Smart people often think social institutions are basically arbitrary and that they can engineer better ways using their mighty brains. Because these institutions aren’t actually arbitrary, their tinkering is generally harmful and sometimes causes social dysfunction, suffering, and death on a massive scale. Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard, and that is a serious indictment of “rationality” as practiced by LessWrongers.
A case of this especially relevant to Less Wrong is “Evangelical Polyamory”.
Agreed except for the part about Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard. I think it’s actually doing better then most gatherings of smart people attempting to reorganize society. Keep in mind lesswrong’s equivalent 50 years ago would have been advocating Marxism.
Atheists assume that self-identified atheists are representative of non-religious people and use flattering data about self-identified atheists to draw (likely) false conclusions about the world being better without religion. The expected value of arguing for atheism is small and quite possibly negative.
Agreed.
Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
You’ve never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it’s another good example of your first point.
Nerd culture is increasingly hyper-permissive and basically juvenile and stultifying. Nerds were better off when they had to struggle to meet society’s expectations for normal behavior.
True, however, the previous culture was hyper-conformist, since it was ‘designed’ to create people intelligent enough to operate machinery but conformist enough to work in an assembly line.
As someone who has read many RAND papers and their retrospectives about the people in RAND 50 years ago, I strongly agree—if nothing else, because of RAND’s early computer work like constructing MANIAC and developing decision and game theory.
I think it gets closer to the truth if you replace 50 years with 100. A century ago communist ideas were the hip thing for a forward-thinking young person to believe in, especially in my home country (Russia), just like singularitarianism is now. This analogy is one of the main reasons why I’m not an outspoken singularitarian.
Ceteris paribus dictatorships work better than democracies.
You’ve never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it’s another good example of your first point.
AFAIK dictatorships are higher variance than democracies, but on average they aren’t too differerent (in terms of GDP at least). Most intuitive explanation: a good dictator can do really good things and a bad dictator can do really bad things, but good and bad democracies aren’t able to do as much good/bad because the political system moves like molasses.
This is the common wisdom at the moment but it’s far too short-termist. All theories are provisional and eventually your enlightened dictator will find themselves on the wrong side of history and need to be removed. Of course you can build a democracy which can’t do that and a dictatorship which can but I suspect the “moves like molasses” aspect moves with this quality and not the voting ritual.
All theories are provisional and eventually your enlightened dictator will find themselves on the wrong side of history and need to be removed.
It is most fascinating how often the right side of history coincidences neatly with the interest of the USG and how often their armed forces or intelligence agencies graciously do the removing.
Sorry, bro, but this statement by its very nature deserves a dozen downvotes, never mind coming from a user who was being proudly apolitical and striving for a non-tribal approach to things five minutes ago. It is perfectly clear to me that “the wrong side of history” in the parent, while perhaps being less than gracious rhetorically, was mentioned in good faith, and not intended to invoke such trollish name-calling.
I think you are right. The original statement does seem to be in good faith now that I reread it.
I however do stand behind the statement in general. “The wrong side of history” usually is a euphemism for the “getting on the wrong side of elements in the US government”.
Ideally doing good things shouldn’t be dependent on the political system.
Edit: I just realized the most obvious reading of this comment isn’t the one I intended. I meant that the political system’s job should be to get out of the way of the people trying to create good things.
A lot of us pro-market liberaltarian types would have been Marxists before the last 50 years of overwhelming evidence in favor of capitalism came in...
I often get the impression, from young american consequentialist libertarians, that they would be socialists in any other country. Certainly they don’t resemble right-libertarians elsewhere, or older american libertarians. And conversely your socialist organisations are missing their usual complement of precocious hippy cynics
You’ve never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it’s another good example of your first point.
The Ceteris Paribus is important. The fact that you can think of a lot of democracies that are nice places to live and dictatorships that are lousy isn’t good evidence that democracy is beneficial in itself. I view democracy as an extremely expensive concession to primitive equality norms that primitive agriculturalists can’t afford. But it isn’t a luxury worth buying.
How many cetera can you require to be paria before you’re creating an implicit No True Scotsman?
It’s quite possible, and indeed I find the idea highly persuasive, that while dictatorships may not necessarily cause all sorts of unpleasant things (oppression, civil war, corruption, etc.), they do make those unpleasant things much more likely due to more hidden structural flaws (e.g. lack of an outlet for dissatisfaction).
That proposition sounds to me a bit like saying “ceteris paribus, driving at 230km/h will get you to your destination much faster”.
I read that comment as: “I think it’s actually doing better than most (in staying self-aware and not being as socially naive)”. Not that it’s doing better than Marxists or others in actually changing the world. They obviously did a lot more in that regard than LessWrong ever has (or likely ever will).
Agreed except for the part about Less Wrong is unusually bad in this regard. I think it’s actually doing better then most gatherings of smart people attempting to reorganize society. Keep in mind lesswrong’s equivalent 50 years ago would have been advocating Marxism.
Agreed.
You’ve never lived under a dictatorship have you? I strongly disagree with the above statement and think it’s another good example of your first point.
True, however, the previous culture was hyper-conformist, since it was ‘designed’ to create people intelligent enough to operate machinery but conformist enough to work in an assembly line.
What makes you say that? Reading “lesswrong’s equivalent 50 years ago” makes me think RAND Corporation.
As someone who has read many RAND papers and their retrospectives about the people in RAND 50 years ago, I strongly agree—if nothing else, because of RAND’s early computer work like constructing MANIAC and developing decision and game theory.
I think it gets closer to the truth if you replace 50 years with 100. A century ago communist ideas were the hip thing for a forward-thinking young person to believe in, especially in my home country (Russia), just like singularitarianism is now. This analogy is one of the main reasons why I’m not an outspoken singularitarian.
AFAIK dictatorships are higher variance than democracies, but on average they aren’t too differerent (in terms of GDP at least). Most intuitive explanation: a good dictator can do really good things and a bad dictator can do really bad things, but good and bad democracies aren’t able to do as much good/bad because the political system moves like molasses.
This is the common wisdom at the moment but it’s far too short-termist. All theories are provisional and eventually your enlightened dictator will find themselves on the wrong side of history and need to be removed. Of course you can build a democracy which can’t do that and a dictatorship which can but I suspect the “moves like molasses” aspect moves with this quality and not the voting ritual.
It is most fascinating how often the right side of history coincidences neatly with the interest of the USG and how often their armed forces or intelligence agencies graciously do the removing.
Sorry, bro, but this statement by its very nature deserves a dozen downvotes, never mind coming from a user who was being proudly apolitical and striving for a non-tribal approach to things five minutes ago. It is perfectly clear to me that “the wrong side of history” in the parent, while perhaps being less than gracious rhetorically, was mentioned in good faith, and not intended to invoke such trollish name-calling.
Noticing the enemies of a very powerful organization tend to consistently disappear is not I think an inherently political or tribal stance.
I think you are right. The original statement does seem to be in good faith now that I reread it.
I however do stand behind the statement in general. “The wrong side of history” usually is a euphemism for the “getting on the wrong side of elements in the US government”.
Ideally doing good things shouldn’t be dependent on the political system.
Edit: I just realized the most obvious reading of this comment isn’t the one I intended. I meant that the political system’s job should be to get out of the way of the people trying to create good things.
If you think so, you’re using the wrong ideals, or using them wrong.
60′s LessWrong would be Ayn Rand’s Objectivism rather than some yet another interpretation of Marxism.
It might be the error where “X years ago” counts back from 2000 instead of the current year.
Or perhaps just dropping a “1” from the left side of the number.
A lot of us pro-market liberaltarian types would have been Marxists before the last 50 years of overwhelming evidence in favor of capitalism came in...
I often get the impression, from young american consequentialist libertarians, that they would be socialists in any other country. Certainly they don’t resemble right-libertarians elsewhere, or older american libertarians. And conversely your socialist organisations are missing their usual complement of precocious hippy cynics
Can you unpack these intuitions? As a young American consequentialist vacillating between socialism and libertarianism, I’m very curious.
The Ceteris Paribus is important. The fact that you can think of a lot of democracies that are nice places to live and dictatorships that are lousy isn’t good evidence that democracy is beneficial in itself. I view democracy as an extremely expensive concession to primitive equality norms that primitive agriculturalists can’t afford. But it isn’t a luxury worth buying.
How many cetera can you require to be paria before you’re creating an implicit No True Scotsman?
It’s quite possible, and indeed I find the idea highly persuasive, that while dictatorships may not necessarily cause all sorts of unpleasant things (oppression, civil war, corruption, etc.), they do make those unpleasant things much more likely due to more hidden structural flaws (e.g. lack of an outlet for dissatisfaction).
That proposition sounds to me a bit like saying “ceteris paribus, driving at 230km/h will get you to your destination much faster”.
Bear in mind that LessWrong has not actually reorganised society yet.
I read that comment as: “I think it’s actually doing better than most (in staying self-aware and not being as socially naive)”. Not that it’s doing better than Marxists or others in actually changing the world. They obviously did a lot more in that regard than LessWrong ever has (or likely ever will).