You don’t even need to reach for such extreme examples as the Khmer Rouge. In ethnic conflicts, for example, if you belong to the wrong ethnicity in the wrong place, you are typically given no option to avoid harassment, dispossession, expulsion, or even death, no matter what loyalties you choose to profess.
Knowing politics can’t save you here in any case. At least will do you no more good than say a simple heuristic of sticking to others of your own ethnicity (which should keep you reasonably safe). And since you are sticking to them, they will again inform you of any potential trouble via daily interactions. Just remember to be more paranoid than the norm and not afraid to change countries.
Moreover, some forms of political instability cause sweeping damage akin to a natural disaster, for example wartime destruction or asset price crashes. Anticipating these just slightly ahead of time gives you an immense advantage; even if you save just pennies on the dollar, it can mean the difference between a difficult but bearable situation and utter destitution.
How much better is, someone involved in the political process, going to be at predicting this compared to someone who apolitically looks at the broad trends and reigning ideology? The latter person knows there is a certain probability of such a blow up, though he may miss it due to too infrequent updating, the former will probably only realize this is possible a few weeks or even days before the event. How these two approaches compare to each other depends on how fast one updates on new information I suppose. I would argue that a long term strategy of preparation for such possible “man made disasters” might outdo the rushed preparations of someone responding to the politics as they happen.
Perfect blindness to both daily politics and the real mechanisms of how one’s society function is naturally perilous. But consider the context of this discussions. The “real” mechanism would be perhaps controversial but mostly not covered under the “no mind killers” rule. Politics as in the politics that most obviously triggers this is useless.
Perfect blindness to both daily politics and the real mechanisms of how one’s society function is naturally perilous. But consider the context of this discussions. The “real” mechanism would be perhaps controversial but mostly not covered under the “no mind killers” rule. Politics as in the politics that most obviously triggers this is useless.
I think we’re having a misunderstanding about what exactly we mean by the “no mind killers” rule. Clearly, getting into mind-killing debates with people is worse than useless; that much we can agree on. On the other hand, making a correct decision to bail out ahead of trouble requires that you face the very worst mind-killing issues head-on and make correct judgments about them. (It is possible that such attempts are ultimately futile or not worth the opportunity costs when all probabilities are considered, but there’s a Catch-22 situation there, because consideration of at least some highly mind-killing topics is necessary in order to establish this.)
However, when people speak about avoiding mind-killers on LW, they often have in mind complete cessation of thinking about such topics and living under the assumption that the status quo will continue indefinitely, or all until some grand technological game-changer. (Worse yet, sometimes they go further and privilege the hypotheses on controversial questions favored by the respectable opinion and official intellectual institutions, and consider attacks on these, but not adherence to them, as mind-killing.)
Politics as in the politics that most obviously triggers this is useless.
What I meant by this was things like idle speculating about the election. Indulging in off hand remarks about Gawddamn Liberals and Bible Thumping Conservatives. Frowning seriously and speaking about some politicians misconduct. Debating the particularities of certain laws. Endorsing candidates, criticizing candidates. Taking the parties stated platform seriously, ad hominens on the demographics that support a certain position, various other Dark Arts, ect.
In short everything that immediately triggers tribal feelings in those who are basically politically active average Joe “good citizens”.
The “real” mechanism would be perhaps controversial but mostly not covered under the “no mind killers” rule.
These are of course ideological mind-killers. I would argue that currently there is some room for intelligent debates on LW about various such issues, the sore thumb being gender relations/sexual conduct. People are not obviously mind-killed by discussing say group differences or questioning Democracy (ok many are, but a substantial and not at all fringe fraction of LWers who have tought about this question and take some deep criticism of it quite seriously), though a kind of paranoia and strained feeling of someone saying “too much” does persist. Considering its demographics, constant stream of new unacclimatised participants and the very aggressive signalling on things like charity and altruism (which are concepts always heavily defined and shaped by the underlying fundamentals of a society) it is admirable that LW rationalist community can go as far as it does.
I say people can survive without daily politics just fine. Because signalling only requires they understand the ideological fundamentals, and even further they might do just as well if they try and understand the ideological fundamentals from the outside, without getting into the messy details. I think my “model crazy society’s expectations as a black box without bothering with the details of how they think their crazy works” satisfices.
I do however agree with your concern here:
However, when people speak about avoiding mind-killers on LW, they often have in mind complete cessation of thinking about such topics and living under the assumption that the status quo will continue indefinitely, or all until some grand technological game-changer. (Worse yet, sometimes they go further and privilege the hypotheses on controversial questions favored by the respectable opinion and official intellectual institutions, and consider attacks on these, but not adherence to them, as mind-killing.)
But to think about such issues critically and objectively, there is in fact no need to even know what has been going on in say the past year. The tabooed fundamentals and key axioms have been the same for quite a bit longer and will not be changed by political action in the context of a modern Western “representative democracy”.
What I meant by this was things like idle speculating about the election. Indulging in off hand remarks about Gawddamn Liberals and Bible Thumping Conservatives. Frowning seriously and speaking about some politicians misconduct. Debating the particularities of say laws. Endorsing candidates, criticizing candidates. Taking the parties stated platform seriously, ad hominens on the demographics that support a certain position, various other Dark Arts, ect.
I don’t see this. It is OK to be in favor of Republicans, provided, of course, one is only in favor of decent respectable republicans like Governor Romney. Being in favor of indecent disreputable evil racist republicans like “teabaggers” such as Herman Cain will get you into trouble, but that is because nominally non political things like supporting the ROTC or “Future Farmers of America” will get you into just as much trouble.
Endorsing Romney against Obama will not cause problems for one. Endorsing Herman Cain or Walmart will cause problems for one. It is not official approved politics that gets one into trouble.
Indeed, if something is officially deemed political, it is perfectly safe to disagree and take the right wing position. It is those things that are deemed non political because all decent right thinking people agree upon them that cause problems.
If, like Herman Cain, you are a teabagger, you are obviously racist, but if you were a leader in the supposedly non political ROTC, as Sam Walton was, you are just as racist. Arguably a substantial part of the hatred directed at Walmart is hostility to the ROTC.
Failure to make an ad hominem at the demographics that support such evil hateful racist republicans, when such an ad hominem is called for, can get you into trouble. Remaining silent is seldom acceptable, one must boo the villains when they are mentioned. Four legs good, two legs bad.
No one gets in trouble for saying “teabagger”, even though it is a homophobic slur, unless of course, one uses it ironically, the irony implying a certain insincerity in booing the approved villains.
Observe that being an officer the ROTC reduces a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database by sixty percent on an all-other-things-considered basis. I doubt that supporting McCain would have such a devastating effect, though supporting Herman Cain surely would.
I don’t see this. It is OK to be in favor of Republicans, provided, of course, one is only in favor of decent respectable republicans like Governor Romney.
Google counts four threads (not including your own) which mention Romney on LW. 1 is at 0 karma. 2 is at 0 karma. 3 and 4 are at positive karma, and Romney is essentially an incidental example.
Please try to get in your head that LW really isn’t some evil left-wing group. When people say they don’t want to discuss politics here, they are generally telling the truth. So when someone discusses how they don’t want partisan politics and you respond with a comment that it is really only one side being partisan, you shouldn’t be shocked if you are downvoted.
Similarly, bringing up tangential (if interesting) claims about ROTC that you’ve already mentioned before isn’t going to incline people to listen to you.
However, that may not be the case. You may be right. We may be a hopelessly left-wing bunch of politically correct, socialist fiends who want to completely remove all meritocracy in the world and tax everyone with an income to provide free pot to the unemployed. If that is the case, then talking to us is a waste of your time. So, find somewhere else to go. We obviously are far too mindkilled to appreciate your nuanced political views. No doubt you can find other, much more rational individuals to discuss your imminently reasonable views.
Please try to get in your head that LW really isn’t some evil left-wing group.
In the above post I was referring to Ivy League universities as an evil left wing group, but, changing the topic to Less Wrong as an evil left wing group, an issue that you raised, not me:
If less wrong is an evil left wing group, one would expect references to Governor Romney to attract no particular negative Karma, whether the reference is favorable or unfavorable, but expect favorable references to Herman Cain, Sarah Palin, and so forth, to attract negative karma
You posted in a subthread which had nothing much to do about either the Ivy League or the ruling classes, but instead was simply about whether “doing politics” in various senses is at all useful or not in promoting political goals.
You might want to refer to Mencius Moldbug’s blog. He subscribes to the theory you espouse here (“‘ruling classes’ are radically left-wing, and one could reasonably describe them as ‘evil’ because their politics are so insidious; universities—and the Ivy League specifically—act as a de-facto ‘state church’ for the ruling classes.”). But he would agree that most political activism is worse than useless, and that diminishing the ruling classes’ influence on society (never mind restoring a sensible social order) will be very difficult.
I don’t entirely subscribe to Moldbug’s theory, but this does show that you were clearly barking up the wrong tree, even under a charitable interpretation of your views.
I don’t think sam’s problem is that he isn’t reading enough Moldbug, I think his problem is more likely that he doesn’t read anything other than Moldbug.
sam has been politically active on Usenet since at least 1993, which is as far back as I can find him in Google Groups, which does not go all the way back. That is 14 years before Moldbug started his blog. (I do not know if Moldbug was active before then.)
(I do not know if Moldbug was active before then.)
Somewhere on his blog, Moldbug mentions either being at university or doing this thesis in the very early ’90s. I get the impression his politics weren’t developed then, so if those sam 1993 posts are ‘immature’ or ‘undeveloped’ forms of later sam posts (as it were), I would take that as evidence for sam=Moldbug and obviously the converse as well—if those sam posts were more or less identical to later sam posts, as evidence against sam=Moldbug.
I don’t think sam being Moldbug is likely at all. For starters, from what I’ve seen of Moldbug, he doesn’t seem to usually make easily refuted factual claims—and that’s the chief definining characteristic of sam’s interactions with LessWrong: saying things as silly, unsubstantiated and easily refuted as that conservatives don’t consciously try to remake language, or claiming that marital equality and its supposed dread consequences were discussed a thousand years ago, or that Shakespeare wasn’t politically censored, or that “Bloody Mary” of England was as bad as it ever got from the point of view of oppression, etc, etc… When he’s challenged on those claims, he just makes some more random claims, again without substantiating them, again without citations, and so forth.
That and the passive-agressive self-pity about being downvoted and about him predicting we’ll downvote him (as if that takes a great genius to figure out, when he’s insulting us all over the place), which didn’t strike me as a Moldbug characteristic either. sam’s feelings towards gay people have been made clear as well, when Moldbug has instead stated that increasing tolerance of homosexuality is that bit of politics where he agrees with leftists.
He posted this in another thread: “Back before 1940 progressivism was nominally Christian and protestant.”
That’s certainly Moldbuggian. His implying that the University system is a mainstay of left-wing hegemony is also Moldbuggian.
Moldbug himself is not to be blamed if someone reacts to his writings in this way, though. I speak from experience as an erstwhile far-right flamer of a similar ilk on another forum, when I say that it is rather easy to fall into an affective death spiral around insurrectional far-right memes.
Note that sam0345 is a racialist; that is certainly a risk factor for obnoxious commenting. This is due to a combination of extremely strong in-group/out-group dichotomy (reinforced by social pariah status) and the fact that (setting aside mind-killing arguments against and in favour) racialism has a low barrier for entry (is not hard to come by for the less-than-smart) but allows people to feel that they are privy to profound truths to which others are blind.
Trying to argue with such a person is unwise (from personal experience, he will eventually gain some maturity and learn that persuasive argument involves far higher standards of co-operation than he is employing).
He posted this in another thread: “Back before 1940 progressivism was nominally Christian and protestant.”
That’s certainly Moldbuggian.
Not at all. Traditionalist Catholics have held such views since the 19th century! Also esoteric anti-Christian thinkers among pseudo-Pagan revivalists and anti-Semites alike have emphasised how socialism and its variants are basically a heretical strain or re-imagining of Christianity. Among Paleoconservatives, by intellectuals such as Paul Gottfried the fundamental protestant and Christian roots of progressivism have been spoken of in much the same terms, though he did so only in the late 2000′s so it is hard to say if this is just the intellectual zeitgeist of the “alt right” or if he was indeed also influenced by Moldbug.
His implying that the University system is a mainstay of left-wing hegemony is also Moldbuggian.
Not necessarily, several groups of the Nouvelle Droite hold this view. It is also shared by nearly any fascist sympathizers that still spring up now and then. Right leaning Libertarians emphasise Academia’s pro-statist bias. At the end of the day even mainstream conservatives speak of disparagingly of Ivory Tower left wing academia.
Also it is an empirical fact that departments like anthropology are not only firmly in the camp of the left but serve as the choice of employment for people with radical (compared to the mainstream) political views.
Note that sam0345 is a racialist; that is certainly a risk factor for obnoxious commenting. This is due to a combination of extremely strong in-group/out-group dichotomy (reinforced by social pariah status) and the fact that (setting aside mind-killing arguments against and in favour) racialism has a low barrier for entry (is not hard to come by for the less-than-smart) but allows people to feel that they are privy to profound truths to which others are blind.
from personal experience, he will eventually gain some maturity
He has been writing on such topics, with I believe substantially the same views and characteristic manner of expressing them, for at least 18 years. This is who he is.
Because I’ve seen it for, well, probably not all of these 18 years, but for enough of them. Despite his ungoogleable pseudonym here, I instantly recognised him from his writing style on
this occasion. While he has not confirmed my identification, he has not demurred from it either, even when directly replying to
this, so I think it definite. A random sample from the Google Groups archive under his full name will confirm the consistency of his views and manner of expression.
I’m a bit late in realizing who sam0345 actually is (commented under a different name elsewhere), I now think heavy down voting and ignoring is even more appropriate.
You don’t want outside thoughts or empirical evidence contaminating the purity of Less Wrong’s rationality.
I notice I get called a liar for stating easily verified facts that really should be common knowledge—but in Less Wrong circles, strangely, are not. Nor does a Less Wrongian in good standing feel any need to verify facts. That I am a liar is good enough. That I have failed to produce citations for the fact the sky is blue is proof that the sky is purple and I am a liar. Since Less Wrong knows everything by listening to itself, any unwanted facts do not excite the slightest curiosity.
This is the typical incestuous death spiral of close minded doctrine. A group gets together, hears their own voice confirming their own beliefs and their own wisdom, and applies the principle of the Bellman “What I tell you three times must be true”. The elite of the larger society is suffering this death spiral, and in Less Wrong’s eagerness to emulate high status behaviors, Less Wong does the same, only more so.
Consensus is the biggest mind killer. In the ancestral environment, where facts tended to immediately empirical, consensus was reliable, just as in the ancestral environment, eating the sweetest available food was good for you. In the modern environment, consensus, like sugar, is bad for you.
Nor does Less Wrongian in good standing feel any need to verify facts.
I’ve already disproven a dozen so-called facts of yours—and you’ve neither conceded that, nor retracted them, nor apologized for any of those obvious falsehoods. Given how many falsehoods you’ve spewed, and at what enormous rate you spew them, it would be unreasonable of me to spend more than a minute trying to prove or disprove any further one of other—BUT I STILL APOLOGIZE FOR AND RETRACT ANY ERRORS I MAKE, UNLIKE YOU.
You claim that Shakespeare wasn’t politically restricted, and you don’t even bother reacting to the list of political restrictions he was labouring under that I gave you. You claim that Catholics had more rights in Elizabethan england than Conservatives have in modern-day America, and you can’t even bother to argue how conservatives becoming President of America fits in with those claim of yours. You claim that conservatives never intentionally manipulate language, and you don’t even comment on ‘freedom fries’ and ‘death tax’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ and all that other crap we mention as counterexamples. You claim that all modern films are egalitarian in attitude and portray people as interchangeable, and you don’t even notice that the film you mentioned in the very same paragraph (StarWars) is the exact antithesis of that, with its messianic heroes, and its ultra-special bloodlines of royalty and supernatural powers.
I’ve argued with you only using evidence, but you’re a dishonest debater who knows to do nothing but lie and insult.
I’ve already disproven a dozen so-called facts of yours -
No you have not. You have made a dozen assertions, often quoting facts that directly disprove your own assertions, and no one calls you on it, knowing it is pointless, because your assertions are transparently absurd to any well informed person.
Of your dozen supposed refutations, choose one, one where the truth is a matter of objective fact, rather than interpretation or debate about what words mean.. I will prove I am right on that issue, and claim therefore, since I am right on an issue of your choosing, I am likely right on every other issue.
The fact that you can get away with such silliness is shows the futility of basing rationality on consensus.
Choose one issue, one where one can in fact determine the truth of it, and I will debate it, even though I generally don’t debate loons who make obviously demented assertions.
Of your dozen supposed refutations, choose one, one where the truth is a matter of objective fact,
Fine. You claimed that modern movies actively uphold the idea that all people are equals, in the sense of interchangeability. You included the Star Wars trilogy in the category of modern movies. Explain to me how the following quotes from the Star Wars series don’t refute your hypothesis: ”The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi. “ ”That boy is our last hope.” “The Emperor knew, as I did, if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him.” ”His cells have the highest concentration of midi-chlorians I have seen in a life-form. It was possible he was concieved by the midi-chlorians. ”—“You refer to the prophecy of The One who will bring balance to the Force. ”
I’ve been upvoting you (and the other commenters who’ve tried to correct sam) throughout this, but there’s a point where even rational, thoughtful rebuttals don’t help LessWrong’s signal-to-noise ratio, because they’re doing nothing but feed an obnoxious troll like sam0345.
And a debate over Star Wars seems especially unlikely to change sam’s mind.
You claimed that modern movies actively uphold the idea that all people are equals, in the sense of interchangeability.
That’s not what he claimed. That’s your fuzzy memory of what he claimed. Quoting:
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.
So, rewinding this, going from example to generalization, his argument is:
1 Leia throttled Jabba.
2 This is an example of the trend that almost all heroines and love interests are actively counter stereotypical.
3 There is an explanation for that trend. Modern films, plays, and books depict counter stereotypical women for the purpose of upholding the religious/political view that women are innately the equals of men in ability, character, etc., that the observable differences are a result of culture, a culture which the work in question is seeking to correct by challenging the stereotypes. The work, in short, is acting as propaganda.
4 There is a similar thing going on with the counter stereotypical depiction of blacks. The purpose is parallel to that in (3), i.e., to uphold the religious/political view that blacks are innately no different from whites in ability, character, etc., that the observable differences are a result of culture, a culture which the work in question is seeking to correct by challenging the stereotypes.
5 Both of these are specific cases of a more general religious/political ideology that all humans are innately equal.
Since you were challenged to pick a factual dispute, only the element 1 falls into the scope of the challenge. The rest are interpretation. And element 1 is plainly true.
So your response to the challenge fails. sam was right about the fact that Leia throttled Jabba.
But maybe you want me to dispute your interpretation? I can do that.
Strangely, you did not offer an alternative interpretation of (1). Instead of conceding that Leia did indeed strangle Jabba and endeavoring to offer an alternative explanation for it, you set that aside and introduced a new set of facts to support a new interpretation.
Your facts can be summarized as follows: in the Star Wars universe, Jedis are superior to non-Jedis, and some Jedis are superior to other Jedis. Therefore the movie does not support the ideology that all humans are innately equal.
Your argument is weak, I think fatally weak, in two respects. The first respect is that the egalitarian ideology in question concerns equality among actually existent categories of humans, such as women and men, and blacks and whites. So the fact that in the Star Wars universe there exists an entirely fictional category of human, the Jedis, or more precisely, the humans who are born with the innate ability to become Jedis, which is innately superior (in that ability) to other humans, does not in any way suggest that any actually existent categories of humans are innately superior to any other actually existent categories of human. Jedis have no real world counterparts. They are fantasy. In contrast, Star Wars women do have real world counterparts, i.e., actually existent women.
The second respect is that your argument assumes that in order for a fiction to support an idea, that fiction needs to fully realize that idea in every respect. You are, after all, arguing that since the fiction does not fully realize the egalitarian idea in every respect in its own universe, therefore it’s not pushing it. But surely that assumption is false. In fact, surely it is normally better to introduce an idea gradually, one piece at a time. If there were a conscious program to indoctrinate the population into the idea that all people are innately equal, we might well expect that the idea would not be introduced all at once, but would be introduced piece by piece. I don’t think there is a conscious program, but there is an unconscious process in which the ideology of progressivism is encountering, and continually pushing against, the realities of the marketplace, so that over time the population is gradually, rather than all at once, propagandized into the religion/politics of progressives.
Constant, if by “that all humans are equal”, and “equality in the sense of interchangeability”, sam had meant something different than what I understood him to mean, I’ll let him say so.
If his claim had been e.g. that modern movies promote the idea that both genders and all racial groups are deserving of political rights, I wouldn’t have bothered to dispute the point—though there would still be exceptions, they would actually be exceptions.
But “equality in the sense of interchangeability” is a much stronger claim than that—I could have just as easily disproven it by showing how Batman is portrayed as indispensable for the well-being of Gotham, how whenever a “superhero” is made to quit by the ungrateful smallfolk, the smallfolk end up realizing they needed him after all (Watchmen being a potential exception in this, but given Manhattan’s effective physical godhood, and Adrian Veidt’s intellectual superiority, egalitarianism in the sense of interchangeability isn’t exactly there either).
But your revised argument appears to have the same two weaknesses I found in your previous argument. Just as the Jedis have no real-world counterparts, neither do Batman nor Doctor Manhattan have any real-world counterparts. And the second weakness is that, once again, your argument assumes that that a fiction supporting an idea needs to fully realize that idea in every respect. I pointed out in particular that market realities dictate that you never go full progressive, to borrow a turn of phrase from Robert Downey Jr.
Other specific criticisms can be made, such as that Batman and Doctor Manhattan are both made not born, and progressives are big fans of the idea that differences are made not born, and that they are individuals not categories, and progressives are focused on categories not individuals, but the first two suffice so I won’t go into the others.
Moreover you were challenged to contest a point of fact. You picked sam’s mention of Star Wars. But sam’s mention of Star Wars was actually nothing more than a mention of the one incident in which Leia killed Jabba by strangling him. It was not a mention of the whole Star Wars universe. That was the point of fact that you picked. You’re going far beyond the challenge by bringing in Batman and Watchmen. Backing up to a slightly more general point which sam made, he mentioned two key respects in which fiction supports progressive ideology, and those are that “almost all heroines and love interests are actively counter stereotypical” and “not one black who is a significant character is stereotypical, a quite improbable number of them are actively counterstereotypical.” You could possibly argue that these are factual, though they are more difficult to assess, since you can’t just look the question up in Wikipedia, as you can the question of whether Leia strangled Jabba. In any case, you did not challenge either of these points.
As it happens, there are plenty of counter-stereotypical women in the Batman universe (two of my favorites are Cassandra Cain and Harleen Quinzel), and there are counter-stereotypical women in Watchmen as well, female heroes, though I don’t recall their names. At this point, counter-stereotypical women have become so common that they are completely unremarkable in fiction. My own mind has been thoroughly propagandized. Sam offered an explanation for the prevalence of counter-stereotypical women in fiction. You haven’t offered an alternative explanation, that I’m aware of.
Just as the Jedis have no real-world counterparts, neither do Batman nor Doctor Manhattan have any real-world counterparts.
And once again: irrelevant.
And the second weakness is that, once again, your argument assumes that that a fiction supporting an idea needs to fully realize that idea in every respect.
Then give counterexamples of how the fiction of StarWars supports the idea of “equality as interchangeability” in other respects. So far the only respects one can find are the respects where it doesn’t promote them.
born, and progressives are big fans of the idea that differences are made not born
Constant, the claim I disputed is a specific claim—it didn’t talk about differences displayed in books/movies between racial groups that exist in the real world, it didn’t talk about whether people are born with differences or made differently by their experiences.
You keep distracting from the point I’m disputing with irrelevancies. I disputed a certain specific claim. You keep bringing irrelevant things into the discussion. FOCUS!
In any case, you did not challenge either of these points.
So? Unlike the mind-killed, I don’t feel obliged to challenge every single point as if they were enemy soldiers.
A falsehood needs be challenged and defeated. An obvious truth like “negative racial and gender stereotypes are less popular nowadays than they used to be” doesn’t.
You picked sam’s mention of Star Wars.
NO! I picked his claim that “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.”.
I chose Star Wars as a counterexample, just because he listed as an example of one such modern film—so that he wouldn’t be able to argue that this wasn’t “modern” enough for him.
Just as the Jedis have no real-world counterparts, neither do Batman nor Doctor Manhattan have any real-world counterparts.
And once again: irrelevant.
Well if you like I will restate my claim as: Every movie, and almost every book is propaganda for the improbable religious belief that all realworldgroups are equal in the sense of interchangeable, whereas on the controversial questions of the day in Elizabethan times people cheerfully weighed in on both sides, and I retract my carelessly stated broader claim.
Well if you like I will restate my claim as: Every movie, and almost every book is propaganda for the improbable religious belief that all real world groups are equal in the sense of interchangeable.
Thank you. Now we start making progress.
EDIT TO ADD: I actually agree with the idea that anti-discrimination attitudes are prevalent in the media in a much more shallow way than I like. As I wrote two and a half years ago ”..it’s pretty easy to be a non-racist when you believe that genetical inheritance play absolutely no part in abilities or attitude. That’s a very shallow sort of anti-racism, same way as it’d be a very shallow sort of feminism if it needed to believe that women are just as physically strong on average as men.
It’s harder and more thought-provoking and yet even more ACCURATE to portray a world where genetical heritage does play a part in abilities and STILL portray attitudes of racial superiority/privilege as wrong, to still portray a world where the various “tribes” of people (for lack of better word) must all be treated with dignity.”
Well if you like I will restate my claim as: Every movie, and almost every book is propaganda for the improbable religious belief that all real world groups are equal in the sense of interchangeable.
Thank you. Now we start making progress.
You seem to have conceded that every movie, and almost every book is propaganda for the improbable religious belief that all real world groups are equal in the sense of interchangeable.
You then seem to argue that that is a good thing. Even supposing it to be a good thing, it is evidence for the original proposition that writers and playwrights in Elizabethan times had more freedom of expression than they do now, that today’s England is in this sense more like a theocracy than Elizabethan England was.
Similarly, Cromwell is remembered as a religious oppressor for attempting to ban Christmas, or at least the pagan elements of Christmas which are nearly all of it, but he let the Jews back into England, and under him there were one thousand varieties of Christianity contending on equal terms, passionately debating every contentious issue, including issues we would now think of as political, such as whether inequality reflected God’s will, and whether economic inequality was natural. Today the Jews are under considerable and increasing pressure to convert to progressivism, a belief system that is proving increasingly incompatible with remaining Jewish, and orthodox Jews depart England because of state and private persecution.
Observe that Shakespeare lets Jack Cade argue in favor of economic equality between classes, and rather than Shakespeare asserting the then orthodox religious and political position that economic inequality between classes is divinely ordained, instead shows us that if everything is up for grabs, much grabbing will ensue, and the result will not be very equal at all. Jack Cade gets to make good arguments for economic equality of classes unopposed, even though the playwright in effect replies that human nature makes this impractical.
Imagine a film today where a Nazi gets to make good arguments against equality of races unopposed, perhaps pointing to the fate of Detroit as compelling evidence of foolish and destructive it is to let n**s move into white neighborhoods. It is unthinkable that such a movie could be made. Even if the film subsequently presented some counter argument, the Nazi would not be allowed to make a single good and persuasive argument.
Stop feeding the troll, everyone. Feeding trolls encourages them and that is not good for LW. If this goes on I will start banning/deleting Sam’s comments and I would recommend that all further replies by LWians to his comments be downvoted because feeding trolls is not good for LW. Once a troll comment is downvoted below −3, the community’s job is done, textual replies are not necessary.
If it’s decided that a certain user should stop posting, it’s possible to ban individual comments and indicate this fact to the user, to discourage further activity. Eliezer used to do this occasionally in the past, it works. What’s not clear is socially acceptable procedure for making this decision, outside Eliezer’s decree.
I think we need to establish the norm of banning same-failure-mode comments from users who keep posting despite getting systematically and severely downvoted, if they still persist after a public warning that is simultaneously a place for potential appeal from the community (to overrule moderator’s decision).
Today the Jews are under considerable and increasing pressure to convert to progressivism, a belief system that is proving increasingly incompatible with remaining Jewish, and orthodox Jews depart England because of state and private persecution.
Ok. As a former Orthodox Jew, this sort of claim is complete and utter bullshit. And there’s really no other word for it. Aside from personal experience, I’ve read quite a bit by Jonathan Sacks the current Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, and the functional head of the national organization of Orthodox, non-charedi and non-chassidic synagogues in Great Britain. He’s extremely vocal about anything perceived of as a threat to Orthodoxy and his own politics are by British standards right-wing. So if Jonathan Sacks hasn’t claimed there’s any such problem, the idea that there are Orthodox Jews leaving England because of pressure to become progressive… yeah. The closest issue is that some people in Great Britain have called for the banning of ritualized slaughter as used for halal and kosher meat because it causes unnecessary pain to the animals. Note that this movement has so far in England had zero success.
And I have numbers to prove it. The Orthodox population in England, especially the ultra-orthodox population is increasingly rapidly.
You’ve made a lot of egregiously false statements before but even by your standards this is ridiculous. To illustrate how ridiculous this is I’m going to pull a page out of Scott Aaronson’s book. I will give you $100 if you can find a single modern source that backs up your claim that Orthodox Jews are leaving England because of “pressure to convert to progressivism” (or any functionally identical statement) that anyone on LW (other than you and it should be someone who already has commented here before) considers remotely reliable.
The question of whether “Jews are under considerable and increasing pressure to convert to progressivism” is not relevant for LW (or even this thread, really), so figuring out what the facts are is the wrong thing to do. We need to be able to switch in the mode of considering relevance of a question, while temporarily ignoring it on object level. This seems like serious vulnerability of the forum, anyone willing to write it up?
We need to be able to switch in the mode of considering relevance of a question, while temporarily ignoring it on object level. This seems like serious vulnerability of the forum, anyone willing to write it up?
I don’t think this particular case is good evidence that this is a problem, for two reasons. The first is that the most likely reason the relevance of the question was not remarked on here is that it is so obviously irrelevant that it went without saying. The second is that the rings of Saturn’s are giant fried onion rings. Delicious.
I don’t think this particular case is good evidence that this is a problem
I don’t either, I think it’s a good example. I’m not arguing for this being a problem, I’m pointing out that it looks like one.
The first is that the most likely reason the relevance of the question was not remarked on here is that it is so obviously irrelevant that it went without saying
Remarking on irrelevance of a question is irrelevant in itself, one should act on that by ignoring the question on object level.
My point was that not answering is the goal, while pointing out irrelevance is only of instrumental value towards that goal, so pointing out irrelevance, but failing to act on it (that is, failing to actually ignore the question), is a case of lost purpose. And the instrumental step being unnecessary (where irrelevance is obvious) doesn’t negate from its goal.
Contradicting false statements, even irrelevant ones, is a strong impulse in our culture (by which I mean LW culture and the broader subcultures from which it draws many of its readers). But it doesn’t yet look to me like we overemphasize this.
Your recent correction of lukeprog on his use of the phrase “Aumann agreement” seemed to me to be an example of this “correcting impulse”. I think it was good for you to make the correction. I would have pointed out the erroneous usage if someone had not already done so. But the incorrectness of the phrase was irrelevant to the point of his post.
Or are you using “relevance” in a sense in which lukeprog’s use of the phrase “Aumann agreement” was relevant?
I’m not sure that I’m getting your point. The theme of your links is that the word “rational” is overused around here. Is it your point that “Aumann agreement” is also overused?
See the zeroth virtue.
Are you referring to the virtue that Eliezer calls “the void”? I’m not seeing the relevance.
Is it your point that “Aumann agreement” is also overused?
Not really, that was poor word choice on my part. Only literally is it overused, in that one excessive use constitutes overuse.
It’s that such words have a warm feel to them, so they are used even when the anticipation controlling/more literal/more technical meaning is not intended. The overuse causes confusion by muddying the meaning, and increases the risk that I will name the way to understand the world and achieving my goals instead of actually understanding the world and achieving my goals.
This type of thing is common because one such overuse is common, “rational”. The specific overuse of “Aumann’s agreement theorem”, the same type of thing, is not common.
I have several times seen it described as a rule that rationalists update towards each other’s estimates, which is distressing. Clearly, they may share evidence and conclude something is more or less likely than either originally thought. A way to make sure one is learning and updating is to avoid using words for ideal methods, lest they cause one to think one is using them when one isn’t.
Are you referring to the virtue that Eliezer calls “the void”
Yes. It’s only belatedly and reluctantly named there so it can be an example of its own point, to explain relationships among concepts rather than try and explain by using labels for rationality.
Right, answering with silence seems inferior to pointing out irrelevance where appropriate (even if superior to responding on object level), it leaves the matter unsettled. So this is possibly a step that shouldn’t be skipped even where irrelevance is obvious, just like with something obviously wrong. This is a natural analogy: what happens is that instead of one question, we consider two questions simultaneously: whether something is right, and whether working on figuring out whether it’s right is a good idea.
For Aumann agreement, the topic is discussed on LW, so certainly isn’t irrelevant.
I am not convinced this undermines your overall point, as “racism is bad” is still the overall message of the movies, but there are certainly racist characters (sometimes even sympathetic ones) who make statements and arguments that go unchallenged.
You seem to have conceded that every movie, and almost every book is propaganda for the improbable religious belief that all real world groups are equal in the sense of interchangeable.
You then seem to argue that that is a good thing.
Not exactly, for either of the two sentences. I’ll reply further (and one last time) in a personal message, later today.
You are changing the topic from “Does the movie support equality” to “does every single aspect of the movie support equality in every single way”.
All real categories of humans in the movie are equal, as illustrated by Princess Leia strangling Jabba the hut. A small woman is supposedly just as strong as a big male—a delusion so widely believed that we are seeing a disturbingly large number of attacks on large males by small women, often with predictable consequences.
The fact that nobility and royalty do not deserve to rule, though plausible enough, unlike Princes Leia strangling Jabba the Hut, produces a gigantic plot hole at the center of the movie.
Further, the real category of nobility and royalty are also equal, since they do not deserve to rule, and good nobles do not get to rule.
And people with midichlorians are unequal. If there were actual people with midichlorians, or if all people with midichlorians in the movie were white males, this would be politically unthinkable. Because there are no actual people with midichlorians, and because, quite implausibly, midichlorian possession is equally distributed among all races and species, it is permitted.
Compare and contrast with Shakespeare, who was able to take the politically incorrect position on the biggest real issues of his day, such as the existence of purgatory.
You are changing the topic from “Does the movie support equality” to “does every single aspect of the movie support equality in every single way”. All real categories of humans in the movie are equal, as illustrated by Princess Leia strangling Jabba the hut.
Jabba the Hutt is at least as fictional as the Force is, you know, and he’s not exactly a physically imposing presence; there’s no particular reason to conclude that that scene is physically improbable, and Leia takes a noncombatant role elsewhere by comparison with the men in the cast. But the weakness of that particular example aside, there’s very little in the films to support a reading as egalitarian.
To wit: the movie centers on a caste of magical warrior-monks whose powers are quite literally in the blood. There’s a titled princess (not an “elected queen” like Amidala, a bona fide hereditary ruler, albeit adopted) in the core cast, and that’s never presented as unwelcome or even remarkable. That princess, by the way, is the only woman in the original trilogy with more than a handful of lines, gets rescued twice, and otherwise mostly limits herself to providing guidance and moral support. There’s only one non-white guy in the original trilogy, and he’s painted as untrustworthy for a variety of reasons. Nonhuman characters are portrayed as stereotypical savages, Orientalist-style local color, or outright subservient: the only real exception is Yoda, and it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to read him as a stereotypical shaman figure. Success is explicitly and repeatedly described as coming not from cleverness or effort, but by surrendering to the numinous forces of destiny.
The only thing that even approaches egalitarianism in the theme is the implicit preference for a republican form of government over an imperial, and I’m not inclined to give that much credit: the central conflict is at least as much about mysticism vs. modernism (in the guise of the regimented, technological Empire) as anything else, and that Empire’s pretty clearly a military dictatorship rather than a traditional aristocracy. You could read it as glorifying revolution, sure, but even that’s carefully constructed as a rebellion against new, illegitimate authority.
because, quite implausibly, midichlorian possession is equally distributed among all races and species
It would help if you did minimal research before making claims. Today’s homework excercise: Go to Wookiepedia and count how many species are listed who explicitly have no access to the Force. Hint: The answer is more than one.
I have no dog in your original fight with JoshuaZ et al, but I’m kind of curious about the Star Wars analysis specifically.
You say,
All real categories of humans in the movie are equal, as illustrated by Princess Leia strangling Jabba the hut.
What do you mean by “real categories of humans” ? There exist many sentient species in the Star Wars universe; and technically, none of them are exactly human, seeing as the movie takes place “long ago, in a galaxy far away”. Leia’s species are probably as close to human as you can get, but there are tons of others—Hutt, Torguta, Mandalorian, Jawa, those spiky Darth Maul guys… Many of these species can wield the Force, which makes them vastly more powerful than most others.
He means things like “women”, “men”, “blacks”, “whites”, “short people”, “tall people”—as opposed to “Jedis” (Starwars), “Numenoreans” (Lord of the Rings), “Wizards” (Harry Potter).
Let’s not make obvious fails of understanding here.
Pretty much, although I’d use less politically divisive before subtler. Writers have been using invented species, bloodlines, Differently Powered Individuals, and what have you as stand-ins for real-world marginalized groups for about as long as people have been writing speculative fiction, and they’re very much meant to be read as such: sometimes this gets distinctly unsubtle, as per the mutants in The Iron Dream.
The political focus varies, though; back in the day, this was traditionally used to bring up some relatively specific real-world issue that would be delicate to handle directly (as in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Outcast)”). These days I think it’s more common to use the device to keep things general, in order to identify with a broad spectrum of causes.
The question seems confused. I’d ask you “better in what”? Better in being scientifically accurate? Better in averting offense? Better for the plot of any given story?
And if you mean “morally better”, do you really think that Tolkien having his stories portray Orcs (which he invented exactly because he wanted an inexhaustible supply of enemies against which we needed feel no moral qualm) as utterly foul creatures, isn’t any morally better than if he’d chosen a real-life group, e.g. African or Mongols, to play that exact role? Isn’t Harry Potter better that it has goblins in the role of greedy banker-types instead of e.g. Jews?
People won’t be motivated to commit hate-crimes against orcs or goblins, if orcs are portrayed as uniformly bad or goblins uniformly greedy in some story.
In the star wars universe, the Jedis do not rule—and when they do rule, it is a bad mistake—dark side, betrayal, and so forth.
Luke is not born to be King, even though the story would make a lot more sense if he was. Indeed, the Star Wars universe is a particular example of the universal rule that you are, these days, not allowed to have a hero who is born to be King, unless, of course, like Pratchett’s Carrot, he wisely turns down the job.
I suppose they might let you have a woman who is born to be a warrior queen, warrior queens being counterstereotypical, but no heroes born to be King.
The lines you quote make sense in a society where the Jedi are a ruling aristocracy, or a powerful part of a ruling aristocracy, and Luke is born to be King. Since star wars is not set in such a society, they don’t make any sense.
How can Princess Leia be a princess, unless her father, and Luke’s father, is or was emperor? It is a gaping great plot hole produced by the ideology of equality. If she is a princess, he must be a prince, in which case winning should set things to right by restoring his family’s just and rightful authority.
At the very center of the Star Wars story is a gigantic plot hole produced by egalitarian doctrine.
There is a Princess Leia, yet strangely and illogically, no Prince Luke, because if there was a Prince Luke, there would have to be a King Luke or Emperor Luke, and a parent or grandparent who was King something or Queen something or emperor something, and that is just totally and completely politically incorrect.
How can Princess Leia be a princess, unless her father, and Luke’s father, is or was emperor? It is a gaping great plot hole produced by the ideology of equality. If she is a princess, he must be a prince, in which case winning should set things to right by restoring his family’s just and rightful authority. At the very center of the Star Wars story is a gigantic plot hole produced by egalitarian doctrine.
I’m not even a Warsie and I know this one. Luke and Leia were separated at birth and she was adopted by a royal family, making her a princess and him not.
you are, these days, not allowed to have a hero who is born to be King, unless, of course, like Pratchett’s Carrot, he wisely turns down the job.
If we for the sake of convenience define “these days” as anything since the production of A New Hope, I can think offhand of Severian, Garion, Tristran Thorn, Richard Rahl, Rand al’Thor, and anywhere up to three or four characters from the Song of Ice and Fire books depending on where you draw the lines for “king” and “hero”. None of these are obscure works; most are popular series including multiple bestsellers, and although fantasy is a low-status genre a couple of them have a high reputation in critical circles as well.
And that’s just literary characters, just protagonists, and just ones with a prophecy or hidden birthright attached to them. I’ve even been nice and skipped reworkings or adaptations of things like the Arthurian mythos. Relaxing any of those constraints would multiply that list manyfold, and I’m sure there are instances I’ve missed.
Severian, Garion, Tristan Thorn, Richard Rahl, Rand al’Thor,
To a limited extent this actually reinforces Sam’s point. Note that the last two of the characters mentioned occur in works that have frequently been accused of being reactionary and sexist. That said, I agree that Severian, Garion and Tristan Thorn are clear counterexamples.
Note that the last two of the characters mentioned occur in works that have frequently been accused of being reactionary and sexist.
For someone in the ‘reactosphere’ (as Mencius Moldbug calls it) ‘reactionary’ and ‘sexist’ isn’t an accusation but a praise. So the fact that several modern and popular series of books are reactionary and sexist (and proclaimed such) is evidence against sam’s position that modern books and films promote an egalitarian progressivist agenda.
True. But for that matter the entire genre’s been accused of being reactionary for pretty much the same reasons that ArisKatsaris applied to Star Wars, and I’m not entirely sure the accusers there are wrong. Point is that you can get away with it in the arena of modern fantasy (and make a lot of money in the getting away).
In the star wars universe, the Jedis do not rule—and when they do rule, it is a bad mistake—dark side, betrayal, and so forth.
True, but irrelevant. You talked about equality in the sense of interchangeability, not about equality in the sense of “one man, one vote”. I won’t accept you first making a wild claim, and then trimming it down to effectively “well by equality in the sense of interchangeability I meant ‘rule by divine right’ isn’t accepted”.
Point remains: Anakin is born super-special.
Point remains: Luke and Leia are born super-ultra-special.
They are not interchangeable with anyone else.
How can Princess Leia be a princess, unless her father, and Luke’s father, is or was emperor? It is a gaping great plot hole produced by the ideology of equality. [...] At the very center of the Star Wars story is a gigantic plot hole produced by egalitarian doctrine.
The “hole” made by calling her a princess was produced by monarchical fantasies, it was not in failing to make her a ruling princess. Unlike later-day “Princess Amidala”, for the purposes of the story Leia didn’t need to be anything other than a Senator, she was called a princess just to call back to the old fairy tales about tailor boys (or farmer boys, I guess) saving the realm and getting the princess—old fairy tales which were actually more egalitarian than modern-day fairy tales StarWars, since farmer boys and tailor’s sons grew up to earn the realm through cleverness and effort, but they didn’t always begin with special genes as in the StarWars movies.
The new trilogy not only makes Amidala both a princess and a ruler, it makes the super-duper innate specialness of special people even clearer, with prophecies about The One—same as Matrix has prophecies about The One.
I’m not going to downvote this comment because it does a much better job than your previous few comments in actually grappling with what other people are saying. I was tempted to upvote it, but if the comment had come from somene else I would not have done so, and I’m not that inclined to reward karma to the most-improved. You’ll probably appreciate the instincts against that.
That said, there are still simple factual issues and other problems with this post.
Indeed, the Star Wars universe is a particular example of the universal rule that you are, these days, not allowed to have a hero who is born to be King
“Chronicles of the Necromancer” would be the only the most recent popular fantasy series that comes to mind involving a hero born to be king. Another example is in the Abhorsen series where one of the main characters is the sleeping prince who is restored to his kingship. Now, you could point out that in both these series there are powerful females also. In the first example, the protagonists love interest a warrior princess. And in the second one the protagonists for most of the books are female necromancers. But that’s a distinct situation from what you are claiming here. The point is that having heros born to be kings is more than ok in the current literature.
The lines you quote make sense in a society where the Jedi are a ruling aristocracy, or a powerful part of a ruling aristocracy, and Luke is born to be King. Since star wars is not set in such a society, they don’t make any sense
I’m not sure I understand this. Do you mean to assert that the lines themselves don’t make sense? Or that they don’t make sense for the purposes that they are being used as an example? In any event, you seem to be using an extremely narrow notion of aristrocracy. The point is that merit, power and being a person that matters are all inherited in the blood in Star Wars. Whether such people are in charge of the government is a nitpicky distraction.
And if one really wants to go there, note that in the Expanded Star Wars universe Leia becomes the prime minister of the New Republic, and everyone who tries to unseat her is portrayed as evil or incompetent.
I agree, though I simply will not upvote posts primarily about Star Wars canon unless they are exceptionally brilliant. But I won’t necessarily downvote them, neither for that nor for involving the participants here.
It would be useful if sam attached confidence estimates to each statements. Then, he could admit he was wrong with “It is a gaping great plot hole produced by the ideology of equality.” and we could compare that to statements he gave similar confidence to.
You’ve never even responded to requests for explanations of what would qualify to change your mind. When you say to choose an issue, and you will prove that you are right, we have no reason to believe that your ability to satisfy yourself that you have done so is contingent on your having any basis for the belief at all.
Of your dozen supposed refutations, choose one, one where the truth is a matter of objective fact, rather than interpretation or debate about what words mean.. I will prove I am right on that issue, and claim therefore, since I am right on an issue of your choosing, I am likely right on every other issue.
In this subthread, you asserted that Robert Gates predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, and that he then tried to hide the fact that he had made this prediction. Your assertion was based on a demonstrably incorrect reading of a Wikipedia article. (Gates was described as contradicting someone else’s prediction that the USSR would fall. You misunderstood the person being attributed with making the prediction.)
You now have the opportunity to prove that you know how to say “oops”.
You get called a liar by one person (after apparently some research that just happened to miss the relevant bits), another corrects them, and the first person retracts their statement. Clearly, persecution of the highest order.
People are wrong factually all the time. I was wrong in a really embarassing way in this thread. The key issue to being wrong is that when one has the evidence that one is wrong, updating and saying “oops” is ok. In many environments doing so will cause a serious loss of status. On Less Wrong the almost exact opposite will occur. But people will be very impatient with people who make factual errors and then don’t say oops when they are pointed out to them.
Please try to get in your head that LW really isn’t some evil left-wing group
The guilty flee where no man pursueth. Nothing in the post explicitly references LW, and I did not intend to refer to LW, but rather to the ruling class and those that suck up to them. You perceived it as referring to LW, because it happened to be as true of LW as it is of the rest of society.
Sam, trolling isn’t acceptable here, and what you just did is pretty much the definition of trolling—trying to sucker people into answering in a way that you’ll then use into further inflaming things.
You don’t have the capacity to at the same time say “It applies to you” and to also pretend to have said “I didn’t mean to say that it applies to you”. And you definitely don’t have the capacity to say “The fact you wrongly believed I thought it applied to you, proves that my belief is true when I believe it applies to you”.
So downvoted. Since you’re following the same tactic in lots of threads, I’ll be now downvoting without further comment whenever you follow remotely similar trollish tactics.
So downvoted. Since you’re following the same tactic in lots of threads, I’ll be now downvoting without further comment whenever you follow remotely similar trollish tactics.
I’ll add that I will be downvoting any comment by sam0345 without reading it at all. If the person behind sam0345 decides not to be a troll and still wants to post on LW then he can create a new identity and start again.
Sam, trolling isn’t acceptable here, and what you just did is pretty much the definition of trolling—trying to sucker people into answering in a way that you’ll then use into further inflaming things.
That you, and others, misread my post as referring to LW reflects on you and LW, not me. I had no intent, nor expectation, that my post would be misread. Your misreading reveals your bias. While I claim to be good at predicting you, and claim that to the extent that LW acts like a hive mind, that mind is predictable, predictably wrong in predictable ways, and predictably foolish in being too smart by half, I did not predict this misreading.
Had I cleverly intended to be misread in order to reveal your irrational biases, would have been more ambiguous. The references to ROTC and to university admission unambiguously points away from Less Wrong. I erred in crediting you (you the monolithic hive mind) with more rationality than you displayed, expecting you to read a post that unambiguously referred to academia as referring to academia.
I added a second downvote to signify “don’t feed trolls, even to correct their minor points”. It’s best for the grandparent comment to get downvoted and disappear unremarked, with no children. (I’m violating the norm in order to state it.)
Yes this is basically right, don’t know why orthonormal’s comment was downvoted when I found it. I have agreed with and upvoted some of sam0345′s comments in the past but honestly he really is trying his best to not participate in a productive way.
Herman Cain is not articulately describing his position on abortion. But I suspect that the political label “pro-choice” is not going to turn out to be accurate.
In other words, applying the label is only scoring a political point.
If you were really asking whether Herman Cain is accurately labelled as pro-choice, then that isn’t clear from the post.
I really don’t think we should get into this topic further, but my impressions of recent events were that
a) Herman Cain was, in fact, pro-choice, but
b) did not realize that opposing coercive state interference against abortion even though one is personally opposed to it is a pro-choice position, and
c) Herman Cain will soon change his substantive position to actually be anti-abortion to match the tribal preferences of the primary electorate he is courting.
I thought he was, actually; I was surprised that I was apparently expected to hate the man when all I knew about him was vaguely “isn’t he that Republican candidate that thinks abortion should be the woman’s decision?”
I don’t actually keep up with political news; thinking back, I’m pretty sure I got that idea from overhearing conversation in a bagel shop. Which indicates something is terribly off about my skepticism filters.
Knowing politics can’t save you here in any case. At least will do you no more good than say a simple heuristic of sticking to others of your own ethnicity (which should keep you reasonably safe). And since you are sticking to them, they will again inform you of any potential trouble via daily interactions. Just remember to be more paranoid than the norm and not afraid to change countries.
How much better is, someone involved in the political process, going to be at predicting this compared to someone who apolitically looks at the broad trends and reigning ideology? The latter person knows there is a certain probability of such a blow up, though he may miss it due to too infrequent updating, the former will probably only realize this is possible a few weeks or even days before the event. How these two approaches compare to each other depends on how fast one updates on new information I suppose. I would argue that a long term strategy of preparation for such possible “man made disasters” might outdo the rushed preparations of someone responding to the politics as they happen.
Perfect blindness to both daily politics and the real mechanisms of how one’s society function is naturally perilous. But consider the context of this discussions. The “real” mechanism would be perhaps controversial but mostly not covered under the “no mind killers” rule. Politics as in the politics that most obviously triggers this is useless.
I think we’re having a misunderstanding about what exactly we mean by the “no mind killers” rule. Clearly, getting into mind-killing debates with people is worse than useless; that much we can agree on. On the other hand, making a correct decision to bail out ahead of trouble requires that you face the very worst mind-killing issues head-on and make correct judgments about them. (It is possible that such attempts are ultimately futile or not worth the opportunity costs when all probabilities are considered, but there’s a Catch-22 situation there, because consideration of at least some highly mind-killing topics is necessary in order to establish this.)
However, when people speak about avoiding mind-killers on LW, they often have in mind complete cessation of thinking about such topics and living under the assumption that the status quo will continue indefinitely, or all until some grand technological game-changer. (Worse yet, sometimes they go further and privilege the hypotheses on controversial questions favored by the respectable opinion and official intellectual institutions, and consider attacks on these, but not adherence to them, as mind-killing.)
What I meant by this was things like idle speculating about the election. Indulging in off hand remarks about Gawddamn Liberals and Bible Thumping Conservatives. Frowning seriously and speaking about some politicians misconduct. Debating the particularities of certain laws. Endorsing candidates, criticizing candidates. Taking the parties stated platform seriously, ad hominens on the demographics that support a certain position, various other Dark Arts, ect.
In short everything that immediately triggers tribal feelings in those who are basically politically active average Joe “good citizens”.
These are of course ideological mind-killers. I would argue that currently there is some room for intelligent debates on LW about various such issues, the sore thumb being gender relations/sexual conduct. People are not obviously mind-killed by discussing say group differences or questioning Democracy (ok many are, but a substantial and not at all fringe fraction of LWers who have tought about this question and take some deep criticism of it quite seriously), though a kind of paranoia and strained feeling of someone saying “too much” does persist. Considering its demographics, constant stream of new unacclimatised participants and the very aggressive signalling on things like charity and altruism (which are concepts always heavily defined and shaped by the underlying fundamentals of a society) it is admirable that LW rationalist community can go as far as it does.
I say people can survive without daily politics just fine. Because signalling only requires they understand the ideological fundamentals, and even further they might do just as well if they try and understand the ideological fundamentals from the outside, without getting into the messy details. I think my “model crazy society’s expectations as a black box without bothering with the details of how they think their crazy works” satisfices.
I do however agree with your concern here:
But to think about such issues critically and objectively, there is in fact no need to even know what has been going on in say the past year. The tabooed fundamentals and key axioms have been the same for quite a bit longer and will not be changed by political action in the context of a modern Western “representative democracy”.
I don’t see this. It is OK to be in favor of Republicans, provided, of course, one is only in favor of decent respectable republicans like Governor Romney. Being in favor of indecent disreputable evil racist republicans like “teabaggers” such as Herman Cain will get you into trouble, but that is because nominally non political things like supporting the ROTC or “Future Farmers of America” will get you into just as much trouble.
Endorsing Romney against Obama will not cause problems for one. Endorsing Herman Cain or Walmart will cause problems for one. It is not official approved politics that gets one into trouble.
Indeed, if something is officially deemed political, it is perfectly safe to disagree and take the right wing position. It is those things that are deemed non political because all decent right thinking people agree upon them that cause problems.
If, like Herman Cain, you are a teabagger, you are obviously racist, but if you were a leader in the supposedly non political ROTC, as Sam Walton was, you are just as racist. Arguably a substantial part of the hatred directed at Walmart is hostility to the ROTC.
Failure to make an ad hominem at the demographics that support such evil hateful racist republicans, when such an ad hominem is called for, can get you into trouble. Remaining silent is seldom acceptable, one must boo the villains when they are mentioned. Four legs good, two legs bad.
No one gets in trouble for saying “teabagger”, even though it is a homophobic slur, unless of course, one uses it ironically, the irony implying a certain insincerity in booing the approved villains.
Observe that being an officer the ROTC reduces a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database by sixty percent on an all-other-things-considered basis. I doubt that supporting McCain would have such a devastating effect, though supporting Herman Cain surely would.
Google counts four threads (not including your own) which mention Romney on LW. 1 is at 0 karma. 2 is at 0 karma. 3 and 4 are at positive karma, and Romney is essentially an incidental example.
Please try to get in your head that LW really isn’t some evil left-wing group. When people say they don’t want to discuss politics here, they are generally telling the truth. So when someone discusses how they don’t want partisan politics and you respond with a comment that it is really only one side being partisan, you shouldn’t be shocked if you are downvoted.
Similarly, bringing up tangential (if interesting) claims about ROTC that you’ve already mentioned before isn’t going to incline people to listen to you.
However, that may not be the case. You may be right. We may be a hopelessly left-wing bunch of politically correct, socialist fiends who want to completely remove all meritocracy in the world and tax everyone with an income to provide free pot to the unemployed. If that is the case, then talking to us is a waste of your time. So, find somewhere else to go. We obviously are far too mindkilled to appreciate your nuanced political views. No doubt you can find other, much more rational individuals to discuss your imminently reasonable views.
It’s still an evil right-wing group, right?
This comment is hilarious and I am surprised someone voted it down.
You need both wings if you want to reach the skies.
Not if you’re a rocket.
Or a dragonfly. Then you need all four.
Or if you have a space elevator.
It’s not ? Now you tell me ! My world domination plans are in ruin !
In the above post I was referring to Ivy League universities as an evil left wing group, but, changing the topic to Less Wrong as an evil left wing group, an issue that you raised, not me:
If less wrong is an evil left wing group, one would expect references to Governor Romney to attract no particular negative Karma, whether the reference is favorable or unfavorable, but expect favorable references to Herman Cain, Sarah Palin, and so forth, to attract negative karma
You posted in a subthread which had nothing much to do about either the Ivy League or the ruling classes, but instead was simply about whether “doing politics” in various senses is at all useful or not in promoting political goals.
You might want to refer to Mencius Moldbug’s blog. He subscribes to the theory you espouse here (“‘ruling classes’ are radically left-wing, and one could reasonably describe them as ‘evil’ because their politics are so insidious; universities—and the Ivy League specifically—act as a de-facto ‘state church’ for the ruling classes.”). But he would agree that most political activism is worse than useless, and that diminishing the ruling classes’ influence on society (never mind restoring a sensible social order) will be very difficult.
I don’t entirely subscribe to Moldbug’s theory, but this does show that you were clearly barking up the wrong tree, even under a charitable interpretation of your views.
I don’t think sam’s problem is that he isn’t reading enough Moldbug, I think his problem is more likely that he doesn’t read anything other than Moldbug.
sam has been politically active on Usenet since at least 1993, which is as far back as I can find him in Google Groups, which does not go all the way back. That is 14 years before Moldbug started his blog. (I do not know if Moldbug was active before then.)
Somewhere on his blog, Moldbug mentions either being at university or doing this thesis in the very early ’90s. I get the impression his politics weren’t developed then, so if those sam 1993 posts are ‘immature’ or ‘undeveloped’ forms of later sam posts (as it were), I would take that as evidence for sam=Moldbug and obviously the converse as well—if those sam posts were more or less identical to later sam posts, as evidence against sam=Moldbug.
I don’t think sam being Moldbug is likely at all. For starters, from what I’ve seen of Moldbug, he doesn’t seem to usually make easily refuted factual claims—and that’s the chief definining characteristic of sam’s interactions with LessWrong: saying things as silly, unsubstantiated and easily refuted as that conservatives don’t consciously try to remake language, or claiming that marital equality and its supposed dread consequences were discussed a thousand years ago, or that Shakespeare wasn’t politically censored, or that “Bloody Mary” of England was as bad as it ever got from the point of view of oppression, etc, etc… When he’s challenged on those claims, he just makes some more random claims, again without substantiating them, again without citations, and so forth.
That and the passive-agressive self-pity about being downvoted and about him predicting we’ll downvote him (as if that takes a great genius to figure out, when he’s insulting us all over the place), which didn’t strike me as a Moldbug characteristic either. sam’s feelings towards gay people have been made clear as well, when Moldbug has instead stated that increasing tolerance of homosexuality is that bit of politics where he agrees with leftists.
Moldbug seems several levels above sam.
I doubt that, since he dosen’t really show that strong a mark from Moldbug’s thinking in my opinion.
He posted this in another thread: “Back before 1940 progressivism was nominally Christian and protestant.”
That’s certainly Moldbuggian. His implying that the University system is a mainstay of left-wing hegemony is also Moldbuggian.
Moldbug himself is not to be blamed if someone reacts to his writings in this way, though. I speak from experience as an erstwhile far-right flamer of a similar ilk on another forum, when I say that it is rather easy to fall into an affective death spiral around insurrectional far-right memes.
Note that sam0345 is a racialist; that is certainly a risk factor for obnoxious commenting. This is due to a combination of extremely strong in-group/out-group dichotomy (reinforced by social pariah status) and the fact that (setting aside mind-killing arguments against and in favour) racialism has a low barrier for entry (is not hard to come by for the less-than-smart) but allows people to feel that they are privy to profound truths to which others are blind.
Trying to argue with such a person is unwise (from personal experience, he will eventually gain some maturity and learn that persuasive argument involves far higher standards of co-operation than he is employing).
Not at all. Traditionalist Catholics have held such views since the 19th century! Also esoteric anti-Christian thinkers among pseudo-Pagan revivalists and anti-Semites alike have emphasised how socialism and its variants are basically a heretical strain or re-imagining of Christianity. Among Paleoconservatives, by intellectuals such as Paul Gottfried the fundamental protestant and Christian roots of progressivism have been spoken of in much the same terms, though he did so only in the late 2000′s so it is hard to say if this is just the intellectual zeitgeist of the “alt right” or if he was indeed also influenced by Moldbug.
Not necessarily, several groups of the Nouvelle Droite hold this view. It is also shared by nearly any fascist sympathizers that still spring up now and then. Right leaning Libertarians emphasise Academia’s pro-statist bias. At the end of the day even mainstream conservatives speak of disparagingly of Ivory Tower left wing academia.
Also it is an empirical fact that departments like anthropology are not only firmly in the camp of the left but serve as the choice of employment for people with radical (compared to the mainstream) political views.
Seems an accurate analysis.
He has been writing on such topics, with I believe substantially the same views and characteristic manner of expressing them, for at least 18 years. This is who he is.
He commented back on OB as well (under a different handle) didn’t he? Also how do you know this has been his pattern for 18 years?
Because I’ve seen it for, well, probably not all of these 18 years, but for enough of them. Despite his ungoogleable pseudonym here, I instantly recognised him from his writing style on this occasion. While he has not confirmed my identification, he has not demurred from it either, even when directly replying to this, so I think it definite. A random sample from the Google Groups archive under his full name will confirm the consistency of his views and manner of expression.
I didn’t realise he was known to anyone. How unfortunate!
I’m a bit late in realizing who sam0345 actually is (commented under a different name elsewhere), I now think heavy down voting and ignoring is even more appropriate.
You don’t want outside thoughts or empirical evidence contaminating the purity of Less Wrong’s rationality.
I notice I get called a liar for stating easily verified facts that really should be common knowledge—but in Less Wrong circles, strangely, are not. Nor does a Less Wrongian in good standing feel any need to verify facts. That I am a liar is good enough. That I have failed to produce citations for the fact the sky is blue is proof that the sky is purple and I am a liar. Since Less Wrong knows everything by listening to itself, any unwanted facts do not excite the slightest curiosity.
This is the typical incestuous death spiral of close minded doctrine. A group gets together, hears their own voice confirming their own beliefs and their own wisdom, and applies the principle of the Bellman “What I tell you three times must be true”. The elite of the larger society is suffering this death spiral, and in Less Wrong’s eagerness to emulate high status behaviors, Less Wong does the same, only more so.
Consensus is the biggest mind killer. In the ancestral environment, where facts tended to immediately empirical, consensus was reliable, just as in the ancestral environment, eating the sweetest available food was good for you. In the modern environment, consensus, like sugar, is bad for you.
I’ve already disproven a dozen so-called facts of yours—and you’ve neither conceded that, nor retracted them, nor apologized for any of those obvious falsehoods. Given how many falsehoods you’ve spewed, and at what enormous rate you spew them, it would be unreasonable of me to spend more than a minute trying to prove or disprove any further one of other—BUT I STILL APOLOGIZE FOR AND RETRACT ANY ERRORS I MAKE, UNLIKE YOU.
You claim that Shakespeare wasn’t politically restricted, and you don’t even bother reacting to the list of political restrictions he was labouring under that I gave you.
You claim that Catholics had more rights in Elizabethan england than Conservatives have in modern-day America, and you can’t even bother to argue how conservatives becoming President of America fits in with those claim of yours.
You claim that conservatives never intentionally manipulate language, and you don’t even comment on ‘freedom fries’ and ‘death tax’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ and all that other crap we mention as counterexamples.
You claim that all modern films are egalitarian in attitude and portray people as interchangeable, and you don’t even notice that the film you mentioned in the very same paragraph (StarWars) is the exact antithesis of that, with its messianic heroes, and its ultra-special bloodlines of royalty and supernatural powers.
I’ve argued with you only using evidence, but you’re a dishonest debater who knows to do nothing but lie and insult.
No you have not. You have made a dozen assertions, often quoting facts that directly disprove your own assertions, and no one calls you on it, knowing it is pointless, because your assertions are transparently absurd to any well informed person.
Of your dozen supposed refutations, choose one, one where the truth is a matter of objective fact, rather than interpretation or debate about what words mean.. I will prove I am right on that issue, and claim therefore, since I am right on an issue of your choosing, I am likely right on every other issue.
The fact that you can get away with such silliness is shows the futility of basing rationality on consensus.
Choose one issue, one where one can in fact determine the truth of it, and I will debate it, even though I generally don’t debate loons who make obviously demented assertions.
Fine. You claimed that modern movies actively uphold the idea that all people are equals, in the sense of interchangeability. You included the Star Wars trilogy in the category of modern movies. Explain to me how the following quotes from the Star Wars series don’t refute your hypothesis:
”The son of Skywalker must not become a Jedi. “
”That boy is our last hope.”
“The Emperor knew, as I did, if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him.”
”His cells have the highest concentration of midi-chlorians I have seen in a life-form. It was possible he was concieved by the midi-chlorians. ”—“You refer to the prophecy of The One who will bring balance to the Force. ”
I’ve been upvoting you (and the other commenters who’ve tried to correct sam) throughout this, but there’s a point where even rational, thoughtful rebuttals don’t help LessWrong’s signal-to-noise ratio, because they’re doing nothing but feed an obnoxious troll like sam0345.
And a debate over Star Wars seems especially unlikely to change sam’s mind.
You win. Now please drop it.
That’s not what he claimed. That’s your fuzzy memory of what he claimed. Quoting:
So, rewinding this, going from example to generalization, his argument is:
1 Leia throttled Jabba.
2 This is an example of the trend that almost all heroines and love interests are actively counter stereotypical.
3 There is an explanation for that trend. Modern films, plays, and books depict counter stereotypical women for the purpose of upholding the religious/political view that women are innately the equals of men in ability, character, etc., that the observable differences are a result of culture, a culture which the work in question is seeking to correct by challenging the stereotypes. The work, in short, is acting as propaganda.
4 There is a similar thing going on with the counter stereotypical depiction of blacks. The purpose is parallel to that in (3), i.e., to uphold the religious/political view that blacks are innately no different from whites in ability, character, etc., that the observable differences are a result of culture, a culture which the work in question is seeking to correct by challenging the stereotypes.
5 Both of these are specific cases of a more general religious/political ideology that all humans are innately equal.
Since you were challenged to pick a factual dispute, only the element 1 falls into the scope of the challenge. The rest are interpretation. And element 1 is plainly true.
So your response to the challenge fails. sam was right about the fact that Leia throttled Jabba.
But maybe you want me to dispute your interpretation? I can do that.
Strangely, you did not offer an alternative interpretation of (1). Instead of conceding that Leia did indeed strangle Jabba and endeavoring to offer an alternative explanation for it, you set that aside and introduced a new set of facts to support a new interpretation.
Your facts can be summarized as follows: in the Star Wars universe, Jedis are superior to non-Jedis, and some Jedis are superior to other Jedis. Therefore the movie does not support the ideology that all humans are innately equal.
Your argument is weak, I think fatally weak, in two respects. The first respect is that the egalitarian ideology in question concerns equality among actually existent categories of humans, such as women and men, and blacks and whites. So the fact that in the Star Wars universe there exists an entirely fictional category of human, the Jedis, or more precisely, the humans who are born with the innate ability to become Jedis, which is innately superior (in that ability) to other humans, does not in any way suggest that any actually existent categories of humans are innately superior to any other actually existent categories of human. Jedis have no real world counterparts. They are fantasy. In contrast, Star Wars women do have real world counterparts, i.e., actually existent women.
The second respect is that your argument assumes that in order for a fiction to support an idea, that fiction needs to fully realize that idea in every respect. You are, after all, arguing that since the fiction does not fully realize the egalitarian idea in every respect in its own universe, therefore it’s not pushing it. But surely that assumption is false. In fact, surely it is normally better to introduce an idea gradually, one piece at a time. If there were a conscious program to indoctrinate the population into the idea that all people are innately equal, we might well expect that the idea would not be introduced all at once, but would be introduced piece by piece. I don’t think there is a conscious program, but there is an unconscious process in which the ideology of progressivism is encountering, and continually pushing against, the realities of the marketplace, so that over time the population is gradually, rather than all at once, propagandized into the religion/politics of progressives.
Constant, if by “that all humans are equal”, and “equality in the sense of interchangeability”, sam had meant something different than what I understood him to mean, I’ll let him say so.
If his claim had been e.g. that modern movies promote the idea that both genders and all racial groups are deserving of political rights, I wouldn’t have bothered to dispute the point—though there would still be exceptions, they would actually be exceptions.
But “equality in the sense of interchangeability” is a much stronger claim than that—I could have just as easily disproven it by showing how Batman is portrayed as indispensable for the well-being of Gotham, how whenever a “superhero” is made to quit by the ungrateful smallfolk, the smallfolk end up realizing they needed him after all (Watchmen being a potential exception in this, but given Manhattan’s effective physical godhood, and Adrian Veidt’s intellectual superiority, egalitarianism in the sense of interchangeability isn’t exactly there either).
But your revised argument appears to have the same two weaknesses I found in your previous argument. Just as the Jedis have no real-world counterparts, neither do Batman nor Doctor Manhattan have any real-world counterparts. And the second weakness is that, once again, your argument assumes that that a fiction supporting an idea needs to fully realize that idea in every respect. I pointed out in particular that market realities dictate that you never go full progressive, to borrow a turn of phrase from Robert Downey Jr.
Other specific criticisms can be made, such as that Batman and Doctor Manhattan are both made not born, and progressives are big fans of the idea that differences are made not born, and that they are individuals not categories, and progressives are focused on categories not individuals, but the first two suffice so I won’t go into the others.
Moreover you were challenged to contest a point of fact. You picked sam’s mention of Star Wars. But sam’s mention of Star Wars was actually nothing more than a mention of the one incident in which Leia killed Jabba by strangling him. It was not a mention of the whole Star Wars universe. That was the point of fact that you picked. You’re going far beyond the challenge by bringing in Batman and Watchmen. Backing up to a slightly more general point which sam made, he mentioned two key respects in which fiction supports progressive ideology, and those are that “almost all heroines and love interests are actively counter stereotypical” and “not one black who is a significant character is stereotypical, a quite improbable number of them are actively counterstereotypical.” You could possibly argue that these are factual, though they are more difficult to assess, since you can’t just look the question up in Wikipedia, as you can the question of whether Leia strangled Jabba. In any case, you did not challenge either of these points.
As it happens, there are plenty of counter-stereotypical women in the Batman universe (two of my favorites are Cassandra Cain and Harleen Quinzel), and there are counter-stereotypical women in Watchmen as well, female heroes, though I don’t recall their names. At this point, counter-stereotypical women have become so common that they are completely unremarkable in fiction. My own mind has been thoroughly propagandized. Sam offered an explanation for the prevalence of counter-stereotypical women in fiction. You haven’t offered an alternative explanation, that I’m aware of.
And once again: irrelevant.
Then give counterexamples of how the fiction of StarWars supports the idea of “equality as interchangeability” in other respects. So far the only respects one can find are the respects where it doesn’t promote them.
Constant, the claim I disputed is a specific claim—it didn’t talk about differences displayed in books/movies between racial groups that exist in the real world, it didn’t talk about whether people are born with differences or made differently by their experiences.
You keep distracting from the point I’m disputing with irrelevancies. I disputed a certain specific claim. You keep bringing irrelevant things into the discussion. FOCUS!
So? Unlike the mind-killed, I don’t feel obliged to challenge every single point as if they were enemy soldiers.
A falsehood needs be challenged and defeated. An obvious truth like “negative racial and gender stereotypes are less popular nowadays than they used to be” doesn’t.
NO! I picked his claim that “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.”.
I chose Star Wars as a counterexample, just because he listed as an example of one such modern film—so that he wouldn’t be able to argue that this wasn’t “modern” enough for him.
Well if you like I will restate my claim as: Every movie, and almost every book is propaganda for the improbable religious belief that all real world groups are equal in the sense of interchangeable, whereas on the controversial questions of the day in Elizabethan times people cheerfully weighed in on both sides, and I retract my carelessly stated broader claim.
Thank you. Now we start making progress.
EDIT TO ADD: I actually agree with the idea that anti-discrimination attitudes are prevalent in the media in a much more shallow way than I like. As I wrote two and a half years ago ”..it’s pretty easy to be a non-racist when you believe that genetical inheritance play absolutely no part in abilities or attitude. That’s a very shallow sort of anti-racism, same way as it’d be a very shallow sort of feminism if it needed to believe that women are just as physically strong on average as men.
It’s harder and more thought-provoking and yet even more ACCURATE to portray a world where genetical heritage does play a part in abilities and STILL portray attitudes of racial superiority/privilege as wrong, to still portray a world where the various “tribes” of people (for lack of better word) must all be treated with dignity.”
You seem to have conceded that every movie, and almost every book is propaganda for the improbable religious belief that all real world groups are equal in the sense of interchangeable.
You then seem to argue that that is a good thing. Even supposing it to be a good thing, it is evidence for the original proposition that writers and playwrights in Elizabethan times had more freedom of expression than they do now, that today’s England is in this sense more like a theocracy than Elizabethan England was.
Similarly, Cromwell is remembered as a religious oppressor for attempting to ban Christmas, or at least the pagan elements of Christmas which are nearly all of it, but he let the Jews back into England, and under him there were one thousand varieties of Christianity contending on equal terms, passionately debating every contentious issue, including issues we would now think of as political, such as whether inequality reflected God’s will, and whether economic inequality was natural. Today the Jews are under considerable and increasing pressure to convert to progressivism, a belief system that is proving increasingly incompatible with remaining Jewish, and orthodox Jews depart England because of state and private persecution.
Observe that Shakespeare lets Jack Cade argue in favor of economic equality between classes, and rather than Shakespeare asserting the then orthodox religious and political position that economic inequality between classes is divinely ordained, instead shows us that if everything is up for grabs, much grabbing will ensue, and the result will not be very equal at all. Jack Cade gets to make good arguments for economic equality of classes unopposed, even though the playwright in effect replies that human nature makes this impractical.
Imagine a film today where a Nazi gets to make good arguments against equality of races unopposed, perhaps pointing to the fate of Detroit as compelling evidence of foolish and destructive it is to let n**s move into white neighborhoods. It is unthinkable that such a movie could be made. Even if the film subsequently presented some counter argument, the Nazi would not be allowed to make a single good and persuasive argument.
Stop feeding the troll, everyone. Feeding trolls encourages them and that is not good for LW. If this goes on I will start banning/deleting Sam’s comments and I would recommend that all further replies by LWians to his comments be downvoted because feeding trolls is not good for LW. Once a troll comment is downvoted below −3, the community’s job is done, textual replies are not necessary.
Thank you.
About @#$@ time.
Why doesn’t LW have a ban-user feature yet?
If it’s decided that a certain user should stop posting, it’s possible to ban individual comments and indicate this fact to the user, to discourage further activity. Eliezer used to do this occasionally in the past, it works. What’s not clear is socially acceptable procedure for making this decision, outside Eliezer’s decree.
I think we need to establish the norm of banning same-failure-mode comments from users who keep posting despite getting systematically and severely downvoted, if they still persist after a public warning that is simultaneously a place for potential appeal from the community (to overrule moderator’s decision).
Ok. As a former Orthodox Jew, this sort of claim is complete and utter bullshit. And there’s really no other word for it. Aside from personal experience, I’ve read quite a bit by Jonathan Sacks the current Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, and the functional head of the national organization of Orthodox, non-charedi and non-chassidic synagogues in Great Britain. He’s extremely vocal about anything perceived of as a threat to Orthodoxy and his own politics are by British standards right-wing. So if Jonathan Sacks hasn’t claimed there’s any such problem, the idea that there are Orthodox Jews leaving England because of pressure to become progressive… yeah. The closest issue is that some people in Great Britain have called for the banning of ritualized slaughter as used for halal and kosher meat because it causes unnecessary pain to the animals. Note that this movement has so far in England had zero success.
And I have numbers to prove it. The Orthodox population in England, especially the ultra-orthodox population is increasingly rapidly.
You’ve made a lot of egregiously false statements before but even by your standards this is ridiculous. To illustrate how ridiculous this is I’m going to pull a page out of Scott Aaronson’s book. I will give you $100 if you can find a single modern source that backs up your claim that Orthodox Jews are leaving England because of “pressure to convert to progressivism” (or any functionally identical statement) that anyone on LW (other than you and it should be someone who already has commented here before) considers remotely reliable.
The question of whether “Jews are under considerable and increasing pressure to convert to progressivism” is not relevant for LW (or even this thread, really), so figuring out what the facts are is the wrong thing to do. We need to be able to switch in the mode of considering relevance of a question, while temporarily ignoring it on object level. This seems like serious vulnerability of the forum, anyone willing to write it up?
I don’t think this particular case is good evidence that this is a problem, for two reasons. The first is that the most likely reason the relevance of the question was not remarked on here is that it is so obviously irrelevant that it went without saying. The second is that the rings of Saturn’s are giant fried onion rings. Delicious.
I don’t either, I think it’s a good example. I’m not arguing for this being a problem, I’m pointing out that it looks like one.
Remarking on irrelevance of a question is irrelevant in itself, one should act on that by ignoring the question on object level.
Logically rude statements tend to be irrelevancies. Should they never be pointed out?
My point was that not answering is the goal, while pointing out irrelevance is only of instrumental value towards that goal, so pointing out irrelevance, but failing to act on it (that is, failing to actually ignore the question), is a case of lost purpose. And the instrumental step being unnecessary (where irrelevance is obvious) doesn’t negate from its goal.
Okay. That makes sense.
Contradicting false statements, even irrelevant ones, is a strong impulse in our culture (by which I mean LW culture and the broader subcultures from which it draws many of its readers). But it doesn’t yet look to me like we overemphasize this.
Your recent correction of lukeprog on his use of the phrase “Aumann agreement” seemed to me to be an example of this “correcting impulse”. I think it was good for you to make the correction. I would have pointed out the erroneous usage if someone had not already done so. But the incorrectness of the phrase was irrelevant to the point of his post.
Or are you using “relevance” in a sense in which lukeprog’s use of the phrase “Aumann agreement” was relevant?
In my opinion, overused magic words deserve correction.
See the zeroth virtue.
I’m not sure that I’m getting your point. The theme of your links is that the word “rational” is overused around here. Is it your point that “Aumann agreement” is also overused?
Are you referring to the virtue that Eliezer calls “the void”? I’m not seeing the relevance.
Not really, that was poor word choice on my part. Only literally is it overused, in that one excessive use constitutes overuse.
It’s that such words have a warm feel to them, so they are used even when the anticipation controlling/more literal/more technical meaning is not intended. The overuse causes confusion by muddying the meaning, and increases the risk that I will name the way to understand the world and achieving my goals instead of actually understanding the world and achieving my goals.
This type of thing is common because one such overuse is common, “rational”. The specific overuse of “Aumann’s agreement theorem”, the same type of thing, is not common.
I have several times seen it described as a rule that rationalists update towards each other’s estimates, which is distressing. Clearly, they may share evidence and conclude something is more or less likely than either originally thought. A way to make sure one is learning and updating is to avoid using words for ideal methods, lest they cause one to think one is using them when one isn’t.
Yes. It’s only belatedly and reluctantly named there so it can be an example of its own point, to explain relationships among concepts rather than try and explain by using labels for rationality.
Agreement is an indicator subject to Goodhart’s law.
(You’ve lost the “magic”.)
I cast magic song!
Right, answering with silence seems inferior to pointing out irrelevance where appropriate (even if superior to responding on object level), it leaves the matter unsettled. So this is possibly a step that shouldn’t be skipped even where irrelevance is obvious, just like with something obviously wrong. This is a natural analogy: what happens is that instead of one question, we consider two questions simultaneously: whether something is right, and whether working on figuring out whether it’s right is a good idea.
For Aumann agreement, the topic is discussed on LW, so certainly isn’t irrelevant.
Anyone on LessWrong other than sam?
Yes. that should be clear but I’m editing it in to make it explicit.
Try American History X or The Believer.
I am not convinced this undermines your overall point, as “racism is bad” is still the overall message of the movies, but there are certainly racist characters (sometimes even sympathetic ones) who make statements and arguments that go unchallenged.
Not exactly, for either of the two sentences. I’ll reply further (and one last time) in a personal message, later today.
The Last Samurai espouses the belief that Japanese samurai are interchangable with Victorian era westerners?
Jedi! The plural of Jedi is Jedi! Aaarhblgharbl my one weaknessss
You are changing the topic from “Does the movie support equality” to “does every single aspect of the movie support equality in every single way”.
All real categories of humans in the movie are equal, as illustrated by Princess Leia strangling Jabba the hut. A small woman is supposedly just as strong as a big male—a delusion so widely believed that we are seeing a disturbingly large number of attacks on large males by small women, often with predictable consequences.
The fact that nobility and royalty do not deserve to rule, though plausible enough, unlike Princes Leia strangling Jabba the Hut, produces a gigantic plot hole at the center of the movie.
Further, the real category of nobility and royalty are also equal, since they do not deserve to rule, and good nobles do not get to rule.
And people with midichlorians are unequal. If there were actual people with midichlorians, or if all people with midichlorians in the movie were white males, this would be politically unthinkable. Because there are no actual people with midichlorians, and because, quite implausibly, midichlorian possession is equally distributed among all races and species, it is permitted.
Compare and contrast with Shakespeare, who was able to take the politically incorrect position on the biggest real issues of his day, such as the existence of purgatory.
Jabba the Hutt is at least as fictional as the Force is, you know, and he’s not exactly a physically imposing presence; there’s no particular reason to conclude that that scene is physically improbable, and Leia takes a noncombatant role elsewhere by comparison with the men in the cast. But the weakness of that particular example aside, there’s very little in the films to support a reading as egalitarian.
To wit: the movie centers on a caste of magical warrior-monks whose powers are quite literally in the blood. There’s a titled princess (not an “elected queen” like Amidala, a bona fide hereditary ruler, albeit adopted) in the core cast, and that’s never presented as unwelcome or even remarkable. That princess, by the way, is the only woman in the original trilogy with more than a handful of lines, gets rescued twice, and otherwise mostly limits herself to providing guidance and moral support. There’s only one non-white guy in the original trilogy, and he’s painted as untrustworthy for a variety of reasons. Nonhuman characters are portrayed as stereotypical savages, Orientalist-style local color, or outright subservient: the only real exception is Yoda, and it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to read him as a stereotypical shaman figure. Success is explicitly and repeatedly described as coming not from cleverness or effort, but by surrendering to the numinous forces of destiny.
The only thing that even approaches egalitarianism in the theme is the implicit preference for a republican form of government over an imperial, and I’m not inclined to give that much credit: the central conflict is at least as much about mysticism vs. modernism (in the guise of the regimented, technological Empire) as anything else, and that Empire’s pretty clearly a military dictatorship rather than a traditional aristocracy. You could read it as glorifying revolution, sure, but even that’s carefully constructed as a rebellion against new, illegitimate authority.
It would help if you did minimal research before making claims. Today’s homework excercise: Go to Wookiepedia and count how many species are listed who explicitly have no access to the Force. Hint: The answer is more than one.
I have no dog in your original fight with JoshuaZ et al, but I’m kind of curious about the Star Wars analysis specifically.
You say,
What do you mean by “real categories of humans” ? There exist many sentient species in the Star Wars universe; and technically, none of them are exactly human, seeing as the movie takes place “long ago, in a galaxy far away”. Leia’s species are probably as close to human as you can get, but there are tons of others—Hutt, Torguta, Mandalorian, Jawa, those spiky Darth Maul guys… Many of these species can wield the Force, which makes them vastly more powerful than most others.
He means things like “women”, “men”, “blacks”, “whites”, “short people”, “tall people”—as opposed to “Jedis” (Starwars), “Numenoreans” (Lord of the Rings), “Wizards” (Harry Potter).
Let’s not make obvious fails of understanding here.
Ok, fair enough, but isn’t Fantastic Racism (or sexism or what have you) just a subtler version of regular racism ? It’s not really that much better.
Pretty much, although I’d use less politically divisive before subtler. Writers have been using invented species, bloodlines, Differently Powered Individuals, and what have you as stand-ins for real-world marginalized groups for about as long as people have been writing speculative fiction, and they’re very much meant to be read as such: sometimes this gets distinctly unsubtle, as per the mutants in The Iron Dream.
The political focus varies, though; back in the day, this was traditionally used to bring up some relatively specific real-world issue that would be delicate to handle directly (as in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Outcast)”). These days I think it’s more common to use the device to keep things general, in order to identify with a broad spectrum of causes.
The question seems confused. I’d ask you “better in what”? Better in being scientifically accurate? Better in averting offense? Better for the plot of any given story?
And if you mean “morally better”, do you really think that Tolkien having his stories portray Orcs (which he invented exactly because he wanted an inexhaustible supply of enemies against which we needed feel no moral qualm) as utterly foul creatures, isn’t any morally better than if he’d chosen a real-life group, e.g. African or Mongols, to play that exact role? Isn’t Harry Potter better that it has goblins in the role of greedy banker-types instead of e.g. Jews?
People won’t be motivated to commit hate-crimes against orcs or goblins, if orcs are portrayed as uniformly bad or goblins uniformly greedy in some story.
In the star wars universe, the Jedis do not rule—and when they do rule, it is a bad mistake—dark side, betrayal, and so forth.
Luke is not born to be King, even though the story would make a lot more sense if he was. Indeed, the Star Wars universe is a particular example of the universal rule that you are, these days, not allowed to have a hero who is born to be King, unless, of course, like Pratchett’s Carrot, he wisely turns down the job.
I suppose they might let you have a woman who is born to be a warrior queen, warrior queens being counterstereotypical, but no heroes born to be King.
The lines you quote make sense in a society where the Jedi are a ruling aristocracy, or a powerful part of a ruling aristocracy, and Luke is born to be King. Since star wars is not set in such a society, they don’t make any sense.
How can Princess Leia be a princess, unless her father, and Luke’s father, is or was emperor? It is a gaping great plot hole produced by the ideology of equality. If she is a princess, he must be a prince, in which case winning should set things to right by restoring his family’s just and rightful authority.
At the very center of the Star Wars story is a gigantic plot hole produced by egalitarian doctrine.
There is a Princess Leia, yet strangely and illogically, no Prince Luke, because if there was a Prince Luke, there would have to be a King Luke or Emperor Luke, and a parent or grandparent who was King something or Queen something or emperor something, and that is just totally and completely politically incorrect.
I’m not even a Warsie and I know this one. Luke and Leia were separated at birth and she was adopted by a royal family, making her a princess and him not.
If we for the sake of convenience define “these days” as anything since the production of A New Hope, I can think offhand of Severian, Garion, Tristran Thorn, Richard Rahl, Rand al’Thor, and anywhere up to three or four characters from the Song of Ice and Fire books depending on where you draw the lines for “king” and “hero”. None of these are obscure works; most are popular series including multiple bestsellers, and although fantasy is a low-status genre a couple of them have a high reputation in critical circles as well.
And that’s just literary characters, just protagonists, and just ones with a prophecy or hidden birthright attached to them. I’ve even been nice and skipped reworkings or adaptations of things like the Arthurian mythos. Relaxing any of those constraints would multiply that list manyfold, and I’m sure there are instances I’ve missed.
To a limited extent this actually reinforces Sam’s point. Note that the last two of the characters mentioned occur in works that have frequently been accused of being reactionary and sexist. That said, I agree that Severian, Garion and Tristan Thorn are clear counterexamples.
For someone in the ‘reactosphere’ (as Mencius Moldbug calls it) ‘reactionary’ and ‘sexist’ isn’t an accusation but a praise. So the fact that several modern and popular series of books are reactionary and sexist (and proclaimed such) is evidence against sam’s position that modern books and films promote an egalitarian progressivist agenda.
True. But for that matter the entire genre’s been accused of being reactionary for pretty much the same reasons that ArisKatsaris applied to Star Wars, and I’m not entirely sure the accusers there are wrong. Point is that you can get away with it in the arena of modern fantasy (and make a lot of money in the getting away).
True, but irrelevant. You talked about equality in the sense of interchangeability, not about equality in the sense of “one man, one vote”. I won’t accept you first making a wild claim, and then trimming it down to effectively “well by equality in the sense of interchangeability I meant ‘rule by divine right’ isn’t accepted”.
Point remains: Anakin is born super-special. Point remains: Luke and Leia are born super-ultra-special. They are not interchangeable with anyone else.
The “hole” made by calling her a princess was produced by monarchical fantasies, it was not in failing to make her a ruling princess. Unlike later-day “Princess Amidala”, for the purposes of the story Leia didn’t need to be anything other than a Senator, she was called a princess just to call back to the old fairy tales about tailor boys (or farmer boys, I guess) saving the realm and getting the princess—old fairy tales which were actually more egalitarian than modern-day fairy tales StarWars, since farmer boys and tailor’s sons grew up to earn the realm through cleverness and effort, but they didn’t always begin with special genes as in the StarWars movies.
The new trilogy not only makes Amidala both a princess and a ruler, it makes the super-duper innate specialness of special people even clearer, with prophecies about The One—same as Matrix has prophecies about The One.
[Superfluous comment. Ignore this.]
I’m not going to downvote this comment because it does a much better job than your previous few comments in actually grappling with what other people are saying. I was tempted to upvote it, but if the comment had come from somene else I would not have done so, and I’m not that inclined to reward karma to the most-improved. You’ll probably appreciate the instincts against that.
That said, there are still simple factual issues and other problems with this post.
“Chronicles of the Necromancer” would be the only the most recent popular fantasy series that comes to mind involving a hero born to be king. Another example is in the Abhorsen series where one of the main characters is the sleeping prince who is restored to his kingship. Now, you could point out that in both these series there are powerful females also. In the first example, the protagonists love interest a warrior princess. And in the second one the protagonists for most of the books are female necromancers. But that’s a distinct situation from what you are claiming here. The point is that having heros born to be kings is more than ok in the current literature.
I’m not sure I understand this. Do you mean to assert that the lines themselves don’t make sense? Or that they don’t make sense for the purposes that they are being used as an example? In any event, you seem to be using an extremely narrow notion of aristrocracy. The point is that merit, power and being a person that matters are all inherited in the blood in Star Wars. Whether such people are in charge of the government is a nitpicky distraction.
And if one really wants to go there, note that in the Expanded Star Wars universe Leia becomes the prime minister of the New Republic, and everyone who tries to unseat her is portrayed as evil or incompetent.
Downvoting this and all the descendants per Kpier. Sorry folks.
In this context, this seems unproductive. Sam’s reply was more polite and more reasonable than many of his other comments.
I agree, though I simply will not upvote posts primarily about Star Wars canon unless they are exceptionally brilliant. But I won’t necessarily downvote them, neither for that nor for involving the participants here.
It would be useful if sam attached confidence estimates to each statements. Then, he could admit he was wrong with “It is a gaping great plot hole produced by the ideology of equality.” and we could compare that to statements he gave similar confidence to.
You’ve never even responded to requests for explanations of what would qualify to change your mind. When you say to choose an issue, and you will prove that you are right, we have no reason to believe that your ability to satisfy yourself that you have done so is contingent on your having any basis for the belief at all.
In this subthread, you asserted that Robert Gates predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, and that he then tried to hide the fact that he had made this prediction. Your assertion was based on a demonstrably incorrect reading of a Wikipedia article. (Gates was described as contradicting someone else’s prediction that the USSR would fall. You misunderstood the person being attributed with making the prediction.)
You now have the opportunity to prove that you know how to say “oops”.
Downvoted because of this.
You get called a liar by one person (after apparently some research that just happened to miss the relevant bits), another corrects them, and the first person retracts their statement. Clearly, persecution of the highest order.
People are wrong factually all the time. I was wrong in a really embarassing way in this thread. The key issue to being wrong is that when one has the evidence that one is wrong, updating and saying “oops” is ok. In many environments doing so will cause a serious loss of status. On Less Wrong the almost exact opposite will occur. But people will be very impatient with people who make factual errors and then don’t say oops when they are pointed out to them.
The guilty flee where no man pursueth. Nothing in the post explicitly references LW, and I did not intend to refer to LW, but rather to the ruling class and those that suck up to them. You perceived it as referring to LW, because it happened to be as true of LW as it is of the rest of society.
Sam, trolling isn’t acceptable here, and what you just did is pretty much the definition of trolling—trying to sucker people into answering in a way that you’ll then use into further inflaming things.
You don’t have the capacity to at the same time say “It applies to you” and to also pretend to have said “I didn’t mean to say that it applies to you”. And you definitely don’t have the capacity to say “The fact you wrongly believed I thought it applied to you, proves that my belief is true when I believe it applies to you”.
So downvoted. Since you’re following the same tactic in lots of threads, I’ll be now downvoting without further comment whenever you follow remotely similar trollish tactics.
I’ll add that I will be downvoting any comment by sam0345 without reading it at all. If the person behind sam0345 decides not to be a troll and still wants to post on LW then he can create a new identity and start again.
That you, and others, misread my post as referring to LW reflects on you and LW, not me. I had no intent, nor expectation, that my post would be misread. Your misreading reveals your bias. While I claim to be good at predicting you, and claim that to the extent that LW acts like a hive mind, that mind is predictable, predictably wrong in predictable ways, and predictably foolish in being too smart by half, I did not predict this misreading.
Had I cleverly intended to be misread in order to reveal your irrational biases, would have been more ambiguous. The references to ROTC and to university admission unambiguously points away from Less Wrong. I erred in crediting you (you the monolithic hive mind) with more rationality than you displayed, expecting you to read a post that unambiguously referred to academia as referring to academia.
Isn’t Herman Cain pro-choice?
Edit: What’s the downvote for?
I added a second downvote to signify “don’t feed trolls, even to correct their minor points”. It’s best for the grandparent comment to get downvoted and disappear unremarked, with no children. (I’m violating the norm in order to state it.)
Yes this is basically right, don’t know why orthonormal’s comment was downvoted when I found it. I have agreed with and upvoted some of sam0345′s comments in the past but honestly he really is trying his best to not participate in a productive way.
Herman Cain is not articulately describing his position on abortion. But I suspect that the political label “pro-choice” is not going to turn out to be accurate.
In other words, applying the label is only scoring a political point.
If you were really asking whether Herman Cain is accurately labelled as pro-choice, then that isn’t clear from the post.
I really don’t think we should get into this topic further, but my impressions of recent events were that a) Herman Cain was, in fact, pro-choice, but b) did not realize that opposing coercive state interference against abortion even though one is personally opposed to it is a pro-choice position, and c) Herman Cain will soon change his substantive position to actually be anti-abortion to match the tribal preferences of the primary electorate he is courting.
Apparently not.
I thought he was, actually; I was surprised that I was apparently expected to hate the man when all I knew about him was vaguely “isn’t he that Republican candidate that thinks abortion should be the woman’s decision?”
I don’t actually keep up with political news; thinking back, I’m pretty sure I got that idea from overhearing conversation in a bagel shop. Which indicates something is terribly off about my skepticism filters.