So exactly what was the point of this article? Boo conservative values, yay liberal values? I am sure we need more like this on LessConservative!
Sure, a conservative mindkilled person may fail to notice that women in conservative societies can be opressed and battered by their husbands, in the name of sacred family. Just like a liberal mindkilled person may fail to notice that some women don’t mind their daughters raped by their sexy alpha boyfriends, in the name of sacred sexual freedom. What a coincidence—biased people not noticing their biases!
However, liberal biases are OK, because liberal people say so; both here and in academy. On the other hand we should remove all topics that could offend… ahem… people other than conservatives. For example, discussions about “pick-up arts”—their strawman versions could make women feel unwelcome. A “pick-up artist” would probably not make the same mistake as author of this article; but for our rationality, it is better if they take their evidence elsewhere. If my opinions are right, I want to believe my opinions are right; and if my opinions are wrong, I want to believe your opinions are harmful.
Seriously—we all have many different values and opinions; but saying that some of some kinds of biases are not so harmful, and then writing and upvoting an article that more or less celebrates this attitude… that’s not the LessWrong I imagine. Liberal biases are harmful for the same reasons like any other biases; they prevent us from seeing the territory correctly.
In other words—trying to use a language a liberal might understand better—articles like this make me feel unwelcome.
In other words—trying to use a language a liberal might understand better—articles like this make me feel unwelcome.
I’m also starting to feel unwelcome here.
I’ve been seeing more and more sings of an intellectual chilling in the past few months and a shrinking of acceptable ingroup political variation.
Things like users commenting on there being concerned about there being “insufficient liberal spin”. Now obviously the no mind-killer norm kept the concern unpopular and a well worded post calling it out was written… but still what concerns me is that I don’t recall things like this happening at all before.
Remember LessWrong is 3% conservative and ~30% socialist and another ~30% “Liberal”! People say “Wow” when they see someone being socially conservative. Do we really need majority ideological biases and group feelings reinforced and further privileged?
Things like users commenting on there being concerned about there being “insufficient liberal spin”.
Multiheaded is a delightfully unusual case with delightfully unusual posting goals, who I assumed was rather unlike any other poster here. Was your usage of the plural ‘users’ solely for aesthetic concerns, or are there other users who have complained about “insufficient liberal bias”?
To use terminology I do not wager Multiheaded would object to, he takes the threat of certain right-wing political philosophies very seriously. Perhaps goal is the not the best term, however. See here for a glimpse of what I mean.
In a nontrivial number of his posts, one could say that a specter is haunting Multiheaded, the specter of fascism. As such, a good bit of his output consists of left-wing ghost-busting.
Indeed, your terminology is OK with me. (Just one qualification: “certain modern right-wing political philosophies”) However, you forgot to mention my roguish charm, my irresistable allure and my gorgeous looks.
No way, I’m not! I mean, yes, I’m certainly mind-killed (and flattered when my mind-killedness is described in dramatic language like above, thanks!) - but at least… how to put it.. I’m mind-killed about the mind!
That is, I fret and read and (sometimes) post about social psychology and cultural processes and human ethics and stuff like that—which is, in the end, self-referential and self-fulfilling/negating to a degree. If e.g. everyone in known history thought that economic equality was massively evil and alien and harmful and undesirable—why, societies would simply increase wealth divergence without ever worrying whether it’s practical or moral to—like, in real life, we feel and act the same about starvation, even when we let its victims die in other ways. If in 1936 or so 90% of Europeans got the idea that Hitler had unspeakably evil plans, he’d never be able to carry out those plans. {1}
Therefore, if someone, like me, fervently believes that [religion name]/[ideology name] is (in its worldview and revealed preferences, not its description of reality) an enormous priority to pursue OR avoid, more important than even lives or happiness—and that humanity is blind to that urgent matter, then they’re slightly better off than someone who fervently believes that e.g. Mars has a breathable atmosphere. The more people share the first “delusion”, the less of a “delusion” it is internally and the more implementable it is in practice. Yes, of course some ev-psych facts—like selfishness, love of authority or envy—limit the phase space of working societies, but those realities can be stretched or hacked around, given how plastic our minds potentially are. The second one remains a delusion no matter how large and committed a group tries to live up to it; a lone atheist and a million good Catholics following a papal edict would choke with equal speed on Mars. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
Barron might hate the universe and feel that it hates him in return; I only hate some particular, and passing, arrangements in the universe, and resent the fact that most people insist on propping up those arrangements (by e.g. thinking that material welfare is the only real measure of political systems).
{1} Yes, yes, I’m aware of the Functionalist argument and find it rather credible; that bit was just rhetorical.
Yes, of course some ev-psych facts—like selfishness, love of authority or envy—limit the phase space of working societies, but those realities can be stretched or hacked around, given how plastic our minds potentially are.
So how did the Soviet Union’s attempt to create the “New Soviet Man” turn out?
There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin’s ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment, and most notably an Asian-style cult of the god-king. In fact, by the end of his life Stalin had uprooted or completely subverted virtually every institution that the 1920s’ Old Bolshevik leaders introduced (with the sole exception of the repression apparatus, which he expanded while purging most personnel) - from the “New Economic Policy” and legal free abortion (!) to the avant-garde artists’ organizations and the Comintern. I’m not necessarily saying that those institutions were good (although the NEP objectively worked well enough); I’m saying that, since around 1930 and until the end, Soviet leadership only paid lip service to genuine radical indoctrination/reeducation, preferring the old staples of nationalism, feudal loyalty and leader-worship.
Later, in the Brezhnev era, an official cargo cult of sorts was formed around Marxist phraseology and such, but no-one gave a shit whether, say, the “Marxism-Leninism” classes at universities were even functioning as propaganda. In fact, it was rather counter-productive as propaganda, as people began to mock even the several objective, verified achievements that it trumpeted—like the space program or the considerable infrastructure investment. The system became too stagnant even to attempt self-replication through indoctrination.
So there. The USSR was mostly an ineffective (if somewhat orderly) conservative regime that would have shat its collective pants if a New Soviet Man suddenly appeared in flesh. And hey, a handful did appear, more or less by accident; e.g. Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Vasily Grossman (Socialist Realist writers!), Sakharov, the Strugatsky brothers, numerous other good people who advocated left-wing ideas and got suppressed by an ostensibly socialist system. Oh, well, for the wider Warsaw Pact, I guess Zizek also counts as a New Soviet Man :)
P.S.: lengthy quote incoming! Orwell’s praise of left-wing indoctrination in Homage to Catalonia.
In practice the democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline
is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army discipline is
theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of
a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that
replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the
bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been
tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were
only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you
did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of
comradeship.
Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say
instantly that this would never ‘work’, but as a matter of fact it does ‘work’
in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly
improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up
to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was
acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had
all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in
getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job.
‘Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness—on an
understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but
it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.
The journalists who sneered at the militia-system seldom remembered that the
militias had to hold the line while the Popular Army was training in the rear.
And it is a tribute to the strength of ‘revolutionary’ discipline that the
militias stayed in the field-at all. For until about June 1937 there was nothing
to keep them there, except class loyalty. Individual deserters could be shot--
were shot, occasionally—but if a thousand men had decided to walk out of the
line together there was no force to stop them. A conscript army in the same
circumstances—with its battle-police removed—would have melted away. Yet the
militias held the line, though God knows they won very few victories, and even
individual desertions were not common.
Hadn’t NEP originally been conceived as a temporary policy for the interim when the society was going to be slowly transformed into communism, after radical immediate implementation of communist economics attempted in the first years after the revolution visibly failed?
There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin’s ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment,
Well, the many far left movements had a militarist element (directed against the bourgeois) to them from the very beginning. Also the nationalism didn’t start going until WWII, and only after it became clear that appealing to people to fight for communist ideals wasn’t working.
Well, the many far left movements had a militarist element (directed against the bourgeois) to them from the very beginning.
They sure had a culture of violence, as in street fighting and insurgency etc, but under Stalin it turned into proper militarism, as in: approval of army hierarchy and officer-caste ethics as not merely necessary but laudable; formal expressions of loyalty turning organization-based rather than class-based; displaying the expected World Revolution (in films, lectures, etc) as being in essense a conventional war, with near-identical armies facing off and some aid from working-class sympathizers—rather then the preceding image of a massive popular rebellion… A somewhat-revisionist Russian historian, Mark Solonin, describes how the massive military build-up was accompanied by this gradual shift in propaganda from “revolutionary violence” to “Red militarism”.
Also the nationalism didn’t start going until WWII
Believe me, it did! It was crypto-nationalism in the 30s, but back then Stalinist propaganda already began to lionize the historical achievements and the “properly” anti-feudal, anti-bourgeois sentiment of the Russian Volk. It appropriated 19th century authors like Pushkin who were previously fashionable to reject as retrograde. There’s a sharp contrast between the 1920s’ propaganda line on Imperial Russia (backward, miserable, completely lost but for the Communist guidance), the lambasting of “Russian chauvinism” as a right-wing deviation and the insistence that all Soviet nationalities should harmoniously melt into a purely political whole—and the 1930s’ quiet suppression of all that, with Old Russia called less a benighted rural wilderness and more a supremely talented nation, naturally predisposed towards communism, that only needed to overthrow Tsarism to assume its rightful place of world leadership. I’ve read a few Russian studies about the relationship between Stalinism, Soviet culture and propaganda; they offer a far more nuanced view than the one you cite.
Just a few minor political digs in it, otherwise it is an appropriate critique of H’s work. I was more concerned with the overall LW climate as I tried to show with my cited example.
How does the article celebrate the attitude that some biases are less harmful? There is a recognisable liberal (American meaning) undertone in the article but it can’t see any definite attitude towards biases.
I don’t think this comment has anything to do with the actual article.
The central question of the article is about how Haidt interprets the five foundations. I point out that his interpretation is somewhat incoherent and question-begging. The article doesn’t celebrate biases in any way.
And, as I noted above, there is still no citation on the Brazil claims.
I don’t think this comment has anything to do with the actual article.
It is a summary reaction to both this article and your comments in Admitting to Bias. I have read both these articles with discussions in a short time, and my mindkilling alarm started ringing. So I posted my comment here, because unlike in the other thread, here you received upvotes, which to me means that community standards (of avoiding politically motivated thinking) are in danger.
If I’d read only this article without any other context, I probably wouldn’t write the same kind of reaction. So I guess a large part of my comment was “object connotationally”.
Specifically, you are right in saying that if Haidt shows five foundations of morality, and then defends one of them by saying that violating this foundation causes harm, then this value is probably a heuristics for minimizing harm. Although you and Haidt may use different definition of “foundation”—since you explicitly provided neither, I don’t know. For you it may be “something that cannot be reduced to other values”, and for Haidt “something directly percieved emotionally”. In which case both of you could be right within your own definitions; “foundation” X has evolved as emotional heuristics for avoiding harm, but our emotions of X are not exactly emotions of harm-avoidance.
And, as I noted above, there is still no citation on the Brazil claims.
I believe the essence of the claim is not Brazil-specific. I don’t have a reference here; it was years ago when I participated in child abuse prevention. I remember the statistics of child abuse divided by type of abuse and gender of perpetrator. In most cases, the different type of abuse is about equally done by men and women; except in the “sexual abuse” category, majority of perpetrators were men. And we were explained that most people, when seeing this statistics, think that the given man is father (or other male relative), but that actually most often it is the mother’s boyfriend.
I trust these data, because they seem to match with what other people told me personally. (Two data points in my social circle. In both cases the given girl was not raped, but mother’s boyfriend was gradually pushing towards higher physical intimacy, and mother offered no protection, so it seemed like a question of time. The situation was solved by boyfriend somehow losing opportunity of further contact with given girl; I will not provide more details.)
(What could be specific for Brazil—but I am only guessing here—is possibly a higher base rate of “mother with daughter and a boyfriend in the same house” situations, or a higher amount of criminal-type boyfriends which instead of carefully scanning the terrain progress faster. Or some combination of both, such as more divorces or higher acceptance of extramarital cohabitation in lower social classes, where criminality is more frequent and economical reasons may press the mother and boyfriend to share the same house.)
Please note that your objection against these data seems based on a premise: “if that’s true, then these Brazilian women must know it” and the consecutive modus tollens. This apparent contradiction is solved by the fact that in each such specific situation there are two women: the mother and the daughter. Their degree of “knowing” may be different—daughter may believe that mother’s boyfriend is going to rape her, based on his previous behavior; but mother may believe (strongly motivated cognition) that her daughter is exaggerating or lying, e.g. because she does not like her boyfriend, because she wants attention or revenge, because she is jealous, etc.
But you are quick to conclude that it’s “more likely that this is just the sort of rumor that the Catholic Church would want to spread”. A logical conclusion… if you build your model on filtered evidence. And in the other thread, you defended this filtering! We should not discuss e.g. data on female sexual behavior on LW, because it might offend some women. But because the world is connected, this will lead to conclusions that information about mother’s boyfriend being the greatest danger for daughter is just a rumor, that Haidt is just spreading rumors and his real goal is to disempower women. -- You missed an opportunity to notice your confusion, because you were focused on fighting a political enemy.
Although you and Haidt may use different definition of “foundation”—since you explicitly provided neither, I don’t know. For you it may be “something that cannot be reduced to other values”, and for Haidt “something directly percieved emotionally”. In which case both of you could be right within your own definitions; “foundation” X has evolved as emotional heuristics for avoiding harm, but our emotions of X are not exactly emotions of harm-avoidance.
I don’t think that gets Haidt off the hook prescriptively, since when he defends non-harm foundations, he doesn’t do so by pointing to his emotions. And as I noted, it’s just fine as a descriptive theory.
. Their degree of “knowing” may be different—daughter may believe that mother’s boyfriend is going to rape her, based on his previous behavior; but mother may believe (strongly motivated cognition) that her daughter is exaggerating or lying, e.g. because she does not like her boyfriend, because she wants attention or revenge, because she is jealous, etc.
I’m not talking about any specific situation, where that indeed might happen. I’m talking about whether “When women have a succession of men coming through, their daughters will get raped” [emphasis in original]. That’s the claim that I object to. If P(abuse|boyfriend) were even 0.3, it would be harder for mothers to deny what’s going on, because their prior for it would be so much higher. When people see rape as rare, they are a lot less likely to believe any individual who claims to have been raped.
I believe the essence of the claim is not Brazil-specific. I don’t have a reference here; it was years ago when I participated in child abuse prevention. I remember the statistics of child abuse divided by type of abuse and gender of perpetrator. In most cases, the different type of abuse is about equally done by men and women; except in the “sexual abuse” category, majority of perpetrators were men. And we were explained that most people, when seeing this statistics, think that the given man is father (or other male relative), but that actually most often it is the mother’s boyfriend.
I think that’s actually very likely. But the question is not P(boyfriend|abuse), but P(abuse|boyfriend).
But you are quick to conclude that it’s “more likely that this is just the sort of rumor that the Catholic Church would want to spread”.
Another reason I don’t think much of Haidt’s non-data, which I couldn’t fit into the article, is that “street children”, by definition, don’t live in houses with their parents.
A logical conclusion… if you build your model on filtered evidence. And in the other thread, you defended this filtering! We should not discuss e.g. data on female sexual behavior on LW, because it might offend some women.
I didn’t propose not discussing data on female sexual behavior. I suggested not linking to a site which has nothing but bad things to say about people of color, which is really quite different. VDARE is a political site; they do sometimes post articles by real scientists, but they would be unlikely to do so if those articles contradicted their basic premise. I also noted that I was trying to avoid filtering, by actually having women and people of color on Less Wrong.
My article did link to a book which mentions womens’ boyfriends killing (but not, in the parts that I have read so far, raping) their infant children. So I’m certainly not opposed to data.
If I’d read only this article without any other context, I probably wouldn’t write the same kind of reaction. So I guess a large part of my comment was “object connotationally”.
I appreciate your concern for the community’s health. I did make one change to the article to remove a bit which
was more specifically political (a bit about the Catholic church), and I think it was an error to put that in there in the first place. I think you might be pattern matching my comments in the other thread, rather than reading them. The typical liberal thing to do is to oppose “racism” and “sexism” (rather than actually opposing racism and sexism), on emotional purity grounds. That’s because many liberals (as noted elsewhere) do think of these things in terms of purity instead of harm. That’s also why a lot of radical feminists (for instance) reject liberalism; because it’s focused on the symbol not the substance. But I don’t identify as a liberal. And I genuinely do believe that there’s a real harm to linking to sites like VDARE. It’s not political, for me, but moral. And if ethics is the mind-killer, well, we’ve got more serious problems.
And I genuinely do believe that there’s a real harm to linking to sites like VDARE.
There is, in my opinion, but a different kind of harm. Accusations of racism, whether based on fact or not, are contagious. Being social species, we cannot afford to ignore the questions of status.
That’s why I never call anyone a racist. We all fuck up and say racist things sometimes. But if we can’t call each other on it, we’ll never stop doing it. For a group of people who aim to be “Less Wrong” to say that we can’t call something racism because we’ve been too mind-killed, or because our status would suffer, would be sad indeed.
When you say “a different kind of harm”, can you be a bit more explicit?
Another reason I don’t think much of Haidt’s non-data, which I couldn’t fit into the article, is that “street children”, by definition, don’t live in houses with their parents<
I imagine Brazil “street children” occassionally return to the homes of their parents, but do not feel particularly wellcome, missed, or protected, so they spend most nights somewhere else.
If it helps, I have recently seen a TV document on Brazil. The document mentioned, that the major source of street children are the families, where widowed or divorced mother has a new partner. And that boyfriends / new husbands tend to discourage such mothers from taking care of their children, they rather want to have new on their own. Raping was not mentioned, but clearly Brazilian culture puts a surprisingly low emphasis on duty and responsibility of a mother to take care and protect their own kids.
After contradicting novalis (for searching ways how to dissmiss the data), I will now say something in his support. I thing there is still too long a step from situations, where women do not live in celibacy after leaving (or burrying) their first partner, to situations, when they fail to protect their children. I think the point is addressed by having a social moral norm, that women should protect their kids no matter what, rather than having a moral norm, that women should not have new sexual adventures after leaving the first partner. So the “avoiding harm / provide care” value is sufficient, you do not need purity and sanctity and whatever…
Or is it actualy the sanctity of motherhood I am trying to advocate ??? Perhaps the confusion is the terminology. After reading several specific examples from the book, we would understand better what the author means by “harm/caring, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity/disgust”. So far, I did not read the book, nor did the author of this blogpost.
After contradicting novalis (for searching ways how to dismiss the data)
I was actually searching for data either way—if it’s true, I want to believe it’s true, and if it’s false, I want to believe it’s false. I searched for papers on Google Scholar, and I couldn’t find any. I want to find some, because I want to actually know the truth.
Religious variants of social conservatism aside, this site has traditionally been very sympathetic to the far right. There has been little or no Stalinism or Maoism advocated here, but quite a bit of the right wing equivalent. If the site becoming somewhat less welcoming to Neo-Birchers, PC-Paranoiacs, and other Reverse-Leninists upsets you, perhaps you might consider how the past political climate has been perceived by those left of center, or even those only slightly right of it.
this site has traditionally been very sympathetic to the far right
Could you please taboo “far right”, and give specific details of what is LW sympathetic to? E.g. quotations from high-karma articles and comments (bonus points for being written by Eliezer or Luke or some other local celebrity).
I am aware that this site is more sympathetic to ideas like “markets are good heuristic for maximizing utility” than to ideas like “we could make the world a better place by killing all people we consider evil, and brainwashing the rest”. But I don’t think this is because the typical correlations with ‘left’ and ‘right’, but because of the ideas themselves.
Disingenuous racism (“race realism” or “human biodiversity” or whatever euphemism it hides behinds currently). Libertarianism. Chest-beating displays towards right-wing boogeymen like political correctness and the media-academia complex. Multiple apparently respected posters taking “Heartiste” seriously, even though his entire shtick is gay-bashing and misogyny, and despite the fact that he’s a grown-ass man who calls himself “Heartiste.” And oh yeah, Mencius Moldbug. Is there a left-wing writer of similar obscurity and extremism so widely and approvingly quoted on LessWrong?
And oh yeah, Mencius Moldbug. Is there a left-wing writer of similar obscurity and extremism so widely and approvingly quoted on LessWrong?
Well there are left-writers of similar extremism quoted approvingly on LessWrong. They just happen not to be as obscure as their right wing counterparts. Basically any far left position you can think of (say Stalinism ) has some unobscure figure arguing for it. But I can see why you’d mind Moldbug, he’s just some dude with a blog, which he himself emphasises.
What I don’t see is Heartiste/Roissy. He’s one of several pick up artists that’s name dropped and discussed when the subject of romance or sex comes up and while the online scene itself is somewhat obscure anyone who is at all familiar with it also knows about him. If PUA in general is your complaint why didn’t you just say so? Our sister site Overcoming Bias does directly link to Heartiste’s blog (under its old name of Roissy in DC) so maybe he is overrepresented in PUA discussions, but I’d argue a larger part of why he is overrepresented is that he makes a good target to straw man PUA.
A libertarian who is also a fan of Moldbug and PUAs is in my estimation almost certain to be some way out on the non-religious branch of the right. Obviously my views are not unbiased, and I hope I have not claimed them to be. Your last paragraph is good snark, but I think it’s pretty close to how a fair portion of those on the political left would see it. Anyone who identifies as liberal is likely to see Peter Thiel and Robin Hanson as far-right nutcases (assuming they’ve heard of them). Yudkowsky, as I see it, is libertarian by upbringing but generally indifferent to politics, so he can only be far-right by association. All of his really far-out opinions are elsewhere.
Our sister site Overcoming Bias does directly link to Heartiste’s blog (under its old name of Roissy in DC) so maybe he is overrepresented in PUA discussions, but I’d argue a larger part of why he is overrepresented is that he makes a good target to straw man PUA.
He is a good target to straw man PUAs! I’m glad we found something we can agree on! Naming himself Heartiste was the greatest gift any man could give to snarky enemies of the PUA movement. But he also writes some truly messed up stuff (no links because I don’t want to vomit right now), and he is linked to by Hanson, so I don’t think criticizing him is unfair.
But yes I’m fully aware people really do think like that. Check out the link I put in “evil knows no bounds”. I’ve seen hysterical diatribes elsewhere online of how utterly vile and wicked it is of Thiel to pay exceptional young people not to go to college since it RUINS THEIR FUTURE FOREVER. Contrary to all the data we have on what education actually does, which shows they will likely be fine since college is probably mostly signaling.
What I think you will have to admit, is that people like Thiel are also the kind of people who are more likely than average to take things like encouraging social or technological innovation, curing ageing, cryonic and existential risk seriously. Just inspecting the sources of funding of such efforts should give you overwhelming of evidence of this.
If you take away Robin Hanson and other people from that cluster away, cease to tolerate them, preciously little original synthesis and though beyond what academia already did would remain. I would go as far as to say that applied rationality and self-improvement that actually works is indeed a strong attractor in the context of their memeplex. One could argue that they where and still are the intellectually and socially invested backbone of the community that formed around Overcoming Bias and LessWrong!
Anyone who identifies as liberal is likely to see Peter Thiel and Robin Hanson as far-right nutcases (assuming they’ve heard of them).
They will just have to get over that though.
And those that can’t… “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.”
I’m sure many conservatives can’t get over what kind of people the atheism filter tends to select either and don’t join us because of it. And unlike conservatives, “liberals” and “socialists” hold a supermajority here, is it really so terrible they make up just 60%+ of the site rather than 95%+?
Looking at the history of the important issues and positions I mentioned hold in society it seems pretty clear that It isn’t that this particular cluster of “far right” people is wickedly hogging them, clutching them with their slimy low status tentacles from the reach of what would otherwise be an enthusiastic mainstream.
It is precisely the traits that attracted them to their cluster that make them more likely to endorse and build upon LW-style rationality.
One could argue that they where and still are the intellectually and socially invested backbone of the community that formed around Overcoming Bias and LessWrong!
That’s the argument I wanted to make, so I think I’ll steal it. The intellectually and socially invested backbone of the community was and is distinctly right-leaning. Hence, the site is in many ways unwelcoming to people on the political left, much as was earlier claimed that the site is unwelcoming to some on the right.
They will just have to get over that though.
Right. And I think this applies equally to the right-wing readers and commenters who feel the site isn’t sufficiently sympathetic to their political views. Obviously I do not think that the political right deserves special treatment on account of somehow being innately more rational than the other tribes.
I think that you are selecting only a part of the story. For example, the official boogeyman here is the religion. (By the way, it happens to be associated with political right, at least today in USA.) Yet somehow, quotes from Chesterton often get many upvotes in “Rationality Quotes”. Does it mean that LW is secretly very sympathetic to religion? Or just that we are able to appreciate a decent quote even from people with whom we disagree on other topics? Could the second explanation possibly apply also to Heartiste or Moldbug? If you found a good rationality quote from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Che Guevara, or Fidel Castro, would it also get upvotes? You can try, if you want.
With regard to political correctness, to me it seems that the current situation is unsatisfactory to both sides. Forbidden topics get mentioned, then they are verbally opposed and the discussion is stopped; later they are mentioned again, and then the discussion is stopped again; ad infinitum. This is what neither side wants. Some people would prefer to never see those topics reopened again. Other people would prefer to have an open discussion now and then, without being told to stop by people who don’t want to participate. Both sides take this as a proof that the other side is winning.
I think that you are selecting only a part of the story. For example, the official boogeyman here is the religion. (By the way, it happens to be associated with political right, at least today in USA.)
Definitely. But there are groups associated with the US political right that are non- or anti-religious. Objectivists are an obvious example. Unsurprisingly, these groups are overrepresented on the internet (though this is becoming less and less the case over the years). My impression is that LW has traditionally skewed toward this branch of the right.
Yet somehow, quotes from Chesterton often get many upvotes in “Rationality Quotes”. Does it mean that LW is secretly very sympathetic to religion? Or just that we are able to appreciate a decent quote even from people with whom we disagree on other topics? Could the second explanation possibly apply also to Heartiste or Moldbug?
Yes, but “possible” is a low bar. I do not believe it could entirely, or even in large part explain the frequency of references to Heartiste and Moldbug, or their reception. Chesterton is less famous and less respected than, say, George Orwell, but he is nonetheless a well-known and often quoted political writer in the English speaking world. Heartiste and Moldbug are not. They are so obscure that even having heard of them requires an unusual degree of familiarity with the fringes of the blogosphere.
Your description of political correctness makes it sound a lot like the “Politics is the Mindkiller” gag-rule. The Boogeyman version of political correctness is more like a hybrid of the Cheka and the Inquisition.
It is interesting to see Ayn Rand, Heartiste, and Chesterton as examples of “the right”. Makes me thinking what exactly does this concept mean; what exactly do these three have in common… which they don’t share with George Orwell.
Your description of political correctness makes it sound a lot like the “Politics is the Mindkiller” gag-rule.
To me it seems more like a “Blue Politics is the Mindkiller” rule.
It is interesting to see Ayn Rand, Heartiste, and Chesterton as examples of “the right”. Makes me thinking what exactly does this concept mean; what exactly do these three have in common… which they don’t share with George Orwell.
Not being avowed socialists. Anyway, the fact that “the right” is an incredibly broad and imprecise category doesn’t make the concept meaningless. It is empirically true that most politically aware Americans vote unerringly for one of two parties based on their identification with a broad and imprecisely defined category, even if you think they ought not to behave that way. A private citizen’s specific policy opinions are of far less practical significance than their identification with “the right” or “the left.”
Funny thing that we agree on this, because when I was writing it, “not being socialist” was the only thing that came to my mind—but I didn’t write it in hope that you will tell me something else that I missed. So perhaps there is nothing else.
But in the light of this explanation, your complaint seems to translate as “LW has traditionally been very sympathetic to some non-socialists”. Do you think that is a wrong thing? I feel like I’m making a strawman version of your arguments here.
In the lifetimes of Rand, Chesterton, and Orwell, socialist vs. anti-socialist was possibly the dividing line in the world of politics, so it’s not a minor difference. I think a slightly better translation might be “LW has traditionally been very sympathetic to non-religious anti-socialists”. I wouldn’t call it a wrong thing, because I don’t perceive this issue as having that much moral weight. I disagree on the facts with a particular assessment of site-wide political bias.
To give a flattering explanation for such activity (I cringe at the thought of being thought as far right) I can only think of the value placed by this community on tolerance of ideas. As Paul Graham says ” If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical. And if it isn’t false, it shouldn’t be suppressed.” You could interpret people quoting reactionaries like Moldbug as an attempt to shock people and show how tolerant they are by seriously entertaining the ideas. The closest analogue I can think of is Salvador Dali saying he admires Hitler in the movie “Surrealissimo”. Link to Dali here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM9E9O9tEHs
For example, the official boogeyman here is the religion.
Really? I doubt I’m the only one who thinks that religious faith is a cheap target for critiques of irrationality. It is the example that people fall back on when they don’t have a better one, because it is so obvious.
But religion isn’t taken as much of a threat or a cause for outrage here. There are communities where it is — New Atheists, skeptics, and science educators concerned about creationism all come to mind.
Really? I doubt I’m the only one who thinks that religious faith is a cheap target for critiques of irrationality. It is the example that people fall back on when they don’t have a better one, because it is so obvious.
Astrology, alternative medicine, alien abductions, etc. are the usual targets attacked by entry-level skeptics. However, I do agree that in mainstream Western culture, religion is easy to attack.
Stalin saved far more lives than he took. In fact, Czarism was three times more deadly on a per capita basis than the average for the Stalin years. Plus, Stalin set a world record for the fastest doubling of life expectancy in any land. This amazing feat was only broken by Mao in 1976. Therefore, based on those records, I hold that Stalin and Mao were two of the greatest humanitarians that the world has ever known.
When I stumbled upon this it was at 3 karma, though I’m not sure where it will be now. I would argue what LessWrong traditionally likes is metacontrarianism of any kind. As more evidence of this I’d like to point out that metacontrarian left wing arguments by users like Multiheaded are well liked too.
I think you are wrong on this. The argument in this thread was about making mainstream conservatives unwelcome not the cobbled together right-y ideologies people here come up with. To quote GLaDOS on why I think the distinction matters:
Even many of our libertarians are probably left libertarians and nearly all of our high quality right wing thinkers are somewhat eclectic, eccentric and often aren’t really conservative in the small c sense of the word. Examples include machinations like Anarcho-Capitalism, Moldbuggian Progressivism-curing Rationalist Uberfact, Eugenic Aristocratic Monarchies or Multi-universe spanning TDT zombie computational theocracies (something like that! ^_~ ).
She’s not making any of that up I swear. That isn’t far right, that’s weird right.
Intellectual hipsters indeed. I’m not sure such fun ideas cooked up by a handful of enthusiastic rationalists really help us offset the bias, rather than just adding their own dose of political craziness to the mix.
Standing where we do as a community, means that our bias against ideas and arguments because of their tribal affiliation will not feel like being unfair or irrational from the inside. I have little idea how to fix this or even if it is wise to fix it considering how the mysterious but probably real w-force continues to do its magic over time. It may hurt our status bad enough to stop us from “Refining the art of human rationality” (yay! ^_^) in other ways.
My head feels funny, and I can’t tell whether I have trouble expressing my thoughts clearly or if they’re hopelessly disorganized to begin with. But I feel compelled to attempt sensible replies to your comments, so here goes(Jetzt Mit Bulletpoints!)...
mainstream conservatives feeling unwelcome
In the US context, I would take mainstream to mean religious. In that case, LW is an atheist site, which is only attractive to atheists and religious eccentrics who enjoy arguing with atheists. US demographics being what they are, LW won’t be welcoming to mainstream anyone, though the right end of the political spectrum will be most affected by this.
eclectic, eccentric, and weird right vs. far right
I think the overlap between “weird right” and “far right” (and “weird left” and “far left”) is extensive, to the point that it’s rare to have one without the other. Political intellectuals almost always espouse eclectic and eccentric views, and are almost always on the fringes compared to the political rank-and-file. A politically centrist intellectual is a politically apathetic intellectual. My point here, assuming I have one, is that “he’s weird-whatever” isn’t a rebuttal to “he’s far-whatever.”
meta-contrarianism
I agree with your general point. The difference in my take is that I think LW, especially in earlier times, has tended to express meta-contrarian views that align with the general politics of the techie-right. A rough description of what I’d consider the techie-right cluster: pro-libertarian, anti-gun-control, anti-religion, anti-environmentalist, pro-hard-sciences, pro-evopsych, pro-mainstream-economics, anti-the-rest-of-academia.
That Stalinist Guy
Uh, yeah, well...exception that proves the rule, that was central to my point, but I equivocated “few or no” etc...nah OK, you got me there. I even remembered TGP’s endorsement and still had that obvious hole in my argument. Didn’t know he had ever posted here though.
I think the overlap between “weird right” and “far right” (and “weird left” and “far left”) is extensive, to the point that it’s rare to have one without the other. Political intellectuals almost always espouse eclectic and eccentric views, and are almost always on the fringes compared to the political rank-and-file. A politically centrist intellectual is a politically apathetic intellectual. My point here, assuming I have one, is that “he’s weird-whatever” isn’t a rebuttal to “he’s far-whatever.”
I kind of have to concede this point. I do still think the connotations of the kind of far and weird positions you are likely to see on LW are better matched by the weird left/right rather than the far right/left.
“Even if utterly disagree with them they practically define themselves into demographic irrelevancy and are very unlikely to cause any damage. ”
vs.
“Aggh this is memeticall virulent! Must stomp on their face with my boot for forever!”
Maybe this is because I’m European. In Slovenia calling someone far right is usually always calling that person a dangerous nationalist or even a crypto-fascist. The implied context is that they should be suppressed or arrested since we don’t have free speech. A dope smoking libertarian isn’t called Far Right but a capitalist lap dog. ;)
I agree with your general point. The difference in my take is that I think LW, especially in earlier times, has tended to express meta-contrarian views that align with the general politics of the techie-right. A rough description of what I’d consider the techie-right cluster: pro-libertarian, anti-gun-control, anti-religion, anti-environmentalist, pro-hard-sciences, pro-evopsych, pro-mainstream-economics, anti-the-rest-of-academia.
This seems like a good description and I agree LW is friendly to such stances. I think the main reason for this is that this cluster is disproportionately present among programmers and transhumanists. Many prominent early posters (I can’t help but think of Michael Vassar) obviously fir into that frame as does Eliezer himself to a moderate extent.
Maybe this is because I’m European. In Slovenia calling someone far right is usually always calling that person a dangerous nationalist or even a crypto-fascist. The implied context is that they should be suppressed or arrested since we don’t have free speech. A dope smoking libertarian isn’t called Far Right but a capitalist lap dog. ;)
Yeah, that’s a very different context from the US. I don’t have much direct experience of Slovenia, but I do have some familiarity with Serbia (my Mom’s from there), so I hope you aren’t too offended if my mental model of Slovenia is a smaller, richer, much less screwed up Serbia. In the US, capitalist lap dogs are generally lumped in with dangerous nationalists and crypto-fascists. It doesn’t work the same when you’ve got some experience with really dangerous nationalists, like in 90′s former Yugoslavia.
So exactly what was the point of this article? Boo conservative values, yay liberal values? I am sure we need more like this on LessConservative!
Sure, a conservative mindkilled person may fail to notice that women in conservative societies can be opressed and battered by their husbands, in the name of sacred family. Just like a liberal mindkilled person may fail to notice that some women don’t mind their daughters raped by their sexy alpha boyfriends, in the name of sacred sexual freedom. What a coincidence—biased people not noticing their biases!
However, liberal biases are OK, because liberal people say so; both here and in academy. On the other hand we should remove all topics that could offend… ahem… people other than conservatives. For example, discussions about “pick-up arts”—their strawman versions could make women feel unwelcome. A “pick-up artist” would probably not make the same mistake as author of this article; but for our rationality, it is better if they take their evidence elsewhere. If my opinions are right, I want to believe my opinions are right; and if my opinions are wrong, I want to believe your opinions are harmful.
Seriously—we all have many different values and opinions; but saying that some of some kinds of biases are not so harmful, and then writing and upvoting an article that more or less celebrates this attitude… that’s not the LessWrong I imagine. Liberal biases are harmful for the same reasons like any other biases; they prevent us from seeing the territory correctly.
In other words—trying to use a language a liberal might understand better—articles like this make me feel unwelcome.
I’m also starting to feel unwelcome here.
I’ve been seeing more and more sings of an intellectual chilling in the past few months and a shrinking of acceptable ingroup political variation.
Things like users commenting on there being concerned about there being “insufficient liberal spin”. Now obviously the no mind-killer norm kept the concern unpopular and a well worded post calling it out was written… but still what concerns me is that I don’t recall things like this happening at all before.
Not cool.
Multiheaded is a delightfully unusual case with delightfully unusual posting goals, who I assumed was rather unlike any other poster here. Was your usage of the plural ‘users’ solely for aesthetic concerns, or are there other users who have complained about “insufficient liberal bias”?
???
To use terminology I do not wager Multiheaded would object to, he takes the threat of certain right-wing political philosophies very seriously. Perhaps goal is the not the best term, however. See here for a glimpse of what I mean.
In a nontrivial number of his posts, one could say that a specter is haunting Multiheaded, the specter of fascism. As such, a good bit of his output consists of left-wing ghost-busting.
Indeed, your terminology is OK with me. (Just one qualification: “certain modern right-wing political philosophies”) However, you forgot to mention my roguish charm, my irresistable allure and my gorgeous looks.
Multiheaded is basically Barron the Green.
No way, I’m not! I mean, yes, I’m certainly mind-killed (and flattered when my mind-killedness is described in dramatic language like above, thanks!) - but at least… how to put it.. I’m mind-killed about the mind!
That is, I fret and read and (sometimes) post about social psychology and cultural processes and human ethics and stuff like that—which is, in the end, self-referential and self-fulfilling/negating to a degree.
If e.g. everyone in known history thought that economic equality was massively evil and alien and harmful and undesirable—why, societies would simply increase wealth divergence without ever worrying whether it’s practical or moral to—like, in real life, we feel and act the same about starvation, even when we let its victims die in other ways.
If in 1936 or so 90% of Europeans got the idea that Hitler had unspeakably evil plans, he’d never be able to carry out those plans. {1}
Therefore, if someone, like me, fervently believes that [religion name]/[ideology name] is (in its worldview and revealed preferences, not its description of reality) an enormous priority to pursue OR avoid, more important than even lives or happiness—and that humanity is blind to that urgent matter, then they’re slightly better off than someone who fervently believes that e.g. Mars has a breathable atmosphere.
The more people share the first “delusion”, the less of a “delusion” it is internally and the more implementable it is in practice. Yes, of course some ev-psych facts—like selfishness, love of authority or envy—limit the phase space of working societies, but those realities can be stretched or hacked around, given how plastic our minds potentially are.
The second one remains a delusion no matter how large and committed a group tries to live up to it; a lone atheist and a million good Catholics following a papal edict would choke with equal speed on Mars. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
Barron might hate the universe and feel that it hates him in return; I only hate some particular, and passing, arrangements in the universe, and resent the fact that most people insist on propping up those arrangements (by e.g. thinking that material welfare is the only real measure of political systems).
{1} Yes, yes, I’m aware of the Functionalist argument and find it rather credible; that bit was just rhetorical.
So how did the Soviet Union’s attempt to create the “New Soviet Man” turn out?
There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin’s ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment, and most notably an Asian-style cult of the god-king.
In fact, by the end of his life Stalin had uprooted or completely subverted virtually every institution that the 1920s’ Old Bolshevik leaders introduced (with the sole exception of the repression apparatus, which he expanded while purging most personnel) - from the “New Economic Policy” and legal free abortion (!) to the avant-garde artists’ organizations and the Comintern.
I’m not necessarily saying that those institutions were good (although the NEP objectively worked well enough); I’m saying that, since around 1930 and until the end, Soviet leadership only paid lip service to genuine radical indoctrination/reeducation, preferring the old staples of nationalism, feudal loyalty and leader-worship.
Later, in the Brezhnev era, an official cargo cult of sorts was formed around Marxist phraseology and such, but no-one gave a shit whether, say, the “Marxism-Leninism” classes at universities were even functioning as propaganda.
In fact, it was rather counter-productive as propaganda, as people began to mock even the several objective, verified achievements that it trumpeted—like the space program or the considerable infrastructure investment. The system became too stagnant even to attempt self-replication through indoctrination.
So there. The USSR was mostly an ineffective (if somewhat orderly) conservative regime that would have shat its collective pants if a New Soviet Man suddenly appeared in flesh.
And hey, a handful did appear, more or less by accident; e.g. Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Vasily Grossman (Socialist Realist writers!), Sakharov, the Strugatsky brothers, numerous other good people who advocated left-wing ideas and got suppressed by an ostensibly socialist system. Oh, well, for the wider Warsaw Pact, I guess Zizek also counts as a New Soviet Man :)
P.S.: lengthy quote incoming! Orwell’s praise of left-wing indoctrination in Homage to Catalonia.
Hadn’t NEP originally been conceived as a temporary policy for the interim when the society was going to be slowly transformed into communism, after radical immediate implementation of communist economics attempted in the first years after the revolution visibly failed?
Well, the many far left movements had a militarist element (directed against the bourgeois) to them from the very beginning. Also the nationalism didn’t start going until WWII, and only after it became clear that appealing to people to fight for communist ideals wasn’t working.
They sure had a culture of violence, as in street fighting and insurgency etc, but under Stalin it turned into proper militarism, as in: approval of army hierarchy and officer-caste ethics as not merely necessary but laudable; formal expressions of loyalty turning organization-based rather than class-based; displaying the expected World Revolution (in films, lectures, etc) as being in essense a conventional war, with near-identical armies facing off and some aid from working-class sympathizers—rather then the preceding image of a massive popular rebellion… A somewhat-revisionist Russian historian, Mark Solonin, describes how the massive military build-up was accompanied by this gradual shift in propaganda from “revolutionary violence” to “Red militarism”.
Believe me, it did! It was crypto-nationalism in the 30s, but back then Stalinist propaganda already began to lionize the historical achievements and the “properly” anti-feudal, anti-bourgeois sentiment of the Russian Volk. It appropriated 19th century authors like Pushkin who were previously fashionable to reject as retrograde.
There’s a sharp contrast between the 1920s’ propaganda line on Imperial Russia (backward, miserable, completely lost but for the Communist guidance), the lambasting of “Russian chauvinism” as a right-wing deviation and the insistence that all Soviet nationalities should harmoniously melt into a purely political whole—and the 1930s’ quiet suppression of all that, with Old Russia called less a benighted rural wilderness and more a supremely talented nation, naturally predisposed towards communism, that only needed to overthrow Tsarism to assume its rightful place of world leadership.
I’ve read a few Russian studies about the relationship between Stalinism, Soviet culture and propaganda; they offer a far more nuanced view than the one you cite.
The lesson is probably that when you create a culture of violence, it tends to get out of the hand and go towards its own attractors.
Sounds reasonable.
Do you feel that the entire article is a problem, or are there specific bits that bother you?
Just a few minor political digs in it, otherwise it is an appropriate critique of H’s work. I was more concerned with the overall LW climate as I tried to show with my cited example.
Do you mean the bit about Catholics, or another bit? I think I’m going to remove that bit. [edit] I did.
(I’m asking because I would like to improve the article, not to start an argument)
(Although I didn’t read that comment at the time, I am also boggled by the “liberal spin” bit, for what that’s worth).
How does the article celebrate the attitude that some biases are less harmful? There is a recognisable liberal (American meaning) undertone in the article but it can’t see any definite attitude towards biases.
I don’t think this comment has anything to do with the actual article.
The central question of the article is about how Haidt interprets the five foundations. I point out that his interpretation is somewhat incoherent and question-begging. The article doesn’t celebrate biases in any way.
And, as I noted above, there is still no citation on the Brazil claims.
It is a summary reaction to both this article and your comments in Admitting to Bias. I have read both these articles with discussions in a short time, and my mindkilling alarm started ringing. So I posted my comment here, because unlike in the other thread, here you received upvotes, which to me means that community standards (of avoiding politically motivated thinking) are in danger.
If I’d read only this article without any other context, I probably wouldn’t write the same kind of reaction. So I guess a large part of my comment was “object connotationally”.
Specifically, you are right in saying that if Haidt shows five foundations of morality, and then defends one of them by saying that violating this foundation causes harm, then this value is probably a heuristics for minimizing harm. Although you and Haidt may use different definition of “foundation”—since you explicitly provided neither, I don’t know. For you it may be “something that cannot be reduced to other values”, and for Haidt “something directly percieved emotionally”. In which case both of you could be right within your own definitions; “foundation” X has evolved as emotional heuristics for avoiding harm, but our emotions of X are not exactly emotions of harm-avoidance.
I believe the essence of the claim is not Brazil-specific. I don’t have a reference here; it was years ago when I participated in child abuse prevention. I remember the statistics of child abuse divided by type of abuse and gender of perpetrator. In most cases, the different type of abuse is about equally done by men and women; except in the “sexual abuse” category, majority of perpetrators were men. And we were explained that most people, when seeing this statistics, think that the given man is father (or other male relative), but that actually most often it is the mother’s boyfriend.
I trust these data, because they seem to match with what other people told me personally. (Two data points in my social circle. In both cases the given girl was not raped, but mother’s boyfriend was gradually pushing towards higher physical intimacy, and mother offered no protection, so it seemed like a question of time. The situation was solved by boyfriend somehow losing opportunity of further contact with given girl; I will not provide more details.)
(What could be specific for Brazil—but I am only guessing here—is possibly a higher base rate of “mother with daughter and a boyfriend in the same house” situations, or a higher amount of criminal-type boyfriends which instead of carefully scanning the terrain progress faster. Or some combination of both, such as more divorces or higher acceptance of extramarital cohabitation in lower social classes, where criminality is more frequent and economical reasons may press the mother and boyfriend to share the same house.)
Please note that your objection against these data seems based on a premise: “if that’s true, then these Brazilian women must know it” and the consecutive modus tollens. This apparent contradiction is solved by the fact that in each such specific situation there are two women: the mother and the daughter. Their degree of “knowing” may be different—daughter may believe that mother’s boyfriend is going to rape her, based on his previous behavior; but mother may believe (strongly motivated cognition) that her daughter is exaggerating or lying, e.g. because she does not like her boyfriend, because she wants attention or revenge, because she is jealous, etc.
But you are quick to conclude that it’s “more likely that this is just the sort of rumor that the Catholic Church would want to spread”. A logical conclusion… if you build your model on filtered evidence. And in the other thread, you defended this filtering! We should not discuss e.g. data on female sexual behavior on LW, because it might offend some women. But because the world is connected, this will lead to conclusions that information about mother’s boyfriend being the greatest danger for daughter is just a rumor, that Haidt is just spreading rumors and his real goal is to disempower women. -- You missed an opportunity to notice your confusion, because you were focused on fighting a political enemy.
I don’t think that gets Haidt off the hook prescriptively, since when he defends non-harm foundations, he doesn’t do so by pointing to his emotions. And as I noted, it’s just fine as a descriptive theory.
I’m not talking about any specific situation, where that indeed might happen. I’m talking about whether “When women have a succession of men coming through, their daughters will get raped” [emphasis in original]. That’s the claim that I object to. If P(abuse|boyfriend) were even 0.3, it would be harder for mothers to deny what’s going on, because their prior for it would be so much higher. When people see rape as rare, they are a lot less likely to believe any individual who claims to have been raped.
I think that’s actually very likely. But the question is not P(boyfriend|abuse), but P(abuse|boyfriend).
Another reason I don’t think much of Haidt’s non-data, which I couldn’t fit into the article, is that “street children”, by definition, don’t live in houses with their parents.
I didn’t propose not discussing data on female sexual behavior. I suggested not linking to a site which has nothing but bad things to say about people of color, which is really quite different. VDARE is a political site; they do sometimes post articles by real scientists, but they would be unlikely to do so if those articles contradicted their basic premise. I also noted that I was trying to avoid filtering, by actually having women and people of color on Less Wrong.
My article did link to a book which mentions womens’ boyfriends killing (but not, in the parts that I have read so far, raping) their infant children. So I’m certainly not opposed to data.
I appreciate your concern for the community’s health. I did make one change to the article to remove a bit which was more specifically political (a bit about the Catholic church), and I think it was an error to put that in there in the first place. I think you might be pattern matching my comments in the other thread, rather than reading them. The typical liberal thing to do is to oppose “racism” and “sexism” (rather than actually opposing racism and sexism), on emotional purity grounds. That’s because many liberals (as noted elsewhere) do think of these things in terms of purity instead of harm. That’s also why a lot of radical feminists (for instance) reject liberalism; because it’s focused on the symbol not the substance. But I don’t identify as a liberal. And I genuinely do believe that there’s a real harm to linking to sites like VDARE. It’s not political, for me, but moral. And if ethics is the mind-killer, well, we’ve got more serious problems.
There is, in my opinion, but a different kind of harm. Accusations of racism, whether based on fact or not, are contagious. Being social species, we cannot afford to ignore the questions of status.
That’s why I never call anyone a racist. We all fuck up and say racist things sometimes. But if we can’t call each other on it, we’ll never stop doing it. For a group of people who aim to be “Less Wrong” to say that we can’t call something racism because we’ve been too mind-killed, or because our status would suffer, would be sad indeed.
When you say “a different kind of harm”, can you be a bit more explicit?
I imagine Brazil “street children” occassionally return to the homes of their parents, but do not feel particularly wellcome, missed, or protected, so they spend most nights somewhere else.
If it helps, I have recently seen a TV document on Brazil. The document mentioned, that the major source of street children are the families, where widowed or divorced mother has a new partner. And that boyfriends / new husbands tend to discourage such mothers from taking care of their children, they rather want to have new on their own. Raping was not mentioned, but clearly Brazilian culture puts a surprisingly low emphasis on duty and responsibility of a mother to take care and protect their own kids.
After contradicting novalis (for searching ways how to dissmiss the data), I will now say something in his support. I thing there is still too long a step from situations, where women do not live in celibacy after leaving (or burrying) their first partner, to situations, when they fail to protect their children. I think the point is addressed by having a social moral norm, that women should protect their kids no matter what, rather than having a moral norm, that women should not have new sexual adventures after leaving the first partner. So the “avoiding harm / provide care” value is sufficient, you do not need purity and sanctity and whatever…
Or is it actualy the sanctity of motherhood I am trying to advocate ??? Perhaps the confusion is the terminology. After reading several specific examples from the book, we would understand better what the author means by “harm/caring, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity/disgust”. So far, I did not read the book, nor did the author of this blogpost.
After contradicting novalis (for searching ways how to dismiss the data)
I was actually searching for data either way—if it’s true, I want to believe it’s true, and if it’s false, I want to believe it’s false. I searched for papers on Google Scholar, and I couldn’t find any. I want to find some, because I want to actually know the truth.
Religious variants of social conservatism aside, this site has traditionally been very sympathetic to the far right. There has been little or no Stalinism or Maoism advocated here, but quite a bit of the right wing equivalent. If the site becoming somewhat less welcoming to Neo-Birchers, PC-Paranoiacs, and other Reverse-Leninists upsets you, perhaps you might consider how the past political climate has been perceived by those left of center, or even those only slightly right of it.
Could you please taboo “far right”, and give specific details of what is LW sympathetic to? E.g. quotations from high-karma articles and comments (bonus points for being written by Eliezer or Luke or some other local celebrity).
I am aware that this site is more sympathetic to ideas like “markets are good heuristic for maximizing utility” than to ideas like “we could make the world a better place by killing all people we consider evil, and brainwashing the rest”. But I don’t think this is because the typical correlations with ‘left’ and ‘right’, but because of the ideas themselves.
Disingenuous racism (“race realism” or “human biodiversity” or whatever euphemism it hides behinds currently). Libertarianism. Chest-beating displays towards right-wing boogeymen like political correctness and the media-academia complex. Multiple apparently respected posters taking “Heartiste” seriously, even though his entire shtick is gay-bashing and misogyny, and despite the fact that he’s a grown-ass man who calls himself “Heartiste.” And oh yeah, Mencius Moldbug. Is there a left-wing writer of similar obscurity and extremism so widely and approvingly quoted on LessWrong?
Well there are left-writers of similar extremism quoted approvingly on LessWrong. They just happen not to be as obscure as their right wing counterparts. Basically any far left position you can think of (say Stalinism ) has some unobscure figure arguing for it. But I can see why you’d mind Moldbug, he’s just some dude with a blog, which he himself emphasises.
What I don’t see is Heartiste/Roissy. He’s one of several pick up artists that’s name dropped and discussed when the subject of romance or sex comes up and while the online scene itself is somewhat obscure anyone who is at all familiar with it also knows about him. If PUA in general is your complaint why didn’t you just say so? Our sister site Overcoming Bias does directly link to Heartiste’s blog (under its old name of Roissy in DC) so maybe he is overrepresented in PUA discussions, but I’d argue a larger part of why he is overrepresented is that he makes a good target to straw man PUA.
Wait libertarianism is scary far right now?
Well ok I guess a third of LessWrong is now far right. I’m not even going to mentioning Robin Hanson’s writings. Also LWs founder is a shady figure who occasionally writes on dangerous far right sites, wants to live forever and his day job is mostly founded by a another rich far right figure who’s evil knows no bounds. Thiel pays kids not to go to college, doesn’t like democracy and wants to settle the seas to escape bad government! Where have he heard that before!
A libertarian who is also a fan of Moldbug and PUAs is in my estimation almost certain to be some way out on the non-religious branch of the right. Obviously my views are not unbiased, and I hope I have not claimed them to be. Your last paragraph is good snark, but I think it’s pretty close to how a fair portion of those on the political left would see it. Anyone who identifies as liberal is likely to see Peter Thiel and Robin Hanson as far-right nutcases (assuming they’ve heard of them). Yudkowsky, as I see it, is libertarian by upbringing but generally indifferent to politics, so he can only be far-right by association. All of his really far-out opinions are elsewhere.
He is a good target to straw man PUAs! I’m glad we found something we can agree on! Naming himself Heartiste was the greatest gift any man could give to snarky enemies of the PUA movement. But he also writes some truly messed up stuff (no links because I don’t want to vomit right now), and he is linked to by Hanson, so I don’t think criticizing him is unfair.
Good, I was aiming for snark.
But yes I’m fully aware people really do think like that. Check out the link I put in “evil knows no bounds”. I’ve seen hysterical diatribes elsewhere online of how utterly vile and wicked it is of Thiel to pay exceptional young people not to go to college since it RUINS THEIR FUTURE FOREVER. Contrary to all the data we have on what education actually does, which shows they will likely be fine since college is probably mostly signaling.
What I think you will have to admit, is that people like Thiel are also the kind of people who are more likely than average to take things like encouraging social or technological innovation, curing ageing, cryonic and existential risk seriously. Just inspecting the sources of funding of such efforts should give you overwhelming of evidence of this.
If you take away Robin Hanson and other people from that cluster away, cease to tolerate them, preciously little original synthesis and though beyond what academia already did would remain. I would go as far as to say that applied rationality and self-improvement that actually works is indeed a strong attractor in the context of their memeplex. One could argue that they where and still are the intellectually and socially invested backbone of the community that formed around Overcoming Bias and LessWrong!
They will just have to get over that though.
And those that can’t… “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.”
I’m sure many conservatives can’t get over what kind of people the atheism filter tends to select either and don’t join us because of it. And unlike conservatives, “liberals” and “socialists” hold a supermajority here, is it really so terrible they make up just 60%+ of the site rather than 95%+?
Looking at the history of the important issues and positions I mentioned hold in society it seems pretty clear that It isn’t that this particular cluster of “far right” people is wickedly hogging them, clutching them with their slimy low status tentacles from the reach of what would otherwise be an enthusiastic mainstream.
It is precisely the traits that attracted them to their cluster that make them more likely to endorse and build upon LW-style rationality.
That’s the argument I wanted to make, so I think I’ll steal it. The intellectually and socially invested backbone of the community was and is distinctly right-leaning. Hence, the site is in many ways unwelcoming to people on the political left, much as was earlier claimed that the site is unwelcoming to some on the right.
Right. And I think this applies equally to the right-wing readers and commenters who feel the site isn’t sufficiently sympathetic to their political views. Obviously I do not think that the political right deserves special treatment on account of somehow being innately more rational than the other tribes.
I hope I didn’t imply this.
Regardless of what you think of his opinions, Mencius Moldbug is, if nothing else, eloquent.
I strongly disagree connotationally, but thank you for the explanation.
I think that you are selecting only a part of the story. For example, the official boogeyman here is the religion. (By the way, it happens to be associated with political right, at least today in USA.) Yet somehow, quotes from Chesterton often get many upvotes in “Rationality Quotes”. Does it mean that LW is secretly very sympathetic to religion? Or just that we are able to appreciate a decent quote even from people with whom we disagree on other topics? Could the second explanation possibly apply also to Heartiste or Moldbug? If you found a good rationality quote from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Che Guevara, or Fidel Castro, would it also get upvotes? You can try, if you want.
With regard to political correctness, to me it seems that the current situation is unsatisfactory to both sides. Forbidden topics get mentioned, then they are verbally opposed and the discussion is stopped; later they are mentioned again, and then the discussion is stopped again; ad infinitum. This is what neither side wants. Some people would prefer to never see those topics reopened again. Other people would prefer to have an open discussion now and then, without being told to stop by people who don’t want to participate. Both sides take this as a proof that the other side is winning.
Definitely. But there are groups associated with the US political right that are non- or anti-religious. Objectivists are an obvious example. Unsurprisingly, these groups are overrepresented on the internet (though this is becoming less and less the case over the years). My impression is that LW has traditionally skewed toward this branch of the right.
Yes, but “possible” is a low bar. I do not believe it could entirely, or even in large part explain the frequency of references to Heartiste and Moldbug, or their reception. Chesterton is less famous and less respected than, say, George Orwell, but he is nonetheless a well-known and often quoted political writer in the English speaking world. Heartiste and Moldbug are not. They are so obscure that even having heard of them requires an unusual degree of familiarity with the fringes of the blogosphere.
Your description of political correctness makes it sound a lot like the “Politics is the Mindkiller” gag-rule. The Boogeyman version of political correctness is more like a hybrid of the Cheka and the Inquisition.
It is interesting to see Ayn Rand, Heartiste, and Chesterton as examples of “the right”. Makes me thinking what exactly does this concept mean; what exactly do these three have in common… which they don’t share with George Orwell.
To me it seems more like a “Blue Politics is the Mindkiller” rule.
Not being avowed socialists. Anyway, the fact that “the right” is an incredibly broad and imprecise category doesn’t make the concept meaningless. It is empirically true that most politically aware Americans vote unerringly for one of two parties based on their identification with a broad and imprecisely defined category, even if you think they ought not to behave that way. A private citizen’s specific policy opinions are of far less practical significance than their identification with “the right” or “the left.”
Funny thing that we agree on this, because when I was writing it, “not being socialist” was the only thing that came to my mind—but I didn’t write it in hope that you will tell me something else that I missed. So perhaps there is nothing else.
But in the light of this explanation, your complaint seems to translate as “LW has traditionally been very sympathetic to some non-socialists”. Do you think that is a wrong thing? I feel like I’m making a strawman version of your arguments here.
In the lifetimes of Rand, Chesterton, and Orwell, socialist vs. anti-socialist was possibly the dividing line in the world of politics, so it’s not a minor difference. I think a slightly better translation might be “LW has traditionally been very sympathetic to non-religious anti-socialists”. I wouldn’t call it a wrong thing, because I don’t perceive this issue as having that much moral weight. I disagree on the facts with a particular assessment of site-wide political bias.
To give a flattering explanation for such activity (I cringe at the thought of being thought as far right) I can only think of the value placed by this community on tolerance of ideas. As Paul Graham says ” If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical. And if it isn’t false, it shouldn’t be suppressed.” You could interpret people quoting reactionaries like Moldbug as an attempt to shock people and show how tolerant they are by seriously entertaining the ideas. The closest analogue I can think of is Salvador Dali saying he admires Hitler in the movie “Surrealissimo”. Link to Dali here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM9E9O9tEHs
Really? I doubt I’m the only one who thinks that religious faith is a cheap target for critiques of irrationality. It is the example that people fall back on when they don’t have a better one, because it is so obvious.
But religion isn’t taken as much of a threat or a cause for outrage here. There are communities where it is — New Atheists, skeptics, and science educators concerned about creationism all come to mind.
Astrology, alternative medicine, alien abductions, etc. are the usual targets attacked by entry-level skeptics. However, I do agree that in mainstream Western culture, religion is easy to attack.
I will point out that LW is extremely sexually liberal—lots of polygamists, heavily pro-gay and relatively trans friendly.
Yeah you might want to reconsider that:
When I stumbled upon this it was at 3 karma, though I’m not sure where it will be now. I would argue what LessWrong traditionally likes is metacontrarianism of any kind. As more evidence of this I’d like to point out that metacontrarian left wing arguments by users like Multiheaded are well liked too.
I think you are wrong on this. The argument in this thread was about making mainstream conservatives unwelcome not the cobbled together right-y ideologies people here come up with. To quote GLaDOS on why I think the distinction matters:
She’s not making any of that up I swear. That isn’t far right, that’s weird right.
My head feels funny, and I can’t tell whether I have trouble expressing my thoughts clearly or if they’re hopelessly disorganized to begin with. But I feel compelled to attempt sensible replies to your comments, so here goes(Jetzt Mit Bulletpoints!)...
mainstream conservatives feeling unwelcome
In the US context, I would take mainstream to mean religious. In that case, LW is an atheist site, which is only attractive to atheists and religious eccentrics who enjoy arguing with atheists. US demographics being what they are, LW won’t be welcoming to mainstream anyone, though the right end of the political spectrum will be most affected by this.
eclectic, eccentric, and weird right vs. far right
I think the overlap between “weird right” and “far right” (and “weird left” and “far left”) is extensive, to the point that it’s rare to have one without the other. Political intellectuals almost always espouse eclectic and eccentric views, and are almost always on the fringes compared to the political rank-and-file. A politically centrist intellectual is a politically apathetic intellectual. My point here, assuming I have one, is that “he’s weird-whatever” isn’t a rebuttal to “he’s far-whatever.”
meta-contrarianism
I agree with your general point. The difference in my take is that I think LW, especially in earlier times, has tended to express meta-contrarian views that align with the general politics of the techie-right. A rough description of what I’d consider the techie-right cluster: pro-libertarian, anti-gun-control, anti-religion, anti-environmentalist, pro-hard-sciences, pro-evopsych, pro-mainstream-economics, anti-the-rest-of-academia.
That Stalinist Guy
Uh, yeah, well...exception that proves the rule, that was central to my point, but I equivocated “few or no” etc...nah OK, you got me there. I even remembered TGP’s endorsement and still had that obvious hole in my argument. Didn’t know he had ever posted here though.
I kind of have to concede this point. I do still think the connotations of the kind of far and weird positions you are likely to see on LW are better matched by the weird left/right rather than the far right/left.
“Even if utterly disagree with them they practically define themselves into demographic irrelevancy and are very unlikely to cause any damage. ”
vs.
“Aggh this is memeticall virulent! Must stomp on their face with my boot for forever!”
Maybe this is because I’m European. In Slovenia calling someone far right is usually always calling that person a dangerous nationalist or even a crypto-fascist. The implied context is that they should be suppressed or arrested since we don’t have free speech. A dope smoking libertarian isn’t called Far Right but a capitalist lap dog. ;)
This seems like a good description and I agree LW is friendly to such stances. I think the main reason for this is that this cluster is disproportionately present among programmers and transhumanists. Many prominent early posters (I can’t help but think of Michael Vassar) obviously fir into that frame as does Eliezer himself to a moderate extent.
Yeah, that’s a very different context from the US. I don’t have much direct experience of Slovenia, but I do have some familiarity with Serbia (my Mom’s from there), so I hope you aren’t too offended if my mental model of Slovenia is a smaller, richer, much less screwed up Serbia. In the US, capitalist lap dogs are generally lumped in with dangerous nationalists and crypto-fascists. It doesn’t work the same when you’ve got some experience with really dangerous nationalists, like in 90′s former Yugoslavia.