Yeah, it’s nice when your opponents volunteer to remove from you the burden of proof whether they are irrational.
But seriously, I don’t even know where to start. Perhaps here: Articles written on most popular websites are clickbait. It means that their primary purpose is to make you read the article after seeing the headline, and then share it either because you love it or because you hate it. And that’s what you did. Mission accomplished.
Another article on the same website explains why animal rights movements are oppresive. (I am not going to link it, but here are the arguments for the curious readers: because it’s wrong to care about animals while there are more important causes on this planet such as people being oppressed; because vegans and vegetarians don’t acknowledge that vegan or vegetarian food can be expensive; because describing animals as male and female marginalizes trans people; and because protecting animals is colonialistic against native people who hunt animals as part of their tradition.) Obviously, the whole article is an exercise in making the reader scream and share the article to show other readers how crazy it is. This is exactly what the authors and editors get paid for; this is how you shovel the sweet AdSense money on them. So the only winning move is not to play this game.
.
I may be too extreme in this aspect, but when I talk with most people, I simply assume that almost everything they say is a metaphor for something (usually for their feelings), and almost nothing is to be taken literally. This is a normal way of communication among people who couldn’t program a Friendly AI if their very lives depended on it.
When someone says “rationality is bad”, the correct translation is probably something like “I hate my father because he criticized me a lot and didn’t play with me; and my father believes he is smart, and he makes smartness his applause light; and this is why I hate everything that sounds like smartness”. You cannot argue against that. (If you try anyway, the person will not remember any specific thing you said, they will only remember that you are just as horrible person as their father.) This is how people talk. This is how people think. And they understand each other, so when another person who also hates their father hears it, they will get the message, and say something like “yeah, exactly like you said, rationality is stupid”. And then they know they can trust each other on the emotional level.
Here is a short dictionary containing the idioms from the article:
we should abolish prisons, police = “I hate my father”
cisheteropatriarchy = “I hate my father; but I also blame my mother for staying with him”
those who are committed to social justice = “my friends, who also hate their fathers”
we have to stop placing limits on ourselves = “we should steal some money and get high”
Being Rational Has No Inherent Value = “I don’t even respect my father”
my very existence is irrational = “my father disapproves of my lifestyle”
The only logical time for abolition and decolonization is now = “I wish I had the courage to tell my parents right now how much I am angry at them”
You are overanalyzing it, searching for a logical structure when there is none. If you treat the article as a free-form poem, you will get much closer to the essence. You don’t share the author’s emotions, that’s why the text rubs you the wrong way.
And by the way, other political groups do similar things, just in a different flavor (and perhaps intensity).
I simply assume that almost everything they say is a metaphor for something (usually for their feelings).
It has taken me many years to realize that, but the more I look for it the more I notice it. I have a friend on Facebook who’s a Syrian living in NYC, she keeps posting things like “Here’s the proof Assad is actually a spy planted by the Israeli Mossad to cause genocide in Syria”. I kept asking her how she could possibly believe it and got very confusing responses that didn’t really address the question. And then it hit me: for her and for many Arabs “X is a Mossad spy” is simply an eloquent way of saying “I hate X”, it has literally nothing to do with the Mossad at all. My friend was confused why I even bring facts about the Mossad into a discussion of whether Assad is a Mossad spy.
Viliam gave enough SJ examples, so I’ll give one from the other side: there was a campaign by some famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it’s feminist propaganda. Hold on, isn’t that the movie where the attractive women in skimpy clothes are called “breeders” whose job is to make babies? And then I realized:
For PUAs “X is feminist propaganda” = “I hate X”
For some Russians “X is a CIA plot” = “I hate X”
For some Evangelical Christians “X is from the Devil” = “I hate X”
For some communists “X is capitalist” = “I hate X”
For some capitalists “X is communist” = “I hate X”
Viliam gave enough SJ examples, so I’ll give one from the other side: there was a campaign by some famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it’s feminist propaganda. Hold on, isn’t that the movie where the attractive women in skimpy clothes are called “breeders” whose job is to make babies?
A lot of feminists agreed with the PUAs’ assessment of the movie as being pro-feminist. The guy who treated women as breeding stock was the antagonist. You aren’t supposed to sympathize with Immortan Joe.
famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it’s feminist propaganda.
I’ve seen PUA stuff and I’ve seen the movie. Whilst it’s true that the protagonists are mostly female and the bad guy is male, I wouldn’t say it’s pushing a feminist message. I don’t think that the film vilifies men as a whole. I’m much more annoyed about ghostbusters actually.
for her and for many Arabs “X is a Mossad spy” is simply an eloquent way of saying “I hate X”, it has literally nothing to do with the Mossad at all.
Don’t forget to notice that this works both ways. Your friend could easily segue into posting things like “Israeli government ordered the genocide in Syria” because hey! Assad is a Mossad agent, everyone know that.
I am not arguing that such statements should be taken literally. I’m arguing that they establish linkages in the minds of the speaker and the listeners and these linkages may well have real-world consequences.
Well, this is exactly the problem. First step is that people say random things just because they reflect the emotions they have at the moment. Second step is that later they sometimes derive logical consequences of what they previously said. Then bad things happen as a result.
Usually there is a boundary; people often have crazy beliefs in far mode, while having quite sensible beliefs in near mode. They can keep talking bullshit as long as it does not concern them directly, but when it becomes personal they can either conveniently forget to apply the bullshit, or have some general excuse such as “but this specific case is different”. This can work surprisingly well as long as there is a social norm of not requiring people to actually act on their abstract beliefs.
Nerds usually lack the social skills to follow this strategy (because no one tells them about it explicitly; because applying this strategy to itself means never talking explicitly about it), usually harming themselves as the result, by following the norms that everyone applauds but no one except a few nerds actually follows. Sometimes they harm the others as the result, for example when they take the norm of killing unbelievers literally and become suicidal bombers; while for most of the society the same words in the holy scripture simply mean “boo unbelievers” without any impact on their everyday life.
And then there is the complication that our civilization became too complex and has too many channels where the far-mode beliefs translate into actions without people noticing that the boundary was crossed. For example, a person holding a stupid belief in far mode could never directly act upon the belief, but they might still vote according to the belief—and then the politician in the office might actually do it.
It is a useful tool of propaganda to channel these emotions into far-mode beliefs that benefit some specific group. For example, any kind of frustration with various failures in coordination problems (what SSC readers would call “Moloch”) can be channeled into hate against “Jews” or “capitalism” or “decadent western civilization”, which can in turn influence the political orientation of people.
Yep, that’s a problem and an additional problem is that this mechanism is often exploited by agitprop and, generally, dark arts at the social scale.
Nerds usually lack the social skills to follow this strategy
I don’t think it has anything to do with nerds or social skills. If I had to come up with an expression for what prevents people from applying their abstract beliefs in practice, it would be the trite “common sense” (which, yes, I know, isn’t exactly common).
Essentially it’s the matter of being able to recognize consequences when they appear in front of your eyes. Most people, thankfully, require a large amount of pushing and shoving to make the transition from “Ethnicity X is bad” to “We will go and set fire to our neighbour’s house and throw stones at his children”. It’s not that avoiding that transition is a social skill, it’s more that watching a house burn and children cry has direct emotional impact that you need very high levels of ideological belief to override.
But then I noticed that the post was a follow up to two more, one entitled “If many-worlds had come first,” the other “The failures of Eld science.” Oh crap, now I had to go back and read those before figuring out what Yudkowsky was up to. (And before you ask, yes, those posts too linked to previous ones, but by then I had had enough.)
Except that that didn’t help either. Both posts are rather bizarre, if somewhat amusing, fictional dialogues, one of which doesn’t even mention the word “Bayes” (the other refers to it tangentially a couple of times), and that certainly constitute no sustained argument at all. (Indeed, “The failures of Eld science” sounds a lot like the sort of narrative you find in Atlas Shrugged, and you know that’s not a compliment coming from me.)
Yeah, it’s nice when your opponents volunteer to remove from you the burden of proof whether they are irrational.
But seriously, I don’t even know where to start. Perhaps here: Articles written on most popular websites are clickbait. It means that their primary purpose is to make you read the article after seeing the headline, and then share it either because you love it or because you hate it. And that’s what you did. Mission accomplished.
Another article on the same website explains why animal rights movements are oppresive. (I am not going to link it, but here are the arguments for the curious readers: because it’s wrong to care about animals while there are more important causes on this planet such as people being oppressed; because vegans and vegetarians don’t acknowledge that vegan or vegetarian food can be expensive; because describing animals as male and female marginalizes trans people; and because protecting animals is colonialistic against native people who hunt animals as part of their tradition.) Obviously, the whole article is an exercise in making the reader scream and share the article to show other readers how crazy it is. This is exactly what the authors and editors get paid for; this is how you shovel the sweet AdSense money on them. So the only winning move is not to play this game.
.
I may be too extreme in this aspect, but when I talk with most people, I simply assume that almost everything they say is a metaphor for something (usually for their feelings), and almost nothing is to be taken literally. This is a normal way of communication among people who couldn’t program a Friendly AI if their very lives depended on it.
When someone says “rationality is bad”, the correct translation is probably something like “I hate my father because he criticized me a lot and didn’t play with me; and my father believes he is smart, and he makes smartness his applause light; and this is why I hate everything that sounds like smartness”. You cannot argue against that. (If you try anyway, the person will not remember any specific thing you said, they will only remember that you are just as horrible person as their father.) This is how people talk. This is how people think. And they understand each other, so when another person who also hates their father hears it, they will get the message, and say something like “yeah, exactly like you said, rationality is stupid”. And then they know they can trust each other on the emotional level.
Here is a short dictionary containing the idioms from the article:
everydayfeminism.com = “I hate my father”
we should abolish prisons, police = “I hate my father”
cisheteropatriarchy = “I hate my father; but I also blame my mother for staying with him”
those who are committed to social justice = “my friends, who also hate their fathers”
we have to stop placing limits on ourselves = “we should steal some money and get high”
Being Rational Has No Inherent Value = “I don’t even respect my father”
my very existence is irrational = “my father disapproves of my lifestyle”
The only logical time for abolition and decolonization is now = “I wish I had the courage to tell my parents right now how much I am angry at them”
You are overanalyzing it, searching for a logical structure when there is none. If you treat the article as a free-form poem, you will get much closer to the essence. You don’t share the author’s emotions, that’s why the text rubs you the wrong way.
And by the way, other political groups do similar things, just in a different flavor (and perhaps intensity).
It has taken me many years to realize that, but the more I look for it the more I notice it. I have a friend on Facebook who’s a Syrian living in NYC, she keeps posting things like “Here’s the proof Assad is actually a spy planted by the Israeli Mossad to cause genocide in Syria”. I kept asking her how she could possibly believe it and got very confusing responses that didn’t really address the question. And then it hit me: for her and for many Arabs “X is a Mossad spy” is simply an eloquent way of saying “I hate X”, it has literally nothing to do with the Mossad at all. My friend was confused why I even bring facts about the Mossad into a discussion of whether Assad is a Mossad spy.
Viliam gave enough SJ examples, so I’ll give one from the other side: there was a campaign by some famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it’s feminist propaganda. Hold on, isn’t that the movie where the attractive women in skimpy clothes are called “breeders” whose job is to make babies? And then I realized:
For PUAs “X is feminist propaganda” = “I hate X”
For some Russians “X is a CIA plot” = “I hate X”
For some Evangelical Christians “X is from the Devil” = “I hate X”
For some communists “X is capitalist” = “I hate X”
For some capitalists “X is communist” = “I hate X”
Etcetera, etcetera.
A lot of feminists agreed with the PUAs’ assessment of the movie as being pro-feminist. The guy who treated women as breeding stock was the antagonist. You aren’t supposed to sympathize with Immortan Joe.
I’ve seen PUA stuff and I’ve seen the movie. Whilst it’s true that the protagonists are mostly female and the bad guy is male, I wouldn’t say it’s pushing a feminist message. I don’t think that the film vilifies men as a whole. I’m much more annoyed about ghostbusters actually.
Don’t forget to notice that this works both ways. Your friend could easily segue into posting things like “Israeli government ordered the genocide in Syria” because hey! Assad is a Mossad agent, everyone know that.
I am not arguing that such statements should be taken literally. I’m arguing that they establish linkages in the minds of the speaker and the listeners and these linkages may well have real-world consequences.
Well, this is exactly the problem. First step is that people say random things just because they reflect the emotions they have at the moment. Second step is that later they sometimes derive logical consequences of what they previously said. Then bad things happen as a result.
Usually there is a boundary; people often have crazy beliefs in far mode, while having quite sensible beliefs in near mode. They can keep talking bullshit as long as it does not concern them directly, but when it becomes personal they can either conveniently forget to apply the bullshit, or have some general excuse such as “but this specific case is different”. This can work surprisingly well as long as there is a social norm of not requiring people to actually act on their abstract beliefs.
Nerds usually lack the social skills to follow this strategy (because no one tells them about it explicitly; because applying this strategy to itself means never talking explicitly about it), usually harming themselves as the result, by following the norms that everyone applauds but no one except a few nerds actually follows. Sometimes they harm the others as the result, for example when they take the norm of killing unbelievers literally and become suicidal bombers; while for most of the society the same words in the holy scripture simply mean “boo unbelievers” without any impact on their everyday life.
And then there is the complication that our civilization became too complex and has too many channels where the far-mode beliefs translate into actions without people noticing that the boundary was crossed. For example, a person holding a stupid belief in far mode could never directly act upon the belief, but they might still vote according to the belief—and then the politician in the office might actually do it.
It is a useful tool of propaganda to channel these emotions into far-mode beliefs that benefit some specific group. For example, any kind of frustration with various failures in coordination problems (what SSC readers would call “Moloch”) can be channeled into hate against “Jews” or “capitalism” or “decadent western civilization”, which can in turn influence the political orientation of people.
Yep, that’s a problem and an additional problem is that this mechanism is often exploited by agitprop and, generally, dark arts at the social scale.
I don’t think it has anything to do with nerds or social skills. If I had to come up with an expression for what prevents people from applying their abstract beliefs in practice, it would be the trite “common sense” (which, yes, I know, isn’t exactly common).
Essentially it’s the matter of being able to recognize consequences when they appear in front of your eyes. Most people, thankfully, require a large amount of pushing and shoving to make the transition from “Ethnicity X is bad” to “We will go and set fire to our neighbour’s house and throw stones at his children”. It’s not that avoiding that transition is a social skill, it’s more that watching a house burn and children cry has direct emotional impact that you need very high levels of ideological belief to override.
Harsh but mostly true, I think.
Many social movements base their popularity on texts that are basically free-form poems. Eliezer, Moldbug, Ayn Rand, even the Sermon on the Mount :-)
cousin_it, if you’re still paying attention- I’m curious why you think this about Eliezer.
Why Massimo Pigliucci thinks something like that
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/eliezer-yudkowsky-on-bayes-and-science.html
Got it. Thanks.
...or like women’s suffrage or abolition!
...or like women’s suffrage or abolition!
Not all poetry is equally valid or has equally defensible aims.
What does it mean for poetry to be “valid”?
In fact, one is inclined to suspect that he adopted his lifestyle largely to spite his father.
Welcome back, old friend.