See? Looks like I haven’t been talkinggibberish after all! Or, at least, someone wise shares some of my paranoid delusions. He even points to the two most infamous technocratic states specifically.
A pity that he hasn’t mentioned another important thing: that being convinced of one’s total freedom from dogma (and founding your philisophy on this “difference” between you and the brainwashed masses) is the most dangerous dogma of all, and nerds are very likely to be convinced of just that.
(It’s easy to glimpse some scary moments of that dogma on the blog of a certain locally famous software engineer… although, as I said, he’s far from the worst of it.)
Presuming it’s not entirely rhetorical, that sounds more than a little overblown. I’d buy “foolish” or “dangerous”, but this seems pretty ubiquitous and generally doesn’t lead to more than the usual amount of disaster. In particular, I hardly think this is unique to nerds or uniquely horrible in their hands; best I can tell, pretty much everyone is under the impression that they’re substantially free of ideological bias, whether they wear a blue collar or a pocket protector, and their attitude toward ideological foes is very likely to be informed by that.
With regard to the OP, I think I broadly accept the theory that technically minded folks are less inclined than average to tolerate fuzziness or internal contradiction in systems, and that this tends to attract them to totalizing systems in the absence of suitable countervailing influences: a set which, unfortunately, includes quite a lot of fundamentalist nastiness.
best I can tell, pretty much everyone is under the impression that they’re substantially free of ideological bias, whether they wear a blue collar or a pocket protector
In far mode most people think in terms of good and evil first, correct and incorrect second. They might think that their enemies are evil mutants, but most sense, underneath it all, that their enemies still have their own unique truth (evil mutant truth). This leads to hatred and aggression, but it’s less bad than an impersonal, clinical, mechanistic approach.
The people I’m so afraid of are the ones who look for some “objective position” first and feel simply that they’re technically correct in the Engineering Challenge of Life, while others are “making mistakes”. Thinking that you’re fixing others’ mistakes all day (like mistakenly allowing Jews to “contaminate” a nation) promotes a much more simplified picture of the world than thinking you’re opposing dread and cunning evil—like Catholics do.
In far mode most people think in terms of good and evil first, correct and incorrect second. They might think that their enemies are evil mutants, but most sense that their enemies still have their own unique truth (evil mutant truth). This leads to hatred and aggression, but it’s less bad than an impersonal, clinical, mechanistic approach.
I agree with the first sentence, but not with the second. Good and evil, for most people, implies correct and incorrect—ideological enemies are both wrong and evil, and they’re wrong because they’re evil. Also evil because they’re wrong, if you back them into a corner on that one. Christian conceptions of sin are tied pretty closely to correctness, for example—the etymology implies “missing the mark”.
I’m honestly not sure unemotional, subjectively-objective hatred exists in neurotypical folks, human psychology being what it is. I’ve gotten pretty angry at software bugs before.
Might be mind projection on my part, true. However, it genuinely looks to me that many people do feel like this, for example, in the trolley problem: the math might say it’s more “correct” to end up with +4 saved lives, yet it’s still an “evil” act to them—they’d say that a solution can be the only technically correct one and still less moral than alternatives.
A pity that he hasn’t mentioned another important thing: that being convinced of one’s total freedom from dogma (and founding your philisophy on this “difference” between you and the brainwashed masses) is the most dangerous dogma of all,
I doubt it. A more dangerous dogma probably involves something to do with killing.
Um, how to put it… it leads to stunning intolerance for other kinds of “dogma”, including wholesome, psychologically healthy ideology or religion. Religious fanatics might hate infidels, but at least they can understand & admit vital human feelings like faith; intolerance for “blindness” or “delusion”, the insistence that there’s one calculable right way to run things is culturally destructive, throwing the baby out with the bathwater in literally all cases—even iif it might spare individuals, it enroaches upon the complex, often beautiful patterns of their culture.
I hope you wouldn’t deny that the “rationality” of RAND, RAF Marshal Harris, Kissinger or their Soviet/Chinese counterparts—the “rationality” of Dr. Strangelove—has been like a grey, soulless plague upon civilization. They all would’ve said that it produced slightly less misery than the alternatives they’ve considered, but I maintain that the indirect damage to humanity has been off the scale, and needn’t have happened if our cleverness hadn’t outstripped our sanity.
Go read Orwell’s or someone else’s notes about how we lost a gentler, less callous way of thought in the early 20th century, one that was so entwined with Christianity as to rot away and leave a gaping hole with the advance of aggressive materialism.
No. I think you are failing to understand the difference between the meanings of the phrases “I express disapproval of” and “the most dangerous of all”.
What sort of fanatics do you mean? Most fanatics that I’m familiar with think that the equivalent virtue in service of a different ideology is not analogous simply because it is in service of the opposing ideology.
Crusaders didn’t tend to say that jihadists were like them, only Muslim. Only we who use the outside view can see the parallel.
Which notes of Orwell’s are you referring to? Orwell has seen tyranny and cruelty since boarding school. I really can’t see him succumbing to wistful nostalgia.
The young Communist who died heroically in the International Brigade was public school to the core. He had changed his allegiance but not his emotions. What does that prove? Merely the possibility of building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself into another, the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.
There’s other such bits of left-conservative, anti-pragmatist sentiment sprinkled throughout his essays. Hell, it’s not a stretch to call him a National Socialist. I suggest that you take a fresh look, without the conventional view of Orwell—a petit-bourgeois view, I’d say—coloring your perception.
Also!
I really can’t see him succumbing to wistful nostalgia.
Do you have any more mainstream examples than your software engineer? I really don’t know what you mean by “dogma.” In the 19th century the word was not used so pejoratively but lately I can’t think of anyone who would describe their package of beliefs as a dogma.
Again, the RAND Corporation. There’s plenty written about its mindset and practices, including in connection with the whole Vietnam deal—Agent Orange and all that. “Forced-draft urbanization”, ain’t that a brilliant fucking idea? Hell, thinking of that, the CIA analysts probably also qualify as slaves not only to bureaucracy, but to the Cult of Reason as well.
Where else have you written about the rand corporation?
Nowhere, just mentioned it in this thread twice. You can start with Soldiers of Reason by Alex Abella, though—it’s really rather biased against RAND, but has plenty of info.
There’s also an interesting-sounding title in the Wikipedia links, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, but I haven’t read that one yet. Looks like it’ll be more helpful for my argument, judging by the name and the summary.
In Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, S. M. Amadae tells the remarkable story of how rational choice theory rose from obscurity to become the intellectual bulwark of capitalist democracy. Amadae roots Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy in the turbulent post-World War II era, showing how rational choice theory grew out of the RAND Corporation’s efforts to develop a “science” of military and policy decisionmaking. But while the first generation of rational choice theorists—William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan—were committed to constructing a “scientific” approach to social science research, they were also deeply committed to defending American democracy from its Marxist critics. Amadae reveals not only how the ideological battles of the Cold War shaped their ideas but also how those ideas may today be undermining the very notion of individual liberty they were created to defend.
Ah yes, the danger of thinking you can think for yourself.
The danger is that it avoids regression to the mean. For that reason, yes it is the most dangerous dogma, but it also has a lot of potential. I’d trust someone like this more than I’d trust your average “agreeable” neurotypical who can at any moment be convinced by a charismatic enough charlattan cult leader to do just about anything if the neurotypical is down on their luck. Yes, some people like this have dangerous beliefs and a dangerous tendency to act on them but at least you can usually see them coming.
Also, what if they are free from dogma? What if they just think better than you or I? Depending on how free they are from dogma the danger may just be that they are excellent rationalisers. If someone who I think is mostly someone who thinks for themselves: they view every claim critically and insist on rederiving every conclusion before they believe it, if they tell me theythey are totally free from dogma and the masses are brainwashed idiots they’re probably wrong about the “entirely”. But, more or less, they are right. The only danger here is you can’t talk them out of things, if they think you are one of the brainwashed masses and they might be angry about most people being brainwashed.
If they are a typically dogmatic thinker then they are really good at believing things which aren’t true which presents a whole different kind of danger. Also they probably think of people who disagree with them as evil mutants and themselves as noble saints.
It’s not dangerous for someone who is better at thinking undogmatically than people in general to found their philosophy on this difference, or even the overestimation of it that you propose.
Can you link the scary moment of dogma from the blog of a certain locally famous software engineer? Is it paul graham?
In a comment below you say “intolerance for “blindness” or “delusion”, the insistence that there’s one calculable right way to run things is culturally destructive.” You sound like you are talking about something completely different. I suspect thinking they are free from dogma is simply something people who think there’s one calculable right way to run things happen to tend to do and you are throwing out the baby (okay, maybe a crocodile) with the bathwater. Thinking that demonstrates blindness to the facts. Thinking that one’s preferences are objective pronouncements on how the world should be in some fuzzy non value dependent way demonstrates that you mistake your feelings for facts. Believing you don’t do this does intensify the danger such people pose massively but it isn’t the source of the danger. And for people who don’t do this, or don’t do it very much, or who are just not abnormally vindictive or aggressive or callous enough to come up with a right way to run things that hurts people, or accept that their right way to run things will not be implemented are not a danger.
See? Looks like I haven’t been talking gibberish after all! Or, at least, someone wise shares some of my paranoid delusions. He even points to the two most infamous technocratic states specifically.
A pity that he hasn’t mentioned another important thing: that being convinced of one’s total freedom from dogma (and founding your philisophy on this “difference” between you and the brainwashed masses) is the most dangerous dogma of all, and nerds are very likely to be convinced of just that.
(It’s easy to glimpse some scary moments of that dogma on the blog of a certain locally famous software engineer… although, as I said, he’s far from the worst of it.)
Presuming it’s not entirely rhetorical, that sounds more than a little overblown. I’d buy “foolish” or “dangerous”, but this seems pretty ubiquitous and generally doesn’t lead to more than the usual amount of disaster. In particular, I hardly think this is unique to nerds or uniquely horrible in their hands; best I can tell, pretty much everyone is under the impression that they’re substantially free of ideological bias, whether they wear a blue collar or a pocket protector, and their attitude toward ideological foes is very likely to be informed by that.
With regard to the OP, I think I broadly accept the theory that technically minded folks are less inclined than average to tolerate fuzziness or internal contradiction in systems, and that this tends to attract them to totalizing systems in the absence of suitable countervailing influences: a set which, unfortunately, includes quite a lot of fundamentalist nastiness.
In far mode most people think in terms of good and evil first, correct and incorrect second. They might think that their enemies are evil mutants, but most sense, underneath it all, that their enemies still have their own unique truth (evil mutant truth). This leads to hatred and aggression, but it’s less bad than an impersonal, clinical, mechanistic approach.
The people I’m so afraid of are the ones who look for some “objective position” first and feel simply that they’re technically correct in the Engineering Challenge of Life, while others are “making mistakes”. Thinking that you’re fixing others’ mistakes all day (like mistakenly allowing Jews to “contaminate” a nation) promotes a much more simplified picture of the world than thinking you’re opposing dread and cunning evil—like Catholics do.
I agree with the first sentence, but not with the second. Good and evil, for most people, implies correct and incorrect—ideological enemies are both wrong and evil, and they’re wrong because they’re evil. Also evil because they’re wrong, if you back them into a corner on that one. Christian conceptions of sin are tied pretty closely to correctness, for example—the etymology implies “missing the mark”.
I’m honestly not sure unemotional, subjectively-objective hatred exists in neurotypical folks, human psychology being what it is. I’ve gotten pretty angry at software bugs before.
Might be mind projection on my part, true. However, it genuinely looks to me that many people do feel like this, for example, in the trolley problem: the math might say it’s more “correct” to end up with +4 saved lives, yet it’s still an “evil” act to them—they’d say that a solution can be the only technically correct one and still less moral than alternatives.
I doubt it. A more dangerous dogma probably involves something to do with killing.
Um, how to put it… it leads to stunning intolerance for other kinds of “dogma”, including wholesome, psychologically healthy ideology or religion. Religious fanatics might hate infidels, but at least they can understand & admit vital human feelings like faith; intolerance for “blindness” or “delusion”, the insistence that there’s one calculable right way to run things is culturally destructive, throwing the baby out with the bathwater in literally all cases—even iif it might spare individuals, it enroaches upon the complex, often beautiful patterns of their culture.
I hope you wouldn’t deny that the “rationality” of RAND, RAF Marshal Harris, Kissinger or their Soviet/Chinese counterparts—the “rationality” of Dr. Strangelove—has been like a grey, soulless plague upon civilization. They all would’ve said that it produced slightly less misery than the alternatives they’ve considered, but I maintain that the indirect damage to humanity has been off the scale, and needn’t have happened if our cleverness hadn’t outstripped our sanity.
Go read Orwell’s or someone else’s notes about how we lost a gentler, less callous way of thought in the early 20th century, one that was so entwined with Christianity as to rot away and leave a gaping hole with the advance of aggressive materialism.
No. I think you are failing to understand the difference between the meanings of the phrases “I express disapproval of” and “the most dangerous of all”.
I’m telling you, IMO it’s an enormous memetic threat to human civilization as a whole, and not just to the well-being of individual lives.
What sort of fanatics do you mean? Most fanatics that I’m familiar with think that the equivalent virtue in service of a different ideology is not analogous simply because it is in service of the opposing ideology.
Crusaders didn’t tend to say that jihadists were like them, only Muslim. Only we who use the outside view can see the parallel.
Which notes of Orwell’s are you referring to? Orwell has seen tyranny and cruelty since boarding school. I really can’t see him succumbing to wistful nostalgia.
Notes on the Way
That’s for a start. I already linked to that essay in the quotes thread. Also, one more in the same vein.
My Country Right or Left:
There’s other such bits of left-conservative, anti-pragmatist sentiment sprinkled throughout his essays. Hell, it’s not a stretch to call him a National Socialist. I suggest that you take a fresh look, without the conventional view of Orwell—a petit-bourgeois view, I’d say—coloring your perception.
Also!
Oh, but he did. Read Coming Up for Air.
Do you have any more mainstream examples than your software engineer? I really don’t know what you mean by “dogma.” In the 19th century the word was not used so pejoratively but lately I can’t think of anyone who would describe their package of beliefs as a dogma.
Again, the RAND Corporation. There’s plenty written about its mindset and practices, including in connection with the whole Vietnam deal—Agent Orange and all that. “Forced-draft urbanization”, ain’t that a brilliant fucking idea? Hell, thinking of that, the CIA analysts probably also qualify as slaves not only to bureaucracy, but to the Cult of Reason as well.
Samuel Huntington certainly had a bloodless way of writing. I wonder if he would have characterized himself as dogma-free.
Where else have you written about the rand corporation?
Nowhere, just mentioned it in this thread twice. You can start with Soldiers of Reason by Alex Abella, though—it’s really rather biased against RAND, but has plenty of info.
There’s also an interesting-sounding title in the Wikipedia links, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, but I haven’t read that one yet. Looks like it’ll be more helpful for my argument, judging by the name and the summary.
Oh, looks like its first 180 pages are on Google Books.
Ah yes, the danger of thinking you can think for yourself.
The danger is that it avoids regression to the mean. For that reason, yes it is the most dangerous dogma, but it also has a lot of potential. I’d trust someone like this more than I’d trust your average “agreeable” neurotypical who can at any moment be convinced by a charismatic enough charlattan cult leader to do just about anything if the neurotypical is down on their luck. Yes, some people like this have dangerous beliefs and a dangerous tendency to act on them but at least you can usually see them coming.
Also, what if they are free from dogma? What if they just think better than you or I? Depending on how free they are from dogma the danger may just be that they are excellent rationalisers. If someone who I think is mostly someone who thinks for themselves: they view every claim critically and insist on rederiving every conclusion before they believe it, if they tell me theythey are totally free from dogma and the masses are brainwashed idiots they’re probably wrong about the “entirely”. But, more or less, they are right. The only danger here is you can’t talk them out of things, if they think you are one of the brainwashed masses and they might be angry about most people being brainwashed.
If they are a typically dogmatic thinker then they are really good at believing things which aren’t true which presents a whole different kind of danger. Also they probably think of people who disagree with them as evil mutants and themselves as noble saints.
It’s not dangerous for someone who is better at thinking undogmatically than people in general to found their philosophy on this difference, or even the overestimation of it that you propose.
Can you link the scary moment of dogma from the blog of a certain locally famous software engineer? Is it paul graham?
In a comment below you say “intolerance for “blindness” or “delusion”, the insistence that there’s one calculable right way to run things is culturally destructive.” You sound like you are talking about something completely different. I suspect thinking they are free from dogma is simply something people who think there’s one calculable right way to run things happen to tend to do and you are throwing out the baby (okay, maybe a crocodile) with the bathwater. Thinking that demonstrates blindness to the facts. Thinking that one’s preferences are objective pronouncements on how the world should be in some fuzzy non value dependent way demonstrates that you mistake your feelings for facts. Believing you don’t do this does intensify the danger such people pose massively but it isn’t the source of the danger. And for people who don’t do this, or don’t do it very much, or who are just not abnormally vindictive or aggressive or callous enough to come up with a right way to run things that hurts people, or accept that their right way to run things will not be implemented are not a danger.
The certain software engineer is Mencius Moldbug, of course.
Are you using this to mean “non-autistic person”, or something else?
Also, also! Just discovered a writer with rather similar sentiments, Garret Keizer.