I think my problem with your responses on this thread so far has been that you’ve taken various liberal positions, said “Obviously this a sacredness value, liberals say it’s about harm but they are lying”, and not justified this.
“Lying” is not the right word, since it suggests conscious deception. The term I have used consistently is rationalization.
In order to demonstrate that liberal sexual values are sacredness rather than harm based, you’d need to point out some specific practice that was harmless but which liberals still violently opposed [...] or harmful but which liberals supported [...]
Arguing against liberal positions on such matters is very difficult because they tend to be backed by a vast arsenal of rationalizations based on purportedly rational considerations of harm or fairness, often coming from prestigious and accredited intellectual institutions where liberals predominate. This is of course in addition to the dense minefield of “boo lights” where an argument, whatever its real merits, will trigger such outrage in a liberal audience that the discourse will be destroyed and the speaker discredited.
So, while I can readily point out concrete examples of the sort you’re asking, unfortunately in many of them, crossing the inferential distances would be an uphill battle, or there would be immediate unpleasantness that I’d rather avoid. Therefore I’ll limit myself to a few more vague and general points:
Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games. Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric?
If it’s OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?
If the alleged vast inequality of wealth is a legitimate complaint against economic laissez-faire, why is it not legitimate to complain about the vast inequality of sexual and romantic opportunities (and of the related social status) under sexual laissez-faire? (The problem is by no means limited to men, of course.)
Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction? Especially since liberals make analogous arguments in favor of paternalistic regulation of practically everything else.
There are many other examples too, but these are the best ones I can think of without either running into enormous inferential distances or sounding too provocative. It really seems to me that liberal norms change suddenly and dramatically towards laissez-faire once sexual matters come under consideration, and I don’t see how this could be because their regular considerations of harm and fairness just happen to entail laissez-faire in this particular area and nowhere else.
I agree that certain liberal values are based on sacredness (diversity and anti-racism) or purity (environmentalism), although I have yet to hear any good argument that liberals explicitly value authority.
Explicitly, certainly not often. But in many of their observed views and behaviors, I detect strong authority-based intuitions, even though they will invariably be rationalized as something else. The typical way is to present authority as some kind of neutral and objective expertise, even in areas where this makes no sense.
Once Peter Singer says he can’t really see any problems with infanticide because it doesn’t harm anyone, the hypothesis that he still is secretly trying to uphold sacredness values just as much as everyone else becomes pretty hard to support.
As I said, I’m not an expert on Singer in particular, and I don’t deny the possibility that he might be an outlier in this regard. (Although I do remember reading things from him that seemed to me like a clear case of rationalizing fundamentally non-utilitarian liberal positions.) Also, I agree that someone’s serious utilitarian bullet-biting on some issues provides some evidence that he is overall less dedicated to the values of sacredness etc. I do think, however, that you underestimate how often such serious bullet-biters can be inconsistent on other issues.
So, while I can readily point out concrete examples of the sort you’re asking, unfortunately in many of them, crossing the inferential distances would be an uphill battle, or there would be immediate unpleasantness that I’d rather avoid. Therefore I’ll limit myself to a few more vague and general points:
I’ve often seen you say this kind of thing in your comments. Do you participate in another forum where you do describe the details? Or alternatively, are you preparing us to eventually be ready to hear the details by giving these vague and general points?
I think there is a good chance that many of your ideas are wrong and you are probably more confident about them than you should be. (Nothing personal, I just think most new ideas are wrong and their proponents overconfident.) I could argue against the vague and general points that you offer, but it feels pointless since presumably you have stronger arguments that you’re not sharing so I have no way of convincing you or bystanders that you are wrong, nor is it likely that you can convince me that you are right (without sharing those details). I imagine other potential critics probably feel the same and also stay silent as a result. In the meantime, readers may see your comments stand uncriticized and form an incorrect idea of what other LWers think of your views (i.e., that we’re less skeptical of them than we actually are).
I thought I’d draw your attention to this issue in case it hadn’t occurred to you already. Perhaps it might spur you to form or speed up a plan to make public your detailed ideas and arguments?
I agree that this is a valid concern, but I don’t think your evaluation of the situation is entirely fair. Namely, I almost never open any controversial and inflammatory topics on this forum. (And I definitely haven’t done so in a very long time, nor do I intend to do it in the future.) I make comments on such topics only when I see that others have already opened them and I believe that what has been written is seriously flawed. (In fact, usually I don’t react even then.)
Therefore, while I certainly accept that my incomplete arguments may cause the problems you describe, you must take into account that the alternative is a situation where other people’s arguments stand unchallenged even though they are, in my opinion, seriously flawed. In such situations, leaving them unanswered would create a problem similar to the one you point out with regards to my comments, i.e. a misleading impression that there is a more agreement with them that there actually is. (This even aside from the problem that, if I am correct, it would mean wrong arguments standing unchallenged.)
In these situations, I take my arguments as far as I believe I can take them without causing so much controversy that the discourse breaks down. This is a sort of situation where there is no good outcome, and I believe that often the least bad option is to make it known that there is some disagreement and voice it as far as it can be done. (In the sense that this outcome, whatever its problems, still makes the best out of the unfavorable trade-offs that unavoidably appear whenever some controversial and inflammatory topic is opened.)
Of course, there are many ways in which I could be wrong. Maybe the arguments I see as flawed are in fact usually correct and I’m just creating confusion and misleading people by parading my mistaken contrary beliefs this way. Maybe these topics are so unimportant that it’s always better to ignore them than to raise any amount of fuss. Maybe my comments, however careful and diplomatic I try to make them, still serve as a catalyst for too much bad discourse by other posters. Relevant to your comment, maybe the confusion and misleading impressions left by my comments end up worse than the alternative outcome in case I stay silent. I recognize all these possibilities, but nevertheless, I think the concrete objection from your comment fails to recognize the relevant concerns I outlined above.
I think the concrete objection from your comment fails to recognize the relevant concerns I outlined above.
Yes, it’s quite possible that you’ve thought through these issues more thoroughly than I have. But one thing that makes me more skeptical than usual is that you’re the only person I know who often makes claims like “I privately have better arguments but I can’t share them because they would be too inflammatory”. If your arguments and conclusions are actually correct, why haven’t other people discovered them independently and either made them public (due to less concern about causing controversy) or made similar claims (about having private arguments)? Do you have an explanation why you seem to be in such an uncommon epistemic position? (For example do you have certain cognitive strengths that make it easier for you to see certain insights?)
If I were you, I would be rather anxious to see if my arguments stand up under independent scrutiny, and would find a place where they can be discussed without causing excessive harm. I asked earlier whether you discuss your ideas in other forums or have plans to make them public eventually. You didn’t answer explicitly which I guess means the answers to both are “no”? Can you explain why?
Sorry, I composed the above comment in a rush, and forgot to address the other questions you asked because I focused on the main objection.
Regarding other forums, the problem is that they offer only predictable feedback based on the ideological positions of the owners and participants. Depending on where I go, I can get either outrage and bewilderment or admiring applause, and while this can be fun and vanity-pleasing, it offers no useful feedback. So while I do engage in ideological rants and scuffles for fun from time to time on other forums, I’ve never bothered with making my writing there systematic and precise enough to be worth your time.
Regarding other thinkers, I actually don’t think that much of my thinking is original. In fact, my views on most questions are mostly cobbled together from insights I got from various other authors, with only some additional synthesis and expansion on my part. I don’t think I have any unusual epistemic skills except for unusually broad curiosity and the ability to take arguments seriously even if their source and ultimate conclusion are low-status, unpleasant, ideologically hostile to my values and preferences, etc. (Of course, neither of these characteristics is an unalloyed good even from a purely epistemic perspective, and they certainly cause many problems, possibly more than benefits, for me in practical life.)
The problem, however, is that on controversial topics, good insight typically comes from authors whose other beliefs and statements are mistaken and biased in various ways, and whose overall image, demeanor, and affiliation is often problematic. And while people are generally apt to misinterpret agreement on a particular point as a full endorsement of someone, and to attack a particular argument based on the author’s mistakes and biases on other questions, I think LW has some particularly bad problems in this regard. This is because on LW, people tend to assign a supposed general level of “rationality” to individuals and dismiss them if sufficient red flags of supposedly general irrationality are raised.
Whereas in reality, on controversial and ideologically charged questions, there is much less consistency within individuals, and people whose rationality is sterling as judged by the LW public opinion (often not without good reason) typically have at least some horribly naive and biased views, while much good insight comes from people whom LW would judge (also often with good reason) as overall hugely biased and irrational. (The only people who maintain high standards across the board are those who limit themselves to technical questions and venture into controversial non-technical topics only rarely and cautiously, if at all.) So that on many questions, saying “I think X has good insight on topic Y” would be just a way to discredit myself. (When I think it isn’t, I do provide references with the appropriate caveats.)
I don’t think I have any unusual epistemic skills except for unusually broad curiosity and the ability to take arguments seriously even if their source and ultimate conclusion are low-status, unpleasant, ideologically hostile to my values and preferences, etc.
Considering the source of the arguments, they most likely have not been seriously evaluated by many other careful thinkers, so you must have very high confidence in your ability to distinguish between good and bad arguments from object-level considerations alone. If you can actually, on your own, synthesize a wide-ranging contrarian theory from such diverse and not pre-filtered (and hence low in average quality) sources that is also correct, I would say that you have extremely unusual epistemic skills.
Whereas in reality, on controversial and ideologically charged questions, there is much less consistency within individuals, and people whose rationality is sterling as judged by the LW public opinion (often not without good reason) typically have at least some horribly naive and biased views, while much good insight comes from people whom LW would judge (also often with good reason) as overall hugely biased and irrational.
I agree with your assessment of this as a problem and an opportunity. But instead of trying, by oneself, to gather such good insights from otherwise biased and irrational people, it would be a better idea to do it as a community. If it seems too difficult or dangerous to try to change LW’s community norms to be more receptive to your mode of investigation, you should build your own community of like-minded people. (From Konkvistador’s not entirely clear description in the parallel thread, it sounds like you’ve already tried it via a mailing list, but you can probably try harder?)
(From Konkvistador’s not entirely clear description in the parallel thread, it sounds like you’ve already tried it via a mailing list, but you can probably try harder?)
I guess I should clarify, I organized a mindkiller discussion mailing list with interested thinkers from LessWrong, that was active for some time. Anyone who was invited was also invited to propose new members, we tried to get a mix of people with differing ideological sympathies who liked discussing mind killing issues and where good rationalists. The vast majority of people contacted responded, the end result was about 30 LWers. I don’t feel comfortable disclosing who opted to join. I think I did send you a PM with an invitation to join.
The reason I thought such a mailing list might be a good idea was partially because I’ve had very interesting email correspondences with several LWers in the past (this includes Vladimir_M).
If your arguments and conclusions are actually correct, why haven’t other people discovered them independently and either made them public (due to less concern about causing controversy) or made similar claims (about having private arguments)?
To offer another data point in addition to Konkvistador’s, HughRistik made similar claims to me. We had a brief private exchange, the contents of which I promised to keep private. However, I think that I can say, without breach of promise, that the examples he offered in private did not seem to me to be as poisonous to public discourse as he believed.
On the other hand, I could see that the arguments he gave where for controversial positions, and anyone arguing for those positions would have to make some cognitively demanding efforts to word their arguments so as to avoid poisoning the discourse. I can see that someone might want to avoid this effort. But, on the whole, the level of effort that would be required didn’t seem to me to be that high. I think that it would be easy enough (not easy, but easy enough) for Vladimir_M to make these arguments publicly and productively that he should want to do this for the reasons you give.
(I’ll also add that the evidence HughRistik offered was serious and deserved respectful consideration, but it did not move me much from my previous mainstream-liberal views on the issues in question.)
anyone arguing for those positions would have to make some cognitively demanding efforts to word their arguments so as to avoid poisoning the discourse.
Merely expressing certain thoughts in a clear way is deemed to poison the discourse on this forum, whereas expressing certain other thoughts, no matter how rudely, aggressively, childishly, and offensively, is not deemed to poison the discourse. The only way to get away with expressing these thoughts on this forum is to express them as Vlad does, in code that is largely impenetrable except to those that already share those ideas.
And as evidence for this proposition, observe that no one does express these thoughts plainly on this forum, not even me, while they are routinely expressed on other forums.
Lots of people argue that we are heading not for a technological singularity, but for a left political singularity, that will likely result in the collapse of western civilization. You could not possibly argue that on this forum.
Indeed it is arguably inadvisable to argue that even on a website located on a server within the USA or Europe, though Mencius Moldbug did.
This post doesn’t deserve the down votes it got. Up voted.
And as evidence for this proposition, observe that no one does express these thoughts plainly on this forum, not even me, while they are routinely expressed on other forums.
Urban Future is a rather interesting blog, just read his Dark Enlightenment series and found it a good overview and synthesis of recent reactionary thought. I also liked some of his technology and transhumanist posts.
Lots of people argue that we are heading not for a technological singularity, but for a left political singularity, that will likely result in the collapse of western civilization. You could not possibly argue that on this forum.
It is probably true that we couldn’t discuss this regardless of how much evidence existed for it. Ever since I’ve started my investigation of how and why values change, the process we’ve decided to label “moral progress” in the last 250 years, I’ve been concerned about social phenomena like the one described in the post seriously harming mankind. To quote my comment on the blog post:
I sometimes wonder whether that is an illusion. What if we are that lucky branch of the multiverse where, looking just at it it looks like a Maxwell’s demon is putting society back into working order?
This would also explain the Fermi Paradox. If all intelligent life in our universe tends to eventually spirals into perfect leftism as described in the OP… if so building self-improving AI designed to extrapolate human ethics like the folks at SIAI hope to do may be an incredibly bad idea.
“If it did not end, the final outcome, infinite leftism in finite time, would be that everyone is tortured to death for insufficient leftism…”
I hope this model of the universe is as unlikely as I think it is!
I’d rather you refer to Three Worlds Collide than discuss such morbid fantasies! (I’ve read Land and he makes H.L. Mencken look kind and cheerful by comparison.)
One (overly narrow) ideology-related interpretation possible is that of a Space-Liberal humanity having Space Liberalism forcefully imposed on the Babyeaters but resisting the imposition of Space Communism upon itself, despite the relative positions being identical in both cases. In which case… was the Normal Ending really so awful? :)
No, but seriously. Consider it. I mean, the Superhappies are a highly egalitarian, collectivist, expansionist, technology-focused, peace- and compromise-loving culture with universalist ideals that they want to spread everywhere.
Aside from the different biology, that sounds like the Communist sci-fi utopias I’ve read of, like Banks’ Culture and the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe. All three are a proper subset of “Near-Maximum Leftism” in my opinion. And I would hardly be terrified if offered to live in either one—or even a downgraded version of one, with a little Space Bureaucracy. Frankly, I wouldn’t even mind a Space Brezhnev, as long as he behaved. I can name a dozen much worse (non-socialist) rulers than the real Brezhnev!
(Can you imagine tentacle sex being plagued by bureaucracy? “Sorry, comrade, you’ll need a stamp before I can give you an orgasm, and the stamp window doesn’t work today.”)
“I privately have better arguments but I can’t share them because they would be too inflammatory”.
I have privately discussed the arguments and found them convincing enough to move my position over the past year much more in his direction.
The best course of action is perhaps a correspondence with assured privacy? The problem is that one to one correspondences are time consuming and have their own weaknesses as a means to approaching truth seeking. I tried to get more open discussion of such arguments on a mailing list but as your probably know most didn’t participate or write enough material to make reasoning explicit in ways they do in regular correspondence.
Also I felt this important enough to say to break my one month streak of staying off LW, I will now (hopefully) resume it.
I have privately discussed the arguments and found them convincing enough to move my position over the past year much more in his direction.
Thank you for this data point, but it doesn’t move me as much as you may have expected. I think many flawed arguments are flawed in subtle enough ways that it takes “many eyes” to detect the flaws (or can even survive such scrutiny for many years, see some of the flawed security proofs in cryptography for important commonly used algorithms and protocols as evidence). I personally would not update very much even if I saw the arguments for myself and found them convincing, unless I knew that many others with a diversity of expertise and cognitive styles have reviewed and had a chance to discuss the arguments and I’ve looked over those discussions as well.
Typically the first thing I do after finding a new idea is to look for other people’s discussions of it. I’m concerned that many are like me in this regard, but when they come to Vladimir_M’s “vague and general” arguments, they see them highly upvoted without much criticism, and wrongly conclude that many people have reviewed these “vague and general” arguments and found nothing wrong with them when it’s more of a problem with potential critics lacking sufficient incentive to attack them. Even worse, if Vladimir_M’s conclusions become commonly accepted (or appear to be commonly accepted) on LW due to such dynamics, it sets up a potentially bad precedent. Others may be tempted (not necessarily consciously) to overestimate how inflammatory some of their arguments are in order to gain an edge in getting their ideas accepted.
(As I mentioned, Vladimir_M may well have already thought through these issues more thoroughly than I have, but I wanted to bring up some possible downsides that he may have overlooked.)
Thank you for this data point, but it doesn’t move me as much as you may have expected.
Oh I didn’t expect it to, its not like I’m a particularly trustworthy authority or anything and your many eyes argument is a good one, I just wanted to share an anecdote.
I was actually hoping readers would take more notice of the other anecdote, the one about the attempt to create an alternative for rationalists to discuss and update on such topics (a mailing list) that was tried and failed. To describe the failure in more detail I think inactivity despite some interesting discussion in the first month or so captures it best.
I was confused by your description of the mailing list so I put it aside and then forgot to ask you to clarify it. Can you tell us a bit more? How many people were on the list? Was it open or by invitation only? Was it an existing mailing list or created just for this purpose? How did you recruit members? Why do you think it failed to be active after the first month? Why did you say “as you probably know”?
I have been on several highly active mailing lists, both open and closed, so my guess is that you failed to recruit enough members. (Another possibility is that people didn’t find the topic interesting but that seems less likely.) Why not try to recruit more members?
Before I saw this reply I already talked about it more here since I saw it needed to be clarified. Now to answer all your questions.
Can you tell us a bit more?
I’ll do better I will share the introductory description sent via PM. To give context, a little before this there was an extensive discussion on the pros and cons of various approaches to discovering truth and gaining sanity on mind-killing issues. I think it was in one of the many sub-threads to lukeprogs rational romance article.
I was mostly convinced by arguments against an official mindkiller discussion mailing list, yet I was wondering, would you consider participating in a more informal discussion with a few more people from LessWrong?
A few people that are currently on the list or have been received invitations: [20 or so names]
I’ve sent similar messages to all of them a few weeks back when starting the list. I am still open to suggestions on who else might be both interested and unlikely to go tribal in their thinking (many people on the previous list where added from suggestions). I’m also open to confidential criticism of the choice for the initial list of people (including myself ).I want to emphasise the usefulness of criticism, since most people so far seem to respond just by adding names not suggesting which should be taken away. As a result the list is a bit bloated.
If you are interested in following or participating please include an email address in your response. Also if you choose to join the group please read the temporary guidelines.
My adress is: [my email address]
Cheers, Konkvistador
Also to again emphasise a key point I fear might be misunderstood I’ll quote from the temporary guidelines:
Please don’t ever present this or the later the mailing list as anything official or semi-official. It is not. It is just some people from LW talking about stuff.
Now to answer your specific questions.
How many people were on the list?
About 20 to 30.
Was it open or by invitation only?
Invitation only. With people having to agree to new members being added. No proposals where shot down, however people didn’t suggest many names.
Was it an existing mailing list or created just for this purpose?
Newly created.
How did you recruit members?
PMs to people on LessWrong with contact info.
Why do you think it failed to be active after the first month
I’m not sure, my best guess was not enough people. Perhaps people where also reluctant to open new topics since privacy protection was pretty much paper thin. My cynical side said it was because the list had too many contrarians who weren’t motivated to write because they lacked a non-contrarian audience, and going metacontrarian one more step would require too muhc legwork. :)
Why did you say “as you probably know”?
I thought you where a member of the list. I’ve now checked, you where invited but you never replied.
I have been on several highly active mailing lists, both open and closed, so my guess is that you failed to recruit enough members.
Most likely explanation.
Why not try to recruit more members?
It has been inactive for some time. Still some discussion did take place, so potentially harmful material may be in the archives, I wouldn’t be ok sending new invitations unless the old members agreed.
I must have been busy with something at the time and then later forgot about the invitation. Can you PM me the details of how to join so I can take a look at the archives?
Lack of a big audience would definitely also contribute to inactivity, especially if there’s not even a feeling that one’s contributions might eventually be synthesized into something that will be seen or used by many others. Maybe you can try a different format? Make the forum public but encourage people to use fresh pseudonyms for privacy, and be ready to ban people who are disruptive?
I must have been busy with something at the time and then later forgot about the invitation. Can you PM me the details of how to join so I can take a look at the archives?
Yes you where on the original list people agreed to so there is I think no problem with you taking a look at the archives. I’ll send you a PM.
Maybe you can try a different format? Make the forum public but encourage people to use fresh pseudonyms for privacy, and be ready to ban people who are disruptive?
Perhaps this would be a better approach. I don’t think I have the time for this right now and not for at least a month or two, so if anyone else is feeling motivated…
It’s possible that the mailing list would be in better shape if you posted more. I used to be in amateur press associations—what people did before they had the internet—and I’m pretty sure that the successful ones had substantial contributions by the people running them.
That sounds like good advice. But I honestly wasn’t sure people where interested in my contributions at all, there where lots of excellent rationalist there, that’s a pretty intimidating audience!
an alternative for rationalists to discuss and update on such topics
I think you’re proposing an alternative because you’re a C.I.A. agent trying to infiltrate LW and divide the community for your government’s nefarious purposes—which will remain unspoken lest they become memetic and drive the world towards the edge of insanity.
/devil’s advocate
And, seriously, when was the last time anyone was punished on LW for posting their contrarian thought? The gestalt I’m getting is that LWers so desperately want to be accepting of contrarians that they’ll take the most insane and unsupported propositions more seriously than they deserve (e.g. Will Newsome).
Contrarian =/= Mindkilling =/= Hurts the community if discussed =/= Something LW can’t productively discuss
Though there is obviously some overlap. Consider the exercises in frustration and mutual incomprehension that result when we talk about PUA/gender/sexuality. It is I would argue not that mindkilling a subject, there is little wild contrarianism, yet it is a debate I’d rather not see relaunched because of the fail that has consistently accompanied it on LW/OB for years.
Also Will Newsome is a bit of a straw man no? I would argue he is seen by most posters as firmly in the people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall territory.
Contrarian =/= Mindkilling =/= Hurts the community if discussed =/= Something LW can’t productively discuss
Though there is obviously some overlap
What is contrarian (for this community and re anything outside of AI) is what is typically considered mindkilling and what is mindkilling is what is typically thought of as hurting the community. When I use ‘contrarian’ in this context, I’m just putting a word to what you’re referring to in your previous comment.
Consider the exercises in frustration and mutual incomprehension that result when we talk about PUA/gender/sexuality.
What I generally see is people assuming conclusions based on flimsy science (e.g., a lot of the science brought in to support preexisting conclusions within the PUA community), and then assuming the push-back is entirely or mostly because of the offense caused (no doubt that offense is motivating for entering discussion, though).
Also Will Newsome is a bit of a straw man no?
Yes and no. He is partly in the 2+2=5 territory in the context of the community as a whole, but then there are people who take him seriously (just saying he supports X gets him karma). In this thread, Vladimir_M is another example.
And, seriously, when was the last time anyone was punished on LW for posting their contrarian thought
Plainly expressed contrarian posts are downvoted, or silently and furtively deleted. The likelihood of silent and furtive deletion discourages people from posting.
In case you weren’t aware, your “deleted” posts are available for anyone who’d care to browse them on your user page. You can check — go back a page or two and click on the permalinks, you’ll see those posts are “deleted” from the perspective of the threads they were part of. Maybe this is a bug in the LW code, but personally I think it’s kinda useful, because folks can verify the nature of your contributions and thereby the veracity of your claims here.
Folks can draw their own conclusions of your work — but I was particularly impressed by your claims that stepfathers typically rape boys, while “girls without a natural father are apt to become whores”; and that “allowing blacks, mestizos, women, white males who have not been raised by their biological fathers, and homosexuals into the power structure has produced a general collapse of trust and trustworthiness in the ruling elite [...] because members of these groups are commonly less trustworthy”; as well as your assertion that the design intent of cervical-cancer prevention programs is to cover up for the evils of male homosexuality.
Despite the fact that your claims are extraordinary and therefore in need of evidence to raise them to any probability worth consideration, you do not cite evidence for your claims. Instead you assert that your beliefs are themselves “evidence” and “fact” — that your map is the territory — and that people who cite evidence that disagrees with your claims are “pious” “PC” censors.
It seems that you are operating what the Wikipedia folks call a “single-purpose account”. You do not participate in discussions on AI, x-rationality, cognitive science, game theory, timeless ethics, self-improvement, or any of the other subjects commonly discussed here; except insofar as you can turn these topics to your own unusual breed of far-right politics. This politics appears to be almost exclusively concerned with the moral and cultural significance of other people’s sexual conduct and racial heritage — and with demeaning anyone who disagrees with you.
Since Less Wrong is not primarily about politics of any stripe, and since people are rather fond of evidence around here, it is unsurprising that you have received a chilly reception. I suggest that your views would be better aired in a different forum.
Despite the fact that your claims are extraordinary and therefore in need of evidence to raise them to any probability worth consideration, you do not cite evidence for your claims.
Liar.
For example I never asserted that “that the design intent of cervical-cancer prevention programs is to cover up for the evils of male homosexuality.”
Rather, I produced evidence that might incline some people to draw the conclusion that was a factor in the design, without ever suggesting that conclusion myself.
So far from making an assertion without evidence, I have been producing evidence without assertions and letting that evidence speak for itself.
But one thing that makes me more skeptical than usual is that you’re the only person I know who often makes claims like …
Observe that one of my previous replies to you have been silently deleted.
The reason you don’t see Vlad’s arguments is that you don’t hang out in the kind of forums where people such as Vlad are allowed to plainly state their arguments.
I’ve browsed Stormfront a few times (rather extensively). That is certainly a forum where people like Vlad would be allowed to plainly state their arguments, and might even reasonably get some cheering. However, there is a slight problem; I haven’t seen any actual people like Vlad there, and that is understandable, since people like Vlad have some self-respect and probably wouldn’t be caught dead posting at such crackpot shitholes.
(I certainly saw some people like Vlad in the comments on UR, but even there about every third comment is useless angry noise.)
Comments like yours—where people hide behind unspecified claims of inferential difference, mindkilling, and unspoken reasoning—piss me off more than the most hateful comments I’ve seen on the internet. That’s probably a failing, but an understandable one. Manipulating and teasing my curiosity with the intent of having me take you more seriously than you deserve is something I really don’t appreciate. I dislike you.
Have you considered ever just privately. … you know …. asking him about details? He’s always obliged when I did so.
Really? That seems self-defeating; I would happily tell everyone the details if he gave them to me. If that’s how he wishes to communicate, by creating a veil for which you have to volunteer to get past, then why doesn’t he just use rot13 prefixed with a disclaimer—that seems more efficient.
there clearly are things that are counter-productive to discuss on LW.
Like what? Give me something that’s true, “counter-productive”, and relevant to LW. (I recognize that the third criteria—relevant—makes it easy to dismiss a lot of what might seem “counter-productive” because generally those thoughts are more relevant in discussion threads like this one. Also, some things are simply irrelevant no matter what, like how to decorate your house.)
I think the people complaining about these topics are expecting their conclusions to go over as easily as other conclusions more in line with LW consensus. But when you tell someone that their belief is wrong (especially when it’s far from the edge of their beliefs as sorted by the date it was last modified), you should expect more opposition because those beliefs have survived the long onslaught of posteriors thereby making new conflicting and contrary evidence more suspicious. For example, “Kahneman-style rationality” is considered a worthwhile aspiration by LW consensus, and people like Vladimir and Will Newsome apparently disagree with that.
And how do Vladimir and Will Newsome try to counteract that consensus? They post comments with unspoken or obfuscated (WN) reasoning. I think they’re afraid of putting their conclusions out there in a more complete and graspable form because of the significant possibility for being wrong and “losing status” (especially WN). Or perhaps they’re just too lazy to do the hard work necessarily involved and want to fuck with people.
If that’s how he wishes to communicate, by creating a veil for which you have to volunteer to get past, then why doesn’t he just use rot13 prefixed with a disclaimer—that seems more efficient.
Those who contact someone for information will be on average I think more genuinely curious about the answer than a casual reader.
Furthermore optimizing when writing for the public is different than optimizing for private correspondence. More can be said not just because it eliminates all sorts of bothersome social posturing but because the participants can agree to things like Crocker’s Rules.
How do they try to counteract that consensus? They post comments with unspoken or obfuscated (WN) reasoning. I think they’re afraid of putting their conclusions out there in a more complete and graspable form because of the significant possibility for being wrong and “losing status” (especially WN).
Are we discussing Vladimir M or Will Newsome? Why mix up these two different users? Just because one has cited the other as a favourite poster? I happen to think Multiheaded has turned out an interesting poster worth reading and like him a lot, but one would be gravely mistaken to use one of our positions as a proxy for those of the other.
I have respect for both posters, but they not only do they have quite different views but very different approaches. WN is very much playing the trickster deity, the fool, many of his arguments are educational trolls and should be taken as invitations to Socratic Dialogue. Vladimir_M is more the worldly mysterious man at the back of the tavern who tends to be right when you coax advice out of him, but who you won’t manage to get out of retirement since he with a tired heart judges your quest folly.
You significantly edited your comment after I replied to it.
not only do they have quite different views but very different approaches.
Not in the context in which they try to counteract the aforementioned consensus—which is by “[posting] comments with unspoken or obfuscated (WN) reasoning”. Which all fits within the weird, fawning description of their approaches you gave.
You significantly edited your comment after I replied to it.
I apologize that sometimes happens to me. I often post a comment find it unsatisfactory and then immediately edit it. Most of the time conversations proceed at a slow enough pace for this to not be a problem.
Those who contact someone for information will be on average I think more genuinely curious about the answer than a casual reader.
People willing to do a rot13 should also be more curious than average; that shits a pain in the ass. Or just make the process even more painful (Actually I think this is what WN does at times, but it also has the added benefit of plausible deniability).
More can be said not just because it eliminates all sorts of bothersome social posturing but because the participants can agree to things like Crocker’s Rules.
Social posturing is exactly what I see when people are too afraid to put their thoughts on the line (I mentioned this). I don’t think it’s healthy in a community trying to be less wrong.
Are we discussing Vladimir_M or Will Newsome? I have respect for both posters, but they have quite different views.
Both in the context of how they try to counteract the aforementioned consensus.
Like what? Give me something that’s true, “counter-productive”, and relevant to LW.
“I greatly hate your post because it makes me irrationally infer things about your nature despite my knowledge of relevant biases, which makes me hate your post and you even more, which is irrational. Now let’s all discuss this because I don’t want to make the effort to go read up and train myself to become stronger.”
...seems like a decent enough fictive example. It’s true (within the context of the thought experiment), it’s directly relevant to LW (it’s about the user’s rationality), and starting a large discussion about it is very counter-productive since the user in question should just read and practice rationality skills, as that would be much more efficient and productive, and the discussion might slow down other people trying to improve themselves and generate lots of noise.
You’re not using “counter-productive” in the same sense Konkvistador is (at least I think so). I.e., true and useful information for LWers but too outside of LW consensus for being productive.
Also, I gave my comment as feedback for why I downvoted Vladimir and as a way for other people to also show why they downvoted Vladimir (or didn’t like his actions). I did not give it with the intent of starting a discussion. I’m also not a robot in that I want to spend all my time reading and practicing rationality skills. I’m happy to make comments like these even knowing I could be doing something better with my time.
Maybe my comments, however careful and diplomatic I try to make them, still serve as a catalyst for too much bad discourse by other posters.
I’d say that it’s their very tone—diplomatic, refined and signaling broad knowledge and wisdom—that adds to the provocative value. After all, nobody would get very stirred up over a usual internet comment like “Your soooo dumb, all atheists and fagz will go 2 hell 4 destroying teh White Man!!” I do not suggest that you deliberately decrease your writing quality, of course.
I just think most new ideas are wrong and their proponents overconfident.
Then presumably you think that the entire progressive agenda must be wrong, seeing as for the last two thousand years it would have been perceived as evil and insane, seeing as pretty much every taken for granted progressive verity was, before it became an article of faith, dismissed by progressives as a slippery slope argument.
For example, until the mid nineteenth century, everyone knew that female sexuality was so powerful, irrational, destructive, and self destructive that women needed their sex lives supervised for their own good, and everyone else’s good. Everyone knew that democracy was stupid and evil because the masses would eventually try to vote themselves rich, and end up electing Caesar. Everyone knew that if you tried to tax more than five or ten percent, it would hose the economy, and you would wind up with less tax revenue. Everyone knew …
I expect you to agree with me that we went of the rails when we emancipated women and gave the vote to every adult male.
Then presumably you think that the entire progressive agenda must be wrong, seeing as for the last two thousand years it would have been perceived as evil and insane
Oh, really? I was not aware that, say, Galatians 3:28 was a passage censored or denounced by the entirety of medieval clergy. Perhaps you’re, ah, slightly exaggerating?
“The last two thousand years” is the most hilarious bit of the above for me, given my view that the “progressive agenda” as broadly understood (or not understood at all, if you happen to be sam0345) basically appeared with Christianity, as its key part that was quite involved in its growth. See Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress for a conservative-progressive account, or Zizek’s works on Christianity (The Fragile Absolute, The Puppet and The Dwarf, etc) for a communist one.
the “progressive agenda” as broadly understood [...] basically appeared with Christianity
One of the curious things about early Christianity is that it is a religion of converts. For the first few generations, Christians were not the children of Christians, and they were not people who had converted under threat of violence as was common later on. They were adults who had converted from the religions of Judea, Greece, Rome, or Persia. The idea of conversion may have descended from the idea of initiation, found in Mithraism and in Greco-Egyptian mystery cults.
Christianity rather readily incorporated ideas from Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism (of John the Baptist and the Essenes), and Mithraist mythology (the idea of a resurrected savior who was the son of God, which is not found in Jewish messianic beliefs). It opposed itself explicitly to Jewish legalism (the Pharisees, progenitors of Rabbinic Judaism) and nationalism (the Zealots / Sicarii / Iscariots).
If anything new — such as “the progressive agenda” or specifically the universalism and tolerance expressed in Galatians 3:28 — did appear with Christianity, we might ask, how did this new thing emerge from Christianity’s antecedents and influences? We can be pretty sure that despite their mathematical advances, the ancient Greeks did not have a formal basis for morality, for instance ….
You’re right, I shouldn’t have used the word “lying”. That mistake bothers me when other people do it, and I’m sorry for doing it myself.
But other than that...I’m afraid the whole point of my last post was to ask for examples, that we have different standards of what constitutes an example, and that I’m still not happy. For me, “Liberals have strong norms around equality” is not an example; I’m thinking something more along the lines of “You know how liberals are pro-choice? That’s irrational for reasons X and Y and Z.”
Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games. Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric?
Can you give an example of a specific laissez-faire sexual policy that causes expensive negative-sum signaling games, and a practically workable less laissez-faire policy that would solve those negative-sum signaling games?
If it’s OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?
Can you give an example of a sexual activity that has such obvious and drastic public health implications that it should be banned?
If the alleged vast inequality of wealth is a legitimate complaint against economic laissez-faire, why is it not legitimate to complain about the vast inequality of sexual and romantic opportunities (and of the related social status) under sexual laissez-faire?
It doesn’t seem illegitimate to complain about it. What particular policies are you recommending?
Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction?
You’re assuming the conclusion when you say “automatic hostility”. If you gave examples of a traditional norm that solved this problem, I would have be able to form more of an opinion on whether that traditional norm was genuinely harm-reducing.
Explicitly, certainly not often. But in many of their observed views and behaviors, I detect strong authority-based intuitions, even though they will invariably be rationalized as something else. The typical way is to present authority as some kind of neutral and objective expertise, even in areas where this makes no sense.
Can you give an example of a liberal intuition which is authority-based but gets rationalized away to something else?
I do think, however, that you underestimate how often such serious bullet-biters can be inconsistent on other issues.
Can you give an example of a serious bullet-biter being inconsistent on other issues?
I hate to sound like a broken record here, it’s just that anyone supporting any position at all can say “All my opponents really hold their positions for terrible reasons, and all their seemingly-good arguments are really just rationalizations”. In the absence of specific evidence, this is just an assertion, and not an uncommon one.
Even though I have some pretty good guesses what you mean by some of these, I don’t want to find myself straw-manning you by accident just because it’s easy for me to come up with examples I can refute.
I understand if you don’t want to start a brouhaha by posting controversial positions publicly. If you want to private message me an example or two, I’m usually pretty hard to offend, and I promise not to share it without your permission.
OK, if you want to delve into a concrete example with all the inflammatory details, PM me your email address. (I find the PM interface on this site very annoying.) If the discussion produces any interesting results, maybe we can publish it later suitably edited.
I’ll also post a further reply later today, addressing some of your points that I think can be answered satisfactorily without going into too much controversy.
Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games. Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric?
Are there liberals who try to crack down on commercial advertising wars? As far as I know, some liberals may grumble about the social waste of Coca-Cola and Pepsi spending millions to expand their relative share in a zero-sum competition, but they don’t actually try to suppress it.
If it’s OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?
Smoking bans are not absolute, just in closed public places where the smoking affects nonconsenting third parties. Liberals tend to favor legalization of recreational drug use when no third parties are affected. They also would, I think, support criminalizing having unprotected sex if you knowingly have a STD and you don’t tell your partner, which is the closest analogue I can imagine to smoking bans. So I don’t see the inconsistency.
If the alleged vast inequality of wealth is a legitimate complaint against economic laissez-faire, why is it not legitimate to complain about the vast inequality of sexual and romantic opportunities (and of the related social status) under sexual laissez-faire? (The problem is by no means limited to men, of course.)
This is difficult to argue for or against unless you specify what concrete government measures to alleviate sexual and romantic inequality you think liberals should support. If prostitution was legal (and many liberals support that, especially if there are regulations to avoid coercion and exploitation) the “purely sexual” chunk of the problem would be subsumed under economic inequality, which liberals are concerned about.
Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction? Especially since liberals make analogous arguments in favor of paternalistic regulation of practically everything else.
You could make the same argument about many other things than sex. E.g. if people are free to choose where to live, they might make self-destructive choices (like buying a big house and then being crippled by mortgage payments and not being able to take vacations or enjoy life; or deciding to live in a “bad” neighborhood because it is cheap without considering the impact on their children, etc). Or you could argue that people should not be able to choose their jobs, their college degrees, etc.
The fact is, liberals do not support paternalistic regulations of “virtually everything else”. It is quite likely that the pattern of which regulations they support and which they do not is not logical, nor based entirely in harm/fairness considerations, but based instead on a mixture of harm/fairness considerations, autonomy considerations, status quo bias, path dependence effects on which causes are suitable for political action, tribalism (opposing things conservatives like and vice versa), and some sanctity/purity impulses. But I don’t see a reason to single out sexual autonomy as an area and ascribe to liberals a strong sanctity foundation on it, at least not in the arguments you have provided.
Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction?
“Traditional sexual norms” (and the power relations they entail) did not arise through a process that optimized for harm reduction; they arose through a process of cultural evolution. At various points in time, patriarchal societies — by treating women as baby factories and men as killing machines — could outbreed and conquer less-patriarchal ones. That’s when and why those “traditional sexual norms” arose.
It would be remarkable if this process had arrived at even a local minimum for harm, for the same reasons that it would be remarkable if biological evolution had arrived at a maximum for intelligence, happiness, or any other trait that we individually find desirable. (Heck, “traditional sexual norms” are optimized for sending excess boys to go kill other tribes’ men and rape their virgin daughters. We call it “warfare” and it even today involves quite a lot of rape.)
So proposing “traditional sexual norms” as a harm reduction appears to be some combination of naturalistic fallacy and privileging the hypothesis; we have no reason to bring this particular set of norms to mind when we think of strategies for harm reduction, since it was selected for other goals.
But we can also ask, “For what reasons would it come to certain people’s minds to politically advocate ‘traditional sexual norms’ if they don’t actually want the things that ‘traditional sexual norms’ are optimized for, namely lots of conquest and rape?” Since we know about self-serving bias and privilege denial, we may suspect that at least some such advocates do it because it would serve their personal interests at the expense of others. That said, this runs the risk of fundamental attribution error. It is more likely the case that certain people find themselves in situations where they feel personally challenged by sexual laissez-faire, and respond by claiming the morality of traditional sexual norms, than that they do so because they are fundamentally misogynistic people.
When Vladimir_M uses the phrase “traditional sexual norms”, he probably is not referring to those norms which you are referring to in your post. Rather, he is probably speaking of a certain subset of Western norms, likely lifelong heterosexual monogamy. This is extremely unoptimized for “lots of conquest and rape”.
Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction? Especially since liberals make analogous arguments in favor of paternalistic regulation of practically everything else.
I don’t know about automatic (and I am not presenting my own position) but it is certainly legitimate for a person to be hostile to being coerced into a worse situation because someone else believes (even correctly) that other people will benefit from said coercion. Similarly, it is hardly unreasonable for the one person who is being tortured for fifty years to be hostile to his own torture, even if that torture is a net benefit to the population.
If you want to do harm to people (whether paternalistic control or counterfactual torture) you should expect them to fight back if they can. Martyrdom is occasionally noble but it is never obligatory.
I don’t have any significant disagreement here, except that I’m not sure if you believe that people’s ideological views tend to be actually motivated by this kind of self-interest. I certainly don’t think this is the case—to me it seems like a very implausible model of how people think about ideological issues even just from common-sense observation, and it’s also disproved by the systematic evidence against the self-interested voter hypothesis.
Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games.
Not completely sure they’re actually negative sum. They might look like that from a purely materialistic perspective (“lotteries are bad because the expectation value of how much money you’ll have if you play is less than if you don’t play”—it is, but that also applies to going to the cinema), but if you factor in Fun Theory aspects...
Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric? If it’s OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?
I can’t think of a way to achieve that (without large costs/risks/drawbacks).
If this was downvoted for disagreement: Why do you think signalling is negative-sum? How you think a ban on certain sexual practices could feasibly (costs not outweighing benefits) be enforced?
“Lying” is not the right word, since it suggests conscious deception. The term I have used consistently is rationalization.
Arguing against liberal positions on such matters is very difficult because they tend to be backed by a vast arsenal of rationalizations based on purportedly rational considerations of harm or fairness, often coming from prestigious and accredited intellectual institutions where liberals predominate. This is of course in addition to the dense minefield of “boo lights” where an argument, whatever its real merits, will trigger such outrage in a liberal audience that the discourse will be destroyed and the speaker discredited.
So, while I can readily point out concrete examples of the sort you’re asking, unfortunately in many of them, crossing the inferential distances would be an uphill battle, or there would be immediate unpleasantness that I’d rather avoid. Therefore I’ll limit myself to a few more vague and general points:
Laissez-faire in sex leads to all kinds of expensive negative-sum signaling and other games. Why not crack down on those, which would lead to a clear improvement by any utilitarian metric?
If it’s OK for the government to ban smoking and other activities harmful for public health, why not extend such treatment to sexual activities that have obvious and drastic public health implications?
If the alleged vast inequality of wealth is a legitimate complaint against economic laissez-faire, why is it not legitimate to complain about the vast inequality of sexual and romantic opportunities (and of the related social status) under sexual laissez-faire? (The problem is by no means limited to men, of course.)
Why the automatic hostility towards the idea that under sexual laissez-faire, a huge segment of the population, which lacks sufficient prudence and self-control, will make disastrous and self-destructive choices, so that restrictive traditional sexual norms may amount to a net harm reduction? Especially since liberals make analogous arguments in favor of paternalistic regulation of practically everything else.
There are many other examples too, but these are the best ones I can think of without either running into enormous inferential distances or sounding too provocative. It really seems to me that liberal norms change suddenly and dramatically towards laissez-faire once sexual matters come under consideration, and I don’t see how this could be because their regular considerations of harm and fairness just happen to entail laissez-faire in this particular area and nowhere else.
Explicitly, certainly not often. But in many of their observed views and behaviors, I detect strong authority-based intuitions, even though they will invariably be rationalized as something else. The typical way is to present authority as some kind of neutral and objective expertise, even in areas where this makes no sense.
As I said, I’m not an expert on Singer in particular, and I don’t deny the possibility that he might be an outlier in this regard. (Although I do remember reading things from him that seemed to me like a clear case of rationalizing fundamentally non-utilitarian liberal positions.) Also, I agree that someone’s serious utilitarian bullet-biting on some issues provides some evidence that he is overall less dedicated to the values of sacredness etc. I do think, however, that you underestimate how often such serious bullet-biters can be inconsistent on other issues.
I’ve often seen you say this kind of thing in your comments. Do you participate in another forum where you do describe the details? Or alternatively, are you preparing us to eventually be ready to hear the details by giving these vague and general points?
I think there is a good chance that many of your ideas are wrong and you are probably more confident about them than you should be. (Nothing personal, I just think most new ideas are wrong and their proponents overconfident.) I could argue against the vague and general points that you offer, but it feels pointless since presumably you have stronger arguments that you’re not sharing so I have no way of convincing you or bystanders that you are wrong, nor is it likely that you can convince me that you are right (without sharing those details). I imagine other potential critics probably feel the same and also stay silent as a result. In the meantime, readers may see your comments stand uncriticized and form an incorrect idea of what other LWers think of your views (i.e., that we’re less skeptical of them than we actually are).
I thought I’d draw your attention to this issue in case it hadn’t occurred to you already. Perhaps it might spur you to form or speed up a plan to make public your detailed ideas and arguments?
I agree that this is a valid concern, but I don’t think your evaluation of the situation is entirely fair. Namely, I almost never open any controversial and inflammatory topics on this forum. (And I definitely haven’t done so in a very long time, nor do I intend to do it in the future.) I make comments on such topics only when I see that others have already opened them and I believe that what has been written is seriously flawed. (In fact, usually I don’t react even then.)
Therefore, while I certainly accept that my incomplete arguments may cause the problems you describe, you must take into account that the alternative is a situation where other people’s arguments stand unchallenged even though they are, in my opinion, seriously flawed. In such situations, leaving them unanswered would create a problem similar to the one you point out with regards to my comments, i.e. a misleading impression that there is a more agreement with them that there actually is. (This even aside from the problem that, if I am correct, it would mean wrong arguments standing unchallenged.)
In these situations, I take my arguments as far as I believe I can take them without causing so much controversy that the discourse breaks down. This is a sort of situation where there is no good outcome, and I believe that often the least bad option is to make it known that there is some disagreement and voice it as far as it can be done. (In the sense that this outcome, whatever its problems, still makes the best out of the unfavorable trade-offs that unavoidably appear whenever some controversial and inflammatory topic is opened.)
Of course, there are many ways in which I could be wrong. Maybe the arguments I see as flawed are in fact usually correct and I’m just creating confusion and misleading people by parading my mistaken contrary beliefs this way. Maybe these topics are so unimportant that it’s always better to ignore them than to raise any amount of fuss. Maybe my comments, however careful and diplomatic I try to make them, still serve as a catalyst for too much bad discourse by other posters. Relevant to your comment, maybe the confusion and misleading impressions left by my comments end up worse than the alternative outcome in case I stay silent. I recognize all these possibilities, but nevertheless, I think the concrete objection from your comment fails to recognize the relevant concerns I outlined above.
Yes, it’s quite possible that you’ve thought through these issues more thoroughly than I have. But one thing that makes me more skeptical than usual is that you’re the only person I know who often makes claims like “I privately have better arguments but I can’t share them because they would be too inflammatory”. If your arguments and conclusions are actually correct, why haven’t other people discovered them independently and either made them public (due to less concern about causing controversy) or made similar claims (about having private arguments)? Do you have an explanation why you seem to be in such an uncommon epistemic position? (For example do you have certain cognitive strengths that make it easier for you to see certain insights?)
If I were you, I would be rather anxious to see if my arguments stand up under independent scrutiny, and would find a place where they can be discussed without causing excessive harm. I asked earlier whether you discuss your ideas in other forums or have plans to make them public eventually. You didn’t answer explicitly which I guess means the answers to both are “no”? Can you explain why?
Sorry, I composed the above comment in a rush, and forgot to address the other questions you asked because I focused on the main objection.
Regarding other forums, the problem is that they offer only predictable feedback based on the ideological positions of the owners and participants. Depending on where I go, I can get either outrage and bewilderment or admiring applause, and while this can be fun and vanity-pleasing, it offers no useful feedback. So while I do engage in ideological rants and scuffles for fun from time to time on other forums, I’ve never bothered with making my writing there systematic and precise enough to be worth your time.
Regarding other thinkers, I actually don’t think that much of my thinking is original. In fact, my views on most questions are mostly cobbled together from insights I got from various other authors, with only some additional synthesis and expansion on my part. I don’t think I have any unusual epistemic skills except for unusually broad curiosity and the ability to take arguments seriously even if their source and ultimate conclusion are low-status, unpleasant, ideologically hostile to my values and preferences, etc. (Of course, neither of these characteristics is an unalloyed good even from a purely epistemic perspective, and they certainly cause many problems, possibly more than benefits, for me in practical life.)
The problem, however, is that on controversial topics, good insight typically comes from authors whose other beliefs and statements are mistaken and biased in various ways, and whose overall image, demeanor, and affiliation is often problematic. And while people are generally apt to misinterpret agreement on a particular point as a full endorsement of someone, and to attack a particular argument based on the author’s mistakes and biases on other questions, I think LW has some particularly bad problems in this regard. This is because on LW, people tend to assign a supposed general level of “rationality” to individuals and dismiss them if sufficient red flags of supposedly general irrationality are raised.
Whereas in reality, on controversial and ideologically charged questions, there is much less consistency within individuals, and people whose rationality is sterling as judged by the LW public opinion (often not without good reason) typically have at least some horribly naive and biased views, while much good insight comes from people whom LW would judge (also often with good reason) as overall hugely biased and irrational. (The only people who maintain high standards across the board are those who limit themselves to technical questions and venture into controversial non-technical topics only rarely and cautiously, if at all.) So that on many questions, saying “I think X has good insight on topic Y” would be just a way to discredit myself. (When I think it isn’t, I do provide references with the appropriate caveats.)
Considering the source of the arguments, they most likely have not been seriously evaluated by many other careful thinkers, so you must have very high confidence in your ability to distinguish between good and bad arguments from object-level considerations alone. If you can actually, on your own, synthesize a wide-ranging contrarian theory from such diverse and not pre-filtered (and hence low in average quality) sources that is also correct, I would say that you have extremely unusual epistemic skills.
I agree with your assessment of this as a problem and an opportunity. But instead of trying, by oneself, to gather such good insights from otherwise biased and irrational people, it would be a better idea to do it as a community. If it seems too difficult or dangerous to try to change LW’s community norms to be more receptive to your mode of investigation, you should build your own community of like-minded people. (From Konkvistador’s not entirely clear description in the parallel thread, it sounds like you’ve already tried it via a mailing list, but you can probably try harder?)
I guess I should clarify, I organized a mindkiller discussion mailing list with interested thinkers from LessWrong, that was active for some time. Anyone who was invited was also invited to propose new members, we tried to get a mix of people with differing ideological sympathies who liked discussing mind killing issues and where good rationalists. The vast majority of people contacted responded, the end result was about 30 LWers. I don’t feel comfortable disclosing who opted to join. I think I did send you a PM with an invitation to join.
More information here.
The reason I thought such a mailing list might be a good idea was partially because I’ve had very interesting email correspondences with several LWers in the past (this includes Vladimir_M).
To offer another data point in addition to Konkvistador’s, HughRistik made similar claims to me. We had a brief private exchange, the contents of which I promised to keep private. However, I think that I can say, without breach of promise, that the examples he offered in private did not seem to me to be as poisonous to public discourse as he believed.
On the other hand, I could see that the arguments he gave where for controversial positions, and anyone arguing for those positions would have to make some cognitively demanding efforts to word their arguments so as to avoid poisoning the discourse. I can see that someone might want to avoid this effort. But, on the whole, the level of effort that would be required didn’t seem to me to be that high. I think that it would be easy enough (not easy, but easy enough) for Vladimir_M to make these arguments publicly and productively that he should want to do this for the reasons you give.
(I’ll also add that the evidence HughRistik offered was serious and deserved respectful consideration, but it did not move me much from my previous mainstream-liberal views on the issues in question.)
Merely expressing certain thoughts in a clear way is deemed to poison the discourse on this forum, whereas expressing certain other thoughts, no matter how rudely, aggressively, childishly, and offensively, is not deemed to poison the discourse. The only way to get away with expressing these thoughts on this forum is to express them as Vlad does, in code that is largely impenetrable except to those that already share those ideas.
And as evidence for this proposition, observe that no one does express these thoughts plainly on this forum, not even me, while they are routinely expressed on other forums.
Lots of people argue that we are heading not for a technological singularity, but for a left political singularity, that will likely result in the collapse of western civilization. You could not possibly argue that on this forum.
Indeed it is arguably inadvisable to argue that even on a website located on a server within the USA or Europe, though Mencius Moldbug did.
This post doesn’t deserve the down votes it got. Up voted.
Urban Future is a rather interesting blog, just read his Dark Enlightenment series and found it a good overview and synthesis of recent reactionary thought. I also liked some of his technology and transhumanist posts.
It is probably true that we couldn’t discuss this regardless of how much evidence existed for it. Ever since I’ve started my investigation of how and why values change, the process we’ve decided to label “moral progress” in the last 250 years, I’ve been concerned about social phenomena like the one described in the post seriously harming mankind. To quote my comment on the blog post:
I’d rather you refer to Three Worlds Collide than discuss such morbid fantasies! (I’ve read Land and he makes H.L. Mencken look kind and cheerful by comparison.)
One (overly narrow) ideology-related interpretation possible is that of a Space-Liberal humanity having Space Liberalism forcefully imposed on the Babyeaters but resisting the imposition of Space Communism upon itself, despite the relative positions being identical in both cases. In which case… was the Normal Ending really so awful? :)
Space Communism is infinite sex with everything? People are right space makes everything better.
No, but seriously. Consider it. I mean, the Superhappies are a highly egalitarian, collectivist, expansionist, technology-focused, peace- and compromise-loving culture with universalist ideals that they want to spread everywhere.
Aside from the different biology, that sounds like the Communist sci-fi utopias I’ve read of, like Banks’ Culture and the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe. All three are a proper subset of “Near-Maximum Leftism” in my opinion. And I would hardly be terrified if offered to live in either one—or even a downgraded version of one, with a little Space Bureaucracy. Frankly, I wouldn’t even mind a Space Brezhnev, as long as he behaved. I can name a dozen much worse (non-socialist) rulers than the real Brezhnev!
(Can you imagine tentacle sex being plagued by bureaucracy? “Sorry, comrade, you’ll need a stamp before I can give you an orgasm, and the stamp window doesn’t work today.”)
I have privately discussed the arguments and found them convincing enough to move my position over the past year much more in his direction.
The best course of action is perhaps a correspondence with assured privacy? The problem is that one to one correspondences are time consuming and have their own weaknesses as a means to approaching truth seeking. I tried to get more open discussion of such arguments on a mailing list but as your probably know most didn’t participate or write enough material to make reasoning explicit in ways they do in regular correspondence.
Also I felt this important enough to say to break my one month streak of staying off LW, I will now (hopefully) resume it.
Thank you for this data point, but it doesn’t move me as much as you may have expected. I think many flawed arguments are flawed in subtle enough ways that it takes “many eyes” to detect the flaws (or can even survive such scrutiny for many years, see some of the flawed security proofs in cryptography for important commonly used algorithms and protocols as evidence). I personally would not update very much even if I saw the arguments for myself and found them convincing, unless I knew that many others with a diversity of expertise and cognitive styles have reviewed and had a chance to discuss the arguments and I’ve looked over those discussions as well.
Typically the first thing I do after finding a new idea is to look for other people’s discussions of it. I’m concerned that many are like me in this regard, but when they come to Vladimir_M’s “vague and general” arguments, they see them highly upvoted without much criticism, and wrongly conclude that many people have reviewed these “vague and general” arguments and found nothing wrong with them when it’s more of a problem with potential critics lacking sufficient incentive to attack them. Even worse, if Vladimir_M’s conclusions become commonly accepted (or appear to be commonly accepted) on LW due to such dynamics, it sets up a potentially bad precedent. Others may be tempted (not necessarily consciously) to overestimate how inflammatory some of their arguments are in order to gain an edge in getting their ideas accepted.
(As I mentioned, Vladimir_M may well have already thought through these issues more thoroughly than I have, but I wanted to bring up some possible downsides that he may have overlooked.)
Oh I didn’t expect it to, its not like I’m a particularly trustworthy authority or anything and your many eyes argument is a good one, I just wanted to share an anecdote.
I was actually hoping readers would take more notice of the other anecdote, the one about the attempt to create an alternative for rationalists to discuss and update on such topics (a mailing list) that was tried and failed. To describe the failure in more detail I think inactivity despite some interesting discussion in the first month or so captures it best.
I was confused by your description of the mailing list so I put it aside and then forgot to ask you to clarify it. Can you tell us a bit more? How many people were on the list? Was it open or by invitation only? Was it an existing mailing list or created just for this purpose? How did you recruit members? Why do you think it failed to be active after the first month? Why did you say “as you probably know”?
I have been on several highly active mailing lists, both open and closed, so my guess is that you failed to recruit enough members. (Another possibility is that people didn’t find the topic interesting but that seems less likely.) Why not try to recruit more members?
Before I saw this reply I already talked about it more here since I saw it needed to be clarified. Now to answer all your questions.
I’ll do better I will share the introductory description sent via PM. To give context, a little before this there was an extensive discussion on the pros and cons of various approaches to discovering truth and gaining sanity on mind-killing issues. I think it was in one of the many sub-threads to lukeprogs rational romance article.
Also to again emphasise a key point I fear might be misunderstood I’ll quote from the temporary guidelines:
Now to answer your specific questions.
About 20 to 30.
Invitation only. With people having to agree to new members being added. No proposals where shot down, however people didn’t suggest many names.
Newly created.
PMs to people on LessWrong with contact info.
I’m not sure, my best guess was not enough people. Perhaps people where also reluctant to open new topics since privacy protection was pretty much paper thin. My cynical side said it was because the list had too many contrarians who weren’t motivated to write because they lacked a non-contrarian audience, and going metacontrarian one more step would require too muhc legwork. :)
I thought you where a member of the list. I’ve now checked, you where invited but you never replied.
Most likely explanation.
It has been inactive for some time. Still some discussion did take place, so potentially harmful material may be in the archives, I wouldn’t be ok sending new invitations unless the old members agreed.
I must have been busy with something at the time and then later forgot about the invitation. Can you PM me the details of how to join so I can take a look at the archives?
Lack of a big audience would definitely also contribute to inactivity, especially if there’s not even a feeling that one’s contributions might eventually be synthesized into something that will be seen or used by many others. Maybe you can try a different format? Make the forum public but encourage people to use fresh pseudonyms for privacy, and be ready to ban people who are disruptive?
Yes you where on the original list people agreed to so there is I think no problem with you taking a look at the archives. I’ll send you a PM.
Perhaps this would be a better approach. I don’t think I have the time for this right now and not for at least a month or two, so if anyone else is feeling motivated…
It’s possible that the mailing list would be in better shape if you posted more. I used to be in amateur press associations—what people did before they had the internet—and I’m pretty sure that the successful ones had substantial contributions by the people running them.
That sounds like good advice. But I honestly wasn’t sure people where interested in my contributions at all, there where lots of excellent rationalist there, that’s a pretty intimidating audience!
That’s why someone has to go first. I nominate you.
I think you’re proposing an alternative because you’re a C.I.A. agent trying to infiltrate LW and divide the community for your government’s nefarious purposes—which will remain unspoken lest they become memetic and drive the world towards the edge of insanity.
/devil’s advocate
And, seriously, when was the last time anyone was punished on LW for posting their contrarian thought? The gestalt I’m getting is that LWers so desperately want to be accepting of contrarians that they’ll take the most insane and unsupported propositions more seriously than they deserve (e.g. Will Newsome).
Contrarian =/= Mindkilling =/= Hurts the community if discussed =/= Something LW can’t productively discuss
Though there is obviously some overlap. Consider the exercises in frustration and mutual incomprehension that result when we talk about PUA/gender/sexuality. It is I would argue not that mindkilling a subject, there is little wild contrarianism, yet it is a debate I’d rather not see relaunched because of the fail that has consistently accompanied it on LW/OB for years.
Also Will Newsome is a bit of a straw man no? I would argue he is seen by most posters as firmly in the people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall territory.
What is contrarian (for this community and re anything outside of AI) is what is typically considered mindkilling and what is mindkilling is what is typically thought of as hurting the community. When I use ‘contrarian’ in this context, I’m just putting a word to what you’re referring to in your previous comment.
What I generally see is people assuming conclusions based on flimsy science (e.g., a lot of the science brought in to support preexisting conclusions within the PUA community), and then assuming the push-back is entirely or mostly because of the offense caused (no doubt that offense is motivating for entering discussion, though).
Yes and no. He is partly in the 2+2=5 territory in the context of the community as a whole, but then there are people who take him seriously (just saying he supports X gets him karma). In this thread, Vladimir_M is another example.
eta: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/9kf/ive_had_it_with_those_dark_rumours_about_our/
Plainly expressed contrarian posts are downvoted, or silently and furtively deleted. The likelihood of silent and furtive deletion discourages people from posting.
In case you weren’t aware, your “deleted” posts are available for anyone who’d care to browse them on your user page. You can check — go back a page or two and click on the permalinks, you’ll see those posts are “deleted” from the perspective of the threads they were part of. Maybe this is a bug in the LW code, but personally I think it’s kinda useful, because folks can verify the nature of your contributions and thereby the veracity of your claims here.
Folks can draw their own conclusions of your work — but I was particularly impressed by your claims that stepfathers typically rape boys, while “girls without a natural father are apt to become whores”; and that “allowing blacks, mestizos, women, white males who have not been raised by their biological fathers, and homosexuals into the power structure has produced a general collapse of trust and trustworthiness in the ruling elite [...] because members of these groups are commonly less trustworthy”; as well as your assertion that the design intent of cervical-cancer prevention programs is to cover up for the evils of male homosexuality.
Despite the fact that your claims are extraordinary and therefore in need of evidence to raise them to any probability worth consideration, you do not cite evidence for your claims. Instead you assert that your beliefs are themselves “evidence” and “fact” — that your map is the territory — and that people who cite evidence that disagrees with your claims are “pious” “PC” censors.
It seems that you are operating what the Wikipedia folks call a “single-purpose account”. You do not participate in discussions on AI, x-rationality, cognitive science, game theory, timeless ethics, self-improvement, or any of the other subjects commonly discussed here; except insofar as you can turn these topics to your own unusual breed of far-right politics. This politics appears to be almost exclusively concerned with the moral and cultural significance of other people’s sexual conduct and racial heritage — and with demeaning anyone who disagrees with you.
Since Less Wrong is not primarily about politics of any stripe, and since people are rather fond of evidence around here, it is unsurprising that you have received a chilly reception. I suggest that your views would be better aired in a different forum.
Liar.
For example I never asserted that “that the design intent of cervical-cancer prevention programs is to cover up for the evils of male homosexuality.”
Rather, I produced evidence that might incline some people to draw the conclusion that was a factor in the design, without ever suggesting that conclusion myself.
So far from making an assertion without evidence, I have been producing evidence without assertions and letting that evidence speak for itself.
Observe that one of my previous replies to you have been silently deleted.
The reason you don’t see Vlad’s arguments is that you don’t hang out in the kind of forums where people such as Vlad are allowed to plainly state their arguments.
I’ve browsed Stormfront a few times (rather extensively). That is certainly a forum where people like Vlad would be allowed to plainly state their arguments, and might even reasonably get some cheering. However, there is a slight problem; I haven’t seen any actual people like Vlad there, and that is understandable, since people like Vlad have some self-respect and probably wouldn’t be caught dead posting at such crackpot shitholes.
(I certainly saw some people like Vlad in the comments on UR, but even there about every third comment is useless angry noise.)
Someone ask Vlad, “such as?”
He makes no real reply.
I reply “Such as, for example …”
Observe what happens.
Fixed in accordance with reality.
(Retract: I really ought to know better...)
Comments like yours—where people hide behind unspecified claims of inferential difference, mindkilling, and unspoken reasoning—piss me off more than the most hateful comments I’ve seen on the internet. That’s probably a failing, but an understandable one. Manipulating and teasing my curiosity with the intent of having me take you more seriously than you deserve is something I really don’t appreciate. I dislike you.
Have you considered ever just privately. … you know …. asking him about details? He’s always obliged when I did so.
I also dislike your dislike because there clearly are things that are counter-productive to discuss on LW.
Vlad didn’t reply to my request. I don’t suppose you would mind summarizing one or two of his more salient arguments?
Really? That seems self-defeating; I would happily tell everyone the details if he gave them to me. If that’s how he wishes to communicate, by creating a veil for which you have to volunteer to get past, then why doesn’t he just use rot13 prefixed with a disclaimer—that seems more efficient.
Like what? Give me something that’s true, “counter-productive”, and relevant to LW. (I recognize that the third criteria—relevant—makes it easy to dismiss a lot of what might seem “counter-productive” because generally those thoughts are more relevant in discussion threads like this one. Also, some things are simply irrelevant no matter what, like how to decorate your house.)
I think the people complaining about these topics are expecting their conclusions to go over as easily as other conclusions more in line with LW consensus. But when you tell someone that their belief is wrong (especially when it’s far from the edge of their beliefs as sorted by the date it was last modified), you should expect more opposition because those beliefs have survived the long onslaught of posteriors thereby making new conflicting and contrary evidence more suspicious. For example, “Kahneman-style rationality” is considered a worthwhile aspiration by LW consensus, and people like Vladimir and Will Newsome apparently disagree with that.
And how do Vladimir and Will Newsome try to counteract that consensus? They post comments with unspoken or obfuscated (WN) reasoning. I think they’re afraid of putting their conclusions out there in a more complete and graspable form because of the significant possibility for being wrong and “losing status” (especially WN). Or perhaps they’re just too lazy to do the hard work necessarily involved and want to fuck with people.
Those who contact someone for information will be on average I think more genuinely curious about the answer than a casual reader.
Furthermore optimizing when writing for the public is different than optimizing for private correspondence. More can be said not just because it eliminates all sorts of bothersome social posturing but because the participants can agree to things like Crocker’s Rules.
Are we discussing Vladimir M or Will Newsome? Why mix up these two different users? Just because one has cited the other as a favourite poster? I happen to think Multiheaded has turned out an interesting poster worth reading and like him a lot, but one would be gravely mistaken to use one of our positions as a proxy for those of the other.
I have respect for both posters, but they not only do they have quite different views but very different approaches. WN is very much playing the trickster deity, the fool, many of his arguments are educational trolls and should be taken as invitations to Socratic Dialogue. Vladimir_M is more the worldly mysterious man at the back of the tavern who tends to be right when you coax advice out of him, but who you won’t manage to get out of retirement since he with a tired heart judges your quest folly.
You significantly edited your comment after I replied to it.
Not in the context in which they try to counteract the aforementioned consensus—which is by “[posting] comments with unspoken or obfuscated (WN) reasoning”. Which all fits within the weird, fawning description of their approaches you gave.
I apologize that sometimes happens to me. I often post a comment find it unsatisfactory and then immediately edit it. Most of the time conversations proceed at a slow enough pace for this to not be a problem.
I don’t care, I just needed to point that out as a reason for creating a second reply. I actually do the same thing.
People willing to do a rot13 should also be more curious than average; that shits a pain in the ass. Or just make the process even more painful (Actually I think this is what WN does at times, but it also has the added benefit of plausible deniability).
Social posturing is exactly what I see when people are too afraid to put their thoughts on the line (I mentioned this). I don’t think it’s healthy in a community trying to be less wrong.
Both in the context of how they try to counteract the aforementioned consensus.
“I greatly hate your post because it makes me irrationally infer things about your nature despite my knowledge of relevant biases, which makes me hate your post and you even more, which is irrational. Now let’s all discuss this because I don’t want to make the effort to go read up and train myself to become stronger.”
...seems like a decent enough fictive example. It’s true (within the context of the thought experiment), it’s directly relevant to LW (it’s about the user’s rationality), and starting a large discussion about it is very counter-productive since the user in question should just read and practice rationality skills, as that would be much more efficient and productive, and the discussion might slow down other people trying to improve themselves and generate lots of noise.
You’re not using “counter-productive” in the same sense Konkvistador is (at least I think so). I.e., true and useful information for LWers but too outside of LW consensus for being productive.
Also, I gave my comment as feedback for why I downvoted Vladimir and as a way for other people to also show why they downvoted Vladimir (or didn’t like his actions). I did not give it with the intent of starting a discussion. I’m also not a robot in that I want to spend all my time reading and practicing rationality skills. I’m happy to make comments like these even knowing I could be doing something better with my time.
(fictive example? don’t be a coward.)
I’d say that it’s their very tone—diplomatic, refined and signaling broad knowledge and wisdom—that adds to the provocative value. After all, nobody would get very stirred up over a usual internet comment like “Your soooo dumb, all atheists and fagz will go 2 hell 4 destroying teh White Man!!” I do not suggest that you deliberately decrease your writing quality, of course.
Then presumably you think that the entire progressive agenda must be wrong, seeing as for the last two thousand years it would have been perceived as evil and insane, seeing as pretty much every taken for granted progressive verity was, before it became an article of faith, dismissed by progressives as a slippery slope argument.
For example, until the mid nineteenth century, everyone knew that female sexuality was so powerful, irrational, destructive, and self destructive that women needed their sex lives supervised for their own good, and everyone else’s good. Everyone knew that democracy was stupid and evil because the masses would eventually try to vote themselves rich, and end up electing Caesar. Everyone knew that if you tried to tax more than five or ten percent, it would hose the economy, and you would wind up with less tax revenue. Everyone knew …
I expect you to agree with me that we went of the rails when we emancipated women and gave the vote to every adult male.
Oh, really? I was not aware that, say, Galatians 3:28 was a passage censored or denounced by the entirety of medieval clergy. Perhaps you’re, ah, slightly exaggerating?
“The last two thousand years” is the most hilarious bit of the above for me, given my view that the “progressive agenda” as broadly understood (or not understood at all, if you happen to be sam0345) basically appeared with Christianity, as its key part that was quite involved in its growth. See Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress for a conservative-progressive account, or Zizek’s works on Christianity (The Fragile Absolute, The Puppet and The Dwarf, etc) for a communist one.
One of the curious things about early Christianity is that it is a religion of converts. For the first few generations, Christians were not the children of Christians, and they were not people who had converted under threat of violence as was common later on. They were adults who had converted from the religions of Judea, Greece, Rome, or Persia. The idea of conversion may have descended from the idea of initiation, found in Mithraism and in Greco-Egyptian mystery cults.
Christianity rather readily incorporated ideas from Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism (of John the Baptist and the Essenes), and Mithraist mythology (the idea of a resurrected savior who was the son of God, which is not found in Jewish messianic beliefs). It opposed itself explicitly to Jewish legalism (the Pharisees, progenitors of Rabbinic Judaism) and nationalism (the Zealots / Sicarii / Iscariots).
If anything new — such as “the progressive agenda” or specifically the universalism and tolerance expressed in Galatians 3:28 — did appear with Christianity, we might ask, how did this new thing emerge from Christianity’s antecedents and influences? We can be pretty sure that despite their mathematical advances, the ancient Greeks did not have a formal basis for morality, for instance ….
Well I do.
You’re right, I shouldn’t have used the word “lying”. That mistake bothers me when other people do it, and I’m sorry for doing it myself.
But other than that...I’m afraid the whole point of my last post was to ask for examples, that we have different standards of what constitutes an example, and that I’m still not happy. For me, “Liberals have strong norms around equality” is not an example; I’m thinking something more along the lines of “You know how liberals are pro-choice? That’s irrational for reasons X and Y and Z.”
Can you give an example of a specific laissez-faire sexual policy that causes expensive negative-sum signaling games, and a practically workable less laissez-faire policy that would solve those negative-sum signaling games?
Can you give an example of a sexual activity that has such obvious and drastic public health implications that it should be banned?
It doesn’t seem illegitimate to complain about it. What particular policies are you recommending?
You’re assuming the conclusion when you say “automatic hostility”. If you gave examples of a traditional norm that solved this problem, I would have be able to form more of an opinion on whether that traditional norm was genuinely harm-reducing.
Can you give an example of a liberal intuition which is authority-based but gets rationalized away to something else?
Can you give an example of a serious bullet-biter being inconsistent on other issues?
I hate to sound like a broken record here, it’s just that anyone supporting any position at all can say “All my opponents really hold their positions for terrible reasons, and all their seemingly-good arguments are really just rationalizations”. In the absence of specific evidence, this is just an assertion, and not an uncommon one.
Even though I have some pretty good guesses what you mean by some of these, I don’t want to find myself straw-manning you by accident just because it’s easy for me to come up with examples I can refute.
I understand if you don’t want to start a brouhaha by posting controversial positions publicly. If you want to private message me an example or two, I’m usually pretty hard to offend, and I promise not to share it without your permission.
OK, if you want to delve into a concrete example with all the inflammatory details, PM me your email address. (I find the PM interface on this site very annoying.) If the discussion produces any interesting results, maybe we can publish it later suitably edited.
I’ll also post a further reply later today, addressing some of your points that I think can be answered satisfactorily without going into too much controversy.
Are there liberals who try to crack down on commercial advertising wars? As far as I know, some liberals may grumble about the social waste of Coca-Cola and Pepsi spending millions to expand their relative share in a zero-sum competition, but they don’t actually try to suppress it.
Smoking bans are not absolute, just in closed public places where the smoking affects nonconsenting third parties. Liberals tend to favor legalization of recreational drug use when no third parties are affected. They also would, I think, support criminalizing having unprotected sex if you knowingly have a STD and you don’t tell your partner, which is the closest analogue I can imagine to smoking bans. So I don’t see the inconsistency.
This is difficult to argue for or against unless you specify what concrete government measures to alleviate sexual and romantic inequality you think liberals should support. If prostitution was legal (and many liberals support that, especially if there are regulations to avoid coercion and exploitation) the “purely sexual” chunk of the problem would be subsumed under economic inequality, which liberals are concerned about.
You could make the same argument about many other things than sex. E.g. if people are free to choose where to live, they might make self-destructive choices (like buying a big house and then being crippled by mortgage payments and not being able to take vacations or enjoy life; or deciding to live in a “bad” neighborhood because it is cheap without considering the impact on their children, etc). Or you could argue that people should not be able to choose their jobs, their college degrees, etc.
The fact is, liberals do not support paternalistic regulations of “virtually everything else”. It is quite likely that the pattern of which regulations they support and which they do not is not logical, nor based entirely in harm/fairness considerations, but based instead on a mixture of harm/fairness considerations, autonomy considerations, status quo bias, path dependence effects on which causes are suitable for political action, tribalism (opposing things conservatives like and vice versa), and some sanctity/purity impulses. But I don’t see a reason to single out sexual autonomy as an area and ascribe to liberals a strong sanctity foundation on it, at least not in the arguments you have provided.
“Traditional sexual norms” (and the power relations they entail) did not arise through a process that optimized for harm reduction; they arose through a process of cultural evolution. At various points in time, patriarchal societies — by treating women as baby factories and men as killing machines — could outbreed and conquer less-patriarchal ones. That’s when and why those “traditional sexual norms” arose.
It would be remarkable if this process had arrived at even a local minimum for harm, for the same reasons that it would be remarkable if biological evolution had arrived at a maximum for intelligence, happiness, or any other trait that we individually find desirable. (Heck, “traditional sexual norms” are optimized for sending excess boys to go kill other tribes’ men and rape their virgin daughters. We call it “warfare” and it even today involves quite a lot of rape.)
So proposing “traditional sexual norms” as a harm reduction appears to be some combination of naturalistic fallacy and privileging the hypothesis; we have no reason to bring this particular set of norms to mind when we think of strategies for harm reduction, since it was selected for other goals.
But we can also ask, “For what reasons would it come to certain people’s minds to politically advocate ‘traditional sexual norms’ if they don’t actually want the things that ‘traditional sexual norms’ are optimized for, namely lots of conquest and rape?” Since we know about self-serving bias and privilege denial, we may suspect that at least some such advocates do it because it would serve their personal interests at the expense of others. That said, this runs the risk of fundamental attribution error. It is more likely the case that certain people find themselves in situations where they feel personally challenged by sexual laissez-faire, and respond by claiming the morality of traditional sexual norms, than that they do so because they are fundamentally misogynistic people.
When Vladimir_M uses the phrase “traditional sexual norms”, he probably is not referring to those norms which you are referring to in your post. Rather, he is probably speaking of a certain subset of Western norms, likely lifelong heterosexual monogamy. This is extremely unoptimized for “lots of conquest and rape”.
I don’t know about automatic (and I am not presenting my own position) but it is certainly legitimate for a person to be hostile to being coerced into a worse situation because someone else believes (even correctly) that other people will benefit from said coercion. Similarly, it is hardly unreasonable for the one person who is being tortured for fifty years to be hostile to his own torture, even if that torture is a net benefit to the population.
If you want to do harm to people (whether paternalistic control or counterfactual torture) you should expect them to fight back if they can. Martyrdom is occasionally noble but it is never obligatory.
I don’t have any significant disagreement here, except that I’m not sure if you believe that people’s ideological views tend to be actually motivated by this kind of self-interest. I certainly don’t think this is the case—to me it seems like a very implausible model of how people think about ideological issues even just from common-sense observation, and it’s also disproved by the systematic evidence against the self-interested voter hypothesis.
Not completely sure they’re actually negative sum. They might look like that from a purely materialistic perspective (“lotteries are bad because the expectation value of how much money you’ll have if you play is less than if you don’t play”—it is, but that also applies to going to the cinema), but if you factor in Fun Theory aspects...
I can’t think of a way to achieve that (without large costs/risks/drawbacks).
If this was downvoted for disagreement: Why do you think signalling is negative-sum? How you think a ban on certain sexual practices could feasibly (costs not outweighing benefits) be enforced?