A bit of word-dissolving in political discussion
I found Scott Alexander’s steelmanning of the NRx critique to be an interesting, even persuassive critique of modern progressivism, having not been exposed to this movement prior to today. However I am also equally confused at the jump from “modern liberal democracies are flawed” to “restore the devine-right-of-kings!” I’ve always hated the quip “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” (we’ve yet tried), but I think it applies here.
Of course, with the prompting to state my own thoughts, I simply had to go and start typing them out. The following contains obvious traces of my own political leanings and philosophy (in short summary: if “Cthulhu only swims left”, then I AM CTHULHU… at least until someone explains to me what a Great Old One is doing out of R’lyeh and in West Coast-flavored American politics), but those traces should be taken as evidence of what I believe rather than statements about it.
Because what I was actually trying to talk about, is rationality in politics. Because in fact, while it is hard, while it is spiders, all the normal techniques work on it. There is only one real Cardinal Sin of Attempting to be Rational in Politics, and it is the following argument, stated in generic form that I might capture it from the ether and bury it: “You only believe what you believe for political reasons!” It does not matter if those “reasons” are signaling, privilege, hegemony, or having an invisible devil on your shoulder whispering into your bloody ear: to impugn someone else’s epistemology entirely at the meta-level without saying a thing against their object-level claims is anti-epistemology.
Now, on to the ranting! The following are more-or-less a semi-random collection of tips I vomited out for trying to deal with politics rationally. I hope they help. This is a Discussion post because Mark said that might be a good idea.
Dissolve “democracy”, and not just in the philosophical sense, but in the sense that there have been many different kinds of actually existing democracies. There are always multiple object-level implementations of any meta-level idea, and most political ideas are sufficiently abstract to count as meta-level. Even if, for purposes of a thought experiment, you find yourself saying, “I WILL ONLY EVER CONSIDER SYSTEMS THAT COUNT AS DEMOCRACY ACCORDING TO MY INTUITIVE DEMOCRACY-P() PREDICATE!”, one can easily debate whether a mixed-member proportional Parliament performs better than a district-based bicameral Congress, or whether a pure Westminster system beats them both, or whether a Presidential system works better, or whatever. Particular institutional designs yield particular institutional behaviors, and successfully inducing complex generalizations across large categories of institutional designs requires large amounts of evidence—just as it does in any other form of hierarchical probabilistic reasoning.
Dissolve words like “democracy”, “capitalism”, “socialism”, and “government” in the philosophical sense, and ask: what are the terminal goals democracy serves? How much do we support those goals, and how much do current democratic systems suffer approximation error by forcing our terminal goals to fit inside the hypothesis space our actual institutions instantiate? For however much we do support those goals, why do we shape these particular institutions to serve those goals, and not other institutions? For all values of X, mah nishtana ha-X hazeh mikol ha-X-im? is a fundamental question of correct reasoning. (Asking the question of why we instantiate particular institutions in particular places, when one believes in democratic states, is the core issue of democratic socialism, and I would indeed count myself a democratic socialist. But you get different answers and inferences if you ask about schools or churches, don’t you?)
Learn first to explicitly identify yourself with a political “tribe”, and next to consider political ideas individually, as questions of fact and value subject to investigation via epistemology and moral epistemology, rather than treating politics as “tribal”. Tribalism is the mind-killer: keeping your own explicit tribal identification in mind helps you notice when you’re being tribalist, and helps you distinguish your own tribe’s customs from universal truths—both aids to your political rationality. And yes, while politics has always been at least a little tribal, the particular form the tribes take varies through time and space: the division of society into a “blue tribe” and a “red tribe” (as oft-described by Yvain on Slate Star Codex), for example, is peculiar to late-20th-century and early-21st-century USA. Those colors didn’t even come into usage until the 2000 Presidential election, and hadn’t firmly solidified as describing seemingly separate nationalities until 2004! Other countries, and other times, have significantly different arrangements of tribes, so if you don’t learn to distinguish between ideas and tribes, you’ll not only fail at political rationality, you’ll give yourself severe culture shock the first time you go abroad.
General rule: you often think things are general rules of the world not because you have the large amount of evidence necessary to reason that they really are, but because you’ve seen so few alternatives that your subjective distribution over models contains only one or two models, both coarse-grained. Unquestioned assumptions always feel like universal truths from the inside!
Learn to check political ideas by looking at the actually-existing implementations, including the ones you currently oppose—think of yourself as bloody Sauron if you have to! This works, since most political ideas are not particularly original. Commons trusts exist, for example, the “movement” supporting them just wants to scale them up to cover all society’s important common assets rather than just tracts of land donated by philanthropists. Universal health care exists in many countries. Monarchy and dictatorship exist in many countries. Religious rule exists in many countries. Free tertiary education exists in some countries, and has previously existed in more. Non-free but subsidized tertiary education exists in many countries. Running the state off oil revenue has been tried in many countries. Centrally-planned economies have been tried in many countries. And it’s damn well easier to compare “Canadian health-care” to “American health-care” to “Chinese health-care”, all sampled in 2014, using fact-based policy studies, than to argue about the Visions of Human Life represented by each (the welfare state, the Company Man, and the Lone Fox, let’s say) -- which of course assumes consequentialism. In fact, I should issue a much stronger warning here: argumentation is an utterly unreliable guide to truth compared to data, and all these meta-level political conclusions require vast amounts of object-level data to induce correct causal models of the world that allow for proper planning and policy.
This means that while the Soviet Union is not evidence for the total failure of “socialism” as I use the word, that’s because I define socialism as a larger category of possible economies that strictly contains centralized state planning—centralized state planning really was, by and large, a total fucking failure. But there’s a rationality lesson here: in politics, all opponents of an idea will have their own definition for it, but the supporters will only have one. Learn to identify political terminology with the definitions advanced by supporters: these definitions might contain applause lights, but at least they pick out one single spot in policy-space or society-space (or, hopefully, a reasonably small subset of that space), while opponents don’t generally agree on which precise point in policy-space or society-space they’re actually attacking (because they’re all opposed for their own reasons and thus not coordinating with each-other).
This also means that if someone wants to talk about monarchies that rule by religious right, or even about absolute monarchies in general, they do have to account for the behavior of the Arab monarchies today, for example. Or if they want to talk about religious rule in general (which very few do, to my knowledge, but hey, let’s go with it), they actually do have to account for the behavior of Da3esh/ISIS. Of course, they might do so by endorsing such regimes, just as some members of Western Communist Parties endorsed the Soviet Union—and this can happen by lack of knowledge, by failure of rationality, or by difference of goals.
And then of course, there are the complications of the real world: in the real world, neither perfect steelman-level central planning nor perfect steelman-level markets have ever been implemented, anywhere, with the result that once upon a time, the Soviet economy was allocatively efficient and prices in capitalist West Germany were just as bad at reflecting relative scarcities as those in centrally-planned East Germany! The real advantage of market systems has ended up being the autonomy of firms, not allocative optimality (and that’s being argued, right there, in the single most left-wing magazine I know of!). Which leads us to repeat the warning: correct conclusions are induced from real-world data, not argued from a priori principles that usually turn out to be wildly mis-emphasized if not entirely wrong.
Learn to notice when otherwise uninformed people are adopting political ideas as attire to gain status by joining a fashionable cause. Keep in mind that what constitutes “fashionable” depends on the joiner’s own place in society, not on your opinions about them. For some people, things you and I find low-status (certain clothes or haircuts) are, in fact, high-status. See Yvain’s “Republicans are Douchebags” post for an example in a Western context: names that the American Red Tribe considers solid and respectable are viewed by the American Blue Tribe as “douchebag names”.
A heuristic that tends to immunize against certain failures of political rationality: if an argument does not base itself at all in facts external to itself or to the listener, but instead concentrates entirely on reinterpreting evidence, then it is probably either an argument about definitions, or sheer nonsense. This is related to my comments on hierarchical reasoning above, and also to the general sense in which trying to refute an object-level claim by meta-level argumentation is not even wrong, but in fact anti-epistemology.
A further heuristic, usable on actual electioneering campaigns the world over: whenever someone says “values”, he is lying, and you should reach for your gun. The word “values” is the single most overused, drained, meaningless word in politics. It is a normative pronoun: it directs the listener to fill in warm fuzzy things here without concentrating the speaker and the listener on the same point in policy-space at all. All over the world, politicians routinely seek power on phrases like “I have values”, or “My opponent has no values”, or “our values” or “our $TRIBE values”, or “$APPLAUSE_LIGHT values”. Just cross those phrases and their entire containing sentences out with a big black marker, and then see what the speaker is actually saying. Sometimes, if you’re lucky (ie: voting for a Democrat), they’re saying absolutely nothing. Often, however, the word “values” means, “Good thing I’m here to tell you that you want this brand new oppressive/exploitative power elite, since you didn’t even know!”
As mentioned above, be very, very sure about what ethical framework you’re working within before having a political discussion. A consequentialist and a virtue-ethicist will often take completely different policy positions on, say, healthcare, and have absolutely nothing to talk about with each-other. The consequentialist can point out the utilitarian gains of universal single-payer care, and the virtue-ethicist can point out the incentive structure of corporate-sponsored group plans for promoting hard work and loyalty to employers, but they are fundamentally talking past each-other.
Often, the core matter of politics is how to trade off between ethical ideals that are otherwise left talking past each-other, because society has finite material resources, human morals are very complex, and real policies have unintended consequences. For example, if we enact Victorian-style “poor laws” that penalize poverty for virtue-ethical reasons, the proponents of those laws need to be held accountable for accepting the unintended consequences of those laws, including higher crime rates, a less educated workforce, etc. (This is a broad point in favor of consequentialism: a rational consequentialist always considers consequences, intended and unintended, or he fails at consequentialism. A deontologist or virtue-ethicist, on the other hand, has license from his own ethics algorithm to not care about unintended consequences at all, provided the rules get followed or the rules or rulers are virtuous.)
Almost all policies can be enacted more effectively with state power, and almost no policies can “take over the world” by sheer superiority of the idea all by themselves. Demanding that a successful policy should “take over the world” by itself, as everyone naturally turns to the One True Path, is intellectually dishonest, and so is demanding that a policy should be maximally effective in miniature (when tried without the state, or in a small state, or in a weak state) before it is justified for the state to experiment with it. Remember: the overwhelming majority of journals and conferences in professional science still employ frequentist statistics rather than Bayesianism, and this is 20 years after the PC revolution and the World Wide Web, and 40 years after computers became widespread in universities. Human beings are utility-satisficing, adaptation-executing creatures with mostly-unknown utility functions: expecting them to adopt more effective policies quickly by mere effectiveness of the policy is downright unrealistic.
The Appeal to Preconceptions is probably the single Darkest form of Dark Arts, and it’s used everywhere in politics. When someone says something to you that “stands to reason” or “sounds right”, which genuinely seems quite plausible, actually, but without actually providing evidence, you need to interrogate your own beliefs and find the Equivalent Sample Size of the informative prior generating that subjective plausibility before you let yourself get talked into anything. This applies triply in philosophy.
Is this true? It seems to me that large scale agreement about anything in politics is fairly rare. Also, people seem to be more aware of differences on their own side than among their opponents. Do you have examples?
Interesting post.
However, I am sceptical about 9. Many ideas have swept the world though their sheer superiority. Here are some examples from a wide variety of domains:
Mini-mills
Limited liability corporations
Sushi
Use of benchmarks (e.g. S&P500) in finance
Washing Machines
Outside of politics, things frequently do succeed purely because they are better. Only in politics does “people don’t like my idea? Better threaten to shoot them” sound like a natural result.
I think limited liability corporations are a very political thing. I would guess that they don’t exist in some communist countries.
Not only that, but incorporation laws are written very differently in different capitalist countries. Economists have debated over whether various apparent differences between Britain, Germany, and USA arose historically from the precise details of the laws and institutional forms for incorporation, partnership, and banking in the three different economies. If I remember correctly, Britain displayed a different pattern of industrialization from the other two due to its laws favoring partnerships of wealthy families over joint-stock companies.
(Points (1) and (4) all over again.)
Yes that’s true. But once you have laws permitting (not necessarily making mandatory) limited liability corporations, they tend to out-compete other forms of organization in a wide array of fields. Once given the option, people choose this form of organization because of it’s superiority. Indeed, I think the limited liability corporation has come about as close to “taking over the world” as ideas ever do.
I would be wary of so quickly buying into LLC as only being laws ‘permitting’ it and having ‘superiority’. If a law was passed giving particular companies subsidies of billions of dollars, you might not be surprised if the companies did well and proved their ‘superiority’, but you would be a little nonplussed at people describing the subsidies as ‘permitted’.
As I understand it, LLCs are not so much permitted as subsidized: if you wanted to form a corporation or partnership before various countries fully legalized them, you certainly could, you were indeed ‘permitted’ to form corporations; what you got, however, was also full liability—the people who made up the corporation were liable for its actions. LLCs get a subsidy in shareholders being able to shed liability and risk for their actions beyond the net worth of the LLC. This is not a free lunch, however, and it comes at the expense of everyone who has a claim against an LLC and discovers it’s bankrupt or a shell and that they can’t pierce the corporate veil.
Limited liability is not a free lunch. Being able to be sued is an important right—it gives others the confidence to deal with you, as you can be held accountable. Being able to discharge those obligations in bankruptcy means a LLC has to prove its reliability in other ways—for example, by holding more capital, or posting collateral, or simply offering better prices to make up for it. As it happened, this proved to be more efficient that unlimited personal liability, so LLC’s won out. Third parties could freely choose to deal with non-LLCs if they wanted to, and if they did, they would not be taxed to fund LLCs, so there is no subsidy.
The one case where you have a stronger case is with negative externalities, where an LLC might cause damage to third parties. In this case third parties are paying the ‘tax’ of the externality. However, I do not think this was the most important cause for the rise of the LLC, and there are many other checks and balances—for example, not just any LLC is allowed to own a nuclear power plant, you have to be very well capitalized.
Also LLC’s are generally more heavily taxed than partnerships, etc. - they pay income tax at the corporate level as well as at the individual level. They have risen to prominence despite this (literal) tax.
Yes, and those countries’ economies aren’t doing to well.
I was going to make exactly this point. Very few ideas get to 100% on their own, but it’s obvious which ideas are winning and which are losing at most given times. A policy can be implemented more strongly with state power, but state power selects for ideas that pass the political sausage-making process, not for ideas that are actually good or right. Capitalist success is a much better filter for idea quality than government is(in large part, because the sorts of people who run governments tend to be ones who pick a few values to elevate and lose perspective on the importance of others).
Thanks for the mini-mills link.
I am extremely skeptical of this claim, and would like to see a good deal more history for each of your examples. Sushi, in particular, strikes me as a strange thing to list: for what criteria is sushi so clearly the superior answer that it spread and pushed out other competitors? The world’s burger bars appear to be just as intact as the sushi bars, in point of fact.
Which fails to address the example I raised, which was explicitly and purposefully apolitical. If things spread and succeed purely on their own merits, rather than on the effort and power put into spreading them by people, then why are frequentist statistics still the standard in most of science?
I mean, are you really going to claim that some political party has been threatening to shoot people who win at probability?
And of course, “threaten to shoot them” is a libertarian applause light.
I’m not a connoisseur, but I’m sure if you asked a Sushi fan they could tell you.
Good point. The franchise burger chain was another excellent innovation that spread like wildfire … a special kind of wildfire that doesn’t kill people and where getting burnt is both entirely optional and quite pleasant. In this case I can explain some of the advantages:
Consistency: you can travel widely and yet be able to trust that the food served, prices, and style of restaurant will be the same.
Low capital cost for parent: a company like McDonalds could open a very large number of franchises quickly without too much capital investment.
Strong incentives: direct ownership by the franchisee meant the local manager’s incentives were very strongly aligned with the parent company.
Replicating best practices: franchises can learn best practices from the parent, which is incentivized to share
Incentivizing operational research: the parent company is incentivized to discover new and more efficient ways to run a restaurant, as it can easily spread them to its franchisees.
Because they are easy, and frequently good enough. In cases where the difference matters (Machine Learning, some areas of Finance) it’s very bayesian.
Furthermore, I don’t think the field of statistics would have been improved if the government had appointed a Statistics Tsar to crack down on anyone using non-ideologically-compliant techniques.
I’m not sure this is true here. According to the original article,
Yet here this is not the case. Some people really do advocate threatening to shoot people who disagree: revolutionaries explicitly, and many other people implicitly—including you. The phrase is conveys information—it shows how many people apply fail to hold politicians, policemen and the state more broadly to the moral standards they ordinarily use to judge people.
edit: unclear sentence structure fixed
But of course it is. Libertarians shoot people who violate private property titles. Wanting to enforce a different set of laws does not mean one is actually an anarchist, nor should any sensible consequentialist put himself in the situation of competing to signal greater anarchism-virtue.
If the reversed sentence sounds coherent then the original sentence carried content, so it’s not an applause light.
Do not ask whether a politician Believes in Global Warming. Ask whether that politician would want their kids to inherit a nice house in South Miami.
(But beware: if this trick gets around, politicians will buy or sell their Florida real estate in order to signal tribal allegiance.)
New business model—marketing land vulnerable to climate change or sea level rise specifically to people who want to signal that they don’t believe those things will happen.
Warning: implementing this may cost you one (1) soul.
Why not market housing in “vibrant” and “diverse” neighborhoods to people who are politically supportive of immigration?
Oh wait, we tried that already, and it didn’t work—they all want to live in “safe” places with “good” schools. Bummer.
In Berlin plenty of people want to live in vibrant neighborhoods.
I believe “vibrant” is a euphemism for has plenty of low-IQ-high-crime sub-populations. In particular I doubt Germans want to live in the Muslim neighborhoods.
Berlin Kreuzberg has a high migrant population and is somewhere where people want to live.
Racists are hypocritical. Everyone somehow still surprised by this. Film at 11.
Why would it cost you a soul? This is Prediction Markets 101 - people buy and sell possessions that have different values based on predictions of future outcomes based on their belief in those outcomes.
Sure, and the people on cigarette marketing teams are just informing people to help them make rational choices in the market.
Assuming they follow truth in advertising rules, that is an unironically correct statement. Different cigarettes differ, and I see no reason to believe that advertising can’t help one tobacco company poach customers from another. Some people choose to start smoking as well, and they’re legitimate targets for advertising. Advertising isn’t all about convincing new customers to start your product category at all.
So by that standard almost no politicians believe in global warming.
Notice how all the rich actors who show up at charity events to “fight global warming” are also lining up to buy beach front property. (They also tend to fly around in private jets, but that’s a separate issue.)
Edit: The reason I didn’t use politicians in the above example is that not all politicians can afford beachfront property and the ability to do so correlates with other things that may be relevant to whether you want him in power.
Evidence?
Who needs evidence when you’ve got bile and cynicism?
As a possibility, buying current beach-front property is consistent with believing in global warming if you also believe that it is hard enough to predict where the new beach-front will be that it is cheaper (say, per future-discounted year of residence) to buy property on the current beach and then at the new location of the beach, than it is to buy any combination of properties today.
The inheritance question is actually rather different, as it is about buying beach-front-property-futures in the present.
Ignoring reasons why someone believes what they believe is not good epistemology.
I don’t think explicitly identifying yourself with one tribe is a good idea. I personally don’t map to any specific political tribe. I might label myself as having a hacker ideology and use that as an argument that I oppose French secularism but I would guess that most people on LW wouldn’t see the connection.
In school we had a philosophy course and our teacher told us that wanting to name tribes is a very American thing. German culture doesn’t have the same value of signalling tribal affiliation.
I remember Berlin’s SPD Finance senator Sarrazin being asked whether he’s in the wrong party after he wrote his book critising the lower social classes. He answered that one doesn’t change his poltiical party like one’s clothing. He had his post because he was actually good at his job.
As far as the meaning of the word democracy goes I like the way Yes, Minister explains British Demorcracy. It doesn’t have much to do with the American idea of political tribalism.
It depends.
If I understand all of someone’s logical arguments for believing what they believe, and I have the knowledge and processing power needed to evaluate those arguments, and I want to know whether the belief is correct, I should ignore all of the non-logical reasons why they believe what they believe. Argument screens off authority, which means it also screens off non-authority and indeed anti-authority.
If someone tells me the sun’s shining, and I look outside and see the sun’s shining, it doesn’t matter if the person told me the sun’s shining because they’re trying to signal something else; it doesn’t matter if they’re privileged; it doesn’t matter if they’re a hegemon; it doesn’t matter if they have an invisible devil on their ear. I can see for myself that they’re correct. The process that generated the claim has been rendered utterly irrelevant.
But of course I’ve made some assumptions there which are routinely false: I often don’t have the knowledge or processing power needed to evaluate all of someone’s arguments, and sometimes don’t even know the arguments for a belief. If so, it’s legitimate to use what I know about the belief-generating process as a cognitive shortcut to judge the belief. And this is true frequently enough that you have a good point, too: in real life we don’t have time to do a full-blown evaluation of the belief network supporting a claim, in which case the “reasons why someone believes what they believe” can be useful (even important) evidence. Whether you are correct or eli_sennesh is correct is situation-dependent.
A person can mention that the sun is shining because they seek a small talk topic with little chance of offense.
They can also say the sun is shinning to indicate that the dislike being indoors at the moment.
If you only focus on the fact that the sun is indeed shining you might miss most of the communicated information.
That’s true, some conversations are not actually about what they’re denotatively about. I didn’t think eli_sennesh was talking about such mundane small talk, though.
Outside of math you also need the relevant evidence, i.e., observations, which requires you to trust that they have been accurately reported.
Agreed. That’s part of the “knowledge” I had in mind.
True, true, and true.
Um, “hard work and loyalty to employers” can also be interpreted as desirable things that raise total utility in the long run. (Also note: the above is not at all an accurate description of any political position that I know off, I was just going with eli’s example.)
Except, as I mentioned above in practice the conventionalist dismisses any consequences he can’t or doesn’t want to measure as “irrelevant virtue-ethical considerations”. And that’s not getting into his license to define the utility function however he sees fit.
Sure. But then you’ve already lapsed into consequentialism, and thus stuck yourself with a mandate to consider the trade-offs between desirable and undesirable consequences. This is not what deontological and virtue-theoretic politicians actually do. What they actually do is see an undesirable consequence, and start loudly pointing it out, signaling “Look how morally brave I am for being willing to let this sort of thing happen out of pure principle!”
Yes, and deontologists and virtue ethicists consider trade offs between different principles or virtues.
This is not what consequentialists actually do either. In particular, I’ve never seen an actual utility function, much less using one to compute trade-offs.
Well, this is also what consequentialists talking about trolley problems sound like.
Disagreed. The correct consequentialist answer to a real-life trolley problem is to Take a Third Option and not sacrifice any lives, every time. If you find yourself stuck in a perverse situation, then yes, you pull the lever, not because it’s a good thing and you’re being brave, but because it’s the least-bad thing available in your perverse situation invented by philosophers who like perverse situations.
Can you give me some examples of this type of bravery by politicians, Eli?
Politicians might address downsides to their policies by ignoring, hiding, or downplaying them (“There may have been some civilian casualties, but the important thing is...”), calling them a necessary evil (“We protect hate speech to protect all other speech”), or spinning them into a positive good (“My new law inconveniences criminals? Good, let’s stick it to ’em!”).
But I can’t think of any time a politician engaged in the proud bullet-biting you see with philosophers.