If you could write up an intelligent post arguing for progressivism, then you would probably get a lot farther on convincing the far-right faction of this site than by telling them they are evil for holding their beliefs without giving reasons as to why. (The problem, of course, is that it requires time and effort.)
For what it’s worth, you seem like a cool person… one of the few people on this site who I could see myself wanting to hang out with in real life. (I don’t necessarily have a real reason to believe this, I just see the name Multiheaded and my thoughts are “that guy’s cool”.) So I would be averse to you leaving the community.
Also, if Yvain ever writes the mega-rebuttal to Reaction that he has planned, I think it could really be a game changer. So there’s hope that if you aren’t up for the task, someone else will take care of it.
Also, if Yvain ever writes the mega-rebuttal to Reaction that he has planned, I think it could really be a game changer. So there’s hope that if you aren’t up for the task, someone else will take care of it.
Except that he seems to have decided to write a few satellite snipes at non-core beliefs and leave it at that. He has explicitly said that he’s not willing to engage with HBD, in a way that shocked me and broke my model of him as a reasonable rationalist. He has said nothing about the Cathedral, or “importing a new people” as a theoretical problem for democracy, instead focusing on proving that the present is broadly superior to the past.
In his defense, reactionaries have not exactly got their shit together with respect to a concise statement of what the core important beliefs actually are.
I asked him if he was ever going to write his mega-rebuttal, and he said “it’s on my list of things to do, but that list also includes ‘write a perfect philosophical language’ and ‘reach enlightenment’.” So I think that’s a pretty clear “maybe”.
He has explicitly said that he’s not willing to engage with HBD, in a way that shocked me and broke my model of him as a reasonable rationalist.
To be honest… if I had a blog, especially one linked to my real name and real-life identity, I would probably do the same thing that he seems to be doing and refuse to talk about race. Unfortunately, it seems hard to imagine that with the current evidence we have today, a true rationalist could get farther than the position of “it seems very unlikely that there are significant mental differences between races”, and yet that’s essentially the right edge of the Overton window. If that’s his reason for not discussing the topic, he can’t go out and say it, because that’s essentially like admitting he’s outside of the window.
Unfortunately, it seems hard to imagine that with the current evidence we have today, a true rationalist could get farther than the position of “it seems very unlikely that there are significant mental differences between races”, and yet that’s essentially the right edge of the Overton window. If that’s his reason for not discussing the topic, he can’t go out and say it, because that’s essentially like admitting he’s outside of the window.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Are you saying that the correct position is outside the window or inside it? (IMO we have pretty overwhelming evidence on all lines of inquiry that a certain position is correct, and that position happens to be quite outside of “civilized” discourse.)
I don’t feel confident enough to say what the correct rational position given the evidence is, not having fully examined the evidence myself, but I cannot imagine that the correct position is comfortably inside the Overton window.
If you could write up an intelligent post arguing for progressivism, then you would probably get a lot farther on convincing the far-right faction of this site than by telling them they are evil for holding their beliefs without giving reasons as to why.
I doubt this very much. The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.
If Multiheaded wrote a post of the kind you recommend with the intent of convincing LW conservatives, it would be a wasted effort. Also, I’m pretty sure a post of that sort would be heavily downvoted, and not just by people who disagree with him politically.
Some of those guys certainly seem irrational and stuck in their ways, but… to be honest, if there are any coherent responses to Moldbug & co. I have yet to see them. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of literature that they’re stubbornly ignoring. If you actually brought them rational arguments that they were forced to confront, I think at least some of them would update their beliefs—this is LessWrong, after all.
EDIT: In response to your edit: (For those reading, it initially just said “I doubt this very much.”)
The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.
This doesn’t seem obvious to me. Could you list those reasons?
I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
While there quite likely is some degree of resolvable factual disagreement about the extent of certain inequities, and maybe-somewhat-resolvable disagreement about how those inequities might be lessened, there is also disagreement about how much those inequities should matter to us and affect our behavior, both political and personal. This is not the sort of disagreement I expect to see someone resolve in a blog post.
Now for a more blatantly left-wing argument: It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. This is not the sort of thing that can be communicated by presenting scientific studies, because such studies may establish the existence of an inequity, but they do not fully convey the impact of that inequity on the lives and psyches of the population affected. The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people, a difficult thing to do on a website with demographics like LW has.
It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. … . The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people
Heh. Well, there was a period in my life when I was very very poor. No money to take public transportation (so I walked), no money to buy a can of soda (so I drank water), etc. I lived in a mostly-black area of the city with gunshots heard at night every week or so.
Unfortunately for your argument I’m not a leftist or a progressive, I do not get hysterical about social inequities and you probably would say that I don’t realize the extent and import of my current privilege (I’m not very poor any more).
Unfortunately for your argument I’m not a leftist or a progressive, I do not get hysterical about social inequities and you probably would say that I don’t realize the extent and import of my current privilege (I’m not very poor any more).
I don’t see how any of this is all that unfortunate for my argument. Perhaps you think I’m saying that only progressives can recognize their privilege along some axis, or that recognizing privilege is sufficient to induce support for progressive policies? Well, I don’t believe either of these things. What I do believe is that recognizing the consequences and extent of privilege undercuts the force of several right-wing arguments.
It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. … The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people
I have been a marginalized person. I did not acquire a realization of “the extent and import” of my privilege, neither do I acknowledge that certain social inequities (you didn’ t specify which ones, so I can’t be sure) are “deeply oppressive”.
Ah, I see. My intent was not to suggest that all (or even most) marginalized people experience inequity as oppressive, although I can see how I could be read that way. I should also note that I believe there’s something to the idea of false consciousness. Oppressed people often do not acknowledge the fact of their own oppression, although I’m not saying that’s the case for past-you. Note that I didn’t say the best way to acquire information about the impact of privilege is to be a marginalized person.
Also, the impact of marginalization along some axis (economic status, say) can be considerably mitigated by privilege along other axes (race/education/gender/etc.). I’ve been quite poor too—while I was a grad student—but my experience of poverty was, I’m pretty sure, qualitatively different from that of an inner-city African American single mother (even one with the same income I had) or a Dalit in rural India.
Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved—an essay which I value because it drew parallels between the way libertarians think most people kid themselves about the value of government and the way (most?) feminists think most people fail to notice patriarchy.
Perhaps the concept does have that role in Marxism, but I’m not a Marxist. I don’t buy “false consciousness” because it is an integral part of some rickety theoretical superstructure that I need to preserve. I think “false consciousness” is a useful concept because there is evidence that various groups that are provably disadvantaged according to certain indicators either underestimate their disadvantage or deny it entirely when asked. There is also evidence that in many of these cases the cause of this is a social system that either hides relevant information from the disadvantaged group or molds their outlook on the world so that they are motivated to deny (or ignore) the evidence.
As such, it’s no more an excuse to protect against conflicting evidence than, say, the claim that people in general dramatically overestimate their relative performance at everyday tasks.
I think “false consciousness” is a useful concept because there is evidence that various groups that are provably disadvantaged according to certain indicators either underestimate their disadvantage or deny it entirely when asked.
As opposed to being evidence that you’re looking at the wrong indicators. At best this amounts to “the people don’t care enough about the things I think they should, therefore there’s something wrong with the people”.
Edit: Also up-thread you said regarding the basis of your argument:
This is not the sort of thing that can be communicated by presenting scientific studies, because such studies may establish the existence of an inequity, but they do not fully convey the impact of that inequity on the lives and psyches of the population affected. The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people, a difficult thing to do on a website with demographics like LW has.
And yet you’re perfectly willing to dismiss those same anecdotes as “false consciousness” if they don’t support your ideas about how much impact there should be on the “lives and psyches of the population affected”.
At best this amounts to “the people don’t care enough about the things I think they should, therefore there’s something wrong with the people”.
It could amount to this, I guess. But I don’t see why you’d think this is all it could amount to at best. Do you really consider it outside the realm of possibility that people could be genuinely better off with certain social changes and yet fail to acknowledge this fact due to conditioning?
And yet you’re perfectly willing to dismiss those same anecdotes as “false consciousness” if they don’t support your ideas about how much impact there should be on the “lives and psyches of the population affected”.
Just because I think an anecdote reflects false consciousness doesn’t mean I’m dismissing it’s evidentiary value. A marginalized person doesn’t have to be saying “Look how I oppressed I am” in order for us to listen to them and realize they’re oppressed. Judgments of oppression are judgments about the objective conditions of people’s lives, not subjective facts about how they feel.
A personal example: I’ve volunteered to conduct surveys in rural India in the past, and this involved talking to women in Indian villages. Virtually none of these women explicitly referred to themselves as oppressed, and I doubt most of them consider themselves oppressed, because they have a host of bullshit religious and traditional beliefs that prevent that realization. But hearing about their lives, it was evident to someone who does not share those bullshit beliefs that they were in fact oppressed.
So when I said that one needs to listen to marginalized people in order to fully appreciate the impact of a lack of privilege, I wasn’t just referring to marginalized people who’re yelling about oppression. The only thing I’m “dismissing” (although this is probably not the right word) when I talk about false consciousness is the idea that people’s subjective judgments about their oppression are a reliable guide to the objective facts.
And just to be somewhat even-handed, let me acknowledge that I think there are certain social justice communities where the unreliability runs in the opposite direction, where people are conditioned to view everything through a framework of oppression, and they overestimate the extent to which various practices are oppressive.
Being “oppressed” is starting to seem like an XML tag with no connection to reality. At the very least can you give a definition of being “oppressed” that doesn’t cash out as “whatever pragmatist says it is”.
I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
As a right-winger I must strongly disagree with the characterization of the right wing position given in your comment. In particular it seems to me that the left-wing position contains a number of specific falsifiable (and false) beliefs, for example, the false belief that all the policies leftists tend to promote to “help the poor and oppressed” actually help the poor and oppressed in the long run.
In fact the main value disagreement that I can see is that some leftist tend to have a pathological form of egalitarianism where they’re willing to pursue policies that make everyone worse off in order to make the distribution more equal.
While there quite likely is some degree of resolvable factual disagreement about the extent of certain inequities, and maybe-somewhat-resolvable disagreement about how those inequities might be lessened, there is also disagreement about how much those inequities should matter to us and affect our behavior, both political and personal.
So I agree there are a number of falsifiable beliefs on both sides. But the mere fact of falsifiability doesn’t mean the disagreements are easy to resolve, partly for “politics is the mind-killer” type reasons, and partly because it is legitimately difficult to find conclusive experimental evidence for causal claims in the social sciences.
I do, however, think there are important value disagreements about how to trade off efficiency and equity between left and right, and I also think your description of the “main value disagreement” is a caricature. I’m pretty sure I could easily come up with socio-political thought experiments where all (non-moral) facts are made explicit, leaving no room for disagreement on them, but where we would still disagree about the best policy, and I assure you I’m not one of the “pathological” egalitarians you describe (although you would probably consider my views pathological for other reasons).
In fact the main value disagreement that I can see is that some leftist tend to have a pathological form of egalitarianism where they’re willing to pursue policies that make everyone worse off in order to make the distribution more equal.
A few examples? (Preferably ones where the conclusion that the policy leads to an anti-Pareto improvement is based on real-world data rather than on dry-water economic models.)
That’s an interesting thought. Maybe I do think that it is better to make everyone a little bit worse off materially to make the distribution more equal. I don’t think this is pathological. In somewhat of a paradox what matters most to absolute well-being is our relative material wealth not our absolute wealth. Now, of course, when looked at as a ranking nothing can be done about the fact that some will have more wealth than others. Nothing short of trying to make everyone equal (and no one wants that). But the ranking is not the only thing that matters. There has always been a distribution of wealth but the those at the top have not always had so much more than the median. Making everyone a little worse off materially to make the distribution a bit narrower may make the absolute well-being greater.
Also I wonder if right wingers would support a distributionist policy to help the poor and oppressed even if such a policy were certain to be effective. My hunch is that they would not because they are opposed, in principle, to any redistribution.
Maybe I do think that it is better to make everyone a little bit worse off materially to make the distribution more equal.
Maybe some policies fail at helping the poor and at making people more equal.
I can imagine a policy done in the name of the poor which results at everyone being poorer… except for the people who organized the redistribution… you know, the powerful good guys.
I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
I’ll be honest, it was really difficult for me to understand the linked wiki page. (I need to learn economics...) It sounds like what you’re saying is maybe leftists tend to inherently value socioeconomic equality more than rightists do? But… I don’t understand how this applies to race and gender.
(This is of interest to me because I’m currently politically agnostic and I plan on someday doing an unbiased inquiry in order to figure out what my views should be. Knowing what the disagreement between the left and the right stems from would be very useful.)
As for your last point, I can definitely see why privileged people would need emotional arguments to understand how marginalized people suffer. I think here on LW we have a perhaps deserved mistrust of emotional appeals in moral tradeoffs—we all know about scope insensitivity and how one dying child feels more painful than seven. The logical brain really does better than the emotional brain on this kind of stuff a lot of the time. But on the other hand, I can see how maybe I, a man, value sexual harassment as −5 utilons, whereas if I take the time to read an article explaining how sexual harassment feels from a female perspective I will realize that it should be more like −15 utilons. So my utilitarian math will be off unless I re-calibrate.
I disagree though that it’s necessarily a difficult thing to do on LessWrong. Well, perhaps difficult, but definitely not impossible. I remember a blog post by Yvain where he was talking about unemployment, and at the beginning he linked to an article of some woman’s experience in a terrible job, saying “read this first to get an emotional calibration for just how terrible minimum wage jobs can be”. I don’t see why we can’t do the same here. It’s not that hard to find stories of marginalized people’s experiences on the Internet now that Tumblr SJ is becoming such a thing.
To phrase it in more statistical terms it would be something like “take into account how selection bias has changed your impressions of things.”
E.g. as a white male in a liberal western nation I intuitively think buying food or finding a place to live is easy, so might not credit reports of someone else finding it difficult. But if prejudice against a group I am not part of was endemic I wouldn’t be aware of it. So checking your privilege is a reminder that your experience may differ from others and to be aware of that.
Guessing by how this word is typically used, it means: “My opponents are cognitively inferior. They can’t understand my situation, because they have never experienced it. On the other hand, I can perfectly understand their situation (despite never experiencing it, too).”
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status. Furthermore, I believe in the snafu principle (people don’t give accurate information if they’ll be punished for it*).
Unfortunately, the true parts of the idea of privilege are apt to get swamped by the way it’s used as a power grab.
*The original version framed this as an absolute. I’m quite willing to be probabilistic about it.
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status.
Do I read it correctly as: ”..therefore, to focus on the opinions of lower-status people, it is necessary to exclude the higher-status people from the debate (because otherwise people would by instinct turn their attention only to what the higher-status people said—which is probably not a new information for anyone—and ignore the rest of the debate).”?
I would agree with that. -- And by the way, in some situations an average woman is actually higher-status than an average man, so perhaps we should debate those situations by excluding the women’s voice. Actually, if a “dating market” is an example of such situation, that would explain the necessity of PUA debates (as in: the debate about dating is culturally framed by women’s terms, so we need a place where men are allowed to explain how they feel without automatically taking a status hit for doing so).
Perhaps the problem is at not making a difference between “hypothesis generating” and “hypothesis debating” parts of reasoning. Excluding higher status people from some hypothesis-generating discussions is good, because it allows people to hear the opinions they would otherwise not hear. But when those hypotheses are already generated, they shouldn’t be accepted automatically. (There is a difference between “you oppress me by using your status to prevent me from speaking my hypothesis” and “you oppress me by providing an argument against my hypothesis”.) In theory, a group of lower-status people doesn’t have a monolithic opinion, so they could make the debate among themselves. But sometimes the dissenting subgroup can be accused of being not-low-status-enough. (As in: “this topic should be only discussed by women, because only women understand how women feel. oh, you are a woman and you still disagree with me? well, that’s because you are a privileged white woman!”)
As an unpolitical analogy, it makes sense to use some special rules for brainstorming, to help generate new ideas. But it does not mean that the ideas generated by these special rules should be protected by them forever. It makes sense to use brainstorming for generating ideas, and then to use experiments and peer review for testing them. -- So while it can be good to use brainstorming to generate an idea for a peer-reviewed journal… it would be silly to insist that the journal must accept the idea uncritically, because otherwise it ruins the spirit of brainstorming.
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status. Furthermore, I believe in the snafu principle (people don’t give accurate information if they’ll be punished for it*).
I would like to point out that Yvain’s post that progressive like to site elsewhere in this thread makes the exact opposite argument.
It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of literature that they’re stubbornly ignoring.
The mainstream of political philosophy and political science is pretty much opposed to their positions. While none of it specifically addresses the topics covered by Molbuggians and neo-reactionaries in the terms they use, the burden of proof seems to be on them to prove there is something massively wrong with the mainstream before the mainstream has to specifically craft responses to their arguments.
I doubt this very much. The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.
Wrong. I used to be a reasonable, well adjusted progressive, even a quite ideologically passionate one (leaning towards anarchism). Moldbug’s intelligent analysis (for all its flaws) convinced me that I was wrong. I can’t be the only one who is capable of responding to argument.
If you could write up an intelligent post arguing for progressivism, then you would probably get a lot farther on convincing the far-right faction of this site than by telling them they are evil for holding their beliefs without giving reasons as to why. (The problem, of course, is that it requires time and effort.)
It may depend on what you mean by the far-right faction—I think the farthest right has already left. It might be more possible to move the middle rather than convince the extreme.
He’s written substantial chunks of it on his blog, but there is no quantity of words he could write that could convince them.
(We’re talking about a seriously minor viewpoint held by cranks, but they’re cranks who include LW regulars, or you and I would never have heard of them in the first place. It is entirely unclear to me how convincing them is a game changer.)
The problem with the reactionaries getting rebuttals in the form of “that’s a socially horrible thing to say and you’re a horrible person, fuck you” is that viewpoints that seem supported by science but are socially shunned as unthinkable are catnip here. A rebuttal that shows that actually the argument isn’t very solid, or the science isn’t being interpreted right, or that there are large chunks of important stuff being left out of the argument would have a lot more staying power, while just bringing on the social shaming sends the signal that the reactionaries might be on to something since it seems to be hard to come up with a rebuttal that works on the same level as their arguments.
Yvain’s stuff is looking pretty good, though there could be more of it. I was talking about the general pattern of discussion that shows up in places like this subthread and seems to keep the dynamic going, and about the thing of the cranks being unconvincable. There are always going to be hardliners who stick to their guns no matter what, but there’s also going to be an audience who sees one side going, hey, argument and pile of citations here and the other side going, that’s a horrible thing to say and you’re horrible, and making their conclusions.
I’d really like to have lots more stuff at the level of quality of the (embarrassingly, also Yvain’s) Non-Libertarian FAQ arguing for progressive views, but don’t really know where to look. Everything seems to be a soup of lazy ingroup flag-waving. (This might be actually another thing that makes reaction tick. With topics polite society is inimical to, anything with obvious argumentation flaws or sloppiness gets quickly torn down and ignored, leaving behind a small group of careful and cleverly argued articles, while with progressive writings there isn’t any similar mechanism culling sloppy, but with the heart in the right place writings from the very clear, careful and well-researched ones, so the latter ones won’t get similar visibility.)
With topics polite society is inimical to, anything with obvious argumentation flaws or sloppiness gets quickly torn down and ignored, leaving behind a small group of careful and cleverly argued articles, while with progressive writings there isn’t any similar mechanism culling sloppy, but with the heart in the right place writings from the very clear, careful and well-researched ones, so the latter ones won’t get similar visibility.
Yvain has also written on this (though I can’t find the post quickly): that bad ideas will tend to have better arguments for them than good ideas, because the bad ideas need good arguments more. Though I think that is more in the form you put it: that unaccepted ideas will generally have better arguments than accepted ideas.
Yvain has also written on this (though I can’t find the post quickly): that bad ideas will tend to have better arguments for them than good ideas, because the bad ideas need good arguments more. Though I think that is more in the form you put it: that unaccepted ideas will generally have better arguments than accepted ideas.
Yvain’s post was about popular ideas, not necessarily good ideas. In particular this rephrasing violates the law of conservation of expected evidence.
Yvain also fails to note that his argument also implies that over time the mainstream position will itself drift further and further away from truth towards whatever is most convenient for signaling.
Yvain also fails to note that his argument also implies that over time the mainstream position will itself drift further and further away from truth towards whatever is most convenient for signaling.
In my experience, most of the best philosophers working on the philosophy of religion are in fact theists, due to fairly obvious selection effects. Of course, most philosophers of religion, good or not, are theists, but I think in the upper echelons of the discipline the disparity is even more stark. Atheists who get into the field tend not to be very good philosophers, with a few honorable exceptions.
So a disproportionate number of the most careful and clever arguments (which, I think, is what David meant by “best arguments”) in that field support the theistic side, the wrong side. If the only thing I knew about an article on the philosophy of religion is that it is extremely well argued, I would consider that evidence that its conclusion is false. Does this violate conservation of expected evidence?
Note that there’s a distinction between all the arguments that exist in some Platonic sense and all the arguments that exist in published form, and that there’s a distinction between arguments that are “good” in the sense of significantly raising the probability of their conclusions and arguments that are “good” in the sense of being clever and carefully constructed. In both cases, I think David was talking about the second option. He was attributing to Yvain the claim that most clever and carefully constructed arguments out of the set of published arguments are for bad ideas. I don’t agree with this claim but I don’t think it violates basic rules of probability.
Yvain has also written on this (though I can’t find the post quickly): that bad ideas will tend to have better arguments for them than good ideas, because the bad ideas need good arguments more.
Could be that too. But it seems like we’re currently in the tail end of some 150 years of reactionary attitudes mostly being mainstream and mostly being argued for with poor and lazy ingroup flag-waving arguments, with the occasional clever argument for progressivism that the mainstream finds disagreeable popping up now and then and nudging things around. Then mainstream society started actually going progressive, and now we’ve started seeing the opposite pattern, even though the reactionary and progressive ideologies don’t seem to have changed significantly.
But it seems like we’re currently in the tail end of some 150 years of reactionary attitudes mostly being mainstream and mostly being argued for with poor and lazy ingroup flag-waving arguments,
Have you ever actually read any of the original argument from 150 years ago, or are you merely going by the progressive characterization of their opponents’ arguments?
Vindication of the Rights of Women was by Mary Wollstonecraft, and from well before Mill wrote The Subjection of Women. Still, Mill’s views were certainly, as you say, radical for his time (and also more radical than those in Wollstonecraft’s essay, if I recall it at all accurately).
Yes, and Mill’s position would be considered libertarian today. In other words, if his books were published today, a lot of the people in this thread would denounce them as “reactionary”, and probably far worse names.
Which of Mill’s views do you think would be regarded as reactionary? I admit some of his views would be regarded as weird in light of more recent experience (e.g. his views on education in On Liberty are based on a very different baseline than the modern situation), but I’m having a hard time thinking of clear cases of overlap between Mill’s views and those commonly denounced as reactionary these days.
Funny thing, I was also thinking about Mill’s “On liberty” when reading this thread. I believe the issue is deeper:
In politics you often have a winning side and a losing side. The winning side can use various techniques to silence the losing side. People sympathetic to the losing side will move to meta arguments about why it is wrong to silence your opponents. -- The unfortunate, but logical, consequence is that arguing about why it is wrong to silence your opponents becomes an evidence for belonging to the losing side. An automatic status hit.
Therefore, it was easy to interpret Mill as an advocate for losing side of his days; and it is also easy to believe that he would support the losing side of today (at least indirectly by his meta arguments) if he were alive today… if what you know about him is that he argued that it is wrong to silence your opponents instead of debating them (which is a part that impressed me strongly).
If Mill advocated that even people guilty of the horrible crime of atheism should be able to publish their opinions, even if just to increase the quality of the theist arguments against them… it seems logical that today he could say the same thing about people guilty of believing in differences between people, or similar stuff. (Of course this assumes that he would be consistent in his beliefs and willing to bite the bullet.)
The problem would not be with Mills beliefs per se, but with inferences people would make from his meta arguments. And he would not even have to support the low-status people to create this association; the low-status people would create the association by quoting him often. -- And then he would have to choose between implicitly denying his support to them, or being considered a silent supporter.
I was thinking that the random person’s opinions about how the mainstream moral climate is the right and proper thing haven’t been preserved for me to read, and whatever did get preserved has probably been heavily filtered for being well-argued and interesting, but that’s not quite right. They did have newspapers, which would be archived somewhere no matter what the content, and all sorts of weird random pamphlets probably are as well. Still a lot more editorial control than Reddit, but editorial control by the contemporary people, not by present-day scholars composing the Collection of Olden Time Moral Arguments Affirming The Great Historical Narrative For Moral And Intellectual Progress.
I was analogizing the current blogs and reddits thing with people ranting to each other at bars or something, with most of the arguments being at the quality of a random people ranting at you, but on second thought that’s not really a good analogy. Face to face socializing has pretty different dynamics than media culture, and the media culture was editorialized newspapers and books and the odd self-published pamphlet by someone with enough money for that.
A third thing, which would be relevant and would be hard to go back and assess now was how community level social persuasion got done. What kind of arguments did priests use trying to convince the congregation that women’s right to vote would lead to the apocalypse, what kind of arguments did the scruffy guy on the soapbox use trying to convince factory workers to start hanging fat people with top hats and monocles from the lampposts and so on.
So I could figure out what was a popular newspaper and go read through its archives, or try to figure out which books where bestsellers and see if I can somehow find a copy and read that, and I might actually learn something more interesting about the common quality of argumentation used than by just picking up filtered-by-present-day recommended books that might be systematic outliers. I haven’t done this because it sounds like a lot of work.
EDIT: Adam Cadre’s reviews of oldpostapocalypticbooks are informing my expectations about what sort of stuff I might find if I skipped the present-day list of exemplary books the people of a past era read and went digging into the piles of half-forgotten stuff they actually read.
with the occasional clever argument for progressivism that the mainstream finds disagreeable popping up now and then and nudging things around.
So why aren’t those arguments being used to defend progressivism today? The answer, which isn’t hard to notice if you actually look at old progressive arguments, is that those arguments tend to have premisses that modern progressives no longer believe and their conclusions are also very different from modern progressive positions.
even though the reactionary and progressive ideologies don’t seem to have changed significantly.
Has there been significant change in the underlying trends where reactionaries are pessimistic about inherent human nature, consider it basically impossible to change significantly, and consider the problem of developing social mechanisms to control it something vital to social stability that takes generations and centuries to solve and is likely to end up with constraining and unintuitive solutions which will nevertheless be the best bet available, while progressives are optimistic that human nature is either benign or malleable enough that it’s possible to enact large and fast social changes and eventually educate people to make the new system work across the board, without messy, nasty and basically impossible to change facets of human nature ending up causing persistent problems?
I’d really like to have lots more stuff at the level of quality of the (embarrassingly, also Yvain’s) Non-Libertarian FAQ arguing for progressive views, but don’t really know where to look.
I will point out that the Non-Libertarian FAQ isn’t actually anti-Libertarian; it’s targeted at a specific (vocal) branch of libertarianism, which I’d call Moral Libertarianism. From the FAQ:
To the first type of libertarian, I apologize for writing a FAQ attacking a caricature of your philosophy, but unfortunately that caricature is alive and well and posting smug slogans on Facebook.
Wow, that is awesome, I did not know there was a term for that. I always wondered why there seems to be a stacking effect when it came to bad beliefs. Thanks
If you could write up an intelligent post arguing for progressivism, then you would probably get a lot farther on convincing the far-right faction of this site than by telling them they are evil for holding their beliefs without giving reasons as to why. (The problem, of course, is that it requires time and effort.)
For what it’s worth, you seem like a cool person… one of the few people on this site who I could see myself wanting to hang out with in real life. (I don’t necessarily have a real reason to believe this, I just see the name Multiheaded and my thoughts are “that guy’s cool”.) So I would be averse to you leaving the community.
Also, if Yvain ever writes the mega-rebuttal to Reaction that he has planned, I think it could really be a game changer. So there’s hope that if you aren’t up for the task, someone else will take care of it.
Except that he seems to have decided to write a few satellite snipes at non-core beliefs and leave it at that. He has explicitly said that he’s not willing to engage with HBD, in a way that shocked me and broke my model of him as a reasonable rationalist. He has said nothing about the Cathedral, or “importing a new people” as a theoretical problem for democracy, instead focusing on proving that the present is broadly superior to the past.
In his defense, reactionaries have not exactly got their shit together with respect to a concise statement of what the core important beliefs actually are.
I asked him if he was ever going to write his mega-rebuttal, and he said “it’s on my list of things to do, but that list also includes ‘write a perfect philosophical language’ and ‘reach enlightenment’.” So I think that’s a pretty clear “maybe”.
To be honest… if I had a blog, especially one linked to my real name and real-life identity, I would probably do the same thing that he seems to be doing and refuse to talk about race. Unfortunately, it seems hard to imagine that with the current evidence we have today, a true rationalist could get farther than the position of “it seems very unlikely that there are significant mental differences between races”, and yet that’s essentially the right edge of the Overton window. If that’s his reason for not discussing the topic, he can’t go out and say it, because that’s essentially like admitting he’s outside of the window.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Are you saying that the correct position is outside the window or inside it? (IMO we have pretty overwhelming evidence on all lines of inquiry that a certain position is correct, and that position happens to be quite outside of “civilized” discourse.)
I don’t feel confident enough to say what the correct rational position given the evidence is, not having fully examined the evidence myself, but I cannot imagine that the correct position is comfortably inside the Overton window.
I doubt this very much. The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.
If Multiheaded wrote a post of the kind you recommend with the intent of convincing LW conservatives, it would be a wasted effort. Also, I’m pretty sure a post of that sort would be heavily downvoted, and not just by people who disagree with him politically.
Why?
Some of those guys certainly seem irrational and stuck in their ways, but… to be honest, if there are any coherent responses to Moldbug & co. I have yet to see them. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of literature that they’re stubbornly ignoring. If you actually brought them rational arguments that they were forced to confront, I think at least some of them would update their beliefs—this is LessWrong, after all.
EDIT: In response to your edit: (For those reading, it initially just said “I doubt this very much.”)
This doesn’t seem obvious to me. Could you list those reasons?
I think a lot of the disagreement between the left and the right boils down to disagreement about the appropriate form of the social welfare function. I think this applies not just to economic issues but also issues of gender and race.
While there quite likely is some degree of resolvable factual disagreement about the extent of certain inequities, and maybe-somewhat-resolvable disagreement about how those inequities might be lessened, there is also disagreement about how much those inequities should matter to us and affect our behavior, both political and personal. This is not the sort of disagreement I expect to see someone resolve in a blog post.
Now for a more blatantly left-wing argument: It is hard to get people to realize the extent and import of their privilege, to acknowledge that certain social inequities that are of minor significance when viewed from a privileged position are in fact deeply oppressive from the perspective of the marginalized. This is not the sort of thing that can be communicated by presenting scientific studies, because such studies may establish the existence of an inequity, but they do not fully convey the impact of that inequity on the lives and psyches of the population affected. The best way to acquire that sort of information is to listen to anecdotes from a number of marginalized people, a difficult thing to do on a website with demographics like LW has.
Heh. Well, there was a period in my life when I was very very poor. No money to take public transportation (so I walked), no money to buy a can of soda (so I drank water), etc. I lived in a mostly-black area of the city with gunshots heard at night every week or so.
Unfortunately for your argument I’m not a leftist or a progressive, I do not get hysterical about social inequities and you probably would say that I don’t realize the extent and import of my current privilege (I’m not very poor any more).
Belief update time? :-D
I don’t see how any of this is all that unfortunate for my argument. Perhaps you think I’m saying that only progressives can recognize their privilege along some axis, or that recognizing privilege is sufficient to induce support for progressive policies? Well, I don’t believe either of these things. What I do believe is that recognizing the consequences and extent of privilege undercuts the force of several right-wing arguments.
Your argument was
I have been a marginalized person. I did not acquire a realization of “the extent and import” of my privilege, neither do I acknowledge that certain social inequities (you didn’ t specify which ones, so I can’t be sure) are “deeply oppressive”.
Ah, I see. My intent was not to suggest that all (or even most) marginalized people experience inequity as oppressive, although I can see how I could be read that way. I should also note that I believe there’s something to the idea of false consciousness. Oppressed people often do not acknowledge the fact of their own oppression, although I’m not saying that’s the case for past-you. Note that I didn’t say the best way to acquire information about the impact of privilege is to be a marginalized person.
Also, the impact of marginalization along some axis (economic status, say) can be considerably mitigated by privilege along other axes (race/education/gender/etc.). I’ve been quite poor too—while I was a grad student—but my experience of poverty was, I’m pretty sure, qualitatively different from that of an inner-city African American single mother (even one with the same income I had) or a Dalit in rural India.
“False consciousness” seems suspiciously like an excuse to protect one’s social theories from conflicting evidence.
Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved—an essay which I value because it drew parallels between the way libertarians think most people kid themselves about the value of government and the way (most?) feminists think most people fail to notice patriarchy.
Perhaps the concept does have that role in Marxism, but I’m not a Marxist. I don’t buy “false consciousness” because it is an integral part of some rickety theoretical superstructure that I need to preserve. I think “false consciousness” is a useful concept because there is evidence that various groups that are provably disadvantaged according to certain indicators either underestimate their disadvantage or deny it entirely when asked. There is also evidence that in many of these cases the cause of this is a social system that either hides relevant information from the disadvantaged group or molds their outlook on the world so that they are motivated to deny (or ignore) the evidence.
As such, it’s no more an excuse to protect against conflicting evidence than, say, the claim that people in general dramatically overestimate their relative performance at everyday tasks.
As opposed to being evidence that you’re looking at the wrong indicators. At best this amounts to “the people don’t care enough about the things I think they should, therefore there’s something wrong with the people”.
Edit: Also up-thread you said regarding the basis of your argument:
And yet you’re perfectly willing to dismiss those same anecdotes as “false consciousness” if they don’t support your ideas about how much impact there should be on the “lives and psyches of the population affected”.
It could amount to this, I guess. But I don’t see why you’d think this is all it could amount to at best. Do you really consider it outside the realm of possibility that people could be genuinely better off with certain social changes and yet fail to acknowledge this fact due to conditioning?
Just because I think an anecdote reflects false consciousness doesn’t mean I’m dismissing it’s evidentiary value. A marginalized person doesn’t have to be saying “Look how I oppressed I am” in order for us to listen to them and realize they’re oppressed. Judgments of oppression are judgments about the objective conditions of people’s lives, not subjective facts about how they feel.
A personal example: I’ve volunteered to conduct surveys in rural India in the past, and this involved talking to women in Indian villages. Virtually none of these women explicitly referred to themselves as oppressed, and I doubt most of them consider themselves oppressed, because they have a host of bullshit religious and traditional beliefs that prevent that realization. But hearing about their lives, it was evident to someone who does not share those bullshit beliefs that they were in fact oppressed.
So when I said that one needs to listen to marginalized people in order to fully appreciate the impact of a lack of privilege, I wasn’t just referring to marginalized people who’re yelling about oppression. The only thing I’m “dismissing” (although this is probably not the right word) when I talk about false consciousness is the idea that people’s subjective judgments about their oppression are a reliable guide to the objective facts.
And just to be somewhat even-handed, let me acknowledge that I think there are certain social justice communities where the unreliability runs in the opposite direction, where people are conditioned to view everything through a framework of oppression, and they overestimate the extent to which various practices are oppressive.
Being “oppressed” is starting to seem like an XML tag with no connection to reality. At the very least can you give a definition of being “oppressed” that doesn’t cash out as “whatever pragmatist says it is”.
As a right-winger I must strongly disagree with the characterization of the right wing position given in your comment. In particular it seems to me that the left-wing position contains a number of specific falsifiable (and false) beliefs, for example, the false belief that all the policies leftists tend to promote to “help the poor and oppressed” actually help the poor and oppressed in the long run.
In fact the main value disagreement that I can see is that some leftist tend to have a pathological form of egalitarianism where they’re willing to pursue policies that make everyone worse off in order to make the distribution more equal.
I did say this:
So I agree there are a number of falsifiable beliefs on both sides. But the mere fact of falsifiability doesn’t mean the disagreements are easy to resolve, partly for “politics is the mind-killer” type reasons, and partly because it is legitimately difficult to find conclusive experimental evidence for causal claims in the social sciences.
I do, however, think there are important value disagreements about how to trade off efficiency and equity between left and right, and I also think your description of the “main value disagreement” is a caricature. I’m pretty sure I could easily come up with socio-political thought experiments where all (non-moral) facts are made explicit, leaving no room for disagreement on them, but where we would still disagree about the best policy, and I assure you I’m not one of the “pathological” egalitarians you describe (although you would probably consider my views pathological for other reasons).
A few examples? (Preferably ones where the conclusion that the policy leads to an anti-Pareto improvement is based on real-world data rather than on dry-water economic models.)
That’s an interesting thought. Maybe I do think that it is better to make everyone a little bit worse off materially to make the distribution more equal. I don’t think this is pathological. In somewhat of a paradox what matters most to absolute well-being is our relative material wealth not our absolute wealth. Now, of course, when looked at as a ranking nothing can be done about the fact that some will have more wealth than others. Nothing short of trying to make everyone equal (and no one wants that). But the ranking is not the only thing that matters. There has always been a distribution of wealth but the those at the top have not always had so much more than the median. Making everyone a little worse off materially to make the distribution a bit narrower may make the absolute well-being greater.
Also I wonder if right wingers would support a distributionist policy to help the poor and oppressed even if such a policy were certain to be effective. My hunch is that they would not because they are opposed, in principle, to any redistribution.
Maybe some policies fail at helping the poor and at making people more equal.
I can imagine a policy done in the name of the poor which results at everyone being poorer… except for the people who organized the redistribution… you know, the powerful good guys.
I’ll be honest, it was really difficult for me to understand the linked wiki page. (I need to learn economics...) It sounds like what you’re saying is maybe leftists tend to inherently value socioeconomic equality more than rightists do? But… I don’t understand how this applies to race and gender.
(This is of interest to me because I’m currently politically agnostic and I plan on someday doing an unbiased inquiry in order to figure out what my views should be. Knowing what the disagreement between the left and the right stems from would be very useful.)
As for your last point, I can definitely see why privileged people would need emotional arguments to understand how marginalized people suffer. I think here on LW we have a perhaps deserved mistrust of emotional appeals in moral tradeoffs—we all know about scope insensitivity and how one dying child feels more painful than seven. The logical brain really does better than the emotional brain on this kind of stuff a lot of the time. But on the other hand, I can see how maybe I, a man, value sexual harassment as −5 utilons, whereas if I take the time to read an article explaining how sexual harassment feels from a female perspective I will realize that it should be more like −15 utilons. So my utilitarian math will be off unless I re-calibrate.
I disagree though that it’s necessarily a difficult thing to do on LessWrong. Well, perhaps difficult, but definitely not impossible. I remember a blog post by Yvain where he was talking about unemployment, and at the beginning he linked to an article of some woman’s experience in a terrible job, saying “read this first to get an emotional calibration for just how terrible minimum wage jobs can be”. I don’t see why we can’t do the same here. It’s not that hard to find stories of marginalized people’s experiences on the Internet now that Tumblr SJ is becoming such a thing.
Also, while we’re here, would you mind defining what you mean by “privilege”?
To phrase it in more statistical terms it would be something like “take into account how selection bias has changed your impressions of things.”
E.g. as a white male in a liberal western nation I intuitively think buying food or finding a place to live is easy, so might not credit reports of someone else finding it difficult. But if prejudice against a group I am not part of was endemic I wouldn’t be aware of it. So checking your privilege is a reminder that your experience may differ from others and to be aware of that.
Guessing by how this word is typically used, it means: “My opponents are cognitively inferior. They can’t understand my situation, because they have never experienced it. On the other hand, I can perfectly understand their situation (despite never experiencing it, too).”
I don’t think it’s implausible to believe that people pay more attention to those who have higher status than themselves, and less attention to those who have lower status. Furthermore, I believe in the snafu principle (people don’t give accurate information if they’ll be punished for it*).
Unfortunately, the true parts of the idea of privilege are apt to get swamped by the way it’s used as a power grab.
*The original version framed this as an absolute. I’m quite willing to be probabilistic about it.
Do I read it correctly as: ”..therefore, to focus on the opinions of lower-status people, it is necessary to exclude the higher-status people from the debate (because otherwise people would by instinct turn their attention only to what the higher-status people said—which is probably not a new information for anyone—and ignore the rest of the debate).”?
I would agree with that. -- And by the way, in some situations an average woman is actually higher-status than an average man, so perhaps we should debate those situations by excluding the women’s voice. Actually, if a “dating market” is an example of such situation, that would explain the necessity of PUA debates (as in: the debate about dating is culturally framed by women’s terms, so we need a place where men are allowed to explain how they feel without automatically taking a status hit for doing so).
Perhaps the problem is at not making a difference between “hypothesis generating” and “hypothesis debating” parts of reasoning. Excluding higher status people from some hypothesis-generating discussions is good, because it allows people to hear the opinions they would otherwise not hear. But when those hypotheses are already generated, they shouldn’t be accepted automatically. (There is a difference between “you oppress me by using your status to prevent me from speaking my hypothesis” and “you oppress me by providing an argument against my hypothesis”.) In theory, a group of lower-status people doesn’t have a monolithic opinion, so they could make the debate among themselves. But sometimes the dissenting subgroup can be accused of being not-low-status-enough. (As in: “this topic should be only discussed by women, because only women understand how women feel. oh, you are a woman and you still disagree with me? well, that’s because you are a privileged white woman!”)
As an unpolitical analogy, it makes sense to use some special rules for brainstorming, to help generate new ideas. But it does not mean that the ideas generated by these special rules should be protected by them forever. It makes sense to use brainstorming for generating ideas, and then to use experiments and peer review for testing them. -- So while it can be good to use brainstorming to generate an idea for a peer-reviewed journal… it would be silly to insist that the journal must accept the idea uncritically, because otherwise it ruins the spirit of brainstorming.
I would like to point out that this is impossible by the definition of “high status”.
I would like to point out that Yvain’s post that progressive like to site elsewhere in this thread makes the exact opposite argument.
The mainstream of political philosophy and political science is pretty much opposed to their positions. While none of it specifically addresses the topics covered by Molbuggians and neo-reactionaries in the terms they use, the burden of proof seems to be on them to prove there is something massively wrong with the mainstream before the mainstream has to specifically craft responses to their arguments.
(For reference here’s an example of what I mean by mainstream ‘progressive’ writing which argue that democracy has empirically better outcomes for its citizens and outlines democratic peace theory )
Wrong. I used to be a reasonable, well adjusted progressive, even a quite ideologically passionate one (leaning towards anarchism). Moldbug’s intelligent analysis (for all its flaws) convinced me that I was wrong. I can’t be the only one who is capable of responding to argument.
It may depend on what you mean by the far-right faction—I think the farthest right has already left. It might be more possible to move the middle rather than convince the extreme.
He’s written substantial chunks of it on his blog, but there is no quantity of words he could write that could convince them.
(We’re talking about a seriously minor viewpoint held by cranks, but they’re cranks who include LW regulars, or you and I would never have heard of them in the first place. It is entirely unclear to me how convincing them is a game changer.)
The problem with the reactionaries getting rebuttals in the form of “that’s a socially horrible thing to say and you’re a horrible person, fuck you” is that viewpoints that seem supported by science but are socially shunned as unthinkable are catnip here. A rebuttal that shows that actually the argument isn’t very solid, or the science isn’t being interpreted right, or that there are large chunks of important stuff being left out of the argument would have a lot more staying power, while just bringing on the social shaming sends the signal that the reactionaries might be on to something since it seems to be hard to come up with a rebuttal that works on the same level as their arguments.
… Did you actually read Yvain’s posts on the matter? That’s not an accurate description of them at all.
Yvain’s stuff is looking pretty good, though there could be more of it. I was talking about the general pattern of discussion that shows up in places like this subthread and seems to keep the dynamic going, and about the thing of the cranks being unconvincable. There are always going to be hardliners who stick to their guns no matter what, but there’s also going to be an audience who sees one side going, hey, argument and pile of citations here and the other side going, that’s a horrible thing to say and you’re horrible, and making their conclusions.
I’d really like to have lots more stuff at the level of quality of the (embarrassingly, also Yvain’s) Non-Libertarian FAQ arguing for progressive views, but don’t really know where to look. Everything seems to be a soup of lazy ingroup flag-waving. (This might be actually another thing that makes reaction tick. With topics polite society is inimical to, anything with obvious argumentation flaws or sloppiness gets quickly torn down and ignored, leaving behind a small group of careful and cleverly argued articles, while with progressive writings there isn’t any similar mechanism culling sloppy, but with the heart in the right place writings from the very clear, careful and well-researched ones, so the latter ones won’t get similar visibility.)
Yvain has also written on this (though I can’t find the post quickly): that bad ideas will tend to have better arguments for them than good ideas, because the bad ideas need good arguments more. Though I think that is more in the form you put it: that unaccepted ideas will generally have better arguments than accepted ideas.
Yvain’s post was about popular ideas, not necessarily good ideas. In particular this rephrasing violates the law of conservation of expected evidence.
Yvain also fails to note that his argument also implies that over time the mainstream position will itself drift further and further away from truth towards whatever is most convenient for signaling.
He did note that, in section IV in this post.
Can you elaborate? I don’t see this.
David wrote:
So would he actually treat hearing a good argument for an idea as evidence against that idea?
In my experience, most of the best philosophers working on the philosophy of religion are in fact theists, due to fairly obvious selection effects. Of course, most philosophers of religion, good or not, are theists, but I think in the upper echelons of the discipline the disparity is even more stark. Atheists who get into the field tend not to be very good philosophers, with a few honorable exceptions.
So a disproportionate number of the most careful and clever arguments (which, I think, is what David meant by “best arguments”) in that field support the theistic side, the wrong side. If the only thing I knew about an article on the philosophy of religion is that it is extremely well argued, I would consider that evidence that its conclusion is false. Does this violate conservation of expected evidence?
Note that there’s a distinction between all the arguments that exist in some Platonic sense and all the arguments that exist in published form, and that there’s a distinction between arguments that are “good” in the sense of significantly raising the probability of their conclusions and arguments that are “good” in the sense of being clever and carefully constructed. In both cases, I think David was talking about the second option. He was attributing to Yvain the claim that most clever and carefully constructed arguments out of the set of published arguments are for bad ideas. I don’t agree with this claim but I don’t think it violates basic rules of probability.
Unless I misunderstand, only if he hasn’t already updated on how many believe in the idea.
Could be that too. But it seems like we’re currently in the tail end of some 150 years of reactionary attitudes mostly being mainstream and mostly being argued for with poor and lazy ingroup flag-waving arguments, with the occasional clever argument for progressivism that the mainstream finds disagreeable popping up now and then and nudging things around. Then mainstream society started actually going progressive, and now we’ve started seeing the opposite pattern, even though the reactionary and progressive ideologies don’t seem to have changed significantly.
Have you ever actually read any of the original argument from 150 years ago, or are you merely going by the progressive characterization of their opponents’ arguments?
Mill’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” and “On liberty” are good examples of arguing for those positions before they were mainstream.
Vindication of the Rights of Women was by Mary Wollstonecraft, and from well before Mill wrote The Subjection of Women. Still, Mill’s views were certainly, as you say, radical for his time (and also more radical than those in Wollstonecraft’s essay, if I recall it at all accurately).
Yes, and Mill’s position would be considered libertarian today. In other words, if his books were published today, a lot of the people in this thread would denounce them as “reactionary”, and probably far worse names.
Which of Mill’s views do you think would be regarded as reactionary? I admit some of his views would be regarded as weird in light of more recent experience (e.g. his views on education in On Liberty are based on a very different baseline than the modern situation), but I’m having a hard time thinking of clear cases of overlap between Mill’s views and those commonly denounced as reactionary these days.
Funny thing, I was also thinking about Mill’s “On liberty” when reading this thread. I believe the issue is deeper:
In politics you often have a winning side and a losing side. The winning side can use various techniques to silence the losing side. People sympathetic to the losing side will move to meta arguments about why it is wrong to silence your opponents. -- The unfortunate, but logical, consequence is that arguing about why it is wrong to silence your opponents becomes an evidence for belonging to the losing side. An automatic status hit.
Therefore, it was easy to interpret Mill as an advocate for losing side of his days; and it is also easy to believe that he would support the losing side of today (at least indirectly by his meta arguments) if he were alive today… if what you know about him is that he argued that it is wrong to silence your opponents instead of debating them (which is a part that impressed me strongly).
If Mill advocated that even people guilty of the horrible crime of atheism should be able to publish their opinions, even if just to increase the quality of the theist arguments against them… it seems logical that today he could say the same thing about people guilty of believing in differences between people, or similar stuff. (Of course this assumes that he would be consistent in his beliefs and willing to bite the bullet.)
The problem would not be with Mills beliefs per se, but with inferences people would make from his meta arguments. And he would not even have to support the low-status people to create this association; the low-status people would create the association by quoting him often. -- And then he would have to choose between implicitly denying his support to them, or being considered a silent supporter.
For example, his views on economics, what we would today call libertarian, have been denounced by several people in this thread.
I was thinking that the random person’s opinions about how the mainstream moral climate is the right and proper thing haven’t been preserved for me to read, and whatever did get preserved has probably been heavily filtered for being well-argued and interesting, but that’s not quite right. They did have newspapers, which would be archived somewhere no matter what the content, and all sorts of weird random pamphlets probably are as well. Still a lot more editorial control than Reddit, but editorial control by the contemporary people, not by present-day scholars composing the Collection of Olden Time Moral Arguments Affirming The Great Historical Narrative For Moral And Intellectual Progress.
I was analogizing the current blogs and reddits thing with people ranting to each other at bars or something, with most of the arguments being at the quality of a random people ranting at you, but on second thought that’s not really a good analogy. Face to face socializing has pretty different dynamics than media culture, and the media culture was editorialized newspapers and books and the odd self-published pamphlet by someone with enough money for that.
A third thing, which would be relevant and would be hard to go back and assess now was how community level social persuasion got done. What kind of arguments did priests use trying to convince the congregation that women’s right to vote would lead to the apocalypse, what kind of arguments did the scruffy guy on the soapbox use trying to convince factory workers to start hanging fat people with top hats and monocles from the lampposts and so on.
So I could figure out what was a popular newspaper and go read through its archives, or try to figure out which books where bestsellers and see if I can somehow find a copy and read that, and I might actually learn something more interesting about the common quality of argumentation used than by just picking up filtered-by-present-day recommended books that might be systematic outliers. I haven’t done this because it sounds like a lot of work.
EDIT: Adam Cadre’s reviews of old post apocalyptic books are informing my expectations about what sort of stuff I might find if I skipped the present-day list of exemplary books the people of a past era read and went digging into the piles of half-forgotten stuff they actually read.
So why aren’t those arguments being used to defend progressivism today? The answer, which isn’t hard to notice if you actually look at old progressive arguments, is that those arguments tend to have premisses that modern progressives no longer believe and their conclusions are also very different from modern progressive positions.
This is not the case as I mentioned above.
Has there been significant change in the underlying trends where reactionaries are pessimistic about inherent human nature, consider it basically impossible to change significantly, and consider the problem of developing social mechanisms to control it something vital to social stability that takes generations and centuries to solve and is likely to end up with constraining and unintuitive solutions which will nevertheless be the best bet available, while progressives are optimistic that human nature is either benign or malleable enough that it’s possible to enact large and fast social changes and eventually educate people to make the new system work across the board, without messy, nasty and basically impossible to change facets of human nature ending up causing persistent problems?
Well, if you abstract things all the way up to that level.
I will point out that the Non-Libertarian FAQ isn’t actually anti-Libertarian; it’s targeted at a specific (vocal) branch of libertarianism, which I’d call Moral Libertarianism. From the FAQ:
Did you mean to post that here?
I mean a game changer in this community. Obviously Yvain’s blog posts will not have far-reaching real-world political implications.
By the way, singularitarianism is also a seriously minor viewpoint held by cranks.
Yes, but that doesn’t make crank magnetism a good idea.
Wow, that is awesome, I did not know there was a term for that. I always wondered why there seems to be a stacking effect when it came to bad beliefs. Thanks
I think a lot of it is the “vindication of all kooks” effect. NaturalNews is an excellent example.