tons of video game consoles/entertainment systems, and other things to spend money on, and people who don’t have those things feel materially pool–but in the 1950s, none of those things existed.
Yes I’m quite explicitly arguing it contributed to it. I said this to Multiheaded right after what you quoted.
I guess the problem is that yes, I do have trouble seeing the “loss of status of the archetype of ‘honorable working man’” leading to an overall economic decline that means both parents have to work–why wouldn’t it be balanced out by the new archetype of the “independent working woman”?
I think I’m probably running into some belief bias here–I’m having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.
You’re probably right that it’s a bad idea for some men, though. Hell, I know some of those men–friends and friends’ boyfriends who are in their 20s and still live with their moms. I’m also not all that familiar, personally, with the “American inner city” that you talk about. And I have no idea how to evaluate the fact that women are apparently less happy with their marriages–but if someone did a study on it and showed a correlation, then something is going on there.
However, there’s no going back at this point (or, at least, I really think there shouldn’t be). Why not wait until society settles into this massive, unprecedented change and creates some new archetypes?
Sorry. I’m really trying to look at your point of view with fresh eyes. This doesn’t happen to me very often, that I have such a strong (and until now unnoticed) opinion on something that I can’t properly think about the opposite being true. It’s a somewhat unpleasant feeling, to be honest.
But gaaaaaah, I’m so entirely grateful that I don’t live in the 1950s! And that’s despite the fact that I’ve sometimes felt like arranged marriage would be just, well, convenient–the main reason I think it would be convenient is because it would be so much less time consuming, and give me more time to do whatever the hell I want with my spare time, as opposed to spending it dating, which I find tedious.
I appreciate your effort to remain open to considering this. I know it is hard to overcome personal experiences when social data contradicts them. It is even harder to overcome opinions that something that is good for us is not good for society as whole, you don’t need to read Robin Hanson to see our brains aren’t built for that. One of the reasons I dislike the personal being the political is that when it does people get very very defensive about any choices they’ve made in their personal lives, even when you merely point out they don’t work out well for all people.
I’d like to discuss the role of loss of male status in connection to greater societal stratification more in either private correspondence or a separate discussion. I would ask we let that point rest for now so that it due to its controversial nature (and I’m less confident in the reasoning behind it anyway) doesn’t steal attention from other points.
The social science is pretty settled that people we can be with in happy relationships are relativey common. For those of us satisfied with the other person(s) in our lives like to pretend those are unprobable outcomes. They aren’t. Our actual selection process for partners also amounts to a pretty weak filter. The greater mystery is why we are so stuck signaling the traditional romantic narrative.
There is no strong utilitarian reason to implement those weak filters on the person itself if institutions can handle it better. You reap most of the benefits and you can get most of the good feelings of choice by picking between the three or four possible brides your family has suggested.
But how much do you actually know about the 1950s? The cultural icon of “the 1950s” is not only not the territory it isn’t much of a good map either.
Sources? In particular:
Why are divorce rates so high?
Why do people in this time and place expect to date around kind of a lot before finding someone they want to stay with? (Possibly they start out picky so no one works and then stop so many people do.)
Why am I attracted to only about a tenth of smart people in my age group enough to say yes if they asked me out, and only a couple percent enough to bother asking out myself? (Maybe it’s uncorrelated to long-term suitability?)
Why, when I tried dating anyone who asked me out just to see how doing things normally worked, was it invariably catastrophic? (Maybe because I was living a lie in the first place.)
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
Roissy would of course dismiss your self report as a shit test and the rationalization hamster running, but then you would say that your observations are more reliable than my and Roissy’s observations, because you are female and can see the truth from inside, whereas I can only see it from outside.
Downloading a girly cartoon romance at random, labelled as a romance and intended for a female audience, and skimming it: Princess is much younger than the prince, and has been given to the prince to seal a peace treaty: The deal was that she was supposed to marry the King, but the King took one look at her and unilaterally changed the deal, giving her to the Prince instead. Prince treats her like the small brat that she in fact is. Prince is a leader of men, commander of the army, and has slaughtered various people in princess’ immediate family. The deal is that her land conditionally surrenders to the prince’s King as a result of military defeat, but the prince has to marry her so that her people get representation and her royal lineage does not totally disappear. Story is that, like the King, he does not want to marry her, because she is a small brat and much hotter chicks keep trying to get his attention, and she homicidally hates him because he has with his own sword killed one of her beloved relatives, and his army under his direct command has killed most of her other relatives (hence the marriage)
Skipping over a zillion frames of the prince in manly poses experiencing deep emotions, thinking about deep emotions, and talking about deep emotions, to the end, they start to like each other just in time for the scheduled wedding,. Final scene is that he goes off to war again and realizes he misses her. He wears the sword with which he killed her beloved relatives in every frame except for a frame when they go to bed, including the frame where he realizes he misses her.
Well I did not check every frame, but every frame that I checked he is wearing that sword, except when they were in bed. As far as I could tell in my somewhat superficial reading, he never regrets or apologizes for killing off much of her family, and treats her as an idiot for making a fuss about it until she stops making a fuss about it.
My account of the story is probably not completely accurate, (aagh, I am drowning in estrogen) but it is close enough. Prince, Princess, sword, arranged marriage, and sword.
So, I would say that the intended readers of that romance rather like patriarchy, and I would not believe anything they said to the contrary.
I wouldn’t know. I don’t really read romance novels–I much prefer sci-fi and thrillers, of which there is more than enough to read. I’ve occasionally watched romantic comedy films–being dragged there by family members, usually–but a) I’ve never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe, and b) I wouldn’t go voluntarily anyway.
So you may be right that the ‘intended audience’ of that novel likes patriarchy, but I am obviously not the intended audience and I have no idea who they are.
Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?
If so, I would say that would probably be seen by me, though not necessarily by you, as having a plot arch that was not merely similar, but for all practical purposes identical.
Much as all porns probably look indistinguishable to you, (naked girl moans a lot) all romances look identical to me.
All romances have a plot that corresponds to marriage as commanded by the New Testament, and endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century: Dangerous powerful high status male overwhelms weak frail low status female, but then falls gooey in love with her and only her.
And now we have a completely different system, and all the indications are that women do not like it, even though they said, and keep on saying, that the new system is what they want.
I’ve read Twilight and ended up seeing the films with family members. I liked the action scenes. I think I miss a lot of the romantic cues–to me it’s just characters looking at each other–and I think I skipped those sections in the books.
Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot. I expect that females in the past who chose, or just ended up with, low-status men with nice personalities got less resources for them and their children than women who were able to attract high-status men. Maybe having that instinct misfires now sometimes–there are plenty of men who are extremely nice and caring and make enough money at their low-status job to provide for a family. But I’m definitely not attracted to guys who come across as significantly lower status than me.
The confounding factor for me is that I’m non-neurotypical and I basically don’t experience physical attraction, definitely not at first glance–I can have a crush on people for their personality (or status) and I develop a solid bond of affection over time, and although I don’t generally like being touched, I can overcome this for specific people with enough repetition and conditioning. But relationships are time consuming, and guys tend to start whining about how I always prioritize other stuff (work, school, extracurriculars) over spending time with them, which drives me crazy because if I spend more time on those things, it’s because they are higher priorities for me. And I guess I’m physically attractive enough that I don’t have a ridiculously hard time finding guys who like me–in fact, I feel like it being too easy is a problem now and makes me less motivated to try to make my relationships work. So yeah...there’s a pretty high activation barrier for me to get into a relationship at all, and if the guy behaves in any way that sets off “low status behaviours” in my monkey brain (i.e. whining about how life is unfair to him, coming across as desperate, being unemployed, spending lots of time at unproductive activities like video games and generally seeming to have poor willpower, etc), it feels like I have no reason to push through the initially unpleasant-for-me phase of dating, because he wouldn’t be a good provider-for-children anyway.
Those are all reasons why I’m probably an outlier, as female go...although I think, when queried in imagine-if format, my brain still gives the usual answer to a lot of romance questions. (Would it be kind of cool to have an immortal vampire gooey in love with me? Well, yeah. But if he tried to nag me into being less of a workaholic or not biking alone in downtown late at night or stuff like that, it would still annoy me.)
Probably–I’ve only seen 1 or 2 so I don’t actually know. I’m curious as to whether they seem varied to you.
Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status. High status girls is not a major male wish fulfillment fantasy, whereas in romance, high status guys are as uniform as moaning in porn.. Even when the sex interest girl is a badass action girl with batman like athletic abilities, for example Yuffie the thief, she gets in trouble for stealing stuff, making her low status.
Further I doubt that there are what males would call action scenes in twilight because if there had been, males would have willingly watched it. What you are calling action scenes were probably status scenes involving violence and cruelty. I assume this because many, possibly most, romances have status scenes involving violence and cruelty. Love interest cruelty in romance is as predictable and repetitious as the girl moaning in porn. The point is not action, but to prove the love interest is potentially capable of cruelty and violence.
In an action scene, James Bond is in grave danger. In a romance cruelty scene, the love interest hurts someone really badly without the audience ever feeling the love interest to be in danger. The heroine is never in danger from the love interest, but the main point of the scene is that she could be. He is dangerous and badass. Hence the propensity of the prince to knock off relatives of the princess with that prominent and lovingly depicted sword.
In contrast, the main point of an action scene is that the hero is in danger. For example the henchman Jaws in “the spy who loved me” is way more badass than James Bond, so that the audience believes James Bond is in danger. No one is ever more badass than the romance love interest.
That is because all the available guys are roughly equal to you in status. So you don’t really want any of them. Not enough immortal vampires to go around. Hence Saint Paul’s policy that females should remain silent in church, wear a head covering, etc—harmless ways to make all females in church artificially lower status than all males in church, thus artificially making all males in church hot, thus making it possible to accomplish his directive: “let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” without the woman having to wait until they run out of eggs in their thirties, thereby causing their status in the sexual market place to drop like a stone until, at last, due to their lowered sexual market place status, they finally find that males are hot enough that they want to put out the necessary effort.
In order to ban hypergamy, Paul had to make females not want hypergamy.
Like Groucho Marx, you will only find them interesting when they start losing interest—hence the extremely low reproduction rate and high fertility clinic attendance rate of intelligent well educated women.
Observe the reasonably high rates of marriage near the age of maximum fertility among Mormons, Palestinians, and Amish.
Well, maybe. But I think one of the serious confounding factors is that I don’t actually like sex and all the associated relationship crap. My friend, who does, has been in lots of relationships with guys who seemed low status to me (and yes, I had specifically that thought...most of them so far still live with their moms.) Granted, she’s a single mom who hasn’t finished her high school, and doesn’t give off the impression of intelligence when she speaks (apparently I do)–so perhaps her status is closer to theirs, and maybe she feels that it’s lower. So it’s possible for her to have a relationship where she doesn’t get along great with the guy, and sometimes doesn’t even like his personality that much, but the sex is awesome and that balances it out. Wouldn’t happen with me. The sex is something I put up with in order to make this weird alien beast happy, so that I can have the other parts of the relationship–I kind of like the whole living together, cooking together, “playing house” thing. And I want kids, and don’t want to be a single mom. Honestly, that’s probably the main reason I make any effort–I don’t get lonely per se being single. (Are you implying that my feelings will change and I suddenly will start to get massively lonely once I perceive that my status has dropped and I’m no longer desirable to males?)
I’m trying to think of times that I did perceive myself as lower status, i.e. high school. Hard to know if I remember correctly, but I had crushes on guys and a few girls. Same as now. If I fantasized at all, my fantasies didn’t include kissing or touching–should have been a clue-in, although at that point I was still expecting to be “normal” with respect to those things. I remember dating a guy at the end of high school who, physically, was considered much more relatively attractive than me, enough that people made comments about it to my friends–but I think he considered me similar or even higher status–I was much more independent, living on my own while he lived with his mom, working and paying my own tuition and rent, getting 90s in first-year university while he failed a couple of his first exams. And he was very aware of that and made comments about it. (In hindsight, that may have been a problem in that relationship, and may have contributed to why we broke up. Maybe I should have learned to play lower status in the sense of “act less smart”? Is that what most girls do?)
You could date ace people and not have to make this tradeoff.
I could–now how do I meet ace people?
I believe they have websites, meetup groups, &c. Not all of them will be there, but some will.
What? That doesn’t seem true. Many of them are his near equals (but evil or at least rivals). Many are colleagues that are fairly high status. I mean, probably somewhat lower status than Bond. But he’s freaking James Bond. He’s the highest status person there is (in his universe). High standard to meet!
Then why are they completely replaced from one film to the next? Whereas there are recurring male characters (and recurring female characters that Bond doesn’t sleep with).
I believe that’s Sam’s point.
Because people like to see romance (or, at least, sexual trysts) bloom. Stable ongoing relationships are sweet and all but just aren’t what we like to see. See what happens when any male and female leads on TV series get together...
That doesn’t seem right. Firstly because it isn’t what he said and secondly because assuming that was his point would hardly be generous to Sam… because it is a terrible (near irrelevant) point.
Ahahahaha! The fanatical, diehard, anti-modern anti-liberal guy… has played Final Fantasy 7 and was enough of a nerd to get the secret character! HahahahahaHA! Sorry, I just find this kinda hilarious for several reasons.
This is not quite the version endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century unless you replace “Dangerous powerful high status male” with “Dangerous but chivalrous powerful high status male”.
For a utilitarian to take this seriously, you need to make the argument that happiness reports are a reliable indicator of utility possessed. As you note, there are strong reasons (many connected to technological advancement) to believe that practically any alive today has more utility than the average person in 1600 (or perhaps even 1800). So that’s some reason to distrust the assertion that happiness reports accurately report something that we should consider morally weighty.
Pending data about minority marriage rates in the 1930s and before, I think my response is “agree denotatively, disagree connotatively.” Even without the gains from technological progress, it seems pretty clear to me that the average minority has more utility now than in 1930, even if the marriage rate is lower.
But the underlying issue is that I think that there are significant policy differences between the victorious community organizer and the losing business executive. There’s a definite partisan slant about things like basic research funding and food safety regulation—I may be mindkilled about this, but I think any reasonable cost-benefit analysis shows one side is more rational about those topics than the other.
Still, there’s always the possibility that I’m terribly mind-killed on this topic—causing me to overestimate the relative power of what I consider the saner parts of the political coalition of which I am a member. And the in-group / out-group smugness is terrible—deserving of being called out whether or not I’m in the in-group just this minute.
I thought we where Bayesians here? It certainly is evidence people are happy or unhappy. We generally consider people’s happiness or at least mental suffering to have moral weight.
Yes, that was a bit of loose language. I agree with you that self-reports are reasonable measures of mood—and that mood is entitled to some moral weight.
But Multi discussed some reasons to believe that reports of mood are pliable and unrepresentative.
My point was broader: There’s no particular reason to believe that positive mood is the same thing as, or even correlated with, utility. Utilitarians seek to maximize utility, not positive mood (infinite orgasms is not generally accepted as the utilitarian utopia).
Issues that you already know to poke holes in a simplistic model of “happniess”:
Stockholm Syndrome; enforced and coercive signaling games around happiness; wireheading; “forced orgasms” of various kinds; smiles painted on soul; internalized self-deception under social pressure not to betray unhappniess with the “virtuous” life; the structures of “Libidinal economy” and the assorted Freudo-Marxian stuff...
You can probably see my line of objection, ja? I think you haven’t given it as much serious consideration as I have given the far-right worldview, dude.
P.S. a quick google search also reveals that Alice Miller, a psychologist who survived Warsaw under the Nazis, has written a lot about abusive family structures from an anti-patriarchal/anti-authoritarian standpoint. Here is some anarchist (?) type ranting/blogging about the implications of Miller.
P.P.S. a paper that, in defense of Deleuze, criticizes Zizek’s critique and rejection of Anti-Oedipus.
Yes lots of other possibilities, I’m well aware of those. I wanted to emphasize it that the simple truth is, that when people say they are happy, you should take it as evidence they generally are happy or at least not suffering. I did this because if this isn’t pointed out people will avoid updating as much as they should using the possibility of different explanations as a rationalization.
Be honest, do you think you would feel the need to invoke or investigate those alternative possibilities to explain away greater self-reported happiness in nations with lower GINI coefficents? We apply different standards of discourse for different institutions without having good reason to do so.
Politics is motivated cognition all the way down my friend.
This depends not just on your definition of “happiness”, but also on your definition of “say” :) How many pre-Victorian narratives by women/queers are you able to name at all without digging into Google? Only Jane Austen… and Mary Shelley’s mom… and 1-2 others, I bet.
So, a lot of women might have, without having to worry their pretty little heads, “said” that they are happy through the testimony of their kind and caring husbands. Much like the Soviet people reported their happiness and contentment through their lawfully elected, not-at-all-rubberstamp representatives. Note that those second-hand assertions hardly ever mention sexual consent/rape or corporal punishment or other such things that we’re curious about when assessing marriage. So could you please provide me with some statistics for e.g. matrial rape in 1700s Britain, to support your likely claim that it was not a serious problem? I’d be (pleasantly!) surprised if you could.
(What I wouldn’t be surprised at is you quoting Three Worlds Collide about the space of possible attitudes to sexual consent. Well, as you can see sam0345 also has… interesting… views on consent. Isn’t this evidence of how terribly dangerous—not just promising—it might be for us to become less paranoid and more tolerant in regards to patriarchy?)
Oh man. Sorry, but this is getting to me. I expressed frustration about perceived evasiveness, and then you frustrate me further by avoiding to mention what I’ve explicitly listed above!
I’ve said a million times: in theory I’m ok with absolute decision-making power concentrated in one ruler’s hands, a succession mechanism can probably be figured out, etc, etc. When I’m talking about egalitarianism, I’m not specifically concerned with the interactions between a monarch and subjects!
Instead, I’d like to repeat:
(let’s drop the issue of censorship for a moment. I’m assuming you’re against it and, like Moldbug, want “free speech” that simply can’t change anything power-wise due to the ruler(s)′ monopoly on force and weapons.)
Just give me a plain answer of some sort: what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like? Along which Schelling points should limits be placed on a father, a boss? A child, a mother, an employee, a customer, a partner? Ought there be universal limits at all, in your opinion? I think there damn well ought to be, and they should at least act as a rubber band on disproportionate personal power!
I shared a lot of my stance on patriarchy and other kinds of institutionalized inequality present in traditional society. I didn’t think I was being evasive. I mean you do realize that lots of readers here can’t imagine an argument for patriarchy or feudalism at all right? But I can see why it seemed that way to you since we discussed a lot of this material already.
So you where among other things asking me about particular policies and institutions that uphold or purport to uphold say patriarchy or a caste system? Things like the inquisition perhaps? The old conservative question of “instead of what” comes up. Let me quote Roy Campbell on this:
“More people have been imprisoned for Liberty, humiliated and tortured for Equality, and slaughtered for Fraternity in this century, than for any less hypocritical motives, during the Middle Ages.”
He does not seem to be obviously wrong. Its incredible how often this happens when you try and actually read let alone take seriously social commentary written decades or centuries ago.
Isn’t this something else? Ok no prob I’ll answer it.
I want workplace to be more forager and family to be more farmer. Nearly all of us are socialized to accept ridiculous amounts of workplace domination or what seems like workplace domination to our forager brains. We also get surprisingly little economic gain for this. Indeed I sometimes wonder whether us abandoning farmer values everywhere but in the workplace is a direct result of the rising demands of extreme-farmer-like behaviour in the workplace driven by signalling the market has been unable to correct (or has perhaps inflated?). The psychological toll was simply too large so we “loosed up” elsewhere to keep up with the workplace with bad results for our personal lives and mixed results for measured GDP.
In farmer family life children are treated as small adults with a unique duty to obey and eventually care for their parents. The parents have a responsibility to help their children fit in socially in their community (help them find a mate, an economic niche, make sure to maintain good relations with neighbours and relatives). The father holds greater formal power, while the wife holds great informal power. For neurotypical humans in farmer culture this is an arrangement that should in theory play to the psychological “feel good” triggers and talents of both. It also enables them to pair bond (preventing abandonment). It is a remarkably functional and stable institution considering it has had probably had merely 10 or 20 thousand years to form!
To give an example of dead legal Schelling points related to this, I think child custody should by default fall to the father.
This is an industrial age phenomenon caused by industrial economies of scale.
I agree. It has impressive productivity gains in say 19th century factory work, but I think its gains are much smaller than usually assumed in say a white collar setting. I think the cost to the well-being of the workers might now that we in the West don’t starve any more outweigh the productivity gains. A good utilitarian counterargument can be made that we need every little bit of efficiency until we say cure aging or develop FAI.
Heck, I’m not convinced the gains in the white collar setting outweigh the loses due to the resulting signaling games. Especially now that routine secretarial tasks can be done automatically.
This is surprisingly Marxist-flavored analysis from Eugine_Nier. Not that the post is wrong.
Sorry, of course you’re not evasive. We have a communication and inferential distance problem, I’d say.
Hehehehehehe!… has it never occured to you that—the “workplace” as such being an industrial-age institution—the domination in it that you so dislike (and quite rightly!) might be the institutional descendant of earlier family-like, harshly hierarchical structures? Imagine the power that a master held over an apprentice in a medieval guild, or the domestic slaves of Ancient Greece.
Our definitions of patriarchy seem to be world apart. It feels to me as if the examples you cautiously list—“the father holds greater formal power”-with-caveats, or “child custody”—are, frankly, local and minor matters compared to the really systemic things!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy#Psychoanalytic_theories
That’s the big, scary shit to me. (Before anyone thinks about it, my father is just fine, lol! But… you’ve read e.g. Kafka, right?)
Some related feminist blah-blah, please take a look:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2011/05/05/my-evolving-definition-of-%E2%80%9Cpatriarchy%E2%80%9D-noh/
Also:
Replace “The parents” with “The Great All-Benevolent Church”, or “The state social services”, and you’d be alarmed to say the least. Of course well-intentioned help and guidance are very nice… but who sets the guidelines for it, and how is the information about children’s extrapolated volition communicated in your society? In today’s families—humans being humans and all power corrupting most of them—we obviously see parents’ convenience and unexamined prejudgices advertised as “for the children’s own good”. Would there be less of that in your farmer society, or more?
P.S.: how “allowed” should, say, experiments with polyamory be? Socially, economically, legally?
The thing about family-like hierarchical structures is that they fail badly when applied to groups larger than families.
Well duh. Decaying institutional wisdom, the workplace is a hastily assembled modern construct from sawed up bits of older institutions banged together. If you set up a new institution the traditionalists will point out that of course it will suck. “New institution” also includes trying to use necromancy to resurrect one that has been completely demolished. Traditionalists are fucked because they are like archaeologists looking at preserved DNA in the gut of a mosquito trapped in amber thinking they can now build a working dinosaur out of cardboard cut outs.
We’ve had this conversation with regards to Christianity and its mainline descendant Progressivism. Best bet seems to be to try and figure out how to build a new institution building institution. Those are also know as religions. See Mormonism’s impressive functionality.
You can’t have patriarchy without the father having greater formal political and legal power than the rest of the family. The 1950s probably broke down partially because the father had informally greater political and legal power while formally having equal power which fucked shit up.
Remind me again which of these has had millions of years of data to hone their heuristics? Also which of these has the most obvious incentives for good outcomes for children themselves.
Edit: Why is this getting down voted?
That’s probably true (especially if we add parallels sentences that say something about “whites” in place of “fathers.”)
Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?
Made an argument for the viability of utilitarian pro-patriarchy position earlier, that you might have missed.
Well, firstly, there are all the fully general Burkean arguments. Not sure if those Burkean arguments can’t likewise apply to the more established aspects of the “modern” family, though—it often fails, but it works even more often. E.g. traditionalists complain—loudly—both about single motherhood and two working parents… yet the second innovation doesn’t seem to directly wreck anything.
I think Konkvistador’s point was that the disconnect between formal and informal rules meant that some change was going to happen. At that point, I’m not sure that Burkean arguments tells us anything about which way to jump.
But it’s possible that I’m misinterpreting Burkean reasoning, which I’ve always understood as saying “Don’t court change for its own sake.”
Because this egalitarian family does not seem to be working, or, indeed, even existing. The law proclaims equality, but instead of getting equality, gets family breakdown.
Find me a family where they equally share picking up the socks, and you will find a family where they do not share the main bed.
Egalitarian families suffer absolutely total dysfunction. Georgian era right, Victoria era wrong.
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
(Did not vote but) I expect it is because the author has a habit of hiding his nuggets of insight in behind the tone and presentation style of an insensitive ass.
And as a less tone-related complaint, sam0345 grossly overgeneralizes. (And if he’s the J that I think he is, I suspect he’s not much interested in being more nuanced, for much the same reason he’s not interested in consensus.)
Because, as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy’s writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! I didn’t downvote him originally, but now I’m going to. I’m not some tolerant liberal guy, and I’m absolutely not going to tolerate this.
I don’t think the tone of the particular comment is out of the normal LW range on other subjects but naturally its your call as much as mine.
How then could the same facts be stated in a way that has acceptable “tone”?
How could one state in a tone that meets your approval that the socially conservative family structure that was the ideal endorsed by authority from the New Testament to the Georgian era worked and was good for everyone, and the new progressive emancipated family structure started not working in the Victorian era, and has been working less and less for everyone as it has become more and more progressive?
There’s a serious cause and effect issue here: we still have a lot of memes from the men-dominant era, but formally that era is gone. What does you data show beyond a failure to relinquish all the memes?
Plus, Sam is not advocating for the next Schelling point in gender relations (relative to where we are), or even the one after that. And he denies that there are multiple Schelling points.
Why is someone who denies the coherent of moral progress defending someone who thinks moral regress has been happening for ~400 years? If moral drift is all there is, moral regress is no more coherent that moral progress.
Defending someone? I don’t recalling being in combat recently. I thought I was commenting on an argument not the author.
Arguments for moral progress and moral regress aren’t symetrical. If you have moral drift then naturally you will also have moral regress from the point of view of anyone who sticks to the older values.
Seriously, WTF? The lesson of “Arguments aren’t soldiers” is not that meta-ethical or object-level moral debates shouldn’t happen. It’s that you shouldn’t back an argument just because you agree with the results.
If politics is the mindkiller means what you say, then you are a significant and substantial violator.
I don’t think that this is the norm, and such an interpretation is very silly on a site that wants to discuss moral values. But deploying any version of the norms to criticize people attacking any particular position is those norms losing purpose.
In the quoted part I was objecting to your language not the content. I disliked how you used “defending someone”. The second paragraph was where I thought I engaged your argument. I notice that I am confused. Most of your comment is flying over my head right now, can you please rephrase what you wanted to say with it?
“From the point of view” elides the central issue. Either there are moral facts or there aren’t. If there are not moral facts, moral progress and regress are not well defined concepts. If there are moral facts, the concepts are well defined—although if one believes in conflicts in moral facts, then the concepts are much less impressive.
It’s very clear that Sam is a moral realist, sub-type value monist. For purposes of this discussion, I’m an anti-realist, sub-type error theorist. I thought you were an anti-realist, but your response here suggests you are a moral realist, sub-type value pluralist. If you are a value monist, then I don’t see how you advance your object level values by defending Sam’s different values.
I’m wasn’t trying to promote any value set in this branch of the conversation. I was trying to via discussion learn more about the arguments for egalitarian vs. non-egalitarian family arrangements.
I’ve written extensively on my current position on morality elsewhere. Like I said in the other comment I think we’re having a misunderstanding but I’m not sure where. I think its most plausible I’m missing some context.
As to moral regress, value drift seems to me obviously bad for any set of values that seeks to impact the world. I think we might mean different things by moral regress. It to me seemed the same thing as values changing from your own, which seemed an obviously bad thing from the perspective of nearly any set of morality because of instrumental reasons in the absence of the assumption of moral progress.
Edit: Oh now I get it!
Just had to read this with a cleared memory cache. I misused moral regress, not keeping with the terminology you established. Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse, just like most possible changes in our map of other parts of reality would be for the worse so would most possible changes in our understanding of morality. Thus all else being equal with these assumptions I think moral regress to be more likely than moral progress.
But if there are moral facts, there are external constraints on the viable changes to our understanding. If such external constraints don’t exist, what do the moral facts cause? And if they don’t cause anything, what does it mean to call them facts?
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
If there really are moral facts, shouldn’t a similar one-way ratchet exist?
You talked about things “from the point of view” of different object-level moral theories. There’s nothing particularly wrong with relativism as a meta-ethic, but it is an anti-realist meta-ethic.
But if you look earlier in history we see much clearer and common examples of technological and even scientific regress. See the loss of technology and science that occured with the decline of Roman civilization or the Greek dark age over a millenium earlier.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress. And even if it does count, that’s before the scientific method was well established, so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Regardless, possible constraints created by “moral facts” didn’t go away just because any particular government or society fell. The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
I didn’t talk about the fall of Rome but the decline of Roman civilization for a reason, it was a process that took centuries. Before it people could build things like the Antikythera mechanism afterwards they couldn’t for what seems to be at least a thousand years. Before it literacy was more widespread than afterwards. Even if we didn’t lose any scientific knowledge in the process, something I doubt because of the large number of lost works we know existed from references in the preserved ones, it certainly was known by fewer people.
Wait what?
Of course moral beliefs in humans are affected by cricumstances! We have empirical evidence of this even in lab conditions. Changed economic circumstances seem to have am obviously big impact on social standards of morality as well.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible (unless we are assuing a created mind for this argument as well). Also human minds just get things plain wrong due to limtied resources too.
Why do you assume we are good at using the scientific method to discover moral truth? If moral realism was true, then looking at moral change in the past few centuries it looks much more like the changes in naturalist knowledge we saw before the scientific revolution than after it.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes. I think there’s no particular reason to think that the scientific method (or some moralistic equivalent) is available to “discover” moral truths. But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Anyway, we seen to be disagreeing on the meaning of the words “progress” and “regress.” To illustrate: Imagine a plantation manager, overseeing a huge plantation. Usually, the plantation grows enough food to give everyone on the plantation an adequate diet. The manager apply his moral theory and decides to actually feed everyone an adequate diet.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
You seem to be talking about moral regress1 and scientific regress1, while I am talking about moral and scientific regress2. I would argue that regress2 (and its counterpart, progress2) is the concept generally meant by ordinary usage. Further, regress2 is the more useful definition in a meta-ethics conversation, because regress1 is not usually evidence for or against moral realism.
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
As an anti-realist, I take the position that “generating less utility than society could” is not a well formed assertion. But the moral realist does think the phrase is universally meaningful.
A thought here: if you genuinely want to steel-man moral realism you need to look at various forms of “minimal” moral realism, which are consistent with moral subjectivism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism and the sub-section “Robust versus minimal moral realism”.
An example here could be a missionary confronting a New Guinea highlander just after a cannibal feast (assuming these really happened). The missionary says “Eating people in your cannibal feasts is wrong”. The highlander says “Eating people in our cannibal feasts is not wrong.” According to a minimal moral realist, one who embraces moral subjectivism, both of these may be true statements—they both correspond to moral facts—because the term “wrong” has a different meaning for the different speakers. Though their meanings clearly overlap e.g. they may both agree that eating people outside special feasts is “wrong” or that sex outside marriage is “wrong”.
Or, for an analogy, consider two normally-sighted people looking at a coloured wall. One says “The wall is orange”, the other says “The wall is not orange, it is red”. Both of these statements may be true—i.e. both correspond to colour facts—because the speakers put the boundary between orange and red in a slightly different place. They have slightly different (though overlapping) concepts of “red”.
It is very hard to refute versions of moral realism like this. You’d have to somehow show that no-one has a properly consistent concept of right and wrong, so that even within the cannibal’s own moral system he is talking self-contradictory nonsense. That’s going to be difficult.
Does he? We have quasi random movement in other kinds of maps of reality too. A Catholic moral realist can at the same time believe orthodox theologians have been making progress on understanding morality while the laity has on average morally regressed, just as a doctor can believe medicine is marching forward even if something like homeopathy gains popularity in the time period he lives in.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
Remember a moral realist is not obliged to consider morality personally adaptive. Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
There’s not a different outcome / decision. Without change, how can we say that there is progress or regress of any kind?
Whatever. For the moral realist, the point is that there are real consequences—reduced wealth or lifespan or whatever—caused by immoral behavior. That feedback from objective reality creates strong pressure against moral regress2 - in the same way that failed predictions create strong pressure against scientific regress2.
Your discussion about elite knowledge vs. mass implementation is interesting, but is probably independent of whether moral facts are objective and universal. For purposes of this discussion, it’s probably easier to ignore the issue for the moment. Like ignoring the knock-on effects when discussing torture vs. dust-speck.
This is naturally the default explanation that our society uses for such results, it seems plausible but why are we so quick and so confident to jump to it as the explanation? Do I even need to point out that other explanations seem just as plausible?
For example the model of attraction build by the PUA community predicts this result. Also basic economics suggests that if the partners specialize in task they are more productive, maybe we aren’t seeing traditional marriage roles validated as much as economics. And why don’t more traditional couples suffer more from residual patriarchal memes? Shouldn’t the people in those relationship have even more of them than the society at large? Based on the evidence we are just as justified saying that they are happier because they have more patriarchal memes than the norm.
Why are we quick to blame the predecessor? Trick question?
Wait am I just getting down voted for arguing for patriarchy as plausibly not evil? People not wearing their rationalist hats and voting based on the bottom line they wrote before thinking about the arguments they are evaluating is lame. Really lame.
I find it hilarious I didn’t have this problem when doing devil’s advocacy for infanticide or slavery.. but traditional marriage roles? Wowjustwowhowcanheargueforthat! Ewww! That’s like something an inbred redneck would say. Onward social justice, lets end the war on women!
I strongly disagree with a lot of your argument, but the level of downvoting here is still interesting. I suspect that this is happening for three reasons: 1) The belief in question is as you correctly note associated with some people who still exist and are pretty low status. 2) Unlike something like infanticide or slavery, there’s a perceived chance that this sort of thing might actually go back to being this way (see the existence of people mentioned in 1) and thus this feels to people like it is much closer to an actual political mindkilling issue. (Robin Hanson might say that infanticide is far but patriarchy is near.) 3) There’s been some problems in the past with a perception that there’s a cadre on LW of people who have essentially implied that women are of less moral worth than men (I can point to multiple threads where this occurred) and so people are downvoting either due to the association with those threads, or due to a perceived need to protect LW’s reputation.
It is possible that the arguments being made are simply weaker than those favoring infanticde and slavery, and they do seem to be somwhat weaker, but not so so much weaker as to explain by themselves the size of the downvotes.
Yes, everyone is downvoting you for stupid, non-rational reasons that you fully understand, and so you don’t need to consider the implicit rebuke or indeed think about this any further at all.
I think about this stuff quit a lot and generally seek out strong counterarguments. I dislike people down voting a comment I’m certain stands up to the level of discourse here while not exposing their own reasoning on the matter.
If you think I don’t have a good idea about the level of discourse here, well then people should have been down voting me much more aggressively over the past few years I’ve spent in this community, people seem to have generally liked my contributions.
My comment complaining over this might was in hindsight perhaps inappropriate and I’ve retracted it, however the reason I’m not as phased as I once was by down votes is because I think the quality of the LessWrong community is slowly degrading and only aggressive counter measures can stop it.
There’s a crowd that is mind-killed, disagrees with your general philosophy, and down-votes you basically at random when you articulate it—without regard for quality of a particular post or even if you are really trying to make controversial assertions?
Hey, me too! :)
But my crowd and your crowd don’t seem to agree very much. :(
Maybe both sides should stop trying to silently suppress contrary views?
Nah, that would never work.
Right, I didn’t mean to imply my situation was unique. I see exactly what you mean and I think we used to have less of that. It is one of the indicators of the lower quality of discussion I think I’m seeing.
Two points:
1) My sense was that my side was more the victim of this than your side—in this community. (Insert obvious caveats about self-mindkilledness).
2) More importantly, I think the particular tactics you used in this thread were unlikely to be effective. The meta-level concerns about this community don’t fit in an object-level discussion of a particular topic. I forget if you are on the LW-more-inclusive or LW-more-exclusive camp, but I think this is a good analysis of the issue.
My sense is the opposite.
I prefer not to think of “sides” in this context.
Why? There are mutually contradictory philosophical positions at play. Should Eliezer refuse to think of his anti-philosophical zombies position as a “side”?
I readily acknowledge the significant risk of identity entanglement (aka mind-killed). But other than that, what harm is there is acknowledging that certain positions are mutually exclusive?
SIAI needed to improve as an organization, so they brought in people who they thought could run a successful non-profit. What they got was a better non-profit plus the whole accompanying spectrum of philanthropy status divas, professional beggars and related hangers-on.
Most of the original thinkers have left, replaced by those who believe in thinking, but only for fashionable thoughts.
Okay, so would you kindly point to some awful, worthless posts/comments by those awful, worthless people? And explain what makes them so awful and worthless? So that the right-thinking users can learn to avoid them?
Or, if you don’t have anything specific in mind, would you at least cease insulting the community?
No
Now you feel the feels that I feel all the time when I’m ideological on LW!
Have not downvoted you (or anyone else) yet in this thread, but am downvoting this comment of yours now. Feel free to project whatever reasons you want onto me. They’ll probably be wrong.
Disincentivize whining about down votes?
I expect Konkvistador to be able to speculate a list of reasons that quickly exhausts all the acceptable reasons to make a publicly announced downvote. Indeed, he has already listed the most notable one. That being the case your prediction must imply either inaccurate insult of Konkvistador or that you are publicly announcing an undesirable motivation for your downvoting.
(ie. Downvoted for poorly calibrated snark!)
Yeah, that last sentence was not appropriate, so your downvote is. Lest I leave you all people in suspense my complete list of reasons was:
Disincentivize whining about downvotes
Disincentivize sarcasm
Disincentivize uncharitably interpreting the actions of other people.
Okay, I confess: we have so little honest, trusted, hands-on information about old institutions, I just snap to assuming the worst about them even after adjusting for less decay.
OK, what if “the rest of the family” is somehow weak/timid/socially clueless/foreign/under-networked/from a disliked minority/whatever, and can’t bring informal/”soft” power to bear in a dispute with the father? Seen lots and lots of times in literature! Works with the wicked stepmother and the spineless father, too. I fear some kind of Stepford Wives shit, but replicated with Singaporean efficiency!
Obvious counterpoint. Unless it’s a TDT-using family (and we don’t see much practical TDT used in real life… besides the evolved pseudo-TDT of religious/Universalist ethics, that is), every family has incentives to have its children compete and beat other children in zero-sum games. A big church or a state have incentives to discourage zero-sum games for all children, and promote cooperation instead.
And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area—teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games. That was only the official intent, of course; policies to that intent might have been as inefficient as everything Soviet.
I don’t think so.
Compare East Germans with West Germans. Started off the same race and same culture, yet socialism made them subhuman. Germany has all the problems in assimilating East Germans that a conservative would plausibly attribute to an inferior race with inherently inferior genetics, except that in this case the problems are obviously 100% caused by recent environmental differences.
Socialism did not make them good cooperators, it made them layabouts and criminals.
And, come to think of it, that is a good parallel to the social decay we have seen following state attempts to impose egalitarianism on the family.
This is getting more and more charming.
Wait, what? So you’re OK with the hierarchy of a medieval guild or an Ancient Greek well-off household (meaning a household with 1-2 domestic slaves)? Because I’m categorically not. Those are basically examples of what power structures I’d like to avoid as much as the modern workplace!
How much do you know about medieval guilds? They are totally 13th century safety nets and trade unions.
You died leaving your widow and kids alone? Don’t worry others in your guild will chip in.
Your kids die, who takes care of you in your old age? Your apprentice.
Some outsider newb wants to economize your profession reducing the living standard and status of the workers in it compared to other professions? Fuck him he can’t do this profession in our town unless he signs up with us and does things our way.
Also your guild’s rules are controlled by a council of people who have spent the largest fraction of their life mastering your trade.
You’re an apprentice, but dad sold (contracted) you to a guy who doesn’t like you for some reason? Good luck ever getting his daughter’s hand to inherit his shit—hell, after you learn the trade, he might even fail you all the time at the (expensive and demanding) test of craftsmanship, and you’ll either be his bitch for life, or run away and live in poverty because of your debt and lack of recognition. Hell, God help you if you run away at all! (And, while you’re still a teenager, hope you enjoy how fists/kicks/belts feel, because you might be getting plenty of those.)
Can hardly talk about industry-related innovations. Good at rationality and optimizing production? Either make it all your trade secret as a master, in the privacy of your own workshop, or kiss your ass goodbye.
Do I even need to bring up comparably bad situations created by modern institutions? I mean we even have ones that are perfectly analogous. coughcrushingstudentdebtcough
The question is what results a institution typically produces and what would exist in their stead. Take a pro and con view of the guild and its various replacements today, subtract better technology increasing living standards, you may be surprised by the results.
Can the end of the guild system and technological progress be untangled like that? My limited understanding was that the guilds were major opponents of certain kinds of technological progress.
Yep, I would’ve mentioned it, but here, in our rather scholastic debate, I’m assuming the least convenient possible world for my values—one where technical progress either naturally forms a positive feedback loop with right-wing tyranny/oppression/whatever, or simply moves at a pre-industrial speed. Otherwise I’d just skip ahead & invoke the perspectives of transhumanity, the event horizon, etc.
Soo… the US healthcare industry on steroids?
Quite so. I am fond of pointing out that an eighteen year old girl cannot commit herself to always be sexually available to one man and never to any other, in return for a promise of undying love and guaranteed life long support for her and her children, but can commit herself a gigantic debt that can never be expunged by bankruptcy in return for a credential of uncertain, and frequently negative, value.
Why not go one step further with the debt system, and allow people to pledge themselves into debt slavery? That would remove the feckless from circulation, and ensure that they had responsible supervision.
The supposition is that if someone goes into debt for a post graduate degree in English literature or a master of fine arts in advanced basket weaving, they are making a responsible decision, so should be allowed freedom of contract, but if someone goes into debt for food and stuff, they are making an irresponsible decision, so should not be allowed freedom of contract.
Seems to me the reverse supposition is wiser—that it is more desirable to allow the stupid to voluntarily choose to restrict their future freedom of action than it is to allow the smart. And I am also inclined to doubt that those who go into debt for a postgraduate degree in English literature are the cognitive elite.
I agree. We have lost the right to marry as Sister Y says.
Every long established functional family that I am aware of, where the couple remained married, the grown up children love and respect their parents, and so on and so forth, is quietly and furtively eighteenth century. Dad is the boss. When the kids were kids, Dad was the head of the family. The family was one person, and that person was Dad. Mum picked up the socks.
So, eighteenth century did it right, and it has all been social decay since Queen Victoria was crowned.
Show me a family where husband and wife fairly share the task of picking up the socks, and I will show you a family where dad sleeps on the couch and Mum’s lovers visit every week or so to use the main bed.
It is just not in women’s nature to have sex with their equals, so the egalitarian family just does not function. Legal measures to make it egalitarian invariably backfire and fail to have the desired effect. Maybe after some millenia of evolution, women will evolve the capability to have sex with their equals, but right now, does not work.
Thank you. Frankly, I feel that you’re being honest with yourself about the kind of tyranny you want, while Konkvistador clings to his rose glasses. I’d slash your tires, but you’re a worthy enemy.
Please take note people, I believe that this is the kind of social atmosphere that “neo-reaction” supports, whether its followers start out technocratic/utilitarian or not.