Serious Marxian and feminist theory, in any sphere. Not that someone’s been seriously trying to post about those on LW and met with hostility, oh no—LW in general just can’t bridge the inferential distance to those schools of thought, so what we’re getting here is a strawman in a clown suit. We aren’t so much failing to extract value from those traditions, we aren’t even trying—because it’s much easier and more fun to mock it all as self-absorbed non-truth-tracking ivory-tower nonsense.
I’ve been reading lots of good stuff on both fronts lately, and attempting to mark what’s appropriate and good for LW (analysis of systemic behavior, self-perpetuating structures of power, etc), so that I can at least provide some good links eventually. Translating any serious insights into LW-speak by myself is a bit of a daunting task; again, a lot of Marxist/feminist context as seriously studied by those schools of thought is nothing like the strawman version that many people have likely absorbed through pop culture.
But at least I can say that, while the inferential gap between the transhumanist/geek discourse of LW and the discourse of left-wing academia that tech geeks love to deride is great, there is a lot to be gained on the other side. We are ignoring some vast intellectual currents here.
We aren’t so much failing to extract value from those traditions, we aren’t even trying—because it’s much easier and more fun to mock it all as self-absorbed non-truth-tracking ivory-tower nonsense.
There’s a reason it is easier to dismiss some things as non-truth-tracking ivory-tower nonsense. A good one.
We are ignoring some vast intellectual currents here.
This is a feature, not a bug. (Although I don’t necessarily claim that the set of vast intellectual currents ignored is perfect, just that there is such a set and that there is non-trivial overlap.)
I’m skeptical, but I haven’t investigated either of those things at all, so I would try to read something about them if you posted it. Has knowing things about those theories been useful to you?
Translating any serious insights into LW-speak by myself is a bit of a daunting task
I like to think my entire tenure here has been something of an attempt at this, although of course I can’t say how successful it’s been.
(I’d also characterize it as in black rather than clown suits, at least from the inside. Will Newsome and muflax are the clown suit guys here, God bless them.)
Serious Marxian and feminist theory, in any sphere.
In many academic fields (including some social sciences, although obviously not econ), Marxist theory is still considered the go-to theory for what most people would simply consider “the economic way of thinking”. This means that there’s an absolutely huge amount of “Marxist analysis” of culture and society with uncertain status, because economically-literate folks simply haven’t had a chance to look at it. Much of this analysis probably makes a lot of sense from the POV of modern economics; much of it is probably utterly nonsensical.
The situation when referring to other branches of “Continental” theorizing (and AIUI, this includes feminist theory) is roughly analogous, except that this particular kind of philosophy spans the range from utterly worthless stuff (“Uncle Bob’s musings on life, the human mind and society!”) to stuff which is probably valuable but we can’t understand it properly because we lack more modern tools wrt. these topics (Freudian psychology might actually be a case in point here, especially in the light of cognitive-behavioral theory, perceptual-control theory and similar) and stuff which just needs some sort of cleanup, like Marxist analyses.
Wikipedia seems to disagree, actually. It is used to refer both to a political strawman, and to a legitimate school of thought—which need not have political implications persay[1]. The generally used label seems to be “critical theory”, or even “theory” for short (talk about ambiguity!); which definitely includes Marxist ideas in addition to other stuff.
[1] Considering how ubiquitous the use of Marxian theory is in the humanities and social sciences, expecting everyone who uses such theories to be a radical socialist is kind of like expecting all business or econ professors to be extreme conservatives or libertarians.
Can I just note I’m amazed by the commenters in this post who are libertarians about money but appear to be socialists with other people’s time and attention. The world does not owe you a social living.
Worth noting that libertarians on Less Wrong tend to be libertarians because they think free markets produce more utility without government intervention—not because they believe a story about taxation being unjustified coercion or wealth redistribution being theft. There is nothing necessarily hypocritical about thinking that wealth shouldn’t be redistributed but social status should.
Though I suspect there are pro-free market arguments that would cross apply.
Again, please understand that this is a little frustrating for me. Just throwing some goddamn links without further comment for now, OK? The below is entirely random, just the stuff I had in nearby tabs—I have no idea of what links to pick for a proper LW-style introduction to a subject.
Responding to these in the order I look at them which is not the order you linked them:
The gender one fails literally in the first 2 paragraphs.
Women aren’t oppressed and haven’t STARTED being oppressed due to 18th or 19th century cultural regimes like the bourgeois. This is like explaining black oppression as a consequence of the KKK despite african slavery having been a thing for centuries before that.
In the interests of policing every comment about my blog anywhere on the internet thought I’d comment.
@drethelin
It is self evident, but posts like that are intended to communicate the point to libertarians in a way they can understand (eg weird reductionist economist speak). I wish we lived in a world where nobody denied employers have power over their employees, but alas it is not the case.
@orphan
Work is necessary; working for a man in a moustache under hierarchical conditions is by no means natural (in fact, historically people have been incredibly resistant to wage labour and in many cases were effectively forced into it). It isn’t about people being free from consequence; it’s about their livelihoods and even life depending on whether someone who happens to own, legally, the means of production, decides to ‘grant’ them the ‘privilege’ of enough money for basic rights.
Personally I find it to be silly. It revolves around freedom from consequence, which is another way about the position that decisions shouldn’t matter, which is itself another way about tyranny. The concept of freedom expressed there is triviality; nothing you do can matter, because if it did, you might not feel free to make that choice.
Which rather sharply contradicts with my own notions of freedom, which require first and foremost that my decisions -do- matter.
Freedom from consequence. The fundamental argument there is that workers have little freedom because, for example, they have to eat, they have to pay their bills, etc. It’s the argument, at its root, that the price we pay for our decisions shouldn’t be too high—and, to recycle my words, that our decisions should be fundamentally trivial. Whether or not we go to work today shouldn’t affect us too much more than whether or not we wear a red shirt or a blue shirt.
And by this I don’t mean such individuals want to be -completely- free of consequence, just free of any consequence that substantially burdens them, that makes their lives substantively worse. They’re fine with consequence, so long as the consequence is inconsequential. (The precise extent varies by individual, but the basics exist there in some extent.)
you’re moralizing altogether too hard. The argument isn’t that workers should be FREE of consequences, it’s that the consequences are disproportionately on them for the decisions of others. This is an argument of fact, and whatever you think may be the correct moral response to this is up to you, but I think it’s definitely true that holders of capital have more power in employment decisions than laborer and that this works out badly for the laborers because they suffer from coordination problems in bargaining.
I don’t regard freedom as a morally desirable state, but rather a state necessary to morality.
And the author doesn’t make that argument. He/she states that obligations such as “debts, families, and of course social obligations” put workers in a weaker bargaining position. The argument is heavily detached from its implications, but those implications are no less there for it—until workers are without such obligation, without the need to work for food and board, they are in a state of coercion. Until the decisions of workers do not actually matter, they—being in a state of coercion—have little freedom of their own.
The author is the one moralizing, with cautious implications, exacting connotations, and carefully evaded implications. My response is merely to point out what it is.
obligations such as “debts, families, and of course social obligations” put workers in a weaker bargaining position. The argument is heavily detached from its implications, but those implications are no less there for it—until workers are without such obligation, without the need to work for food and board, they are in a state of coercion.
The word ‘coercion’ might be slipping in some unwarranted connotations, but this seems roughly correct to me. There’s a reason that having enough wealth saved up to live comfortably for an extended period of time is popularly known as having ‘f**k you money’.
I don’t think there is a single thing in the piece I could describe as factually untrue. The factual truthness of it isn’t really the problem; the problem is that nothing the author was intending to convey actually depends upon the truth; the truth conveyed is a relatively trivial one, practically a tautology; those who depend on working to live have to work to live.
Everything in the post comes back to that one truth. The author even takes it as a given that justice requires that people -not- have to work to live (that’s what the “universal wage” line is), and then argues that this isn’t enough, because other things in life still require you to work, and you’re still being coerced. (Coerced by what? Reality?)
It’s an exceptionally well crafted piece of dark arts.
Serious Marxian and feminist theory, in any sphere. Not that someone’s been seriously trying to post about those on LW and met with hostility, oh no—LW in general just can’t bridge the inferential distance to those schools of thought, so what we’re getting here is a strawman in a clown suit. We aren’t so much failing to extract value from those traditions, we aren’t even trying—because it’s much easier and more fun to mock it all as self-absorbed non-truth-tracking ivory-tower nonsense.
I’ve been reading lots of good stuff on both fronts lately, and attempting to mark what’s appropriate and good for LW (analysis of systemic behavior, self-perpetuating structures of power, etc), so that I can at least provide some good links eventually. Translating any serious insights into LW-speak by myself is a bit of a daunting task; again, a lot of Marxist/feminist context as seriously studied by those schools of thought is nothing like the strawman version that many people have likely absorbed through pop culture.
But at least I can say that, while the inferential gap between the transhumanist/geek discourse of LW and the discourse of left-wing academia that tech geeks love to deride is great, there is a lot to be gained on the other side. We are ignoring some vast intellectual currents here.
I look forward to your further posts.
my limited research on these topics has been very negative.
There’s a reason it is easier to dismiss some things as non-truth-tracking ivory-tower nonsense. A good one.
This is a feature, not a bug. (Although I don’t necessarily claim that the set of vast intellectual currents ignored is perfect, just that there is such a set and that there is non-trivial overlap.)
I’m skeptical, but I haven’t investigated either of those things at all, so I would try to read something about them if you posted it. Has knowing things about those theories been useful to you?
Yeah. Unfortunately all of that stuff is covered with a thick level of mindkilledness, plus some other incredibly messy stuff, anti-epistemology, etc.
I was really disappointed by the way that rather than adapting the valuable stuff, Atheism Plus just assimilated.
I do think that looking at this stuff would be pretty useful, although it should be scrubbed first.
I like to think my entire tenure here has been something of an attempt at this, although of course I can’t say how successful it’s been.
(I’d also characterize it as in black rather than clown suits, at least from the inside. Will Newsome and muflax are the clown suit guys here, God bless them.)
In many academic fields (including some social sciences, although obviously not econ), Marxist theory is still considered the go-to theory for what most people would simply consider “the economic way of thinking”. This means that there’s an absolutely huge amount of “Marxist analysis” of culture and society with uncertain status, because economically-literate folks simply haven’t had a chance to look at it. Much of this analysis probably makes a lot of sense from the POV of modern economics; much of it is probably utterly nonsensical.
The situation when referring to other branches of “Continental” theorizing (and AIUI, this includes feminist theory) is roughly analogous, except that this particular kind of philosophy spans the range from utterly worthless stuff (“Uncle Bob’s musings on life, the human mind and society!”) to stuff which is probably valuable but we can’t understand it properly because we lack more modern tools wrt. these topics (Freudian psychology might actually be a case in point here, especially in the light of cognitive-behavioral theory, perceptual-control theory and similar) and stuff which just needs some sort of cleanup, like Marxist analyses.
Worth noting that as far as I can tell, the phrase ‘cultural marxism’ refers to a strawman, and a strawman alone.
Wikipedia seems to disagree, actually. It is used to refer both to a political strawman, and to a legitimate school of thought—which need not have political implications persay[1]. The generally used label seems to be “critical theory”, or even “theory” for short (talk about ambiguity!); which definitely includes Marxist ideas in addition to other stuff.
[1] Considering how ubiquitous the use of Marxian theory is in the humanities and social sciences, expecting everyone who uses such theories to be a radical socialist is kind of like expecting all business or econ professors to be extreme conservatives or libertarians.
Hmmm. I have never heard the exact phrase used in a non-politically-smearing context.
Can I just note I’m amazed by the commenters in this post who are libertarians about money but appear to be socialists with other people’s time and attention. The world does not owe you a social living.
Worth noting that libertarians on Less Wrong tend to be libertarians because they think free markets produce more utility without government intervention—not because they believe a story about taxation being unjustified coercion or wealth redistribution being theft. There is nothing necessarily hypocritical about thinking that wealth shouldn’t be redistributed but social status should.
Though I suspect there are pro-free market arguments that would cross apply.
True, it also isn’t entitled to stop us from trying to acquire one by imposing arbitrary rules.
Edit: I could equally well turn the question around and ask why liberals aren’t trying to make social livings more fair.
Is there any chance that there are people who want your company that you’ve been ignoring?
I gotta ask: how’s your present approach working out for you?
Do you mean the present approach to markets, or to dating?
How your present approach to everything works out in terms of dating.
While I agree with your fundamental point, you seem too be confusing libertarian political philosophy with libertine ethics.
give me three simple examples on the order of length of sequence posts of what there is to be gained from these vast intellectual currents there.
Again, please understand that this is a little frustrating for me. Just throwing some goddamn links without further comment for now, OK? The below is entirely random, just the stuff I had in nearby tabs—I have no idea of what links to pick for a proper LW-style introduction to a subject.
Structural power as applied to decision theory:
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/AJS1994.pdf
Erik Olin Wright’s works on Marxist social analysis:
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/selected-published-writings.htm
Gender:
http://isreview.org/issues/02/engles_family.shtml
Econ:
http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/10/27/a-brief-anti-economist-history/
http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/why-does-capital-have-more-bargaining-power-than-labour/
http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/is-economics-a-gun-that-only-fires-left/
(Also check out Chris Dillow’s blog.)
Responding to these in the order I look at them which is not the order you linked them: The gender one fails literally in the first 2 paragraphs.
Women aren’t oppressed and haven’t STARTED being oppressed due to 18th or 19th century cultural regimes like the bourgeois. This is like explaining black oppression as a consequence of the KKK despite african slavery having been a thing for centuries before that.
can you show me ONE post you read (not at random) that seemed as awesome and sense-making as http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/ or http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/ or http://lesswrong.com/lw/ny/sneaking_in_connotations/ or etc.
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/AJS1994.pdf this seems good but not actually about Marxism?
http://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/why-does-capital-have-more-bargaining-power-than-labour/ This is good but seems pretty self-evident to me?
Hi,
In the interests of policing every comment about my blog anywhere on the internet thought I’d comment.
@drethelin
It is self evident, but posts like that are intended to communicate the point to libertarians in a way they can understand (eg weird reductionist economist speak). I wish we lived in a world where nobody denied employers have power over their employees, but alas it is not the case.
@orphan
Work is necessary; working for a man in a moustache under hierarchical conditions is by no means natural (in fact, historically people have been incredibly resistant to wage labour and in many cases were effectively forced into it). It isn’t about people being free from consequence; it’s about their livelihoods and even life depending on whether someone who happens to own, legally, the means of production, decides to ‘grant’ them the ‘privilege’ of enough money for basic rights.
Holy shit, that sounds exhausting. How do you find the time?
I was semi-joking, sometimes I just don’t bother.
But the short answer to your question is: I’m a student.
Personally I find it to be silly. It revolves around freedom from consequence, which is another way about the position that decisions shouldn’t matter, which is itself another way about tyranny. The concept of freedom expressed there is triviality; nothing you do can matter, because if it did, you might not feel free to make that choice.
Which rather sharply contradicts with my own notions of freedom, which require first and foremost that my decisions -do- matter.
It revolves around what now? I really don’t know what you’re saying here.
Freedom from consequence. The fundamental argument there is that workers have little freedom because, for example, they have to eat, they have to pay their bills, etc. It’s the argument, at its root, that the price we pay for our decisions shouldn’t be too high—and, to recycle my words, that our decisions should be fundamentally trivial. Whether or not we go to work today shouldn’t affect us too much more than whether or not we wear a red shirt or a blue shirt.
And by this I don’t mean such individuals want to be -completely- free of consequence, just free of any consequence that substantially burdens them, that makes their lives substantively worse. They’re fine with consequence, so long as the consequence is inconsequential. (The precise extent varies by individual, but the basics exist there in some extent.)
you’re moralizing altogether too hard. The argument isn’t that workers should be FREE of consequences, it’s that the consequences are disproportionately on them for the decisions of others. This is an argument of fact, and whatever you think may be the correct moral response to this is up to you, but I think it’s definitely true that holders of capital have more power in employment decisions than laborer and that this works out badly for the laborers because they suffer from coordination problems in bargaining.
I don’t regard freedom as a morally desirable state, but rather a state necessary to morality.
And the author doesn’t make that argument. He/she states that obligations such as “debts, families, and of course social obligations” put workers in a weaker bargaining position. The argument is heavily detached from its implications, but those implications are no less there for it—until workers are without such obligation, without the need to work for food and board, they are in a state of coercion. Until the decisions of workers do not actually matter, they—being in a state of coercion—have little freedom of their own.
The author is the one moralizing, with cautious implications, exacting connotations, and carefully evaded implications. My response is merely to point out what it is.
The word ‘coercion’ might be slipping in some unwarranted connotations, but this seems roughly correct to me. There’s a reason that having enough wealth saved up to live comfortably for an extended period of time is popularly known as having ‘f**k you money’.
I don’t think there is a single thing in the piece I could describe as factually untrue. The factual truthness of it isn’t really the problem; the problem is that nothing the author was intending to convey actually depends upon the truth; the truth conveyed is a relatively trivial one, practically a tautology; those who depend on working to live have to work to live.
Everything in the post comes back to that one truth. The author even takes it as a given that justice requires that people -not- have to work to live (that’s what the “universal wage” line is), and then argues that this isn’t enough, because other things in life still require you to work, and you’re still being coerced. (Coerced by what? Reality?)
It’s an exceptionally well crafted piece of dark arts.