The most dangerous religious fundamentalisms lead people to do things such as blowing up buildings, committing mass murders, jailing and torturing people for apostasy, and throwing acid in the faces of schoolchildren. This occurs both when dangerous religious fundamentalists occupy positions of formal political power (governments), and when they do not (terrorist groups, militias, abortion-clinic bombers).
Well, LW has only been around for a couple years, give it time. I’ve definitely seen ideas here that, if taken to their logical conclusion, would imply that under the right circumstances one has a moral imperative to do comparable things. There is also a norm against flinching from taking things to their logical conclusions.
Indeed, that sort of behavior seems to be pretty rare in the Traditional Rationality community too — the skeptics movement; the New Atheists; etc.
Notice how you need to add the qualifier “New” to “Atheist movement” there in order to exclude all theatrocities committed by the old atheists.
Notice how you need to add the qualifier “New” to “Atheist movement” there in order to exclude all the atrocities committed by the old atheists.
Although linking the atrocities of 20th-century Communism to atheism seems to be a favorite trope of contemporary reaction, I’m confused as to why you chose to bring it up in the context of traditional rationality. Marxism might claim an empirical basis, but it’s quite hostile to skepticism, and neither its atheism nor its claimed empiricism seem foundational to its social aims. Likewise, Dawkins et al. don’t inherit from any of the major philosophers in the socialist family tree that I know of; they’re both products of the Enlightenment, but they took quite different paths on their way here.
Moreover, the broader socialist movement isn’t at all incompatible with religion: consider liberation theology.
Marxism might claim an empirical basis, but it’s quite hostile to skepticism
I’ve read Marxist stuff (the old man himself, Gramsci, Adorno, Zizek, my boyfriend’s incomprehensible paper on Lacan...) and the LAST thing I’d describe (non-USSR-sponsored) Marxist thought as is “hostile to skepticism”. It looks hyper-skeptical to me! At least when describing everything outside of a communist utopia that might or might not be envisioned in their writing. When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
Did you know that Gramsci, a Marxist through and through (although a liberal and idealist one), developed the highly LW-relevant concept of cultural hegemony? [1]
(I disagree with those dudes on quite a few issues, it’s just that strawmanning them as blindly orthodox fanatics is unfair.)
[1] “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”—Philip K. Dick
It looks hyper-skeptical to me! At least when describing everything outside of a communist utopia
I guess the Pope is also skeptical about Buddhist reincarnation.
When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
If one believes that “everything is a class fight” (I know this is oversimplification), then finding elements of class fight in everything is not an evidence for their skepticism.
Shortly, skepticism does not mean “a belief that your opponents are wrong”.
Speaking of which, communists were also extreme utilitarians. The problem with utilitarians, really, is that self described utilitarians are not the people who calculate utilities so much better than everyone else. It is the people who think they calculate utilities so much better than anyone else. Throw Dunning-Kruger into the mix, and people who actually have troubles evaluating utility are utilitarians, whereas those who can evaluate utility also process uncertainty and tend to act in more deontological manner due to incorporating empirical knowledge on outcome of strategies, or due to concern for societal values like trust etc. I blogged some about that
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us. Then, we will build a paradise with infinite utility, because there will be no one to stop us. Net result: huge positive utility. From utilitarian viewpoint, we are the good guys, which means that anyone who opposes us deserves to be killed.
Add some technical details, and you have communism; add different details and you have something else. Focus the attention of people to those technical details to avoid the outside view comparison.
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
Well I think it is fairly complicated. It may be that the lack of understanding of what it takes to think straight leads to sociopathy in some instances (I see sociopathy as a symptom of a multitude of abnormalities).
I wrote another blog post on that: http://dmytry.com/blog/?p=268 . What I think happens, is that people with strongly deficient utility evaluation—people who do not even see what it takes to evaluate utility, people who will evaluate utility on any partial outcome that popped up in their mind, or was even suggested from outside (without even any explicit assertion that it is complete!) - tend to end up self describing as utilitarian, and in some sense, actually believing that they are, and that they are highly moral (and everyone else is flawed).
Other issue, is that historically it is not in the slightest bit positive when someone pushing a bad idea is not simply being selfish. In practice, to do the most evil, selfishness does not suffice. It takes certain degree of selflessness in the name of a bad idea and sloppy thought. It takes narcissist love with intellectual self. A particular form of incompetence is far superior to malice when it comes to actually doing large scale evil.
Long ago (I don’t remember the source) I read an interesting thought: that people who speak about great ideas or strong emotions are probably intelectually and emotionally pretty weak, and when they get any result in such area, they are overwhelmed by the contrast. (It’s like Dunning-Kruger on steroids.)
For example a smart person will have dozen smart ideas every day, so “having a smart idea” is no big deal for them, it’s life as usual. Even if they find something extraordinarily interesting, they have a large reference class, so instead of greatness of the idea, they will speak about specific details that make this idea interesting.
On the other hand, when a rather dumb person hears a non-trivial idea and understands it, it is a shocking experience, a unique uncomparable thing. So the person will treat it as the greatest idea ever, the dividing line between stupid and smart, and will be obsessed about it.
Analogically, if a person with supressed emotions or mostly negative emotions suddenly falls in love, they will perceive their emotion as overwhelming, unique in the whole universe, unrepeatable. A person with a larger emotional scale would see the same emotion as a point in a continuum, so there is e.g. smaller chance they would do something stupid if their love is not reciprocated. The former person would (by a mind projection fallacy) think that the latter person’s feelings are much smaller, because the reactions are less dramatic.
So maybe the same effect is at play here—people who never thought too much about morality suddenly understand some moral rule, and (their interpretation of) it immediately becomes the moral rule, the dividing line between immoral and moral. (And if the rule is not based on emotions or traditions, it is convenient to label it as “utilitarian”.)
That’s an interesting thought. On the ideas, the other issue is that e.g. with certain fairly advanced mathematics, fuzzy and inaccurate understanding may easily be more amazing than any coherent understanding can ever be; the condition that is normally quite short lived if one has sufficiently thorough understanding of base level concepts and can study the idea formally, but this condition can be perpetual otherwise. Same can happen with morality.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us.
...add some technical details, and you have communism
U mindkilled, bro. Yes, that was what the people who called themselves “communists” did in the 20th century. But name any other system, no matter which one, that wouldn’t kill everyone who refuses to obey it in certain matters.
E.g. fleeing from a battlefield; every nation that grok’d total war gave its court-martials the powers of swift summary execution in the 20th century. It’s what the “communists” were trying to regulate, and from what perspective, and how much, and what processes this led to—that’s what you have a problem with, not with the fact of enforcement itself.
Everyone has to resort to murder sooner or later, it’s the actual internal details of the system (like the type and amount of murder, and what incentives the “undesirables” have to surrender and avoid it, if any) that make the difference.
You have a good point. But there is a difference between people who see killing others as a regrettable last choice (e.g. in self-defence), and those who see killing others as “no big deal” (sociopaths, and their happy-death-spiralled followers). Although there probably is a continuum.
EDIT: The difference is that a non-sociopathic utilitarian considers a possibility of running on a corrupted hardware, if they are a rationalist, or simply deflect the thought by an “ugh field” if they aren’t.
When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
This is getting a little too politically charged for my liking, but cynicism does not imply skepticism, at least in the sense I intended. Now, Marxism is built on a set of social theories expressed largely in terms of self-interest or group self-interest, and Marxist scholars have gotten fairly inventive within that framework. The ideology wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as it has been if it wasn’t credible as social criticism, or if it didn’t speak to people skeptical of the status quo. So it does speak the language to some degree, and I probably should have been more accommodating of that in the grandparent.
But for me to call it open to skepticism, I’d have to see evidence that Marxist thinkers engaged in good-faith questioning of the theory’s own social and economic assumptions or at least engaged with skeptics on even ground, and of that I’ve seen very little. In fact, most strains of Marxism seem to actively discourage these lines of thinking—a tendency predictably most pronounced in Marxist political regimes, but which goes all the way back to Marx and Engels’ writings on ideology. False consciousness and related concepts offer a fully general alternative.
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
E.g. something a bit like that description of “false consciousness” clearly does happen, not as to provide a convenient reason why capitalism must be the unseen Ultimate Evil, just as a matter of human nature—something psychosocial and fairly disturbing, else we why would see e.g. realistic/cynical poor workers voting against progressive tax. (I’m not arguing its virtues here, just pointing out that it’s obviously a big mid-term gain for lower class people who realistically expect little relative social mobility for their family.)
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is essentially a result of ideological control which the proletariat either do not know they are under or which they disregard with a view to their own POUM (probability/possibility of upward mobility). POUM or something like it is required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption.
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“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”—John Steinbeck
And yet ideologies saying e.g. that people in “nice” countries act in “enlightened self-interest”, and are generally special snowflakes that shouldn’t be stirred in their beautiful arrangements, are respected and highly popular. Clearly a dose of Marxist cynicism could serve as a good counterweight to such happy individualist fantasies. People—most of all people who want to be “normal”—are fucking delusional as to their immediate or long-term personal interest, that’s what Marxism is saying. Hell, that was what George Carlin often said too. (I don’t agree that a Marxist dictatorship should decide everyone’s best interest, I’m not a strawman commie.)
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
Frankly, I’d rather not compare the rationality record between various unspecified creeds, at least here; that sort of thing has a way of taking over threads, and in its general form seems almost completely orthogonal to Catholic deconversion or anything related to it. This business about skepticism came up in the context of Marx’s proximity to traditional rationality of the Dawkins/Randi school, particularly in terms of approach to atheism, and that’s where I’d like to keep it.
Dawkins et al. seem to be skeptical in methodology: presented with a set of supernaturalist beliefs, their normal procedure is to look at the claimed evidence for them, look for replications or attempt to perform a replication if it’s convenient, and proceed to deprecate the beliefs in question when they predictably fail. They do tend to be fairly apolitical (Penn and Teller notwithstanding), and I’m not even sure what a proper extrapolation of this methodology to the social realm would look like, but I am pretty sure it wouldn’t start with a future history (sketchy though Marx’s is) or a complete theory of class interaction. And I’m also pretty sure most Marxists wouldn’t appreciate a Randi-style analysis of their own foundational beliefs.
I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, but as I haven’t seen anyone in this thread encouraging the lady in the OP to reject her conversion on transhumanist grounds, I’m again not sure why you’re bringing it up.
Well, Hitchens always considered himself a socialist.
(BTW, many socialists would deny him the honor. Me, I think his reputation was certainly quite spotty from any ideological view—not that I hate him or anything.)
Well, LW has only been around for a couple years, give it time. I’ve definitely seen ideas here that, if taken to their logical conclusion, would imply that under the right circumstances one has a moral imperative to do comparable things. There is also a norm against flinching from taking things to their logical conclusions.
Notice how you need to add the qualifier “New” to “Atheist movement” there in order to exclude all the atrocities committed by the old atheists.
Although linking the atrocities of 20th-century Communism to atheism seems to be a favorite trope of contemporary reaction, I’m confused as to why you chose to bring it up in the context of traditional rationality. Marxism might claim an empirical basis, but it’s quite hostile to skepticism, and neither its atheism nor its claimed empiricism seem foundational to its social aims. Likewise, Dawkins et al. don’t inherit from any of the major philosophers in the socialist family tree that I know of; they’re both products of the Enlightenment, but they took quite different paths on their way here.
Moreover, the broader socialist movement isn’t at all incompatible with religion: consider liberation theology.
I’ve read Marxist stuff (the old man himself, Gramsci, Adorno, Zizek, my boyfriend’s incomprehensible paper on Lacan...) and the LAST thing I’d describe (non-USSR-sponsored) Marxist thought as is “hostile to skepticism”. It looks hyper-skeptical to me! At least when describing everything outside of a communist utopia that might or might not be envisioned in their writing. When observing contemporary social phenomena—from family life to academia—they’ve historically been rather cynical and tried to look for base motives of power, dominiance and greed affecting them.
Did you know that Gramsci, a Marxist through and through (although a liberal and idealist one), developed the highly LW-relevant concept of cultural hegemony? [1]
(I disagree with those dudes on quite a few issues, it’s just that strawmanning them as blindly orthodox fanatics is unfair.)
[1] “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”—Philip K. Dick
I guess the Pope is also skeptical about Buddhist reincarnation.
If one believes that “everything is a class fight” (I know this is oversimplification), then finding elements of class fight in everything is not an evidence for their skepticism.
Shortly, skepticism does not mean “a belief that your opponents are wrong”.
Speaking of which, communists were also extreme utilitarians. The problem with utilitarians, really, is that self described utilitarians are not the people who calculate utilities so much better than everyone else. It is the people who think they calculate utilities so much better than anyone else. Throw Dunning-Kruger into the mix, and people who actually have troubles evaluating utility are utilitarians, whereas those who can evaluate utility also process uncertainty and tend to act in more deontological manner due to incorporating empirical knowledge on outcome of strategies, or due to concern for societal values like trust etc. I blogged some about that
Exactly. For a sociopath it is very useful to (pretend to?) be utilitarian—one good rationalization, and anything becomes morally OK.
First, let’s kill all our enemies, or more precisely anyone who refuses to obey us. Then, we will build a paradise with infinite utility, because there will be no one to stop us. Net result: huge positive utility. From utilitarian viewpoint, we are the good guys, which means that anyone who opposes us deserves to be killed.
Add some technical details, and you have communism; add different details and you have something else. Focus the attention of people to those technical details to avoid the outside view comparison.
Well I think it is fairly complicated. It may be that the lack of understanding of what it takes to think straight leads to sociopathy in some instances (I see sociopathy as a symptom of a multitude of abnormalities).
I wrote another blog post on that: http://dmytry.com/blog/?p=268 . What I think happens, is that people with strongly deficient utility evaluation—people who do not even see what it takes to evaluate utility, people who will evaluate utility on any partial outcome that popped up in their mind, or was even suggested from outside (without even any explicit assertion that it is complete!) - tend to end up self describing as utilitarian, and in some sense, actually believing that they are, and that they are highly moral (and everyone else is flawed).
Other issue, is that historically it is not in the slightest bit positive when someone pushing a bad idea is not simply being selfish. In practice, to do the most evil, selfishness does not suffice. It takes certain degree of selflessness in the name of a bad idea and sloppy thought. It takes narcissist love with intellectual self. A particular form of incompetence is far superior to malice when it comes to actually doing large scale evil.
Long ago (I don’t remember the source) I read an interesting thought: that people who speak about great ideas or strong emotions are probably intelectually and emotionally pretty weak, and when they get any result in such area, they are overwhelmed by the contrast. (It’s like Dunning-Kruger on steroids.)
For example a smart person will have dozen smart ideas every day, so “having a smart idea” is no big deal for them, it’s life as usual. Even if they find something extraordinarily interesting, they have a large reference class, so instead of greatness of the idea, they will speak about specific details that make this idea interesting.
On the other hand, when a rather dumb person hears a non-trivial idea and understands it, it is a shocking experience, a unique uncomparable thing. So the person will treat it as the greatest idea ever, the dividing line between stupid and smart, and will be obsessed about it.
Analogically, if a person with supressed emotions or mostly negative emotions suddenly falls in love, they will perceive their emotion as overwhelming, unique in the whole universe, unrepeatable. A person with a larger emotional scale would see the same emotion as a point in a continuum, so there is e.g. smaller chance they would do something stupid if their love is not reciprocated. The former person would (by a mind projection fallacy) think that the latter person’s feelings are much smaller, because the reactions are less dramatic.
So maybe the same effect is at play here—people who never thought too much about morality suddenly understand some moral rule, and (their interpretation of) it immediately becomes the moral rule, the dividing line between immoral and moral. (And if the rule is not based on emotions or traditions, it is convenient to label it as “utilitarian”.)
That’s an interesting thought. On the ideas, the other issue is that e.g. with certain fairly advanced mathematics, fuzzy and inaccurate understanding may easily be more amazing than any coherent understanding can ever be; the condition that is normally quite short lived if one has sufficiently thorough understanding of base level concepts and can study the idea formally, but this condition can be perpetual otherwise. Same can happen with morality.
U mindkilled, bro. Yes, that was what the people who called themselves “communists” did in the 20th century. But name any other system, no matter which one, that wouldn’t kill everyone who refuses to obey it in certain matters.
E.g. fleeing from a battlefield; every nation that grok’d total war gave its court-martials the powers of swift summary execution in the 20th century. It’s what the “communists” were trying to regulate, and from what perspective, and how much, and what processes this led to—that’s what you have a problem with, not with the fact of enforcement itself.
Everyone has to resort to murder sooner or later, it’s the actual internal details of the system (like the type and amount of murder, and what incentives the “undesirables” have to surrender and avoid it, if any) that make the difference.
You have a good point. But there is a difference between people who see killing others as a regrettable last choice (e.g. in self-defence), and those who see killing others as “no big deal” (sociopaths, and their happy-death-spiralled followers). Although there probably is a continuum.
EDIT: The difference is that a non-sociopathic utilitarian considers a possibility of running on a corrupted hardware, if they are a rationalist, or simply deflect the thought by an “ugh field” if they aren’t.
If you mean that Marxists are all furiously agreeing with each other, I can assure you that they’re not.
If you mean that they all agree on whatever one makes the minimal criteria for calling someone Marxist, well, trivially yes.
If you mean that they’re really confident in their conclusions, that seems to be temperamental.
This is why I avoid the term when I can (unless I’m referring specifically to the ancient school of philosophy).
This is getting a little too politically charged for my liking, but cynicism does not imply skepticism, at least in the sense I intended. Now, Marxism is built on a set of social theories expressed largely in terms of self-interest or group self-interest, and Marxist scholars have gotten fairly inventive within that framework. The ideology wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as it has been if it wasn’t credible as social criticism, or if it didn’t speak to people skeptical of the status quo. So it does speak the language to some degree, and I probably should have been more accommodating of that in the grandparent.
But for me to call it open to skepticism, I’d have to see evidence that Marxist thinkers engaged in good-faith questioning of the theory’s own social and economic assumptions or at least engaged with skeptics on even ground, and of that I’ve seen very little. In fact, most strains of Marxism seem to actively discourage these lines of thinking—a tendency predictably most pronounced in Marxist political regimes, but which goes all the way back to Marx and Engels’ writings on ideology. False consciousness and related concepts offer a fully general alternative.
This is all true, but we’re comparing the rationality record between various creeds and not imagining how well one such creed would do in a vacuum.
E.g. something a bit like that description of “false consciousness” clearly does happen, not as to provide a convenient reason why capitalism must be the unseen Ultimate Evil, just as a matter of human nature—something psychosocial and fairly disturbing, else we why would see e.g. realistic/cynical poor workers voting against progressive tax. (I’m not arguing its virtues here, just pointing out that it’s obviously a big mid-term gain for lower class people who realistically expect little relative social mobility for their family.)
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And yet ideologies saying e.g. that people in “nice” countries act in “enlightened self-interest”, and are generally special snowflakes that shouldn’t be stirred in their beautiful arrangements, are respected and highly popular. Clearly a dose of Marxist cynicism could serve as a good counterweight to such happy individualist fantasies. People—most of all people who want to be “normal”—are fucking delusional as to their immediate or long-term personal interest, that’s what Marxism is saying. Hell, that was what George Carlin often said too. (I don’t agree that a Marxist dictatorship should decide everyone’s best interest, I’m not a strawman commie.)
Frankly, I’d rather not compare the rationality record between various unspecified creeds, at least here; that sort of thing has a way of taking over threads, and in its general form seems almost completely orthogonal to Catholic deconversion or anything related to it. This business about skepticism came up in the context of Marx’s proximity to traditional rationality of the Dawkins/Randi school, particularly in terms of approach to atheism, and that’s where I’d like to keep it.
Dawkins et al. seem to be skeptical in methodology: presented with a set of supernaturalist beliefs, their normal procedure is to look at the claimed evidence for them, look for replications or attempt to perform a replication if it’s convenient, and proceed to deprecate the beliefs in question when they predictably fail. They do tend to be fairly apolitical (Penn and Teller notwithstanding), and I’m not even sure what a proper extrapolation of this methodology to the social realm would look like, but I am pretty sure it wouldn’t start with a future history (sketchy though Marx’s is) or a complete theory of class interaction. And I’m also pretty sure most Marxists wouldn’t appreciate a Randi-style analysis of their own foundational beliefs.
Well, Hitchens always considered himself a socialist.
I could say the same about transhumanism.
I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, but as I haven’t seen anyone in this thread encouraging the lady in the OP to reject her conversion on transhumanist grounds, I’m again not sure why you’re bringing it up.
(BTW, many socialists would deny him the honor. Me, I think his reputation was certainly quite spotty from any ideological view—not that I hate him or anything.)