I find it difficult to believe that any specific weakness is unfixable a priori.
Fixing human biology or conditioning is easy with the right technology, but the game theory that often pushed the biology or the conditioning there in the first place can be more tricky.
Very true. Also, the ‘right technology’ does not currently exist, and isn’t likely to in the next decade.
Social reformers often don’t seem to understand that pushing a society far away from ‘default’ human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope—you spend more and more energy fighting just to stay in place, while creating an increasingly dangerous pool of potential energy that acts to oppose your efforts. Push hard enough for long enough, and eventually you get crushed as the boulder rolls back downhill.
Exactly, this is why there haven’t been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that’s the word in my local Baron’s court.
I would say having a Baron is more civilized than having a popularity contest. I bet the latter is how things around the stone age camp-fire where worked out.
My post was not meant as an endorsement of that lifestyle, nor as a condemnation; I was mainly trying to point out that it existed and was quite different from most stratified post-Neolithic social systems. Honestly, we don’t know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
Honestly, we don’t know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
I agree with this. Even modern examples of tribes with tech not far above that level aren’t representative due to marginal terrain and interaction with other groups.
Also, modern paleolithic societies might be different from early paleolithic societies due to change over time—it would surprise me if there wasn’t gradual improvement in their tools, and there would also be random cultural changes.
It is near-impossible to compare the space of all possible human “barons” with the space of all possible human “popularity contests” and decide which one is more “civilized” across multiple criteria.
This seems a straw man.He didn’t say they where always or often unsuccessful. Just that this can happen. And we clearly do have examples of unsuccessful attempts. See the USSR or the Puritan Colonies in the Americas.
That would have been more reasonable, though also trivial and irrelevant (yes, some reformers fail. what of it? this comment wouldn’t make sense in context). But the claim in the great-grandparent is made in absolute terms, a claim about the nature of the world—if you push society from default modes, then it will get harder and harder to accomplish nothing much and eventually you will be crushed.
One might feel compelled to interpret this as an error, and say that the intent was to say something trivial instead of wrong. But I thought that unlikely based on the user’s posts in this topic: one about how reformers are crushed by history, one about how “the PC hive mind” is trying to silence them in order to establish themselves as the unquestioned masters of reality, and one misinterpreting and mocking a post about how you can insult people with facts.
Comments about how one’s “opponents” are doomed to horrible violent retribution by the very nature of the universe are not unheard of. See, for example, the Men’s Rights Movement, branches of which prophecy a coming time of inevitable violent revolution against our feminist overlords, or Communism, under some versions of which the success of the movement and the overthrow of all opposition is an (eventual) immutable fact.
What is a “default” human mode, though ? As I said on a sibling thread, there do exist examples of apparently successful social engineering efforts. For example, in most of the developed world, outright slavery was not only eliminated but rendered morally repugnant, and this change does not show any signs of reversal. To use an older example, monogamy became the social norm sometime during the Middle Ages (IIRC), and it persists as such to this day—despite the fact that humans are biologically capable of polygamy.
Social reformers often don’t seem to understand that pushing a society far away from ‘default’ human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope...
The more charitable (and less fully general) interpretation seems to be that they disagree about where the local maxima are. To say nothing of the difficulty of describing default human behavior given the differences between post-Neolithic environments and the EEA.
That would be more charitable, but less accurate. Most of the major social reform movements of the 20th century explicitly claimed that the human mind is a blank slate that can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning, and built elaborate reform programs on the idea that they could eradicate everything from discrimination to selfishness through aggressive re-education efforts. I’m not inclined to let them sweep that bit of hubris under the rug, especially since the same groups are in many cases continuing to advocate for the same reform programs despite the fact that one of their key assumptions has been disproved.
I’ll certainly concede that we don’t currently know exactly what the landscape of human behavioral tendencies and constraints looks like, but this should be a motivation for reform advocates to be cautious rather than dismissing the concern. Blithely assuming that you can suppress an infinite variety of undesired behaviors with sufficient social pressure is a recipe for disaster—the end result is likely to be a long buildup of resentment and covert resistance, followed by a sudden revolution that replaces the reformer’s desired social order with a new regime that feels more psychologically comfortable to whatever faction manages to seize power.
Most of the major social reform movements of the 20th century explicitly claimed that the human mind is a blank slate that can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning
That’s the special case of “every point in the state space”, isn’t it?
And I’m not even sure it’s true. Marxist ideology, for example, explicitly disclaims that sort of neuroplasticity: its big idea (oversimplifying like crazy here) is that people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups, and that this sort of group agency is stable enough to be exploited when promoted to conscious awareness. Far from implying a tabula rasa, it actually requires certain stable psychology.
I don’t see how “people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups” contradicts “the human mind can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning”. To me it seems that one implies the other.
Isn’t the whole Marxist project based on the idea that you can bring about radical changes in human behavior by reorganizing society? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” can only work if humans are so malleable that basic greed, laziness, selfishness and ambition can be eradicated through social programs.
I don’t see how “people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups” contradicts “the human mind can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning”. To me it seems that one implies the other.
It’s less about social conditioning and more about the extent to which people pursue group interests regardless of social conditioning. To people subscribing to Marxist ideas of class, behaviors which we might perceive as individualistic ambition in fact serve partly—even primarily—to further the interests of the social class in which an actor is embedded, unbeknownst to the actor; when a Marxist talks about capitalist greed, they’re not talking about the selfishness of individual capitalists, they’re accusing capitalists as a group of greed for the resources of other social groups. None of this requires any grand scheme of brainwashing (though social conditioning does come into play when we start talking about “false consciousness” and related ideas); it’s all seen as implicit in people’s native behavior.
It wouldn’t be too far wrong to describe Marxism as primarily a theory of group agency; originally it covered only coarse-grained economic classes, but modern descendants of Marxist ideology have extended it to cover other common interests as well. You’re probably more likely to encounter the latter these days.
I think we mean different things by ‘brainwashing’ and ‘social conditioning’, which is causing some terminology confusion. The above is perfectly consistent with my thesis, which is simply that a major theme of 20th-century social movements was the belief that you can change individual behavior pretty much however you want by changing the society that people live in.
I call this an incorrect belief because more recent research in cognitive science reveals that there are strong constraints on what kinds of mental adaptations will actually happen in practice, and thus on what kinds of social organizations will actually be stable enough to survive for any great length of time.
For example, humans have an innate tendency to form ingroup / outgroup distinctions and to look down on members of their outgroup, which is one of the factors responsible for a lot of bigotry and racism. Society can tell people who to include in these groups with a high degree of success, and can encourage or discourage the abuse of outgroup members. But you can’t eliminate the underlying desire for an outgroup, and if you try you’ll get odd phenomena like people who violently hate their political opponents while honestly believing themselves to be paragons of love and tolerance.
Again, this is not to say that reforms are impossible. Rather, the point is that you can’t fix everything simultaneously, because every social change has unpredictable side effects that currently no one knows how to eliminate. This is one reason why grand social engineering projects almost always fail—because they carelessly pile up lots of big changes in a short period of time, and the accumulated side effects create so much social chaos that they get deposed and replaced with someone more psychologically comfortable.
The above is perfectly consistent with my thesis, which is simply that a major theme of 20th-century social movements was the belief that you can change individual behavior pretty much however you want by changing the society that people live in.
I feel like I’m explaining this poorly. You can’t make arbitrary changes to behavior under the Marxist worldview by making social reforms. You can get people to further the interests of their social class more effectively by changing their perception of class, or get them to further the interests of other social classes by making them aware of common social goals, but to a Marxist this follows preexisting and fairly strict principles of how people relate to the class structure. To an orthodox Marxist, for example, improving social conditions by means of placing constraints on the behavior of socially dominant classes would be doomed to failure without a corresponding increase in the power of socially subordinate classes: other forms of exploitation would be found, and class relations would regress to the mean.
It’s not that you can do whatever you want by hacking society in a certain way; it’s that people’s psychology is organized in such a way as to lead to more equitable outcomes if you hack society in particular ways. And even describing this as “hacking” is a little misleading; Marx didn’t see any of it as a social project, more as the inevitable result of existing social forces. (Incidentally, this is a main point of divergence between orthodox Marxism and Leninism or Maoism, both of which aimed to produce Marxist revolutions “early”.)
Fixing human biology or conditioning is easy with the right technology, but the game theory that often pushed the biology or the conditioning there in the first place can be more tricky.
Very true. Also, the ‘right technology’ does not currently exist, and isn’t likely to in the next decade.
Social reformers often don’t seem to understand that pushing a society far away from ‘default’ human modes of conduct is a bit like pushing a boulder up an increasingly steep slope—you spend more and more energy fighting just to stay in place, while creating an increasingly dangerous pool of potential energy that acts to oppose your efforts. Push hard enough for long enough, and eventually you get crushed as the boulder rolls back downhill.
Exactly, this is why there haven’t been any successful social reforms, and people who try to effect reform are successful at first but lose momentum as the reform gets more and more established before being crushed by powerful historical forces. At least that’s the word in my local Baron’s court.
You have a Baron? We just talk things out over the campfire while pounding willow bark and sucking the marrow out of aurochs bones.
Grunt grunt grunt, ook ook.
performs mitosis
You say there was what size bang?
I would say having a Baron is more civilized than having a popularity contest. I bet the latter is how things around the stone age camp-fire where worked out.
You know what it’s like living with popularity contests Have you lived with a Baron?
My post was not meant as an endorsement of that lifestyle, nor as a condemnation; I was mainly trying to point out that it existed and was quite different from most stratified post-Neolithic social systems. Honestly, we don’t know enough about what the average Paleolithic social structure looked like to advocate effectively for it, even if we wanted to.
I agree with this. Even modern examples of tribes with tech not far above that level aren’t representative due to marginal terrain and interaction with other groups.
Also, modern paleolithic societies might be different from early paleolithic societies due to change over time—it would surprise me if there wasn’t gradual improvement in their tools, and there would also be random cultural changes.
It is near-impossible to compare the space of all possible human “barons” with the space of all possible human “popularity contests” and decide which one is more “civilized” across multiple criteria.
Apply this argument to the politics of suffering Konkvistador talked about.
This seems a straw man.He didn’t say they where always or often unsuccessful. Just that this can happen. And we clearly do have examples of unsuccessful attempts. See the USSR or the Puritan Colonies in the Americas.
That would have been more reasonable, though also trivial and irrelevant (yes, some reformers fail. what of it? this comment wouldn’t make sense in context). But the claim in the great-grandparent is made in absolute terms, a claim about the nature of the world—if you push society from default modes, then it will get harder and harder to accomplish nothing much and eventually you will be crushed.
One might feel compelled to interpret this as an error, and say that the intent was to say something trivial instead of wrong. But I thought that unlikely based on the user’s posts in this topic: one about how reformers are crushed by history, one about how “the PC hive mind” is trying to silence them in order to establish themselves as the unquestioned masters of reality, and one misinterpreting and mocking a post about how you can insult people with facts.
Comments about how one’s “opponents” are doomed to horrible violent retribution by the very nature of the universe are not unheard of. See, for example, the Men’s Rights Movement, branches of which prophecy a coming time of inevitable violent revolution against our feminist overlords, or Communism, under some versions of which the success of the movement and the overthrow of all opposition is an (eventual) immutable fact.
What is a “default” human mode, though ? As I said on a sibling thread, there do exist examples of apparently successful social engineering efforts. For example, in most of the developed world, outright slavery was not only eliminated but rendered morally repugnant, and this change does not show any signs of reversal. To use an older example, monogamy became the social norm sometime during the Middle Ages (IIRC), and it persists as such to this day—despite the fact that humans are biologically capable of polygamy.
The more charitable (and less fully general) interpretation seems to be that they disagree about where the local maxima are. To say nothing of the difficulty of describing default human behavior given the differences between post-Neolithic environments and the EEA.
That would be more charitable, but less accurate. Most of the major social reform movements of the 20th century explicitly claimed that the human mind is a blank slate that can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning, and built elaborate reform programs on the idea that they could eradicate everything from discrimination to selfishness through aggressive re-education efforts. I’m not inclined to let them sweep that bit of hubris under the rug, especially since the same groups are in many cases continuing to advocate for the same reform programs despite the fact that one of their key assumptions has been disproved.
I’ll certainly concede that we don’t currently know exactly what the landscape of human behavioral tendencies and constraints looks like, but this should be a motivation for reform advocates to be cautious rather than dismissing the concern. Blithely assuming that you can suppress an infinite variety of undesired behaviors with sufficient social pressure is a recipe for disaster—the end result is likely to be a long buildup of resentment and covert resistance, followed by a sudden revolution that replaces the reformer’s desired social order with a new regime that feels more psychologically comfortable to whatever faction manages to seize power.
That’s the special case of “every point in the state space”, isn’t it?
And I’m not even sure it’s true. Marxist ideology, for example, explicitly disclaims that sort of neuroplasticity: its big idea (oversimplifying like crazy here) is that people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups, and that this sort of group agency is stable enough to be exploited when promoted to conscious awareness. Far from implying a tabula rasa, it actually requires certain stable psychology.
I don’t see how “people unconsciously act as agents of large-scale social groups” contradicts “the human mind can be arbitrarily re-written by social conditioning”. To me it seems that one implies the other.
Isn’t the whole Marxist project based on the idea that you can bring about radical changes in human behavior by reorganizing society? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” can only work if humans are so malleable that basic greed, laziness, selfishness and ambition can be eradicated through social programs.
It’s less about social conditioning and more about the extent to which people pursue group interests regardless of social conditioning. To people subscribing to Marxist ideas of class, behaviors which we might perceive as individualistic ambition in fact serve partly—even primarily—to further the interests of the social class in which an actor is embedded, unbeknownst to the actor; when a Marxist talks about capitalist greed, they’re not talking about the selfishness of individual capitalists, they’re accusing capitalists as a group of greed for the resources of other social groups. None of this requires any grand scheme of brainwashing (though social conditioning does come into play when we start talking about “false consciousness” and related ideas); it’s all seen as implicit in people’s native behavior.
It wouldn’t be too far wrong to describe Marxism as primarily a theory of group agency; originally it covered only coarse-grained economic classes, but modern descendants of Marxist ideology have extended it to cover other common interests as well. You’re probably more likely to encounter the latter these days.
I think we mean different things by ‘brainwashing’ and ‘social conditioning’, which is causing some terminology confusion. The above is perfectly consistent with my thesis, which is simply that a major theme of 20th-century social movements was the belief that you can change individual behavior pretty much however you want by changing the society that people live in.
I call this an incorrect belief because more recent research in cognitive science reveals that there are strong constraints on what kinds of mental adaptations will actually happen in practice, and thus on what kinds of social organizations will actually be stable enough to survive for any great length of time.
For example, humans have an innate tendency to form ingroup / outgroup distinctions and to look down on members of their outgroup, which is one of the factors responsible for a lot of bigotry and racism. Society can tell people who to include in these groups with a high degree of success, and can encourage or discourage the abuse of outgroup members. But you can’t eliminate the underlying desire for an outgroup, and if you try you’ll get odd phenomena like people who violently hate their political opponents while honestly believing themselves to be paragons of love and tolerance.
Again, this is not to say that reforms are impossible. Rather, the point is that you can’t fix everything simultaneously, because every social change has unpredictable side effects that currently no one knows how to eliminate. This is one reason why grand social engineering projects almost always fail—because they carelessly pile up lots of big changes in a short period of time, and the accumulated side effects create so much social chaos that they get deposed and replaced with someone more psychologically comfortable.
I feel like I’m explaining this poorly. You can’t make arbitrary changes to behavior under the Marxist worldview by making social reforms. You can get people to further the interests of their social class more effectively by changing their perception of class, or get them to further the interests of other social classes by making them aware of common social goals, but to a Marxist this follows preexisting and fairly strict principles of how people relate to the class structure. To an orthodox Marxist, for example, improving social conditions by means of placing constraints on the behavior of socially dominant classes would be doomed to failure without a corresponding increase in the power of socially subordinate classes: other forms of exploitation would be found, and class relations would regress to the mean.
It’s not that you can do whatever you want by hacking society in a certain way; it’s that people’s psychology is organized in such a way as to lead to more equitable outcomes if you hack society in particular ways. And even describing this as “hacking” is a little misleading; Marx didn’t see any of it as a social project, more as the inevitable result of existing social forces. (Incidentally, this is a main point of divergence between orthodox Marxism and Leninism or Maoism, both of which aimed to produce Marxist revolutions “early”.)