(facially the claim about the Enlightenment fostering resistance to slavery is particularly bizarre, or at least lazy.)
I’m curious why you think this, looking at the history to strikes me as fairly obvious. The meme that slavery is wrong in principal, as opposed to only being wrong when it happens to you, is definitely a product of the enlightenment.
The meme that slavery is wrong in principal, as opposed to only being wrong when it happens to you, is definitely a product of the enlightenment.
That’s true only under a highly contrived definition of the Enlightenment, which defines it more or less as the set of all intellectual trends in the 18th century that are in sufficient agreement with today’s respectable opinion. (Admittedly, this is more or less how the term is used in today’s standard cartoon history.)
In reality, the modern anti-slavery attitudes are due to the political (and military) victories of the abolitionist movements in the English-speaking world in the period 1807-1865. These were strongly religious in character, and influenced by the Enlightenment only insofar as all major intellectual trends influence each other to some degree.
In reality, the modern anti-slavery attitudes are due to the political (and military) victories of the abolitionist movements in the English-speaking world in the period 1807-1865. These were strongly religious in character, and influenced by the Enlightenment only insofar as all major intellectual trends influence each other to some degree.
The French First Republic abolished slavery in 1794 -- and that one was explicitly anti-Christian.
Spain abolished slavery in 1811.
I don’t really disagree with you factually about the role of England or of Christians… but Christianity had been around for about 1800 years by that time. Christianity wasn’t a new thing that we can therefore attribute the end of slavery to its coming.
In short: P(Abolitionist ideas|Christian Ideas) < P(Abolitionist ideas|Enlightenment Ideas)
You seem to be assuming that my goal is to make a point that would somehow be in favor of Christianity in general. My writing was not motivated by any such goal, and lumping all historical Christians (under whatever definition) together on an issue like this is meaningless, given the diversity of their views. Moreover, it is clear that the concrete people and denominations who stood behind abolitionism were on the outer fringes of Protestantism, and motivated in their activism by their peculiarities much more than any universal Christian beliefs.
My goal was merely to clarify the historical origin of the concrete anti-slavery laws and attitudes that are in force in today’s world, not to speculate on what exact circumstances are likely to give birth to anti-slavery ideas.
Slavery was abolished for the first time in England in 1102, though it kept coming back; it was abolished again in Cartwright’s case of 1569, for instance. However, when people refer to “abolition of slavery” today, they usually mean the abolition of the African slave trade and then of slavery in the New World, notably the Caribbean colonies and the United States.
In Great Britain, many Enlightenment philosophers including Locke and Mill were significant opponents of slavery and the slave trade — although so too were many religious dissenters, notably Quakers, who tended to be better organized and more committed. The mainstream Church of England, in contrast, held many slaves itself; so this wasn’t a case of religion vs. irreligion. For that matter, religious toleration, which led to the legalization of the Quakers and other dissenting churches, was itself arguably an Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment was never an expressly atheistic movement in Britain or America; English Freemasonry, rather deeply involved with the Enlightenment, to this day does not accept atheists.
Meanwhile in France and the French colonies in the New World, slavery was abolished by the “Enlightenment” (and “rationalist”!) French Revolution, then shortly re-established by Napoleon. That didn’t work out so well for Haiti …
Well, yes, it is a lot more complicated if you want to get into all the details. However, the concrete political movements that led to the abolition of British slave trade in 1807, the subsequent British commitment to stamp out the slave trade globally with the Royal Navy, the Empire-wide Abolition Act in 1833, and the American struggles over slavery that culminated with the Civil War, were overwhelmingly instigated and promoted by religiously motivated people coming mostly from Quaker and certain other Dissenter groups. The modern anti-slavery attitudes draw their ideological origins primarily from these people and their work.
Also, some of your details are not quite right. Locke was by no means a principled opponent of slavery—he considered slavery legitimate in certain cases (“state of war continued”) that he outlined in his Second Treatise. (Also, I have read, though never seen conclusive evidence, that he had some financial interest in the slavery business and participated in drafting a strongly pro-slavery constitution for the Carolina colony.) Mill can’t be classified under the Enlightenment unless its definition is made absurdly overbroad, and even regardless, he was a latecomer to the whole issue.
It is true that the British and American Enlightenment was never as atheistic as the French. (This was to some degree because of its representatives’ actual beliefs, but also because atheism was more dangerous for one’s reputation and career in Britain and America than in France.) However, the leading British and American Enlightenment figures—from Locke to Hume to Smith to Gibbon to the U.S. founders -- were definitely not among the leading anti-slavery activists of their day, and I’m not sure if any of them even made a principled condemnation of it. Whatever we make out of it, the people who actually started and promoted abolitionism as an ideological and political force were first and foremost religious Quakers and other Dissenters, for whom the Enlightenment was at most a side influence.
Back before 1940 progressivism was nominally Christian and protestant.
The new testament takes an extreme socially conservative position on sex and marriage: Marriage should be patriarchal, a woman should never divorce her husband, no matter what, and a divorced woman should never remarry while her husband lives. It takes a moderate position on alcohol, suggesting one should drink socially at meal times, and an alarmingly moderate position on slavery. It is desirable to free one’s own slaves, at least if they convert to Christianity, but by no means required, and one should not free anyone else’s slaves by any pressure stronger than moral suasion.
That branch of Christianity that was in substantial part a political movement, the ancestor of today’s non communist left, found the new testament inconvenient, and tended to demote Jesus from God to major community organizer, since the politics of the new testament imply no role for Christian political activists—Christians are supposed to do good, but, if they take the new testament seriously, none of the good they are supposed to do is appropriate to being done through the state. A theocratic Christianity is a absurd as a non theocratic Islam, so to the extent that Christians have been active in politics, they tended to ditch the New Testament, (Christians on the left) or else claim with varying degrees of plausibility to be defending the Church from state intervention (Christian conservatives)
RETRACTING: I missed the Pauline quotes from Corinthians, which makes my whole post irrelevant.
The new testament takes an extreme socially conservative position on sex and marriage: Marriage should be patriarchal, a woman should never divorce her husband, no matter what, and a divorced woman should never remarry while her husband lives.
You’re right about one of these, that the new testament (specifically Paul) says marriage should be patriarchal. The other words you spoke are the exact other way around. The exact New Testament quotes are:
“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” ”
After a long passage Jesus at the end responds “What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” and also Mathhew 5:32 “But I say to you, That whoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery: and whoever shall marry her that is divorced commits adultery.”
And also Luke 16:18: “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery. ”
--
In short, in complete opposition to what you said, the new Testament says that a man should never divorce his wife, and that a divorced man should never remarry after a divorce (or marry a woman who was divorced) -- it’s the man who is committing adultery in both these cases, or who is causing the woman to commit adultery (and thus is portrayed as ultimately responsible for this sin).
I want to be charitable in my interpretation of your words, but these factoids seem way too reversed to have been an honest mistake in your part.
Romans 7:2-3 The apostle Paul taught that “...by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man.”
Here’s another:
1 Corinthians 7:10-13, 27, 39 The apostle Paul’s teaching continues: “To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband. But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.
Let us compare. Romans says:
by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive
1 Corinthians says:
A wife must not separate from her husband.
sam says:
a woman should never divorce her husband, no matter what
Sounds like it’s saying the same thing in different words.
Let us compare. Romans says:
if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress.
1 Corinthians says:
But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband.
sam says:
a divorced woman should never remarry while her husband lives
Sounds like it’s saying the same thing in different words.
Ah, you’re right, I somehow missed those Pauline quotes from Corinthians when I was looking up quotes about divorce, and I thought sam had deliberately mangled the Jesus quotes instead.
I’ll retract my earlier comment. Thanks for the correction.
A theocratic Christianity is a absurd as a non theocratic Islam
The history of Europe strongly suggests otherwise. There’s a reason that the Catholic Church in the 19th century labeled the idea of separation of Church and State a heresy dubbed “Americanism”.
so to the extent that Christians have been active in politics, they tended to ditch the New Testament, (Christians on the left) or else claim with varying degrees of plausibility to be defending the Church from state intervention (Christian conservatives)
Excuse me? Most left wing Christians make a big deal about how they care about the New Testament and not the old. The second claim is simply wrong. The whole modern return of evangelicals to the political sphere (starting in the 1970s) was explicitly to put religion back into government. Jerry Falwell is one example of this approach. More extreme are the Christian Recontructionists. And even the fairly moderate Mike Huckabee has explicitly said that if the US Constitution is not in keeping with God’s law that it should then be modified to fit it.
It’s a subtle point, but theocratic doesn’t mean “rule according to religious dictates”; it means “rule by the clerical arbiters of religious dictates.” Medieval Christian states, with the notable exceptions of the Papal States and Montenegro, were not theocratic. In other words, Iran is a partial theocracy; Saudi Arabia, at least de jure, is not. Nevertheless, official religion is probably a more oppressive force in Saudi Arabia than it is in Iran.
The Christian Reconstructionists give me the willies just as much as anyone else around here, but it is probably not correct to label them theocratic (and the fact that they aren’t theocrats doesn’t make them less dangerous).
Voting your comment up for being a valid point. That said, while that may be the intended use of theocratic, but in context here it seems that the poster intended to mean theocratic in a more general sense. I
Note that given the historical existence of the Papal States, the claim is, even when interpreted in the narrow sense, still wrong.
This also runs into the problem that many governments in the Islamic world did not generally have a theocratic element in this narrow sense. The Ottoman Empire for example did not have clergy members involved in politics (although technically speaking the sultan was officially considered to be the heir of the caliphate, I think.).
So while you’ve made a good point about the technical meaning of the word, I don’t think it saves the poster’s remarks.
Note that given the historical existence of the Papal States, the claim is, even when interpreted in the narrow sense, still wrong.
I think Sam is generally correct about Western Christianity. Yes, historically many church officials have simultaneously held secular power, and this was by no means limited to the Papal States—as the most notable examples, in the Holy Roman Empire there were a great many sovereign abbeys and prince-bishops. These were theoretically under imperial authority, but in practice, except for the occasional appearance of strong medieval emperors, they were fully sovereign for all practical purposes. (Interestingly, besides the Vatican, another historical relic nowadays is Andorra, whose co-sovereign, in an odd arrangement, is the bishop of Urgell in Catalonia.)
However, in all these cases, the simultaneous secular and ecclesiastical authority was considered as two separate functions exercised by the same person or institution, not as one and the same. The closest modern analogy would be when a bishop as an individual, or an abbey as a corporation, is also the owner of some business enterprise. (Indeed, before the rise of the modern nation-state, the line between sovereignty and private property was much less clear.) The claim to the secular authority over a piece of land could be gained or lost by conquest or a legal transfer independently of the ecclesiastical title, even if they were often held and passed together for many generations. The secular issues would be under the jurisdiction of the local secular legal system, typically derived from some mix of the local customary law, Roman law, and sovereign statue, while the ecclesiastical issues would fall under the canon law.
This is very different from a real theocracy, where religious leaders claim secular authority by virtue of their religious status alone, and where religion is considered as the sole, or at least primary, source of law—something that was never true for any legal system under Western Christianity. Even in the Papal States, the religious office of the Holy See and the sovereign office of the monarch of the Papal States were considered as separate. (And foreign powers could deal with either of these separately.)
This is not to say that popes never claimed theocratic secular authority. However, such claims were typically unsuccessful, and even their occasional temporary and limited success would backfire badly. Insofar as real theocracies ever sprang up under Western Christianity, it happened among peculiar fringe groups, such as the New England Puritans.
You also say:
There’s a reason that the Catholic Church in the 19th century labeled the idea of separation of Church and State a heresy dubbed “Americanism”.
However, the heresy of Americanism was about principled opposition to having an established church. But an established church is very different from theocracy. The fact that a particular church is awarded particular legal privileges, or even some kind of special representation in the government, doesn’t mean that religious leaders are claiming secular sovereignty by virtue of their religious position, or that religious law is being enforced. England, for example, has had an established church throughout its history (there are still bishops in the House of Lords), and it was never a theocracy in any meaningful sense of the term.
Similarly, the idea that secular law should incorporate values dictated by the predominant or established religion is not theocratic either, as long as the law originates from legislators whose office is not religious, and doesn’t claim a religious basis for its authority. Of course, a principled secularist may consider any legal privileges awarded to religious groups and any religious influences on the law as unacceptable. But claiming that any such things automatically constitute theocracy is an abuse of the term.
Also:
The Ottoman Empire for example did not have clergy members involved in politics (although technically speaking the sultan was officially considered to be the heir of the caliphate, I think.).
Ironically, for Christians living under the Ottomans, the millet system) forced a much greater blending of religious and secular authority than anywhere in the West. It is in fact one of the main reasons why I had to make the qualification about “Western” Christianity in the above paragraphs. (Though not the only one, as things were somewhat different in Eastern Christianity even before the Turks.)
That aside, the Ottomans were indeed a peculiar period in the Islamic history, and their rule was long and widespread enough that these peculiarities should be taken into account when making general statements about the Islamic world. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the basic theocratic notions, such as law derived straight from religious authority and lack of clear de jure separation between religious and secular offices, have indeed been much more characteristic of Islam than of Christianity—especially Western Christianity, whose historical tradition of such separation is in fact the root of the modern notions about the separation of church and state.
England, for example, has had an established church throughout its history (there are still bishops in the House of Lords), and it was never a theocracy in any meaningful sense of the term.
Theocracy has a lot of meanings, and one can argue that Elizabethan England was a theocracy in that the head of state was the head of the religion, and that the official religion was compulsory, but I was contrasting Islam and Christianity, and Elizabethan England was not a theocracy in the sense that Islam is a theocracy, one difference being that law in islam supposed to be religious, that secular law is supposed to be subordinate to religious law and priestly authority, while England had truly secular law independent of priestly authority, another difference being that Queen Elizabeth the first was under no obligation to make holy war to extend the true religion, whereas the Caliph was under
obligation to make holy war to extend the true religion.
The biggest difference of course is that every Shakespearean play was written from a Roman Catholic, materialist, or pagan point of view, whereas you could not get away with that sort of thing under Islam—and indeed you cannot get away with it in today’s England where no television program or movie will written from a politically incorrect point of view. In this sense, Elizabethan England was not a theocracy, and today’s England is a theocracy.
In the original context, the implied definition of the theocracy for that post is that in Islam, the ruler’s authority comes from the true religion: The ruler must be a true Muslim, and his law must be subordinate to Shaia law. In Christianity, Caesar’s authority does not come from the true religion, he need not be a true Christian, and his law is not subject to priestly authority.
In another post, I might well use a different implied definition of theocracy, under which most of the Christian past was theocratic, or all states are theocratic in some sense, some being more theocratic than others.
But in other contexts, other definitions are defensible.
The biggest difference of course is that every Shakespearean play was written from a Roman Catholic, materialist, or pagan point of view,
You’ve claimed that before, and I’ve challenged that position, and you’ve not provided any evidence to support it.
EDIT TO ADD: Also, to make proper comparisons with modern-day political correctness (i.e. following what is considered the limits of acceptable political discourse), you need to show where a Shakespearean play ever attacks Queen Elizabeth or her politics.
Also, to make proper comparisons with modern-day political correctness (i.e. following what is considered the limits of acceptable political discourse), you need to show where a Shakespearean play ever attacks Queen Elizabeth or her politics.
Elizabethan England did not enforce a political view, in large part because in those days religion was politics., it enforced a religious view. Religious issues where what was controversial back then, were what people argued over, and frequently killed each other over. The divine right and natural right of Kings was like motherhood and apple pie, not an issue.
Which official religious beliefs Shakespeare with great regularity doubted, and sometimes attacked—his plays imply the existence of purgatory, doubt the existence of an afterlife, and doubt the existence of a God that cares about humans, or pays much attention to them.
Modern politics asserts several political views that have distinctly religious characteristics, such as that all humans are equal, and then enforces equality in the in sense of interchangeability. Modern films, plays, and books not merely refrain from doubting such views, but actively uphold them. Not one black who is a significant character is stereotypical, a quite improbable number of them are actively counterstereotypical. Almost all heroines and love interests are actively counter stereotypical, for example in that they quite improbably successfully beat up bad guys, the most notorious example being princess Leia improbably and unbelievably throttling Jabba the Hut.
Elizabethan England did not enforce a political view,
You keep talking utter falsehood about past eras, which you predictably and utterly fail to substantiate with evidence.
I’ve already told you about Shakespeare needing to present Macbeth as a tyrant, and Jeanne D’arc as an evil witch. Here’s some more direct evidence of political censoring: Quotes from http://www.family-source.com/cache/144244/idx/0
“The best-known case of political censorship is that of Richard II. The play’s first edition had a scene that showed the deposition of Richard II, which “so infuriated Queen Elizabeth that she ordered it eliminated from all copies”
“In Henry IV, the name Oldcastle was changed to Falstaff after the intervention of the Cobham family, Sir John Oldcastle’s descendants, who were powerful in the Elizabethan court (”
such as that all humans are equal and then enforcing equality in the in sense of interchangeability
Are you kidding us? With half the released movies being superhero flicks where people of special heritage and/or power have the fate of the whole world resting on their shoulders (X-Men, Superman, Batman, Spiderman), or other Messiah/Mighty Whitey types (e.g. Avatar, The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves, The Matrix)?
the most notorious example being Princess Leia improbably and unbelievably throttling Jabba the Hut.
She’s a princess. From a family of Jedis. You bring up Star Wars in the same paragraph that you claim that modern films portray all humans as equal and interchangeable, and you don’t even notice the fricking irony? Is Luke Skywalker interchangeable with Stormtrooper #4, or even with Lando Calrissian? Is Anakin Skywalker interchangeable with even Random Jedi #52?
Look, nearly every single sentence of yours ends up unsubstantiated, and disproven ludicrously easily. Can you just try to think of an obvious counterexample to your claims before you press “Comment” next time, so that you don’t waste our time typing said obvious counterexamples?
Note that given the historical existence of the Papal States, the claim is, even when interpreted in the narrow sense, still wrong.
While the donation of Constantine was fraudulent, the donations of Charles the Hammer and Charles the great were real enough, but the church ruled those states under the holy Roman emperor, like a baron under a king—hence arguably not a theocracy. At least that is what they argued, though as the authority of the holy Roman emperor declined, the argument became less credible, and was accordingly condemned.
While the donation of Constantine was fraudulent, the donations of Charles the Hammer and Charles the great were real enough,
The very fact that papal secular authority was justified by the alleged Donation of Constantine reflects a profound lack of theocratic thinking. In a theocracy, a religious leader claims secular authority as inherent to his religious office—yet the popes and their champions considered it necessary to present their claim as inherited from a purely secular sovereign, despite the ultimate papal religious authority.
I don’t agree with his point at all. I’m just trying to preempt possible confusion if this thread ends up continuing—it’s helpful if everyone actually uses the term the same way.
A theocratic Christianity is a absurd as a non theocratic Islam
The history of Europe strongly suggests otherwise.
The pope at least pretended not to be a theocracy. Theoretically the Holy Roman Emperor was Caesar, in “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s” To the extent that they actually were a theocracy, they were criticized for it, and denied it. The Spanish inquisition was supposedly answerable to the King of Spain, and theoretically the Pope’s minions were supposedly merely advising them, much as Harvard theoretically merely advises the federal bureaucracy.
Most left wing Christians make a big deal about how they care about the New Testament and not the old.
Most left wing Christians in the protestant line are in practice indistinguishable from Unitarians, and Unitarians don’t give a tinker’s damn about either testament.
If one testament is less right wing than the other, it is the old testament that is the less right wing, since the old Testament places limits on debt and slavery, The old testament position on slavery is markedly less reactionary than the New Testament position on slavery—not that left wing Christians read either one.
While the donation of Constantine was fraudulent, the donations of Charles the Hammer and Charles the great were real enough,
The very fact that papal secular authority was justified by the alleged Donation of Constantine reflects a profound lack of theocratic thinking. In a theocracy, a religious leader claims secular authority as inherent to his religious office—yet the popes and their champions considered it necessary to present their claim as inherited from a purely secular sovereign, despite the ultimate papal religious authority.
Meanwhile in France and the French colonies in the New World, slavery was abolished by the “Enlightenment” (and “rationalist”!) French Revolution
To add a related data point, the same thing happened in the rest of Latin America. Abolition of slavery was of the first measures of many of the revolutions against the Spanish in the early 19th century, which were heavily inspired by the Enlightenment. Brazil held out a few decades more, because slavery was a lot more integral to its economy.
From what I’ve heard, the enlightenment played into making American slavery as bad as it was. Since the enlightenment said that it was bad to enslave people, but slavery was very profitable, a pattern of rationalizations were built up that Africans were innately inferior and slavery was good for them.
The religious progressives were the predecessors of today’s progressives, so today’s progressives can take credit for abolitionism, though they are embarrassed to do so, since they do not wish to recall their Christian past. They were already ditching the New Testament for its horribly reactionary position on slavery and marriage, and while they purported to say “Jesus is Lord”, they were already demoting him from God to chief community organizer. As Mencius argues, as recently as the 1940s, the predecessors of today’s progressives identified themselves as explicitly Christian, though when they finally threw Jesus under the bus and allowed the Jews in to join them, it was in fact less of a change than one might expect.
Mencius argues that they finally openly ditched Jesus so that they could impose their religion in the schools without running afoul of the first amendment, though perhaps letting the Jews into an explicitly progressive establishment also had something to do with it.
Why is this so heavily downvoted without a counterargument?
The notion that modern American progressivism is sociologically or memetically speaking the descendant of various Christian religious groups seems plausible and several points speak in its favour (including the heavily upvoted father of this comment).
I find this voting pattern especially strange considering that Mencius Moldbug is read by quite a few people on Lesswrong so the theory shouldn’t be that shocking in itself and people are generally quite detached and reasonable when discussing even controversial issues here (with the exception of gender relations).
Why is this so heavily downvoted without a counterargument?
What counterargument? What factual point is sam actually making? That today’s progressives (I don’t know how he defines the category—everyone who voted for Obama or Nader?) are embarrassed to take credit for abolitionism because they don’t wish to recall their Christian past?
How does one argue against that, by showing electroencephalographs of progressives that reveal the embarrassment zones of the brain don’t light up when progressives think about the abolitionist movement? It seems to me that the person making the claim should provide the evidence for this “embarrassment”.
sam doesn’t make arguments, he just sprays insults all over the place. Even when he makes specific claims, (perhaps progressive organization did stop identifying as Christian at a specific point of time, perhaps it was politically motivated) he uses the most insulting manner of expressing himself he can think of. “threw Jesus under the bus”—and he still doesn’t offer any actual evidence that can be discussed or analyzed, he just makes the claim.
sam has to learn to be civil, and provide evidence.
sam doesn’t make arguments, he just sprays insults all over the place
These aren’t mutually exclusive. I upvote many of his comments. Perhaps one in thirty simply deserve upvoting, one in fifteen because I have lower standards for him.
he uses the most insulting manner of expressing himself he can think of
Voting with lower standards makes sense if you think he is salvageable and want him to stick around—but that is not usually how we deal with extremely irrational posters.
He’s also provided me with enough evidence that he is not in the business of seeking truth that I have little reason to think even is reasonable-sounding points correlate with the truth. Even outside sources can be cherry-picked. If it were the case that everything here got fact checked or that we could effectively discount the evidence he provides proportionate to our estimation of his reliability this wouldn’t be a problem. But as time is a limited resource and we are not perfect Bayesian reasoners it is bad epistemic hygiene to encourage him to stick around. It is worse epistemic hygiene to lower our voting standards for him.
Not to mention the fact that people can’t seem to keep themselves from feeding the troll so we end up spending our time talking about whether or not conservatives have ever reinvented language to benefit themselves—as if that wasn’t already obvious to everyone who hasn’t been turned into a memetic zombie.
Sources are OK evidence, people bringing sources are better evidence. When those advocating banning chimp testing focus on cases decades old, that tells me no similar case has happened recently. I don’t assume that that case is typical of all chimp experiments, past and present, instead I learn the contrary.
If I find some study indicating that colleges discriminate against high school ROTC members, I don’t really have much of an idea if what I stumbled upon is the strongest evidence for that. If sam tells me about it, I am confident no reliable study showing more discrimination has been conducted.
This requires a model of the poster that not everyone reading comments will have. That can be solved by downvoting such posters to indicate their untrustworthiness.
But as I said humans are not perfect Bayesian reasoners and are not good at adjusting for unreliable speakers. We almost always either adjust too far and reverse stupidity or don’t discount enough and let cherry picked sources or skewed interpretations sneak into our brains. We’ll update without even noticing.
This seems like a selective application of a universal objection. “We almost always either adjust too far and reverse stupidity or don’t discount enough,” makes your reason technically not a universal objection, just an objection to learning anything from badly biased people, but this might be a confabulation added to the universal “humans are not perfect Bayesian reasoners”.
There is a difference between suboptimal updating and updating in ways that don’t correlate with the truth. My point is that badly biased posters may cause us to do the latter. But this is really tangential to the main thrust of my argument. Even (if) you can learn things (from) the occasional source Sam cites that seems very unlikely to make up for the rest of his noise. Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism.
Even you can learn things about the occasional source Sam cites
To be read: Even if you can learn about things from the occasional source Sam cites?
WKGDbP would be squarely on point if I had implied there was anything bad about condemning, downvoting unto hiddenness, censoring, banning, or the like, that Sam had net negative value, and that the evils of censorship were what was preventing me from harsher criticism of his comments.
As it is only the first few paragraphs of that are applicable. I concede I may be succumbing to the bias of valuing known, tangible gains over unknown, intangible but probably greater losses. I think Sam has net positive value here, but your argument he is deterring more valuable people from joining is important.
I think the most important landmark in the failure scenario described is “then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other...”
To be read: Even if you can learn about things from the occasional source Sam cites?
Correct. And edited.
As it is only the first few paragraphs of that are applicable. I concede I may be succumbing to the bias of valuing known, tangible gains over unknown, intangible but probably greater losses. I think Sam has net positive value here, but your argument he is deterring more valuable people from joining is important.
I’m not sure you’re thinking about your information diet economically. Any minute you spend reading sam0345 or an indignant but obvious reply to him is a minute you could have spent reading something better. What make Less Wrong a special place is the ratio of good comments to bad not the total amount of insight gained by reading every single comment.
Yes, I’ve upvoted a couple of his comments too. A couple others got downvotes from me instead. It basically depends on whether he can focus himself on the argument, instead of the insults.
I agree both on the memetical relation between Christianity and progressivism, and on the likely receptiveness of LW to this idea. My guess is that most of sam’s downvotes are not for the intellectual content of his/her postings but for their style, that seems intent at scoring political points as opposed to finding truth.
I’ve down voted sam0345 before for similar reasons. This post didn’t strike me as that bad. My intuition puts bad style and good ideas to be somewhere on the −3 to +1 scale karma wise.
I suppose LW is sensitive to repeated misbehaviour. Either that or we let ourselves be affected quite strongly on how any particular comment is judged by who wrote it.
I’m curious why you think this, looking at the history to strikes me as fairly obvious. The meme that slavery is wrong in principal, as opposed to only being wrong when it happens to you, is definitely a product of the enlightenment.
That’s true only under a highly contrived definition of the Enlightenment, which defines it more or less as the set of all intellectual trends in the 18th century that are in sufficient agreement with today’s respectable opinion. (Admittedly, this is more or less how the term is used in today’s standard cartoon history.)
In reality, the modern anti-slavery attitudes are due to the political (and military) victories of the abolitionist movements in the English-speaking world in the period 1807-1865. These were strongly religious in character, and influenced by the Enlightenment only insofar as all major intellectual trends influence each other to some degree.
The French First Republic abolished slavery in 1794 -- and that one was explicitly anti-Christian. Spain abolished slavery in 1811.
I don’t really disagree with you factually about the role of England or of Christians… but Christianity had been around for about 1800 years by that time. Christianity wasn’t a new thing that we can therefore attribute the end of slavery to its coming.
In short: P(Abolitionist ideas|Christian Ideas) < P(Abolitionist ideas|Enlightenment Ideas)
You seem to be assuming that my goal is to make a point that would somehow be in favor of Christianity in general. My writing was not motivated by any such goal, and lumping all historical Christians (under whatever definition) together on an issue like this is meaningless, given the diversity of their views. Moreover, it is clear that the concrete people and denominations who stood behind abolitionism were on the outer fringes of Protestantism, and motivated in their activism by their peculiarities much more than any universal Christian beliefs.
My goal was merely to clarify the historical origin of the concrete anti-slavery laws and attitudes that are in force in today’s world, not to speculate on what exact circumstances are likely to give birth to anti-slavery ideas.
Well … it’s a little more complicated than that.
Slavery was abolished for the first time in England in 1102, though it kept coming back; it was abolished again in Cartwright’s case of 1569, for instance. However, when people refer to “abolition of slavery” today, they usually mean the abolition of the African slave trade and then of slavery in the New World, notably the Caribbean colonies and the United States.
In Great Britain, many Enlightenment philosophers including Locke and Mill were significant opponents of slavery and the slave trade — although so too were many religious dissenters, notably Quakers, who tended to be better organized and more committed. The mainstream Church of England, in contrast, held many slaves itself; so this wasn’t a case of religion vs. irreligion. For that matter, religious toleration, which led to the legalization of the Quakers and other dissenting churches, was itself arguably an Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment was never an expressly atheistic movement in Britain or America; English Freemasonry, rather deeply involved with the Enlightenment, to this day does not accept atheists.
Meanwhile in France and the French colonies in the New World, slavery was abolished by the “Enlightenment” (and “rationalist”!) French Revolution, then shortly re-established by Napoleon. That didn’t work out so well for Haiti …
Well, yes, it is a lot more complicated if you want to get into all the details. However, the concrete political movements that led to the abolition of British slave trade in 1807, the subsequent British commitment to stamp out the slave trade globally with the Royal Navy, the Empire-wide Abolition Act in 1833, and the American struggles over slavery that culminated with the Civil War, were overwhelmingly instigated and promoted by religiously motivated people coming mostly from Quaker and certain other Dissenter groups. The modern anti-slavery attitudes draw their ideological origins primarily from these people and their work.
Also, some of your details are not quite right. Locke was by no means a principled opponent of slavery—he considered slavery legitimate in certain cases (“state of war continued”) that he outlined in his Second Treatise. (Also, I have read, though never seen conclusive evidence, that he had some financial interest in the slavery business and participated in drafting a strongly pro-slavery constitution for the Carolina colony.) Mill can’t be classified under the Enlightenment unless its definition is made absurdly overbroad, and even regardless, he was a latecomer to the whole issue.
It is true that the British and American Enlightenment was never as atheistic as the French. (This was to some degree because of its representatives’ actual beliefs, but also because atheism was more dangerous for one’s reputation and career in Britain and America than in France.) However, the leading British and American Enlightenment figures—from Locke to Hume to Smith to Gibbon to the U.S. founders -- were definitely not among the leading anti-slavery activists of their day, and I’m not sure if any of them even made a principled condemnation of it. Whatever we make out of it, the people who actually started and promoted abolitionism as an ideological and political force were first and foremost religious Quakers and other Dissenters, for whom the Enlightenment was at most a side influence.
Back before 1940 progressivism was nominally Christian and protestant.
The new testament takes an extreme socially conservative position on sex and marriage: Marriage should be patriarchal, a woman should never divorce her husband, no matter what, and a divorced woman should never remarry while her husband lives. It takes a moderate position on alcohol, suggesting one should drink socially at meal times, and an alarmingly moderate position on slavery. It is desirable to free one’s own slaves, at least if they convert to Christianity, but by no means required, and one should not free anyone else’s slaves by any pressure stronger than moral suasion.
That branch of Christianity that was in substantial part a political movement, the ancestor of today’s non communist left, found the new testament inconvenient, and tended to demote Jesus from God to major community organizer, since the politics of the new testament imply no role for Christian political activists—Christians are supposed to do good, but, if they take the new testament seriously, none of the good they are supposed to do is appropriate to being done through the state. A theocratic Christianity is a absurd as a non theocratic Islam, so to the extent that Christians have been active in politics, they tended to ditch the New Testament, (Christians on the left) or else claim with varying degrees of plausibility to be defending the Church from state intervention (Christian conservatives)
RETRACTING: I missed the Pauline quotes from Corinthians, which makes my whole post irrelevant.
You’re right about one of these, that the new testament (specifically Paul) says marriage should be patriarchal. The other words you spoke are the exact other way around. The exact New Testament quotes are:
“Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” ” After a long passage Jesus at the end responds “What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” and also Mathhew 5:32 “But I say to you, That whoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery: and whoever shall marry her that is divorced commits adultery.”
And also Luke 16:18: “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries one who is divorced from a husband commits adultery. ”
--
In short, in complete opposition to what you said, the new Testament says that a man should never divorce his wife, and that a divorced man should never remarry after a divorce (or marry a woman who was divorced) -- it’s the man who is committing adultery in both these cases, or who is causing the woman to commit adultery (and thus is portrayed as ultimately responsible for this sin).
I want to be charitable in my interpretation of your words, but these factoids seem way too reversed to have been an honest mistake in your part.
It’s easy to google the quotes up. Here’s one.
Here’s another:
Let us compare. Romans says:
1 Corinthians says:
sam says:
Sounds like it’s saying the same thing in different words.
Let us compare. Romans says:
1 Corinthians says:
sam says:
Sounds like it’s saying the same thing in different words.
Source.
Ah, you’re right, I somehow missed those Pauline quotes from Corinthians when I was looking up quotes about divorce, and I thought sam had deliberately mangled the Jesus quotes instead.
I’ll retract my earlier comment. Thanks for the correction.
The history of Europe strongly suggests otherwise. There’s a reason that the Catholic Church in the 19th century labeled the idea of separation of Church and State a heresy dubbed “Americanism”.
Excuse me? Most left wing Christians make a big deal about how they care about the New Testament and not the old. The second claim is simply wrong. The whole modern return of evangelicals to the political sphere (starting in the 1970s) was explicitly to put religion back into government. Jerry Falwell is one example of this approach. More extreme are the Christian Recontructionists. And even the fairly moderate Mike Huckabee has explicitly said that if the US Constitution is not in keeping with God’s law that it should then be modified to fit it.
It’s a subtle point, but theocratic doesn’t mean “rule according to religious dictates”; it means “rule by the clerical arbiters of religious dictates.” Medieval Christian states, with the notable exceptions of the Papal States and Montenegro, were not theocratic. In other words, Iran is a partial theocracy; Saudi Arabia, at least de jure, is not. Nevertheless, official religion is probably a more oppressive force in Saudi Arabia than it is in Iran.
The Christian Reconstructionists give me the willies just as much as anyone else around here, but it is probably not correct to label them theocratic (and the fact that they aren’t theocrats doesn’t make them less dangerous).
Voting your comment up for being a valid point. That said, while that may be the intended use of theocratic, but in context here it seems that the poster intended to mean theocratic in a more general sense. I
Note that given the historical existence of the Papal States, the claim is, even when interpreted in the narrow sense, still wrong.
This also runs into the problem that many governments in the Islamic world did not generally have a theocratic element in this narrow sense. The Ottoman Empire for example did not have clergy members involved in politics (although technically speaking the sultan was officially considered to be the heir of the caliphate, I think.).
So while you’ve made a good point about the technical meaning of the word, I don’t think it saves the poster’s remarks.
I think Sam is generally correct about Western Christianity. Yes, historically many church officials have simultaneously held secular power, and this was by no means limited to the Papal States—as the most notable examples, in the Holy Roman Empire there were a great many sovereign abbeys and prince-bishops. These were theoretically under imperial authority, but in practice, except for the occasional appearance of strong medieval emperors, they were fully sovereign for all practical purposes. (Interestingly, besides the Vatican, another historical relic nowadays is Andorra, whose co-sovereign, in an odd arrangement, is the bishop of Urgell in Catalonia.)
However, in all these cases, the simultaneous secular and ecclesiastical authority was considered as two separate functions exercised by the same person or institution, not as one and the same. The closest modern analogy would be when a bishop as an individual, or an abbey as a corporation, is also the owner of some business enterprise. (Indeed, before the rise of the modern nation-state, the line between sovereignty and private property was much less clear.) The claim to the secular authority over a piece of land could be gained or lost by conquest or a legal transfer independently of the ecclesiastical title, even if they were often held and passed together for many generations. The secular issues would be under the jurisdiction of the local secular legal system, typically derived from some mix of the local customary law, Roman law, and sovereign statue, while the ecclesiastical issues would fall under the canon law.
This is very different from a real theocracy, where religious leaders claim secular authority by virtue of their religious status alone, and where religion is considered as the sole, or at least primary, source of law—something that was never true for any legal system under Western Christianity. Even in the Papal States, the religious office of the Holy See and the sovereign office of the monarch of the Papal States were considered as separate. (And foreign powers could deal with either of these separately.)
This is not to say that popes never claimed theocratic secular authority. However, such claims were typically unsuccessful, and even their occasional temporary and limited success would backfire badly. Insofar as real theocracies ever sprang up under Western Christianity, it happened among peculiar fringe groups, such as the New England Puritans.
You also say:
However, the heresy of Americanism was about principled opposition to having an established church. But an established church is very different from theocracy. The fact that a particular church is awarded particular legal privileges, or even some kind of special representation in the government, doesn’t mean that religious leaders are claiming secular sovereignty by virtue of their religious position, or that religious law is being enforced. England, for example, has had an established church throughout its history (there are still bishops in the House of Lords), and it was never a theocracy in any meaningful sense of the term.
Similarly, the idea that secular law should incorporate values dictated by the predominant or established religion is not theocratic either, as long as the law originates from legislators whose office is not religious, and doesn’t claim a religious basis for its authority. Of course, a principled secularist may consider any legal privileges awarded to religious groups and any religious influences on the law as unacceptable. But claiming that any such things automatically constitute theocracy is an abuse of the term.
Also:
Ironically, for Christians living under the Ottomans, the millet system) forced a much greater blending of religious and secular authority than anywhere in the West. It is in fact one of the main reasons why I had to make the qualification about “Western” Christianity in the above paragraphs. (Though not the only one, as things were somewhat different in Eastern Christianity even before the Turks.)
That aside, the Ottomans were indeed a peculiar period in the Islamic history, and their rule was long and widespread enough that these peculiarities should be taken into account when making general statements about the Islamic world. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the basic theocratic notions, such as law derived straight from religious authority and lack of clear de jure separation between religious and secular offices, have indeed been much more characteristic of Islam than of Christianity—especially Western Christianity, whose historical tradition of such separation is in fact the root of the modern notions about the separation of church and state.
Theocracy has a lot of meanings, and one can argue that Elizabethan England was a theocracy in that the head of state was the head of the religion, and that the official religion was compulsory, but I was contrasting Islam and Christianity, and Elizabethan England was not a theocracy in the sense that Islam is a theocracy, one difference being that law in islam supposed to be religious, that secular law is supposed to be subordinate to religious law and priestly authority, while England had truly secular law independent of priestly authority, another difference being that Queen Elizabeth the first was under no obligation to make holy war to extend the true religion, whereas the Caliph was under obligation to make holy war to extend the true religion.
The biggest difference of course is that every Shakespearean play was written from a Roman Catholic, materialist, or pagan point of view, whereas you could not get away with that sort of thing under Islam—and indeed you cannot get away with it in today’s England where no television program or movie will written from a politically incorrect point of view. In this sense, Elizabethan England was not a theocracy, and today’s England is a theocracy.
In the original context, the implied definition of the theocracy for that post is that in Islam, the ruler’s authority comes from the true religion: The ruler must be a true Muslim, and his law must be subordinate to Shaia law. In Christianity, Caesar’s authority does not come from the true religion, he need not be a true Christian, and his law is not subject to priestly authority.
In another post, I might well use a different implied definition of theocracy, under which most of the Christian past was theocratic, or all states are theocratic in some sense, some being more theocratic than others.
But in other contexts, other definitions are defensible.
You’ve claimed that before, and I’ve challenged that position, and you’ve not provided any evidence to support it.
EDIT TO ADD: Also, to make proper comparisons with modern-day political correctness (i.e. following what is considered the limits of acceptable political discourse), you need to show where a Shakespearean play ever attacks Queen Elizabeth or her politics.
Elizabethan England did not enforce a political view, in large part because in those days religion was politics., it enforced a religious view. Religious issues where what was controversial back then, were what people argued over, and frequently killed each other over. The divine right and natural right of Kings was like motherhood and apple pie, not an issue.
Which official religious beliefs Shakespeare with great regularity doubted, and sometimes attacked—his plays imply the existence of purgatory, doubt the existence of an afterlife, and doubt the existence of a God that cares about humans, or pays much attention to them.
Modern politics asserts several political views that have distinctly religious characteristics, such as that all humans are equal, and then enforces equality in the in sense of interchangeability. Modern films, plays, and books not merely refrain from doubting such views, but actively uphold them. Not one black who is a significant character is stereotypical, a quite improbable number of them are actively counterstereotypical. Almost all heroines and love interests are actively counter stereotypical, for example in that they quite improbably successfully beat up bad guys, the most notorious example being princess Leia improbably and unbelievably throttling Jabba the Hut.
You keep talking utter falsehood about past eras, which you predictably and utterly fail to substantiate with evidence.
I’ve already told you about Shakespeare needing to present Macbeth as a tyrant, and Jeanne D’arc as an evil witch. Here’s some more direct evidence of political censoring: Quotes from http://www.family-source.com/cache/144244/idx/0
“The best-known case of political censorship is that of Richard II. The play’s first edition had a scene that showed the deposition of Richard II, which “so infuriated Queen Elizabeth that she ordered it eliminated from all copies”
“In Henry IV, the name Oldcastle was changed to Falstaff after the intervention of the Cobham family, Sir John Oldcastle’s descendants, who were powerful in the Elizabethan court (”
Are you kidding us? With half the released movies being superhero flicks where people of special heritage and/or power have the fate of the whole world resting on their shoulders (X-Men, Superman, Batman, Spiderman), or other Messiah/Mighty Whitey types (e.g. Avatar, The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves, The Matrix)?
She’s a princess. From a family of Jedis. You bring up Star Wars in the same paragraph that you claim that modern films portray all humans as equal and interchangeable, and you don’t even notice the fricking irony? Is Luke Skywalker interchangeable with Stormtrooper #4, or even with Lando Calrissian? Is Anakin Skywalker interchangeable with even Random Jedi #52?
Look, nearly every single sentence of yours ends up unsubstantiated, and disproven ludicrously easily. Can you just try to think of an obvious counterexample to your claims before you press “Comment” next time, so that you don’t waste our time typing said obvious counterexamples?
While the donation of Constantine was fraudulent, the donations of Charles the Hammer and Charles the great were real enough, but the church ruled those states under the holy Roman emperor, like a baron under a king—hence arguably not a theocracy. At least that is what they argued, though as the authority of the holy Roman emperor declined, the argument became less credible, and was accordingly condemned.
The very fact that papal secular authority was justified by the alleged Donation of Constantine reflects a profound lack of theocratic thinking. In a theocracy, a religious leader claims secular authority as inherent to his religious office—yet the popes and their champions considered it necessary to present their claim as inherited from a purely secular sovereign, despite the ultimate papal religious authority.
I don’t agree with his point at all. I’m just trying to preempt possible confusion if this thread ends up continuing—it’s helpful if everyone actually uses the term the same way.
The pope at least pretended not to be a theocracy. Theoretically the Holy Roman Emperor was Caesar, in “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s” To the extent that they actually were a theocracy, they were criticized for it, and denied it. The Spanish inquisition was supposedly answerable to the King of Spain, and theoretically the Pope’s minions were supposedly merely advising them, much as Harvard theoretically merely advises the federal bureaucracy.
Most left wing Christians in the protestant line are in practice indistinguishable from Unitarians, and Unitarians don’t give a tinker’s damn about either testament.
If one testament is less right wing than the other, it is the old testament that is the less right wing, since the old Testament places limits on debt and slavery, The old testament position on slavery is markedly less reactionary than the New Testament position on slavery—not that left wing Christians read either one.
The very fact that papal secular authority was justified by the alleged Donation of Constantine reflects a profound lack of theocratic thinking. In a theocracy, a religious leader claims secular authority as inherent to his religious office—yet the popes and their champions considered it necessary to present their claim as inherited from a purely secular sovereign, despite the ultimate papal religious authority.
To add a related data point, the same thing happened in the rest of Latin America. Abolition of slavery was of the first measures of many of the revolutions against the Spanish in the early 19th century, which were heavily inspired by the Enlightenment. Brazil held out a few decades more, because slavery was a lot more integral to its economy.
From what I’ve heard, the enlightenment played into making American slavery as bad as it was. Since the enlightenment said that it was bad to enslave people, but slavery was very profitable, a pattern of rationalizations were built up that Africans were innately inferior and slavery was good for them.
The religious progressives were the predecessors of today’s progressives, so today’s progressives can take credit for abolitionism, though they are embarrassed to do so, since they do not wish to recall their Christian past. They were already ditching the New Testament for its horribly reactionary position on slavery and marriage, and while they purported to say “Jesus is Lord”, they were already demoting him from God to chief community organizer. As Mencius argues, as recently as the 1940s, the predecessors of today’s progressives identified themselves as explicitly Christian, though when they finally threw Jesus under the bus and allowed the Jews in to join them, it was in fact less of a change than one might expect.
Mencius argues that they finally openly ditched Jesus so that they could impose their religion in the schools without running afoul of the first amendment, though perhaps letting the Jews into an explicitly progressive establishment also had something to do with it.
Why is this so heavily downvoted without a counterargument?
The notion that modern American progressivism is sociologically or memetically speaking the descendant of various Christian religious groups seems plausible and several points speak in its favour (including the heavily upvoted father of this comment).
I find this voting pattern especially strange considering that Mencius Moldbug is read by quite a few people on Lesswrong so the theory shouldn’t be that shocking in itself and people are generally quite detached and reasonable when discussing even controversial issues here (with the exception of gender relations).
What counterargument? What factual point is sam actually making? That today’s progressives (I don’t know how he defines the category—everyone who voted for Obama or Nader?) are embarrassed to take credit for abolitionism because they don’t wish to recall their Christian past?
How does one argue against that, by showing electroencephalographs of progressives that reveal the embarrassment zones of the brain don’t light up when progressives think about the abolitionist movement? It seems to me that the person making the claim should provide the evidence for this “embarrassment”.
sam doesn’t make arguments, he just sprays insults all over the place. Even when he makes specific claims, (perhaps progressive organization did stop identifying as Christian at a specific point of time, perhaps it was politically motivated) he uses the most insulting manner of expressing himself he can think of. “threw Jesus under the bus”—and he still doesn’t offer any actual evidence that can be discussed or analyzed, he just makes the claim.
sam has to learn to be civil, and provide evidence.
I downvoted sam’s comment above.
These aren’t mutually exclusive. I upvote many of his comments. Perhaps one in thirty simply deserve upvoting, one in fifteen because I have lower standards for him.
Probably.
Voting with lower standards makes sense if you think he is salvageable and want him to stick around—but that is not usually how we deal with extremely irrational posters.
He’s also provided me with enough evidence that he is not in the business of seeking truth that I have little reason to think even is reasonable-sounding points correlate with the truth. Even outside sources can be cherry-picked. If it were the case that everything here got fact checked or that we could effectively discount the evidence he provides proportionate to our estimation of his reliability this wouldn’t be a problem. But as time is a limited resource and we are not perfect Bayesian reasoners it is bad epistemic hygiene to encourage him to stick around. It is worse epistemic hygiene to lower our voting standards for him.
Not to mention the fact that people can’t seem to keep themselves from feeding the troll so we end up spending our time talking about whether or not conservatives have ever reinvented language to benefit themselves—as if that wasn’t already obvious to everyone who hasn’t been turned into a memetic zombie.
Sources are OK evidence, people bringing sources are better evidence. When those advocating banning chimp testing focus on cases decades old, that tells me no similar case has happened recently. I don’t assume that that case is typical of all chimp experiments, past and present, instead I learn the contrary.
If I find some study indicating that colleges discriminate against high school ROTC members, I don’t really have much of an idea if what I stumbled upon is the strongest evidence for that. If sam tells me about it, I am confident no reliable study showing more discrimination has been conducted.
This requires a model of the poster that not everyone reading comments will have. That can be solved by downvoting such posters to indicate their untrustworthiness.
But as I said humans are not perfect Bayesian reasoners and are not good at adjusting for unreliable speakers. We almost always either adjust too far and reverse stupidity or don’t discount enough and let cherry picked sources or skewed interpretations sneak into our brains. We’ll update without even noticing.
This seems like a selective application of a universal objection. “We almost always either adjust too far and reverse stupidity or don’t discount enough,” makes your reason technically not a universal objection, just an objection to learning anything from badly biased people, but this might be a confabulation added to the universal “humans are not perfect Bayesian reasoners”.
There is a difference between suboptimal updating and updating in ways that don’t correlate with the truth. My point is that badly biased posters may cause us to do the latter. But this is really tangential to the main thrust of my argument. Even (if) you can learn things (from) the occasional source Sam cites that seems very unlikely to make up for the rest of his noise. Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism.
To be read: Even if you can learn about things from the occasional source Sam cites?
WKGDbP would be squarely on point if I had implied there was anything bad about condemning, downvoting unto hiddenness, censoring, banning, or the like, that Sam had net negative value, and that the evils of censorship were what was preventing me from harsher criticism of his comments.
As it is only the first few paragraphs of that are applicable. I concede I may be succumbing to the bias of valuing known, tangible gains over unknown, intangible but probably greater losses. I think Sam has net positive value here, but your argument he is deterring more valuable people from joining is important.
I think the most important landmark in the failure scenario described is “then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other...”
That’s where I draw the line, personally.
Correct. And edited.
I’m not sure you’re thinking about your information diet economically. Any minute you spend reading sam0345 or an indignant but obvious reply to him is a minute you could have spent reading something better. What make Less Wrong a special place is the ratio of good comments to bad not the total amount of insight gained by reading every single comment.
Yes, I’ve upvoted a couple of his comments too. A couple others got downvotes from me instead. It basically depends on whether he can focus himself on the argument, instead of the insults.
Generally I do agree with this assessment, though to be fair the average LW commenter dosen’t provide much evidence for their claims (unfortunately).
I agree both on the memetical relation between Christianity and progressivism, and on the likely receptiveness of LW to this idea. My guess is that most of sam’s downvotes are not for the intellectual content of his/her postings but for their style, that seems intent at scoring political points as opposed to finding truth.
I’ve down voted sam0345 before for similar reasons. This post didn’t strike me as that bad. My intuition puts bad style and good ideas to be somewhere on the −3 to +1 scale karma wise.
I suppose LW is sensitive to repeated misbehaviour. Either that or we let ourselves be affected quite strongly on how any particular comment is judged by who wrote it.
I downvoted it because because very little of it was actually relevant.