I needed to re-read your comment twice to understand what you meant, because I got it completely wrong the first time. This is how I understand it now, so I write it clearly for readers like me:
What is the dominant form of nationalism (in Orwell’s very loose sense) today in our society?
Would criticizing it make other people percieve you as one of people considered dangerous delusional extremists?
I abstain from the first question, and the answer to the second one is: yes, and it is kinda scary. (Well, disagreeing with majority on a topic that the majority blindly follows is always scary.)
Your reading is correct, but I would also emphasize one particularly bad failure mode for people reading Orwell’s essay nowadays. Namely, people often read it and imagine crude and overt expressions of “nationalism” (in Orwell’s sense) that were common in his own day, and are still common outside of the Western world. So the most subtle and insightful points of the essay are likely to go right over their heads.
More concretely, how many people will stop and think about this part of the essay (bold emphasis mine):
But for an intellectual, transference [of “nationalist” allegiance] has an important function… It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. [...] In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. [...] [Yet] [h]e still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. [...] [A]ll the overthrown idols [of traditional nationalism] can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.
Now, Orwell had in mind here primarily the Communist Russophile intellectuals of his own day, whose allegiance was transferred to a specific and readily identifiable foreign state and ideology. Nowadays, things are rarely so crude and obvious, but it seems to me that essentially the same phenomenon is still rampant—except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)
(Now that I’ve written this, I remember a more recent writer who once wrote an essay that reads practically like an update of Orwell’s above cited paragraph for our time. Yet his very name is associated with such unseemly controversies that I’d have to get into long and bothersome disclaimers about where exactly my agreement with him ends, so I’d rather not get into it. This latter fact, of course, is just another reminder of how rampant the “nationalist” passions are in the respectable public discourse nowadays.)
except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)
That’s very easy to imagine as a concept… but are you really making a falsifiable claim that Western intelligentsia typically does all that right now? “Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct.”? I hardly recall seeing this kind of sentiment expressed by modern authors with any frequency*; if they have do have partisan feelings for some group (e.g. articles by straight liberal people in favor of gay marriage), they’re usually more circumspect—and more sane (as in, less doublethink & vulgar use of unspoken assumptions) - about it. Maybe you and me just read the same words differently.
I know you’re likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual “respectable” authors in such context, but… any examples? Please? (I’d like some where such association with a distantly-viewed group is more or less explicit, of course, and I’m also curious to see if you feel that people renowned as cynics and skeptics fall prey to such sentiment.)
-* For “Opponents of evil regime X”, see the ongoing coverage of the “Arab Spring” (yes, the naming does display a little partisan bias); do the overwhelming majority of publications imply that 100% of the rebels commit no atrocities, have exclusively noble motivations and are of good moral character, share a lot of priors with Western liberals, etc? If so, I haven’t noticed it; in fact, the most partisan pro-uprising source so far has arguably been Al-Jazeera, not e.g. Huffington Post or Guardian.
“Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct.”
They won’t make that statement explicitly, but they will accuse people who point out specific cases where said group isn’t virtuous or is doing something wrong of racism/sexism/homophobia/Islamophobia/victim bashing.
Yup, but that’s mostly unfalsifiable; people with different values can find different things unacceptably racist/*phobic/whatever. And they aren’t really hiding the fact that such accusations are just part of ideological warfare, or that they are partisan on those issues.
Uh-huh. But there’s a debate on truth-seeking vs. avoiding damage to society about this sort of thing even here on LW, as you know. Also, are there that many articles that only counter a listing of [favoured group]’s flaws with “That’s *-ist!”? At the very least and the worst level of argument commonly found, the writers try to make it look like the group’s virtues or just its “normality” to ordinary Western folks outweigh the criticism. I’m drawing on my impressions of The Guardian (which I read sporadically to see what British intelligentsia is up to), specifically of its CIF section.
Uh-huh. But there’s a debate on truth-seeking vs. avoiding damage to society about this sort of thing even here on LW, as you know. Also, are there that many articles that only counter a listing of [favoured group]’s flaws with “That’s *-ist!”?
Well, one historical example is the reaction to the Moynihan Report. It’s by no means the only example, but it’s the one where the people dismissing the report as racist and “victim bashing” probably did the most damage to society.
It seems very unfortunate to me that the concept of “Blaming the victim” has been founded upon such an ill-advised swipe at that report. Certainly such a phenomenon is painfully apparent all the time in daily life and politics, yet Moynihan’s intentions to me seem neither aggressive or very patronizing, nor even fuelled by conservative ideology, even if it could end up as ammunition for an unscurpulous ideologist. (he was in the Kennedy administration, so he might well have been a liberal technocrat)
Now this is pure conjencture and indeed fantasy on my part, but I guess that Ryan might’ve been motivated by the “Hostile media effect”, assuming that the report was a nefarious reactionary ploy and missing even the fact that Moynihan places nearly all the blame for the cultural dysfunctions of the black community squarely upon white oppression! (Hardly thought of as a right-wing thought pattern.)
I’m not suggesting that such an accusation of American culture and whites’ old behavior towards blacks must conversely be left-wing silliness; the logic of Moynihan’s explanation seems sound enough to me—it might be a cliche, but it’s probably true. (But then, I believe that Noam Chomsky is frequently spot-on and somewhat of an authority—what else is to be expected of me.)
Wow. That’s actually a stunningly interesting report. The conflict caused is also very interesting: one could also argue that the report itself, coming out at such a time, could have done more damage to society than its obfuscation did. The opponents of the Civil Rights movement would, I think, have weaponized it and used it to blame the Blacks entirely for their own problems, not to say they didn’t have partial responsibility, of course.
The opponents of the Civil Rights movement would, I think, have weaponized it and used it to blame the Blacks entirely for their own problems, not to say they didn’t have partial responsibility, of course.
My thoughts exactly! Even today you see the more extreme elements of the Right scouring the net in what can be described as a search for ammunition, their bottom-line being already as entrenched as that of the Left extremists. And most of the radical Right do conspiciously seek to absolve traditional society of whatever stripe they prefer of absolutely any moral guilt. Back to the report in question, it seems well-founded in asserting that the black community had some faulty traditions and regressive ways of raising its new generations (as, from a modern perspective, might some other communities). However, it doesn’t outright deny the economic angle of the problem, nor, especially, does it paint a picture of fundamental hostility between the races, yet it is undoubtedly used to “support” such a picture even now by the real racists!
I wonder if Moynihan himself feared that key the message he apparently tried to send—“White people, in view of their historical fortune, have a duty to help struggling minorities out in an intelligent way, even if it might hurt some feelings in the short run when some structural elements of society need to be altered”—would be co-opted by some unsympathetic fucks to “prove” that n**rs are culturally inferior and should be subjugated by the “superior” races.
Even today you see the more extreme elements of the Right scouring the net in what can be described as a search for ammunition, their bottom-line being already as entrenched as that of the Left extremists.
Why does right wing extremism scare you so much more than left wing extremism when the former is utterly despised as the definition of evil by most Westerners while the latter is only ever lukewarmly condemned?
Do extreme right wingers have some particular super power that I’m not aware of? The right wing are the guys who have been on a losing streak since Stalingrad and if you listen to Moldbug for a century before that too. I need some actual evidence that I should worry about them getting power anywhere in the West without being bombed into the stone age by the US five minutes later (bombing European right wing extremists, especially racist ones is the stuff of victory, moral superiority and war fantasies for them—check out American video games, adventure novels and action movie villains), than say of me personally being struck by lightning when I’m walking my dog on a rainy Saturday evening.
Reading some of your comments I can’t shake the feeling that you for some reason see their intellectual ammunition as so much more formidable than what is usually consumed by intellectuals that it despite the massive incentives against it threatens to one day quite suddenly break out and become popular among the smart fraction. Is this a correct reading?
Reading some of your comments I can’t shake the feeling that you for some reason see their intellectual ammunition as so much more formidable than what is usually consumed by intellectuals that it despite the massive incentives against it threatens to one day quite suddenly break out and become popular among the smart fraction. Is this a correct reading?
Sort of yes! I’ve always been a little terrified of the power of naked, unashamed technocracy, of either despotic or Randian aspect. Even the more ruthless bits of Moldbug’s (rather comfortable and watered-down) technocratic fascism are, I fear, hardly a glimpse of what’s to come, if the “rationality” of geeks and engineers, finally free from either today’s humanist quasi-theocracy and the sober bounds of old-time coonservatism, gets free rein. Perhaps many here on LW, especially non-neurotypical people (who I tend to sympathize with a lot, but also be wary of if their condition includes any change in empathy) would be tempted by such a Ubermensch thing. Think of a hybrid of Speer, Eichmann and a weak UFAI and you’ll understand how this nightmare of mine goes.
(I’m actually integrating a sinister-yet-rationalist one world government based on these fears in my science fantasy novel—instead of a generic villainous empire I started out with—except that in my story it was formed by voices of moderation in high places after the Axis victory in WW2 and the ensuing cold war, not as the radical elitist movement that I can phantom it as in the real world.)
Sort of yes! I’ve always been a little terrified of the power of naked, unashamed technocracy
“Naked, unashamed technocracy” strikes me as much more similar to the position advocated by the left (ETA: especially the socialist left) then the right.
Oh, it’s advocated by the left, alright (damn you language), but e.g. Stalinism was much less that and much more feudalism than Westerners commonly assume; it was quite the underground struggle, and Stalin himself (even without supposing any conspiracy) fell to it, as everyone around was either genuinely too afraid of disrupting him the morning he had his heart attack/whatever it was, or consciously decided to abandon him.
My point is, if you scratch a Stalinist you’re likely to find a barbarian; those smart, brave and virtuous alt-right-wingers strike me as the only sort of people who could potentially succeed in truly implementing such a regime.
(I’m actually integrating a sinister-yet-rationalist one world government based on these fears in my science fantasy novel—instead of a generic villainous empire I started out with—except that in my story it was formed by voices of moderation in high places after the Axis victory in WW2 and the ensuing cold war, not as the radical elitist movement that I can phantom it as in the real world.)
That is a very interesting concept! I’d love to read more about it, if you are writing in English and have any drafts you would like someone to read or will eventually publish, please make a post on LW!
The novel’s background is that Nazi and Japanese research into the nature of reality in an attempt to access “magic” or create “ontotechnological weapons” (credit for the word “Ontotechnology” goes to EY) pretty much broke the self-sealing “reality bubble” of Earth, placed there by an interdimensional supercivilization fighting its own civil war for the Universe itself. That supercivilization’s factions are perceived as “Angels” and “Demons”; they have made themselves into ontologically basic mental entities and the former are trying to impose absolute objective morality upon the Universe (which IS absolutely good and benign for any species that comes within its influence) while the latter are ruthless anarchists and opppose any rules at all, especially deontological ones. As humans were predicted to have unusually strong reality-warping potential, Earth was sealed away in a local ceasefire that forbade both recruiting from it. After the “bubble” began to tear, the “demons”, acting without any hierarchy, just spontaneously invaded, making some people into their playthings, dragging others away for use as psychic slave-soldiers and helping start WW3 in the ongoing panic. As Japan and the Reich, blaming each other, were preparing to obliterate the remnants of civilization, powerful technocratic elements on both sides independently launched coups, came to an agreement and instated a new world order that was essentially a megacorporation (I thought of this before reading any Moldbug). It shaped humanity into a great and complex hierarchy, where daily strife and the fullfillment of urges by the population would accumulate the “psychic” reality-warping energies in huge resonators to drain every drop of them, including from people gifted enough to become “mages”. The pooled energy was used to assist in brainwashing the masses, as a shield to keep rampaging demons away from the major arcologies, and to lash out at the barren and twisted Wastelands, where barbaric, Nietzchean sorcerer-cults now contended with each other and the infernal hordes.
At the same time, there was a divine intervention as well. The “angels”, before being driven out of our meta-region of the Universe by the disaster, took volunteers with especially strong psychic potential and moral fibre with them to fight in the endless war, while for all the other humans whom they found worthy—about 5-10% of the population after a century of life under brutal totalitarian regimes—they created a small utopian realm with impenetrable defenses near the North Pole. Founded upon some weird rules, restrictions and gifts, it’s essentially going to be anime-like in my description. You know, heartbreakingly beautiful vistas, surreal technology like dragon AIs, ornithopters and crystal exoskeletons, an elaborate system of universities, guilds and knightly orders for everyone’s talents to flourish, everything is always romantic, etc.
However, it comes at a price, as the trope demands; the ruling council is allowed to use utilitarian logic for hard decisions, and what they’re going to do with it is my main plotline. The utopian culture sends agents Outside to help people and thwart the bad guys’ attempts to penetrate their barrier or otherwise harm them, like Banks’ Contact and Special Circumstances. And they support a network of resistance cells in the utilitarian megacorp’s arcologies. Think like Al-Quaeda, but somewhat sympathetic and with Gnostic mysticism. The protagonist is a young soldier/technician in the Resistance, who starts out depressed, demotivated and Shinji-like (write what you know!); he’s hopelessly in love with a female agent of the Utopia that’s working with his cell on something top-secret. In the beginning, the cell is wiped out by a State Security raid and the agent is taken prisoner, but not before she implants the mortally injured protagonist with her hyper-advanced drone, making him into a superpowered zombie cyborg. Stumbling away from the wreckage, he meets up with a hacker from the arcology—who’s part of a subculture stealing psychic energy and addicted to it—and that hacker’s tsundere sister, a promising social engineer/spin doctor/brainwasher who’s devoted to the megacorp at first but slowly agrees to become a double agent. Together they unveil a conspiracy involving a weird urban legend, said to be a memetic virus called the “Invisible Dawn”—which is the title of the novel. Whew.
Unfortunately for you, I’m writing in Russian, as attempting something novel-length in English would’ve at this point only become a drain of my mental energy; I’ll need another decade of practice before I can use it as easily as Russian.
You would also describe yourself as having beliefs that correspond to reality, but neither you nor me nor the general public would claim that you’re some kind of extremist on account, say, of your posts here; you look like a typical secularist conservative/libertarian type to me. While we would clearly disagree about many of each other’s values or instrumental decisions, we definitely wouldn’t believe that the other is a horrible enemy of civilization.
I know you’re likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual “respectable” authors in such context, but… any examples? Please?
OK, I’ll try to give a current example, with the caveat that I’m giving it purely for illustrative purposes, not to start unwelcome politically charged discussions.
Observe the ongoing controversy over the recent shooting in Florida. Now, I’m not going to speculate on the details of the case itself at all—for the sake of the argument, you can assume any version of the events you wish, and what I’ll say will still apply.
Whatever may have actually occurred in this case, there is no doubt that: (1) conclusive evidence of what really happened is still lacking, and even less evidence was available when the controversy erupted some weeks ago, and yet (2) numerous respectable voices of the mainstream opinion rushed to express passionate condemnation of the shooter that went far beyond anything that could be reasonably inferred from the evidence, often going even beyond mere bias and spin into outright lies and fabrication. Even if, hypothetically, some evidence eventually emerges showing that their general conclusion was right, and the shooter really did something as nasty as they believe, it is simply undeniable that they have gone far beyond anything that might be justified given the presently available knowledge. (And it’s easy to find plenty of examples of vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty in their reactions.)
Now, how to explain these reactions? Clearly, some people’s reactions are easily explained with just plain “nationalism” in Orwell’s sense, since they share their own identity with the person who got killed. But what about those who have no such connection, which certainly includes the majority of the respectable opinion that got inflamed with such passionate intensity? It seems to me like a clear-cut case of “transferred nationalism” in Orwell’s sense.
(Again, I really hate to introduce any discussions of controversial daily politics on LW. I’m giving an example like this one only because I was specifically asked to do so, and I don’t intend to follow up with any specific discussion of the case. I’m interested in it only as a case study for examining the mechanisms of public opinion demonstrated in it.)
Okay, thanks. However, based on what I know of the US, nearly any murder or other serious incident caught in the news where the races of the victim and the accused were different would practically always provoke a hysterical reaction wracked with all the usual American neuroses. There’s nothing exceptionally bad about this case’s handling that hasn’t been true for a very long while IMO.
(Well, except for pre-Civil War times, when things might have been a little less convoulted but positively flaunted the heuristics we now find disgusting; the mainstream wouldn’t stop for a moment before assigning guilt based on how non-Anglo-Saxon* a participant was, and the radical anti-racists would jump to the opposite conclusion, often in a patronizing “Uncle Tom” way. Can’t point to a specific case from which I got this picture, and you might be justified in calling it oversimplified, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not just a modern political caricature of the bad old times.)
-* Were the Southern whites also considered Anglo-Saxon in the broad sense? If no, what word did they use to separate themselves and e.g. the Irish/Eastern European immigrants or other “inferior” whites?
However, based on what I know of the US, nearly any murder or other serious incident caught in the news where the races of the victim and the accused were different would practically always provoke a hysterical reaction wracked with all the usual American neuroses.
There is plenty of counter evidence to this.
Even some stuff that would seem to have all the building blocks for media exposure and revenue generation, like say the recent case of a home invasion where a young man sexually assaults and kills a 85 year old woman and beats her husband to the point of him being hospitalized.
Huh? So… what do you think makes the difference between this case and the ones that failed to detonate? If your answer looks too mind-killing to you, please PM me.
However, based on what I know of the US, nearly any murder or other serious incident caught in the news where the races of the victim and the accused were different would practically always provoke a hysterical reaction wracked with all the usual American neuroses. There’s nothing exceptionally bad about this case’s handling that hasn’t been true for a very long while IMO.
Well, I am giving it as an example of standard and long-standing attitudes of the sort that Orwell described as “transferred nationalism,” not some novel phenomenon.
Well, how about, say, Germany or Canada? The racial issues are obviously less charged here, and not due to their especial monoethnicity - and it appears to me from outside view that while people there might be unimaginably biased on other issues, they are at least more polite, less prone to contagnious hysteria and just have a higher sanity waterline as communities.
There are several reasons for why the prestige press is so fundamentalist in its fervor to stereowipe… The third is ideology: knowledge is evil. The fourth is the sheer will to power.
Sorry, but I think this is too partisan and arational (has Sailer even tried to imagine what his “enemies” think and believe before professing that they are basically Stalin and O’Brien?) to quote on LW. You could’ve just linked to the post.
The fact that Zimmerman stinks so badly at his self-appointed job of “neighborhood watch captain,” it led him to kill an innocent man. (If you think Martin was actually committing a crime, I can probably give you 2-to-1 odds.) In the absence of social condemnation, Zimmerman might continue carrying a gun in pursuit of his hobby. The media has put itself in charge of condemnation. Since some of their leaders seem very stupid, we would expect them to make mistakes. (In fact, you could argue they stink at this job and shouldn’t be in charge of condemnation at all.)
The fact that Florida law might allow two men to “stand their ground” and escalate the use of force until someone dies also seems relevant. If it actually happened then Florida voters should know. But I don’t think this played more than a small role in the media’s actions, because they seem too stupid on the whole to make decisions based on policy concerns.
You are aware that according to the best theory based on public available evidence Zimmerman didn’t shoot Martin until the latter was beating his head on the pavement? Also in that kind of situation “stand your ground” laws aren’t all that relevant since there is no way to retreat.
Edit: Also, your “media incompetence” theory doesn’t explain why all the mistakes went in the same direction.
By saying “incompetence” you make it sound like I think the media wants to create accurate beliefs about reality, but fails due to other factors. This seems as silly as thinking the human brain evolved to get the right answer, in general, but has all these extraneous biases mucking it up. I thought I explained how I see the media’s motives.
I don’t understand what you mean. Are you assuming that beating someone’s head on the pavement would count as a crime? Because like I said, Trayvon Martin had a perfect right under Florida law to stand his ground if the strange man with the gun genuinely seemed threatening.
Edit: Also, your “media incompetence” theory doesn’t explain why all the mistakes went in the same direction.
Why not? All their mistakes seemed to go in one direction back when Chris T.N.O. Matthews was saying Al Gore “would lick the bathroom floor” to be President. But I explain that as the result of personal dislike combined with a tribal sense of offense at Bill Clinton’s actions, not a bias against Democrats. Why on Earth would you not expect idiots like that to fly off the handle at the death of an innocent child?
I’d like to mention that depending on the situation and the regime in question people might attach their nationalism to the regime itself (denying its evils) rather than to its opponents.
Heh, of course. I see it all the time in Russian right-of-center publications. But wasn’t the blame here being placed upon stereotypical liberal-minded people? I don’t see any liberals gushing about how unfairly e.g. Fidel Castro is being treated, or how the Viet Cong were all righteous and noble freedom fighters who only wanted peace and treated enemies with respect (of course, most people—including me—are more sympathetic to them than the American soldiers when talking about the Vietnam war, but that’s to be expected given the vast objective differences in the combatants’ situations).
I don’t see any liberals gushing about how unfairly e.g. Fidel Castro is being treated, or how the Viet Cong were all righteous and noble freedom fighters who only wanted peace and treated enemies with respect
Well, those people certainly don’t make their living by writing or abstract thinking. I meant liberal/moderate leftist journalists, professional writers, political experts, etc. Celebrities known to be conservative also often say misguided ideological things, except that there’s less of them in America because conservatives there typically stay away from the entertainment industry (both due to natural predisposition and active self-segregation, I’d guess).*
(In other countries the political divide looks less sharp in general, and proeminent people tend to express their political views more subtly too.)
- I think it was pretty silly of Moldbug to spin a theory of how everybody-who’s-anybody is carrying the “progressivism” meme in America because it’s supposedly better adapted; it’s clear that there’s simple Hanson-style signaling at work in Hollywood and elsewhere; Moldbug’s assertion that academia sets the intellectual fashion might bear closer scrutiny, but clearly most people (non-intellectuals) don’t give a rat’s ass about the contents* of any fashion they’re following! They believe-in-belief that they do, of course, but e.g. the people of the US entertainment industry, AFAIK, went from cautiously admiring the Soviet Union to considering it a miserable dump sometime around the early 80s, so they clearly aren’t faithful adepts of “progressivism”. Also, consider all the psychodrama after 9/11.
The belief that people behave certain ways because it signals something about their thought process, without actually thinking that way. I.e. politicians expressing outrage to signal, not because they are actually outraged. Hanson thinks this type of insincere signaling explains a lot of social behavior, much more than conventional wisdom would suggest.
Oh! We have this thing in TV Tropes! We call it a Straw Hypocrite! Indeed, it’s a hypothesis always worth assuming, but I don’t see how much use it can have except in hindsight, I mean how would one go about predicting someone else’s genuine emotional state? It’s much easier to predict the emotional state they will allow themselves to show, than it is to try to divine what’s going in in that brain of theirs! Not to mention, they probably aren’t even actually very clear on what they feel or what they think, at all. In extreme cases, they may have less predictive ability on the topic of their inner workings than an external observer! Not to mention the remarkably ironic occasions where people believe they are “faking” feelings that they actually have and are in denial of!
By the way, here in Russia it is mostly reactionary/nationalist/authoritarian types that express disapproval at any suggestion of regime change, either external or internal, in places like Cuba. It seemingly doesn’t matter much to them what kind of dictatorship it is, as long as it continues to exist and spite the 1st world nations. (Yes, I’m biased as hell against them.)
You mean to say Russia isn’t 1st world? When was there a 1st and 2nd world in the first place? I thought “third world” was a reference to a “third party”, not an attempt to actually order parts of the world in the shape of some list. For one thing, that would be rather insulting for whoever is the 2nd world, wouldn’t you agree?
In Europe anti-fascists basically are fascists, at least when it comes to their tactics and their relationship to the authorities who often look the other way while they do their thing (which is the use of violence and extortion to attack right wing organizations and individuals known to support them).
In Ireland, antifa is pretty small, but seems to be closely associated with radical republicanism—which has a specific meaning in Irish politics: Sinn Féin and other more millitant nationalist groups, generally left-leaning (or appearing to be to gain popular working-class approval) and often anti-British.
This leads to the odd situation where antifa is closely correlated with nationalism.
From a communications clarity point of view, I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-right ideology, in the same way that I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-left ideology. Using the far-right failure mode label for those on the far left confuses this distinction.
To me, the defining feature of fascism (or communism) is not use of private, politically motivated violence with the tolerance of the authorities. That’s bad, but it’s not the reasons that I think fascism is bad.
It’s similar to the problem of saying that Nazism is bad because it is socialist (“National Socialism” in the name). Nazism is bad, and socialism (as those speakers intend the term) is bad, but Nazism != socialism.
To me, the defining feature of fascism (or communism) is not use of private, politically motivated violence with the tolerance of the authorities. That’s bad, but it’s not the reasons that I think fascism is bad.
And what are those reasons? Since I really don’t see the distinction you’re trying to make.
To speak more carefully—violence for the purpose of influencing the “center of mass” of political opinion in a country, when the government is not uniformly in favor of the political position of those executing the violence—is not the same thing as fascism. More colloquially, tactics similar to voter intimidation have been used by fascists, but not only fascists.
My main point was that an ideological label that applies to both FARC and AUC is not a particularly informative label. If fascism is restricted to the usage I suggested, then it is more informative than that.
Fascists seem to believe that there once was a society that lived perfectly. Some of us can become these “Ideal Men” if we are spiritually pure enough (or maybe we can only set things up so that our descendents can be this way). Further, the importance of this spiritual purity justifies any violence in service of reaching this goal.
Fascists are wrong because the imagined past never occurred (like the country song that complains that Coke is a slang shortening for Cocaine—as if there was ever a time when Coke was not a reference to Cocaine).
Communists have the same belief in an “Ideal Man,” but they think that no one has ever lived that way. With sufficient mental purity, we might be able to become “Ideal” (again, we might only be able to cause this for our descendents). Once we are all ideal, we will be able distribute resources “fairly” and avoid the social problems we face today. Again, achieving that ideal justifies any violence.
Communists are wrong because the existence of scarcity guarantees that schemes of wealth distribution cannot solve every social problem.
Transhumanist look forward, not backwards. But they don’t say that all social problems will go away. Only that technology will make us so rich that all our current problems will be gone. There’s the joke of the person revived from suspended animation in the distant future who asks if there was still poverty, disease, hunger, wars or crime and is told that no, those problems were solved long ago. Then he asks, then why doess everybody seem so nervous? “Well, you see—we have REAL problems.”
There’s no such thing as being “basically” fascists: either you are a fascist or you aren’t. Totalitarian, violent extremists, maybe. But that’s a strange “general truth” you’re stating here. The anti-fascists I know (basically, everyone) are radically averse to violence. In fact, being anti-fascist is the one single thing everyone agrees on, even the parties branded as “fascist” by everyone else! Is this violence the case in your country, or are you generalizing from fringe groups?
Well, it could look like hypocrisy if you fail to understand that the points I oulined aren’t principles or goals in and of themsleves. They are simply measures taken to avoid the rebirth of fascism or anything like it, mere means to an end. The top priority remains anti-fascism in and of itself, and the repression of anything that could promote it, looks like it could promote it, or could be made to look like it could promote it. Hence why Mein Kampf is banned, and people in Belgium have gone to prison for reading The Protocols of the Sages of Zion in the subway. Really, it all boils down to Hitler: bad in mainland Europe, and Civil War: bad in Spain (which is probably why they abhor violent methods so much).
Obviously the dilemma anti-fascism faces is the danger of becoming so repressive in its efforts to stop fascism from raising again that it creates a new totalitarianism of its own, but so far they seem to be pulling along fine.
Against intellectual censorship and police states, for freedom of expression.
...
If anyone disagrees with any of these points, they had better not say it out loud
So for you and your friends, freedom of expression doesn’t extend to letting people say things you don’t like, and it isn’t censorship if you stop them doing it.
Certainly not: they are allowed to say them, the same way they’re allowed to say, for example, that they’re sexually attracted to small children: sharing this information about their state of mind will brand them as dangerous, repulsive, and immoral, they will be subject to suspicion and strong scrutiny, people will be wary of letting power in their hands, of associating with them in public… but no-one would tell them to shut up. In fact, people would want them to speak up, so that they can be identified and tagged.
So, we’re fully in favour of letting them say things we don’t like, we’re actually enthusiastically in favour of them saying them. When I say “they had better not say it out loud”, I mean that it would not be in their best interests to signal that state of mind, and that they would, as a matter of pure self-interest, censor themselves, without any input from us, and to our great regret.
For a moment I was going to say that I had misinterpreted you, but on reflection, I don’t think I did at all.
You just compared being against your favoured constellation of political ideas to child molesting, and called those who are against them dangerous, repulsive, and immoral. You want them subject to suspicion and strong scrutiny; they must be identified and tagged. Of course, you’re not going to personally suppress them, but—nudge nudge, wink wink—they’d better take care if they know what’s good for them, eh?
Now, imagine someone had read only that comment, but not its ancestors. What might they conjecture that this constellation of political ideas might be?
The manifest destiny of the Aryan race? Missionary Christianity? The white man’s burden of ruling the lesser peoples? Pan-Islamism? No, “liberal democracy”. (That was just the third of your five bullet points, but “liberal democracy” includes the other four already.)
Of course, you’re not going to personally suppress them, but—nudge nudge, wink wink—they’d better take care if they know what’s good for them, eh?
I’m not nudging, I’m not winking, and I’m not jocular or joyous: I’m dead serious, and state this as a matter of fact. Not as a threat or a warning, but as a statement of common sense. In fact, I like it better when they do not show this much common sense, so we can discuss their ideas in the open, and expose them for what they are.
You just compared being against your favoured constellation of political ideas to child molesting, and called those who are against them dangerous, repulsive, and immoral.
I chose paedophilia (not child molesting, I never said anything about actually having ever laid a hand on an actual child) because it’s something people get panicky about on a gut level, but is contingent to the local region of space and time one occupies. You may replace it with “racism”, “military expansionism/imperialism”, “support for the Death Penalty”, “support for banning guns”, “support for Cryonics and/or Transhumanism”, or “support for gay marriage”, depending on the social environment you’re moving in.
BTW, have you come across Mencius Moldbug?
I have. I am fairly unimpressed. Some interesting, daring, and refreshing new ideas, but I don’t know if it’s “rehearsing arguments”, “one argument against a thousand”, and so on and so forth, but I find his arguments un-satisfactory, ultimately.
The manifest destiny of the Aryan race? Missionary Christianity? The white man’s burden of ruling the lesser peoples? Pan-Islamism?
I find it telling that you conflate all of these and put them on the same level. In particular, you seem to be confused as to what missionary Christianity and Pan-islamism entail, respectively, by themselves.
I’m not nudging, I’m not winking, and I’m not jocular or joyous: I’m dead serious, and state this as a matter of fact. Not as a threat or a warning, but as a statement of common sense.
A statement of “common sense” that they will be seen as dangerous, repulsive, and immoral, and all the rest. If not by you, and not by them, then by whom?
I find it telling
I wish people who use this expression would go on to say what it tells them.
Those were just some examples of ideologies that have taken this attitude to their opponents. (Ok, maybe not all manifestations of missionary Christianity deserve to be in that list; consider it replaced by Stalinism or the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)
For “liberal democracy” to take that attitude doesn’t sound very liberal.
Er, yes, I have turned it into a draft at the behest of some readers who told me to reformat it in a way that would make it a proper top-level post, rather than a mere recapitulation/contextualization of the discussion so far. I’ll warn you as soon as it’s done.
If your regret over the consequences of punishing them for expressing their actual state is great enough, you might consider not punishing them. Conversely, if after considering it you decide to continue to punish them, you might want to calibrate your estimate of your regret more precisely.
No, no, I regret that they won’t speak up so we can’t identify them, I don’t regret the treatment they are given once they are identified. This is especially annoying when they start to act out on the opposites of these ideas as policies without announcing themselves, and in fact vehemently denying any type of association with the typical opponents of those ideas. It makes working to stop them harder.
You seem to have a fundamental confusion between “person is going to be punished for expressing beliefs outisde the Overton Window”, and “person is going to suffer negative consequences once it is publically known that they have beliefs outside the Overton Window”. The first would be institutionally enforced censorship, and wrong. The second would be simple social dynamics at work, and inevitable. If you can’t tell the difference, I suggest you live in a country like the one where I was born, where the very circulation of certain ideas can be paid with your own life.
That link doesn’t work for me. Do you have a preferred expression for people indicating that they are no longer interested in discussing a particular subject with you?
How about “I have lost interest in closing this discussion”, or even not answering at all? Anyway, that’s not what you indicated, you indicated that I had “won”, somehow. I’m not interested in winning arguments, I’m interested in finding out the truth. “(You have satisfactorily proven that) my (implcit) accusations were precipitated/groundless/undeserved. I now see where you are coming from (even though I disagree with your conclusions).” would have been my preferred outcome, “You are clearly insane and not worth talking to” would have been my least preferred.
Now, me, Richard and Nier have gone into a tangent where I have shown some very poor grasp of both social and rational skills, and allowed myself to snap at my comrades in an entirely unseemly manner, under externally-induced stress and time pressures, that I should have known better than to let get the better of me. The posts I have fathered have shamed me, but I shall keep them up as an example of what not to do.
I’ll try here to adress their points more intelligently, pertinently, and courteously.
So for you and your friends, freedom of expression doesn’t extend to letting people say things you don’t like, and it isn’t censorship if you stop them doing it.
This statement got me very very angry. The conclusion you jumped to, Richard, is an understandable extrapolation, but I would have liked it if you had been more cautious about embracing it, because I have said nothing of the sort. My guess is that you are committing the “Politics is the Mind-Killer” mistake of trying to fit me into preexisting categories, groups, and roles, in your narrative. You should know, by now, that trying to do that with a Less Wronger is like trying to catch water, except water doesn’t get pissed off. Abstain from doing that in the future.
Now, I don’t know about my “friends” (I’ll ask them… both of them… when I get the chance, though I think they’ll agree with what I’m going to argue), but I for one think that people should be allowed to say what they want, regardless of whether I like or I don’t like it. If there is any merit to their ideas, sharing them with the public will represent an improvement to the pool of collective knowledge. If there isn’t, having them submitted to be de-constructed and exposed as worthless is also an improvement.
At least, that’s my kind, idealistic, forgiving, past self. After having spent some time with /b/tards and goons, I have found that there is such a thing as a harmful, dangerous, or cruel abuse of freedom of speech.:
There is the promotion of the discriminating of minorities.
There is the promotion of violence.
There is the promotion of sexual and psychological abuse, and of the oppression of one gender by another, of one age group by another.
There is the promotion of one group using lethal force on another to, well, force them to undertake certain actions, or cede certain advantages, for the sake of the group that is most effective in its use of violence.
There is the promotion of totalitarian regimes.
There is the systematic aggression by certain self-appointed standard enforcers, against any opinions that go enough outside the mainstream that they attract any attention at all. (Hypocrisy? Wait up!)
There is the promotion of not giving a fair trial to people (lynching, purging, and so on), mostly by presenting their guilt as being beyond doubt (regardless of evidence), and that what they did was so heinous they must be punished as soon as possible, as harshly as possible, without getting a chance to defend themselves.
With some correlation to the last one, there is the promotion of the idea that said extremely heinous criminals should not even have the right to live on.
There is the promotion of the idea that strikes are an illegitimate form of protest, heck, that any form of protest at all in the workplace is illegitimate, save for job-quitting, if that.
Analogically, that protests against the actions of the government are illegitimate, no matter how non-violent.
I’ll leave the question of how these (ab?)uses of freedom of expression should be dealt with, and whether there should be consequences for those who make use of their freedom in such a way, and what those consequences should be, as an exercise to the reader.
When I said
If anyone disagrees with any of these points, they had better not say it out loud, regardless of what they actually end up doing.
I had this sort of guy in mind. A fascist in a liberal democracy, he keeps his mouth shut (well, at least he tries, but his burning, endless love for the kind Fuhrer cannot be contained), and bides his time. Because he fears… what? In what I conceive of liberal democracy, he’d have the right to hold on to his ideas, even to speak them out. As long as he doesn’t actively advocate finishing the Holocaust or oppressing black people or that kind of thing, the Law would leave him alone. He would be allowed to discuss his anti-democratic, fascist opinions in public places and media… and have them be ridiculed and soundly refuted. His immediate environment may or may not care: they may very well file him off as an inoffensive cuckoo (he’s anything but: he almost gunned the protagonists down, and then blew up a theatre at their behest… long story). He’s poor, unambitious. incompetent, and keeps to himself. No-one will bother to obstruct him or get in his way.
Now suppose that someone who was in favour of wars of conquest, in favour of strict government censorship, in favour of ideological totalitarianism and one-party rule, in favour of lynchings, trial by ordeal, “adminsitrative detainment”, summary execution, extermination camps, prohibition of any form of protest in the workplace or against the government… suppose that this someone was smart, rich, capable, pragmatic, competent, and ambitious. Suppose that, and I know this is hard, given the previous attributes, suppose that they publicly announced holding this set of beliefs.
Would you not expect them to meet with a spontaneously generated slew of obstacles and hindrances of every kind?. And I haven’t said anything about their opinions on race or gender or social inequality. Just the institutions of liberal democracy.
Would it not be right, and good, and proper that they are subjected to this kind of obstruction, if not outright legal action?
But, see, that’s why that hypothesis was hard to swallow. Someone like that, smart and capable and pragmatic, would keep their mouth shut. They would bide their time. And then, when you expect it the least, they might pull this kind of shit. Or this other kind of shit.
Are you still going to pretend that this is just a matter of what “me and my friends” “like” or don’t “like”, Richard?
Now, see, I regret that, out of self preservation, and/or for the sake of bringing their plans to fruition, that kind of people will keep quiet, and only share and discuss these opinions with like-minded people. I regret that they do not feel that they can share their opinions in public, and expect them to win out by their own merit. I regret that they might, in fact, not want to submit their opinions to public scrutiny, because somewhere, deep inside, they know them to be evil or false. There is an idealistic part of me that wants to believe that, were these people given a chance to express themselves, to communicate freely and civilly with others, they would either change their beliefs as a result of the bayesian update, change everyone else’s beliefs, and/or, if it’s a matter of “personal” or “irrational” sensibility, make peace with the fact that they live in a world where the majority does not share their point of view, and that they cannot force their opinions, least of all their policies, unto them.
There is another, more cynical and ruthless side of me, that believes that the sort of people who are dangerously violent because of their ideology are not the sort of people who would benefit in any way from publicly debating their ideas, nor would anyone benefit from arguing with them. This aspect of me posits that sometimes, defending the freedoms of the most means stopping others from promoting the idea that said freedoms should be partly or fully, but permanently, waived, as well as infringing on the freedoms of these others should they show that they are willing and able to destroy these freedoms, and that this is perfectly okay.
To give you an example, you can’t accuse of hypocrisy someone who claims to want to preserve life, because they kill a few select individuals, that have proven that killing them was the only way of incapacitating them (or that you can’t try to incapacitate them without at least risking, and sometimes accidentally achieving, killing them).
You can’t accuse liberal democracy of “not being very liberal” if its institutions, official and unofficial, actively work to hinder, by any means necessary (and ideally by the least harsh means necessary), any and all efforts to make it less liberal. This democracy is, in fact, in a constant equilibrium of being as liberal as it can sustainably be.
The problem with censorship is that it inevitably expands to far. For example, your list of “abuses of free speech” includes both promotion of ideas that really are heinous and promotion of ideas that are perfectly reasonable. For example:
There is the promotion of the idea that strikes are an illegitimate form of protest, heck, that any form of protest at all in the workplace is illegitimate, save for job-quitting, if that.
Depending on what you mean by strike. But I think it’s a perfectly reasonable idea that you shouldn’t be able to refuse to do your job whenever you feel like expressing a “grievance” with no consequences except possibly loss of pay for the period of time when you don’t work.
But I think it’s a perfectly reasonable idea that you shouldn’t be able to refuse to do your job whenever you feel like expressing a “grievance” with no consequences except possibly loss of pay for the period of time when you don’t work.
Wrong emphasis. Society depends on people*, doing their jobs.
Let’s taboo some words:
Society: a sufficiently large group of individuals. Are we assuming a shared final goals? A power structure? A distribution of labour?
depends on: requires for its continued… What? Existence? Prosperity? What aspect of society depends on “people doing their jobs”? What does society depend on “people doing their jobs” for? For now, I’ll assume you’re using “depends on X” in the sense of “expects X to happen”… but that’s kind of weak.
people: individual sentient beings, not machines or tools, with needs other than being kept in optimal condition for the performance in the functions they perform, and existences that do not necessarily revolve around performing said functions.
doing their jobs: performing the functions that they have promised to perform reliably and within certain sufficient quality and quantity parameters
Again, given that it’s people we are talking about, they will only want to do their jobs in exchange for a reliable retribution in advantages in the shape of wealth and status in sufficient quality and quantity that have a utility to the people that is equivalent or superior to costs that “doing their job” entails for them. They will only be able to do their jobs if the compensation is sufficient to keep them alive so they can come back the next day.
Now, let’s use some basic economic theory: let’s assume work is a commodity, that is, let us do away with the “people” part and suppose the job-performers are emotionless, non-sentient machines, tools that will simply go irreversibly out of order if they are given insufficient resources for a long enough period of time, beings that exist only and purely to do their jobs, whose downtime is either spent in maintenance (and can be shortened or lengthened depending on where the optimal total productivity point between maximum duration and maximum instant output lies). Let’s also assume that their work capacity is distributed in an ideal free market, and that the machines are programmed to ask for as many resources as you are willing to give them. There’s a very close real-life equivalent to said machines: cattle.
Finally, let us assume that there is a steady influx of new machines, but that the work that the society needs to get done fluctuates.
This situation automatically results, thanks the to wonderful “Invisible Hand” that guides the self-regulating ideal market, into the jobholders being given *exactly as many resources as they need to work and keep functioning the next day, maintaining exactly the population that can provide the necessary amount of labour needed for getting the amount of job that society demands done.
Now, in the XIXth century, that is often what actually happened, except with people, specifically unqualified labour (heck, look at the very term: “unqualified labour”, as if labour was everything they are). And that was just unplanned market fuckery. The Nazis would actually planify killings by giving workers rations that were exactly calculated so that they would die soon upon completion of the project they were assigned to.
Why did this happen? Because those workers were powerless to make the people who had the right to set the conditions of the job agreement give them anything more than what ensured what was strictly needed for them to perform their task, which was basically them being alive for as long as they were needed and useful, and not an instant more. Which was what they ended up actually getting, because a free market ensures that’s where the Nash Equlibrium lies: they are locked in a prisoner’s dilemma in which if any single one of them refused to agree to work under those conditions, they would simply be replaced by another, willing person, and then die.
This is why as long as we assume that job-performers are people, more than tools to be used and thrown away, that their existence has value beyond the utility derived from them performing their jobs, and that it should not be entirely miserable, it is absolutely vital that job-performers have a form of power over those who set the conditions of the work agreement, that will allow them to protect themselves from being reduced, by the sheer strategic necessity, to the status of tools.
Now, strikes are a horrible way of achieving this: they are self-regulating too, in that, performing them is at the immediate cost of the job-performers (of course, since they are paid less than what their job-performing is actually worth, this costs whoever profits from their job even more) and risks the cessation of the demand for the job itself being performed. So, game-theory wise, it works, ideally resulting in the job-performers being assigned just under the amount of resources that would make the net utility of the job being performed inferior to that of it not being performed.
If you have suggestions for alternate ways in which job-performers can protect themselves from becoming cattle or machinery, I would love to hear them. I say this in all sinceirty: strikes are ugly. If you can additionally justify why people should not have the right to strikes, given those alternatives existing, I would love to hear that too
The Nazis would actually planify killings by giving workers rations that were exactly calculated so that they would die soon upon completion of the project they were assigned to.
Why did this happen?
Because the Nazis put industry under state control so that people had no choice but to work for companies guided by the state’s economic policy.
If you have suggestions for alternate ways in which job-performers can protect themselves from becoming cattle or machinery, I would love to hear them.
Sure, don’t centralize the hiring process under the guise of “economic planning” or maintaining an “economic policy” so much that hiring effectively becomes a monopsony.
The first point would be more of an issue in terms of that particular state’s particular economic policies: in a democratic state, economic policies that would not result in such an outcome would win out.
The second point… do you mean to say that, were there to be many job-assigning institutions competing to get the same job performed at the least possible cost, the equilibrium would fall into job-performers being given more resources than what they would receive were they to be considered disposable cattle? That only works if the work-performers are scarce, in which case it doesn’t matter whether there is one or many institutions competing. And if the work-performers are abundant, the equilibrium will fall into them being given exactly as many resources as they physically need to perform their job.
In a perfect market, centralizing or decentralizing doesn’t achieve anything: what matters is simply offer and demand.
Also, why do you put scare quotes around “economic planning” and “economic policy”?
The first point would be more of an issue in terms of that particular state’s particular economic policies: in a democratic state, economic policies that would not result in such an outcome would win out.
No, my point is that by and large states don’t need and shouldn’t have “economic policies”.
The second point… do you mean to say that, were there to be many job-assigning institutions competing to get the same job performed at the least possible cost, the equilibrium would fall into job-performers being given more resources than what they would receive were they to be considered disposable cattle? That only works if the work-performers are scarce, in which case it doesn’t matter whether there is one or many institutions competing. And if the work-performers are abundant, the equilibrium will fall into them being given exactly as many resources as they physically need to perform their job.
Are you trying to argue that monopsony power doesn’t exist? Without monopsony power an employer who pays low wages will have a hard time attracting employees. Whereas a monopsony employer can set wages arbitrarily low, his only limit is his own conscience and that at some point potential employees will prefer not to work. It’s possible to state the above more mathematically, for example here (Note: that article talks about monopoly rather than monopsony but the principal is the same).
In a perfect market, centralizing or decentralizing doesn’t achieve anything: what matters is simply offer and demand.
Except that centralizing destroys the perfect market.
No, my point is that by and large states don’t need and shouldn’t have “economic policies”.
You haven’t established that point to my satisfaction. Don’t try to: it’s not that I don’t expect you to succeed, it’s that, at this point in time, I am compelled away by urgent priorities.
Except that centralizing destroys the perfect market.
I now know that we are falling for red herrings, both of us. I also acknowledge that I am out of my depth, and that I will have to leave this sort of conversation for when my understanding of economics and game theory are sufficient to tackle it with ease. I advise you to do the same: I have the feeling that there is much cached wisdom and pre-rehearsed arguments in what you say, as I will acknowledge there is in mine.
Then you will abstain from going swimming: if you don’t, it will be at your own risk and peril. Though bad working conditions in this case is more likely to cause people to quit, and a scarcity of appliants (which means you’ll have to take unqualified people or close the swimming area for longer periods of time): it certainly won’t be a manner of being overexploited by abusive leadership. Overexploiting a lifeguard by assigning to them a larger area than they can effectively cover simply means they will fail at their jobs and people will die, so that’s not an option either.
The exception puts the rule to the test, and, as I have shown, lifeguards are an exception in more ways than one.
But, as a general rule, and given the way power dynamics function in the modern workplace, I would argue that the right to strike is an absolutely vital part of the checks and balances of a healthy economy.
Not to say unions can’t act petty or spoiled at some points, but that attitude is self-defeating, and the existing counterpowers will stop them soon enough. That’s what checks and balances are for: selfishness keeping itself in check.
Not to say unions can’t act petty or spoiled at some points, but that attitude is self-defeating, and the existing counterpowers will stop them soon enough.
Assuming the rest of society is functional, i.e., capitalist. Unions in industries that are enforced monopolies, e.g., government workers, are a problem. For example, here in the United States, teachers’ unions are probably the biggest obstacle to fixing the education system.
The idea that education is an enforced government monopoly in the United States Of America of all places makes me question whether you are aware of the importance of private education in that country relative to public education. The idea that a society being functional equals it being capitalist simply makes me question what you mean by capitalism and functionality: try to taboo those words? Finally, the idea that teachers’ unions would get in the way of the improvement of public education strikes me as odd and unexpected, and I would like you to develop that point: what do you mean by “fixing” and why are they “obstacles” to it?
The idea that education is an enforced government monopoly in the United States Of America of all places makes me question whether you are aware of the importance of private education in that country relative to public education.
It’s not quite an enforced government monopoly, although people choosing private school have to pay twice (pay for the public schools through their taxes and tuition for the private school). There are various attempts, e.g., school vouchers, charter schools, to fix this but the teachers’ unions have been fighting them tooth and nail.
The idea that a society being functional equals it being capitalist simply makes me question what you mean by capitalism and functionality: try to taboo those words?
By capitalist I mean free market. By functional I mean provides effective services. Note: my claim is not that societies can’t have both functional and non-capitalist elements, rather that for the most part the functional elements will be capitalist and the non-functional ones will be non-capitalist.
Finally, the idea that teachers’ unions would get in the way of the improvement of public education strikes me as odd and unexpected,
This doesn’t surprise me given the filters you likely get your news through.
and I would like you to develop that point: what do you mean by “fixing” and why are they “obstacles” to it?
By “fixing” I mean making it so that students come out of the schools having actually learned basic math and English skills. A specific reform is making it possible to get rid of incompetent teachers.
When is effectiveness, and when can a service be qualified as effective?
for the most part the functional elements will be capitalist and the non-functional ones will be non-capitalist
Depending on your definitions of effective and free-market, the existence of Sweden, at the very least, might make you want to question that reasoning.
the filters you likely get your news through
I don’t select the media from which I get my news. While the press in general does operate a selection on what information they release to the public, I do not think favouring teachers’ unions is one of their priorities.
A specific reform is making it possible to get rid of incompetent teachers.
Well, in the end the institutions are made of people, and applying game theory oversimplifies many factors. Such as public backlash: I cannot imagine teachers being stupid enough to risk the public backlash that opposing such a reform would cause (supposing that reform is exactly what it says on the tin, rather than making it possible to fire teachers for other, less avowable reasons. Unless teachers in the USA already had such a low social image that they would not care about degrading it further.
EDIT: You know, someone keeps down-voting both of us, and I don’t know why.
Or rather they have such a high social image that the people who aren’t paying attention react the same way you just did.
By all accounts, teachers in the USA are the dregs of society: very badly paid, subjected to unreasonable demands of moral upstanding, and powerless in front of the students, the administration, and the parents.
I just read whatever information falls in my lap while browsing my favourite sites: Less Wrong and Tv Tropes. I don’t get out much, Internet-wise. I don’t go out of my way for sources that agree with me, nor do I actively refuse sources that don’t. A selection bias still happens, because I only read news provided to me by tropers and rationalists.
I was talking more about various street level anti-fascist organizations like say this one and other more recent “antifa” groups across Europe, not the average person who would describe themselves as against fascism or “anti-fascist”. Also I meant fascist in the sense of using fascist tactics and mode of operation. Fascism before takeover was basically street level political violence and intimidation with good ol boys sympathetic to their causes in the law enforcement and the court system helping them get off with minimal penalties.
Well, that’s what happens when you try to fight fascist gangs on their own terms: you become a mirror image! Ethical injunction, he who fights monsters, and so on and so forth.
Why yes, absolutely. I do not know if this is lucky or unlucky, but I don’t know (personally and outside of the internet) anyone who isn’t a pacifist in some capacity when it comes to foreign policy, and in full capacity when it comes to domestic struggles. It just isn’t done. Symbolic violence such as flag-burning or, if it comes to that, car burning, is perfectly okay. So is strong language… as long as said language doesn’t appeal to violence. We don’t joke about being violent to our opposition, unlike, say, American pundits and talk show hosts. Again, it just isn’t done.
Just to clarify: do you mean to restrict the scope of discussion to voicing support for large-scale/political violence? Or do you also mean to say that you are all radically averse to violence in your personal lives?
Well, both, clearly. Violence is bad. Unless it’s in a ring and strictly for sport, then it’s seen as slightly less disgusting and may even gain a “bad ass” edge. But otherwise, violence, personal or political, is just… bad. It’s dangerous to all parties involved, it hurts, and it doesn’t achieve anything. Of course, under extreme circumstances, and I do say extreme, someone snaps. But even then, it’s never justified unless it’s in self-defence, and it’s always a shameful display: the common understanding is that you should have been smart enough, civil enough, to defuse the situation without getting physical.
It’s dangerous to all parties involved, it hurts, and it doesn’t achieve anything.
This just isn’t true. Violence achieves all sorts of things. (I would also dispute “dangerous to all parties involved”.)
But even then, it’s never justified unless it’s in self-defence
This isn’t true either (but at least is somewhat subjective).
, and it’s always a shameful display: the common understanding is that you should have been smart enough, civil enough, to defuse the situation without getting physical.
Also false. I disprove of narrow-minded overgeneralizations almost as much as I disapprove of violence.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, of course, but I am simply sharing with you the general attitude towards violence in my social environment, not arguing in their name. Nevertheless, if you’re going to go so far as to pick those memes apart, instead of simply saying “thank you for the clarification, now I understand how you people think”, I’d suggest you actually go through with it and lay down your argument in full. Saying “I’d say you are wrong” and then leaving it at that tends to leave a bad taste in your interlocutor’s mouth.
I’d suggest you actually go through with it and lay down your argument in full.
OK:
[violence} doesn’t achieve anything.
Yes it does. For example if you beat someone up you can take their stuff. Or thwart their political designs. If you beat up enough people well enough you can execute social change. In fact the vast majority of positive social change (and even more negative social change) that has occurred in the history of mankind has relied on violence.
Violence is the crudest form of power we have. Power does stuff. Pretending violence doesn’t achieve anything is gross self delusion.
Don’t let your pacifist politics corrupt your very model of reality. Instead, understand what violence does and does not achieve and then act on your preference for non-violence.
Ah, well, yes, violence will get you what you want in the short term, but unless you exterminate your enemies, they’ll still be a liability: violence doesn’t convince anyone, it just makes them more tractable. Heck, even verbal combat, that is, argument, doesn’t usually serve any purpose but convince both parties that they are right.
So, yes, “violence (and rudeness, for that matter) achieves nothing” is a gross simplification. “Violence brings very flawed achievements and has lots of terrible drawbacks” would be much more accurate.
Ah, well, yes, violence will get you what you want in the short term, but unless you exterminate your enemies, they’ll still be a liability: violence doesn’t convince anyone, it just makes them more tractable.
Let’s frame it as comparing two options against each other (not one option against some unspecified ideal outcome). Based on a quantum event, in one branch of the multiverse you use violence, in another you refrain from violence. Is your long-term utility in the first branch necessarily lower than in the second branch?
Your enemies are not a homogenous group. Some of them are very convinced and eager to act, but others just like to join the existing group and be an anonymous part of the mob. Destroy the former, and you don’t have to worry so much about the latter.
A short-term advantage can sometimes be used as a leverage for long-term advantage. If you happen to rule a country, you can change education and media to include your propaganda. This increases the number of your followers in long term. (Back to typical LW topics: If you are an AI capable of recursive self-improvement, paralysing your opponents for a week may be all you need to conquer the universe.)
Depending on specific circumstances… for example, your enemies may be popular because they have an aura of invincibility. Beat them once and you have ruined the aura, which may remove many of their followers.
(Disclaimer: I don’t suggest using violence, I just say that sometimes is may be the better choice, so the “violence doesn’t achieve anything” is untrue.)
Hm. Very true, I’m afraid. Anyway, “violence achieves nothing” is a useful heuristic, and in times of extreme need the use for violence will still impose itself: the meme simply puts up a mental “barrier of potential” that makes sure you really think hard of alternatives before resorting to it.
I tend to distrust ideas whose usefulness depend on not being too compellingly expressed.
If what I actually believe is that there are usually more valuable alternatives than violence, I endorse saying that as compellingly as possible, rather than saying that violence is never valuable no more compellingly than appropriate.
But even then, [violence is] never justified unless it’s in self-defence
This isn’t true either (but at least is somewhat subjective).
I strongly agree with your general point, but could you explain what you mean by this comment, because it looks problematic for any reasonable understanding of self-defense (which I would expand to include defense of others).
I though about democracy “nationalism” (which also includes antifascism). A belief that whatever is decided by majority, must be the true, good, and beautiful thing. If something decided by a majority vote happens to be bad, there is always an excuse, some technical detail which explains that this wasn’t a truly democratic choice. If you are more mindkilled, you can just use “democratic” as a synonym for “good” and label everything you like as democratic, and everything you don’t like as undemocratic, whatever the actual majority position is; because even if the majority does not agree with X, well they should agree with it, and in your favorite parallel universe they agree with it, therefore X indeed is democratic.
Are they more possible algorithms of vote counting? What a lucky coindidence that exactly the one used in my country right now is the best, I mean the most democratic one! I only blame the non-voters for its failures; they are always my last resort for explaining why my preferred choice didn’t win.
(There seems to be some similarity with the CEV concept, so I would like to emphasise the difference: in democracy, there is no need for “coherent extrapolation”, because the majority is already perfect as it is. We only need to find its “volition” by a majority vote. If anything goes wrong, it can be explained away as a technical failure in the vote-counting process.)
I only blame the non-voters for its failures; they are always my last resort for explaining why my preferred choice didn’t win.
Well, demographically speaking, that seems to only work with the left, at least within countries I’m familiar with. The Right is usually a third of the population, and they are very disciplined in always voting for their party, no matter what that party does. The Left, on the other hand, is easily disappointed, and tend to abstain from voting entirely.
I don’t know about the rest of your post. The fairly consistent pattern of Islamic countries achieving democracy by overthrowing secular and oppressive regimes, and then voting for Islamist parties is universally seen as a bad thing, in the West at least. This tends to elicit some fair amounts of mockery in the Arabosphere: “So it’s only democracy when you like it, huh? Surely we have much to learn from the Beacons of Civilization and their unquestionably good institutions and supreme, universal values...”
Antifascism seems to be a much steadier pattern, to the point of labelling totalitarian Islamist regimes and ideologies “Islamofascism”, calling anyone with strict, pro-police or pro-military ideas a fascist (in France you’d say of a very stern teacher that “she’s a little fascist”)… A politician of whom you say “he is a fascist” is a politician that is beneath contempt.
Heck, now that I think of it, you could extend it to “human rights” “nationalism”. Apparently the Human Rights Declaration of 1948 is the be-all and end-all of governmental morality. Except in the USA, “because they are weird like that” (and that’s the charitable memetic explanation).
Also, for what it’s worth, I think the best algorithm for vote counting in Presidential elections is the Australian one (strangely enough, they don’t brag about it, but instead mostly complain… perhaps it is a good sign). In Parlimentary Elections, I present to you FluidDemocracy. I think it’s awesome and we should do it right now.
The part about non-voters was not supposed to be about facts, but about rationalizations. Whenever someone loses election, they can imagine that they would have won, if all the people would have voted. This is how one keeps their faith in democracy despite seeing that their ideas have lost in democratic elections.
I guess the typical mind fallacy strongly contributes to the democracy worship. If I believe that most people have the same opinions as me, then a majority vote should bring victory to my opinions. When it does not happen, then unless I want to give up the fallacy, I have to come with an explanation why the experimental data don’t match my theory—for example most people had the same opinion like me, but some of them were too lazy to vote, so this is why we lost. Or they were manipulated, but next time they will see the truth just as clearly as I do. And then, sometimes, like when looking at the voting for Islamist parties, it’s like: WFT, I can’t even find a plausible rationalization for this!
Human minds are prone to separate all humans into two basic categories: us and them. If someone is in the “us” category, we assume they are exactly like us. If someone is in the “them” category, then they are evil, they hate us, and that’s why we (despite being good and peaceful people) should destroy them before they destroy us. Whatever education we get, these two extremes still attract our thinking. In recent decades we have learned that other humans are humans too, but it causes us to underestimate the differences, and always brings a big surprise when those other humans, despite being humans like us, decide for something different than we would.
Apparently the Human Rights Declaration of 1948 is the be-all and end-all of governmental morality. Except in the USA, “because they are weird like that” (and that’s the charitable memetic explanation).
In USA they already have the Bill of Rights. Despite differences, it seems to me that both documents inhabit the same memetic niche (that is: officially recognized and worshiped document which you can quote against your government and against the majority vote).
What’s the CEV concept, again?
Here.Shortly: “our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together” extrapolated by a super-human intelligent machine. It is proposed as a solution to problem what should we ask such machine to do, assuming that the machine is smarter than us, and we don’t want to get burned by our own stupidity. Something like: my true wish is what I would have wished if I had my values and your superior intelligence; plus assumption that sufficiently intelligent humans could together agree on a mutually satisfying solution, and the super-human intelligence should be able to find this solution.
The part about non-voters was not supposed to be about facts, but about rationalizations. Whenever someone loses election, they can imagine that they would have won, if all the people would have voted.
Another popular rationalization, is that my side would have won if it wasn’t for the biased media misinforming the public. I suppose that’s also similar to CEV.
But the values would change with a higher intelligence, wouldn’t they? The perspective on the world changes dramatically!
Well, yes and no. Perhaps it would be better if you look into relevant Sequences, so I don’t have to rediscover the wheel here, but essentially: some things we value as means to get something else—and this is the part which may change dramatically when we get more knowledge—but it cannot be an infinite chain, it has to end somewhere.
For example a good food is a tool to be healthy, and the health is a tool to live longer, feel better, and be more attractive. With more knowledge, my opinion about good and bad food might change dramatically, but I would probably still value health, and I would certainly value feeling good.
So I would like the AI to recommend me the best food according to the best scientific knowledge (and in a Singularity scenario I assume the AI has thousand times better knowledge than me), not based on what food I like now—because this is what I would do if I had the AI’s intelligence and knowledge. However, I would appreciate if the AI also cared about my other values, for example wanting to eat tasty food, so it would find a best way to make me enjoy the diet. What exactly would be the best way? There are many possibilities: for example artificial food flavors or hypnotizing me to like the new taste. Again, I would like AI to pick the solution that I would prefer, if I were intelligent enough to understand the consequences of each choice.
There can be many steps of iteration, but they must be grounded in what I value now. Otherwise the AI could simply make me happy by stimulating the pleasure and desire centers of my brains, and it would make me happy with that treatment—the only argument against such solution is that it is in a strong conflict with my current values and probably cannot be derived from them by merely giving me more knowledge.
Of course this whole concept has some unclear parts and criticism, and they are discussed in separate articles on this site.
So, here is the definition… and the following discussions are probably scattered in comments of many posts on this site. I remember reading more about it, but unfortunately I don’t remember where.
Generally, I think it is difficult to predict what we would value if we were more intelligent. Sure, there seems to be a trend towards more intellectual pursuits. But many highly educated people also enjoy sex or chocolate. So maybe we are not moving away from bodily pleasures, just expanding the range.
But the values would change with a higher intelligence, wouldn’t they?
Yes, which is precisely why CEV proponents think a constrained structure of this form is necessary… they are trying to solve the problem of getting the benefits of superintelligence while keeping current values fixed, rather than trusting their future to whatever values a superintelligence (e.g., an AI or an intelligence-augmented human being or whatever) might end up with on its own.
Well, it shares with the U.S. Constitution (and many other constitutions) the property of being intended to keep certain values fixed over time, I suppose. Is that what you meant? I don’t consider that a terribly strong similarity, but, sure.
I find the US constitution remarkable in its sheer longevity, and how well-designed it was that it can still be used at this point in time. Compare and contrast with the French and Spanish consitutions throughout the XIXth and XXth centuries, which have been changing with every new regime. Sometimes with every new party. The Constitutions tended to be fairly detailed and restrictive, and not written with eternity in mind. I still used to prefer the latest versions of those because they tended to be explicitly Human Rights Compliant (TM), and found the Bill of Rights and the Amendments to be fairly incomplete and outdated in that regard. But it’s been growing on me as of late.
Anyway, yes, the similarity I draw is that both are protocols and guidelines that are intended to outlast their creators far, far into the future, and still be useful to people much more intelligent and knowledgeable than the creators, to be applied to much more complex problems than the creators ever faced.
The U.S. constitution still has its problems (the Electoral College turned out to be a stupid idea, and the requirement that each state have equal representation in the Senate is also problematic), but it seems to have worked well enough...
You’d expect the CEV’s performance to be within those parameters. But I have one question: when can one decide to abolish either of those, and replace it with a new system entirely? Sometimes it is better to restart from scratch.
This certainly isn’t the time. The two problems CronoDAS mentioned are at most mildly annoying, it isn’t worth destroying a powerful and useful Schelling point merely to fix them.
I needed to re-read your comment twice to understand what you meant, because I got it completely wrong the first time. This is how I understand it now, so I write it clearly for readers like me:
What is the dominant form of nationalism (in Orwell’s very loose sense) today in our society?
Would criticizing it make other people percieve you as one of people considered dangerous delusional extremists?
I abstain from the first question, and the answer to the second one is: yes, and it is kinda scary. (Well, disagreeing with majority on a topic that the majority blindly follows is always scary.)
Your reading is correct, but I would also emphasize one particularly bad failure mode for people reading Orwell’s essay nowadays. Namely, people often read it and imagine crude and overt expressions of “nationalism” (in Orwell’s sense) that were common in his own day, and are still common outside of the Western world. So the most subtle and insightful points of the essay are likely to go right over their heads.
More concretely, how many people will stop and think about this part of the essay (bold emphasis mine):
Now, Orwell had in mind here primarily the Communist Russophile intellectuals of his own day, whose allegiance was transferred to a specific and readily identifiable foreign state and ideology. Nowadays, things are rarely so crude and obvious, but it seems to me that essentially the same phenomenon is still rampant—except that the object of transferred allegiance is typically some more or less abstracted group, rather than a concrete political unit. (The vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty are by no means lacking, of course.)
(Now that I’ve written this, I remember a more recent writer who once wrote an essay that reads practically like an update of Orwell’s above cited paragraph for our time. Yet his very name is associated with such unseemly controversies that I’d have to get into long and bothersome disclaimers about where exactly my agreement with him ends, so I’d rather not get into it. This latter fact, of course, is just another reminder of how rampant the “nationalist” passions are in the respectable public discourse nowadays.)
That’s very easy to imagine as a concept… but are you really making a falsifiable claim that Western intelligentsia typically does all that right now? “Africans/Blacks/Gays/Arabs/Immigrants/Trotskyists/Opponents of evil regime X are such a virtuous and naturally blessed group that they can do no wrong, and everything that they believe as a group must therefore also be correct.”? I hardly recall seeing this kind of sentiment expressed by modern authors with any frequency*; if they have do have partisan feelings for some group (e.g. articles by straight liberal people in favor of gay marriage), they’re usually more circumspect—and more sane (as in, less doublethink & vulgar use of unspoken assumptions) - about it. Maybe you and me just read the same words differently.
I know you’re likely to prefer avoiding any mention of individual “respectable” authors in such context, but… any examples? Please? (I’d like some where such association with a distantly-viewed group is more or less explicit, of course, and I’m also curious to see if you feel that people renowned as cynics and skeptics fall prey to such sentiment.)
-* For “Opponents of evil regime X”, see the ongoing coverage of the “Arab Spring” (yes, the naming does display a little partisan bias); do the overwhelming majority of publications imply that 100% of the rebels commit no atrocities, have exclusively noble motivations and are of good moral character, share a lot of priors with Western liberals, etc? If so, I haven’t noticed it; in fact, the most partisan pro-uprising source so far has arguably been Al-Jazeera, not e.g. Huffington Post or Guardian.
They won’t make that statement explicitly, but they will accuse people who point out specific cases where said group isn’t virtuous or is doing something wrong of racism/sexism/homophobia/Islamophobia/victim bashing.
Yup, but that’s mostly unfalsifiable; people with different values can find different things unacceptably racist/*phobic/whatever. And they aren’t really hiding the fact that such accusations are just part of ideological warfare, or that they are partisan on those issues.
The point is that they’re using these charges to avoid rationally confronting their opponents’ arguments.
Uh-huh. But there’s a debate on truth-seeking vs. avoiding damage to society about this sort of thing even here on LW, as you know. Also, are there that many articles that only counter a listing of [favoured group]’s flaws with “That’s *-ist!”? At the very least and the worst level of argument commonly found, the writers try to make it look like the group’s virtues or just its “normality” to ordinary Western folks outweigh the criticism. I’m drawing on my impressions of The Guardian (which I read sporadically to see what British intelligentsia is up to), specifically of its CIF section.
Well, one historical example is the reaction to the Moynihan Report. It’s by no means the only example, but it’s the one where the people dismissing the report as racist and “victim bashing” probably did the most damage to society.
It seems very unfortunate to me that the concept of “Blaming the victim” has been founded upon such an ill-advised swipe at that report. Certainly such a phenomenon is painfully apparent all the time in daily life and politics, yet Moynihan’s intentions to me seem neither aggressive or very patronizing, nor even fuelled by conservative ideology, even if it could end up as ammunition for an unscurpulous ideologist. (he was in the Kennedy administration, so he might well have been a liberal technocrat)
Now this is pure conjencture and indeed fantasy on my part, but I guess that Ryan might’ve been motivated by the “Hostile media effect”, assuming that the report was a nefarious reactionary ploy and missing even the fact that Moynihan places nearly all the blame for the cultural dysfunctions of the black community squarely upon white oppression! (Hardly thought of as a right-wing thought pattern.)
I’m not suggesting that such an accusation of American culture and whites’ old behavior towards blacks must conversely be left-wing silliness; the logic of Moynihan’s explanation seems sound enough to me—it might be a cliche, but it’s probably true. (But then, I believe that Noam Chomsky is frequently spot-on and somewhat of an authority—what else is to be expected of me.)
Wow. That’s actually a stunningly interesting report. The conflict caused is also very interesting: one could also argue that the report itself, coming out at such a time, could have done more damage to society than its obfuscation did. The opponents of the Civil Rights movement would, I think, have weaponized it and used it to blame the Blacks entirely for their own problems, not to say they didn’t have partial responsibility, of course.
My thoughts exactly! Even today you see the more extreme elements of the Right scouring the net in what can be described as a search for ammunition, their bottom-line being already as entrenched as that of the Left extremists. And most of the radical Right do conspiciously seek to absolve traditional society of whatever stripe they prefer of absolutely any moral guilt. Back to the report in question, it seems well-founded in asserting that the black community had some faulty traditions and regressive ways of raising its new generations (as, from a modern perspective, might some other communities). However, it doesn’t outright deny the economic angle of the problem, nor, especially, does it paint a picture of fundamental hostility between the races, yet it is undoubtedly used to “support” such a picture even now by the real racists!
I wonder if Moynihan himself feared that key the message he apparently tried to send—“White people, in view of their historical fortune, have a duty to help struggling minorities out in an intelligent way, even if it might hurt some feelings in the short run when some structural elements of society need to be altered”—would be co-opted by some unsympathetic fucks to “prove” that n**rs are culturally inferior and should be subjugated by the “superior” races.
Why does right wing extremism scare you so much more than left wing extremism when the former is utterly despised as the definition of evil by most Westerners while the latter is only ever lukewarmly condemned?
Do extreme right wingers have some particular super power that I’m not aware of? The right wing are the guys who have been on a losing streak since Stalingrad and if you listen to Moldbug for a century before that too. I need some actual evidence that I should worry about them getting power anywhere in the West without being bombed into the stone age by the US five minutes later (bombing European right wing extremists, especially racist ones is the stuff of victory, moral superiority and war fantasies for them—check out American video games, adventure novels and action movie villains), than say of me personally being struck by lightning when I’m walking my dog on a rainy Saturday evening.
Reading some of your comments I can’t shake the feeling that you for some reason see their intellectual ammunition as so much more formidable than what is usually consumed by intellectuals that it despite the massive incentives against it threatens to one day quite suddenly break out and become popular among the smart fraction. Is this a correct reading?
Sort of yes! I’ve always been a little terrified of the power of naked, unashamed technocracy, of either despotic or Randian aspect. Even the more ruthless bits of Moldbug’s (rather comfortable and watered-down) technocratic fascism are, I fear, hardly a glimpse of what’s to come, if the “rationality” of geeks and engineers, finally free from either today’s humanist quasi-theocracy and the sober bounds of old-time coonservatism, gets free rein. Perhaps many here on LW, especially non-neurotypical people (who I tend to sympathize with a lot, but also be wary of if their condition includes any change in empathy) would be tempted by such a Ubermensch thing. Think of a hybrid of Speer, Eichmann and a weak UFAI and you’ll understand how this nightmare of mine goes.
(I’m actually integrating a sinister-yet-rationalist one world government based on these fears in my science fantasy novel—instead of a generic villainous empire I started out with—except that in my story it was formed by voices of moderation in high places after the Axis victory in WW2 and the ensuing cold war, not as the radical elitist movement that I can phantom it as in the real world.)
“Naked, unashamed technocracy” strikes me as much more similar to the position advocated by the left (ETA: especially the socialist left) then the right.
Oh, it’s advocated by the left, alright (damn you language), but e.g. Stalinism was much less that and much more feudalism than Westerners commonly assume; it was quite the underground struggle, and Stalin himself (even without supposing any conspiracy) fell to it, as everyone around was either genuinely too afraid of disrupting him the morning he had his heart attack/whatever it was, or consciously decided to abandon him.
My point is, if you scratch a Stalinist you’re likely to find a barbarian; those smart, brave and virtuous alt-right-wingers strike me as the only sort of people who could potentially succeed in truly implementing such a regime.
That is a very interesting concept! I’d love to read more about it, if you are writing in English and have any drafts you would like someone to read or will eventually publish, please make a post on LW!
SYNOPSIS:
The novel’s background is that Nazi and Japanese research into the nature of reality in an attempt to access “magic” or create “ontotechnological weapons” (credit for the word “Ontotechnology” goes to EY) pretty much broke the self-sealing “reality bubble” of Earth, placed there by an interdimensional supercivilization fighting its own civil war for the Universe itself. That supercivilization’s factions are perceived as “Angels” and “Demons”; they have made themselves into ontologically basic mental entities and the former are trying to impose absolute objective morality upon the Universe (which IS absolutely good and benign for any species that comes within its influence) while the latter are ruthless anarchists and opppose any rules at all, especially deontological ones.
As humans were predicted to have unusually strong reality-warping potential, Earth was sealed away in a local ceasefire that forbade both recruiting from it. After the “bubble” began to tear, the “demons”, acting without any hierarchy, just spontaneously invaded, making some people into their playthings, dragging others away for use as psychic slave-soldiers and helping start WW3 in the ongoing panic. As Japan and the Reich, blaming each other, were preparing to obliterate the remnants of civilization, powerful technocratic elements on both sides independently launched coups, came to an agreement and instated a new world order that was essentially a megacorporation (I thought of this before reading any Moldbug). It shaped humanity into a great and complex hierarchy, where daily strife and the fullfillment of urges by the population would accumulate the “psychic” reality-warping energies in huge resonators to drain every drop of them, including from people gifted enough to become “mages”.
The pooled energy was used to assist in brainwashing the masses, as a shield to keep rampaging demons away from the major arcologies, and to lash out at the barren and twisted Wastelands, where barbaric, Nietzchean sorcerer-cults now contended with each other and the infernal hordes. At the same time, there was a divine intervention as well. The “angels”, before being driven out of our meta-region of the Universe by the disaster, took volunteers with especially strong psychic potential and moral fibre with them to fight in the endless war, while for all the other humans whom they found worthy—about 5-10% of the population after a century of life under brutal totalitarian regimes—they created a small utopian realm with impenetrable defenses near the North Pole. Founded upon some weird rules, restrictions and gifts, it’s essentially going to be anime-like in my description. You know, heartbreakingly beautiful vistas, surreal technology like dragon AIs, ornithopters and crystal exoskeletons, an elaborate system of universities, guilds and knightly orders for everyone’s talents to flourish, everything is always romantic, etc.
However, it comes at a price, as the trope demands; the ruling council is allowed to use utilitarian logic for hard decisions, and what they’re going to do with it is my main plotline. The utopian culture sends agents Outside to help people and thwart the bad guys’ attempts to penetrate their barrier or otherwise harm them, like Banks’ Contact and Special Circumstances. And they support a network of resistance cells in the utilitarian megacorp’s arcologies. Think like Al-Quaeda, but somewhat sympathetic and with Gnostic mysticism. The protagonist is a young soldier/technician in the Resistance, who starts out depressed, demotivated and Shinji-like (write what you know!); he’s hopelessly in love with a female agent of the Utopia that’s working with his cell on something top-secret. In the beginning, the cell is wiped out by a State Security raid and the agent is taken prisoner, but not before she implants the mortally injured protagonist with her hyper-advanced drone, making him into a superpowered zombie cyborg. Stumbling away from the wreckage, he meets up with a hacker from the arcology—who’s part of a subculture stealing psychic energy and addicted to it—and that hacker’s tsundere sister, a promising social engineer/spin doctor/brainwasher who’s devoted to the megacorp at first but slowly agrees to become a double agent. Together they unveil a conspiracy involving a weird urban legend, said to be a memetic virus called the “Invisible Dawn”—which is the title of the novel.
Whew.
Unfortunately for you, I’m writing in Russian, as attempting something novel-length in English would’ve at this point only become a drain of my mental energy; I’ll need another decade of practice before I can use it as easily as Russian.
Having beliefs that correspond to reality?
You would also describe yourself as having beliefs that correspond to reality, but neither you nor me nor the general public would claim that you’re some kind of extremist on account, say, of your posts here; you look like a typical secularist conservative/libertarian type to me. While we would clearly disagree about many of each other’s values or instrumental decisions, we definitely wouldn’t believe that the other is a horrible enemy of civilization.
OK, I’ll try to give a current example, with the caveat that I’m giving it purely for illustrative purposes, not to start unwelcome politically charged discussions.
Observe the ongoing controversy over the recent shooting in Florida. Now, I’m not going to speculate on the details of the case itself at all—for the sake of the argument, you can assume any version of the events you wish, and what I’ll say will still apply.
Whatever may have actually occurred in this case, there is no doubt that: (1) conclusive evidence of what really happened is still lacking, and even less evidence was available when the controversy erupted some weeks ago, and yet (2) numerous respectable voices of the mainstream opinion rushed to express passionate condemnation of the shooter that went far beyond anything that could be reasonably inferred from the evidence, often going even beyond mere bias and spin into outright lies and fabrication. Even if, hypothetically, some evidence eventually emerges showing that their general conclusion was right, and the shooter really did something as nasty as they believe, it is simply undeniable that they have gone far beyond anything that might be justified given the presently available knowledge. (And it’s easy to find plenty of examples of vulgarity, silliness, malignancy, and dishonesty in their reactions.)
Now, how to explain these reactions? Clearly, some people’s reactions are easily explained with just plain “nationalism” in Orwell’s sense, since they share their own identity with the person who got killed. But what about those who have no such connection, which certainly includes the majority of the respectable opinion that got inflamed with such passionate intensity? It seems to me like a clear-cut case of “transferred nationalism” in Orwell’s sense.
(Again, I really hate to introduce any discussions of controversial daily politics on LW. I’m giving an example like this one only because I was specifically asked to do so, and I don’t intend to follow up with any specific discussion of the case. I’m interested in it only as a case study for examining the mechanisms of public opinion demonstrated in it.)
Okay, thanks. However, based on what I know of the US, nearly any murder or other serious incident caught in the news where the races of the victim and the accused were different would practically always provoke a hysterical reaction wracked with all the usual American neuroses. There’s nothing exceptionally bad about this case’s handling that hasn’t been true for a very long while IMO.
(Well, except for pre-Civil War times, when things might have been a little less convoulted but positively flaunted the heuristics we now find disgusting; the mainstream wouldn’t stop for a moment before assigning guilt based on how non-Anglo-Saxon* a participant was, and the radical anti-racists would jump to the opposite conclusion, often in a patronizing “Uncle Tom” way. Can’t point to a specific case from which I got this picture, and you might be justified in calling it oversimplified, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not just a modern political caricature of the bad old times.)
-* Were the Southern whites also considered Anglo-Saxon in the broad sense? If no, what word did they use to separate themselves and e.g. the Irish/Eastern European immigrants or other “inferior” whites?
There is plenty of counter evidence to this.
Even some stuff that would seem to have all the building blocks for media exposure and revenue generation, like say the recent case of a home invasion where a young man sexually assaults and kills a 85 year old woman and beats her husband to the point of him being hospitalized.
Huh? So… what do you think makes the difference between this case and the ones that failed to detonate? If your answer looks too mind-killing to you, please PM me.
Man bites dog partially explains it.
Well, I am giving it as an example of standard and long-standing attitudes of the sort that Orwell described as “transferred nationalism,” not some novel phenomenon.
Well, how about, say, Germany or Canada? The racial issues are obviously less charged here, and not due to their especial monoethnicity - and it appears to me from outside view that while people there might be unimaginably biased on other issues, they are at least more polite, less prone to contagnious hysteria and just have a higher sanity waterline as communities.
I think Steve Sailer does a good job of analysing this.
Sorry, but I think this is too partisan and arational (has Sailer even tried to imagine what his “enemies” think and believe before professing that they are basically Stalin and O’Brien?) to quote on LW. You could’ve just linked to the post.
Good point, fixed the post.
The fact that Zimmerman stinks so badly at his self-appointed job of “neighborhood watch captain,” it led him to kill an innocent man. (If you think Martin was actually committing a crime, I can probably give you 2-to-1 odds.) In the absence of social condemnation, Zimmerman might continue carrying a gun in pursuit of his hobby. The media has put itself in charge of condemnation. Since some of their leaders seem very stupid, we would expect them to make mistakes. (In fact, you could argue they stink at this job and shouldn’t be in charge of condemnation at all.)
The fact that Florida law might allow two men to “stand their ground” and escalate the use of force until someone dies also seems relevant. If it actually happened then Florida voters should know. But I don’t think this played more than a small role in the media’s actions, because they seem too stupid on the whole to make decisions based on policy concerns.
You are aware that according to the best theory based on public available evidence Zimmerman didn’t shoot Martin until the latter was beating his head on the pavement? Also in that kind of situation “stand your ground” laws aren’t all that relevant since there is no way to retreat.
Edit: Also, your “media incompetence” theory doesn’t explain why all the mistakes went in the same direction.
By saying “incompetence” you make it sound like I think the media wants to create accurate beliefs about reality, but fails due to other factors. This seems as silly as thinking the human brain evolved to get the right answer, in general, but has all these extraneous biases mucking it up. I thought I explained how I see the media’s motives.
I don’t understand what you mean. Are you assuming that beating someone’s head on the pavement would count as a crime? Because like I said, Trayvon Martin had a perfect right under Florida law to stand his ground if the strange man with the gun genuinely seemed threatening.
Why not? All their mistakes seemed to go in one direction back when Chris T.N.O. Matthews was saying Al Gore “would lick the bathroom floor” to be President. But I explain that as the result of personal dislike combined with a tribal sense of offense at Bill Clinton’s actions, not a bias against Democrats. Why on Earth would you not expect idiots like that to fly off the handle at the death of an innocent child?
I’d like to mention that depending on the situation and the regime in question people might attach their nationalism to the regime itself (denying its evils) rather than to its opponents.
Heh, of course. I see it all the time in Russian right-of-center publications. But wasn’t the blame here being placed upon stereotypical liberal-minded people? I don’t see any liberals gushing about how unfairly e.g. Fidel Castro is being treated, or how the Viet Cong were all righteous and noble freedom fighters who only wanted peace and treated enemies with respect (of course, most people—including me—are more sympathetic to them than the American soldiers when talking about the Vietnam war, but that’s to be expected given the vast objective differences in the combatants’ situations).
Well they certainly exist, expecially in Hollywood.
Well, those people certainly don’t make their living by writing or abstract thinking. I meant liberal/moderate leftist journalists, professional writers, political experts, etc. Celebrities known to be conservative also often say misguided ideological things, except that there’s less of them in America because conservatives there typically stay away from the entertainment industry (both due to natural predisposition and active self-segregation, I’d guess).*
(In other countries the political divide looks less sharp in general, and proeminent people tend to express their political views more subtly too.)
- I think it was pretty silly of Moldbug to spin a theory of how everybody-who’s-anybody is carrying the “progressivism” meme in America because it’s supposedly better adapted; it’s clear that there’s simple Hanson-style signaling at work in Hollywood and elsewhere; Moldbug’s assertion that academia sets the intellectual fashion might bear closer scrutiny, but clearly most people (non-intellectuals) don’t give a rat’s ass about the contents* of any fashion they’re following! They believe-in-belief that they do, of course, but e.g. the people of the US entertainment industry, AFAIK, went from cautiously admiring the Soviet Union to considering it a miserable dump sometime around the early 80s, so they clearly aren’t faithful adepts of “progressivism”. Also, consider all the psychodrama after 9/11.
Forgive my ignorance, but what’s that?
The belief that people behave certain ways because it signals something about their thought process, without actually thinking that way. I.e. politicians expressing outrage to signal, not because they are actually outraged. Hanson thinks this type of insincere signaling explains a lot of social behavior, much more than conventional wisdom would suggest.
Oh! We have this thing in TV Tropes! We call it a Straw Hypocrite! Indeed, it’s a hypothesis always worth assuming, but I don’t see how much use it can have except in hindsight, I mean how would one go about predicting someone else’s genuine emotional state? It’s much easier to predict the emotional state they will allow themselves to show, than it is to try to divine what’s going in in that brain of theirs! Not to mention, they probably aren’t even actually very clear on what they feel or what they think, at all. In extreme cases, they may have less predictive ability on the topic of their inner workings than an external observer! Not to mention the remarkably ironic occasions where people believe they are “faking” feelings that they actually have and are in denial of!
Pinkie Pie mode, eh?
Pinkie Pie mode is my default mode, I just try to subdue it when I’m on the Internet, but sometimes I get lazy...
By the way, here in Russia it is mostly reactionary/nationalist/authoritarian types that express disapproval at any suggestion of regime change, either external or internal, in places like Cuba. It seemingly doesn’t matter much to them what kind of dictatorship it is, as long as it continues to exist and spite the 1st world nations. (Yes, I’m biased as hell against them.)
That doesn’t surprise me in the least.
You mean to say Russia isn’t 1st world? When was there a 1st and 2nd world in the first place? I thought “third world” was a reference to a “third party”, not an attempt to actually order parts of the world in the shape of some list. For one thing, that would be rather insulting for whoever is the 2nd world, wouldn’t you agree?
1st World—Capitalists
2d World—Communists
3rd World—The places where puppet games were played (particularly former colonies).
I’d say… antifascism?
In Europe anti-fascists basically are fascists, at least when it comes to their tactics and their relationship to the authorities who often look the other way while they do their thing (which is the use of violence and extortion to attack right wing organizations and individuals known to support them).
Note: Possibly Mindkilling
In Ireland, antifa is pretty small, but seems to be closely associated with radical republicanism—which has a specific meaning in Irish politics: Sinn Féin and other more millitant nationalist groups, generally left-leaning (or appearing to be to gain popular working-class approval) and often anti-British.
This leads to the odd situation where antifa is closely correlated with nationalism.
From a communications clarity point of view, I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-right ideology, in the same way that I like that there is a word for certain failure modes of far-left ideology. Using the far-right failure mode label for those on the far left confuses this distinction.
To me, the defining feature of fascism (or communism) is not use of private, politically motivated violence with the tolerance of the authorities. That’s bad, but it’s not the reasons that I think fascism is bad.
It’s similar to the problem of saying that Nazism is bad because it is socialist (“National Socialism” in the name). Nazism is bad, and socialism (as those speakers intend the term) is bad, but Nazism != socialism.
And what are those reasons? Since I really don’t see the distinction you’re trying to make.
To speak more carefully—violence for the purpose of influencing the “center of mass” of political opinion in a country, when the government is not uniformly in favor of the political position of those executing the violence—is not the same thing as fascism. More colloquially, tactics similar to voter intimidation have been used by fascists, but not only fascists.
My main point was that an ideological label that applies to both FARC and AUC is not a particularly informative label. If fascism is restricted to the usage I suggested, then it is more informative than that.
You didn’t answer my question. Let me state it more explicitly. What do you mean by “fascism”?
Fascists seem to believe that there once was a society that lived perfectly. Some of us can become these “Ideal Men” if we are spiritually pure enough (or maybe we can only set things up so that our descendents can be this way). Further, the importance of this spiritual purity justifies any violence in service of reaching this goal.
Fascists are wrong because the imagined past never occurred (like the country song that complains that Coke is a slang shortening for Cocaine—as if there was ever a time when Coke was not a reference to Cocaine).
Communists have the same belief in an “Ideal Man,” but they think that no one has ever lived that way. With sufficient mental purity, we might be able to become “Ideal” (again, we might only be able to cause this for our descendents). Once we are all ideal, we will be able distribute resources “fairly” and avoid the social problems we face today. Again, achieving that ideal justifies any violence.
Communists are wrong because the existence of scarcity guarantees that schemes of wealth distribution cannot solve every social problem.
Transhumanist look forward, not backwards. But they don’t say that all social problems will go away. Only that technology will make us so rich that all our current problems will be gone. There’s the joke of the person revived from suspended animation in the distant future who asks if there was still poverty, disease, hunger, wars or crime and is told that no, those problems were solved long ago. Then he asks, then why doess everybody seem so nervous? “Well, you see—we have REAL problems.”
Who do you have in mind? ETA?
There’s no such thing as being “basically” fascists: either you are a fascist or you aren’t. Totalitarian, violent extremists, maybe. But that’s a strange “general truth” you’re stating here. The anti-fascists I know (basically, everyone) are radically averse to violence. In fact, being anti-fascist is the one single thing everyone agrees on, even the parties branded as “fascist” by everyone else! Is this violence the case in your country, or are you generalizing from fringe groups?
That’s because in today’s Europe anti-facism is an applause light not an ideology.
Unless you mean it’s become such a widespread ideology that it’s isometric to a tautology in the minds of the public, I don’t see what you mean.
I mean someone calling themselves “anti-facist” doesn’t have any semantic content.
It sure does. It’s vague and nebulous, because “fascism” itself is vague and nebulous by design, but usually it boils down to:
Against wars of conquest and even against gunboat diplomacy.
Against intellectual censorship and police states, for freedom of expression.
In favour of liberal democracy.
In favour of the right of all to a fair trial, against death penalty.
In favour of the right to unionise, to make strikes, to pacific and non-violent demonstrations.
If anyone disagrees with any of these points, they had better not say it out loud, regardless of what they actually end up doing.
Unless, of course, the people you’re censoring are themselves fascist or can be accused of facism or “hate speech” then it’s ok.
Well, it could look like hypocrisy if you fail to understand that the points I oulined aren’t principles or goals in and of themsleves. They are simply measures taken to avoid the rebirth of fascism or anything like it, mere means to an end. The top priority remains anti-fascism in and of itself, and the repression of anything that could promote it, looks like it could promote it, or could be made to look like it could promote it. Hence why Mein Kampf is banned, and people in Belgium have gone to prison for reading The Protocols of the Sages of Zion in the subway. Really, it all boils down to Hitler: bad in mainland Europe, and Civil War: bad in Spain (which is probably why they abhor violent methods so much).
Obviously the dilemma anti-fascism faces is the danger of becoming so repressive in its efforts to stop fascism from raising again that it creates a new totalitarianism of its own, but so far they seem to be pulling along fine.
...
So for you and your friends, freedom of expression doesn’t extend to letting people say things you don’t like, and it isn’t censorship if you stop them doing it.
Certainly not: they are allowed to say them, the same way they’re allowed to say, for example, that they’re sexually attracted to small children: sharing this information about their state of mind will brand them as dangerous, repulsive, and immoral, they will be subject to suspicion and strong scrutiny, people will be wary of letting power in their hands, of associating with them in public… but no-one would tell them to shut up. In fact, people would want them to speak up, so that they can be identified and tagged.
So, we’re fully in favour of letting them say things we don’t like, we’re actually enthusiastically in favour of them saying them. When I say “they had better not say it out loud”, I mean that it would not be in their best interests to signal that state of mind, and that they would, as a matter of pure self-interest, censor themselves, without any input from us, and to our great regret.
For a moment I was going to say that I had misinterpreted you, but on reflection, I don’t think I did at all.
You just compared being against your favoured constellation of political ideas to child molesting, and called those who are against them dangerous, repulsive, and immoral. You want them subject to suspicion and strong scrutiny; they must be identified and tagged. Of course, you’re not going to personally suppress them, but—nudge nudge, wink wink—they’d better take care if they know what’s good for them, eh?
Now, imagine someone had read only that comment, but not its ancestors. What might they conjecture that this constellation of political ideas might be?
The manifest destiny of the Aryan race? Missionary Christianity? The white man’s burden of ruling the lesser peoples? Pan-Islamism? No, “liberal democracy”. (That was just the third of your five bullet points, but “liberal democracy” includes the other four already.)
BTW, have you come across Mencius Moldbug?
I’m not nudging, I’m not winking, and I’m not jocular or joyous: I’m dead serious, and state this as a matter of fact. Not as a threat or a warning, but as a statement of common sense. In fact, I like it better when they do not show this much common sense, so we can discuss their ideas in the open, and expose them for what they are.
I chose paedophilia (not child molesting, I never said anything about actually having ever laid a hand on an actual child) because it’s something people get panicky about on a gut level, but is contingent to the local region of space and time one occupies. You may replace it with “racism”, “military expansionism/imperialism”, “support for the Death Penalty”, “support for banning guns”, “support for Cryonics and/or Transhumanism”, or “support for gay marriage”, depending on the social environment you’re moving in.
I have. I am fairly unimpressed. Some interesting, daring, and refreshing new ideas, but I don’t know if it’s “rehearsing arguments”, “one argument against a thousand”, and so on and so forth, but I find his arguments un-satisfactory, ultimately.
I find it telling that you conflate all of these and put them on the same level. In particular, you seem to be confused as to what missionary Christianity and Pan-islamism entail, respectively, by themselves.
A statement of “common sense” that they will be seen as dangerous, repulsive, and immoral, and all the rest. If not by you, and not by them, then by whom?
I wish people who use this expression would go on to say what it tells them.
Those were just some examples of ideologies that have taken this attitude to their opponents. (Ok, maybe not all manifestations of missionary Christianity deserve to be in that list; consider it replaced by Stalinism or the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)
For “liberal democracy” to take that attitude doesn’t sound very liberal.
Please see here.
I don’t have access to the link. Is it an unpublished draft?
Er, yes, I have turned it into a draft at the behest of some readers who told me to reformat it in a way that would make it a proper top-level post, rather than a mere recapitulation/contextualization of the discussion so far. I’ll warn you as soon as it’s done.
If your regret over the consequences of punishing them for expressing their actual state is great enough, you might consider not punishing them. Conversely, if after considering it you decide to continue to punish them, you might want to calibrate your estimate of your regret more precisely.
No, no, I regret that they won’t speak up so we can’t identify them, I don’t regret the treatment they are given once they are identified. This is especially annoying when they start to act out on the opposites of these ideas as policies without announcing themselves, and in fact vehemently denying any type of association with the typical opponents of those ideas. It makes working to stop them harder.
You seem to have a fundamental confusion between “person is going to be punished for expressing beliefs outisde the Overton Window”, and “person is going to suffer negative consequences once it is publically known that they have beliefs outside the Overton Window”. The first would be institutionally enforced censorship, and wrong. The second would be simple social dynamics at work, and inevitable. If you can’t tell the difference, I suggest you live in a country like the one where I was born, where the very circulation of certain ideas can be paid with your own life.
Tapping out.
Please see here. This is not a fight, and I’m not trying to knock you out.
That link doesn’t work for me.
Do you have a preferred expression for people indicating that they are no longer interested in discussing a particular subject with you?
How about “I have lost interest in closing this discussion”, or even not answering at all? Anyway, that’s not what you indicated, you indicated that I had “won”, somehow. I’m not interested in winning arguments, I’m interested in finding out the truth. “(You have satisfactorily proven that) my (implcit) accusations were precipitated/groundless/undeserved. I now see where you are coming from (even though I disagree with your conclusions).” would have been my preferred outcome, “You are clearly insane and not worth talking to” would have been my least preferred.
Now, me, Richard and Nier have gone into a tangent where I have shown some very poor grasp of both social and rational skills, and allowed myself to snap at my comrades in an entirely unseemly manner, under externally-induced stress and time pressures, that I should have known better than to let get the better of me. The posts I have fathered have shamed me, but I shall keep them up as an example of what not to do.
I’ll try here to adress their points more intelligently, pertinently, and courteously.
This statement got me very very angry. The conclusion you jumped to, Richard, is an understandable extrapolation, but I would have liked it if you had been more cautious about embracing it, because I have said nothing of the sort. My guess is that you are committing the “Politics is the Mind-Killer” mistake of trying to fit me into preexisting categories, groups, and roles, in your narrative. You should know, by now, that trying to do that with a Less Wronger is like trying to catch water, except water doesn’t get pissed off. Abstain from doing that in the future.
Now, I don’t know about my “friends” (I’ll ask them… both of them… when I get the chance, though I think they’ll agree with what I’m going to argue), but I for one think that people should be allowed to say what they want, regardless of whether I like or I don’t like it. If there is any merit to their ideas, sharing them with the public will represent an improvement to the pool of collective knowledge. If there isn’t, having them submitted to be de-constructed and exposed as worthless is also an improvement.
At least, that’s my kind, idealistic, forgiving, past self. After having spent some time with /b/tards and goons, I have found that there is such a thing as a harmful, dangerous, or cruel abuse of freedom of speech.:
There is the promotion of the discriminating of minorities.
There is the promotion of violence.
There is the promotion of sexual and psychological abuse, and of the oppression of one gender by another, of one age group by another.
There is the promotion of one group using lethal force on another to, well, force them to undertake certain actions, or cede certain advantages, for the sake of the group that is most effective in its use of violence.
There is the promotion of totalitarian regimes.
There is the systematic aggression by certain self-appointed standard enforcers, against any opinions that go enough outside the mainstream that they attract any attention at all. (Hypocrisy? Wait up!)
There is the promotion of not giving a fair trial to people (lynching, purging, and so on), mostly by presenting their guilt as being beyond doubt (regardless of evidence), and that what they did was so heinous they must be punished as soon as possible, as harshly as possible, without getting a chance to defend themselves.
With some correlation to the last one, there is the promotion of the idea that said extremely heinous criminals should not even have the right to live on.
There is the promotion of the idea that strikes are an illegitimate form of protest, heck, that any form of protest at all in the workplace is illegitimate, save for job-quitting, if that.
Analogically, that protests against the actions of the government are illegitimate, no matter how non-violent.
I’ll leave the question of how these (ab?)uses of freedom of expression should be dealt with, and whether there should be consequences for those who make use of their freedom in such a way, and what those consequences should be, as an exercise to the reader.
When I said
I had this sort of guy in mind. A fascist in a liberal democracy, he keeps his mouth shut (well, at least he tries, but his burning, endless love for the kind Fuhrer cannot be contained), and bides his time. Because he fears… what? In what I conceive of liberal democracy, he’d have the right to hold on to his ideas, even to speak them out. As long as he doesn’t actively advocate finishing the Holocaust or oppressing black people or that kind of thing, the Law would leave him alone. He would be allowed to discuss his anti-democratic, fascist opinions in public places and media… and have them be ridiculed and soundly refuted. His immediate environment may or may not care: they may very well file him off as an inoffensive cuckoo (he’s anything but: he almost gunned the protagonists down, and then blew up a theatre at their behest… long story). He’s poor, unambitious. incompetent, and keeps to himself. No-one will bother to obstruct him or get in his way.
Now suppose that someone who was in favour of wars of conquest, in favour of strict government censorship, in favour of ideological totalitarianism and one-party rule, in favour of lynchings, trial by ordeal, “adminsitrative detainment”, summary execution, extermination camps, prohibition of any form of protest in the workplace or against the government… suppose that this someone was smart, rich, capable, pragmatic, competent, and ambitious. Suppose that, and I know this is hard, given the previous attributes, suppose that they publicly announced holding this set of beliefs.
Would you not expect them to meet with a spontaneously generated slew of obstacles and hindrances of every kind?. And I haven’t said anything about their opinions on race or gender or social inequality. Just the institutions of liberal democracy.
Would it not be right, and good, and proper that they are subjected to this kind of obstruction, if not outright legal action?
But, see, that’s why that hypothesis was hard to swallow. Someone like that, smart and capable and pragmatic, would keep their mouth shut. They would bide their time. And then, when you expect it the least, they might pull this kind of shit. Or this other kind of shit.
Are you still going to pretend that this is just a matter of what “me and my friends” “like” or don’t “like”, Richard?
Now, see, I regret that, out of self preservation, and/or for the sake of bringing their plans to fruition, that kind of people will keep quiet, and only share and discuss these opinions with like-minded people. I regret that they do not feel that they can share their opinions in public, and expect them to win out by their own merit. I regret that they might, in fact, not want to submit their opinions to public scrutiny, because somewhere, deep inside, they know them to be evil or false. There is an idealistic part of me that wants to believe that, were these people given a chance to express themselves, to communicate freely and civilly with others, they would either change their beliefs as a result of the bayesian update, change everyone else’s beliefs, and/or, if it’s a matter of “personal” or “irrational” sensibility, make peace with the fact that they live in a world where the majority does not share their point of view, and that they cannot force their opinions, least of all their policies, unto them.
There is another, more cynical and ruthless side of me, that believes that the sort of people who are dangerously violent because of their ideology are not the sort of people who would benefit in any way from publicly debating their ideas, nor would anyone benefit from arguing with them. This aspect of me posits that sometimes, defending the freedoms of the most means stopping others from promoting the idea that said freedoms should be partly or fully, but permanently, waived, as well as infringing on the freedoms of these others should they show that they are willing and able to destroy these freedoms, and that this is perfectly okay.
To give you an example, you can’t accuse of hypocrisy someone who claims to want to preserve life, because they kill a few select individuals, that have proven that killing them was the only way of incapacitating them (or that you can’t try to incapacitate them without at least risking, and sometimes accidentally achieving, killing them).
You can’t accuse liberal democracy of “not being very liberal” if its institutions, official and unofficial, actively work to hinder, by any means necessary (and ideally by the least harsh means necessary), any and all efforts to make it less liberal. This democracy is, in fact, in a constant equilibrium of being as liberal as it can sustainably be.
The problem with censorship is that it inevitably expands to far. For example, your list of “abuses of free speech” includes both promotion of ideas that really are heinous and promotion of ideas that are perfectly reasonable. For example:
Depending on what you mean by strike. But I think it’s a perfectly reasonable idea that you shouldn’t be able to refuse to do your job whenever you feel like expressing a “grievance” with no consequences except possibly loss of pay for the period of time when you don’t work.
Why in the world would that be a reasonable idea?
Because society depends on people doing their jobs in order to function.
Wrong emphasis. Society depends on people*, doing their jobs.
Let’s taboo some words:
Society: a sufficiently large group of individuals. Are we assuming a shared final goals? A power structure? A distribution of labour?
depends on: requires for its continued… What? Existence? Prosperity? What aspect of society depends on “people doing their jobs”? What does society depend on “people doing their jobs” for? For now, I’ll assume you’re using “depends on X” in the sense of “expects X to happen”… but that’s kind of weak.
people: individual sentient beings, not machines or tools, with needs other than being kept in optimal condition for the performance in the functions they perform, and existences that do not necessarily revolve around performing said functions.
doing their jobs: performing the functions that they have promised to perform reliably and within certain sufficient quality and quantity parameters
Again, given that it’s people we are talking about, they will only want to do their jobs in exchange for a reliable retribution in advantages in the shape of wealth and status in sufficient quality and quantity that have a utility to the people that is equivalent or superior to costs that “doing their job” entails for them. They will only be able to do their jobs if the compensation is sufficient to keep them alive so they can come back the next day.
Now, let’s use some basic economic theory: let’s assume work is a commodity, that is, let us do away with the “people” part and suppose the job-performers are emotionless, non-sentient machines, tools that will simply go irreversibly out of order if they are given insufficient resources for a long enough period of time, beings that exist only and purely to do their jobs, whose downtime is either spent in maintenance (and can be shortened or lengthened depending on where the optimal total productivity point between maximum duration and maximum instant output lies). Let’s also assume that their work capacity is distributed in an ideal free market, and that the machines are programmed to ask for as many resources as you are willing to give them. There’s a very close real-life equivalent to said machines: cattle.
Finally, let us assume that there is a steady influx of new machines, but that the work that the society needs to get done fluctuates.
This situation automatically results, thanks the to wonderful “Invisible Hand” that guides the self-regulating ideal market, into the jobholders being given *exactly as many resources as they need to work and keep functioning the next day, maintaining exactly the population that can provide the necessary amount of labour needed for getting the amount of job that society demands done.
Now, in the XIXth century, that is often what actually happened, except with people, specifically unqualified labour (heck, look at the very term: “unqualified labour”, as if labour was everything they are). And that was just unplanned market fuckery. The Nazis would actually planify killings by giving workers rations that were exactly calculated so that they would die soon upon completion of the project they were assigned to.
Why did this happen? Because those workers were powerless to make the people who had the right to set the conditions of the job agreement give them anything more than what ensured what was strictly needed for them to perform their task, which was basically them being alive for as long as they were needed and useful, and not an instant more. Which was what they ended up actually getting, because a free market ensures that’s where the Nash Equlibrium lies: they are locked in a prisoner’s dilemma in which if any single one of them refused to agree to work under those conditions, they would simply be replaced by another, willing person, and then die.
This is why as long as we assume that job-performers are people, more than tools to be used and thrown away, that their existence has value beyond the utility derived from them performing their jobs, and that it should not be entirely miserable, it is absolutely vital that job-performers have a form of power over those who set the conditions of the work agreement, that will allow them to protect themselves from being reduced, by the sheer strategic necessity, to the status of tools.
Now, strikes are a horrible way of achieving this: they are self-regulating too, in that, performing them is at the immediate cost of the job-performers (of course, since they are paid less than what their job-performing is actually worth, this costs whoever profits from their job even more) and risks the cessation of the demand for the job itself being performed. So, game-theory wise, it works, ideally resulting in the job-performers being assigned just under the amount of resources that would make the net utility of the job being performed inferior to that of it not being performed.
If you have suggestions for alternate ways in which job-performers can protect themselves from becoming cattle or machinery, I would love to hear them. I say this in all sinceirty: strikes are ugly. If you can additionally justify why people should not have the right to strikes, given those alternatives existing, I would love to hear that too
Because the Nazis put industry under state control so that people had no choice but to work for companies guided by the state’s economic policy.
Sure, don’t centralize the hiring process under the guise of “economic planning” or maintaining an “economic policy” so much that hiring effectively becomes a monopsony.
The first point would be more of an issue in terms of that particular state’s particular economic policies: in a democratic state, economic policies that would not result in such an outcome would win out.
The second point… do you mean to say that, were there to be many job-assigning institutions competing to get the same job performed at the least possible cost, the equilibrium would fall into job-performers being given more resources than what they would receive were they to be considered disposable cattle? That only works if the work-performers are scarce, in which case it doesn’t matter whether there is one or many institutions competing. And if the work-performers are abundant, the equilibrium will fall into them being given exactly as many resources as they physically need to perform their job.
In a perfect market, centralizing or decentralizing doesn’t achieve anything: what matters is simply offer and demand.
Also, why do you put scare quotes around “economic planning” and “economic policy”?
No, my point is that by and large states don’t need and shouldn’t have “economic policies”.
Are you trying to argue that monopsony power doesn’t exist? Without monopsony power an employer who pays low wages will have a hard time attracting employees. Whereas a monopsony employer can set wages arbitrarily low, his only limit is his own conscience and that at some point potential employees will prefer not to work. It’s possible to state the above more mathematically, for example here (Note: that article talks about monopoly rather than monopsony but the principal is the same).
Except that centralizing destroys the perfect market.
You haven’t established that point to my satisfaction. Don’t try to: it’s not that I don’t expect you to succeed, it’s that, at this point in time, I am compelled away by urgent priorities.
I now know that we are falling for red herrings, both of us. I also acknowledge that I am out of my depth, and that I will have to leave this sort of conversation for when my understanding of economics and game theory are sufficient to tackle it with ease. I advise you to do the same: I have the feeling that there is much cached wisdom and pre-rehearsed arguments in what you say, as I will acknowledge there is in mine.
Lifeguards.
Then you will abstain from going swimming: if you don’t, it will be at your own risk and peril. Though bad working conditions in this case is more likely to cause people to quit, and a scarcity of appliants (which means you’ll have to take unqualified people or close the swimming area for longer periods of time): it certainly won’t be a manner of being overexploited by abusive leadership. Overexploiting a lifeguard by assigning to them a larger area than they can effectively cover simply means they will fail at their jobs and people will die, so that’s not an option either.
The exception puts the rule to the test, and, as I have shown, lifeguards are an exception in more ways than one.
But, as a general rule, and given the way power dynamics function in the modern workplace, I would argue that the right to strike is an absolutely vital part of the checks and balances of a healthy economy.
Not to say unions can’t act petty or spoiled at some points, but that attitude is self-defeating, and the existing counterpowers will stop them soon enough. That’s what checks and balances are for: selfishness keeping itself in check.
Assuming the rest of society is functional, i.e., capitalist. Unions in industries that are enforced monopolies, e.g., government workers, are a problem. For example, here in the United States, teachers’ unions are probably the biggest obstacle to fixing the education system.
The idea that education is an enforced government monopoly in the United States Of America of all places makes me question whether you are aware of the importance of private education in that country relative to public education. The idea that a society being functional equals it being capitalist simply makes me question what you mean by capitalism and functionality: try to taboo those words? Finally, the idea that teachers’ unions would get in the way of the improvement of public education strikes me as odd and unexpected, and I would like you to develop that point: what do you mean by “fixing” and why are they “obstacles” to it?
It’s not quite an enforced government monopoly, although people choosing private school have to pay twice (pay for the public schools through their taxes and tuition for the private school). There are various attempts, e.g., school vouchers, charter schools, to fix this but the teachers’ unions have been fighting them tooth and nail.
By capitalist I mean free market. By functional I mean provides effective services. Note: my claim is not that societies can’t have both functional and non-capitalist elements, rather that for the most part the functional elements will be capitalist and the non-functional ones will be non-capitalist.
This doesn’t surprise me given the filters you likely get your news through.
By “fixing” I mean making it so that students come out of the schools having actually learned basic math and English skills. A specific reform is making it possible to get rid of incompetent teachers.
What do you mean by free market, exactly?
When is effectiveness, and when can a service be qualified as effective?
Depending on your definitions of effective and free-market, the existence of Sweden, at the very least, might make you want to question that reasoning.
I don’t select the media from which I get my news. While the press in general does operate a selection on what information they release to the public, I do not think favouring teachers’ unions is one of their priorities.
Well, in the end the institutions are made of people, and applying game theory oversimplifies many factors. Such as public backlash: I cannot imagine teachers being stupid enough to risk the public backlash that opposing such a reform would cause (supposing that reform is exactly what it says on the tin, rather than making it possible to fire teachers for other, less avowable reasons. Unless teachers in the USA already had such a low social image that they would not care about degrading it further.
EDIT: You know, someone keeps down-voting both of us, and I don’t know why.
Well, adjust you’re priors appropriately.
Or rather they have such a high social image that the people who aren’t paying much attention react the same way you just did.
By all accounts, teachers in the USA are the dregs of society: very badly paid, subjected to unreasonable demands of moral upstanding, and powerless in front of the students, the administration, and the parents.
How do you manage that? Does someone else select it for you?
Wait, you’re on the internet, that can’t be right.
I just read whatever information falls in my lap while browsing my favourite sites: Less Wrong and Tv Tropes. I don’t get out much, Internet-wise. I don’t go out of my way for sources that agree with me, nor do I actively refuse sources that don’t. A selection bias still happens, because I only read news provided to me by tropers and rationalists.
I was talking more about various street level anti-fascist organizations like say this one and other more recent “antifa” groups across Europe, not the average person who would describe themselves as against fascism or “anti-fascist”. Also I meant fascist in the sense of using fascist tactics and mode of operation. Fascism before takeover was basically street level political violence and intimidation with good ol boys sympathetic to their causes in the law enforcement and the court system helping them get off with minimal penalties.
Well, that’s what happens when you try to fight fascist gangs on their own terms: you become a mirror image! Ethical injunction, he who fights monsters, and so on and so forth.
It seems to follow from this statement that everyone you know is radically averse to violence.
Is that actually what you meant?
Why yes, absolutely. I do not know if this is lucky or unlucky, but I don’t know (personally and outside of the internet) anyone who isn’t a pacifist in some capacity when it comes to foreign policy, and in full capacity when it comes to domestic struggles. It just isn’t done. Symbolic violence such as flag-burning or, if it comes to that, car burning, is perfectly okay. So is strong language… as long as said language doesn’t appeal to violence. We don’t joke about being violent to our opposition, unlike, say, American pundits and talk show hosts. Again, it just isn’t done.
Just to clarify: do you mean to restrict the scope of discussion to voicing support for large-scale/political violence? Or do you also mean to say that you are all radically averse to violence in your personal lives?
Well, both, clearly. Violence is bad. Unless it’s in a ring and strictly for sport, then it’s seen as slightly less disgusting and may even gain a “bad ass” edge. But otherwise, violence, personal or political, is just… bad. It’s dangerous to all parties involved, it hurts, and it doesn’t achieve anything. Of course, under extreme circumstances, and I do say extreme, someone snaps. But even then, it’s never justified unless it’s in self-defence, and it’s always a shameful display: the common understanding is that you should have been smart enough, civil enough, to defuse the situation without getting physical.
This just isn’t true. Violence achieves all sorts of things. (I would also dispute “dangerous to all parties involved”.)
This isn’t true either (but at least is somewhat subjective).
Also false. I disprove of narrow-minded overgeneralizations almost as much as I disapprove of violence.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion, of course, but I am simply sharing with you the general attitude towards violence in my social environment, not arguing in their name. Nevertheless, if you’re going to go so far as to pick those memes apart, instead of simply saying “thank you for the clarification, now I understand how you people think”, I’d suggest you actually go through with it and lay down your argument in full. Saying “I’d say you are wrong” and then leaving it at that tends to leave a bad taste in your interlocutor’s mouth.
OK:
Yes it does. For example if you beat someone up you can take their stuff. Or thwart their political designs. If you beat up enough people well enough you can execute social change. In fact the vast majority of positive social change (and even more negative social change) that has occurred in the history of mankind has relied on violence.
Violence is the crudest form of power we have. Power does stuff. Pretending violence doesn’t achieve anything is gross self delusion.
Don’t let your pacifist politics corrupt your very model of reality. Instead, understand what violence does and does not achieve and then act on your preference for non-violence.
Ah, well, yes, violence will get you what you want in the short term, but unless you exterminate your enemies, they’ll still be a liability: violence doesn’t convince anyone, it just makes them more tractable. Heck, even verbal combat, that is, argument, doesn’t usually serve any purpose but convince both parties that they are right.
So, yes, “violence (and rudeness, for that matter) achieves nothing” is a gross simplification. “Violence brings very flawed achievements and has lots of terrible drawbacks” would be much more accurate.
Let’s frame it as comparing two options against each other (not one option against some unspecified ideal outcome). Based on a quantum event, in one branch of the multiverse you use violence, in another you refrain from violence. Is your long-term utility in the first branch necessarily lower than in the second branch?
Your enemies are not a homogenous group. Some of them are very convinced and eager to act, but others just like to join the existing group and be an anonymous part of the mob. Destroy the former, and you don’t have to worry so much about the latter.
A short-term advantage can sometimes be used as a leverage for long-term advantage. If you happen to rule a country, you can change education and media to include your propaganda. This increases the number of your followers in long term. (Back to typical LW topics: If you are an AI capable of recursive self-improvement, paralysing your opponents for a week may be all you need to conquer the universe.)
Depending on specific circumstances… for example, your enemies may be popular because they have an aura of invincibility. Beat them once and you have ruined the aura, which may remove many of their followers.
(Disclaimer: I don’t suggest using violence, I just say that sometimes is may be the better choice, so the “violence doesn’t achieve anything” is untrue.)
Hm. Very true, I’m afraid. Anyway, “violence achieves nothing” is a useful heuristic, and in times of extreme need the use for violence will still impose itself: the meme simply puts up a mental “barrier of potential” that makes sure you really think hard of alternatives before resorting to it.
I tend to distrust ideas whose usefulness depend on not being too compellingly expressed.
If what I actually believe is that there are usually more valuable alternatives than violence, I endorse saying that as compellingly as possible, rather than saying that violence is never valuable no more compellingly than appropriate.
I strongly agree with your general point, but could you explain what you mean by this comment, because it looks problematic for any reasonable understanding of self-defense (which I would expand to include defense of others).
OK. Thanks for clarifying.
I though about democracy “nationalism” (which also includes antifascism). A belief that whatever is decided by majority, must be the true, good, and beautiful thing. If something decided by a majority vote happens to be bad, there is always an excuse, some technical detail which explains that this wasn’t a truly democratic choice. If you are more mindkilled, you can just use “democratic” as a synonym for “good” and label everything you like as democratic, and everything you don’t like as undemocratic, whatever the actual majority position is; because even if the majority does not agree with X, well they should agree with it, and in your favorite parallel universe they agree with it, therefore X indeed is democratic.
Are they more possible algorithms of vote counting? What a lucky coindidence that exactly the one used in my country right now is the best, I mean the most democratic one! I only blame the non-voters for its failures; they are always my last resort for explaining why my preferred choice didn’t win.
(There seems to be some similarity with the CEV concept, so I would like to emphasise the difference: in democracy, there is no need for “coherent extrapolation”, because the majority is already perfect as it is. We only need to find its “volition” by a majority vote. If anything goes wrong, it can be explained away as a technical failure in the vote-counting process.)
Well, demographically speaking, that seems to only work with the left, at least within countries I’m familiar with. The Right is usually a third of the population, and they are very disciplined in always voting for their party, no matter what that party does. The Left, on the other hand, is easily disappointed, and tend to abstain from voting entirely.
I don’t know about the rest of your post. The fairly consistent pattern of Islamic countries achieving democracy by overthrowing secular and oppressive regimes, and then voting for Islamist parties is universally seen as a bad thing, in the West at least. This tends to elicit some fair amounts of mockery in the Arabosphere: “So it’s only democracy when you like it, huh? Surely we have much to learn from the Beacons of Civilization and their unquestionably good institutions and supreme, universal values...”
Antifascism seems to be a much steadier pattern, to the point of labelling totalitarian Islamist regimes and ideologies “Islamofascism”, calling anyone with strict, pro-police or pro-military ideas a fascist (in France you’d say of a very stern teacher that “she’s a little fascist”)… A politician of whom you say “he is a fascist” is a politician that is beneath contempt.
Heck, now that I think of it, you could extend it to “human rights” “nationalism”. Apparently the Human Rights Declaration of 1948 is the be-all and end-all of governmental morality. Except in the USA, “because they are weird like that” (and that’s the charitable memetic explanation).
Also, for what it’s worth, I think the best algorithm for vote counting in Presidential elections is the Australian one (strangely enough, they don’t brag about it, but instead mostly complain… perhaps it is a good sign). In Parlimentary Elections, I present to you Fluid Democracy. I think it’s awesome and we should do it right now.
The part about non-voters was not supposed to be about facts, but about rationalizations. Whenever someone loses election, they can imagine that they would have won, if all the people would have voted. This is how one keeps their faith in democracy despite seeing that their ideas have lost in democratic elections.
I guess the typical mind fallacy strongly contributes to the democracy worship. If I believe that most people have the same opinions as me, then a majority vote should bring victory to my opinions. When it does not happen, then unless I want to give up the fallacy, I have to come with an explanation why the experimental data don’t match my theory—for example most people had the same opinion like me, but some of them were too lazy to vote, so this is why we lost. Or they were manipulated, but next time they will see the truth just as clearly as I do. And then, sometimes, like when looking at the voting for Islamist parties, it’s like: WFT, I can’t even find a plausible rationalization for this!
Human minds are prone to separate all humans into two basic categories: us and them. If someone is in the “us” category, we assume they are exactly like us. If someone is in the “them” category, then they are evil, they hate us, and that’s why we (despite being good and peaceful people) should destroy them before they destroy us. Whatever education we get, these two extremes still attract our thinking. In recent decades we have learned that other humans are humans too, but it causes us to underestimate the differences, and always brings a big surprise when those other humans, despite being humans like us, decide for something different than we would.
In USA they already have the Bill of Rights. Despite differences, it seems to me that both documents inhabit the same memetic niche (that is: officially recognized and worshiped document which you can quote against your government and against the majority vote).
Here. Shortly: “our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together” extrapolated by a super-human intelligent machine. It is proposed as a solution to problem what should we ask such machine to do, assuming that the machine is smarter than us, and we don’t want to get burned by our own stupidity. Something like: my true wish is what I would have wished if I had my values and your superior intelligence; plus assumption that sufficiently intelligent humans could together agree on a mutually satisfying solution, and the super-human intelligence should be able to find this solution.
Another popular rationalization, is that my side would have won if it wasn’t for the biased media misinforming the public. I suppose that’s also similar to CEV.
Another wonderful line I’ve got to use someday.
But the values would change with a higher intelligence, wouldn’t they? The perspective on the world changes dramatically!
Well, yes and no. Perhaps it would be better if you look into relevant Sequences, so I don’t have to rediscover the wheel here, but essentially: some things we value as means to get something else—and this is the part which may change dramatically when we get more knowledge—but it cannot be an infinite chain, it has to end somewhere.
For example a good food is a tool to be healthy, and the health is a tool to live longer, feel better, and be more attractive. With more knowledge, my opinion about good and bad food might change dramatically, but I would probably still value health, and I would certainly value feeling good.
So I would like the AI to recommend me the best food according to the best scientific knowledge (and in a Singularity scenario I assume the AI has thousand times better knowledge than me), not based on what food I like now—because this is what I would do if I had the AI’s intelligence and knowledge. However, I would appreciate if the AI also cared about my other values, for example wanting to eat tasty food, so it would find a best way to make me enjoy the diet. What exactly would be the best way? There are many possibilities: for example artificial food flavors or hypnotizing me to like the new taste. Again, I would like AI to pick the solution that I would prefer, if I were intelligent enough to understand the consequences of each choice.
There can be many steps of iteration, but they must be grounded in what I value now. Otherwise the AI could simply make me happy by stimulating the pleasure and desire centers of my brains, and it would make me happy with that treatment—the only argument against such solution is that it is in a strong conflict with my current values and probably cannot be derived from them by merely giving me more knowledge.
Of course this whole concept has some unclear parts and criticism, and they are discussed in separate articles on this site.
Oh, I’d love it if you were so kind as to link me there. Although the issues you pointed out weren’t at all what I had in mind. What I wanted to convey is that I understand that the more intelligent one is, the more one values using one’s intelligence and the pleasures and achievements and sense of personal importance that one can derive from it. One can also grow uninterested if not outright contemptuous of pursuits that are not as intellectual in nature. Also, one grows more tolerant to difference, and also more individualistic, as one needs less and less to trust ad-hoc rules, and can actually rely on one’s own judgement. Relatively unintelligent people reciprocate the feeling, show mistrust towards the intelligent, and place more value in what they can achieve. It’s a very self-serving form of bias, but not one that can be resolved with more intelligence, I think.
Oops, now I realized that CEV is not a sequence.
So, here is the definition… and the following discussions are probably scattered in comments of many posts on this site. I remember reading more about it, but unfortunately I don’t remember where.
Generally, I think it is difficult to predict what we would value if we were more intelligent. Sure, there seems to be a trend towards more intellectual pursuits. But many highly educated people also enjoy sex or chocolate. So maybe we are not moving away from bodily pleasures, just expanding the range.
Yes, which is precisely why CEV proponents think a constrained structure of this form is necessary… they are trying to solve the problem of getting the benefits of superintelligence while keeping current values fixed, rather than trusting their future to whatever values a superintelligence (e.g., an AI or an intelligence-augmented human being or whatever) might end up with on its own.
So it’s kind of like the American Consitution?
Well, it shares with the U.S. Constitution (and many other constitutions) the property of being intended to keep certain values fixed over time, I suppose. Is that what you meant? I don’t consider that a terribly strong similarity, but, sure.
I find the US constitution remarkable in its sheer longevity, and how well-designed it was that it can still be used at this point in time. Compare and contrast with the French and Spanish consitutions throughout the XIXth and XXth centuries, which have been changing with every new regime. Sometimes with every new party. The Constitutions tended to be fairly detailed and restrictive, and not written with eternity in mind. I still used to prefer the latest versions of those because they tended to be explicitly Human Rights Compliant (TM), and found the Bill of Rights and the Amendments to be fairly incomplete and outdated in that regard. But it’s been growing on me as of late.
Anyway, yes, the similarity I draw is that both are protocols and guidelines that are intended to outlast their creators far, far into the future, and still be useful to people much more intelligent and knowledgeable than the creators, to be applied to much more complex problems than the creators ever faced.
The U.S. constitution still has its problems (the Electoral College turned out to be a stupid idea, and the requirement that each state have equal representation in the Senate is also problematic), but it seems to have worked well enough...
You’d expect the CEV’s performance to be within those parameters. But I have one question: when can one decide to abolish either of those, and replace it with a new system entirely? Sometimes it is better to restart from scratch.
This certainly isn’t the time. The two problems CronoDAS mentioned are at most mildly annoying, it isn’t worth destroying a powerful and useful Schelling point merely to fix them.