At least one of us is failing to understand the other, because I’m having trouble how that comments relates to anything I said. Unless you think I was taking “in the circles I move in” to mean “in LW, and only LW”. I wasn’t; but I was taking them to include LW.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation unless you’re saying that (1) LW is among the circles you move in and (2) it resembles the others in that X is true there.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation
OK, let me reformulate things this way. Let’s say there is a variable s (which stands for snark) defined on the [-1..1] interval so that when it is at −1 the snark is entirely directed at the left wing, when it’s at 1 it is entirely directed at the right wing, and the intermediate values determine the proportions in which both left and right get snarked. This variable s is a function of two other variables: the subject who’s doing the snarking and the location in which the snarking takes place.
You assume that s is predominantly a function of location. This is not true in my case. For me, s is predominantly a function of the subject (me) and the influence of location is secondary.
In other words, the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
I suggest that this is unwise; snark on LW won’t do anything to repair the opinions or attitudes of people elsewhere. If one place is Too Green and another Too Blue, then someone who frequents both does no favour to the place that’s Too Green by complaining about bluism there merely because they’re annoyed by the excessive bluism in the other place.
(Of course, you might not be able to help it; or you might not care. Fair enough, in either case. But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW and happen to be able to overcome your annoyance at overzealous progressives elsewhere, I suggest that you would do better to match the snark to the venue.)
But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt. The former is not a function of the latter. Besides, as I mentioned in another comment, how you see the tilt depends on where you set your zero point. I do not consider LW to have a conservative tilt.
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt.
Why do you think that? I’m not suggesting that you match your snark to the venue because that would push LW politics in “my” direction. (At least, I don’t think I am.) I’m suggesting that you do it because it will tend to improve the quality of discussion at LW. I would make the same suggestion if we were in some left-leaning place where you were complaining at all the conservatives because you were annoyed by all the neoreactionaries elsewhere.
But if, as seems to be the case, you don’t share my perception that LW has a lot more right-wing nastiness than left-wing nastiness, then fair enough.
Anyway, it’s pretty rude of me to be trying to tell someone else whom he should be snarking at. Sorry about that.
Reason 1: Because I think that there’s some chance (maybe not very large) that if an LW denizen is wrong about something and gets snarked at, it may be what they need to improve; and that for any given quantity of snark this effect will be larger if the snark is aimed at a larger deserving subpopulation of LW; so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
(Of course—I repeat myself—if you’re snarking just for the fun of snarking then you needn’t care about that. And perhaps the chances of any good ever coming of snarking at anyone are negligible.)
Reason 2: Because if LW is welcoming to people in group A and hostile to people in group B, these groups playing roughly symmetrical roles on opposite ends of some spectrum, there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan, which (as you have already remarked) is not how LW is supposed to work and (as you haven’t remarked but I think is true) makes LW a less interesting and useful place by decreasing its intellectual diversity.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW is welcoming to rightists and hostile to leftists. If so, then shifting that balance a bit would reduce the danger.
(How real is the danger? I don’t know. Maybe less real since the More Right folks left LW. Still there, though, I think.)
(An important note that perhaps I should have written some time ago: all this left/right stuff is of course a crude but useful one-dimensional simplification of reality and if taken too seriously raises the risk of the kind of us-versus-them thinking that we’re all too familiar with. And the axis we’re really looking at here doesn’t exactly correspond to the usual left/right political axis—it’s much more concerned with social, and less with economic, issues. Please be assured that I understand all this and am using terms like “left” and “right” only as a convenient shorthand.)
so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
I am sorry, my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time. I am not in the re-education business.
for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
Well, go for it :-) As I already noted, I don’t think so.
there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan
Given that NRx used to inhabit LW and then almost all of them went away while LW stayed as it is, I consider this risk negligible. Unless, of course, direction A is leftward :-D
Also, don’t forget that LW is populated mostly by Americans. From the European point of view, both US Democrats and US Republicans are right-of-centre.
And the axis we’re really looking at here...
I don’t know which axis are we looking at. Is there an axis at all or you just dont’ like a particular thought cluster?
my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time.
Fair enough! As I said: you aren’t obliged to care about this stuff.
I don’t know which axis are we looking at.
Take one of those political questionnaires. Throw out all the questions about economics and foreign policy, and keep the ones about social issues. Administer the questionnaire to a representative sample of Americans and Western Europeans. Take the first principal component. That axis.
I wouldn’t put it that way because there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy, and because there are other areas of morality where the “social left” are the puritans (e.g., meat-eating and pollution).
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
Is your axis one of Haidt’s five moral axes
No, I don’t think so.
I am still not quite sure how do you see it.
I’m sorry about that. I’ve tried giving handwavy qualitative descriptions. I’ve told you how to identify it statistically. I’m really not sure there’s much more I can reasonably be expected to do.
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
Interesting. Our minds work sufficiently differently so that we hit minor misunderstandings on a very regular basis :-/
When I said “close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy” I meant that decisions in this spheres are not driven by ethical considerations. Once you take out things like naked self-interest, desire for money and/or power, the necessity to keep up appearances, etc. the remaining influence of ethics, IMHO, is very small.
You, on the other hand, said “there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy” meaning that decisions in that sphere have meaningful consequences which we can evaluate ethically. That’s certainly true, but under this approach I can say that there is a lot of ethics in earthquakes. An earthquake “may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths”, but is it an ethical matter?
No one (so far as we know) chooses whether there are to be earthquakes.
People do choose whether to start wars, increase or decrease minimum wages, levy new taxes, etc. (Governments choose directly; in democracies, their electorates choose indirectly.)
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are. I am fairly sure that when I vote, I am greatly influenced by my estimates of the candidates’ parties’ likely foreign and economic policy, and that I am thinking in ethical terms about what policies would be best.
Of course I may be fooling myself about that, and the politicians may certainly be lying about what drives their policies. But the same is true on “social” issues. I don’t know of any reason to be more confident that (say) abortion policy is really more driven by politicians’ or voters’ ethics than (say) taxation policy.
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are.
You can examine their decisions (“revealed preferences”) and check whether they require ethical imperatives as an explanation or they can perfectly well be explained without considering ethics.
I appreciate that this is not a trivial exercise (e.g. distinguishing between “we cannot ethically do that” and “we cannot do that for the sake of keeping up appearances” is going to be difficult), but so is much of real-life analysis.
G: “I notice that although the sort of agitprop you complain of comes from all sides here on LW, you’re only complaining about one of them.”
L: “That’s because in the circles I move in, the left is always the aggressor.”
G: “Well, here on LW there seems to be distinctly more right than left.”
L: “Oh, I wasn’t talking about LW.”
… Then what was the relevance of your original response?
Huh? You asked about me. I answered about myself. There is no narrowly-specialised clone of me for which LW is the entire world.
At least one of us is failing to understand the other, because I’m having trouble how that comments relates to anything I said. Unless you think I was taking “in the circles I move in” to mean “in LW, and only LW”. I wasn’t; but I was taking them to include LW.
To be more explicit, again: if you do something in LW and explain it by saying “in the circles I move in, X is true” then I don’t see how that’s a useful explanation unless you’re saying that (1) LW is among the circles you move in and (2) it resembles the others in that X is true there.
OK, let me reformulate things this way. Let’s say there is a variable s (which stands for snark) defined on the [-1..1] interval so that when it is at −1 the snark is entirely directed at the left wing, when it’s at 1 it is entirely directed at the right wing, and the intermediate values determine the proportions in which both left and right get snarked. This variable s is a function of two other variables: the subject who’s doing the snarking and the location in which the snarking takes place.
You assume that s is predominantly a function of location. This is not true in my case. For me, s is predominantly a function of the subject (me) and the influence of location is secondary.
In other words, the direction of my snark is heavily influenced by things that are happening outside LW, even though the snark which you observe happens at LW.
I suggest that this is unwise; snark on LW won’t do anything to repair the opinions or attitudes of people elsewhere. If one place is Too Green and another Too Blue, then someone who frequents both does no favour to the place that’s Too Green by complaining about bluism there merely because they’re annoyed by the excessive bluism in the other place.
(Of course, you might not be able to help it; or you might not care. Fair enough, in either case. But if you do happen to care about the quality of discourse at LW and happen to be able to overcome your annoyance at overzealous progressives elsewhere, I suggest that you would do better to match the snark to the venue.)
I think you’re confusing me with this guy.
I think you’re confusing the quality of discourse with political tilt. The former is not a function of the latter. Besides, as I mentioned in another comment, how you see the tilt depends on where you set your zero point. I do not consider LW to have a conservative tilt.
Why do you think that? I’m not suggesting that you match your snark to the venue because that would push LW politics in “my” direction. (At least, I don’t think I am.) I’m suggesting that you do it because it will tend to improve the quality of discussion at LW. I would make the same suggestion if we were in some left-leaning place where you were complaining at all the conservatives because you were annoyed by all the neoreactionaries elsewhere.
But if, as seems to be the case, you don’t share my perception that LW has a lot more right-wing nastiness than left-wing nastiness, then fair enough.
Anyway, it’s pretty rude of me to be trying to tell someone else whom he should be snarking at. Sorry about that.
Well, that would be a straightforward uncharitable reading :-D
Why do you believe this to be so?
Reason 1: Because I think that there’s some chance (maybe not very large) that if an LW denizen is wrong about something and gets snarked at, it may be what they need to improve; and that for any given quantity of snark this effect will be larger if the snark is aimed at a larger deserving subpopulation of LW; so that if there are more people wrong in way A and fewer wrong in way B, snarking about A is more likely to do good than snarking about B.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW has more people in need of anti-far-right snark than people in need of anti-far-left snark.
(Of course—I repeat myself—if you’re snarking just for the fun of snarking then you needn’t care about that. And perhaps the chances of any good ever coming of snarking at anyone are negligible.)
Reason 2: Because if LW is welcoming to people in group A and hostile to people in group B, these groups playing roughly symmetrical roles on opposite ends of some spectrum, there is a risk of a positive-feedback loop that pushes LW further and further in the A direction and away from the B direction until it becomes severely and unfixably partisan, which (as you have already remarked) is not how LW is supposed to work and (as you haven’t remarked but I think is true) makes LW a less interesting and useful place by decreasing its intellectual diversity.
And, in the present instance, for reasons already discussed I think LW is welcoming to rightists and hostile to leftists. If so, then shifting that balance a bit would reduce the danger.
(How real is the danger? I don’t know. Maybe less real since the More Right folks left LW. Still there, though, I think.)
(An important note that perhaps I should have written some time ago: all this left/right stuff is of course a crude but useful one-dimensional simplification of reality and if taken too seriously raises the risk of the kind of us-versus-them thinking that we’re all too familiar with. And the axis we’re really looking at here doesn’t exactly correspond to the usual left/right political axis—it’s much more concerned with social, and less with economic, issues. Please be assured that I understand all this and am using terms like “left” and “right” only as a convenient shorthand.)
I am sorry, my life’s purpose is not to bring balance to the universe, one forum at a time. I am not in the re-education business.
Well, go for it :-) As I already noted, I don’t think so.
Given that NRx used to inhabit LW and then almost all of them went away while LW stayed as it is, I consider this risk negligible. Unless, of course, direction A is leftward :-D
Also, don’t forget that LW is populated mostly by Americans. From the European point of view, both US Democrats and US Republicans are right-of-centre.
I don’t know which axis are we looking at. Is there an axis at all or you just dont’ like a particular thought cluster?
Fair enough! As I said: you aren’t obliged to care about this stuff.
Take one of those political questionnaires. Throw out all the questions about economics and foreign policy, and keep the ones about social issues. Administer the questionnaire to a representative sample of Americans and Western Europeans. Take the first principal component. That axis.
So, basically morals, especially sexual morals? An axis with libertines at one extreme and puritans at the other?
I assume we’re throwing out “social” issues which are just economics in thin disguise, right?
I wouldn’t put it that way because there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy, and because there are other areas of morality where the “social left” are the puritans (e.g., meat-eating and pollution).
Funny :-/ I think there’s close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy (there is some in handwringing and propaganda around them, though).
Is your axis one of Haidt’s five moral axes or it’s something different? I am still not quite sure how do you see it.
Wow. I wonder what you mean by ethics, then. A change in economic or foreign policy may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths if there’s a war—how can these not be ethical matters?
No, I don’t think so.
I’m sorry about that. I’ve tried giving handwavy qualitative descriptions. I’ve told you how to identify it statistically. I’m really not sure there’s much more I can reasonably be expected to do.
Interesting. Our minds work sufficiently differently so that we hit minor misunderstandings on a very regular basis :-/
When I said “close to zero ethics in economics and foreign policy” I meant that decisions in this spheres are not driven by ethical considerations. Once you take out things like naked self-interest, desire for money and/or power, the necessity to keep up appearances, etc. the remaining influence of ethics, IMHO, is very small.
You, on the other hand, said “there’s a lot of ethics in economics and foreign policy” meaning that decisions in that sphere have meaningful consequences which we can evaluate ethically. That’s certainly true, but under this approach I can say that there is a lot of ethics in earthquakes. An earthquake “may put many thousands of people out of or into work, it may result in lots of deaths”, but is it an ethical matter?
No one (so far as we know) chooses whether there are to be earthquakes.
People do choose whether to start wars, increase or decrease minimum wages, levy new taxes, etc. (Governments choose directly; in democracies, their electorates choose indirectly.)
I don’t know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are. I am fairly sure that when I vote, I am greatly influenced by my estimates of the candidates’ parties’ likely foreign and economic policy, and that I am thinking in ethical terms about what policies would be best.
Of course I may be fooling myself about that, and the politicians may certainly be lying about what drives their policies. But the same is true on “social” issues. I don’t know of any reason to be more confident that (say) abortion policy is really more driven by politicians’ or voters’ ethics than (say) taxation policy.
You can examine their decisions (“revealed preferences”) and check whether they require ethical imperatives as an explanation or they can perfectly well be explained without considering ethics.
I appreciate that this is not a trivial exercise (e.g. distinguishing between “we cannot ethically do that” and “we cannot do that for the sake of keeping up appearances” is going to be difficult), but so is much of real-life analysis.